Miscellanea OR Here She Goes Again

Here's my week.  I pulled off shreds of wall paper from the dining room walls because it had the most horrendous poop brown pattern that man will ever see.  (Or woman.  Or child.  Or Moron cat.  Or Giant Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches, which I will get to later in the blog.  Be patient.)  Beneath the wall paper I discover MORE WALL PAPER.  But this wall paper has been painted over with graveyard gray.  (I'm not making this up.  They had GRAY walls the color of Bruce Willis' undershirt at the end of Die Hard.)  Normally this probably wouldn't bother me but they didn't do a good job on the corners and they look like Joan Rivers' face before Botax.  (That would be a bad thing for the walls, not so much for Joan.)  Not much I can do about the wrinkles except to break out the box cutters and a big sanding block.  You might wonder why I'm doing home improvement instead of writing.  (Well, I'm writing now, I'm blogging.  Same thing.  Kind of.)  The formal dining room will be my Fortress of Solitude or my office of doom, into which no animals, children or HIMs shall intrude when I have my headphones on.  (Hah!  That'll work.  Really.)  So I need my office space and since the IRS is particular about home office rules (we don't need no stinking IRS rules) I have to have a dedicated space in the house.  Hence, home improvement nonsense, which naturally translates into blogging galore.  (I can't help it.  It's kind of like a weird writing disease.)

Under the painted wall paper I found evidence of termite damage.  The amount of critters in this house is gaining by the minute.  Ghetto bugs, daddy long legs, skinks, chipmonks, er, chipmunks, squirrels, and probably a few other species I haven't yet seen.  (Bigfeet, skunks, aliens, the list could be endless.)  My daughter, Cressy, who is eight and not into entomology except under glass and from a great distance, said she won't be using the downstairs bathroom anymore because there was a large daddy long legs in there who I indulgently nick-named Bob.  Even though Bob is gone, she says she doesn't trust the bathroom.  I'm not sure what she thinks is going to happen.  I don't dare suggest anything like there might be a spider in the toilet or she might cross her legs in perpetuity.  (Once we went to the Smithsonian and there was a bug guy in the basement of the Museum of Natural History.  He had a large bug in a cage that he was letting crawl over people's arms.  Somehow he managed to get the gigantic critter on me and I stood there and calmly showed Cressy how brave Mommy was being.  Cressy wouldn't let the guy put the bug on her, because I suspect she's smarter than I am.  Then I asked the man what the bug was and he said, "It's a Giant Madagascar Hissing Cockroach."  I said, still very calmly, "I think I'd like it off my arm now."  Then I went to the bathroom and napalmed my arm.  What fun.)  (What does that have to Cressy not trusting the downstairs bathroom on account of Bobs in the corners?  Well, nothing except it's a bug story that I've always wanted to tell and hey, it gives me ideas.)

It's a pity you can't hear the moaning wail
that came from my lips after I realized
what I'd had on me.

Anyway, termite damage.  Lovely.

And I can't help myself.

The house also has a sprinkler system which the guy who owned said works.  Hahaha.  It probably worked in the last decade when he last turned it on so technically he wasn't lying.  Technically.  (I think the fact that the first zone won't turn off and that eight sprinkler heads spray gallons of water in the air like broken fire hydrants qualify the system as broken, but what do I know?  HIM, the man to whom I'm married, is running around with a cheap metal detector trying to find the valves.  (So far he's found a paperclip, a Budweiser can, and some unidentifiable metal.)  I'm not sure why it is but the last house we had with a sprinkler system had all the valves in one place.  The house we live in now, has valves all over the place.  There are eight of them.  We've (I should say HIM) has found three.  It wouldn't be important except one of the valves isn't working properly.  So it's a treasure hunt!  Come find some.  We don't have a map, but we have beer and Cheetos!

I have a bamboo pad and I'm not afraid to use it.

I'm also preparing for two breakout sessions at the Hampton Roads Writers Conference 2012 in Virginia Beach, Virginia on September 20-22, 2012.  I luv this.  I get to do How to E-publish your work and Make Money and Maintaining and Sustaining Authentic and Appropriate Voice.  I also get to hang out with all the writers and drink Screaming Blue Vikings off of Turkish Cabana boys' six packs.  (Well, okay not off their six packs.  HIM, you know you're the only one I would drink a Screaming Blue Viking off of, don't you?)  So if you're thinking of going to Virginia Beach in September come by and check it out.  I'll sign business and post cards and brag about my sales.  I might even tell a pirate joke if someone asks nicely.

This is what I'd imagine a Giant Madagascar Hissing Cockroach
would like to teach, if one were so inclined.

Then I'm outlining two works.  There's a Cat Clan novella, tentatively called Crescent Moon, because I'm running out of moon names, and I'm digging deep.  (Booger Moon, Hangnail Moon, Howling Moon, you can see where I'm going right?)  I'm also outlining Bubba 4, which I haven't yet named.  I thought I would have a naming contest for my blog, Facebook, and website fans.  I'll give everyone a short teaser synopsis of the book, and ya'll will make suggestions.  The only stipulation is that it has to start with "Bubba and..." for obvious reasons.  The winner will get a Basset hound plush, a free copy of the novel, and an honorable mention in the novel.  The five runners up will get free copies of the novel.  I'll announce the contest in a couple of months, so keep an eye out.

For you people who keeping asking why I don't write faster, this is why.  House improvement, getting everything in line, registering our daughter in school, picking up the dry cleaning for HIM, opening boxes up to discover things I haven't seen for years, and attempting to figure out what the packers did with the cables to the printer and the scanner.  (You would think if one were packing a printer for a computer and a scanner for a computer that one would put the cables that go to the two items in the same box as the two items.  YOU WOULD THINK!  I would think.  Maybe this is their little joke.  I can see them standing there, giggling as they put the cables into a box marked kitchen sundries.)  While I don't use the printer or the scanner much I do use them and when you need one, YOU REALLY, REALLY NEED ONE!  So the cables remain missing in action.  I might need a monument to them.

Everyone within a mile radius would have heard the scream.

But hey, look what I  did find.  This is the statue of a head hunter my parents brought back from the Philippines about forty years ago.

This statue used to give me nightmares as a child.
I used to imagine it would come to life and come
down the hall with the big knife/machete thing to
do lurid things to me.
How inspiring to have it on my desk.

I used to piss off my mother by walking by the statue and pulling its scarf down, revealing the statue's nekkid glory and bare buttoskis.  My mother would mutter endlessly while pulling the scarf back up and retying it.  So I put it on my desk amidst all the clutter and Cressy came by and immediately pulled down the scarf.  (Of course, she stopped to stare at his wee-wee.)  Ah, she has my DNA.

Off to outline and call exterminators.