I went into a store this weekend for a quick look-round, and it was packed with men, women and children scrambling for bargains and filling up baskets. It was dazzling - it looked like the day after Thanksgiving.

Oh, and I paid $1.99 per gallon to fill my gas tank yesterday. Thank you, Karl Rove for lowering the price of gas and for turning off the hurricane generator this year.

And what's this bit of news about the Dow Jones venturing up above 12000 repeatedly recently?

Hmm. I'd say considering the crippling blow 9/11 dealt our economy--particularly the airline industry--it's a marvel to see things in such a boom a mere 5 years later.

Then it occurred to me today that along about 1992, election year and right after our first big foray into the Persian Gulf, I was seeing all these bumper stickers and headlines that said "it's the economy, stupid."

Funny, but the current critics of the executive branch seem almost mute about how well the economy is going. Now it may just be a fluke here - y'all all over the rest of the country may not be thriving and having loads of extra dough to splash out on new cars and new houses and luxury condos that we do here. Or maybe I'm just seeing the extra business locals are getting from the Katrina transplants.

I'm just saying...

One more post about another potentially embarrassing situation on Saturday.

We had our dogs along, and in all the excitement of hundreds of dogs at the lake for a doggie event, my dog got a touch of the di-reer. I had baggies in my pocket, and I dutifully (heh!) did my best to congregate the bits of poop-slick into the plastic bag. I know what you're thinking: sexy.

We sat down to listen to the band for a minute, and about 5 feet from my chair was a callow youth sitting in an apron, obviously working at a concession stand or some such for that event. Having just arrived at that spot, the doglet copped a squat near him and a few pathetic drops of yuck dribbled out onto the grass. The kid sneered at the dog and then made eye-contact with me and I smiled my biggest grin and made the Lyndy England two thumbs up, like I was so proud of everything that came out of my baby.

Seriously, after the drive of shame, nothing could have embarrassed me - I'd already pegged and had nothing left to give!

Thanks for all the comments - I feel much better about the whole thing now.

Some times I'm mired so deep in clusters that I wonder if I exist merely as a cautionary tale for others.

Much of my time here is spent deriding the boobery of others and pointing out idiocy that merits the venomous rancor I am so keenly equipped to dole out. Well, I'm nothing if not an equal-opportunity offender, and I'm not going to pull punches when I'm guilty of a phenomenal bit of boobery. My only hope is that you will learn from my errors, one of which I will tell you today and the other soon to follow. The one in today's post is much funnier (to me) although it was a lot more embarrassing to experience at the time. The other bit of boobery no doubt will come home to roost like ripples in a pond, but more on that later.

Now, usually when you screw up something, if you're lucky, no one will see it and you can correct it and make everything right. If you cut someone off in a car, hopefully you don't cause an accident and you can sheepishly mouth the word "sorry" (i.e., I'm an idiot) to other motorists, and hopefully you haven't stoked their ire hotly enough to provoke the can of road rage they are just dying to open up.

Rarely does one face a gauntlet of shame that lasts more than an instant, thankfully. When you feel particularly culpable, waves of humiliation can keep lapping at the banks of your conscience for days, weeks and even years down the road. Going forth and sinning no more(or at least not sinning in that way again) is a great remedy to keep the feelings of worthlessness and doubt at bay, and in extreme cases, we have been blessed with a plethora of pharmaceuticals to bludgeon such negative emotions into oblivion.

Saturday I experienced something so monumentally horrific, socially speaking, that I am still trying to process it. It was super-awkward. Here's what happened:

I was going to a local lake with a girlfriend and we were meeting other friends there at a named point in the park. About 15 years ago or so, I rode around the lake on my bicycle a couple times a week with friends, and I knew its paths and roads well. However, since that time, the layout of motorways has changed with regard to bike/pedestrian paths.

My friend was driving and we were going in the right direction, I knew, but I wasn't sure exactly where we should turn off. We were following a car and driving very slowly, mindful of pedestrians and cyclists while also looking for our friends. There must have been a sign that said "no vehicles beyond this point" somewhere along the way, but we certainly didn't see it, and sometime the car ahead turned, but again, we were looking ahead and not noticing where or why they turned off. (Also, other points in the park have poles in the path about 4 feet apart which would prevent a vehicle such as a car from entering a restricted pedestrian/cycle zone.) Next thing we know, the road is narrowing and narrowing and we suddenly find ourselves on the bicycle path at water's edge, a paved strip that is barely wider than the vehicle.

