Her name was Lola....she was a showgirl...

It may not have been the smartest move I ever made, but I volunteered to keep a puppy in my house for a few days.

My 15 year old and I are in a charity organization together and our big fund raiser was coming up. I was helping with the live auction and one of our generously donated items was an absolutely adorable puppy. We had to pick the puppy up a few days before the actual event.....and my family is a dog loving family so I figured no harm could come from volunteering to keep the puppy at my house for a few days.

I was wrong.

This wasn't just a puppy....this was one of those puppies who knew how to work a room. She would snuggle up in your lap, she would kiss you and leave that puppy breath smell lingering behind, she would pounce when she ran to you and then nuzzle her nose into your neck and fall fast asleep.

Seriously, look at this face

...........she was crazy cute!

I named her Lola.

I fell in love!

Someone bid $1500 for her......and that little hussy left me without even looking back.

Bitch!

I'm going to quit reading the newspaper

Want to guess what I read the other day?

No......not the Cox/Arquette separation drama.....although you have to admit that was some pretty juicy stuff. Seriously David, do you really think you can tell Howard Stern and all of his listeners that you still love your wife and you really hope to get back together with her in the same breath that you admit that you slept with another woman in the very short time that you have been separated? I mean really dude, maybe just maybe the separation was to see if you two kids could work out your differences and if one of you could GROW THE HELL UP and start acting your age. I know that I am not Courtney, but I am not thinking that telling the world that you have had one "conquest" in the two months you have been living apart from you wife is really the way to show her that you are past the age when your brain still resides in your pants.

It also wasn't the story of the amazing rescue of the Chilean miners and the heartwarming picture of the rescued man being greeted with a big giant hug from his MISTRESS while his wife decided to wait out the rescue at home. Something tells me she wasn't exactly thrilled that the government found a way to beat their Christmas timeline....she thought she had way more time to clean out all of their joint accounts and pack up the house.

No, the story I read was not as pleasant as any of these.

It was that the amazing people who track and predict earthquakes have now stated that "the big one" is probably going to hit California "sooner rather than later"......and it will probably be "even more catastrophic and wide spread" than earlier thought. Well, thank you Debbie Downer for that update. I am always a worst case scenario type of girl...I want to know what the best situation could be and what the worst situation could be in almost every aspect of my life so that I can plan accordingly. I don't want to be the one who runs out of toilet paper when the aliens land on earth and we are all too afraid to leave our houses to go to the grocery store. Nor do I want to be the one who has a hamper full of dirty laundry when someone calls to tell me that I have won an all expense paid trip to Greece but only if I can get to the airport in exactly 20 minutes. But how in the hell do you prepare for an earthquake of such epic proportions that no one can even begin to imagine the toll it will take?? Really, what do I stock up on? Water? Antibacterial? Caulk?

Barry come back!! The post otherwise known as "Curse you iTunes"

I think we have established that I am a HUGE Barry Manilow fan ...........(Go ahead, call me a "fanilow", make your "Barely Man-enough" jokes....get it all out of your system and then get back to my story.) I think we have also established that I hate quickbooks. Now let me tell you how these two things go together. Stupid quickbooks needed more space than my laptop had left and since my daughter needed a laptop anyway we decided to get a new laptop for me and then hand the old one down to her. Good news.....I have way more memory now and I can support the stupid quickbooks program. Bad news....iTunes can only back up your iphone and ipad to one computer. So, when I downloaded itunes to my new laptop and synced my phone and my ipad with it something very tragic happened. I lost ALL of my Barry Manilow music. ALL. OF. IT!!!!! I am not sure if you understand the enormity of what I am saying here people. My sweet husband spent an entire day one Saturday downloading every single Barry Manilow CD I have into my itunes account so that I could have every single song ever sung by Barry right there at my fingertips. Do you even know how many Barry cd's are out there?? Me either, but from my stack of cd's I would have to guess at least 50. And now all of those songs are GONE!!!!!!!! I am tragically sad......and I am blaming it all on our CPA! He better give me one hell of a write off this year!

Hello Kitty hates quickbooks too!

This week I decided to prove to myself that I am a complete and total idiot. . Okay, to be fair, I didn't so much set out to prove that I was brainless.....it just sort of came to me. A few months ago my husband quit the corporate world and opened his own business. Yay for no more travel, yay for no more business dinners, yay for no more huge dry cleaning bills, yay for no more corporate crap......but boo that I am now the person in charge of the financial reports for his business. I am a REALLY organized person. I have a color coded calendar for goodness sake. I can pretty much tell you where anyone in my family will be at any given moment...I can tell you exactly how much is in any one of our accounts at any given moment....I can tell you what day almost every single one of our bills is due and what the normal payment is. The catch is, I do this all on paper.....I prefer to keep my laptop, i-phone and i-pad free for fun stuff like facebook, shopping, blogging or playing. I know that every single person out there who pays their bills on line will tell me that it is waaaayyyyy easier to just type in a few numbers every month rather than have to sit down and write out checks....what can I say?....I'm just old fashioned. Well, the attorney that we went to in order to set up my husband's business said that we needed to go see a CPA. I drug my feet for as long as I could because I knew that no CPA was going to dig my 'Hello Kitty notebook' way of keeping my finances straight.....and sadly I was right. The damn CPA said the word that I was dreading the most.......'QUICKBOOKS'!!!!!! . NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to!!!!!.

