Is that a Ritz or a saltine?

I got called a cracker this evening. While I was walking the dogs, down the street from my house.

Is that really still a valid racial slur? If so, what the fuck does it mean exactly?

Everytime I see a Cracker Barrel, I imagine the restaurant was built to house what must be the epitome of crackers. Maybe that's why I was so pissed. I am NOT a Cracker Barrel kind of person.

The girl must have been about 12 or 13 (ah...happy times of hormones, anger, and feelings of helplessness...I remember that age fondly). I threw out the baddest B.I.G. attitude I know how and said, "WHAT did you say?"

Her friend sold her out. "She called you a cracker."

"That's what I thought. You better watch that mouth!"

Honestly, it sounded more menacing than it reads. Really. Maybe. Probably not. My instinct was to add "you fucking bitch" to the end of it, but I figured someone should be the adult.

I hope it's Ritz. I really like those little peanut buttery ones.

Next on my hit list

Things have been blissfully quiet lately, which means I've been spending more time in the 'hood.

Which means I'm bound to be pissed off about something.

I'm happy to report that Bad Influence Grandma has officially been cited by the city for the junk cars in her back yard. No doubt using her "but I'm just a sweet little old lady" wiles, she got an extension to get rid of them. She's due for reinspection Dec. 1. The cars haven't moved. She's running scared, I can tell.

So I'm turning my attention to the other house down the street that periodically has been the bane of my existence. Among other violations of common decency/criminal code, this house has been through more dogs in the past six years than I've been through men. So when I walked Big Head Dog and the Monster past this house, I wasn't particularly surprised to hear the scampering of doggy feet.

The front chain-link-fence gate was open, of course. Two pit bull puppies ran up to the fence. One ran out and jumped my dogs. No "hi, how ya doin'" butt-sniffing, no "wanna play?" tail-wagging, just flat out jumped 'em and went for the jugular.

The puppy went for the Monster, who's without a doubt the bigger pussy of the two dogs, and rolled 'im. Big Head Dog moved in and in no uncertain terms showed the puppy who's boss, and it ran off with its tail between its legs. The Monster cried like the girl he isn't, but was unhurt.

During this melee, I'm yelling, dogs are snarling. A chained-up dog in the back yard is raising ten kinds of hell. The lights are on in the house, yet no one is sufficiently curious to come out to investigate.

I considered dialing 911 to report a vee-cious dog attack. Then it became clear what I must do. Amass evidence. Photos, specifics, incidents. Then I will report them to the city's dog-fighting task force. I don't know for certain the thugs are into dog-fighting, but I like the last line of that press release: "all tips are investigated."

I like to think the investigators will arrive in SWAT team fashion, but that's probably too much to ask for.

A guy walks into a bar...

A good shouting match just ended in the neighbor's back yard. I couldn't catch all of it--that's the bad thing about arguments, multiple people tend to all talk at once. Plus, all the windows were closed, so it took me a while to figure out that the best place to listen was at the back of the house, lights out, window cracked enough to stick my head through.

What I finally got, though, was that the beau of one of the Crazy Sisters came home late. And really drunk. Once D got Crazy Sister in the house, I heard him pleading his case to the guy who's been over there painting.

Apparently he was out with a buddy and kept telling him he couldn't hang out all night. The buddy took him somewhere, and at that point, according to Drunken Beau, "I said, man, I can't leave you here, this is the ghetto hood! I ain't gonna do ya like that!"

In other words, his excuse for late drunkenness, or drunken lateness, whichever, was that he was in too bad of a neighborhood to leave, so he had to stay there and drink.

I've heard worse excuses. Maybe even made them.

If you want something done right...

So the loser I hired to "hit" the graffiti tags on the sidewalk reported back to me today. He stopped by Sunday morning, but forgot the friggin spray paint, so he went back home, then he got a phone call, and by the time he got back around to it it was mid-afternoon and he figured the thugs would be out, blah blah blah.

Now he's out of town for two days.

For fuck's sake, can it really be that hard to hire good help? It's a 10-minute job! All you need is a car, and a can of spray paint, and he couldn't get his shit together enough to get both of those things in the same place at the same time??!! I weep for the future of America! Jesus!

On the bright side, I was outside sowing grass seed (the legal kind) in the front yard when a car screeched to a halt in front of my house and a fuh-laming gay man jumped out waving frantically (or maybe it just seemed frantic because of the lack of wrist muscles) at me. He wanted to know how I like the neighborhood because he's *this* close to buying a renovated bungalow down the block.

Well.

Omigod, I LOVE it! I've been here 6 years and the neighbors are all WONDERFUL! There's this teensy weensy little problem down the street but we're working on taking care of that and it'll be gone soon enough and everything will go back to being right as rain!! It's a fabulous investment and, ha ha, oh yes, people told me not to move this far south, too, they're so silly!!

Ahem.

Yay! The gays are coming to my block! Finally! I've been waiting for this moment for 6 long years!

sweet as sorghum

Friday night, on my way out of town, my neighbor down the street said to me, "You're a special kind of crazy. I like that."

He said that as I was parked outside of his house, 1/2 block away from my own, sitting in my rather distinctive vehicle (not too many on this street have a "Dog is my copilot" bumper sticker) watching the thugs. They kept looking at me like, "what is this crazy bitch doing?" I actually saw a real live drug deal!

Anyway, then I left town, which probably wasn't the worst idea ever.

I headed south to meet up with my sister and a couple of her friends. After some great directions, we found the Hancock County Fairgrounds just outside Hawesville, Kentucky, which calls itself the Sorghum Capital of the World.

