Phlegmmy's Shooty Spa

Sunday coming home from late lunch with Holly, I stopped off at the range and squoze some rounds through several .22s just for giggles. JPG loaned me a kit gun (what does that mean-- kit?) which is the .22 sister of my .38 snubbie, only without the 50-poundish trigger pull. This .22 is fun fun fun. I also shot the Ruger Mark II a lovely couple generously loaned me until I get my own. This one's sweet and one of my favorites. Dad's .22 revolver was the one I shot most, though. This was the first time I've gone to the range entirely alone, not meeting someone, etc. It was great, actually, and medatative, even. I set up the guns on the table, got the cartridges arrayed and everything was by my dictate. Shooting in a state of solitude is a zen exercise, which is a roundabout bullcrap way of saying it's good fer ya. I intend to rinse, lather and repeat this version of therapy more often in future.

I set up in one of the bays with 5 steel plate targets. I apparently shoot better when I have targets that give an audio response. Kind of whack-a-mole or something - I need to hear it hitting. Once I've got a handle on where to shoot that makes the noise, I can usually hit the spot over and over.

I thought I had enough callous on my trigger finger, but apparently not so: I have a blister from Sunday's exploits. Clearly I need to be practicing more.

I am also happy to announce I've officially shot through an entire brick of .22 LR by my lonesome, now. I should have passed that milestone weeks ago, but things have been hectic. Anyway, my next brick will go much faster, I expect.

After shooting, I stopped by my apartment and picked up the doglet and took her with me to my folks' house. I forgot that my parents haven't been seeing doglet as she has declined gradually in recent months. I think they were a little surprised, although they've known recently she's been in a bad way. Anyhoo. She seemed to enjoy getting in the car and going someplace, and I didn't want her home alone any more than could be avoided.

So, dad and I set up all my gun cleaning stuff and set about cleaning all the .22s and my shotgun (it was a dirty dirty girl) and some of dad's weaponry. I told dad this was a fun father-daughter activity, and he said if I enjoy it so much, he has about 50 more guns that could use a cleaning, and I laughed and said I'd love to help. He wasn't kidding, and I wasn't either. I suppose we'll have a marathon cleaning session one day soon. Oh, and he's going to let me take the 1911 I posted here last year so I can practice with it. *Fun!*

Anyhoo, messing with all the unguents and patches and rods and crap, I was thinking how this is sort of like a day-spa for guns. They get de-funked and properly cleaned, and then they get all oiled and spruced up. Some of them get the mani-pedi, and some of them get the Brazilian Wax. I'm happy to announce, though, that no matter how sissified any of my guns ever get, at no time will they be getting any of their personal areas bleached. I'm phlegmmy, and I approved this ad.

Ah, the tantalizing fragrance of Hoppe's 9. They don't teach this in finishing school, but apparently women who daub a bit of Hoppe's behind the ears attract the right sort of fellows. I'll keep you posted.

I've been looking for the most recent Interpol cd for several weeks in town, and it's been impossible to find. Is this because everyone's downloading things these days and I'm stuck in a century in which I refer to albums as "albums?" Borders and Barnes & Noble locations I've visited haven't had it. Meh. I mean, it came out in November and it's not what I'd call obscure music. Then again, I don't know of any radio station playing this, either, or I might listen to the radio occasionally. CD Warehouse at Greenville and Mockingbird had a used copy of Antics, their 2004 release. I've loved the song Evil for a long time from that cd, but I found the video so unsettling that I was never ready to buy the cd. Couldn't figure out what they were on about.

Anyway, whatever they meant, I find I like them. If Ewan MacGregor were a rock band, he'd be Interpol. If Interpol were a clothing item, they'd be a peacoat. If Interpol were a movie, they'd be a Jean Seberg film. Definitely too cool for the room. I love the melodic, guitar-driven sound. Heck- any band who puts 4 guitars on stage - that's timelessly good sound, in my humble opinion.

