Crazy Contest Rules

Okay, I've already heard from one person who has a lunatic story - and the rest of you are invited to play, too!

Here's how it will work: I'm gonna celebrate the reality-challenged all summer long. I will accept and anonymously post your stories. At the end of each month (June, July and August) I'll set up a poll and everyone will vote for their favorite. After Labor Day, I'll set up a poll for the three monthly winners, and let everyone vote for a grand prize.

Each monthly winner will get a free bar of soap, their choice of scent. The grand prize winner gets a gift set - one bar of soap, one salt bar, one body polish, one body butter or frosting, and a lip balm. To further celebrate the crazy, you can pick your scents, but you aren't allowed to make a matching set.

The more batshit the collection,
the happier I'll be to send it out.

Enter as often as you'd like. That's right! Send your stories to me via e-mail, to magichands at cox dot net. I look forward to giggling while I read.

Image courtesy of http://thegoldguys.blogspot.com/

If You're Crazy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands

A lot of you know that I’m considering making some major changes in my life. The economy seems primed to cram changes down my throat, so I may as well catch that wave and surf it on in. One of the things that’s likely to change is my daytime employment.

I’ve know this was possible for months on end, and I’ve posted about layoffs here in the past, so I’ve had a lot of time to envision how this would all wind down and what the aftermath would be. Hell, I’ve even started cleaning out my desk – I’ve been here for eleven years, so I have a truly astonishing amount of personal crap that needs to be eliminated.

While you visualize walking out the door, leaving behind a spotless office, you naturally imagine your goodbyes. And there is one woman in particular that I cannot wait to say goodbye to. She’s a wackadoo of major proportions. A bad case of OCD, coupled with a severe mean streak and the tendency to cry if she doesn’t get her way. (Nic is laughing when she’s reading this, because she knows exactly who I mean.)

Years ago, I saw this woman threw a giant public screaming fit because the document copies that had been delivered to her had the corner staples at the wrong angle. Seriously. She cried, threw things, insisted that everyone was being mean to her on purpose, and told the entire office that we were lazy because we lacked her attention to detail. Apparently the copier puts the staples parallel to the top page edge, whereas our heroine the nutjob thinks they should be at a 45-degree angle. Then she started wailing like a five year old (complete with hiccups and snot bubbles) and ran away to the ladies’ room.

She does this crap ALL. THE. TIME.

I’ve tried to be sympathetic to her, because she’s very clearly troubled, but she’s so darn mean that it’s difficult. She keeps lists of imagined slights by people and distributes them regularly. It’s hard to say, “aw, poor thing” when HR is standing in your doorway with the latest list of what you did during the past year.

Her malicious insanity is legendary.

So, when I leave here, do I say something to her? Like, “You’ve been horrible, I hope I never see you again?”

No, too mean. I could say, “I beg of you, get help.” The problem, of course, is that she has no idea that she’s batshit crazy, and it seems too mean-spirited to tell her.

I am not by nature a mean person, so I’m sure when the moment arrives I’ll just sneak out the back door and not say anything.

Though I am giggling at the idea of spending my last week sneaking into her files and stapling every single document on all four sides.
PS – if you freak out and have crying fits in your workplace on a regular basis, you’re batshit crazy, too.

See, I’m not afraid to be mean in cyberspace!

Summertime and the Living is... ...Crazy!

I have a theme for the summer season:

Lemme ‘splain.

I was talking to Jesse about my summer blog, and a couple of entries I had in mind – there are some complete whackjobs in my office that deserve an entry, and a couple of personal stories of loonies I have known, if not loved.

Plus the spring fashion collections were just released, and Helena Bonham Carter is still roaming the streets free as a bird, so there are boatloads of things to discuss.

We agreed that there is way too much crazy roaming around the world at the moment for us to hog it all.

So, please, I beg of you, send me your crazy stories!

I’ll have to hide the names of the perps – crazies tend to be vindictive – but I want to post your tales. The best story will receive a gift from my shop – details to be worked out and announced shortly.

I’ll also be running periodic Batshit Crazy sales, with completely random discounts and time frames.

Now, I’m off to work on the first post, so you’ll see what I have in mind, and figure out a good giveaway.

But watch for more info soon!

Let the Sun Shine

This is usually one of my favorite times of year – we get a heavy marine layer here, so there’s a traditional overcast referred to as June Gloom. It expanded a bit in the past decade, so we got to add May Gray.

Now, I’m a big fan of humidity and I love, love, love the fog.

However.

This is flippin’ ridiculous.

As much as I like humid moments, there has been a constant drizzle going on at my house for a month. The sidewalks have been wet 24/7. And I have soap that needs to dry.

So, those of you with special orders who are wondering where your stuff is? It’s on my drying racks, not getting dry, dammit. I need to make more soap, but I can’t do it unless some of this stuff moves out of the way.

