Monthly Archives: April 2005

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Photoshop Contest

A picture of a bathroom was circulating around the dreaded email circuit (you know the circuit, where friends you hardly talk to still insist on forwarding you jokes). The bathroom claimed to have a painted floor where it looks like sky with a man falling. Thanks to Snopes, the Urban Legend Website, this was proved obviously fake. But the cool thing is, it was part of a Photoshop contest where everyone was supposed to take the picture of the bathroom and make it look different, just using photoshop. Check it out. Kind of cool

The Contest

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Buffy Thought of the Day

I’ve been rewatching Buffy on DVD since getting rid of my Dish Network. It’s a whole new world of TV watching. So, in the future you can look here for cool quotes, observations or life lessons I’ve ascertained while watching Buffy. Because damnit, I won’t have my TV time mean nothing. 🙂 But for now, I want to start off with some inquiries for those Buffy fans who care.

When Buffy died in the first season, we realize later that another slayer was brought forth. Kendra. She shows up in the Second Season, but I have all sorts of questions. My old roommate Scott and I talked about this a lot near the end of the series and researched it quite a bit, but I have found a few other pieces that confuse things for me. It seems like the lineage goes like this:

  • There are numerous girls that are the “chosen one” but their powers don’t come forth until the last chosen one dies. (Question: this part bugs me, so what are your thoughts on this?)
  • The Watcher’s Council knows who could be called and they decide whether to train them just in case. (Question: How do they know?)
  • They didn’t train Buffy because they didn’t think she would be a good slayer so when the slayer before her died and she was called she fought on her own without a watcher. Proving herself enough so that when she moved to Sunnydale, they assigned her Giles. (Question: Before she met Giles, did she know she was a slayer or did she just know she had some superpower?).
  • SEASON ONE AND TWO SPOILER: When Buffy died, Kendra, who had been in training, was called upon and now had the superpower. (Question: Kendra never mentions not having had the power before, so do we think this is how they presented it in the episodes where she and Buffy talk about their upbringing?)
  • LAST SEASON SPOILER: At the end of the series when they call on all the potential slayers, they don’t have their superpower yet so there is a lot of training they do. (Question: this would jive with some of the mythology set forth, but are we really to believe there are that many chosen “ones?”)
  • SEASON THREE SPOILER: Faith comes forth when Kendra dies and Faith had a bad upbringing so she didn’t have any training either. (Question: Any thoughts here?)

I guess what I want to know is what you Buffy fans out there have surmised. Or mistakes you’ve caught.

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Pet Peeve of the Day

When I’m trying to walk down the stairs with my arms full of laundry or tools or something sharp and heavy, sit on the step in front of me with your cute little furry face looking up at me and wonder why I would presume to interrupt your moment.

And then meow like I’ve offended you when I accidentally poke you out of the way.

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The Women who Move Me: Installment #2

Installment #2

1988 Baby Shit Brown Mazda 626
Never earned a nickname although I could think of a few now
*the pictures in these posts are temporarily stolen from sites to represent the cars – they will be replaced with pictures of the real cars when possible – use your freaking imagination.

After the volvo was cruelly taken away from me and returned to my sister upon her return from Italy, I was left carless for awhile. Luckily, by this time, most of my friends had cars. But as Christmas of my senior year approached, family friends thought it cruel of my parents to force five drivers to share one car (my parents, myself, my sisters). You see, my senior year my dad had retired and took a job in Oak Harbor, but it turned out that if I moved up there I would be sent to the Community College for most of the school day since they were so far behind the California school system. Apparently, my mediocrity was seen as genius in Oak Harbor, and thus my still standing rule to never live there again.

So while my dad was up in Oak Harbor, and my sisters off at college in Seattle and Spokane, my mom stayed behind in Monterey so I could graduate there and we shared a cozy little house just a couple blocks from the school. Without a car, this made life easy and I even recall during the summer I rode the bus to my job at Lovers’ Point and tried rollerblading there every so often. What ever happened to that resourceful brave little Katie? Today if I didn’t have a car I’d be calling my sisters asking, “when are you going to pick me up (to be said with annoyed whiny voice)?”

