It's My Blog and I'll Cry If I Want To

Nobody likes a whiner, but nothing gets my whiny engine roaring faster than bearing witness to the unfairness of life. "Living in the Moment" was never my thing and I blame my mother for that (that's right, I'm a victim - see? I'm already whining.). She raised me to consider the consequences of my actions. And now I suffer because of it.

You wanna get my goat? Act without thinking. Let your heart rule your head. Jumble your priorities. Make use of a banana peel in a dangerous prank. Become a high-profile person and then consumed with power, sleep with whomever you wish, regardless of your marital status. Get away with murder, or worse, get a sub-prime loan on a house you can't afford and then walk away from it, or why not even sell one of those sub-prime loans? You know, little things like that.

And then if someone wants to boil my blood until pink steam shoots out of my ears, they will enable your behavior by saying nothing (or lying for you, or bailing you out, or forgiving your debt, or refusing to allow hard evidence into your murder case because of a 'technicality'). And now, because I'm RESPONSIBLE, I'm subsidizing your slack. Well, not YOUR slack, of course. You people are perfect. It's those OTHER people out there that I'm talking about.

Why can't I just relax like everyone else? Live in the moment? Let it go? Throw all my cares away?

But I digress. In fact I think I digressed before I even got started. The real reason I called you all here today was to talk about how I can never seem to find the perfect balance between over-thinking and under-thinking. For example, the last time I posted a picture of someone's car on my blog, I forgot to blur out the license plate. And then I worried too much about it. I considered the consequences. (So I guess I didn't digress THAT much - I'm still on the consequences thing.)

I vowed that the next time I posted a car's picture, I would blur out the license plate, because I keep imagining myself getting into big trouble when the owner finds out and sues me for invasion of privacy. This would be an example of me over-thinking because, really, as if my puny blog is on anybody's radar. Besides, I probably don't have to worry about getting sued until I'm rich and famous. So, not for at least a couple more months or so.

Anyway, I still stress out about it and figure I should blur out the car's plate to be on the safe side. But then it turns out, I'm going to be posting THIS picture of a car I saw on the freeway recently:


                                           License Plate = MYPNK69

And seriously? A vanity plate is all about vanity, the whole vanity and nothing but the vanity, your Honor. The owner WANTS everyone to see it. And in the Dress-How-You-Want-To-Be-Treated Department, a pink car is not exactly trying to pass through life unnoticed. So do this attention whore a favor and NOTICE HER ALREADY! (By the way, I apologize for not risking my life further by capturing a better view of the pink wheel covers.)

Oops, I probably shouldn't have called her a whore. I mean, I'm sure she doesn't mind her car and even her license plate being broadcast all over the internet, but to call her a whore? Well, now I've gone too far and I probably will get into trouble for this. Should I take out the "whore" part? She probably won't even read this. I mean, what are the chances? It's not like a lot of people see this blog, right?

What if I called her an attention hog, would that be better? You think she'd mind that? It doesn't carry the punch of "whore", but you know, I don't want to make anybody mad. Like last week's post that brought in 137 F-bombs from a cowardly anonymous commenter.

How about pig? Would pig be okay?

Nightmare, Thy Name is Christmas

Well thank God THAT'S over.

Christmas sucks. For me, anyway. It's that dreaded time of year when I am forced to spend "quality" time with loved ones. Blech! Ptui! - I say.

My loved ones (and while I use that term repeatedly, I use it loosely) are a bunch of two-bit half-wits. Take my eighteen-year-old niece. She showed me this so-called "art" she created:

What a loser! I could do that. Anybody could, right? Obviously, she's doomed to flipping burgers for the rest of her life. I fought the urge to tell her she was a no-talent hack; I figured that would just send her into yet another shrill drama queen scene that she's so famous for.

Art, my ass.

Oh, and don't get me started on that whole nasty train wreck of a Christmas gift exchange. A bunch of thoughtless crap that you have to pretend to be overjoyed about as you open it. For example, how about this garbage I got from my husband:



Now what am I supposed to say after opening this pile of dog turds? "Thank you, Honey"? "Oh, just what I always wanted, sweetie"?

Yeah, it was a Charlie Brown Christmas for me. It always is. But, it's the cross I must bear, if I'm to get into Heaven someday. And so I go on pretending to like these people and feigning gratitude to have them in my lives.

