Bye Bye, Pie!

Throw this lifeless lifeline to the wind. Or, June does flowerspeak.

I went out for a giant Americano with Dick Whitman yesterday, at 5:00 p.m. Guess what was a stupid idea. There I was at midnight, like Bono.

"I'm wide awake! WIDE AWAKE! WIIIIDE AWAAAAKKE! I'm not sleeping."

Did he really need to throw in that last line? I think we got it when you screeched at us about being wide awake 14 times. Imagine being his wife.

 

Are you shocked I threw in a U2 YouTube? Please enjoy Bono's mullet. You think you're wide awake? Vidal Sassoon hasn't slept since you got that thing.

June. Using current hairdresser references since 1979.

So. Trouble falling asleep. Is what I'm telling you. Thanks to D. Whitman and his giant black coffee. He was working in Greensboro yesterday, which he does not normally do. We were celebrating this fact. Woo!

Other than that, I sat around and waited to get jobs. Which I did not get. I mean, I didn't officially NOT get any, and I didn't get any. So to speak. And I read all of that Jeffrey Dahmer's dad book, which was sad. I mean, you feel terrible for the guy. "Hey, Jeff, why'd you get a freezer?" I mean, he actually asked him that. Ack. Right there is why I never wanted kids.

Of course, then God saw fit to bring me Francis. Who given the chance would have poured acid into as many head holes as he could.

@#@&%*@, mom. And who the blynd cat you got there now? She a wimp.

eyeriss heer you, and she NOT A WIMP. ded cat. ded cat in yardd.

Iris is getting big, and every so often one of the cats will walk by and I'll think, wait. Was that Lily or Iris? I have to see if the cat in question has eyeballs or not.

Anyway, I am (wait for it) going to do freelance work now, but Ima do it outside because it is OUTSTANDING weather. I know it snowed, like, three days ago. All my daffydills are up and yes, I am annoying for calling them that.

We up. Now what?

Hiya, 'cynth!

Sadly, I believe I made this funny funny joke last year. I like this photo because Edsel's snout just barely made it in. We were going for a walk and I decided to take a picture first. You can imagine how this pleased him, seeing as walk time is NUMBER ONE TIME EVER! EVER! WALK BEST TIME! I'M WIDE AWAKE! WIDE AWAKE!

I'm not sleeping.

Okay. June out. Somebody tell me about anything interesting they're doing this weekend. I have Dick Whitman tomorrow night and an Oscar party on Sunday. You?

P.S. I want a cool nickname like The Edge. I realize I just said I want you all to call me Nippy. But now I want to be "The" something. The Nippy makes no sense.

Did I mention I hate my computer?

Blogging from work would be wrong. And that is why I am not doing it right now.

Computer COMPLETELY dead at home. Dead. Dead dead dead. Stick a fork in it. The fat lady has sung. Unfortunately, that fat lady is me.

I blame work. If someone is gonna BRING chocolate-chip cookies stuffed with Oreos, what am I to do? IGNORE them? They won't be IGNORED.

Also? While I am not blogging from work? I have had this photo on my desktop for the longest time...

Oh. Wait. That is not the picture I wanted to put in...

Here it is. This is my coworker TinaDoris' puppy, with the toy I gave her. My dogs never once played with this and my mother spent $800,000 on it. You are supposed to put treats in the bottle and the dogs are supposed to figure it out. The dogs reacted the same way I do when I see Sudoku.

So at least Penny, here, likes the rope part. I love her.

I know! June loves an animal! Sound the alarm!

I had better go, because I have to, um, go to work. Because I am not at work already. Nosir. But before I do I want to tell you that (a) I am getting a new computer TOMORROW after Tallulah's vet appointment (nothing wrong with her. Just general shots and telling me she weighs too much and sticking something up her bung to check for worms. Basically she will adore me tomorrow) and (4) I see The Fireman tonight.

Oh! And I was in the spare room, not to sound like The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, and I saw this outside my window:

Oh, piffle.

There we go. Geez. Blogging from...home...certainly is an adjustment. 

Anyway, how pretty! In all the overgrown jungle that is my back yard a flower has grown! A flower grows in Greensboro. And yes I DID traipse out there in this driving rain, in case anyone is local and knows of the monsoon we are experiencing currently.

Okay, I'd better...get to work!

 

 

One of those annoying posts where many topics are discussed

1. Last night I was chatting with The Fireman, and I said, "I have to go. I have to pull weeds before it gets dark" and he said, "Again? You seem to...do that a lot."

