Food for Thought

I wanted to hurry up and get this food meme done because I was tagged by Merrie Olde England’s most ardent Big Orange supporter, The Vol Abroad, who is likely going to be going into labor just about any minute now, so I wanted to finish this before she winds up knee-deep in nappies and such and still has time to read.

This one’s all about your five fave places to go out to eat in your own general locale. I find myself kind of grasping here because most unfortunately, nearly all of my very favorite locally owned, non-chain places in the metro Memphis area have closed – some long closed now, some relatively recently. Cafe Roux, The Fish Market, vegetarian joint Babylon Cafe, and five legendary Memphis haunts – Gallina’s (Italian spinach to die for), the Buntyn Restaurant (Southern home cooking and the best yeast rolls ever), and Captain Bilbo’s, Pappy & Jimmie’s, and Anderton’s (all seafood) – all gone.

So here are my five still alive & well in Memphis:

1. Paulette’s on Overton Square in Midtown - Best Sunday brunch ever, with the world’s most delicious crepes of all kinds, strawberry butter for your croissants, and what would Sunday brunch be in the South without a Mimosa? (Well, unless you’re doing the Bloody Mary thing.) Brunch is awesome, though I pretty much have crepes of some sort there no matter what time of day it is.
2. Cafe Ole’ in Cooper-Young – The ex and I dined there the first week it was open (now quite a long time ago) and for a few years after probably ate there once a week at least. It’s still a fave place to go and fave meet-up place for me, having met up there with Hutchmo, and ‘Coma & Squirrelly on a couple of different occasions last winter. One of the reasons we used to go so often in the early years was because it is very vegetarian-friendly and was a fave of a vegetarian friend of ours, and my mom and I used to go pretty much anytime she was in town (for the shrimp, see next sentence). Decent Mexican Tex-Mex type fare, and the bacon-wrapped stuffed shrimp are to die for.
3. Huey’s (all over but the original is in Midtown) – Legendary in all its dive-y goodness, anyone who lives in or visits Memphis regularly will likely regale you with the virtues of the Huey Burger if asked. It’s one of those things that people just tend to crave. Whether the original or one of the many variations, it’s dependable – you can always count on it to be exactly the same every time. The potato soup is also excellent, and they had stuffed jalapenos before everyone and their brother and the grocery started carrying them, and these are done RIGHT (though the East End Grill’s are pretty great too).
4. Brother Juniper’s College Inn off the Highland Strip – I actually haven’t been here in quite some time, but that’s mainly because I am rarely up in time for breakfast, which is what anyone should go for. It opens at 6:30 a.m. now, but I think back in the days when the ex and I used to hit it for breakfast it was open even earlier; it was a frequent stop before long road trips for us, including when we drove to Kansas City to see the Hoodoo Gurus in ’91. The breakfast fare is just so indescribably good, I couldn’t even begin to tell you. The biscuits – you would not believe.
5. The Rendezvous, Downtown, and Corky’s (several locations, but the original on Poplar in East Memphis) – I’m cheating here by putting two restaurants here but (A) surely I couldn’t do this without mentioning BBQ, and (B) I am partial to both. And lots of you outside of Memphis are familiar with Corky’s since it has branched out to many other locations statewide and nationally and therefore it’s actually a chain now, but since it’s a Memphis original, I’m keeping it here. It’s my meme and I can do what I want! So anyway, yeah. I love both for different reasons – for dry ribs made with dry rub, I prefer the Rendezvous; wet ribs with lotsa sauce, Corky’s. And the Rendezvous is a Memphis legend and has been there forever and the atmosphere is pure Memphis, you just can’t beat it. I love to take first-time visitors to Memphis to both when possible.

Now here’s where I make up two more of my own categories, because I can:

Honorable mention of places I’ve been to: Zinnie’s East in Midtown – for the spinach nachos, which I haven’t had in a very long time but now my mouth is watering just thinking about them. If you’re a spinach lover, you won’t be disappointed. Yum.

Honorable mention of places I’ve not yet been to: Memphis Pizza Cafe on Overton Square, Midtown (other locations too) – Practically everyone I know, including Lesley, loves it and I’ve been thinking for years I’d get down there eventually, but just never have. Maybe sometime when Lesley is in town again I’ll break my missing streak on this one and we’ll meet up there for lunch.

