Ways in Which I Plan to Emasculate Our Dog

These ain't the cat's pajamas. They're better.



Care for a cocktail? Maybe some l'il smokies to get the night started?



Mommy thinks Daddy will turn this red when he sees me in this getup. Out of love and pride, of course.



First, I will make Ichabod Crane poop himself. Next, I will poop all over your house.



Buffy told me you girls were making hot cocoa and s'mores at the lodge! Sounds like an occasion for argyle!



Aren't I so EMO? I'm going to go listen to Evanescence and cut myself. Later, poseurs.

Welcome to Tackyville. Population: 2

There's nothing like coming home from a jog to your man blasting, "Queen of My Double-Wide Trailer," while attempting to put up the gazebo-tent-contraption he hustled from Home Depot.

We were there buying paint supplies a couple of weeks ago and we walk outside and see one of these shrines to the wife-beater (the shirt, not the person -- actually, who knows, now that I think about it) that R has been coveting since we bought the house. Seriously, every time I see one all I can think of is a sweaty guy with a belly and a farmer's tan slapping some poor girl on the ass and telling her to "go bring Daddy another High Life" and the whole time she's thinking how much better her life would've been if she'd just gone home with the manager of Krystal that time he brushed up against her by the shake machine. Tragic, right? But I see my boyfriend beaming at this thing, to the point where I can just about make out the visions swimming through his head of him kicking back beneath its cheaply-constructed metal frame and flesh-colored mesh panels with nothing but a cheap beer, his iPod, his lady friend, and his cairn terrier-german shepherd mutt (more on that later) at his feet. For him, this is heaven. I know... I know how to pick 'em.

Being the kind of girl who played "fort" in the backyard until I was like 10 (ok, like 15), I truly understand the desire to have a ridiculous pretend house out in the yard, even though you have a perfectly good real house for the doings of real life things. But I'm also not an idiot. And am well aware of the fact that a bedroom set, for instance, maybe could be slightly more useful than a glorified patio umbrella as our first real home purchase.

So I say, "Ok, you can have it if it's less than a hundred bucks."

He lights up like a gd sparkler.

So we go inside to ask and they say it's $149. I win! I look sympathetic, yet practical! The contraption does not have to come home with us and I still get props for being open-minded, rather than one of those bitches who throws out her dude's collection of ashtrays. (Oh, wait. Oops.) But apparently, I'm not so clever as I think because rather than walking out the door like a normal person would at hearing the price is too high, he asks if they will take $99. My boyfriend is trying to wheel and deal with the Home Depot. He thinks he can bargain with The Man. And apparently, he can. Some joker tells us we can have it for $99 if we take it down ourselves. R is elated. I put on a brave face and go gangk a screwdriver.

Fast forward to today. We decide to finally put it up in the yard. We notice we are missing:

- a least one screw and a nut
- one of the poles to clip the netting business to
- any indication we had previously given our neighbors of having "good taste"

And here it is in all its amazingly tacky glory:



My God, what have we done.

Hot Syrup

Sorry, kids, but I'm busier than the lady who refills the french toast sticks bin at Shoney's on a Sunday morning. Will return when I can sneak in a smoke break with the bus-boys.

Everybody's got a dream! What's your dream?

I would apologize for the lack of posts, but really, I don't owe you anything, internets.

So anyway, remember Philip Stuckey? Edward/Richard Gere's scheistery douchebag of a lawyer in Pretty Woman? We stayed in his apartment over the weekend:





It may be difficult to discern from these pictures, but if you were in the market for lucite furniture, lacquered cabinets, French bordello-esque bathroom lighting fixtures and velvet velvet everywhere, you would be IN LUCK! Sometimes a place just screams, "Who wants to be sexually assaulted by a balding egomaniac?"

I shouldn't complain because our little haven of ostentation was provided free of charge by a generous benefactor to whom we are very tenuously connected. It was in a fantastic midtown Manhattan location and there's no denying the hours of entertainment that mirror-on-mirror walls can provide you. But seriously, I spent the whole time wondering what color silk jumpsuit said benefactor's wife was wearing when she decided that metallic window panels were a good idea. I'm gonna guess gold. Just a hunch.

