Blackberry Ninja

7 months ago, as we were moving into our new place, I had a vision of my future summer self, lounging on the hammock with raspberry lemonade made from the fruit I grew as pumpkin vines curled at my feet, ready to do my bidding.  However, things don't always turn out the way you want, as evidenced by my cat's complete incompetency at filing taxes.  So far this summer, my lemon tree has stopped growing and now has white fuzzy things on it that alarm me, those venomous squirrels have eaten most of our raspberries and strawberries, and I'm pretty sure those white fuzzy things might be alien eggs now that I think about it.  Anyways, as anyone know who has eaten fruit straight off the plant/tree/vine, it is about 182 kablillion times better than storebought, and I felt like my dreams were crushed beneath my feet.

Is it just me or does "an asshole" sound wrong?  "A asshole" sounds even more not right.  Maybe because "asshole" is usually used in the plural, as it is hard to limit yourself to just one asshole?  This particular squirrel, however, deserves singling out due to the ridiculous way he is holding the nut.  What are we, at a tea party?  USE YOUR PINKY FINGER ASSHOLE.

Anyways, my work has a giant blackberry bush that is blooming right by the exit to the parking lot.  The thing with this is that people in Oregon treat blackberry bushes like they're a communicable disease and typically don't approach blackberry bushes unless its with a bottle of planticide and full body armor (blackberry plants are very hurty).

If you can believe it, even the LEAVES are painful.  Forget chinese water torture, if I ever have to go torturing I will just whack people in the armpits with blackberry branches.

I  figured I would stop by one day after work, grab a few berries, and bring them back as a treat for LOML. It was then that I made the fatal mistake of tasting a delicious berry.  Flash forward to an hour after work ended and I am manically limping through the bushes (I stepped on a giant thorn because of the hole in the sole of my stupid vegan shoe) with blood all over my hands and scratches on my arms.  Every time a car came by I feel the need to duck in the bushes, thereby spilling my blackberries and making me screech insults at anything in the nearby vicinity.  I ate berries like I hadn't eaten in a year, and the madness didn't stop until I heard a bear*^,** in the bushes and ran away, screaming like a little girl.

delicious, magical fruit.

So I brought home whatever loot hadn't gone in my mouth and we devoured it in a matter of minutes.  The next day, I dragged LOML back there to get more, and we spent another hour, me with a little less enthusiasm as I am never anything but a classy lady in front of LOML.  Then two days later I was back again, and now I'm sitting at work wondering how I can slip out and pick berries for an hour without anyone noticing my absence, so this is evidently a new problem for me and I might need an intervention.

Now comes the point in the story where I really don't know how to end this, and all I really want to do is go pick berries and mash them in my face.  So I will just wrap this up with a picture of the chicken mask I want to buy.

I could name him Friar Chicken.  Get it?  Because it's so close to fried chicken?  Genius.

*I never actually saw the bear, and LOMLs assertions that there aren't bears in an office park remain unfounded until he can prove to me that there isn't a bear in there.

**Actually, it could have been a vampire, because I did have a lot of blood all over me.  Or a shark.   Regardless, a hasty retreat probably saved my life.

Old-fashioned green beauty: leeches for the derriere

Why is it so hard to buy you?

For some reason in the past month I've stumbled across three different articles about all natural beauty treatments from ye olden days.  There were a lot of recipes that were really ahead of their times, such an old wrinkle remedy that involved a lead powder concoction (lead poisoning definitely takes the attention away from your crows feet), but the one that tickled my fancy the most was the mention of anal leeching.  I do appreciate that back then, women didn't pay $60 for an eye cream to evil salary magnets like Sephora, no, they just whipped up a skin mask with the good ol' arsenic supply from their pantry.  But you can't get greener than leeches.  Not only is there no packaging to waste, but you are supporting the eco-system by feeding them top-of-the-line human blood, which, according to my vampire book obsession, is so much better than disgusting animal blood.  And apparently, the "discreet lady" liked to keep her leeching private, and what better privacy for both her and the leech than to gently guide the creature towards the anus.  Apparently this was done for the sake of skin whitening, and I think if these women were to time travel today and see women paying to tan their skin in a machine they would most definitely faint whilst shedding a tear over the indecency of the loose-moraled modern women.

