Random Words

Y’all, it’s not that I am totally out of ideas and/or crazy life events to write about, it’s just that I’ve been playing on this Random Word Website and some of my word associations/first thoughts have been mildly amusing. For this reason, I’m going to share some with you.

• Dream: I just woke up. It’s 2 am and I’m wide awake, because tonight was one of those weird occasions where every now and then, my brain won’t stop working when I try to sleep. Tonight, believe it or not, I was actually dreaming in blog form. Needless to say, I woke myself up editing every fifteen minutes until I gave up a little while ago and started writing this. Gonna be honest, dream was a slightly-less-than-random word. But the rest of them were generated here, I promise.
• Pew: I think of my first kiss. Parents, always volunteer to chaperone church lock-ins your teenagers are attending. And then keep the sanctuary off-limits. Also, check under pews. For real.
• Superscript: MATH! Yes.
• Locomotive: This word actually makes me think of The Cosby Show. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I have an image of Vanessa Huxtable and her friends dancing to some awful song about doing the Locomotion.
• Chirp: The bird that, when I was unemployed, sat outside my window at 7:30 every morning and woke me up. Hate. That. Bird. Doesn’t bother me anymore now that I’m up an hour earlier than he is.
• Ellipsis: During the early days of AOL, ellipses were my very favorite form of punctuation.   . . . Now they come in fourth. I like ellipses better than colons and semi-colons, I think.
• Gelatin: I am disturbed by the fact that this food additive is made by horse hooves. Super gross.
• Coastline: Honestly I think we all know what I’m gonna say about that one.
• Gob: Seriously? Best. Random. Word. Ever! Can’t get enough Arrested Development. And GOB Bluth is one of the awesomest of awesome characters.
• Peach: Peaches come in a can…they were put there by a man…
• Outburst: Two things. First, the game Outburst is pretty fun. Secondly, I went to a restaurant once and had a waiter who introduced himself as Starburst. STARBURST! Seriously. We asked another server and apparently no one ever said his name right (Stavros) so he just introduces himself as Starburst.
• Twilight: I’m not making this up – it really showed up on a random word generator. For the record, Twilight disturbs me on multiple levels, and yet I can’t deny I enjoy it.
• Tickle: I had a recurring nightmare as a child that I was being tickled by a skeleton. I’ve always been a little creeped out by tickling ever since.
• Avocado: I make some seriously good guacamole. That’s all.
• Clatter: I can think of nothing but Arrested Development apparently. Tobias Quote!  “I spend so much time making sweet love on my wife that it’s hard to hear anything over the clatter of her breasts.” Inappropriate, I know. So sorry.
• Mermaid: I recently ran into an old babysitter, who I remember quite fondly. As it turns out, she remembers me as the little girl who made her watch The Little Mermaid every time she babysat. Which wasn’t necessarily infrequently. Slightly mortifying.
• Bubbles: So this is funny. Just yesterday I admitted to co-workers about my tattoo of bubbles on my hip-bone. It has been suggested that Bubbles be my new nickname. We shall see.
• Yeti: I didn’t realize this was a real word. Abominable.
• Fraction: MORE MATH!
• Lipstick: Okay, there’s this ad that plays all the time on Hulu. For Rouge Coco Chanel lipstick. I don’t know what the folks at Chanel were thinking or if this lady in the ad is some sort of famous model/singer or something, but she’s singing while applying lipstick and she has a fairly abnormal mouth to begin with, then she whistles… it’s just bad. Disturbing.
• Ash: So my middle name is Ashmore. Before college, I made this strange decision to go by Ash rather than Liz. Did this work? Clearly not.
• Agent: Yes, I’d like one, please.
• Forbearance followed immediately by Deferment: Just a strangely coincidental pairing of words that stick out in my mind because of Hubby’s professional school loans. Loan terminology is rarely far from my mind.
• Registry: I heard from Comical Colleague the other day that Wal-Mart is no longer allowing people to look up and print wedding registries in store. You have to print it at home and bring it with you in order to purchase a gift from it. This is why registering at Wal-Mart continues to be a bad idea.
• Knob: Don’t get all goofy, in my  mind, this word means hill. I grew up as a member of, swimmer for, lifeguard at, and ultimately swim coach of a community pool called Gobbler’s Knob. Oh, the unfortunateness of this name.

We all know I could go on with this forever, but you get the picture of how my mind works. I’m a simple lady. When I’m lucky, my mind goes to funny places. When I’m unlucky, well, that can be pretty funny too.

