La Fée Verte

Vicodin fueled mushroomed baby mobiles and an ornery peacock

2013-02-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

I call this one: "I don't know how to ship you". It's my personal favorite.

There is nothing like acute back pain to remind you just how fast one might perish in a zombie apocalypse. Due to a cocktail of terrible LA drivers and ballet, every few years my back will wrench itself into a hunchback-like state that would drive Quasimodo into a jealous rage. I am now on day 5 of my first world hell, and while I feel like I have come a long way from passing out on the bathroom floor at 5 am and ugly-crying (day 1), I am still unable to function without my personal nemesis, pharmaceutical drugs. On the plus side, as I am currently attempting to create a flurry of baby mobiles to sell on Etsy, I now have a valid excuse for a. talking to myself and b. Personifying and naming every woodland creature I have created. Allow me to introduce you:

This is Hedwig. He is practically perfect in every way.

This is Penelope. She has been doing the Tracy Anderson method to overcome her pear shape.

This is Hank, and he isn't allowed in the same room as Hedwig because they bicker. What's that? He doesn't look like a Hank? Well, this is why I'm naming them, and not you.

This is the beginnings of a fairy castle for Hank to throw temper tantrums in.

Some homemade shrooms. I certainly hope mothers-to-be like mushrooms as much as I do, because I made a lot of 'em and these bitches are going everywhere.

Because the real purpose of this post is the hope that someone out there will want to give me money in exchange for these mobiles, here are some photos of the finished products, soon to be expanded once I am no longer in gimp condition. You can find them here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/CassAndMerlune.

No One Cares About Halloween Anymore...

2012-12-13T11:36:00.002-08:00

But I'm going to post about it anyways, because I forgot to 2 months ago, when it would have actually been timely. Behold, this is what takes up my free time from Sept - Oct, and also makes it impossible for me to pee at night without scaring myself shitless. I get asked for pictures of our parties from friends that miss out, or more likely because then it will get me to stop talking about my Halloween decorations, o I'm putting them up here in the off chance that some rich person will come across this site and want to pay me a lot of money to turn their home into a living nightmare. Enjoy!

Hot coals made with fire string lights and spray foam.

Portrait hallway

Jungle bathroom

Another homemade book out of dollar store materials. This one is a tutorial on renting out condos.

More of the jungle bathroom

Aaaand another homemade book.

Dementors!

Overall, I would rate this as kind of a boring entry, and those pictures are terribly out of order, but not much you can do about it now, you're at the end. Special thanks to cousin Herm for taking these pictures, you are the best.

DIY drippy candles, fragrance: melty hair

2012-09-03T17:28:00.002-07:00

After three years of churning out obsessive Halloween parties, I fancied myself a bit of a halloween expert. That is, until I went online and discovered that I'm not an expert at all, other people are and I suck. Seriously, there are some incredible creations out there, and I will be the first to admit that I just do not have the patience nor talent to replicate them. One thing is for sure, I most definitely do NOT scroll through Pinterest and cry myself to sleep every night, calling for Pan to come cuddle with me. That would just be sad, so I only do that on Thursdays.

From halloweenforum.com

However, this DIY is one that I have seen a few different takes on, and actually looks doable, based on my criteria for laziness. Every good haunter knows that candles make or break a place, and after our unfortunate first year in which we lit 2 tables and myself on fire, we stick to mostly electric candles, which typically look ugly as sin:

The DIY ones are from PVC pipes, which unfortunately did not fit my criteria because I would have to put effort into cutting the pipes, and that just ain't happenin. So I found a tutorial for ones that use paper towel rolls and TP rolls, which definitely fit my criteria for free, plus I got the added bonus of getting to dig through the trash (why do I like doing this? Because I feel like a hobo, and sometimes it's very freeing to act like a hobo, until you get hungry). Win win!

Here is what I started with:

I would list everything, but I don't wanna.

Basically, I taped the bottom of the roll, stuck some pebbles in it to weigh it down (just about a half inch or so), then jammed it full of scrap paper.

Then comes the fun part of hot gluing the s%$* out of it. It's not actually fun, but it helps if you tell yourself it is. My one recommendation -- tie your hair back. For the love of God, I should know this by now, but I didn't and I glued my hair together. Oh, and don't put your hands on the roll. I know you want to, but just don't, because you will get an instant second degree burn and scare the s%$* out of your cat with your hollering.

Also, ripping the top part up a bit helps it look more authentic.

Then comes the painting. Everyone said to use spray paint, but like an a-hole, I decided to not listen because I don't have any spray paint. So, here is what happened:

What? This is so ugly. Not to mention the ridiculous looking seams running up the rolls.

So yeah, it turns out that if I had read the directions I would have known cover the rolls up with paper mache or something before I did this, but I don't like to read directions. So then, instead of redoing the project like a normal person, I decided to run out to the hardware store and get these fancy fluorescent bulb covers that one other DIYer had recommended. Yes, this involved actual effort and money, but I was pretty miffed at the TP tubes for jacking up my project so I needed to make them feel inferior.

It was only a couple of bucks, and created about 11 various sized candles.

Cutting was kind of a bitch, and I didn't really think through the part that my cuts weren't perfect, shockingly, so I had to even out quite a few of them.

Follow the same process, tape, pebbles, paper. I want the tealight to be all the way inside so you don't see that uggo fake flame tip, just the flickering light.

Glue it, paint it, and roll it in dirt. Les voila!

My candles, which actually look really crappy when you compare them to the ones at the top.

Some tips -- pick off the small strands of glue before you paint it, because no matter how many times you try to convince yourself, they do not look good. Also, don't get glue in the tube because then you can't fit the candle in. Overall, I'm still feeling some pretty low self esteem because the pictures I see online look AMAZING and mine look kind of, eh, but either way they will look way better than the crappy plastic ones, and they are cheaper to boot. On the plus side, I have decided to mostly forgive the candles made of TP and paper towel rolls, and will paint them black and stick them in the far corner of the graveyard. Where they belong, ingrates.

It's officially time for things to get weird.

2012-08-30T23:02:00.003-07:00

This is what Pan will look like this year, except 400% larger and 200% more pissed.

Every year, we throw a Halloween party, and every year, when I'm cleaning ivy out of our stairwell or finding plastic spiders in our food or even worse, finding a real spider and thinking it's plastic and oh my god that is a mistake I will never make again, I decide that I never want to do Halloween ever again. Spring comes and I am like F*&% no. Summer will roll around and I will be like, nu uh this is not happening, then sometime in August or September I will see something creepy and BAM I am in full-fledged Halloween crazy mode. This year, I can thankfully attribute my Halloween mania to the crafty wonder that is Pinterest, a gigantic 4 foot owl from Home goods, and being unemployed.

