Friday, June 25, 2010

Why I Impulse Buy New Notebooks

Kimber explains a bad habit.



Every time I go to a store at which notebooks are sold, I have to make a conscious effort not to buy one. The notebooks don't even have to be pretty or original. I'm just as tempted by the crappy spiral-bound school notebooks they sell for 47 cents as I am by hand-stitched Italian leather journals that are sold for the price of a small child.

The thing is, when I get my new notebook home, I hardly ever use it, and I have yet to fill a notebook up. This seems like a terrible waste to me, yet I continue to have the urge to buy notebooks, wherever I am, and regardless of how many notebooks I've acquired in the last week.

I think this illogical desire stems from the possibility that a blank notebook holds. Before I've filled pages with shopping lists, undecipherable doodles, and resentfully taken notes, a notebook is full of promise of the great American novel, an award-winning play, or even just a comedy routine that kills. I imagine that the only reason I haven't written these things yet is that I haven't found the right sort of paper on which to put them down. I never want to acknowledge the truth that I just don't want to go the work of polishing something mediocre into something great, and I have yet to recognize that maybe I don't have anything that important to say.

So I continue to buy notebooks, because in the end, they are a far cheaper impulse buy than what it would cost me to really accept that they will never have anything meaningful written in them.

Monday, June 14, 2010

My Love Affair with Meat

Kimber thinks the title of the post may or may not sound dirty, depending on the person's mindset. She'd like to inform the readers that she only loves to eat meat, not do ANYTHING else with it.

I've recently been on a health food kick, where I read books like Fast Food Nation, The China Study, and In Defense of Food. This inspires me to eat better, but I usually end up craving all the unhealthy foods they talk about, and then seek them out before I'm halfway through the book. I have made some overall improvements in my eating habits, but mostly I just buy more fruits and vegetables, then end up feeding them to my dogs.

While I do want the benefits of eating healthily, and I like vegetarianism, raw foodism, and slow food as concepts; in practice I love chicken, I adore pork, and I'd die for a good steak. I enjoy eating salad, as long as I know it will be followed with a substantial amount of meat, or at the very least some sort of refined carbohydrate.

I've made a pro/con list of whether or not to give up meat and start eating a balanced diet in earnest. Sad to say, I'm willing to cut a couple of years off my life and add a few inches to my waistline as long as I'll be able to eat meat, fat, carbohydrates, and sugar. Luckily, even the very strict China Study has a loophole.

You see, the China Study, and other studies similar to it, measure food intake in terms of percentages, so by increasing consumption of a certain type of food (say, vegetables), then you will automatically decrease your consumption percentage of another type of food (like meat, for instance), without actually changing how much you eat of the second group of food.

Since my pro/con list clearly states that I cannot stand to give up meat altogether (just the cheap hot dogs and fast food hamburgers), I have decided to significantly increase my vegetable intake, thus decreasing my meat intake, hopefully to the recommended five percent. If that fails, I can always go back to giving the dogs my leftovers.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Crusty Boogers and The A-Team

Kimber goes over the highlights of her day.

My dog Grendel, while I love him, is a sick little puppy. Not that he's into weird sex acts or anything (actually he is, but that's material for another post), he just is fighting off some sort of doggie cold. This would be fine, except dogs are unable to pick their own noses, so I have to do it for him.

This brings to mind a movie I saw today; The A-Team. Like picking a dog's nose, The A-Team was better than I expected it would be, but still sticky and confusing. It was surprisingly enjoyable, but got bogged down at the end by unnecessary complications. I could be talking about the movie or the dog's nose now, I'll let you decide. I was a little disappointed that Mr. T didn't have a cameo (I'm referring to the movie now), and I felt like the writers were trying to make the movie deeper than it needed to be by making a series of plot twists that didn't need to be made.

I was going to review the movie more than that, but I'm tired, and that was the best I could think of to describe how I felt about it. Besides, Grendel is starting to get clogged up again, so I have to go.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Why My Dogs Are Awesome


Kimber explains some things about her two pet schnauzers.