The Christmas Video They Don't Want You to Know About

Stringed popcorn doesn't last more than two minutes at the Nanny Goats household, let alone make it onto the Christmas tree. I'm busy stringing one end while cousin Billy Goat is gnawing on the other end. He's such a pig.

I feel like a ten-year old at Christmas. Why? Because I have yet to figure out how to work my video camera and free video editing software well enough to produce something for the holidays worth watching. So I end up with something that looks childishly strung together on one end and chewed up on the other.

And because of this, you would think that nobody would be paying attention to the Christmas video I made of our little group outing to see Christmas lights and posted on the internet last year. Many months went by before I was accosted via email by some video hosting service who shall remain nameless but it rhymes with "BlueBoob".

They made some outrageous claim that I was using copyrighted material and that I could get in super D duper big trouble. I mean, I know Disney can be very proprietary, but Mickey wasn't on MY lawn with Santa lights, so why are they after me? But then I remembered I had included a song that may or may not have been "borrowed" to accompany this lame video.

BlueBoob must have realized just who they were dealing with -- a silly and harmless little blogger to whom nobody pays any attention -- and decided in their caustic letter to me that they would "let me" continue to keep the video up unless something or other, I don't remember what else they said.

So, for those of you interested in catching this video before I am forced to cease and desist, I give you Nanny Goat's Virtually Banned Holiday Music Video (less than 3 minutes) (Also? Dramamine tablets will be provided for those prone to motion sickness due to my wonky cameraman skilz):

If the above link doesn't work, the direct video link is here. 

Goat Thing of the Day

Tracy at I Hate My Message Board showed me this picture of her son with my buddies:

Jenn at Of Cabbages and Kings gave me a new set of knickers. Boy, I sure am getting a lot of panties for Christmas!

Elizabeth from A Nut in a Nutshell thinks NGIP is fabulous.

Pooba thinks NGIP is exceedingly charming.

Valerie Gail at It's a Wonderful Life - gave me the butterfly award.

Thank you, ladies - I appreciate it!

Not That I'm Bitter About It or Anything...

You haven't slept until you've laid yourself down on an pillowy mattress, covered in heavy blankets on a cool night, in a duplex, sharing a wall with a couple of reformed crack addicts, a few yards away from the railroad tracks. Here, I'll show you:



Every night, the 1:00AM Express barreled through, shaking the windows and furniture.

I got used to it. Eventually.

The reformed crack addicts, let's call them Bubba and Charmagne, were a very nice couple who had met and fallen in love at Narcotics Anonymous. Isn't that a romantic story?

They had a little girl, let's call her Gwendolyn. When they first moved in, Charmagne and Gwendolyn came over to formally introduce themselves. I have this overwhelming empathy for bored children, so I scoured my childless (and therefore toyless) house for Gwendolyn and all I could find was my semi-prized Cabbage Patch Doll. This was around 1990 or so and as some of you well know, the Cabbage Patch doll was the Wii of the 80s.

My doll was named Magdelena Something with blonde hair and hazel eyes. She looked a lot like this:








She wasn't "mint in box", but she wasn't dog-eared either. My hands hovered over the doll on my guest room bed, as I hesitated to allow this child to play with it. I was sure she wouldn't rip it to shreds, but I hadn't meant for it to be played with, really.

It's only a doll, I told myself. It's not like she'll pee on it or anything. Will she? I forced myself out to the living room where they still stood there politely not touching anything. See? Everything's fine.

I held up Magdalena and little Gwendolyn's eyes widened. Her cute, pouty lips spread into a smile.  

Score! She likes it. That'll keep her busy while the mom and I chat.

"Here you go," I said, handing Magdalena and her hazel eyes, to little Gwendolyn.

"Wow." said Charmagne. "Oh, she loves Cabbage Patch dolls. She's never had one. What do you say?"

I stood there with a smile frozen on my face.

Oh no! It's not a gift! You're just supposed to play with it while you visited here. But how do I say that with out sounding like a jerk? 

"THANK YOU!" said the little girl.


Say something! Maybe, "Well actually...", or "Oh, I just meant..." No, that won't work. Hurry! You're going to lose if you take too long!  

