Grand Central Station at Ole and Lena's

Here it is - Saturday morning - 11:30 a.m. - and I'm still sitting in my jammies at the computer. Don't tell anybody, though - okay? I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm lazy or anything. I just can't get going this morning cause I didn't get enough sleep.


Our house was like Grand Central Station this morning. Ole and I, along with Senior Citizen Simon, (who was in the middle stretched crosswise pushing with his hind feet against Ole for more room in our king-sized bed) were sleeping in this morning when the door bell rang at 7:30 a.m. It was the grand doggers being dropped off early because both Lovely Daughter and Lars had to be to work at 8 o'clock this morning. And of course the doggers are always excited when they come over so made a mad dash down the hallway to the bedroom, leaped on the bed (which they aren't supposed to do) and began slobbering Ole's face, top of his head and in his ears. I swear Beau's tongue went in one ear and came out on the other side! This definitely got him awake.


Well, of course, this scared Simon off the bed, who ran to the kitchen and wouldn't shut up until I got up and put some of that stinky wet cat food in his dish. Then I had to stand guard while he ate it so that the doggers wouldn't snitch it from him. When Simon is eating canned food the doggers stand over him, sometimes drooling to the point where Simon gets wet. And of course, under these circumstances, Simon ALWAYS takes his time eating, chewing his food extremely well before swallowing. Meanwhile, all I can think of is going back to my nice warm bed and snuggling down under the covers and going back into La La Land.


I finally managed this and was just drifting off when the phone rang. I rolled over and grabbed it and on the other end was a sweet little voice asking for Ole. Turns out it was a buddy's teenage daughter who had been assigned the task of calling a number of car club members to remind them about a fall festival parade that was taking place this afternoon, and would he be able to drive one of his old cars in the parade. Okay. That's done. Phone hung up. Back to sleep - NOT!


Fifteen minutes later the phone rang again. Once again I picked it up and said HELLO in not so sweet a tone. This was some guy calling for Ole coordinating some other stuff for this parade.


All this between 7:30 and 8:30 on a Saturday morning. NOW YOU KNOW WHY I'M CRANKY!! I finally just gave up and went to make some coffee. And I don't even drink the darn stuff!! So you see what a good wife I am (breaks arm patting self on the back.)


Ole finally got organized and left here about an hour ago to go to the Pumpkin Festival and drive his car in the parade. He'll have two little Pumpkin Princesses in the rumble seat that will be throwing candy to the crowds, so I'm sure he'll have fun. I could have gone too, but I'm just too crabby.


Then when Ole comes home he'll have to get organized to go to Minneapolis. He's taking all his Viking paraphernalia along because he's going to the Vikings/Green Bay Packers game on Sunday. He'll be staying with a buddy, tailgating before the game and then head home tomorrow after the game. Be sure to watch for him if you watch the game. Last time he was there he was on FOX News - guess they liked his look or something. In addition to all the head gear he also carries a wooden sword and a shield made out of a Ford hubcap. So every time the Vikings do something good (which isn't very often) he bangs his wooden sword on the hubcap and makes tons of noise. Apparently FOX picked up on that and he had his 5 seconds of fame!!

Well, Folks, I need to develop a better attitude here, get my butt out of this chair and go accomplish something. I started putting my yard to bed for the winter yesterday and hope to have it all done by the end of the day today. We're leaving on a bike trip on Thursday for a week or ten days, and who knows what the weather will be like by the time we get home. I sure don't want to be out doing yard work in the snow!!

So - Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it's off to work I go (ugh). See ya'll later.

Love Lena

There's been a death in the family - Sob !

I’ve had a death in the family. Someone that I’m going to miss tremendously. I can’t imagine life without her at this point. I haven’t known her all that long, but her passing is going to leave an enormous hole in my life.

Rosie the Roomba (robotic vacuum) died today.

For the last couple of weeks she’s been making some strange noises when she’s been sweeping up all the dog and cat hair. Maybe she thought there should be more to life than just animal hair – like cookie crumbs or some such thing. Unfortunately, at my house the grand doggers play Hoover and eat all the food crumbs so all Rosie ever got was pet hair. Maybe she died of malnutrition or something.

I’ve been very careful to give Rosie a thoroughly cleaning frequently. And to enhance her cleaning I would periodically send Rosie out to the shop with Ole so he could give her a blow job. Now get your minds out of the gutter, please. In my terms, when Ole gives Rosie a blow job he blows all the excess hair and dust from her innards with an air hose. Makes her nice and clean. Just like new.

