aka, Can a post title made up of only initials bear anything good?

Well, my living room is rearranged and lookin’ good (although now I need to repaint my walls once it’s warm…good thing I love my hubby). My computer and I are plugged into the outside world once again. And the FAQ section of the Waiting For Spring page is now up and running. Here it be: https://rjkeller.wordpress.com/waiting-for-spring/faq/

Naturally, I’ll add to it as new questions become asked frequently, or when something catches my fancy. My fancy is easily distracted, though, and quite fast, thus a rather difficult thing to catch…

Once every winter, my hubby gets the urge to remodel a room in the house. This year it’s the livingroom, where my computer lives. As a result, I’ll be offline for at least today, and possibly tomorrow, depending on how long said remodeling takes.

I think it’s time to invest in a laptop.

I spent most of yesterday in front of my monitor, watching reruns of “The Office” on Netflix instead of writing and editing my new book or responding to emails or working on my website or finishing up my post for the Publishing Renaissance blog. I wasn’t too worried about my Day Of Unmotivation and Unproductivity, because I figured I’d have the evening to do all of that grown-up, responsible stuff. Instead I ended up at work.

“E” (aka The Cute One) called me yesterday evening to ask if I’d finish her shift, because her hubby (I know I originally said  she had a boyfriend, but I was originally mistaken…he’s her lawfully wedded husband) was in a snowmobiling accident. Naturally, I rushed over to finish the shift so she could be with him. Imagine my relief when the two of them walked into the store about three hours later and he appeared to be in one piece, without cast or bandages of any kind.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded a little sheepishly. 

“What exactly happened?”

“The sled caught on fire. So I jumped off.”

Since he’d obviously made it out of the incident alive, I asked what I knew was the second most important question: “Can you repair it?”

“Nope. It’s toast.”

“That’s too bad.” I looked over at E. “Is he really okay, or is he just embarrassed to admit he’s hurt?” It was hard for me to imagine that he’d jumped off of a flaming snowmobile without so much as a bruise.

“Yeah, he’s alright,” she said. “His crotch is just a little toasty, that’s all.”

And then I did it. Yep, I did. Before my brain could tell my eyes not to do it, I looked down toward the guy’s crotch. Thankfully, the region was covered with a rather long winter coat. Still. I looked down at the guy’s crotch! I suppose it was just reflex, and that if she’d said he’d burned his hand or ear or foot, my eyes would have darted to those regions before my brain could figure out it was okay to do so. Still.

I looked down at the guy’s crotch!