I have only known the fireman a short time, and already he has noted my yard obsession. But DUDE, you go out there and get eaten to bits by mosquitoes and then you have to run inside screaming as dramatically as you can.

Being my neighbor is fun. And yes, I DO use Off. On me it doesn't work. Anyway, I was pull-pull-pulling when I looked at the front of my house and saw this:

Can you see everyone? Tallulah is on the left, Edsel on our right, and Roger Dodgerhead is in front of him. I've no idea where Anderson Cooper was. Perhaps he had news to cover. BAH.

I am just saying. Am I that exciting? "let watch mom pull weedz." I mean, really? You can't hump each other or eat some kibble or chew the couch? That wouldn't be more rewarding?

2. I have spoken about my Uncle Leo many times. He married into our family in 1971, but when he and my Aunt Kathy divorced in the mid-80s, we liked him so we kept him. My Uncle Leo is ridiculous. He is the HAPPIEST person you have ever met. Nothing fazes him. In fact, he has had three brain operations in his life and says, "This is great! I get to retire! I get to see the world! Everyone should get to have three brain operations!"

He is the pinnacle of optimism.

So he, along with everyone else I am related to, went to India for that wedding I have now mentioned 994934 times, and I know you wish I'd bring it up MORE OFTEN. The point is, everyone else was back WEEKS ago, but not Uncle Leo. No. He was gonna spend a MONTH in India.

Yesterday I got an email from Aunt Kathy: "I don't know if anyone's told you that Leo is in Mt. Sinai in NYC."

That was it! That was ALL she told me! Why was Uncle Leo in the hospital? Why the hell was he in New York when he lives in Saginaw? Was it his brain? Is it something so serious he had to be, I don't know, TRANSPORTED to New York?

Seriously. What the frosting? (A commentor taught me that phrase.)

I desperately tried to get ahold of everyone on planet Earth through email, because guess who hadn't brought her iPhone with her to work? And was NO ONE online?

You know who would have been online because he is all the time? Uncle Leo.

Crap.

Turns out? He was coming back from India and decided to go to New York for a spell, because his head is a bowling ball with the three brain operations and he can do what he likes. Except, apparently, keep anything in his body, because he just started getting VIOLENTLY ill and he got so sick and so weak that he called an ambulance for himself.

Now, if I had called an ambulance it'd be no big deal. Daniel Boone said the ambulance just stops at my house several times a day on its way back from calls to see if it's needed. (Yes, I did just mention D. Boone. Hang on.) But for my UNCLE to call an ambulance, he must have been near death. And in fact he was. His potassium level was 2. Which I guess is, you know, not good.

So he's weak and feels dreadful and just wants to sleep, but they have managed to unnauseate him for the most part. They do not know precisely what is wrong yet but hello India. Hello Indian parasite.

One of my friends said, "They should check his wrists. Maybe he got an Indian burn." Everyone's a comedian.

3. I am going to Raleigh this weekend to see Daniel Boone. Oh, get your knickers out their twist.

In case you are just tuning in, Daniel Boone is someone I like like liked for three weeks, and we broke up and it got ugly.

When we broke up, I deleted all of our emails, and in three weeks' time we had emailed each other over 200 times. What Daniel Boone and I did? Was talk. Talk talk talk. We are the same PERSON, including the verbal part. And the part where we think we're hilarious. Sometimes his emails make me have to lay my head on the desk, I am laughing so hard.

After our hideous breakup, we went two days without talking and on the third day he emailed me to kind of scold me. I scolded back. We talked. And talked. And apologized. He apologized many times. And the other day I deleted our emails again because I can never FIND anything on my email, and I realized that since we broke up last month we have exchanged 500 additional emails.

Did I mention we talk?

And I am over him. I do not have a romantic interest in D. Boone. I just really dig the guy. We have fun. And because we talk everything TO DEATH, we know this is gonna be a platonic visit. Which will be, you know, interesting. See him in a new light and so forth.

And that is all I have to tell you about that.

4. The Real Housewives reunion. Riveting AS ALWAYS.

5. Maybe I'll go pull some weeds...

RIP. Not so much.

My weekend? Pretty good, other than when the dogs dug up my dead cat. Yours?

I KNOW. How ludicrous is my life? How ludicrous is poor Frannie's death? He never did like those dogs. Guess who got the last laugh in THAT relationship.

