Chicken Water

Pardon my hiatus, I'm trying to make a living and it's about to kill me. And all of my brain cells. Anyway, let's get straight to the story.

I'm having a bridal shower tomorrow and, in anticipation, I've been at home with Granny and Papa, bugging the snot out of her. Ok Polly is here, too, but she doesn't count. I'll tell you about Polly later.

At approximately 8 o'clock p.m. I realized that I had yet to mail my wedding invitations. Also, I had three Redbox movies in my purse that I would soon own if I didn't get up and return them. After a bit of guilt tripping and nagging, Granny agreed to ride into town with me to run my errands.

*A piece of advice- don't try to mail 219 wedding invitations through the regular letter slot. You will have to do them three at a time and it is quite time consuming.  People will line up behind you, juding your holey brown pajama pants and mustard flats. At least, that's what I hear. Sometimes that happens. To some people. Not me, though. No sir, not this girl.

Once I completed the arduous task of cramming the invites into the already full mailbox- you're welcome USPS- we scooted over to the Redbox where approximately 5 well dressed persons were waiting to return movies. I was in pajamas and my Cole Haan flats. Fancy shoes and lounge pants, how attractive. Naturally, I wasn't carrying my purse. (I was being judged, for sure. With no fancy purse to validate my slack appearance.)

I suffered through the return process. The natural progression of events, of course, was to go to Chicfila and get ice dream cones to reward ourselves for our hard work. The cones were huge and they were delicious. Good thing I'm not getting married in six weeks or I'd not be eating ice cream.

Oh, wait. Sigh.

We inhaled our ice cream cones and headed back home to check on Papa and Polly. I was itching to see What Not to Wear and I'm sure that Granny was wanting to see a Nancy Grace re-run.

The second we stepped through the door, I heard Papa yelling from the bathroom. "Hazel! Come here!"
I hear muttering and Granny emerges and stomps angrily my way. She was not amused.

"What's wrong with him?" I asked.

"I've got to call Keith and tell him to turn off the chicken water. Papa can't take a shower."

Uh. Excuse me? Chicken water? What?

I'm sure I've mentioned our fabulous collection of chickens and whatnot that live in the woods in a chicken community that is, really, the avian equivalent of a gypsy ghetto. Or maybe a slum.

The explanation is really quiet simple. My uncle had left the water on to fill the water dishes for his 300 million chickens, so when my grandpa went to shower, he had no water pressure.

Does this story make sense? Nope.

Does this story make sense in the context of my life? Yep.

The moral of the story: next time your water pressure is a little puny, go make sure the chicken water is turned off- lest you burn up the water pump.

That is all. Goodnight.

A Work in Progress

Things are changing around here. I've been working non-stop so the weekends are absorbing all of the projects I meant to do during the week. And by projects I mean things I want Adam to do. They include:

1. Build a garden so I can have tomatoes and squash to my little hearts desire. I won't lie, I'm bothered by the fact that I don't know where my food comes from and the radiation catastrophe has been a big influence on my decision to make Adam become a quasi farmer.

2. Build this bed. Mine will be stained a light pecan color and distressed. I am so in love with it. Obsessed really. However, Adam says it's not happening until I sell his current bed because, seriously, who needs two beds?

I do!

I. Love.

3. Build four of these for his kitchen bar area.

So cute in distressed black!

For now, that is all that I have lined up. I feel confident that these little projects will provide for great blogging seeing as how I'm always right and he's always right.

Hey, I may not know what I'm doing but I can always tell him how to do what he's doing better and more efficiently. 

And to think, a few months ago I was eating sushi in the city.

Off to find stains and glazes!

Focus... Focus... Huh?

My mind is mush. No matter how many Mountain Dews I drank today I could not get with the program. It wasn't until I saw that I only had an hour left at work that I actually became a productive member of society. I was a number crunching machine.

Anyhoo, I've got several things to tell you about but can't formulate a cohesive blog entry so I'm reverting to my favorite story telling method: listing.

1. My uncle's dog has recently taken up opossum hunting. She trees the opossum (or, "possum" as Helper insists I say/spell it.) and he shoots it. The end.

2. He likes this because the opossums are killing his chickens. I dislike this because I dislike the menagerie that is his back yard. If I wanted to wake up at the butt crack of dawn I'd set an alarm. I don't need the stupid chickens to start my day for me.

3. The dog is cute so I can't take it personally. She runs with one of her back legs picked up off of the ground as though it is slowing her down. And she pees when I talk to her. I like her.

