I am such an idiot.

I wish blogs had been around when I was young; back then I wrote a lot - mostly short stories. Of course, I also went through a Nun phase and wanted to cloister myself. Go figure.

I took one college comp course and though I did well -an A and a personal kudo from the prof- I was bored. In class we wrote by rote, framed by form. Anyone could follow the guidelines; I wanted to tell stories as well as Pat Conroy. Capture the reader’s attention, draw them in; if possible elicit as passionate a response in them as I’d experienced in the writing.

But I couldn’t write like Pat, so I stopped writing at all… and now, recognition dawns thirty years later that I might have cheated myself out of a different sort of future… Why can’t people have epiphanies younger in life?

The moral of the story? You can’t be Pat Conroy or Mother Theresa. But you can be your personal best, and that will be good enough; hell, that just might be great.

I forgot it was WW! Just beat, I guess.

This is the new WordPress Gallery option. If the pictures in the Gallery change, do the pictures on this page change as well? We shall see…

I love my planet as much as the next woman, and would happily refrain from using poisons to do my dirty work… IF I could find ecologically friendly solutions to my problems! I know the pesticides and weed killers run off into the drinking water and pollute the environment, but sometimes there’s no other choice.

The previous owners of this house ran a landscaping business and made a lot of ‘improvements’ designed for curb appeal right before selling to us. Meaning, there are multiple -large- rock beds and the back yard is roughly 80% covered with pavers.

The rock beds and their plantings may look nice from the street, but they’re a nightmare to keep weed free, not to mention the shoots pushing their way through the pavers… so after months of trying to keep the worst of it at bay I broke down this morning and drove to Home Depot for Round-Up. This place reeks of the stuff now, but already the weeds are giving up their little lives so that we may live a more a more orderly one without them. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be perfectly happy to abandon the place to weeds; you oughta see my lawn. Just don’t care… but they don’t belong in amongst the rocks and must be eradicated.

Now that I’ve done my bit to pollute my parcel of land, I have to go back out and trim some trees. The yard work, she is never finished in south Florida, where nothing ever dies unless you spray the crap out of it!

As an aside, I did google ‘eco friendly weed management’. Know what came up first? GOATS!

The Sims 2 is a guilty pleasure, and since my husband installed a new video card in this machine two days ago I’ve done little else besides manipulate my simulated babies. Exercising my executive privilege as supreme being in their little lives down to the tiniest detail and downloading custom content from other sites; it’s all been about them. And their jobs, pets, vacations, hair and clothing.

Not completely OCD, I have actually managed to do laundry and feed myself. Oh, yeah. And the dog.

Hubby, who will someday learn not to upgrade my computer at the risk of losing touch with me, is equally lost. Comparison shopping for a new GPS, we’ve mainly spoken on the phone while he drives to and from work.

Now let’s see… if we were characters in the Sims, what would the player do? Have us die in a house fire, starve us to death a la Bob Newbie or make one us fall for someone else and move out?

Good thing we’re flesh and blood instead of pixels; most of my married sims who lose touch with their mates end up on the couch with the maid.