I thought this was on the outside of our window, but then I got up really close to it to take a picture and it was actually on the inside of the window and that was the worst. Just the worst. And LOML still refuses to put it outside.

And so it begins -- I will chronicle my descent into madness for the next 2 months. Or at least try to on a somewhat consistent basis. Today began with me getting pissed at LOML for not thinking albino bats are f*&%ing incredible, nearly peeing my pants in the Spirit Halloween store, and while I say that jokingly, I can assure you it came really close once or twice, and desperately wishing that my friend Jen was coming up for Halloween because I think that she would actually pee her pants with one of the props LOML wants to attempt to make.

So far, nothing much to report: I have been trying to talk LOML out of turning the basement into a dungeon because A) that is a lot of work that I don't wanna do and B) I would like to be able to do my laundry without crying. I'll let you know how progress goes, but I'm counting on his laziness to turn the tides my way.

Instead of boring you with more rambling, here are some random pictures, including some of our dollar store finds and my beginning attempts to paint them into something that doesn't look like it came from the dollar store (the whole unemployed thing is really throwing a cramp in my style):

This was seriously at the dollar store, and would you believe that LOML did not want it? Why would anyone not want this?

Clearance! This picture shakes back and forth. I seriously cannot wait.

Dollar store. These are our filler tombstones so the awesome ones don't look so lonely. Good God that sentence makes me sound like a loser.

Fricking amazing dollar store spiders. They are bigger than they look. I wish I could be including some albino bats in these pictures but SOMEONE thinks they are gimmicky and not real. But they are real, because I just googled it. So there.

I saw this at an antique shop last year and thought it would be amazing to put a skeleton in it and why oh why didn't I buy this?

Right. That's why.

Saw this in a mall last year and I have plans to make this my ceiling.

How could I pass this up at the store? Turns out, Witch Hunt is a crappy beer. Lesson learned. Well, not really because I'll probably buy it again because I'm a sucker for witch themes.

Aaand that about wraps up tonight's installment of my crazy. Come back next week for more. Unless I get lazy.

Blackberry Ninja

2011-08-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

7 months ago, as we were moving into our new place, I had a vision of my future summer self, lounging on the hammock with raspberry lemonade made from the fruit I grew as pumpkin vines curled at my feet, ready to do my bidding. However, things don't always turn out the way you want, as evidenced by my cat's complete incompetency at filing taxes. So far this summer, my lemon tree has stopped growing and now has white fuzzy things on it that alarm me, those venomous squirrels have eaten most of our raspberries and strawberries, and I'm pretty sure those white fuzzy things might be alien eggs now that I think about it. Anyways, as anyone know who has eaten fruit straight off the plant/tree/vine, it is about 182 kablillion times better than storebought, and I felt like my dreams were crushed beneath my feet.

Is it just me or does "an asshole" sound wrong? "A asshole" sounds even more not right. Maybe because "asshole" is usually used in the plural, as it is hard to limit yourself to just one asshole? This particular squirrel, however, deserves singling out due to the ridiculous way he is holding the nut. What are we, at a tea party? USE YOUR PINKY FINGER ASSHOLE.

Anyways, my work has a giant blackberry bush that is blooming right by the exit to the parking lot. The thing with this is that people in Oregon treat blackberry bushes like they're a communicable disease and typically don't approach blackberry bushes unless its with a bottle of planticide and full body armor (blackberry plants are very hurty).

If you can believe it, even the LEAVES are painful. Forget chinese water torture, if I ever have to go torturing I will just whack people in the armpits with blackberry branches.

I figured I would stop by one day after work, grab a few berries, and bring them back as a treat for LOML. It was then that I made the fatal mistake of tasting a delicious berry. Flash forward to an hour after work ended and I am manically limping through the bushes (I stepped on a giant thorn because of the hole in the sole of my stupid vegan shoe) with blood all over my hands and scratches on my arms. Every time a car came by I feel the need to duck in the bushes, thereby spilling my blackberries and making me screech insults at anything in the nearby vicinity. I ate berries like I hadn't eaten in a year, and the madness didn't stop until I heard a bear*^,** in the bushes and ran away, screaming like a little girl.

delicious, magical fruit.

So I brought home whatever loot hadn't gone in my mouth and we devoured it in a matter of minutes. The next day, I dragged LOML back there to get more, and we spent another hour, me with a little less enthusiasm as I am never anything but a classy lady in front of LOML. Then two days later I was back again, and now I'm sitting at work wondering how I can slip out and pick berries for an hour without anyone noticing my absence, so this is evidently a new problem for me and I might need an intervention.

Now comes the point in the story where I really don't know how to end this, and all I really want to do is go pick berries and mash them in my face. So I will just wrap this up with a picture of the chicken mask I want to buy.

I could name him Friar Chicken. Get it? Because it's so close to fried chicken? Genius.

*I never actually saw the bear, and LOMLs assertions that there aren't bears in an office park remain unfounded until he can prove to me that there isn't a bear in there.

**Actually, it could have been a vampire, because I did have a lot of blood all over me. Or a shark. Regardless, a hasty retreat probably saved my life.

Old-fashioned green beauty: leeches for the derriere

2011-08-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

Why is it so hard to buy you?

For some reason in the past month I've stumbled across three different articles about all natural beauty treatments from ye olden days. There were a lot of recipes that were really ahead of their times, such an old wrinkle remedy that involved a lead powder concoction (lead poisoning definitely takes the attention away from your crows feet), but the one that tickled my fancy the most was the mention of anal leeching. I do appreciate that back then, women didn't pay $60 for an eye cream to evil salary magnets like Sephora, no, they just whipped up a skin mask with the good ol' arsenic supply from their pantry. But you can't get greener than leeches. Not only is there no packaging to waste, but you are supporting the eco-system by feeding them top-of-the-line human blood, which, according to my vampire book obsession, is so much better than disgusting animal blood. And apparently, the "discreet lady" liked to keep her leeching private, and what better privacy for both her and the leech than to gently guide the creature towards the anus. Apparently this was done for the sake of skin whitening, and I think if these women were to time travel today and see women paying to tan their skin in a machine they would most definitely faint whilst shedding a tear over the indecency of the loose-moraled modern women.

This is also pretty discreet, and with the application of a few well-placed rhinestones could totally be a glamorous earring.

