Strange Talk

January 31, 2012 ~ JodiLea ~ 3 Comments

Kansas Farmland

My parents both came from families that had many ~~colorful~~ interesting sayings & expressions. My father was born into a Kansas farm family. My mother was born into a West Virginia mountain coal-miner’s family. This makes my sister and I Hickabillies. For some reason we are proud of this.

The other day one of my father’s favorite words popped out of my mouth. I had not heard (or used) it in years. It’s funny how your subconscious mind stores things from childhood that you don’t even know you remember.

did·dly·squat (dĭdˈlē-skwŏtˌ) noun, Slang: A small or worthless amount.

Origin of word: Too insignificant to piss on. (I don’t know if that’s true, but it makes sense.) Used in a sentence: “I got diddly squat for my bonus this year”;

Dad drove us all crazy with this expression: “We?? You got a turd in your pocket?” You might be saying “What???” to your screen. I know, it’s a strange one. It took me months to get it, and dad had to explain it to me (hey, I was a dumb kid!)

Grandma often hollered at us when we were being rambunctious; “Too much laughing always turns into crying!” Sis and I would just snicker and roll our eyes. And damn it all, she was right. Somehow during our giggling & carrying on somebody got pinched, poked or scraped and ended up crying. One day my sister’s precious Ooffy, her old stuffed dog’s head flew off. Her scream reached decibels never heard before by human ears. Imagine a couple of screech owls, trapped in a metal barrel. That would have been music.

I remember it like it was last week. A mind-numbing horror to witness, especially for a five-year old. They only way to get her to calm down was promising her Ooffy would have surgery to re-attach his head and he would be OK. Grandma took headless Ooffy into her bedroom and sewed him back together. Then bandaged him up. Whew! My sister still thinks it was my fault, 45 years later.

Not only was Grandma right, but her words of doom actually came out of my mouth last Saturday when my granddaughters were playing and giggling (quite loudly). They turned to me and said, “What???” I simply rolled my eyes and said, “never mind”.

Not a minute later both of them were crying.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

Not a Good Day

January 31, 2012 ~ JodiLea

Pissed Off Gorilla If we morphed into creatures representative of our moods, this was me yesterday. The gal above lingers a bit today, but she’s not so large or angry. Hopefully she doesn’t smell as bad either.

I drive to work on a dark country road. At 5:00am all roads are dark, but this one has very few street lights. Suddenly, a cat appears in my headlights and then I hit it. A very sickening Thud and a bump.

My first thought was “I hope that wasn’t somebody’s kitty“. The next thought was “Oh crap! That was a black cat“. I’m not a superstitious person, so I wasn’t afraid of bad luck following me. For the most part.

Oh, but it did. And it was not even a black cat. It used to be a small skunk.

The smell has somewhat lessened over night. I think. I’m not sure because I have a cold and my sense of smell is obviously impaired. I was thinking that I blew all the skunk off the car when I drove home. Then, hubby got home and he was coughing and gagging after stepping out into the driveway.

I tossed the super-duper, turbo air conditioning container (from the bathroom) into my car and closed all the windows, but it was no match for the skunk-mobile.

The perfume I have in my office drawer should help some. I plan on staying in my office and rescheduling my meetings anyway.

Organize Smorganize

January 30, 2012January 29, 2012 ~ JodiLea ~ 1 Comment

I fantasize about living in a house that has a place for everything, and everything in its place. I know it can be done, I’ve seen it on TV and even in a co-worker’s office. My office is nearly as bad as my house. In both cases I have too ~~much crap~~ many things and not enough room to store them in.

This will not be the case at our new house. We made sure that there was plenty of storage, both inside and outside. Not that we need the room now. There is nothing in the house yet except some things for my office bookshelves. Which are in boxes because the book shelf is TBD.

I have my sweet new dishes, bowls & matching mugs in my new kitchen. You guessed it – they are in boxes. I can’t wait to put them away in my new cupboards. I want to skip the hard part and go directly to the fun stuff like decorating, buying furniture, a desk and organize everything into its place.

But first I must organize the house we are living in, which we will sell soon, God willing. 24 years of living in a house (with a pack rat no less), means you have a lot of ~~crap~~ things to weed through and make decisions about. I HATE making decisions. I have started going through things I we don’t want and putting them in different boxes. One box is for the Vets to pick up. One box is for garage sale items. Even though I won’t decide to have a garage sale until there are things we want to get rid of that we think people will pay money for, there is a place to put them.

Junk waiting to be sorted Organizing looks very much like a mess, while it is being done. It also takes up twice the space when stuff is separated and spread out. This is how we have been living. We are so accustomed to the disaster that is our home, we forget that people who don’t live here might find this uncomfortable. Get over it. Be happy you don’t live here.

Another box is for the ~~crap~~ stuff the kids left in their rooms. They all have been warned. We are NOT moving your abandoned ~~crap~~ stuff from your childhood up to the mountains. So sorry. Yes, we know you don’t have room for it because we never did either. We feel your pain.