Four, Fira, Quatre, Vier, uno dos tres Cuatro Go

Gotta love a good meme; this one is from the Texpat Karla:

Four jobs you’ve had in your life:
1. Exercising race-horses/training barrel horses.
2. Stage Manager
3. Scenery and Costume Designer
4. Manager of a dance studio on Sixth St. (anyone remember Torturcize?)

Four movies you could watch over and over:
1. Arthur
2. Better Off Dead
3. Dodgeball
4. Sixteen Candles

Four places you’ve lived (I’m sticking in Austin for this one):
1. In a Lakeshore Drive apartment with loser peeping-tom frat boys next door, and a crazy roommate from Flatonia.
2. Three doors down from Janis Joplin’s old house on Baylor, above the old Whole Foods.
3. An old Victorian cottage in Hyde Park, when there were still old people all around who remembered my grandparents, and everyone sat outside because mostly we just had window units. Plus, they brought me pies.
4. Mi casa mi casa mi casa– I love my house! I am a nester.

Four TV shows you love to watch:
1. Battlestar Galactica
2. Grey’s Anatomy
3. Rescue Me
4. Buffy (me miss Buffy, especially the scenes w/Spike)

Four places you’ve been on holiday (I’m altering this to be 4 places you’ve been inappropriately drunk while on holiday):
1. San Angelo’s in Little Italy, Ontario, Canada. After many mussels and lots of red wine, I was talked into singing “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” by my friends. The owner and his sons (none of whom spoke English) accompanied me.
2. A floating bar in Cozumel when I was nineteen. My dad and I were drinking tequila, telling jokes, and getting all the rest of the men in our family into the action. My mom was mortified- I still don’t know if it was the tequila or my bikini that so totally pissed her off.
3. My dad and I (are you starting to see a theme here? And yes, my mom was quite irate this time, too) ANYWAY we were at one of the many cousins’ weddings, at the San Antonio Country Club. The family drink-of-choice for weddings is the Cuba Libre, and Daddy and I were shouting, “Liberate CUBA! Liberate CUBA!” while jitter-bugging on the dance floor, and the Daddy fell, and couldn’t get up for laughing so hard, and I ended up right beside him. Just to make the point: everyone– excepting, apparently, my mom– was right there with us in spirit.
4. Ummm, I don’t want to tell this story.

Four blogs you visit daily:
1. Up From Sloth
2. The Schell Cafe
3. Tales of a Texpatriate
4. Diary of a Pine Curtain Refugee
5. (Okay, so I’m cheating: sue me). Malcontent Mama

Four of your favorite foods:
1. The Shrimp Saltillo at Nuevo Leon
2. Davy’s Steaks
3. popcorn and Diet Coke
4. Dirty Martin’s burgers

Four places you’d rather be:
1. St. John’s, in one of the bays
2. Crested Butte, CO
3. A blue state
4. Austin– even in August, I love this town

Four albums you can’t live without (okay, this one is flat-out impossible for me- I am mentally incapable of narrowing my list. It will hurt some album’s feelings. Just call me a fucktard.) So, the last four albums I listened to:
1. “Midnight Pumpkin” by Toni Price
2. “Greatest Hits” of the Red Hot Chili Peppers
3. “Spike” by Elvis Costello
4. “The Phantom of the Opera” movie soundtrack. (Yes, I am a showtunes slut).

Four vehicles you’ve owned:
1. A 1973 mustard-colored 3/4 ton Chevy pickup, with positrac rear end and two big old honkin’ dents in the sides where Daddy and Stanley West drank too much whiskey and tried to rope a steer from the back of the truck (the steer objected, and won).
2. A 1982 shortbed Chevy truck named Penelope.
3. A 1984 Blazer, with a kickass stereo and no roof (it came with a roof, but I lost it).
4. more trucks, trucks, trucks– that’s what comes of being a Hill Country ranch girl. I used to haul horses and hay; now I haul babies.

No, Carrie, NO! No prom pics!

Actually, the truth is that I can’t find my prom pictures. There is a chance that I burned them in a ritual ceremony, but I can’t think why… besides the fact that I was with my first boyfriend, and he was a major asshole.

But since Karla asked, I did go grab some pics. Random, but old and embarassing, so I felt they had to qualify.

Well, so here I am in my Hoss hat. It’s not really embarassing, but I found the picture, and I loved this horse. Her name was Sandy, and she was my first (and way worthier than the aforementioned ‘first’). My friend Dallas is looking semi-70’s hip, but in a peeved way.

