Here’s a shot of Merrinette and Taylee, her lovely grand-daughter.

Note the crown of significance on her head.  BIRTHDAY GIRL!

Here she is sporting a different crown.  This one is a bit more…less slutty laid back than the, ahem, after five one above.   It never hurts a girl to have a good choice of crowns.  And please take a moment to notice how well her hair poofed up behind it,(we DO live in Texas, after all), AND the sparkle in her eyes.

And here’s the evil siblings sisters themselves!  Merrinette and Kerry Lynda.  AKA Auntiepoo and Mither.  Here comes trouble!

And it wouldn’t be a post of pictures of the two of them without the gratuitous shot of them trying vainly to have only the one chin.  Yes, that is exactly what they’re doing.  There is nothing unusual on the ceiling.

Did I mention they’re a little nuts and I come by it quite honestly?  Yeah, well…..ya know.

Moving right along.

Fajitas!!!! And we ate and ate and ate.  And then we were so full we decided we needed to take a nap.

BUT!  Before we returned we went by one of my favorite places in Decatur!

Here are Mither and Auntiepoo going into the wonderful, magical Main Street Home and Gardens.  Possibly my favorite place ever.  Other than Mither’s!  And Auntiepoo’s!  Whew!  Couldn’t forget that!

Here are just a few pics to whet your appetite until tomorrow when I show you all around the place!  It really is a magic spot and besides, it’s where I get the black magic stuff to keep H in line we are all going to have lunch the next time I go visit.  Sadly, we didn’t have time this day.

Free Toes, everybody!

I am being threatened again, by family and… “loved” ones.  I am being told that if I don’t post again immediately, well, there will be consequences.

You don’t want to know.

So here’s what’s going on at chez Lopez now and for the past six months few days.

As you probably remember, there was another auspicious occasion to go along with Mother’s Day.  My birthday was the day before.  I promised pictures when I wasn’t feeling too lazy to work on it and since I am now properly motivated, here they are.

Here’s John and I at Olive Garden.  I gained 50 pounds that night, and it’s all in my neck… and boobs.  I SWEAR my neck doesn’t look that wide in real life.  My boobs, however… Yeah, that’s about it.

We had a wonderful time and I got all kinds of gifts and whatnots.  The whatnots were especially great, but what would you expect?  I know everyone has had tons of fun with their whatnot’s before and you know of what I speak.

Here I am with my adoring fans.  I know you thought I really didn’t have any so I am attempting to provide proof.  John took this and I have to admit that every night there is a fight to see who can get in my lap first when I sit down in the living room with John to watch TV and talk.  Please click on the picture and notice that there are three (3) animals ergonomically packed into the chair with me.  There is the one small dog slid in over there on the right trying not to be noticed, cause if I get feeling claustrophobic after a bit, or just plain HOT (and who wouldn’t), they all have to be dumped out.

Going   back a ways, the last time I was at World Market I found the neatest little pair of earrings.  They are freshwater pearl on a sterling silver wire.  And, they were ten bucks.  I LOVE them.  They are comfortable to sleep in and came with little, tiny, clear acrylic backs that keeps them from wriggling out of my ear.  Cause if something can wriggle off of me, it will.  Except the pets… I think we all can agree that I am doomed to be smothered by the pets.

Moving right along…

This tree, planted between my house and the neighbors is in bloom and it is the neatest thing!  The blooms, that are ALL OVER IT smell like lavender.  And I guess they look a tad like it too.

The leaves, however, look like marijuana.

Well, they DO.

I have named it the “Lavender Marijuana Tree”.  It sounds like a kind that should be very expensive.

And finally we come to my new Haan steam mop!  Ignore the little old lady in the background.  She continually throws food onto the floor for the dogs, (and they DO NOT clean it up well), and she’s the reason I need the steam mop in the first place….  Yeah.  That’s what I’m going to run with.

