Very Moving

Not me. I'm much grumpier than
this when I'm moving.

I moved my blog to be able to have better control over images. Come over to the new place. We have pizza and beer.

Conjuring Troubles

Clap Clap... Clap Clap who? This is not a time for clap clap jokes.

We're going to see The Conjuring today. I honestly don't know why I'm doing this to myself. Seeing this movie is an especially bad idea for me for a few reasons.

• I'm easily creeped out. Have you seen the movie Insidious? No? Good. It's awful. It's laughable, but the 5 months later, the "ghost in the corner" trick still messes with my sleep. And I KNOW it's just a movie.
• If you scare me, that fear sticks with me forever. Do you remember the movie It? That, too, was awful (Stephen King should stop turning to television to make movies because they ALWAYS turn out poorly, but that thought is best saved for another post). I read the book version of It

  

  Ruined toilets for me forever

  when I was 15ish and to this day I am terrified of public restrooms - sometimes even my own bathroom. There are some nights when I don't flush in the middle of the night, not because of water conservation, but because I don't want the noise of the flush to hide my screams as the ghosts steal me from this plane of existence (yes...I am aware this is nutballs)
• Because I have this wonderful, evil imagination treating my brain like a bouncy castle, I have a hard time sleeping in total darkness. The rationale is that I need to be able to see what's comin' at me. For this reason, I travel with a nightlight. I am a full-grown woman who is not ashamed to admit that I'm scared of the dark. (OK, I'm a little ashamed, but I still own that shame!)

Yet, I love creepy horror movies (not gore porn). I love funny horror movies. I love ghosty TV shows, with the exception of Ghost Adventures, but that's more because of the douche nozzles who star in it than the ghost stories. I love being creeped out by a well-written horror novel, though I haven't seen one of those for a long time. And I do not know why I love all these things, because I'm such a gigantic wimp. Once, while home all alone, I watched three back to back eps of Ghost Hunters. I could NOT leave the couch until my husband walked in the door, even though I had a very pressing urge to pee.

So we're going to The Conjuring at 4:30 this afternoon. Here are the two reasons that seem super logical in my brain that you are totally going to find completely ridiculous:

1. If I go see this during the day, leaving the theatre while it's still light out, I won't be as freaked out. Then the creepiness will wear off by bedtime (uh huh...see bullet point two above to prove that bit o' logic so wrong)
2. I want to watch The Conjuring at the theatre, not on a DVD at home. Because if we watch a horror movie at home, the spirits in my house (which is not haunted) will pick up pointers from the movie on how to freak me out/kill me.

Look. The rational, adult part of me is fully aware how ridiculous these things sound, but this is not my rational brain working. It's that damned, over-developed amigdala again. I look forward to sleeping again in August. I am so stupid.

Here's the trailer, just for funsies:

And a Spider Shall Bring Me Back

Good lord, I'm lazy.

It's been awhile folks. Partially because I've been working on a long-form writing project (catch you up on that one later) and partly because I've been exceptionally lazy (don't have the energy to elaborate on that.)

I'm blogging today because of the creature that visited our house this morning. Our story needed to be shared in the blogosphere, mainly because it's a story that will creep out my sister Susan.

In the middle of the night, I woke up by the sound of coughing/quacking/choking. After I checked the house without finding the source, I stumbled back to the bedroom, not too terribly freaked out yet.

But then, our little tortoiseshell cat, Olivia, would not come into the bedroom. She stood in the doorway, staring at a corner of the ceiling over my pillow. Her freckly little fur-hackle mohawk started to rise and her tail got all puffy. Nothing was there.

Lingers was totally LOLing

(FYI - The Conjuring is opening in 2 days and the commercials have been freaking me out. I think Olivia must have known this. Obviously she was just messing with me.)

Eventually, I mustered the courage to get back in bed, (after 'accidentally' waking Seen up so he could bear witness if the ghosts killed me when I ran to the bathroom). Even with the bedside lamp on, I was plagued by banshees chasing me in my dreams.

Then, another round of coughing/quacking/choking cut through the darkness. This time it woke Seen too, scaring both of us out of bed at 4:37 a.m. I was in the living room checking on cats before I was really fully awake. Cats were all fine, even the little trickster Olivia.

Seen, wandering about in PJs and rubbing his sleepy eyes, thought the sound might be coming from the backyard. We're on the 2nd level of a duplex and our smaller patio faces the tree-lined backyard.

Because I just had to know what kind of monster was quack-choking in the backyard, I grabbed the big  flashlight and whipped open the back deck door, and then the screen door. Thank god I had turned the flashlight on, because...this spider was sitting in the middle of a huge effing web, in the middle of our patio, just outside the door, between the trees and our screen.

You try not to scream if you see this in the middle of the night.

This creature was smart enough not to attach her web to the screen. She anchored it on the bottom lip of the door frame and the eaves above the door, so the web stayed in the same spot, even when I pulled the screen door open, which I did before I even saw her.

She was at eye level, in the middle of a web that wasn't there last night. I screeched, shuddered, closed and locked both back doors. Because clearly she was big enough and smart enough to open the door if it wasn't locked.

Seen is scared of spiders. So I said "Honey, come here a minute!" and shined the flashlight through the door at the thing. That wasn't a nice thing to do. Seen's reaction? He said his amigdala has grown three sizes today. He also says he's never going on the back patio again. Ever.

Now, I'm usually pro-spider, but being sleepy and scared, I poked the tip of a wasp killer spray through the door and shot the poor thing.

It died, which actually made me sad when I woke up a little. Sorry 'lil spidey.

