Wholesomeness

http://grimm.wikia.com/wiki/Hexenbiest

It's been remarked to me more than once than I have an air of fresh, good clean health about me, and that's mostly true. Oh, I do have the occasional smoke or alcohol overindulgence when I'm in the mood for party time excellence, but nowadays it's rarer and rarer, because I'd rather produce work in service to you. I am, however, an actual native New York kid, so there ain't much I don't know about, or have not done in the past, or know someone who does it, whether it's illicit or not. 

How do I stay "phresh"**?! I eat real food, a$$hole!

But my healthy appearance does sometimes trick the rather foolish, naive, and unsophisticated suburbanite or out-of-towner (and they are legion in this area) into believing they somehow have the upper hand, because I'm not some triflin' petty piece of sh#t who sweats over what people may "feel" about me (or anyone and anything else), which always amuses me: it's like a truck-sized hole in their persona that this city-traffic driver navigates like she was born to it, because I am. You read that one of my grandparents was a Medallion-owning cabbie, right? Yeah, so like that, kid.

This is called "healthy". It's a box of USDA organic cereal. Hard to do!!

Anyway, I'm also not "all hagged out"; a phrase my Scottish/British ex whose family emigrated to Colorado back in the day coined out of sheer necessity, so that he could accurately describe the low-minded office bitches who prey on union guys like him for ca$h, like some desperate throwback to "Mad Man" days in the city that required the master/servant, boss/secretary dynamic to earn a high salary. 
That is also not me. 

More "weird" stuff like grass-fed milk that's also organic. So strange...

He also called them "Office Cows", for their near-constant bitching about food in the common kitchen area that they graze on throughout the day, because your homemade cookies make them "fat", like it's everyone else's fucking problem that some Long Island yenta* blows her also near-constant diet (greatly assisted by tanning salons, hair extensions, and Boca Ration vacations) to properly maintain said upper hand. You know exactly what I mean because you've been there, and that's New York, too.

More "weirdo" stuff, like ancient Asian foods with ginger to sooth tummies.

So, there I was as an Art Director thrown into the mix, with no makeup on, no weirdo diet, nor overly expensive clothes (Pay retail? In Manhattan? Are you insane?! What turnip truck did you fall off of? This girl goes to "Sample Sales" with her size 6 ass, yo.), or having a total "raging bitch off her meds" attitude, which makes me seem like the glowing healthy town AND country kid I am. I am healthy, it does show, and I'm asked about it so often, I wrote the book on it for you to read. 

Just do what I friggin' tell you to do: SPF applied almost every day (and yes, you do need some sunlight for vitamins. Some, hexen-hag), no anorexia, or "tanorexia", or "drunkorexic" behavior in an office environment, take your prescribed meds, dress appropriately, groom yourself well, eat a decent, well-balanced diet of fresh food that's readily available, get regular exercise, be a decent human being to other humans (in AND out of human form, hexen), and failing all of that? Get the fuck out of my city, town, and/or state. Better yet, get the fuck out of my country, you insane asshole. There, now. Doesn't that feel better?


*   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenta
** http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Phresh

Foogy Day

Seasons change, time moves on, and large fog banks descend upon us for a few days like a bad horror movie in which those poorly hidden (and scantily clad) teenagers will die for having sex. It's kind of atmospheric. 

I caught a flock of seagulls (I know! I know!) resting in the park yesterday, and it was awesome. Maritime birds typically move inland during storms, but this flock seems to have taken year-round to our clime. Yes! The animals are back, and today is a good day.  
Have a great weekend.

I get to write this caption today: it's "A Flock of Seagulls"!

Whoa! Those clouds have come way down off the hills since midday.

Is that...is that fog coming closer to me?! Cool!

Getting thicker by the minute...

...and now it's covering up buildings and building up speed like it's alive. Good thing I took out that horror movie from the library! Oh....

Love is in the Air

Springtime has long been the traditional time for romance, a time when a young man's fancy turns to love. It's no different for me, except in lieu of an actual man, I bought this heavily discounted Valentine's Day toy from a local drug store chain. Sigh! I love his accent ;) Enjoy the warmer weather today, New Yorkers. It is so on for Spring!

