From this year's Chick-fil-A calendar, One-Hit Wonder Cows:

These rambunctious rawhides from across the pond weren't afraid to ruffle feathers. Their anti-burger-establishment message struck a chord with the feedlot generation; however, after the band scored a hit, their fans considered them sellouts. But to these porterhouses of punk, it was well worth it, because restaurants throughout the kingdom were selling out of chicken.

I don't know if Josie stopped crying or I was just too tired to hear her, but I slept much better and longer last night. Given that I was up at 10:00 this morning, it looks like I'm right back on west coast time already. Mr Moo, however, is not faring so well. After getting home and having a quick bite to eat last night, he fell asleep on the couch for a while then got up just long enough to go upstairs to bed. He said he's suffering badly from jet lag this time, which is unusual for him.

I spent so much time online answering emails and dealing with work stuff yesterday that I never even started any laundry and barely picked up at all. You get three guesses as to what I'll be doing today and the first two don't count.

Last night's Project Runway. Discuss.

As per usual, I picked up a couple pins from our visit to Acadia National Park last week.

The one on the left is the basic park pin. The one on the right is a US Geologic Survey pin for Cadillac Mountain. While we didn't hike Cadillac from foot to summit, we did hike down a good portion of it, over to Dorr Mountain and back again, so I think it's fair to say we hiked the mountain.

It's official. Our garage door opener is possessed. I pulled the car out of the garage to run errands today, but the door would not close when I pressed the remote. I figured the battery had died, so I got out of the car and punched the keypad. The door closed halfway and stopped. Since I was already back in the car, I tried the remote again, just for kicks, and the door finished closing. Weird. Even weirder (and a hella lot more frightening) - when I got home a few hours later, the garage door was wide open. Fortunately, nothing appears to be missing from the garage and the door into the house was locked. After getting everything out of the car, I pressed the button on the wall to close the door and nothing happened. I had to go back in the car and use the remote to get it to close. Then, on top of all that, when I went into the garage to dump some recyclables about 20 minutes later, the door was open again. What the frell?! Mr Moo had trouble getting the door to close when he got home, too, so it's not just me. Guess we'll be performing an exorcism this weekend.

I would like you to meet the latest addition to the Moo Household:

He Who Shall Remain Nameless (But Hopefully Not For Too Much Longer)

Mr Moo took me shopping for my birthday today. We went to Ikea for a few things, Best Buy for a DVD, and to the pumpkin farm for pumpkins, gourds and cornstalks to decorate my front doorway. Somehow (cough), we ended up at PetSmart and I with a small aquarium and Betta food in my hands. I think Mr Moo was beyond thrilled that I wasn't begging for a kitten or puppy, so he bought me everything with a smile. I've got a few names in mind, but we're still open to suggestions. Got any?

"NAME THAT MOVIE" CONTEST - 136

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Arrrrrr! I'm gonna git choo!

Christmas ornament we picked up in Bar Harbor, Maine.

I bought some books while we were away, too.

I read Lisey's Story while I was trapped at my parents' house with nothing else to do. It will probably take me 100 years to read the other two.

This weekend, I noticed our house had an abundance of fruit flies and it was driving me mad. I cleaned up the kitchen well and threw out all of the fruit that wasn't in the fridge. It didn't help. Sunday evening, I finally discovered the source - an onion in the vegetable bin had gone bad. When I opened the bin, about a trillion fruit flies flew out. Disgusting. I spent a couple hours running around the kitchen "clapping" in a vain attempt to kill them all. I got a lot of them, but not all. After a quick Google search, I learned how to make a fruit fly trap. I didn't hold out much hope for it, but I was pleased to see quite a few victims this morning.

It's a small dish containing some apple cider vinegar and a couple drops of dish soap. Apparently, they can't resist the vinegar and the dish soap does something to their wings so they can't fly out and they drown. It doesn't smell very good (vinegar - blech!) and is a gross-looking thing to have on your counter, but it really does work well.

