What?! Is there a sign?

I'm beginning to suspect that there is a neon sign, spider height right, outside my bedroom door advertising a big white butt as spider food. I've been bitten again, twice, in bed the other night. Wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't allergic to spider venom and be forced to drag around all the next day with a head threatening to explode. I never really had anything against spiders. I was one of those idiots who would capture one in a napkin and carry it outside. I once even had an almost pet spider that I allowed to weave a web in the house that fleas would fling themselves at, thinking it was a trampoline perhaps, and then being devoured by the resident spider. That spider did auch a good job of catching fleas and flies that when we had a party, I put up a sign next to the web stating that I knew a web and a spider was there and please do not disturb. But that was before I became so tasty to spiders.
Come on now. It's not as if they have no other food than my big ole butt. It's a horrible year for fleas and those itsy bitsy ants that must climb up my arm when I'm seated at my craft desk. I have tried everything to get rid of those little pizy ants but they persist, marching in their straight little lines coming in from who knows where to drink at my perpetual glass of soda on the desk. I've been reduced to buying an enclosed cup with an attached straw (think adult sippy cup without the cute little decorations} because it cannot be healthy drinking a mouthfull of ants. Heyh, if watermelons can grow in your stomach from swallowing a seed and pop rocks and soda can make your stomach explode if taken forever, whose to say that those ants won't set up a colony in my stomach? So why do the spiders prefer me to a nice healthy helping of soda logged pizzy ants? (Don't know why we called them pizy ants as a kid) Must be that spider sized neon sign.

And so it ends

I received and read the last Harry Potter book yesterday. It took me only about 7 hours for a 759 page book. Finally I have something to thank my mother for. She didn't like me reading. I was supposed to be out in the fresh air when all I wanted to do was escape into a book. So the only place I could read was the bathroom and even then there was always an impatient 'what are you DOING in there' if I took too much time. I've often wondered what she thought I was doing. Cooking dinner? Ice skating? Finding a rent in the space time continum m(sp?). No. I was "gasp" READING.
So I learned to read quickly, gobbling down the words like a glutton.
And so I read Harry Potter yesterday.
Some observations.
I do not know how the author could keep up the quality of her writing throughout so many books. Too often I read a series where I'd get to book six or whatever and lose interest in the characters or the whole series and I'd stop reading them. Sue Grafton's 6th book did me in, as did the one by Patricia Cornwell where the medical examiner bungies into a neuclear power plant as if she was some James Bond Wannabee.. as if medical examiners actually DO that. I wont' even go into the last book of hers I read where this young hunky guy in his early twenties had the hots for two women in their 40's. As if... and as for the flesh eating bacteria that killed off a husband.... now that's fantasy for you. And yet J K Rowling managed to keep up the quality, managed to kep her characters as separate people (after awhile my characters tend to look alike) and while she didn't write down to her juvenile audience she, nonetheless, wrote in a way they could understand while capturing adult readers as well.
But what I like the best about the Harry Potter books, and something that warms my soul, is all the hoo ha about, of all things, a book. Paper and ink and print and words.... a book. No movie star or sports team or latest release. A good old fashioned book, one that you can turn the pages and feel the paper beneath your fingertips and smell the smell of the paper. A book. Hooray for her. She deserves every single penny she's made off the book, small recompence for her sharing her world with us. God wouldn't I love to just sit down and have lunch with her some day.
I'm sorry the series is over but there is something that makes me even sadder and that is the fact that magic, at least Harry's magic isn't real. Oh how I would love a world where it was. And when real life the mundane life gets to me I can always escape for a time into hers.



By the way.


I'm giving nothing away. No spoiler from me.

What's wrong with this picture

I'm blaming this on the heat and humidity.
Making cheeseburger for dinner I opened the cabinet door to get the onion soup mix and stopped dead, staring and wondering....what is wrong with this picture till it came to me that while I was looking into the cabinet, Isabella the smallest cat in the world (ok my world) was staring back at me, not at all upset that she had been enclosed in the cabinet.
This is the cat that was once lost for 3 days on the front porch and recently lost up a tree in the back yard for seven days and now that cabinet. I suppose I should check my purse and pockets each morning on my way out the door in case I have a feline stowaway,.

Since when

Is three days of over 90 degree weather considered a heat wave? This is Maryland, in the summer with the usual humidity of 2000% and days and days of 100 plus weather. Three days do not a wave make.
Also.. does anyone proofread anything anymore. I have a problem with this keyboard when I try to type the same two letters in a row but that's a keyboard screwy. My comcast sign in page has a photo each day near the weather link. Today's is a Pansee. Yep P-A-N-S-E-E.
Tonight someone on TV used the word Funner as in "It's funner than that'.
Reminds me of the craft shows where things constantly "POP" and I hear 'How fun is that?" Have we run out of the word much as in 'how much fun is that?" Or do we not have enough breathable oxygen to waste some on the word much.
I axe you now, where it at?

And why must I continually type in crooked words, twice and sometimes thre times just to post something on blogger. Apparently, there isn't a shortage of words.

Miracles DO happen

I have spoken time and again about little dog Ollie. I have been crazy about him since older son received him as aChristmas present a decade ago. There is just something so endearing about him. Part Shi Tsu and part Powderpuff he looked remarkably like an ewok and while I had thought he would be a frou frou dog sitting on a cushion and eating bons bons, apparently no one told Ollie For he swaggers around the yard leaving his mark on anything that doesn't move. How could I NOT love a puppy who pooed in my shoe when I yelled at him or let me cry into his fur when the library broke my heart?
Sunday morning little dog Ollie could not move his back end. This happened before, some time ago, and the vet actually was convinced that we would have to put Ollie down. But Ollie, being Ollie bounced back remarkably. So Iknew what to do for him this time and since I had some prednesone left from the last time this happened to him, I dosed him, plus gave him his muscle relaxer.
Ollie spent most of his time sleeping but when I went outside to work with my beads he had to come so I picked him up, carried him out, put him in his favorite spot in the yard and let him be. As the days passed, Ollie gradually started using his back end more and more but he wasn't his old self and then yesterday, he stretched out in this odd position he favors and took a long nap. I was in my craft room when the older son came in asking if I had seen my boy lately and I had to come with him. I thought the worst and followed only to discover Ollie walking around the yard, peeing on everything that didn't move as if nothing had been amiss. I cried. Older son's eyes looked teary so we cracked out some lunch meat and gave the dogs a treat.
When the Husband came home last night he was as amazed as we had been and then he told me something he had hidden from me. On Sunday while Ollie was in his favorite place outside, the Husband came out to mow, he found Ollie, dead. The Husband tried to wake him, to get him breathing, get his heart going but Ollie was limp and unresponsive. The Husband went to get Older Son figuring that it would take the two of them to tell me. Even Older son thought the dog was dead till Ollie lifted his head and looked at the two of them!
So I have mylittle dog Ollie back. Right now he's humping Rocco the Wonder dog in order to maintain his place as king of the household, only he's humping Rocco's head.
There's a heart of a lion inside every little dog.