1. They can always make me laugh. Especially when I've used my bathrobe (otherwise known as Kimber's plaid kimono) to turn two dogs into one push-me-pull-me.

2. Spartacus (the little grey one) can sense when I'm uncomfortable in a situation, and responds by pooping on the offending person, or their belongings.

3. Grendel (the black one) sleeps more than I do. That's a lot.

4. They both love me no matter what I do.

5. Spartacus routinely runs into things, then looks at me like nothing happened.

6. Grendel knows when I'm not fond of a visitor, and responds by resolutely ignoring them, no matter how much they try to get his attention.

7. Spartacus rolls onto his back to show his submissiveness, even when I'm just trying to play with him.

8. Grendel doesn't chase children.

9. Spartacus does.

10. No matter how rotten either of them are, I still want them around, because even their rotten stuff is kind of funny, like the time Spartacus stole one of my bras, ripped it up, then ran around the yard with the neighbors laughing while he wore it like a cape.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Sprouting Satisfaction

Kimber (slightly) overcomes her laziness.

I have never been a fan of hard work. I look for the easy way out, no matter what I'm doing, and I always do just enough to scrape by. Which is why I was surprised last January when the desire to garden came over me. I found myself panting at the window, waiting for spring to come so I could weed and mulch, till and plant. I only waited till February before I was laying cardboard down (to smother the weeds) and looking for a cheap source of mulch to cover it with. By March I had bought more seeds than I could possibly plant, and in April I was hauling dirt and scrounging in dumpsters for suitable gardening pots (upcycling, you know).

And then I did nothing in May. It snowed off and on, but I didn't even bother to start seedlings indoors. Every so often I would go out to my dedicated gardening area and survey the work I had done months ago, but that was about it. By the time June arrived I barely wanted to turn on the sprinklers, much less actually do real work.

At this point I must digress to explain that this is typical behavior for me. Once in a blue moon I dream up a grand project for myself which I imagine will improve the quality of my life, make me a better, healthier, happier person, and enhance my satisfaction of everything. I'm very ambitious, until I have to do the work necessary to make such things happen. Then I decide that I'm really happy exactly how I am, don't really need to change anything, and wouldn't reap that many benefits anyway.

So I was all ready to let the gardening project slide, until I realized that I had already spent over a hundred dollars on seed, gardening tools, and gas to haul mulch around. I figured seed potatoes didn't have a satisfactory return policy, so over the past few days I've been grudgingly committing a little time every day to sow dreams I'd already given up on. All I needed to do to appease my guilt was put the seeds in dirt and water them a little. If they didn't come up, which I was sure they wouldn't, then at least I tried, and my money wasn't wasted, so much as mis-invested.

I finished planted everything yesterday, and felt a huge wave of relief that all I would have to do is splash a little water on things for a month or so until I was sure that everything was dead and beyond hope. And then I found a seedling.

Today, at dusk, I found one, tiny, adorable little sprout of green poking itself up through the dirt. Despite the fact that I had planted most of my seeds in cardboard boxes, in the cheapest dirt I could find, on a half-way mulched, fenced in, old dog pen, that one little seed had sprouted anyway.

I'm still unenthusiastic about work of all kinds, and I continue to plan to do all my gardening work just before the sun sets to that I have an excuse to quit when darkness falls, but that one little seedling has changed my outlook just a little bit. I won't be surprised if none of my plants survive long enough to produce anything edible, but I am a happier person for having coaxed that one little plant out of the dirt and towards the sun.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Not Quite Dead Yet

Kimber Disagrees with Devin.


I don't think this blog is gone, so much as it has been in a coma for the past few months. However, with summer upon us (and the related heat and unwillingness to be outside longer than it takes to hail down the ice cream truck) I am looking forward to much free time, which will mostly be used to finally train my dogs not to be assholes, but some of which will be used to get this blog running again.


That's not going to happen today though, and I'm hungry, so tune in tomorrow, to see what the mind of Kimber has in store for you.


Also, tell your friends about us. Pretty please?