SickPea

I have a nasty cold. It all started Christmas Day with a that really horrible sore throat. I'm at the nasal congestion and fatigue part. I would probably be feeling a lot better today if not for the really loud music some people in my building thought the rest of us wanted to listen to until 4:00 in the morning. So I had maybe 3 hours of sleep last night. I just woke up from a two hour nap so I'm feeling much better than I was this morning. I'm tired though. I still can't upload pictures but I wanted to share with you what MrPea got me for Christmas. Best gifts ever!

Peace be with Thee Internets

I had a cute picture for you my peeps but our computer has been hijacked by something really funky and my camera cannot upload. I couldn't let the day pass without wishing the Happiest of Holidays to everyone in the Blogosphere. To those who don't celebrate, have a beautiful and relaxing day.

Peace, Love, Happiness!

Hell on Earth is a shopping center in December

MrPea and I don't usually do gifts because we shop together often. Plus, he is the sort of guy who, if he wants it, he bought it already so that makes it so difficult to shop for him. This year we decided to do gifts. I am the sort of person who is usually finished Christmas shopping before December even rolls in but this year, economics forced me to wait until this week. I can't tell you where I went because MrPea likes ruining surprises for himself. I can't even tell you about the miracle wrapping techniques I had to use so that he wouldn't be able to shake, inspect, put his ear next to and figure out what. Yes, I had to sabotage for the sake of Christmas.

Oh. How the hell can anyone even think of shopping this time of year? There are some people out there who love all this. I am not one of them. I usually do not step foot in any retail store from mid November until February.


I actually stood in line behind someone who I just SAW park a $70,000.00 vehicle argue with a poor, tired looking cashier over 48cents. According to his calculation, his amount due should have been 48cents less than the cash register's figure. Honestly, I wanted to reach into my pocket and just give him the 48cents he was bitching about. I totally get it that economic times are tough-- MrPea and I have been cutting back on just about everything and I've been on pins and nails every time his company announces job cuts. OK I'm there. But this guy wasn't using a,"I'm sorry, I think there must have been a mistake," kind of tone. It was more of a,"You f-ing stupid ass people need to correct this extra 48cents otherwise I'll enjoy ruining everyone else's shopping experience...." outburst. The worst thing about it was, he was with his kid, who will likely grow up to be just as rude and entitled as his father. Happy Holidays....

The cashier kindly told him he'll have to take it up with customer service and I swear she is my new hero because there was a HUGE line at customer service. Just as someone who used to work in retail, and suffered through a Holiday season, I always cringe when I hear people say,"The customer is always right." No, my dear, the customer is not always right. Sometimes the customer is an assh@##. I didn't bother to see if he took it up with customer service but I did giggle with the cashier over it. Poor girl, I bet he wasn't even the worst of them. You know who 'they' are. You've probably been encountering 'them' just as much as I have.

What the hell happens to us at Christmas? Are we a bunch of vultures? Just a social critique but the only good thing that I hope will come out of our collective belt tightening this season is that maybe people will realize how ridiculously overboard they have been going as far as gift buying. Look, I'm no Scrooge, I LOVE buying gifts for my nephews but I still don't get why people spend thousands+ of dollars on their kids, tell them some strange man drops down the chimney to give them all these things for free and then wonder why their kids start acting all entitled and materialistic when they are too old to believe in Santa Claus. Don't jump down my throat, people with kids, I know-I know, I don't have any so I can't really say anything. But I'd rather raise my hypothetical kids to believe that 'mommy and daddy work really hard so I should be thankful for these wonderful gifts they bought me' than the above method. Mind you, this does not mean I would ruin Santa Claus for them. Of course Santa will come down our chimney, just not with 1000s of dollars worth of free stuff for being "good". I'm not delusional, I have 6 nephews ok? There's no such thing as a kid who's '$3000.00 at Toys-R-Us' good. I used to work for a Child Care Center in a neighborhood who will not be feeling the economic pain the rest of us are, and I can tell you right now, every single one of those children had some kind of behavioral problem. Because their parents were either the "I want to be my kid's best friend" types or the "buy everything the kid wants so he'll shut up" type. Or "they are being raised by their nannies and spend about 5 minutes per day with their kids so they use money to alleviate their guilt" type. And once in a while I'd run into the "I'm an unapologetic jerk and I want my kid to grow up to be just like me" type, like I did today.

Oh I'm in a bad mood today aren't I? Am I picking on kids? I can't be, I love children. I wish I had 10 of them I do. No, I'm picking on parents.

Well after all my lecturing about wasteful spending, my sister sent me this:

And it sounded like a reasonable request.

