Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talking about!
Apparently, this is what I have to look forward to in my twilight years. Although, who can complain about an awesome biker jacket and doo-rag? Not I, my friends, not I. 😉
WC
Fire Drill
Yes it is, no it isn’t, yes it is, no it isn’t… What were we doing again?
What Movie Character Are You?
Fun little test here will tell you who you are in the classic movie genre. I’m not sure it’s very accurate, although this one sounded right for me – but it is a fun little diversion.
For me, life would be nothing without movies. Movies of all makes and models. I can watch movies until my eyeballs bleed. So it may be I will dedicate much or all of this week to movie themes. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s movie meme.
WC
PS: Just in case you don’t know the movie, here’s a little clip.
Baby You Can Drive My Car
Okay, so what does Cary Grant have to do with my new car? Nothing, actually – but I love him and the song and I needed to celebrate. Oh yeah, did I mention I sent the old car to the car graveyard in the sky and got a new car? Why yes, yes I did. She is midnight blue, has power everything, leather interior, moonroof and well she’s just perfect. Doing the happy dance.
WC
The Magic of Chalk
Beerman, the chalk artist has more amazing entries I just had to share:
and
and
and
I think my favorite is the one with Batman – but hey I wouldn’t kick any of them out of the neighborhood. It never ceases to amaze me how much a true artist can do with so little. Incredible. Bravo I say!
WC
Snappy Office Come-backs!
Hey – ever get a little tongue-tied at work? You know, somebody chaps your hide and you just sit there like a kid with an IQ of 30 or something? Then about 15 minutes later your mind kicks in again and you think of all manner of things you should have said? Well here’s a little list you can keep under your keyboard for those very occasions – you can even laminate it so coffee spills won’t hurt it. Good luck and hope it helps.
1. Never give me work in the morning. Always wait until 4:00 and then bring
it to me. The challenge of a deadline is refreshing.
2. If it’s really a rush job, run in and interrupt me every 10 minutes to inquire how it’s going. That helps. Even better, hover behind me, and advise me at every keystroke.
3. Always leave without telling anyone where you’re going. It gives me a chance to be creative when someone asks where you are.
4. If my arms are full of papers, boxes, books, or supplies, don’t open the door for me. I need to learn how to function as a paraplegic and opening doors with no arms is good training in case I should ever be injured and lose all use of my limbs.
5. If you give me more than one job to do, don’t tell me which is priority. I am psychic.
6. Do your best to keep me late. I adore this office and really have nowhere to go or anything to do. I have no life beyond work.
7. If a job I do pleases you, keep it a secret. If that gets out,it could mean a promotion.
8. If you don’t like my work, tell everyone. I like my name to be popular in conversations. I was born to be whipped.
9. If you have special instructions for a job, don’t write them down. In fact, save them until the job is almost done. No use confusing me with useful information.
10. Never introduce me to the people you’re with. I have no right to know anything. In the corporate food chain, I am plankton. When you refer to them later, my shrewd deductions will identify them.
11. Be nice to me only when the job I’m doing for you could really change
your life and send you straight to manager’s hell
12. Tell me all your little problems. No one else has any and it’s nice to know someone is less fortunate. I especially like the story about having to pay so many taxes on the bonus check you received for being such a good manager.
13. Wait until my yearly review and THEN tell me what my goals SHOULD have been. Give me a mediocre performance rating with a cost of living increase. I’m not here for the money anyway
Feel free to add any to the list that I’ve overlooked. 😉
WC
(PS: HT to A-Mum for the list – come back soon Moe)
I Love Me Some Thin Mints! Don’t You?
I don’t know about you but every year right about this time I start to get a little excited. Not because Spring is right around the corner or because a cute guy has moved in to the house across the street but because the cookies of all cookies are about to go on sale.
Yep – I am a girl scout cookie junkie. I just can’t help myself. If there is even one thin mint within a 20 mile radius I can smell it, hunt it down and take it for my own. Since I don’t even smoke any more I figure I am entitled to just this one little obsession.
Also too there is just something sweet and nostailgic about them. They have been around since I can remember and I can remember pretty far back. Always somewhere around spring break you would start to see little cardboard table and folding chair sales stands cropping up – in front of super markets, laundramats, banks and even street corners in some suburban neighborhoods. Naturally when I was a kid I knew many of the salesgirls 😉 now, not so much.
However, I do have one little friend who is probably one of my favorite cookie sellers: 
Let’s call her Cookie-Girl – she does a bang up job, according to her mom and troop mama. But I mean who has to be told, check out that stand, nice display, clean, neat with lots of variety but no clutter. Poifect.
What many of you may not know is that there is a whole lot more to selling girl scout cookies than meets the eye. In the words of my favorite Girl Scout Mama:
Cookie sales gets so much negative crap that people don’t see the good it does. On the money side, it funds the whole Girl Scout program and it helps troops earn money for their activities. (camping, horseback riding, community service projects [one troop paid their way to Build A Bear to stuff and dress bears then donated them to the Fire Department to give to kids that needed them])
On the “Where Girls Grow Strong” side of it (a Girl Scout saying) cookie sales gives girls a chance to learn so much in a safe environment. Sales, money handling, responsibility, people skills, persistence, goal setting, etc. When it’s all over, they have such a sense of achievement! You can see the change in them. They’ve grown!
