| Closing up shop |
After a run of nearly five years or so, I've decided to retire my blog and turn to other things. My life is about to get a little crazy, leaving not much time for blogging, lingerie modeling, or much else.
I'll be leaving this up for a while, for posterity, of course. It's been fun and no doubt, somewhere down the line, I'll have a new blog. Be sure to look me up.
Sweet dreams.
Melanie O.Labels: farewell |
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| Guess who's coming to dinner? |
Dan's been home all day and I've been helping him nurse an injured shoulder. He keeps forgetting that he's not 30 years old any more and he shouldn't lift as much or move as quickly as he thinks he can. Needless to say, he did himself an injury over the weekend, and I've been keeping an eye on him, because, from past experience, he won't look after it himself.
This is fine as long as I'm working from home, which I did today, but in the midst of something I was doing for work, he called to me, frantically, which, in Dan-speak means "come quickly! There's something really cool I want to show you!"
I was thinking,"awesome! Yesterday, I got off a couple of good shots of a kookaburra that was scratching for grubs in our lawn. There must be some kind of exotic bird out there," and so I grabbed my camera and ran to the kitchen window. You never know what you're going to find out there in our yard, in the country.
"Look," Dan pointed. "Why are there poodles in our yard?"
Poodles? I looked.
"Dan, those aren't poodles. They're goats. They must have wandered over from a neighbor's farm and are browsing the menu in our yard."
I grabbed my camera, wondering how close the goats would let me get to them before they took off. They were busily eating the fallen tree leaves and scrub brush and my presence didn't seem to bother them all that much. Goats have strange tastes. They were eating dried grass and twigs and ignoring the grapefruit that littered the ground.
I tried calling to them. I wondered how tame they were. The two young goats just ignored me and roamed our back yard, trying this leaf and that leaf, to see which ones were best. All was well until they got to my roses and started tasting the leaves.
"Oh, you naughty things!" I said, and tried to push their little mouths away from the rose bushes. Fortunately, the roses were spared, but only after I got to pet the little beasts. The smaller of the two of them seemed particularly fond of having his ears scratched, and so gave up his rose bush eating for some head scratching.
After a few minutes, they wandered back down the driveway, in the direction of, I hoped, their home. I was kind of sad to see them go.
I think I heard the small one say, as he trotted off my veranda: "so long, and thanks for dinner!"Labels: goats |
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| How to explode an egg without a microwave |
I have a one-track mind. I think this is how I got to be reasonably successful and is why I also keep surprising myself in not so pleasant ways. Growing up, my dad always told me I had a one track mind. I think he was right. You know how women are supposed to be such great multi-taskers? Well, I think I missed out on that gene.
This morning, I decided to make myself a hard boiled egg for the protein component of my breakfast. I imagined myself to be Julia Child as I put the egg in a pan of water and stirred it around so that the yolk would wind up in the middle of the white, and not down at one end of the egg. The water began to heat up as the egg swirled around.
And then I remembered that I needed to email my office. I'm home today with a cold. I needed to let them know I'd be working from home.
Of course, once on the computer, I completely forgot about my egg - that is, until about an hour later, when I could smell something cooking.
My egg! I had totally forgotten about it and all of the water had boiled out of the pan. Of course, this meant that the egg was now as tough as rubber and inedible. I ran into the kitchen to save my pan from being destroyed, removed it from the burner and touched the bottom of it to the cold water that was sitting in my sink.
The cold water on the bottom of the pan touched off an explosion. Boom! The overly-heated hard boiled egg exploded all over my nice cashmere sweater. I had egg in my hair, and on my face, of course. I was no longer Julia Child. I was one of the guys from Myth Busters.
For breakfast, I wound up grabbing a cold chicken leg from the fridge. At least there is no way I can make that explode.... for now.Labels: eggs, explosion |
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| Retro-fied |
Well, you knew it had to come down to this. With Mozilla now allowing personas for Firefox, I decided that I needed to dress mine up to keep it in line with the mid-century theme of the rest of my life. So, I trawled through their personas gallery, looking through thousands of designs for that special persona - just for me.
