The knock on my head apparently killed some brain cells, too, ’cause words, thoughts, ideas…I don’t have them tonight.  I’m stealing an idea from MommyByDay and just posting a picture.  Or two.

These were the greatest jeans ever.  Unfortunately, this picture is eight years old, so even if I could remember the brand and style, I’m sure they don’t make them anymore.  Too bad.

Here’s Mom playing Marine:

I wouldn’t say no to this view from my window.

Or this one.

Well, that’s enough.  Gotta give Roxy her medicine and go to bed.  Off to the busy life I lead…

End of public service announcement.

Check this out – my favorite books combined with one of my favorite movies.  Thanks, Jenny!

I have to admit, I didn’t clean out my closet.  I looked through it, realized I really do wear most of what’s hanging in it, and got rid of one shirt.  Most of the clutter in there is made of shoes, totes, and random small overnight bags.  It was too intimidating over the weekend.

Tonight is about Chinese food (Jess, we chose Chinese!  I know how much you care…) and one of the movies from the DVR.  I’m so ready to be lazy this weekend.  Except for the closet cleaning, of course.

Okay, maybe this is going to be a little bit of a vacation post.  I was reading The Bloggess just now, and of course I’m laughing hysterically at today’s post (that should totally go without saying), and I had a similar experience over the weekend, and then I started writing the story in my head, so here it is.

Background: My family (Mom, Dad, brother, sister, me, assorted spouses, and one almost 5-year-old) decided to stay in a cabin in the mountains in northwest Georgia for a few days.  In the mountains.  In the woods.  Not in a clearing in the woods.  In the woods.  With me?  Okay.  ‘Cause this will become important.  John and I were supposed to arrive just before midnight Friday night (fly into Atlanta, rent a car, drive an hour and a half), but our flight was delayed (a lot) and then, only about 7 miles from the place, the road was blocked by a police cruiser because the power company was removing a tree from the power lines.  After about 20 minutes of sitting there (no map, no Internet connection to find a map), I finally asked the cop if there was another way to get where we were going.  There was, of course, and we finally got to the house.  In the woods.  At about 2:30 in the morning.  Oh, after we pulled into the wrong driveway.  ‘Cause it was a gravel road that was more of a track up the mountain.  In the very deepest dark.  Because it was in the woods!  And the power was out.  Dad met us at the right driveway with a flashlight and helped us get inside (where there were no lights, because the power was out) and find our bedroom.  With a flashlight.  Because there was no power.  Being up the mountain meant we were using well water, which gets into the house via pump.  Which totally doesn’t work when there’s no power.  So, you know, no flushing.  And bottled water for brushing teeth and washing faces and hands.  NO POWER!  But we were ready to collapse into bed (a bed we never collapsed into again after that night – I promise I’m getting to the point) when the power came back on, and so did every light in the house.  Anyway, most of that background was not really necessary, but let’s just say it illustrates how tired and ready for bed we were the next night, having only gotten about 5 hours of sleep the night before.