Anyway, Mither gave it to me because I had told her how badly I wanted one and there is genuinely a NEED for it.  She’s wonderful like that!

This bad boy does it all and with only a cup of water.  Of course it needs someone to run it around and before that happens the floors need all the pet hair and food scraps swept up off of it.  My chiropractor specifically told me not to sweep or mop for a couple of days.

What?  Chiropractor?  Krissa, you must lead an exciting life doing all kinds of adventurous things to have to go and see a chiropractor.

Yeah, well… OK, sure.

John went with me and I was glad he did so he could see and verify that I wasn’t just making up big fat fibs about how archaic the machinery looks in there.  Plus I felt like it wouldn’t hurt for him to hear all the cracking that happened when she “adjusted” me.

I feel  better now and go back again on Friday.  Henrietta, on the other hand is going on a diet.  She laughed when I told her that…  I don’t know why she thought I was joking…

It’s late now and I am tired and am about to go to bed.  John is snoring lightly in the chair beside me and he’s off work tomorrow.  So we will get all kinds of things done.  Maybe.

Free toes, everybody!

The other day I decided to cook a chicken, rotisserie style, on the grill.  We have the gizmo that you plug in and it turns the bird on a spit via an electric box bolted to the side of our monstrosity of a grill.

This, in and of itself, is not that noteworthy.  However, I would pay big bucks, (if I had them), to have had someone take footage of me trying to get that damn chicken on that spit.  That sucker is 45″ long.  I looked like a dwarf trying to maneuver that stupid chicken onto that spit and not skewer anything or anyone else, (including myself).  WAY harder than you’d think!  I never never would have thought it would be so awkward.

See the two prong things.  Well you, (and of course by “you” I mean me), have to tighten one of them on there at the right spot that the chicken needs to be on the grill and then ram the bird down on top of them impaling it and not any part of yourself, most specifically your hands.  And, once again, by “you” and “yours”, I mean ME!

Then, you slide the other pokie thing down on the other end of the chicken, shoving it hard so that it impales the damn thing as you cuss and laugh manically.  Then tighten it down with a pair of pliers because your hands are too sore from multiple stab wounds to do it without them.

After shoving placing the spit into the hole of the turning deal and and resting the other end in the… other end receptacle, I flipped the switch on and left it alone on low for a solid hour.  It was about an 8 pound chicken.

It took every bit of that time to clean my kitchen with anti-bacterial spray everywhere some sort of raw chicken/chicken juice squirted and/or landed.  That was several days ago and I still don’t feel entirely clean.  I am probably a walking salmonella factory.

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I am now watching Craig Ferguson and it’s a rerun, (So much for up to the minute reporting.  Snort!), and he’s saying that Michelle Obama “TOUCHED the queen.”  I am guessing he’s talking about The Queen of England.  He’s acting like it was a mistake and a horrible faux paus, however he tends to be a tad sarcastic and facetious at the least, when it comes to anyone English. (He IS Scottish.)

I’m still wondering what the story is?  And how do you “make up” for “touching” somebody?

Henrietta had a visitor today.  Her next door neighbor from her old neighborhood that she hasn’t seen in about 5 years came to see her today.    My SIL, to her credit, brought her out to see her.   She was absolutely beside herself with joy.  It was so funny, she saw her from across the room right  when she entered the doorway and she practically yelled, “Barbara!”  They sat and talked for hours and hours.  It really did make Henrietta’s week to be able to sit and chat and get caught up on all the neighborhood gossip.  Especially what’s going on in the house she and Marcos lived in for close to 50 years.  Her eye’s grew huge as Barb related tales of how the woman that lives there with the three grown men is married to one of them, but she goes out partying till all hours of the night with the other ones and she’s had two babies since she’s been there and nobody in the neighborhood knows whose children they are!    THIS? Is exactly the kind of crapola Henrietta lives for.

