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Casual Sundays with Mr Curry
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Last Friday, the US house passed the Waxman/Markey cap and trade bill. To put it as simply as possible, this is an energy bill guaranteed to make energy- all energy- much, much more expensive.
Don't like the compact florescent bulbs because they give a poor quality of light, are expensive and due to the mercury inside them, a serious health risk should you ever break one? Tough beans, soon you won't be able to afford the bill on any other kind of bulb.
I had a dream back before the election that government employees were going house to house and counting the number of outlets in each house to tax us accordingly. My brother Joe said "Don't tell anyone, you'll give them ideas." Turns out in the UK, there are already such programs in place. They don't need to knock on your door, they have equipment that can register how many electronic devices are plugged in. Think of the meter in your basement; the ones they used to have to come in to read and now can simply monitor from afar.
The price of gasoline is on the rise again. It went up a good fifty cents a gallon in the last six weeks or so. Cap and trade will make sure it doesn't come down. The idea behind this legislation is very simple; using energy is bad so we'll make it so expensive that you'll have no choice but to curtail your use of it. The IDEAL behind all this is that energy is damaging the planet and we all must sacrifice our 21st century lifestyles to reverse such damage. What's the evidence of such energy produced damage? Global warming. Oh, wait, I'm sorry. Actual weather over the course of the last few years have debunked "warming" so the charlatans have changed their song to "Climate Change".
What constitutes "climate change"? Oh, you know; mild winters one year followed by lots of snow the next. Really hot sticky summers followed by a few years of cooler, dryer summers.
How is that different from the way the planet has always been?
What's different is that politicians are now convinced that you'll believe what they tell you instead of your own lying experience.
So the winters were cold and snowy and the summers were hot and sticky, except for those years when they weren't, back when you were a kid in the pre WWII years? And now the winters are cold and snowy and the summers are hot and sticky except for the years when they aren't? Well, there you have it.
Ordinarily I don't care too much when people who should know better believe whatever nonsense they read in the silly papers or hear from the hysterical talking heads on tv. It's no skin off my nose if you believe you have every disease featured on "Undiagnosed Illnesses". But now it's gotten to the point where the National Religion is Environmentalism and BY GOD they're going to use the force of the federal government to cram their morals down my throat.
Things are bad and our esteemed politicians are working over time to make sure they get worse. You think the government wants to take care of you? Yes. Like Nurse Ratchet wanted to take care of McMurphy.
If you don't vote against every single incumbent in the next election, you may as well line up for your lobotomy.
Oh, yeah! Congratulations Minnesota! You've elected Al"I hate those right wing mother fuckers" Franken to the US Senate! Not only is he the most representative of Representatives, I think we should change the state motto to "I hate those Right Wing Mother Fuckers." That's already the heading on most of our government schools' stationery, isn't it?
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I just finished painting two chair seats that were inspired by Grandma Moses. They took forever to do, they'll probably sell immediately and someone will want me to do them again and I don't want to do them again; I hate them.
I hate Gr. Moses. I'm glad she's dead. I think she actually died before I was born so why does she torment me so?
Because folks who needlepoint just looooove her crap.
She can't draw. Critics say "Oh, her work is so lovely and primitive!"
"Primitive" is code for "sucky". "Primitive" basically means "Looks like any four year old with a box of crayons could do it."
Seriously, anyone with opposable thumbs could have produced that woman's entire catalog. Oh, but she didn't even start til she was eighty! people will say as though that's any excuse. You know why more octogenarians don't paint like her? They would look at the results and consider it a waste of time. My dad is over eighty and deaf. If he takes up the guitar should he get a record contract based on that? If the music industry were as retarded as the "art" community he would.
We had a fun weekend. Last Friday was our 28th wedding anniversary. For the life of me, I can't remember what we did. I'm pretty sure it involved food...
Katie left town on Saturday morning. She borrowed my car and went to Wisconsin for a wedding reception. Zack left town Friday morning. He and his buddies went to a music festival in southern Minnesota. He's been telling me about it since he got home from work last night. They had a blast. Josie babysat on Saturday evening, so the minute she left the house, Jay and I hopped in the convertible and took a road trip of our own.