In high school, I was always the designated driver. That pretty much says it all when it comes to my friends. This one (the girl in the pic, who isn’t me), who I loved dearly and was going out with some SERIOUS eye candy, I found on a random car roof later this night, fast asleep. But, you know, we were at a Dead concert.

Hello Jerry. You are missed.

The following is definitely embarassing, and has to qualify as strange fashion at the least (long underwear and my dad’s robe). This was when the Bachelor’s Club boys showed up at my parent’s at 7 am w/champagne and a limo, to ask me to be a deb. Now, I had told my mom five years before (when they showed up for my sister) that she needed to nip that shit in the bud, because I was going to shut the door in their face, but she didn’t listen, and Daddy talked me into playing nice (obviously, see the nails? I painted my nails, Mom!). I did manage to send my escort flying off the risers during a group pic. He was about five years older, and completely convinced that he was the second coming of Elvis. He’s not in this picture, but the cute boy to my left is his brother. Anyway, when he tried to cop a feel (being the typical drunk frat boy– an old frat boy, at that), I elbowed him off the risers. As always, I was one of the too tall girls in the back row, so off he went, and he took down a curtain, and we all just kept smiling.

I posted this because, well, I like my waist size back then. Enough said.I gotta say, though, the shirt is a little, well.. ruffly. The skirt and belt can’t really be embarassing, because they’ve come back in style. I suppose there is a slight cause for embarassment in that last statement. Heh heh. So later I hope to figure out what did happen to those prom pics.

It’s all about the Fred

This is Fred. Napolean for short. (We often pronounce his name as ‘Frayyyyyyed’, long and soft). He and the Boy are huge buds.

We love our Fred. He just turned 10 on MLK day. We chose that date to celebrate his birth because, well, he’s Fred.

Fred came to us via the Town Lake animal shelter 8 1/2 years ago. The babies and I went in, and Fred said, “I’ve been waiting for you!”. He had been on the floor for nine days, telling everyone else to go away. He has one blue eye and one brown, which probably freaked some folks out, but we immediately knew it was to match the babie’s eyes (one for each kid). Before he was caught by the Law, Fred lived under the 1st Street Bridge. He had dreadlocks.

His first night in our home, Fred found newspaper, shredded it into a bed, then collected one shoe from each member of the family and lay on them, like eggs in a nest. He did it again the second night. The third night we shut the door to the Boy’s room.

Fred loves construction workers. They have yummy things in the mornings, like breakfast tacos and honey buns. Fred brings food home to his bed and stashes it.

At Christmas the dogs get lots of toys. Fred sneaks in, grabs one, then slinks off to his room and hides it before going back for another.

Fred likes to go on walkabout. Even if his Invisible Fence collar is on, he often deems it worth the momentary pain to go pee on everyone else’s stuff (and look for construction guys).

Fred also loves to rumble. He especially likes to start fights with big dogs (like Rottweilers), then hide behind another big dog. He also likes to jump puppies. If Fred were a human, he’d carry a switchblade, smoke cigarettes, and have a mullet.

Like I said, we love our Fred.

Holy haberdashery, Batman!

Six and a half hours, hard labor, cleaning/going through/organizing the Boy’s closet, room, shelves, etc.

Yes, girls accumulate a bunch of junk, but boys (at least in this family) can happily exist in filth. At least we girls keep our bunches of crap clean.

To give him a break, the Boy has plenty of help from his dog Fred. The two of them can hole up with chew bones and Cheezits, and happily co-exist for days. Enough said.

the many perks of the blogging world

Bookhart wrote about “R.Kelly: Trapped in the Closet” in a way that had me hoppin’ over to Netflix. Despite the “available within the next 12 weeks” notice, it arrived pretty quickly. Tonight the boys are gone, and baby girl has four other seventh graders spending the night, so after feeding the masses, I settled in with the movie–

Okay, all I can say is when Big Man was found hiding under the sink, I started howling. I was already snickering while R.Kelly did his pie-bakin’ White Woman voice, then the Big Man came out. I haven’t laughed so hard since the episode of The Office (season 1, the BBC version) where the trainer is there holding a seminar, and David brings out his guitar, and Gareth starts singing the descant.

So, my personal recommendation in the Twisted Humor Category is “The Dancing Outlaw”, a documentary about Jessco (aka ‘Jess’; aka ‘Elvis’). Even though it’s about a jigging hillbilly in the hills of West Virginia, it shares a common spirit with R.Kelly and the BBC. Go figure.