Seriously. Best commercial EVAH.

Mr Moo bought me some flowers for my birthday on Saturday.

It's almost a week later and they're still doing really well.

Somebody got into a whole lot of trouble while we were away last month.

Busted!

"NAME THAT MOVIE" CONTEST - 136


Click here for the entry form.

Round 136 is still open.

"NAME THAT MOVIE" CONTEST - 137

Click here for the entry form.

Mr Moo and I spent most of yesterday outside working on the house and yard. He's installing an outlet on the outside of the house on the second floor for my Christmas lights. I've been weeding, pruning, dividing, digging, trimming and whatever-ing all of the flowers and plants in the yard to get ready for winter. I also got most of my Halloween decorations set up outside our front door.

I still need to hang the paper bats from the ceiling and gather up a few more leaves once they've fallen off the trees, but it's almost done.

One of our next door neighbors just stopped by. His mom is making spring egg rolls this afternoon. We had asked about her teaching us how to make them some time ago, so we've been invited over to learn how. We're heading over there in a few minutes. Wheee!

From yesterday, our neighbor showing us all of the ingredients needed to make her incredibly yummay egg rolls.

Mr Moo, our neighbor and one of her friends wrapping and rolling.

One of Mr Moo's masterpieces.

Our share of the bounty.

All cooked up and ready for eating!

I joked that, instead of turkey and all the fixings, we were going to have nothing but egg rolls for Thanksgiving dinner this year.

Do you remember the insanity-inducing mosaic cow jigsaw puzzle my sister and BIL gave me for Christmas last year?

The large cow image is made up of approximately 8 poopillion tiny photos of other cows. Mr Moo and I started it back in early April, right before I got sick with the Martian Death Flu and the rest of our craptastic summer officially started. We got quite a bit of it done at the time.

Unfortunately, we haven't done a thing with it since. It collected a lovely thick layer of dust before I finally decided to put it away this past weekend. I did my best to keep as much of it together as possible when putting it back in the box. Maybe I'll set it up in the guest room and make my sister finish it when she's here for Thanksgiving.

How to Bathe a Kitty - The Moo Way

Fill the tub part way with warm water. Corral and fetch kitty.

Wet her down. Note: Repeating, "See? That's not so bad." will help make you feel better. Kitty will not agree and will continue plotting ways to kill you later.

Converse. You: "I'm only doing this for your own good." Kitty: "I'm so going to poop in your shoe later."

Lather. Rinse. Receive evil death glare. Repeat.



I'm wet! I'm hysterical and I'm wet!

Drain kitty thoroughly then wrap her in towel for drying and lots of cuddles.

My mother loves bingo, so Mr Moo and I bought a home version so we can all play when my family comes to visit for Thanksgiving.

Look closely. Anyone else see the problem?

We haven't had the Random MooCam pointed out back in a while. Glad to see it didn't take long for someone to make an appearance once we put it back in the window.

Our ballots have arrived. It's time to vote!

For those unaware, elections in Oregon are by mail-in ballot only. There are no polling places. Our ballots are mailed to us. We fill them out and either mail them back, if there's time, or drop them off. Mr Moo and I traditionally fill them out on Halloween night. Since we spend most of the evening downstairs answering the door anyway, we get out our laptops, pencils and all of the information that's been mailed to us, do our research and vote at our kitchen table. Easy peasy!

"NAME THAT MOVIE" CONTEST - 137


Click here for the entry form.

"NAME THAT MOVIE" CONTEST - 138

Click here for the entry form.

When we were leaving the pet store parking lot, Mr Moo accidentally got a bit stompy on the pedals. Since all that was keeping our new betta fish from an untimely demise on the floor of the car was a small plastic cup with a large hole in the lid, I was understandably a bit concern. In an attempt to bring Mr Moo's attention to the situation, I tightened my grip on the plastic cup and said, in my best Short Round voice, "Hang on, Dr. Jones! We goin' fo' a ride!" And, for whatever reason dumb names stick, it stuck. Say hello to Dr. Jones.