We drove over the border to Hudson, WI and turned North. We drove up the St. Croix past Somerset and stopped when we got hungry. We had beer, brats and grilled eggplant on the veranda of a lovely little winery over looking the river. It was a perfectly beautiful early summer evening. After we were done we headed back. Over the border, in Minnesota, we watched rainstorms march across the sky far to the west of us. I was sure it was pouring in all the windows we had left open at home but Jay assured me that the rain was farther north than our house. Eventually we hit the storm but we were going so fast that the rain just bounced off the wind shield and flew right over us; we didn't have to put the top up until we got back to the Twin Cities and had to slow down. We pulled off on University Ave and stopped to put up the top right in front of a bar where a group of young men were huddled under the awning. They enjoyed the spectacle we provided, getting the top up in the downpour. I enjoyed it, too. Driving the last few miles home with the top up felt sort of like being zipped up in a plastic bag. Naturally, we drove out from under the storm not a mile after putting up the top.
At home, not only had it never rained a drop so it's okay that all the windows were open; we had left the sprinkler on, too.
Jay decided that the eggplant from two hours earlier hadn't held him so he threw a tenderloin on the grill and we snacked on that as the sun went down. Josie got home around 10:30 and she had no idea that we had run away from home while she was gone.
I think it's time to go for a run.
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Newsflash; Fifty year old man dies of heart failure while trying to perform Michael Jackson's "thriller" moves.
Poor, Farrah. There was a time when we all wanted to have her or be her and twelve hours after her death, she's old news.
This is the best obituary I've read on him.
And this is the best on her.
This double death feels like an omen.
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In recent years, I switched from working "picture day" at my kids' school to stuffing envelopes whenever they need help. Josie has graduated but I told Maggie, the volunteer coordinator to keep my name on file. I want to continue to support what I consider the best elementary school in the twin cities in this way. Also, I find stuffing envelopes to be sort of a Zen-like activity; mindless repetitive action allows my creative juices to flow so that when I do get back to work, it flies.
I'm the only one under the age of seventy folding, stuffing and sorting on those days. Retiree/volunteers help make the private school world go round.
It's probably due to working in the wonderful world of needlepoint since I was fourteen but I get along very well with senior citizens. I figure; anyone who's managed to stay alive that long probably knows something worth while. Wisdom doesn't always come with age, of course. Plenty of people who are old enough to know better simply don't, but that's just the human condition.
There's one gal who is always there when I volunteer whom I can't stand. She's a perfectly nice (way too syrupy nice if you ask me) and soft spoken, with a squeaky little Minnie Mouse voice. A chance statement she made the first time I ever volunteered with her rubbed me the wrong way and she's managed to compound it every single time I meet her.
In her sweet little voice, she manages to bad mouth people she knows every chance she gets and it's always over the same thing; that certain folks choose to continue working rather than retiring and donating all their time and energy to volunteering like she does.
Naturally, she's an Obama supporter. Hey Mr. President; I serve the public by working, contributing to the economy, paying taxes and raising my kids to be law-abiding (mostly), productive citizens, so with all due respect, get off my back.
The smug doesn't roll off her in waves, but it seeps from every pore.
One time she disparaged a gal she knows for continuing to work and paying others to keep up her garden and her house for her, rather than devoting the rest of her life to painting her own woodwork and pulling her own weeds.
"Thank goodness for her!" I opened my yap and chirped "Someone's got to keep all those handymen and yard workers employed!"
Another time, she tsked over a woman who just won't retire and volunteer enough because according to mean Minnie she just looooves getting a paycheck. What does this Scrooge McDuck do? She's a nurse.
"Maybe she just enjoys taking care of people." I said. "Maybe she loves what she does and considering the burn-out rate in the nursing field, thank goodness there are some like her who can stick with it."
"Well..." Minnie shrugged "I just think she should take it easy and there are plenty of others who could do her job."
WHO THE F*** CARES WHAT YOU THINK? I'm pretty sure I didn't say out loud. What I did say was "Well, I'm never gonna retire. There's no one out there who can do what I do."
