I frequent a site called fertility friend – yes, yes I am a pathetic woman trying to get knocked up. But these women! I can’t stand them. All their “blinkies” and photos of their overweight kids and white trash husbands. Don’t even get me started on the way they communicate. Needless to say I’m a “lurker” and never post. I mainly just watch from a far, if you will. Consider me the Jane Goodall of the TTC community (that’s “trying to conceive” for those of you unfamiliar with this acronym – and yes I see the irony of this). Here’s a great post I found in the Off Topic section of the forum:

Okay… I have a question.

I don’t text a whole lot, I don’t IM either. I email quite a bit for my job, however.

I don’t get all the “codes” and “shortened words”. WTF is up with those?

How much harder is it to type “What” vs. “Wut” or “Because/Cause” vs. “Cos, I could go on and on? What happened to using proper english/grammar?

Am I just getting old???

Now, I respect what this woman is saying. I hate all this LOL and OMG crap. Can’t you spare a millisecond and actually type a full word out? It just makes you sound like an idiot. However, look at line three above. She added a “WTF” in there (and I can assure you it’s ironic use was purely unintentional). Ah woman … if I really were Jane Goodall and you were a gorilla I’d certainly give you a banana for that honey of a sentence. I needed a good laugh.

And these people are breeding…

My mother and aunt are ardent Barack Obama supporters. This afternoon they came over and asked hubby & me whether we were familiar with a certain gesture they had seen Obama make during a speech last week. Imitating his movement, each of them simultaneously curled their right arms and touched their right shoulders with their hands. They assured us that after Obama did this, the crowd cheered boisterously. However, hubby & I have never seen Obama (or anyone else for that matter) perform this maneuver. Maybe this was some sort of “new” fangled thing the young’ins are doing now a days (when they aren’t busy texting or updating their myspace pages).

Undaunted by our own ignorance, we proceeded to enlist the help of the internets (gotta love those tubes) to help us decipher this new “Generation Y” code. Our first google search was ‘rap shoulder touch’, yielded plenty to results but nothing we were looking for. After about 20 minutes of substituting ‘hip-hop’ and various synonyms for ‘grab’, we were still no closer to understanding Barack’s mysterious shoulder gesture.

Finally, hubby typed in ‘urban shoulder gesture’ and low and behold guess what popped up? This site. Ah-Ha! According to The Root, Barack performed a “shoulder brush” and even provided a link to this Youtube video of the speech my mother and aunt had seen. Upon viewing the video, we quickly realized that Obama had indeed brushed his shoulder and not just touched it as my mother and aunt had indicated: a fact that would have aided our search processes immensely.

Now we could preform a new google search: ’shoulder brush off’, which yielded this definition from the “Urban Dictionary”.

Dirt off Ya Shoulder:

– as in, “get – that – dirt off ya shoulder.” it means that you need to let go of that grudge you got on your shoulders because you are jealous of me.

as in Jay-Z’s song, “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” …I’m a hustler homey, you a customer crony
Got some, dirt on my shoulder, could you brush it off for me?

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. We now know that the gesture in question originated from a video by Jay-Z. One more google search: ‘Jay-Z Dirt off Your Shoulder’ resulted in this link to Youtube once again (see 1:03 for exact shoulder gesture). As it turns out, this video probably has been seen by everyone in America expect hubby, me, my mom and aunt. Upon viewing the video we quickly realized we had actually heard the song on numerous occasions, we just never realized that’s what Jay-Z was saying (or gesturing).

How white are we?!

PS. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MO & GRANDMA!

Yep, I sure did.

Ps. Apparently, this is called a word cloud, and I thought it was kind of pretty. Yes I am a nerd. And, if you’re also a nerd go make one yourself. It’s fun!

I’ve been feeling kind of blah lately. Perhaps it’s the intense wanting of a baby (and the subsequent lack of conceiving one) that has caused me to become a bit melancholy. Or, perhaps it’s the fact that I really don’t like all this red white and blue crap that occurs on the 4th. I’ve never had that sense of patriotism that drives a person to hang an American flag outside their house on the 4th (or on other flag displaying days). I do think that fireworks are pretty and thus I feel the 4th isn’t all that bad.