Aww... Poor little thing :(

OMG! NOT SO LITTLE! AAaaaaaEEEE!

After the sun came up, I put on some yellow, dish-washing gloves, grabbed an old plastic bread bag and picked up the dead GIANT spider like it was a mound of dog pooh. Then I ran, cringing and gagging to the trash bin in the front yard, shivering and spasming the whole time. I just knew that big, dead thing was still alive and wiggling around in there (it totally wasn't).


After I tossed it into the trash, I gave out one last big shudder, arms flailing and a loud "BLUUUUGGGHHH" which caused a friendly man driving by in a big white pick up to stop and lean out his window.

"Are you okay?" he was very concerned.

"Spider" I said and shrugged

He laughed and drove on.

Still don't know what the sound was. Current theories floating around: a duck or a dying squirrel or the neighborhood stray cat coughing up a hair-ball.

A Little Good Luck

As it happens, I didn't plan well during our last grocery shopping trip. With the holidays in the middle of the week, I somehow over calculated the number of times we would eating at friends or restaurants. The refrigerator was short by 2 days of meals.

Not a problem, around 6:30 last night, Seen and I just slipped into our coats and headed off to the local market for some back-up meal supplies. As we walked into the garage under our apartment, something seemed off. Our parking spot was a lot emptier than it usually is.

Our car was missing.

"Honey." I said as he walked up behind me, "Where's the car?"

We both stopped in our tracks.  There is a moment of slight disbelief when you realize your car isn't where you expect it to be, all cozy in it's parking spot under your apartment. We walked over to the spot. There was no broken glass. Had it been stolen?

It had been drizzling that morning, so Seen had driven us to the gym. I walked home after my workout, leaving Seen to pump up his muscles a bit more. Seen had come home about 45 minutes later. This happens a lot so neither of us really thought a thing about it.

"Did I drive back from the gym?" Seen was questioning himself. "Or did I walk?"

We go to the gym almost every day. We walk most of the time, drive when it's cold or rainy. Walking home would just be something either of us did on auto-pilot.

"Well, there's only one way to find out." I said, and we started walking towards the gym.

That morning, we had parked at a meter on a side-street. Since it was free to park there before 9:00 a.m., we didn't really give it a second thought, even though our town is notorious about giving parking tickets.  Now we were definitely discussing it.

As we walked the 4 blocks, both of us pondered how much we would owe in tickets. The general cost of parking at a meter is $2 an hour. You are allowed to park for 2 hours between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. It's free between 6 p.m. and midnight. If your car is there between midnight and 5 a.m., your car is going to get towed. It's a convoluted pretzel of parking. Still with me?

Our car had been at a meter for 12 hours. Easy prey for the parking cop in her golf-cart. In my mind, I envisioned stack of red and white envelopes tucked under the wiper blade. If the car was indeed there and not a) stolen from our garage or b) towed for being parked there all day.

Seen snuck into the street a little bit down the road and said "I see it!" Good news! Paying tickets is a lot easier than having your car stolen.  We crossed to where the car was parked, taking a deep breath before looking at the windshield.

It was empty. No tickets, no little red envelopes in sight. I actually hard blinked a couple of times, just to be sure I wasn't missing something. Then I remembered the post-it note on the meter.

I'd seen it when we parked in the morning. It read "This meter ate my quarters!" and it was dated Saturday. I had been thisclose to removing it when we got there in the morning, but then I got cold and made a dash to the gym.

The parking matron must have seen the post-it note and thought it was for our car.

A big thank-you to the coincidence/karma patrol, and the lady who wrote that meter eater note, because it was a little bit of good luck and good news we needed to start off the year. Also thanks to me for not buying enough food for the week, because otherwise we would have left the car there all night and it would have been towed.

I'm considering this the sign that 2013 is going to be filled with good luck for the Robinsons.

Not Impressed

It's totally something I can't do, but how exactly does this advance science?

The Judge

I judge. I hate that I judge, but still it doesn't stop me from thinking stuff like "Your ass is too old for that checked knit ultra-mini-skirt." or "If I was her trainer, her form would be a little straighter and she wouldn't swing those free weights".

Because I know that I'm mentally judging others unfairly, I usually have that internal dialogue with myself to stop it. This happened this morning during my AM walk. My brain was arguing with itself.

Judge Judgerson: "OMG she's trying to do push ups but she's barely bending her arms and she's bending from the waist so her head is almost to the ground and she's looking at her shoes! What muscle group does she think she's working?"

Amy Gupta Zenchild: "What are you judging? You can do maybe 5 girlie push ups"

JJ: "Yeah, because I'm focusing on getting the form right so I can build the muscles correctly."

AGZ: "You are not her. Not in her workout routine. Not in her arms or abs or thighs. You don't know the challenges ahead of her today, how her parents treated her when she was a kid, if she's allergic to eggs. You don't know ANYTHING about her. You are not her, so stop judging her."

JJ:  "If I was, I'd actually bend my elbows and straighten my spine"

AGZ: "Oh Judgy, at least she's out here doing something. And something is always better than nothing."

JJ: "Except in cases like Ebola"

AGZ: "...."

Say No to Poetry!

I said 'NO!' to keeping up with that project of writing a poem a day, but not on purpose.  It's funny how a day job can drag you away from doing things like writing poems, exercising, breathing deeply. Or is that just me?

The one thing my job has taught me is that just because something has an urgent deadline, doesn't necessarily make it important in your life (or the world itself.) It's possible to get something done on time and still take care of mind and body stuff that will matter for the rest of your life. It just takes a smidge of effort.

It may be time to take a vacation day or two.