sunday was spent cleaning my house and crying. not because i was sad, but because i was frustrated with my current living situation with three dogs and three cats and their ability to shed more hair than they actually have. oh, and don’t forget the cats’ recent hatred of the litter box and their fascination with pissing in the dog toy box. we cleaned our house top to bottom. side to side. horizontally and laterally.

this has got to be my hands down favorite thing i’ve bought since moving into our house. it was purchased at southeastern salvage in irondale for the low low price of $98. stop reading and go over there. now!

my favorite room in the house. it is bright and cheery and full of stuff that jack insists on knocking over. click on the image for identification of various things that i love.

because i am a wannabe photographer i proudly display all of the cameras that i own. from left to right - my dad’s old minolta, my first SLR (a minolta also), my fujifilm digital, my lomo quad actionshot, and my lomo colorsplash

i used to collect all sorts of little toys. this one survived the five moves i’ve made in the last five years. my uncle gave him to me when he sold v-dubs in albuquerque.

meet steve. steve is from montego bay, jamaica. we brought him back from our honeymoon in hopes to smuggle heroin in his head. okay, not really. but i do like to think that he wards off evil from our house. or atleast the carpetbaggers.

james brown rubber duck. the coolest fucking thing ever! don’t deny it.

one of the reasons why i cried on sunday. don’t let the cute face and squishiness fool you. he’s 15 pounds of attitude.

another of my favorite house items. darcia la rosa bought this for us when we moved into our condo, but it goes perfectly with our new house.

with all the new dog loving and cat hating that goes on in our house, mollycate is often left out of photos. however, she is the best dog on the planet.

and let’s not forget my sweet cooper. she looks a bit harried (no pun intended) because she was up late the other night finishing off a bottle of jack.

they would probably tell you that i torture them by taking their photos and posting it to the innernets.
since lira’s tragic accident with the deck on monday it feels like she has taken ten steps back from the work we have been doing with her. until today. i came home from a greyhound meeting at the track and was absolutely exhausted. my allergies were kicking my ass so i took two benadryl and lied down. i asked kev to put lira on the bed with me (she still hasn’t learned to jump up on her own) and she nestled into his side of the bed.

yes, yes, i am adorable. now will you please stop taking pictures of me?!

lira and i took a nice two hour nap together which is completely unheard of in our house. she’s a loner, Dottie. A rebel. when i woke up it was time for dogs to go outside. once back in the house lira went back to sleep on her pillow and i fell back asleep as well. when i woke up the second time, i caught lira in what we greyhound owners call a classic “roach” position.

i have the cutest pink belly!

what?! you know you love me!

more photos tomorrow when i have actually cleaned the house.

i’ve been neglecting you, poor innernets, of the fantasticism that is my photography. and by fantastic i mean “horribly wrong” and by photography i mean “i couldn’t aim a gun at my head correctly”.

we like to match our furniture and wall coverings to our pets

molly models her new collar. not shown: molly’s 1/5 of Jameson’s

lira takes a break after a long day doing absolutely nothing

i’z under ur coffee tables sniffin’ ur carpets

my greyhound makes your dog look like rosanne barr.

well that didn’t take long. the minute i sit down and decide that i have nothing to share, along comes the most challenging yet rewarding role i could throw myself into: fostering.

kev and i have long wanted another greyhound if not for any other reason than to give cooper a height complex. while we can’t exactly afford to have a forevor dog right now we certainly had enough house and love for one. i contacted the greyhound adoption group at the racetrack where we got mollycate and asked if they had any pups that needed a place to hang until that perfect home presented itself. they answered quite emphatically: “Lira”. they explained that Lira, while in mid-race career, became pregnant and had whelped her litter. a couple of her litter were already placed in homes, two of which were in our weekly romp group. they then told me that Lira is a shy girl which literally translates to “we’d be surprised if she didn’t pee on your shoe in terror”. we knew that with a little patience and some wisdom from mollycate that we could give her a nice place to live for a while.

