Prepping for the Bloggershoot!!

Preparing for the Bloggershoot

Camera? Check!

Pen and spiral-bound notebook? Check!

SIG 239 in 9 mm? Check!

Vorpal ammo? Check!

Flour, baking soda, butter, peanut butter, brown sugar, white sugar, eggs, vanilla, peanut butter cups, Hershey kisses? Check!

Flour, baking soda, butter, chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, brown sugar, white sugar, eggs, vanilla and cinnamon? Check!

Enough bug spray to take on mosquitoes the size of crabapples? Check!

Random stuffed animals, water balloons and plastic toys? Crap, gotta stop at Goodwill tomorrow morning . . .

That is all 🙂

Survey SAAAAAAYS:

Since all the cool kids are doing it . . .

You are 4% hippie.

Ok, you conservative soul. Do you even believe in global warming? Loosen that necktie a little, and try some organic food. It actually does taste better. And go to a farmer’s market–they’re fun.

Are you a hippie?
Take More Quizzes

And that’s with the soy milk that stems from lactose intolerance. Boo-yah!

Workout Wednesday

I almost passed out on my run yesterday.  I think.

I’m not real familiar with fainting — I’ve only done it once* — but as I was finishing the last few minutes of yesterday’s 5K I started feeling nauseated and the world got a little fuzzy.  And cold.  Anytime things get cold after a half hour on the treadmill seems like it would be rather troublesome.

Not wanting to do this, I slowed down by a whole kph while I caught my breath.  After thirty seconds the nausea abated so I sped up again.  I ended up doing 5K in 30:05 — new record for me! Yay!

I seriously haven’t run this far, or this well, since I was eighteen.  I remember training in high school and keeping a running journal — my goal was to run two miles in eighteen minutes.  (You cross-country people, shut up and stop laughing! I’m a sprinter, dammit! Distances are HARD!)  I remember being so proud when I achieved that goal.  I wonder how hard it would be to do nowadays.

Now that I’m all trained up on 5K, we might actually enter a road race.  Once Mike’s ankle recovers he’s thinking of bumping up to the C210K plan (couch to 10k, as opposed to 5K), but I think that’s more running than I want to do on a regular basis 😉

It’s a beautiful summer day, y’all!  Get up, and get active!

*Hmmmm. I don’t believe I’ve told the story of my fainting episode before. Or have I? I’ll do some searching in the archives and let you know.

Today’s Must-Read

Oh. My. God.

Mike and I are going about the business of building a life — figuring out if we’re going to move, doing our homework on buying our first house, joking about housebreaking dogs versus housebreaking children.

But we know that the fates don’t always give you what you want. Or what you expect.

I started this post being a little irked about the writer’s slightly caustic take on how, “Duh,” children don’t make you happier in life.  She wrote, “If there’s an occupation more likely to make you feel incompetent and unrewarded than being a parent, I have never heard of it.”

That was apparently to lull me into a sense of complacency, so that the author could quietly approach and knock my bloody socks off.

Because she continues:

If you weren’t an academic, you might define happiness as the experience of being fully alive. To know grace, and despair, and the kind of hardness you have to learn to stand against; to watch your family fail you when you need them the most, and have your ex-husband look around, shrug his shoulders, and hold out his hand to help you up again.

Right.  Your ex-husband, so that you can learn a bit of gratitude, just enough to appreciate him, which you didn’t manage the first time around.

These are things you’d never know if you hadn’t had your daughter.  Things you wouldn’t have had to know, and learn the hard way, bitterly.

If the medical resident hadn’t sat down while you held your baby girl in the neonatal intensive care unit and said, “Your daughter’s brain is massively deformed.”

The daughter you loved even before she was born.  When she was an abstraction, a positive sign on a pregnancy test, before she kicked you in the ribs, long before she ever drew her first breath. Love you did not know you were capable of feeling, primal and angry and powerful, you would kill ten men and Satan if you had to.

But the universe doesn’t ask that from you.

And the further I read, the more my eyes teared up and my throat got tight:

The sky has fallen down many times in your daughter’s short life, the sky with all the stars in it, and you have picked up the pieces more times than you can remember, and you have climbed the ladder and put them back in place, where you think they should go, and you get things in backwards and out of sequence, but you do the best you can, and you climb down off the ladder, and you’re at peace with your work.  You wish it could be better, but there’s only one of you, and the sky is so vast, it takes a while to put it back together again, and you did the best you could.

And you just went through all that work, and here is the goddamned sky scattered all over the carpet again.

Go.  Read.  Thank the gods and goddesses for the grace in your life, and pray that you are strong enough, or will grow strong enough, to bear the adversity in your life.

Range report: Bushmaster edition

Good morning all!  *slurp* C’mon coffee, do your miracle work and let me stop yawning already . . .

We had a lovely afternoon with Jay G yesterday.  Duh.  Prepare ye for the picture dump!

Jay G starts off our day with the .22 bolt-action; Mike spots for him using the VEPR scope

Mine is upper left, Mike's is upper right, Jay G's is center -- check out those fab-o holes through the red!

Bushmasterrrrrrr! Beware the flying brass!*

For the resulting Bushmaster’d target, I’d like to provide the close up, Mr. DeMille:

That’s my AR-15 grouping.  Pretty sweet, huh?! . . . except . . .