A brief respite

Tomorrow we head to Connecticut for a visit with my fam, where we'll end up having the inevitable "but you grew up in such a beautiful, serene slice of New England wilderness. How did you end up so crazy?" conversation. Well, chickadee, this is what happens when you spend your adolescence going "camping" with a sleeping bag from 1974 and a tupperware container full of gin. And maybe some Twizzlers. And maybe once you fell in the fire and forgot how to stop-drop-and-roll in your drunken terror, but luckily it was so gd cold out, they just pushed you into some partially frozen leaves and everything ended up ok except for having to hide a slightly singed London Fog coat. Sorry, Bob Biscuits.

Reno is going to pick us up in her Jeep Wrangler. I'm gonna see if I can get her to blast Metallica and do donuts in the airport parking lot. Doubtful, but one can dream.

But seriously, I know lots of people like to imagine that where they grew up is some sort of utopia because of their great memories with family and friends, blah blah, but hi, who are you kidding? You grew up in a split ranch in a subdivision, not here:



I can't wait to be there.

Milestone!

Just spreading the amazing news that someone found this blog by searching for the phrase "slutes in panty house." The only thing that could make this better is if the person were really searching for "sluts in pantyhose" and was just that bad at spelling. Come back, mentally challenged dude with the nylon fetish! We welcome everyone here.

Whimsy

As promised, here is the paint job. As you can see, the original color is a buttery (though more like margariney) yellow that we think is Restoration Hardware's umm, Butter Yellow. It actually wasn't completely unfortunate in that room, but I've had an aversion to yellow bedrooms ever since I found out that the color can cause exhaustion and depression if overused. Seriously. Studies show it agitates babies and I don't think it's coincidence that Van Gogh's paintings are rife with yellows, what with him being bat shit crazy and tortured and all. So the true yellow had to go and will be relegated to an accent color in the sleeping context..

Before painting/after spackle-priming:



Mid-paint job:



Feldspar (with flash)!



That table and frame won't actually be in there, but some black furniture will be, so I wanted to make sure the contrast was ok. I.e. I didn't want folks to feel like they were walking into a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Though that doesn't sound all that bad seeing it's 850 degrees outside.

Sans flash (the early morning lighting makes it look lighter than it actually is):



I'm also in love with this quilt from Anthropologie, so it will probably make an appearance in a later incantation of this room. We're getting a very old antique bed and armoire from my uncle for the other guest bedroom, so I have a feeling that will lean more toward elegance and refinement (what little we know of those, anyway). As such, I wanted to have a room people would feel comfortable putting their kids, dogs, adulterous flings, whatever, into. Stay tuned for the furniture and decor, my little homewreckers.

I'll be home.. I'll be home.... I'm comin hooooome..

I'm still recovering from Saturday night, wherein I think I impressed the varied patrons at the Flora-Bama bar mightily with my interpretive dance rendition of Melissa Ethridge's "Come To My Window." I'd like to think that not many possess the kind of skill it takes to prostrate oneself upon a dirty picnic table in front of 500 sweat-soaked rednecks, arms arched and extended, to symbolize "the light of the moon." Tell me that's not talent and I'll tell my new girlfriend, Suzette, to pin your scrawny neck to the wall with one of her huge biceps.

Pics of the painting will have to wait til tomorrow because I flew back at 5:30 this morning and haven't been home yet. R says the color looks great in the front bedroom that I would've finished completely on Friday if it hadn't been so ridiculously hot and I hadn't spent half the time sponging myself down and trying to decide which clothes I could strip off without being embarassed to answer the door if one of our neighbors stopped by to ask if we'd heard about that time Don and Meredith got stomachaches and ended up barfing up a rainbow of joy and love. "They were just so full of it that it was the only way out!"

Oh yeah, well did Don and Meredith ever give out Christmas baskets of homemade beef jerky? I didn't think so.

Anyway, if you ever end up painting your own place, whatever you do, wait at least a day and a half to judge the color. Seriously, get out of the room, close the door and come back tomorrow. Otherwise you'll end up walking back and forth, bringing different lights in and out, and working yourself up to hyperventilation mode because you can't believe you just wasted 8 GD hours to have a bedroom look like Slimer just made sweet sweet love to the walls. If you wait that little bit of extra time, then when you look again, it ends up resembling a little slice of chartreuse heaven more than a sticky ecto aftermath.

Just try to ignore all the places where you later notice that it dripped all over the molding. Because it did. And you will notice.