When Francis died on Friday, I had to come home and become June Gardens, Grave Digger. And I do not know if you've ever dug a hole like that, but MAN is that hard. I mean, I dig holes all the time. I'm always out there in my garden. But a BIG hole?

And apparently the site I chose was brought to me by Alex Haley. Because every three inches there was another ding-dang root. I had to PLY stupid roots out with my shovel, or cut them out with my 1942 clippers. I was sweating like Meat Loaf by the time I was done.

You know when you go to join a gym, and they give you a tour, and they're all, here's the spinning room and here's the weight room? They should have, "Out back, here, is the pet grave digging area. We add new roots every week!"

I wanted to put Francis near his angry chair, only, you know, outside the house. My mistake was to put him on the INSIDE of the fence, where the dogs were, and not outside. Because yesterday when I ventured into the back yard, and saw the dirt thrown hither and yon, and SAW POOR FRANCIS...

Well. It was traumatic.

They didn't drag him around the yard, thank heavens. That archeological team just found him and reported the results to National Geographic or whatever. And do you know I tried to elicit Edsel's help with that hole in the first place? He had been standing there with his mouth gaping, watching me, and I actually got down on all fours and dug like a dog, and said, "Come on, Edsel! Help me dig a hole!"

But Edsel kind of whined and placed one delicate paw in the dirt, then said, "Eds just got clawns clip at day care. Not wish to dirtee."

Oh, but when digging the hole was on his OWN time! SURE! Then he could mess those precious "clawns" up.

I am irritated with the dogs right now. Can you tell?

So anyway, I called Marvin. Have you ever noticed the only times I call Marvin are to say things like there's a scorpion under the corner cabinet, or Tallulah's missing, or my dead cat has been dug up? Who probably enjoys my number flashing on his screen?

So I tell him this lovely tale and I say, "I really don't think I can bear to, you know, excavate Fran and move him to a new place. Can you come do it? I'll dig the hole. I just need someone to move him."

"I'll come dig the new hole," said Marvin. "Geez, how long has he been in there, again?"

"He died on Friday," I said, "and on the third day, he rose again."

We toyed with the idea that maybe Fran was trying to rise from the grave because he was pissed off about the kitten, and we discussed how the dogs managed to move that giant, heavy St. Francis statue I had put over the cat, and anyway, in due time Marvin came over and did the deed. And he got to meet Roger Sterling, whose obligatory blurry photo I will add now:

Here he is pouncing on my robe tie. Do you enjoy my cowboy robe?

Anyway, Marvin buried Franics--again--around the corner, so really Fran is even closer to his angry chair than he was before. He inexplicably put a giant flat weight on top of the site, which is a lovely tribute that makes no sense. I guess he really was worried Francis was doing the kicking of the soil.

So that's the dirt. Bah.

Sigh.

June gets picky

I'm up. It's 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday.

Apparently I am easily trainable, like a German shepherd. I do have a lot of German in me. So to speak. But one week of getting up at 7:00 and whooo! here I am. Up at 7:00 on Sunday. Nice. Relaxing.

So far I have taken out all the trash, done some laundry, put some clothes away, organized (but not paid; don't be silly) the bills, fed the pets and realized I could just stuff Francis' pill in his deer food and not spend nine hundred thousand dollars on pill pockets for him. That was a revelation.

Yes, he's eating DEER now. He grew tired of the bunny. He only wants to eat things that were cute, which makes me feel terrible. Can't he get a hankering for Donald Trump meat?

See what I did there? I went for the Donald Trump joke. That is what happens when I wake up at 7:00. My humor lacks considerably.

Anyway, Tallulah spent the greater part of yesterday catching up on her beauty rest and I was quite tempted to make her get up and wash the car or something, the way parents of teenagers do when they know their kids are hung over.

Nevertheless, I let her sleep, mostly because Edsel ate our bucket so Talu COULDN'T have washed the car. I was in the yard clipping things with my stupid hand-held 1942 hedge clippers, which make my wrists shake after about an hour and yes I do realize I am a giant wuss and this is where Edsel gets it.

On the side of my house is this giant heater/air conditioner unit, and also 80,000 feet of very scary pricky climbing rose bush action, and it is trying to bloom but there were all kinds of weeds getting in the way. So I climbed the ding-dang air-conditioner box and hung precariously off of it and got completely attacked by prickers while I attempted to cut ONLY the weeds and not the pretty roses and every time I came up with a pale pink rosebud I felt bad.

