Enter Laughter

My mother-in-law (who is an absolute angel) gave me a ton of jigsaw puzzles that she had worked, and asked me to sell them at online auction. She said, "Now I GUARANTEE that all of the pieces are here for these, and that they are in fine shape. I promise, 'cause I am a good Christian woman and I don't swear". Then she giggled like only an adorable grandmother can giggle. Overstock.com recently launched an auction section, and they are so much nicer and cheaper than E-Bay, that I have been listing most of my items there. (Their commercials are for, "The Big O") I have been listing items there for a couple of months (since they opened). They randomly select items to feature on their home page, and I was STUNNED to see one of my jigsaw puzzles highlighted there today! Of the hundreds of thousands of listings, mine, which includes a little song parody about my darling mother-in-law having so many jigsaw puzzles (to the Beverly Hillbillies theme, "...

I am honored that my friend Pam from the Carnivale message board has chosen to name her new Guinea Pig after me (I go by Cyberpumpkin there). {{For the uninformed, Carnivale is a TV show on HBO. Wonderfully quirky}} So I am a Gawdmother to a lil' bundle o' joy. She wrote, "I set her up in a huge plastic bin. She has a hidey hut, and a hay manger, and a salt lick, and wooden chew sticks. I feed her one fruit and one vegetable twice a day. So far I have discovered that she doesn't like oranges. She loves celery tops and carrots and grapes and french bread. She has rewarded me today with recognition. I had my Mom hold her while I scooped the corners of her bin and cleaned up a little and prepared her breakfast. Then I went in and sat across from my Mom and started talking, and with the sound of my voice Pumpkin perked up and stuck her little nose in the air and was trying to sniff me out. Every time I said something she turned her head in my direction and grunt/squee...

Husband's car overheated, leading to a comedy of mechanical errors, (because I just gotta laugh or I'll lose my mind!) How many people have a car overheat in JANUARY? First, a heater hose split. Car overheated. He pulled off the freeway, and being the resourceful fellow he is, he stuffed a SOCKET into the hose and wrapped it with electrical tape, to get him to safety. Hose was replaced. Next day, water pump blew up. Took that in for repairs. Turns out hose split/water pump problems were due to blown head gasket. So his car was in the shop all that week. Repairs were $1,500. The fifteen-hundred-dollar-hosed Marti

I will not slurp fish food from the surface of the aquarium. I must not help myself to Q-tips, and I must certainly not proceed to stuff them down the sink's drain. I will not eat large numbers of assorted bugs, then come home and puke them up so the humans can see that I'm getting plenty of roughage. I will not stand on the bathroom counter, stare down the hall, and growl at NOTHING after my human has been watching The X-Files. I will not use the bathtub to store live mice for late-night snacks. I will not perch on my human's chest in the middle of the night and stare into her eyes until she wakes up. We will not play Herd of Thundering Wildebeests Stampeding Across the Plains of the Serengeti over any humans' bed while they're trying to sleep. I will try to remember that screaming at the can of food will not make it open itself. I will try to remember that I cannot leap through closed windows to catch birds outside. If I forget this and bonk my hea...

Today is Eldest Son's birthday. Love you, sweetie. How did he grow up so fast? How did he get so old when I still feel so young? The-doesn't-understand-this-whole-space-time-continuum-thingy Marti

I like the idea of being able to share my thoughts with y'all whoever, wherever, you may be. Maybe make you smile, give you a little hope that if a woman who has been through the kind of shit I have been through, (hope that saying "shit" doesn't get my ass kicked off of here - also hope saying "ass" doesn't LOL) can still laugh, then maybe you can laugh at the absurdity of it all, as well. The-new-to-blogging-but-not-to-life Marti