Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

I haven't blogged here in such a long while! I have some important news that I know will come as a shock to some of you. I hate winter. There. I said it.

I'm no longer a fan.

It's not the snow so much as it is the cold. Don't get me wrong. I still prefer cooler weather more than hotter weather (though I did find myself quite enjoying the summertime weather this year), I just don't like the BITTER cold. I can't stand not being able to get warm. Owning a house means you own the bills, too, and with heating costs going through the roof, I keep my thermostat at a relatively cool 64 degrees. There are times when it's fine. I put on a sweatshirt, socks and slippers and for the most part I can stay toasty. But my hands! I can't go around wearing mittens all the time. How would I work? I don't even really like having to wear all those clothes around the house.

Do you want to know what else I don't like? The major production you have to go through every time you exit or enter the house. Hat, scarf, coat, gloves, etc. I hate shoveling the driveway. Thankfully, I park my car in my garage, but I know that if I had to scrape it off every morning, I would hate that, too.

My car gets horrible gas mileage in the snow/winter, the sky is always gloomy and people get depressed and take it out on others.

I still like to ski, so that's still winter's saving grace.

Here's wishing for sunshine and sandals!

Questionable Zoning Regulations

The following is from my friend, Paul. It made me laugh, so I thought I'd post it here for all of your reading enjoyment. I have his permission :) Enjoy...

For those of you familiar with the Youngstown area, you've most likely heard of the Jib Jab Hot Dog Shoppe. Everyone everywhere should have heard of it by now because their sign claims that they're "World Famous" and I seriously doubt that people who have made of living out of serving whatever mystery material those things are made of would lie to us.

Anywho, about 10 or 12 years ago they got so big that they outgrew their location in Girard and built a brand new building that is nothing less than a shrine to this American staple. It's a veritable Taj Mahal as far as hot dog diners go. A building this large could only be built in the thriving metropolis of... well, Girard. Right next door to the existing old one.

I could go on and on about this fine establishment's lack of brain power behind the counter, my general disdain for its questionable patrons, or its quirky position in our society of being a huge Sunday afternoon dating locale for the broke local teenagers, but most of that would be a retread of some of my earlier blogs so I won't waste your time with that. Instead, I'd like to touch on what's become of the old building that used to house of this fine, fine blog fodder.

It's now a Spay and Neuter Clinic.

This got me to wondering... Girard is one of those weird little towns that you would only hear of in the Offbeat section of USAToday, so I wouldn't put it past them to do such a thing... I wonder if I look back through the town's records if I'll find some weird zoning restriction for that particular parcel of land that would only allow it to be used for businesses pertaining to wieners...

Didn't see that coming did you?

Hot Eleven

Eleven is my favorite number. And it's decidedly not hot. When you look at the number 11, it looks calm and in control. Not hot.

It's 11:45, and once again, I'm getting it again right under the wire. I'm exhausted, so this will be short. On the first day of my vacation, I had great plans to stain my deck, which I did, but it took twice as long as I thought (and I'm not finished yet), plus, I worked some more on my flower bed that I'm digging fresh. Do you have any idea how heavy sod is? I had great plans to go to Sam's to watch the meteor showers, but when I came in from the yard at 8:45, I was just too exhausted. Sorry, Sam. This old girl just can't keep up.

Good night, all!

Hot Ten

Here it is, the second post of the day. I'm back on track!

I've decided that for my hot post, I'd go with a decidedly "not hot" post. I'm going to post photos from Luna's birthday party, and since Jackie is terribly afraid of fire of ANY kind, we were not able to put any candles on the cake.

Luna wears a purple collar, which is why I went with the purple cake:



It's pretty, isn't it? Here she is waiting expectantly for a first lick. Did I say lick? I meant look:



As far as I know, this was her first birthday party. She seemed to enjoy herself and couldn't wait for her first look at her cake:



And yes, her first lick.



I tried to stop her, but she was too fast for me. Guess which piece she got?



She loves cake. I knew she would. I think that she couldn't be my pet anymore if she didn't like cake. The kits got a lick of some frosting, too.

For gifts, she got a squishy ball, a Littlest Pet that looks like her, and I got her her very own bath towel for that bathing ritual she hates so much. It won't make it any more likable for her, but at least now she has her own towel.

Steamy Hot Failure

Yep. That's what I am. I failed to post yesterday. You see, the challenge was that for the month of August, there was to be a daily post about anything hot. I was doing pretty well up until yesterday. I didn't get very far, did I? To my credit, though, I am a girl that posts about every three months, so I've upped my output quite a lot.

I've been told that if I post twice today, it will make up for the missed one yesterday, and I'll be back on track.

Here's number 1!

Hot Eight

I didn't get a chance to photograph the Pepper Hotties today, so maybe I'll save that for tomorrow.

I did, however, make bread today. Multi-grain bread, to be exact. I ate a piece as soon as it was done and it was all kinds of hot bread softness. Yum!