I was in the midst of this unrewarding task, so covered in prickers I was mistaken for a porcupine by my neighbors and shooed away, when I heard rustling in the leaves. I figured it was one of the 8,000 bunnies we have, but when I turned around?

It was a little apricot-colored dog.

You know I don't know from little dogs. It was a Yorkie, I think, or maybe a Pomeranian. Anyway, it was smiling up at me and woooshing its huge feathery tail, obviously attracted to porcupines, and when I said hello it ran away.

I uncontorted myself from my air conditioner and when I got to my front yard, there was nobody with the dog. There she was, running up and down my yard like a crazy person, if a crazy person were six inches tall and feather-tailed.

Then she headed straight to the busy street where Tallulah had gotten hit.

Honestly, is this an epidemic?

So me and my prick suit ran out there and called her over to me just as she was inches from the road, and unlike my OWN dog, she turned around and smilingly ran right into my pokey arms. She let me pick her up and I could feel she had peed herself from all the excitement of meeting a 5'6" porcupine.

The whole thing was pleasant.

I walked down my street, where I had traversed at least 10,000 times this past week looking for Lu in all the wrong places, and there was a family in their back yard, hanging on the hammock, barbecuing, and when they saw the human pincushion with a Yorkie or a Pomeranian or whatever the hell they screamed, "SUGAR!" or some equally dumb name.

June. Losing readers who've named their dog Sugar since 2011.

Their dog had escaped and they hadn't even noticed, which I guess can happen when your dog weighs .06 ounces. They were very grateful and said, "Aren't you the person who lost Tallulah? We heard she came back." Clearly we are famous in this neighborhood. Perhaps I am known for my prickly personality.

BAH.

Oh, and speaking of which, I got a card from the girl I ran into. Remember last month, when I was shopping and my car rolled into that poor girl in a parking lot? She sent me a card saying if anyone was going to hit her, she was glad it was me. So that was nice. It's not every day you get a card from someone you smack into and dent.

And speaking of nice, thank you all for caring so much about Tallulah and her bad self. Thanks for the suggestions about getting her home, and for willing her to come back. I wonder if that's what did it? She was out there having the time of her life like Patrick Swayze, but she kept getting the feeling she should come back to Kellerman's and do the last dance with me.

Someone has seen that movie too many times.

I carried a watermelon.

Anyway, thank you again. Oh, and happy mother's day! Am going to spend today avoiding all restaurants. Because I'm social that way.

Ferrous Sulfate's Day Off

I decided what made me ill yesterday was taking my two iron pills way too close together on Sunday. Since I was all busy getting ready and visiting God and everything, I forgot to take it till late afternoon, then I took the other one before bed, and my stomach was all, "WHAAAT? I'm coming up there to talk to you."

I called my doctor, the one who didn't quit (did I tell you the doctor who did my surgery quit? That is, like, doctor number 40,000 now) to ask if I could start taking one effing iron pill a day now and she said yes. Mostly because I have driven her to the brink like every other doctor.

So yesterday I was too afraid to even take that pill, and now I have probably depleted my body of iron and am back to being ironless again.

zzzzzzzzzzzzz....

...what? Oh, my blog. Right.

See what I did there? I fell asleep. That was anemia humor.

Anyway I am mostly better although my stomach is still a little, "You better be good to me." Tina Turner is in there. With her spike heels.

I do not understand you people who can just barf and go on with your day. It is so TRAUMATIC. I mean, maybe it is for me because I haven't done it since 1982. And my record STLL HOLDS. But man.

In other less nauseating news, the dogs and I had some drama the other night.

Now that they have their ridiculous harnesses, which kind of help, I have their leashes all twisted up so it's like one leash for me to hold. I was walking them near the perfect-lawn guy's house, and right next door to him is this kind of shady house. They always have yukky cars in the driveway, and the house needs painted, and I always figure perfect-lawn guy is appalled that he lives next door to this Herman Munster home.

So we're walking past that unkempt house when all of a sudden a HUGE PIT BULL comes CHARGING out of the screen door, there.

Now, I say "huge pit bull" without being prejudiced, as my own Tallulah is part Pit. I am not trying to say, "You all know this dog is evil in its bones because it's a Pit." Although Tallulah is pretty evil in her bones. Basically any dog charging out the screen door would be disturbing, particularly a huge one. And this one was growling.

