The Gurly Life

Potty, for short

I give you ... Potter Van Smokersdaam. Directly from Amsterdam. Solar powered.

Hippo surprise

The only thing more awesome than this cute little hippo doodad (courtesy of Ms. Willow)

Is that it's actually useful.

Form *and* substance.

 

Weirdness actually, is all around us

Last night I went on a date in Old Town Pasadena. The date consisted of dinner and window shopping. We had fun. As you are aware by now, wherever I go weirdness emerges. Well, it's not that it emerges, it's there for the picking - and I pick it. So here are some highlights.

This was in the window of the creepiest store ever, called Gold Bug. Weird and creepy does not begin to describe it. You really need to click on the link and check out the website. I will admit that there is something fascinating about the whole thing, and the contributing artists obviously put in a lot of work and care in the pieces, so it's good that there's a store that caters to this kind of work. Having said that, it's weird and creepy. Take the above. It appears to be a diorama of some sort, a Christmas scene that began bucolic and then a tarantula wandered in and stole the Christmas gifts. Puts the Grinch to shame if you ask me. I think the caterpillar is about to eat the Christmas tree, too.

There there was this:

The heads of hair in the front of the frame are about the size of a fist, to give you perspective. So from the street, you see the backs of these seemingly shrunken heads with pretty hair under glass jars, and this miniature goat wearing a crown. A passer-by said those are not shrunken heads, that's doll hair. For dolls. Oh, ok, so that makes it, like, 10 times creepier, kthxbye.

We wondered around some more, and spotted this little gem taped to a tree.

Yeah dude, just wait for the good women to line up.

We wondered through a store called Naughty Or Nice, which really didn't seem to relate to what it sold, but whatever. They had these fur hats for sale, so here we are, wearing fur hats.

Everyone looks sexy with a big fur hat. You can't deny it.

A flash of genius

You never know what will impress people, and why, what simple gestures are jaw-droppingly ingenious.

This, from Ivy the Monkey Goddess:

The other day, Elena was having trouble peeling a banana from the stem, so she flipped it over and peeled it from the bottom. It was genius. You had to be there, maybe.

Ivy and I were chatting in my office, when I pulled out my banana. Normally, I peel bananas from the stem and peel down to the bottom. I think most people do that. But this particular banana had a slightly green stem. Anyone who has ever tried to peel an unripe banana (and why would you? but curiosity may have made you do it) most likely knows that the peel is very cellulosy, almost rubbery, and it's difficult to crack that baby open without a knife.

I struggled with the stem for a few seconds, and just as Ivy was beginning to wonder how I was going to solve this problem, I flipped the banana over and opened it up at the other end with no difficulty whatsoever. Ivy's jaw dropped here, and she declared me a genius.

So I wondered, why was Ivy the Monkey Goddess so impressed by this trick? A quick, unscientific Google search revealed that monkeys peel their bananas from the bottom, not the stem. Shockingly, monkeys have a much more elegant way of opening bananas than we do (hah!). The point of this post, of course, is that Ivy is indeed the Monkey Goddess.

I borrowed the video from the same blog.

I was almost killed!

Ok not really, but I could have died. This morning I left for work in Pixie the Prius and as I pulled into traffic I had a sneezing fit. And by sneezing fit I mean I sneezed something like 10 times in a row. This only took about a minute, but you know in a minute much damage can be done.

Here's what I learned about sneezing and driving.

Have you noticed how when you sneeze your eyes shut tightly? Someone told me that it's because the air is forced out of your lungs so hard (200 miles an hour, I hear), that if you don't shut your eyes tightly, they will pop right out of your head and simply dangle off your face by the optic nerve. I have no idea how true this is, but the image stuck with me and every time I sneeze I have this vision. I also wonder whether I would still be able to see, except it would be all weird and I'd see my feet or my lap (depending on whether I was sitting or standing) and whether my 3D vision would be all shot to hell and I would just get two separate images. I mean at some point the 3D vision would no longer work, especially if one eye went all googly and started swivelling in a different direction. Right?

The other thing about sneezing is that your body (or is just me?) kind of convulses, like a giant involuntary spasm of every muscle in my body. When I sneeze once or twice it's not a big deal, but anyone who's had a sneezing fit will tell you how exhausting it is. It might be more accurate to say that I will tell you how exhausted I am after a sneezing fit.

What seems to happen when I keep sneezing is that the giant spasms build on each other. My body hasn't quite recovered from the first sneeze, when the second hits, then the third, and so on. So the spasms become more intense and uncontrolled.

What I further discovered this morning is that if I'm having a sneezing fit while I'm driving, strange things happen like I start to smack my forehead against the wheel, sudden acceleration, and random turns of the wheel, directly into traffic, of course. It did occur to me to pull over, but as I said this all took less than a minute, and by the time I had the thought to do that it was over.

Point is, I could have died. I didn't, but I could have.

Cheesy popcorn!

Last week sucked. It just did. It's a testament to how good I have it that when things don't go my way at work I think the week sucked. Nevertheless, it sucked. Over the weekend I was in a workshop, so I did not get a chance to burrow under my blankets and sleep it off. Sleeping it off always helps.

