You know what this blog needs? Another kitty post.

And a picture that just cries for the caption “they think they’re people”.



We’ve determined that Bear is a genius. How many cats do you know that play fetch? Seriously. He also does taxes.

Cow isn’t entirely happy with the new addition, but she tolerates it. She has put her concerns in writing… the rug is her paper and pee is her pen. While “peeing outside the box” may be applauded in kitty corporate world, it is frowned upon in the Nicola house. Don’t look at Tim like that. I’m talking to you, Cow.

Here was our view of Paula Poundstone

She is less blurry and more funny than this photo suggests:



Of course, when we got there I ended up sitting next to a woman who was under the impression that she was my best friend. You know the type. I blocked out most of what she said to me, but would occasionally make some sort of grunting sound just to maintain a facade that this was an actual two-way conversation and not just a crazy person babbling at me. I'm not sure if I did that for her sake or for mine.

At one point she started to prattle on and on about how Second City had ‘the best show ever’ last week. That's when I finally said something to her using words instead of noncommittal grunts. I said, “We had tickets for that show but I was sick and we missed it. Good Lord, I was upset about it before but now I’m completely depressed.” Awkward silence followed, which is preferable to awkward babbling.

Anyway, Poundstone was excellent. No mention of poptarts, but there were a few cat jokes. She did a lot of improv and audience interaction. Tim and I held our breath and tried to not draw attention to ourselves. As soon as the show began, it dawned on us that we weren’t prepared to succinctly answer her first question to chosen audience members: "What do you do?”

Let's not talk about Poptarts.

We are going out to see Paula Poundstone tonight. If you haven’t seen her since she was wearing neckties and talking about cats and poptarts in the 1980s, then you haven’t been listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on NPR… and you also haven’t figured out a way to see people on radio.

The drywallers have sectioned off the basement with plastic.

It’s like we’ve got ET living down there… or a 1976 John Travolta (Boy in the Plastic Bubble).

I haven’t infiltrated the bubble yet, but this is what I sort of imagine is happening down there today:

"Caaaaaaaawll me."

I actually remembered to have my cell phone on today, so I am sending vibes for an agent to call me. I’m telephonically incompetent, as anyone who has tried to reach me on the phone knows. In fact, I only recently learned our home phone number. Tim is better with the phone than I am, which isn't something he carries around like a badge of honor. It's like saying Tim is better at coloring within the lines then I am. It's not that impressive since I should have learned this stuff before I was allowed to graduate 2nd grade.

As evidence of our collective phone incompetence, we didn't check our voice mail messages for the first seven or eight months we lived here. Yea, seven or eight months. Most messages were from telemarketers with that pre-recorded message with the forced casual tone: "Hi, I'm sorry I missed you. Ahhhhh..... Your name was passed along to me as someone who may be interested in an exciting opportunity. Ahhhh..." The "ahhhhs" make me laugh everytime. They are very insincere "ahhs" seeing as the message is pre-recorded and being read from a script. It's even more insincere than the "ahhs" of an airline pilot trying to sound calm to keep passengers from freaking out "Ahhh.... you may feel a little turbulance. Ahhhh... and if you look out the windows on the right side of the plane....ahhh... you can get a nice view of an engine that recently fell off. Ahhhh....."

So today I am supposed to be writing, but instead I am checking my e-mail every two minutes hoping to hear from an agent who has my full manuscript. She would just be rockin' to work with. So here is a breakdown of my day:




Speaking of wasting time, this webcam that comes with the iMac has been a source of distraction and amusement. It has several Naked Lunch settings that Tim and I find to be much funnier than they probably should be.

Here is Tim as a husky alien:





Here is me as Ozzy Osbourne:



Here is the real Ozzy:




Scary, eh? OK, back to writing. No, really. Unless Cow wants to rematch on the staring contest...

Norwegian lingerie.

Modest and practical. Every good Iowegian woman wears her Norwegian lingerie after Labor Day. We don't need to impress anyone, just stay warm.



The drywallers are done fartin' around downstairs (at least for today). Now our home smells chemicalicious!

The Cow and Bear Experiment in Forced Bonding

The forced bonding between Cow and Bear is finally paying off. The only negative repercussions we have seen from all of this is Cow's expanding waistline. In addition to eating her own food, she eats all of Bear's food. She is a total emotional eater, and we are considering slipping an OA pamphlet into her liter box and hope that she looks it over while doing her business.

"Are you going to eat that... er...?"


Check out Cow practically leering at Bear's food... we are just glad that they are enjoying activities together.

They've also starting napping together, and in our house that qualifies as an activity:

What is going on down there?

They have finally started putting up the drywall in the basement today. Who knew that installing drywall sounds exactly like flatulence? Seriously.

Want to keep a Nerd excited for hours?

I was SO EXCITED. Last night we watched the Film Crew. Why didn’t I know about this before? I guess I need to start reading my geek e-mails (the MST3K Satellite News). Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy watch bad movies while delivering commentary. I love these guys and wish I could shrink them and carry them around in my pocket all day to make commentary. (“There is more lint in here than in Lt. Col. Glenn Manning’s belly button.” “This is a little restrictive, maybe you could go up a size.” “What smells like old cheese?”) (OK, I just fantasized myself out of that idea. I don’t want them in my pocket all day.)

Anyway, we watched the Wild Women of Wongo. It was an island where all of these really hot women lived with really unattractive men. (Imagine an island populated with Rod Stewarts and his wives.)



