Saturday Silliness

Seriously, I rarely go looking for dolls, but sometimes it seems like they come looking for me. Like when this guy showed up unsummoned in my email. I took one look at the blonde mess on his head and decided he needed me. (You know he had an agenda when he dressed in that houndstooth vest and New Wave tie–how does that not scream, “SAVE ME!” to me specifically?)

I’ll put the rest of this foolishness behind a cut so you can see what I spent a bit of time doing when I was also managing serious dogsitting/relocating while workers were on the property.

Continue reading “Saturday Silliness”

Photo Friday, No. 781

Current Photo Friday theme: Sacred

A random collection of items from throughout my home, these aren’t all the cultural objects that are at Houndstooth Hall. They symbolize: birth, death, sacrifice, worship, religion, nature, animal totems, angels, magic, myth, music, art, the cosmos.

Many of them, along with those not pictured, represent what I hold most sacred: their givers, who have been my friends and family throughout my life.

Shuffling through Wednesday

There’s a lot of action at Houndstooth Hall on this Wednesday, and it will be noisy, so I may have to be gone for a while to preserve my sanity. Someone I follow on social media posted snippets from a meme. You’re supposed to shuffle your music library and write down the song that matches each category below. Pretty sure you can find all of these on YouTube if you’re curious about any you don’t recognize.

1 This song will play at your wedding
Beatles: If I Fell (wedding was long ago, but it’s perfect, because I have an entire unwritten novel’s love story based around this song, lol)

2 This song best describes how you die
Gregg Allman: These Days (apparently I’m going to die of guilt for how I mistreated a lost love)

3 This song will play at your funeral
Lenka: Trouble Is a Friend (trouble must have been TOO good a friend)

4 This song is your theme song
Taio Cruz: Dynamite (hell, yeah, I’m gonna rock this club, I’m gonna light it up like it’s dynamite)

5 This song will play when you think of someone you love
Mr. Mister: Broken Wings (this song always makes me think of Paul McCartney, and I DO love him; it’s true)

6 This song will play when you think of someone you dislike
The Alan Parsons Project: I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You (damn, my iTunes library is psychic)

7 This song will play when you get something you want
Portugal. The Man: Feel It Still (hmm, the first time I ever heard this song, it played on a TV show while two girls were shoplifting)

8 Add “with a lighter and matches” to the end of this song
Gary Jules: Mad World (with a lighter and matches) (it works!)

9 This song best describes your week ahead
Don Henley: The Boys of Summer (don’t look back, you can never look back)

10 This song will make you fall asleep
Fleetwood Mac: Sara (possibly, but there are other likelier candidates)

Toasty

There was a floor furnace in the house on Twelfth Avenue my friends and I rented when we were undergraduates at Bama. I remember so many fall and winter days coming home from class, exhausted and cold, to sit or lie next to the grate of that furnace so I could get and stay warm. It was an old house with very little insulation and windows that often allowed cold air to whistle through their frames into the rooms.

Often, I’d fall asleep, and my feet would slip or relax and land on the furnace. The soles of my shoes would start to put off a scorched smell that woke me up before much harm was done.

I’m chilled today, though it’s not that cold outside, so I’m sleepy. Fortunately, our gas fireplace isn’t turned high enough to scorch my socks. I can barely keep my eyes open as I edit. Geez, I hope my novel isn’t boring.

All cats are grey

The reason for another coloring page is because I ended up giving myself a massive headache last night. I had dinner cooking when I decided to go back to Tim’s to give him his mail and have a chat of ten minutes or so to catch up after his return home from Maine.

Beware: long and winding story ahead.

Suddenly I realized 25 minutes had passed, but I wasn’t too worried because Tom was home. When I walked in the door, four dogs were freaking out (and one of them peed on the dog bed in the master bedroom), Tom was trying to shut off the smoke detector, and the house was full of smoke. Nothing from dinner was burned, but the mini meat loafs (loaves?) which I make in muffin pans (meat muffins?) had spilled grease into the bottom of the oven. Tom put a baking pan on the shelf below the muffin pan, which basically meant that meat grease was smoking on two surfaces. Thus the mayhem that followed.