Anyway, Antics is a fantastic cd, and great housecleaning music, actually. I was in Denton visiting Hols on Sunday and stopped by Hastings, who--bless their hearts-- had a copy of Our Love to Admire-- the latest Interpol fare. Yays. Listened to it on the way to the gun range, and loved it.

Good stuff.

I don't know if you've seen sparrow's blog (lovely gal, she), but she has a haiku contest every week that you ought to check out. Poetry seems to have sustained folks elsewhere in times ancient and modern, but I think Western culture forgot about poetry when we traded our i-rony chips in for i-phones and sundry other i-shit.

Anyhoo, the theme this week was home. I've had profound reasons to consider what makes a home in recent times myself, and I find my notions are evolving and moving forward, and while my idea of home is more nebulous in ways, I think I've never been more clear-headed.

Jean's Entry:
Home is heart and hearth.
Is it really inside me?
Somewhere. Anywhere.

I'm maybe a little unconventional in a few ways. Among the things I surround myself with, the furniture and belongings I most treasure tend to be the ones I bought at thrift stores and junk shops. I had a moment of clarity about possessions, though, about 9 years ago. Terrified by a thunderstorm, my wild banshee doglet got out and probably ran for miles in the wind and the rain. I was grief-stricken, shattered. I put up reward signs around town and mailed flyers to every veterinarian in Dallas, Collin and Denton counties. I went to the SPCA every day.

Every.
Day.

I was a total wreck. I then realized that I would trade every possession I owned to have my little dog back. We could live in a cardboard box under a bridge, but I needed my dog, and she needed me. One day at the SPCA, Tuesday, August 10, she'd been missing for 9 weeks. I walked in and saw her picture was covered up by a photo of someone's missing cat. I said "you covered my dog's picture" and they scrambled to uncover it. Three days later, a woman came in and saw the doglet's picture on the board and said "I have that dog" and I got my dog back on Friday 13th.

Big Cat's Entry:
Wherever she is
My head resting next to hers
There my home resides

Home again.

Carteach's entry:
Home shifts, moves, travels
Each day in another world
Tracking her heartbeat

So every day since then has been extended play in our closed corporation. I meant what I said about giving up all I owned to have her and not looking back. Now, though, she's at the end of a journey where there is no bargaining and only grim truths to be faced, all absolute and non-negotiable. Looking around at my apartment, I still wish I could trade all this stuff to have her a little longer. Cardboard box technology has come a long way.

Wyo's Entry:

be who you should be
do what you are called to do
home is within you

Sometimes, you just have to wonder...

A British tabloid has published photos Elvis Presley's manager Colonel Tom Parker carefully prevented from being published. In the photos, Elvis doesn't look terrible or anything, but mostly he's not on his A-game in them.

The one that amazed me, though, is this one with a caption reading Here, he's kissing his mother, Gladys, unembarrassed by the youthful acne on his shoulders.

What was he thinking? He should have known that in 50 years, people would be obsessing over his back acne. Colonel Parker knew what he was doing, apparently. Translation is the crap photos of famous people will one day be worth way more than the good photos ever were.

I'm still waiting for a photo of Madonna in a restaurant with tri-focals trying to read a menu, regimented little rows of chin-skin accordioned up as she holds the menu as far as possible from her face so's she can read it. Of course, that's silly of me to imagine. She prolly pays a lackey just to hold menus for her on the other side of the table.

The exquisite Ofra Haza 30 years ago when she was 21. This song Im Nin'Alu, was updated in the late 80s and has been sampled in pop and hiphop tracks by other artists. Ofra's voice had a jewel-like quality and was an instrument of rare purity. She died in 2000.

Stunning artist.

PHLEGMMY'S ACCESSORY CORNER:



Louis Vuitton's Conspiration Pilote lunettes with the monogram coating on the lenses. We likee because it reminds us of Madeline Kahn in High Anxiety. What's not to love?




