I really wanted to like this book.

You may remember reading about Colton Harris-Moore, aka the Barefoot Bandit. Colton was a semi-local teen who managed to outrun the law for a really long time. He got caught, and now he's in jail. Now I understand that crime is bad and all the jazz, but I really really became captivated by his story. The same way I was captivated by the Ruby Ridge fiasco. Speaking of which, Jess Walter wrote an amazing book all about Randy Weaver and what went down at Ruby Ridge (shame, shame Idaho). I highly recommend you check it out. The book is called Ruby Ridge, but the original title was Every Knee Shall Bow which is just soooooo much better, but it was changed later on. I really do prefer the original title, but that's neither here nor there. Jess Walter =  good. Bob Friel = really bad.

Yeah, I didn't want to brag, but it is pretty much signed too! (Thanks Christine.)

Who is Bob Friel? Oh just the guy that wrote THE BAREFOOT BANDIT: The True Tale of Colton Harris-Moore, New American Outlaw. Cue disappointment! It's so bad!!! I read the first 4 chapters and I had to put it down. I was giddy when I got the email saying my book hold had arrived at the local library. GIDDY. After twenty minutes I knew I wouldn't make it through all 500 plus pages. I mean would you...

"After nearly four hours, the alternately thrilling and terrifying flight was over and the pilot's heart was still beating. He'd started the morning as Colton Harris-Moore, trailer-bred juvenile delinquent and petty thief. When he popped open the door of that stolen Cessna, though, and stepped into the wilds of Washington State haunted by the legends of Sasquatch, D.B. Cooper, Twin Peaks, and Twilight, he became Colt, the new millennium's ballsiest outlaw.
Move over Bigfoot, meet Barefoot."

I even kept reading after that paragraph. I did stop a few pages later when the chapter started with,
"Meanwhile, back on the Wild West's watery frontier, the residents of Orcas Island woke on November 12 to a big breakfast of WTF?"

WTF indeed.

I just couldn't take anymore. I'll have to wait until Colton gets out of jail and decides to write his own book.

new black hat

I bought a new hat. WHY?

I don't know. It was on sale. Sometimes I just do these things. 

blanket time!

I started knitting this blanket forever ago. And by forever I mean around April. Progress pretty much halted once summer arrived and a chunky knitted blanket just seemed ill-advised. But now that it's all frosty again, a chunky knitted blanket seems like the best idea ever. Am I right or am I right?

But last night, while I was painting my nails: DISASTER. 

That's right, my lovelies. Red. Nail. Polish. 

Hello, bordello.

Or more appropriately, bordello museum, which would make it, of course, a defunct bordello. Wow, those two words are super-depressing together. Not that an operating bordello is something to get ecstatic about, but what do you picture when you read defunct bordello? 


Something along these lines, perhaps?

The ladies stayed for four months at a time and then
moved to another brothel. A sex worker circuit, if you will.

I bet it is.

All this was left by the ladies. Not the mannequins and packing peanut- simulated bubble bath, but everything else. Yes, that includes sheets, Mr. Bubble, and lingerie, which the mannequins now wear. 

So, yeah. This is the Oasis Bordello Museum in Wallace, ID. Catherine and I went for a visit last Saturday. It was...creepy. Honestly, I don't know what I expected. Well, I think I expected it to be creepy in a way that didn't actually creep me out as much as it ended up creeping me out. Creepy-funny, not creepy-think-about-it-while-trying-to-fall-asleep-and-being-incredibly-disturbed. It was so very much the latter in this instance. 

The bordello operated until 1988--it stopped because the FBI set up shop in town to investigate the crooked sheriff. But before all that came to pass, the ladies of the evening made a tidy profit (around a 100K/year, according to our guide) serving up to 40 gents a night. All right, calling them gents is bit of a stretch. I believe Catherine called them dirty husbands...as in, "Can you imagine your dirty husband getting his paycheck and going there before coming home?" I think we all can. 

The dirty husbands entered through this door. 

While Catherine had the good sense to ask about condom usage--there were regulations in the 1980s, but they were not enforced--we really wanted to know about the doctoring. There was a weekly exam and blood work, but we were skeptical about the regulation of this, too. And what about the STDs and pregnancies from the unenforced condom policy? Good questions, which we did not ask. Not because we were shy (we did ask to have the sex menu decoded and now know what the half and half option entailed), but because we got the sense our lackadaisical guide would not know the answer. We preferred to come up with the answers on our own--our imaginations are quite thorough.  


However, we couldn't come up with an explanation for this. 

It's just an extra mannequin leg. Whatever. 

I can sum the experience up thusly: it was like going to the 4H tent at the county fair and seeing the cow with the visible stomach (You know, the window?). It's a learning experience, but it's also gross, and somehow sordid, and really doesn't seem as acceptable as it once was. 

Do not rent a room here. 

The term for cow windowing is cannulation, by the way. Did you think you were going to learn that today? I certainly didn't. You're welcome. 

The Case of the Purloined Gloves

Spokane has been warm and sunny for exactly two days...like 70 degrees warm and clear blue skies sunny. You know, the good stuff. The shift into spring has my brain temporarily flummoxed. The ol' thinker is still in winter malaise mode. For instance, my brain is still really concerned with stuff that occupied us (as in me brain and me-self {a la Karl Pilkington}) during the drear rainy season.


Recent examples of this stuff include: reading an article in The New York Times about Rob Marshall directing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, having a terrifying dream about Transformers and Decepticons, and deciding (despite the fact that I am not even halfway through the book) to read the last page of Game of Thrones, only to discover one of the characters suckling not 1 but 2 baby dragons (dragonlettes, dragonlings, dragon pups? What is the correct term?). Ganz shockiert!


