Oh...
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This just breaks my heart. St. Louis was once stuffed to the brim with architecture that was beautiful, inspired, and complete. As an example, the first apartment I remember living in was a 2 family building. The typical brick 2 family on the South Side. It had stained glass windows, wooden floors, a cast iron soaker bath tub, and best of all; 11 ft. tall pocket doors separating the living room from the bedroom. -A bedroom that was big enough to sleep my entire family, hold 2 complete bedroom sets, and still give us kids plenty of play space.

To see bits and pieces of this architecture for sale on ebay makes me sad. Stained glass, doorknobs, terra cotta, even the precious iron stars that held our brick homes together, are offered to the highest bidder. Each of these pieces made my neighborhood a little nicer. The streets were dangerous, but the architecture made it all better. I don't have words to describe how good it felt to come home from school and open a front door with a knob like this. (buy it now for $75!)
I never minded polishing all the brass in that home. I never minded washing windows that were so tall I needed a step ladder to clean the upper pane. I loved that the glass was so old, that it was thicker at the bottom than at the top; proving that glass is indeed a liquid.
I loved that the place had seen continual use for 100 years and was still both beautiful and functional.

On a side note, I love my 1960 ranch home too. The only thing I want to change are the doors. Hollow core doors are not doors if you grew up with solid wood. I want sturdy, real doors inside my home. Doors I can cover with a patina of time and love, rather than a coat of paint.

Ways To Startle Your Teenager
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Flip channels until you come across the GameShow Network airing an old episode of "Let's Make A Deal". Get said teenager engrossed in the show, what with the people in funny costumes and the weird prizes and all. At the finale of the show, when they begin to reveal that the final prize is a car; point at the TV and scream, "That's a Satellite!" "That's my first car!"

If you wish to truly embarrass your teen, pause the DVR and describe in detail every aspect of said car.

I bought mine in 1987 for $800. On the 4th of July, 1989, it was cruelly murdered by a drunk driver.

Christians in Cowboy Hats
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I was knitting in the living room, when I saw a man in a straw cowboy hat walk past my front window. I thought he might be one of the contractors who are building houses across the street, so I went to the door.
I had been sitting for a while, and one of my arthritic knees wasn't working too well. So really, I limped to the door. Anyway... The guy with the hat was heading down the street, and there was a neat plastic packet of papers inviting me to a revival.

My first instinct when offered Christian invitations is to say, "Thank you, and please share this with someone else. I'm very happy with my church." But since the guy had left it on my door, I couldn't do that. I didn't want to put the plastic and heavy paper in the trash, and most of it didn't look recycleable. So I hobbled out the door, down the 16 steps in front of my home, and went after him.
Barefoot. Wearing (no kidding) A sage green t-shirt and bright red pajama pants covered with dancing Snoopy and Woodstock's.

No, I'm not colorblind. Those pants are *comfy*.

Anyway... The guy with the hat had a pair of young boys with him. They were also wearing straw cowboy hats. It was cute, in a 1950's kind of way.
They were walking pretty fast, and I was hobbling rather slowly; but I was determined to catch them. I almost did when The man and (I presume) his sons doubled back to give a packet to a family that was exiting one of the new homes on my side of the street.
To be precise, he looked at the family. He did a double take. He looked at his literature. And then he turned back and gave a packet to the (black -gasp!) woman with teenagers who was walking down the steps.

My thoughts ran in this order: Ooh! New neighbors! With teenagers, yay! Why did he do a double take? Maybe I can catch up to him without walking all the way down the damn block. Good god, the new neighbors are gonna see me in this tacky outfit! There's nowhere to hide now! I guess I'll say hi, and pretend I don't look like a colorblind orangutan (because of my orange hair). "Good morning!" (Warm smile... keep walking and just let them stare) Is he surprised to see black people? Or do they not have many non-white people in their church?

Anyway... He gave the packet to the family and hurried off to the next house. I finally caught up to him there. I handed him back the package he'd left on my door and said, "Thank you, but I don't need this. Maybe you can get someone else with it. I mean, it's expensive paper and all."

Which was not remotely what I'd meant to say. I really had intended to say something along the line of, "I don't need this, although I appreciate the invitation. I'd like you to pass it along to someone who truly needs the Word Of God."

See? I can be nice about it. I just wasn't as nice about it as I'd planned to be.

The next time I see my new neighbors, I'll have to explain that I do not, normally, go out in public like that. I do own rational looking clothes. They match and everything. Really.

The Party .
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A while ago, I wrote about my mom's 60th birthday party. My sister gave me a CD full of pics from the party, and I decided to share a few with you all.


The collage my cousin and I put together
I never could have done it without the old family pictures owned by cousin M and aunt P. TY!



I told you I had red hair.


Family shot on stairs.
Mom was trying to keep the glare off her glasses. And yes, that's me, finally showing my face to the world. Do I look like you pictured me? My hair is weighed down with conditioner to keep the fluffiness in line. My sister has dark brown eyes and (dammit) a tan too!


