Bingo!

My good friend, the CEO at The Morning Meeting, has given me the Blogging that Hits the Mark Award. Thank you so much, Monty. All I can say is it takes one to know one.

I would like to pass it on to the ever-lovely and succinct Liz at Los Angelista's Guide to the Pursuit of Happiness.

To the beautiful inside-and-out as well as funny Claudia at On a Limb with Claudia,

To the most delightful and charming Velvet at Velvet's Room,

To the clear-eyed and straight-shooting I Am Not Star Jones at The Unemployment Cafe,

And to the incredibly talented, witty Jocelyn at O Mighty Crisis.

These ladies are totally different from one another, but each of them hits the mark every time, and I love them all.

Case Study on the Dysfunctional Duck Family

With Recommendations:


This memo from Children's Protective Services of the Department of Social Work concerns the Donald F. Duck family, which has come to our attention on numerous occasions because of certain mysteries which remain unclear despite several investigations into the workings of this Social Unit.

The State has sent three different Social Workers to the domicile to monitor a situation which involves the care of three minor male ducklings, known only as Huey, Dewey and Louis whose relationship to the Head of the Household, known as Donald, is ambiguous at best. They refer to the aforementioned Donald as "Unca Donald," but there is no evidence that Donald ever had a sibling who could have parented these three minor male ducklings.

Also of concern is the apparent inability of said minor male ducklings to form an independent thought. They have been observed by all three Social Workers dividing every utterance among them three ways, which leads to the obvious conclusion that they share a single brain of which each of the three minor male ducklings owns one-third.

It is not known if they attend school, or if their alleged "uncle" home-schools them.

To all appearances, Donald has a good heart and good intentions. Yet, the police have been called to the Duck residence too many times to count because he also has a very bad temper. It has been suggested that his middle name is Fauntleroy, which could possibly account for a goodly share of his generalized anger, but that is just speculation.

Donald F. Duck has, in the vernacular, a "short fuse" which is often triggered by mounting evidence that his friends Mickey Mouse and Goofy, who seems to be a canine, often get what they want without having to fight for it. We believe that Donald suffers from extreme angst over being forced to hoe a tougher row, but it should also be noted that he has developed a most tenacious temperament.

Even when he is up to his beak in trouble, Donald does not give up, although he is overly inclined to say "Aw, phooey!" which is cited here as further evidence of his hot-headedness.

There is also the matter of Donald Duck's wardrobe. He wears a sailor suit, which, while unquestionably adorable, is the official uniform of mama's boys everywhere. It would be remiss of we, the Petitioners, to overlook this further evidence of his patent unsuitability to be a sartorial role model to impressionable young ducklings.

He has demonstrated considerable ability to manipulate his environment, which is of concern to the Department of Social Work even as it elicits our reluctant admiration since to our knowledge, the Disney extended family is generally at the mercy of its surrounding landscape.

The competing Warner Brothers family, on the other hand, traditionally employs great expertise in working with guns, dynamite, Acme brand anvils and rifles with barrels that can be tied in a bow. There are witnesses who will swear under oath that one of them painted a tunnel road onto the side of a rock outcropping to facilitate his escape from the law.

We mention this because we believe that it calls into question Donald's loyalty and willingness to behave in a manner befitting a prime representative of the Disney family; therefore, how can we then expect him to satisfactorily discharge his responsibilities as "pater familias" to the minor male triplets, Huey, Dewey and Louie?

It is the Opinion of this Office that Donald is constitutionally incapable of providing a wholesome environment for the said three minor male ducklings, Huey, Dewey and Louie.

There is more: A female duck known only as "Daisy" seems to be a part of the Duck family entourage, but her relationship to Donald is cloudy. She maintains her own home but is often on hand, lending her feminine energy to the all-male Duck family.

While we would like to believe that her influence is benign, her association with Donald and his so-called "nephews" who are of impressionable age and might be particularly vulnerable due to their lack of a mother should be investigated further. It must also be noted that Daisy Duck, like that Britney Chick, does not wear covering on her lower body.

There is also an elderly millionaire named Scrooge Duck who seems to be a relative of Donald's, but this is never explained to our satisfaction either. He appears to be of sound mind, as nearly as we have been able to determine, but again, the issue of the minor male triplets rears its ugly head(s.)

It does not seem that Scrooge contributes to the wellbeing of Donald's household and in fact, consistently exerts pressure on Donald to accompany him in his many travels around the world. Who is tending the aforementioned Huey, Dewey and Louie in the absence of "Unca Donald?"

Despite the indisputable fact that the minor male ducklings Huey, Dewey and Louie evince distinct affection for the aforementioned Donald F. Duck, we hereby and with great reluctance Petition the Court to remove them from this home for placement in the Foster Duck System pending reliable evidence that Unca Donald provides a safe, decent and stable home for the care and nurture of the duckling triplets.

Signed in Triplicate,

Social Worker # 1
Social Worker #2
Social Worker #3

Under Construction

I dragged my Blogging awards into Photoshop to make them smaller, and somehow managed to lose my entire blog. All of it. So I dumped it into a new template and in so doing, lost all my changes -- like links to your blogs.

Sigh.

I am going to have to rebuild all of it. I stupidly did not make a list of the many blogs I read and enjoy. It will be a long and hard process.

I.Am.Not.Happy.

The word of the day: BACK IT UP.

