Some Things Just Bear Repeating

The 4 Steps to becoming a Drag Queen

1. Let Good Thoughts be your Sword and Shield
2. Ignore Adversity
3. Abide by the Rules of Love
4. Larger Than Life is Just the Right Size

Ouch! A Career Summed Up in 2 Words

This from Wonkette:
"sex person John Ensign"

To be fair, my career could also be said to have been reduced to 2 words...but at least it isn't these 2. Hey, take smug moral superiority where you can, I say!

Oh Christ, the Porn Spam Has Got to Stop!

Does spamming people really help sell a product? Why don't spammers realize that when they send this crap out all it does it create a negative impression in the mind of the potential customer. Lately I've been getting lots of porn spam trying to get me to buy penis enhancement drugs.

Sorry kids, but since I'm a woman your product won't do me any good (and frankly my honey doesn't need it anyway). So now I'm doing whois lookups on these instead of merely adding the sending addresses to my Spambot™ page so that bots will spam these people in turn. Hey poetic justice and all...Anyhoo, when I do the whois lookup I see the email of the person who registered the spamming domain. Now I am adding that email to the Spambot™ page as well. I guess the next step would be to contact the admin of the hosting service and complain.

The last 6 domains that sent me this crap were registered to 2 emails: wiangd@126.com and uyamlegb@yeah.net

Palin Resigns

"'I'm not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual,' she said in Wasilla Friday."

"Palin, who was elected governor in 2006 and has widely been seen as a leading 2012 presidential contender, said she had tired of 'superficial, wasteful political blood sport.'"

I thought that the beauty queen who could field dress a moose was into blood sport.

Wow. The funny thing is that she did not do this earlier...like before John McCain picked her as running mate. She could have easily spared him the embarrassment, not to mention the election...

Poor Sarah. Were those pesky ethics investigations getting in the way?

Battling the Blackberries

Hard to believe we've been in Grandma's house for a year already. We've done so much but there is still a ton of work to do on the place.

The tenants who had been here for 15 years never notified the property management people of any problems and God knows there were plenty of them, the main one being plumbing issues in the bathroom that caused mildew on the walls in every other room in the joint, rotten sheetrock and a wet slab on the living room foundation under several layers of flooring. We scraped/sanded mildew from the walls, spackled, sanded and painted. We ripped off the many layers of floor in the living room and installed laminate. We tore out the crumbling/cracking vinyl tub surround in the bathroom and put in ceramic tile and a matching back splash behind the sink. We had started scrubbing the kitchen prior to painting and tiling and replacing cupboards when Mom told us to stop; that further work would add value to the place and since Grandma was ill (and 103) she didn't want to have to come up with more money to buy out my uncle Bill's share of the estate.

Well, Grandma passed on the 10th and it turns out Bill isn't interested in any portion of her estate. So we've gotten back to work on it but for now it's the yard. Yep, a half acre of blackberries awaiting us. In March or so Mom had a guy come in with a bobcat and cut them all down. I staked out a 12 x 16 patch for a garden but never got as far as planting anything. Within just a couple of months the blackberries had come back with a vengeance and were already 3 feet high. Aside from the stakes in the ground, it was impossible to tell that I had planned a garden at all.

Some years ago at another property of Mom's I spent my weekends with a pair of loppers cutting the blackberries back 1 cane at a time. This time: no freaking way! We got a plastic cutter attachment for the string trimmer and went to town.

I have come to have the greatest respect for Rubus spp. as a biological entity (this despite an unfortunate encounter with them the year I was 10. We had parked by a railroad trestle to watch fireworks at Fort Vancouver. Klutzy to the core, I fell headlong into a patch. I don't know whether the pain made the fireworks more beautiful than ever than year, but I do know that I spent the next 2 weeks plucking thorns from my arms and legs). Small animals that do not threaten it are able to vanish within its brambles. Its defense system is legendary. It grows and loops over itself and other plants, making it nearly impenetrable. However, our humble Ryobi trimmer, armed with the plastic blade, made short work of dispatching them.

I loves me some blackberry cobbler, but probably not enough to want to allow these pesky plants to take over the yard again. I hear Winco has them frozen in bags...