Grandpa is a whoreson.

Ohio is home to something called "Grandpa's Cheese Barn." On our way home from COFW, we wanted to stop at this wonderland and purchase some of the meats, cheese, gifts, and fudge touted on Grandpa's many, many billboards.

Well, Grandpa's was closed when we got there. We can only assume he was spending his typical Sunday morning passed out in a 1972 VW microbus in front of the Showtime Gentlemens' Club with a 54-year-old stripper and an assortment of empty Ohio wine bottles.

See if Grandpa gets a Christmas card this year.

I don't care what anybody says, Ohio is pretty nice.

So I have spent the weekend at the Central Ohio Fiction Writers conference in Worthington, Ohio with my chapter president, Gina Ardito. Many wondrous things have happened, including Facebook-fighting, text-torturing our vice president, who could not attend (BWAHAHAHAHA!!), and assorted shmoozing. The conference was informative and fun, the people we've met (*cough cough Virginia Kantra cough cough*) have been absolutely fabulous, and we gained some insight into how to put together our own conference, which we hope to make reality in 2012. We're tired, but it's a good kind of tired. We're hoping it will still be the good kind of tired AFTER the ten-hour drive home tomorrow, but Gina knows when to keep her mouth shut, so I foresee easy traveling.

Poodle in Tiara

Here's a picture of my poodle, Cookie, in a pink tiara.

So last night my RWA chapter, who are awesome, gave a talk at a local library discussing romance novels and why it's so terrific to be a person who writes them. One of the members made a comment before the talk, in the course of asking what to wear, that tiaras were probably out. Well, needless to say, our president, Gina Ardito, to whom we owe most of our awesomeness, ran with this. She picked up six little pink tiaras for all of us to wear at the talk. And we did. There will be pictures later today on the Facebook page as evidence.

As soon as I got home, the first thing I did was snag my poor sleeping poodle and stick the tiara into her little poodley head and get my husband to take a picture. She sort of looks like she isn't quite sure what's going on, but she never is, so she always looks like that. At least now she's clueless and FABULOUS!!

My new favorite bakery.

MUST give a plug for my new favorite bakery: Otterbein's in Baltimore. I grabbed a bag of their chocolate chips at a gas station in Pennsylvania last week, and OMG. I polished off the whole bag in three days, went online, and ordered a bag of every one of their five flavors. These cookies are heavenly. They just arrived, and I've already been in the chocolate chips again!! Thery're not fancy frou-frou cookies, just simple basic sugars, gingers, lemons, and oatmeal raisins - but they're the best simple cookies ever! Their order processing is super fast too, and they've been around forever, so they know what they're doing. And at $4 a bag, they're an affordable little treat!

Too good not to steal!

A Facebook friend just posted this link to a Livejournal page of weird Halloween candies. I had to steal it. They're absolutely priceless!!

http://benjikane.livejournal.com/10396.html

I actually went and found the gummi zits and ordered them for certain women of my acquaintance who enjoy watching zit-popping videos on YouTube. One of them for sure is going to wet herself when I give them to her.

Ghosthunting in Gettysburg!

We spent the week in PA, farting around and hunting for ghosts. We didn't see any, but man, those battlefields at Gettysburg are friggin' creepy after dark! We sat by the big statue up on Culp's Hill and just watched the woods for a while, thinking about how 150 years ago, there was no woods, just a hill with thousands of dead people piled up on it. Hairyman is making noise about getting me my own ghosthunting kit, with EMF detectors and infrared cameras and all the bells and whistles. I'd love that! Maybe we'll actually capture a spirit. I promise I'll link to the video. ;-)

On a more somber note, drivers in PA bite. The truckers and the regular ones. Srsly. Dudes, the left lane is for PASSING. Not squatting in front of my twin-turbo-powered Volvo, Jane, and going 50. And by "passing," we don't mean "going .01 of a mile faster than the loser in the right lane. " We mean PASS and get the frickin' frack out of the WAY already. Jeesh!! Jane HATES that!!

Well done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr_tcDcUCYA

Next season!

I think we've found the next AGT winners.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E_0oOc6Lf8

Where to begin?

The blog has been quiet for a while. I just haven't had much time or inclination to share the Trishy love lately. But a lot has actually been happening.

I quit my job (yay), the hedgehog business is rockin' (yay), I have had some medical issues (boo), and assorted other cheese. And I'm finding myself yearning more and more to get my writing butt in gear. It's been running, but the linkage has been slipping, and it makes a sort of a putt-putt noise when I step on the gas, so I need to get my mojo tuned up a little, and then it'll be smooth sailing, as long as I can stop mixing metaphors.

Speaking of fast cars - We bought a used Volvo some time back (yay). Her name is Jane. She's awesome. Twin turbos, baby!

And I found a little poodle. Her name is Cookie. I saw someone tie her to a fence and drive away, so I now have a poodle. Chopper the Pom likes her, and she does that thing where you point a finger at her like a gun and go "bang!" and she flings herself onto her back like she's been kilt ded. It's pretty funny, and she loves to do it for anyone she meets. Plus she's an awesome chicken wrangler.

Speaking of chickens: We have chickens. They're awesome, and soon they will be making me eggs (yay).

That's all I can think of for the moment. I'm going to try to update a little more often, and now that I have conqured the Blogger Mobile thang, I might actually feel like it sometimes.

I am twelve.

