Amy’s Gripping Commentary

I am in a mood for which I don’t really have a good source. Probably just working too much and dealing with too many @ssholes. (Note my mood is cranky enough that I tolerate incomplete sentences.) Anyway, this picture is the truth and I’m glad it came up in my search. I haven’t seen it in awhile. Isn’t today supposed to be lucky or something? Should I buy 11 lottery tickets? I’m more likely to clean 11 litterboxes.

From NatalieDee.com.

Also: Emmy is still wearing her voting sticker from Tuesday.

I am impressed with this year’s I Vote stickers. I wore it on my sweater all day yesterday and stuck it to Emmy when I got home, and it’s still there this morning.

I’m pretty sure when Gatorade is on my grocery list, I won’t remember to look for the “isotonics” aisle.

I wanted a mouse to take to meetings at work, but I didn’t want a black one that could be confused with everyone else’s mouse. So I bought a pink one.

Not long after I started using this mouse I looked closely at the design. It looks like a pole dancer! It’s definitely some dancing woman with quite the body and long designer arms that remind me of Barrel of Monkeys monkey arms. Soon other people came to know my mouse as the Naked Lady Mouse.

It was obscure enought that I continued to use it, but I just didn’t understand the design the manufacturer chose. Then last week I rode my bike to work and when I arrived, the Naked Lady Mouse didn’t work. The little receiver had cracked during my travels. Fortunately my laptop always does well on this trip! I put it in a foam sleeve but I guess that wasn’t enough for the mouse receiver.

To round out the story, when I came out to my bike that afternoon, I found a friend had decorated it with a joke magnet that had previously gone undetected on her car for weeks. But everyone at work saw it on my bike right when they went in the door!

I bought a new mouse. It’s the same model, but it’s BLUE. No design.

I’m really going to miss her
A tomato ate my sister

I stopped drinking milk years ago, but “From the titties to the cities” still sounds pretty gross.

Mom look: a Huffy Sea Pines bike!

From a link on MSNBC. I don’t know where this was planted.

Phoning it in tonight… tired from work and visitors. Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow in the States! David’s mom is here and is cooking a dead bird. I made a pumpkin pie and Emmy the dog stole a loaf of bread from the counter, bread crumbs from the trash, and pearl barley and rice noodles from the pantry. Everyone plays a part… kind of glad I’m escaping at work most of the day.

Enjoy these cards from someecards.com and don’t eat too much mash (that’d be mashed potatoes)

Time for Calm Tummy
Watch the ad…

The cranky tummy running and waving his arms in this video cracks me up!

Emmy sacked out like this for over an hour the other day:

And happy birthday to David!

This short PSA is cool in more than one way! And I should know.

We went to trivia night run by the Lions Club at a local hotel this week and picked a GI Joe motto as our team name. I’m not sure where our friend Kathleen saw the signs but she invited us and our table of four (Kathleen, her sister, David, me) didn’t come in last but sure didn’t win! It was more fun than I expected. We were the youngest participants for sure! They were raising funds for local charities through the entrance fees and raffle tickets. It lasted over three hours! We also got a map of the defibrillators in town to keep in our wallets…

The MC was a dry-humor English guy and he sang Happy Birthday to people when they came out of the bathroom (because it really was the first lady’s birthday; “happy birthday to Sue, she is in the loo”). There was an entire round with questions related to lions.

Things we knew or guessed:
How long is elephant gestation? (I don’t know why I had this stored in my brain)
What was Beethoven’s disability?
Who designed St. Peter’s in Rome?
Who flew too close to the sun?
Year the US civil war began (no other table got it right!)
How many times Armagh won the All Ireland senior championships (I don’t remember now if it was about hurling or football, but we guessed the number, except I think David was reading lips at another table)
Largest cell in a human body
A LOT of questions about songs, from Bonnie Tyler to Tony Bennett to Phantom of the Opera to Eurovision

Things we got wrong:
Neil Diamond being the writer of a Monkees song (I put down Mickey Dolenz but actually had second thoughts about Neil thanks to my brother)
What team some famous soccer player played for (I crossed out Man United but it was right)
What town Gilbert O’Sullivan is from
Most of the names of streets associated with pictures of buildings in Kinsale
What year the Republic of Ireland became the republic (they multiple choiced it, so I guess not everyone here knows?)
Bono’s real name

The big prize was a hamper, which is what they call a prize basket, but it always makes me think of dirty laundry. We even get a Christmas hamper at work with a turkey AND a ham voucher. I’m curious what the mentioned vegetarian option is… and why they mailed a company-headed letter to everyone’s home to ask which butchers they want to use instead of just asking us at work!

So most of you will be familiar with this, but I’m guessing some of my relatives are out of the loop. Time to catch up!

First watch this clip, Witness describes robbery attempt, from the news in Kansas. She’s a character.

…Which means someone autotuned it and it went viral. Now time to watch the hilarious musical version! (Ignore the stupid stuff at the very end.)

I don’t know why it makes me laugh so much. But is she better than the Bed Intruder?

NaBloPoMo participants: cool prize offer here!

I started this post several weeks back and thought I’d resurrect it.

All this travel means so many pretty pictures and not enough rants on my blog! That’s like going against my own philosophy. I’m afraid I’ll become extra boring if I’m not staying true to my roots. Or I’m growing older, I guess.

Pretty much all of these items were posted by US friends on Facebook. Either I don’t have enough acquaintances here to be close enough to be pissed off, or Americans really are self-centered and annoying.

home parties
fireworks killing dogs
going to the circus
purpose breeding your dog
hunting
whining about how much you hate moving (not you, TMC!)
right wing insistence on radical Islam’s focus
UK TV (it’s so American)

I guess I’m done now.

I thought of something else Ireland doesn’t have: big bags of potato chips. They only sell big bags full of single-serve bags of potato chips. Useless!

I’m trying to decide if I should do NaBloPoMo this year. I will never post a real post every day but I have a bajillion pictures and could do one a day pretty easily.

Someone at work made fun of me for saying awesome a few weeks back, even mimicking me with an American accent. So I tried not to say it so often (I didn’t realize I said it at all), and then our taxi driver made fun of me for saying awesome this weekend in Belfast. I looked it up and have said it 22 times on the blog. That’s not too much over four+ years, is it?

Finally feeling better after having a nasty upper respiratory thing last week, though the cough is lingering. I’ve been frustrated by lack of cold medicine here–all they do is take acetaminophen and suffer. You can get codeine OTC but not cold and flu treatment. I saw empty blister packs for something orange called DayNurse at another sick person’s desk and got excited that it might be like DayQuil, but it was just the same pain reliever crap. Anyway, I learned two new words for being sick: dosed and smothered. “Oh, you must be smothered!”

I also heard someone use the term away for slates, which I picked up at corkslang.com but had never heard in person before! It’s something like being content or everything’s hunky dory (the more common phrase is “happy days”).

A peace wall in Belfast. Our taxi driver was a little strange and looked like he might have been in Flock of Seagulls. I think he said the walls, gates, and checkpoints are currently scheduled to come down in 18 more years. The gates are still closed at night. I took the name “Peace Wall” to sound rather hopeful, but really I think it’s just acknowledging that the only reason there’s peace is because of the wall.