I didn't mean no one can design needlepoint. But just like there are plenty of novelists, only Vince Flynn can write a Vince Flynn novel.
Mainly I just said it to bother her.
The bottom line is I can hardly wait to get another call from school for envelope stuffing so I can verbally punch Minnie Mouth in the chops.
I love old folks as long as they don't piss me off.
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It's June in Minnesota. That means it's either raining, cool and clammy or it's broiling hot. On Father's Day, Katie M. and I took our daughters to see The Proposal before we all headed out to Mom and Dads for brats and burgers with the clan. It was about seventy degrees and pouring rain all day. We need the rain; the lakes and the creek are very low. We've had rain in the last few weeks but never enough.
The movie was so-so. I laughed in parts, which is the only reason I don't give it an F. There were a few funny lines but most of it was so pat, so clichéd, so by the numbers that the cringingly embarrassing scenes were a welcome relief. I read a review that said Betty White steals every scene she's in. Believe me, it's not cuz she had great material to work with, or even that she does a particularly good job with it. It's just because she throws herself into the awful material as though it were worth the effort. Which is more than Sandra Bullock does. I kinda like Sandra Bullock and that's the problem; the plot revolves around what a professional Attila the Hun she is, and nothing that actually happens demonstrates that she's even unreasonable. The guy she fires in the beginning was clearly not getting the job done. I guess in Hollywood, any boss who actually expects value from their underlings is a WORKMONGER and therefore to be hated. Of course, I liked Meryl Streep's character in the Devil Wore Prada, too. Bet you can't wait to get a job working for me, can ya?
Anyway, since Sandra can't be bothered to actually be a hateful bitch, we viewers are left to depend on visual cues to understand that she's loosening up, as in; she undoes her pony tail. Now that's as subtle as a gun. The director seems to believe she was making a movie for idiots. Ryan Reynolds seems to think he was in a drama. And apparently Betty White was ten years old when she got married and gave birth to Craig T. Nelson who looks pretty good for 80. (Idiots who can't do math is the director's specific demographic.) Mary Steenburgen is either aging backwards or has had the world's greatest face lift.
It's always sad when a movie with possibility falls back on threadbare cliches. And don't say that rom-coms are so over done that there's nothing left; some people think the world has had enough of silly love songs but it never has and it never will! Besides, the road trip movie has been done to death as well, yet The Hangover is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. It takes the over used premise of four guys plus a bachelor party in Vegas and makes the idea seem brand new. I imagine the writer(s) laboring over the script saying "What's the worse thing you could run into in the bathroom? No, worse. Worse. Make it worse." And who knew that the line "Here's your car, officers" could be so funny?
You know what's a good romantic comedy? Win a Date With Tad Hamilton. Cuz Josh Duhamel without a shirt is even better than Ryan Reynolds naked. You can quote me on that.
After our rainy, cold Father's Day, the sky cleared and the temperatures soared so naturally our central air failed. We had to swelter through yesterday's 91 degrees before the service plus tech could get here. This morning we got the good news/bad news. The unit was too low on freon to cool and that's an easy fix. The bad news is all the old freon leaked out cuz the unit is a thousand years old and needs to be replaced.
Oh, yay I was wondering what to do with all that stimulus money.
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| Suzanne Lukas comes across as a brownshirt in this story. I can only hope that it isn't true, that the superintendant of schools in Portland, Maine is not such an idiot and that the story is a misrepresentation of the facts, only tells the most sensational part of the whole and actually makes some of it up out of whole cloth. Seeing as it is from the AP, there's actually a pretty good chance of it.
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So Josie graduated and summer vacation started and the sky immediately turned gray, temperatures plummeted into the 50s and while I wouldn't say it rained for ten straight days, it's certainly been soggy.
Not much to write about. I've been painting a lot but it doesn't seem like it. I've gone to a lot of movies. Three in two weeks is more than I usually see all summer long. I liked them all.
