I am thinking a lot (after watching the news) of our eastern friends. Liminal is in Maryland, Abashai is in Ohio, and everywhere in between we have Mizaharians all up and down the eastern seaboard. I thought I'd offer up the funniest snow thing I've ever heard for your consideration in today's blog. If you don't get the Little House on the Prairie joke you've never sat as a little girl and read all the Little House books - which are amazing for a girl of about 6-8 to enjoy. Also, we all have that neighbor. You know the one. The entire article is reposted here for your reading pleasure, but the original one was posted on NPR here. Hopefully married people and horse owners alike will enjoy the humor.

Jen

February 5, 2010

Laura Lorson is the producer, editor and local All Things Considered host for Kansas Public Radio.

Some advice for you folks in the mid-Atlantic on snowstorms: You can trust me; I live in the Midwest. We get phenomenal amounts of snow pretty regularly ... though I could see where you might not know that, because we have to get, like, apocalyptic amounts of ice before anyone on The Weather Channel bothers to point it out. So anyway, here are my rules for a safe, healthy, happy snow experience.

1. Chopping up your furniture for fuel goes a lot more smoothly if you keep your axes nice and sharp.

2. Do not pay more than $50 for a loaf of black-market Wonder Bread.

3. There's more food in your house than you think. Search the junk drawers — there are often stale Gummi bears and Lemonhead candies.

4. Check on your shut-in neighbors, especially the ones who don't think you are sufficiently serious about lawn care in the summertime. Be extra-nice and superconcerned while you are there. They will feel guilty. The evil glee in your heart w...

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Well, its been a long week and it keeps getting longer. A lot has happened in real life and it keeps getting worse. I'm not sure why, but I bet if someone was interested in astrology they'd say something like 'Mercury is in bad alignment with the planet Bullshit' and that's why life is going oddly. It just keeps getting weirder. I started out the week having a day where I was seriously the biggest klutz ever. I tripped up stairs, down stairs, over my own feet, broke eggs collecting them from the chicken house cause I dropped them, lost tools, broke a headlight, and had misc things happen in a long string of exhausting events. My tire went flat, I was late for work, etc. Can you say Ugh? I can.

Anyhow, I thought it was getting better. Until last night.

Anyhow... what changed my mind? Life was crazy busy last night. And above all the other stuff going on that defined crazy, I met someone who was acting crazy. Well, you know how distracted people can get driving right? They talk on cell phones, text, eat cheeseburgers, shave, apply lipstick, drop something on the floorboards, fiddle with the radio, etc. Well, officially as of last night, I saw an all new high of stupidity. A driver had a laptop computer mounted to his dashboard that was playing a movie. He was more interested in watching the movie than dropping his load and picking up his empty. He was acting dangerously, and so I stopped him. I asked him to not watch his video in the yard and please please please be thinking of safety.

So he pulls out his work permit? Green Card? Some sort of card BS and his lawyers card, and flashes them all at me. I'm not kidding here. Then he goes "You are interfering with my civil rights! I will sue you!" In heavily accented russian. At least I think it was russian. Yea. Dude... you have a high probability of running over my family (or someone else's family) with your 18 wheeler because your stupid distracted driving and I'm crunching...

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I have learned, throughout life, what makes me happy isn't always what makes other people happy. I think a great deal about happiness. It might be because so many people around me are not happy. It doesn't matter if I'm talking about people I know online or people I interact with daily in my life. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why they aren't happy - not to improve their lives - but to truthfully avoid my life becoming theirs. That might not make a lot of sense to you, which is fine, but truthfully I think that this the key to happiness. We all have a foundation. That foundation is our personality. Personalities rarely conform to societies rules and regulations, nor do they ever usually follow along with the status quo. You have to work with what your dealt. It's a great deal like your phenotypic expression. You look like what you look like (due to genetics and how those gene's express themselves), and you truthfully can't change your black/bronze/white/red/chartreuse skin color any more than you can change the foundation of your personality. Popeye said "I am what I am." He was so right.

So, what exactly is that? Who is Jen?

Seriously. It's a terribly hard question to answer. If you take a look deep inside yourself right now, most people would start waxing eloquently about their nobility, their kick ass writing ability, their superior storytelling abilities/grammar/spelling, their self-sacrificing persona... but that would all be bullshit wouldn't it? Oh hell yes. If you start thinking of yourself immediately (if you paused a minute to play my game and say "Who is X?") in any of those categories, the first thing you need to dub yourself is a liar. There's a lot of them out there. Grats. That would be part of your foundation. The foundation is the truth about who you are. It is not someone else's truth. It is not even what society expects or demands. People rarely fall into the 'normal' category....

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Pics of my Mom's cousin's Place in Carrol, Iowa. These are my... second cousins (?) Jean and Wayne. Great people. Don't egg their house. You gotta love it. I'm really glad I'm not there.

I love Ikea. I really do. To those of you who have never had the pleasure of visiting one - you're truly missing out. Now, your good old pal Gossamer here is about as redneck as they come, but I do have streaks of 'designer' in me that nature or nurture would be hard pressed to stamp out. I heard the hype, several years ago, when Portland Or first got their Ikea. I wasn't sure what an Ikea was... or whether or not it was going to be something I'd remotely enjoy. I was leaning towards the 'not going to bother' because I really dislike the whole shopping experience. But I broke down once, on a whim, and walked in... and let me tell you, it was absolutely love at first sight.


The whole store is huge, first of all, and divided into two parts. Upstairs is by far the coolest. It has a series of rat-maze like rooms set up. What I mean is you experience the illusion of walking from one living room into another and into another. You can go poke into closets, see bathrooms off bedrooms, and explore kitchens. There's sections so all the bedroom/bathroom set ups with their special cool fake walk-in closets are all grouped together, then living rooms, then office spaces, then kitchens. You can open everything, play with everything, sit on the furniture and see all the different ideas for decorating. And every inch is decorated. The little stuff found in the rooms is usually stored in bins or islands in its various sections so you can see what you like, go a few steps walking out of the illusion, and pick it up. They give you bags to carry through the store to keep your things in. If they are larger items, like tables, lamps, couches, you can write down the numbers of aisle and row in the self-serve furniture area and go get them all boxed up just before you go to check out. There's a really cool restaurant upstairs that serves a mean ceasar salad and grilled chicken plate. I cant vouch for the rest of the food, but the one time I ate there it was great....

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