Due to my genes, I think I would have lucked out in the anus department because my morbidly pale complexion is au natural, thankyouverymuch. However, what I am really getting into with this is making your own beauty products, even if google won't let you buy arsenic unless you're in Europe where apparently they don't treat grown ups like they're kids who can't handle a little responsibility around poison, and I am guessing I am now on some kind of flagged list because I just googled "anal leeching for beauty" and "how to buy arsenic" in the past 5 minutes. Bring it on, terrorism unit, I have a ninja cat to defend me*.

Anyways, I remember way back in the day when my friend Courtney and I would make our own beauty concoctions by mixing together everything we found in her bathroom, which surprisingly did not turn out to be all that effective. Nowadays I do more research, if you can define research as "I put it on my face and see if my skin bubbles or not." I've found through various successes and failures that when it comes to kitchen skincare, one should always refer to my life's motto: simpler is better, because when you mix shit together it tends to smell bad and burn you.

In case you care, here are some of my favorites:

1. Olive oil and honey: warm it up and put it in your hair for as long as you can stand to be sticky. Warning -- do not heat up for a minute in microwave and then pour on your head without testing, as it will scald you and you will have to ice your head for at least 2 hours. The benefit is that if it drips in your mouth you can eat it, unless you are allergic to olive oil or honey, in which case you shouldn't do this mask, and you should probably also hate yourself a little because you can never enjoy the wonder that is bruschetta.

I love the presentation here. Usually when I need sugar I get the plastic bag that is gooey from me grabbing it with lotion/soap on my hands, swat away the fruit flies and just cram my hand in there, like a lady.

2. Sugar. You can use this as a scrub for anything and it is awesome and you can eat it. If i'm feeling productive, I will make a mix of this with vanilla extract and whatever oil I can find, but if I'm lazy and heading out and realize that my hands feel more like Gollum than I would care to admit I just squirt on some soap and lotion, grab a handful and 2 minutes later my hands feel less like ass. Warning: do not do this right before a zombie attack. It will make your skin taste much better. I would recommend substituting salt, because I'm sure even zombies worry about their sodium intake, but you would still have the smooth skin necessary for living a life in fear of flesh-eating mutants.

3. My favorite, coconut oil. You can put this shit anywhere. No makeup remover? Done. Shaving cream? No problem. Got your hand stuck in a mason jar trying to get the last chocolate chip that melted onto the bottom? Well, this will only work sometimes, depending on the fatness of your hand and size of the jar, but all I can recommend there is that slamming your hand bottle against a hard surface to break it isn't a good idea either. Anyways, this stuff is amazing and smells like Tahiti and works and lasts forever.

I have plans to phase out my purchases and make all my own skincare, so I will keep you updated on how that is going. When I finally do it. <Cough.>

Side note, I found out that Demi Moore admitted to using leeches. My absolute favorite part of the article is when she says that "These aren't just swamp leeches though - we are talking about highly trained medical leeches." How do the workers at the spa keep a straight face when they tell clients that? I'm picturing Demi in her fancy leech robe drinking spa water as some yokel trudges through the waiting room with swamp boots on slurring "I delivered them leeches ma'am, I was promised some moonshine y'hear?"

I'm willing to bet Swamp Thing preferred to keep his leeching private as well.

*I am now definitely on a black list because I had to google "who will the government send if they think I am going to arsenic a bunch of people", which didn't even come close to giving me a correct answer, until I read this link which let me know that the government will just think I fucking grow chickens and feed them to the population at large, which really should be a whole other blog post because that is crazy and why don't more people know about this?

This chicken likes to grease itself up with coconut oil, lay on the beach, and dream of a time when it wasn't fed arsenic.

A mason jar of green crap

2011-07-14T16:20:00.000-07:00

This is not my personal green juice, but I am entirely too lazy to take a picture, find the thingy that lets me upload it, upload it to iphoto, export it from iphoto, deal with the pressure of naming it god I'm getting stressed just thinking about all this so I stole this picture from another blog. Honestly though, it looks just the same, except typically with me, there will be more green juice on the walls/counter and less in the mason jar.

Reason number one why I need a legitimate smartphone - so I can take pictures and EMAIL them immediately. I am still cursed with a crappy phone that is ignorant to the will of my impatient nature. Anyways, I thought it was about time I posted something about green living instead of pictures of my awesome cat/urine. I decided to take it literally so you are getting something that is both green in color AND in lifestyle, try to contain your excitement.

So every morningish (sometimes I'm lazy and just eat a half a hamburger bun) I whip up either a green smoothie or juice. It takes some time but I'm always happier when I do and it's not really that hard to prepare. If you read other green or raw food blogs, green juice enthusiasts like to boast that it feels like it gives them "superpowers" or that "their cells are brimming with energy" (not an exaggeration.) While I love these people for their naivete when it comes to superpowers, and envy them their ability to find happiness in a smoothie, this is a falsehood. (seriously, you have to EARN superpowers, by being bitten by a spider or coming from another planet or wearing a cape in public without shame. If it were as easy as drinking a beverage with vegetables in it pretty sure I would have the ability to levitate the chocolate chips from the pantry into the living room, or some superpower that's even better than that one because I'm not very creative right now.) But anyways, I feel like these bloggers are giving people a sense of expectation about the juice that isn't very realistic and might also lead to fatalities if people take these exclamations too seriously.

So I'm gonna lay out all the reasons why I think you should all be making green smoothies and I'm going to judge you if you don't:

1. I will judge you if you don't. Seriously, some mornings I cram a solitary bun half into my mouth with shame and try to hide the evidence as quickly as possible, but the mornings I bring a green juice? I take my motherfucking time*. And why? Because I'm better than you people with your egg mc Muffins that contributed 1.5 gallons of cow gas to the ozone.** Or at least that's what I tell myself. You can tell yourself that too, if you start drinking them.

2. Salads are the mother%^&%*ing worst. I hate them. It took me a long time to admit it. They are messy and I always drop lettuce on my lap and they taste like the opposite of pizza, even if its a salad pizza, and don't get me started on those. A few years ago, I got into an all-raw phase where every day for lunch I would eat a giant salad and I would always try to find the magic ingredient that would make me love them, so by the end my salads had avocados, flax seeds, chia seeds, some weird seaweed thing, "raw bacon", and countless other ingredients that raw people try to delude themselves into thinking tastes as good as a hamburger.

This is what raw bacon looks like when it's made well. Mine was not made well. I did, however, grow to like it because I drowned it in salt and liquid smoke.

