The Bigger They Get

Grrrrrrrr…..

This place advertises 5 plasma TV’s, a Cigar Center, Entertainment in the Central Lounge, 22,000 square feet of booze, low, low prices, and bills itself as “The Most Unique Liquor Store in America”.  The ad even boasts of “Marble & Limestone Bathrooms with Chandeliers”.  Methinks the target market is pretty damn clear and the chandelier thing is a red herring.

Yes,Dear wants to go to the Grand Opening this weekend to check out all the “experienced retailers”.

Boy, this week is just full of swine, isn’t it?

Fairy dust?

I wish.

Pine pollen.

It was too hot to close the windows the other night, so we didn’t.  Big mistake.  Apparently, the heat prompted our neighborhood pine trees to begin spewing pollen.  We have been pollinated, people!

Our house has been pollinated.  The dogs have been pollinated.  It’s everywhere, on everything, including in our ears, our eyelashes, between our toes.  Our deck is yellow.  The pollen seems to have formed a particular attachment to electronics, so I now have to take my computer with me to Philly this weekend when I pick daughter up for her short summer break to get it de-pollinated.

And I have to do an environmental cleaning of our house, but will have to wait until the trees are finished doing their tree-thing.

This is, like, the ULTIMATE test of my Zyrtec.

All is well here.  We’re fairly well settled in - a few more things to put away, a few more things to do to the house, but no rush.  It’s funny, semi-retirement: you work like crazy to get settled and then you sit there and stare at each other and say now what?

Since we both like to eat and since paying bills is always a good idea, the logical answer to now what? appears to be finding JOBS in this dismal economy.  Heh.

So Yes, Dear will be working as a delivery driver a few days a week starting in the next week or so and we have taken over the management a resort area franchise service business which I’ll explain in more detail soon.  We’ve also started working on putting together an Etsy shop.  Again, details to follow.

Finally, to the comment spammers who seem to think this middle aged mom has any interest in seeing Miley Cyrus n*a*k*e*d, well, that’s just WRONG.  And to the spammer who thinks I want to see Charles Grodin n*a*k*e*d?  Oh, come on!  Ewwwww.

Hope to be here more often in the near future. I have been keeping up as much as possible with my feed reader but haven’t had time to comment much.  I miss you guys.

So how the heck are YOU doing?

The LILACS!

Just Awesome.

Hope your Easter was happy!  Ours was great.  The boys came down for the weekend and my sister visited yesterday for our Annual Welcome Spring Easter Barbecue.  Yeah!  Why wait until it’s 75 degrees and sunny when you can warm yourself over the grill in 50 degree temperatures with the wind howling at 30 mph? And why eat HAM when you can have THIS:

Mmmmmmmmmmm

And this:

And these:

And CANDY.  Which I would have photographed except WHERE IS IT?  I can’t FIND IT!  OH MY GOD WE WERE ROBBED!

Wait.  What?

Oh.  I ate it all?

All of it?

Really?

Never mind.

By the way, you know what I think would make a REALLY, REALLY interesting TV show?  Just combine The Housewives of New York City with Wife Swap.  Send Bethanny to some redneck house in a holler somwhere and The Countess to a family farm or something.  Just don’t send Jill to my house.  I hate what she did with the apartment.  I LOVE this idea.  Who’s with me?  Show of hands…

Spring, that is.

Harrumph.

Sorry for the blog silence.  I’ve been working on a project to be announced soon and looking for part time work.  I still have my work-from-home clients, but damn, retirement is expensive.  And living with a retired husband is NOT easy.  I’m trying to make his life so miserable that he’ll go back to work and get out of my hair and I think I’m finally making inroads.  He’s starting to roll his eyes every time I call his name instead of just the third or fourth time.

Speaking of Yes,Dear, today is our anniversary.  Twenty six  years or, as he says, the best two years of our lives.  Haha.  He’s a funny, funny man.