She will be talking about this visit and all the accompanying gossip for a solid week.  To me.  And the really funny part will be the way the stories will grow and grow in her mind as time passes.  Eventually, her house will have become a brothel with a line of men outside and circling the block.

I will keep you appraised of the situation.  It’s only right.

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The… boyfriend-in-law was outside giving my yard a makeover.  That’s about the only way to describe the before and after shots that make a jungle look tame.  It was VERY bad.  He showed up about 1:00 and finished and left at 4:00.  Three hours to mow and weed-eat a front and back yard the size of mine if ridiculous.  THAT is how bad it was.

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Tomorrow is Easter and do ya wanna know what my plans are?  Do ya, huh, do ya?  Get a load of this!

Nothing.

The SIL and her bunch of people that descend on my house for every holiday, to consume as much as possible of everything I cook and then leave as soon as they’ve eaten, are… otherwise engaged.  Where?  Who cares.  It is going to be quiet and I might put a ham in the oven.  I might not.  I might cook the Easter bunny if he pisses me off.

WOO-HOO!  Reel me in, I am COMPLETELY out of control.

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Last night I called Mither and asked her what she was doing.  She told me she was about to watch a Maverick’s basketball game.

I had better preface this little rambling with the fact that there has never been a bigger Dallas Maverick’s fan than both Mither and Auntie-Poo.

Aaaaanyway, she mentioned to me, (not for the first time), at some point in our conversation that she was not supposed to be talking to anyone on the phone when the game is on because Auntie-Poo might call and yell at her if she wasn’t paying good attention to the game and couldn’t keep up with what Antie-Poo was talking about.

We laughed about this, just because they are both fairly hopeless and then I told her I was going to wait until the game started and I was going to call Auntie-Poo and chat aimlessly to her for a while and then call her back several times.  Just cause I’m that way.  Ya know?

All of the sudden I heard evil laughter and Mither said that I should call her at exactly 8:30 then she would call her at 8:33 and when Auntie-Poo told her she was on the other line talking to me, Mither would yell at her that she WAS NOT ALLOWED TO TALK ON THE PHONE WITH ANYONE ELSE DURING THE BALL GAMES!

So I did this and all went to plan and when Aunti-Poo came back to me after Mither called her I asked who it was and she said, “Oh, it was your mother and she told me I have to get off the line cause the basketball game is on.”  We both agreed it was absurd that SHE have to get off the line and when I told her that we set her up to be caught she decided that she would have all my cousins call Mither one at a time, just to “chat”, during the game.  There are four of them.

That was the last I’ve heard of them.  I haven’t talked to either one of them today and they are out of pocket.  I left messages for both of them to call me, so I will follow up sometime.

Sometimes I wonder at the mechanics of this family.

We went to Hobby Lobby, Garden Ridge Pottery and out to eat at Cheddars.  No, it’s not a cheesy place.  I don’t know why it has such a horrible name.  Really good food.  We had a wonderful time.

Kes came home from school in time for me to stay out as long as I wanted with Lisa and Mimi.  We had loads of fun.

I came home and now H is fed and in bed and I am waiting for my hubby to come home as it is our 20th anniversary! I got him a new cell phone for his gift as he desperately needed one and I think I got some perfume and I’m not sure what else…  I will see and report back.

On the bleak side of things, I have a rather disturbing picture I am going to shock and appall entertain you with.

The following is an image of my dear mither’s foot about a week after her foot surgery.

Yes, what you are seeing is a pin with a large white ball head on it, sticking out the end of her second toe.  Strangely, what bothers her most, (besides the pain from the surgery), is the blood around her toenails that she can’t clean off well due to the fact that she’s not supposed to get it wet.

The Pin started out pushed all the way in.  It has slowly worked it’s way out and is not supposed to do that.  She hadn’t walked on it at all and yet, it was wriggling out slowly.  She went back to the doc today and he said something like,

“Hummmmmm.”

And then he strapped some tape and gauze around the whole thing and duct taped it to the back of her ankle said he thinks it’ll be fine.

