YGRS can haz a blob

For Christmas last year, for a gift for her sister Elle, my daughter Sarah ordered some soaps online from an Etsy site called Distilled Rose. She got a wonderful assortment of handmade natural soaps in different fragrances --- they all smelled absolutely *amazing* ... They smelled so rich & creamy & fragrant that I just wanted to EAT them. I think that one of them was coffee scented. I think I remember mint, too. They were just the best smelling things that I had ever smelled.

Along with the order of gift soaps, Distilled Rose included a little slice of their Distilled Rose Vegan soap as a sample. It smelled so awesome that we kept it in a zip-lock baggy and every so often, for weeks afterwards, both of us would shove our noses in the baggy and just breeeeeeath in the rosey creaminess...it was heavenly.

So for Mother's Day this past weekend, Sarah surprised me with my very own bar of Distilled Rose Vegan soap --- complete with lovely dried red rose petals on one edge of the bar.

I don't normally have extravagances like handmade soaps, so it's a real luxury for me. I love love love the smell of it. And since I've been using it the past couple of days, I'm noticing that my skin already feels more moist & smoother & silkier.

I feel special & pampered! --- yummy me!

So I thought I'd pass this along to you guys, in case you'd like to see the neat stuff there for yourselves. Distilled Rose says their products are all natural, vegan or vegetarian, and have no artificial colorants, etc. There are other products there too: bath salts, toners, aftershaves, etc. ( I noticed a Strawberry Marshmallow Vegan soap! )
Check it out!

&:o)

oh noes!!!

I missed your birfday Carlisa!!! --- I'm sorry ...

I hope it was a happy day for you --- and I hope you have a very happy year, Car!

In honor of your belated birfday,

somewhere, right now, a kitty is getting stoned.

((( Big belated-but-still-loving huggs Car! )))
&:o)

I'm low on money & gas until pay day.
I put my last $5.00 in my Hyundai this morning so I can get to and from work today and part of tomorrow.

1 and 1/4 gallons is what $5.00 bought me this morning.

1 and 1/4 fricking gallons.

$3.89 a gallon for Regular.

1 and 1/4 effing gallons.

&:o(

2 pieces of cake,
Caramello bar, soda:
My breakfast. My bad.

&:o(

I'm tired of working. I feel like jumping in on this one.

Name three words or phrases you wish you'd coined:

I actually did invent this one: Squoozle
If you squeeze something, and it oozes, you are squoozling it.
Feel free to use this any time you'd like.
&:o)

My ex came up with this one many many years ago: Pork Roger
Many many years ago, he was at an office party. Booze may or may not have been involved. One of the Big Bosses got up to the microphone and said "Now it's time for Door Prizes." My ex, gem that he was, yelled out "Pork Rogers??? What the hell is a Pork Roger????" The Big Boss replied "I don't know what the hell a Pork Roger is. I said Door Prizes." After everyone stopped laughing at him, my ex decided (for whatever reason) that a Pork Roger is what you get when you roll a slice of lunchmeat into a tubular shape, so you can eat it like that. To this day, I use that word and I'm pretty sure my kids still know it (how about it LG???) and my BFF uses it like a real word too.
Please feel free to use Pork Roger whenever it's appropriate, also. It needs to catch on more than it has.

I wish I had coined the word: Schnorgle
I was doing that for years before it was officially named over on Cuteoverload.com.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

If I don't talk to you guys anymore before I leave for the weekend tonight, I'd like to tell you:

I hope everything is good with all of you.
I hope all of you moms (whether it's to a hooman kid or a furry kid) have a wonderful weekend and a peaceful happy Mother's Day on Sunday!
Take good care of yourself --- all of you.
And
Huggs and loves to you all.
&:o)

P.S.