Totally unrelated:  There is a flock of seagulls nesting at the end of our street and they chatter for a half hour or so every evening as they settle in for the night.  Since we no longer have kids at home, we find ourselves talking to the gulls saying things like Girls, settle down and get to sleep, or Quiet down kids!  Don’t make us come up there.  And then we laugh.

Life is good.

This past Sunday I drove Son One home and stayed at my sister’s place until Tuesday, giving her a hand with some things around the house.  Yes,Dear did not grocery shop while I was away.  He went to the dollar store and picked up a can of Spam and a couple cans of potted meat (what is potted meat, anyway? I had a Potted Pelican once in the islands, but that’s something very different and much tastier). He can argue all he wants that his trip to the dollar store constitutes “grocery shopping”, but we all know better, don’t we?

Today Yes,Dear drove up to Philly to visit his parents.  Did I grocery shop?  Hell no.  I think Yes,Dear was hoping I would have to because the cupboards are, if not bare, at best sparsely populated.

But I dug around and look what I found:

I am SO set.

In other news, I’ve learned that the police department in the town where we lived before our move has been receiving calls from residents who report seeing coyotes in their yards.

In suburban Philadelphia.

Really.

Turns out what they are seeing are foxes.

Holy hell people!  Even if you don’t know the differences between a coyote and a fox, odds are you’re paying a fortune for the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet.  Watch and learn something, for Pete’s sake!  I’m embarrassed for you.

Okay.  Now a question.  If you think you have an answer, please speak up.  Since Yes,Dear and I moved into our new home we’ve been finding rabbit tails in our yard.  We’ve found five or six of them now.  Why?  What’s happening to the rabbits?  I know it’s not our dogs.  Not only have we found no evidence beyond a couple of bunny tails in the fenced portion of our yard, but we’ve actually found more bunny tails outside of the fence.  Besides, Sebastian would probably die of a heart attack if he ever came face to face with a rabbit.

Can this be explained by some sort of natural phenomenon or are our new neighbors trying to tell us something? Is this a Fatal Attraction kind of thing?  Do rabbits shed their tails?  This is upsetting, especially with Easter right around the corner.

Still trying to catch up on my reader.  Hope all is well with y’all.  I live south of the Mason Dixon line now, so I can say that.

We gathered our insurance cards, auto titles, two pieces of mail, etc., got in the car and headed to the DMV to get our new licenses and register our cars.  Halfway there, I turned to Yes,Dear and said:

Hmmm.  Don’t you think it might have been a good idea to bring both cars?

Yes,Dear:  Doh.

Me:  What a couple of knuckleheads.

Yes,Dear: And we call the dog stupid…

****

Son One finally got two days off in a row and will be visiting next weekend! Yay!

****

Daughter and I had a nice time at the Philadelphia Flower Show last week despite the show lacking a certain something-or-other this year that we couldn’t quite put our fingers on.  There was some interesting statuary, though.

She was such a lovely girl…too bad about those crossed eyes.

I thought the bride was crossing her fingers behind her back, but the woman standing next to me thought she was scratching her butt.  Either way, eww.

And just in case we forgot where we were…

But the flowers were spectacular!

****

Son Two and a friend stopped by for dinner last night.  It was great to see him, even if he did receive another citation for defiant trespass earlier in the day.  Being the mother of an urban explorer there is just no end to the worry, people.  This boy needs to find a new hobby.

****

Finally, GREAT NEWS!  The TWINS ARE BUDDING!  No, I don’t have human twins approaching puberty.  I have twin lilac bushes that were purchased when we lived in New Hampshire 21 years ago.  When we moved from NH to North Carolina a year later, we dug them up and put them on the moving van.  When the movers opened the van at our new home, the twins had bloomed on the truck.  Later that same year, we moved back to PA and brought them with us again.  They lived and grew in our yard there for nearly two years before being moved again to the house we just left.  Now, after spending the last 17 years in one spot, they are so massive we had to hire professionals to dig them up.