OK, so now that we’re basically done, here are the actual rules and regulations for this particular meme:

1. Add a direct link to your post below the name of the person who tagged you (if you get tagged for it, you can probably copy and paste it to make things easier – I did). Include the state/city and country you’re in:

Nicole Tan (Sydney, Australia)
velverse (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
LB (San Giovanni in Marignano, Italy)
Selba (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Olivia (London, England)
ML (Utah, USA)
Lotus (Toronto, Canada)
Yianna (Athens, Greece)
Melusina (Thessaloniki, Greece)
Vol Abroad (London, England)
Lynnster (Memphis, Tennessee, USA)

2. List your top 5 favorite places to eat at your location with as much or as little info as you’d like to share. (See above.)

3. Tag five other people (preferably from other countries/states) and let them know they’ve been tagged.

Since I’m interested in places I might wanna check out someday (who knows!) or already hit on occasion, I’m gonna tag five people I know stop by here fairly often and are from different places, and going to just choose one Nashville/Middle Tennesseean. Most of my Nashville area friends seem to be hot spicy food fans (which I wish I could but cannot do) so I’m just going to select somebody else at random, and skip East Tennessee altogether (no offense but I already am familiar enough up there). Take your time if you get tagged, no hurry. Here goes:

1. Megan can probably tip me off to some good Nashville/Middle Tennessee spots.
2. Churlita (I might need to know where’s good to go in Iowa, you never know)
3. Margaret (seeing as how I am in Birmingham rather frequently tho not as much lately, good info to have on hand tho)
4. Kathy P. (traveling to St. Louis is always a possibility when you live down here)
5. And Sara to cover the Wild Wild West.

Not Really THAT Picky

Things I used to refuse to eat as a child that I now love:

1. Vegetable soup
2. Raw oysters
3. Spinach
4. Artichokes
5. Breakfast food at any time of day besides breakfast

Things I still won’t eat:

1. Brussels sprouts
2. Country ham
3. Turnip greens
4. Turnips
5. Liver
6. Chicken livers
7. Radishes
8. Celery (unless it’s in vegetable soup)
9. Veal
10. German chocolate cake

Bad Girls & Boys (Not Just Ivy!)

Sista tagged me for this “true confessions” meme that came from Blogarita, the full outline of which can be seen here. Sista and Aunt B. lucked out – they are as pure as the driven snow, apparently. I love that, even though Aunt B. is upset that none of the many with higher fines have corrupted her. I think it’s cute!

By the time I got around to adding my “fine” up, several others in the NiT community had already done theirs, most of the results of which are in the comments over at Aunt B.’s. My own “fine” was $485, but I was kind of relieved to be outdone by several in the $550 and up range. Bad Bad Ivy was also a bad, bad girl, coming in at $575.

But we ALL were outdone – by far – by Knuck coming in at $740.20, with Exador running behind a close second at $685.60. I am just stunned. Whew.

Seven Best in 2006

I got tagged by Newscoma almost a couple of weeks ago for this, so I saved it for New Year’s since I thought that would be a good topic to reflect on for the holiday. However, I think it would have been a lot easier for me to come up with the seven worst things I did in 2006 than the best. But still, I’m willing to give it a go, boring though it may be. 2006 just wasn’t a real great year. Funny, almost all of my “bests” have something to do with blogging or bloggers or something otherwise online. Guess that makes sense since this is where I spend most of my free time.

By the way, my favorite number is seven. Just in case you didn’t know.

So anyway, here – The Seven Best Things I Did in 2006.

1. I ditched cable TV. I got tired of paying almost $70 a month (not long before that, it was $90 a month) for cable I never watched and ditched it forever. With the exception of the first year or two I was in Memphis, this is just about the first time in almost all my life I have never had cable. My grandparents’ house was the first home in Paris, Tennessee to get cable when it was available there, and my house was probably among the first dozen. The ex and I did without it for a little over a year when we first moved down here, but then some plant started getting built up the street a ways and the more that got built, the worse our reception got, so we broke down and got cable again.

Cable was reasonable when I was in my twenties and it was $15-20 a month. $70 and $90 a month for cable is ridiculous, I don’t care HOW many channels there are.

The other best thing in relation to that was opening my Netflix account, and once I cut off cable, I upgraded my Netflix account. And am STILL paying less than half of what I was for cable, only now I can watch what I want to when I want to, and stuff that’s been long gone from current television. I am very happy with this tradeoff. Between that, YouTube, and networks themselves finally getting smart and airing many of their shows online, who needs it. Screw cable.

