Archive for August, 2014

August 12, 2014

This is what happens when you prepare posts for future publication

by Janie Jones

I’ve been having a dark time lately and losing interest in my blog, but feeling bad about it because blogging used to be so much fun for me and I miss that enjoyment.  So I was trying to recapture a bit of snarky fun with my blog.  The problem though is I hate having nothing to say that’s not rehashing all my same miserable complaints over and over.  So, I decided to download pictures from earlier on the season and had a few set to publish throughout the week.

Unfortunately there was this morning’s which was a bit off color and I’d forgotten I’d set this picture to publish.   Now with what’s going on in the Middle East and with the loss of Robin Williams when I opened up the blog this morning and I saw what I forgot I’d prepped a while back it made me uncomfortable.  And I’ve removed it.

Sorry to any of you who whom I may have upset.

Bad timing, poor judgement.

Sorry again.

 

 

August 11, 2014

An unusual observation

by Janie Jones

So there I was, in the dark, dingy, dilapidated laundry room doing laundry.  At first I spent as little time in there as possible as it stank to high heaven from having been the resident weasel’s toilet.  Shortly after I moved out to the farm I coaxed Leif into helping me remove everything from the room and I very literally hosed the whole room down.  Not to worry, the laundry room is built basically over wooden decking so there’s no basement or crawl space below and, as there’s a hole in the floor, what water I couldn’t mop up drained through the cracked linoleum tile out of the room and into what’s likely a weasel condo below.  After an equally liberal application of Pine-sol, the room was passably clean, but despite all that scrubbing I still only gave it’s ancient decor a cursory inspection.  It appeared to have some faded colonial/cottage-y wall boarder.

Then, out of the blue, yesterday, as I sorted laundry, it occurred to me that there were images of flying witches on the wall boarder.

Odd, I thought.

The more I thought about it the more odd it seemed that someone in the past would have decorated the laundry room with a witch wall boarder.   At length I finished sorting and stood staring directly at the boarder thinking, now why didn’t I notice those witches before?

So, I got on the step stool and got a closer look.

Blame it on my wonky eye, or blame it on the faded colors.  Or even blame it on the fact I just finished reading The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe, which I enjoyed very much by the way, but what I thought were witches flying brooms over a colonial New England town were actually angels with itsy bitsy nearly invisible wings in dark robes blowing trumpets.

Now I don’t know what’s more strange:  that I thought they were witches, or that someone would like wall boarder with the ugliest angels I could imagine.

I always say, there’s no accounting for taste, and this my friends is a case in point.

August 9, 2014

Curious and Curiouser

by Janie Jones

So I have started my glamorous new job as a tour guide.  As minimum wage jobs go, it so far doesn’t suck with the power of a black hole, but I have to admit that on account of being on the wrong side of 40 and having been pretty much completely sedentary for the majority of the last 4 years my thighs, hips and back are not terribly pleased with all the walking, stair climbing and standing.  Still the people I work with are pleasant, if a bit neurotic in that over caffeinated, college student sort of way and the tourists have generally been very pleasant too.  Time doesn’t drag too much and over all I don’t have much to complain about all things considered.  Imagine that.  No complaints.  You must be visiting the wrong blog….

Anyway, to get to the new job I have to drive down the gravel road a piece, turn on to the state highway and then 15 miles or so later I can get onto the interstate and cruise the rest of the way at 75 mph into work.  It’s a gas guzzling commute, but traffic isn’t bad and I’ve only had to endure it for 4 days so far so it hasn’t worn on me much yet.  But…  You knew there’d be one coming eventually didn’t you?

I have noticed something which strikes me as very odd.

So far I’ve spotted not just one, not even just two, but three different cars on two different mornings and one afternoon all pulled over at nearly the exact same place on the interstate all with flat tires.  Coincidence?  Yeah probably.  Still, paranoid much?  Yeah you bet.  I can’t afford to place a flat tire, nor would I like to put on the spare in my oh so stylin’ work uniform.

Seriously though, it does seem pretty suspicious to find so many cars pulled over with flats in the same place, doesn’t it?