I am glaring at the clouds.

Do you think it will help?

June Gloomitude

Travel Planning

A couple of things about me.

One, I don’t keep secrets well. I have a very very hard time not talking about stuff that’s going on.

For the most part, my life is an open book. I have some stuff going on right now that I shouldn’t talk about, so I’m practically strangling trying NOT to post about it. This is keeping me from saying much at the moment.

So, sorry about the apparent writer’s block.

Two, the most ridiculous crap imaginable happens to me. If you hear that someone in my neighborhood was struck by lightning, it was me.

I’ll be fine, and I’ll walk away from it with nothing worse than a bad hair day, but if someone in my immediate area is gonna get hit with 1.21 gigawatts, I’m your huckleberry.

An old friend of mine used to call this the “bad luck of the Irish”. She meant that something terrible was always nearly happening to me. People who have traveled anywhere with me can testify to this, too.

Sailing across the Catalina channel at 2am, who gets hit in the face with a flying fish and has a black eye for a week?

Me.

Taking a water taxi from the mainland to a small island in Belize, who first hears the noise that signifies a broken crankshaft?

Me.

Landing in Jakarta, who finds out that they are the ONLY person that the tour company forgot, and has no plans, reservations, or transportation for?

Me, again.

Lost in Cancun at 3am on a Wednesday?

Yep, it was me.

Buying our bedroom furniture was an adventure that takes twenty minutes to tell, so I’ll give you that one later. Do you know the Spanish word for “nightstand”?

Neither do I.

I thought everyone’s life was like this, and it wasn’t until I started comparing notes with people that I realized that most of y’all have perfectly reasonable lives, where things go according to plan.

I cannot even imagine how that feels.

Anyway, this has come up recently because I’ve been talking to my husband about travel. I haven’t gone on any wild adventures in a while, and I’m feeling like at the very least we should visit the Grand Canyon (although I’d probably fall in, so maybe a shallower destination is warranted). I could get snakebite in the wilds of the desert or something.

Or some coastal sailing, around the Channel Islands might be a good idea. I’ve rolled a boat over in bad weather when I was alone, hours from shore, so this time I’m due for something safer, like slipping off the anchorage and running aground in the middle of the night.

He is a little hesitant. I nearly killed us driving to a cheap restaurant a couple of nights ago, and he is reluctant to go anywhere more dangerous than the back yard. (Which of course is full of big hairy spiders and marauding raccoons, so maybe that’s a bad choice on his part.)

It isn’t that Jesse is a coward. Not at all. He has rescued me from quite a few horrifying predicaments, so he can’t possibly be a coward.

He just knows that I will end up in brand new predicaments, and I will be laughing like a lunatic, thoroughly enjoying myself and he’s pretty sure that means he’s stuck with a crazy woman which by extension means that he’s crazy, too.

So I’m considering travel and insanity. Jesse is thinking of a protective restraining order, or a nice rest home. I’ll let you know who wins the argument.

I think I may have run out of Zen.

I was being all calm and stress-free and stuff, when things took a sudden turn and I started having to hack my way through a briar patch of stupidity.

So that I don’t give too much detail, here are a few notes to the guilty parties.

And if you decide that the shuttle is going to start waiting an extra ten minutes for late trains, I should find out some way OTHER than hearing two drivers gossip. I wouldn’t have noticed that, had I not been wondering why we were so effin’ late.

Of course, you don’t want it to impact you in any way except for the warm fuzzy feeling. However, I am taking public transportation, which is run by morons (see above), and glaring at me as I rush in the door from the bus stop will not make it any earlier. It’s only a two block walk; I promise I’m not stopping off to go shopping or anything on the way in. And since I ran part of the way, I am only three minutes late, so you should GET A GRIP.

And I warn you now, if you increase my interest rates on my credit card, I’m going to stop using it. I’m also going to move my money market account, wee though it may be, to elsewhere. Now you don’t have my interest income AND your cash reserves have gone down. I wonder if anyone there can do math? I suspect that the answer is NO, and therein lies your problem. I look forward to your demise.

However, I must mention your cupcakes. They are hella cute, I have to admit. I know you got a big book all about cupcake decorating, and you put a lot of effort into them. It really shows. You have them decorated like flowers, with little red M&M’s that you’ve drawn on with frosting so they look like ladybugs. They are adorable, and it must have taken hours.

I wish you’d stop bringing them into the office and hovering to make sure that everyone is eating one, though. Or, alternatively, that you would put even one quarter the effort into learning how to bake, because your damn cupcakes taste like Spackle with frosting on top. If I have to choke down one more of these vile lumps I’m going to lose it. I am all out of polite, so back off and take your adorable crapcakes with you.

It’s not even lunch time.

This is going to be a long day.