Good Monday morning! * Happy Cinco De Mayo! * Happy 4th Birthday Deniro! *
&:o)

LaidOutInLavender (who always takes the most beautiful & interesting pics) tagged me over the weekend and the rules are:
I am supposed to post 8 songs that make me remember when..... just songs that bring me back to a certain memory: make me remember the time.
So in-between work phone calls, I'll get this done. Here goes:

The comment that I mentioned on LaidOutInLavender's post is the first song that I'll use. It was:

1. Queen --- "Another One Bites The Dust": I was in my early thirties, and decided to take roller-skating lessons. One night at a free-skate at the rink this song was playing when a careless teenager crashed into me and I fell & totally hurt my left knee. It was late and I was about 30 miles from home --- I had to drive myself back home & my car was stick-shift, so every time I had to push the clutch in, it really hurt. (I ended up being on crutches for a couple of weeks & getting the knee drained twice.) When I hear this song now, I picture me crashing & burning. (ha!!)  And yes --- every time I hear the pulsing bass THUMP THUMP THUMP before the words "Another one bites the dust!" I can feel my knee throbbing in perfect time with it...Plus, over 20 some years later, my left knee still gives me trouble.

2. Led Zeppelin --- "Kashmir": Summer of 1975 - this song was on the Top 40 on the charts - my first baby, my oldest daughter, was a tiny newborn. My husband & I lived in our very first apartment together: 1/2 of the second floor of an older 3 story brick home that sat next to the Dunkin Donuts on the corner of Main Street in Jeffersonville PA (which could have been Any Small Town USA). Soooo many times when I would get up in the middle of the night to feed my baby daughter, this song was on the radio. When I hear it now (33 years later) I immediately picture sitting in the big comfy overstuffed chair in the living room, in front of the big bay window there, with the lights on dimly. The windows are open and there's a soft hot summer breeze drifting through the shear curtains. I am more tired than I ever had imagined that I could be. The sultry exotic "Kashmir" is on the radio and I am feeling like I am the only person awake in that moment --- the entire rest of the world is dark & asleep. I look down at the tiny little baby in my arms and my heart is overwhelmed with the thought that she is mine. How is it possible for me to be completely responsible for someone so helpless & small? How is it possible to love someone so much who I have only known for such a short time?

3. Hall and Oates --- "Sarah Smile": October 8th 1979: I had just given birth to my second daughter, Sarah. This was back in the days where you labored in one room, were wheeled to surgery to deliver, and then were rolled on a gurney back to your own room after delivery. I was being wheeled back to my own room after delivery and over the hospital intercom, this was the song that was playing! When I hear this song now, I still picture being flat on my back looking up at the hospital's white ceiling tiles rolling by, thinking "Hey! --- What a coincidence! I just HAD a Sarah!"

4. Ray Parker Jr --- the theme from the movie "Ghostbusters": Every time I hear this song, I will always think of my son Sam as a little boy. When he was little, he LOVED this movie. When we saw it in the movie theater, we paid once but snuck back in and sat through it a second time. We had the video tape and he used to watch it every day at LEAST once, sometimes twice. One week when he was sick, he spent a couple of days on the couch and watched it 3 or 4 times each day. (He was sick and I felt bad telling him "enough is enough!") For one Christmas, Santa brought him a set of Ghostbuster equipment: some kind of headgear with special glasses & a proton pack with a Nerf proton ray sticking off the front of the proton gun. He used to run around the house busting any living being that got in his way--- ghosts, humans or unsuspecting kitty cats. When he busted someone he'd yell "You're BUSTED!" This Ghostbusting was very serious business to him.

5. "Sad Girl" --- OK --- all you other Old People out there, help me out --- who is the Artist for this song? I can't remember. It was another Top 40 hit: 1968-ish: "Sad girl --- you look so sad. Did he break your heart? Gee that's too bad. I guess now you see, how love can be..."
?????
When I was in 9th grade, for the Very First Time Ever, a boy that I liked actually liked me back. [[...be still my heart...]]  I went to a friday night dance at my junior high school. I was wearing my favorite moss green sweater & the moss green a-line skirt that matched it perfectly. After my parents had dropped me off at the school, I had rolled my waist-band up at least 2 times, so that my skirt was shorter than they would have let me wear it out of the house. The lights were dimmed in the gymnasium. Some local band was playing but in between breaks, one of the AV nerds would play records. The sad opening notes of "Sad Girl" came over the loud-speakers and every angst-ridden teenaged girl's heart started to instantly melt. (yes, including ygrs'...) *HE* walked over to me and asked if I wanted to dance...
*GASP!*
I wished the song would last forever. I thought that this was the most monumental moment of my entire life. For 3 minutes and some-odd seconds, I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.
[[ In Hind Sight, I should have run from the gym screaming and never looked back. Who Knew.]]