This is also pretty discreet, and with the application of a few well-placed rhinestones could totally be a glamorous earring.

Due to my genes, I think I would have lucked out in the anus department because my morbidly pale complexion is au natural, thankyouverymuch.  However, what I am really getting into with this is making your own beauty products, even if google won't let you buy arsenic unless you're in Europe where apparently they don't treat grown ups like they're kids who can't handle a little responsibility around poison, and I am guessing I am now on some kind of flagged list because I just googled "anal leeching for beauty" and "how to buy arsenic" in the past 5 minutes.  Bring it on, terrorism unit, I have a ninja cat to defend me*.

Anyways, I remember way back in the day when my friend Courtney and I would make our own beauty concoctions by mixing together everything we found in her bathroom, which surprisingly did not turn out to be all that effective.  Nowadays I do more research, if you can define research as "I put it on my face and see if my skin bubbles or not."  I've found through various successes and failures that when it comes to kitchen skincare, one should always refer to my life's motto: simpler is better, because when you mix shit together it tends to smell bad and burn you.

In case you care, here are some of my favorites:

1. Olive oil and honey: warm it up and put it in your hair for as long as you can stand to be sticky. Warning -- do not heat up for a minute in microwave and then pour on your head without testing, as it will scald you and you will have to ice your head for at least 2 hours.  The benefit is that if it drips in your mouth you can eat it, unless you are allergic to olive oil or honey, in which case you shouldn't do this mask, and you should probably also hate yourself a little because you can never enjoy the wonder that is bruschetta.

I love the presentation here.  Usually when I need sugar I get the plastic  bag that  is gooey from me grabbing it with lotion/soap on my hands, swat away the fruit flies and just cram my hand in there, like a lady.

2. Sugar. You can use this as a scrub for anything and it is awesome and you can eat it.  If i'm feeling productive, I will make a mix of this with vanilla extract and whatever oil I can find, but if I'm lazy and heading out and realize that my hands feel more like Gollum than I would care to admit I just squirt on some soap and lotion, grab a handful and 2 minutes later my hands feel less like ass.  Warning: do not do this right before a zombie attack.  It will make your skin taste much better.  I would recommend substituting salt, because I'm sure even zombies worry about their sodium intake, but you would still have the smooth skin necessary for living a life in fear of flesh-eating mutants.

3. My favorite, coconut oil.  You can put this shit anywhere. No makeup remover? Done.  Shaving cream? No problem.  Got your hand stuck in a mason jar trying to get the last chocolate chip that melted onto the bottom?  Well, this will only work sometimes, depending on the fatness of your hand and size of the jar, but all I can recommend there is that slamming your hand bottle against a hard surface to break it isn't a good idea either.  Anyways, this stuff is amazing and smells like Tahiti and works and lasts forever.

I have plans to phase out my purchases and make all my own skincare, so I will keep you updated on how that is going.  When I finally do it.  <Cough.>

Side note, I found out that Demi Moore admitted to using leeches. My absolute favorite part of the article is when she says that "These aren't just swamp leeches though - we are talking about highly trained medical leeches."  How do the workers at the spa keep a straight face when they tell clients that?  I'm picturing Demi in her fancy leech robe drinking spa water as some yokel trudges through the waiting room with swamp boots on slurring "I delivered them leeches ma'am, I was promised some moonshine y'hear?"

I'm willing to bet Swamp Thing  preferred to keep his leeching private as well.

*I am now definitely on a black list because I had to google "who will the government send if they think I am going to arsenic a bunch of people", which didn't even come close to giving me a correct answer, until I read this link which let me know that the government will just think I fucking grow chickens and feed them to the population at large, which really should be a whole other blog post because that is crazy and why don't more people know about this?

This chicken likes to grease itself up with coconut oil, lay on the beach, and dream of a time when  it wasn't fed arsenic.

A mason jar of green crap

This is not my personal green juice, but I am entirely too lazy to take a picture, find the thingy that lets me upload it, upload it to iphoto, export it from iphoto, deal with the pressure of naming it god I'm getting stressed just thinking about all this so I stole this picture from another blog.  Honestly though, it looks just the same, except typically with me, there will be more green juice on the walls/counter and less in the mason jar.

