a.k.a. Mojo Gets DMCA'd By a Heartless Soulless Media Giant and Learns Valuable Life Lessons About How We're All Human Beings 'n' Stuff.

You might not know it from her carefully crafted online persona, but in Real Life Mojo rather enjoys obscurity. She is not one of those pathetic attention whores who will wave at passing cameras and eat live bugs and document the nasty bathroom corners in her life in the feeble hope that people might like her. No, she avoids cameras like the plague. For the most part Mojo just wants to be left alone.

My other three siblings are all social butterflies, bless 'em, always out gallivanting with their friends, while Mojo chose long ago (indeed it's been one of several of Mojo's charmed life-long dreams come true) to move far away from polite society and pretty much live by herself in the woods. Okay, so the Favorite Husband came along, too, and he can be as annoyingly social as the sibs. Which is good for Mojo. But the simple fact is, Mojo lacks Certain Social Instincts: she rarely calls people, or invites them to lunch, or has much to do with them unless there is an obvious technical need to do so.

While she has never undergone any official diagnosis, a fairly recent brush with certain members of the Aspergers community has led Mojo to suspect she might have a touch of it, as well. She has always been somewhat faceblind, which does not help you socially when you talk to someone for an hour, they leave and come back in five minutes only to have an utterly blank Mojo ask, "Can I help you?" There's a lot more there than just that: social indifference, the ability to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of everything else around, a certain obsessive need to be precise and correct about various topics, and the occasional ... um, let's call it RAGE ... when someone inadvertently transgresses the Unwritten Law. (Which can change on a dime. That's the beauty of being unwritten.)  MORE Mojo! »

Just when you thought Mojo couldn't POSSIBLY get ANY cooler (uhhhh, you WERE thinking that just now, weren't you?), Mojo has gone back to her private vault of experiences to bring you her tenure at what used to be "The Wolf Sanctuary", more formally known as the Wild Canid Survival and Research Center at Wash U's Tyson Research Center in Eureka, MO. Being the charming lass she is, Mojo got permission from various Authority Figures (heh heh--suckers) and spent many an hour communing with wolves, well before it became oh-so-super-trendy to do so. (And eventually Mojo accepted the simple fact that the wolves, as noble wild creatures of intelligence and discernment, have no particular desire to commune with HER. Which is a lesson many a nature-lover has yet to learn, it sometimes seems.)

(The WCSRC has since changed its name to the Endangered Wolf Center; you can see what they're up to (and, hint hint, donate!) at http://www.endangeredwolfcenter.org.)  MORE Mojo! »

So how's this for timing? Just last week I blogged about getting the snowblower ready for winter, got it all primed and ready for the season, and wouldn't you know it? A little storm we were told all week would be rain turned out to be snow. Not SUBSTANTIAL snow, but maybe two or three inches. Enough to purty up the place.

Or, rather, Mojo's single day thereof, since Sunday is the only day Mojo has off. The rest of the time she is slaving away. People might feel bad for her and think, geez, how can she stand the hours? But the simple fact is, Mojo rather likes what she does (yeah, right, like she KNOWS exactly what she does) and what other people might find slavedriving work Mojo thinks of it as frolicking. And as much as she indulges in her petty complaints, the simple fact is, if you give Mojo some sort of technical problem to solve her queen-sized brain will grab it like a pit bull and keep her awake at night until she has a solution for you. If you are wise you will figure out how to exploit this tendency for your own evil purposes, but in the meantime Mojo keeps on keepin' on, whatever that means.

But even broken-winded nags like Mojo deserve at least ONE day off, away from the computer, and Sunday is her day to go for a small hike with her Favorite Husband. We went on a brief three or four mile jaunt around where he saw his bear buddy as related in his bear story a couple of months ago. Being late November, and the middle of the day to boot, we did not expect to see said bear. I was surprised, early on in the walk, to encounter a baby garter snake sunning himself in the middle of the road.  MORE Mojo! »

What, you ask breathlessly? Or, rather, "What?" you ask breathlessly. Usually Mojo agrees that adverbs are expendable, but clearly in this case I simply HAVE to convey--despite the simple fact that words cannot adequately express the GROWING EXCITEMENT you are no doubt feeling--the rising tide of expectation and longing sweeping the country as the Craptacular inches closer and closer to once again becoming a reality.

