About that Twilight thingie...

When I went to this new job, the supervisor in charge of the group introduced herself to us the first day. D's a gregarious, engaging person and probably never met a stranger. D is our kind of girl. Love her. She told us a lot about her life and how great the company was to work for. She also said we might as well get used to the fact that she is obsessed with Edward from Twilight and wishes her husband were more like him. Apparently, her husband is aware of this benign obsession and indulges her.

Since I'm still in training (only 4 or 5 months of training to go-- yays!), I've been cloistered with the other n00bs in a training room, not yet having been unleashed into the general worker bee population where I'll no doubt one day fondly embrace my new role in life as cublicle whore. Still, we walk through the main workroom and there are quite a few Twilight posters dotted about, but D's cubicle is liberally festooned with Twilightery.

Stopping by a book/record store recently, I saw a raft of Twilight-themed products, including candy hearts with Edward on the box and sayings appropriate to the story line: "Bite Me" and, well, you get the picture.

Eureka!
Wouldn't it be lovely if Edward were to requite D's affection in some small way? Well, Edward bought a box of those candies and left them on D's desk last week with a greeting card declaring his utter besottedness with her. This week, Edward left a simple offering of a ripe, perfect plum, more sweet nothings scrawled lasciviously within the accompanying card.

Thursday D was talking to our group and saying what a superlative lot we are (none having been fired this first 8 weeks was in itself exceptional, apparently), and that, by the way, Edward has been leaving her gifties on her desk, and she asked our instructor if she was Edward. She searched our faces for recognition, but I sat, poker-faced, having known it was coming. No one admitted to being Edward, least of all your humble narrator.

One of my inner circle has ventured that I can't ever come clean now if I want to keep my job, but I think I will, one day. I think it's obviously an innocent and good-natured lark-- Edward doesn't exist at all, so it's not like she thinks this is really from him. I'm going to winnow it out a bit, though. It's fun for her and I'm getting a giggle out of it. Next week, Edward will probably leave another goodie on her computer along with a card valanced with unctuous, looping swags of Byron. *shrug* It blows my skirt up, anyhoo.

Why do I have the overwhelming urge to throw my panties?

Tom Jones rocks it out in 1974. Points for the frilly shirt, the bouffy hair-preening, the rodeo champ-een belt buckle the size of a volkswagen and the marching band pants with the stripe down the sides.


Thinking about Tom and also about Sean Connery makes me hope we'll never hear a news story that either one has broken a hip. That just wouldn't be right, would it? On such a day our innocence would surely die.

How many drab fellows shifted uncomfortably in their Barcaloungers watching this broadcast in 1974, boiling with quiet rage as their wives breezed in from the pan of dirty dishes in the kitchen, squealing "ooooh! Tom JONES!" As years went by, he'd remember how Eunice seemed quite agitated at the mere mention of the Welsh crooner. As their twilight years came, he'd think, "sure, Eunice was married to me and hung around, but that was only because she couldn't have Tom Jones. I know who she really loved... *grouse* *grouse*..."

Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, I suppose.

Giving a little something back to the world of poultry, some humans are making strides to reach out to our chicken brethren and begin the healing. This news dispatch came Feb 7 from Arkadelphia Arkansas - just a frog's whisker away from Bill Clinton's hometown of Hope.

Woman Does 'Mouth-To-Beak' to Save Chicken

Cliff's notes version of the story is a woman found her brother's pet exotic chicken (named BooBoo) floating beak-down in a pond, and she decided to see if she still "had it" from her glory days as a medical professional. She sealed over the beak and nose holes with her mouth and breathed life anew into the fowl. BooBoo is fine, tanned and rested, and is most likely plotting world domination.

In a related story, the January 13 edition of the Times online reported that the 3+ million year old remains of a child have been determined to have been killed by some sort of bird of prey. This revelation must be taken seriously. Birds used to eat people. This is like a Twilight Zone episode. Horrors!

Of course, this all reminds me of my own salient writing on the subject of how we should respect the noble yard bird. Soaking the chicken pieces overnight in buttermilk make them SOOOO much better when you want to fry it up properly. In an iron skillet, of course. Some say frying with the lid on makes them crunchier. Home-made fried chicken - it's WHY we climbed on top of the pile, people. You see? We are the masters of the food chain because we fought our way up there, and it's important that we not send mixed signals about who should be eating whom on this planet.

Now the crafty chicken is worming its way into our good graces, becoming house pets, and the like, and I'm sensing a dangerous trend in the other direction. When husband and I lived in McKinney, we had a lovely neighbor who had boutique variety pet chickens. She'd take turns having one sitting in her lap on the porch swing each night, and she'd shampoo and blow-dry them weekly. Being utterly mesmerized by the peculiar as I am, I thought it was an innocent lark, but now I see it was part of a vast right-and-left hotwing conspiracy to ingratiate chickens to their captors and thus gain the upper-hand. Now people are doing CPR on chickens? Trust me when I say the chickens are just waiting to take over. The world will be one big chicken plantation, and we'll be working for the chicken-man. Not pretty, people. This is crazy talk. Crazy and scary. Someone comfort me, please?