oh, hello....yeah.............

Right, so I barely blogged over here, right? And when I did it was never so horribly important that I couldn't share it with my grandmother, my neighbour, or whoever. And then SO and I decided we wanted to move. And originally we thought we'd be moving in October-ish and we wanted to start a blog so family can keep up with us. So we switched over to wordpress and began our own site; and if I or he ever feel the need to be private, wordpress offers a password option for its blogs. And, really, I'll just give out the password to anybody that asks, but honestly...who is even going to want to bother going to that much trouble, just having the password there will be deterrent enough from whomever the post is being blocked.
So, I'll leave this up for a month or so, and then I may just shut this blog down entirely.
I only know of two people who have the address to this anyhow. (hi, J! hi, E!) And I'm not even sure if they are reading it either.

But the new blog:

PetlerInn dot wordpress dot com

you should come by and say hello.

in which I participate as part of the worst bloggers ever

**I am deeply apologetic for all of the parenthetical expressions and the sentence fragments and the over abundance of exclamation points--we're going to blame it all on the whiskey, okay??**

Other blogs take up so much of my internet time, that it is horribly shameful. I'm that awful sort of lurker. I only De-lurk if I feel the absolute need to say something...or if there's a contest (you know, poor girls who don't speak need love too!).
And all I seem to do here are list-updates on my life and book/movie reviews (which, by the way are SO UNBELIEVABLY far behind, that I cannot imagine I'd actually ever realistically catch up).
I had a birthday recently and I'm a big believer in birthdays; it's the German in me, a birthday is more important than any other holiday to these people.
But I was unbelievably lucky enough to receive from my parents a ....you ready?? A KITCHEN AIDE!!!! AND IT'S GREEN!!!!! LIME GREEN!!!!!! Oh-My-God!! I could not be any more excited if I tried. Also, SO gave me the ENTIRE collection of (prepare for super-nerdom) Sailor Moon--including the movies!!! (although, the first part is still in the works, I only have the second half in my possession) and he also gave me a Holga camera TWIN LENS!! (I didn't even know they made a twin lens!) And Sister gave me a beautiful handmade necklace and an art book from Hieronymus Bosch...just so many wonderful things did I receive from those who love me!! :)
Also, SO and I went to Savannah for the weekend; to look around and see if it could be the kind of place we could live. And of course, I loved it. (Although if we're being totally honest it's about in 6th place of places Sassy should live next; however my poor little Rock Star just loathes cold weather) I should probably dedicate a separate post to the Savannah trip and the debates (read: lengthy arguing) contained as a result, and really, I'm in much to pleasant a mood to delve into it.
Happy Thoughts to any who happen to pass by!!
:)

where I talk about updating, but don't really follow through

I love mornings like today: pre-storm sunlight filtering in through the windows is gray, and we lay tangled up in our sheets, sleepily nuzzling until I delicately extract myself to start the coffee brewing.

I've got book/movie reviews to write, but I'm beginning to see that's about all this blog has become; which isn't exactly what I wanted so I'm going to try to get better about it. Also, I'm still tossing around the idea of switching over to wordpress and taking my blog to a more-public venue (i.e. give my family/friends the name); with wordpress I can password-set any blogs I don't want any particular person/people to read. Although everyone can always ask for it....I'm just unsure, still debating
really.

Also, I think we're going to be traveling down to Savannah in a few weeks for the weekend to re-check out the city. Of course, the date we chose the only hostel in the city is closed for renovations, so we may or not be living out of our car. We'll see.

Tumultuous Tokens of Tenderness

*also called How I Get Way Too Excited About Alliteration*

June is the month for birthdays. Baby-girl last week, the Celt this week, the next weekend is Father's Day, and then it's SO's birthday.
By the way, I'm HORRIBLE at gift giving. I hate having to wait until a specific day to give someone a present. As soon as I buy one, I want to give it away immediately.
So much time is spent on picking out something(s) that lucky guy/girl will just absolutely love and will want to keep forever that as soon as I bring it home, I turn into a four-year-old, "Guess what?!? I bought you something!! It's a surprise!!!!! ....wanna see it?!?!!??"
Even now, I know SO will occasionally pop into my blog and read all the nasty things I say about him, so I can't even put my secrets out into the world wide web. I am forced to sit on them in high anticipation, teasing him with the occasional (alright, fairly frequent--I'm sorry, sweetie!!), "You are gonna LOVE your gifts!! Want a hint?....You are going to be so excited!" And I do this type of thing with such frequency, that as soon as the special day arrives, I start getting nervous. Did I over-hype it? What if he doesn't love it as much as I thought he would? What if I led her to believe it was something else, and this isn't what she was expecting/wanting at all?
Apparently my ease of mind rests on the perfect gift-giving experience.

friday night

and full of red wine....sweet red Cabernet Sauvignon as I listen to my sweet rock star sing god-awful Manofwar with his drunk friends...



