If It Looks Like A Duck and Quacks Like a Duck, It's Probably Just A Four Year Old At Wal-Mart

Hello girls and boys! I’m sorry I’ve been MIA for a little while, but it’s been a crazy busy past couple of weeks. My life is funny like that. I’ll go through these weeks, sometimes months, where I have absolutely nothing to do except stare at four walls and try to make up weird things to amuse myself with. Then, all of a sudden, I’ll get weeks where I have to schedule time to breathe. I don’t know why this happens, but it does and I’m sure it thinks it’s funny. I concur.

Because of this, I don’t always get around to doing my blog. Since emails and other online correspondence take me between an hour to three hours a day depending on what all I have to do, a lot of times it comes down to me either having time to write, or having time to do my blog. As much as I love you all, I have to keep trucking on my novel. No, I am not saying I love it more than all of you. Please don’t hurt me.

I’ve had a weird past week that I don’t quite know how to explain. I had intended on going into this much deeper, as I had mentioned a little bit about this in the second part of the Good Girls Go Bad saga, and I will, but for the most part I am going to let sleeping dogs lie.

To put this simply, I was innocently shopping when I found something that reminded me of my grandmother. It was a message about losing a loved one and a lot of things really hit me. When my grandmother passed, we found out a lot of surprising things about her that we never knew. Ultimately, my grandmother was not the person I thought she was, or that any of us thought she was, for that matter. She practically raised me, along with my grandfather, and now they were both gone and leaving me to wonder who grandma really was. The message I saw was a little too exact, and it seemed to be speaking straight to me. It made me realize that, no matter who my grandma really was, all that matters is who she was to me.

After this happened, I got home and posted a status on my Facebook that was generalized, but basically about the whole situation having to do with my grandma. The first person to respond to this was Friend. I thought this odd considering the status, being as it was generalized, could also refer to him, and I wondered why, after almost two months of us not talking, he would suddenly respond to that. I thought it too striking to be a coincidence, but now I don’t know what to think. And so it is...

I also wanted to address something that has been brought up to me regarding Friend. I know there’s been several times that I mentioned I was a hot mess when he met me. I feel as if I need to express how much of a hot mess for you guys to really understand what this poor man has gone through with me, as it’s been brought about how much of a hot mess I could have really been. I started a blog just a few mere months before I met friend and I never took it down. I will direct you there and give you a new appreciation for friend, because yes, I was really messed up. To be honest, looking back, I should have seen a psychologist, but I couldn’t even talk to my mom, and still can’t most of the time, to bridge the subject, so I didn’t. Turns out, I didn’t need one. I just needed friend, who, at the time, was a psychology student. Funny how that works out.

But on to bigger, better and funnier things. This is going to be an extremely pretentious announcement considering this is probably coming many months in advance, but I will be starting a new blog. Some of you know that I am a bit of a vintage clothes restorer aficionado. I am in love with vintage clothes and the look of them in general, and I am in love with sewing. Lucky for me, Aunt Bev happened to have a slew and a half of vintage clothes that fit me that I was welcome to. This is one of the many of millions of reasons why I love Aunt Bev.

Anyway, some of the clothes were vastly out of style with their sleeves and length, and were not the cute kind of vintage at all. However, the patterns and the garment itself were vintage, and I saw complete hope for reworking the garment so that it kept with feel of the pattern and the era, but also update it so I could wear it everywhere and not look like an old schoolmarm, as Aunt Bev would say. Sometimes all it takes it removing the shoulder pads from the sleeves, and others all it takes it removing the puffy, I’m on a pirate ship, sleeves. It’s quite easy, actually.

There are some pieces that are fine on their own, several actually, and only needed the buttons and what not changed out. But some of the pieces were those matronly pieces, as some were her mother’s, and they actually laughed when I put them on and wondered how I was ever going to do something with them to allow me to wear them in public. Since I’ve had a few people who are also in love with vintage clothing and want to know how to change them up and make them fit today’s style without stealing their integrity, ask to see the pieces I’ve done or how I’ve done them, I decided to do a blog all about this particular subject.

In this blog, I will take some before and after pictures of garments that seem as though they are past help. I will also include the pieces that I’ve done nothing to and show how to make them work with an accessory or two. Accessories can make all the difference. I am also vastly in love with Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character’s style on Ghost Whisperer. She wears all vintage pieces and changes them up with accessories, so even the silliest things suddenly don’t look so silly after they are dressed up with the right accentuating pieces and accessories.

I am far from a fashionista, but I think this blog could be something fun for me. It will be awhile until I get it up, because I’ve got a ton of other pieces that I’m currently working on altering, and it is also time consuming to get some great pictures to put up on the blog. As soon as I am ready for the new blog, I will let you all know. I will not be taking this blog down, but simply starting another one dedicated simply to vintage clothing.

For now, though, I will just stick to telling you some funny stories that have happened recently. I realized today that I have blurbs of stories everywhere. By everywhere I mean in my phone, on my computer, and on flash drives and CDs to my computer. Apparently, for quite awhile now, I’ve just typed out weird things that happened to me that I wanted to blog about, and then never got a chance to do so. I think I have enough material to last me the next eighty years. Damn, I’d be old in eighty years.