We literally squeal over the Shadows bracelet from Sarah Graham in blackened steel and diamonds. Blackened steel jewelry? I'm totally down with that. It looks particularly stunning with yellow gold, too. But I'm not picky. Hee. Having done some fabrication, I have to say that steel is a bear to work with, compared to the relatively pliant properties of gold, which only goes so far toward splainin' the ghastly pricetag on this little deadly. Love This Stuff. Her rings are also superb.




Then there's the new accessory the brown truck of happiness delivered today. Peter called me up last week and told me about a sparkling deal on this baby over at Numrich, and said if I were smart, I'd snap it up. Well, I'm here to tell you, I'm a smart girl. I'm going to slap this puppy in my new Mossberg and I'll have a date with several representatives of the international symbol of peace in September, and we'll see who comes out on top, preferably with new feathers for her cap. ROWR! YEAH! Cause I'm a cougar, baby! Look out, little birdies! Gonna gitcha.

Turns out, I'm a damned caulking prodigy, and it's so very special that you'll have to wait at least an extra day to prepare yourselves for the glory of my mad caulking skills.

For now, let's enjoy a celebrity Thursday, shall we?



***************


Where will Ben
Affleck pop up next?

Why does he look like a floating head in this photo? He's at some charity event in Calgary. Uh. bless him for showing up and all, but...





He's looking rather Bob-Dobbs a la Church of the Subgenius. Emphasis on SUB, there.

And Bob Deniro plays guitar?

Nope. That's The Boss. Love those arm-wrap thingies.

Um, if you're trying to turn me on, it's working.

PREPARE FOR DOWN-COUNT!

Who could resist eyes more stronger than darth vapor?

Not me, man. No way, no how.

May I bitch for just a teeny second?

A little over a month ago I commenced on a battery of scary tests of the medical variety which will culminate (I hope) in a visit to the doctor on Thursday. I’m hoping for a clean bill of health, but a host of scary possibilities loom before me and to say I’m experiencing a bit of angst behind it all would be a supreme understatement. The last time I was in this particular doctor’s office was 3 weeks ago. As I was leaving, I stopped to pay and they said they’d bill me after my insurance company paid their part. Mind you, I’ve been going to this particular office for about 5 years, so it’s not as though I just wandered in off the street and might be expected to act in a louche way wherein my financial obligations are concerned.

Okay. Great. Fine. Whatever.

Today I was sitting in my office, trying to get things wrapped up to be away from the office for a whole day on Thursday and my cell phone rang. The caller identified herself as being from the doctor’s office and I expected her to say she was confirming the upcoming appointment, but no. It went more like this:

SHE: I was calling with regard to your outstanding bill of $7.83 and I wanted to ask when you expect to pay it.
ME: I haven’t received a bill yet, and of course I’ll pay it.
SHE: Great. Would you like to pay that now with a credit card?
ME: Um, I’m coming in for a procedure on Thursday—wouldn’t it be more convenient for you if I pay you then?
SHE You can do that if you want to, but I’ll be happy to take your credit card and you can pay it now.
ME: I can certainly give you that number if you like. I’d hate for your office to go broke behind my eight dollars between now and Thursday.
SHE: There is no need for sarcasm. I’m just doing my job.

Funny thing is their office has the word “harmony” in the title, and this full-frontal aggressive sort of bill-collection style seems more like dissonance to me. Maybe I’m overreacting, but my foot kind of twitches when someone calls to harass me about not having paid a bill they have not yet sent me, implying that I mean to run off to Mexico with their goods or something.
Seriously?
Are you shitting me?
Do me a favor: tell me if I have cancer and I’ll leave you a blank check, bitch, and you tell ME when I’m paying you. It’s your world: I’m just living in it.

Argh. I WILL be bringing this up to the manager of their office.

Will President Obama and the Supremes make us change the names of Texas cities such as Gun Barrel City and Cut and Shoot?

Maybe it's time take all our marbles and secede.