Star Trek. Zack and I saw this one evening when there was nothing else to do and no one around. It was the middle of the week so tickets were only $5. Totally worth it. Loved every minute of it so much that when I was in Sam's club a few days later and saw a dvd of "best of" episode's from the original show, I bought it. Only four eps on the disk, but all good. Here's what I was struck by, as someone who hasn't really seen the original show since I was eight years old; it's funnier than I remember. The banter between Spock and the rest of the crew is very dry and really hilarious. I may have to add Star Trek to my netflix list. I also noticed that while the new movie makes no attempt at re-creating Shatner's Kirk, the kid who plays Kirk nails the essence of the character. He avoids doing a lame imitation but he totally gets who Kirk is; an alpha male with complete confidence in his own ability and no hesitation whatsoever at assuming command. I never found Kirk particularly attractive but I admit I love a guy who isn't afraid to be a Man.
Angels and Demons. This was far more enjoyable than I expected it to be. I found Dan Brown's books to be unreadable due to his lack of talent as a writer, not because his stories were bad. In fact, I find the stories to be fun, intricately detailed action adventures that had to be better on screen than on the page. Plus, Tom Hanks and Ewan MacGregor! This one could've been subtitled "How Indiana Jones almost became Pope"...but turned out to be the bad guy, instead. Jay saw the end coming. He didn't read the book, he just leaned over and whispered his prediction in my ear half way through the movie and he was on the money.
Up. I loved it. Josie liked it a lot but said she didn't love it because it was sad. Parts of it are sad. I had huge tears rolling down my face in the first ten minutes and then was shrieking with laughter ten minutes later. The "little mail man", Russell, was the cutest kid I've seen in a movie since Boo in Monster's Inc. Like the Incredibles, this movie is incredibly pro-family and old fashioned family values, without bashing you over the head with it. There's just one short, poignant scene that tells you the way to break a kid's heart is divorce. "It's the boring stuff I think I miss the most" is one of the saddest lines ever uttered on film. And then I laughed so hard I almost wet myself. Great movie.
At home, Josie and I finished watching Firefly. She's a total convert. What does that mean? We were watching the original Star Wars and I pointed out how Mal equates to Han, River and Simon are like Leia and Luke, Shepard Book is Obi Wan, Inara and Kaylee are C3PO and R2D2 and Jayne is Chewbacca, but no one is as cool and tough as Zoe. She said "Is it wrong for me to like Mal better than Han? And no one is as cool as the crew of Serenity." She loved Star Trek, too, because everyone in it was cute, but she said "It was no Serenity."
That's a total convert.
Now I'm watching the first season of Las Vegas. It's Katie's favorite show and she brought me the first season. I'm enjoying it. I like the characters and the dialog is entertaining. When it comes to tv, I don't believe in moderation. If I can't see the whole season at one, I'm not interested. Everything is better in large doses.
I've also managed to read about six books in the last ten days. A lot of Janet Evanovich. She's perfect summer reading; light, funny and occasionally sexy. I'm mixing her up with Mark Levin and Thomas Sowell. still want to read the Next 100 years, by George Friedman but haven't gotten my hands on a copy yet. Oh, and I'm reading James Herriot again, because I bought All things Bright and Beautiful in hardcover at an estate sale. You just have to re read his stuff every few decades. I don't understand people who never read a book twice. That's as stupid as only listening to a piece of music once.
Finally, the sun's back! Maybe now we can have some actual summer.
I can't get the quote "He killed me, Mal. Killed me with a sword. How weird is that?" out of my head.
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Yesterday was my parents' 53rd wedding anniversary. My brother Bill wrote this in honor of the occasion.
Read it and weep.
I did.
I have nothing to add. Bill said it all.
Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad. 53 years really flies when you're having fun!
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"It would be a disgrace if an umpire in a baseball game let his "empathy" determine whether a pitch were a ball or a strike. Surely we should accept nothing less from a judge."
--Thomas Sowell
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...for I have sinned.
I have strayed.
I have been unfaithful.
I have lusted after that which was not mine.
I have coveted.
I wasn't looking for trouble. I wasn't unsatisfied with my choices. I was happy! I never thought I'd be the type...I didn't know!
I didn't know.
Forgive me.