First come the story about my creeper cat, Sophie. Sophie is a cute little calico that looks completely innocent, but beware, as she is not. Many are the times I will be minding my own business, look down, and she will be there staring at me. She never blinks. Sometimes I’ll be doing something and simply turn to find her right next to me staring, and I never heard her coming. Other times, I will wake up to find her right next to my face just staring at me. She’s plotting something. I just don’t know what. That’s the scary part.

My friend and I were discussing this the other day and she and I decided that we could write a novel called “Where Sophie Goes, Murder Follows.” Maybe we’re jumping to conclusions, but if you could see the look in her eyes, you would know it’s clearly one of murder. Yes, because cats totally murder people.

This book would obviously be so popular that it would be turned into a movie. No one would really want to star in a movie where a cat killed them except for Lady Gaga, because she’s odd. So she would be our only star, but that would never work. The studio would want to pull the movie. Therefore, we’d find ourselves having to give out non homicidal kittens to convince others to do the movie by showing them that most kittens are not homicidal. It’s just Sophie. And we’d also promise that Sophie would never come anywhere near the actors. We’d simply use an uncanny double.

We also decided we need a cute lead. At first I thought we couldn’t get any big name actors, but then my friend pointed out all the really, really stupid movies that had big name actors, and we figured that between giving out free kittens, and the movie already starring Lady Gaga, we probably could get one to agree to do it. We also figured that if a movie about sparkly vampires, humans and werewolves could top the box office charts, a movie about a killer cat would probably also do well in retrospect. Naturally, we decided we’d have to get a Twilight actor to be in the movie since they’d be most likely to do it. We have too much time on our hands.

Keeping on the subject of animals, we all know how Greta Hayley is adorable, yet I always call her a little con artist. This is because she is one in too many ways to count, but let me just give you an example of one. Once everyone goes to bed, Greta will get a special cookie for being a good girl. I will get one out of the cupboard, and sometimes she will take it, but mostly she will reach out, lick it, and then decide she doesn’t want it. I know they’re dogs, but I hate to put the cookies back that she doesn’t want, so I set them on the floor hoping she'll eat it later. I give her another cookie, which she takes, and eats. Then, she comes back, snaps that other cookie off of the floor and takes off with it. I should have seen that one coming, but I never do. The little stinker totally cons me into giving her two cookies instead of one, and I fall for it every single time.

I recently had some doctor's appointments. The hospital where I go for them is in a large town, but the roads are a little narrow, and each street has a small town feel to it. While driving down the street to the hospital, we saw two people standing right in the middle of the sidewalk reading a piece of paper. This wasn’t unusual at all until you realized that the piece of paper was tiny and each was holding the piece of paper in one of their hands, bunched together, reading it. Apparently it wasn’t good enough for one person to hold said paper. Nope, both had to. They were so cute, even though I suppose they were lost, or just in general confused. I wonder how that ended.

Another thing about the hospital that I go to is that it is in a complex of four separate hospitals. They are all connected by a walkway, or an underground tunnel. They are different hospitals, all within the same health group, and all on a two block wide radius, two in a row per block, one behind the other. If it’s warm out, instead of taking the walkways, we will walk outside on the sidewalk to get from one hospital to another. Parking is so expensive, and there’s no use in moving the car to go from one hospital to another when they’re right on top of each other.

As we were walking up the hill, a young male nurse came flying out of one of the hospitals, and passed us at top speed. The hospitals also serve as nursing schools, and he was young, so we figured he was an intern. We also figured that he was on his way into the hospital below the one we were walking past. We turned to watch him, wondering what kind of emergency was going on to see him run that fast. Instead of going in the other hospital, he ran past all the hospitals, onto the main street and kept going. I guess he found out the nursing life wasn’t for him and didn’t know how to express this revelation other than to run far and fast. Poor kid.

We live in a fairly remote area with lots of trees, woods and overgrown grass. With this comes bugs, particularly spiders. As you all may know, spiders are my favorite. And by favorite, I mean I scream, run, jump on something and cringe while crying for someone else to kill them if one comes along. If that doesn't work, I got at them with the hose on the vacuum from as far away as humanely possible. However, I recently found myself faced with a spider that was colored like a poisonous spider would be, leaving me to assume it was poisonous. He or she, I didn’t check, was out on the back porch where our dogs pass through to get to the fenced in back yard. Not wanting to find out if he or she was poisonous or not, I knew I had to kill it there and then.

I picked up a trusty broom, the only weapon within reach, and whacked at it several times. When I lifted the broom, I saw that it had curled up into a ball. There was no blood, there were no guts. Dude or dudette obviously was in tuck and hide mode. He or she so wasn’t dead, just faking. So I stood there and waited, ready to pounce. Predictably, he or she thought after several minutes that he or she was safe, so he or she uncurled, but I was ready. Just as he or she uncurled him or her self, I struck again. BAM! This time there was blood and there were guts. Muahaha, take that spider! Now that I’ve had my moment of glory, a spider is going to scare the crap out of me, isn’t it?

With all these unusual, non correlating stories in the mix, I will leave you with just one more ultra confusing thing. Some kid quacked at me the other day at Wal-Mart. That is all.