The Lisa Life

The Picture

Since Howell High School Class of 1984 is one of the most hit on categories of my blog (God knows why), here is a picture of Martin and I taken before the reunion.

This Smells Really Bad, I Think I'll Eat It!

My coonhound is a trash picker and a poop eater.

There, I've said it!

We have one of those curb cart dumpster thingies and since we have a trash compactor (I'll never be without one again) we don't always take out trash out for the weekly pick up. Sometimes there is only one tiny bag of trash, hardly makes it worth it.

China the coonhound likes to wrestle her way into the curb cart. She then eats the choice morsels and coerces Benny, one of our other dogs, to join her in the feast.

Dogs have a highly developed sense of smell I understand. Why would they eat things that smell so horrible then?

After rolling in the offensive thing first, of course. As you do.

The Latest Books

I'm sure, faithful readers, you have thought I have given up book reviews or that I haven't been reading for pleasure lately.

Not the case, I've just been lazier than normal.

I got on a Richard Russo kick. I'm not a huge fan of fiction, as I might have mentioned, but I adore Richard Russo. The man can tell a great story. I've just reread Empire Falls (which won a Pulitzer), Nobody's Fool and I'm about to finish Straight Man.

My favorite is Nobody's Fool, which is also an excellent movie with the always hot Paul Neuman. (Paul Neuman is high on the list of senior citizens I'd sleep with.)

I'm sending the husband to get Risk Pool and Mohawk from the library for me this week.

Send The Poor Dude a Postcard

My friend over at Sain't Christopher (see link on the right hand side) loves postcards. I have to say, getting any sort of personal snail mail these days is a pleasant surprise. Sort of like finding a twenty in your jeans pocket when you do the laundry. Bonus!

Send Christopher a postcard. Here is his address:

Sain't Christopher
P.O. Box 641213
San Fransisco, CA 94104

Since he is a transplanted Michigander, I already have a few in mind I'm going to pick up and send his way.

You owe me a drink, buddy!

Goin' To The Chapel

Tomorrow, Martin's oldest friend Don is getting married. Martin and Don have been friends since 6th grade, since they both attended Maltby Middle School, which was a brand spanking new state of the school then, way back in the olden days. Fred Flintstone was their bus driver. He'd retired from the gravel pit.

Anyway.

Don is getting married to Lori tomorrow. Lori is wonderful, a really sweet, funny, bright and interesting woman. I like her a lot.

We're really looking forward to the wedding. Martin's folks, Peter and Margaret are also going and best of all, this will be Mia's first dress up occasion, other than pictures.

I've spent a good part of this week getting everything organized. Well, mostly doing care and maintenance of Lisa and figuring out what the three of us are going to wear. Mia is wearing a beautiful red velvet dress, white tights and red Dorothy-esque Mary Janes. I have to do the poor child's hair fancy tomorrow and she's going to be mad at me for an hour or so afterward.

Since the weather here has been so crappy the past couple weeks, I'm really in a quandary as to what to wear. Too cold and overcast and gloomy for something sleeveless or backless and sexy. Martin put the ix-nay on my funky burgandy burnout velvet blouse and a skirt, said it looked too "bar like" so I guess I will wear my long black velvet dress with my ultra cool kitten heel black leather Ann Klein boots with the really pointy toes.

This week, in preparation for this wedding, in Lisa maintenance, I have had to do the following:
Manicure
Eyebrows (OUCH)
Pedicure
Hair color (it's all the same color now, what a relief)
Practice make up that hides my scarface without hurting myself or irritating my healing cut
No tanning though, so I feel pale as a ghost

Pictures will follow. I can't wait to see Mia all dressed up for her first "occasion".

Why I Hate Wal-Mart

**Note** Holly, you may want to skip this one.

I don't hate all big box stores. I think that like everything else, they have their pros and cons. I do think the bad they bring to communities, such as driving all the mom and pop type places out of business is particularly bad, as it steals a sense of community. I particularly dislike Wal-Mart and have for years. This is not an editorial on the horror of Wal-Mart to general society, it's an editorial as to my personal horror of Wal-Mart.

I went grocery shopping tonight at our local Super Wal-Mart. I tend to avoid Wal-Mart unless I am counting pennies because I find it so tedious and frustrating to shop there. My fellow shoppers tend to be particularly annoying. We've all seen the internet joke about playing the Wal-Mart game, picking out all the various physical defects the shoppers have, such as homemade tattoos, stitches from dog bites, etc.

Tonight, I encountered a very large lady in one of the motorized wheelchair shopping carts. No problem with that, but the motorized wheelchair shopping cart was emitting a very high pitched buzz that was extremely LOUD. Like I could hear her in the next aisle. Does anyone do routine maintenance on these carts? Obviously not. Poor woman must have been hard of hearing as well as large to not have been driven batty by the noise.

I wanted to buy a whole roasting chicken for Sunday dinner. Wal-Mart had 4 or 5. None of them had price tags on them, there was no sign posted of the price per pound, but living dangerously, I decided to purchase one anyway. Because we were buying cigarettes, there was only ONE DAMN LINE IN THE ENTIRE STORE WE COULD WAIT IN! ONE! After waiting in said line for about 20 minutes, (gave Martin time to run back and grab the butter we forgot and gave me more time to play the Wal-Mart game and read the National Enquirer), the poor cashier tried to call the Meat Department to get the price. After three tries of paging with no response and the people in her line stacking up like cordwood, I told her to forget it. She was very nice, apologized and I told her, hey not your fault, which it wasn't. By the way, isn't it a law that prices have to be displayed and marked?

