The Coming of the New Ice Age

The wind is howling here in Kanawha City. I haven't heard wind like this since I lived at the edge of the Yorkshire Moors (where the wind never stops blowing in some places, and trees sometimes grow sideways from it). It's like "Hound of the Baskervilles" movie wind. It's awesome.

The snow has come to the Kanawha Valley in a big way.

Curmy went out to walk the dogs and take out the trash at about midnight. He was gone maybe ten minutes when I started hearing the wind howl. I feared that he and Girl Dog would be like Piglet in "A Blustery Day" and fly away in the wind.

Next thing I know, they're both back in the house and Curmy's yelling, "Buzz are you in here?"

I felt like yelling back, "No, I often decide to go shop at Kroger at midnight in the middle of dog walking," but I bit my tongue. You see, Curmy doesn't think the dogs should bark. They're dogs. Dogs bark. It's a given, right?

Wrong. I am in charge of bribing them not to bark by cleverly feeding the one that's not being walked popcorn while the other one walks outside. There is no walking them at the same time. They would want to play, which would not only bring the barking, but also interrupt the flow of da poo. Curmy says, "It's a business trip, not a pleasure trip."

So, instead of being a smartass, I said, "Yes, what's wrong?"

He said, "It's a fucking white-out."

It's pretty darn close to a white-out. I bundled up and we got the trash out, but it's nothing close to the worst white-out I've ever been in. That time, I couldn't see my hand a foot from my face. I had to put my foot on the edge of the sidewalk and drag it to be sure I stayed on the sidewalk because I had to keep walking and I couldn't see because my eyelashes froze together.

And, it's not like the wind in downtown Toledo, where buying an umbrella means you're going to watch it blow apart within a month if it's windy. The wind on the street I worked on in Toledo was so bad that sometimes I'd see a poor soul who'd gotten tired of fighting the wind to walk and they stopped to cling to a telephone pole to rest. Streets signs worked for that, too. Other times, I would see guys running as fast as they could to get their carefully sprayed combovers indoors because they just flopped like lids on the guys' heads otherwise.

Unfortunately, all the wind and snow squinched up Girl Dog's pooper, so now I'm on poop watch in case the wind dies down or Girl Dog starts whining. I don't expect either to happen. Once she's locked her pooper down, it's not opening for business until the morning.

I can't imagine what you folks who've already been getting dumped on are feeling like. I'm going to assume "sick of snow" is a good guess.

Attack of the Crab Woman

I went to review a show tonight. It was at The Clay Center. All day, I had been seeing Mountain Stage tomorrow on the list of cancellations due to weather, but I saw nothing about tonight's show.

As we normally do, we went early and ate a Bruno's before going over to The Clay Center. Dinner was good as usual. When we came out, the air was like an blast from Siberia right on Leon Sullivan Way. And, disturbingly enough, The Clay Center looked like it was closed. No cars in sight. Not a lot of lights on. No people milling about. Yet, we walked over anyway to peer in the glass doors and see a lonely janitor polishing the floors.

We looked high.

We looked low.

We saw no sign of our show.

We scurried back to the car gleefully discussing warm fuzzy pajamas and central heat. We decided it would be wise to circle the building just to be sure there wasn't some other place that we didn't know about. It is a building almost the size of a block, after all.

Swoop One left us confused. There were a smattering of cars near the back, but still nothing in the line of useful signage. We decided to go for Swoop Two and slow down to see if we could catch a real live human. Between the two swoops, I'm torn: Am I excited for pajamas or will I be disappointed to find that it's gonna be at least three hours before I see my beloved jammies again?

Swoop Two brought out a guy yelling for us to park. Enter Crab Woman. It's like "Enter Sandman" only you have some hope of eluding the Sandman. Crab Woman is just gonna hang on your ass. Could be for hours. Could be for days. Crab Woman doesn't even know the answer to how long she's going to be Crab Woman. She just is, and she's pinching your ass in a bad way.

So, the nice man tells us to park in the semi-circle for easy egress since I'm doing a story. Way to go, nice man! You have slain the Crab Woman. Curmy pulled into the semi-circle and told me to go ahead to get the tickets while he parked the car. I said, "The man said to park here."

He said, "Oh, he couldn't have meant park here; he must have meant for me to pull in here to drop you off."

"No. He said we could park right here."

"No. We can't park here." And off he pulled, leaving Crab Woman to wait outside the door for him to find a parking space since she has his ticket.

But, once we were inside this full space of people enjoying fine music, Crab Woman went away as she watched the show and wondered where in the hell all of those people came from and where did they hide their cars.

The show was great. We had a fine time. We came home. Curmy turned the heat on full blast in the car for a moment before Crab Woman reared her head to fix that shit (because on full blast the heat in my car smells like it's burning plastic). Poor thing. He looked at me and said, "Can I do nothing right?" And Crab Woman sidled away like a fiddler crab into the night.

I wrote my story while making phone calls to see who was going to receive it on the other end. I wrote. I called. I wrote. I called. I finished. I called. I called and called and called and before I knew it: Crab Woman.

Don't know why no one answered. I understand other parts of the state got dumped on with snow. We're bone dry in Charleston. Even the rain we had been getting is gone and dried away.

At least when I finally just blindly e-mailed the story off to the two names I had (and a copy to the editor who sent me their information just for safe measure) and got to put on my jammies, Crab Woman disappeared again.

Then I weighed myself. I have got to step up the dieting. All this work and I've lost nothing. Nothing at all. Clothes fit better, looser, or differently, but not one pound has left Crab Woman's body. Not one. And don't give me that "muscle weighs more than fat" or "inches matter more than pounds" shit either.

How much shit could a dipshit dip...

