Why Yes, my Dead Father Would Love a Free Trunk Organizer.

An open letter to people and organizations that are still mailing things to my deceased parent.

Why yes, my dead father would love a free trunk organizer. I could put his ashes in it and drive him around in the back seat while I do my shopping. That would be a totally sane thing to do. Oh and I'm sure he would love a pool cleaning robot for the pool that he didn't own too. While were at it, I'm sure he would to resubscribe to your organization in exchange for some free stickers, although I'm not sure about the appropriateness of placing an 'I love the NRA' bumper sticker on his urn.

While we are on the subject I'm sure he would love to support you, politician that won't stop calling and or mailing things. I am sure he would just love to vote for you in the up and coming election, but unfortunately I believe that West Virgina has laws against that sort of thing. Unless the political figure in question is also dead, in which I think that this is okay. I'm not very sure though, you might want to check your local laws on the subject. I just don't keep up with these things seeing as though I am, last time I checked, still living.

Also I think that my father would be very insulted by your offer of a 'free' hover round mobility scooter. Plus, I am fairly sure that he will not be needing to 'talk to his doctor about the increased risk of stroke or heart attack' anytime soon. I am fairly sure that he will, in fact, never need to see a doctor again. Nor will he ever need to get a 'discount MRI'. I am also vaguely appalled by your implied suggestion that he would, if given the chance, use a discount MRI service.

You have yet to mail him anything he could actually use, such as a knitted urn sweater, (for those cold nights) a pedestal, or perhaps some googly urn eyes. So far I am disappointed in your wild presumptions about my beloved father. I can only hope that things will improve from this point out, and we can all get on with our respective lives (or deaths).

Sincerely,

Queen Holly the Magnificent

Dear Celestial Seasonings...

Dear Celestial seasonings I understand and approve of your desire to send me little promo items with my purchases. I enjoyed and used your dollar off coupons. What I did not enjoy, however was this.

You read that right. LaxaTea. I do not know why you thought this was a good idea. I have no idea why you would assume this was something I need. I also understand that you cannot be blamed for coincidence and happenstance, but it rather a painful blow when I opened a new tea box on the week that my dog has explosive diarrhea all over my office to discover a LaxaTea sampler. I would like to think that I took the high road on this one by not burning the packet on the stove.

Also, it seemed that I received way more LaxaTeas then dollar off coupons. I am assuming this is because it costs less then a dollar to put one tea bag into a plastic sleeve. Possibly because LaxaTea is made from lawn clippings with flavoring sprayed on them. Despite my complaining, though, I cannot actually convince myself to try any. Because I am terribly frighten it would actually work too well.

In conclusion, please do not send out free tea samples that have a very narrow range of buyers to all and sundry. What it somebody drank one without reading the package? What if they only own one pair of pants. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?

Sincerely,

Queen Holly The Magnificent.

A Letter From the Morrow Jungle.

So a while ago I got the idea to send my friend a letter detailing my (fake) adventures in some place called the Morrow Jungle. I wrote the letter late one night, sat back and thought hey, that's pretty good. Of course most people would have stopped there. Or maybe sent the letter via email or posted it to their blogs with a brief explanation.

I am not most people.

This is the letter my friend received.

 

It reads:

Dearest Lorien,

I am writing to inform you of my safe arrival in the Morrow Jungle. We had set down about a week ago, but this is my first chance of finding a place to post a letter. The locals assure me that this letter will indeed reach you. I hope you are well and that the weather back home is much better then this terrible tropical heat.

So far I have only had one encounter with the dreaded Peruvian Fire Weasels. Luckily most of our tents and equipment were spared, with only one porter suffering serious burns. I was able to save most of my notes as well. I have enclosed a drawing of the Lesser Fire Weasel for your consideration. Less fortunate was our encounter with the Giant Vampire Mosquitoes. I had been assured that the clubs the men brought along were sufficient to destroy the insecticidal menace, but sadly they fell regrettably short in that regard. However, do not fear for my safety or comfort, I have found through a delightful local shaman that the sap from the Morrow tree, yes indeed, the very tree from with this jungle was named, has a marvelous effect on the bites.

Professor Wirthington had ventured a guess that the sap must contain some sort of morphine or codeine. He has cautioned us to use the sap in moderation only, and to maintain records of it's use on ourselves for future study and reference. Nevertheless, I am not worried about overuse, as I am presently not worried about much of anything. I am hoping to bottle some of this wonderful substance to take back -purely in the name of science.

I am afraid that I cannot say more at this juncture as night is falling and a think that I will soon not have light enough to see by. In the morning I will venture further downriver in my search for the Pip Piper Vulture and the elusive Singing Waddle Bird of Paradise.

Yours forever, your esteemed friend,

Holly.