2. Traveled to Texas and hung out with old friends. I spent a couple of days in Houston and renewed some bonds with old friends, most of whom I talk to often but hadn’t seen and hung out with in over two years because we’re spread out all over – Houston, Memphis, Florida, Brooklyn, Boston, and eastern Canada. It was too short a visit, but it was worthwhile and an extra special couple of days. Also my first visit ever to Texas.

So that was fabulous, and the only real traveling I did in 2006. The only other places I went last year were to Birmingham and otherwise all in Tennessee – Jackson, McKenzie, Paris, and Chattanooga – none of them except the last really count as “travel”.

3. Opened my MySpace account. You may laugh, but while MySpace as a whole is kind of silly (and I swore for years I was never going to have one), if you’re as much into music as I am, it’s an AMAZING resource for musical interests. I have found new “local” music from around the globe that has just been incredible, and likely stuff I never would have known about otherwise. And not only have I gained a lot of new contacts and acquaintances in the music world, but I have renewed communication with an unbelievable number of old music contacts and friends, some of whom I’d thought dropped off the face of the earth and I’m sure some thought the same of me. That’s been really cool.

It’s also been quite a humbling experience, like when I found that a kid half my age who’s newly become a Replacements fanatic had a link to my old ‘Mats pages along with other more “academic” (for lack of a better word) links, or the occasional commenter or mailer who says they remember my old Hoodoo Gurus page. Or when someone whose work I have had a huge amount of respect for, for years – when I said I was pleased to finally meet “the famous (name)” – replied that I was more famous (LOL, don’t get excited, only in Australia and only among circles of a certain music genre). I was simply taken aback by that. Come to think of it, not really sure why I never made an effort to make a career out of it.

On the other hand, I do know the answer to that. I have never made a dime from efforts helping to promote other people’s music that I like, but I’ve spent a significant amount of my free time over the years doing it, online for the most part in many online mediums. I’m not sure it would have all been anywhere near as much fun and as satisfying if it were a job rather than a labor of love.

4. Volunteer work and trying to be a little more charitable in general. Hopefully the volunteer work I have involved myself in the last several years helps folks, at least I hope so – I’m really not at liberty to speak publicly about it because it’s generally an anonymous organization, and I do a lot more technical work these days rather than personal involvement, but it’s one of those situations where I figure if I helped one person make a good decision because I knew the answer to their question, or helped one person find the information they needed because of some tech work I did, then I feel like I’ve done something good.

I also did a couple of other things I generally never have much done. In 2006, I started donating a small part of my monthly salary to an Episcopal church in Mississippi that could use it as a way to honor my grandmother’s memory, after she passed away right before Christmas in 2005. There’s a reason why I picked this church in particular that I won’t go into here (not that interesting of a story), but given the fact I have been a severely lapsed Episcopalian for many years and the fact that this would make my grandmother happy, it’s pretty significant for me. I also did some more donating I don’t generally do to some stuff I strongly believed in. So that was all cool.

5. Started blogging regularly again after a really long mostly-break. Pretty soon it will be ten years since I started “journaling online” and whew, that’s a long time. For about five years, though, I took what was mostly a long break and was really haphazard about it, especially the three year period from 2003 to 2005. I skipped 2004 altogether.

In January of 2006, I finally left behind HTML hell for good and started moving all my old archives to Blogger, with a mirror on LiveJournal, and wow – how much easier was it to do after that. I started blogging more often and before the year was through, I got back into almost daily blogging (mostly thanks to the kickstart of pledging to do so during NaBloPoMo). Apparently that was the kick in the butt I needed to get back in the swing of things again.

And then in December and sick of the hassle of Blogger Beta, I jumped to WordPress for good, which is the other aspect of this best thing I did in 2006. In retrospect, I wish now I had just gone to WordPress to begin with. It ROCKS.

But it’s been good to get back in the regular blogging habit again and loads of fun. A little bittersweet for me since some of my old longtime peanut gallery is gone (actually, sometimes that’s a relief depending on the day’s blogging subject matter, heh). But having not only gotten back into it, but also becoming involved in a fabulous blogging community of other Tennesseans has been terrific and great fun. I’ve made a lot of good new friends this past year, and maybe a couple of enemies, but one can never have too many friends! And, speaking of, another of the best things I did in 2006 was…

6. The best dinner date I ever had. Getting to meet Hutchmo in person and getting to know him, with an extra bonus being that we both share a longtime mutual friend we just recently found out each other knew, was terrific. We had a fabulous and fun dinner at one of my fave Mexican restaurants in Memphis in December, and the two guys just had me laughing till I almost cried all night, and John is just a really good friend now who I absolutely adore, plus it’s extra cool that we share so many of the same musical interests. Like I said, friends are good, can’t have too many of them!

