Category Archives: blogging

Cheesy Monsters in Hawaii?

Today I introduce a new feature to my Mohawk Valley Girl blog:  Weary Wednesday.  It is kind of a companion day to Tired Tuesday.  Only I hope to not be quite as foolish as I was yesterday on Totally Tired Tuesday (many thanks to Granny K for the elusive adverb).  I have been noticing lately how many pictures are in my Media Library here at WordPress, so I think I will pick out a few to re-visit for today’s post.  Think of is as one of those clip shows like the sit-coms do. Full disclosure:  I HATE clip shows; my own hypocrisy is not lost on me.

How do I STILL not have one of these shirts?

How appropriate is this?  I think, very.  This is a cheesy blog post!  I say it with a cheesy grin.  Soon I hope to publish a few more write-ups of cheesy movies.

Oh, if only I could drink beer and be this skinny!

It actually has not been a horrible day, although I feel beat enough to just sit and drink a beer (in fact, I am drinking water right now).  Could it be a sign of my ever-increasing age and waistline that things seem to get to me more these days?  SAY IT AIN’T SO!!!

This is probably as close as I will ever get to a tropical vacation.

Just to change things up a little, I add a more cheerful shot.  It is a lovely photo of me and my wonderful husband, Steven, at a fundraiser for H.A.L.O. (Helping Animals Live Organization), a no cage, no kill cat rescue.  Perhaps you read my blog post about it (although it was some time ago; I wonder if I can find the post and make a link).

I have no idea where I stole this one from.

I end with a kind of a self-portrait.  This was my Facebook profile picture recently, until I replaced it with a picture of Nosferatu yesterday.  As regular readers know, I’m kind of into monsters.  And now that I think about it, this was kind of a Frankenstein’s monster of a post, pieced together with whatever came to hand.  NOW what will I do for Non-Sequitur Thursday?  I hope you’ll stay tuned and find out.

 

Speedy Saturday Post

My plan right now is to post something really really fast, so we can get on to the movie-watching portion of the evening.  I cannot do a true Scattered Saturday, because I have not done a whole hell of a lot today. I wrote some post cards and took a very uneventful walk to the post office to mail them.  Then I waited around till it was time to go to the Utica Zoo for this afternoon’s performance of The Tempest with LiFT Theatre Company.

The performance was fun and went pretty well.  I think the audience liked us.  The Utica Zoo is a fun place to be.  I only wish I had gotten there a little earlier, so I could have gone into the gift shop and purchased some post cards.  I do like to have a variety of post cards.

After the performance, my friend Kim and I drove back to Herkimer, where we went to a brief wine tasting at Valley Wine and Liquors.  Then I went home, where my dearest husband Steven was, and we got some dinner at PK’s Pub.  Yes, I could write blog posts about the wine tasting or the dinner, or, for that matter, the performance of The Tempest or this morning’s walk to the post office (yes, I know, I said it was uneventful, when has that ever stopped me?).  So many posts, so little time.

I am now over 200 words.  I call that respectable.  Maybe not  a good post, but respectable. Happy Saturday, everyone, and I hope to see you all on Wrist to Forehead Sunday.

 

The Silliest Blog Post?

I could not think of anything to write a blog post about (I know, All Tempest All The Time, only I could not think of anything new to say about that either).  My husband, Steven, suggested I write a post about my silly husband.  Now I am afraid he will be dreadfully disappointed if I do not write such a blog post, so here goes.

The most glaring example of Steven’s silliness is that he was silly enough to marry me.  Obviously somebody married to me must be very silly, or perhaps a glutton for punishment (which is also, arguably, a silly way to be).  As anybody who has actually met me knows and readers of this blog suspect, I am no picnic.  Oh, I’m sure I have my good points, but we’re not talking about me.  The operative thing to do next is to give other concrete examples of how Steven is silly.  Well, for one thing, he has dubbed me the silliest.  Can you imagine such a thing?  Me, silly!  Well, I do write a silly blog, but, once again, we are not talking about me.

When my nieces were younger, it was quite the family controversy of who was the silliest, me or Steven.  Showing their wisdom and discernment, my nieces usually concluded that it was Steven, although for some unaccountable reason, the scales sometimes tipped in my direction.  My niece Gillian, however, wholeheartedly embraced Uncle Steve as the silliest.  Being a gentleman (albeit a silly one), he returned the favor.

One Christmas when I spoke to Gillian on the phone, she asked how The Silliest was.  Steven, in the background, said, “Tell her to quit talking about herself.”  When I asked Gillian what she had gotten for Christmas, she told me that one of her presents was a pig.  Steven immediately began saying, “Oink, oink.  Oink, oink,”  to which Gillian replied, “Tell him to quit talking about himself.”

