Catchy Name Needed

See part 1. I'm skipping around a bit.

(Note, again, that I made the font color gray because my Dreamwidth journal has a dark background and it was the only way I could get it to cooperate. If you have trouble reading, try highlighting the text.)

12. Would you ever go out in public wearing pajamas?

If I wore them, maybe, but I don’t.

13. Have you ever had a lemonade stand?.

Not on my own account - I’m really lacking in entrepreneurial spirit, generally. I think my sister may have had one and I helped out a bit.

14. Do you think you look older or younger than your real age?

Since I started going gray, I think I look my age. I used to get people telling me I looked much younger than my age, but this is another one of those things where I don’t think most people are really good judges, either. This may be because people in sort of the 30-50 year old range (i.e., not real young but not yet visibly aging much) are harder to sort out.

15. Where have you lived throughout your life?

I’ve only ever lived in Texas, mostly in the south & southeast Houston suburbs (and in Galveston, which is the same general area, just a little further out). When I was small we lived in West Texas for a couple of years. I was big enough to remember that - I remember prairie dogs, and the cotton field that was behind our house, among other things. And then a decade or so later, I went to UT, and hung around for a few years afterward - so I was in Austin from the late 70s to the mid-80s.Those are the only two times in my life when I've lived away from this general area I'm in now.

16. Do you want any piercings?

I have pierced ears and that’s plenty.

17. What’s your mouse pad look like?

It’s this one, which I bought a few months ago. Disclaimer: the designer, “Ellie Monroe,” is actually my sister (that's not her real name, of course). But I really like this mouse-pad - I like the design, plus it’s really well-made - and I paid for it myself. I didn’t even tell her I bought it until a good while later. (Really, I feel like mouse-pads should be unnecessary, but the surface of my desk doesn’t seem to lend itself to doing without!)

22. Do you still use a radio or just use your phone/computer for music?

My car radio went out in, like, 2014, and I never bothered to get it fixed. I just use the phone. I listen to podcasts more than I actually listen to music, these days.

23. What kind of socks do you prefer to wear?

None. I hate wearing socks. Luckily I live where it’s not often really necessary.

24. Do you have any family heirlooms?

I have quite a bit of my mother’s stuff, and her parents' and some of my grandmother’s on the other side too. I don’t know that there’s anything really tremendously valuable but I have a lot of their stuff, for sure. I’m not sure that the things that they would have said are heirlooms are the ones I value most.  I am very partial to my (maternal) grandma’s very brightly-colored flowered china that my uncle brought back from Vietnam for her. Our dining room furniture came from the other grandma. And then I have a large number of my mother’s quilts, and I watched her make most of them, so I know exactly how much work went into them. And boy, family pictures out the wazoo. I have to force myself to part with that stuff gradually.

I have no results for the "How Texas are you?" quiz, because I am apparently not Texas enough to check a box that says "Forget driving a Porsche, you'd rather have a brand new truck." Aargh. I got annoyed by the stereotyping and didn't answer at all. (Not annoyed enough to refuse to link to it, though, you notice.) However, for some reason, the one about how the only spices you know are salt, pepper, ketchup, bbq sauce, and Ranch dressing amused me instead of annoying me, even though I've heard variations on it before. It's still very Texas. Nevermind that I loathe ranch dressing and am not really all that big on BBQ sauce, the stuff is inescapable around here. So are pickups, actually - although everybody that doesn't actually own a ranch or something is suddenly scrambling to get rid of theirs. Anyway, the silly quiz as a whole was mildly amusing, I just didn't think you could really get anything resembling meaningful results out of the thing. (Although I suppose expecting meaningful results out of a Blogthing is probably ridiculous, in any case!) (And besides, if you think about it too hard, the part about ranch dressing being a spice will break your brain.)

Well, anyway. What else? I have been shopping on Etsy again - this time I bought these lampwork earrings, which I have been eyeing for a couple of days. In semi-related news, you may have noticed that I have mostly stopped babbling about jewelry lately - I think there's a definite connection between the lack of bead-talk and the increase in WoW talk. If I spend all my time on the latter, there's no time to make jewelry. However, there are still beads and findings all over my dining room table and I have no doubt that I will pick it up again eventually. As a matter of fact, just yesterday I was thinking about the carmine glass beads I bought a while back and wishing I had a bracelet made of them to wear - unfortunately I didn't think about it early enough to be able to actually do anything about that. Mostly I have been staying away from the beads and the shopping online, which is probably a good thing, on the whole.

I had the afternoon off yesterday because I was supposed to do financial-type things because this afternoon I have my long-delayed appointment with Mom's accountant and I was supposed to be preparing. And I actually did do some financial-type things, and an awful lot of sorting through papers and things like that, but unfortunately I am still not prepared. I just decided that I am going to have to do that annoying thing that people do (annoying if you're an accountant, anyway) where you take all the papers and dump them on the accountant's desk and let him sort it out. Or let him help me sort it out, at least, or something like that. Because otherwise it's clearly never going to get done. I seem to only be able to deal with one piece of the estate business at a time - lately it's been the house, and everything else has been on hold. The good news, of course, is that with the house selling (knock on wood - I have this fear that something will still go horribly wrong with it), there is light at the end of the tunnel there, and we can look at getting everything all closed out and done before too too long.

Somebody in my apartment complex has a bumper sticker that says "An Aggie's Girl" - which just makes me want to barf. (The same person also has a license plate with her first name on it; I think between those two things, I know all I need to know about her.) You used to see those "Aggie Mom" and "Aggie Dad" stickers a lot, but they're not as popular as they used to be. Of course, I suppose they're a concept that's at least a couple of decades old, because they started turning up when I was in college. (At one point after my sister started at A&M, my dad had "An Aggie's Dad" on his pickup and my mom had "I'm a Longhorn Mom" on her car. I know that's fairly barf-worthy, too, but we thought it was funny at the time, mostly because of the UT/A&M rivalry aspects of the thing.)

That reminds me that I added my high school to my user info page earlier this week, and for some reason the dates on that really make me blanch. (Pause while everybody runs to look.) I've had the college dates up there for a couple of months and it never bothered me a bit, but somehow the high school ones - jesus, the mid-seventies ?? That was an eternity ago.


Sign in the restaurant where we had dinner: "We believe you only get what you pay for, but at Kelley's you get more than you pay for." Does that make any sense at all?


We had planned to stay on the island - and on this end of the island, to boot - all day today, but there weren't any movies showing that we wanted to see, and it rained all afternoon so we decided it was probably safe to go to the mainland. Good Night and Good Luck was the movie we actually wanted to see, and it's apparently not showing anywhere on this side of Houston any more. We toyed with the idea of going to see Match Point instead but couldn't really work up any enthusiasm for it, either one of us. So we just went to Kelley's to eat - I had a truly enormous breakfast, even though it was the middle of the afternoon - and went to the big HEB in Dickinson to buy groceries. I like to go there once in a while because they carry a lot of things the other stores don't, especially Wal-Mart. (Yes, we buy most of our groceries at Wal-Mart. Yes, I know it's of the devil and all that, but it's cheaper. Not to mention being right across the street. If HEB would get off their collective asses and put a decent store in here, I would switch like a shot.)

Anyway, we were right about it being safe to go off the island. The issue was that the Momus parade was supposed to be tonight, and the traffic is normally horrendous. But it was nothing. It stopped raining, finally, so I'm assuming the parade went off as scheduled, but I don't think there was much of anybody there. Not many people are going to drive down from Houston to see a Mardi Gras parade when it's cold and raining.