We got off to a bit of a shaky start (in addition to the bumpy car ride home) because he didn't want to eat his pellets for the first three days. Apparently, many pet stores spoil them with freeze dried blood worms and they can get finicky like that. Just when I was starting to get really worried, he got hungry enough and started eating them. He now gets several pellets, which he eats voraciously, every morning and one worm as a treat before bed at night. He seems to be settling very well into his new home. So much so he's begun building bubble nests. This was the beginnings of his first.

He's made a few other and decidedly larger ones over the past couple weeks. I hate to break it to him, but the cat and I are the only females around, and neither of us are planning to lay any eggs anytime soon.

Hey, baby! Check out my nest!

The day after Mr Moo joined me in Massachusetts last month, we drove into town to return my rental car. One of the ladies at the rental place walked around the car to look for damage while I did paperwork inside. After passing around the back of the car, she hurried inside with a strange look on her face. She said there was something on the rear windshield and she wasn't sure if it was alive or not. It turned out to be a stowaway walking stick bug.

My aunt and uncle's house is in a heavily wooded area. He must have fallen out of a tree onto my rental car and somehow managed to hang on all the way into town. Since there wasn't a tree anywhere near the car rental place, we decided to bring him back to the woods. We carefully placed him into the trunk of Mr Moo's rental car and drove back to my aunt's house. Of course, there was no way I was going to just let him go without taking some pictures first. He started out acting quite aggressively towards me...


...but quickly went on the defensive and into camouflage mode once I touched him a few times.

I'm just a stick! You can't see me!

While I was in Massachusetts last month, I worked with my uncle to make a memorial stone for Zoe. The plan was for me to do the whole thing with his supervision. I did all of the prep work, but, unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate and we kept having to postpone the actual sandblasting. My uncle ended up doing that part the morning of our last day there just to get it done so we could bring the stone home with us on the plane. Since the TSA website doesn't say anything specifically about bringing stones through security, we were at the mercy of whichever agent we encountered. I was fully prepared to start bawling, if necessary. The agent at the airport was baffled when he looked at it through the x-ray machine. I can only imagine what a block of granite must look like on an x-ray. Once it came out and I told him it was a memorial stone for our kitty, he let us through. Phew! Crisis averted. I think it looks nice with Zoe's urn.

I'll post photos of the process of making it tomorrow.

The first step in making Zoe's stone was to pick out a stone. Honestly, I think this was the hardest part. A smooth beach stone would have been the easiest to work with, but I found I liked the texture of the rough granite blocks better. I also liked that it was something which could stand upright rather than lay flat on the table.

It didn't hurt that it was rough around the edges, just like Zoe was. :-) After taking an age choosing a stone, I used a font alphabet to trace the letters onto a piece of tracing paper. I went over the letters again on the back, then rubbed it to transfer the outlines onto a special sheet of template rubber. Mr Moo helped at this point by cutting all of the letters out with an Exacto blade. A couple pieces of packaging tape were used to hold the floating circle bits in place.

Once we had a template made, it was time to glue it on. Several coats of an extremely stinky glue were applied to the stone...

...then we very carefully attached the template. I used the handle of the Exacto blade to press down every millimeter of the template to make sure it was securely attached. Any loose bits or air bubbles and parts of the stone we didn't want blasted would have been, which could have been catastrophic.

We did end up losing the insert on one of the 9's while blasting, but my uncle quickly made a new one and worked around it. As I mentioned in my previous entry, I was going to do the sandblasting myself, but the weather just wouldn't cooperate. When the day came for us to leave, we decided to let my uncle, the expert, do the blasting just so we could get it done in time.



After we gave it a quick bit of spray paint, removed the template and cleaned it with some turpentine, it was finished and ready to come home.