 This letter was accompanied by these.

 

I am going to assume that stunned silence is due to awe. Yes, I spent all this time dying the paper, doing the drawings, scanning it in, finding a font and printing it out and mailing to my friend for no real reason at all other then I thought it was fucking funny.

It's possible I might a little crazy.

A little awesome crazy.

Scott's a Skyrim Widow Now.

After the many terrible adventures we have been having lately, with the car accident and dog being lost and the being poor and having to work like crazy pants to make up for it, I was beginning to feel a little rubbed raw by life. You know, that feeling where you feel like someone has taken your soul and rubbed it on some asphalt for a few hours? That feeling? Yeah, I had that.

So I got me some Skyrim.

Of course I got it home and said, you know what, I'll just pop the disc in to make sure it works, which is gamer speak for I am going to be up until midnight playing this sweet ass game. I was a little worried since this is a sequel next step up whateverthefuck you wanna call it from Oblivion. And we all know what I thought about Oblivion.

My fears were laid to rest however, because Skyrim is fucking sweet.

It's so detailed that after playing it for two nights straight that was beginning to feel like that dude from Avatar where near the end he doesn't know whether the real world or the avatar world is more real to him. You know, like that, but with Skyrim.

I also learned something about myself. Namely I learned that if your game lets me make my own armor and potions that I will spend almost all my time doing that. Main story line? Fuck that shit, I got elk to kill. It also doesn't help that once I have made the armor, then I can also enchant it.

Except that none of these things are exactly easy.

So to make my own leather armor, I have to kill an animal and then take it's pelt to the tanning rack and turn it into leather or leather strips. Then I have to use the blacksmiths to make the armor, and then use the crafting table thing to improve the armor, which also takes more leather. Also, to enchant the armor I have to have a item that already has the spell I want on it, which I will then disenchant to learn the spell. Then I have to get a soul gem, fill it with a soul (which involves killing things, and the right things at that) then go back to the enchanting table (which is across town from the fucking blacksmiths) and then add the enchantment to the item.

And then it's like 1am and I'm all like WTF happened to my evening? I haven't even gone on a quest yet.

Also my inventory weighs like a billion pounds and my bodyguard/companion keeps getting pissed that I want her to carry back like 200 pounds of steel armor from the bandit camps because I can sell that shit later.

So I keep playing and playing and then like, three nights later I'm all like, wait, I haven't even got on a real quest yet. I have no idea what the storyline is and yet I obsessed with making my own health potions.

So now I am trying to save money (in game) to get a house (in game) so I can store my crafting supplies and books and things I have no way of storing right now. Which is, well, exactly what I am trying to do in real life.

Wait. What?

Huh.

Your hitting a little too close to home here Skyrim.

Removing the Water Pump.

So, in order not to have to heat the second mobile home we are using for storage- because holy hell sweet Jesus motherfuckers have you seen the price of fuel oil this year- we had to cut the water off to it. Now considering the sewage is busted and the sinks don't drain this was an easy decision to make, except for one thing.

We were going to have to remove the water pump.

Which is located under the trailer.

You know. The like three foot crawl space under the place that is covered mold, ripped up fiberglass insulation (for all your itching needs), and seems to be permanently damp. That place. Yeah. We prepared to crawl under there the way some people prepare to detox crime scenes. We had head lamps and dust masks and flashlights and long sleeved shirts and pliers and mallets and safety glasses.So we carefully dressed ourselves and put on our masks and shared a look of grim determination. We looked like tacky space aliens that had come to earth to explore the hu-man things called tourist traps.

Which is of course when the UPS guy would show up.

Dignity, we has it.*

So with our proverbial loins girded, we gathered our tools and removed the skirting and stared into the gaping black maw of the beast. Now to make things even more fun, I had shut off the main water valve some time ago, except that we weren't completely sure that it had worked. Fully. So we were hoping that we wouldn't be hammering on the cut off valve while water spewed at us.

Crawling under the thing was an adventure. First off it's a damn good thing I don't appear to have a problem with tight spaces or haunted houses, because this was a combination of both.

And not in a good way.

First off you had to crawl. There was enough space between the floor beams that you could kneel in some spots, but for the most part, you had to crawl. Ripped up bright pink insulation hung down across out path like itchy spider webs and all of the other stuff we had covered the pump with like bubble wrap and insulated wrap was laying around in heaps. It also didn't help that the metal beams under the trailer kept grabbing my hair and pulling it. And everything was damp and covered in mold and it didn't pay to think about what you were laying on.

In short, it was the worst environment possible.

Anyway, we got under there and unwrapped the pump and unhooked the electric and then began to unhook the pipes leading to the tank. Except that we failed to realized that a pressurized tank has pressure and so when Scott loosened the top pipe water came shooting out motherfucking everywhere.