4. Moaner, aka Caroline, sent me a box of clothes and I'm going to wear every single article at some point this week. I've already worn 4 out of 8 and it's only Monday. I'm certain that I'd dress like a homeless troll if I didn't have her to guide me away from the yoga pants and flip flops.

5. Helper's name is Adam and he edits my blog every day. I hate it when he finds spelling errors.

6. I hate it even more when he misses my spelling errors.

7. I shop at a ridiculously expensive grocery store called the Piglet because it is near Adam's house. I once paid $45.00 for soup ingredients because I didn't pay attention to what I was doing. FORTY-FIVE BONES! I could have bought a bra and made soup with that money!

8. Granny is making a quilt and I fully intend to somehow smuggle it into my room.

9. She'd scalp me if I stole her quilt.

10. Every single tv show that I watched today made me cry. Not sobbing like hearing Tim McGraw's My Little Girl, but misty like you get when you see the ASPCA commercial.

Ok so that makes me sob, too. I cry a lot.

11. I ate a honey bun for dinner and didn't even feel bad.

12. I'm pretty sure that #11 is absolutely a bad thing.

13. I'm going to find my tennis shoes tomorrow.

14. Goodnight.

Nailed

I am uncharacteristically awake at this hour on this night.

I drank milk before I got into bed, watched non-exciting TV shows and said my prayers.

And then I just laid here. And tossed. And turned. I finally wound up on my side staring at the wall that I like to call “The Shrine of Sunny.”

The shrine isn’t my fault and I don’t particularly understand it. It is a collection of Sunny themed things that I’ve gathered over the years. Ok so it used to be just two things but now there are three of them. 

Watching over me as I sleep.

Oh, what’s that? You want to know what these things are and how they got there? And why they are there in the first place?

Item one is a charcoal portrait I had done my senior year in high school when I was lucky enough to travel to New York City with Helper’s dear mother and a friend of hers.

Aside from the 14-block trek to the Sex Museum, it was a lovely trip. A very educational trip, too.

I also commissioned an Asian man to write my name in fancy Asian letters while I was visiting Central Park.  I had instant buyers remorse, but what are you going to do with a painting that says “Sunny” in letters of birds and butterflies?

I brought both pieces of “art” back with me, fully aware that I had no intentions of hanging them up or doing anything special with them. I had simply bought them in the heat of the moment. It was NYC, after all. 

Once I returned home with said articles, I put them in my closet and didn’t think much about them.

Time out. Remember the time that Papa took all of the decorative pillows off of my bed because he said that if he were to ever want to go and lie down on my bed to take a nap, he didn’t want to have to move the pillows out of the way? In essence, the decorative pillows were blocking his potential napping spot.

You never heard that story before? Well it happened. He put all 8 of my pillows in the utility closet on the other end of the house.

We have lived in this house for five years and I have lived with them for thirteen. He has never laid his head anywhere except the sofa or his bed. Or the recliner.

Back to the shrine. Granny found the portrait and had it matted and framed. She also found a frame for the awkward name drawing/painting. An arduous task it was, but she was unrelenting in her quest. 

I shall interject here to say that Granny and Papa don’t put a lot of thought into artwork placement. If there is a nail in the general vicinity of where they want something to hang, then they stick it on that nail and call it a day.

Exhibit A: I purchased a large oil impressionist painting and hung it in my bedroom beside my bed. It took a few tries but I finally got it just right. Papa always hated it so he took it down and left a few nails in its place.

Enter, Granny. The portrait currently hangs at about 6’ and the name is directly below it, centered perfectly. Somewhere along the way another random nail entered the picture. It now holds a family portrait of Granny, Papa and I that we had done back when I was still a blonde.  It’s an interesting collage to say the least. The Moaner thinks it’s hilarious.

Exhibit B: When we first moved into our house, I had three pictures flanking each side of my bed. They were level and symmetrically spaced. Once I decided that I no longer wanted pictures of dresses in my room, I took them down but the nails remained.

Currently, on the right side of my bed there are two pictures occupying two of three nails. One is of a friend from high school and another of Papa and his favorite dog, Susie. The pictures are 5x7 and 8x10. Nowhere near large enough to hang. Did I mention that they’re hanging at about 6 foot?

On the left side there is a picture that I had framed while I was in college of a couple dancing. It is more to scale, but the color scheme doesn’t exactly “go.”

The moral of this rambling story is this: it doesn’t matter how many beautiful things I buy or how many times I move my pillows back into my bedroom. If Papa doesn’t like it, it goes. That, and if there’s a nail somewhere, Granny will hang something on it.