Doesn’t LOOK fine.  Looks gross.

At least child number two and her friend are going to go and see Mither and Pop for spring break.  They will be a really big help, I know.

I wish I could go.

This year they are having it on the 31st and the theme is ancient Rome.  We received an invitation that had two copies of the same cast of characters in it and on each list there was one name that was highlighted.  One of the characters was a Roman Senator and the other was a Vestal Virgin.  So I kinda took things into my own hands and told John I was going to be the senator and he was going to be a vestal virgin.  I had to explain how funny this was going to be a few times before I got him on board with the whole plan.  After all they didn’t assign us the rolls they just indicated that these were the two that we were supposed to play.

Mither and I went out and bought John some false eyelashes and found an old costume for him to wear and fashioned a veil from some pink organza and a laurel of silk roses.   He already has some leather flip flops that he can wear and I will wrap pink ribbon up his legs to look like Roman sandals.

He will be a real head turner.  I have to stop making remarks about his “virginity”.  He seems quite sensitive about this.  He said something like, “Gosh, it’s been a long time since I was a virgin… at least 5 years…”

I told him that the Romans didn’t wear anything under their toga’s but I really think it would be a good idea if he did cause we wouldn’t want anyone to think he was “easy” or anything since he IS playing the part of a virgin.

My costume is fairly elaborate in that it is about a million miles of white cotton fabric trimmed in purple rope gimp.  We worked long and hard on how to… toga it.  I kinda hate to think about cutting it down smaller since it was originally a valance in my dining room and may have a future as such again.

I have some other fancy stuff to my get-up, but I will take pictures and show you after the party.  I am looking forward to it and John said that there is NO WAY I will be allowed to post a picture of him dressed as a woman.  I will just tell him to put his veil down and no one will see his face.  Heh.

We also did some sleuthing!

Now I bet you are all wondering what happened with Henrietta’s aide/thief that we suspect swiped the $100 out of my purse.  Well, we set up the camera that Lisa had loaned me that is motion activated.   Got it all set up on top of the fridge and John and Pop left and then Mither announced, (loudly), that we needed to run over to Lisa’s house to see what was going on with her.  So I told the aide and H that we’d be back later and we left.

John got home first and found the camera lying on it’s back on top of the extremely tall refrigerator.  It was lying in a manner that it was incapable of “falling” into.   It was incapable of falling in the first place.  He took the card out and he and Keelan were looking at the pictures when we got home.  There are a lot of them simply because it snapped one every time the light went on or off or anyone left or came in, but here are a few showing what happened and in the order it happened.

Here is John leaving.  My purse is on the counter on the right.  You can see the top of the faucet in the sink in the wet bar.  My purse is the blob to the left of it.  Right beneath the “10″.

Here is Mither leaving and I am right behind her.  I guess the light was on in the kitchen since the wall is now green, (as it really is), and it looks turquoise in the first one…

And here is the last one it took.  You can see the fingers and the double exposure from the movement.  It happened 8 minutes after we left.  Undoubtedly she saw the camera on top of the fridge and turned it over.  I hadn’t left any cash or credit cards in my purse but she didn’t know that until she looked.  Henrietta said that she stood “behind the counter” to watch the soap opera with her and she didn’t know why she didn’t sit down like she usually did. She said she kept going and looking out the window and then going back to stand at the counter.  The widow is to the left outside the frame of the picture.

I do.

Henrietta doesn’t know that we suspect the aide of anything.  She doesn’t know about the missing money, or the camera or any of it.  She has such a negative view of the world and all it’s inhabitants anyway, we all just think it’s better that she not feel like she was duped.  The sad part is that she really likes this aide a lot.  They spoke Spanish to each other and H was thrilled with this as her Spanish was really rusty and getting to be more and more of a second language all the time.  She did an excellent job with her and they really got along well.