At this point, there is no doubt we are in the wrong place and we are looking desperately for a way to get off the path. Meanwhile every person we see either flips us off, yells, curses or very imaginatively deploys a combination of the three. My friend said "Phlegm, I just want to crawl into a hole and die!" We're laughing, but it's that nervous "what fresh hell is this?" awkward sort of laughter.

From the window, I asked a woman "we don't know how we got on this path and we don't know how to get out, can you help us?" She was surprisingly gracious (at this point we were fearful of being stoned to death, so a kind word went an awful long way) and told us that the path only got more narrow with no outlet whatever ahead, and that we needed to turn around and go back the way we came.

We pulled over onto the grass and turned around, and then some rocket surgeon yelled "get off the grass!" There's just no pleasing some people. Get off the path? Get off the grass? Make up your mind.

Mind you, we'd just come about a half mile in probably 10 minutes that seemed like 45, what with all the rancor, and now we were heading back to re-visit head-on the purple-faced rage of folks ranging from urban whole-grain earth-shoe latter-day hippies through to weekend-warrior extreme cyclist white collar guys - eek.

As one big doughy frat-boy vented his spleen in our direction, I thought "yeah, we're on the wrong thoroughfare, but I'm not the one with the wedding tackle on display in a swampy, petroleum-product pair of biker shorts." If I'd been clever, I would have just held the L-is-for-loser symbol up to my forehead to let people know "uh, yeah, we noticed we're, like, on the wrong damned road, already."

I got home and called me mum, and she chuckled and said "now those cyclists have had a taste of how it feels when one of them is in the road on the highway." Somehow, I don't think they were making that intellectual stretch at that moment, but it was a welcome fresh perspective.

Dad laughed and laughed--we both did-- and he said he would like to have been along for that ride, that it sounded funny. It was funny, but it was mortifying, and I honestly wish it hadn't happened. We weren't driving wildly or recklessly, and we certainly wouldn't have run over a person under any circumstance, but it was a major screw-up. Of course, it's preferable that we'd never ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it's not as though we maliciously set out to ruin someone's day - it was an honest mistake. It's incredible how from a benign sate you can suddenly blunder your way into something that turns into a huge mess.

Yeah. We're dummies.

Anyway, I hope your weekend was happily devoid of anything approaching the painful lessons of my weekend.

Uh oh. It's looking like I won't make it out to the State Fair this year after all, alas. No fried coke for me. Yup, they've figured out a way to imbue a little ball of dough with liquid coca-cola inside, and then the dough ball is deep-fried and a cola sauce and whip cream are drizzled over them, or so they say. You have to wonder how they come up with this stuff, and every year it's something new.

The deep-fried Oreos appeared last year, I think. So far, they haven't come up with the spaghetti taco, but odds are they will, evenutally. Actually, even though I haven't had one since I was probably under 10 years of age, I'd sort of like to have a candied apple now that my braces are off, if only for that nook-yoo-lar red coating that's probably bad for you.
Maybe next year.

Speaking of my teeth... Before braces, my molars were snug up against each other and the front and centers were a little more spaced out. Food never got caught between the molars because it was physically impossible to fit between there, and the front teeth didn't get food stuck up there because of their opposite-of-kung-fu-grip. NOW, however, they are pretty uniformly spaced, and I can floss 3 times a day and every single time I get swampy bits of salad greens and nefarious white blobs out from between the teefs, and all of it, well, decaying, is the best way I can put it.

And speaking of that, here's a question someone can maybe help me with. If there's someone you see on a casual or friendly basis, at what point is it advisable to tell them their breath needs a little work?

Believe it or not, I can seriously lack assertiveness when it comes to this kind of thing, and I simply clam up and don't mention it, all the while hoping my watering eyes don't give them the wrong idea. I take criticism so badly that it's hard for me to give it, because I don't want to hurt someone's feelings - is that silly of me?

Don't start thinking it's the softer side of Phlegm. I'm still the same embittered weirdo you've come to know and vex over.

Oh, and what's going on with Blogger & pictures lately? Frustrating!

OK, this may be a bit rushed, as I am knackered and dying to get to bed.

Things are going pretty well, and it seems I've finally found my stride in this over-committed/underslept schedule I've been keeping. Thursday was one of the best/worst at work, with funny things happening that I can't even talk about.

One amazing thing happened this week that left me feeling like the last of the gallopin' goobers. rightly so. SOrry, will have to finish this post later.

So, I had a much longer post that was quite entertaining, but I decided to abbreviate the whole mess to simply state that people don't just commit identity theft to access funds from your bank and credit cards - they can also have an entire criminal life listing your name birthdate and SSN as the responsible party, FYI. Something to think about...

