There is a woman in our neighborhood who has a sporty little convertible, a young child and rents a house with a roommate. All wonderful and normal things.

Where I find issue is in her choice of license plate. As she is not married, I can only assume she chose the plate herself…

SXY MILF

Yes, you read correctly, MILF, as in “Mother I’d Like to F**k”, the phrase made so popular by the character Stifler in American Pie.

Imagine having to tell your 11-year-old son what that plate means.

ACK!

So tell me, what vanity plates, inappropriate or otherwise, have you seen lately?

Being a musician (not a practicing one at this time, but a musician none-the-less) I pretty much have music going through my head all the time. Snippets of things I hear on the radio, things I’ve played in the past, scales and arpeggios, fingering excercises, ornamentation, made up crap. You name it, it runs around in my head. Add it to the rest of the crap up there and you have a veritable junk yard of creative schmutz.

Usually I have songs stuck in my head first thing when I wake up. Or sometimes things are on a loop playing for hours in the background of everything I do. I’ll find myself humming it in the shower or singing lyrics as I work or drive.

You may think this is not so odd, that I probably just heard the song just before I fell asleep or as I was waking up. But I don’t listen to mainstream radio very often. I normally listen to NPR news and classical music or WRFG blues and talk. So tell me, where does this list come from???

• Overkill – Men at Work
• One Donut a Day – Hoops & Yoyo (yes the greeting card cartoons)
• Accidentally in Love – Counting Crows
• Harry Potter Theme – John Williams
• Orinoco Flow – Enya

That was all I remember for first thing in the morning this week. There were others swimming around during the day while working, but I can’t remember what they were. I’m going to start writing them down, though.

I also make up a lot of songs. Mostly about stupid people and the stupid things they do. Or songs for the silly dogs who are always under foot around here. Sometimes songs just to make munchkin or hubby laugh.

Add this to the fact that hubby, munchkin and I are always playing with the lyrics of songs. Most notably Diary of Jane is now Diarrhea Jane and the chorus of Hey There Delilah is “ooo watching people pee”. What can I say, I’m surrounded by boys!

So I thought I might start posting my weekly playlist, or soundtrack if you will, of songs only I can hear. Every Monday, sometime during the day, I will put up my list of songs I remember throughout the week. Feel free to chime in with your own weekly soundtrack.

I can’t be the only one afflicted by this… can I?

I’ve been putting off writing a post for the past week. Why you ask? Because I can’t decide what I want to write about. It’s not so much writer’s block as it is writer’s avalanche. There are so many things going on inside my head I don’t know where to start. It’s looking like my house in there. Piles of crap everywhere. Pretty soon you’ll have a butt-load of posts to read.

I apologize in advance.

Today I’ll start here: Why can’t the baggers at the grocer’s bag correctly any more?

I mean REALLY?!?!

I bring my own reusable bags when I shop (unless I need a few extra small trash bags, then I let them use their plastic ones.) Halfway through my order I notice the bagger was using plastic bags. I asked why and was told he ran out of room in the reusable ones. I had 6 of them. Did I really buy that much?? I bought a lot, but having been a bagger, I knew I could get most of the stuff into my bags, with a couple plastic for the milk and cold stuff.

When I get out to the car I see why he ‘ran out of room’. One reusable bag had a pint of ice cream, a can of green beans, a bottle of spicy mustard and a box of au gratin potatoes. That’s all.

WTF???

The next bag had a multi-pak of individual bags of chips (with its own convenient carrying handle) and two boxes of Little Debbies.

?!?!

Next up a plastic bag with a gallon of ice cream.

Another plastic bag with an avocado, soy sauce and raspberries.

One of my favorites, a reusable bag with corn on the cob on the bottom, bananas on top of that, 2 boxes of Little Debbies, 3 ready-to-eat lunches and bread.

My other favorite, reusable bag with blackberries on the bottom, a ready-to-eat lunch and a gallon size bottle of car wash on top.

Yes, the berries were a little mussed. Hubby said I should have gone back and pointed it out the fact the grocery had apparently negleted teaching the baggers how to properly build a bag, but at that point I just wanted to get home.

>(

So here I sit, fuming for the past few hours about how the baggers have no idea what they are doing.

And realizing I have, unfortunately, gotten old.

I’ve been really tired lately and most of it is self-induced. I “discovered” Facebook about a month ago.

Now, when I say I “discovered” Facebook, it does not mean I did not know it existed until a month ago (if that were the case it would be quite a large and distant rock I had been living under.) What it means is I joined Facebook. And it has become somewhat of an obesession.

When I moved back home 5 years ago, I sort of wanted to reconnect with my former life. I don’t know why. High school and college really weren’t my “glory days”, but I had a few good friends whom I wanted to reconnect with. I contacted my high school alumni society. They hired me as the director of development to entice more alumni to join. It didn’t work out. We mutually agreed to split. It appears I am not the only one to whom “glory days” does not mean high school.

