Have I mentioned that my parents are American?

And that they're Democrats? Perhaps that's why I enjoy posting things like this:

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

P.S. If anyone can tell me how to stop cutting off the right side of embedded videos, I'd appreciate it. I tried reducing the object and embed width, but to no avail.

Seriously?

Is this necessary?

As if I'm not feeling old enough these days, here are the targeted ads with which Facebook has decided to grace my home page:

DO NOT LIKE!

Five things that recently made me laugh.

#1. This ad for a course at a ballet school:

From This Sign Has Sharp Edges

#2. The fact that this dog probably ran away because of its description:

#3. The acronym for this city project update dealing with solid waste:

BMPU -- had to be intentional.

#4. The way these supposed marathon runners are dressed:

Sweatjeans and Bermuda trackshorts?

#5. What appears to be the biggest set of domestic-feline cahones ever:

It's actually my female cat's belly.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire

Or in my case, away from the knife, onto the skewer. I managed to chop a zucchini, a pepper, an onion and some portabello mushrooms with a great big knife and I didn't even slice a fingernail. (Often the extra crunch in our meals is my own keratin.) Then, as I slid the chopped veggies and fungi onto a pair of bamboo skewers, I stabbed a vein in my hand. For a few minutes I had a teeny, tiny red geyser. So much for that part of dinner being vegetarian.

A memory

Out of the blue, I just remembered something that I saw at a subway station one evening several years ago. A man, perhaps in his thirties, was entering the station alone. He had a sheet of paper taped to his back. On the paper was written, in great big letters, "MY NAME IS BARRY AND I LOVE BINGO!"

That is all.

Bright-eyed and pony-tailed

My mood and mobility have been hampered by the recent hot, humid weather. At home, if I'm not slouched on a soft sofa, I'm sluggishly dragging myself around. My energy level is low and my ability to concentrate is compromised. Come to think of it, those could be symptoms of depression, but I thought I had that pretty much under control. (Thanks to drugs! Hooray for drugs!) (Er, the legal kind!)

Anyway, since I normally appear to be moping around like these two lugubrious characters...

Eeyore and Marvin the Paranoid Android

...I was puzzled today by an unfamiliar sensation of being very wide-eyed and alert. I don't take uppers, I've had no caffeine and I certainly haven't had any extra sleep. So what gives?

I figured it out when I removed my hair elastic this evening. Due to the heat and humidity, I had decided to wear my hair up. Apparently I had made my pony-tail too tight. What with my eyes pulled wide open you'd think that I would have noticed my stretched face in a mirror at some point. I must have looked like this:

...or this:

...or perhaps this.

Maybe a buzz cut would suit me.

We've got stones

A few weekends ago, Scott and I went rock climbing. That is, we went to his friend's rock-selling business and scrambled up huge piles of river rocks to select the perfect stones for our yard. Scott wanted some medium-sized rocks to go along the side of the garage. Weeks earlier we had torn out the paving-stone path that I had very laboriously laid there three years ago. By tearing out the path we had inadvertently left a mucky ditch for the dogs to romp in. With near-record rainfalls this summer, we'd finally had enough of muddy paw prints everywhere. The plan was to fill half of the ditch with rocks and to lay sod in the other half. Scott's hope was that the new rocks would filter away the rainwater that had previously dripped from the roof onto the path and into the garage. (You may have seen our old paving-stone path, as well as evidence of the dogs' love of romping in muck, here.)

Precariously perched on the rock piles, Scott and I picked the patterns that most appealed to us. That was the fun part. We loaded the rocks into a crate in the back of a borrowed pick-up truck and headed home on the highway. At one point Scott braked hard and the crate slid toward the cab at such a rate of speed that I thought it would crash through the rear window and crush us. There were points later on in the project when the thought of being crushed by a crate of rocks sounded inviting, but at the time I was pleased to be alive.

After arriving home safe and sound, I decided that we needed to insert a gardening project into our schedule. I thought that my rapidly reproducing red border lilies would look sharp nestled between the garage and our new rocks, so we spent the next hour digging the flowers out of the garden and planting them beside the garage. I had given no thought to the fact that the bulbs are completely shaded in their new location and will never feel the warmth of direct sun; they may never bloom again.