But apparently, this time she needed more and a blow job just didn’t satisfy her. So she’s become uncooperative and refuses to clean anymore. Or maybe she’s gone through dust-o-pause and just doesn’t enjoy the blow jobs anymore.

I’m hoping that with a little interference (robotic hormones) she’ll come back to life and start doing her job again. I got onto the Roomba website today, and because she’s still under warranty they’ll either perform some kind of surgery so she’ll enjoy cleaning again, or replace her with a newer, younger model.

Just an aside speaking of a newer, younger model – when Ole turned 50 he asked me if he could go out and find a 25 year old. A younger model, you know. I told him “Sure. No problem. Because you’re turning 50 you can have TWO 25 year olds.” Of course his face lit up like a Christmas tree. Then I told him there was only one stipulation to the agreement. He could have two 25 year olds but he’d have to be able to keep up with them. Didn’t take him long to give up that idea (snicker, snort.)

Tomorrow I’ll have to pack Rosie up and ship her off to the Roomba Hospital. Hopefully she’ll be able to enjoy life again. They’ll have to evaluate her and let me know if she can be restored to life or not. I’ll sure miss her while she’s gone.

Just send sympathy cards and any memorials to me via blogspot.com, Okay?

Twinkie Guts and Kitty Litter

This is Dante

Poolie's entry about her Twinkie cake inspired me to tell you a story about Twinkies and cat litter.

When Lovely Daughter got out of college she moved into an apartment and got a cat – that was the beginning of her feline zoo. Dante was a huge neutered male, part Siamese and part barn cat, I think. He had been neutered and then declawed as an adult, which made him somewhat on the grumpy side as I think he had been an outside cat at some point. He wanted nothing more than to spend time outside in the sunshine, and here he was cooped up in a third floor apartment.

Well, Lovely Daughter got married to a Marine and in the interim, while they were waiting for base housing, she moved back home with Dante. Because he was declawed (front only) we didn’t let him outside as we’ve just got too many critters around in the country just waiting to make a meal of declawed cats. After a couple of months her then husband was allocated base housing so she loaded up her car and headed east. Loading up her car consisted not only of her personal items, but also Dante and a litter box placed on the floor in the back seat.

Most cats aren’t good travelers, but Dante settled himself either in the back window or on the dash their first day out and watched the world go by. They stopped for the night somewhere in Ohio or Indiana, I don’t remember now, and took off early the next morning to complete their trip.

Now at that point in time Lovely Daughter wasn’t exactly into eating healthy, so she stopped to pick up breakfast, which consisted of a can of Coke and several Twinkies. She placed them on the passenger seat beside her. I don’t know what happened to Dante at this point in time, but he jumped from the back seat into the passenger seat, landed on the Twinkies which went whoosh when their plastic wrapping blew open, and then squish when all the cream center squeezed out and immediately went between his toes. The noise of the plastic blowing and the texture of the cream filling must have upset Dante. He jumped up on the dash, tracked the cream filling across it, wangled his way across Lovely Daughter into the back seat, down on the floor into the litter box where the litter stuck to the cream filling in his feet, back into the front seat and into the Twinkies again. Wash, rinse and repeat a number of times before she could get pulled off the turnpike and get him settled down and cleaned up.

Now she has Twinkie guts and cat litter from one end of the car to the other and all over her clothes, and has another full day of driving before she reaches her destination. Her ex-husband said it took him two full days to get all the Twinkie guts and litter out of her car.

So Dante moved into an apartment on base where he proceeded to let them know that he still didn’t like living inside and just wanted to be outside. They finally bought a cat harness and a leash and would stake him out in the front yard under a tree for periods of time. That made him a little bit happier.

Then we came for a visit (snicker). Ole decided that Dante needed a bit of exercise because he was getting pretty porky around the middle, so one day he started off down the sidewalk with the cat on a leash. Of course Dante didn’t know that he was supposed to get up and walk, so Ole would take a step, drag the cat, take a step, drag the cat. Dante eventually caught on, and that was the beginning of Devil Cat. From then on he didn’t want to be in the house at all. He would sit in the window and cry or lay in front of the apartment door so that you couldn’t get in or out without moving him.

When the ex-husband got out of the Marines and they moved back here of course Dante came along. They moved into their little house on the other side of our property and decided they would let Dante out on his own for short periods of time. Now this cat was no dummy. He had it figured out that they were both gone all day working so there was no one home to let him in or out. So he packed his little kitty suitcase and moved to my house where he could come and go as he pleased. From then on he was the happiest cat you could imagine. I think he went back to his barn cat roots and thoroughly enjoyed the remainder of his time on earth.

