Category: Crankypantsing

Art, Crankypantsing, Doodles

Staff Meeting Doodle

Shelly

Staff Meeting Doodle
Staff Meeting Doodle

We had an hour long presentation at work this week, and I spent my time, as usual, doodling. I’m glad I took a notebook, because even though I picked an out of the way seat in the back of the room, someone just had to sit right next to me. Why are some people unable to comprehend that someone who has gone out of their way to sit alone might want to be left alone? Grrr.

I’m used to taking crap from other people about being antisocial, but I’d occasionally like to see people who are overly social stop and think for a minute. You may think I’m abnormal, but I can assure you, you seem a little bizarre to me, too.

Crankypantsing

Grammar Rant o’ the Day

Shelly

On a few of my favorite blogs, I have noticed the same form of hyphen abuse. It is normally accepted practice to place a hyphen between two words to create a compound word. This is especially common when the two words precede a noun which they describe. For example, “a well-timed kick upside the head.” What is not acceptable is to hyphenate an adverb-adjective combo if the adverb ends in -ly. If you want to write about your “recently elected congresswoman” or your “freshly brewed coffee,” then please to be omitting the extraneous hyphen!

Thank you. Class dismissed.

(And, of course, every grammar rant is required to include numerous grammar mistakes. C’est la blogging.)

Postcard
Postcard: Cannes, Un Coin de la Croisette (from my ephemera stash)

Crankypantsing, Doodles, Photography

Sunrise and Sunset and a Brand New Year

Shelly

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Sunset, Owen County, Indiana

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Sunrise, Owen County, Indiana

I mentioned that I’d given my mom my SLR? Well, she told me a few weeks ago that I’d left film in the camera, and that there were a couple of pictures on it of either sunrises or sunsets. When I was there over Festivus, I had her dig them out for me. I’m glad I did! The sunset photo is one of best I’ve ever taken. My scanner is in awful shape–it’s making unhealthy grinding noises and is scattering white specks across everything–so this is not the best scan, but it’s not too bad. The frosty winter sunrise photo turned out kind of nicely, too, I think. I don’t remember taking either of them, which shows what sort of Swiss cheese my brain is made of.

Below: This is one my mom took. While I was on the phone with her one evening, she said there were some weird cloud formations. I told her to get the hell outside and take some pictures (duh!), which she did. We’d had the same storm system earlier in the day, complete with mammatus, but my photos didn’t turn out anywhere as well as hers did. (That line along the left is an electric line, and the dark section at the bottom right is the eaves of her house.)

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Mammatus clouds, Muncie, Indiana

And now for a couple of mindless doodles. We’ve had a barrage of staff meetings and training sessions over the past couple of months, in preparation for a major upgrade to our cataloging software. I’m not good with meetings and training sessions. They bore my brain into the danger zone for implodiation. So, I doodle. I don’t care if it makes it seem like I’m not paying attention. I am. I just need to keep my hands busy or my brain will atrophy.

Staff Meeting Doodle
Staff Meeting Doodle

Staff Meeting Doodle
Staff Meeting Doodle

The obligatory New Year resolutions:

I haven’t got a long list of resolutions, because I don’t tend to keep them. However, I’m going to make a concerted effort to try to do some art every day. I’m also going to try to eat more greens and drink less caffeine. Not killing Mr. Upstairs or beating the Bumpuses upside their heads with their dog’s tie-out stake are on the list, too, but alas, they aren’t my first priorities. I may spend 2007 in jail, if my neighbors don’t stop being assberets.

Crankypantsing, Pets, Photography

Fog

Shelly

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This is a pretty good approximation of how my brain feels this morning. Mr. Upstairs (Milton) has spent the last two nights rearranging furniture, so I haven’t been getting much sleep. How much furniture can one fit into a 700sq ft apartment?! And why can’t it be (re)arranged at a reasonable hour?

I still can’t figure out when Mr. Upstairs sleeps or when he goes to work, assuming he actually does either of those things. Whenever I pass him in the hallway or parking lot, he pretends I don’t exist. Even when I say hello, he stares straight ahead and ignores me. M’kaythen!

In other neighbor news, the Bumpass family have moved into the apartment I share a wall with. I was a little apprehensive at first, but they’re surprisingly quiet. I had to laugh when I saw them moving in. Their patio is cram-packed with filthy, broken-down old furniture, and they’ve erected a Monument to Tackiness that leaves me equal parts horrified and impressed. I’ll try to get a picture of it, but for the time being, you’ll have to make do with the knowledge that it contains a bunch of glass-ornamental-garden-tchotchkes-on-sticks, US flags, and porcelain bunny planters.

Also, they’ve got the requisite Bumpass Hound, in the form of a cuter-than-hell Catahoula Leopard Dog puppy. She seems pretty well behaved, though when she gets barking, it tends to go on and on and on. Miss Brown does not approve. Whenever Miss Catahoula starts roo-roo-rooing, Harriet gets agitated and starts pacing and hrumfing.

Crankypantsing, Photography

Bookshelves

Shelly

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Dawn mentioned in comments that bookshelves are for books, not knick-knacks. I obviously agree. Bookshelf real estate is a precious commodity in my house, and I don’t see the sense in wasting it on trinkets. On the other hand, knick-knacks have a way of insinuating themselves into my life (“Ooooh! Shiny!”), and once in my house, they breed in the corners like Tribbles. It won’t be long before my nice, new bookshelves are riddled with tchotchkes. It is inevitable.