Yay.

Somehow I managed to back myself out of the crawlspace fast enough not to get wet, and then I started running because my brain apparently thought that the water monster was coming to kill us all. Of course Scott was soaked and had to go change his shirt while I went back under there and wrestled with the other connections on the pump. I would get a grip in the plastic pipe with the pliers and then hit them with the mallet trying to drive the pipe loose, except that everything was now soaking wet and dripping and I was laying in water, in the near darkness while my dust mask kept fogging up my glasses.

It was like all the worst bits of a horror movie, really.

So after cursing and swearing and grunting and having the pipe go absolutely nowhere Scott got pissed and hacksawed the damn pipe in two, shoved the valve into the hole by beating it in with a mallet. Meanwhile I grabbed the pump and began to pull that fucker out.

The last time we had done this, when we put in the new pump, I had remembered it being extremely difficult to pull the old pump out. But not this time. This time I flipped it onto it's side and drug it out of there before the pumping monster could show up and eat my fucking brains.

It seemed like no time at all before it was sitting calmly in the grass. The sky was as blue as I had ever remembered seeing it and the colors of the trees seemed so alive and fresh and wonderful. It was glorious. It was like being reborn after what seemed like years of being trapped in the wet darkness.

Then Scott followed me out and we resealed the hole so the pumping monster was once again contained in it's lair.

So now I have a spare water pump.

And it only cost me the memories of a life without terror!

I'll call that a win.

*Kill me.

The Car and the Freezer

So the other day, I had a DAY. You know one of those days where you plan on having a nice easy day because you have to get up at like 3am in the morning and then everything snowballs into a big mess?

Yeah I had that.

What we had planned was that we were going to clean out the big chest freezer my dad owned that was still sitting in the shed. Unfortunately the outlet it had been plugged into had died over the course of the summer, and I did not realize it until I walked into the shed to get a tool one day and it smelled a whole lot more like meat in there then I remembered.

At that point I did what anybody would do, I found a working outlet and plugged the freezer into that.

Don't judge me, you would have done it too.

This would have been a great plan except for the fact that all the other outlets in the shed are controlled by the light switch by the door. You know the light switch that accidentally got flipped off sometime last week thus cutting power to the freezer AGAIN. So this time I flipped the freezer back on out of habit and made plans to clean it out because we would like to have it to store our food in.

Now to clarify we knew we would have to clean it out since the first time it lost power and that we would pretty much be making the dump run the same day we cleaned it out. However, what neither of us realized was that we probably should have cut power to it the night before we cleaned it out.

Ha ha ha! Hindsight you stupid bitch you.

Ahem.

So the next morning we leisurely got up, after spending the night cuddling with our sweet doggy boy who had just recently come home, gathered the necessary materials such as trash bags and rubber gloves, moved the truck up by the shed, flipped the power off and prepared to clean it out.

For the most part everything was going well. The top layers were a little stuck together but that was to be expected. It wasn't until we had emptied out the top trays that we saw the horror. Everything, and I mean everything, on the bottom was completely stuck together. Three layers deep of solid icy food.

It was about that time that we got the call saying the car was done and that the rental was due back this afternoon or they would charge us.

Fuck.

Now keep in mind we have a truck full of rapidly dethawing meat and food that we absolutely have to take to the dump because A: it will smell bad real soon here, B: we are going to be gone for two days and it will smell really really bad, and C: bears.

So pretty much Scott would have to leave for the dump right now in order to have enough time to get the rental back. We both stared down at the solid looking wasteland that was bottom of the freezer.

What happened next was the two of us freaking out and dumping boiling water into the freezer which didn't really help and then breaking bags of food loose with a crow bar and a mallet. Which was really not effective at all.

There came a moment when we were both exhausted and we stared at the bottom of the freezer and then Scott checked his phone and realized that he had to leave RIGHT NOW if this was going to happen at all. So I volunteered to stay home, dump the excess food down the bank by the shed* and finish cleaning out the freezer.

Possibly because I hate myself.

What followed was Holly using every science trick she ever knew. First I remember that air heats and cools faster then water so using a bucket and an old sour cream container I scooped out as much of the now freezing water as I could. Then I tried the blow dryer which did nothing, before finally wising up and putting a god damn heat lamp on it for an hour.

By the end of the hour I removed the heat lamp and peered down into what appeared to be some sort of meat and blackberry slushy. Unfortunately it appeared only the top layer had really thawed. What followed next was me using the crow bar and the mallet to wedge a few bags loose. Luckily, they were still frozen enough that I could use them as leverage, because scarring up the sides of the freezer would have been bad.