...honestly, I really don't believe other people can be as happy as I am.

on moving and my Other

Tennessee summers are rather mild as summers go; surrounded by the mountains it cannot get too hot and it gets nowhere near the humidity of the more southerly states. However, I do believe I'd like to try living in a place that perhaps never gets cold; or rather, perhaps rarely gets cold. SO, of course, has such a natural abhorrence for any temperature below 55 degrees Fahrenheit that he simply LOVES this idea. Right now, the top contender is for Savannah, GA. We both fell in love with Savannah the moment we stepped out of the car. I don't believe 24 hours were even spent in that beautiful city and we both knew that it was a perfect place for us.
I'm still keeping hope for Boston (I know, the opposite of warm year-long) open right now; Sister is moving there within the month and I have such a fondness for the north-eastern cities (i.e. my beloved New York) and the trains and the theatre and the people (Northerners are my kind of people, none of this foolish, lets-talk-to-every-single-bloody-individual-in-a-seven-mile-radius-of-where-we-are-standing Southern hospitality shit); plus Boston is simple a TRAIN RIDE from Manhattan, and not just any train ride, a SHORT train ride--anyplace that gets me closer to my city is definitely high up on my Places-Sassy-Should-Be list. But SO doesn't want to move someplace he's never visited before, and despite this severe rationality of his, I'll go along with it; I'm just so happy I'm getting my little homeschooler to move away from the only state he's ever known.

and in other news...

In an interesting turn of events the other day, Sassafrass was thrown off track when she realized that she had been spending so much energy trying not to turn into her mother that she had inadvertently turned into her father!!

Oh, yes. It's true. I carry a lot of my German mother's neurotic tendencies; and with these, I try not to turn into the gigantic ball of emotion and stress that is my mother. I do a pretty good job at avoiding this; largely in part thanks to SO.
However, I've been working A LOT lately as Baby-Girl is still on tour; to make up for her absence, I've been pulling double shifts, for about two weeks.
The better part of Thursday morning was spent in a MAJOR argument with SO, basically boiling down to he had been treating me quite rudely because he was now expecting it as soon as I get home; that I would be so stressed out from my job and the double work of it and I wasn't properly separating my job stress from the peace of being at home; of coming home to a wonderful man who was cleaning the entire house, buying and prepping all the dinner so all I would have to do is throw it in a dish and cook; and basically taking care of everything I needed.
This? This is EXACTLY how my father acted (and still does) while I was growing up. He was rarely at home due to the difficult climb up the corporate ladder, and when he would finally come home, he would snap at my mother, my sister, and I.
To use a common southern term, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I realized that I had inadvertently turned into my dad. No shit. We were mid-argument, yelling at each other, saying terrible things, and out he bursts with, "Well, if you could just learn to separate your job from your home, then I could be nicer to you. Take thirty minutes, take an hour as soon as you get home. Do whatever the fuck you want to do, and when I get home, be in a better goddamned mood!!"
And that stopped me dead in my tracks. Shit. I've turned into my father. And given the choice between the two parental figures, I would most certainly choose to turn into my mother.

What woman ever thinks that she will utter that phrase?

The Watchmen

(movie poster from movie)

The Rock Star and I went out with some of the old crowd last night to watch some friends of ours play a promotional show at Hot Topic for their new CD; (yes, it's cheesy as hell, they know it too, but its good money and they've gotten a 700-stores-wide distribution deal and need to promote; plus it shows off their natural ability rather than a lot of bands that really only sound good in shitty bars with a lot of electronics [HT shows are acoustic]).
And then we moved on to dinner at the mall food court--surprisingly DELICIOUS thanks to a brand new Greek restaurant that just opened (I met the owner: a Greek man who's been in America less than a year) and SO received a free piece of baklava as he "lost" with a slice of stale pizza; the owner felt pity on him for choosing the bad food. WAY better eating than I expected at a mall.
And then it was on to watch our movie. We had bought our tickets two days prior, we even planned eating at the mall so we would not have to rush eating and then get bad seats because we would end up behind the crowd--it was all totally useless. The theatre was near empty, it was opening weekend and there were MAYBE twenty people in the whole theatre--I need to check the stats tomorrow to see if the movie bombed or if its just my po-dunk little area of the world.
But the movie. God. I loved it. I thought it was two hours and forty minutes of comic-book-movie magic. When I heard they were making the movie, I had some major doubts. The book is so graphic; there's a lot of cussing and a lot of nudity and a whole lot of some very graphic violence (see a dog with it's head split open; see a woman being raped in the alleyway; see someone's skin melting because hot oil has been poured over it). And dense; the book is extremely dense. But I thought they pulled it off well.
It doesn't seem to really fit into the comic-movie genre however. Yes, there are costumes and superheros and such, but its so very dark and serious (things I associate with the reading of actual graphic novels, not so much their movie counterparts). The actors/actresses in it are relatively unknowns (especially for such a huge production) and they did very well. Whoever was in charge of casting did a WONDERFUL job. Everyone looked nearly exactly as I pictured them. Although I thought the major curve on Jacobi's ears was extremely distracting. Jon looked great, I was terribly afraid he'd come across as false. And I was glad to see that they mostly kept to his nakedness, it didn't pose as a distraction for me, but some of my friends complained about the abundance of blue penis in the movie, of course, they were both heterosexual males that have a gay phobia. The reason Jon (Dr. Manhattan) isn't wearing any clothes helps to show his separation from humanity, from humanity's bindings. The only major difference between the book and the movie is the way we got to the ending. The change they put at the end makes sense for the movie, without any of the revolving secondary characters that are in the book (the newspaper stand owner, the lesbian, the young man reading the comic, the pirate comic storyline--which they've turned the pirate comic into a small cartoon that's being released as promotion for the movie!!) you miss most of the storyline that encompasses the ending; and although the end result is still the same, I don't like laying the blame upon Jon.
Also the director, Zack Snyder of 300 fame, did the same sort of stop-slow-motion action sequences that made 300 so mind-blowing, but I didn't think they fit in very well here; also, made me wonder if that's the only way he knows how to shoot a fight scene.
Really, I'm sorry they had to make the edits they did, but they are totally understandable and you really aren't missing a lot of the main storyline--the only edit they should have worked out was with Bubastis, Adrien Veidt's genetically engineered cat. In the movie, one sees him killed after only having about three seconds contact with the large cat; and so missed out on the cruelness of Adrien because of it. My friends (none of which had read the book) were completely thrown off by the cat, and thought it was ridiculous; and without book-knowlege who could blame them? Bubastis should have been cut out entirely (or alternately added another 20+ minutes to the movie just so he can be explained).
But overall, I'm very pleased with the way the film turned out; I'm curious to see what others think, especially those that aren't familar with the graphic novel.