My post-Christmas tour plans to meet some more Middle TN bloggers got waylaid by my post-holiday tardiness getting on the road, but I hope in 2007 to meet everyone else I’m dying to meet and hang out with and feel sure I will meet most everyone, at least. Planning to make many trips to Middle Tennessee in the coming year, and anyone who may be coming to Memphis (like Newscoma in a couple of weeks, matter of fact – can’t wait to see her and her Squirrelly sidekick!) – let’s do BBQ, Mexican, veggie pizza, Huey burgers, or whatever!

7. I didn’t cry. Nope, I didn’t cry when my kid sister and brother-in-law left Memphis, after being here for five years prior, moved to Nebraska for good. At least not where they could see. Granted, they were in Florida, then northern Ohio, then Rhode Island for years before they moved down here for a while. But that was different. Even though sometimes we’d go months without seeing each other, for five years they were right across on the other side of town, and now they’re in freakin’ Nebraska. Sigh.

But right now in freakin’ Nebraska with 14+ inches of snow. Heh heh. I am trying very hard not to say “I told you so” right now!

Well, OK, there’s my Seven Things. I’m not tagging anyone, but feel free to tag yourself by proxy if you get a mind to do so. This one was kind of hard; like I said, I could have probably easily come up with The 100 Worst Things I Did in 2006 in comparison.

We Three Things

I’ve no idea where this one came to me from, but after this I’ll be caught up and will institute a temporary moratorium on memes. At least until the day comes I’ve run out of something to say again, which is, like, never. So, here.

Three things:

That scare me: Heights; spiders or basically anything creepy or crawly; and winding up with some illness or condition that leaves me completely awake, alert and oriented but totally without any control of any other functions (and karma is going to bite me in the ass one day and get me for now having documented this fear in black and white for posterity, I just know it).

People who make me laugh: The Young Ones, The Kids in the Hall, Travis L. Harmon (OK, I know technically that’s WAY more than three people but it constitutes as three things/entities, or at least I say so, which is all that counts here).

I love: Music (duh!), cats, working four days a week instead of five (officially anyway, only problem there is I usually end up working on my day off anyhow).

I hate: Any peas except for black-eyed peas, washing dishes, flat land (yeah, I know – so why do I live in Memphis?).

Things on my desk: A bottle of hazelnut liqueur from the Czech Republic, Tim Lee‘s Concrete Dog CD, and an orange cat who is sleeping and won’t move his head off the edge of my keyboard.

I’m doing right now: Wondering why I didn’t go to sleep last night AGAIN, dreading having to start work soon for what is going to be a long and painful ten hours, drinking coffee.

I want to do before I die: Visit Australia (at least Sydney and Perth), live in an actual house again and not a duplex or apartment or whatnot, figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

I can do: Waste an incredible amount of time; play guitar; appraise, buy and resell vintage Barbie stuff at a hell of a profit (my “part-time job” for several years).

I can’t do: Wrap presents well at ALL, sew, keep plants alive or garden.

I think you should listen to: Paul Westerberg and The Replacements, the silence when (if) it snows, your heart or instinct instead of your head or what other people tell you most times.

You should NEVER listen to: Telemarketers, only certain music just because it’s what everyone else is listening to or tells you that you should, me when I’m talking in my sleep.

I’d like to learn: How to cook on a grill, to play guitar a little better than I do, how to fix up and repair various things without messing them up in the process like I normally do.

Favorite foods: Mexican, southern BBQ, breakfast.

Beverages: Lipton Citrus Green Tea, coffee, anything alcoholic that tastes like Kool-Aid basically.

Shows I watched as a kid: The Monkees, American Bandstand, Saturday Night Live (well, and cartoons… I was kinda a normal kid, sometimes).

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

I got tagged for this Christmas meme by Sonia, which is kind of funny because I’m such a Scrooge, as Sista knows and has been having mucho fun taunting me over. Actually it’s not really that I’m all that Scrooge-y, it’s just that I hate the fact that I always end up in a mad rush trying to be ready for it and it’s downright traumatic almost; my actual Christmas is always either at my mother’s, my godmother’s, or my sister’s, all out of town, so I don’t really do any decorating or anything “for” Christmas, haven’t in many years anyway; and this year in particular I’m not really looking forward to it, for a variety of reasons.

