Lets get right to it, shall we?
Introducing the Comedy Wildlife Photo Competition as discovered by Widders via her just-about-favourite-est blog ever, io9.
Julie Hunt – Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
See the winners … HERE!!!!
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This is my last post for the year. I wish you all the Blessings your Path may shine on you for this season. See you next year.
Goodnight to All, and to All, Goodnight. 🙂
Am I a bad person because I can’t stop laughing and watching this and figured out how to embed it into a post? …
Not exactly the post I planned as my reentry into regular blogging, I tell you!
Mrs Widds and I took a couple of weeks off recently to go do touristy things in the Kootenay Rocky mountain region of BC. I have pics of glaciers and snow-capped mountain tops, and we both realised we absolutely love breathing the air at 2000 meters above sea level.
So, that was going to be my lead-in story, however, the best laid plans of mice (rats, actually) and lesbians …
We’ve been aware of the pitter-patter of tiny clawed feet in the house for a few months now, but we thought that turning the house upside down looking for the little bugger would’ve scared it off.
Nope.
We’re not heartless beasties so before we left, we set out a bit of fruit for it, just in case it decided, for some unknown reason, to stick around.
We arrived home from our adventures to the gutted skins of two bananas, and knew we’d have to take drastic steps.
We bought this:
Threshold of Doom on the right with sneaky trapdoor open
‘Critter’, as we now called our diminutive (and as yet of undetermined species) houseguest, turned out to be smarter than the average bear, and eschewed falling for the old pile-of-nibblies-at-the-end-of-the-trap trick, so we resorted to the trail-of-seeds-to-the-opening-of-the-trap trick.
Side note: Mrs Widds has a thing about rats ever since one of her cats, long since departed via the Rainbow Bridge to the Summerlands, gifted her with a very large and very dead rat … on her bed … while she was sleeping … about a centimeter from her face.
Let’s all have a skin-crawling shudder at that image shall we?
**shudders**
Therefore, I was the designated remover of whatever species ‘Critter’ turned out to be.
For two nights Critter snacked on the dwindling number of seeds in front of the trap but didn’t cross the Threshold of Doom. It was all part of my Plan though.
Last night, having got Critter accustomed to finding food near the trap, I only put seeds inside it. Critter’s fate was sealed!
Overconfident, Critter crossed the Threshold of Doom and the trap snapped closed behind it .. just about the time Mrs Widds got out of bed. (She’s an early riser. Me? Not so much)
I felt a gently tap on my shoulder, and woke to the immortal words, “Happy Birthday. It’s a rat!”
To her credit Mrs Widds spoke softly, in spite of what she felt about the slithery, snickerly, squirmy, freaked-out RAT, bouncing around inside the trap, trying to escape.
I got dressed, released Critter-rat outside and fell back into bed.
I am 56. Bring on that second Saturn Return!
It’s been a very ‘interesting’ two weeks-ish. We have Widdercat’s ashes back, (they’re sitting on our altar) and, in the mysterious ways that cats have, although she’s not physically with us anymore, (unless you count the ashes, which is interestingly morbid) the big hole she left in our lives is lessened.
On the other hand, grief sucks. It turns me inside out, gives me headaches when I have big sobbing crys. I feel as though I’m the only one in the entire cosmos who’s feeling this bad. (seriously, the rest of the world ought not to be allowed to just continue turning and have the temerity to look exactly the same when I do eventually surface)
On occasions, it’s also funny.
I don’t know if the ‘baby brain’ of pregnant women and new mothers is a myth, but I can personally attest that the ‘grief brain’ is alive and well. Take breakfast the other day.
I had just turned the dishwasher on. It’s one that connected to the kitchen sink hot water tap. I then set about preparing my breakfast of eggs on toast, one of my comfort foods. We’d recently retired our old frying pan and bought a shiny new ceramic one that was just for the frying of eggs. It takes some time getting used to the whims of new appliances, and after a few not-so-dazzling efforts on previous mornings I was determined this time my eggs would be perfect.
The scene is set. The play begins …
I plop the bread (Mrs Widder’s 1-day-old bread, ‘cos it’s a mortal crime to toast fresh bread the day it’s baked) into the toaster and prepare my plate. Usually I run a bit of hot water over it to warm it up, (there’s nothing worse that your eggs-n-toast cooling too fast on a cold plate) but of course the hot water tap is currently occupied.
There is still some hot water in the kettle from my tea so I pour a bit onto my plate and set it to one side while I cook my eggs in our shiny new frying pan. I sense that this time they’re going to be perfect, and I’m right.
