Have fun, ita!!

But she's all "Oh, I had to go on a call at the firehouse, so I'm running late...". She's a motorcycle-riding firefighter/EMT and beekeeper. It's an interesting combo. Sadly, doesn't quite work for me, I think.

Huh. I guess that's a good reason, but after a half hour? Reschedule.

yep, Brenda. Heil is a student at McGill.

You know, I'm gone for a day having RL things to deal with, and my only comment? Jesse L. Martin is, indeed, the burning hotness, and I'd so see that biopic despite generally avoiding them.

Hey, Erika, did you know that Munch was on Arrested Development last night? (Seriously. It was RM, there was a scrapbook class sting. He was Professor Munch.)

And I'm moving this from VMars, because it's really not VMars related...

(2) I *am* from Cincinnati, after all, and we're pretty jaded when it comes to ballplayers and gambling....

Steph did you watch Arrested Development? Because they used a picture of Pete Rose sliding head first into a base to indicate certain intimate acts, and now I want to call that act a Pete Rose. But it's no fun unless I have company.

My experimental white chocolate raspberry cake is a failure.

I blame the nestle white chocolate. The icing is pretty good, and it's pretty because of heart shaped bundt pan and pink raspberry icing with fresh raspberries all around.

But the cake itself is total butt.

Next time I'll do dark chocolate. Much better I think.

She's a motorcycle-riding firefighter/EMT and beekeeper. It's an interesting combo. Sadly, doesn't quite work for me, I think.

Yeah, one thing about firefighters/paramedics (my best friend is one) is that anything job-related that interferes with socializing really IS more important than whatever you were going to do. Thus, no satisfaction of guilting them about flaking out on you.

For the second night in a row, I've fallen asleep unexpectedly in the evening and napped through dinner. It seems lisinopril has replaced the Insomnia Fairy with a tiny elfin version of my mother who thinks I need to get more sleep and lose weight.

Skipping lots and poking head to post that, according to the Buffista Calendar, today is KristinT's birthday. Happy birthday, Kristin! With lots of wishes for a great day and a wonderful year!

Can't sleep. Apartment building a block away is burning. Street is full of emergency vehicles.

Since all the sirens were keeping me awake I figured I'd go see what was happening. Seeing the fire is one thing. Fire is fascinating to watch. But seeing the people gathered across the street in their jammies and coats holding their pets is just heartbreaking. Makes me wish I had a spare room to offer a complete stranger. It was probably a full hour after the sirens woke me up that the warming bus finally showed up.

I remember a few years ago, hearing a huge "SMASH!" just down the street. I started heading over to check it out, but it was further away than it sounded. Turns out the collision was fatal for one of the drivers, which is really rare in a residential neighborhood with cars supposedly only going 30 mph.

In completely other news, if anyone either missed Thursday's Colbert Report, or would like to see again the music video by "Stephen and the Colberts," check it out.

When I was a kid a loud BOOM woke my parents and knocked out the power to a couple of blocks (my brother and I slept through it). A drunk teenage driver was going fast enough that he lost control of the car and slid sideways into a utility pole with enough force to split his mustang in half and knock down the pole. Some of our neighbors managed to keep the kid from bleeding out before paramedics arrived but he didn't make it.

I think the image of that scene was the reason my early driving years were full of all sorts of rules and restrictions.

That sounds similar to the way that my godfather's daughter (and my honorary cousin) got the head injury that ended up killing her five years after the accident--she was driving home from a party down a rural road, drove off the road into a light pole. Normally, the pole would have been knocked down, but the farmer whose property it was on was so fed up with drivers knocking it over that he had cemented it into the ground. So, Laurie ended up wrapping the car around it and sending her head through the windshield. She lost most of her short-term memory and was barely mobile for her remaining years.

That happened when I was around 20 years old, and I've been paranoid about both not drinking when driving and with wearing a seatbelt ever since.

The other time I remember hearing a BOOM at home was when Mom and I were eating dinner one summer evening. The house shook, and we immediately went out the back door and looked northeast, where the noise came from, as did the entire rest of the block. Turns out a retaining tank at the Shell Oil refinery about 17 miles away had blown up, obliterating the five workers who were working on the tank and breaking windows up to 10 miles away.