It’s Aliiiiive!

My Sista wrote today about wanting to get a set of those grandma glasses if she gets her eyes dilated during her exam today.

It reminded me of a picture of me in Hawaii in 1985 that I encountered while cleaning off an old hard drive yesterday:

Joe Cool? You be the judge.

There’s No Accounting for Taste

A year ago I wrote my most viewed post ever.  By a factor of ten, this post still dominates my stat counter.

What could it be, oh gentle reader, that has so captivated the small but deranged loyal following of The Dry Spot?

Was it my first, and probably worst “embarassing stuff about myself” story?

Or could it have been one of my harrowing tales of near death experiences?

Did the blogiverse favor one of my travleogues?

Maybe it was one of my tales of misspent youth.

It probably wasn’t one of my navel gazing moments or odes to my pets.

Nope, I’ll end the suspense (such that it is…)

My most viewed piece of writing ever was my bourbon and allergy medicine inspired “Ode to a Bradford Pear” from last spring before the late hard freeze killed most of the pretty foliage in a hundred mile blast radius around my backyard.

Apparently, the poem got picked up by a group of invasive horticultural species botanists who flooded it with link love and started a heated debate among that extremely passionate geeky community.  They reposted it to dozens of websites that had hundreds of comments about whether Bradfords were truly a parasite or not.  Next to nobody actually commented on the poem itself, except to point out that I was obviously not a professional scientist.

No shit, Sherlock.  I’m just a homeowner with allergies and an ear for the turn of a phrase who thinks it’s stupid to plant trees that explode at the first gust of a March wind.

A Prufrockian Moment

I woke up this morning in a dark place.  No, not my bedroom.  A dismal vortex of despair.

I wasn’t hung over.  I got to bed early. Things have generally been going fairly well in my personal and professional life.  Sure, RUABelle and the animals have been in our Sewanee cabin for Spring Break this week, but I’ve been talking to her a couple of times a day and have kind of been enjoying the bachelor lifestyle since Tuesday.

Then it hit me.  She always made the coffee in the morning.  I’m not officially checked out on the coffeemaker, so it is a no fly zone for me.  If I try, it’ll be awful.  If I break it, she’ll kill me.  I guess I’m trapped.

Why go on…?

Well, That Didn’t Last Long

It only took one car trip to Sewanee for my brand spankin’ new Camry Hybrid to go from “that new car smell” to “that gassy, wet dog with a side order of Arby’s curly fries smell.”

It was nice while it lasted.

Do You Know This Guy?

Because I sure don’t. Yet for some reason he has decided to send me 25 unsolicited text messages (probably from prison) over the past couple of days.

It doesn’t really bug me much since I have unlimited texts anyway. But I thought I’d post about him here in case I turn up missing over the next few days. If that does happen, no matter what he says in his testimony, I most certainly did not agree to go for a moonlit walk in a secluded part of a state park somewhere…

More Grafitti Fun from Over the Sportsman’s Urinal

Correct me if I’m wrong…

But if I buy that top on the right for my Jeep, won’t it be a little difficult to see out?

To quote ZZ Top, “you been arrested for drivin’ while blind.”

Yet Another in a Long Line of Really Bad Decisions

RUABelle and I spent most of yesterday afternoon moving and rehanging artwork around our house.  We’ve acquired a lot of little prints over the course of our travels and weren’t really getting any enjoyment out of them seeing as they were all stacked up in a closet.

So we distributed them around the house filling up little nooks and crannies and small areas of wallspace with a virtual tour of our favorite vacation spots.

One featured piece of real estate is in the guest bathroom downstairs.  We hung a lovely little watercolor of a quaint fishing village in Ireland that we visited on a beautiful spring day a couple of years ago.  The hues of the painting and the matte and the frame coincidentally perfectly complement the color scheme of the room.  The evocative nature of the subject brought back a flood of fond memories of our trip to the Emerald Isle and the wonderful people we met during our stay.

I totally peed on my shoe.

Meme-o-matic

I hardly ever get tagged for memes. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I blog so sporadically that I’m not really a dependable provider of content. I’m sure I’ve skipped some tags in the past, but one of my most favorite early posts was the result of a meme that I begged Ivy to let me try.

But in the last couple of days I got tagged by two of my absolute favorite bloggers ever, Sista Smiff and NewsComa. As a matter of fact, outside of Knuck who I’ve known for more than a decade before I even heard of blogs, these two ladies are probably my closest online friends. So when they talk…I answer.

Coma’s meme sounded easy. She asked for me to:

1. Pick up the nearest book.

2. turn to page 123.

3. find the 5th sentence.

4. post the next 3 sentences.

5. tag 5 people.

Unfortunately, the closest book to me right now is the one we keep under the DVD player, “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.” Page 122 is a review of “It Happened One Night,” and page 123 is a full page picture of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Actually, I think NewsComa would think this is groovy, so here’s the picture:

But in order to keep within the spirit of the meme and actually contribute some literary content to the blogosphere, I went into our library (hallway with a bookshelf from Target) and grabbed the first book at random. It was a gift from my best friend that is on the top of my reading stack after I catch up with five weeks of Entertainment Weekly, “1491″ by Charles Mann.

Let’s see…page 123…5th sentence…next three sentences…good…here we go.

“At the time of the conference at least a quarter of the Haudenosaunee were former captives. At great personal risk, many Indian leaders even after they knew that influenza was in Montreal. Dozens died.”

Err…I guess it needs context. I’d better get caught the heck up with EW before the new post-writers’ strike shows start arriving on the networks or I’ll never get back to reading all the cool books that DogDoc has given me over the past year.

Sista’s meme is even more self-referential. It asks me to:

** Go back to your archives and link to your five favorite posts.
Link One: must be about family
Link Two: must be about friends
Link Three: must be about yourself
Link Four: must be about something you love
Link Five: can be anything you choose

Hmmm…considering I haven’t updated my blogroll or my “The Driest Spots” list in over a year (lazy, lazy, lazy) this might be a good way for me to get off my ass and actually comb through the back catalog and introduce both my new readers to some of the golden oldies.

Here’s the family post.

And over here is the one about friends.

Something about me.

A post about something I love.

And dealer’s choice. Fingers crossed, I think I’ll get to take this trip again this year.

 

Continuing my reputation as the black hole where memes go to die, I won’t tag anybody. Consider yourself lucky, technoverse.

 

Note to NiT

When you repost another aggregator’s entire post that quotes a post that you already posted practically in its entirety, you’re not serving to help drive any traffic to the original author’s site, like a good aggregator should.

You’re just stealing content to populate your own advertiser-driven site.

And that’s not cool.

T for Texas. T for Hil-La-Reeeee.

Like Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow, I’m afraid we’re in for six more weeks of this crap.

I think I’ll follow the lead of our fuzzy little groundhog buddy and crawl back into my warm, dark den until it’s over.

Wake me when they get to Denver.

Rationalization in Action

As part of selling my catalog business and the building which previously housed it, I have had to go through piles and piles of boxes of old records and pictures which had accumulated there over the past 15 years like the detrius from a syllogomaniac from an episode of Dr. Phil.

I have decided that I am not a packrat.

I am a personal archivist.