But truth be known, Christmas has always been my favorite holiday and my family makes a huge deal of it, bigger than most families probably, and once it actually GETS here, I will be fine with it. Santa still fills stockings at our houses (boy, does he) and opening presents between the six of us has almost always been an all-day affair (because everyone can only open one thing at a time so everyone can see what it is, same thing with going through stockings), though last year we agreed to downsize a little and actually finished before dark that time. We also drink mimosas all day and have some other little family traditions and it’s generally a great day. It’s just getting TO that day that’s such a problem for me every year it seems, I’m all dread and doom and gloom and running around like a madwoman at the last possible minute trying to be ready, especially since I’m the one who always has to go out of town every year.

So it’s not so much that I’m anti-Christmas, this just hasn’t been the best of years and I’m sweating the anxiety and rush even more than usual (especially since I have NO gift buying done yet to speak of, except for one thing). That said, I don’t know, everyone on my list may be getting Amazon gift certificates this year, the way things have been going lately and with me being short any transportation.

That all said – onto the Christmas meme:

Favorite Christmas Movie: Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Favorite Christmas Song:I can’t choose between “Angels We Have Heard on High” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” – both remind me of Christmas Eve Mass (Episcopalian) and especially while growing up, that was just magical for me. I have lots of good memories of Christmas Eve. In secular music, anything off The Ventures’ or The Supremes’ Christmas albums. My dad had a special Christmas reel-to-reel tape that was always playing in our house that time of year, and was full of songs from those albums so anytime I hear them now I am immediately transported back to childhood Christmases.

Favorite Christmas cookie:My godmother’s cookies and I have no idea what they are made of.

Favorite Christmas gift ever received: I was so spoiled rotten as a kid and got so much great stuff it’s hard to choose and same really with a lot of gifts as an adult. I guess if I have to narrow it down to one or two, the first would be a quilt my grandmother re-made for me, that has cats on it. I say re-made because she initially made the quilt and gave it to me (maybe not even as a present, or if it was it was a birthday present) when I was about 7 or 8 years old, and throughout my teen years it hung on the wall over my bed. Time really took its toll on it (as well as many and various cats playing Spiderman on it climbing it) and sometime in my twenties, I talked to her about whether or it not it could be repaired and she told me to bring it to her and she’d see what she could do. A year or two or three later, it reappeared as one of my Christmas presents that year and she had not only repaired it but totally redone it – same embroidered (and repaired) cat squares, but with a whole different backing, and it was even better (and thicker and warmer) and better colors for my tastes as an adult! It’s gorgeous and especially now that she’s gone, means all the more to me that I have it.

The other gift wasn’t really a “major” one but was certainly one of the most memorable. I was probably nine or ten years old and there was this oddly-shaped, triangular present under the tree from my dad that drove me absolutely crazy trying to figure out what it was the whole month of December. It turned out to be three LP albums taped together in a triangle. You may have figured that out before I even got to that sentence – and it was of course a method he could never use again because it would never be a surprise again – but that thing being under the tree all those weeks just drove me nuts trying to guess what it was. One of the albums was Elton John, I can’t remember what the other two were.

One more – last year, my grandmother passed away on November 30th, and had been sick for a while before that, so when I was handed something I was told was from Grandmama I was so shocked, it was so unexpected. It turned out that while going through things after her death, one of my aunts had found a pretty significant amount of cash stashed away in something, and it was decided that that would be split among the grandchildren as that year’s Christmas present from Grandmama. Talk about turning on the waterworks, immediately.

Least favorite thing about Christmas: The mad crazy rush for shopping which is really my own fault because I am always so behind, even though usually part of that’s because I normally can’t afford to do most of my shopping until right before Christmas. One of these days I might learn to start saving up year ’round.

Where would your perfect Christmas be: Anywhere my family is. Though, admittedly, I like it best when it’s at home in my hometown, at my mom’s.

Favorite part of Christmas: Christmas Eve, late at night, with or without Christmas Eve Mass (we’ve gotten really bad about not going the last few years).

Favorite Christmas Decoration you own: We have a lot of neat decorations that have been in the family for many years, but I’d have to say my favorite is this little plastic pink elephant ornament that’s encrusted with what looks like rock salt, is the only way I can think of to describe it. I have had it for as long as I can remember and it may have been one of my first Christmas presents as a baby, not sure. Once I was old enough to start helping decorate the tree (probably two years old) I demanded it be the last ornament hung on the tree every year (for some unknown reason), and that tradition continues today. Even though my mom doesn’t always put up a tree these days, the years she hasn’t, that little pink elephant still gets hung up somewhere.