Which brings me to today’s crankypants observation. I’ve mentioned my addiction to house porn? I’d watch TLC and HGTV all day, if I could. One thing I’ve noticed is that redecorating shows invariably waste a chunk of their budget on purchasing tchotchkes. What on earth is wrong with people, that they don’t have boxes and bins and bags and closets full of crap, so that they have to actually go out and purchase decorative junk? I just don’t get it. I collect junk because I like it and want to look at it, not because I need something to match the sofa.

Photo: Speaking of junk accumulating. My mom had her chimney replaced years ago (it had separated from the house and was leaning out into thin air), and the pile of bricks from the old chimney is still lying right where it landed.

Crankypantsing

Operation Shelving

Shelly

I repeat: We have achieved shelving!

I finally had time and sufficient hardware to slap together three sets of bookshelves on Sunday. Between building the shelves and unpacking and sorting books, Operation Shelving took me damned near 12 hours to finish. Yes, 12 hours. Trying to force screws through rock-hard cedar is no picnic. Please, don’t try this at home unless you have a drill. Otherwise, your hands may turn to hamburger. Actually, the hamburger is partially due to the fact that some dog who shall remain nameless chewed the hell out of the handles of a couple of my screwdrivers. About halfway through Operation Shelving, it occurred to me that maybe I should wrap the chewed bits with duct tape, but by then the hamburger was made.

But, it’s done, done, done. Hallelujah! I still have a couple of boxes of art books to unpack, but those will go in the studio, so I’m not worrying about them just now. Besides, the bookcase they go in needs a coat of paint before I can put anything in it. I should have taken care of that a couple of weekends ago, when it was 75F and sunny outside. Now, I’m going to have to paint it indoors, which will probably end in tears when the inevitable paint-on-carpet tragedy occurs.

In any event, this means that I can finally focus on getting the studio unpacked. I’m not sure yet what Ms. Lea’s weekend packing and moving plans are, but I suspect I’ll have at least one day to work on the studio, which makes me happy.

And, speaking of things that make me happy, I have found perhaps the world’s most perfect carpet stain remover. I may have mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: Woolite Oxy Deep. It’s damned good stuff. It even removed dried blood stains from the carpet at the old place [1]. I had tried just about everything I could think of and had just about given up on finding something that would work. This stuff removed it quickly and with a minimum of elbow grease.

And now for the crankypantsing. I was busy all weekend and didn’t get much sleep, so I was looking forward to sleeping in on Monday and spending pretty much the whole damned day sitting on my ass. The only problem was, I didn’t account for Milton and His Spectacularly Loud Television. Holy crap! I woke up at 7am to the morning news, blaring away from upstairs. That went on pretty much all day, then through the night, he plunked on his bass guitar. He must be learning to play, because when I first moved in, he was working on simple scales. Now, he’s graduated to adding halftone decreases to the up progression and halftone increases to the down progression. Only, he fucks up about every third note. This went on all freaking night. The man must not ever sleep!

Then, when I got home yesterday, I noticed that his television was on, but for once, it was at a sane volume. Hmmm. That’s the first time he hasn’t had it on full-blast since I moved in in late September. I wonder if someone complained? The folks who share a wall with him can’t be any more thrilled than I am with the noise.

Alas, the bass playing went on last night as scheduled, from about midnight until I left this morning at 5:45. Which really makes the mind boggle, when you think about it. That’s six solid hours spent doing nothing but playing scales–and badly, at that. It makes no sense from the standpoint of learning to play an instrument, which makes me wonder if it’s an OCD sort of thing, wherein he just cannot put the instrument down until he completes the given scale perfectly.

I dunno. I do wish he’d turn the damned amplifier off, though. What kind of jackass thinks it’s reasonable to play electric bass all night in an apartment complex? It is sure to make the Baby Jeebus weep.

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[1] The body was buried in the front yard. And, no, I’m not kidding.

Crankypantsing, News & Politics

Mr. Pants on Fire

Shelly

I think anyone with half a brain stem and a functioning logic lobe knows that our Chimperor is a big, fat liar. However, it somehow manages to boggle my mind that he would actually come right out and admit it. At the recent presidential press conference, though, he did just that.

When asked why, only last week, he’d claimed that Rumsfeld would not be resigning, Bush answered:

Right. No, you and Hunt and Keil came in the Oval Office, and Hunt asked me the question one week before the campaign, and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they’re going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.

That’s right, folks. He just makes up shit when he wants people to get off his back or if he thinks it will negatively affect people’s opinions of his political party. Ironically, he later stated that he thought voters had elected Democrats because “People want their Congress — congressmen to be honest and ethical.” Gee, d’ya think?  Also, he repeated an earlier assertion that “stay the course” does not, in fact, mean “stay the course.” Apparently, those three words mean something entirely different in Bush’s Bizarro World.

Crankypantsing

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Shelly

Just for what it’s worth, if you find that you are so sleep deprived that you can’t remember whether or not you really did just wash your hair, then you should probably just go back to bed. Trying to fight it will only end in tears.  I think I washed it.  I’d say I’m about, oh, 90% positive I did.  But maybe I didn’t?  For the life of me, I couldn’t remember.  I considered washing it again(?) to be on the safe side, but I was already late for work, so I decided to chance it.

Crankypantsing, Pets

Note to Self

Shelly

On the next move, do not lose the dog’s nail clippers.  Also, her leash.  Also, too, her rubber curry comb.  I finally found the nail clippers this morning.  I still haven’t found her leash, so I’ve been using Elliott’s old one.  I have no idea where to even begin looking for her curry comb, though, and there’s really nothing that will substitute for it.  Hrmf.