Bare asses and an exploded car...

Today marks the 5th year since my mother passed away.

I've been moping around the house all day, as melancholic and weepy as the year before and the year before that, and truth be told, I just ate a whole pot of macaroni and cheese...out of the pot...like a broken hobo...I hope I don't pass out from a sodium overdose before I finish this post.

Anyway, I thought maybe I should torture myself (as I do every year around this time) and go through some family photos/mementos. I was glad to find a few photos that I had never seen of my mom in the early 70s and I was also happy to find some photos of a male stripper giving my mother a lap dance in the 80s.

*If you are averse to male, hairy butts, scroll down very fast to pass the pictures below*



The story here is not so much that my mother had a stripper at her party because hey, it was the eighties and hairy male strippers were all the rage.

No, the story here is what happened 20 years later when these pictures first came to my attention.

A few years ago, when I was still living in Queens, my stepmother gave me a big can of old family photos that she had found in the basement of my childhood home. My mother had already passed away by this time but I still had her car, which my poor husband had to move several times during the week for alternate side of the street parking because I didn't have my license yet. I hadn't looked at the pictures--it was too difficult--so they basically lived in my mother's car for months.

So one day I came home and sat down by the window to have a cigarette. As soon as I put the ashtray on the windowsill, there was a loud boom that shook the house and knocked the ashtray out the window. This was all post 911 so of course I imagined bombs dropping and buildings collapsing. When I went outside to investigate, I saw my neighbors (about 100 more than I thought I had) standing outside looking around all puzzled. There were a few roads in front of my apartment complex that were pulled up and broken. It turned out that Con Edison, the main electric company in NYC, had accidentally triggered an underground explosion that caused all the manhole covers within a 6-10 block radius to go shooting up in the air! I had no idea where my husband had parked the car but I thanked my lucky stars that it wasn't parked in front of the apartment complex where the roads and several parked cars had been damaged.



The next day we headed out to the laundromat but when we turned the corner, we saw my mother's car sitting in the middle of the street, windows shattered, glass everywhere. I screamed and ran towards the car--The police had left a mini police report/note on the windshield since they didn't know who the car belonged to. I was in total shock.

Pretty soon, the people on that block started to make their way to the car to tell me that they had seen the car go up in the air and come crashing down--unfortunately, my husband had parked it over a manhole cover--what are the odds? As people came closer and looked in the car, I realized that there were a million pictures of a hairy, bare ass all over the car seats. I looked like a complete pervert. It was one of the funniest, strangest things that could have happened. I guess you had to be there to appreciate the awkwardness of it all...but my neighbors did look at me differently after that incident.

Anyway, here's to the male stripper from the 80s with the hairy buns!

and p.s: miss ya ma!

New Zazzle store up and running! yay!

My Zazzle shop features new Halloween designs--I will be adding more designs in the days and months to come. Check it out:


buy unique gifts at Zazzle

Catching up--not that anyone reads this anyway...

So it's September.

This year just flew by. It feels like only yesterday I was posting on this blog.

Since my last post in April, several things have happened.

First, my aeroponic garden had to be euthanized. Everything was growing beautifully when all of a sudden things took a turn for the worse and everything shriveled up and died--that is, everything except my tomato plant. This evil tomato plant grew to several feet in height and I think it basically hogged all the nutrient solution and sucked the life out of the other plants. Unfortunately, the tomato plant thrived but never flowered--so I supposed I was missing something or my solution's PH was off. In any event, I finally pulled the plug a few months ago and will try again this winter.

In the meantime, I built an outdoor balcony garden and my cucumber plant is a monster!


Secondly, I ended up shutting down my website since things are bad financially and I didn't have any time to maintain it. I have been doing a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet and I've even done some freelance writing through Elance. I plan to put my site back up by next year but who knows, we'll see. In the meantime, I created an Etsy shop and plan to sell odds and ends on there. My shop is located at: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=8083440 and of course, I can be contacted through this blog. Hit me up!