Tom took the dogs to Aunt Debby’s so they’d stop freaking out about the noise from the smoke detector. He also detached the main smoke detector to shut it up. But the smell of burning grease was so overpowering that I lost my appetite. After Tom ate and did dishes, I threw the dog bed in the washing machine and set the oven to clean. If you don’t have a self-cleaning oven, at least a gas one, this means the temperature is so high that the door locks to prevent any injuries. And it basically turns anything on the interior surfaces to ashes. It takes three hours to complete the job.

The smell was by then giving me a headache, so I had four diffusers misting and four sticks of nag champa incense burning in different parts of the house. All the widows were open with fans blowing. When the oven finished cleaning, the dogs came home, the smoke detector was reattached, and everyone went to bed. Except I couldn’t sleep because of the headache, plus I could feel my blood sugar dropping because I didn’t eat. So first I got up and ate a snack and drank some water, then I tried again to sleep. Nope. So then I got up again, put the dog bed in the dryer, and took headache meds and drank more water, plus put the Wyndmere essential oil blend “Head Aide” on my pulse points. All that knocked me out, so SUCCESS.

I still had a residual headache when I woke up today, and my blood sugar was REALLY low. Drank some apple juice, ate some sweetened cereal, and wiped out the oven and cleaned the glass on the oven door and the stove surface. Afterward, I tried to write, but I couldn’t bear to look at the computer monitor, so I colored the rest of my headache away.

Then I thought I was cold, so I went to take a warm shower, but in the shower, I realized I wasn’t cold, I was shaking because my freaking blood sugar was too low again. So after the shower, I finally ate last night’s meal as a late lunch.

Everything’s normal now, and all you got was a long, boring story and a gray cat. The post title comes from The Cure song “All Cats Are Grey” (in the caves), but it’s also a Benjamin Franklin phrase, “All cats are gray in the dark.” So now you got some trivia, too (and I spelled “gray” both ways to satisfy everyone). You’re welcome.

Button Sunday

Happy Halloween! We won’t be giving candy for the second year because of the pandemic, but I’ve had a hell- raising good time through October on Instagram with the Eleventh Earl of Houndstooth Hall, Lord Cuttlebone.

Here’s a spooky Texas-style reminder from a cow skull and some gnomes that if you partake in the eating of the Devil’s Teeth, as I call candy corn, tonight is your free pass to do so.

This is my favorite photo of Lord Cuttlebone from the month. I won’t post all of the photos from October, but I’ll put the music-related ones behind a cut for fun if you want to see them.

Continue reading “Button Sunday”

Questions, No. 6


Forgive me for delving into some of these books for posts. I’m doing a lot of writing right now (this is good news), as well as keeping up with my October skeleton posts on Instagram (staging those photos can take a lot of time), plus trying to take care of household stuff. Yesterday, I emptied all my lower kitchen cabinets and cleaned and reorganized them. It’s so funny to remember The Compound and how limited my cabinet space was and wonder where the heck I kept all this stuff that now fills so many more cabinets–plus a pantry! The kitchen at Houndstooth Hall was a definite selling point for this house.

From the 3000 Questions About Me book: 1474. What three songs will always be found at the top of your playlist?

The first two are easy answers, although they often switch positions. But that third one… I mean, there are hundreds of songs that I never get tired of hearing. But for the sake of answering the question:

1. The Boxer – Simon and Garfunkel
2. Thunder Road – Bruce Springsteen
3. Til I Die – Beach Boys

It’s all about the poetry in those songs’ lyrics (although the music is also fantastic). If you only knew how many Beatles (group and individuals), Randy Newman, Beach Boys, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Byrds, and Bob Dylan songs are eyeballing that number three spot, and I haven’t even mentioned the female artists, who are legion.

It’s funny that I found “Thunder Road” with lyrics that say “Mary’s dress waves.” This is an ongoing battle among fans AND Bruce’s own documents as well as his team’s–whether Mary’s dress waves or sways. I once taught this song with Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” as fine examples of the carpe diem theme, and Mary’s dress was waving in my version. I visualized it as the breeze making the lower half of a dress undulate like waves. To me, “sways” makes it seem like the dress is moving to the sway of hips, and I kind of feel like the sway’s gone out of poor Mary’s life. Listen to the speaker, Mary! Get your sway back and wave goodbye to the ghosts in the eyes of all those boys forever!

I’m sorry, students, if I led you wrong, but I have plenty of support for “waves.”