So today I was not feeling as frisky as I normally do on Monday mornings. I slugged through the morning, moping about, sipping my water gloomily, tip tapping on my computer. And then ...

CHEESY POPCORN!

Someone brought a bag of white cheddar popcorn to the office. Mmmh, delicious, crunchy, cheesy popcorn. And miraculously, all of last week was forgotten and life was good again.

In some ways, I'm easy to please.

A couple of funnies, Part II

What's a trip without a few funnies? This are from my DC trip and one from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. What is it about Texas airports??

This cupcake is almost obscene in its sensuality, isn't it?

One of those new fangled toilets that wash your hoohah, too. This was in the open house Era and I checked out in Georgetown. Post to follow.

Note the little poopy dog on the right with the word NO! Awesome.

I don't quite know what to say about this. Spotted in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, Terminal C.

A couple of funnies

While you patiently wait for the blog posts and the Pictorial Representations (who are we kidding? You just want the Pictorial Representations), here are a couple of fun things.

The tallest carport-slash-patio ever!. This is in Panama City Beach, only a block or two from the beach, so we (Adam, Willow and I) surmised that it is a boatport.

I don't know what this is, but it's pretty cool. It's upside down. But not. As in, it's not really upside down, because as you can see, down is down and up is up, but they built it to look like it's upside down...I'm thinking now that you can figure that out on your own. I don't know if you get the same effect in a photo, but it is slightly disorienting when you first see it.

What's a beach vacation without a cutout photo?

Ouch! So what you're telling me is that if I dive, I will break my head and I will bleed.

And this, I promised I would try to get on the way back since my original photo died. I know that it's hard to believe unless you actually see it. That's why it was important for me to get this shot. I am still wondering why you have to "open" the trash bin to drop the trash "in." If anyone can help me with this, I would be grateful.

And -- eh-hem -- well, needless to say, we did not have dinner here, we were with children. Nor would we have even if we had been child-less. Or, for that matter, we probably would not have even touched the door handle.

Mom. Mom. Mom! MOM!! MOMMOMMOMMOMMOMMOM!!!!!!

WHAT!!?!!

If you have been following the increasingly insane artwork on this blog, then you know that my mom arrived yesterday, on a jet plane, accompanied by ducks. Or geese, I can never really tell the difference. Point is, she is here, safe and sound, with all her suitcases.

So, yay!

The hilarity has already begun, in the form of the cats' reaction to her arrival. Cricket, the Calico Hippo, merely noted mom's arrival with a predatory look, which clearly indicated her plan to meow at her all day long or just stare at her meaningfully until my mom gives her T-R-E-A-T-S.

Maliboo Kitty, on the other hand, is more emotionally complex that Cricket. Her first reaction was to sit in the bedroom in the dark and stare out into the living room. Later, when my mom approached her, she gave her an indredulous look and hissed. It was very clear Maliboo Kitty had not decided yet whether she was going to forgive mom for being gone for so long and now coming back like nothing ever happened. Tsk.

This morning the vocalizations began. I think they went something like this: "You know, I don't know who you think you are, waltzing in here after what you did. And not to mention that you didn't just leave -- you didn't call, you didn't write, you just left us here, and during the day when I get hungry there is no one to yell at for food. Now here you are again, expecting me to take you back, but you know what missy maybe I won't. Maybe it's too little too late. Maybe you're a day late and a kibble short. You are going to have to do a lot to get me to forgive you because you are in the dog house, missy, that's right in the dog house. Now, where's my breakfast?"

Very Gloria Gaynor.

Maliboo Kitty then walked over to me, hissed, and flopped resignedly on the carpet.

The placeholder

It turns out that I have an invisible friend. Always had one. I only just realized this today -- it's one of those things that has always been there, so much so that I never really consciously realized it until today.

Perhaps a more accurate description would be to say that I have an imaginary boyfriend. I wish that instead of an imaginary boyfriend I had dreamt up the imaginary world of Harry Potter, but what can you do?

I call my imaginary boyfriend the placeholder because he feels like the imaginary guy who is holding the place of the real guy with whom I will eventually have the relationship I really want. The interesting thing about the placeholder is that he's not technically imaginary. I mean, he is, but not. What I mean is that the guy is a real guy, someone I know and really like and who makes me feel good, though occasionally it's a fictional character from a movie or even a book. But imaginary because the guy is not usually someone I am actually dating. Often he'll be married or gay or, well, a fictional character from a movie, or someone I haven't even seen or spoken to in years, or even some guy I shared a laugh with at Starbucks one day.

I have all kinds of imaginary conversations with the placeholder, he's my date to things, and of course he's in my intimate fantasies, too. He is there for me when I'm upset, and he makes sure I'm never lonely, even when I'm alone. The placeholder might last a day, a week, a year, a decade. I had one when I was younger that must have lasted for 15 years. It was an on-again, off-again kind of thing, but there he always was. Until I found out that in real life the guy was an ass, and then I had to replace him with another placeholder.

This begs the following question: just how crazy am I, really?