 

Scattered Sunday?

I wanted to have another Severed Head Sunday.  I thought it would happen when Steven agreed to watch The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, one of my all-time favorite cheesy movies.  From there we could have gone onto a number of other features, cheesy or otherwise:  Hush… Hush, Sweet CharlotteStraitjacket, Sleepy Hollow (or, as I like to call it, The Headless Everybody), even Jaws has a scene with a severed head (I believe Jaws was a feature of my first Severed Head Sunday).

Then we decided to go for a walk, because  I finished a letter I wanted to mail.  I brought along the Tablet and took some pictures, so why not do a Sunday Stroll post?  While Steven was changing his shoes, I went into the backyard and got a picture of our Black-eyed Susans that I have been wanting.

The three bushes in the background are in the neighbors’ yard.

 

I took two shots, thinking to use the best one, but I now I think I’ll use both.

I don’t know if you can tell, but we’ve got quite a nice batch of chives next to the Black-eyed Susans.

I had just been remarking to Steven that our spearmint seems a little out of control, so I got a shot of that, too.

I should have gotten Steven to stand next to it for perspective.

I was glad I had taken two pictures at home, because I did not find as much to shoot on our walk.  However, I knew I wanted a picture of our post office, because I think it is kind of cool and historic looking.

I stood across the street so I could get the whole building.

As we walked up Main Street, I saw some flowers in front of Basloe Library which I had not taken a picture of, I don’t think.  I think I only took a shot of the ones in the park next to the library.

I wish I had focused in on the big pink blooms more, but you can’t see on the Tablet really well in the sunshine.

I was glad to get back home, because it was hotter outside than I had thought.  Also, I had not worn my sunglasses and the bright sunlight was bothering me.  Just to piss and moan a little, so this is more of a Wrist to Forehead Sunday after all.  However, my headline promised a Scattered Sunday and I began by talking about movies, so I will close with a photo I downloaded from one of my monster movie groups on Facebook.

Is it just me or does the building in the background look a little like Stone Mill at Canal Place in Little Falls?

It is a rare close up of Max Schrek in make-up as Nosferatu, who, as regular readers know, is one of my all-time favorite guys.  Happy Sunday, everyone.

 

I Didn’t Act and Type

So yesterday before our play, I just felt I could not write a post.  I thought to myself, “That’s OK.  Sometimes on a Saturday, I drink and type.  Today I’ll act and type!”  That was my plan, and it was a good one (it has been a saying of mine since army basic training: “That’s my plan and I think it’s a good one.”).  Except I didn’t come right home after the play.  I went to a lady’s house.  I drank wine.  I knew I wasn’t driving, and that was good, because I put the seat back and slept part of the way home.  That may have been awkward had I been driving.

The show went wonderfully.  That is, The Tempest by LiFT, Little Falls Theatre Company, in Caroga Lake, for those just tuning in or who forgot. I love acting, and I love community theatre.  This play has a delightful cast.  I like to hug the entire cast before a performance.  That gets awkward when there are people in the cast I don’t like.  Today I got pre-show and post-show hugs.  I can get very huggy.

Anyways, I went straight to bed when I finally got home.  I would still be asleep if it was up to me.  However, my husband has to be up.  He gets up early with me all week; I guess I can get up semi-early with him on the weekend.  As a added bonus, I can type in a kind of a blog post to make up for my miss on Saturday (that’s not writing, that’s typing, as Truman Capote once said).  Additionally, I did not have Lame Post Friday this week, which I almost always do.  So we an call this a Really REALLY Lame Post Saturday.  I hope to see you all later today on what is sure to be Wrist to Forehead Sunday.

 

No Laughing Matter! Or Is It?

OK, major panic attack just now.  I have about a half hour before my ride to rehearsal gets here.  That’s rehearsal for The Tempest with LiFT Theatre Company, in case you did not know or had forgotten.  I personally have forgotten most of my lines, the ones I reliably knew, at any rate.

So it’s Wuss-out Wednesday!  I actually started writing an awesome blog post while on breaks at work today.  Or perhaps I flatter myself.  You can judge for yourself, if I manage to finish it and post it in the next day or so.  Oh, I am so STRESSED!!!

And, as always, being a big baby about everything.  The fact of the matter is, I do not have to publish a blog post every day.  This is a purely self-imposed deadline and onus.  I know, some of you wish I would place a further onus on myself to write a GOOD blog post every day.  Well, ha ha on you, because this is as good as it gets!  Or is that no laughing matter?