home alone...

Whenever SO goes away for a tour, I’m prepared. I’m aware I’m going to be alone for awhile.
But this past weekend, he went away to SEE a show, not play one…and, I don’t know. Somehow its different.
Last night, I was all about being alone, planned my special ME time and such and a friend of mine called and wanted some company so he came by and hung around for several hours. It was nice, we haven’t been able to spend alone time in awhile, usually just a 5-9 people gatherings, but there remained a part of me that kept saying, “fucking go home…this wasn’t in my plan.”
So I planned on being alone tonight, but my friend’s show got cancelled so they came back from tour early and wanted something to do for their Saturday night…well, just call ole Sassy. So my house filled up with some more tired rock stars and we hung around and chatted all night—and it really was great fun. But because they drove nine hours last night after their last show for their short play-excursion, everyone just left at once.
And, suddenly, after acclimating myself to being around a group of friends, I’ve been left alone.
And part of me wants to tell them, “No, wait. Come back. Stay a bit longer.”
And a much larger part of me says, “Finally. Time to catch back up on me.”
And the very core of me, the part I don’t want to admit silently cries out, “Where is my Other?”

Oooh, getting a wee bit too sad around here for me.
I do believe I’ll pick up some Tucker Max, a glass of Chianti, and take myself a nice hot bath...

warm nights to you.

Fourth-of-July-an-hour-left-at-work-post

Oh, what a bad blogger I am!!! I started this so I could put some of the ramblings in my head out into the universe and I barely touch the damn thing.
Fourth of July is definitely not a big shopping day for most people. It has been so dead all day in the store, luckily there's only 45 minutes left before closing. Then I'm headed back to the house for some fried chicken, corn-on-the-cob, and s'mores around our fire pit with some friends. Not too big on fried food, but it's been a few months since I've had any, and it seems appropriate for the holiday.
The lack of activity is a happy change from the hellish night I had yesterday. By far the worst working day I have ever had in all my working days--EVER. If I had owned a gun last night, there would be blood covering the store and I would be tightly locked up. But I'm lucky enough to have the best partner in the world, and after we got home, he gave me such a wonderful night; bottle of red wine, our funny show, a good movie, an hour long walk with Chubbers around town, good dinner, and wonderfully mind-numbing sex. He made it so I could totally forget about the teenagers, the cop, the angry customers, and the stressfulness that was my Thursday at work.
I hope I tell him often enough how wonderful I think he is. My sweet metal rock star.

sweet serendipity

Last week while SO and I were at the Wal*Store (you know, that horrible chain store that's taken over the world) shopping for road nourishment for the upcoming tour, we were bickering in front of the granola bars of the merits of with fruit vs without (my stance being, he's not gong to be getting many fruits and veggies while on the road) when this little old woman comes up to us and just stares at us. When we conclude the "discussion" (and tossing the granola WITH fruit into the buggy) she leans into me, pointing to SO and asks,
"Is this your sweetheart?"
{smiling somewhat patronizingly} "yes"
-"Are you going to marry him?"
{appraising SO}"probably one day"
-"You should. I've not seen such a beautiful couple so well matched in many years. People tell me I'm crazy, but I thought you should know that your auras match each other very well."
{me, speechless}
SO-{smiling at her} "thank you so much."

and she wandered away.


This may be a completely off-the-wall remark to some, but for SO and I, it actually happens all the time; it happened daily for the several months when we were just friends and refusing to date each other.

It was a nice little portent before the separation.