Back to the story at hand. With dad and sisters FLYING in, we still only had the one car my mom usually drove. Like I said, this cruel and unusual punishment was lost on my parents, but not on their friends. They lent us their Mazda 626 for the holidays. It was sort of beat up, or well-loved if you prefer, with beaded seat covers (gotta love it) and apparently was car #5 they had just sitting around not being used. I thought it was a treasure. Best part? Wait for it…

After the holidays, I was still driving around in it and my mom called to see when we should bring it back. They told me to keep it for a while longer. I had a car again. Joy of all Joys. It was like…well…like a full tank of gas, obviously.

Now nothing could match the Volvo, but there is something special about these cars that fall into my lap. The Mazda never got a name, but I loved her as if she were my own.

  • She had a tricky passenger side lock and only I knew how to open the door. This helped trap many an unsuspecting boy in my car. Imagine being a teenage boy and having a perky attractive girl have to lean across you and open your door for you. (Okay, maybe not so perky and attractive, but it sure helped the visual didn’t it?) It also prevented abrupt exits during fights from the obviously wrong person residing in the passenger seat. That’ll teach you to try and jump out before I tell you the tenth reason you are so utterly wrong.
  • As mentioned before, she had these really tacky beige and brown beaded seats that really didn’t make the car any more comfortable, but seemed a part of the car and therefore were left in place.
  • She was stick-shift. Ah. Yes. Stick-shift. This was a dream come true. No more driving with my foot up on the dashboard on auto-pilot. Now I was a true driver. No more begging my boyfriend to let me drive his stupid embarrassing CRX just so I could drive stick-shift (and since he still didn’t know how). Now I had my own. The Power. The Control. The Driving Experience. I had arrived.
  • Finally after driving her for a few months, I decided to treat her to a carwash. Half a mile away, she died. Completely. Wouldn’t budge. Some girls just like to be dirty.

So that was that. A good run while I had her, but we towed her to the owners and apologized. But get this. I was serving on the school board (yeah, I know, big dork) and so was the family friend who had loaned me the car. I showed up for a school board meeting and he handed me the keys to his Fiat. His Fiat!

Now I don’t know much about cars, and maybe it wasn’t this exact model, but it sure looked like a 1970-ish yelllow-gold Spyder Fiat:

Now this little skank had some sort of attitude. She knew she was sexier and cooler than I was and she let me know this on a regular basis. I had to respect her for that.

  • She didn’t like to start when I needed her to start. Usually right when a meter maid was writing a ticket, she would decide to play dead. “Don’t look so smooth now, Katie, do ya?”
  • She caused me to do sinful things like park at an abandoned house with a certain sexy Jewish Boy, the night before our AP English Exams. The things I did in that car…well…okay, I confess, it WAS a tiny little Fiat so it was fairly PG-13. But damnitt, PG-13 by todays standards! (Sidenote: I only got a 3 on the AP test, but it was enough to get out of English 101 in college. Thank Heavenly God. And thank the Jewish Boy. And his ears…and his neck…and his lips…
  • She was ALSO stick-shift although she liked to test my skills by not always going into the gear I was requesting. I became a better driver because of her. If you can start her AND handle her, you can handle any car.

Ultimately she protested completely and wouldn’t work for me. She cried for her owner, preffering his gentle loving hand to my clumsy pissed off one. After hearing of her Ghandi ways, I arrived at another School Board meeting only to be greeted by the family friend who handed me back the Mazda key with a little note that read, “I got the Mazda fixed for you. We’ll pick up the Fiat this week. Enjoy!” Hello? Do they know I’m not worthy? This guy was a POW in Vietnam and he thinks I’M suffering because I don’t have a car? I am SO not worthy.

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Pet Peeve of the Day

Debating for hours about whether to go get those Starbursts out of the vending machine, then delaying the gratification in order to make it more enjoyable and give me something to do to break up the 4-midnight Urgent Care shift, only to put my money in, select the Starbursts, pull them out, rip them open, pop one in my mouth, and spit it out.

Who’s fucking idea was it to make Tropical flavored Starburst. People. Don’t fix something that wasn’t broken.

