Oh, my stars and garters!

If I were 19 and reading this I'd advise me to shoot myself.

I started cleaning my house as soon as I got home from work tonight. Now I have a clean house but nothing to write about. Except how clean my house is. It's really clean! Well, not really clean. But it's cleaner. Clean enough. This cleaning was long overdue, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend what's supposed to be a pretty, not-too-hot weekend scrubbing grout and washing towels.

This is all the crap I vacuumed out of the carpet. I think carpet is disgusting. I'd like to know who thought Hey, I know, let's put down a permanent absorbent surface upon which everyone will walk, spill food and beer, and vomit up the birds they caught in the backyard! Because I'd like to tell that person their idea was terrible.

I do like that it slowly and invisibly binds up all that filth, hiding the extent of the problem for as long as you need, so you're not confronted with the evidence until you've already done something about it. Carpet has fallen out of favor lately, and rightfully so, but since I've had a house full of it, I have discovered there are advantages.

Fit

Ooh eee ahh oooooo yaaaaaaaaaaargh, I do not recommend getting a mosquito bite on the bottom of your foot.

Olympics

I could totally do all that running and jumping and diving and stuff; it's just that I don't want to.

Not kosher

JLowe* kindly bought these for us this weekend because he wanted to give them to someone and could think of no greater bacon fans in his life.

They are, as promised, full of both smoky bacon and crisp mint flavor. The combination doesn't taste bad so much as fill you with a deep sense of wrongness and the merest hint of violation. I suspect we will have them around for a while.

I also tried a bacon chocolate bar at work the other day. It was a little disappointing in that it was neither very bad nor very good. I had really thought it would be one or the other. Instead it just tasted like a moderately good-quality chocolate bar with Bac-Os mixed in, not the salty-sweet delight/terrible aberration I had been expecting.

Anyway, if you see me around, hit me up for a novelty mint and I'd be delighted to give you one. There were no takers on the Iranian cigarettes, though, so I'm not holding my breath. Which for some reason smells like Altoids and Liquid Smoke right now.

*Who has a master's degree!

Still cain't paint

The painting class was fun, but it is clear I simply do not have a knack for oils, as satisfying as they are to mush them around and mix them together. No one but me, my teacher, and my classmates will ever know the extent of my limitations for sure, though, because I dropped my just-completed, still-wet painting in the parking lot, smearing everything around and embedding filth and gravel in the thick parts. Ah, well.

Cordial invitation

Someday I hope to have money enough to install a pommel horse in my house and hire talented, eager young men to perform on it for me and my friends.

After we get bored with that we can wander off to float on the lazy river that winds around the property, taking a detour to tear it up on the tank-firing range for a few hours. Later, when everyone's dried off and things are winding down a little, we'll watch the in-house ice sculptor do requests. It'll be like the caricatures they draw for you at Six Flags, only so much classier. You'll come to my pommel horse/lazy river/tank/ice sculpture party, won't you? Although I would probably have to ask that you BYOB because all this could get pretty pricey.

Sink or swim or, you know, whatever.

It can't be denied that our swimming teacher is not very interested in teaching us to swim. She likes to give us long drills and then wander off to talk to the lifeguards and send text messages. Unless you get her attention and ask her very specifically to help you with something, you're out of luck. She's only about 18 and she teaches kids' classes and manages the pool all day before she gets to us, so I suspect she's just over it by the time we get there in all our grumpy/eager adult student glory.

Despite the lack of instruction, I've been improving slowly, and my physique has even changed a little after just a week and a half. Really, just the tiniest bit; you wouldn't notice, but I can feel it. The freestyle finally clicked for me. I still flail around and have a hard time getting all my limbs to be where they need to be, but at least I understand why they need to be there to get me through the water. It feels powerful when it works, and incredibly goofy when it doesn't. I can build on that.

I don't think I'll ever be an especially serious swimmer, but I'm thinking about joining the Y by my house to get through the winter months. I feel like a better person all around when I swim regularly, and despite the lameness of the actual class, hitting the pool every evening has been a bright spot in what's been, for various reasons, a crappy couple of weeks.

This weekend: Painting class! I'm going to become a full-fledged dilettante if it kills me. Is "full-fledged dilettante" an oxymoron?  Well, tough.

Tiny Iranian cigarettes

Or should that be cigarettettes? Whatever you call them, they're not bad. One of Eric's customers brought them in to the bar. I've been passing them out whenever I remember to. Ask me the next time you see me and I'll give you one.

Bring me the head of Bob Costas on a stick

Seriously, I can see what's going on. I can tell when one swimmer gets to the end of the lane before the other swimmers. And if I can't, well, that's why your network drummed up all those superfancy garish graphics for us. Really, you don't have to state the obvious constantly, without pausing for thought or effect or to take a goddamned breath. An entire stadium lit up with fireworks shooting off every inch of its perimeter is a stunning sight? You don't say! I would have thought that as ordinary as cockroaches if you hadn't been there to prattle on and on about it.

Other than He Who Will Not Shut Up, I'm enjoying the Olympics. It's great to turn on the TV every time I cruise past it to see some guy doing like a million flips in the air or beat a world record by a hundredth of a point. I'm not much of a sports watcher, but it's fun to watch people who are really, really good at what they do, particularly with the sound off.

Taupe flag of surrender

Beige/taupe/whatever is a great color for a TV room! What the hell was I thinking, trying to impose some actual color on the walls? Seriously, the taupe is deadly dull, but it's not offensive, and whoever did the paint before us did a fantastic job getting it up there. We've decided to take the money we would've spent buying paint and prep crap and put it toward framing colorful art instead. If that makes us lame, so be it, but I prefer to keep my brains inside my head if at all possible. I'm just not feeling the home improvement this month, and Eric doesn't care, so the path of least resistance it is.  What are y'all doing this weekend?