Steve or Cory?

While i tried to ignore the basement and all its hideous glory, i could hear it in the night calling me "Jennifer" because we are on a first name basis apparently, "you're full of crap! no wait, hows that go? oh yeah yeah yeah, OK, let me start over. Jennifer, I'm full of crap! come clean me!" maniacal laughter inserted here. Yes, the lure of the basement, and its pathetic need to be cleaned, lured me back into its deadly snare. And as a reward for my efforts, i found me a poncho! and not just any poncho, a deluxe rain poncho with a picture of one disgruntled poncho wearing man on the package! He is crazy cool! i imagine if you panned down him his acid washed pants would be tight-rolled. I think his name would be Steve, he would love Charles In Charge, and secretly desire to take over the world. But i could be wrong, i suppose his name could also be Cory.

how could i forget!

OK, so right before i left for up north, who do i spy out my window but my awesome german neighbor, wonderful-walt. Apparently the goggles are not only for grilling, they are multi-purpose, and are now grilling/lawn maintenance goggles. This now leaves me wondering, what else does he wear them for? Inquiring minds want to know. As for my basement cleaning adventures, alas, i was forced to read Harry Potter in my spare time, and so have still not ventured into the basement. OK, so not really forced, but lets pretend. But since i finished reading the book today, and can at last exhale, i will be back to my basement mission in no time*.

*
Above stated "no time" is defined as being less than a week, but longer than 2 days, allowing appropriate time for mandated procrastination and/or complete denial that said basement actually exists.

baby butts

I meant this blog to be an inspiration (the wind beneath my wings perhaps?) of sorts for me to get cleaning, only since i have started the blog i seem to have done more procrastinating than ever.
I just got back from vacationing up north in Manistee, and since i was not going to clean my Aunt and Uncles basement, i have no basement stories to share. So i figured i would share some gratuitous nudity with you instead, just until i can force myself back into the basement with all its surely new-and-improved beasties, that is. Oh how i love the beasties.

Anna the bear

During the past week we were lucky enough to have my awesome 5 year old niece Payton come visit for a few days. One of the many exciting things i promised her we could do was paint her very first mural in the basement on the back of a storage closet door. After a lot of debate she decided that she wanted to paint a picture from a book that was one of my favorites when i was little, The Fourteen Bears. I drew the outline for her, and away she painted! i think she's a little genius, but i suppose i am biased. And now i have a little piece of happiness to keep me company in the dark lair that is my basement.

huh?

Just when i think it's safe, i find this thing. I was sitting in one of the storage rooms in the basement pondering my plan of attack against the junk, when there amidst the caulk, paint and strange bottles of nails, i saw this in all its marvelous wonder. While it seems to fit seamlessly in with all the other junk piled around it, i still have no idea what the heck it is, or what the heck it is used for. And yet i love it just the same. I believe that my parents inherited it along with the house, but the question of why they kept it will forever haunt me. Perhaps it has some way cool workmanly like function, or perhaps i have foiled the basement-bugs nefarious plot against me in confiscating their evil genius bug-o-matic-death-ray.

scuba dude

As i clean and uncover these sadly interesting items, i thought that i would be questioning 'what the heck?' but as i press on and keep digging, i find that the true question is 'why?' Take these scuba flipper thingies here, which are so old that i fear they would dissolve if they actually ever came in contact with water, why oh why do we have them? I may be able to understand if someone in our family actually ever went diving, or snorkeling, or anything else that actually involved wearing these flippers, but we are just not that kind of family. we are more of the type of family to sit on the dock and laugh at the people who do wear flippers such as these. Unless back in the 80's my dad wore them in the bathtub for a good time, i cant imagine why we had them in the first place, let alone still have them.

i go for the bathtub theory.

I was seriously considering putting the flippers on to model them for you all, but i couldn't muster the courage. For i am afraid that they may have become a rest home for invalid spiders and heebeegeebies of all sorts. I found a creepy crawly worm thing the other night on the floor, it was fine while i thought it to be dead, but it was when it began to wriggle and have a little wormy seizure that i lost a good deal of my well maintained composure and totally freaked out. since then i trust nothing down there. it is war. i am confident that i shall conquer the junk, but suspect that the heebeegeebies and creepy-crawlies may out number me as well as the state of Iowa.

*-*-

PS if anyone wants to give me a random assortment of verbs, nouns, adjectives, plural nouns, numbers and a variety of liquids (i think i have covered all of my mad lib bases here, if you think of anything else just throw 'em in) i'll pick a mad lib and put in your words for you and put the story on the blog :) if anyone is interested that is.

NAN

I don't know about the greatest party game in the world, i would hope that some where else in the world there would be something a little better, but perhaps if you're like 12 or something, or apparently, if you're me, mad libs are awesome. I was so busy looking back over all the stupid mad libs that i didn't actually get a whole lot cleaned, although the pile of mad libs has never looked better, if i do say so myself. here's one that my friend holly and i did, in elementary school you ask? no, afraid not, in high school, because even back then we were the crazy party animals, mad libs and paper mache. i blame my parents.

....

What do you do when you have a cold?

