Ode to pollen, ragweed, mold spores, and getting old…

Creeping up on my 44^th year of life and the inevitable breakdown of the physical form becomes… well, inevitable. 

I feel it in the tightness of the hips and lower back getting out of bed in the morning. It’s in the creaking and cracking of knee joints whilst squatting to lift up an object. It’s in my failing eye sight that has been, up until a year ago, perfect vision 20/20. It’s in the unavoidable root canal that I’ve been avoiding for the past eight months. The most recent ailment that has befallen me is seasonal allergies, in addition to a general assault on my previously ironclad immune system.

For someone who has always been healthy, strong, hardly ever sick and never been to the hospital ever (except for that one time I had to have my stomach pumped), it’s sobering to realize that the body is on the slippery slope of decline. Exponentially so. To commemorate this officious step away from youthful immortality towards unalterable death, an attempted (silly) foray into composing haiku… (part of the PBS experiment.)

                                                      Weepy, wat'ry eyes

                                           Mucous membrane, snot snot snot

                                                   Phlegm, my best friend is

         O, yonder hip-bone
Lest you jest at my pai-ain

       T’aint funny one bit

                                         Curs-ed are the years 
                                     Cantankerous maladies

                                         I declare, Begone!

                          Ipso facto death

            ‘fore he thee pluck, crooks finger

                            It, I ignoreth

I’m obsessed with the notion that we are (literally) dying just a little bit every day. I may be having a mid-life crisis. More on that later if/when I figure it out.

Project Brain Stimulation

Who sez you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

Brad Pitt is a big proponent on keeping the brain healthy and fit so that we’re both mentally agile as we drift into our twilight years. No vacant drooling into our soups for this couple.

Do you know that if you don’t periodically teach your brain new tricks, it’s in danger of becoming flabby from disuse? Our brains are thinking organs that learn and grow by interacting with the world through perception and action. Mental stimulation improves brain function and actually protects it from cognitive decline. Or so I've read.

Do you also know that alcohol in moderation can actually be good for the brain, however too much alcohol can kill brain cells and your ability to think and reason effectively? But that’s another post for another day.

Accordingly, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to engage the brain in creative and fun new activities (Project Brain Stimulation, or PBS) to keep it in P90X tiptop shape. I'm not implying one needs to tax one's brain by reading Michio Kaku's "Parallel Worlds" and mastering the notion of string theory, black holes and parallel universes, which is fascinating, by the way. Can you imagine eleven different versions of yourself living eleven different lives? I can't.

I'm talking about learning something new on a small scale. It can be as simple as learning how to dance the rhumba, or craft haikus, or fashion swan origami, or a new language (okay, learning a new language may be a little harder). Or knitting. Which is what I chose for my first PBS endeavor.

Not sure how or why I was compelled to learn how to knit. Before last month, I've never had an inkling of needing nor wanting to knit. (Knitting was for grandmas.) It may have been when I stumbled across ravelry.com while researching blogs for this blog. Ravelry is this giant on-line knitting community. Knitters share their projects, patterns, chat/discuss/gossip about knitting on message boards. It's like a cult with yarn instead of the wacko philosophizing and/or partner swapping.

Poking about, I came across these drool-worthy sweaters made by a knitter in Germany. I may have thought something like, "Dang, that's a fine looking sweater", downloaded the pattern, got confused with all the strange instructions (it was akin to trying to make heads and tails of Egyptian hieroglyphs), drooled over more sweaters, got more inspired, googled knitting classes in Rhode Island, found one taking place at Blithewold Mansion in Bristol, and there I went.

For whatever reason, the instructor didn't feel the need to teach us how to cast on (committing the first row of stitches on which to grow subsequent stitches), the very FIRST thing, in my humble non-knitter opinion, one would need to know to even BEGIN knitting. In spite of that one weird exclusion, it was a productive 2 hours - I learnt how to make the knit and purl stitch.