What the...what the heck is that?!

Is that what I think it is?

Oh, yeah! It's the Pepe doll I bought on sale at the drug store. Weird...it's staring right at me. Yeesh. That's kind of jarring, first thing in the morning.

http://www.nonstick.com/sounds/Pepe_Le_Pew/ltlp_001.mp3

Nut Job!

What the...?!

Our town undertakers (Bluebell the Bulldog and Highway the Golden Retriever's dad and granddad) own several properties around town, the most dominating one being the large old brown and yellow house that plays host to families in their time of grief, with one spectacular oak tree growing resplendent in the front lawn, a visual symbol of our area's shared genetic history.

Naturally, it also plays host to an enormous variety of wildlife, including one very large bird of prey that is the young Peregrine Falcon, a murder of loud noisy crows, as well as many other types of birds, and the fattest, happiest bunch of squirrels I have ever seen. I think this place is "Heaven" for them, their only foes the birds flying around the treetop, but food scarcity is wholly unknown as a factor in their lives.

Ohh...the squirrel that just ran away unearthed his stash. Nice!

As a result, I spied with my eye one chubby little squirrel take advantage of last week's brief afternoon thaw to dig out his trench of buried nuts that ran in a neat orderly row in the soil between the sidewalk edge and the line of snow that's shoveled. That critter actually knows where the soft dirt demarcation line is in that tiny zone, and plans for it way in advance. Genius! 

$ucking brilliant, dude. Look at all these nuts!

Wintertime fatness in an animal is a sign that it has planned well for scarcity, not a small feat in this fiercely cold clime that we live in, and something amateur housewives of yore learned the long hard way, hence the abundance of glass Mason jars and canning artifacts known to this part of the country. Squirrel is winning at the "Game of Life", and I think it knows. I love you, fat bastard!

"Fat Bastard" is smarter than some people I know. Kudos, squirrel friend!

Insane Cat Posse

Uh oh. I feel eyes on me, like I'm being watched....

Rockland County rednecks like lots of things: Hooters, hot wings, beer (all in one great location), huntin', big trucks with flashing lights and awesome monster tires with stripper silhouettes on them mudflaps, and dollar stores. The dollar store in my town is no different than, say, a Wal-Mart is out west. There are pairs of scratchy polyester pants, cheap plastic shoes; in fact, a bevy of plastic goods that "off-gas" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgassing) at such an alarming rate, you get a headache if you're in there long enough. It's an unhealthy but sometimes necessary place to shop, for financial reasons.

Ah!! Scared the bejeesus outta me!

And just like my truckin' neighbors, the t-shirt rack rarely disappoints. It's a wealthy mix of loud cheesy prints, sayings, and slogans, most of it overly jingoistic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism) nonsense about flags with colors that don't run, big deer heads, guns, and camouflage prints that relay strong fears about "foreigners", and that's just the male shirts.The women tend to like chocolate and cats; lots and lots of cats. This one design is so particularly egregious, such a high temple to offensively bad taste, I had to snap a few pics. These cats' eyes follow you, and they are angry; oh so angry. Beware. Halloween is a'comin'.

The Rabbit Head

WTF?!

I was on my way to the library, when I saw this from across the street. I had to cross the street for a closer look. Sometimes I see random objects hung in the chain link fence, like the skateboard sold at the dollar store or a missing baby sock, but this stuffed animal took me way back, to a time when me and my brother outgrew our childhood toys forever. 

Instead of play, my Barbie doll got a Mohawk haircut that I dunked into a paper cup of blue food coloring on the kitchen counter, and we froze my brother's Stretch Armstrong doll in the freezer, just for kicks, to see what the red goo inside would do. It cracked into big chunks after we took it out and threw him onto the hard kitchen tiles. Oh. Neat! 
After that initial experimentation, everything we had was up for grabs. 

Oh, I see. It's "Don't let this be you!" in kid-talk.