In short, I never got over hating salads and had a fairly unfortunate reaction from the seaweed. Don't get me wrong, I never felt better after the raw food trial, but if you buy a raw lasagna, that shit does NOT taste like lasagna, despite the blank-eyed protests of the lady behind the counter. But back to the smoothies, you can BLEND in your greens, thereby getting the equivalent (or more) of a salad and you can disguise it with fruit or cocoa powder, which is apparently a health food in the raw community, which almost makes up for that seaweed atrocity.

3. They actually taste good. To me. LOML hates them, but this is a man who would eat a nerds blizzard for breakfast everyday and be perfectly content. But I think once you get the right ratio of veggies/ fruit or find out what you like, you can learn to love them.

4. You really do feel good. Not good enough to perform feats of magic, but better than if you ate a milkshake crammed with candy at 7 am and don't have a stomach of stone.

5. I had another reason, but I forget it, so I'm gonna put up a warning here to not drop a mason jar on your foot because it will hurt a lot and you may swear and wake up other grouchy members of the household and Pan does NOT like to be woken up.

6. I remembered. The whole reason why it's green is that every morning you have about NO waste, and you can use veggies from your own garden. And fruits, unless some asshole squirrel ate all your strawberries too. Blast them. Anyhoo, I made mine this morning with the kale I grow all by myself in a dresser I found on the street:

In case you care enough to make one, I added a mango, parsley, cinnamon, cardamom, and water and it was pretty damn good.

So that is the story of why you should drink your veggies instead of eating them, and if I haven't inspired you to try one, I hope to have at least instilled a healthy dose of fear of eating an egg mcmuffin in my presence.

*This would work better if I lived in New York and could travel by subway where I could judge a larger number of people and they are unlikely to be drinking green stuff, not in an office where there are at most three other people there when I eat breakfast, and they don't even seem to eat anything.

**Unsubstantiated number.

I would never leave my house

2011-07-06T14:27:00.000-07:00

Pan could wear his favorite costume all day and greet visitors.

Reasons why LOML is LOML: Because he send me things like this:
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/pirates-of-the-caribbean-home-movie-theater-1307742969-slideshow/#crsl=

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post these pictures on here because I'm not sure how blogging politics work, but I'm a rebel so I'm gonna do it anyways.

Courtesy of Elite Home Theater Seating:

I love how they have the actual Pirates movie playing, so we won't get confused about what theme this is supposed to be. I would have been completely lost if it had been playing Inception.

There is a motherfucking fake sky there. I seriously cannot contain myself.

I'm not really sure if this is necessary. I mean it still looks cool, but it also kinda looks like a garage, which I'm pretty sure it once was. But do we really need that much more effort for what is essentially a hallway into the room you actually want to hang out in?

Not gonna lie, they phoned it in for the tavern. Decent start, but compared the the first room of what my dreams are made of, kinda not so much "piratey" as "somewhat old looking with a plant or two."

I'm obsessed with the ship's wheel. I am unallowed to have a ship's wheel on display in the house because a certain someone has a hard time dealing with the "nautical" look and it is apparently too "on the nose" but apparently as long as we are spending $2.5 million on an actual pirate ship to go in our garage then that's just dandy and WHY WON'T YOU JUST GIVE ME A STRAIGHT ANSWER DAMN YOU?!?

Apologize for the swearing, seeing evidence of pure pirate genius is like crack to me. Or it could be the adderol LOML slips into my lunch when he wants to toy with my emotions.*

Anyways, I promise soon I will have an actual post of me getting something accomplished and not just me figuring out how I can find whoever owns this and convince them that I'm their long lost daughter. Although if that does happen, then I'm totally quitting this blog and having them sponsor my lifelong dream of finding a unicorn. And to my real parents, I still love you and all, but I might have to make some edits to my birth certificate, it's for the greater good, you know?

*Undocumented, but I'm pretty sure he does this. I think he's conspiring with the gnomes to slowly break me down. Another day, my friend, another day.

Bad omens?

2011-06-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a really cool pentagram but this came up and every time I look at it I want to vomit so I thought I would share.

So last night Im about to go to bed and I look at my pristine white pillow and there is a fucking scary ass bug running all over, spreading his bug germs everywhere. I screamed, and LOML runs in and has the audacity to LAUGH despite the fact that this thing could just meander into my nostril while I slept and crawl into my brain and ruin it and I would just be a blank-eyed pile of meat and it's almost like LOML doesn't even really care that that might happen. So then he tells me that it's good luck, so then I'm cool with the silverfish thing because I have really been keeping up with my sweepstakes entering.

It was really big, like the size of my hand, if my hand was smaller than it is now.

So then right before I goes to bed LOML cheerfully adds, "it probably means you will have a good dream tonight", at which point I'm not really thinking of the consequences of this but then I DREAM about winning a sweepstakes and finding a lot of strawberries that weren't eaten by bugs and I was super happy in my dream and then I woke up and realized that I just ENDANGERED MY FRAGILE BRAIN to have a useless fucking DREAM about winning money. F&%$ you, silverfish.

I guess the strawberries might need some explaining, but this was taken a few days ago and this is the first ever strawberry that I have ever grown and it got eaten by a bug so I'm guessing that was why I was so happy in my dream, plus all the money to buy all the strawberries I want. Well, as much as $6,000 could buy. I'm not sure why my brain decided to win $6,000 in my dream when it could have gone with a much better number, like say 200 billion dollars, and for the record strawberries don't even make it into my top three fruits so I would really like to figure out why my subconscious is lowballing me.

Anyways, all this talk makes me waste my precious (made more precious now that is ENDANGERED) brain space on omens and all that kind of witchcraft stuff. Just the other day, I was entering something online and imagine my dismay when that vengeful word verification demon asks me to spell out the word "hag". I tried to overlook it and not scrutinize the shit out of my dark circles but then I get to ANOTHER word verification and it says "hag" again, and now I'm starting to wonder if I should confront my computer about its insulting behavior, because I'm not even 30 yet and I feel like it could come up with some insults that are better suited to my demographic.

Then I started thinking about the time I bought a book about witchcraft and I read it at night and lucid dreamt I was levitating so it got stored outside the bedroom from then on but I took it out and tried to read it again a few weeks ago and I dreamt about being magic again so there's a pretty good chance I am actually a witch, in which case the insult "hag" would probably be a suitable fit, so you see how all this just kind of works together?

I'd like to think this was me in a past life

But it was probably more like this in which case I'm not even mad at my computer anymore.