*********************
I started on an odious project on Monday night. My apartment has a porcelain bathtub, but it has one of those ghastly acrylic tub surround enclosure type thingies. Now, to begin with, the tub is white, and the acrylic is sort of an ivory. Yuck. Before I moved in I told my maintenance crew to not bother with the cleanup, as I knew I was going to have to rout out the caulk and re-do it, and I knew if I'd instructed them to change it out, they would have simply smeared new caulk over the old muck and oomska. Not good enough. Even if I moved out before the mold ate its way through the new caulk, I'd always know it was there and would never have an enjoyable bath, as a result.

I don't blame the staff for doing things in this way because they've been trained by others over the years to do certain things in the most expeditious way, rather than the most frugal way. The irony is, this spirit of expeditiousness is the result of a wish to do things in the cheapest manner possible, when in fact, if they would do the frugal thing and do it right the first time, this would obviate the need to go back and re-do the slap-dash job multiple times in the future. Fortunately, things of this nature are the exception and not the rule. It's just that when it DOES crop up, it seems particularly senseless and irksome.

Same law of frugality applies when you make a purchase. If you buy a crap $15 pan of lesser materials, you'll probably ruin it and have to replace it every few years, whereas the $60 pan may last you a lifetime and give you more satisfactory cooking results over the course of that lifetime. Yes, it's painful initially, but that quality item never need be replaced. Simple, right?

So, here I am, digging out the old caulk around the tub surround. Whew! That's messy business. Turns out I'm chiseling/digging/razoring out multi layers of caulk laid over previous moldy caulk. Nice. Add to that these manifold caulks are of differing composition, so I may have to chip one layer away to find a layer that must be carefully cut away with a razor. I stopped in the middle and went to Home Depot and got a wet/dry vac for hoovering up the sludgey bits as I went along.

Add to the funky old caulk the supreme annoyance of these hideous wing-shaped wedges at either end of the tub side designed to keep water from splashing out beyond the shower curtain. Well, this wasn't ugly enough: some clever soul took rubber bits of weather-stripping like you'd put under a door and caulked them along the edge of the tub from one wedge to another, just as a little bit extra splash guard. In fact, they didn't even use one contiguous strip-- it was cobbled-together leftover bits, apparently. Did I mention the weatherstripping was gray? Well, it had to be painted a sort of whitish ivory sort of color, didn't it? *much eyerolling here* This had the effect of making the whole bathroom look several orders below the quality and construction of the rest of the apartment, in my humble opinion. Apocalyptic DIY.

This is where being manager serves me well: I'm going to let MY shower dry out a couple days and I'll re-caulk on Wednesday night. I was going to say if the results are not humiliating, I'll post the pictures Thursday, but after talking trash about someone else's craftsmanship and repair principles, it's sort of incumbent upon me to put up or shut up, innit? So, anyway, watch this space in a couple days for images of my adventures in home repair. It should be funny. More importantly, maybe you'll get to see some of my pearly blue turquoise nail polish. It's fabulous. Everyone says so.

Jean-Michel Jarre and Jellyfish

The French call jellyfish "meduse" for Medusa, obviously. It's funny how things of such gossamer elegance can be so violently toxic.




The Dallas Aquarium had leafy sea dragons at one time (and may still do). They are exquisite and impossibly fragile-looking, and fascinating to watch, but it somehow seems horrific to me to keep them in an aquarium, no matter the size of the space. I don't know-- maybe they are as common as cockroaches in some distant ocean, but they have the air of rarity and remoteness about them and seem so out-of-place here. They are other-worldly and seem like they could come drifting through a cactus-filled moonscape, dancing to a Martin Denny soundtrack.

Big Brother is watching you(r rubbish pail)

Lookee here:

Britain's Department for the Environment is moving forward with plans to fine households 50 pounds each (about $100-ish) for not recycling and for producing excess waste. Apparently the goal is to reduce the amount of rubbish households produce in England. It seems they will run out of landfill space in about 9 years if there is not a serious reduction in the amount of rubbish produced by the average household. I understand this is a serious problem, and I'm not making light of that, but...