Thirdly, I'm amazed at how prophetic my mini essay about the state of health care was and I'm glad that we're on the verge of finally getting some kind of health care reform. I need a check up. Like so many other Americans, I only go to the doctor when I need a prescription for my allergy medication or when I get sick. I have put doctor and dentist visits off and I have slept through painful toothaches; as an American living in 2009, this is absurd! I'm really hoping for change.

Until next time.

(Who am I talking to? Nobody reads this!)

Garden Update

My seeds are germinating nicely and there are sprouts everywhere --The tomato plant (pictured below) is several inches tall after only 10 days!



The cucumber & pepper seeds were not germinating so I replanted them and hope they will sprout quickly.

So far so good :)

Health insurance mafia looking to expand...

After reading an article entitled "U.S. health insurance mandate gains support" I sat open jawed in front of my laptop for several minutes thinking how this corporate segment could be so bold.

The article talks about [supposed] growing support for insurance industry demands that all Americans be forced to obtain health coverage. Yes, insurance companies want to push legislation that enhances their profits and further enslaves the American public. What else is new?

Of course, they present themselves as being concerned for the well being of Americans by implying that a mandate would mean everyone would have health care and blah blah blah. The truth of the matter is that Americans don't have health insurance because they can't afford it so making it a requirement like car insurance, would put those people who already can't afford the wildly outrageous health insurance premiums further into a hole. With such a system, not only would the uninsured not be covered, they would probably be fined or punished in some way for going against the coverage requirement.

If health insurance companies were really trying to be helpful, they would drastically reduce their rates, they would cover anyone and everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions or circumstances, and they would return a portion of the unused payments to the insured every month. How awful it is to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars every year without receiving any kind of credit or refund when most of the time the health services are used only a handful of times. But making the changes I mentioned above would bring the health insurance mafia to a screeching halt and they would never let that happen; after all, entire careers have been created around the health insurance industry and that would be the main justification for not implementing changes that benefit all Americans.

Fairness and humanity often take a back seat to money and power and this is very apparent in the health insurance system of the United States. This is why it pisses me off BIG TIME.

My homespun Aeroponic Garden...

About 2 weeks ago, I stumbled upon the subject of "hydroponics," or growing plants in water instead of soil, and it really tickled my brain. So looking around online (on mostly weed growing sites), I found out as much as I could about setting up a hydroponic system. Then, I discovered aeroponics and decided this was the system for me. The basic concept behind aeroponics is that plants are grown in air instead of water and are gently misted every so often with nutrient rich water. Aeroponic sysytems sell for hundreds and thousands of dollars and the most common one is the tabletop AeroGarden which has gained popularity in recent years.

There are many resources online that show you how to set up a DIY aeroponic system. One good site is this blog. where an aeroponics enthusiast created her own DIY system for about $100. I read up on the subject and finally ordered my stuff and set it all up today. I'm hoping it works because all of my previous (traditional) gardening attempts have been unsuccessful. I've planted 5 different vegetables and 1 herb and the total cost of this system has been about $125 so far.

What I like about aeroponics is that a) you can grow vegetables all year round; b) it's fairly easy to maintain; c) it's small enough to fit comfortably in my kitchen which is good since I don't have a backyard; and d) it works for almost everyone. Best of all, it's a different way of gardening and anyone who knows me knows I'm always drawn to different ways of doing things :).

To learn more about aeroponic gardening, click here

My next project will probably be constructing a DIY solar panel to power this system. I found a good resource here.

Me...

I'm an unknown and unappreciated artist from Queens, NY currently living in the strange mountains of Pennsylvania. I'm married and I have 3 cats that I've progressively inherited over the course of 5 years.

I dabble in a little bit of everything; I paint when I'm able to and I watch many informational videos online. I also routinely participate in the development of my father's inventions and I am extremely interested in any kind of home spun technology such as DIY aeroponic gardens and DIY solar panels that can help me become a little more self sufficient. I love oldies music and classic flicks; I absolutely adore Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Elvis Presley, and the many other legends of the past; I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons; I thoroughly enjoy TV Court shows and British TV; I'm easily addicted to sites like Facebook, Ebay and Fora.tv; and I'm on a never-ending mission to get organized.

So that's me.