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.