We also have this other decoration which has kind of become a family joke simply because, most years, everyone forgets about it when the decorations are being put away after Christmas. It’s a large ball that looks like a Christmas ornament and, in fact, is a music box – you pull the string hanging down from it and it plays “Jingle Bells”, and was a gift one year from my godmother and godfather. Somewhat surprisingly, even though it comes from the tacky Seventies, it’s really a tasteful piece and still looks great today. Which is a good thing, ‘cos more years than not, it winds up hanging in whatever doorway or archway it got hung up in until the next Christmas. And is another thing that usually gets hung up for decoration every year whether we’re decorating at Mom’s or not (unless, again, it was still hanging from the year before). I think last time we decorated at Mom’s (two years ago) we actually did spot it right before the last box went down to the basement and it got packed up. But there’s been lots of years it’s amused me to no end to go pulling the string on that thing in the middle of July or other very non-Christmas-y months and send the sound of “Jingle Bells” throughout the house, with everyone snickering because we forgot about it once again that year.

When do you put up the tree?: When I was a kid, it probably used to go up very shortly after Thanksgiving. In more recent years, if we’re decorating at Mom’s there’s usually a mad rush a couple of weeks before Christmas to get the tree and everything else up.

Do you wear “holiday” sweaters/sweatshirts/t shirts?: Yep. My mom actually made several which are gorgeous, most of which are not in good shape nowadays, but these days I’ve got some really nice pieces to wear if I want. However, on Christmas Day and the day after I usually wear a couple of sweatshirts, one of which has some cartoon reindeer and Santa and a tree on it that’s really funny, and the other is a great big smiley face wearing a Santa hat, and I like ‘em and don’t care whether anyone else thinks they’re silly or not. They are both pretty typically “me”. I guess I should retire the reindeer one since probably every batch of Christmas Day photos for the last ten years of me features that sweatshirt, but like I care. It’s the only day out of the year I ever wear that one and I’ll probably wear it ’til it’s literally falling apart.

Modern English

I know it’s hard to believe some days around here, as half-assed and retarded as I toss some stuff up on the blog sometimes, as well as occasionally being deliberately illiterate. But, believe it or not, I was an English major in college.

So when I saw this on another blog this morning, I immediately had to go take it, because I secretly am a geek like that.

Your Language Arts Grade: 100%

 

Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know “no” from “know.” Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).

Are You Gooder at Grammar?
Make a Quiz

Darn good thing, ‘cos I do believe I would have had to shoot myself in the head had I gotten much less than 100%. Actually the test is mostly about apostrophes, but I’d hazard a guess that is one of the top ten English stumbling blocks for most people.

Wow, I feel so academic today! I must be coming down with something.

Four Four Four for My Headaches

Detach your nose from the monitor & go do something productive, miss…
Originally uploaded by LynnsterZone.

Still recycling & moving old site pics but you know what, this is pretty much what I’ve looked like for the last 72 hours anyway with my nose permanently attached to the monitor screen. And no makeup.

Four quick things before I go take that nap I was going to take about this time yesterday afternoon…

1. I tested Blogger Beta this morning and am very disappointed. It REALLY sucks with IE 7, a lot of functions do not work at all. Needless to say I don’t think I’ll be moving anytime soon and maybe not ’til they make me. It might work just fine with IE 6 but it is HORRIBLE with IE 7. I might play with it with Firefox later but you know what, Firefox has its good points and all but it’s always run so danged slow for me. I don’t like slow.

2. I can’t remember when I last slept in my bed because I keep falling asleep this week in the chair here at the desk. First because I was working so much Monday and Tuesday and worked through the night. Then after that, just because I keep falling asleep sitting here. And I do NOT have a comfortable chair here. This all sucks and I intend to remedy all that right now – see: nap I intended to take yesterday afternoon.

3. I have four thousand things I want to get done this weekend but, most importantly, I would like to watch at least ONE of the five Netflix discs I’ve had sitting here that I haven’t had time to get to the past two weekends. Any bets on whether I watch any at all, or how many? Let’s not even talk about stuff I was supposed to do the past week that I can’t seem to make myself do. God, if there’s such a thing as Internet/online ADD, I’ve surely got it.

4. Childhood Misheard Lyric #1: “Joy to the bishops in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me…” (So, I was raised Episcopalian and “fishes” just never occurred to me for, well, years.)