For those who've never knitted before, the actual physical act of knitting is like learning how to walk for the first time. The synapse firings were rebelling HARD, as my fat clumsy fingers fumbled with these too-long knitting needles, threatening to poke an eyeball out with every stitch, yarn tangling around my ankles. I MAY have stabbed the woman next to me with the non-pointy end but she was too polite to bitch me out. (Sorry, knitting fellow whose name I do not recall.)

Once my over-ambitious plan of knitting a cool sweater as my first project crashed and burned, I set my sights on a more humble project: the all-purpose winter scarf. I went home, youtubed how to cast on, three months later… et voilà!

Don't laugh!

I may now cross # 7 off my bucket list.

Wanderlust + Winter Doldrums = Travel Wish List

I like making lists. When I see a list, I see items that can be checked off as complete and ergo, a feeling of accomplishment.  It gives an illusory sense of order that I can truly appreciate.

Without further ado:  go to TRAVEL WISH LIST now.

Wanderlust at Defcon 5

Pinterest. Do you know it? I'm a tad obsessed.

I'm keeping a running visual Travel Wish List over on Pinterest as well.

Compiling the following list made me a little sad.

Places I'd Love To Revisit But Probably Won't Because The Wish List Is Ever So Long Already:
- Australia
- New Zealand
- France
- Italy
- Cuba
- Cambodia
- Thailand
- India


What's on your Top 5 Travel Wish List?

A Case of the Mondays on a Tuesday Night

This is a rant about how much I hate work more than the heat of a thousand burning suns.  And by work, I mean that obligatory thing most all of us do to avoid being homeless. I'm not referring to WORK that most of us dream of doing, WORK that is born from great inspiration, WORK that makes your insides hum, WORK that brings out the best in you, WORK that makes you excited about getting up in the morning. Yeah, that WORK I will most gladly and happily do.

I hate work more than:

• bamboo shoved under my fingernails
• waterboarding
• bathing in a river of sh*t
• listening to Michael Buble on repeat
• propping up of eyelids, Clockwork Orange styles, for forced viewing of Keeping up with the Sh*tKardashians, Jersey Sh*tShore, Sh*tty Housewives of Sh*tWhatevsCounty, Dancing with the Sh*ts, et al

Rant over. Thanks for listening.

EDIT: ps. This post is 75% hyperbole and 25% truth. Some folks were confused.

My Husband is Brad Pitt

No, not really, but the husband refuses to let me use his real name or post his photo on the blog because he's an anti-social freak. To this day, I do not have a proper photo with the husband - just obscene hand gestures and silly faces, like so:

Ah, the finger. How original!

(The above facsimile has not been approved by the husband so let's keep this between ourselves, shall we?)

Since I'm banned from using his real name (Jeff), and because "the husband" is so impersonal and cold, from this point forth, I shall refer to the husband as Brad Pitt.

Speaking of Mr. Pitt (the real one, not the husband), I was inspired to make a visual retrospective of my favorite Brad Pitt movie roles.

Sweet baby jesus

Thelma & Louise

Stoner Floyd

True Romance

Worst. Irish. Accent. Ever. 

Snatch

Psycho Pitt

Twelve Monkeys

Finding-my-wife's-severed-head-in-a-box Pitt

Seven

Licking of computer screen permitted. 

Fight Club















You're very welcome.

How I Spent Black Friday

It wasn't at the friggin' mall, that's for certain. Only lunatics leave the house on Black Friday. Don't these people know they can get that same shit on-line? What they sacrifice in tactile viscerality (I just made up that word), they save in gas money, sales tax, elbows to the face, and sanity points by shopping on-line. But you know this already - I'm preaching to the choir, am I right?

Anyhoo, look at these gems I found on Etsy. My shopping list is complete! Finished a month early!

Self high-five!!


Handmade Art Doll
Guaranteed to scar the child in your life with recurring nightmares. (If that's what you're aiming for.)




Maris the Mermaid Cloth Art Doll
Apparently, there's this burgeoning underground movement of all things mermaid as evidenced here. Fine, whatever. You like mermaid crafts, and I don't. To each her own. The thing that has me scratching my head, though, is how anyone in good conscience can charge $20 for Maris here when it looks like the seller's six-year old niece fashioned her from leftover Bratz dolls and a burlap sack.