This is the most incoherent post yet, I think.  But I have no time to fix it.  I need to get all my costume pieces together for rehearsal.  How complicatedly these Elizabethans dressed!  So many parts!  I will try to bring my Tablet to tomorrow’s rehearsal and take some pictures.  Today I fear I am too distracted by my own foolishness.  Some of you are thinking that tomorrow will be no different.  Indeed, I will probably be just as foolish.  But, as they say, I gotta be me.

I hope to see you all on Non-Sequitur Thursday.

 

Not Enough Monsters on Slacker Saturday

All I want to do is sit on my couch, crochet, and watch a monster movie.  Taking a nap would be a nice Plan B, but it is a little late in the day for that.  I was going to make a Scattered Saturday post but feared it would be such a lame one that I decided to go with Slacker Saturday instead.  I think I’ll share a couple of pictures, though, to liven things up.

As I mentioned, I had rehearsal for The Tempest in Little Falls..  It was not an official rehearsal but the meeting of a few characters to go over lines for one of our scenes.  I shall now share with you a picture I took of last Thursday’s Preview Performance, which, alas, includes none of the people who weer at today’s meeting.

Prospera and Ariel, discussing Ariel’s employment situation.

As you can see, we had a nice sized audience.  Enough to fill the chairs, with a some people standing behind, although that may only have been so they could make a fast getaway.  After all,  a few of them had dogs.

This was a good angle for me to watch the scene from.

This one is a little blurry, but you can see the audience a little better.  I think they enjoyed it.

Also not as clear as I would have liked, but showing two more characters.

You can see Ariel and Ferdinand in this one.  They are the love interest, although that is really just a subplot.  Still, they make a cute little couple.

I see none of the pictures feature the “monster,” Caliban, so I can’t connect up with my first line about watching a monster movie.  Oh well, what do you want from me on Slacker Saturday? In my defense, our rehearsal was from two to almost four in the blazing sunshine.  You know how that fries my brain (and if you don’t know, I’m telling you now: it fries my brain).  On to the monster movie, which may feature in tomorrow’s Wrist to Forehead Sunday post.

 

Short on Excuses, Long on Monsters: It’s Lame Post Friday!

If ever there was a day I needed Lame Post Friday, this is it.  Fortunately, it is in fact Friday, the day I have decreed that I am allowed to make a really lame post.  I know, what is my excuse the rest of the time?  Well, regular readers know, I have different excuses on different days.  However, my purpose today is not to muddle around with excuses but to make a short, reasonably entertaining post and get back to enjoying my Friday.

Sons of bitchin’ graboids! Pardon my french.

This may be worthy of Non-Sequitur Thursday, but we can’t always have these things exactly when we would like to.  I went into Downloads on our laptop, looking for something to pep up my post a little.  I could not see what this was a picture of, so I inserted it in the post, thinking I could always delete it if I didn’t like it.  But how could I delete a scene from Tremors, one of our favorite movies!  We never saw any of the sequels nor yet the television show.  I felt they might taint my memory of the beloved original.

When in doubt, there is always Nosferatu.

I recently found this picture of one of my all-time favorite guys.  I shared it on Facebook, just because, and now I share it with you, for a similar reason.

I would SO buy this book if I ever found it!

For the sake of using three pictures (it’s kind of a thing with me), I include a beautiful pulp fiction paperback cover.  Now that I am looking at it, I see it is a novelization of a movie.  Interesting.  I would still buy the book, even though I do not care for novelizations.  I have a minor collection of pulp fiction paperbacks which I purchased purely because I find the covers so delicious.

So this is my Friday Lame Post for the week. It entertained me to write it.  I hope at least some of my readers are likewise entertained.

 

A Few Pics from the Preview

You know, time does not fly JUST when you are having fun.  It flies other times, too.  Not usually at work, of course.  I’m not at work right now (I can’t get online at work, for one reason).  Time flies when you have a limited amount of it and a great number of things you were hoping to get done.  Well, I just won’t get everything done, that’s all.  And I will not make the blog post as long as I had hoped (some people may not find that to be a tragedy, I’m sure).

Today’s post was to have been a cross between Wordless Wednesday and Wuss-out Wednesday.  For one reason, I wanted to share the pictures I took at last week’s preview performance of The Tempest in Little Falls.  However, it seems I have quite a few shots, and my internet keeps going on (bad modem?  lousy router? operator error?).   My new plan (my plans are nothing if not flexible!) is to spread the pictures out over a few posts.  It! Could! Work!