17, 18, 19, 21! (Part 2)…

OK, so I didn’t have another post planned for today, but it would seem the one day I decide to toss up a YouTube video is the one day I need to take a new screenshot of the blog, and now I need to get Adam Sandler’s big head down further on the page so here – another post about not much of nothin’.

Since I did the Six Weird Things earlier, here’s Eight – No, Nine! – Totally Random Things About Whatever, Mostly But Not All Slightly Musical.

1. I can tell you exactly what I was doing every Friday night from October 1970 to March 1974. Sitting in front of the TV (usually the black & white TV in the living room at my grandmother’s house) from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. CST watching The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. Which is a nice segue into…

2. Further embracing my inner bubblegum, I shall now list the top ten 45 RPM records my mother would have surely liked to have burned into a melted puddle of vinyl:

“Dizzy” – Tommy Roe
“Sugar, Sugar” – The Archies
“I Think I Love You” – The Partridge Family
“A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” – The Monkees
“Julie, Do Ya Love Me” – Bobby Sherman
“Jam Up and Jelly Tight” – Tommy Roe
“One Bad Apple” – The Osmonds
“I Woke Up in Love This Morning” – The Partridge Family
“Shambala” – Three Dog Night
“ABC” – The Jackson 5

Only because they got PLAYED SO MUCH. But “Dizzy”, especially. She’d have probably loved to have broken that record into five million pieces.

So, another nice little segue onto…

3. Yes, indeed, I had an imaginary friend named Davy who for years was with me wherever I went. Yes, it was Davy Jones. And yes, indeed, I know where I was every Saturday morning throughout most of 1969-1970. The Pink Panther, the first rebroadcast of (naturally) The Monkees, then American Bandstand. Usually at my grandmother’s house too, except on Saturday mornings I got the color TV in the den all to myself. Which leads to…

4. (Here’s where I shake off the bubblegum and get some of my indie cred back.) To this day I’ve never met the man, but the first cousin of two boys who were like big brothers to me when I was a little kid is none other than Alex Chilton. It’s even odder that we haven’t crossed paths – there have been a bunch of occasions since I’ve been an adult where we have missed crossing paths with each other within a matter of hours. The younger of his cousins used to read to me when I was little and was one of my favorite people in the whole wide world… RIP Peter. Anyway, speaking of my indie cred…

5. My two seconds of fame, I reckon, was being acknowledged in Michael Azerrad’s terrific book, This Band Could Be Your Life (I contributed some very minor Replacements swag to the project). So there’s my little piece of rock solid indie cred, and that and 50 cents might buy me a cup of coffee (or four bucks at Starbucks). I was invited to participate in the documentary that’ll be out soon about Replacements fans, but thanks to my awful lazy habits of procrastination and the fact I don’t have a working camcorder of my own right now, I never got around to making a tape. Big bummer, but I’m still looking forward to seeing the finished project.

6. One of my former neighbors & babysitters when I was a kid, the younger sister of one of my best friends since high school, and the daughter of my high school tennis coach all have one thing in common: each is a former Miss Tennessee.

7. If jokes about drug addiction and alcoholism offend you, then you’re probably going to get offended here sometimes. The ex, the current, another ex, and many many of my friends all being in long-term recovery or otherwise – I’ve paid my dues and I can joke about it all I want, and I will and I do. Stuff they do, or did, is pathetic but it’s also often funny, in some laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind of way, yeah. And sometimes it’s just funny. There’s really very little in life I can’t find the humor in somewhere, and even in its pitifulness, that stuff sometimes amuses me, so you’re forewarned. I’m just sayin’.

8. Many have probably figured this out already, but 99% of post titles on the Zone are, yep, song lyrics. Maybe one of these days I’ll run out, maybe not, guess we’ll see!

9. The puppies you see on the blog sometimes – well, for one thing, The Edge (Not of U2) keeps asking me when I’m going to stop calling them puppies, seeing as how they’re going on three years old now. And I reply I will stop calling them puppies when I have puppies younger than them. Anyway, you might be interested to know their mama was a solid black Lab mix with just a tiny little bit of white on her. Yeah, I don’t know how that happened either.

I should probably incorporate some of this stuff in an about me/bio/FAQ/whatever someday, but that’s another project for another day. Right now I just need to get Adam Sandler’s big head moved down the page a little bit. So, ’til later and Happy Thanksgiving again. I haven’t even eaten today and I still need a nap.