However you choose to express this excitement, I must announce that yesterday, after overcoming a growing sense of procrastination and whatnot, I finally sat down and, um, "composed" the Craptacular's particularly inane earworm of a jingle. If by "composed" I mean, I sat at my midi keyboard and fiddled around a bit and shrieked repeatedly into a mike until I noticed the animals were trying to call the Humane Society and turn me in for cruelty. (Thank heavens the phone is not meant to be operated by paws, or I'd be in the slammer right now.)

Why, you ask (or, rather, "Why? WHY? Oh dear lord in heaven, WHY?"), does the Craptacular need a jingle? For several reasons, which Mojo shall now relate.  MORE Mojo! »

It's been raining so much this summer it's been impossible to mow the lawn. Not that I'm complaining, but Mojo has to complain.

Which reminds me--Mojo happens to know someone in a vague social sort of way who is TOTALLY PSYCHO about their car. Which probably explains why, even though they are young and hip and full of beans, there is no Significant Other in their lives. Or, rather, there IS a Significant Other in their lives, but that SO requires a key and gasoline to function, and the only real date you could take it on would be a drive-in movie.  MORE Mojo! »

As much as Mojo dearly loves to complain, the simple fact is, she leads a charmed life. So much so that every two years or so Verizon offers her a new phone. So Mojo succumbed to spiffy advertising and her pathetic desire to look cool and hip, and bought a brand new Chocolate. A blue one. I think they called it "Blue Mint" or some such car-color name. Who cares.

The point is, a few days before it came, I happened to see my Favorite Younger Sister and I remembered SHE had a Chocolate, too. So I asked to see it. Turns out she has the old, decrepit moldy Chocolate with the fake navigation wheel, whereas MY Chocolate is oh so much hipper and cooler. In fact, I dare say that MY new phone not only TOTALLY KICKS her pathetic phone's butt, but it also dances and stomps on the little bits of broken plastic that rain down after getting its butt kicked, and G-R-I-N-D-S them into the carpet.  MORE Mojo! »

Before Mojo got distracted by something shiny, she was going to mention something that, now in retrospect, is even more boring than usual.

As I have said many times previously, Ratty Cat is not allowed in the bedroom at night, because he comes and goes two or three times a night and each time he announces his arrival and departure with his yowling. The decision to banish him is entirely that of my Favorite Husband. Far be it for Mojo to punish a fellow complainer. Whenever *I* hear the stupid cat, being the tolerant, saint-like person that I am, I just roll over and go back to sleep. For me, I have accepted the simple fact that Ratty is a yowly cat, and that's the end of it.

Not the Favorite Husband, however.  MORE Mojo! »

So Mojo's been thinking lately of building a coop and getting chickens again. She's been thinking about it since she moved up here, so it's really been almost ten years of thinking about it, which means, in Mojo's world, it's almost time to maybe do something about it.

Mojo's bird of choice back when she had chickens were Rhode Island Reds, a dual-purpose bird who has the added bonus of being rather pretty, which is of course all-important. Plus you can say the name while stammering like Foghorn Leghorn--"Rhode Island, I say, Rhode IIIIsland Reeeeed"--when telling people what kind of chickens they are. Not that anyone cares other than other chicken people. Most people seem totally oblivious to the simple fact that there are breeds of chickens and not just "chickens". Say La Vee.  MORE Mojo! »

So yesterday morning after her morning blog our beloved Mojo is relaxing in the bathtub, letting Calgon take her away, or however the commercial used to go, only it wasn't Calgon, but instead some generic liquid soap, but once again I digress....the point being, I am sinking into my nice hot bath and relaxing before starting my oh-so-important day, and a movement catches the corner of my eye.  MORE Mojo! »