I will just tell her that the company had to send her to another area or something and she has to have a new aide.  Oh, I don’t know.. I’ll have to think it through.  I have to have a better story than that, I guess…

John asked H where the aide was and where all she went while we were gone and then I did too, separately. and she then got the idea that something was wrong and when she asked if something was missing and I lied and said, “No.”, she got a bit defensive for her.  She told me that she was a good person and there was no reason to “look into her”.   I feel really bad, but I have enough to go on and I called the company and told them not to send her back and that I wasn’t accusing her of anything, (after all I don’t have any hard evidence), but that I didn’t want her back because I couldn’t risk trusting her.  I asked to talk to the owner but she was out of town for a “few days” so I told the lady what had happened and she was nice, but I can tell there was no way they could afford to lose any employees so I feel sure they won’t fire her even if they have reports of this kind of thing happening before.

I hope to talk to the owner when she gets back in town.

The last one was uncharacteristically long.  More than, probably anyone wanted to hear from me.   I was full of angst. (That’s my excuse, in case you didn’t know.)

Mither and Pop are coming to see me and they are on their way here RIGHT NOW.  I gots to get this dump cleaned up!  Change the sheets on their bed!  Start a grocery list for supper tonight!  Clean the bathtub!  Finish the laundry!  Locate all obscene graffiti written in the dust on my furniture and add or subtract letters to make it more grandparent friendly.

FIND MY DAMN GLASSES.  They are gone, people!  I have looked everywhere!  Remember, I just got them a short while back and I cannot function for very long without having to actually READ something.  I took them off when John got home yesterday and they have been gone ever since.  I cannot remember where I was!

Oh crap!  I gotta get going!  Before I do I will share with you that I have a new look coming for HalfAsstic and am excited about it.  Cam is working on it as I type.  Well, actually, that’s not true as he’s in Italy and is seven hours ahead of us, (he’s asleep), but he’s already done some things that I really like.

Anyway, stay tuned!

Free Toes, everybody!

Now.  Keeping that in mind how often would you think we see snow?  Not often.  The freakiest thing I will ever be able to say about snow down here happened four years ago on Christmas Eve.  That’s right.  We had one of those rare snowfalls that only happens about once every 5 to 7 years and it was on Christmas Eve.  It was so beautiful Christmas morning.  My dear Miter and Pop live up a little bit north of Ft. Worth and get snow, usually every year.  Though, not always a lot of it.  They are both from the small town they live in and have never in their lives had a white Christmas.  It was pretty surreal calling them and telling them we were having one.

Last night it snowed again.  We got a good blanket of it and all my vegetation is bum-fuzzled.

Here’s crazy Kes out on the front porch in her nightgown! She doesn’t mind the cold, I guess…

Keelan with a severe case of dandruff… She does not seem to mind, though.

Doofus and Goofus

Unhappy bushes covered with white cold stuff.  They all got themselves pulled up and left in the morning, bitching the whole time.  They never did appreciate me…

This is my BIRD OF PARADISE.  It is so tropical it could (and does) live in Hawaii.  Only not this one.  It was silently screaming, “Aaaaaahhhh!  Get this cold shit off of me!  I am tropical, dammit!  My best friends are azaleas!  Even St. Francis in the bird bath was cussing…  It was bad.  But very pretty!  And I say that’s what counts!

1. I think she’s probably lying fibbing.

2. I think she’s a pansy-assed coward for not doing it.

3. I don’t even think it’s very impressive to make up such wild stories so closely related to my heroic button sewing on while wearing the pants.

4. I sure do love her for making a game effort at giving me something to post about.  (Maybe next time she could actually DO it and then get pictures of the finished product.)