Now that I’ve (hopefully) exhausted my blog-thinking, perhaps I will be able to fall asleep again. Heck, I’ve only got another hour and a half before my alarm… I might as well give it a shot.

 

Late Night in New York

Wow, it’s late. As of half an hour ago, I was WIDE awake with no plans of ever falling asleep again. As of ten minutes ago, I’m wiped out completely. I can’t even imagine what kept me so wired, except for my utter failure at the “no more sodas” kick I was on, as I have been sipping on a Coke all evening. I guess my body just isn’t used to all of the caffeine and excitement. There’s quite a lot of both to be had in this city.

I wish I had more time to soak it all in. Since I arrived, I’ve been rushing. I’ve been going from 7AM to 9PM for three days straight without a break. That’s just unbearable when most of the day is spent hearing about new art books that are so obscure I couldn’t name five of them if you paid me. It’s not physically demanding (though I’ve done a lot of walking since I arrived, and a lot less subway-ing than I generally do when I’m here), but it is certainly mentally exhausting. I have a feeling that after this weekend, I’m never going to want to see another book again in my life.

Okay, so I exaggerate. Often. And clearly I love books, so never seeing one again would be rather tragic. But to do these conferences twice a year every year is going to either make my brain very wrinkly or I’m going to have to figure out a better way to give my mind a rest than watching hours of mindless television every week, and a more interesting (for my readers at least) way of brain dumping than posting my every thought here instead of my usual witty, insightful observations and comments on life.

Ha. Obviously, the influx of new information has caused delusions of grandeur. I suppose it could be worse; I could be having delusions of wealth and be preparing for a trip to Tiffany and Saks instead. That would definitely come back to bite me. I hear VISA doesn’t accept free review copies of obscure art books in exchange for actual payment…

 

What Is It With Me and Security Scares?

It’s 3:30 Friday morning. I’m wiped. And I’m waiting for the police to arrive at my parents-in-law’s house. Wait, there they are – a knock on the front door.

Hubby is walking our hero through the house and through the whole scare… 3:00 AM, Abby, Hubby’s parents’ German shepherd starts barking downstairs. She is a pretty docile dog in general so barking in the middle of the night means one of two things. 1) She’s got to go potty. Bad. Or, 2) something lurks in the night.

Hubs went with the potty option and pulled himself out of bed and downstairs to let her out. To make quick work of this interruption to our sleep, he sat outside with her while she went. While seated on the back porch, he noticed something that looked oddly like a baseball cap hovering between the two fences separating us from the back-yard neighbors. Assuming this was just a baseball-cap-shaped shadow, he didn’t think much of it. Until it moved.

Because this shadow was backlit he only briefly caught the reflection of eyes in the light when it became obvious that whoever was between the fence was either looking straight at Hubby or in the opposite direction. Hubs was freaked.

Being a dutiful husband, he roused me to full waking consciousness and got on the phone with his Mother and Father who are staying the weekend in Mobile while we dog and house sit. He requested the location of the nearest firearm, just in case. He would call them back with the details.

Gun at the ready, he went to investigate, sort of. He wasn’t going to take matters into his own hands, but he did want to be armed in case something “went down” (oh, how I love the language of the crime drama). He took Abby the dog with him and they didn’t see anyone. Of course, crouching sinister figures are just as reasonable as standing ones, so he didn’t take any chances. He phoned his parents to let them know that he was alive and to fill them in on what prompted his need for the weapon.

At this point I’m sitting on the stairs, elbows on knees, chin on upturned wrists, praying. In the midst of my prayers I hear Hubby relay the story twice, once to Mother, once to Father – who insists that he call the police and report what he saw.

So he dials that unforgettable series of digits, 911 and speaks with the operator. I hear the story a third time. She instructs Hubby to put the safety on the firearm and stay inside, she was dispatching a unit (this language is purely a mixture of my imagination and a CSI-type narration going on in my sleep deprived head) to check things out. She inquired about the dogs, about who was home, about what the strange man looked like, about when all of this happened. She made Hubby laugh. I haven’t the faintest idea what she could have said to make anyone laugh while in the heights of panic mode, but she’s obviously quite good at what she does. Especially for 3:15 in the morning.

Anyway, that leads us to now. The nice policeman has come, inspected, chatted with Hubs, and gone, promising to drive around for a bit to make sure any threat has gone. The doors have been re-dead-bolted. The alarm has been re-set. It’s nearing 4:00 AM. And I am wide awake.

All I’m sayin’ is that we may need to re-prioritize the bills for awhile and invest in that alarm system after all…