Imagine my huge disappointment when I didn't find anything suitable. If you're a Rob Pattinson fan, you're set. Or if you like animé, you've got plenty to choose from. Some were close, but none were, well, kitschy enough to feed my need for cheese - especially when I'm online and have to actually do some serious work. Solution? Create my own.
At first, it started with a simple cosmic design inspired by my Franciscan Starburst china. Would Mozilla accept it? To my surprise, they did. This was encouraging!
So then, I created a persona using pink flamingos. As everyone knows, pink flamingo yard ornaments were huge in the 1950's and 1960's. That was accepted as well - I was on a roll! Heck, if no one else was going to create cheese, then I was going to.
Not content with that, I then went on to create a Las Vegas leopard theme and a '57 Chevy theme, which, I expect will be approved within the next few days. And several more are in the works.
You know what they say - if you don't like the way something's done, do it yourself. So I did. I'm keeping my Firefox retrofied until further notice.
Labels: Firefox, retro |
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| Menopause - a family affair |
A couple of weeks ago, I came home from a long commute, tired and worn down. By the time I got home after two and a half hours of travelling, I was on auto-pilot. I set my handbag down on the lounge inside the door and shuffled my way into the bathroom to splash water on my face and try to perk up for the rest of the evening.
Later that night, as I was working on my computer, I heard noises. It sounded like someone was walking around on my veranda. I was annoyed. We have neighborhood children who play on our veranda without permission and slam doors. We've nicknamed them "the ferals." "Great," I thought. "The ferals are at it again."
I went to the door and gazed out into the darkness. I couldn't see anyone.
Feeling peculiarly suspicious, I checked my handbag by the door. My wallet was gone! The new pink one I'd just recently purchased. That couldn't be right. I hadn't gone anywhere since I got home! Worried now, I checked the bedroom and the office, thinking that maybe I'd set it down there, even though I didn't remember removing it from my handbag. My wallet has my life in it! Money, ID, credit cards - this was B.A.D.
It wasn't in either obvious place. Now I was really panicking! I called the police and explained that I'd heard noises and the sound of my door closing and I think someone had lifted my wallet! Never mind that a new DVD player was sitting on my kitchen table near the lounge and that hadn't been taken. It was just my wallet. I'd bet anything it was neighborhood teens and they were drinking on my dollar down at the local pub. I had this crime solved even before the police arrived.
The police were very responsive and sent two female officers to the house to take a report. I was a bit shaken up. My house - our castle - had been invaded while I was home alone. I would never feel secure again.
Within 20 minutes after the police departed (no doubt they thought I was some crazy woman on drugs), the crime was solved. I solved it. I found my wallet in the bathroom, sitting on top of a neatly folded stack of face cloths. How it got there, I swear I don't remember. I was the only one home, so I must have put it there. But I don't remember one iota of doing it.
George Carlin had a routine about getting foggy brain as you get older. He asked
"Ever go into a room to get something ... and then forget why you went into it? And the first two words to pop into your head is Alzheimer's disease."
Dan ribbed me about this event for days.
I felt silly about the whole thing, that is, until Dan called me from work last week. His company jacket had been stolen. He'd left it in the break room on a hook, and when he got back from a run, it was missing. Dan was upset. He'd had other things stolen from him in the break room. He'd been given a gift basket from his boss for Christmas, left it in the fridge for a few days, and when he went to retrieve it, the beer and cheese in it had been stolen.
I told him to make sure he never left anything of value in the break room. You just can't trust people to keep their hands off anything that isn't nailed down. Dan agreed, but continued to rant for another five minutes about the den of thieves he worked with. He complained to the office manager and the secretary and they gave him sympathy.
He came home from work that night ... tired after a long day, and went to change out of his work clothes. There, on the bed, was his company jacket.
At least, now we're even. Labels: forgetfullness, menopause |
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Name: Melanie O.
Home: Durham, North Carolina, United States
About Me: Female, American health and beauty-conscious professional who has rekindled a childhood love of dolls.
See my profile...
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posted by Melanie O. at 