It’s getting close to 9:00pm here and if I were still living in Fresno, the whole neighborhood would be sitting on their driveways, BBQ’n, drinking, and lighting off bottle rockets or those little annoying whistling fireworks. Also along the same vein, if I were still living in Oceanside our neighbors would have our culdesac blocked off, and they would have the big massive grill out and be grilling who knows what – I think one year they had shark (but it turned out to be chicken).

Alas dear readers, I am in the peace and quite of the central coast. My neighborhood is filled with mostly 60+ year olds and I think most of them are probably in bed sleeping by now. That doesn’t mean that the beaches and piers are not going to be filled with people setting off fireworks. Pismo Beach is supposed to be the “craziest” 4th of July “party” spot. The paper even said their pier would have a clown – wow, now that’s some happening party.

Whoa, just heard a fire work go off. Damn those crazy retirees.

Two years ago hubby & I said “I do” … seems like longer, honey. Naw, but really … I married the sweetest, funniest, most caring, and intelligent man (not to mention liberal and cute), guy. I love him to bits and I couldn’t imagine my life without him. We always joke that we married the perfect person (except for the walking). I love you honey.

On a non-sappy note, it’s still freaking hot here. Yesterday it was 109. Yes you read that right, it’s not a typo … 1-0-9. For a place that perhaps gets into the mid 70’s as it’s high, everyone along the coast is basically freaking out. I think most of our coastal towns broke records yesterday. Also, most of the citizens of our coastal towns don’t have air conditioning – us included. We have a ceiling fan in our bedroom which we left on all day and all night. We also had my mom bring up some portable fans from the Fresno days. Speaking of the Valley, hubby’s mom called yesterday and said it was actually cooler in Bakersfield than it was here. I keep having summer Valley flash-backs every so often. This is what military folk must get after being in battle, except I have PTSD for all the hot summers I spent in Fresno. I must say that at least the air quality is a heck of a lot better here & that makes a huge difference. Except for the fact that there happens to be a forest fire burning to the north of us, which means each evening for the last few days we’ve had horrible air quality and apocalyptic sunsets.

Well, my dear readers I hope wherever you are it’s a bit cooler. Gah, I might go stick my head in the freezer or at least get a popsicle.

On Wednesday hubby & I traveled down the coast to Santa Barbara to visit a friend from a disabled forum I frequent. She was totally great and we had a fun time – except for the excessive heat and the incident where hubby did a face plant on a very busy street.

Ah yes the heat! My god man the heat!! Now, I lived in Fresno for a while so I know what heat is. 108 degrees, yeah I know what heat is. But when it’s in the 90’s on the coast you might as well be in Fresno in 108 degree heat. It’s the kind of heat where everything is still, no breeze, and it feels as if you’ve stuck your whole body in an oven. Just going outside a minute ago I was taken aback at how freaking hot it is — and it was only 9:30 in the morning.

Santa Barbara was even hotter then in Los Osos. Hubby was getting overheated on our trip and it kind of affects his balance, so when he hit a wacky bump on a curb-cut he just kind of fell to one side of his chair then all the way out, and smacked right on the pavement. Poor guy, got a small cut on his head and a skinned elbow. So, other than a bloody head and the debilitating heat our trip was fun.

Now, I ask you what the hell is going on? All together now … global what? … global what? … ah yes … global warming. Jesus, with all the floods happening in the Midwest and his unbearable heat all across California and other part of the US, you think we’re either going to see plagues of locusts next, or we’re actually going to have to realize we’re fucking up our planet royally.

Well, I’m going to go get some ice water and then go hug my Prius.

I liked the Sixth Sense, even Lady in the Water somewhat, but why M. Night Shymalan why must you give us The Happening. I had great expectations with this movie. I had watched the HBO “behind-the-scenes” for the movie and it sounded intriguing, but it turned out to be a big waste of $14.00. I would have been better off just lighting the money on fire; at least that would have been a bit more exciting, more realistic and perhaps more suspenseful then this film.

Here’s hubby’s three word review: Worst. Movie. Ever. That pretty much sums it up.

