Maria

I am going beg your forgiveness in advance.  I am just plain cranky right now, and it is probably going to show.  The wind (Maria) has been blowing off and on now for several weeks.  For those of you that don’t live in wind prone areas, I am not talking a gentle breeze here; it’s 25 to 35 MPH, with higher gusts closer to the mountains.  I got so tired of going and fetching my Christmas decorations from the neighbor’s yard!  It keeps you awake at night wondering where the next tree branch is going to hit, and if your roof will hold up to this one.  Sigh …  We are not supposed to have this kind of weather till March, so it is not fair to start so early.  It’s pretty sad, when I am hoping for snow to slow it down, but knowing my luck, we will get a blizzard.

It’s enough to make a girl need a pair of these:

I am thinking one for each hand.  Heck, they are non-spill, so maybe I could try a third one with my feet?  I personally don’t see the need to even bother making these look like wine glasses on the inside.  Just skip the fancy interior, fill ’em up with alcohol, and let ’er rip!  I can’t believe these are unused.

We get pissy about souvenirs all the time, and here is yet another tourist fail:

Seriously, people.  Get someone to take your photo holding up the leaning tower, go have a nice glass of wine and some pasta, and leave Italy empty-handed.  There is no one back home that wants this.  ANYWHERE.  Maybe if you could find a REAL pop-up book like this, it might be worth a look, but I doubt it.

On the topic of mementos:

Here’s another tip.  Go climb the Space Needle (actually, this is a cool link, you can see the view from the top online!) , blow your wad in the Space Needle restaurant, or if you are feeling poor, go find a Starbucks (no matter how poor I am feeling that is NEVER going to happen!).  Again, you can skip the luggage hog.  You can tell no one every bothered to take these out of the box, but if they had, can you imagine how relieved they would feel knowing that each one has a sanitary plastic insert?  I frequently am disturbed by thoughts of how icky my salt and pepper is in those ordinary S&P sets.

So I like rhinestones just as much as the next girl, but really?

If I had some spare blue sparklies just sitting around, wrapping them around a bottle is the last thing I would do with them.  Rhinestones are for jewelry to bedeck myself with, or just admire sitting around in my jewelry box, as I have reached the point of not being able to wear all my jewelry even ONCE a year.  Also, what are those bottles doing empty?  See first item.  Fill ’em up.

No, not with this:

Yes, they just got worse.  Who, in their right mind, would have a party that these sort of decorations would be perfect for?  I hope to high heaven it wasn’t a wedding.  The bride wore yellow and groom blue, and everyone was blinded by the winking rhinestones?  See, I told you I was grumpy.  Perhaps it was a perfectly lovely anniversary party.  Nope, going with my first hideous mental picture.

We couldn’t decide if this photo was good or bad:

We do desperately want to know the story.  Was it a jailhouse rock football team?  Were these the champs, or were they caught deflating the ball, and the fines were REALLY stiff back then?  Who are the lucky four that forgot their striped uniforms on picture day?  Is this the WHOLE team?  Where are their iPads, and how do they know what play to run without their wired-for-sound helmets, for that matter, where are those helmets?  Bet there was no concussion protocol back then.  (This was not a good thing, but I don’t think the guys were as big, or played as hard back then, so we will forgive them.)  Pix like this really make us sad that there is no one to tell their story any more.

You can bet your life that those fellas in the above photo probably tried this at least once:

Yes, it’s what every athlete needs to be big and strong—a professional skip rope.  Somehow, a skip rope doesn’t seem very manly, but they made up for that in spades, by putting that muscle bound stud on the front.  I am sure every 98-pound weakling was lining up to get their hands on one of these.  Seriously, it is probably a lovely jump rope, and there are worse ways to get in shape.  I don’t think those abs are coming from this, but hey, they are trying.

I like that we are seeing equal opportunity here:

Who says dogs get all the fun?  They get to ride around on the fire truck and look heroic and polka dotted; why not give cats their due?  I personally don’t know of any cat that would take the time, but whatever floats your boat.  They even gave it an official fire badge:

If am alarm went off around my cat, he would hide under the bed, or just take a message.  I wouldn’t count on any firefighting skills coming to the forefront.  Maybe they just didn’t know what a dog’s ears are supposed to look like?

This last item is good and bad:

Is this not the cutest little WWII plastic pin you ever saw?  Those girls at home could show their support for their fellas at war by wearing this charming patriotic pin.  We thought it was adorable, and both of us would have been tempted by it, but they thought it was worth $10.99 even with the broken wings.  We would have given it a home, as a great historic piece, but we are cheap.  This is probably a really tough find in good shape, but fun nonetheless.

Well, looking out my window, I see the wind is kicking up again.  Time to go rescue the inflatables in the yard.  I don’t care what they call it, it still ticks me off!  Tune in next week, when hopefully our mood has improved.  If not, well, we will find plenty to grouse about.