I finished only 5 dollars over budget for MrPea and have one more gift to get at Tar-jay. Oh help me if I have to spend more than 5 minutes in another store until all this is over.....

More More More

That's it for a little while though. I need a break. My eyes need a rest. At least I have something to post as I am still blahgged out lately.




These are nothing to get excited about but I thought they looked interesting. A nice patterned piece of crab shell, a broken whelk and the one on the bottom is very common-I forgot the name. But it looks pretty hanging in the sun so it was the only one I kept.

More teeth.

The find of the day was this reddish one. Second time I found a red tooth.

A stingray barb and really worn down tiger shark tooth.

I did make friends with an old guy who found a blue starfish but I was too shy to ask if I could take a picture. I also met some people from out of town who asked for some tips. Normally I don't give out tips to tourists as I am stingy and want all the shark teeth for myself. I usually just say smile and play stupid and say," I don't really understand how to find them myself, I just stare at the ground until I see one." But they were Floridians and I was feeling generous. It is Christmas after all.... they even came up to me later all triumphant with a small bull shark tooth and gave it to me.

Do not adjust your screen,just another day in the fog

It really was that foggy. Scary Scoobie Doo episode foggy. Edgar Allen Poe foggy. You know what I mean. Ooh and it was fun.

My find was nothing to brag about....


But I did have fun scaring myself as the fog got worse and worse. I sat on a dead palmetto eating chocolate covered graham crackers and pretended this man in dark clothes was a Psychoman coming to get me. Passing by, he looked at me funny, um, I don't know probably because I was giggling like a campfire kid listening to a scary story at a girl scout trip.

Most sane people would have packed up and went home because after about an hour you could barely see at all unless you were crouching on the ground to take pictures, er, which was what I was doing.

I always think to myself, it's a good thing only a handful of people come to this beach because I'm pretty sure I must look like a complete fool to anyone who happens to see a girl laughing by herself and skipping around in the foam.
At the same time do I care whether anyone sees me walking around in foam? No. And why should I? Everyone should, at least once walk around in algae foam grossing themselves out in the fog. Just cuz they're wearing flip flops and they can.



The fog was so bad that any hair sticking out of my hood was dripping wet and my nose was running.

At last look before I dragged myself back to my bike to go home, I could hardly see the ocean anymore.

Call me crazy, but there's just something magical about a scary fog.

Not bad at all

The ocean's been kind of rough lately. I couldn't get out the the beach until today when low tide is too late in the day for me to really find the good stuff. Today's find was not as I had hoped but here's the thing: It's December and I'm on the beach wearing flipflops, do you think I'm going to even think about complaining? And anyway, as you can see, I did ok for a mid-tide , foamy trek.

The best ones were these, that bigger one being a Great White. I did end up finding a small handful more than this after my apple juice break (when I took these pictures) but I was too lazy to take more pix and anyway, ya'll get the point.

These tiny ones are kind of interesting because they have a redddish color to them that my camera didn't capture well but take my word for it. When I saw them wet on the sand, they were a red-orangey color.

It had been thick-foggy all day and just before I left at 4, the sun came out for a peak and this shrimp boat sort of appeared out of no where. I thought, if I squint my eyes, it could pass for a pirate ship but alas, Johnny Depp did not show up. Oh well.

Peanut is still king of the snow

Even though it doesn't snow here. Yesterday was Peanut's 11th birthday so I wanted to post this picture of him in Canada. As I've said before, we got him on Valentine's Day at a pig farm in Slidell, Louisiana. I almost didn't take him home because when I picked him up he was so wiggly and noncompliant unlike his wiry haired sister, who, I was 5 seconds away from putting in my backpack and running off with after we had already paid for our new disobedient, new shoe eating puppy. He sort of chose MrPea, even though today he has an "I love you/I'm ignoring you unless you have food or something I need," attitude towards the both of us(but especially MrPea). He doesn't listen. He'll run out the door if you leave it open. He steals unattended food. He likes destroying crumpled up paper. He enjoys dismembering and disemboweling his toys. He likes to hunt lizards in a creepy, stalkerish manner. He also begs shamelessly and sticks his face in everyone's food. But still, we'll keep him around a little while. He's our old man of the house.....


I have nothing interesting to post as nothing interesting has happened lately. Well, no, there are a couple noninteresting but noteworthy things I can tell you peeps.

-Two days ago I was wearing a short skirt and teeshirt. This morning our temperature was 43. How the hell is that possible?

-Last week MrPea talked me into buying some really highheeled snakeskin(faux,mind you) peep toe shoes. I'm loathe to admit that I loveth them. But my goal was to find warm shoes. I did not accomplish this goal because I hated everything else in that store that looked remotely warmish. And there they were beckoning me. But I've decided to return them. I already feel jealous of whoever's going to buy them. I feel like I need to take a picture of them before I bring them back. Is that sick or what?