Back in the Saddle Again

Well, I’m healthy again. Healthy-ish, really.

Because I’m still pretty tired.

But a big thank you to all the people who wished me well – it was very sweet, and even in my delirium I appreciated it.

And of course, I’m behind again on posting.

There’s an actual reason this time – it isn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, but that I had something I didn’t WANT to say. Not terribly long ago, you might recall me posting about Duke, a neglected puppy with a burning need to love somebody. We spent a lot of time with Duke over the last couple of months. Walks, games, sometimes just getting on some clean grass and petting him for a while.


And now?

Duke is gone.

It turns out that my neighbors were not only lousy dog owners, they’re rotten tenants, because their landlord had specifically forbidden them to have a dog. They might have gotten away with it, had other neighbors not complained about the smell and condition of their yard. Anyway, one day last week, Jesse went out to get Duke and found an empty yard. Duke has gone to live with a relative, so the kids can still see him and he can kind of stay in the family. This relative has other dogs, so I’m really hopeful that Duke has gone to a better home. At least he won’t be alone so much.

As much as I know that it was better for Duke to get a new place to live, I do miss him. Jesse and I offered to take him, but I think they wanted to keep some ownership. I suppose it would be hard to watch your dog, living two doors down. And during the last couple of weeks, Duke had been showing a preference for our house instead of his own, so there might have been some hurt feelings.

I don’t know all the reasons they decided not to give him to us. He was a complete knucklehead, had too much energy, needed lots of training, and was honestly pretty obnoxious.

I miss him anyway.

I hope you’re happy now, Duke.

Good boy.

coughcoughcoughHACKcough

I am sick.

I have a terrible head cold.

And yet...



... due to my relentlessly inconvenient and unfortunately necessary day job, I am in the office, sixty miles from home.

Jesse was kind enough to put me to bed early last night, and that helped a LOT, but it sure didn’t cure me completely.

I will spare you the disgusting symptoms, but this is going to be a long day. I am only going to make it through with many drugs, most of which will slow time to a crawl and kill a bunch of brain cells.

My only consolation is that I can run around to the offices of the people I don’t like and sneeze on their keyboards, lick their computer mice, and breathe all over their phone receivers.

coughsniffleCRAP.

Which Road?

I ran across an interesting article today – Weekday Misery, Weekend Pleasure,
in a blog called The Simple Dollar. It’s an interesting read, and ties in with some other stuff I’ve been seeing about people who are using the recession as a time to reinvent themselves.

I find this dangerously enticing.

Many of us out there – heck, most of us, I’m sure – have things that we do to pay the bills that are less than pleasant. This is because things that more fun than a barrel of monkeys get done for free or next to nothing, and you’re unlikely to get big bucks for it. However, that doesn’t mean that you need to spend your life doing something that’s sucking the life out of you, draining your soul bit by bit.

The first step to take is glaringly obvious, especially in the current economy. Which bills are you paying, and can you get rid of them? Is there something you can do without, if it means doing without that job you hate? In my case, getting rid of the day job would get rid of a horrible commute – several hundred dollars and at least four hours a day, gone! That’s a pretty big incentive.

Then there’s this part – what do you DO all day?

Do you shuffle paper?









Do you dye poodles pink to match their owner’s handbags?









Do you save lives?









Do you file the serial numbers off mysteriously acquired valuable property?





Do you scrape gum off the underside of restaurant tables?








Do you write fortunes for a cookie company?






And when you do whatever it is that you do – how do you FEEL at the end of the day?

I’ve had a job that included gum-scraping, and whoo did it SUCK. And at the end of the day I felt dirty and abused. I’m not sure what school one attends to become a poodle stylist or an author of cookies, but doesn’t it sound like a wonderful idea; to re-invent yourself?

I know the economy is a mess, but what better time to decide what you’re going to be when you grow up? I mean, I know we all decided once, but look how that turned out. It seems reasonable to get a do-over.

When I was VERY young I was convinced that I would grow up to be Aquaman. While I could probably buy the spiffy waterproof hero suit, and gender reassignment surgery has come a long way, I don’t have any idea how to have gills installed. So I’m going to assume that Aquaman is out as a career option.

I suppose I could become an underwater welder, but that just isn’t the same, somehow. I wonder if this is where the whole Seamonkey obsession started?

Anyway – point, and I do have one, is that when you come out of this period of vast national upheaval, do you want to be on the same path? Or would you like to travel a different road? I’m going to be doing some heavy thinking.

I bet a lot of you are, too.

What'cha Makin'?

Well, as usual, I've been so busy I'm crazed. But here's the update on what I've been doing, and what's on the curing rack: Zen Tea, Wildwood Rose, Almond Cocoa Butter, Gardner's Soap and Ginger Silk:

I'm searching for new stuff for summer more updates on that, soon! Now I'm off to stamp and wrap and slice.