But while I was working this job, I joined Classmates.com and Reunion.com. Yikes! Useless, unless you pay to post and email each other. And the level of security is entirely too high! “If you want to contact this person, please send a message here, but don’t include your email address or we will block you. If you are having a class reunion, please post details here, but only one class per post, you can’t send to all alumni… forget homecoming plans! Oh, and you must be the president of your class or appointed by the president to send this info.” GAH!

I don’t use those anymore.

Next was MySpace. I joined this a little over a year ago. I have a few friends and family who ONLY use this as a means to keep in touch. Unfortunately, I consider it more of the trailer park of the online communities. Many people decorate their pages much like those who put plastic flamingoes, bathtub Madonnas and reflecting balls in their front yards (along with junkyard dogs lying around, a burn pile, a mountain of drink cans and boxes and a few broken lawnmowers to add to the mystique.) I did the same.

Then I was reading Karen Cheng one day. She has this thing she does where she takes pictures of herself in a mirror when she is out and about, or trying on new clothes and/or accessories, visiting with friends, whatever. It became a phenomenon and people started emulating her and sending their versions to her. I did it for Mother’s Day this year.

She started a Facebook group and people around the world have been posting. I thought I’d join just to see what people would send.

But I couldn’t leave a blank page up. What if I have friends who are here? They wouldn’t know if it was me and it would not be nice to make them send a message asking, “Are you the Colleen I went to high school/college/worked with?” So I added my Karen Cheng-esque image… and a little info about me… and a few more images… and some applications… and hubby joined… and he added some applications… and some people I work with have been there for years and added me as a friend… and high school friends found me… and college friends found me… and work friends found me… and I found Scrabbulous… and lost Scrabbulous… and found Wordscraper… and Pokey… and Doctor Who… and pieces of flair.

I could go on. But I’ve gone on enough, and I’m jonesing for Facebook. Though I should probably wakeup the sleeping monsters and feed them. We were going to go hiking and swimming today, but I don’t think they have Facebook at the park…

God, I can’t believe it’s August already. Where has the time gone. Munchkin is back in school, 6th grade. A big fish this year. Hopefully he’ll take to it well.

Anyhoo… here is the calendar page for this month. Look at me getting it out on time. Amazing! (Gotta love the pre-scheduling feature!)

 This is munchkin with his Tae Kwon Do instructor, Mr. Church. He had just gotten his black belt. YAY, I’m the mom of a black belt! Now he’s Level 3 black belt. He’s taking a little time off from classes (he needed a break as did our bank account). We should be back once we get school under control again. Plus we’ve decided we’d also like to take guitar lessons (go figure). So it looks like a busy schedule coming up soon.

Enjoy the calendar! Looks like I’ll be using mine a lot more real soon…

I used to want to be a writer. I used to want to be a lot of things along the way in my 40 years of being on the planet. Let’s review those things:

• A ballerina
• An equestrian
• An accountant
• A writer (newspaper, magazine)
• A musician
• A caterer
• A music librarian
• A music transcriber (electronically)
• A computer geek (for lack of a better term)
• Creator of table tents, menus, etc.
• Music teacher (marching band)
• Web designer

Wow, that’s quite a list! I have actually done a few of those things, plus some others that aren’t listed. I count myself lucky that I am doing one of the things on my list right now. Working as a project manager for a food and beverage, wine and spirits marketing company, I am fulfilling the table tents, menus, etc. desire. It’s great! It’s not always graphic design, but I get to do it some! And I am working on websites on the side sometimes. So it’s all good.

Except I miss music, and I miss writing.

I made a promise to myself, hubby and munchkin that I would do more with music this year. I have my flute, piccolo, Irish flute, penny whistle, Chinese flute, recorder, bagpipes, bowed psaltry, keyboard, and 3 guitars to choose from. To be fair, one guitar is hubby’s and two are munchkins, but they add to the mix of items to choose from. All these, and I’ve picked up 2 instruments a couple of times.

Pathetic.

I vow to do better. One of the blogs I read, Karen Cheng’s Snippets of Life, Karen updates her New Year’s list every month. I thought it was a good idea, so I’ll try it. Starting in August I will post my list for the year and see where I am so far. I’ll warn you now, I haven’t accomplished much on it, so don’t expect greatness.

Another thing I wanted to start doing was write more. Well that starts now. I have been reading many blogs of late. They have been fantastic (as far as I’m concerned.) I will list them all over there to the right in the blogroll, so look for them and visit them. You’ll get a chuckle from some, a bit of knowledge from others, and a window to the arts in yet others. Enjoy.