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I’m special and you could be too

I’m hoping the infamous web guru in our circle, Mr. Kables himself, has not already blogged about this because I am so excited that I found it. I’ve discovered quite easily how to make a cute little picture icon for my website appear when people bookmark me or make me a favorite. Presently, I’m not too happy with my icon picture, but as I redesign my site, I’ll make a better one. It may end up being a simple KT, but damnitall if I’m not going to use it while waiting for my genius to take hold.

Here’s the secret. Visit Favicon and follow the instructions.

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I can’t be that different

Thanks to StudioZoe for this test, but come on people, am I that different from the rest of ya? I think if enough of us get an abnormal score, then it will be normal. Who’s with me?


You Are 40% Normal

(Somewhat Normal)



While some of your behavior is quite normal…

Other things you do are downright strange

You’ve got a little of your freak going on

But you mostly keep your weirdness to yourself
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The Women Who Move Me: Installment #1

Many of you have known me long enough to know the ladies that have come in and out of my life. And when I say ladies, of course I mean…my cars.

Installment #1

1980 WHITE VOLVO STATION WAGON
“White Lightning” aka “Chewy”

1980 White Volvo Wagon 240 DL (not mine, but just like it)

My sister Marie inherited the family Volvo Station Wagon when she got her license and I wanted that car so badly. When she went away to Florence, Italy for a year of school, I was a junior in high school and her car needed to go somewhere. I faintly remember my mom saying something like, “Just because Marie is going to Italy for a year, I don’t want you to think you’ll be able to do something like that when you are in college, but what you DO get is to drive the Volvo while she’s gone.” Now I realize that Marie actually paid for Italy (at least the getting over there and the day-to-day living aspects; my parents probably still paid tuition) but at the time I thought the Volvo was my consolation prize.

I loved my Volvo. I mean, I loved this car more than any other car I’ve ever had.

  • She was almost as old as I was
  • She had electrical problems so I sometimes had to start her under the hood, but this also meant that all the lights on the dashboard would blink at me from time to time, which I told people was just her way of talking to me like Kit on Knight Rider.
  • She had a nasty dark blue leather-simulated but more plastic-like interior that would crack in the sun so my dad had sewn a dashboard cover out of denim and would stain it blue every few months after it faded from the light
  • She had these grey fur seat covers which helped keep your legs from sticking to the seats on hot sweaty days (this was California, people), but my dad had spilled coffee on the passenger side so he had cut the seat part off and all that was left was a fur cover for the top part of the seat
  • Her brakes would make this sound every time I pushed them that was reminiscent of Chewbacca from Star Wars, so we nicknamed her Chewy and I kept a Chewbacca Pez Dispenser on the Dashboard
  • She had the best turning radius I’ve EVER encountered and I’ve driven over 50 different types of cars. When taking sharp last minute “teenager-like” turns, the blue denim dashboard cover would invariably slide right off into the passengers lap or almost out my window.
  • She didn’t have any cup holders so my friends and I went through a series of poorly designed accessories meant to hold a beverage, but usually just snapped off and spilled all over. My favorite one being the one that hooks into your door in the space where the window goes up and down. Every time you rolled the window up, the holder would pop out and Pepsi would go all over your lap. Ultimately, my thighs were the best form of cup holder I had, or if I took out the Kleenex box, that was most likely still soaked in old Pepsi, from between the seats, I could prop my cup between my seat and the emergency brake (which never got used).
  • You could fit an entire twin bed, box spring and mattress, in the back with the seats down. The seats laid flat and the door shut easily. You will never find a better car for carting stuff around. A true wagon.
  • She had this armrest that came down in the middle of the back seat, which we called “the hump.” When I was a little girl, I always wanted to sit on “the hump” so I could see out. At some point, they stopped letting me because I got too big. And at another point, we got a van because the back seat was too small for three sisters who hated to share space, yet in high school we somehow managed to fit 5-10 people in there without any complaints or problems.

Eventually my sister came back from Florence and reclaimed Chewy. Luckily, I hadn’t seen the last of her. She would resurface in my life again and I would have one last hurrah before putting her to sleep.

Stay tuned for Installment #2 in “The Women Who Move Me.”