So without thinking I dropped the leash. Because Tallulah is 800 times nicer when she's not on the leash. If she doesn't have me to worry about me, she is not so rabid. Then I did what any responsible dog owner would do.

I covered my eyes.

"DANG IT, Heather! The dog is out! Nugget! Git in here!"

The least-sophisticated person you have ever seen in your life came running out of that house.

I peeked through my hands to see the anti-Coco Chanel, and Tallulah and the Pit Bull were sniffing each other's buttal regions. Edsel was standing there like a statue. He looked horrified. If he had been able to cover his eyes he would have done so, as well.

"NUGGET! CUT IT OUT!" cried Zelda Fitzgerald, as she approached her dog. It was at that point that the two dogs started fighting, and I really don't know who started it, so stunned and scared and fashion appalled was I by the whole scenario.

Oh, it was dreadful. Tallulah and Mr. Nugget Pit, of the Embroidered Mickey Mouse Sweatshirt Nugget Pits, there, did that thing where they made a tight circle and said, "ROWR ROWR ROWR" and showed their teeth, and poor Edsel, who was connected to the whole thing by a wound leash, was still standing there with his ears down going, "holy shyte. do anyone see Edsel?"

That woman may not have been Heidi Klum, but she certainly was brave. She got right down in the whole thing and PULLED THE DOGS APART.

"GIT YER DOGS! GIT.YER.DOGS!" she yelled at me. Now, I understand I had been standing there with my hands over my eyes pretty much the entire time and I was as useless as Edsel, but geez. Nice neighborly manners. It was HER mean dog who stampeded out there.

I stepped on the leash and gathered it up and explained about the leash aggression thing, and she was hugging her mean cruel red-eyed vicious snarling dog and said, "I unnerstaynd."

Without another word, I walked on, and it was a block before the shock wore off and I started shaking. I finally stopped and checked Tallulah for any injury. She wasn't remotely upset and she didn't even have any dog spit on her, so it must have been one of those things where they made all kinds of noise and showed possessed-by-demons faces but did not actually bite each other. Either that or she was the total victor in that round.

I kind of hope so.

Edsel is seeking therapy for his PTSD and is taking valium for the next week. Good gravy, he is a wimp.

"we all just get 'long?"

Before I go, I wonder if anyone can tell me what the teensy green bugs are on my climbing roses, and what I can do to gleefully murder them. Perhaps Nugget could come over them and chaw them with his flea teeth. Perhaps Nugget's mom could show the bugs one of her outfits and they would die of shock.

Suggestions, please.

Barf, poop, spiders, embroidered sweatshirts, 11 herbs and spices

I woke up this morning to the sound of Edsel hurling. I do not know if he 's hung over or what his story is, although he has relatively new puppy food--I got it Monday before I went crashing into everyone at PetSmart, there, with my auto.

So I got out of bed and dragged his poor self outside, only to see that Francis had barfed, as well, in the back room, and is there a VIRUS in my house? Also, there was a piece of cat poop on the floor and I'll bet you're glad you tuned into my delightful blog today.

If you are a cat owner, I know you know what I mean when I tell you I could tell Fran had not intentionally pooped on the floor, rather it was one of those, "I wish I could quit you" things that just wouldn't leave, that eventually fell off his large self on his way back to his angry chair.

Anyway, it was a charming morning and I hope I have many happy returns of it.

After cleaning both floors and washing my hands like I was Howard Hughes, I fed everyone and headed to the curtains to open them, only to see THE BIGGEST SPIDER IN THE HISTORY OF TIME on the wall.

This is when it hit me I truly do live alone.

I do not enjoy spiders. They are really the only members of the animal kingdom that I simply cannot warm up to. I mean, you will hear me say, "Hello, little slug!" and "Look at your lizard-y self!" But spiders? Uhhhhhhhggh. No.

"Tallluuuulah!" I called brightly, hoping she'd want to munch that disgusting thing. She ran over helpfully. "Eat that spider, girl."

She put her snout over by that tarantula, and do you know that creature JUMPED at my dog? JUMPED at her!

It's times like this I miss my old tough cat Mr. Horkheimer. Because he would have digested and passed that spider already. My Pit Bull, over here? Shirked and ran out the room.

So I did what any adult would do. I got the spray bottle of Murphy's Oil Soap and soaped that thing to death. Later I have to get up the nerve to vacuum its dead dangly spider parts. Ack.