Having read these blogs, it makes me heartily miss writing. Hence “Well that starts now” up there a few lines ago. I am going to write more often. Period. And you can’t stop me. I can stop me (and hopefully I won’t), but you can’t. This is my soapbox and I can write about anything, anyway, anytime.

So I hope you come to visit and see what I’m up to. I hope I’m more entertaining from here forward than I have been in the past. Drop me a line and let me know. I’ll also be doing a little more with the site design as time permits, so watch for little things.

Here’s to writing!

In addition to our regular work this past week, we also held our Brand Week. “What is Brand Week?”, you ask. Well, I’ll tell you.

During Brand Week, my company invites the appropriate sales rep of various spirits companies, wineries and even non-alcoholic beverage companies. These reps are given an hour of our time to present their companies and products to us, let us know what their main focus is for the year, and ask us a little about what we have going on with our clients. Then comes the hard part…

Trying the product! It is gruelling having to sit in a room with multiple bottles of wine, a myriad of rainbow colored spirits, various juice mixers and have to methodically work through them all. Because you can’t sell something well without at least trying it once. Or twice (if you like it).

I jest. It isn’t really that gruelling. We only had one day that was a little trying. We had back to back to back to back tastings. One of these was what we lovingly called “power-tasting”. We had something crazy like 15 wines we tried all in about a 20 minute timeframe. Luckily most of the wines were pretty good.

Shoot me an email and I’ll let you know some of the better wines, spirits and mixers we tasted. No advertising here. Don’t want to put anyone in an awkward position.

This past week was VERY long. I’ve been working in my new position for a couple of weeks now and was starting to get a handle on all the small steps it takes to take, for example, a menu from conception to the book you hold in your hand when you go to the restaurant. Or a list of items made into a door hanger in a casino hotel. I got to sit in on my first brainstorming session a couple of weeks ago for an entire year’s worth of beverage promotions. New stuff! Fun stuff! Creative stuff!

 Now I know it won’t always be fun or creative. I will have to do billing/accounting things. Drumming up funds for a promotion here, a menu printing there. But right now it is all new, shiny, glossy… even the boring accounting part.

So imagine my disappointment when this past week I was stuck doing the same old stuff I was doing before the promotion. I know it was/is (for I’m still not done) great experience working on a large trip (this is for a meeting, but future ones may be educational or incentive). But none of it is new to me. I finally decided that it might behoove me to ask about the behind the scenes part of the meeting. How the accounting works, do we request funding for them, all of the financial matters are really foggy to me.

I know food and beverage in the meeting rooms and for main meals needs to be worked out. However, having been an admin for the Director of Catering for Gaylord Palms as well as admin for Catering and Convention Services for Wyndham Orlando Resort gave me more exprience than I could hope to get where I am now, so that won’t be anything I’ll need.

This project will be over in about a week, though. So I’ll just have to get through it and get back to the shiny, new stuff afterwards.

The back deck is done! YAY We were able to almost double the size of the deck we had before. We replaced the table, chairs and umbrella. We haven’t replaced the window boxes or the tiki torches, though I do have some nice glass oil lamps that are filling the void quite nicely. So here I sit with the laptop surrounded by the singing of crickets typing away. I’m so happy! Pictures coming soon…

So I just finished reading A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon, and as she hasn’t completed the next book in the series, and I haven’t started reading her Lord John series, I am pondering actors for the characters. Mind you, I don’t really want the books turned into a mini-series or a movie series, but when I’m reading, I tend to put people I know in the roles.

So, for the role of Claire, to date has been my sister because she is a doctor. All well and good, but other than that she doesn’t fit the role. As for looks, to a certain extent my manager Macayla fits the description. Her hair is not as wavy as Claire’s seems to be, and I don’t think Claire has the Native American look Macayla’s features have, but the EYES must be a perfect match for color.

The role of Roger to this point has been my brother in law. Because of the general dark hair coloring and the singing and guitar abilities he possesses. But for some reason, as I was watching David Tennant (of Doctor Who, Harry Potter fame) earlier, I was thinking he might be a good fit. I just think he needs to put on a bit of weight beforehand, but a pretty good fit none the less.

I have not really thought much of the other characters… Jamie is just an entity to himself. I haven’t seen anyone who could pull of that character. Brianna, occasionally myself, only for the motherhood and the being good with her hands. I’m not as engineering blessed as she is, but I could hold my own if needed. But I don’t know who might play her.

Raymond, the froggy guy from France who deals in the occult and is possibly the same person who talks the kids from the 60′s into “travelling” could maybe be the guy who plays Peter Pettigrew from Harry Potter, Timothy Spall, or maybe Wallace Shawn of The Princess Bride.

 As for the other characters, Lord John, Frank Randall/Black Jack Randall, and the others, I need to think some more. Glad I don’t work in casting!!! (as I’m sure are the actors )