Swoon

"The most precious thing a man can have is a woman's heart."

Or this:

" . . . a woman who is creative and dares to see all the wondrous facets of reality and experience - someone who can take care of herself regardless of a man's presence but will also surrender to love when it comes knocking on her door . . ."

*Sigh.* This is just NOT GOOD for my princess paradigm, but fabulous fodder for fantasies. ;) While it's a sure thing that I need reality to come kick my sorry butt, I'm not wishing for it's arrival, at all.

Happiness is . . .

Really cheap, real-life garden porn. Yes, now I've got quite a few still healthy and

viable pansies to plant tomorrow.

The decorated giant chocolate chip Valentine's cookies that Mom & I made yesterday evening. Yes, it's silly. Yes, they're decorated badly (hey, we'd had more than a few glasses of wine by that point). Yes, the email she sent earlier in the week about planning an evening to make the cookies made me cry, because we haven't done this since I was, oh, maybe 6 years old and I LOVED IT. It was the one thing about Valentine's that made me question my intense hate for the "holiday."

Don't get me wrong. Valentine's can be beyond fabulous, I'm sure. But it's never been beyond fabulous for me. (Let me caveat that by saying that I had a wonderful Girls Night Out this past Valentine's and it takes the cake, so far, no contest.)

My hate for Valentine's probably has something to do with realizing I was one of, oh, maybe two kids in class of 25, that only got two or three stupid valentines from the other kids in the class. And this happened year after year. And it was worse when teachers made it mandatory that you bring valentines for EVERYONE and announced it to the class, because that's oh-so-good for your self-esteem: getting a bag of valentines from people who didn't want to give them to you in the first place.

And I'll spare you my thoughts about middle school and high school. Just take the above feeling and apply to adolescence. Yeah.

The Madness Begins

Today is day one of NaNoWriMo. I'm done for today and looking for a widget that shows my word count on the side of the blog. 1671 words. Just 48,329 to go. Wow, that's a big number.

Otherwise, life is trucking along, except for the $1400 bill I got for the hoity-toity frou-frou doctor's exam that I had in APRIL. Yeah, I said APRIL. I got the bill yesterday. Let's see, that's, hmm, SEVEN MONTHS. *&^% who don't know how to do things in a timely manner. I'm going to try to figure out several things about this tomorrow:

1. WHY did it take SEVEN MONTHS to send a bill?
2. WHY it wasn't a covered expense. I understood - as did all parties around me - that it would be.
3. WHY I wasn't told it wasn't a covered expense AT THE TIME.
4. WHO'S going to pay it. If I've got to, I will, but the hoity-toity frou-frou exam wasn't worth $1400. They couldn't even tell me if my osteoporosis was improving.

Grr . . .

Laugh Out Loud

Yep. This article is that funny.

Two points, one courtesy of Jess:
(1) No more evidence is ever needed that people don't read signs.
(2) Why did they feel the need to mention the detail about only one eye? Must have been just to show exactly how much of an advantage this guy had.

Humph. Men and golf. Glad women don't do such silly things - especially since I'm about to be one of them.