And my favorite picture

Mom finds her sister from Texas in the crowd. Such a big surprise!
Her bracelets are: pink= breast cancer survivor, blue= pro-life, metal= medical alert i.d. bracelet. Allergic to insect stings/bites and "no left arm procedures" because they took a bunch of lymph nodes along with her left breast and blood work or even a blood pressure cuff could cause lymphodema in that arm.
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She's so happy in that picture. Her sister is 11 months younger than her, and they're very close. They hugged each other and cried for a long time. It was wonderful to see.

Voting
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The hubby-man came home for lunch, and we both went to vote together. It was sweet. We punched our individual choices, watched the paper ballot scroll past, confirmed our votes, (crossed our fingers), walked out the door, and said "dammit." In unison.

Because we had both chosen "The other guy" rather than choose the person who keeps running for whatever office is available, and keeps being rejected by the voters.

Upon leaving the polling place, we spotted the sign for "the other guy". Yeah. The one who's billing himself as "The Pro-Life Democrat"

Shit.

Can I have a do over?

The Real Life Exploits Of My Sleeping Brain
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I think I'm getting close to the one year anniversary of my foot accident, because it's been hurting like crazy the past few days. This is only relevant to this story because the pain was keeping me in a state of semi-wakefulness, even though I was exhausted. I heard a noise outside like someone was collecting aluminum cans at our dumpster, and it segued into a dream:
I got out of bed and looked out the window. I saw this guy

With a clear trash bag full of aluminum.
I wondered why Rasputin was rummaging for cans. I mean, that was weird even for a dream; and I knew I was dreaming. As I watched him in the darkness, I knew there was no way he could see me. Yet he turned his head and stared right at me. Or at least where I ought to be, except he couldn't see me. Because the blinds were drawn. And I was in total darkness. So there would have been no back lighting to show my figure.
He walked toward the next dumpster, keeping his eyes pointing toward me; and I noted that the dream Rasputin had streaks of white in his hair and his beard was long and scraggly. (thus the photoshopping)
Suddenly, he dropped the bag of cans and dashed across my neighbor's yard. The bag made a rattling noise as it fell then vanished. (the awake part of my mind identified this as Hunter bumping the dishes in the drying rack, then jumping off the counter.)

I dashed to the living room to make sure the front door was locked. I was just nearing the big picture window that looks out on the river when Rasputin jumped up and pressed his face against the glass in classic horror movie fashion. It scared the bejeezus out of me. Then he started pounding on the front door.

I pressed my back against the door, even though it was locked with two dead bolts. The door was shaking and bending a little at the edges, so I tried to bring my hubby-man into my dream so that he could save me. But the hubby-man was deeply asleep, so I couldn't summon him.
I felt a sharp bite on my right arm and saw that Rasputin had forced his fingers through the door jamb and taken a chunk out of my arm with his creepy long fingernails. ("Ah Ha!" My waking mind said, "This is a nightmare... Or maybe just a scary movie type dream. Either way, he's splintering the door; you'd better do something.")
My neighbor Gary appeared out of thin air and helped me hold the door shut. I was relieved. Then I was angry. After all, who the hell does this Rasputin looking, grey haired, claw-nailed geezer think he is that he can attack me out of the blue and scratch my arm through my own damn door?!?

So I yanked the door open and went after him. He dashed over to my other neighbor's yard and stood there rubbing his hands together and looking malicious. He moved toward me in a menacing manner and I started toward him too. I had no clue what I was doing, or how to fight him. All I knew was that moving forward was the right action. The hubby-man appeared in the doorway and tossed me a rolling pin. (I guess he'd entered a REM cycle, LOL.)

A rolling pin? WTF am I supposed to do with a rolling pin? Hubby-man said, "You're a woman! He has no defense against women's tools!" (I beg your pardon?) "It's anachronistic to his era!" The hubby-man explained.

So I whacked ineffectually at Rasputin a few times with the rolling pin, then decided I'd better get a wooden spoon instead. (this actually makes sense. The wooden spoon was the tool of choice for meting out punishments during my childhood.)

I ran through the house, grabbed a wooden spoon from the kitchen drawer and went out the back door. Rasputin was waiting for me in the back yard. His bag of aluminum was back, only now it was filled with bones. Some of then had been carved into rings and ornaments. "That's kind of twisted," I thought; and I got ready to go to town on him with my wooden spoon.

It wasn't much of a fight. I whacked him once with the spoon; felt the punishing hand of my entire line of ancestresses flowing though me -and thus the spoon- And Rasputin collapsed into ashes.

The bag of bones split open and a crowd gathered to look through them. Someone asked me what I was going to do with the bones. "Dissolve them in a vat of acid?" I replied. It seemed like a good idea. The crowd turned away, and I saw that a girl had attached 4 of the carved bone rings to her hair.

The hubby-man and I tackled her and removed the rings. One of them crumbled and showed the real ring that was hiding in the bone. It was Rasputin's Evil Ring Of possession or some-such. And although I was tempted, because I like shiny gemstones; I dumped it in the giant black cauldron of acid that had appeared when I wasn't looking, along with all the bones. I even had a wooden spoon to stir it all up.
Then I (finally) fell into a real sleep.