That's that. Until Hot Nine - goodnight!

Hot Seven

So far so good on the hot posting, huh? I think I'll get the hot discussion out of the way right off the bat. What's the deal with Hot Pants? And why, O why do people who should not be wearing them feel like they should? One just has to go to the Canfield Fair to understand what I'm talking about.

And Crocs. What's the deal with those shoes? If anyone reading this has some and likes them, well, I hope I don't offend you. But who on earth thought those big hunks of rubber ugliness looked good on anyones feet? I love it when people decorate their crocs. Little strawberries, happy faces, flowers, stars. You get the idea. I bet there is even a Jesus fish charm, or a cross. Nothing like wearing your faith on your shoes!

Luna is excited about her birthday party. She can't wait for that cake. I'm picking it up at noon tomorrow. Someone told me about a store in the mall that bakes gourmet doggie cookies. Can anyone confirm this? I haven't been to the Southern Park Mall in probably a year, and I can't recall seeing anything like that since I was there. Although, I would not have been looking for it.

Sam, my garden is producing! Besides Kimmy's tomato, I have many more grape and cherry ones, leafy green lettuce, green peppers, jalapeno peppers, beans, broccoli, herbs out the ying yang, and lots of flowers on my cucumber plants, but as of yet, no cucumbers. I'll get some soon, I'm sure. Since I planted so late, my veggies are coming a little later, too, but so far, so good. My corn plants are huge! It will be interesting to see if I get any.

Maybe tomorrow will be a hot jalapeno post with some pics. I'll have to learn how to put that little squiggly thing above the "n" so that blogger will quit underlining it in red to let me know that I've spelled it wrong. Let's try it now: jalapeño. There! I did it! That wasn't so bad. Truthfully, I pretty much thought I had the right idea, I was just too lazy to try it. But I hate those squiggly red lines so much that I had to. From here on out, I'll call them Pepper Hotties. No wavy line above the "n", but now the word "Hotties" is underlined! ARGGGHHH! (that is underlined, too).

If I keep this up, Adrienne will no longer be the queen of long posts. Watch out Adrienne – once I get started, I just can't stop!

Good news! I have a whole week off for vacation next week. I'm very excited about this. I'm going to stain my deck, finish my flower beds, then do nothing. Absolutely nothing. I can't wait. I'll sleep a lot, catch up on some housework, take my dog for walks, hang out with my sister, etc. You get the idea. I like the idea of sleep, so I'm going to finish this now. Enjoy my rambling, and stay tuned for pictures of the Pepper Hotties!

Hot Six

I'm getting tired of this daily posting already. How much can you write about hot? I thought maybe I'd do and Adrienne-style post, but I honestly don't know if I have that much to write about. I will say this, though: How many of you don't sing the little diddy in your heads when you say the words "Hot Pockets"? See? You just did, didn't you?

My new flower bed is looking pretty good. Since our weather people are terrible, however, we didn't get the rain they've been predicting for the last three days, so I had to water everything this morning. I would have done it last night, but we were supposed to get this massive thunderstorm. The weather people around here would do better just to look out the window and tell us what they see. My dad lives in Houston, and you can pretty much make your plans based on the weather forecast they give. They must have the same Doppler system, right? Is is that our people just don't know how to interpret what they see? I don't know, but you never can count on the extended forecast.

How sad. I'm reduced to talking about the weather.

In other news...
Today is Luna's birthday. She's five. Since I found her, I don't really know when her exact birthday is, so I made it the day I found her. One hot summer day a year ago today, Stephie and I had just left my house on our way to meet friends for lunch. Stephie points out the window and says "Awww. Look at that cute dog." We get to the stop sign at the next block and I say, "Should we go get it?" And she says, "Yeah. We really should." So we turned around, parked in my driveway, and called for the dog. In the few short minutes it took us to get back to my house, she had vanished. While Stephie left to get some dog food from the store, I went looking for her. She came running from behind a house down the street, and she would come up to me, but she wouldn't let me pet her. She did follow me back to my house, though, and as soon as I sat down on my back deck, she jumped in my lap. She was skinny, dirty and quite smelly, but so cute. I tried to give her away; I really didn't want a dog. I even called Angels for Animals and left a message with them. They never called me back. So now she's mine and I LOVE HER!

So, her birthday kind of blindsided me, so I wasn't prepared. I have a cake ordered for Friday. She likes GiantEagleWhiteCakewithwhippedcreamfrosting. Imagine that. James made her a Luna trading card for her birthday. It's pretty cute.

Kimmy, your tomato is ready. I'll bring it to church on Sunday.

I have a terrible headache right now, so I'm going to cut this hot post short. This is pretty long for me, though. There's not a lot of coherent stuff running through this hot little head of mine these days. Maybe it's another sign of old age.

Oh hay! I just remembered a valid excuse that I thought of when I don't want to do something like post every day. I'm just too old for that.