No reward offered, just hugs.

My apologies, I seem to have disappeared. If you find me, let me know. I think I was last seen purchasing Cheetos and Malt Liquor beverages at the 7-11. Not armed, but occasionally dangerously too smart for my own good. I can just be dropped off at any local carnival and I will eventually find my own way home.


While you're looking for me under freeway overpasses and in dumpsters, a little bit of stuff to keep you busy...

Remember in that post I did like a month ago where I said I was going through old photos? Yeah, you know- my last post before this one? Well, I realized something odd. I realized that I had hundreds, yes HUNDREDS of photos that fell into one of three categories:

• Scenery/landmarks that I have no fucking clue what/where they are or when the pic was taken/who took the picture.
  
• Random people I don't know
• Duplicate photos/photos where important bits got cut out of the pic
  

Once I pulled all of these out, the stack I threw away was over a foot tall. Lucky for you I saved a few random snaps so maybe you could help me figure out what/who the hell I'm looking at.

#1:
Haunted barn? Leftover scenery from Blair Witch Project 2? My only memories from that winter I was kidnapped by a lonely farmer and was made to milk cows and churn butter wearing little more than hot pants and the top half of a sheep costume?


#2:

Good one, Ansel Adams.

#3:
Honestly- this could have been taken at Lake Titicaca in 1954 by Richard Nixon for all I know. Who saves an undated, unidentified picture of a lake (?) with part of someone's thumb in the pic but me? This could be anywhere, but I'm going to go ahead and say it was taken in the south of France when I was there last summer with my Clive Owen, making sweet monkey love and drinking moderately priced champagne.


#4:
Random child-tumblers. I know this was taken in 1985, and I can safely say that I knew no random child-tumblers then, so what gives? I'm positive I'm not a pedophile (nor was I then), and I've never been what you could call a "tumbling enthusiast", so why oh why have I held onto this photo for 24 years? The worst part is, this was #1 in a series of 3.


Finally, #5:
This is my favorite of the bunch- some random, European-looking dude with a honkey-fro pompadour. Lets call him Johann. In my squishy mind, Johann is studying Animal Husbandry at Oslo University with a minor in cat grooming. He enjoys the music of A-ha and Manheim Steamroller, taking nature hikes to collect dirt samples, and making ice cubes. He hasn't lost his virginity yet, but the chubby yet likable Inga from his Communist Poetry class has indicated that, given enough hard cider, she may let him touch her boobs (under the bra).


Hope those are enough to keep you entertained while searching for me. I think I was last seen wearing fishnet pantyhose, a potato sack as a dress, and bowling shoes, if that helps.

Happy Monday, my milk-deprived lost little sheep. Happy Monday.

XO

Should I put red or white wine in my emergency preparedness kit?

So...
Saturday night I was super-duper excited as we got our first big-big storm this summer in my little corner of the world. Seriously- the first big one with lightening, thunder, wind and scary black skies. God I love storms.
It took a few seconds to register that the prolonged siren I was hearing was the tornado sirens and not just another night where one of my neighbors drunkenly shoots someone in the foot then goes on a high-speed chase with the police in a stolen bakery truck, but that's neither here nor there.

When they first went off, I did what any tornado-fearing Minnesotan would do- I turned on the teevee to see what the local weather people had to say. It went something like this: "You might have a tornado where you live, then again you might not."

When the sirens went off a second, then a third time, I got a little nervous. While it would be unusual for a tornado to develop where I live (so close to the Mississippi River), it wouldn't be impossible. Crap.

When I was growing up, we lived kind of in the middle of nowhere- the kind of "middle of nowhere" that tends to attract all sorts of weather oddities. Blizzards, hail, locusts, tornadoes, worm invasions (true), lightening storms, volcanoes and the like. One summer, after a night of huddling in the basement with little more than a transistor radio and some Shasta soda, we emerged from the house to see that a tornado had cut a 20-30 foot wide path through the woods a mere 50 or 60 feet from our house. We didn't have electricity for a week, and my Mom discovered shortly thereafter that our house insurance didn't technically cover tornadoes. I also hear the story every few months about how my Mother-in-law and her family (seven kids plus the parents) pretty much lost everything in a tornado in the 60's. Ugh.

So yeah, I was a little worried on Saturday. You'd think that I would be most worried about the safety of the Mr. and the furry turdlets, wouldn't you?
Um...nope. Not so much.

Turns out they rank slightly below my heirloom tomato plants and all of my photographs.

I am an asshole.

A few hours earlier, I had decided to finally go through my giant tote of photos that, over the years, had become a mixed up mess- 70's family photos freely mingled with late 80's bad hair pics and more recent pictures of the cats. I had just about finished organizing them into piles, which was a long and difficult process considering that many of them weren't dated or labeled, so I had to organize them according to hair styles. No lie. It seems to be the only true indicator of different eras of my life. Pixie-cut dark brown hair? That indicates 1989-1991, as well as 1993-1995, the difference between the two being that the second time around I dyed it nearly black. Various growing-out phases indicate the in-between years, and when my own hair could not determine the date, I looked to the Mr. or my friends. While a fun trip down the memory highway, this was a pain in the ass project that probably won't be totally done for another 20+ years.

So, I've got hundreds of photos spread out on the dining room table in various piles when the sirens started. Good one, Universe. I had visions of all of them blowing up in a funnel cloud- people miles away would be finding pictures of me for weeks and wondering who the unfortunately coiffed girl with a penchant for pinning the ankles of her jeans was. I would end up in some Freshman art student's "found art" project. The horror!
I didn't know what to do with them that wouldn't screw up what progress I had made, so I did the only thing I could- I prayed to the gods of weather-related calamities. "Oh, St. Snowverina, Oh St. Windfred, Oh St. Hurry Caine, hear my plea! I'll sacrifice a virgin daiquiri in your honor if you just spare the photos!" I then did my patented "dance of the thousand winds" and after putting my pants back on, just hoped for the best.