I would say I couldn't make this stuff up, but apparently I did whilst I was dreaming. :D

Can One Be Proud Of Their Cat?
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Because I'm proud of my cat. When we found her at the shelter, she was a "rescued stray". Meaning some good hearted person spotted a bunch of wild kittens foraging for food and took them to the ASPCA animal shelter (they took the mom cat too). The shelter decided that the kittens were young enough to be tamed (but not old enough to be adopted yet) and put them on display.

Meanwhile, across town; my hubby and I were buying a house. When we moved in, our cat lost all the fur on his butt and around his tail. The vet said he was healthy, and the fur would grow back once he got used to his new environment. We decided that Yellow Kitty was lonely, and began the search for a new cat.

A friend of ours was doing some carpentry work at the ASPCA and spotted the kittens, so he gave us a call. This was on October 24th, 2000. The only kittens left were black and the ASPCA wouldn't let them be adopted until after Halloween. So on November 1st, my hubby-man went there and adopted a tiny bundle of black fur. We had to wait another 2 weeks for her to be old enough to go home with us. Turns out she was born right around the time we were buying our house; which was on a Friday the 13th. No. We're not superstitious. :D

In honor of her blackness (she is a true black cat: black nose, black ears, black underfur, etc.) And the possible date of her birth, we named her "Friday" short for "Princess Friday the 13th of October".

This is a tradition begun with Yellow Kitty, who my 3 year old son named "Mine Little Yellow Kitty Cat". Each cat since gets a long name and a short name. We currently also have "Hunter of Things In The Night" (Hunter) and "She Hides In The Shadows Of The Moon" (Moonshadow, or just Shadow) Although I think we got their names reversed, because Hunter will persistently hide in shadowy places, whereas Moonshadow lays right out in public and kills every moth that gets in the house.

Anyway, back to Friday. She has a trait that you often see in strays, she's an opportunistic eater. If there's food, she eats it. She can not walk past a food bowl without stopping for a nibble. And Yellow Kitty was naturally thin. He was 10 lbs of lean muscle mass, but looking at him you'd never believe he weighed as much as a bag of flour, much less two.

Having a skinny cat makes it hard to put the fat cat on a diet. And Friday was FAT. Over the years she has gone from a delicate pile of fluff to a rotund blob, to something so heavy she can't jump down from the sofa without a muffled "oof".

We worried about Friday. We knew her weight was shortening her life, and we knew she was miserable. We asked the vet about Kitty Prozac. We searched the internet for behaviour modification techniques. The best we found was the suggestion to put the food in a box and make the hole too small for the cat. We joked about it, but would never do it.

In the end, Friday learned all by herself that food would always be there. She became mother cat to the kittens Hunter and Shadow, and always tried to leave food in the bowls for them. (3 cats = 2 small food bowls and 2 small water bowls)

So now Friday looks fat. but isn't. She has hanging skin. She can jump again. Yesterday, I saw her sitting on the arm of the couch; with all her feet on the arm! I noticed it because she had a flap of fur hanging into my coffee cup. But she actually fit on just the arm of the couch!
And today, she was crouching on the foot rail of the wet bar downstairs! She can do kitty things again! I'm so proud of her.

And yes, it is funny when she runs across the room batting at a cat toy, looking like furry black jello during an earthquake.

Bad Meat
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I have a pretty hardy constitution. After all, my mother consistently and thoroughly poisoned my sister and I as children by giving us expired milk, expired canned food, expired everything... She wasn't being mean, and she wasn't crazy. She was feeding us what was available. If bread had mold, you cut off the mold and ate whatever wasn't blue; etc.
As a result, I can eat a lot of things that would make the average American sick. I won't go into detail here, but trust me... Anyway...

Tonight I bit into a chicken wing from a famous fried chicken place and unfortunately swallowed before I could spit it out.

If you've ever left poultry out for too long, then cooked it; but maybe not quite thoroughly enough, then left it under a lukewarm heat lamp for longer than you should, then tasted it... you would know the taste of which I speak.

And because my mom fed us so much expired stuff, I don't vomit very easily. So I thought I would need to sit and wait to see if the immunity my mom gave me as a child is still in effect.

But then my wonderous hubby-man reminded me: I still have antibiotics for pre-dental work! Woo! So I swallowed them, and I hope they'll kill off the truly nasty bacteria colony I swallowed.

*UPDATE* Either the antibiotics or my own constitution -or both, did the trick. No digestion problems at all. :D
Thanks mom!

Geek Speak
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My hubby is getting some quotes for computers and servers and such, and I can only hear his side of the conversation. So I hear things like this:
"I need a raid controller" and picture hordes of digitized barbarians trying to squeeze through an hourglass shaped "raid controller"; thus controlling the flow of their "raid".

He's going to laugh at me when he reads this.

A raid controller is, in actuality, a device that allows you to share data on multiple hard drives in such a way that if one drive fails, you still have access to all the data. Thus it has everything to do with MAGIC and has nothing whatever to do with barbarians.

Quote from hubby-man, "RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices or Independant Disks or some such combination of the last 2 words. Both are accepted."