Beach, biatches

I got my hair cut today. I'm hoping it totally turns your man on when he comes home to you looking like Lucy from the Peanuts



I'm off to paint the front bedroom -- we went with Feldspar from Behr, which does not quite look like Chernobyl in real life:



I'll post pics of the 'fore and after when I return from hot as balls Pensacola. If you happen to be there this weekend, I'm the bossy one making eyes at Schroeder. Sorry, R.

Dog-To-Be

Many of you know of my short and sordid history with dogs over the past 10 or so years. We got Shelby right before my senior year of high school, after I begged my parents for a dog for approx. five years. Eleven months later, I went off to college, she remained with them. My mother tries to liken it to a teen mother leaving her baby to be raised by Grandma. I prefer to be likened to a crackhead, if we're going to be throwing stones here. At least in that scenario I'm too high to feel bad about abandoning my dog.

Next came Caddy. She was a birthday present from my college boyfriend when I moved off campus. He got her from some people who were divorcing, which clearly had scarred her. That dog would not crap outside. I could walk her for 3 hours and I swear to God she would hold it out of spite, then later I'd be welcomed into a room by some sort of turd extravaganza. She also ate the crotch out of everyone's underwear she could get her grubby little snout on. Lesbian. When I went to DC for a semester, she was sent to live with the boyfriend's mom, where I assume she still resides, blissfully sofa-pooping and tearing apart panties at her whim.

Finally, in law school there was Bacon. Another "We've been dating for 5 minutes and who cares that you live 5 miles away and I don't have a car! I'll walk! In January!" disaster. We brought her back a week later, after I cried hysterically for 2 days that we would be bad dog parents and she would end up like Corey Haim.

You would think that these experiences would have dissuaded me from wanting a dog in the past few years. And you would be so completely wrong, as evidenced by the fact that I've visited Petfinder more or less daily since 2002. And now that I have a house and a fenced in yard and a goofy, but cute live-in caretaker, it's like a free pass to go on a 3 week bender, but this time involving more dog research, less hookers and blow.

There is a catch, however.

R has allergies. Not like the he's going to end up dead like Macauley Culkin in My Girl if he touches a dog allergies, but the kind where you can only have a low to non-shedding dog. So that limits us mainly to dogs that are either completely dopey looking (e.g. poodles, doodles, schnauzers) or that really should only be owned by Ivana Trump/men who wear pinky rings (e.g. malteses, shih tzus, westies).

We've begun to narrow down the possibilities based on our lifestyle and various breeds' tolerance for humiliation, as I plan to buy a "dog stroller" for my runs, so I can keep going even when the dog gets tired. Quitter. So anyway, I present to you dog possibility numero uno: THE HAVANESE



Apparently, they were developed uniquely in Cuba. This one I would name Elian. Together, we would feast upon plantains and tasajo (cuban beef jerky). He would teach me to salsa and I would reward him with Dentabones and Beggin' Strips. Life could be muy bueno.

Thank You, Don and Meredith

We don't know much about the woman who owned the house before us. She worked for the EPA, got transferred to go work on September 11 stuff, and had a dog named Gracie. I bet she was probably nice, but maybe a little reserved and not really interested in being BFFs with the neighborhood.

You can tell they hated her for it.

But before her, there was "Don and Meredith." And oh man, do they still talk about Don and Meredith.

"Don and Meredith lived in that house for 20 years."
"I was great friends with Meredith."
"Don was quite a handyman."
"Don had that tree checked by an arborist too!"
"Don would weed the lawn inch by inch with his bare hands."
"Meredith was perfect."
"Once, a squirrel was choking on a nut and Don performed squirrel CPR with one nostril and two fingers."
"Meredith single-handedly delivered 2 of my children while baking a chocolate souffle, which we later enjoyed with my placenta."

Seriously, I have no idea what kind of spell these people cast over our neighbors, but regardless we're completely screwed. We were already at a marked disadvantage what with all the drunken yelling, lack of blinds/lack of modesty, the fact that R's Georgia flag currently hangs from the plantation shutters in the front room because I don't know what else to do with it, etc. But these people (who, by the way, I'm convinced are responsible for the heinous makeshift shelving everywhere. Guess you weren't that much of a handyman, DON) set the bar so astronomically high that we might as well stop cutting the front lawn, put the Tahoe up on bricks out there, and roast a pig inside of its bed because if you can't ever live up to Don and Meredith, you might as well terrify the neighbors.