And I'm still really upset that my luck got wasted on a dream about 6 g's and strawberries.

Grade A Halloween A-hole

2011-06-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me is well aware of my Halloween obsession. Before I met Love of my Life, I would always be the one hassling friends to get their shit together and I'm pretty sure they got pretty fed up with it. Once I met LOML and discovered he was as obsessed as I was I knew I would never be able to tolerate anyone else. Needless to say, we lived in a little courtyard complex in Venice, and I'm not entirely sure our neighbors were as enthused with our addiction. For two years, from September 1 to October 31, we spent an unhealthy amount of our time and debt allowance on extreme decorating, so our courtyard friends might look out their window at any given time to find me manically hanging a skull from a tree with blood dripping out of the eye socket, and due to our nocturnal natures were typically woken up at 2 AM to us building a coffin/monster/torture chamber. One particular neighbor was very quiet and had actually never spoken to us, but he came over one night at 1am and was inordinately calm as he said in his fun Swedish accent: "I don't even know what the fuck you guys are doing, but it's got to fucking stop." It didn't stop us, but I applauded his effort, and tried to cheer him up with a few extra tombstones by his backdoor.

Anyways, the point of the story is that now we live in a house that is bigger than a shoebox so I'm a bit nervous that we won't get the full effect that we did in previous years. On the plus side, we have a lot more space and can do awesome things like CREATE A PUMPKIN PATCH, which I have already done and have yet to kill, and am now going to bore you with the progression of my seeds because they are now like little children to me, little precious children that I plan on harvesting and carving into monsters in 4 months.

Here they are one week in, nothing happening. Apparently I was supposed to grow these in special peat pots but I just used some old plastic pots that were left in the basement by a previous renter and it worked just fine so suck on that, seed instructions

About 3 weeks in, I was beginning to give up hope and then they started sprouting like crazy. Was it love, or my constant, sometimes alcohol-fueled threats of planticide by garbage can? We may never know.

I kind of flaked on taking an update picture between weeks 3 - 5, so for your enjoyment, here is a picture of LOML preening in our gypsy caravan themed room from Halloween 2010.

Wait, no, I found one. They are a tiny bit bigger. Isn't this exciting?

This is week 5. I would also like you to know that I haven't really been keeping track, I have no idea when I planted the seeds, so I'm just inventing these week numbers. Anyways, we cleared out this whole section of what was initially weeds, but we left the pretty weeds.

These are pictures I took this morning, which is erm... week 7. Yes, 7. They are growing really fast, which kind of scares me, but considering I birthed them and only threaten them occasionally, I figure if they grow wills of their own and turn evil they will do my bidding, which I'm ok with.

Anyways, I will keep you updated on their status, but I'm guessing no one really cares about my pumpkins but me, so I'll just read this post on lonely nights and weep tears of pride.

If anyone is still interested, I'm posting pictures of our last two Halloweens:

2009 -- Harry Potter -- this is the year both me and the table caught on fire. The pictures that look like they were shot by a mentally competent person were most likely from friends Jen, Holly and Megan, so thanks you guys, please come visit this year so that we have more than a few pictures with my finger over the lens. And also because I heart you and I never need to hunt you guys down to work on your costumes. And we just moved here and we need more friends.

Halloween 2010: Pirates and gypsies -- at the time we found a way to make the themes go together but I can't remember why.

That crab didn't look so obviously fake in real life. I think.

Captain Von Smervish

2011-06-29T09:28:00.000-07:00

I just realized that my last post about cats kind of ended with no point, but truly, the only point I could've made was that I didn't really get much done. However, after all of the excitement of the Bieber fiasco, I did manage to glue something onto something.

I bought this fireplace for cheap off craigslist a few months ago, and had mad hopes of repainting it to look old. However, there was this big blank moderney squareish thing on the front that looked weird and out of place and I hate it so much. The obvious answer was to buy a gargoyle head off ebay to cover it.

So this is my new friend. I have named him Captain Von Smervish. He prefers Gargamel, but he can't really do anything about it because he is an inanimate object, and it was kind of ridiculous for you to believe in the first place that he would prefer the name Gargamel.

Anyways, I had planned on glueing him on, painting the whole fireplace and trying to get a fun crackly glaze over it to make it look old all in one day, but it took a surprising amount of time to accomplish step #1 because Captain Von Smervish doesn't appear to enjoy being super -glued to things. So finally we used a different glue and held him in place with the stretchy things that you use to tie stuff to your car. So far it seems to be working, and I have a goal of getting this fireplace looking awesome by weeks end, and now I have this damn blog to hold me to it.

Another view of the same thing you already saw, but this time I was too lazy to rotate it.

Sidenote/poll: I am debating whether to stick to his current name or name him Captain Von Dugle-Pantaloons, because it sounds more piratey. If you have any kind of opinion on what to name the gargoyle that I glued to my fireplace, you have too much time on your hands, but feel free to leave a comment with said opinion. I used to own a lovely picture of Baroness Edna Von Fancypants, and I would like to think that had I not lost her in the move to Portland, they would have tea and crumpets, and get drunk together while we are out of the house, which would probably terrify our cat and make him want to eat our face after we die for ever buying them in the first place.

The regal Baroness Edna Von Fancypants.

Productivity Update: It has taken me three days since writing this to even post it, things are not looking good for the fireplace to be awesome by Sunday.

Very productive weekend

2011-06-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

So last week, I was really unmotivated to post anything so I promised myself that I would be uber-productive this weekend and would have a bunch of awesome green posts to write about today.
Friday: Nothing useful ever gets accomplished on a Friday, this one being no exception, unless you count drinking too much wine and photobombing strangers as useful.
Saturday: We finally got internet (seriously, 4 months without internet, I was starting to have the shakes) so clearly nothing was being accomplished that day, but I had very high expectations that Sunday would be very incredibly productive and fulfilling.

These are not the exact moldy strawberries, but you see one you've seen them all.

Sunday: We woke up and started making breakfast, which turned out to be us picking the least moldy strawberries from the box we bought from a man on the corner, and just as we got to the point where we had to figure out which project we would tackle first the boyfriend (who from this point onward will be referred to as "love of my life" so he will not feel objectified, and also because he is the love of my life and I would never want to refer to him on a blog in any manner that made him feel like he is not a valid, intelligent man. So anyways, the Love of my Life is all like, "we should totally give Pan (our cat) Bieber Fever and make him a toupee and videotape it and put it on the internets and we will be rich." And I was all like, "YES. This is happening." At that point my excitement got ahead of me and I started making suggestions about changing it to beaver fever and finding a beaver to dress up as the real Justin Bieber and then Pan would stalk the beaver in the video and it was all going to a bad place, so LOML cut me off and decided to check youtube* to make sure no one else had carried out our genius plan first. Hunger be damned, the moldy strawberries would have to wait.