I bought the stupid thing and let it sit on my kitchen table for a week......nothing! See, I told you it was worthless.

I went and bought "Quickbooks For Dummies" only to be embarrassed to realize that what I really need is "Quickbooks for people who have apparently had lobotomies and who should not even be allowed to operate a computer".

I have never felt so stupid in my entire life...and I haven't even installed it yet! Can you only imagine how much worse it's going to be when I actually have to try to use it for real??

Can anyone give me a referral for a CPA out there who would be happy with being handed a Hello Kitty notebook?? Please???

Greeeaaat, now I am itchy!!

When I first read the story about the bed bug infestation in New York I have to admit that I kind of laughed. Those silly New Yorkers and their apartment living.....why can't they just give up the glamour of living in the heart of the world and move somewhere boring that doesn't have a ridiculously large rat population and a bed bug problem?

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But now it seems like those crazy New Yorkers were just ahead of the trend again because the bed bug infestation has gone more global than skinny jeans.

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I am reading everyday about the infestation of movie theatres, clothing stores, massive buildings.....all of whom have no beds for the bed bugs to lie in so those little blood suckers have had to find new and creative ways to hide out.

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Today I had to take my little one shopping for blue jeans, and because jeans now come in low rise, high rise, skinny, boot cut, wide leg, peg leg, jegging, pirate one peg leg etc..... with sizes like slim, , 1/2 and regular, there is no way you can buy a pair of jeans for anyone with out trying them on. Only the entire time I am making her try them on I am thinking, "Is that gnat really a bed bug in disguise?", "Is that just a loose stitch or is that a colony of bed bugs that have flattened themselves and are hiding out pretending to be a loose stitch so that I won't see them and they can attack my poor helpless baby girl?" I even found myself looking at the sales girl and wondering if maybe she was a great big bed bug who had taken over the poor helpless sales girl's body.

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All I know is I am home and I am itchy!!!

The mother ship has landed

There was quite a stir the other day when a "mega-yacht" anchored in San Diego. People said it looked a bit like a 'sci-fi submarine' or an 'alien watercraft'.....which is funny because I didn't even realize that we knew what alien watercraft looked like. Now that I know I feel much safer realizing that if I am ever at the beach and a ship looking like this one comes near me I can cause a total and complete panic among the other beach goers by screaming "RUN FOR YOUR LIVES PEOPLE.....THIS IS NOT A DRILL....THE ALIENS HAVE LANDED!!!!" and all the families who were enjoying their day at the beach will hug me, thank me and treat me as their hero for saving their souls from being sucked from their bodies and replaced with the soul of an alien who wants to live among humans and learn our secrets. You know, like what does McDonalds put in their fryer to make their french fries better than Burger Kings....or why do we humans feel that we have to talk SO much louder on our cell phones than on any other phone in the world.
.............but I digress....

People were all abuzz about the fact that this yacht was owned by a 38 year old Russian billionaire and that it had a freaking 2,583 sq ft master suite with a $40,000 faucet and a $60,000 stair banister and a crew of 35 who were all wearing matching outfits that had been specifically designed in keeping with the modern design of the vessel. But the part that I kept focusing on was the fact that the master suite is wrapped in bullet proof glass and has a fingerprint scanner at the door.

Now Mr. Billionaire dude, I am trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that you made your billions doing something perfectly legal and for the good of helpless children and animals and that you are just taking precautions against those nasty Somalian pirates......but I have an inkling that there is something sinister in your Russian source of income when you have to surround yourself in bullet proof glass. I'm just saying, it looks bad.

They want a heatwave???

Oh my goodness, Californians crack me up!

So, yesterday I am sitting on the beach with some friends....not a cloud in the sky....a perfect 78 degree August day.....the beach was empty and I do mean empty, like practically 'have it to ourselves' kind of empty.....the waves were beautiful and the sun was shining when the talk turned to the weather.

Everyone started complaining about the fact that it was such a mild summer and that we just didn't seem to have more than one week of really warm weather. I laughed and said that, coming from Texas where you could go 90 days in a row never dipping below 100 degrees, I was going to go on record as saying that I couldn't believe they were complaining about not being hot enough.

One of my dear friends said, "Yes, but this is California and we expect perfect weather!"

You crazy Californians.....THIS IS PERFECT!!!!! Have you people lost your minds???? The rest of the world is running their air conditioners like mad, praying they don't break down and trying to figure out what bank they are going to have to rob to pay the electric bill. They are dumping ice in their pools to cool them off. They are buying those little spray mister thingys so that they can walk to their mailboxes without passing out. They can not risk walking barefoot for fear of literally burning the skin off of their feet.

God, if you read my blog (which I'm guessing is not so much the process of "reading" it as just "knowing" what it says) please, please, please don't listen to all those other Californians who are asking for heat. Ignore them and leave us with the perfect weather that they just don't seem to know is perfect.

Oh and God, if you are listening.....could you also lower the real estate prices around here and maybe talk to that big ugly spider who keeps making the biggest web I've ever seen on my back porch and ask him to stop. Okay? Thanks