Reason number one why I need a legitimate smartphone - so I can take pictures and EMAIL them immediately.  I am still cursed with a crappy phone that is ignorant to the will of my impatient nature.  Anyways, I thought it was about time I posted something about green living instead of pictures of my awesome cat/urine.  I decided to take it literally so you are getting something that is both green in color AND in lifestyle, try to contain your excitement.

So every morningish (sometimes I'm lazy and just eat a half a hamburger bun) I whip up either a green smoothie or juice.  It takes some time but I'm always happier when I do and it's not really that hard to prepare.  If you read other green or raw food blogs, green juice enthusiasts like to boast that it feels like it gives them "superpowers" or that "their cells are brimming with energy" (not an exaggeration.)  While I love these people for their naivete when it comes to superpowers, and envy them their ability to find happiness in a smoothie, this is a falsehood. (seriously, you have to EARN superpowers, by being bitten by a spider or coming from another planet or wearing a cape in public without shame. If it were as easy as drinking a beverage with vegetables in it pretty sure I would have the ability to levitate the chocolate chips from the pantry into the living room, or some superpower that's even better than that one because I'm not very creative right now.)  But anyways, I feel like these bloggers are giving people a sense of expectation about the juice that isn't very realistic and might also lead to fatalities if people take these exclamations too seriously.

So I'm gonna lay out all the reasons why I think you should all be making green smoothies and I'm going to judge you if you don't:

1. I will judge you if you don't.  Seriously, some mornings I cram a solitary bun half into my mouth with shame and try to hide the evidence as quickly as possible, but the mornings I bring a green juice?  I take my motherfucking time*.  And why?  Because I'm better than you people with your egg mc Muffins that contributed 1.5 gallons of cow gas to the ozone.**  Or at least that's what I tell myself.  You can tell yourself that too, if you start drinking them.

2.  Salads are the mother%^&%*ing worst.  I hate them.  It took me a long time to admit it.  They are messy and I always drop lettuce on my lap and they taste like the opposite of pizza, even if its a salad pizza, and don't get me started on those. A few years ago, I got into an all-raw phase where every day for lunch I would eat a giant salad and I would always try to find the magic ingredient that would make me love them, so by the end my salads had avocados, flax seeds, chia seeds, some weird seaweed thing, "raw bacon", and countless other ingredients that raw people try to delude themselves into thinking tastes as good as a hamburger.

This is what raw bacon looks like when it's made well.  Mine was not made well.  I did, however, grow to like it because I drowned it in salt and liquid smoke.

 In short, I never got over hating salads and had a fairly unfortunate reaction from the seaweed.  Don't get me wrong, I never felt better after the raw food trial, but if you buy a raw lasagna, that shit does NOT taste like lasagna, despite the blank-eyed protests of the lady behind the counter.  But back to the smoothies, you can BLEND in your greens, thereby getting the equivalent (or more) of a salad and you can disguise it with fruit or cocoa powder, which is apparently a health food in the raw community, which almost makes up for that seaweed atrocity.

3. They actually taste good.  To me.  LOML hates them, but this is a man who would eat a nerds blizzard for breakfast everyday and be perfectly content.  But I think once you get the right ratio of veggies/ fruit or find out what you like, you can learn to love them.

4.  You really do feel good.  Not good enough to perform feats of magic, but better than if you ate a  milkshake crammed with candy at 7 am and don't have a stomach of stone.

5. I had another reason, but I forget it, so I'm gonna put up a warning here to not drop a mason jar on your foot because it will hurt a lot and you may swear and wake up other grouchy members of the household and Pan does NOT like to be woken up.

6.  I remembered.  The whole reason why it's green is that every morning you have about NO waste, and you can use veggies from your own garden.  And fruits,  unless some asshole squirrel ate all your strawberries too.  Blast them.  Anyhoo, I made mine this morning with the kale I grow all by myself in a dresser I found on the street:

In case you care enough to make one, I added a mango, parsley, cinnamon, cardamom, and water and it was pretty damn good.

So that is the story of why you should drink your veggies instead of eating them, and if I haven't inspired you to try one, I hope to have at least instilled a healthy dose of fear of eating an egg mcmuffin in my presence.

