Friday, October 31, 2008

Happy Halloween!!

Tonight I will be attending an annual Halloween party at a friend's house. Usually they dress up as some "well known" couple from any variety of sci-fi adventure series. This year, they have a two month old little boy, so I am very excited to see what they will have come up with. I will be even more excited if I know who it is they are referring to (I don't really get around the sci-fi networks that much).

My husband hates dressing up in costume and conveniently (for him) he has a meeting out of state that he has left for.

But I decided that we could attend the party as a couple anyway. I will be going as Linus and my husband will be portraying the Great Pumpkin.



Which I think works out great, because all night long I will be able to refer to the fact that he will show up before the night is over, and then when he doesn't show up at all it will be even more appropriate.

:)

What are you going to be for Halloween?

Thursday, October 30, 2008

We interrupt this blog...

...to dedicate my hair today to my favorite muppet, Don Music.



May your music always inspire children and may your hair always lack styling gel.

Amen.



Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Coasting Anon


Well, there's a new girl around these parts and she is no longer 'MZpuzzled', rather she is 'Coasting Anon'.

I like it.

It represents my love for all things Coastal as well as my current take on how I am traveling through life.

It expresses my anonymous blogging stance while still associating itself with the concept of 'Coasting Along" by sheer force of rhyming.

And, most importantly, if you Google search it only two results show up so far.

Why that last one, you ask?

Well, on my last blog, my moniker was 'Girl'. Just 'Girl'. Do you have any idea how hard it is to pick your blog or any mentions of your blog out of a line-up on Google when the search term is 'Girl'? Yeah. So Coasting Anon it is.

I think it has a rather nice ring to it. What do you think?

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Whoops…you mean I’m supposed to update this thing?

Sorry about that. I have been out of practice. I don’t have much to report from the field here other than it is a craptastic day here in Boston complete with wind, rain and defeated umbrellas strewn along the sidewalks.

Oh...here's some news: I finally talked to my husband about this blog.

You see, he thinks anything to do with the internet is evil. Seriously. Evil.

Mostly because the experience he has with blogs comes from me…and I used to sometimes say things on my blog that would inevitably royally piss off my friend, and roommate at the time, and then I would turn to him for comfort and his reaction would be, ‘than don’t put it out there’.

Also, he was sitting there at the table with me when I was fired from my job, so he knows how deeply involvement with a blog can hurt.

Lastly, the only other information he ever hears about people on the internet are the horror stories we get every few months about some kid meeting up with some perv from MySpace or Facebook and getting killed or maimed or drawn into a Liger-worshiping troupe of ne’re-do-gooders who think the end of the world will be signified by a female governor from Alaska in the White House...oh wait...I believe that.

Annnnnnyyyyway....I talked to him about starting another blog and told him that I was doing it because I have a voice that I think people want to hear. Not millions of people per-say, but rather a handful. And as long as there is a handful of people who are amused and, dare-I-say, entertained by my writing, I felt I should allow myself to provide to those people via my blog on the big-ole-scary internets.

I explained that I was going to write as anonymously as possible but that I was going to focus on stories about me, rather than stories about other people; which meant that theoretically, the only person who would potentially be getting 'exposed' by my writing would be me. I also reminded him that the stories I have to tell aren’t all nice and pretty and perfect; that there are things about me in the stories I want to tell that some people may find offensive or shocking, but that it was my choice to ‘put it out there’ and I was doing so because I felt like I had something to say.

And he said ‘ok’.

Not that I was looking for his approval, but at least now I can rest assured that I am not hiding anything from him which really opens up the opportunity to blog freely and express myself.

Ok, so now that THAT's out of the way...any ideas on where to start?

Monday, October 13, 2008

The Wordle has spoken

Thanks to my lovely friend, Ellie, over at The Lucky Nest, I found a lovely site, Wordle, which has a wonderful feature for creating word clouds.

I entered in this here blog, and lo and behold this is what came out (click on the wordle to enlarge):

So, anonymous I shall be.

Let's not mention how with this type of rationalization I should apparently be getting drunk to the point of feeling up the toilet, writing more letters by hand and letting my husband know he's gonna get lucky tonight.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

This is why I never get anything done

A while back my husband and I noticed that the toilet in our 1/2 bath downstairs would suddenly start running all on its own and it was determined that the rubber seal at the bottom of the upper tank was leaking water into the bowl and making the toilet feel as though it had to fill the upper tank to keep up.

It seemed like a simple fix...turn off the water, take out the old rubber thingy, install the new rubber thingy and voila!

Sadly, that wasn't the case. Which is how I ended up with my downstairs bathroom looking like this for a couple of days:


As you can see from the picture above, I had to take the entire back of the toilet off in order to even access the big plastic nut that attaches everything to the inside from the outside.

You can also see the lovely instruction sheet from the kit purchased to take care of this task:


Oh yeah, and waaaaay down there in direction #6 is the small disclaimer that part you have supposedly bought the kit to fix, doesn't actually come in the kit. It is sold separately.

AAARREGHHH!!!!!!!

I do enjoy how they just slide that information into parethesis like a true after thought. It reminds me of why I never cook from a Martha Stewart cookbook. Because more-often-than-not, halfway through the recipe, you get to a step that tells you to go out to the garden to the tree you planted last spring and drain the sap for 10 hours with a tool that you can only get from Williams-Sonoma on Tuesdays in years ending with odd numbers.

In any case, I do feel rather satified that I eventually pulled this off and did, in-fact, fix the toilet!

Thursday, October 09, 2008

To blog anonymously or not to blog anonymously

As a follow up to my very first post (at this blog), I am finding that I am having a very difficult time deciding whether I should blog anonymously or not.

On the one hand, by blogging anonymously, I have a little more freedom to discuss things going on in my life.

On the other hand, I already did the blogging anonymously thing and it turned right around and bit a huge chunk out of my ass.

On the one hand, I feel that when writing, you should write what you know and you shouldn't edit yourself to only include the happy, not-going-to-offend-anyone bits.

On the other hand, some people in my very own family will only accept that truth if you are 'in-fact' a writer...something that apparently can ONLY be defined by having a degree in literature, a previous history of the desire to write (which, incidentally, should NOT include any failed English classes no matter how much better you would have been in school had someone only recognised and treated the signs of ADHD in a way other than closing you up in a box in front of your entire fourth grade class so that you didn't daydream away from your assignment), published the great American novel to great acclaim and a weekly showing on the NY Times best seller list.

If I blog anonymously and say what I want to say and then someday get found, I could end up hurting others, including myself, all over again.

If I don't blog anonymously, I might feel censored and the whole point of starting this all up again was to be able to write.

I am at an impasse. I don't know what to do.

What would you do?

PS - while you are mulling over the answer to that question, can you also give up a suggestion for what I should be calling myself over here until I DO make a decision? Because, well, MZPuzzled is...uh... ...lame. Thanks.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Jersey Shore

I spent the weekend at the Jersey Shore with some family on my husband's side. Below are some pics of the trip. Please excuse the blatant use of post-processing techniques. I truly loved the original pictures that I took...but I took them with the sole intent of 'going to town' on 'em with Photoshop, just so I can get some more exposure (pun not intended).
































Such a cute little fuzzy-wuzzy bear



Do you think she knows those ridiculous boots paired with her unfortunate stature makes me just want to pick her up and sqeeeeeeze her?