white squirrel!

i've known there's a white squirrel near our house for a couple of years now but i never have my camera when i see him.

until today!

i felt like meryl streep with her ghost orchid in 'adaptation'!

i love you white squirrel!

exhausted by sandwiches

angela sent me this photo of my nephew william this weekend, with the caption "Totally asleep at lunch."

tallahassee trip

on the way to tallahassee last week, we passed this corner with two brand new drug stores. walgreens vs. cvs. there were no other stores of any kind around either of them. don't companies do research before building anymore? insane.

a little farther down the road we stopped at a chick-fil-a. the other half of the restaurant was called "Dwarf House." apparently there are a few of them in the area. it seemed like a denny's. again, insane.

friday morning we went downtown to the veteran's day parade. we saw the famu marching 100. the rattlers. i cried and cried when the floats of the families of kids who died in wars rode by. they had banners with the kids' names and pictures on them. good lord. there were many higher points like this fun "high five a vet" guy.

also strawberries were eaten by adorable little girls in sherpa jackets with polar bear ears attached.

later in the weekend i shucked 60+ of the most delicious oysters you could imagine. salty and cold and fresh. eli and nacho were very interested in this process. so interested in fact that after some of the oysters were dredged and fried and the peanut oil was dumped in the pine straw, nachodoggy the nitwit ate the pine straw and dirt and threw up brown shit all over kevin's mom's white carpet at 6am. good times!

finally, there was a birthday party for a really sweet 3 year old girl whose favorite color is YELLOW.

smoked mussels halloween

we had no trick-or-treaters last night. 

which is good since we had no candy. 

we agreed if any trick or treaters showed up we would put a handful of smoked mussels in their bag. 

can you imagine a worse treat than smoked mussels? weird color. weird smell. weird texture. full of crap. their smoky fish oil would get all over the candy in your bag. 

my late great grandfather named flops ran out of candy one halloween and put a meatball wrapped in paper towels into the kids bags, pulling out some of their candy to give to the next kid as he did so.

blood

my 33 year old brother chris had pulmonary embolisms on saturday. that means blood clots in the tissue between his heart and lungs.

he was in africa for two weeks for business and took a 20 hour flight back to the US last week. he closed on his first real house friday afternoon. he had chest pain friday and it was getting worse throughout saturday, and thought he pulled a muscle or cracked a rib. then he couldn't breathe and finally went to the hospital. he's lucky he didn't trow a seven.

he's expected to make a full recovery and be home later this week. and into their new home this weekend.

the picture above is from 1984 when my 33 year old mother was in the hospital for the exact same thing. my dad took us to the spring carnival by himself and we had our faces painted.

you never know when you'll want to grate cheese so it's good to have a rusted antique grater hanging on the wall.

Crazy Critters and the Downtown Asheville Hurricane of Vintage T-shirts

(originally posted at Skippy Haha Vintage blog)

I recently went downtown Asheville with a hamper of my finest Skippy Haha Vintage t-shirts.

Alli Marshall of Asheville StreetStyle had arranged for local rock band The Critters to meet up and shoot a video for their song "Visions of Light."

The rough concept was for them to try on a shirt, come through the Flat Iron, show the camera, go around back and try on another shirt, ad infinitum, until the hamper was empty. Something sped-up and lighthearted like the intro to the Monkees TV show.

What actually happened was, as the Mountain Xpress said - total mayhem. It was a hurricane of t-shirts, a t-shirt-ornado. No one could have been prepared for the energy and enthusiasm displayed by those Critters. 

Here is the video, expertly edited by Steve Shanafelt of the Mountain Xpress. You can see me at the end, as shirts are being flung into the trees of Wall Street, silently screaming in my head "AAAAACKKK! My precious heirlooms! Save my precious heirlooms!" 

No really, it was fun. Really fun. It was all over in under 10 minutes. I came home and washed all the shirts.

Mountain Xpress article here

i was issued some art

i love my brain

i am glad i'm not bald because my head is lumpy and soft. thank god i have hair to cover it. it's like it never hardened when i was a baby. or else i am slowly growing devil horns on the back. i've tried googling 'soft skull adult' etc. and can't find anything. i should probably ask a neurologist or something. in the mean time i should probably wear a helmet 24/7.

but, instead, i have decided i don't really want to wear a helmet ever again. i don't need that big of a rush that sports requiring helmets give a person. i fell off my mountain bike 15 years ago and dislocated my shoulder and decided i don't need to do that anymore. i don't miss skiing or want to learn to snowboard. i don't really want to do intense whitewater rafting. i don't want to jump out of a plane again. never say never, but i think i'm done with helmets. 

i love my brain!

cock clock

i wonder how many suicides are caused at least partially by the '60 minutes' stopwatch ticking.

it must be the most depressing sound on all of TV.

just listen as click click by click click your weekend disappears.

now have a fantastic monday!