We're going to this concert in November:

Portland's Singing Christmas Tree

Eight of us are going on Friday, November 28, the day after Thanksgiving. The tickets arrived today. The lady I spoke with when ordering the tickets suggested we get fours seats in two adjacent rows instead of all eight in one so we can actually see and talk to one another before the show starts. I thought it was a great idea and wish I had thought to do it ages ago for other events.

There were a crazy number of goldfinches at the feeder outside my office window the other day.

If you look closely, there are seven total - four on the feeder, one on the hook and two on the feeder's handle. There was no room at the inn that day.

Mr Moo and I went shopping for a new bed today. The mattress and box spring set we currently have are over ten years old now and it's time to get something new. Since we both end up practically on the floor every time Josie sleeps with us (how do cats take up so much bleeping room anyway?), we decided to move up from a queen to a king size bed. We went to several stores, checked out a whole bunch of styles and decided on one earlier this evening. We even called the salesperson and had him place the bed on hold. Of course, you know it can't be that easy...

All of the furniture in our bedroom right now is a mish mosh of put-it-together-yourself cheapo stuff that's literally falling apart and some cherry pieces we inherited from Mr Moo's great aunt. We've looked at getting a new complete bedroom set many times over the years, but always talked ourselves out of it since it's not something we really needed. Every time, we gravitated towards Mission style pieces. We even got so far last year to get a quote from a store that custom made the most beautiful stuff we'd ever seen. Needless to say, it would have cost us an arm and a leg for an entire set, but a girl can dream, right?

We mentioned the bedroom set we wanted to the mattress salesman today. He immediately asked, "You know that store went out of business, right?" Ack! What? He told us a new place, which had a lot of the same types of furniture, had opened up in the same building, so we decided to head over to see what they had. Imagine my delight when the first thing I saw upon walking in the door was a bedroom set almost identical to the one we got a quote for. Imagine my increasing delight when we learned that the prices of these pieces were nearly half of the other set as well. Squeee! Since they just opened, they're offering almost everything in the store at "special introductory prices", which is great, but the sales ends on Friday so we don't have a lot of time to take advantage of them. We brought home a brochure and price list to mull it over.

After looking at our original quote for the custom pieces again (man, it's still painful) and doing some comparison shopping online, we decided that the prices we saw today are probably the best we're ever going to find. We also like the fact that it's a locally owned company, not a big box store, and, goodness knows, the economy needs all the stimulating it can get right now. We didn't set out this morning to buy a new bedroom set, but it's all clicking into place like it was meant to be.

With our new king size mattress and box spring on hold and Mr Moo somehow and miraculously agreeing to buy a new bedroom set (he's a total tightwad so this really is a huge deal), I went into the bedroom with a tape measure to sort where everything is going to go.

Houston, we have a problem.

(to be continued)

(continued from previous entry)

Don't get me wrong. I love our house. It has three full baths and more than enough rooms for the two of us to live in. The only thing I really lament, on a regular basis anyway, is I wish the rooms were all a bit larger. I don't want any more rooms, just a few more feet along each wall. Let me tell you, I was lamenting away earlier tonight.

This is the layout of our master suite:

Of the two long walls in our bedroom, the one in back has a giant bay window in the middle of it and the other has half taken up by the double door entry. The shorter wall on the right has the door to the bathroom in the middle of it. That leaves just the one short wall to the left where we have to put the bed. With the crappy nightstands we currently have, there is just enough extra room along that wall to put the additional 16" of bed we'd get with the king size. What we neglected to notice earlier is the size of the new nightstands. They're an additional 7" wide each. Multiply that times two and guess what. There goes pretty much all of the extra space for the additional inches of bed. ARRRGH! We technically could fit everything along that wall, but it would take up literally the entire length of it. One nightstand would end up behind one of the entry doors (large door crashing into nightstand = bad) and the bed would end up so close to the entrance it would interfere with getting into the room. We debated losing one nightstand and moving everything closer towards the back wall with the bay window, but that would mean one of us going without a lamp and an alarm clock on that side, which is made of all kinds of fail. We had no choice except to admit defeat and give up our dream of ever having a king size bed in this house. Yes, I proposed tearing down a wall and adding square footage, but that was met with an evil death glare, so don't even suggest it.