Yesterday was a much better day. My friend The Other June and I went to an herb show, and by that I do not mean that several men named Herb exposed themselves to the old ladies wearing embroidered sweatshirts.

When do you reach the age when you cease to care about fashion and embrace the embroidered sweatshirt? Because my friend The Other June and I were the only people not wearing those at the herb show yesterday, other than a few hipsters who apparently are into herb gardens as well.

I remember when I was 20, and I used to get so annoyed at unfashionable people. "What is so hard about knowing what's in?" I'd think. "You just look at magazines and emulate the pages." Of course, I used to have instant coffee and potato chips for breakfast when I was 20 and I weighed 113, and I wish I could go back and slap myself, and my point is it's much easier to be fashionable when you are size nothing.

So is that it? You just get rotund enough that you're all, screw it. Ima pull on this embroidered sweatshirt and my mock turtleneck. That'll be cute. When does that happen? When you're 49? 58? 72? I need to know.

At any rate, I got a lavender plant, and I know. How cliche. There was a myriad of herbal delights for me to select and I get the old faithful lavender. I could have gotten Peaches and Herb, Herb Alpert, Herbal Essence, 11 secret herbs and spices. But I got an ENGLISH lavender plant this time, which is different from the French lavender plant I already have. So there you go. I'm mixing it up out there in the garden.

Afterward, we got Indian food at this buffet place right near my house and I wish I didn't know this buffet existed, because now I'm gonna want to go there for lunch every day. I could be their Norm from Cheers. "JUNE!" they could all yell, as I load up on the Tandoori chicken. Soon I'll be looking like Norm.

Do you think the Indian place sells embroidered sweatshirts?

P.S. Confidential to my fellow intellectual RHoNY watchers: Ramona is SUCH a B. I cannot believe she gave skin cream to that interviewee.

Spring. A lovely time to deal with your fibroids.

Spring in the South is lovely. My feeling is for every time you have to see a Confederate flag, you also get to see this:

That's one of the trees in my front yard. Isn't it pretty? And pink?

Also, my next-door neighbor, Peg, has a white dogwood mixed together with a pink dogwood and my purple-y tree is hanging right next to it like this:

Okay. Trust me. It's more exciting and blossom-y in real life.

Look at that rogue dandelion trying to be all casual back there. "Me? No! I'm not a bad influence on the other flowers! I won't SPREAD everywhere and be a menace! I won't invite the wild onion into your yard! What you mean?"

Also too, the City offered free wood chips to anyone who wanted them, and our whole neighborhood looks like an ant farm. We all have these mounds of chips that no one can use up, and everyone is getting terribly generous with their wood chips all of a sudden.

Don't you hate it when people say "all the sudden"? I also hate it when people say "regiment" when they mean "regimen." "I've been using my skin regiment for years, and I still break out."

Sigh.

Anyway, I am having a wood chip giveaway, if anyone wants any.

Also too too, I am having my delightful fibroids removed next Thursday in an outpatient procedure. They are kind of shaving them off. I'm certain you want to hear every detail. The day I get my fibroids removed coincides with the day Marvin leaves, so I lose fibroids, cats and a husband all on the same day.

My mother is coming to town that day, anyway, and we were planning on getting the HELL out of here so I don't have to watch Marvin go. So after my procedure, we are staying at a fancy hotel nearby where I can recover.

The bright side of all this is that I will no longer wake up to this every day:

See the sink? See the dishwasher? See how close they are?

Let's review. Sink.

Dishwasher.

WHY CAN'T MARVIN'S DISHES MAKE THEIR WAY IN THERE? They are AN INCH from the dishwasher! And yet every morning I get up and put his dishes in the dishwasher, as they are in the sink. So I know there is one week left of doing that. Perhaps every time I get sad, I could refer to these pictures.

Kind of like the Confederate flag/spring blossoms thing.

 

In which you all come charging at me with torches if I mention the "h" word again

FIN!

Ima keep it just like that, with nothing on it or in it. I worked so hard on the thing; I'd hate to ruin it with stuff marring it.

Okay, here it is with stuff. Marvin has packed a lot of his doo-dads, and it turns out a lot of them resided on this here hutch, so it's emptier than it used to be. Knowing me and my old lady knicknack self, it will fill up again in no time.