Sorry that's all I have for you guys as I'm all blahhged out. Give me something to blog about peeps. Ask me something, I'll tell you. As it is, life is blissfully quiet right now and I find myself in hibernation mode with the drop in temperature. No shark teeth either, the wind is damp and cold. Maybe next week.

Feedback Please!!

I'm not so sure I'm crazy about the new look over here but I needed a change. Please give me some feedback guys and let me know if it shows up well or if I should lose all these colors and get with a more simple palette. Even if I don't hear from any of you peeps, I might just change it all up anyway. I am keeping my header no matter what. I'm just not so sure about keeping a template that forces me to have the same color for my header and post font.

Tuesday Confession

I have been eating chocolate covered popcorn nonstop for 5 days now. Yesterday I ran an extra half mile just so I could eat a bigger chunk of chocolate covered popcorn when I got home. I hate sweets but I do this every winter with the chocolate. Why?


Last week I had a Doctor appointment. I got bullied into agreeing to having a body scan this January. Well I wasn't really bullied, she just told me that this would be a yearly thing until every body scan in a row for 3 years showed up clean. This means I could possibly have another radioiodine situation which depresses me just thinking about because of how badly it was all coordinated last year. I talked with her about how angry I still was about all the scheduling problems, the no return my phone calls, the letting me know about my appointment the day before, making appointments without asking me first, me being off my meds for 6 weeks instead of the 2 that I was promised which resulted in my being extremely and unnecessarily ill and sore for a month and a half, etc etc. She said she'll give me her cell phone number so that if this happens I can reach her directly but I have a feeling it will all be the same story. Everyone gets treated this way by their healthcare providers when we have a for-profit-system so I don't see why I would get any better treatment just because I'm bitching about it now. Plus even she knows it's a possibility otherwise, why would she try to make me feel better by giving me her number. I have a feeling it won't come to that though. I mean, I've had radiation twice. Most people with my problem only need it once. I'm preparing for the worst though because my tumor was the size of a friggin banana. That way I won't be disappointed if they still find some left over cancer cells. I told her I wanted to get it all done ASAP so I could get it over with. She said January, which I'm wondering if it really means February since that's when it all went down last time. If you were around back then, you'll remember I snuck in an old phone so I could post. What I didn't post was that they were working on the fire alarm system and it was going off every hour from 11pm until 6am. The food was puke on a plate and my view was a brick roof. I took so many showers and drank so much damn water, forcing myself to pee as much as I could(that brings your radioactive level to safer levels so you can go home), that's why I got out of there in 24 hours. I'm doing it in a different hospital this time. I wish you guys could have seen my room when I left. They tape paper on the floor and everything in the room except the bed and in the bathroom they use latex to cover anything that might be touched except for the shower. The water facets look like they are giving you the bird because they used latex gloves. It was a primary election day so I decided to write Barack! all over everything in the room. Every nurse that came in said," bay- rack? what's that honey?" At around 2am when I gave up on getting any sleep because the effing alarms were going off, I started writing stupid stuff like,"Help me help me. They told me I was a mental patient...I just thought I was Elvis...they are keeping me against my will. Can I have some Cheerios please?"Anyway, at least I'll be left alone until after Christmas....


BTW Did anyone watch Charlie Brown last night?

(I hate)Shopping for winter clothes

I've been busy lately. Instead of posting like a good blogstress, I have been at the mall looking for warm clothes to wear until Spring. I loathe winter clothes. I've already told ya'll this. I hate long sleeves, they make me feel like I'm in jail. I hate tights, they itch. I hate hats, I'm vain about my hair. I hate gloves, they make my hands sweat. I hate scarves, it feels like a noose. I hate jackets, they are heavy and once you get to your destination you have to drag it around all over the damn place. And most of all I hate pants. Yes, even jeans, the staple must have in every person's wardrobe. But the biggest of my many reasons I hate shopping for jeans/pants can be seen here:

Looks like a nice little outfit right? Navy cardigan, nice fitting jeans.....

Until you scroll down. I'm not a big fan of paying for new jeans and then having to pay even more to get them tailored.

I did end up getting the cardigan but not the jeans. I hate cardigans too but, like I said, I'm not going through another winter feeling like slouchy smurf. I heard about another store nearby that does free alterations. I'll probably go there this weekend.

I'm still looking for the shoes. I might get these for walking just cuz' I'm beginning to feel like a girl Jerry Sienfeld in my old Nikes. I'm just not crazy about the price so let me know if you guys see anything similar for less. I'm also still looking for some boots that don't make my legs look like two stumps.....