*This would work better if I lived in New York and could travel by subway where I could judge a larger number of people and they are unlikely to be drinking green stuff, not in an office where there are at most three other people there when I eat breakfast, and they don't even seem to eat anything.

**Unsubstantiated number.

I would never leave my house

Pan could wear his favorite costume all day and greet visitors.

Reasons why LOML is LOML:  Because he send me things like this:
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/pirates-of-the-caribbean-home-movie-theater-1307742969-slideshow/#crsl=

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post these pictures on here because I'm not sure how blogging politics work, but I'm a rebel so I'm gonna do it anyways.

Courtesy of Elite Home Theater Seating:

I love how they have the actual Pirates movie playing, so we won't get confused about what theme this is supposed to be. I would have been completely lost if it had been playing Inception.

There is a motherfucking fake sky there.  I seriously cannot contain myself.

I'm not really sure if this is necessary.  I mean it still looks cool, but it also kinda looks like a garage, which I'm pretty sure it once was.  But do we really need that much more effort for what is essentially a hallway into the room you actually want to hang out in?

Not gonna lie, they phoned it in for the tavern.  Decent start, but compared the the first room of what my dreams are made of, kinda not so much "piratey" as "somewhat old looking with a plant or two."

I'm obsessed with the ship's wheel.  I am unallowed to have a ship's wheel on display in the house because a certain someone has a hard time dealing with the "nautical" look and it is apparently too "on the nose" but apparently as long as we are spending $2.5 million on an actual pirate ship to go in our garage then that's just dandy and WHY WON'T YOU JUST GIVE ME  A STRAIGHT ANSWER DAMN YOU?!?  

Apologize for the swearing, seeing evidence of pure pirate genius is like crack to me.  Or it could be the adderol LOML slips into my lunch when he wants to toy with my emotions.* 


Anyways, I promise soon I will have an actual post of me getting something accomplished and not just me figuring out how I can find whoever owns this and convince them that I'm their long lost daughter.  Although if that does happen, then I'm totally quitting this blog and having them sponsor my lifelong dream of finding a unicorn.  And to my real parents, I still love you and all, but I might have to make some edits to my birth certificate, it's for the greater good, you know?


*Undocumented, but I'm pretty sure he does this.  I think he's conspiring with the gnomes to slowly break me down. Another day, my friend, another day.

Bad omens?

I was looking for a really cool pentagram but this came up and  every time I look at it I want to vomit so I thought I would share.

So last night Im about to go to bed and I look at my pristine white pillow and there is a fucking scary ass bug running all over, spreading his bug germs everywhere.  I screamed, and LOML runs in and has the audacity to LAUGH despite the fact that this thing could just meander into my nostril while I slept and crawl into my brain and ruin it and I would just be a blank-eyed pile of meat and it's almost like LOML doesn't even really care that that might happen.  So then he tells me that it's good luck, so then I'm cool with the silverfish thing because I have really been keeping up with my sweepstakes entering.

It was really big, like the size of my hand, if my hand was smaller than it is now.

So then right before I goes to bed LOML cheerfully adds, "it probably means you will have a good dream tonight", at which point I'm not really thinking of the consequences of this but then I DREAM about winning a sweepstakes and finding a lot of strawberries that weren't eaten by bugs and I was super happy in my dream and then I woke up and realized that I just ENDANGERED MY FRAGILE BRAIN to have a useless fucking DREAM about winning money. F&%$ you, silverfish.

I guess the strawberries might need some explaining, but this was taken a few days ago and this is the first ever strawberry that I have ever grown and it got eaten by a bug so I'm guessing that was why I was so happy in my dream, plus all the money to buy all the strawberries I want.   Well, as much as $6,000 could buy.  I'm not sure why my brain decided to win $6,000 in my dream when it could have gone with a much better number, like say 200 billion dollars, and for the record strawberries don't even make it into my top three fruits so I would really like to figure out why my subconscious is lowballing me.