We're still heading out in the morning to order and pay for everything. Since the king size mattress and box spring we chose are just on hold, there shouldn't be a problem with releasing those and getting them in queen instead. Well, assuming they have them in stock that is. We didn't do anything regarding the furniture so we'll be placing that order from scratch. Cross your fingers that everything we want is in stock and we can get it all delivered on Tuesday.

My insomnia kicked into full gear again last night. Sigh. I've been doing really well with getting to bed relatively early every night and getting up sometime between 8 and 10 o'clock each morning (which isn't bad for someone who, at one point, went to bed at 8:00am and slept until it was dark every day) since getting back from our trip to Massachusetts. I was in bed before midnight last night and slept great until about 2:00am. Not sure why I woke up then, but I could tell there was no way I was going back to sleep anytime soon so I got up. I didn't get back to bed until almost 7:00 and got up again about 40 minutes ago. I'm quite shattered at the moment and easily could have slept for another three hours or so, but, if I have any hope of maintaining "normal" people hours, I had to force myself out of bed, spend the day exhausted and go to bed early again tonight. We'll see how it goes.

Right now, I'm about to hit the shower so we can head over the bed and furniture stores to get our orders placed soon. Wheee!

"NAME THAT MOVIE" CONTEST - 137



Click here for the entry form.

"NAME THAT MOVIE" CONTEST - 139

Click here for the entry form.

This is the design line we chose for our new bedroom set.

It's the Tradewins (yes, that's how they spell it) Adult Mission Bedroom Collection. We ordered the queen size slat bed...

...two of the 3-drawer nightstands...

...a door chest...

...and a 12-drawer mule chest (without the mirror).

Apparently, it's called a mule chest because, like the animal that's a cross between a horse and a donkey, it's a hybrid. I'm not sure what exactly this particular piece is a hybrid of, but that's still the name of it. Now you can say you learned something new today.

The furniture delivery dude called last night. They will be delivering our new bedroom set on Saturday morning between 7-9am. That's painfully early for me, but when they offered first appointment of the day, we took it.

This is the blanket chest that is part of the bedroom collection we chose.

We didn't get it because we didn't care for the design. Instead of being a big box with a hinged top, like every other blanket chest we've ever seen, it has two drawers. How exactly is one supposed to fit blankets and pillows in this thing? We expressed our disappointment to the salesperson, who actually had some good news for us. Besides buying manufactured furniture, the store works with a local furniture maker. He can make all sorts of additional pieces to match whatever set you buy and can customize them however you like. We had her price out the cost of duplicating the look of this piece with a hinged top instead of drawers in three different lengths - the same length as the collection piece, plus 6" and plus 12". Amazingly, having the custom piece made isn't a whole lot more expensive than the piece in the store. It helps that we're just wanting a big box instead of something with drawers instead of vice versa. Also, adding the additional 12" in length didn't add much cost either. We've decided to wait until after the other pieces have been delivered before making a definite decision on the chest. It would be a nice piece to have, but we don't want the bedroom stuffed to the brim with furniture either.

Sometime back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I visited my sister in South Carolina. While there, we visited a fabric store, where I found and purchased some fabric. My intention was to make curtains for our guest room with it. I would like to get them made before my family comes to visit for Thanksgiving, but, at the rate things are going around here, I'm not holding my breath. Just to see what they would look like, I unrolled several yards of the fabric and draped it over the rod.

I really liked it. Mr Moo, on the other hand, hates it. Isn't that how it always goes? The lighting was very poor when I took these photos, so it's hard to see the true color of the walls, which is garnet red. It's far from fire engine red, but it's not quite as dark as a maroon. It matches the red in the fabric quite well...

...but even that's not really accurate here since I had to lighten the photos quite a bit. If you can ignore the photo color troubles, what are your thoughts on the fabric in general?

Happy Halloween!