They discover another tribe where hot men lived with really unattractive women. (The line between an attractive and an unattractive woman was confusing in some cases. One of the “attractive” women I swear had a package. And one of the “unattractive” women was really hot… just a bit taller than average. Huh??)

I have yet to download and actually try this out – but Rifftrax has commentary on current (and too expensive for MST3K or Film Crew) movies. You download the commentary track, rent the movie, and then sync it up. They have Bourne Identity, 300, Star Trek Generations, The Maxtrix, etc, etc. Sweeeeet.

http://www.rifftrax.com/




For other excellent commentary tracks – check out Mike Nelsons commentaries on some Legend Films videos. These are creatively colorized films and the commentary is excellent. Reefer Madness is particularly high-larious, although you run the risk of PERMANENT INSANITY. (I usually find drug humor to be pretty lame, but this is not just drug humor. This … defies categorization. I still can’t decide if the original actors, writers, and directors were entirely serious when they put this together way back in the high-pants wearin', thirty-year olds playin' teenagers, jalopy drivin' days.)



Legend Films and Mike Nelson also did a number on Plan 9 from Outer Space, Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, House on Haunted Hill, and a few others I am too high on the reefer to remember.

Found Rocks

We took an odd picture of Bear, making him look as if he had ridiculously long front legs and uselessly short back legs. It reminded me of an item that was published in Found Magazine's first book.

I think we found a deformed bunny too.

Archive of Dumb Pictures

While garage sale shopping last spring, we came across a gigantic box of kleenex box coozies. I'm not sure if these were a collection, or if someone made them with the idea of selling them at a garage sale. The kleenex box coozie is just a trend that never took off any further than church crafts sales:


It is interesting to note the surroundings in this picture. Every home looks identical - it's a little freaky. This is one of those neighborhoods where the signs say "build to suit"... so are we supposed to believe everyone wanted the exact same thing? Like, I guess these are all built to suit "hu-man" needs. If if a robot or a horse were to apply for a home in this neighborhood, perhaps we'd see a little variety. What is the psychological result of a sprawling cookie cutter community? It drives ordinary people to craft 1200 kleenex coozies.

Also in the spring, we went to Iowa to check on the land there. There was just a precious widdle ittle crop just starting:

So cute.

Also, more shots were fired at the stop sign. All the stop sign could do is say "STOP" (shooting) (sic), but alas he went down in a blaze of glory:


We saw Jon Stewart, who was funny -- and very very tiny from our point of view. They must use some sort of magnifiying camera on him while taping the Daily Show:

Not sure who you support?

Get a Flag Flag! A flag that shows your loyalty to flags.

Cow has a drinking problem.

We've known her drinking has been problematic for some time. You can always tell when she has been drinking because little droplets of water cover her forehead, whiskers, and ears.

We decided that if we are going to stage an effective intervention, we need to start documenting her drinking problem. Observe:



You really need to zoom in on these to get the full effect. (Click on the picture).




After a rough afternoon of drinking, she reaches for a pen to work on her memoirs: Smashed: Memoirs of a Drunken Kittyhood.

We got one down.

I'm down with the sickness today. Some flu bug hit me hard yesterday. So all day today and most of yesterday I was laying in the upstairs bedroom with Cow and Bear splayed on top of me. They seemed to have bonded over my sickness, so that's cool.

People were coming and going all day for the basement construction, which is why I reported to Sick Bay in the upstairs bedroom. In our basement, we have two tons of drywall just waiting to become actualwall. The drywallers will be coming tomorrow.

It's amazing to me how specialized everyone is. We had different guys for framing, plumbing, electrical, low voltage... etc. etc.. and then specialized inspectors too. It's just like the field of medicine, people have gotten way too specialized. And there are lots of failures to communicate.

Here is something funny/scary... what I look like after being in bed for two days straight:




I'm going back to bed.

Recent studies have shown...

Bear decreases productivity by 65.2%.


We've asked Bear to tone down the cuteness, but we haven't finished hammering through all the negotiations.


Cow and Bear are slowly becoming BFFs -- just as slowly as their little brains realize their choice in BFFs are rather limited.

565, dude!!

Does anyone know what 565 means? Is that the number of hits we can expect this blog to get? The number of seconds someone spent making this template? The hourly salarly of the guy who came up with blogger? My highest weight at some time in the future? (God I hope not.) Tim's total cholesterol? Average number of grammatical errors per post? What? WHAAAT?

Nothing says "I'm a hip and creative individual" like a template. That's fine, we never said we were either.

This is why Tim doesn't like to buy cards. He hates the idea of paying some anonymous person to say something that is reasonably close to what you might have come up with on your own.











Happy Birthday!? Genius! Does anyone else find that picture a bit terrifying? That baby looks like an Olsen Twin baby. I always thought those girls looked sort of creepy in their infant days on Full House. See:






Same gaping mouth, same beady little dark eyes. Well... we can laugh about it now because the Olsen twins grew up to be gorgeous and leered at by creepy guys across the globe. Who knows what happened to the Hallmark baby.

Wait. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, this crazy template. We could have built our own template. We also could have made Grandma a birthday card out of cheese and sequins. Sometimes mass-produced things promise more mass-appeal. Plus... laziness preveils.

There.

Now we have a blog.

We will fill it with dumb news, dumb pictures, dumb thoughts... when Tim proposed to me, he promised a "lifetime of dumb". Now it is time we document it.