Then I thought- tomatoes!

I FINALLY have tomato plants that are producing real, live, edible tomatoes, and they're heirlooms at that. We've eaten a few already and they were amazing. This is pretty much the first year ever that I have successfully grown tomatoes, and I wasn't about to let that bitch Mother Nature take my tomatoes away. I'd cut the bitch first. So I run out, throw a big towel over them, and cross my fingers, toes and eyes for good measure.

Last and certainly least, I start thinking that maybe, just maybe I should shoo all the beasts into the basement, including the Mr.
If this had been a made-for-TV movie, they all would have already perished in the storm, leaving me a hollow shell of a human being who becomes a storm-chaser in an effort to "find herself". At the end I would find the meaning of life and give up my storm chasing ways to settle down with the hunky country Veterinarian whose wife left him for a big city stockbroker.

But I digress...

Just in case, I light a bunch of candles and fill a few pitchers with water. Never mind that we live in the city and probably wouldn't lose power for more than a few hours, but in my mind without the proper precautions we would quickly slip into Donner Pass-like conditions, trying to decide if we should eat Pooter or Bubs first.

By the time I turn off the tap, the tornado watch is over, the rain has subsided, and my pictures, tomatoes, furry turdlets and spouse are intact.

How very anticlimactic, I know, but that's how it happened, folks. And no- you can't return the last 5 minutes of your life that you spent reading this for a full refund. Store credit only.

Happy tornado-free Monday, my photogenic little cannibals. Happy Monday.

XO

Bless me internets, for I have sinned...

As I am having a blissfully peaceful week doing little more than singing songs to my pets, making sure my ass crack isn't exposed while riding my bike, and pickling and canning anything I can get my hands on (pickled cheerios or ham, anyone?), I thought I'd give you a confession plucked directly from the archives of Whiskeymarie's Church of Our Lady of the Perpetually Confused- where the word "confidential" really means "We'll totally blab this crap to anyone who'll listen."

Confession: I, Whiskeymarie VonPartypants, willingly and enthusiastically attended a Gallagher show when I was 14 or 15.

Yes folks, I love love loved me some dopey sledgehammer-through-a-watermelon humor back in the day. My friend Tallgirl, my sister and I would sit in front of the teevee for hours, watching poorly edited VHS tape after VHS tape of his shows that my Grandma would tape for us, being that we lived in the middle of nowhere and barely had the four local channels, let alone cable. Every time he'd reach into the cushions of the giant couch and pull out the flip-flop sandal and declare, "There's that thong!" we'd laugh ourselves retarded. He was corny, outdated, and looked like the missing member from the cast of the Slim Goodbody show, but for whatever reason we thought he was hi-larious.

When we found out he was coming to the Duluth Auditorium, we waged a full-on teenage assault on my parents to get tickets, including (but not limited to): whining, begging, pouting, door-slamming, pleading, bargaining, screeching, and pulling the "we never get to do anything" card until they relented. Our poor parents.

We were such assholes.

Turns out, my Mom had already snagged us tickets- front row center tickets for us, while they would be sitting about 10 rows back, away from the schrapnel.

FRONT ROW CENTER, SUCKAS!!!!!!!

Holy hell, the screeching and over-enthusiasm unique to over-caffeinated teenage girls was probably unbearable. In our minds, we were the envy of all. My Mom kept mumbling about how she "shouldn't have told us about it until the last minute so that maybe she would have some goddamn peace and quiet around this house".
We were way more excited for this than any heterosexual girls should have been.

The night of the show was sort of a twofer of joy for me: not only was I about to be splattered by misc. food and nonfood items by someone who probably flunked out of Mime school, but when we settled into our seats the night of the show, complimentary yellow plastic ponchos in hand, I looked down the row to see a boy whom I didn't know but had been randomly seeing around town and had decided I would eventually marry, such was my love.
Squee!!!!!

The show was exactly what we expected- in fact I'm pretty sure that Gallagher just did the same jokes over and over for the span of his career- we got splattered, we laughed when he pulled out the flip-flop again, I tried not to stare too hard at the object of my affection, who did not once even look at me being that he was probably 20-21 and I was jailbait with bad 80's hair and a food-splattered yellow poncho. In my young, Duran Duran and Jolt Cola-addled brain, I considered this a near-perfect evening.
Good times.

Not that anyone in their right mind would make this shit up, but in case you think that I live an embarrassment-free life where I don't do things like tripping on my own feet or somehow accidentally getting a toothbrush stuck in my ear...

...I have proof that I, indeed, willingly subjected myself to the rantings and horrifyingly bad comedy stylings of a dude whose "look" consisted of tight black polyester pants, a tight baseball jersey, SUSPENDERS, a gay porn 'stache and honkey 'fro.

Behold the evidence that I have held onto for 20+ years:

So there you go- another tidbit I probably should have kept to myself, much like my confessing to willingly attending a Huey Lewis and the News show.

Next up: "Did I ever tell you about the first time I got my period on Track & Field day?" And, "How about that one time I split my pants at work and it sounded like I ripped a huge one and couldn't decide to confess to the splitting or the 'fart' so I did neither?"

Happy Tuesday, my little sledgehammer-splattered pieces of hammy goodness. Happy Tuesday.

XO