Wednesday, October 21, 2009

How Does One's Garden Grow?

I can never decide whether it's more fun to be cheerful or more fun to complain. Since I can't decide, and the last post was a complaint of sorts, I guess I'll post a cheerful one.




This is the view from my deck.




Since it faces directly west, we get to watch the wild Texas sunsets, which pictures hardly do justice. But they're my favorite part of the house.

I know the backyard needs a lot of work, but considering it was not taken care of for over a year, and we are just coming out of an extraordinary, extreme, mega-unheard of drought, I think it's manageable. I'm mostly going to put in vegetables and zeroscaping anyway. I've never seen the point in not using native plants in one's landscaping. Trying to keep a lawn of unnatural grass in the climate we have just seems like an exercise in futility and time that could be better spent on growing something productive. I intend to chop down and de-stump every last cedar tree (we're all allergic), replacing them with peach and orange trees and maybe a lemon tree. I would like some berries too.

Now I just have to learn about growing things in Texas. Every bit of knowledge I've retained as far as plant growing, is from my childhood up north. And I can't explain just how, but things grow differently down here.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Clotus

My massage therapy classes are boring. I think I've mentioned that. The only redeeming factor was the fairly cute instructor who could at least provide some eye candy while I debated the merits of poking out said eyes. So of course they fired him. There wasn't any good reason I could see, but the ignoramuses were looking for an excuse for their constant failure, and he was the scapegoat. I wonder what the school will say when their grades don't actually improve.

So as luck would have it, his replacement is a portly gentleman of somewhat less than average looks who regaled us on his first day with an exhaustive description of the surgery he had to correct his deviated septum, leaving out nothing including the removal of his nose tampons in all the bloody, stringy, mucousy detail. I don't hate him or anything, but he's constantly saying disparaging things about the other instructor, and he's certainly no beauty.

And I got into a heated argument with him after a test. He marked an answer wrong on my test that was technically correct. It was a multiple choice question and the correct answer was misspelled which made it an entirely different word. One of the other answers was 'none of the above' which was the one I chose. I thought it was a trick question. Apparently he had warned everyone of this question at a moment I was either not in the room or absent. He wanted to mark the answer as incorrect because I wasn't there to glean the information, and I argued that I shouldn't be held responsible for a misspelled test question since I had studied and not only knew the answer, but also knew how the answer was spelled. On top of that, the answer I chose was actually correct. He disagreed with me, and I disagreed with him in a slightly louder tone. He disagreed again and said he wasn't responsible for the test because he wasn't the one who had written it. I said that I wasn't either and I should get credit because I knew the answer. He said it was my fault that I wasn't in class to hear him tell everyone what the answer was, and I said that would have been a valid point had there not been an answer on the test that was correct given the misspelling. If there hadn't been a valid answer, I would have deduced that it was a misspelling. I further added, that it was ridiculous that there were any misspellings on the tests at all, and that it was extremely unprofessional.

He ended up giving me the two points and then shook my hand as if I was a man that he wanted no more quarrel with. That was kind of cool.

Then came the next class on the reproductive system. Judging by the ever changing hues of purple his face kept turning, I don't think it's his area of expertise. We came upon the term 'sexual intercourse' and he asked everyone what another word for that was. We all looked at him as if he was out of his mind. One girl ventured, 'um...sex?' "Sex?" he said, mockingly. "Come on. Don't you know the biological term? I'll spell it. C-L-O-T-U-S."

I was completely befuddled. "Do you mean C-O-I-T-U-S?" I asked.

"No," he said. "Maybe it's C-L-O-I-T-U-S. Spelling isn't my strong point."

"I don't think there's an L in that word," I said.

"No, I'm pretty sure there is," said he.

"I've never heard of an L in that word. And I've seen that word many times," I insisted brazenly and pointlessly.

"Well, let's look it up," he said smugly.

We whipped out our i-Phones, he looking up his version and me looking up mine.

I was correct, naturally. I tried to soften the blow by telling him there wasn't anything I didn't know about coitus, which I think didn't make him feel better because it made it seem as if he knew nothing by comparison. It's probably true, though.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Jethro's Been Eating His Wheaties

Or rather these new manly vitamins that make him, for lack of a better word, EXTREMELY HORNY.

Now I'm as game as the next wife. I am. Maybe more. But these vitamins don't have a female equivalent and sometimes I need to sleep. The second I get into bed, it's hands, hands, hands. The other night, after futilely defending myself for about 10 minutes, I exasperatedly reverted to cliche.

"You're like a kid in a candy store," I said, to which he replied, "Or a grown man in a pussy store."

You can't block teleporting hands when you're laughing.

New Topic:

Jim Treacher, a lovely, clever boy, and one of my favorite political satirists and just generally funny people of all time ever, got his Top Ten Reasons To Accept That Job Offer From David Letterman read by Mark Levin and Dennis Miller.

He also does funny things with cartoon bubbles.

Really, he's a treasure, especially for the right side of the political spectrum who tend to miss mockable moments in their haste to express outrage.