My Kermit the Frog doll was hung by a rope-fashioned noose from the top of the stairs by my brother and our cousin, as a tribal warning to me when I came through the front door about what was in store. Aha! Something was afoot with those boys, and methinks our childhood is officially over. I could fight the tides that be, but true to me, I shrugged it off and joined in the fun. 

Kermie went into the dryer, Barbie was blown to bits by firecrackers (after she drag raced Mad Max style a few times in several horribly disfiguring crash-and-burn scenarios), and then we just simply tore things apart. The next year in junior high school, we read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Lesson learned.

The Perfect Summer: August in New York

Beautiful fluffy clouds, after a recent, brief summer rain. So normal!

We've had a cooler than average summer this year, which has made me extremely happy. First of all, there's no power outages, outrageously high utility bills, or constantly running air conditioning that's smells moldy from old filters; a huge break indeed. 

A symphony of beautiful weather set in the skies.

But more importantly, this crucial respite from insanely high temperatures gives the Earth a chance to cool down after many years of escalating global warming, temperatures so high from human waste, that we have melted polar ice caps and destroyed entire coral reefs from artificially warm waters, as well as displacing human populations from their sea level homes.

Ah! Another gorgeous sunset behind a stand of large trees.

It comes as no surprise to me that it's been one of the best summers I've had in a long, long time. I sleep comfortably every night with a fan blowing and open windows. I wake up happy and refreshed from actual cooled air that I can comfortably breathe in when I open the curtains to let in the beautiful morning daylight. 

The  glow of an orange sunset; a New York summer's day.

This is the kind of summer I remember from my youth: warm, sunny days with cool, breezy nights. It's also no coincidence that these are optimal growing conditions for this area, as one recent broadcast on local news suggested. A berry farmer in New Jersey said this was by far the best bumper crop they've ever seen, with the longer season extending the harvest to December.

The daylight's music fades, as the night chimes in.

Still, true to a human's ridiculously selfish nature, many an idiot talking head has loudly grumbled on-air, like some grade-school fuck-up on summer break, that all this "horrible" cool air is wrecking their friggin' beach time, to which I say this: go fuck yourself. I mean it!

A cloud adds punctuation, a single note at the end of the day.

If your spoiled bitch ass is bothered by the planet cooling itself back into good health, then go buy yourself a stupid fucking tanning bed and burn yourself into a compulsively fried oblivion, because we've had enough of your stupid fucking bullshit.

The perfect light.

Or, go buy a cheapo ticket to Boca in Florida, where you can bake your brains out (what's left of them, anyway) in some generically bland condo, you short-sighted, evil, corporate-owned cunt. I hate you! 
This is war >:o(

The music winds down, and the light grows softer.

For the rest of the decent Americans and other people like me, I raise my glass of freshly squeezed organic lemonade in your direction, as I put my feet up on the wood railing of an old house somewhere in the Hudson River Valley region, watching another spectacular light show that's delivered free of charge by Mother Nature herself. 

Perfect pink and orange lighting.

It's some of the best light I've ever seen in our skies, which is also not a surprise to me, a long-time watcher of weather and clouds. I'm rooting for Planet Earth all the way, (which we are just a small part of, despite the blown up arrogance and tiny penis insecurity of some fucking on-air tool), every single day, with every seemingly "small" choice I make, many of them at the grocery store, when I choose local and fresh organic foods, higher priced as they may be than the high fructose shit on sale for a rip-off $.79, now that word has spread about food and beverage company's poison profits, the shit that also seeps into our groundwater and land with every acid rainfall we have, with yet another weirdo tropical storm that we endure. Who do you want to see win? I know my choice (and my conscience) is clear. Asshat.

Wow...

...pink and purple clouds say "goodnight"...

...to another perfect day in the Hudson Valley.

My Week in Gaming: Fighting Since Day One

I feel so alone!

Yes! Teeny Phoenix helps me smite my Mega Foes.

I have the mug!

I wonder what I'll be when I grow up? So hard to know....

People love all sorts of folksy shit that I don't necessarily have time 
for, because it's excessively repetitive to someone like me. I know coaches who base their entire careers on delivering these neat little quips in the form of cutesy quotations (usually ripped off from
someone way more famous), and I don't specifically have a problem with sayings, except that I've heard them all my life. Why, you say? 
I'm so glad you asked! 