I looked at little Gwendolyn's arms tighten around the doll as she buried her sweet little face in Magdalena's blonde yarn of hair. Gently, through semi-gritted teeth, I said:

"You're welcome."

Goat Thing of The Day

Midlife Slices gave Nanny Goats a Christmas gift the other day.  It's a Gift card!

That's FIFTY-SEVEN pairs of panties, ladies. Also? She sent me a catalog for me to peruse from the privacy and comfort of my own home:

And the best part? Now Nanny Goats can lounge around the house all day for FIFTY-SEVEN days in a row. Without doing laundry. Woo-Hoo! Thank you, Midlife Slices. You rock!

Confessions of an Eavesdropper

While modern technology has ostensibly made our lives easier, it has also created many opportunities to ruin our lives. With just one click.

Oh sure, it's funny when it happens to somebody else.

My friend, Ingrid (not her real name), was driving around in her car when she called.

"Hello?" I said.

I knew it was Ingrid (still not her real name) because of Caller ID, but she didn't say anything. At first.

I could hear that airy windy sound when someone is clearly in their vehicle with the windows rolled down.

"Hello?" I said again.

"Oh, nice." she said.

Huh?

"Now why do you have to piss me off like that? No. No. Excuse me, sir, I was there first."

Was she talking to someone in her car?

No. I was in the midst of finding out that my friend Ingrid talks to herself. A lot.

"Come onnnn! That's right, just pull out in front of me. It's not like my time is more important than yours. Clearly you are in much more of a hurry than I am."

Now, when you come to the realization that your friend's phone has mistakenly dialed your number, shouldn't you hang up? I mean, you could be wasting their monthly plan's precious minutes.

On the other hand, you could find out some seriously private personal information. What if she says something about you?

I had another friend (let's call her Hortense) who accidentally called me while talking to her husband in the car. I grabbed a diet soda out of the fridge, made some microwave popcorn and settled onto the couch with a blanket for some great juicy conversation. But after about 35 minutes, I was BORED. Plus the music on their radio sucked.

But that kind of behavior is so wrong. Are you justified in listening because they're the ones who called you in the first place? It's not like you asked them to call you and then leave you hanging.

What if you hang on for sixty minutes eavesdropping and then they get their bill and they don't remember talking to you for an hour. In fact they haven't talked to you for months. What the heck are you going to say to her if she asks you about it? Play dumb? Like you both were unaware that your phones were connected?

I can just see the innocent look on your face, too. "You don't remember calling me? Oh really? Well, I don't remember answering. Huh. Gosh, that sure is weird."

Or what if she decides she has to make a phone call and she grabs her phone and sees you've been sitting there on the line for 20 minutes? How are you going to explain THAT?

Anyway, back to my friend Ingrid, who was heard (by me) to say: "Yeah, I'd like one Filet-O-Fish sandwich and a large order of fries." And then I listened to her pull up to the first window and pay for her meal. And then I listened to her pull up to the second window to pick up her meal.

I know. I'm a bad person. I'm certain I will pay for my transgressions.

I have yet to decipher all of my new iPhone's bells and whistles. When I least expect it and I'm in full trash-talking mode, karma will bite me in the nether regions and place a call to the object of my derision. I'll be in the car with my husband talking about Mildred (not her real name) and how she married an idiot and I give it six months and what does she see in him and God knows what all else when I'm on that kind of a roll.

And because I'm a complete dunce about all those fancy schmancy cell phone applications (or, "apps", for the lingo-savvy), I will not have installed Eavesdropper 2.0, alerting me with a ringtone snippet from Marvin Gaye's Heard It Through The Grapevine, that someone is listening to my conversation. Mildred will send me a Twitterrific direct message with a heinous virus rendering me mute and sickening everyone in the car with me. It won't be pretty, I can tell you that.

Since necessity is the mother of invention, what I really need is a voice-activated application that automatically bleeps out gossip-mongering if my phone makes that dreaded unauthorized call in the first place. Then we'd all live happily ever after.









Goat Thing of The Day

I would like to thank Leslie from Stethescopes and Stillettos for surprising me with this the other day:

Where Do You Store Your Fat?

They say it's different between men and women. Personally, I store my fat here:








When I was a kid, my mother used to have this thing, this metal, adjustable, spring-loaded contraption that clipped onto the top of any frying pan, like a lid, but with holes and you just tilted your pan and poured the grease right out. Into the sink. While cold water ran down the drain.