So, today was the day when I granted my upstairs a hiatus from all this. We planted some plants. Thusly...



A selection from Mel's Nursery. Tomato, lavender, clover, shamrocks, sedum.

Dark Dancer White Clover



Charmed Wine Shamrocks

Sedum ground cover

Now for the mystery: for the second year in a row, my gardening gloves have disappeared. Is some Browne's Addition person sneaking onto my porch and rifling through my planting stuff to steal my $6.00 gloves? Or does one of the squirrels have a liking for gloves as nesting material? Here's some added weirdness: I also have a single glove (the mate was lost when it inadvertently touched some cat poop 2 years ago) which remains, untouched, from year to year. So, is my porch the go-to place to pilfer gloves? I don't know, but I don't like it.

If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon.

What I should be doing tonight is working on a seriously overdue project and watching my Napoleon miniseries (John Malkovich as Talleyrand!), but that seems like such an assignment. I mean, I love projects, and I love Napoleon (He was made a general at 26!), but I've had those dvds from Netflix for like two weeks and haven't watched them yet. Too much pressure!


I mean, I know Josephine's real name was Rose (It was changed by Napoleon because he didn't like Rose.), and I know that she was 32 to his 26 (the general-making age) and she had bad (I mean, bad) teeth. But there are so many other things I don't know. (I also know the thing Napoleon said in that letter to Josephine about not bathing because he was coming home soon--learned that in 9th grade {Who didn't?}. Dirty birds.)


So, yes, I'm excited to learn through the power of the miniseries, but it's like seven hours long. That's a pretty big commitment for me.


In the meantime, I've spent my evening watching Bonnie and Clyde (excellent, in case you're wondering), marvelling at Warren Beatty's wonderfully unkempt hair (and unsettling laugh) and everything about Faye Dunaway. Oh! Also, Estelle Parsons plays Buck Barrow's wife, Blanche. Who is Estelle Parsons? Only Roseanne and Jackie's mother, Bev, from Roseanne! It took me a couple minutes to realize. I had to talk myself through--grating, dissatisfied yet superior voice--and then I had to have a moment of silence while I filtered through all the television mothers I could recall (because I knew enough to know that it was a mother voice). It was an exciting moment. I thought about calling someone.

I've also been doing a little bit of kick-back drinking. No biggie, but it did directly contribute to this next thing: me reading old myspace blogs and cracking up. Like this little gem from an October 2005 conversion with Catherine:


Her: "I've limited myself to drinking coffee on social outings only."
Me: "You're a social drinker?"
Her: "Yes, and this is social."
Me: "No, this is anti-social. Just because we're being anti-social together--"
Her: "Two wrongs don't make a right, but two negatives do make a positive...that's math."
Me: "Hah, we're two negatives."


Maybe it's just my current state, but that is hilarious.

I found this crab claw while walking along the lake in Milwaukee last summer.

I was thinking about it today. Poor little crabbin. (I know that isn't a word.)

Who comes first. Napoleon the first.

This has nothing to do with that.

I went back to work today and even though I felt a little iffy in the morning, by the end of the day I was right as rain. Yippee! I was so happy to be feeling better that when I got off work, I decided to make a trip 1. to the liquor store and 2. to the yarn store. Now, I know me saying that I'm going to the liquor store sounds...bad (Bad? Hey, I'm an adult.), but I don't plan on drinking tonight. It's an errand that needs (yes, needs) to be run, and they're not open on Sunday (my regular errand day). 


You see, I finished up everything in the house before I got sick (which had nothing to do with me getting sick--it began as a cold and moved onto the stomach flu) and it wasn't at all important while I was sick, but now that I'm not sick, I can envision a weekend where drinking a couple of gin & tonics or bourbons, neat (my friend, Dan, taught me neat last year. Before that, my bourbons were plain or regular), would not be such a bad idea. And I should also say, because I felt like a super-lush carting four empty liquor bottles out to the recycle bin this evening, that it took me a while to drink those. It's not like this restocking episode is a weekly or even monthly occurrence. It just so happens that I found myself at the bottom of those bottles around the same time.


Wow. I went on the defensive right away. And not much to say about the yarn store. Guess I don't expect Mother dear to frown on that half of the excursion.


Moving on...


I've been waiting for the right moment to show off some of my estate sale and thrift store finds, from our out and about in Tacoma over Second Christmas, but I realized that the right moment is a ways off (because I had to leave all the unpackable {not a word} items at Mom's), so I better just get to it. Here's what I was able to bring home with me.

A handful of hearts

A vintage telephone and address book.

The cover is all satiny. Ooooooh.

And the pages are all blank. Just waiting for me to put pencil to paper.
This is a very important step in writing oftener.

A colorful assortment of gift cards

A 1968 copy of True Grit

It has an appropriate amount of wear, I think.

What an oddball assortment of items, but I suppose it fits with the oddball assortment of topics in this post. Oh well, I can't always tie everything together. Wait. Rooster Cogburn and drinking. You must admit, that just about gets there.

Let's be honest,

Starting is the worst. Do we go the wow route and try to create something so spectacularly awesome that the entire
blog-o-sphere (a word that exists, yeah? but maybe not hyphenated?) collapses in on itself? Or do we map out the parameters of the blog? Let everyone (and by everyone, I mean ourselves and our audience of zero people) know what we hope to accomplish? Figure out a format? Or just fiddle around? Decision, decisions. The pressure is too much for me, especially when I have no idea what I'm doing. And now I just admitted I have no idea what I'm doing. Add to that the fact that I have no skills and we're looking at a recipe for an incredible mess. Well, it can only get better, right? Just as soon as the sisters dear get on the blog-wagon. (Does that word exist? I wonder...)

Happy birthday, on my honor. Hopefully, we don't regret you at some point down the road.