“I don’t always wear pumpkin pants. But when I do, it is for Shakespeare.”

I led with one of my favorite shots.  This is Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, the king of Naples.  He really was posing like The Most Interesting Man in the World.  As a matter of fact, in the play, Miranda finds Ferdinand the most interesting man in the world.  Of course, she does not have much basis for comparison.

This was also described as a pirate outfit.

This is our director.  He also plays one of the sailors in the first scene of the play then goes on to lay Stefano, the king’s drunken butler.  One thing we do in community theatre is multi-task!

They may look nice, but they are up to no good!

These are Antonia and Sebestian.  Antonia has deposed her sister, Prospera, the rightful Duchess of Milan.   They spend a good amount of time in Act II making fun of my character, Gonzalo.

Looking regal and kingly.

And this is Alonso, the King of Naples.

You may have noticed that a number of the names begin with the same letter: Alonso and Antonia (Antonio in the original script).  Sebastian and Stefano.  There is also a Francisco, to get mixed up with Ferdinand.  I couldn’t believe Shakespeare could do such a thing!  When I start to name my characters, I write the alphabet at the top of the page and cross out letters as I use them, just to avoid such confusion.  The fellow who plays Alonso is also a writer. When I remarked about the alliterative names (the one time I do NOT like alliteration), he said, “Yeah, Shakespeare made a rookie mistake.”  I have to love someone who thus off-handedly accuses Shakespeare of a rookie mistake.  Rock on, Alonso!

Ooh, look everybody, I’m over 400 words!  I may have wussed out, but I am far from wordless (really, am I ever wordless?  Those who know me in person will tell you I am NOT).  I hope to see you all on Non-Sequitur Thursday.

 

Soggy Scattered Saturday

There really isn’t much to this week’s Scattered Saturday, but it is definitely soggy and, as regular readers know, I have to go for the alliteration.  I have been re-living through my Facebook On This Day my experiences of the flood of 2013.  My experiences were not as horrific as some, for which I am grateful.  No, I am not going to do a re-cap.  I’m not even going to link back to my blog posts of the time, because I don’t know that they’re all that great (I don’t know if any of my posts are all that great, but they’ll have to do).

So after a short(ish) run yesterday, I thought to do a long run today, with hills and everything.  Unfortunately, I paused for a cup of coffee and Facebook perusal before I left.  I hadn’t gone very far when it started to sprinkle.  I persevered until I heard thunder.  Even then I was inclined to keep going.  I kept thinking of Grandma in the pool.  You see, my grandmother loved to swim.  She had a four-foot above-ground pool which we went over and swam in all the time.  If there was thunder, Grandma would watch the lightning and count the seconds till the thunder and stay in the pool if it seemed the storm was far enough away.  I have since heard that this is not the right thing to do, because those thunder storms can move awfully fast.  Still, what was good enough for Grandma…  Additionally, once I’d started running, I felt I REALLY wanted to keep going for at least 15 minutes.

So it was a 15-minute run.  It soon stopped raining, but by then I had showered and felt too clean and sweet-smelling to get all sweaty again.  I thought I might run later, since it had stopped raining.  I wondered how many showers I could reasonably take in a day but was willing to at least go as high as three (if my second run got rained out as well).   However, it rained and thundered on and off, and I never got around to it.

And then Utica got flooded (for non-local readers, Utica is a half hour/45-minute drive away) (depending on if you consider the speed limit a mere suggestion).  I found this out because I was having a Putter-and-Post kind of day.  That is a day when I putter around the house, do something useful, then post about it on Facebook. Or post something else on Facebook or just read other people’s posts.  I am nothing if not flexible about these things.  I had not been inclined to go to Utica today, so that worked out for me.  For everybody in Utica, not so much.

I tried to download some pictures from Facebook to share but had no luck (some laptop issue I’ll have to figure out, I suppose).  So I thought I’d use my Tablet and take a couple of pictures of Herkimer (where I live).  When I had looked earlier out the road was not a river, as it had been in 2013, but the gutters were widening and looking brown.  By the time I took the pictures, it had stopped raining and the puddles had receded, but there was debris in the road.

The end of my driveway looks icky.

 

And this is the view to the right.

 

I went off the porch and walked a short way down the sidewalk to get this shot.

It seems to have stopped raining, but I hear there is flooding in many streets.  Travel is restricted, and many people are pumping out their basements.  Oh dear.  So far we only have a little water in our basement, so we are fortunate this time.  I can only hope it continues, or I will definitely have a Wrist to Forehead Sunday!  As always, I hope you’ll stay tuned.