There we sampled a lot of sorghum (yummy) and learned much about this plant, which comes in somewhere far behind tobacco and marijuana on the list of Kentucky's largest cash crops.

At the sorghum festival, a mule named Molly walked around in a circle to squish the sorghum juice out of the cane:

That is, until my sister and her friend told Molly she was a pretty girl, at which point the whole operation ground to a halt. Molly is such a slut.

The Kentucky Department of Ag trotted out Kentucky Kate for the event. Here you can see some young men developing their teat know-how by pulling the hell out of them and trying to squirt each other. Someday, some poor girl is going to have to spend hours un-learning that behavior.

And although I haven't milked a cow (R.I.P., Girly) since I was about 4, I found it's kinda like riding a bike, only ickier. For the record, Ky. Kate was giving only water, not milk.

Because I have more work to do than is humanly possible, I procrastinated by taking the scenic route home to Indy, which effectively stretched a 2-1/2 hour trip into 4 hours. Bought some mums, though, and wandered Indiana. It really is a lovely state.

Got home and used the rest of the daylight to work in the yard. The trip must have done some good--one of the thugs made fun of my car and I just laughed. But seriously, is "I don't know who would drive that thing" supposed to scare me? I scoff at you, thugs!

parched

For reasons that I won't go into, my life is stressful. I know, I know, whose isn't, but there's just some shit going on right now that I'll feel a lot better about when it's resolved.

I don't deal with stress very well. I am not, as a rule, very pleasant to be around when my nerves are a little on edge. Additionally, I bottle up stress deep inside like any good German would. And, I'm a Scorpio. Not that I'm into astrology at all, but if some sources (or here, or here) are to be believed, friggin Mount Vesuvius lurks under this pleasant, sunny exterior.

For these reasons, relaxation is very important to me, and when I cannot achieve it, bad things happen, usually to me but sometimes also to my personal relationships. Which really sucks.

Which brings me to this week's experiment: relaxing without the assistance of alcoholic beverages. September seems like it's been one big blur, and not just because I've been busy, but at least partly because literally, things have been a little bit blurry much of the time. I haven't woke up in a different state (unless you count hungover as a state) or anything, but my behavior has been a little unhealthy even by my liberal standards.

This would all be much easier if I was able to release all that pent-up tension through, oh, sex, for instance. That hasn't been working out so well for me either lately. Generally the drinking leads to the sex, but clearly, I've been doing something wrong.

Maybe it's the 15 pounds I've gained since I quit smoking in June. Yeah, that's right, no nicotine to relax me, either. Not that I haven't cheated liberally when drinking (see above).

All the good stuff, in short, is gone. I'm left with exercise, eating right and getting a good night's sleep. For fuck's sake, what's become of me?

Oh, and I was going to post a picture of the neighbor's fucking outdoor living room, but apparently the IT overlords at work wiped the photo program off my laptop, and I need to reinstall it as well as my camera as recognized hardware. And it's hot and I'm cranky and I just don't feel like it.

Tonight we--me and Patio Man--had a kitchen window standoff, btw. I stood in my kitchen, shade open as it always is because I feel claustrophobic when it's closed unless it's below 20 degrees outside, in which case the numbness in my fingers overrules any claustrophobia, and fixed dinner. (A stupidly healthy dinner of fresh veggie stir-fry, fyi.)

Patio Man sat, his chair actually facing my house, and watched me. I had all the windows open, with Audioslave blaring at 11 on the volume knob. It got dark and I still didn't close the shade. For all I know he was sitting there pleasuring himself while I chopped red peppers--the oil in his tiki no-torch musta been running low because I could barely see him--but dammit, it's my window, my view, and I was there first!

just throwing some words out there

**Correction: the one chair is actually green, not pink. If I could retrieve the picture off my friggin' camera, I'd prove it.

For a few years now, some people have suggested I start a blog. Mostly, this subject comes up when I talk about an article I've written for a less-than-edgy business publication, and I have to leave the best parts out of the printed story. Like the elk farm story.It was never enough to get me to start a blog, though. What was? The neighbors' "outdoor living area."

Now, I've been reading a lot of articles about the latest trends in outdoor furnishings, outdoor kitchens, bringing the indoors to the outdoors, blah blah blah. I am certain that two upholstered chairs--one pink and one homemade patchwork denim--on an unsheltered brick patio, with a tiki torch that's missing the stick that makes it a torch, does not qualify as an "outdoor living area."

Unless you're my neighbor. Some guy has adopted the patio, along with furnishings listed above, as his house, or perhaps room. Today, he rearranged the furniture. I guess he needed a new view.

This house was built in 1910 or thereabouts. From my big kitchen window--the best window in the house, incidentally--it looks a little like the house from Amityville Horror, which, if you don't associate horror with it, is a pretty darn cool-looking house. You know, the quarter-moon windows on either side of the big chimney and all. My neighbor Miss D. just got it painted a real purty creamy pale yellow color, and the house sits on a double lot, so there's probably 50 feet or so of lawn between our houses. An original brick patio runs the length of the house on the side facing my house.

Enter into this lovely tableau some guy sitting in a freaking stuffed armchair. He seems to prefer the pink one. The patchwork denim one, he reserves for guests. I don't even know who this guy is. He is not the owner of the house. He is not the owner's ex-husband, or boyfriend, or brother. He may be connected with one of the owner's siblings--Skinny Crazy Sister, Fat Crazy Sister, or Short Crazy Sister--but no one's sure. All I know is that when I look out my kitchen window, be it morning, noon, or night, there is a man smoking cigarettes and drinking Bud Light, sitting in a pink armchair, doing nothing.

If I wanted to look at that all day, I would have stayed married.