Next we unloaded the rocks. We painstakingly placed them, one by one, in front of the replanted lilies, being careful to avoid having too many of one size, shape, colour or pattern in the same area. It was a long, slow process, and in the end we had... far fewer rocks than we required. The sun was setting, our stomachs were growling and our muscles were aching. Neither one of us had to speak it to know it: after having chosen and placed each stone so carefully, we would not be hand-selecting the next batch. We would have them loaded into the crate by a backhoe and we would dump them unceremoniously on top of the thoughtfully placed first batch. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, unless you're so bloody exhausted and sore that you really couldn't give a rat's ass about aesthetics anymore.

During a subsequent weekend Scott borrowed a rototiller and tilled the clay-filled mud. Since we have had so much trouble keeping grass alive with the dogs tearing up the ground day after day, he was intent on doing it right this time. I thought that a new stepping-stone pathway from the driveway to the dogs' poop area would be just the thing to preserve the grass. All we needed to do was to lay the new path along the same route as the dogs already travelled. It was a great plan, but not one that we were able to stick to. In laying out the base for the path we forgot entirely about the dogs' usual route and instead dug a meandering trench faintly echoing the curves of the garden wall. We anchored weed barrier with rubber lawn edging and at the end of a long day the yard looked like so:

Eventually we purchased two dozen rolls of half-dead sod -- the only sod we could find mid-season -- and turned our yard into this:

We had rejected the idea of stepping stones, feeling that introducing yet another texture of stone into the yard would be an eyesore. Instead, we opted for smaller versions of the river rocks we had laid along the garage. Our yard then became this:

You may notice Montana, the main culprit in lawn destruction, gleefully trotting along beside the path in the photos above. Since their poop area is gravel, I had never imagined that the dogs would balk at walking on stones. But balk they did. They refused to set paw on the path, and as a result they began doing their business all over our new grass. To say that this displeased me would be an understatement. To say that Scott was fuming mad would also be an understatement. The next week found us taking turns walking the dogs back and forth along the new path. While they eventually got used to the feel of the river rocks and resumed using their poop area rather than the lawn, I am no longer foolishly harbouring the illusion that they will stick to the pathway at all times and cease to run muddy ruts into the lawn. For now, at least, the grass is thriving and the yard looks half decent:

This was a typical Scott-and-Jenni project: poorly thought out, done in numerous steps weeks apart, and involving several spats, streams of sweat and superfluous swearing. I can only imagine how painful a process our upcoming home renovations will be. All's well that end's well, however, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Even if our victories are only temporary.

Today the desk isn't hard enough...

...to make banging my head on it satisfactory.

It's been one of those days.

It's been a while.

It's been a while since I've posted. Some days when I start to blog I stop myself and think, "Who would want to read about that?" Then there are days like today, when I don't care if anyone wants to read my drivel or not. If I don't get rid of it, it will puddle at my feet. Instead, I choose to share my drivel with you.

It's interesting that "drivel" contains the word "drive," because driving is something else I hadn't done in a while. I finally had an opportunity to drive tonight. Wasn't I pleased with myself when Scott dozed off in the passenger seat. Normally he is stressed out, hyper alert and grouchy when I'm in the driver's seat. I figured that I couldn't be doing too badly if he was comfortable enough to doze while I drove. I smiled fondly and watched him, with his head tipped back, his mouth ajar, snoring softly.

"STOP!" Scott yelled suddenly. Somehow he had emerged from the depths of his slumber just in time to holler at me as we approached an intersection. He feared that I was going to ignore the traffic lights and race ahead recklessly. As if.

Scott soon fell back to sleep, only waking up periodically to point out my mistakes. I took one turn a bit too wide and hit the curb during another, my lane changes were jerky and my deceleration was rapid enough that the dogs slid around in the back of the vehicle. It could have been worse. I know, because I've done worse.

As we approached the driveway at the end of our half-hour ride, Scott instructed me to pull in front first. He had interrupted his nap so many times that he was too irritable to tolerate my clumsy attempts at reversing into place. I complied, turning smoothly into the driveway. As annoyed as Scott appeared, I remained satisfied with my performance. I got out of the car, having left plenty of room to swing open the door. On my side of the vehicle, that is. As for Scott, he practically had to reenact his birth to squeeze out of the car, as I had parked dangerously close to the house. That did not improve his mood any. But like I said, it could have been worse.

I wasn't going to do it.

I wasn't going to write a post about Michael Jackson. Sure, I had the Thriller album, and I even composed a letter to him when his hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial, but I wasn't his biggest fan. Still, I had to post the video below.

Click here for more information on the dancing inmates.