And that means I’ll never be able to look him in the eye again.

~~~~~

The good news is that I finished my blog entry for Publishing Renaissance. Check it out here!

aka: count your blessings before they’re hatched

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I had to work this weekend, and it was a crazy-busy one. Everyone had to stock up on their “holy shit, we’re gonna get 20 inches of snow!!!!” liquor. It was like they’d never seen snow before. Or liquor.

This one guy who’d just moved up here from Florida was bitching about the cold on Saturday. And I do mean bitching. I don’t understand it, personally. I mean, yeah, it was -4 degrees (F) outside, but come on! He was going on about it like it was a surprising thing. Moving to Maine and being surprised about the temperature being -4 is tantamount to moving to Florida and being surprised at seeing a scorpion or three in your backyard. (My mother-in-law spent some time in Florida and loves to regale us with scorpion tales.)

Still, I wanted to cheer the guy up, so I said, “Cheer up!”

“Why?”

“Well, look at the bright side. At least we don’t have any scorpions up here in Maine.”

“I suppose so,” he said, not looking too cheered up.

“Or any tarantulas.”

“Tarantulas?”

“That’s right. Tarantulas. Texas is crawling with them.”

“Oh.”

“No rattlesnakes up here either.”

He didn’t ask me which region of our great land is infested with rattlesnakes, and I was glad. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure. I just know that in True Grit, a movie I first saw at the age of nine, Mattie fell into a pit of rattlesnakes and it made a big impression on me. By “big impression”, of course, I mean “instilled within me a great and abiding fear of rattlesnakes”, and it’s a source of neverending relief for me that Maine is rattlesnake-free.

“Mosquitoes and snow. That’s what we’ve got,” I concluded, because I could see that he was getting a little tired of my geography lesson.

“And coffee brandy,” he answered, getting back down to business.

Yep. Coffee brandy. Maine’s got plenty of that.

and, “I’m back.”

The Internet Connection Fixer Guy came. Turns out there was something wrong with the modem, so he replaced it. Problem. Solved.

You may have noticed I took down the “Indie Books I Like” page. It’s not because I don’t like them anymore, it’s because I’m working on a new page that incorporates said indie books along with other Things I Like. I’m not sure exactly when it – or the promised Waiting For Spring FAQ page – will be done. Hopefully soon. I’m still getting used to the whole WordPress thing. Bear with me.

In the meantime, here are said books. I highly recommend each one of ’em. (Click on the cover pictures to find out where you can read and/or buy them.)

Steal Tomorrow – by Ann M. Pino

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The Proviso – by Moriah Jovan

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Kept – by Zoe Winters

Also, here are some awesome movie sites I dig:

I know you haven’t seen me round these here parts too much for the past few days. The reason is that I’ve been having problems with my internet connection. One minute everything’s hunky dory, the next I find myself in a “cannot find that page” wasteland. Emails don’t go through. Blog comments are erased. Kel’s hair is pulled out. It isn’t pretty.

I don’t fully understand the reason for it, even though my dear hubby – computer geek extraordinaire – took the time to explain it to me last night. I seem to remember the word “hub” came up a few times, but other than that it’s a blank and a blur.

The Internet Connection Fixer Guy is scheduled to come to the house tomorrow at the very convenient hour of “sometime between 9-3.” Until then you may find my presence here and at my friends’ blogs to be a bit spotty. Don’t take it personally. Like Ahnold, I’ll be back.

In the meantime, check out the Publishing Renaissance blog. You’ll find me waxing poetic about characterization, Kate Winslet, and masturbation. Not in the same sentence, though.

aka it’s time for another rant from Kel

This is a picture taken of me at work the other night. I might look happy, but that’s really a bitter smile. I’m saying, “If it wasn’t for Allen’s Coffee Brandy, the state of Maine would go bankrupt. We’d have to sell ourselves back to Massachussetts.” I’m also saying, “Shit! Look at that double chin!” and  “Wow! My teeth sure look extra white in black & white photos!” But those are topics for a different blog entry.

The store I work at accepts EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) cards. For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, they are basically like debit cards, only instead of bank balances they carry food stamp and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, aka welfare) balances for state aid recipients. I have said many a time and oft that I have no problem with the concept of state/federal aid for those who qualify for and need it. I still feel that way. “There but for the grace of God and my husband’s full time job go I” about sums it up. Some go so far as to call me a liberal. But there are more than a few problems I have with the way the system works, and today I’m gonna talk about the one that pisses me off the most; probably because I see it way too often.

Did you know that (at least in Maine) you can buy alcohol and tobacco products with your EBT cards? Well, you can. Not on the food stamp account, of course, but with the TANF account. That’s right! Every weekend I wave goodbye to much of my precious tax money as many of my town’s most poverty striken residents use it – not to fill up their gas tanks or oil tanks or on toilet paper – but to get wasted on Allen’s Coffee Brandy and suck on their nicotine sticks. Many of these same residents use their food stamp accounts for things like chips and soda and candy bars and donuts. Oh, and milk. To mix with their Allen’s Coffee Brandy. With my tax money. While I’m busting my ass working at a convenience store, on a cement floor, for nine hours straight each night, without a break, helping to fill up the state’s coffers with my paycheck, just so the state can give it to these fucking people to spend on liquor and cigarettes. In twenty years, half of ’em will end up with alcoholic liver disease and lung cancer and diabetes, and my tax money’ll go towards their medical bills. And why not? My tax money will have helped to put ’em in the hospital in the first place.

Meanwhile, down the road from me lives a woman with three kids. Her husband left her a few years ago, leaving nary a trace behind. She went to work full time to support herself and her kids, but child care is expensive. So is food and clothing and heating oil and electricity, and she frequently doesn’t have enough money to go around. She applied for state assistance a few weeks ago and was turned down. She makes $11/month too much. ELEVEN DOLLARS. Yet a twenty-two-year-old girl with four kids (oldest age 8 – I shit you not) comes into the store at the first of the month, every month, and buys four gallons of Allen’s and five cartons of Marlboros with her EBT card.

That’s almost $340. Of my tax money. Every month. That’s a little over 130 gallons of heating oil. That’s two months of a light bill. That’s a lotta damned groceries and a sackful of winter coats and hats and mittens. Instead it’s being pissed out and puked up and inhaled and exhaled by a girl who’s never worked a day in her life, and probably never will. And why should she? She gets everything she wants every month. With my tax money.

First things first:  Today marks my first post at Publishing Renaissance. Check it out!

Next.

There seems to be a strange rash of toothache and oral dentistry gone awry stories lately. My buddy Elle recently had an impacted wisdom tooth pulled. Poor Spy Scribbler has been having one dental problem after another. And the guy who works my old graveyard shift called in sick for the last two days because of an abscessed tooth.

I felt bad for him, so I worked the two shifts for him. And you know that old adage: no good deed goes unpunished. Last night, during said shift, I got a little hungry and decided to buy a pre-made sandwich wrap. Roast beef and asiago cheese wrapped up in an herb-seasoned tortilla. Sounds good, no? I thought so. What I didn’t realize at the time is that the thing was delivered a little more than two weeks ago, and was well past the expiration date. The reason I didn’t know that is because I didn’t bother to check the date on the package. It became apparent about half an hour after I finished eating the thing, though.

Henceforth I will refer to asiago as the “nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, headache, so you can’t rest” cheese.