**Granny, please do not take down my artwork. I’ve grown to love it and would be very sad if I came home tomorrow to find the shrine gone and my picture of Papa and Susie in a drawer somewhere. I love my yard sale room!

Love,

Me

Ps. Once I decide to stop being lazy, I'll take pics so stay tuned for an update to this post!

Grammer

My obsession with correcting others' grammatical errors began in a small classroom. It was seventh grade English and I hated it. We had paper back books that served as work/text books. While most of my classmates used their books for assignments, I used mine for practicing signing my name, listing all of my friends and drawing random animals, flowers and swirlys. I was a doodler.

This particular class was terrible. It was immediately after lunch so we were all fighting off the afternoon slump and trying our best to pay attention to our teacher explain prepositional phrases and gerunds. Gerunds? I don't even know what that word means anymore.

The only thing that kept us awake was the sporadic gas episodes of a fellow classmate. He would eat bean and cheese quesadillas EVERY SINGLE DAY for lunch. While we were all doing everything we could to stay awake, he was over in the corner gassing all of us. We would break out into fits of laughter and shake violently. Half of us were beet red and the other half was doubled over. It was disgusting, but thinking back on that muggy classroom makes me chuckle every time.

We never had the heart to tell the teacher what we were laughing at because we didn't want to hurt his feelings. We suffered through it for better or worse. Oh, how I lived for pizza day. He loved pizza so we were all spared the first and third fridays of the month.

God bless Pizza Hut. Amen.

Anyway, I became addicted to correcting grammar after that point. To this day, I can her someone say "I'm doing good," or, "I ain't never seen that before" from a mile away. Call me a snob or know it all if you will, but I just can't help myself.

The other day after a particularly long day at work, I was driving home when a sign caught my attention. It was for a new store downtown advertising affordable fashions.

"Fashion with flair at prices you can bare."

Bare? Unless we're undressing the prices, I'm guessing someone didn't run that slogan through a word processor.

I do love my small town and the local dialect does come with its own unique set of grammatical allowances and quirks. The locals can keep their double negatives.

I'll just keep fighting the good fight.

Nothing's worser than bad grammer, after all.

Jelly

While I was in college, the oversized wrist watch trend hit. And hit it did. Everyone I knew had a Michael Kors watch. One friend's was gold, another's cream. Mine is tortoise shell.

There's also a black one that I accidentally bought one day when I was feeling sorry for myself. They're beautiful watches and I had to stop going to Nordstrom because two is more than enough.

I'm attaching pictures below so that you can get a good visual. That, and to help you appreciate the following story fully.

As you all do not know, I have recently begun working at an insurance agency in the smallest town I've ever frequented. It's the good kind of small town. It's got a few cute shops, a drug store/everything store, and two and a half restaurants. I say a half because most of them are closed on numerous days of the week. Except Subway. 

I wore black pants on the first day of work and the towns people looked at me like I was an alien. I wore wedges on the second day and the towns people looked at me like I was an alien. I wore jeans and sandals on the third day and the towns people smiled at me and didn't stare. It was a great relief.

On the fourth day I wore my tortoise shell watch to work. I actually wear it every day, but this day I had on 3/4 sleeves and it was easily visible.

I was talking to a particular lady who must have been in her sixties. We were almost done with our conversation when she spotted my watch. 

**Time out. Let me take this moment to say that the only mall that sells these watches is two hours away from this town. It is highly likely that she has seen my watch or even knows who Michael Kors is, juding by her elastic ankle sweat pants. I take great pride in my accessories so the following conversation metaphorically knocked the wind out of me.**

Spotting my watch, she says "Oh, I've got one of them jelly watches but it's purple. I got it at the drug store and I paid $5 for it. I hear people pay as much as $10 for them. That's just too much if you ask me." 

This is a jelly watch.

Welcome to rural Georgia. You can pick up your watch at the drug store. Just watch for price gouging. I hear they charge $10 in some parts.

Hiatus

I'm a terribly inconsistent blogger. I know this.

I also know that my brain isn't formulating coherent sentences today.

I've spent the past week studying 10 hours a day. The good news is I passed the state insurance licensing tests. The bad news is that I fried a whole bunch of synapses and I fear they're down for the count.

As a result, my brain is taking a break and I can't do nothin' about it. Maybe it'll come back to me by morning. I sure do hope so. I need it for work.

Say a prayer and cross yourselves or whatever you non-Catholics do.

(I'm a Baptist. I cross myself, too. Makes me feel like I'm adding some good juju onto my prayers.)

Good night, y'all.

Ps. I jumped into my bed after sprinting across my dark room. I have issues.