Anyways, all this talk makes me waste my precious (made more precious now that is ENDANGERED) brain space on omens and all that kind of witchcraft stuff.  Just the other day, I was entering something online and imagine my dismay when that vengeful word verification demon asks me to spell out the word "hag".  I tried to overlook it and not scrutinize the shit out of my dark circles but then I get to ANOTHER word verification and it says "hag" again, and now I'm starting to wonder if I should confront my computer about its insulting behavior, because I'm not even 30 yet and I feel like it could come up with some insults that are better suited to my demographic.

Then I started thinking about the time I bought a book about witchcraft and I read it at night and lucid dreamt I was levitating so it got stored outside the bedroom from then on but I took it out and tried to read it again a few weeks ago and I dreamt about being magic again so there's a pretty good chance I am actually a witch, in which case the insult "hag" would probably be a suitable fit, so you see how all this just kind of works together?

I'd like to think this was me in a past life

But it was probably more like this in which case I'm not even mad at my computer anymore.

And I'm still really upset that my luck got wasted on a dream about 6 g's and strawberries.

Grade A Halloween A-hole

Anyone who knows me is well aware of my Halloween obsession.  Before I met Love of my Life, I would always be the one hassling friends to get their shit together and I'm pretty sure they got pretty fed up with it. Once I met LOML and discovered he was as obsessed as I was I knew I would never be able to tolerate anyone else.  Needless to say, we lived in a little courtyard complex in Venice, and I'm not entirely sure our neighbors were as enthused with our addiction. For two years, from September 1 to October 31, we spent an unhealthy amount of our time and debt allowance on extreme decorating, so our courtyard friends might look out their window at any given time to find me manically hanging a skull from a tree with blood dripping out of the eye socket, and due to our nocturnal natures were typically woken up at 2 AM to us building a coffin/monster/torture chamber.  One particular neighbor was very quiet and had actually never spoken to us, but he came over one night at 1am and was inordinately calm as he said in his fun Swedish accent: "I don't even know what the fuck you guys are doing, but it's got to fucking stop."  It didn't stop us, but I applauded his effort, and tried to cheer him up with a few extra tombstones by his backdoor.

Anyways, the point of the story is that now we live in a house that is bigger than a shoebox so I'm a bit nervous that we won't get the full effect that we did in previous years.  On the plus side, we have a lot more space and can do awesome things like CREATE A PUMPKIN PATCH, which I have already done and have yet to kill, and am now going to bore you with the progression of my seeds because they are now like little children to me, little precious children that I plan on harvesting and carving into monsters in 4 months.

Here they are one week in, nothing happening.  Apparently I was supposed to grow these in special peat pots but I just used some old plastic pots that were left in the basement by a previous renter and it worked just fine so suck on that, seed instructions

About 3 weeks in, I was beginning to give up hope  and then  they started sprouting like crazy.  Was it love, or my constant, sometimes alcohol-fueled threats of planticide by garbage can? We may never know.

I kind of flaked on taking an update picture between weeks 3 - 5, so for your enjoyment, here is a picture of LOML preening in our gypsy caravan themed room from Halloween 2010.

Wait, no, I found one.  They are a tiny bit bigger.  Isn't this exciting?

This is week 5.   I would also like you to know that I haven't really been keeping track, I have no idea when I planted the seeds, so I'm just inventing these week numbers.  Anyways, we cleared out this whole section of what was initially weeds, but we left the pretty weeds.

These are pictures I took this morning, which is erm... week 7. Yes, 7.  They are growing really fast, which kind of scares me, but considering I birthed them and only threaten them occasionally, I figure if they grow wills of their own and turn evil they will do my bidding, which I'm ok with.

Anyways, I will keep you updated on their status, but I'm guessing no one really cares about my pumpkins but me, so I'll just read this post on lonely nights and weep tears of pride.

If anyone is still interested, I'm posting pictures of our last two Halloweens:

2009 -- Harry Potter -- this is the year both me and the table caught on fire.  The pictures that look like they were shot by a mentally competent person were most likely from friends Jen, Holly and Megan, so thanks you guys, please come visit this year so that we have more than a few pictures with my finger over the lens.  And also because I heart you and I never need to hunt you guys down to work on your costumes.  And we just moved here and we need more friends.

Halloween 2010: Pirates and gypsies -- at the time we found a way to make the themes go together but I can't remember why.

That crab didn't look so obviously fake in real life.  I think.