So it might shock and dismay you all to learn that we are definitely NOT the only people in the world to have thought of giving our cat Bieber fever, and it is not always a case of fun and games, sometimes it is more a form of kitty torture:

Seriously, is she Justin Bieber singing to the kitty or is the cat Justin? What is going on? Why is she seducing her cat? Why would anyone allow this to be on the Internet? She didn't even really seem to know all the words, which seems kind of half-assed for a pervy cat serenade music video.

This one is actually pretty funny due to the cat dancing, although he doesn't really hold a candle to Pan's dancing**.

And then this one. LOML astutely pointed out that the kitten appeared to be trying to turn the song off.

I have a feeling this is one of those situations where the owner will take a fall in the kitchen, and someone will find them days later and their cat will have eaten their face. I'm just saying, if you force your cat to listen to Justin Bieber, he will eat your face. But Pan is exempt from this rule, because technically we were too lazy to even give him Bieber fever, and also because he is always very enthusiastic about being our source of entertainment.

Totally unrelated update: Here are some pictures of our cat in his favorite Pirate costume!

*It is really funny to see the videos on the youtube homepage that they suggest for you. Mine are all nerdy Harry potter stalker videos, shark attacks, and cats that bark. Now it will all be Justin Bieber fan videos. Sigh.

**Pan's dancing might not be altogether willful and consenting.

Bedwetters unite!

2011-06-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

I'm ever so sorry for the misleading title if you are an adult bedwetter who thought they finally found someone who can relate to their shame. Alas, my secret shame is not bedwetting, but remains to this day that I eat food off the floor, showing little to no regard for the possibly fictitious 10 second rule (I fell asleep in the mythbusters where they investigated this, most boring episode ever.) I have also noticed that if left to my own devices, I can and will subsist solely on canned beans for up to 5 days before bean disdain sets in. I don't know if that's shameful or awesome.

Are you thinking now that I'm just trying to trick you with an exciting title and I'm just gonna prattle on about beans for an entire post? I just don't understand why not everyone is as enthusiastic about beans as I am, but fine, I will get to the heart of the matter.

In my quest for outdoor furniture that looks like this:

But doesn't cost me my firstborn child, I turned to trusty craigslist. I found a giant twin bed-sized ottoman type thing that looked loungey and was my in my price range of $35. It was all covered in indoor fabric, however, and in case you weren't aware, it can actually get pretty rainy up here in the Pacific Northwest. As I pondered a way to outdoorize it cheaply, I came upon the realization that the entire sky is like a giant bedwetter from the heavens. (Hallmark, feel free to pay me to use this on a card. I take cash.)

Actually, that didn't happen. I googled waterproof mattress covers and happened upon a gem of a site, http://bedwettingstore.com/. So I decided to buy a plain white vinyl mattress cover and then I could cover it in fancypants outdoor fabric once I got my next paycheck.

It looked like this it was very pretty

I place my order, then contentedly occupy my time with my traditional self-destructive habit of looking on craigslist for a better deal on something I had just purchased. Lo and behold, I found it. It was a wicker set that was ALREADY sky piss-proofed and I wanted it really bad. Alas, I had just spent $20 on a stupid useless vinyl mattress cover. Panic set in and seeing as patience is not a virtue of mine, I couldn't handle waiting to e-mail them asking them to cancel my order. I called them frantically, my thoughts consumed by how much Top Ramen could be purchased with the $20 I may have just thrown out the window. I got someone on the phone and after hastily explaining that I really needed to cancel my order, she said, "well ma'am, what site are you ordering from? I take service calls from three different sites." So I of course blurted out "Bed-wetting.com!" She calmly promised to cancel my order, and I hang up with a sign of relief until I notice all the familiar markings of doom -- an eerie silence, the clicking of fellow keyboards --did I forget to mention something? I was at work.

That is ridiculous, you might say. That is really stupid and how could you possibly forget you were at work? Well, it's not that I forgot, it's that when I'm at work focusing on things that are way more exciting to me than my actual job, I have a tendency to zone out and I'm in my happy place that doesn't include anything work-related, including my co-workers that surround my desk. It's like I have a gift: people are constantly hovering around my desk, as it is in the center of the office, talking to each other about work-related matters and I will just be happily googling the shit out of how to make beeswax candles or something like that, completely oblivious to anyone else who is not currently wasting company time. So needless to say my co-workers heard me cancel my order from a bed-wetting website.

And that is the story of how my co-workers think I'm an impulse-purchasing bed-wetter.

PS: While I was writing this post, I was clearly scouring the internet for images of bed-wetters, and no less than 3 co-workers have walked by during this process. They may have an intervention for me.

PPS: The wicker chairs were taken by some other asshole who had the audacity to respond to the ad before me. I still have the original ottoman and have weatherproofed it by staple-gunning it with $1.29 plastic sheeting. It is the utmost image of class.

Growing moss on shit

2011-06-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

This is my cat, who doesn't give a fuck about moss

So, being a green fairy and all, I like moss. With the exception of food type substances and most clothing, I would pretty much be ok with moss being on everything I own. Portland happens to be the ultimate moss-growing environment and also happend to have been an actual motivator for the move up here, so I tried whipping up a handy dandy recipe that will grown moss on whatever you want that I have concocted from various websites. Here it is:

-1 part buttermilk

-2 parts moss spores

-1 part beer

-few teaspoons of sugar

blend all together.

I got this off inhabit.com, apparently you can even make awful bunnies from moss paint. I'm sorry, I like the intent, but that is one crappy bunny.

Once you are all done, it should resemble something that looks like vomit and smells truly awful. Brush this on stuff you want moss on and mist with water if it gets dry.

I put this on a bunch of stuff:

you can't really see it but it is there, and after a few weeks, drumroll please...it has done nothing. I will keep you updated if it suddenly bursts out with moss, but I'm not holding my breath. Bet you thought this post would have been a bit more exciting, didn't ya? Thats what you get for making assumptions.

Moving to the city of roses, bridges, and 80's nights.

2011-06-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

Our backyard bonfire in Venice at Halloween. I lit myself on fire that year.