It all started eight months ago. Jay got himself a new car. It was used but in prime condition. It was an Audi A8 Quattro. This is a car that began it's life as a limo in a high class car service. It came with all wheel drive and a built in phone. Big deal. I was glad that Jay was happy but that's as far as it went. I've never been a car girl. I had even been known to say things like "how can anyone spend that kind of money on a car?" and I wasn't even talking about your really high end cars like a Bentley or Rolls. I was talking about Lexus' or Caddies.
I should've known better. There was that day, years ago, when a friend brought over his brand new 2000 Corvette. I had never been a fan of Corvettes, but in 2000 the brand changed. It went from being that overtly phallic design of the seventies to the current sleek, aerodynamic work of art that it now is. Looking over the elegant craftsmanship of that 'vette, I had an epiphany.
All I could see in the gorgeous lines and beautiful upholstery of that car was the love, talent, pride and joy of the artists who made it and I realized; If no one spends this kind of money on cars, then no one can afford to design and build these beauties and who am I to consign all those creative people to careers of nothing but K-cars and mini vans?
That car had a profound affect on my philosophy toward money. I began to look at commodities I'd never been interested in before, like cars, shoes and purses and realize that each of those objects can be works of art and art is expensive. A pair of twelve dollar pumps from target are great but I thank God that there are people out there who support the artisans who produce gorgeous, butter soft stiletto's that are so comfy you can actually wear them all day long. Why shouldn't craftsmen who create things far above and beyond the ordinary be well paid? If someone is going to put the time, skill and raw materials into a project, it's gonna cost you. And well it should.
But I wasn't car girl.
Then Jay brought home that Audi. No, Jay tossed me the keys and asked me to drive it home for him. He was in his convertible and it was one of the last rag top days of autumn. We had picked up his new winter-weather car and I was bringing it home for him.
Six blocks later I was in love with a car for the first time in my life. It was so smooth! So powerful! It responded to my touch as though it could read my mind! The GPS with it's soothing tones, cooing in my ear, whispering when and where to turn, doing all the work while I just laid I mean sat back and enjoyed it! And the leather! Oh, the leather...
I began to look forward to the times when Jay would be out of town so I could drive the limo. Every chance I could, I drove that beauty. I would take the long way to Target, just so I could drive it farther. I was volunteering to pick people up from school and work just to get more time behind that smooth, leather clad wheel that actually heats up in the winter. Jay knew what was going on but it didn't bother him at all. He thought it was funny. It's as though I had a new boyfriend whom Jay knew was gay.
Everything was going so well.
Then, a week ago, disaster. There was something terribly wrong with the Audi. It refused to leave the garage.
It was the transmission. My limo had no reverse.
Heart break.
The folks at the dealership gave Jay a loaner car they thought he might like as well, while the Audi was being repaired.
"Like as well?" I muttered under my breath while waiting for him to get home. "Fix my limo."
When Jay returned, he gave me a smile and said "Look in the driveway."
I shrugged, cuz you know; who cares? A car's a car except for the Audi. (my Audi) But I went and looked.
It was a Mercedes E500. Charcoal gray. Shining like an apple in Satan's hand.
I honestly don't even know how it happened. The circumstances are fuzzy in my mind. Somehow, I wound up driving that car all over town this afternoon. All. Over. Town.
The E500 is a powerful car. A little scary. Not just the engine but the brakes, the steering...everything about it screams "Don't worry baby, I'll take good care of you." The gear shift just begged to be caressed. Oh, did I ever caress it. I felt wanton. Depraved. Helpless.
It was like being stuck in an elevator all afternoon with Colin Farrell. I'm only flesh and blood, after all.
I didn't think of the Audi even once, all day.
I'm so ashamed.
With the Audi, I could tell myself "This is so unlike me. I'm not a car girl. This isn't like me at all!" Now I have to face the truth; this is exactly like me. Hello. I'm Mary Louise and I love luxury sedans.
We picked up the Audi late in the afternoon. Jay took off in the Mercedes and I drove the Audi home.
Tomorrow, Jay has to bring one of them back to the dealership.
"I think I'll just bring them both back and get another mini van." he said.
Maybe he's not as okay with this thing as I thought.
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