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Dante's favorite place to sleep was wrapped around my head. Believe me, when you're having a hot flash the last thing you need is a big cat covering your head!

Even though Dante was declawed in the front he could still climb trees. The only problem was that he could never figure out how to get down so Ole would end up rescuing him.

And the Beat Goes On

To answer some questions from yesterday’s entry:

Yes, Jane was at the Watering Hole on Friday night, but I neglected to introduce Kitchen Logic to her. Sorry, my bad. But Kathy did get to see her and watch her perform. This was another night that Jane chose to surround herself with her entourage. So earlier in the evening Ole and I had moved from her table of Jane worshipers over to our own table so we could develop our own Group of Groupies (snicker).

I must admit that Jane has been on good behavior lately. I don’t know what’s come over her unless Dick finally told her to get her act together or else. I can’t even guess. I do know that one thing that makes her happy currently is that her son-in-law in working away from home these days and only makes it back to see his wife and little daughter about once a month. This means that her daughter and granddaughter come home every weekend so Jane can run that show more frequently. Oh, well, on to other things. Those are her issues, not mine. I have enough trouble trying to run my own life, let alone my daughter’s.

Thanks, Paula, about the warning to not touch my eyes when making salsa. Got that one under control. I never peel, de-seed or dice the peppers – I’ve talked Ole into doing that. For some reason when I’m working with peppers, even under running water, the smell gets in my throat and causes me to go into horrible coughing spasms. Then I start to choke, and we couldn’t have that because if I choked, Ole would have to finish the salsa.

A few years back Ole used to eat REALLY REALLY hot food. The hotter the better. I think you have to develop a taste for really hot over a period of time. Those were the days when we were growing habaneros, which are some of the hotter peppers available. Well, Ole thought he wanted some habaneros put into a batch of salsa so he volunteered to prepare them. He made two mistakes: 1) he didn’t wear latex gloves when he handled them, and 2) several hours after he had prepared them he rubbed his eyes and immediately went into rolling-on-the-floor pain even though he had washed his hands with soap and water several times after handling the peppers. I actually thought I was going to have to take him to the emergency room, but of course being a man, he wouldn’t go. I think he actually blistered the surface of his eyeballs. After several hours of keeping cool, wet cloths on his eyes the pain lessened and he eventually came out of it. But we learned the hard way how to handle peppers – any kind of peppers.

With my ScandiHOOvian taste buds I don’t handle any kind of hot very well. After all, Norwegian spices consist of salt, a bit of pepper and ketchup. I’m fine if the hot taste stays in my mouth, but if it burns all the way down my throat it’s definitely not good. So the current recipe for salsa that I have and we all like a lot has kind of a sweet hot taste. It won a blue ribbon at the fair a couple of years ago. But then I’m sure there’s Norwegians doing the judging, too.

On another note:

If you haven’t read Cosmic’s entry today, it’s a must. I totally agree with her. She may not represent the entire blogging world, but her party of one became a definite party of two after I read her entry.

I haven’t said anything publicly about the recent flame war either, but it’s long past the point of being ridiculous. Certain parties seem to feel the need to keep it going. I’ve never had anything against the person, only their behavior. I always enjoyed the pictures and guess I’m way too naïve to even think about all the weirdoes out there who might have taken a shining to the pictures of children that were posted. The behavior reminds me of a spoiled three year old saying “I can play with your toys, but you can’t play with mine. I’m going to take my toys and go home.” And then standing on the front porch and saying, “Nyah-nyah-na-boo-boo.” In my opinion that’s what’s encompassed with deleting all entries, locking diaries but then keeping one diary open for all to see and making very pointed, sarcastic remarks. Adults who act this way need to grow up and get a life. Instead of threatening to quit writing, hoping that other bloggers are going to beg you not to, you need to move on. Quit taunting. That’s what spoiled brats do. By keeping this going you're forcing people who liked you previously to develop a strong distaste for you.

I really don’t care if you read my diary or not. I’m glad you find it interesting enough to keep coming back. But I really wish that people who act this way would grow up. By this time you all know who I’m talking about and I find it extremely scary that people with this kind of a personality are teaching our children.

Like Cosmic, I’m sure I’ve opened myself up for lots of attacks. But so be it. You can’t scare me. Enough said.