Okay, it's almost Craptacular time. I am considering the list for my post-holiday cleanup sale on eBay, and believe me, I have enough to last a lazy person like me several months. The last thing I need is MORE CRAP.

In fact, living in a very small rural town, Mojo must make occasional dump runs--although technically our dump is no longer a dump but a "transfer station", and everything gets dumped into variously labeled Dumpsters to be driven away and either recycled or dumped--oh, sorry, I mean "transferred"--elsewhere, like where poorer people live. Or whatever happens to it; Mojo has no say in the matter. (Once when I worked in a Very Old Library at a Very Old College, they spent a year or so removing asbestos from the building, and they had a staff meeting with an asbestos expert to allay staff fears (the actual removal process, it turns out, involved a lot of plastic sheeting and duct tape, which did NOTHING to ally Mojo's vague fears, since she was looking for something a little more high-tech), and one of the things one of Mojo's trouble-making librarian friends brought up was, "Where does the asbestos go after you remove it?" To which the asbestos expert hemmed and hawed and tried very hard to sugar-coat what they do with it. Which, rumor had it, was to truck it all down south and let some poverty-stricken Appalachian community deal with it. You'd think they'd be asked this often enough to have a good strong super-casual response to it instead of this decidedly awkward exchange (and maybe now they do), but back then Mister Asbestos Expert clearly did NOT want to talk about it.)  MORE Mojo! »

After nearly a year of whining about will-I-or-won't-I, my Favorite Older Sister got tired of me talking about it and finally gave me a three month's subscription to Netflix for Christmas. Unfortunately for me (since it meant I had to delay receiving presents) my Favorite Husband wound up in the hospital with pneumonia, which resulted in me totally missing my family's Christmas celebration. (He was healthy enough to visit HIS family, mind you, but come the day Mojo can expect to score awesome gifts from people who share a lifelong obligation to love her despite all the scurrilous things she writes about them, and all of a sudden he's all like, oh, help, I'm dying of pneumonia; please drive me to the hospital, blah blah blah. Which was a total bummer. Plus the hospital ended up costing us over two thousand bucks even WITH insurance, which ends up being over five hundred bucks a day for his little adventure in nearly dying. I've stayed in very nice hotels for less than that, hotels with MUCH BETTER FOOD. But I digress.)

Anyway, this is not about HIM nor the inconvenience of his Brush With Death, except to say that despite my Favorite Older sister's nagging me about my opinion of Netflix I didn't bother to redeem it until sometime in February, when he was well enough to sit up on the couch so *I* could have a place to sit while watching movies.  MORE Mojo! »

So Mojo's Favorite Husband has been sick for about a week, and on Friday he finally went to the doctor's. He got antibiotics and spent the weekend on the couch watching movies and napping. Which meant Mojo spent much of the weekend watching movies and napping. And since Mojo is one of those kind, saintly, laid-back "whatever you wanna do is cool with me, dear" sort of wives, it was pretty much Husband's Choice for movies all weekend. Which is not always the greatest thing in the world.  MORE Mojo! »

Stupid people. There are two types. Well, make that three. The first type, and the sort I was about to leave out, are the stupid people who realize right to the letter just how stupid they are. Ironically, I view this brand of stupidity as the first step toward actual intelligence. When you're in your twenties, you think you pretty much know everything and you dearly love to lecture your elders in How Things Ought to Be. At least Mojo did, charming lass that she was and is.  MORE Mojo! »

So I'm sitting on the couch, cleaning up some cels I've painted. The dog, Rosie, has assumed her typical position on the stairs just above my head, sticking her cowardly nose between the curtain and the window so she can watch anyone or anything should they come up the driveway to attack us. And all of a sudden she starts barking as viciously as possible. Rosie's not a barker, so I know something's out there. Probably our neighbor, walking his dog. So I get up to look out the window to see what's up.

And guess what. It takes me about ten seconds of staring before it registers to me what was staring back at the end of my driveway.  MORE Mojo! »

Have you heard this story before? Maybe. I am too lazy to look it up, myself. So if I repeat myself, at least rest assure that when Mojo repeats herself it is still a hundred times better than some tiresome people who can't tell a story ONCE without it being excruciatingly painful for their audience. I know someone who occasionally announces "Hey, I heard a great joke the other day..." and whenever they do something inside Mojo dies a little. She starts casting about for excuses to leave. But it's always too late, huh?  MORE Mojo! »

Okay, so recently I was involved in a vast conspiracy to surprise a five-year-old--an undertaking that apparently requires four or five adults working full time for a couple of weeks trying to get everything to come together at the proper time. My job (no doubt because Mojo is intellectually incapable of handling anything more complex) was to keep him quiet and occupied for several hours before the surprise was sprung.

Easy enough, sez I. We'll just eat lunch and watch videos. But of course being a five-year-old, he got to pick what videos to watch. And he decided there was nothing in the world he wanted to see than his new DVD, chockablock full of over two and a half hours of vintage Popeye the Sailor cartoons.  MORE Mojo! »

One of the joys of living WAY out in the sticks is, you never know what's going to show up on your doorstep. Sometimes literally. One morning I was late for a meeting and I went dashing outside and had to suddenly leap over a very large porcupine to avoid it. He was just flopped on my front walk basking in the morning sun. I learned that day if you are in a hurry you cannot "shoo" a porcupine. They only move at one speed. If you try to make them waddle faster they curl up into a ball and quill out.

Anyway, it's very late at night, I'm typing here on the couch, and the cat is flopped on top of the armchair near the window. And suddenly there's funny snuffley diggy noises coming from under the open window. I'm sort of wondering what it is, and the cat all of a sudden goes all rigid and bolts upright and starts staring out the window. So I figure something's out there. I go over, but I don't see anything. I turn on the outside light, and there's nothing. I open the door and stick my head out, and nothing.  MORE Mojo! »