5 minutes after eating the leftover prime rib

you may remember nachodoggy won a contest a couple weeks ago for $25 gift card to outback.

we went last night and used it. that place is not great. it is not cheap! a (small) glass of wine was $7. to add 3 super-SUPER-measly dry shrimp (size of a poker chip) to your steak was $4. a salad was $12, and the dressing choices were ranch, bleu cheese, 1000 island, and bleu cheese vinaigrette.

anyway we had a gift card and it was nacho who won the contest so we brought home a few bites of prime rib and sweet potato for him to eat. he shared with his brown bro eli.

then they wrestled for 20 minutes. nacho's head was inside eli's mouth for 15 of those minutes.

i walk funny

i'm pigeon toed. but probably not as pigeon toed as i would have been had my feet not been stuck in shoes attached to a bar hanging on my crib for the first year of my life.

i hated this bar and broke the wood on my crib by banging my feet against it trying to escape.

this medieval contraption is called a Denis Browne bar, and may or may not have something to do with my lifelong propensity for flight rather than fight.

checkin out the piggies

went to charlotte this weekend for a super fun british open party. here is emmitt, a ridiculously cute nugget of 10 month old sweetness. how awesome are his cheeks? and his hair? and his name?

shady bluff, charlotte's rockingest trio also graced our ears with a noon set.

later i walked around the corner and found these two nutball sisters by themselves frozen and whispering. i said "what are you doing?" and they said "being statues." i said, 'can i take your picture' and they said "YES!" and here we are:

congratulations! nacho!

every month or so we get a light magazine full of local asheville coupons. on the back page of the last one was a contest asking you to find "mr. moon" the (asheville tourists single A baseball team's new mascot) hidden in one of the ads inside. email your answer to enter the contest.

nacho doggy found mr. moon and emailed and won the contest!

4 free tickets to mccormick field to see any tourists home game

$25 at outback. tax tip beer not included. 

the contest and the coupon book were done by tim at muse graphics, and to him nachodoggy say 'gracias amigo!'

doggy bunk bed

pomegranates

it's 6500 miles from chile to asheville. how fresh can they be?

baby bonanza

it really seems like every one of my best friends and family has a baby under the age of 3 right now. it's wild how they all have such different personalities and styles, in line with their parents' personalities of course. though they are spread out across the country, i would love to get them all together. especially in like 13 years.

two more tots joined the party this week, and if you ask me they look like tough little cookielets. and perfect prom dates in 2027!

introducing...finley!

and...lucas!

muchos adorables, no?

andrews not geyser

while in old fort over the weekend, we followed signs to 'andrew's geyser.'

wikipedia sayeth:

A geyser is a spring characterized by intermittent discharge of water ejected turbulently and accompanied by a vapor phase (steam). Generally all geyser field sites are located near active volcanic areas, and the geyser effect is due to the proximity of magma.

i was interested to see what kind of phenomenal natural water spout could possibly be found around here.

something like so? -

or like so? -

?

?


?


or how about something more like so:

this is andrew's geyser. it's a hose. a fountain that was made by the hands of men. it makes me want to cry.

i can't be the only one

this giant phallic symbol rock is situated on probably the 'nicest' street in all of asheville - evelyn.

big old houses, manicured lawns, back yards on the grove park country club.
i would like to know who put this rock here and what they were thinking.

winky

a fish will not eat another fish's eyeball on a hook as bait.

our unbelievable fishing streak (first cast teddy caught 2 on the double hook of the one line) was disrupted after an unfortunate unhooking incident (we threw all the fish back) in which one fish (winky) left an eyeball dangling on one hook of a 2-hook rig. even with good bait (sand fleas/shrimp) on the bottom hook, the fish did not bite this line again until the eyeball was removed.

kisses scoobs

if you put your face up to the screen he will licky you.

("i must licky you" asheville police department scandal explanation in mountain xpress)