Now, however, due to the freaking out and chastising of my husband, I must pour fat from ground beef or whatever into a spaghetti sauce jar. But I have to use the frying pan lid, carefully placing the lid on top but leaving a little opening on one side as I torque my body and strain my wrists waiting for the last few drops of fat to fall into the jar. It's quite precarious, and one of these days a disaster will occur.

My kingdom for a proper meat strainer/drainer/thingy! I can't find such a beast anywhere! What do YOU people use to drain your meat (so to speak)?

I swear if it doesn't exist, this would be the perfect thing for me to invent and become rich off of with one of those Guthy-Renker/Ronco-type infomercials:

"...just snap it on, then secure it using our patented Nanny Goats In Panties 'Pan Strapper'. Look at how easy this fat pours into your spaghetti sauce jar. Are ya keepin' up with me camera guy? It's so easy a goat can use it! And if you act before midnight tonight, we'll throw in three empty spaghetti sauce jars free!"

Yeah, man. I just need me a goat costume and an extra large pair of pink ruffled panties, like Braja made me the other day when she honored me as Talk Show Host #3 in her sidebar...






I'm gonna be rich! Rich, I tell ya! Just look for me in your Preview Guide under "Paid Programming".


* * *

Thank you to Words of Wisdom From a Smart Mouth Broad for awarding me with the manly Measures Up award. Because that's the kind of guy I am. Thankful, that is.

A big bark of thanks to Dennis The Vizsla Dog for awarding me with the Kreativ Award.

Thanks to Fergie Sims for awarding me this pretty Butterfly.

Also, many thanks to the people who tagged me recently:

The Bookworm award from The Twisted Path.

Nooter the Dog tagged me with the 7 Random Things thing.

Omah's Helping Hands tagged the Bajeezus out of me, first with a tag, and then with a beautiful sentiment. Just overflowing with the link love, that woman.

Jane from ByJane tagged me with the 7 Random Things thingy.


I can't perpetuate them all, but I want to acknowledge you, return the link love, and let you know how much I appreciate it - THANK YOU!!!

The Bigger the Man, the Bigger Their Ego

[Author's Note: due to some confusion by some readers, let me clarify that the story below is just a silly made-up piece of fiction. OK, as you were...]

My boyfriend can stand still for hours. In fact, he's so good at it, he does it for a living. Must have been all those years in the service guarding the sacred pet rabbit at the White House. This was when Eisenhower was in office. Boy, you never hear anything about Eisenhower, do you? No History Channel specials, no conspiracy theories. I'll bet you didn't even know he had a sacred pet rabbit, did you? His name was Bert.

Anyway, my boyfriend. Stanley. His mother claims he loved those little green army guys as a little boy.





Stanley was big for his age and the other kids made fun of him so he stayed home a lot and played alone with his army men.

"He imitated their stealth and stillness for hours," his mother told me.

I met Stanley while he was in the service guarding Bert. I was walking down the White House hall toward the cage where they kept little white Bert, when all of a sudden I saw this huge man standing unbelievably still. He held his army rifle in front of him and stood in front of the cage. His huge square jaw coupled with the discipline of standing at parade rest for hours made me swoon. I begged the First Lady (I forget her name now... well do you know what it is? OK then.) to introduce me.

And we've been together ever since. Well, except for the time he left me for another man. But that didn't last long and I knew it wouldn't. He has too many quirks that drive people batty that I find so endearing.

For example, he has to (HAS TO) watch at least one Clark Gable movie every day. I'm not sure why, or how it started, but I do remember he started growing that Gable moustache of his and hasn't let it go. He was so stubborn about keeping it that the army sort of discharged him over it.

Years went by before he found work again. I think he's too old to be standing outside in the elements, stiff as a board, but he was so proud of his work in the White House that he still pretends he's a little green army guy holding a rifle guarding that rabbit:

I'll always look up to him and put him on a pedestal. And I will continue to support him in whatever he does. People still make fun of his size, but I will defend him until the day I die. He has shown me nothing but kindness and love. And extremely large jewelry. Speaking of which, last weekend while we were visiting our winter cabin in BigAss Redwood Park, he proposed! I can't lift the rock he gave me let alone have it set for an actual ring, but it's the thought that counts, right?