on saturday morning we drove to the racetrack with mollycate to meet our new house guest. Lira came out to us completely non-plussed with us and mollycate. that was until i tried to pet her. she did everything in her power to get away from me. as much as i tried not to i was a little disappointed. i mean, my friends call me the dog whisperer for god’s sake! we chatted with the kennel owners for a while and met some of the other dogs waiting for homes. Lira was still not entirely sure of us. i had a 2:00 p.m. meeting and wanted to get Lira settled at the house so we loaded everyone in the car and drove home.

once we had Lira in the house she panted and shook and even peed on the floor. she still cringes when we try to touch her (which leads me to believe that she had an awful experience with a human) and occassionally whines for attention, but all in all she is settling in well. she mastered stairs within a day, as well as mirrors, windows, and fat ass cats. Lira and mollycate get along famously, chasing each other in circles in the backyard. cooper couldn’t give to flying fricks about the whole situation.

who knows, we might fail at fostering and have to keep this goofy little girl.

that black box thing in your hand better be a treat.

man, i’m worn out. mr. froggy, please take my messages.

this is one of Lira’s puppies, Laura. she is approximately 4 months old

i laugh because you’re stupid

could also be a documentary of my high school. yeah, i’m ghetto.

on monday at 8:00 a.m. we will be homeowners or as i like to say “homo owners”, because wouldn’t owning a gay person be totally cool?! i would name him hortense and he would decorate my house with track lighting and plantation blinds and make a very tasty artichoke spinach dip in a hollowed out bread roll. right now i am exhausted and frustrated and just want this process to be over. i want to be doing all the fun things that are associated with owning a house like hanging pictures and fixing things and telling those kids to get off my damn lawn. as of right now we are currently living out of approximately four million boxes which probably sounds like palm springs to a homeless person, but to me it is no fun. i can’t find anything, the dogs are freaking out, and there is still way more to pack. the only satisfaction anyone is getting out of this is the cats for they are like homeless people. let us not forget that it is almost two weeks into december and because our current home looks like a FedEx drop-off station i cannot assemble our christmas decorations. i appreciate every single person who has kept me sane these past couple of weeks, especially rush, without whom i probably would have doused myself in nail polish remover and driven to a match factory.

to lighten your spirits after reading the above “rant from a crazee ladee” here are two photos i took from this past week’s chilling temperatures. enjoy and pass the xanax.

fountain of ice: taken in front of my neighborhood.

tomorrow jennybean and flip are tying the knot and i couldn’t be more excited. nothing revs my engine like the words “open bar”. the only downside to this is the shopping fiasco that will take place four hours prior which will leave me crumpled on the floor of a dressing room sobbing and pulling my hair out in clumps. clothes shopping for me is not a fun experience and clothes shopping with me will almost certainly make you want to take a running start off the nearest parking structure. i get grumpy and frustrated and want to punch that chipper little sales girl who asks in her samford sing-song voice “how’s everything going in there?”. more times than not i am polite and respond “fine although i think i left my self-esteem somewhere on your sales floor”.

as creative and imaginative as i think i am you would think that i would have no problem going to a store and picking several items that would work. you thought wrong. if i cannot see an outfit on a mannequin or tied together neatly on a demo hanger then you might as well shoot me with a sedative. i once took my very metrosexual friend andrew with me to help find a dress for a cocktail party and what he picked versus what i would have picked were very different. at one point i came out of the dressing room wearing some frock that had my boobs spilling out and said to him “i’m not sure i’m supposed to show up the host”.

the other day, in preparation for my shpooing endeavor, i decided to check out a couple of websites to get ideas of what to buy. one of the websites i went to was anthropologie. if you are not familiar with this store think of the clothes that you could buy at the thrift store and add about $75 to the price tag.

i think mia farrow wore this in rosemary’s baby. either way it is satanic.	i once had a school uniform that looked like this, of course it was never this god-awful ugly.
mischa barton wore something similiar to this dress and i hated it on her too.	it is really progressive of anthropologie to employ blind people to design their dresses. you can find me in a corner clawing my eyes out after looking at this monstrosity.
hey paw, me and the other ingalls girls are going to go into the dress-makin’ business!	i thought the whole point of paying $175 for a dress was to look good, not like some throw back from M.A.S.H.