I recently moved from Venice, CA to Portland OR, due to a whole mess of things that don't need to be elaborated on. Still transitioning, as it is June and last week it was in the mother f^&*ing 50's. Degrees, that is. Having been raised in California, I tried to limit my bitching during the winter months, mostly because I am getting pretty sick of people asking "how I'm adjusting." "Oh, I'm thrilled, I just adore wearing two snuggies to bed." Also, I'm reading a book about Africa, and I feel pretty shitty whining about being chilly when people in the Congo have to worry about the worst parasites in the universe.

Despite paying over $1600 for a tiny apartment and narrowly escaping the traincrash known as Lindsey Lohan moving on my street (we moved out the month she moved in), I still get pangs of sadness for the old haunts of Venice. We lived about a block from Abbott Kinney, which, if you haven't been, you absolutely MUST. It alleges itself as the hippie mecca of LA, and you can pretty much find a good mix of rich people with expensively distressed clothing, a handful of celebrities, and druggies. There was one shop, a vintage shop, and one day me and the boy decided to go in. He picked up a chipped coffee mug and asked the price. The lady eyeballed his t-shirt with legitimate holes in it and said it was $600. (author's note: I don't remember the exact price, but it was definitely in the realm of $600-900). As we snorted with laughter, she gave us the most supreme bitchface I have ever witnessed. It was truly spectacular. She was like the Gwyneth Paltrow of boutique owners, and I would feel pretty confident in assuming that she sanitized everything we touched after we left the store. Anyway, you just can't get experiences like that here, and it is one of the many reasons Venice will be missed.

It looked like this but with french writing and like it had been dropped

Anyways, now that the weather is clearing up, I actually get to enjoy Portland, even though it doesn't have the snobs to entertain me. For someone interested in green living, it is certainly one of the best places to be in, and you can't help but love a place whose motto is "keep Portland weird." (Fun fact: we almost moved into a place next door to a previous mayor of Portland who was a BIG proponent of the "keep Portland weird" movement, and he had a homeless man that lived on his balcony and acted as the neighborhood watch. ) One thing that I have discovered that rules the shit out of Portland is 80's nights. Now don't get me wrong, I love me a costume party and any chance to dance to The Go-Gos, but I also have to be a big fan of some other decades, and I know I'm new to town but I am fully in favor of expanding our decade-themed party horizons. Maybe a sock-hop? A Flapper Festival? Am I just out of the loop and these are actually happening and I don't know about them?

I'm sure I could go on about other topics that people will care more about, but I'm going to choose to perseverate on this 80's obsession. I'm starting to think that maybe its a matter of decoration investment, and as a designer, I can assuage your fears. Lets take a 60's theme:
-Go to dolllar store, buy lots of white sheets and colored markers.
-Google tie dying.
-Tie dye sheets.
-Hang on walls.
-Done.

This is what the sheets will look like if you don't suck at tie-dyeing.

I can assure you that the amount of money it will take to accomplish this will be less than what I personally spend at the bar, and if all partiers are not completely transfixed by all the colors then they have missed a crucial step in the pre-partying process for a hippie dance. So can we get on this please? Mcmenamin's, I'm looking at you, as you seem to be the leading abuser of the 80's night.

Theater chairs - Now infestation free!

2011-06-15T15:27:00.000-07:00

I found these gems on Craigslist and it was love at first sight. What I failed to understand, as many do under "love at first sight" circumstances, is that turning these into something I could deal with on a daily basis would be a giant pain in the asshole. To this day, I still glare at them occasionally for all the sawdust I swallowed and the number of times they fell on me. Ah, l'amour, you fickle beast.

Here are some more "before" pictures. While I cannot show proof that they were actually infested, I will say that I have no earthly clue how the fabric on the backs got so scratched up. If that is not the work of a wild animal that is some serious voodoo my friend:

Anyhow, this was my first real wood refinishing project and I guess I didn't realize that picking things without a lot of curves/tight spots would be optimal, but a few hours and some angry biceps later and they were ready for staining. I stained them a super dark color and finished them with 100% pure tung oil from this like this: The Hope Company 32TO12 1 Quart 100% Tung Oil or you can get some from this website: http://www.realmilkpaint.com/oil.html. I saw some other tung oil at home depot, but it had all the nasty chemicals that this website was bashing, and not wanting to grow a third eye after sitting in my soon to be finished chairs, I went with the natural stuff. The bonus was that it smells like peanut butter. I seriously wanted to eat it, but settled for reeses peanut butter cups. The negative was that it took fucking forever to dry. The website said 1 - 2 days but mine was more like 4. I don't think this should deter anyone from buying this though, because it looks great after it dried, and I feel much more comfortable knowing that if I unknowingly licked the theater chairs I wouldn't be poisoned.

Now came for my least favorite part, the reupholstery. I picked a creamy white microsuede type fabric despite boyfriend's protests and my empty promises of curing our black cat of his scratching and shedding problem. I'm not gonna go into all the details, but I can assure you that the process blew. I always pick projects that need new upholstery and only think about the fact that I hate upholstery and am bad at it later. However, I did get to use my favorite tool the staple gun so all's well that ends well. Long boring story later, here are the finished chairs:

I'm pretty happy with them, and cat has yet to soil them with his feline hair and nails, mostly because I keep them stored up. However, I'm broke and need new boots because my vegan boots are the worst and the sole broke in two. So this beautiful set of theater chairs are now for sale!!! Let me know if you want to buy them and live in Portland.

The Ultimate Granola Move: Hennaing my Hair

2011-06-15T09:54:00.000-07:00

As someone who prefers to take matters into her own hands when it comes to hair, I tend to shy away from the hair salon. Nothing against it, but I like to change things up so often that it would make it a very expensive habit, and I also have a passionate hatred for small talk. None of my friends seem to share the fear I have of being chained to a salon chair for an hour, inventing travel plans I will never make in order to avoid the awkward silence that will eventually come with a stylist who likes to chat it up, so I might be in the minority here.

Anyways, the point of the matter is that I have been dyeing my own hair for the past 9 years, ever since I discovered my sophomore year of college the joys of changing your entire look with $7 and 30 minutes. Since then, I have had numerous shades of blonde, red, and brown, and I can honestly say that I have been pretty lucky that I even still have hair, as there have been times when I hated it immediately, ran to the rite-aid and dyed it again that same night. I got into a chemical-free obsession a few years ago and started reading up on Henna, which would still let me change up my hair color without having to deal with the feeling of dissolving scalp that one gets with typical hair colors. Every few months or so, I would go through a pro-henna phase where I would read every article I could on it, then read some horror story about a woman with bright orange hair that had to grow it out and immediately talk myself out of it. Fast forward to a year ago, when I decided to get drunk and order a henna kit.