Mike's is top, mine is center, Jay G's is bottom

Riiiiiiight.  My wonderful tight grouping is quite obviously off target.  Boo!  (In my defense, the scope was off; we were having to compensate by using one of the top hatchmarks instead of the crosshairs.  Still, though.)

Jay cut quite a figure playing with Kahr-oline:

And I shot holy hell out of my target with Jay’s Gold Cup .45 and our M&P .45:

(We didn’t let our .45 see Jay’s Gold Cup.  The poor thing would’ve gotten a complex, and she’s a perfectly serviceable well-behaving gun.  No point in waving a beauty queen’s pinup in the wife’s face, y’know?)

A lovely time was had by all  🙂  Thanks so much for hosting us, Jay!

And Happy Monday, all!

*Well, it was either flying brass or this moronic groundhog that showed up a few times.  Darwin was WRONG, dude.  Any wildlife stupid enough to hang out at a gun range should’ve gone extinct several years ago.

Happy Caturday: Contortionist edition

Just hangin' out, chillin' with my leg over my head

What? Somethin' wrong with how I roll?

Whatever. I've seen you painting your toenails and you don't look any more dignified, so stuff it.

Guess we’re not moving south after all

‘Cause Mike asked if we could move to Bell, California instead, so we can make a run at public office and earn lots of money.

It was the first council meeting since the Los Angeles Times reported July 15 that Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo earns $787,637 — with annual 12 percent raises — and that Bell pays its police chief $457,000, more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck makes in a city of 3.8 million people. Bell council members earn almost $100,000 for part-time work.

Now, morally, I’m not questioning the personal worthiness of the CAO nor the police chief.  (Especially the police chief.  Hell, if we lived in the wonderland utopia that some people think is possible I’d be in favor of paying a half-mil to anyone willing to get shot while protecting the public.)  But I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt that personal character, in a town of 38,000 people, translates to that sort of green.

Tar and feathers, dear people.  Tar and feathers.  (h/t Hot Air)

Oh, and also?  This is the most pathetic, half-assed, I’m-so-sorry-I-got-caught-by-you-subhuman-cretins statement that I’ve seen in quite a while:

I made poorly considered remarks about Rush Limbaugh to what I believed was a private email discussion group from my personal email account. As a publicist, I realize more than anyone that is no excuse for irresponsible behavior. I apologize to anyone I may have offended and I regret these comments greatly; they do not reflect the values by which I conduct my life.

As TOTWTYTR says:

Note that she apologizes to anyone that she might have offended, but didn’t apologize specifically to Limbaugh or specifically for wishing him dead. This is a non apology of the weaselly sort that politicians give when caught doing something wrong.

Spitz should have apologized directly to Limbaugh for her comments, without and equivocation, but apparently admitting when she is wrong isn’t one of those values by which she conducts her life.

Exactly.  Pull up your big girl panties, admit you got caught saying nasty things, apologize to the subject of the nasty words, or go home.

Happy Friday, all!  Try to keep your feet out of your mouths . . . or, lacking that, remember that emails and the Intrawebz are forever 😉

Movie Review: All Saints Day

Short review: Yay! Happy movie!

Longer review: I think you have to be a big Boondock Saints (the first one) fan to love this movie.  Luckily, I am 🙂

It’s got the same quick, clever dialogue and campy relationship between the brothers that I enjoyed in the first movie.  I particularly enjoy the sibling-whapping that regularly ensues, such as the below (language warning!):

(Norman Reedus hasn’t aged particularly well, I must note.)

And while I adore Willem Dafoe, I just love Julie Benz in the FBI ass-kicker role.  If nothing else, I loved this: They dressed her in tight outfits (per usual Hollywood norms) and had her OPEN CARRY.  INSTEAD OF PRETENDING THAT HER SKINTIGHT OUTFIT MAGICALLY HID A LARGE HANDGUN. *cough cough BURN NOTICE cough IN THE LINE OF FIRE cough NCIS cough cough* etc.  HALLELUJAH!

(That’s CLEARLY a stage gun, so no yelling about improper gun handling, m’kay?)

OF COURSE it’s not as good as the first one.  They never are.  But they bring back all my favorite characters, have some really fun scenes and dialogue, and entertained me very well.  That’s all I ask of a sequel.

P.S. WHY, oh WHY, do Hollywood guns go FORWARD when the trigger is squeezed?  It’s against all laws of physics!!!

Workout Wednesday: Turning point?

On Monday I jogged for 31 minutes and made 5K on the treadmill.  Hooray!!! Seriously, I think that’s the farthest I’ve jogged without a break since I was 18 and doing varsity track.  But that’s only half of it.

On Saturday I jogged for 31:11 minutes and made 3 miles.  And I was in the potential Lissaville South.

Last week I made my three days of exercise easily.  That included workouts in Canada and in Lissaville South.

I’m actually dedicated enough — or optimistic enough! — that I’m working out in foreign countries and trips to the South.

Does that mean exercise is the new normal?  Yes.

Does it mean it’s a no-brainer, a habit now?  No!  There is ALWAYS the chance that I’ll miss a few days.  And then a few more.  And that will turn into a week, two weeks, a month, and more. The Charity Challenge still provides necessary incentive.

But . . . I’m proud of myself for the 5K.  And I hope to keep going.  🙂