So this is my personal salute to you, Don and Meredith. Thank you. Thank you for sucking.

An Email from Reno

from "reno@awesome.com"
to cannedgoods1@gmail.com
date Aug 6, 2007 4:33 PM
subject Good news....

Hi - We tried calling you yesterday as we drove home from RI but no answer. Give me a call tonight. I have great news about the cookward you like. MOM

GREAT NEWS ABOUT THE COOKWARD!

I am thinking cookward could mean any of the following:
- A new direction. E.g. Onward, upward, cookward!
- The place in the asylum where they keep the chefs. No knives, peelers, choppers, graters, etc. allowed.
- The enigmatic duo of Rachel Leigh Cook and Sela Ward, who decided to team up after they both realized neither have had much of a career since 1999. Plan: play mother/daughter team in slightly different but actually the same dramedies that involve generational conflict and finding the strength that only a female familial bond could create to overcome tragedy.

Or she meant cookware with a typo. Whatever. Though come to think of it, we could use some Calphalon seeing as how my Dad had to cook eggs and french toast in a wok when they were here to visit. Hey, my people MAKE DO.

Creepy Things Said By the Termite Guy

Him: So, do you talk to Old Grandfather out there?
Me: Um, our tree?
Him: Yes, he's the biggest oak I've seen in a long time.
Me: Uh, actually he's a yellow poplar. And mainly I just hope he doesn't fall on us. [nervous, awkward laughter]

Him: [kneeling on the floor, writing up our report] Uh, I'm gonna uh have to stand up.. this is a little uncomfortable on my knees.
Me: Oh! I'm sorry. Go ahead and sit on the couch.
Him: Oh, this might be too comfortable. I might have to take a nap right here.
Me: ...

Him: Insects are very matriarchal. It's amazing how a pregnant bee commands her hive! And female bees do all the work. Termites are one of the few insects where both the females and the males work.
Me: ...

I would have been less than surprised had he offered to show me his suit made of fat ladies' skin. He had to write down his name on the report, so being the asshole I am, I tried to Myspace him and then did some searches using his name plus "renaissance fair," "jedi convention," etc., but no dice. Though I guess if I worked in pest control and lived in my mother's basement, I would use some sort of alias (Genevieve Von Awesome) too. WTF.

Anyway, he kind of looked like this:



Imagine being alone in your house with that. Please Jesus, don't let us have termites so that guy never ever has to come back. Too bad he already knows where we live.

New Template. Check it.

I tried to find video of Beavis yelling, "FIRE! FIRE!" from back in the day but apparently there was some controversy where Beavis got blamed for some kid burning up his trailer or something, so MTV went so far as changing all the episodes and apparently there's no evidence of his pyromania. Except in my heart. And yours.

Also, way to blame Beavis for a trailer fire, America. How about you blame that kid's mom who, rather than raising her kid, probably spent her days watching Maury and amassing her beanie baby collection in the hopes that she could one day sell it to buy some new tits. I'd bet money that Peanut the Elephant didn't buy her much more than a pack of Marlboros and some Hostess Snowballs.

Anyway, "like a house on fire" is an idiom. Our house isn't really on fire, but come to think of it, maybe I'll put up a link to Paypal on here so idiots think it burned down and will donate to the "You'd Help Us Rebuild Our Life If You Loved Jesus" fund and then I can take the mad cash it pulls in and spend it on what else? Beef jerky. Also maybe like a couch or some furniture for the front room since we don't really have any besides R's couch from his apartment, on which I don't even want to know how many people have had sex. God, we are so classy. Get ready for the housewarming/STD party!

So anyway, I'm changing the title of the blog because we're gonna change the name of the house, plus it's all punny and entendre-y* because R and I met like 5 seconds ago and are all in L-0-V-E love and apparently the pheromones or whatever made us lose our minds and enter into like a gajillion dollars worth of debt together. Now us kooky kids are totally overwhelmed with the fact that hi, we have like a house and shit and have to put stuff in it and we have some slightly, uh, differing taste, so get ready for some awesome posts about him trying to put some ashtray from his grandmother's beauty shop in our home and me using it as firewood. See? FIRE!

* If you didn't know that getting on "like a house on fire" basically means that you like each other a whole bunch, really quickly, then please donate to our You'd Help Us Rebuild Our Life If You Loved Jesus fund through my Paypal account. Many thanks!