UPDATED: Edited to add #9 and to wonder why the hell it’s after 8:00 p.m. now and I STILL haven’t had a nap…

Nobody Weird Like Me

I got taggeded (sic) by Sista the other night to post six weird things about me, but the past 24 hours have been a nightmare so I’m just now gettin’ to it. I should probably call my former co-worker and see what she says those six things are because she thinks plenty I do is weird, but it’s late so I won’t. I bet she’d come up with six totally different things than these though, I might have to call her later in the weekend just to see what her six things about me would be.

Actually I have probably already posted six or more weird things about myself in recent weeks – not liking chocolate, for one – and I already posted over at Sista’s about not liking to be on the phone except with The Edge (Not of U2 – see? It works!), my mom, my sister, or my future mother-in-law (I don’t like the phone because being on the phone was too big a part of my job for too many years). But since I’ve already gone over all that, I’ll think of six new things here.

OK, so here are Six Weird Things About Lynnster.

1. I have my dad’s feet and my second toe is longer than my big toe, except it won’t straighten out (too many years in tight pointy heels and other shoes probably ) so you can’t really tell it unless I straighten it out and show you. But, I can do something with my feet he couldn’t. If I concentrate real hard for a minute, I can make my littlest toes stick way far out and it looks pretty strange. The left toe is easier to do than the right.

2. Next to my bed, there are two alarm clocks that have three alarms total – two beeping and one radio, which the latter I keep at the loud end of the dial. Once upon a time the least little noise would wake me up, but nowadays I’m very hard to wake up and can sleep thru most anything. I have had this setup for about 15 years now. Unfortunately now, lately, I’ve found I can sleep thru all three of those alarms too. Including the one on the clock that was advertised to have an “extra loud alarm”. I had an old-fashioned windup alarm clock with a bell in the mix for a while too which sort of worked, but eventually I slept through it too. Lately, I have found that the alarm function on my cell phone will wake me up (the current ringtone is The Vines’ “Outtathaway!”) but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before that stops working, too. I have two different clocks that were advertised as having “extra loud alarms” and all I’ve got to say to that is yeahsureright, NOT. Not enough anyway.

3. Back before I started working at home and what few days out of the year I have to go work at our corporate office – as well as out at at restaurants, etc. – I drank my coffee with Sweet’N Low, Equal, or whatever, but never sugar. At home, I only drink it with sugar, never the artificial sweeteners. And it bugs me if I have to drink it with sugar when I’m out of the house, or with artificial sweetener at home. It SERIOUSLY bothers me to have to do vice-versa. This makes absolutely no sense, I know.

4. As much as I love and am obsessed with music, and as long as I’ve lived in Memphis, I have never been to the annual and huge Beale Street Music Festival during Memphis in May. I’m not too keen on crowds nor traffic, and even tho there have been plenty of bands and artists I’d have dug seeing, they’ve yet to have a Lynnster-absolutely-cannot-miss one in all the time I’ve been here, so I’ve just never gone.

5. My family would like to be able to say I’m adopted because of the blasphemous-’round-these-parts fact that I hate, loathe, and despise country ham with a passion and beyond almost any other food ever. People outside the South probably won’t get it, but country ham is a pretty huge thing down here and, in fact, giving someone a country ham is a pretty generous gift around these parts – it (or a turkey) are employee Christmas bonuses at some Southern companies. Anyway, I hate it immensely. I’m sorry, but country ham is N-A-S-T-Y. There, I said it. And my family can’t say I’m adopted because I look too much like them, and now all you Southern folks that come by here think I’m weird because of it too.

6. A hodgepodge of little things for #6 – I don’t know how to grill, I am grilling-impaired. With the exception of when I was little and my grandfather showed me how to wash a glass at the family drugstore, I never washed a dish by hand until I was in college. I never mowed a yard until I was 30 years old. When I was little, I had an imaginary friend named Davy (maybe I still do!). And, I always slept with the covers up to my neck until I was a teenager. Because you never know when Dracula might show up.

OK, there’s six things plus some bonuses. Now which six people shall I tag? Let’s see… whose weirdness do I wanna see (and tagging some folks that aren’t folks other NIT folks will likely tag)… how about Contrary, Sister Margaret, kilowatthour (when you return from your trip of course!), Dirty Catholic, Bitter Betty, and pageantmom? (Maybe Newscoma and The New Jan Brady too… except Newscoma, dear, you have to post about something BESIDES Bigfoot…heh.) And anyone else who wants to join in on all the weirdness, of course!