6. The Delfonics --- "La La Means I Love You": May of 1970: *HE* writes this line in my 10th grade high school year book --- Again, I think I am the luckiest girl in the world: I am SURE it is A Sign...( how wrong can one YGRS be???)

7. The Moments --- "Love On A Two-Way Street": The entire year of 1971- Emo Teen ygrs is sitting in her bedroom, playing this vinyl 45
over
and
over
and
over
again, singing along with it sadly, feeling like her heart will surely shatter into a million little pieces and she will just die.
WHY did my parents not bust through my closed bedroom door and smash this record over my head and heave my record player through my bedroom window??? Why??? I know that's what I would have done if I were them...oh my god!

8. Gino Vinelli --- "I Just Wanna Stop": November of 1988: My husband (this is NOT the same guy as in # 5 & # 6 & # 7) and I were having a good year in our rollercoaster marriage - it was our 16th wedding anniversary. My parents babysat our 3 kids for the weekend. We went for a long snowy weekend getaway to a honeymoon resort in the Poconos - the Couples Only kind of resort with individual chalets & heart-shaped jacuzzis. We had spent one evening at the small basement night club there (which was below the large dining room area) eating & drinking, dancing & smooching at our little candle-lit table. It was late & we decided to go back to our chalet. We walked upstairs & got our coats. There in the dimly-lit entrance foyer of the empty dining room, there was a jukebox. We found this song. We put a coin in the jukebox and picked this song. In the quiet emptiness we held each other close & slow-danced. "I just wanna stop and tell you what I feel about you babe. I just wanna stop: I never wanna live without you babe."
A year and a half later, we separated. On what would have been our 20th wedding anniversary (to the day) my finalized divorce papers came in the mail

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
 

HA!!
A friend sent this to me recently --- I've seen it before, but it's still funny to me. Plus some new stuff has been added since I saw it last.

&:o)

POLITICS FOR DUMMIES

DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
You push for higher taxes so the government can provide cows for everyone.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk
the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are
surprised when one cow drops dead.
You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and
are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and
produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give
excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives
to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

BELGIAN CORPORATION
You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally
vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think
is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegal.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

I got something to surprise you with today!

On TV, have you ever seen any shows about
Cirque Du Soleil?

If you haven't, it's an AWESOME show!! It's a circus, but there are no animals. All of the acts are people: people in really colorful, really weird, incredibly interesting costumes --- and they do all these TOTALLY UNBELIEVABLE stunts --- stuff that you can't imagine a person being able to do --- some of it dangerous, some of it funny, some of it just beautiful to watch, some of it surprising, all of it amazing! The stage is beautiful and there's something to look at everywhere you look -- high in the air and on the ground ---  it's big and beautiful and hard to even imagine.
It totally takes your breath away!

Here's info on Wikipedia about the background.

Sunday, June 8th at 1:00 --- just you and me are going down to center city Philadelphia to see Cirque Du Soleil!!

The show is called:

The HUGE tent we'll be seeing it in will probably look something like this:

And some of the awesome things that we'll be seeing may look something like this:

Remember my recently remodeled kitchen?

And remember those Dolls of the Nations cards I found at the thrift store the other week? I framed 2 of them in a plain red wood frame and it's hanging in our kitchen. Here are the framed Doll cards BEFORE I decorated the bejeebus out ot the frame:

and here they are AFTER I decorated the bejeebus out of the frame: (oooh...sparkley...)

Sarah and I want to decorate the kitchen in a kind of Mexican / Day of the Dead decor. There's a really neat store down on South Street in center Philly that sells all kinds of bright colorful pictures & figures & mirrors etc that are in that style. I'd love to be able to get some kind of large-ish picture from there to hang on one of the kitchen walls that would be a real focal point and would give the room the feel that we want it to have. I decorated the Doll frame to fit in with that kind of look. (Wembley doesn't care how the kitchen is decorated --- just as long as her food keeps making regular appearances there!)

Then I have this piece of material (which I got off of ebay) that I want to make a simple valance curtain for our kitchen window out of (whenever I can get my lazy butt motivated enough to just stop procrastinating and DO it...):

When my kitchen's all done being decorated you'll all be invited over for puddin'!
&;o)

Saw this today on ICHC:

and was instantly reminded of this:

&:o)