Oh, that's right! I have the fucking mug! Every damn day, people.

My dad programmed us (some would use the nicer word "trained"), like we were an elite military unit, and, look at that! Fast forward some 40 years, and here we are: leaders, all. So it's not that I personally find you distasteful, though if you try to cram too much of your crap down my throat, I will get angry (trust on that), it's just that I really don't need your fucking input at this particular point in time, because if I do, I will ask the questions I want to to get the answers I need. How do I know? I have the mug. 

Look! Here's a plaque my dad sent me with a quote on it.

p.s. - Yes, that's me in the morning, and yes, I am aware that shot is a bit overexposed (but that's not the point of that picture), and no, I am not wearing any makeup, because that's me having my morning cup of coffee (and no, I don't need makeup to drinking a fucking cup of coffee at home, alone), and yes, I am 44, and no, I have never had plastic surgery or used Botox, because (and this is important), I am a fucking working class New York girl. Get it together, ho. You're pissing me right the fuck off, and if you don't like it, then wear sunblock, bitch.

Toys: Bubo! As a Key chain!

Bubo in handy key chain form. Come with me in my pocket, Bubo!

Fans, followers, friends, family and the occasional hater know I love the original Bubo owl character from the first Clash of the Titans movie: you know, the real one, with Harry Hamlin and stop motion animation by Ray Harryhausen, who kicked ass in so many ways for me as a kid that he is a separate piece entirely. Yeah, that one.

Athena's Magical Owl.

Anyway, whenever I find my trusty, little sidekick Bubo in other forms, I dig it in a big way, and I also kind of freak out because it's so cute. Here is Bubo as a magical screeching key chain toy with glowing eyes. Please to observe:




Do you have a Bubo? If so, what does it do? If the answer is "no", then why the hell not?! Have some fun today, will ya? That is all.

Nature: Winter Weary

This is that time of the year when we wish the snow and cold would just go away, and indeed it does. Spring comes when we need it the most; when we feel like we simply can't with another snowstorm, and as usual, Mother Nature gets it just right. That pretty pile of snow has turned to a dirty mess, depressing and ugly, like a muttering homeless person on the corner whose public indignities insult the well-shod foot of an Upper East Side matron. 

It's gross, and we want it to disappear. Fortunately, the seasons are much more sensible than people, and like an unwanted guest, sloppy and drunk at a party that's gone on way too long, Winter leaves us with one final gasp of its' icy breath, giving way at last to sun and warmth. We sense the ground moving beneath our feet, and as humans, we respond accordingly to this ancient rite of passage with glad, open arms. See you in the Spring! It's right around the corner.

A classically picturesque winter scene.

Red berries in snow! Charming and Christmas-y.

Sigh...I love winter. So pretty, and it's such a beautiful day today.

Wow! The town looks so good covered in snow.

Great. Now I can't walk on the sidewalks. That leaves me with the road.

Ugh. And now it's filthy, too. Is that dog pee? So gross!

Nasty frozen, dripping ice/dirt cavern blocks the sidewalk. Boo!

Done! I hate everyone and everything. Look at this shit!

Toys: Yeti Freddie

Yeti Freddie and his lovable side.

This software app I use occasionally for E-Blasts sent me a toy because I signed up for a newsletter. Nice! I'm a sometime collector when time, space, and budget align, most notably of the Tim Burton and Simpsons kind.

When I first ran aground from the recession, I set up shop on eBay to sell what I could. I sold a few items and made about $300-$380 total, but given the time it took to take all those digital pictures, tweak them, post them online, create the Internet storefront, manage the customers, print labels, pack them up and ship them off, it was really not worth my time. Oh, well. I didn't have the hunger faints that week!

I don't predict this fella will have great resell value, but I still took care opening the packaging so it would remain in as good as condition as possible. Nerd habits die hard. And now he lives in a cavern created within the bookshelves, a cheerful reminder that the fun hobbies we enjoy somehow always find a way back to us in good times. 

It's an Abominable Snowman situation.

He likes pencils, too.