Funnniest movie in a loooong time:

OH MY GOSH!!!
You HAVE to see Hamlet 2. Nate and I cackled through the whole movie. My cheeks actually hurt when we left. Make sure to stay through the credits for the awesome closing credits song, too.
We were the only ones in the theater, which was a shame, because this movie is wonderful.
I predict it will be another Office Space type sleeper hit once it comes out on DVD. I hope they have the whole musical on the DVD extras. That would R-O-C-K!! (Literally, lol!)
For those who see it: I believe the narrator is Peter O'Toole, rounding out a surprisingly stellar cast for such a small film.

Are we fucked?

By we, I mean liberals. And if you're not with me, you're against me, so stop reading, lol.

First: GREAT convention, GREAT and historic acceptance speech. BLAH BLAH BLAH...

McCain picked a hockey mom with five kids (one w/Down's Syndrome), a blue-collar oilman husband, a kid going to Iraq, and who is adamently anti-choice, a hunter and a lifetime NRA member. Sure she has zero--really: ZERO!!--experience and she is, as I mentioned, ADAMENTLY anti-choice. But she is a 44-year-old SUPERMOM. (She went back to work days after giving birth this past spring!) So here come the Hillary-bots, right? Am I wrong?? PLEASE feel free to explain my faulty logic, as I really need to think differently right now. I went to sleep with such hope and woke to this...this...SHIT!!

My intellect wants to say something profound here, but my gut is SCREAMING:

FUCK McCain and the Hillary-bots he rode in on!!!!

More Picture Pages; More Great-Grandparents

I wish I had a scanner for some older pics of mine, but here are some my mom had emailed me over the years.

The side yard in the (appx.)'60s. That slope down from the sidewalk is steeper, now. The bushes in the foreground are replaced by a tree and a few shade perennials. And the pines in front of the ghouse ar emuch taller. Otherwise, the same.

The back of the house appx. the same time period. I love the back porchj the way it was. The pretty white railing was, at some point, replaced by (now rusty) black wrought iron. And our woooden screen door is no more, although I'd like to replace it once we start painting the exterior.

My Greats in the other side yard. It was really flat then... And landscaped...sigh... Thirty years of neglect before my great-grandapa died has assured us an uphill climb with the landscaping porject. Seven years and counting... Someday...

The greats' vegetable garden. I'm not even going to pretend we'll replace that someday, but Nate has high hopes.

The back yard, complete with dog pen, ca. '60s or '70s.

Supposedly my back yard at some point in time. I can't/don't believe it.

My great-grandpa's redtick coonhound, Sam.

My bluetick coonhound, Zelda. (RIP)

My great-grandma and my mother by my kitchen sink. Th esame kitchen sink. The same cabinets. the same (much beloved) stove. And we even have garbage cans just like that, although not the SAME ones.

My kitchen when we first re-did the floor to tiles. But the same kitchen table and chairs my grandparents (alnost) always had in the kitchen.

I love my house almost as much as my grandma must have. I hope I would have made her proud of it with our changes and fixing it up.

It occurs to me...

how very much I am becoming my grandmothers. I seem to have skipped right over my mother and landed on the "grands" and "greats."

First there's the shape of my upper arms, which look exactly like my mother's mother's arms used to--she is thinner, now--and her mother's arms before her. General shape of my body: CHECK. The authoritative eyebrow raise: I've always had that; my mother tries, bless her heart, but looks a bit... confused or something. (She has other ways to exert authority.) And then there's my hands...fatty and wrinkly. An...odd...combination. Finally the old lady purse hold. I don't know that any of my female forebears actually did this, but they must or must have as it seems nearly universal. To wit: the first picture in the last post. (Go ahead and check it out; I'll wait...) I was re-studying it after Ma and BFF commented on it and noticed: There! Look!! It's a grandma. Ramrod straight posture with her hands folded protectively and a bit defiantly over her very large purse. Yes, there are tissues in it, but no hard candies. Gum, sure. Mints, check. Wait... That's what Ma's ma always had when I was a kid. Should I be scared or grateful or both?

This is Ma's ma's ma. Known as Nana to my mother and Grandma Nana to my brother and I. (If I can dig up my senior pic, I'll edit it in for comaparison...but, basically, I was "doomed" [j/k] from the start.)

This is Grandma Nana with me as a baby:

This is Grandma Louie (Mary Louise Taylor to you, chump) and me as a baby:

And this is me with my niece Syd Vicious shortly after her birth:

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Picture Pages Picture Pages

Today is picture day. Get ready cuz it's comin' at ya!

Rehoboth version of American Gothic.

Kayly: hat, tent, sunscreen, book

Holden: chillaxing and bronzing

Ethan: rolling in the sand for the hell of it

Nate (not pictured): trying to swim to the horizon

That pretty much sums up our week at the beach.

Awww! Arrgh! Pirate Syd Vicious at the beach house

GAW-gous!!

Fat Cat Lays Flat (Sorry, no mat.)

Nate must have taken this; he's yard proud. See our hammock, almond trees, dog run and, in the very back on the left--behind the big tree, our weeping willow.

Side yard! WOO-HOO!

The very first piece of real, new furniture I bought with money I earned. (See part of my Haeger collection on top?)

Moved the two matching bookcases to either side of the fireplace for my cherished sense of symmetry. (The empty pot is due to my snake plant sunning itself on the back porch. Lazy thing!)

My good friend Tahnee gave (yes! another FREE plant!) me this corn plant as it was too tall for her new(ish) house and suffering there. It was her grandmother's, then her mom's, then hers. It is TWENTY years old. Pray I don't kill the poor thing. (Nate wanted me to show Tahnee how the plant was happy with it's new friends the Madagascar Dragon Tree--a.k.a. Dracaena marginata--with ivy on the right and the money tree o pachira on the left.)

This corner used to be stacked hip high with loose piles of books; now it's my best version of a Martha Stewart-esque functional tableau. Those are wines corks in the carboy.

My newest freecycle acquisition. The aforementioned Madagascar Dragon Tree which came with the ivy and this be-yoo-tee-ful pot. Sweet!

B-Lyme-y!

After my bloodwork and x-ray results were in, my family doctor referred me to my rheumatologist. My rheumy's nurse was able to squeeze me in, a miracle in and of itself.
And so, yesterday, my rheumy decided to go ahead and treat me for Lyme disease, even though my test had been negative. She said due to the fact that it can take 8-12 weeks for a positive and the fact that I am on a low dose of tetracycline--a treatment for Lyme in a dose four times that of what I take for adult acne--which might never allow a positive test, in addition to the fact that some never test positive even though they have it (how they diagnose it then, I don't know) leads her to believe that I have early stage Lyme disease. My c-reactive protein was up. That is an inflammatory marker that rises and drops quickly with inflammation. My sed rate--another inflammatory marker that takes longer to go out of whack and longer to correct--was normal. This information means basically the inflammation was a fairly recent thing and still ongoing. So Lyme it is, for now. I will lay off the tetracycline and take doxycycline two times a day for a month. If after three to four weeks after my last does I still don't feel "better" (remember, it's all relative) then I will go back to see her for further testing to figure out what else it could be.
She also told, and I found it interesting enough to share, that in North America Lyme disease tends to manifest more neurologically--like my neuropathy--than in Europe where Lyme manifests more often with rheumatological symptoms. Nobody is really sure why, I guess. Weird, huh?