Saturday. I changed it over from "template" to "layout" and things got even worse. Please send a guru or the deity of your choice.

Community of Friends

Rachel, the radiant spirit at Lessons Learned has given me the Community Blogger Award. This one clearly belongs to all of us because there is no such thing as a community of one.

Rachel is a wonderful writer and artist, and if you don't know her yet, you are in for a great treat.

Thank you, Rachel! I'm so glad we found each other.

As soon as I formed the thought that I would have to pass it on to someone else, one name came to me.

Chani.

Chani at Thailand Gal embodies community. Everything she posts is designed to exchange ideas with her readers on how we can all be better, more conscious citizens of the world. And she manages to do it without preachiness, but with humor, warmth and elegance.


I know that awards go against the grain with Chani, who eschews anything that smacks of competitiveness, but I think these blogger awards are simply a means to acknowledge each other, virtual wing-dipping or proffering bouquets of beautiful flowers.

In honoring those we admire, we grow more like them.

So man up and deal with it, Chani.

Peace.

Happy Birthday, FLIP!

You are a lovely man, and I treasure you.

Thank you for your many gifts to me, especially that you understand me perfectly and love me anyway.

Your wit and intellectual curiosity still delight me, and your kindness to all has taught me to be kinder, too.

You make me feel safe, and I know that together, we can handle anything.

It's been a great ride, and the (k)night is still young.

Love,
S

Tales of the Crypt

Today I called in one of those "I would do anything for you, honey's." I got Flip to remove some of the cobwebs from our ceiling as it was beginning to look a lot like Halloween.

I normally accept that if I want something done I should do it myself, but the ceilings are high, and he is the only one of us who is 6'4". A tall man nowadays is hard to find.

For this favor, I had to endure bad jokes, like "I see all these cobwebs, but I have never seen a cob." With endless variations. His father was from Oklahoma. He seems to have been raised on a steady diet of corn.

I have never seen a spider in our living quarters either. These cobwebs seem to be made entirely of dust and cat hair, which is good because I do not practice or solicit murder. It would be wrong for spiders to live or die at the whim of a creature they cannot even comprehend. Which would probably make me God to the spiders.

Flip was happy to zap the furry stalagtites with a broom, although he repeatedly shooed me and my superior eyesight away as I pointed out dangling particles that he had missed.

Directing the operation was like operating a remote-controlled toy without the noise. I wonder what else I can have him do before he reaches critical mass.

Still, he got off easy. Most people buy new cars more often than he washes ours.

Confessions of a Blue Meanie

My next-door neighbor is out of control. Between the incessant coke-induced clattering of high heels on wood floors, the loud head-banging music and the hysterical giggling, I am losing my mind.

Flip can't record his music because his mics pick up extraneous noise, and we are living in a hotbed of extraneous noise. (I do believe hotbed is the operative word here.)

A thrumming bass line coming through the walls is like the Chinese water torture.

Her apartment seems to have a revolving door. A great many people pass through there, some of them staying for a few days or a week in her absence. I suspect that she is renting out the apartment and parking space to anyone who needs a place to crash and is willing to pay for it.

She uses the garage as a dump. There is an enormous pile of discarded furniture, comforters and a computer monitor as well as actual garbage, all of which has become a fire hazard. It's hard to imagine why anyone would do this when there is a large trash bin behind the building.

A leopard print car seat has presided over the pile since she moved in, as well as an assortment of bottles and pacifiers. I wonder what she did with the baby.

Yesterday, I removed a milk crate in which I kept a bag of potting soil that had been completely covered with her junk. I found a parking ticket from May, as well as two empty boxes addressed to her at two different addresses in the city. I finally know her last name, which of course does not appear on the mailbox or buzzer since she is an illegal tenant.

I had what may be my meanest thought ever. It occurred to me that I could send the parking ticket to the DMV with a letter stating her name and present address and informing them that the car described on the ticket was rented by her at the time the ticket was issued. This ticket may be the tip of the iceberg. She is clearly a grifter who does not play by any of the rules that govern the rest of us.

She probably has a string of unpaid parking tickets racked up on rental cars and has moved so many times that the address on her license is obsolete.

My anger made me feel particularly toxic, so I went to an Ikebana show at a lovely Japanese boutique hotel in Japantown. Ikebana is the ancient art of flower arranging. The word "Ikebana" means "live flowers."

Ikebana is rooted in Buddhist culture but has undergone many changes since its beginnings in the 9th century. Flower arrangements are a way to celebrate events or to express emotion. They speak to people without words and bridge diversity.

The Japanese attitude toward floral arrangement, as in many things, is more spiritual than the Western approach and strives to express the wondrous creations of Nature, on a reduced scale.

There are certain inviolable principles:

An arrangement must fit the environment in which it is displayed, and the individual arranger's emotions and character must be expressed in the arrangement. Ikebana is an art of human communication, not just flowers crammed into a vase.

In contrast to most Western floral design, Ikebana compositions are based on asymmetry, requiring specialized artistic development and technical expertise.

Ikebana is noted for its mastery of proportional harmony between the flowers, vase, and setting. Its uniquely beautiful proportions have made a permanent impact on Western-style floral design, as there is probably no other culture with the highly developed aesthetic sense of the Japanese.

It was wonderfully healing to see that there are still those practicing gentle beauty in the world. Sadly, it is too easy to lose sight of that when one is denied the peaceful enjoyment of ones home.

I am focusing on the flowers.