Took the dog for her noon walk a bit ago and holy fucksticks, Batman! It is hotter'n hell out there today, and the humidity is definitely making it worse. Even the breeze feels like a wet slap.
Given tomorrow's forecast, I think I'll leave the AC on all night to get a jump on it.
On a more positive note, my cousin Zeke was over earlier this morning with 12 pints of blackberries from their new thornless canes. They've been trying out three new varieties, and this one (supposed to be quite sweet) is the newest of the lot. This is their third season (their first real run on them), and they're already as tall as a one-story house. I must say, they're gorgeous, if nothing else.
So, I have 6 pints of berries to work with. Cobbler, I think. Just need some gooooood ice cream.
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Saw this when I took out some of J's trash a minute ago. Storm had just blown through.
Posted via LiveJournal.app.
I can't get over how cool it is today! 79 degrees at 1:30pm is spectacularly pleasant for August. I have all the windows open and the cats are feeling their predatory Wheaties.
(Still need to consider some lunch, but I think I will probably continue to stick to the Coffee Diet.)
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“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”--George W. Bush
This delusional, worm-brained wingnut was in charge of *an entire nation.* THIS nation. One wants to weep.
(GWB quote via
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Directly from Warren Ellis, we have:
"The beautifully-produced London-based magazine FILAMENT has a problem.
Explicit images of women are available at any newsagent, but Filament, the world’s only magazine featuring male pictorials designed for the female gaze, is finding itself between a rock and a hard place when it comes to printing explicit images of men.
Filament only prints explicit images when these are of high photographic and erotic quality, and clearly designed for women - we won’t ever be putting hard cocks on every page. The problem is, all the printers that a small, independent magazine like Filament can afford have said they won’t print images of the male of the species in a state of obvious arousal. Reasons given include that printing these images may cause offence to ’women’s groups’.
If they can sell another 300 copies of FILAMENT #1, they’ll have the money to switch to a printer that isn’t terrified of the cock, and then they can
make history and print (we’re pretty sure) the first explicit male pictorial in a British women’s magazine."
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April has decided that the Best Place Ever to play with her mousie is under my desk chair. I pick it up and throw it into the next room, and she brings it back and engages in more under-chair ass-kicking.
She gets her second set of baby shots tomorrow, and an ultrasound of her heart and other major organs, since they were not growing quite as quickly as they should have been. Her heart and lungs, in particular, seemed to be a bit undersized, and she was having some issues with overtiring and panting and generally not being able to physically keep up with her typically energetic kitteny ambitions to wreak utter havoc. Those symptoms seem to have diminished to non-existence, although there was a very real chance there for a while that she would have some serious issues to deal with. She's actually a bit of a shrimp for 15 weeks, but that's okay. As long as she's healthy, I don't care HOW tiny she is.
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If any of you folks are interested in Mary Shelley, or just enjoy a different take on the traditional Frankenstein tale,
I think I need this.
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The kitten is becoming far more interested in exploring her world vertically. Just this morning, she has vertically explored my floor-length cotton dress, the BF's white dress shirt, and his bath robe--not to mention leaping onto the side of the bed to grab onto the bedclothes and pull herself up there to frolic in the throw pillows.
She's ridiculously cute, but I think she's outgrown her playpen and baby toys and it's time we built a climbing pole with a platform at the top. If I carpet it in a neutral color, I can get away with one in the bedroom near where the final CatGenie will be installed.
The latest bit of cat-related construction will be on the stairs, and will involve running a ramp up the right-hand side of the steps, under the handrail. (My grandmother was disabled for most of her life, so my grandfather put in a second handrail that there would be one on each side.) The ramp will extend to the landing, and then a shorter ramp will go up to the top of the last few steps. It will just be a board, stained to match the stairs and held in place with a couple brackets that will be hidden under the steps so as not to ruin the woodwork. I'm going to finish it off by buying a few of those rubberized stair treads and using them longwise, running them up the boards so that the cats get some additional traction. I'm planning to use the heavy-duty outdoor kind so they last longer and hold up to any potential clawing. I considered carpet, but: A.) they would sharpen their claws on it and it wold look awful in a matter of weeks, and B.) I have done away with almost every last rug and carpet in the house, and I want to keep it that way.
Also drawing up plans to build a new mudroom, but that is for another post, as I plan to solicit some opinions from you lot.
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If I have to deal with any more ridiculously ill-conceived political correctness issues today I'm going to have a Falling Down moment. In all seriousness--sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. Yes, it's a cancer-causing, air-polluting piece of phallic death, but it's still just a cigar. It's not a penis extension or the patriarchal establishment's tool of subjugation or a statement about the size of the idiotic inhaler's genitalia.
It's just a cigar.
I also believe that "cigar" is the default setting--all the "not a cigar" possibilities are far less common. I'm not suggesting that one exist in a state of blind ignorance to the obvious--just the rather idealistic notion that a cigar smoker should probably be considered innocent until proven guilty by a preponderance of the evidence.
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here we have 11 Sexy Photos Totally Ruined By People in the Background. While some of them are just "wrong place wrong time" situations, a couple are made of WTF? and one is downright gross. Srsly. You have been warned. (And yeah, PhotoShop might have been involved in some of them, but I'm not the best judge of that.)
And in case you didn't gather this from the title, this might not be safe for work. There's no blatant nudity, but there's a lot of flesh on display.
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