I do not have an official "before" picture, because believe it or not I do not live every moment with thoughts of my blog in mind, but I culled my photos and found one of our hutch, when it resided with us in Burbank back in aught six or so:

I know! You can't see the old handles. They were brown and tarnished. And kind of '70s-looking. Like Tony Orlando.

In other news, and I know you're sad to move away from the topic of the hutch, The Other June and I went to the farmers market yesterday and I bought a bird house that will supposedly get bluebirds in it. It was seven dollars. I thought I took a picture of it but apparently I did not. I culled my iPhone shots and it was not there.

"Culled" is a big word with me today.

At any rate, it basically looks like this:

I was thinking I might...

...paint it.

I KNOW! I'm OBSESSED. When did I become Junebrandt?

Also, while I was there, I got something I have always wanted to get. I have always always always wanted a St. Francis statue for my yard. I never got one because (a) in LA I never HAD a yard, (4) Marvin never seemed keen on having a saint in his yard once we DID have one and (12) they were always $9,000 when I saw them. But yesterday I found one for a good price and yes I do know that I am unemployed.

I was so excited to take old St. Francis home and plop him in my garden.

And guess what.

Edsel is terrified of him.

He's the patron saint of ANIMALS, for goodness sake. Why is Edsel scared of him? Is Edsel the devil? Does everything named Francis horrify Edsel? Does Edsel think I have actually put a miniature person under the azalea, back there?

Anyway, here was my first attempt to take a photo, but as you can see, Edsel has alarmed St. Francis considerably.

Oh, look. I DID take a picture of my new $7 bluebird house. Nice culling. It is next to the 33 million cans of paint and ruined shelf, there, because EVERYTHING HAS PAINT ON IT NOW.

Anyway, here is a better photo of St. Francis, who is still wishing he were back at the garden store and not being constantly sniffed and barked at by a dog. He is so rethinking this patron-saint-of-animals thing.

And after the farmers market, Other June and I went to a bookstore that inexplicably also sold kitchen supplies, and I bought a tea kettle. We don't have a microwave anymore, and I needed one for my Cream of Wheat and tea and general water-heating needs.

Yes, I am aware, once again, that I am unemployed. SHUT UP.

Isn't it lovely? Isn't it cheerful? Don't you just want to heat up some water and serve tea to St. Francis? While admiring my hutch? And waiting for bluebirds? And my unemployment check?

Okay, off to chase Edsel around with a statue.

Team Fibroid

Beleaguered April, the nurse who assists my doctor, called me at 3:18 yesterday. "Miss June? You got a fibroid."

Well.

I'm glad I spent $900 to learn WHAT I ALREADY KNEW. Okay, you spent $900 so I could learn what I already knew. Still. At least it wasn't, you know, a bomb or anything residing in there. My doctor referred me to a gynecologist and we go from there. I'll either have outpatient surgery or a giant hysterectomy, but either way it will be fine.

Maybe I am eating too much fiber. You think? Hence the FIBroid?

So that problem is solved. I mean, sort of.

Also, I know it's Pieces of Wisdom day but I'm not in the mood. Is everyone okay with that? I do not wish to be wise this week. Next week we're going to work on Faithful Reader Hulk's dating life, a thing that needs fixing in the worst way. It needs the loving hands of all the yentas who are up in this here blog.

In the meantime, even though I got 99 problems, my garden ain't one.

Despite the 94852445 dead leaves that I keep raking and yet hey! there's more!, my spring flowers are blooming. See my purple hyacinths hither and yon?

Being pretty. It so exhausting.

Yes, my flowers do talk like Tallulah. I know it's a coincidence.

Hya! I a 'cynth!

Good Lord, I need to leave the house.

Talu and Edsel still have free dog day care visits left, and seeing as Edsel has already chewed (a) a pillow, (b) a shoe (c) Winston and (d) my favorite sock and (e) yes it IS sad that I have a favorite sock, I am taking their houndy selves to day care. Then Ima paint this DANG HUTCH, which WILL NOT LOOK GOOD and I am going to have to call Starsky for advice soon, and there, folks, is my day. Oh, crap. And I have to take a copyediting test for a freelance company.

I just learned copyediting as a verb is one word. It used to annoy me when people made it one word then I looked it up. Oops. Looking things up. A thing copy editors should probably do. FYI: "copy editor" is two words, still.

Isn't this an informative place? Remember when I used to feature Ask June, and you would ask me grammar questions? Then the other readers would complain that that was boring? Whatever with them. Grammar and spelling are fascinating.

As is having a favorite sock.