It was incredibly slow going. I had to bend all the way over while the edge of the freezer cut into my innards. The side which by this point was covered in who knows what, and the only thing I could leverage myself against while crowbarring was the sides of the freezer so I ended up bruising both knees. Also everything was starting to thaw so I was left scooping out a slushy of blackberries, venison and cheese.

I had also decided to cut all the plastic packaging off the food before dumping it into the woods which I should point out at his juncture was a fucking ADVENTURE.

Also, I became incredibly nauseous because the combination of being bent over all the way and the smell of meat berries was taking it's grim toll. I looked down at freezer. Even with all my efforts I had only cleared one little corner. Defeated I went and stood at door of the shed. How the fuck was I going to get this done in time? There was only one solution.

Anger.

I was going to hate that freezer like no one had every hated anything before. I was going to call it a bastardwhorecuntmotherfucker. I was going to think of every single thing that had ever pissed me off and direct it at all at those bags of rotting meat.**

And I did. I cursed and swore and beat, and I mean BEAT that crowbar down into the ice. At some point my fingers went numb and I didn't even notice. It became a routine, smash bag loose, cut bag open, dump and scoop contents into bucket, repeat. At some point Scott came back, looked at me and announced that he would get a lift to repair garage from the rent a car place and left again.

But I hardly noticed, I had entered the perfect point of mediation when all things are balanced and pure.

Did I mention that I was also wearing a white tank top?

I was wearing a white tank top, at least it was white when I started out. At one point I burst out of the shed, holding my bucket of meat, looking like I had just hacked apart someone or something, wearing bright yellow kitchen gloves that were covered, covered with gore,to discover that they were mowing along the road today and one of the flagger trucks had pulled into our drive temporally to let some cars pass.

Lets, just say it was not the proudest moment of my life.

So after an hour of fighting and swearing and not being able to feel my fingers and of course it started raining so not I looked even more like a serial killer, it was done.

Wearily I grabbed a roll of paper towels and gave the freezer a good wipe down and cleaned it out and then staggered back to the house where I took the greatest shower of my entire life and then spent the rest of the day wondering when the cops were going to show up and demand to know what the fuck I had been doing except this is the country so nobody gives a shit.

I'm not sure if this story has a moral, other then, don't let power get cut to your chest freezer. Or maybe, try not to act like an axe murderer around your neighbors.

Really, the moral is that you probably just shouldn't be me.

*Down the bank is still on my land, I was not, nor would I ever, dump even biodegradable waste on someone else's land because that is why we can't have nice things.

** I somehow never thought I would ever type this sentence in context.

The Rental Car is too Good for us.

In their infinite wisdom, the rental agency saw fit to outfit us with what I consider to be a luxury model car. It has a motorized seat adjuster on the drivers side, heated seats, satellite radio, and best of all, the air conditioning works. I can make the internal temperature of the car anything that I want. For this brief moment in time I can experience physical comfort that has nothing to do with the outside temperature!

I can finally show up to work without my hair looking like it had been through a motherfucking wind tunnel.

Except I know it's all too good to last. I know at some point they will fix our car and I will have to go back.

I will have to go back.

I will have to go back to a world where the AC doesn't work and I don't really have enough leg room and I will no longer be able to fit all my travel shit into the truck because my real car is tiny, and the breaks don't immediately break when you step on the break, and it won't tell me what show I am listing to on the radio in neat little green letters.

I was never meant to see this world.

There's something about being poor, okay? Like you feel happy just to have two vehicles that run because you personally know people that are still playing the our only car is in the shop and there are two adults in our household that have to work WTF do we do now game and you feel like you have won some sort of multicar in game trophy and that you are totally winning at life.

And then you see how the other half lives.

And it's not only better, but it's fucktastically a lot better. Better then you had ever dreamed it could be better. It's like most of you are never going to have caviar or 200 year old wine, or a 100$ a plate dinner. Which is fine, because it is hard to miss things you have never personally experienced in any way. Except I think you can buy caviar at Walmart now so maybe that was a bad comparison.

Anyway.

You know how all those rich guys that lost all there money threw themselves off bridges and shit. Yeah, I think I dimly understand that now.

What was really depressing was when I sat down and realized that this car costs more them I make in a year and quite near what we both make in a year not counting things like paying for repairs when it breaks or putting gas and oil in the fucker.

Have you ever had a moment where you suddenly felt very, very poor? Like Fuck my 29 acres and my backhoe and the fact that I can pay for my hobbies most of the time, now I feel poor because I can't afford the insanely expensive car the rental agency gave us because our insurance is paying for it?

You know what, sometimes I think the rental agency is just fucking with us. Here take this one, it will destroy your happiness and world view, bring it back with gas in it!

Asshole motherfuckers.

Asshole. Motherfuckers.