This morning Henrietta told me the music is back.  Actually I asked her when it started and she says she almost always hears it, sometimes just “more” than others.  This would be the mysterious music she hears mostly in her deaf ear that nobody else can hear.  Sometimes “they” are singing in Spanish, sometimes Italian, and sometimes in English.  Often she is offended by the naughtiness of the songs and how “nasty” they are.  It’s always a male singer, (to the best of my knowledge), and late at night and early in the morning seems to be the most frequent times for this phenomenon.  She told me today they were singing in English and then she smiled and said, “Well, I’m just waiting… pretty soon I should be getting Christmas Carols!”

And then she laughed and high fived me!

It’s November and it’s National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo, as everyone is calling it.  I should have mentioned this yesterday on November 1st, but, hey, I’m just unorthodox, non conformist, a freak like that.  So the deal is that if you are going to take up the NaBloPoMo challenge you whip out a post every single day for the whole month.  I’m not sure I can come up with anything good to say, but jabber has always been one of my specialities.

I dunno, people.  John has had two days off in a row and went back to work today and of course the store is a hellhole.  (One of the reasons he hates to be off two days back to back.)  I think his boss really thinks he’s doing him a favor when he does this to his schedule.

I have been discussing the situation with Witchy-poo and she was of the opinion that they were possibly softening him up before sending him to the new, gi-normous, grand opening store.

I don’t think they’re concerned enough about how he feels to bother with softening him up.  This just sounds nothing like them.  His immediate boss is a fairly nice guy, though a bit incompetent.  But the higher up one is a tee-total bitch.  I believe, in my heart of hearts, she is very proud of this.

Kes just came home from work and dashed in to nab my credit card and run out and buy herself some new bras.  She was in worse shape than me, if that’s possible.  (Yes, it is.)  She had only one bra left and recently the underwire broke through and gouged into her boob leaving a nasty puncture wound.  I couldn’t believe it when she showed me the wire.  It was sharp as a needle!  A man must have designed it.

It’s 1:50 PM now and I’m just waiting for H to poo.  I believe I will do some laundry.

It is now 3:23 and H is pooed and dressed and in the wheel chair.  Except for feeding her, I am done for the day until time to put her to bed.  Unless there is the dreaded U.P. (For those of you so unfortunate you missed a particular explanatory post, this means “unscheduled poop”.  Try to keep up.  There may be a test.)

On October 25th, while my dear Mither and Pop were here, my good friend, Lisa had a birthday and we felt it very necessary to celebrate with great food and even better company.  Here is Lisa blowing out the candles that I lovingly placed on her birthday cake.

There was some discussion about the actual numerical amount represented by the flaming digits on the cake.

I was concerned that I may have gotten the number wrong because I wasn’t sure if the third candle is a one or a seven.  Lisa was, as usual a good sport about it and insists that when you hit 65,000 whats 600 years give or take?  I guess I can see her point.

You too can achieve this affect if you save every single numerical candle your kids have ever used on a cake.  And it could have been even longer if the cake was bigger!

I am going to call dear Mither and ask her for the recipe for this particular cake and be so generous as to give it to YOU!  It is, really, the very best cake in the world.  Lisa has had it before and she has told me many times that it’s her fav, too.  For a scratch cake it’s really very easy.

It’s supposed to be called Chocolate Sheet Cake, but, it’s known around here as BIRTHDAY CAKE.

BIRTHDAY CAKE

(CHOCOLATE)

2 c. sugar

2 c. flour

4 Tbsp. cocoa

1 stick butter

1 c. boil water

Add the following in this order and beat after each:

2 eggs

1/2 c. buttermilk

1 tsp. soda

1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 tsp. salt

Bake in greased and floured 9×13 sheet cake  pan at 400 for 20ish minutes.  Frost as soon as it comes out of the oven.

FROSTING

Bring to a boil:

1 stick butter

4 Tbsp. cocoa

1/3 cup of milk

Add one box of confectioners sugar (2 cups), and 1 teaspoon vanilla.  Mix well.  One cup of nuts, (optional).

THAT is the most moist cake I have ever tasted… Moistest?  Moisty?  Moistester?

Whatev.