It wasn’t cheap. Yes,Dear wasn’t happy.  The landscaper was happy because it filled his pockets during a slow season in a bad year, but I did see him cast a sympathetic glance toward Yes,Dear, who I’m sure rolled his eyes behind my back.

Oh, well.

Needless to say, If the twins had died this time Yes,Dear would have been REALLY REALLY pissed and I would have been REALLY, REALLY sad.  But THEY HAVE BUDS ON THEM, so he is not as unhappy and I am wildly happy.  And a little smug.

The twins are the only two plants other than grass in our sparse new yard right now, but not for long.  I’ve already got a garden plan forming somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain.  Please don’t tell Yes,Dear.  He hates it when I think because it usually means work for him.  So we’ll keep him in the dark a little longer.  Okay?

I’ve always wondered what Heaven is like and now I know.  To those of you who know me, the fact that I LOOOOOOVE chocolate comes as no surprise.  It is my boyfriend, my one true love really.  Fortunately, Yes,Dear has accepted this and moved on.  Apparently a lot of you feel the same way about chocolate because I still get a lot of hits on an old post in which I talk about George Clooney wearing chocolate pants.

Anyway, yesterday I met Ruth.  She is lovely and sweet and has an adorable husband and a dog, Theo, who is really quite something.  I understand she has children too, but I didn’t meet them.  She had probably hidden them in the attic or somewhere because some strange chocolate-stalking blogger was OH MY GAWD AT THE DOOR and one never knows what THAT could lead to.

Ruth has started a new business in which she makes AMAZING CONFECTIONS and sells them to people who like to eat them.

Well, Bossy recently posted a photo of Ruth’s Mousse Cake.

Naturally, I had to have one.  So Ruth, sweetheart that she is, on way-to-short-notice this week (thank you!) made me one.  Visually, it is a work of art.  Or it was until I cut into it last night and SAVORED it.  This cake is SO good that even Yes,Dear, who claims not to give much of a hoot about chocolate unless it’s wrapped around peanut butter as in a Reese’s Cup, was making obscene-phone-call-type noises while eating it and then, licking the remains out of his mustache, said, “oh, my GOD, is this stuff even LEGAL?”

I kid you not.

I have decided that Heaven is living inside one of Ruth’s Mousse Cakes and having to spend eternity eating your way out.

And Ruth?  You’d better hide the kids again when I come back for more because I swear I’ll kidnap them and ransom them for a lifetime supply…

I was supposed to teach the boys how to do their own taxes this year, but we only had an hour last week when we were all together to get them done, so I ended up bringing home their W-2’s.

Did I spend this beautiful snowbound day wrapped in flannel, drinking hot toddies and enjoying a good book?  No.  I did the boys’ taxes online.  And in the process I learned something rather appalling.

Just look:

Click graphic to enlarge.

If your filing status is DECEASED, odds are paying taxes is the last thing on your mind, but with the economy in a shambles apparently Ed Rendell has resorted to desperate measures to replenish the state coffers (coffins?  ahem).  Sorry to hear you’ve been under the weather - yeah, six feet under - but you’ll have to pony up like everybody else…

Rendell’s taxing zombies.

At least he’s made it possible for the zombies to file online to avoid grossing out the living.  It’ll be tricky, what with the skin sloughing off their fingers and leaking gooey bodily fluids all over their keyboards, but they certainly can’t just saunter into any old tax preparer’s office looking like that now, can they?

Someone might want to let Rendell know that it’s never a good idea to piss off the zombies.

Thank God we moved.

Last night Son Two emailed me the transcript of a IM conversation he had with a friend regarding a Facebook post.  This cracks me up:

Friend (11:00:11 PM): is there a new lady friend in your life?

Friend (11:00:40 PM): izzz all g00d, and whos the biddy!