i am in no way a fashionista so you can take my snarky comments with a grain of salt. and if by some chance you happen to own one of the dresses above i advise you to get your money back because regardless of how pretty you are these will only make you ugly. and broke.

in all my 28 years i have only had one broken bone. i was a precocious three year old trying to open a window when said window shut on my thumb. i was in a cast up to my armpit for two months. to this day i still cannot bend my thumb all the way.

this past wednesday i was feeling quite ill with a cold and headed downstairs to grab a glass of juice when my pinkie toe on my left foot decided it was absolutely not going to go where i was. a coup was staged and my little pinkie toe caught on the carpet and bent all the way backwards. the worst sound in the world is that of a bone breaking in half. at first i thought i just jammed it but 30 minutes proved something was amiss. i knew very well that there was nothing i could do…they just don’t make tiny casts, but i was deadset on going to the doctor just to prove that it was broken. after six x-rays the doctor came in and proved that i was right…it was broken. the doctor went ahead and gave me pain meds and checked the wheezing and coughing from the cold. hey, when it rains it pours.

thursday i stayed home to rest up in hopes that i could return to work on friday. i even picked up a pair of crutches from the local pharmacy as walking further than my couch to the kitchen was quite painful. on friday i returned to work maneuvering the crutches like crazed metal appendages. it seemed that using the crutches were much more of a pain than the actual broken bone. i could’nt take my pain meds while at work because they make me so sleepy so i tried to tough it out by taking eight ibuprofens to no avail. around 1:00 p.m. my toe had had enough and was beginning to talk my foot into joining the pain game so i went home.

for the past three days my toe has taken on the image of a grape. today it is a little better. not nearly as swollen. they don’t call me “grace” for nothing.

not so much a grape as it is a raisin

the underside of the evil pinkie toe

the bulge in the toe is due to swelling around the broken joint

my pet project The Destruction Of The Bathroom That Was A Backdrop To A Messengill Commercial is now complete. sadly (read: thankfully, because it would have taken all my strength to operate my camera) i did not take “before” pictures, but trust me, it was horrible. flowers exploded in my downstairs bathroom. they were everywhere. on the walls, on the doors, on the cabinets, on the drawer pulls…EVERYWHERE!

here is the semi-finished* product:

looking in from the door. the toilet is below the picture. and no, the walls are not orange.

surprisingly found at wal-mart

why yes, that is a picture i took. and printed. and signed like the wannabe photographer that i am.

the walls are red and the hardware is faux wrought iron. it is nice to use the bathroom and not feel like i need to shoot up testosterone just to level out.

*i say “semi” because i am still waiting to install a black granite countertop and an undermounted sink.

last weekend kev, d-rock and i hopped into “debbie” (my 4Runner for those of you not playing the home edition) and drove two hours north to the small, yet affluent town of killen. we were accompanied by the wonderful hosts of this little excursion, amandapandapants and her talented husband justin, marymary and jeremy, kp and jason, carrot and andy, and ash and paco. when we arrived at the house i was shocked. this house was not your run-of-the-mill lake house. oh no. this was a five star resort complete with a bar in every common room, a billiard table, dart boards, swimming pool, two wave runners, and a house dog named daisy whom i would have easily kidnapped.

looking out from the top balcony onto lake wilson

the next day we all rolled out of bed (couch, air mattress, etc.) and paco made us a scrumptious breakfast. boy, can that kid cook! i believe at one point i asked him to move in with us. ash was having none of that. after eating we all spent the day drinking beer and playing in the sun. i was stung by “something” on my behind and amandapandapants forced me to drink children’s benadryl.

d-rock and his little floatie

more food was consumed as well as beer and cocktails. we played Cranium, sang karaoke, and discussed the finer points of chocolate chip cookies and fanny packs. needless to say much fun was had.

these people are why i am so obnoxiously bitchy