Thanks for indulging those two rants this week. Some people are slow to catch on, but I always knew the email of the species is more deadly than the mail. Anyone crafty enough to con people into paying them to navel-gaze in D.C. shouldn't need to be told that.

Yes, I washed my hair Wednesday I am happy to report. I know how relieved you must be.

OOOOH, little bit of heaven - when we were leaving the country fair after my dad's horseshoe triumph last weekend, I stopped by a vegetable stand and bought 8 luscious green tomatoes for $10 from Tennessee, which mom fried up proper on Wednesday night. OK, I know they don't translate well owing to the fact that grease in a photograph never conveys the true glory of the first-person experience, but they were so marvelousI had to include a photo the little deadlies on my blog. The thinly sliced green tomatoes are dipped in flour and corn meal then fried. My toes are curling just remembering it. Also, it only occurred to me to snap the photo near the end of the platter, but I knew you'd want to get a gander at them. Yummy.

Speaking of food, for any foodie/film afficionados out there, Tampopo is a superb Japanese film that sort of orbits around the theme of food. For anyone who has seen it, my favorite vignette is the guy with the toothache and the little boy with the carrot and sign - incredibly cute and sweet.

LEE HARVEY'S
2ND SEMI-WHENEVER
CHILI COOK-OFF
AND BUTT SCRATCHIN' FIESTA
SATURDAY 10/21/06
COOKING STARTS @ NOON
JUDGING AT 3PM
DRINK SPECIALS ALL AFTERNOON
NEED A RECIPE?
WWW.CHILI.ORG

Perhaps this should be added to your busy agenda this weekend, Big Dick & Kelly. What's not to love about a Butt Scratchin' Fiesta? Good times.

If you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip this dirty girl post. .

My hair is curly and I like to wear it that way, but one does tire of the same old thing, day after day.

I reckon if we can put a man on the moon, science and nature should provide me with the wherewithal to sport stick-straight tresses on occasion. When I wear it curly, I never brush it or it will just fuzz up like a pissed-off kitty, so there's no telling how many lint-balls or threads or cinema tickets plastered in my Gordian locks I've walked around with, oblivious. Well, ignorance is bliss.

I wash it every couple of days, but drying it straight takes a lot of time, and that's pretty much how I wear it all the time these days.

Friday: the air was a bit cooler and drier, which makes drying my hair much easier. Yummy, silky, limp-as-a-rag hair. Yay.

Saturday: Storms at night have left a bit of moisture in the air, and it gets a bit wavy. Fair enough. Still silky and nice and I can run my fingers through it. Uh oh, caught out in the rain, though with an umbrella, well, I can feel it curling.

Sunday: Wow, VERY curly - the curliest I've worn it in a while, oh well, it's the one day off this week, why not?

Monday: Hey, it looks exactly like it did yesterday, and it looked really cute yesterday. I'll wash it tomorrow.

Tuesday: Crap - woke up late, MUST wash hair, going to be late to work, (looking in mirror) well waddayaknow? My hair looks fabulous! I think I won't wash it after all.

So, are you gagging? I'm grossing myself out - 5 days without washing my hair. It's camper hair. It's caught-in-the-wilderness-without-products hair. It's road-trip hair. Eek. Amazingly, it doesn't smell as bad as I would have imagined. Then again, the fall allergies - maybe my sniffer has gone off.

Well, that's the whole story - just that I've grossed myself out thoroughly.

But wait! There's more: my goal for the immediate future in my life is that someday soon on a Thursday night I'm going to go to the grocery store. Then when I come home from work on Friday, I'm going to put on pajamas and not leave the house and not wear anything but pajamas until Monday. I may clean, I may do productive things, I WILL shower and I will put on fresh pajamas, but I will not pass Go and I will not collect $200. My ass will be planted for one solid weekend. This I do solemnly swear.

You know, I've thought about what I was blathering about last time, and I want to delve into it a little bit more.

One thing I was getting to earlier but didn't say clearly is the fact that the way our media cover sexual harrassment issues is situational sounds a foul note to my ear.

After the last 8 years of the 90s being hammered over the head by media shrieking "get out of people's bedrooms," you'd have to be blind deaf and unutterably dumb to not recognize the double-standard at play here. The thing is, if our judgment of right and wrong is nothing but gray area, we exasperate ourselves - there MUST be some point on the scale of experience where we draw a line and say "there! Cross this one, and you've erred." We seem unwilling or unable as a society to agree on this, and I think that's tragic.

But that's not even the most salient point, I think.