You can always tell when you're getting a cold because your puffalump will feel stuffy and you will have a Nan ache. The first thing to do is take a couple of toasters. Then get into your jolly-green-giant and rest, and drink plenty of prune juice. Sometimes it's fun being sick. Food is brought to you on a hula hoop so you can eat and watch TV, and your temperature is taken by putting an ass in your Frito's. If your temperature goes over 628 degrees, a doctor should be called. He will thump you on the door bell and say "ahhh!" Then he will ask you what bumper stickers you ate the night before and x-ray your stomach. Finally, he will give you freaky advice on how to get well. If you do just what he says, you'll feel lumpy in no time at all.

Retarded? yes. and so goes my life.

grilling-goggles

as much as i actually kind of enjoy cleaning in the depths of my basement and finding the strange things we have felt it necessary to pile and save, i needed a day off. so i must confess that i didn't clean in my basement yesterday. i kept myself busy cooking like a crazy cooking fiend. i don't know if fiends really like to cook all that much, but perhaps there is a crazy obsessive compulsive fiend off somewhere cooking up a storm of pies, i don't know. anyway, my mom is on some sort of wacky diet for 2 weeks in which she can have no iodine, which means no prepared products with sodium in them, no seafood and no dairy products. So i have taken on the task of preparing some meals for her from scratch, using iodine free salt, and no dairy. it definitely is eye opening to have to read the labels and see what it is exactly that we are consuming on a regular basis, and just how prevalent sodium is in just about everything. I even had to make my own ketchup to put on the meat loaf i made. who knew ketchup took almost an entire day to cook? And who knew there was sodium in a bag of coconut that i wanted to use for my coconut kisses? seriously. so i decided to try my hand at whacking open a real coconut or 2 myself. The glass in the picture contains the coconut milk, which was interesting in its own right, i still cant decide if i liked the taste of it or not. at first i really liked it, but then i tasted it today and was a little grossed out by the fact that i liked it last night. so, i had a day of great adventure cooking and brewing. and while i was a-cooking and a-brewing i happened to look out my window and see my neighbor Walt. I love my neighbors, on both sides of our house there are cute little German couples who are very sweet and very tolerant of us and our curious ways. they put up with my moms lawnmower which shoots grass 6 feet in the air while it mows, and my car alarm going off when it rains a little too hard, and apparently when people set off fire-works. they may cuss at us in German in their houses, but they are very nice when outside. so i was cooking along, and looked out the window to see our nice neighbor grilling with his little grilling goggles on, i thought it was so cute i had to take a picture of him. also note his bling-bling going crazy in the sun, he is big pimp'n! that was my great excitement for the day, whoo-hoo Walt!

well, i think i'll head off to the basement while the baby is still sleeping, to see what other wonders i can unearth and share, and get back to my regular routine, alas.

meat grinder anyone?

Apparently our basement is not only full of crap, but full of hidden dangers as well. To the untrained eye, the note which has been taped to the door of one of our many side storage closets, is obvious and stupid. But to the trained eye, this note is very amusingly stupid. see, our walls were finished with a lovely faux- wood, and the doors to the storage rooms are simply cut out of the wood, which makes them blend in with the walls, whether the doors themselves are closed or open. this note that alerts passers by that the door is indeed open appeared after my father ventured into the basement one evening for a night of gay frivolity and slipper stashing. nothing was ever said to explain the note, but i can only imagine that my dad wasn't paying careful attention and walked into the door that was standing open, and not wanting this to happen again, thought it would be genius to put up a note for himself. its kind of like when people walk into glass sliding doors, but in this case not so much glass, but wood. i would have totally paid money to see that. oh, and rusty meat grinder anyone? because you can never tell when one of those will come in handy. you know, when you have that craving for a delicious hamburger with creamy tetnus sauce and tomato? i gotcha covered homey. word-em-up. so, it will never be used, but we need to save it, because, um, you can never have too many meat grinders. isn't that how the saying goes?

crack crazed bird

What wondrous things lurk in the basement? i found this lovely toxic mutant bird the other day while cleaning, aint he a beaut? while he looks a little like he has smoked some toxic crack, he has a good reason for looking wacky in that my brother created him in elementary school. if you look at it from that perspective, its not so bad. but other than that, its the toxic crack thing, kind of like Whitney Houston, all that crack does weird things to ya. not that all that many birds are known for the smoking of the cracks and all, but you never know, maybe he had a rough childhood or something. I believe there to be a crazy looking turtle and a bear-sphinx-cat-thing that match the wonderousness of toxic bird somewhere in the basement as well, but i have yet to come across them and their loveliness. when i find them i fully intend to put them in a safe place so that one day i can proudly display them in my house, because my brother is an artistic genius. come to think about it, perhaps he was the one on crack instead of the bird...the mysteries continue.

the basement, in all its hideous glory

OK, this is the view as soon as you walk down the basements terribly pea-green steps and emerge into our over-grown basement. a sneak peek into another realm known only as craptopia. i know, it kind of makes you want to run far far away and pretend that basements don't exist in the happy world you've created in your mind. or at least that's what it makes my mom feel like, because that is exactly what she does, well, except when she carries more loads of crap down there to pile mindlessly on top of the other crud. it's overwhelming to her. but i hate to break it to you, putting more crap down there will not help it. or will it? and so, this is the end product of many moons of hoarding and over piling, the cave of eternal sorrows, also known as my basement. up until now i haven't been any help, being the majority of my earthly belongings are piled there near my red couch, but so begins my journey of discovery and growth as well as a holy crap load of cleaning. it will be great, and lucky as you are, i will share my stimulating discoveries with you as go. yee haaa!