Also, especially in recent years, there are many troops who are selling cookies in order to send them to the troops. The way it works is this: you buy a box of cookies and instead of taking them home and eating them and making your thighs and butt even bigger, you tell the troop to go ahead and send them to the troops overseas. In addition to this, the kids take a lot of the money they make and send additional cookies to the troops. For example there is a relatively well known program called Operation Cookie Drop, which is a program started by Girls Scouts who managed to send bagillions of cookies to our young men and women in Iraq and gave them a taste of home.
If you see a local troop selling in your area, ask them what their ’cause’ or program is that they are selling for – I’m sure you’ll discover that they are not in it for a beach chair or so they can all go to Chuck E. Cheeese for a weekend. They are going to do something special with the money for someone who needs it, senior citizen homes, the troops overseas, underprivilidged children and so forth.
So the next time you see that little cardboard table and chairs set up, don’t hide your face and mumble something about being on a diet. Chat with the girls and find out what they intend to do with their proceeds. And don’t be so darn stingy, give them a five-spot and tell them to give a box of cookies to their favorite shut in, kid stuck in a hospital, or a kid in a uniform overseas and far far away from home.
If you want to know when the cookies are going on sale in your area you can go here – type in your zip code and councils in your area should come up, with their schedules of sales.
Heck there is even a myspace girlscout page here.
So for pete’s sake, get some Thin Mints, Tagalongs, Samoas, Trefoils or even som DoSiDos and know that you are likely contributing to something worthy and worthwhile. Heck if you are really worried about your diet they even sell some fudgy sugar free numbers AND all the cookies have Zero trans fats. So let’s not sweat the small stuff, otay.
For pictures, descriptions and nutritional information about the cookies go here
Also, if you just want to help and contribute to a troop who is sending cookies to the troops, I personally know of such a troop and I’d be happy to hook you up with them. If so, feel free to email me.
Okay, let’s get our fat asses down there and be loading up on the damn finest cookies ever made in America. Sound good? 😉
WC
Turn the Magic Ear to the ‘On’ Position
I have seen the future and it looks like this. LOL. Oh yes it does. 😉
WC 
Lover You Don’t Treat Me No Good No More
Sonia Dada is a weird name for a band – still, I have loved them for years. Their harmonies are incredible – and you can really hear them since they only use instruments to accompany themselves as opposed to blaring over them. I hope you love them too. Enjoy!
WC
Renaissance Man
(I originally wrote this post last summer while guest blogging for the subject of the post. In honor of his birthday, I repost it here. Happy birthday, Michael – you’re one in a million. Annie)
He’s a writer. He plays a mean piano – by ear no less – hard on the head but easy on the hands from what I hear. He’s a dad. He’s a husband. And to me, a friend. What you would call a real friend.
It’s funny, though we’ve never met face to face and honestly I’m not sure what it would be like if we did, we have fostered a friendship over the last 4-5 years that is rare. We go beyond friendship, almost all the way to family.
He’s shared with me about the tragic illnesses of both of his parents. I’ve told him about my brother who died of AIDS. I know all about his beautiful daughters and how special each of them are to him. About how his wife is one in a million. About his cute little cats. And his big silver truck. He knows about my love-hate relationship with cigarettes. My sloppy, anal room-mate. My hilarious dog.
We met at an online writer’s group, of all places. It was one of those places that wanna-be writers flock to and need-to-write-to-live writers approach with caution. What the heck, it was free and you also got to meet other writers. What’s not to love?
We swapped crits (critiques) on each other’s assignments. Culminating into a ‘story’ at the end of the course. His was the “Goodbye House” mine was “Faith.” From the beginning I admired the work and the man. Always taking the time to really say something, really give you his honest opinion. You could tell this guy had a lot of heart.
Well, our stint at the online group didn’t last long. We both realized in our own ways that truly we were engaging in Writer’s Socialism. Struggling to help the writers who couldn’t and barely having time for the writers who could. We both like to think we were among the latter.
But our friendship didn’t end there. After there were emails. More story swapping. Talking about anything and everything. Yakking on the phone about this and that. Really, somehow this guy became the brother I lost so many years ago. Somebody who I could talk to about anything and everything. Somebody who really cared about what I had to say.
I was amazed by his life and how he took everything in stride. Juggling parents that needed constant supervision, a family, a marriage, a job, doing music gigs on the side and somehow still finding the time to write. For cripes sake he wrote on the train into work.
Not long ago, we got into this wild marathon email where we starting discussing deeply writing – the ins and outs – where to publish – how to publish, the whole ball of wax. And it got positively addictive. It got to the point where we were each jonesing for the next response. We even had discussions about posting it on his blog. But realized that only a lunatic or a psychic would be able to follow it. It’s done us both good. And I hope it continues to do us both good. Keep us inspired and motivated.
Recently, he went on vacation and asked me to babysit his blog. Frankly, I was a little scared. I’d read his blog and hell I’ve read his writing. A little intimidating to say the least. I was sure his ‘readers’ wouldn’t like my style. That it would be a shock to the system to go from warm, gentle Renassaince Man to whacky, who the hell knows what’s firing those synapses Writer Chick. But…I like a challenge and try to force myself to do things that scare me.
So, I’ve struggled along this last week. Trying hard to entertain the troops in his absence. I hope I have done him justice. Cuz he’s a helluva guy and a true Renassaince Man is a modern world gone (almost ) mad.
Writer Chick
Anita Rodgers Mystery Writer 