We are so entertainment-drunk (and I'm guilty of it, too) that we are fast losing a grip on who and what we are as a nation. I mean, is this what our ancestors struggled to make possible? Languorously idling about in a self-indulgent state and jaded to the point that we are discussing in which cases sexual harrassment or adultery are just ok and private business, and in which cases they are total public domain - do you think this was what your forbears had in mind when they risked life and limb to get here?

I guess in the end we can't help re-evolving into clusters of humanity guilty of the same oppressive and corrupt behaviors the Pilgrims left Europe to get away from, but I reserve the right to be disappointed.

Yeah, I know I'm a vulgar person with very low standards, but I do at least have SOME standards. It's not that I'm saying whatever the Foley person did was not an outrage, but I think very few of our D.C. officials could evade shame if held to that degree of scrutiny, and maybe THAT is what we should be discussing - the fact that we consistently elect pathological liars to represent us and we re-elect them even though they do a crap job, at best, and the diametric opposite of what they promised, at worst.

What most grieves me here is that we're wasting time focusing on a libidinous representative (and anyone who claims they are surprised by this event is a liar or delusional) when in fact, we have men and women fighting overseas and we can't be bothered to talk about what's going on over there - we're wallowing in vileness that utterly debases us. I say it's time we re-assess what we stand for, and I think we should throw every last rascal out of D.C. who acts in opposition to that end. I think we need to strip the chaff from the wheat in our media AND our government.

Thank God for the internet, which is the only true equalizer I know of in my lifetime, this side of death.

Is "pursuit of happiness" a synonym for amorality? I don't think so, or at least, it shouldn't be.

Dateline: Kinko's at twenty cents a minute.
The DSL line crapped out last night so I didn't post because I thought I'd do so first thing this morning. To top it all off, the power went out at about 2:45 AM, and just came on about an hour ago, and the DSL is still not working. Meh.

On the upside, I went out for pancakes and got stuff for a new jewelry project I'm working on that involves pouring resin. OOOH, chemicals, and non-abrasive ones, for once. Still, I don't want to get any on me. Will show pictures of the finished project if it turns out as I envision it - right now this ideer is in the fact-finding stage.

Oh, couple more things: I haven't weighed in here on the scandal du semaine [that's scandal of the week, but couldn't resist the beastly pun]. I KNEW I remembered the horrid "congressmen like their pages bent over" joke from my days in high school in the early 80s. I will point out the 1983 scandal involved a 17-year-old boy, and this was pre-email/pre-internet era, so Al Gore's bridge to the 21st century didn't make an unholy alliance with Republicans to create a new form of child-exploitation - Foley was just re-hashing an old bit. Funny thing is, the media seem to view this as a badge of courage in the case of that Studds fellow. I don't get how the then-46-year-old Studds interfering sexually with a 17-year-old child is less morally repugnant than the current situation.

Oh, and what about that Kennedy guy who carried on an affair with the 16-year-old babysitter? He held a press conference and broke down weeping and went into the Betty Ford clinic or some such, resulting in a spate of resounding back-slapping and sympathetic forehead-wrinkling. I guess that was ok because it was a chick-- and of course - that's what we're here for.

Considering that I knew of the murky goings-on in D.C. involving young pages and interns when I was a mere lass in a suburban Texas town, I'm thinking it was ever thus that children sent to D.C. in such a capacity were pretty much there for the taking, and probably most parents who participated in such programs HAD to know their children would return much more worldly than they were when they flew the coop.

My point is that we can't give a pass to one politician or one political party, oh, say, a president, saying it's ok for him to treat the young interns on staff as a box of tissues but conversely declare it an outrage that lewd communications passed between an elected official and a barely- or not-quite-underaged page. This current bout of outrage seems obnoxiously disproportionate, unless it's going to come out that Foley inserted a cigar into the person of said intern and then smoked that cigar in the Rose Garden with Arafat. I'll be right here, not holding my breath waiting for that news bulletin.

"Oh, it's his private life." "It's between him and his wife." "It depends on what your definition of "is" is." "You conservatives love invading the privacy of other people's bedrooms because you are repressed." "Republicans' repression gives them a sick thrill out of keeping alive a scandal that's none of their business."

Wow, I suppose I'll never get rid of that ringing in my ears. Just sit back and enjoy the crashing waves of hypocrisy.

Y'all have a great week. Hopefully I'll be able to post as usual, but I want to maintain the habit of not blogging from work - slippery slope and all. Having the attention-span of a lit match, I already have enough of a challenge staying focused on business, so I simply avoid the blogging temptation.

See my Dad.
See my Dad win at horseshoes.
Win, Dad, win!