I was washing my face in the bathroom when I heard a very loud, somewhat shocked “JESUS CHRIST!” from the bedroom.  I came running and found John standing about three feet away from the foot of the bed, kinda pointing towards the pillow.  “There’s a scorpion.  IN the bed.”  “Can’t be.  Scorpions don’t live in Georgia, they live in Texas and New Mexico and deserts and stuff.”  “Zannah, it was a scorpion.  Go look.”  “Um, no.”  He twitched the covers a little and I saw something scurry under his pillow.  I got a little closer and saw it come out from under the pillow and go upside down under the mattress.  Kinda looked like a scorpion to me, but I wasn’t about to get close enough to really look.  Besides, it couldn’t be.  Either way, though, I didn’t want it in the bed.  John was pretty freaked out, and I wasn’t brave enough to get it, so I ran upstairs and grabbed Corey before he disappeared into his room.  Normally, I’m the one who finds the big ugly bug, and I’m the one who completely freaks out.  John walks into the situation knowing what to expect (I’ve already shrieked about the bug), so he’s usually able to handle it fairly calmly.  This time,  he was the one who found it after nearly LAYING DOWN ON TOP OF IT, so I think he was well within his rights to be a little less than rational.  Anyway, big brother came down, we both grabbed shoes, and I helped him lift up the mattress so he could WHACK the damn thing dead.  And then he put it in a plastic bag to show every person who came to the house over the next few days.  ‘Cause he’s a boy.  Thanks, Cor, for killing the scorpion!  After Corey left (with the scorpion, which he left on the table for everyone to find at breakfast), John and I discussed whether or not we’d be able to sleep in that bed.  I was actually fairly okay with it, I think because I’m not the one who found it, whereas all those other times I have been the one surprised by the spider or the centipede, I can’t sleep because of all the creepy-crawly nightmares.  According to John, that kind of inconsistency is one of my most endearing (or is that infuriating?) qualities.  Anyway, we did a thorough search of the room and the bed, checked all of the blankets, all of the sheets, took the pillows out of the pillowcases so we could shake them out, lifted up the mattress again, looked under the bed with the flashlight, then checked the drooping fabric underneath the box spring just in case they were nesting (isn’t that something you’ve heard of?  A nest of scorpions?  Maybe that’s vipers…), and when we didn’t find anything, we decided it was time to go to bed.  Gingerly.  And without much sleep.  Every night after that, we did the same bed check.

After the scorpion IN THE BED, the spiderwebs that apparently only took 10 minutes to string up across every doorway and sidewalk, and the millipede on the wall over our bed the last night (I called Dad to rescue us from that one), John and I have decided that although we like the idea of having a house in the woods, the woods will totally have to keep their distance.  Nature (the buggy part, at least) is not for me.

(I counted six, which I totally (seven) put in on purpose.  For reals.  Think I can go higher next time?)

I’m wearing my glasses today instead of my contacts, and my eyes have been sending signals to the sleep centers of my brain for hours now (“No contacts! That means it’s bed time.  You’re getting very sleepy…”), but I’m fighting the urge to nap.  It’s too late in the day for that.  Perfect time for a walk, though.

I’m all packed and ready to go.  I will be away from the Internet for four whole days.  And somehow, what with the family and the hiking and the swimming and the tubing and the horseback riding, I think I’ll manage.

Have a wonderful weekend, everybody!

From Nancy Nall’s post today, I found (and came late to the party, apparently, but that’s not unusual for me) I Write Like, which supposedly compares your writing samples to those of famous authors.  I plugged in a blog post from a week ago or so, and found that

Well, that’s pretty cool, but maybe it’s because I just finished reading an Agatha Christie mystery.  So I plugged in a different blog post and got

I write like
P. G. Wodehouse

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Again, I can live with that.  So I plugged in another post.  Mario Puzo.  Hmm.  Another post: Vladimir Nabokov.  Um, yeah.  So I agree with Nancy – it’s gotta be random.  Fun, but not enlightening.  I googled it and found this from a NYT blog.  End of story, I think.

Zoot alors, I have missed one!

But hey, the withdrawal doesn’t have to start just yet.  My vacation doesn’t start until the weekend.  According to my brain, however, it started around lunchtime today.  Ooh, that reminds me of breakfast today.  A guy on my project won breakfast for the office from Chick-fil-A!  That place might have the best fast food breakfast in the world.  They certainly have the best fast food chicken sandwiches in the world.  And since that’s basically what goes on their breakfast menu, I think they’ve got the breakfast trophy all sewn up.  Which reminds me…I used the phrase “hungry as all get out” the other day, and that made me wonder where “as all get out” came from.  I was driving just then, so I couldn’t google it, and I’ve only just remembered.

[Pause for googling]

Okay, according to one forum, the OED says it was first used in Huckleberry Finn in 1884.  I couldn’t find any other references to the origin of that phrase, and I don’t have access to an OED myself (and I don’t subscribe to OED Online, although maybe I should – mm, no, $30 a month), so I can’t check.  That’s not very helpful.  Maybe I’ll be just fine after a few days without Google.  (Look!  I can tie things together!  (Oh, is it not cool to point that kind of thing out?  Better to be subtle and let others notice on their own?  Oops.  Guess I’m not cool.))