Miscellaneous Meanderings of a Fat Woman

This week in review:

1.  Tree House I was busted by unknown neighbors who squealed to the City of H'ville who sent a zoning department officer to say things to me.  He wasn't mean.  Tree House I was pulled down the next day.  I glared intermittently at the neighbors and entreated them to kiss my tuckus.

2.  I have decided to fill that side of the house with tacky lawn ornaments.  I have order 12 pink flamingos, 1 three foot high, plastic Santa Claus, two reindeer, a three foot tall tin man who is guaranteed to rattle fetchingly in the wind, three dog statues where the dogs are all sniffing each other's asses, and a gnome who is mooning the world at large.  We also have plans for an old toilet and flowers, which was thoughtfully suggested to us by one of my readers.  (Thank you!  It's a lovely suggestion.  I will be posting pictures soon.)  I have also got my eye on a five foot tall Easter Island guy statue thing and a Tiki god.  I have a book on how to carve my own totum pole, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to go there, yet.  (Spring Break project.)  (Today I got a package from the mail lady.  She is entirely too perky and smiley for a woman who has to do her thing through rain, snow, and dog chasing.  And it was my mommy friend, Rebecca, to the rescue!  She and I think alike.  I will post the picture of what she sent because it fit into my thinking.)

I placed this gnome squarely where they would
look out the window and admire it.

3.  Tree House II is under construction in our back yard.  Today I poured concrete into the footers.  That effing tree house won't be coming down unless the Mayans were correct.  Does everyone know that they make concrete that you don't have to pre-mix.  In fact, the stuff sets up in fifteen to thirty minutes.  Believe me, you have to work fast.  Does anyone know how to get concrete out from underneath your fingernails?  (If anyone asks, I'm saying it's a special Halloween look and concrete was involved with dealing with my new, special neighbors.)  (Okay, is anyone going to comment that I don't seem to get along with my neighbors?  Well, I get along with some of them.  The ones who don't let their dog poop in my yard, tell me that it's my fault their 13 year old daughter lied about me, and the ones who don't complain about a perfectly good tree house.  That narrows it down.)

It may not have three trees around the corners but it's going to be
way cooler than the all the other tree houses.  Plus it's going to
be purple, pink, and red.  Cressy choose the colors.

4.  This is probably the most important part of this blog.  Bubba and the Mysterious Murder Note (Thanks again to Amy Douglas Croft, who probably isn't any relation to Lara Croft) is almost done.  I should say that the draft is almost done.  (That's the hard part for the non-writers.)  I have likened writing a book before to vomiting.  It's true.  I have made the comparison.  It's like I vomit it all out and then go back and fix what's wrong with it.  Like in chapter 2 when I forgot that someone was supposed to do that thing or in chapter 17 when I forgot that the villain didn't do that other thing.  Then when I've polished it up the best that I can, I let my husband read it.  Then I re-read it.  Then I send it to my lovely and talented proofreader, Mary, who is a gem and thankfully catches 99.9% of my boo-boos.  To more specific, I expect I'll write THE END on Friday or Saturday.  I love how I can do that.  It makes me so happy that I immediately melt into a pool of warmed over goo that smells strangely like Hershey hugs and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.

There.  I drew the skull myself.
I love the Bubba covers.

5.  That, of course, leads me to why I have to go to the doctor next week.  Having recently moved, and recently ranted about it at great length, I had to find a new doctor.  Turns out that the doctors down here don't seem to want new patients.  Or maybe they're just very picky.  I do not understand.  I had to call down a long list of approved doctors, only to find that they weren't accepting new patients until November or December or some distant point in the future that the person on the telephone couldn't possibly be persuaded to share with me.  Then when I found one, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork that the doctor would look over first and then possibly accept me.  (I thought about taping on a photocopy of Raquel Welch just to see if he was really paying attention.)  (Little does the doctor know that he will be an endless source of blogging information.  Haha.  The writer gets her revenge.)

Hi everybody!  Do you want a shot in the butt?
Well, okay then!

6.  Later this week I must have a teacher/parent conference.  I'm not really looking forward to this because I have to say some bad things about the stupid computer that the school district foisted off on all the children.  (The one they issued to Cressy isn't unique, I'm sure.)  I'll be damned if I know what's happening in Cressy's class and I want to know.  But I can't find it on the computer because the stupid, bleeping thing doesn't really work that well half the time and the other half of the time it's slower than my 486 from fifteen years ago.  I seriously have the urge to pick the netbook up and bang it against a wall, even though it does not actually belong to me.  ("$1000 for it?  It was totally worth it!")

In addition to my issues with doctors, contractors, neighbors, and
OCD, I must have issues with teachers.  Uh-oh.

All right.  Enough meandering through the tulips of my life.  Back to Bubba before my brain makes that horrid bleeping noise that the computer makes right before it crashes.