What I wonder is why everything has to be so bloody over-packaged in the first place? Here, if you want to buy a cd, for example, there's a whole bunch of plastic you've got to plough through to even get to the shiny bit you paid for. And food? Why do so many things have redundant wrappers? It's funny how big a role style and perception plays in how things are packaged and sold, and I suppose it affects how/when/what/why people chose to buy.

I must say, though, that at the gun show last weekend, I was walking around testing my new custom earplugs, I walked by a trader who had a massive table of components for re-loaders. The boxes were simple and to the point, and didn't seem to have been the product of a marketing campaign or even of a public relations department. Matter of fact, all the cartridge boxes I've seen don't look like products tweaked for a sexy sales scheme. I think that's really cool, actually.

Maybe a massive un-sexy campaign is really what we all need to be going for. We should, perhaps, make a study of the rugged utilitarian homeliness of, say, some certain Texas polygamist funranch for how to pare down and simplify.

Um, are plastics a petroleum by-product (anyone? g bro?), and if so, if we didn't make all our yummy plastic crap from that stuff, what else would we be doing with it? Would it go straight to landfills? Could we set it ablaze and jettison it into space? On second thought, if plastic wrapping and stuff is just a way to get rid of by-products of other industrial processes, then maybe all the over-wrapping is a good thing? Hmm?

I don't know. IT's late. I'm tired. Long, hairy week. meh. Have a nice Sunday.

Will fatherhood spoil the neanderthal charms of bongo entoosiast Texan Matthew McConaughey?

Apparently not.

On a recent surfing trip to Nicaragua, MM arrived at a bar drunk and drank a whole lot more as he put the moves on all the women in the place. At one point, he apparently blew out a flip flop and then jumped on the bar and said in broken Spanish "I lost my flip flop."

Naturally, this was of tremendous concern to everyone.
Not.
MM was later seen sifting through a sewage ditch for his missing special left flip flop.

I hope he finds it. Really, I do.

Starstruck, much?

Well, actually, yeah.

Along about a year ago, I posted a video of The Puppini Sisters' brilliant rendition of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. This is and has remained a high water mark for re-makes of classic tunes for me.

Thursday was a major visit to my property by code compliance peoples. I got to the office by 8 (I usually drag in at my scheduled 10AM) and met the kind gentleman charged with inspecting the property. A maintenance person assisted him in his rounds of the property while I sat in the office tackling a pile of paperwork. Along about noon, I was wishing they'd wrap it up so I could go get lunch. Well, the minutes crawled by, but finally the inspection was over at nearly 2pm. I went to an eatery in the victory park area of town, and ordered my food. I chatted with the waiter about the Puppini Sisters (playing that evening) for a few minutes, and tucked into my lunch. Within a few minutes, three sirens entered the restaurant and sat a couple tables over from me. ZOMG! It was the Puppini Sisters. Though they weren't in their usual stagey glam-doll getups, they did look just as gorgeous as ever. The blond was wearing mustard-color lizard cowgirl boots. Yes!

I sat poking at my food and trying to peek discreetly at my heroines. I thought about approaching them and saying something politely praise-filled but non-gushy. Then I noticed a mushroom floating in a puddle of gravy on the hem of my light-blue blouse-- uh, um, maybe some other time. Probably they prefer to eat in peace, anyhoo. Still, it was a thrill to get a sneak preview.

Well, the good news is I just got home from seeing The Puppini Sisters at House of Blues, and it was a phenomenal show. Seriously, I had goosebumps. Anyhoo, if they come to your town and you don't go see them, well, you need your head examined. Fun show, all around, oozing artistry and brilliant musicianship. The act is wonderfully theatrical, and a good time was had by all. The girls also mentioned they love Dallas, that they'd never been so far south, and had each acquired several pair of boots today while in town. Yee Haw! I think we should perhaps give them honorary citizenship.