...if a dipshit did dip shit?

A: More than you could keep up with counting because a dipshit cannot get enough of dipping shit.

I can't sleep. I'm angsty. It's one of those nights when I try to sleep but find myself drifting in thought to all of the people I should have bitched to within an inch of their lives at one time or another, but didn't.

Oh, I know that's useless unless you're some kind of you're some kind of self-important prick who loves nothing more than plotting about how to make life just a tiny bit more miserable for someone else (and, in the process, ensure a peaceful, quiet, relatively friend-free old age). Really, no one like that stays on anyone's friend list for very long. Why go there? What would be the prize?

So instead of pondering dipshits to the point of restlessness, I got up to become more tired before going back to bed.

All that dipshit overanalyzing is nothing more than regret wearing a fiery cape. I hate regret. There's just nothing useful you can do with it, but learn to avoid it and move on. Perhaps I'm not learning from my regret. Perhaps if I simply went straight to the source of my pissimication (yes, made that up...you still get it) and said my piece/peace at the proper time, I wouldn't have so much regret.

Sure, that method feels about as warm and fun as stepping in a steaming pile of glitch when it's still all puddiny and smooshes right up between your toes, but it is a steaming pile of shit. When you've got a problem with someone...a real righteous beef with them because they are doing you or yours wrong-wrong-wrong...it is like you've stepped in shit and you're just continuing to walk around with the shit stuck to your foot, like you're waiting for time to slowly erode the shit from your sole/soul when a hot soapy scrub right at the site/sight of shit meeting foot would remove it much more efficiently.

Your thoughts?

(And since it seems vent posts get a person here or there who feels for you and wants to make sure he or she didn't do something to make you feel this way, none who would read here did. Go theoretical with it.)

Power Ghost 650 for Valentine's Day!

Yes, that's what I'm getting this year. I've got more jewelry than I can possibly wear. Sure, I'd love a string of real Tahitian pearls, but that's way way way expensive. I really hadn't been thinking about Valentine's Day at all until I opened my e-mail and found that Chris Fleming is selling his SB7 Spirit Box, which was the talking gizmo that he used in his guest spot on Ghost Adventures Live from the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, WV, this past Halloween.

It's on this clip from the post-mortem show about the 7-hour-long Halloween live show. Unfortunately, the video's 10 minutes long and they don't get to Chris Fleming and the spirit box until past 5 minutes.


The SB7 Spirit Box is what I asked Curmy to get me for Valentine's Day. He said yes, but refuses to call it a Spirit Box. He calls it the Power Ghost 650. No matter how many times I tell him it's the SB7 Spirit Box, he says, "I know. It's the Power Ghost 650." He can call it whatever he wants because I ordered it last night. It won't be here for a few weeks, but I can wait. Well, I can't wait, but I have to.

He went into work today and told folks that he is getting the Power Ghost 650 for me for Valentine's Day. He said people would look at him funny and say, "Is that what she wanted?" Of course, it's what I wanted!

Innit romantic?

My sister, Grasshopper, sure thinks so. We can't wait to get that puppy out and see if it does anything for us or not!

We are way overdue for something ghostie.

Curmy Loves His New TV

Those of you who don't Facebook don't know that we got a new TV finally.

The Old Bohemoth that we had before was beginning to have the colors go all doowacky on us, like spaghetti is not supposed to be orange, is it? Anything that was supposed to be orange would have swatches of green and yellow through it, which made watching orange juice commercials somewhat sickening.

We decided before Christmas that we were going to get the new TV for our Christmas presents to each other. We waited until after Christmas to get it because that's when the good sales are. That way we got plasma for the price of LCD.

The day the TV was to be delivered, Mom had a doctor's appointment. I was going to reschedule the delivery to the next available day. Curmy was going with it, but there was some pretty obvious unhappiness on his part. So, I felt the guilt. He didn't mean to make me feel the guilt. I just live to feel guilt.

I had to get Mom to the doctor's and all the extra errands that go along with that process, and I couldn't see how I could get the cable box switched from Suddenlink to have HD and get a new cell phone because my old one died its final death (the "we don't carry the stuff for that old thing anymore" kind...the kind where my sister had been singing the Free Credit Report song every time I whipped out my big old ancient cell phone).

So, I dropped Mom at the doctor and raced to get the new cell phone. Then I called Curmy and said, "You really want that TV tonight, don't you?" His answer: YES!

So, I whipped past the house on the way to pick Mom back up and grabbed the old box and the old remote for the cable box switcheroo. Then, I picked up Mom and dropped her off for her labwork while I raced off to the Mall to get the HD cable box for the new TV.

And when they were finished installing the new plasma TV and carting away the Old Bohemoth, my Curmy was happier than a pig in a fit of mud wallering (that's wallowing for you outlanders). He looked at me and said, "Today, you are golden." I did not want to ask what I am on other days. I don't think I want to know. I'm going to guess tarnished and leave it at that.

He sat in his King of the House Recliner while I came into puter land. He kept yelling into me to tell me what all we get in HD. Apparently everyone's nose is larger in HD. The man was excited at everything. He actually yelled, "I get Steven Seagal Lawman in HD!" No one gets excited for Steven Seagal Lawman, but Steven Seagal, do they?

Well, last night, we were watching Pawn Stars on History Channel. I said, "Why aren't we watching it in HD?"

He said, "We get Pawn Stars in HD!!"

I said, "Yes, History Channel is part of the extra package you had me add to get all of the HD channels," and away he went.

"Oh! Look at that! The Old Man in HD! Chumlee in HD!"

Really, if the TV wasn't as big as the bed, I'd expect him to put it on my side of the bed when he sleeps at night just to make sure that it's protected.