Okay, lets go into the waiting in line. If you want to buy cigarettes in Wal-Mart there is only one aisle that you can do so in. So even if you are popping in to buy milk, bread and cigarettes, you get to wait in line for half an hour with people who are buying groceries for a month. Plus, Wal-Mart cigarette prices are extremely high. $6.06 for Marlboro Lights. I can get them at the overpriced gas station for $5.15.

I needed to buy a new filter for my Brita water pitcher. Pretty simple, right? You go to the section that sells kitchen stuff like plates, coffee makers, the like and there is it, right? NOOOOOO! It's in freaking HARDWARE DEPARTMENT! The logic of this is just beyond me, I can't even editorialize on that because stocking something that goes in your refrigerator with the hammers is just stupid.

I would never buy or wear Wal-Mart clothes. Never.

We wandered through the toy department to see if we could find my daughter Mia a doll baby. Mia is a biracial child. I would not buy her a Wonder bread baby doll. That's just not right. Was there one single baby doll that was not a Wonder bread doll? Nope, not one. Wal-Mart really wants to promote diversity, don't they? I don't count Dora the Explorer, either.

Oh, while we were wandering the toy department, we saw a Wal-Mart employee, easily identified by his blue vest and cheap shoes, reading a Precious Moments book. This guy was like 19 or 20. Sam would have been frowning because he was STEALING WAL-MART'S TIME! TIME THEFT!

I feel bad for the employees. I know they get a shit deal. It's obvious they not only don't get paid well, they don't get good benefits, either. How is this obvious, oh wise one, you ask? Well, they all wear cheap bad shoes. By that I don't mean inexpensive, because I'm a clearance rack sort of girl myself, I mean downright cheap, as in plastic shoes. And an awfully high percentage of them also seem to have really poor dental care. Missing teeth, black teeth. The stink of defeat is on many of them.

For more insight into Wal-Mart, please read Barbara Ehrenreich's excellent book, "Nickel and Dimed." She spent some time undercover as a Wal-Mart employee. An example:

"They talk about having spirit," she says, referring to management, "but they don't give us any reason to have any spirit." In her view, Wal-Mart would rather just keep hiring new people rather than treating the ones it has decently. You can see for yourself there's a dozen new people coming in for orientation every day-which is true. Wal-Mart's appetite for human flesh is insatiable; we've even been urged to recruit any Kmart employee we may happen to know.

I really hate Wal-Mart.

What Was I Thinking?

I have realized lately that my ex-husband looks disturbingly like Conan O'Brien. I wish I had a picture of my ex-husband to post but alas, most of them have gone up in ashes. But he does looks disturbingly like Conan O'Brien, for those of you who were wondering.

What the hell was I thinking?

The Amityville Horror

I first read the book, "Amityville Horror" when I was twelve or thirteen. It scared the bejesus out of me. I was always a somewhat timid kid, but this knocked me right over the edge. I wasn't comfortable being home by myself anymore(which I rarely was, maybe a couple hours once a week). I eyed our poor old toy collie suspiciously, looking for red eyes and porcine features. I inspected the walls for suspicious green slime, which would never have dared appear in my mother's pristine house, supernatural or not. Since we didn't have a boathouse, I'm pretty sure I developed my insane fear of the basement about this time. (I still don't like basements and was convinced Jame Gumb was living in ours as of quite recently.)

This book absolutely scared the hell out of me as a kid. Why? Because it was supposed to be true.

Thanks to Scott over at www.findadeath.com, I know now for sure that the whole Amityville Horror book was a total hoax by the Lutzes, the family who bought the house after the tragic murders of six of the seven DeFeo family members. Scott's site pointed me to a great website called www.amityvillemurders.com, which not only details murders that took place at 112 Ocean Avenue in 1974 but also details the criminal case of Ron DeFeo Jr, and debunks the whole myth of the "haunting."

Another one of my childhood dreams dashed.

Timothy McVeigh

This is really strange. I have a lot of links to Tim McVeigh, although I have never met him and if I had, would probably think he was a total crazy nutbag. As he was.

My ex-husband Kerry, grew up in Lockport, New York. Tim grew up in Tonawanda, the neighboring town. Tim was a couple years older than Kerry and Kerry never knew Tim personally but Kerry certainly knew his wackjob sister Jennifer, who also ran track, as my ex did.

My former father in law used to drink with Tim's dad at the local Fraternal Order of Eagles. By all accounts, Tim's dad was a nice guy.

Kerry, my ex-husband, worked in Republican politics. He was a mouth frothing right winger, but not racist at all. He at various times had worked for some questionable candidates, namely one who shall remain nameless who insisted on attending questionable white supremacist gatherings. Tim turned out to have attended some of these same gatherings.

Ex and I had dear friends who lived across the road in a gated lake community from "Mark from Dexter", the ham radio guy who spewed racist crap. He was arrested in connection to the bombing and although I think he may have given advice, he was never charged.

My son's name is Dexter.

Too many ties and links for me. How crazy.

Good Vibrations

I want to thank all of my faithful readers for all the positive thoughts and energy and prayers and the good luck messages they have sent me regarding my accident.

They are working.

I still have a terrible headache. I am resigned to this for a while. On a good note, my scar is healing nicely. I may even be able to wear a touch of make-up tomorrow for the first time since October 2, which will do wonders to boost my confidence and overall self-esteem. I've felt very ugly for these past couple weeks.

Feeling bad about my looks is much better than being hideously scarred or dead, so I can't complain too much.

My Staples delivery guy, who is very sweet, told me I look 200% better and actually paid me a very nice compliment. He said, "I know, you feel awful without make-up, my wife won't go to the mailbox without make-up, but you are still pretty. You have a wonderful smile and nice eyes."

I almost cried. How nice is that?

Thank you all. This has been a bad time for me. I don't think I am Miss America but I feel really homely right now but I'm turning the corner.

Cripes, I feel like Sally Field at the Oscars again.