The toast pops up … I throw it on the breadboard … turn the heat off under my eggs … butter the toast and quickly throw it onto my plate before my eggs get too hard …
… with frying pan and eggflip in hand I turn to deposit the eggs on the toast when I realise …
SOGGY TOAST!
By the time I toast some more bread my perfect eggs are somewhat past their former glory.
😦
I told this story, along with other non-funny stories of my journey through my grief, (they did ask first. I was merely being obliging) to a not-quite-an-acquaintance who then commented with the best of intentions that they didn’t really get why I was so upset, after all she was just a cat.
This person is still alive only because it was a public place and I couldn’t immediately think of anywhere to hide the body.
I’m willing to bet if they had an animal in their lives at all, they’d consider themselves to be ‘owners’ of a ‘pet’ rather than sharing their life with companion of a different species.
However, the incident made me realise what a wonderful genre Speculative Fiction (SF, Fantasy, Paranormal, etc) is, and how glad I am it’s my genre of choice for the writing and reading of. I think that more than any other genre, it has raised the awareness of other species as being more than just ‘pets’.
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In among all of the turmoil of these last weeks we did have a peek at our dandelion wine. I’ll tell you all about that in my next post.
A mash-up is when two (or more) segments of stuff – in this case two of the great movie franchises of the 20th Century – are combined to form something else altogether.
Another form a mash-up can take is superimposing one thing on another, thusly:
Dandy and Judel
Hermy and Harione
Brangelina
I have no idea who created these but they’re a genius. And isn’t interesting how the women look a whole lot better than the guys?
This isn’t a mash-up, but it’s too cute to be ignored. Grrrrowrrrrr!
On her blog today, Kyrosmagica discovered she writes like Stephen King!
I apparently write like Dan Brown, Cory Doctorow, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mark Twain, depending on which story I offered up a sample of.
Enough about TV shows … well I do have one more post, but I’ll put a bit of a distance between here and then … and on to some fun stuff.
So, Susieee Mac, bless her little cotton socks, nominated me for a Liebster Award.
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So, I sez to her, “Susieee,” I sez. “Wot am I supposed to do wif this?”
And she sez to me, “Answer me questions, and pass it on.”
“Simple,” I sez. “ But, I don’t do ‘pass-it-on’s.”
“S’aright,” she sez back at me. “Pass it on anyway.”
P.S. We was pretendin’ to be Pirates!
So I will. Anyone who wants to play, go ahead. These be the questions …
1 – What was the last thing that made you laugh?
2 – What’s the one thing that irks you?
3 – About how long do you think you can stand on one foot?
4 – Time yourself. How long did you actually stand on one foot?
5 – What would you want for your last meal?
6 – What’s something that you would not regret about having missed doing?
7 – What’s the one thing that scares you, but you do it anyway?
8 – What’s something funthat you would like to do right now?
9 – Would you rather be an eagle, crow, or a parakeet?
10 – If you could be a sitcom character, who would you be?
11 – Who rules – Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennett, or Jo March?
Herewith be my answers:
The last thing that made me laugh? Widdercat wanting to go out the front door and be let in through the back. Three times! Consecutively! She had to have a long snooze after that.
Something irksome? Article writing persons who rely on spellcheck. It’s pique, not peek or peak. (this is different from the odd typo, of which, as we all know, there will always be at least one!)
Thinking of standing on one foot? About 15 seconds.
Actually standing on one foot? 15 seconds – but my knees aren’t what they used to be. They used to be my elbows! (old joke)
Last meal? Mashed taters with green onion in them, turkey sausages from our local supplier (to die for, heh, heh,) Mrs Widder’s gravy made from the sausage juice, steamed broccoli and cauliflower, and chardonnay Dijon mustard. A glass of our own zinfandel rosé wine, perhaps two.
Not on my bucket list? Bungee jumping – see previous comment about knees.
Tall cliff of scared-ness? Having my regular blood tests. I can watch until the needle right up until it actually goes into my arm, and immediately afterward, but to actually watch something thin and metallic slide into my person without any resistance? Nope, No. Not gonna happen. No way, no how!
Fun, Right now: I wrestled with this one for far too long. It was the ‘right now’ component that derailed me. But my eventual answer involved Mrs Widders … and to quote Forest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
Feathered dinosaur descendant? Crow. Don’t take no s**t from nobody.
Sitcom character? Bea Arthur as Dorothy, from The Golden Girls. (Betty White better not die, ever!)
Who rulz? Jo March, of course.
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The Last Word:
You want your socks?
Why don’t you come and get them?