What’s truly disappointing is the fact that M. Night starts with an interesting premise (the first enigmatic scenes of the film show promise) and goes no where with it – for 90 grueling minutes. I found myself laughing at points where nail biting should have occurred. I don’t know if M. Night is starting to “dumb-down” his recent movies, or he just got lucky with his previous work, but something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I don’t want to give anything away, but I feel it’s my duty to urge you in the strongest words possible not to waste your money or your time on this film. For a real run down on the film’s many, many, many failures just visit this site.

It’s my birthday! It’s going to be a pretty low key birthday this year – probably just go out to dinner with hubby. This morning we went to the golf course down the street for breakfast. It’s funny, they have such crappy coffee, however, I still always manage to block that out of my mind and order a cup. I’m always shocked that the coffee is terrible, then I remember … duh their coffee is always terrible – at least they’re consistent.

My mom just showed up with a birthday pie. That’s right, a pie. I love lemon meringue pie, and my mom was sweet enough to bake one for me. But, it’s not like we need more sweets in the house. I have two tubs (yes, tubs from cosco) of cookies sitting on my kitchen counter. We had them from the neighborhood BBQ that happened a couple of days ago. That reminds me, I should talk about the BBQ.

So, a couple of days ago our whole neighborhood was invited to a BBQ at the local park. Both hubby and I had a vision of outside pick nick tables …etc … but the BBQ was held indoors in the rec-center type room. The acoustics in the room were terrible and to talk to anyone required yelling. Also, our neighborhood consists of mainly retired “older” folks, so yelling while taking was probably going to occur whether inside or not. Yes, everyone was about 60 or older and then there was hubby and I. It was quite funny. Basically all the people in the room could have either been my parent or more likely my grandparent. Out of our neighborhood of 6 blocks with about 12 houses each on both sides, only about 20 people showed up. Not a big turnout. But hubby and I were there along with my mom & aunt (and our tubs of cookies). It was fun, they had a raffle. I also caved and ate a piece of bbq chicken. I know, I know … I’m going to vegetarian hell for that offense.

Well, I might go enjoy some birthday pie …

My cat Courtney is my alarm clock in the morning. If I’m not up by at least 8:00 she’ll definitely make me painfully aware. I found this little video on YouTube and thought it was spot on:

Courtney does all of the above, and then some. You see, she’s a “passive aggressive” cat. Sometimes she’ll sit kind of close to one of her siblings just to annoy them, but far enough away to make it seem like she’s just sitting there randomly. Or she will sleep in Raz’s bed just to piss him off and we all know she likes sleeping on the cat condo much better. You get my drift. So, aside from pawing at my face and walking on top of me, she will get on my bed-side table and proceed to try to knock stuff off. Yes, very passive aggressive. The sound of her trying to do this, makes me move and push whatever object back on my bed-side table. This gets her excited; jumping on me and trying to bite my fingers. I don’t know why she thinks that biting my finger will make me get up and feed her. Apparently, Courtney has never heard … “don’t bite the hand that feeds you”.

Courtney in my little waste basket.

A few days ago hubby and I went to get tickets for the new Indiana Jones movie (don’t even get me started on how crappy the movie was … just made me miss the “original” Indiana Jones movies. Also, hubby and I got kind of sad thinking that our kids will think of this movie as the “Indiana Jones” movie not the “original” movies … just sad, thank goodness for DVD’s). Anyway, as we were going to get the tickets we passed a guy wearing a shirt with this on it (I hope you can make it out). It says “I’m only in it for the parking” with a disabled parking symbol.

The guys wearing it was totally not disabled. He was just some random guy. Both hubby & I had to pass him as we got into the ticket line, we both were a bit perplexed in a “WTF is this guy thinking!?” kind of way. I tried to make eye contact with him, but he looked away as we passed. I hope he realized what a stupid shirt to wear if you’re not disabled. It would be like me wearing a shirt that said “I’m only black for the affirmative action”. Yeah, totally not right – me being a very pasty white person. If I ever see this guys again I would love to run right into the back of his legs, perhaps he’ll need a disabled parking placard after … although I wouldn’t want some looser taking up my valued parking. Ug.

]]> http://inanemusings.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/not-part-of-the-club/feed/ 0 karenferguson Disabled Parking T-Shirt