It was unfortunately unpopular with our target market:
Sadly, the patio furniture did not make it through the night as evidenced by the body bags:
A Very Shiny Mother’s Day
This may have been my favorite mothers day to date. Our son and a bunch of his friends called me from Sandy Eggo and yelled Happy Mothers Day, then he made me tell them my hipster joke. *
We drove the four and a half hours to our daughter’s college to pick up a carload of her stuff and hug her a lot ( her last final is tomorrow). We had Spenser with us, so we went to McDonalds and got McNuggets and ate them in the McPark. We hung out for a while and then got Starbucks. (love)
*How many Hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
(It’s an obscure number, you’ve probably never heard of it)
Also, Spenser’s adoption story was featured on the Furever Dachshund Rescue website.
Everyone has probably seen this Time mag cover by now. The mom looks so angry, the kid is probably getting powdered milk. And look at his face. He’s thinking, “I’m missing Tball for THIS?”
Mika Brzezinsky made the excellent point on Morning Joe, that they put the titillating photo of the hot young mom on the cover when the story inside was about Dr. William Sears. I’m actually surprised that she is not carrying a briefcase and a spatula.
My biggest problem the cover is that it makes breastfeeding moms look edgy and weird when they have been fighting for a sliver of acceptance for decades.
Happy Mother’s Day!
The Avengers: Observations, Questions and a Three Word Spoiler
Observations
Captain America needs a cooler secret weapon than a giant frisbee.
I love Ironman. Tony Stark such an awesome smartass. My husband will testify that smartassitude is one of the top things I look for in a man.
I love that the women were kickass. No shrinking violets, no damsels in distress. (ps. I want to be Scarlett Johansson when I grow up).
Loki’s costume made him look like a demented goat. Has he no close friends that could pull him aside and suggesting a more badass look if he is going to look like a proper villain.
If you have pretzel bites with cheese balanced on your lap and your husband selects the wrong pretzel bite, the cheese will pour into your boot. You know that nasty orange, foul-smelling chemically melty cheese food product food cheese. In my boot.
Questions
I didn’t get the bow and arrow dude. I just kept calling him boy Katniss.
So can the Hulk channel his anger or not? It was a little inconsistent.
Three Word Spoiler: Giant Space Turtles
Bonus from my friend Maureen: Stay until after the credits. Really. To the very, very end.
I’m Not BranchingOut and You Can’t Make Me
BranchOut is a new career networking site on Facebook. I am the queen of early adopters. I am currently on:
Facebook
Linked In
Twitter (as is my dog @spenserthedog)
MySpace (pretty much dormant)
Pinterest
Google + (still waiting for the +)
Goodreads
Letterboxd
Wordpress
Blogger
Digg
Spotify
Sound cloud
Klout
StumbleUpon
But for some reason, I have not accepted any BranchOut invitations to date. I think it’s because my persona on different social networking sites.
On Linked In, I have about 450 connections, and I am nothing but professional there.
On Facebook, I have almost 700 wildly disparate friends; former work colleagues, friends I’ve made on the Internet, church friends, theatre people, college kids, so my Facebook interactions are pretty tame. Pictures of my dog, goofy comments or jokes, posts about my favorite music. I try to keep it inoffensive, but reasonably true to myself.
Twitter, on the other hand, is where I let my hair down. My 157 followers (haha! Spenser only has 21) are treated to off-color humor and political opinion.
I think this is why I am resisting BranchOut. I just don’t like commingling my social media. How about you. Are you the same across various media?
Everest, My Yearly Obsession
Every year, I obsessively follow Everest summit attempt converge. This is Everest Season. There is a tiny sliver of time each year where the weather is marginally cooperative. A time when it’s slightly less likely that you will be buried in an avalanche, crushed by a serac or swallowed by a shifting glacier. That window is early to mid-May.
The weeks ahead are spent acclimatizing to an environment that is completely inhospitable to human life. Climbers frequently use the “climb high, sleep low” technique. This involves repeated day climbs to successively higher altitudes, sometimes laying in supplies at higher camps before returning to lower elevations to recuperate.
This year’s teams include veteran climber Conrad Anker, with National Geographic this year and a group from the Mayo Clinic who will be studying the effects of altitude on the human body.
I may write about this quite a bit here because it seems that IRL, the sentence, “An experienced Sherpa died today on the Khumbu icefall when he fell into a crevasse while crossing a ladder without clipping into the fixed ropes” is a conversation stopper.
In case you are interested, check out #oneverest on twitter or the National Geographic blog:
Why Do Women in Real Estate Flipping Shows Wear Stupid Shoes?
In just the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen a stiletto go through a rotted floor, a platform sandal slip off in a mud puddle and a pair of leather pumps ruined my red clay.
Why would anyone turn up at a construction site in frivolous shoes? They should have been wearing steel-toed work boots.
I’m convinced this has to be a directorial decision. I can believe that women who are supposedly actively involved in the house-flipping business would not have the good sense to arrive in proper footwear.
Can Someone Tell Me Why Tampons Need to Be Radiant?
…I am befuddled…
Update: it’s come to my attention that these tampons come with resealable wrappers. I can see how this could be a concern because improperly sealed rappers return as holograms.
This is How I Know I am Old
I heard part of an NPR story this morning about VC in Silicon Valley and I was wondering why the Viet Cong would be interested in investing in startups.
Meet Fedora Dog!
Hi! I'm Spenser
We didn’t last long as a dog-free house. We missed Sharkdog (Akeesha) too darn much to come home to an empty house. This is Spenser. Spenser is a 7 month old long-haired Dachshund from South Carolina. He was rescued from a high-kill shelter by Furvever Dachshund Rescue. We have a family friend who is a dog lover and doxie foster in Clemson, SC. She posted his picture (he was named Bo) and the “we need to get this dog” campaign began in the Oooh Something Shiny household.
My better half wanted a break from dogs, which made sense on every level, but Bo was just irrestible. Our daughter’s powerpoint pushed him over the edge. (Her mad Powerpoint Skills predate the recent commercial by about 7 years. She created a PowerPoint Christmas list when she was 12 and remains to date one of the most skilled PowerPoint users I have seen).
We drove the 13 hours to Clemson on Saturday and returned on Sunday. I decided to rename him when I read that it’s a bad idea to name a dog Mo or Snow or Beau, because it’s too close to No and confuses them. I came up with Spenser after the Robert B Parker detective. One of my favorite character from one of my favorite authors. I had some selling to do on the name, but my entire potential name list was pronounced nerdy and my husband was convinced with every name that I came up with after Spenser was an attempt to come up with something even worse so that he would agree to Spenser. He looks like a Spenser though, doesn’t he?
I took yesterday off for some basic training (Did you know that adopting a dog doesn’t meet maternity leave requirements??). Spenser learned his name quickly as well as Sit! and Leave It! We tried lay or down, but he keeps just looking at us like “Look, I want to make you happy and I really want that treat, but I have no idea what you’re getting at.” I’m working on Stay now and we’ll see what’s next after that. He is a really quick study.
I referred to him as Fedora dog, because the night we picked him up, he tried to sleep on our heads. He hasn’t tried that since we’ve been home, but that may be because with no other dogs in the house, he doesn’t need to prove himself to be “Top Dog”
Expect many more Spenser stories to come.