If you're not familiar with henna, you might be wondering why this is a big deal, and in the grand scheme of things, it really isn't. There are a lot more pressing issues to be thinking about than hair color, but here you are, reading this blog that has so far been pretty much useless in terms of world-changing content. So I assume that if you are still reading, you are saying "OK" to hearing about the logistics of spreading dirty goop on your hair and the resulting tantrum I threw when I saw the result.

Back to the matter, henna is a bigger deal than store bought because it is extremely permanent. Those "permanent" haircolors you can buy at walgreens? Not permanent. If you truly eff it up, it will fade or you can redye, but with henna, this shit ain't coming out. Hence why I had to resort to liquid courage to even place an order. Once it is in your hair, you can't use normal hair colors anymore (I have heard either your hair will fall out or it just won't work, but the worst case scenario is bad enough to scare me into making it a no-no.) So if you hate it, your option is either to grow it out or shave your head, or dye it black(with henna) to cover it up. Needless to say, I was well-informed of these warnings before hennaing my hair, but I think that information went back to hang out in the happy part of my brain that likes to pretend that what I'm about to do isn't a terrible decision. Instead, it focused on the pros, which is that I was embracing nature and my hair would be super soft and natural.

Another warning is that you have to buy body art quality henna instead of henna that has been mixed with metallic compounds. Why? Oh, because your hair might literally melt off your head. Seriously. So after this oh so inspiring post don't just run to Whole Foods and grab the first henna kit you see. I got mine from this site http://www.mehandi.com/ and found out a lot of information from http://www.hennaforhair.com/. Anyways, this post is getting to be way longer than I expected, so I'm going to try to speed it up to the good freak out part, but if anyone really wants me to expand on the whole process of mixing the henna and whatnot, let me know and I will add it in.

What the mixture looks like

So, I mix up the batch of henna, and you have to wait for a day to make it all good and ready to make things orange, and then you have to test it on something to see if the dye will release or something like that. So I waited a day, and I tested it, and said tester did not come out orange. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I'm impatient and decided to go for it anyways. On the poor advice of a blogger, I thought I needed to leave it in for at least an hour to make sure the color sets. Since I did not see any color on the tester thing (a piece of paper) I was like, oh, well I'll just leave it in for 2 hours, just to make sure, which I would determine later to be the worst idea ever.

During said two hours, I had random panic attacks that I was making a serious mistake which I decided to quiet down with wine, which turned out to be bad idea as wine tends to make people klutzy, which isn't the best when you have white furniture and a head full of drippy, bad-smelling crap that will dye anything it touches. I managed to make it out of the shower with only minor offenses to the apartment that were henceforth covered up with whiteout, and took off the towel to reveal sideshow-bob colored hair.

Hair before Henna

This picture does not even do it justice

This was a costume party, I don't normally dress like a
gothic renaissance hooker.
Unless its a Saturday.

After screaming at my boyfriend for laughing, then screaming at him for not stopping my destructive, impetuous decision, I rekindled my love for hats. I tried to find some pictures that show the atrocity that was my hair, but I didn't let a camera near me for about a month. Luckily, henna fades verrrrry slowly so the two pictures above show it almost at its glory, so just picture this but with jazz hands. Picture below is after almost a year of fading.

A bit less cartoonish

In the end, it has since faded to a nice normalish color that I have actually gotten a lot of compliments on, so I guess I'm happy except that it would be nice to be able to change it. It is also ridiculously soft and healthy and I rarely get split ends. However, I can already feel myself itching for a change from red hair but seeing as I am unlikely to shave my head, I'm not quite sure when that will happen. Would I recommend henna? I think very few people would be able to deal with the inconsistency, time, and radioactive hair, but seriously, this is some soft hair people. I would imagine it's what unicorn hair feels like.

My first post -- and it's about cannibals.

2011-06-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

Jesus, I thought it was hard to motivate myself to write a book, but it literally took me a month just to figure out what background I want to go with for this thing, and I'm pretty sure thats getting changed soon. Needless to say, it is really hard to pick what I want to write about for the first post. On one hand, it sets the tune for the rest of the blog, and you can't really ever just get rid of your first post, but on the other hand, considering I have zero followers right now, not very many people will probably ever scroll all the way through my posts to read the first one, except maybe my mom, so hi Mom.

Anyways, to take the pressure off and just post something because the blankness is driving me nuts, I have decided to just post this email I wrote to my boyfriend that I randomly ran across today while searching for something in my gmail and I can't help but laugh about it now. Warning: some of you may find some of this offensive. I truly do not mean anyone offense, but speaking as a very pale person who doesn't eat people who can look genuinely frightening in bad lighting, maybe this is a personal opinion but I would not like to come across a very pale person who actually DOES eat people. FYI -- Megan =sister-in-law.

"Subject: DILEMMA -- need help

ok, I have a very serious dilemma here:

so I wrote megan today to rsvp for the rehearsal dinner, and she tells me that they found a house and is really excited about it. She sent me the link to it and the pictures look great, the backyard is amazing and the inside is ok but not as amazing.

So I decide to google the address to see if i could find out how many beds/bath there are and lo and behold, what pops up? Guess. Seriously guess. Ok you will never guess. That cannibal albinos live on that road and they attack people. Now, it is on some urban legend sites, but it is referred to quite a lot and on a yahoo questions page there is this:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080302100805AA1ZfvF

WHAT THE FUCK ARE ALBINO SOUNDS?!?

So here is my dilemma: Do I tell her about this and :

1) this ruins the house for her and they pass and regret it

2) she passes this off as ridiculous and they buy the house and live happily ever after with an awesome backyard

3) She passes this off as ridiculous, but then one day when Jeff is gone she hears a weird sound and thinks its an albino sound and spends the rest of her years with an insomnia problem and carrying around a shiv, much like my year of terror after I read that 1 in 3 people have been abducted by aliens and had their memories erased.

Or do i not tell her bc this is slightly crazy and:

1) they all get eaten by albinos and i go mad with remorse.

For your reading pleasure, here are some more links, and you can google it: hicks rd. san jose: cannibal albinos. Apparently they like to surround cars.

http://www.horror-movies.ca/horror_10859.html

http://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/entries/alum_rock_park_albino_menace/"

Blog Update: They now live in the house and are still not eaten, but apparently they have some pretty wicked giant turkeys causing all kinds of havoc over there.