You know what’s really good?

Drinking a strawberry daquiri while you’re doing the dishes on a hot summer day, that’s what.

My redneck husband dragged me to a 1:30 matinee of The Dukes of Hazzard.

It was so totally latent.

During the out-takes at the end credits, while Willie was singing the theme song, we:

• Saw Johnny Knoxville’s bare ass (surprize!)
• Heard Seann William Scott say (about Johnny), “He’s showing me his balls!”
• Saw Scott get stuck (during a cyclone fence-climbing scene) hanging upside down by his left ankle, and Knoxville took the opportunity to thrust his groin at Scott’s mouth and began to undo his fly
• Rip Taylor, who wasn’t even in the movie, was in one of the outtakes… in bed with Knoxville and two starlettes.

Oh, and there were, of course, a bunch of excellent, unuseable car crash-landings, which made me go, “Oh damn!” out loud a couple of times.

Jessica looked weirdly ‘perfect.’ She’s… surreal. She’s, like, plastic. She doesn’t even jiggle. Aren’t girls supposed to jiggle, or are they all supposed to look like boys with implants these days? Her characterization was good, though. She is cute. And Willie was adorable, of course, and so was Burt.

All in all, it was a wholly mediocre movie. I would have liked it better on pay-per-view. I wish I’d seen Willie Wonka instead, but it was nice to get out of the house. We ate Icees, popcorn, Butterfinger Minis, and Junior Mints. I’m lucky I’m not shaking too hard to type.

Brett said, “I can’t believe you didn’t like that movie!” and threatened to make me walk home from Ottumwa. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” I said, “I’m just saying it was totally gay. But then again, so was the original series.”

“Well, it was still funny as hell,” he said.

I have cramps. Bad cramps. The kind that will have me popping Advil like they’re Sweetarts within the hour.

In other news, I’ve been over at Amazon this morning and there’s really cool stuff on my Wishlist, should you suddenly feel compelled to RAOK me.

But for now at least there’s some chocolate, I think, in the kitchen. And sheep to knit.

Being a rather grumpy and random list, from a grumpy and random girl.

1. My husband is going to drag me to a BBQ at his boss’s house in Keosauqua tonight. I don’t want to go because I won’t know anybody but him and Jim & Joy.

2. I feel tense, like my body’s thinking about having a little panic fest. I desperately want to go to sleep.

3. I finally remembered to pay the mortage today.

4. I had lunch with my boyfriend, Joe. We ate at the shitty Mexican restaurant. He told me about a website he saw (NSFW!) that features videos of people, from the shoulders up, suffering la petite mort. It’s like porn with no porn. I haven’t looked at it because I’m at work, but it sounds “interesting” even though I’m not a particularly visual person. He also asked me to help him write a haiku to taunt Daphne with, one with the word “moist” in it, but I don’t know that I’ve ever written a haiku.

5. I ate way too much food at lunch today. I had the veggie fajitas. Two hours later, I’m still uncomfortably full.

6. I am starting to feel happy about this new template. I’m going for something rustic. The header image is our front pond, and the wood background is a tile I found on the web somewhere.

7. Yesterday my work computer totally shit the bed, so now I’m on a temporary computer and it is totally not set up right at all and it’s so indescribably stupid I won’t even try to describe it.

8. Yesterday, I bought this. I will put a 10GB hard drive in it, and I will keep all my important shit on it where I can get at it and I will carry it around with me. Right now I haven’t really lost much data, but I can’t use any of it.

9. I pretty much feel like shit.

10. I’m wondering if chocolate might be the answer to this unasked question. (It probably is. Speed is always the answer.)

11. The damn rain isn’t supposed to get here until, like, six. Just in time for the BBQ I don’t want to go to.

I had two panic attacks today.

Two.

Sweating palms, chest ‘pains’, dizziness, and an intensely real and convincing feeling that I’m about to fucking die.

Little or no arrhythmia, though, which was nice. Well, not ‘nice,’ but better.

I’ve wanted to leave work and go home and curl up since about 1 o’clock, but I didn’t. Goddammit, I didn’t feel like letting some pansy-ass set of “symptoms” run me out of my own office!

I wonder if that hippy barrista failed to give me a decaf latte, like I requested.

The weather is just nasty.

It’s like a big, sweaty armpit out there. I step outside and instantly become all damp and sticky, and not in a fun way.

Perhaps some swimming in the triangle pond is indicated.

Speaking of the triangle pond, the Friday before last Tahmi and Cat came out, and we ate an entire box of 24 popcicles and a whole lot (a lot, in this case, being less than an entire box) of fudgecicles, and swam naked together in the mentioned pond. As we were sitting on the floating dock drying off between dips, I looked down and cleverly made the observation, “Jesus, my pubes are really turning gray!”

“I can see that,” Cat replied.

“Brett likes to joke it’s from ‘beating on it.’ But this is absurd, it used to be only a few! Now it’s like half of them! Holy shit!”

This, my friends, is the essence of being in one’s thirties: exciting things like realizing that those fat upper arms are never going to go away (if you had them when you were nineteen, nothing will get them to budge now you’re in your late 30’s), and looking down one naked sunlit afternoon to realize that one’s pubes are about 25% gray. I mean, even the hair on my head is less gray than that!

Oh, and age spots. I now get these dark brown freckles that aren’t really freckles. There’s one on my left forearm I keep trying to brush off, because when I see it out of the corner of my eye my brain iterprets it as dirt or something. I try to brush the thing off at least once a day.

Oh, and a screwy sleep schedule: last night I didn’t get to sleep until the second half of the midnight hour, and I woke up at the absolute asscrack of dawn this morning for no apparent reason.

Which means I slept fewer than five hours.

Which means I’m fucking exhausted right about… now.

—–Original Message—–
From: Personnel Dept.
Sent: Monday, August 01, 2005 1:54 PM
To: Staff
Subject: New Employee

Dear LISCO Buddies:

Please join me in welcoming our newest employee – Bonny Lass. Bonny will be working with Mr. Man on tariffs etc.

Her phone number is 1234. Attached is a revised phone list, incorporating all the recent changes.

—–Original Message—–
From: Mushlette
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:17 AM
To: Bucket
Subject: FW: New Employee

Yours is so much better. (Your phone list, that is.)

—–Original Message—–
From: Bucket
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 10:02 AM
To: Mushlette
Subject: RE: New Employee

My phone list brings all the girls to the yard, and they’re like “It’s better than yours”. Damn right, it’s better than yours. I could teach you, but I’d have to charge.
—–

My iPod is full. FULL. I have to take stuff off of it whenever I want to put new stuff on it.

Suckage!

Mostly women looking for stuff about pregancy symptoms, but then there’s one about a horse… View the image of search engine strings that brought people to this site in the past 24 hours. You’ll totally laugh.

Check your dialect with the Yankee or Dixie quiz.

I’ve been away from the Great Northwest for far too long; I’m “58% (Dixie). Barely into the Dixie category.” Which means I’m way far the hell away from the Yankee I used to be.