Dad and Uncle (remember the guy who fried the dog testicles with the car cigarette lighter? Yeah, that uncle) have been competing at a local annual country fair horseshoe match on and off for the past 20 years or so. Today was the first time they've pitched horseshoes since the last time they won a few years ago. Most of the time they have taken top honors in the match.

Needless to say, Dad and Uncle kicked horseshoe butt on Saturday. I had fun capturing a few ringers in action, and here's one of them. Here's also one of many pairs of double-ringers my pop pitched, and a futile attempt of an opponent to stay in the game. This is the first time I've actually watched the match throughout in each game my Pop competed in. It was amazing to see my Dad making short work of the task. Considering what a hash they made of most other teams, I'd say it's a kindness that they don't practice before the matches. Well done, Dad!

Lovely niece was in the parade and nephew scarfed up a boatload of candy from the parade people, so a good time was had by the whole family, and I got a bit of R&R the likes of which I haven't had in weeks, it seems.

Sweet.

To my darling baby sister:

The doctor reckoned you'd arrive October 5th, but in your ornery way, you had your own ideas. I prayed all day long on my birthday that you would come then, but again, you set your own agenda. Of course, when I saw you I fell in love instantly and forgave you for making me wait the additional 6 days. You have always been a living doll, and I'll always adore you as much as I did way back before you could exhibit demonstrably different opinions from my own.

Happy Birthday, Sister!

WOOHOO! I'm always happy when a Friday 13 rolls around. Once my doglet got out of the house during a storm and she was gone for 9 weeks. I'd given her up for lost forever, but I got her back on Friday 13th. Ever since then, me and my dog have been in bonus round together, gravy-train style. This was a phenomenal moment in my life - mourning her and realizing I would happily trade any material possession I owned just to have her back. Thinking that, I pictured me and the dog, cowering under an overpass naked, but happy to have each other. And then, Eureka! A minor miracle.

I'm not superstitious, anyway, and I know there's no significance to the number of the day - it was just a neat idea to hang my hat on, the fact that I got a phone call from a woman who'd been harboring my long lost doggie for 5 weeks and had even taken her on family vacation with them to Florida. That's a wild story I'll tell you some time.

In my digging about in vintage jewelry, I've noticed there are quite a lot of gold charms and pendants from the late Victorian era that are simply the number 13, so I'm guessing it must have been associated with good fortune back then.

What I wonder is what is up with no 13th floor on high-rise buildings? Are people really so silly that they won't live or office on the 13th floor? Is this merely a Western thing, or do they not put a 13th floor in skyscrapers in Indonesia or Bahrain or Tokyo, too?

If I had such a galloping neurosis, I'd be embarrassed for other people to know about it, frankly. I wouldn't advertise my idiocy by not having a 13th floor in a huge building I was erecting. Duh.

Then again, I suppose you can't afford to have an entire level of a structure that people are too intellectually stunted to set foot upon. So, I suppose there are boatloads of numbnuts out there who live/work on the 14th floor relieved not to be living/working on the 13th floor, when in fact, they live/work on the 13th floor, dagnabbit.

Who understands?

Yay - I took the lampshade off the doglet tonight and she's not chewing her paws. Hallelujah. I hate having her wagging that thing around hang-dog style - it makes her seem so downtrodden and sad.

Project Runway - ok - I've been peeking at images online - I think the best collection (though it's not totally unified, in my eyes) is Jeffrey's. I felt bad for him today when he was talking about his violent father and how he wants to be a good father to his son, I felt sad for him, and happy that he'd come through so much.

After the earlier incident of cheating this season, I hated hearing him accused of having help on his sewing, and I hope they were wrong about that. It seems like maybe this is a tempest in a teapot that producers are inflating a bit to create buzz - like maybe they were all getting along too well. I also thought it was sad to see that beer bottle on his bedside table - as though the stress of it all had tumbled him off the wagon - I hope that was just some exotic water bottle, but I doubt it. You may say I'm a dreamer.

Laura's husband was not at all the button-down type I expected to see rather than the Graydon Carterish-type. Overall I liked the pieces in Laura's collection best, but I think she has two major mis-fires that are going to trip her up totally. There's a jacket & shorts set that I find beastly, and the black dress with the feathers at the shoulders looks like a costume piece from maybe the 60s or something.

Uli's collection is passable but sadly bereft of enough of the flowy wild prints we associate with her. So that one's a wild card.

Michael's collection is beautiful, but I think some of the skirts are too short&tight, too mid-80s. Eek.

I suppose we'll see. After this show is over, I'm FREE! At least unitl PR begins again. I'm not falling for the American Idol B/S this time, nor any of several other programs.
OK, I will keep DVRing House. But that's it!
I'm not addicted to television, I can quit any time.