This past Saturday, while Hairyman was working, the 14 YO and I were left to our own devices. Big mistake. Here's what our shopping cart looked like:

1 bag of Munchos
1 pint of ice cream
1 apple pie
2 pound cake loaves (hey, it was on sale!)
Laughing Cow cheese
Ritz crackers
12-pack of Blue Moon
rice pudding
Cool Whip
fusili pasta (the actual dinner)
Strawberry Newtons
Pilsbury cookie dough

There may have been something else, but if there was, it was probably crap.

My attempt to save myself from Worst Mom award: "It's OK, I got the low-fat Cool Whip!"

I am a 12 YO girl, just like my son says.

Ankle-deep!

The Northeast has just been hit with record-setting rain. This is on top of the record-setting rain we had last week, which was on top of the record-setting snow we had all winter. Between all these records, the ground can't hold any more water, so where does it all go? Into my basement, of course. Hairyman's guitars and amps had to be rescued, and everything else is ruined. Today he went in search of a pump, but there were none to be had for love nor money at any of the hardware stores. Yet, he is pumping the basement right now. How, you ask? Well, my husband is extremely brilliant. There were no pumps available at hardware stores, but there were fish pond pumps at the feed store. Worked like a charm, better than the regular kind even. Our stuff is still ruined, but at least the house won't float away, and they are only things. We're OK, and that's all that matters.

Too stupid not to share

We are about to get the money from selling my husband's grandmother's apartment building. She passed away about six years ago, and Hairyman and his brothers have been fighting over the estate since then. That's all about to be over and done, and we'll be getting a modest amount in the final split.

Hairyman said everyone can choose a gift for themselves, up to $1000. Noodlenose is getting a rockin' new guitar. Navy Man will pick something when he gets home in May, probably involving guitars too, and I decided I wanted a nice set of diamond jewelry. We may also get a piano for the house, and a drum machine, so the boys can have a band in the basement, and when they get me drunk enough I might sing for them. This all sounds so nice and Beaver Cleaver-ish, right?? Aww, those Kiefers, they're so cute!!

But wait! What does my husband want for his gift?

He wants a shrunken head.

The boy is damaged. I am leg-shackled to a damaged human being.

OK, it's really getting old now.

Every day, I perform a large number of various tasks at work. Mostly, they are performed correctly. I'm no angel, I make mistakes, but out of 100 things, maybe one will be so wrong it needs to be redone, and maybe one or two more need tweaking. Not too shabby, I'd say. But despite a pretty good record, and in the middle of a day that was already crazy and crazy-busy, because we STILL do not have a replacement for The Assistant From Hell, my boss this afternoon chose to call me into his office and make a stink about a mistake that A) I had NO CLUE was a mistake, because I didn't design the computer program that doesn't like the mistake I made, and because the guy who did (him) never told me it even WAS a mistake; and B) happened in OCTOBER. Uhhh, give it a rest, hmmm? The control-freak thing is so five minutes ago, dude. You catch more flies with honey and all that crap.

And then I went home and cried. No, really!

Awesome news!!

The Assistant from Hell has RESIGNED!!! I'm FREE! I'm happy dancing and singing spritely tunes, and all the things you associate with extreme joy.

That is all.

"Sherlock Holmes" - I'm torn.

We saw "Sherlock Holmes" yesterday. OK. I will confess. I would like to be licking Robert Downey Jr. right now.



I would like to lick him regularly and often. I'm also a fan of Mark Strong, the creepier of the two gentleman seen here. I loved him as Mr. Knightley in "Emma" too.



And I really enjoyed the movie. I really did. It was a great action comedy, set in Victorian London, about two mercenaries who solve crimes using methods juuuuust outside the limits of the law, who find themselves up against a Freemasonesque group of mystics who want to take over the world. It was full of action, lots of chase scenes, a large French-speaking personage who wanted very badly to damage the good guys, and a beautiful woman in men's clothing. All the elements were there for a good old time at the movies. The only problem I had was with the title. It wasn't Sherlock Holmes. Not even a little bit. If a bunch of video-game designers got together with a bunch of cheesy sitcom writers and decided to make a Sherlock Holmes movie, this is what it would come out like. They basically borrowed the names of all the principal characters and did whatever they liked with them. I can't get behind that. Oh, and guys? Sherlock Holmes was NOT in love with Irene Adler. He just hated her less than all other women, because she was as smart as he was. That's all.

The flu makes me blog

Among other things.

I have the flu. It is a bad flu. Everything hurts, even my lips. And somehow I have to get myself presentable enough to go to Walmart, which may seem like a contradiction to some, given the menagerie of Moreau victims you generally find at any given Walmart, but if you could see what I look like right now, you'd agree that something needs to be done about me. So I'm going to take a shower and hope the shampoo doesn't hurt.

One of my hedgehogs gave birth to SEVEN FREAKING BABIES the other day, ZOMG! That's a Hedgie Mama record! Another little girl is ready to pop any second now.

The Assistant From Hell is still employed, despite numerous outbursts, slammed doors, demons invoked upon the souls of everyone in management from the depths of the toilet in the third stall of the ladies' room, etc. BUT, she has been given an Official Final Written Warning. ONE more episode, ONE more day of excessive cell-phone time while she's on the clock, ONE more day of me having to correct 50% of what she does for a living, and she's toast. It's only a matter of time. She can't hold out.