Mamie! That was her name. Mamie Eisenhower.

Oh, I gotta run. I need to go grab the flatbed truck to pick up my big boy from work. But first I gotta stop off at Walmart. The Complete Clark Gable Forty-Seven Disc Box Set on Blu-ray comes out today. It'll make a great stocking stuffer!

An Open Letter to My Fat Cells

Dear Fat Cells,

I have a bone to pick with you. You are a million tiny dark clouds that, en masse, have been growing inside of me, haunting me. Terrorizing me, really.

You are like pigeons who hang around garbage dumpsters, waiting for half-eaten burritos. You are scavengers who lie in wait scooping up pancake molecules that swish past you in the current, feeding on them like starving savages. You are evil and you are not wanted here. I’m thinking of having you exorcised. I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who has talked about a guy known as a gym priest, a personal exorcist, if you will.

First he will come a calling and clean out all signs of the gastronomic devil: Hostess Cupcakes, Oreo Cookies, Cheetos Cheese Puffs, oh I could go on. And that’s the problem.

This black-outfitted, lean-muscled priest will exorcise you, making me scream in pain as I repeatedly and incessantly flap about. He'll yell at me. Or you. It’s hard to tell, frankly.

“Get out!” he will yell. “Get out of this body!” Oh, he’ll be talking to you, then.

Every twenty minutes he will sprinkle holy water on you by making me drink bottles of the blessed stuff. I will beg him to stop.

“If it hurts, that means it’s working.” The personal exorcist’s lips will curl with a sardonic smile. I imagine he will not like you.

When the exorcism is done, he will mutter something about what a fine job I have done.

“This body needs work, but now there is less poison.”

He'll say the only reason you hang around, the reason you “possess” me is because I keep feeding you, enabling you. If I quit throwing bacon cheeseburgers and Mother’s Iced Oatmeal cookies into my dumpster, you will leave me and look for sustenance elsewhere.

But I don’t know if I can. You tempt me so. I fear I’ve already sold my soul to you and it’s too late for redemption.

The priest will strongly suggest that the only path to salvation is to attend his church regularly, like three to four times a week!

“A pound for a pound.”

But I’ve seen his church and it’s full of freaks. These people hit it religiously.

But they do have fewer fat cells. And they do look happy.

But then they want you to evangelize. To recruit your friends and family. And I’m not really comfortable with that. Pushing a belief system on someone else when I’m having my own crisis of faith.

Maybe I can just do this on my own. At home. I mean, church is where two or more gather, right? And my husband has just announced that dinner is here: Pizza and Cinnamon Twisters.

Hey, stop tickling me! I’m still mad at you guys.

Sincerely,
Nanny Goats

He Sees You When You're Sleeping, He Knows When You're Awake

Christmas Cards are going out early this year. Here's yours:

photo credit

Twas the night before Christmas,

And Nanny Goats waited,

For her gift from Santa

To see how she'd rated.

She put out the cookies

And milk; twas lowfat.

Then she hoofed it outside,

In her new Christmas hat.

Her panties were hung 

On the fence with great care,

In hopes that St. Nick 

would bring new underwear.

She stayed up til morn with

 The patience of a lamb.

But Santa came not, 

And she cried out "Oh - 
So that's how it is!" 

photo credit

This post is part of the Merry SITSmas Extravaganza, where the good folks at SITS are giving away fabulous prizes every hour on Tuesday, including a Grand Prize of a $200 Target gift card.

Here are a few of my favorite fellow SITStas:

Mrs. Mouthy
A Duck in Her Pond
The Scattered Mind of a Tattooed Minivan Mom
Don't Forget To Flush
Blah, Blah, Blah Blog


And here's hoping you aren't stuck waiting up all night for Santa in your ratty underwear.

P.S.  If you're SITSmas post-hopping, the next blog in the link list is The R Family Diaries.

Slow Blogging and F Bombs

So there's this Slow Blogging Movement kinda like the Slow Food Movement only with blogs and people who slow blog who blog slower than fast bloggers whatever that means although I think it refers to people who take their time with their posts not worrying about the frequency with which they throw something out into the blogosphere unlike some blogs that put up as much stuff as they can even stuff that isn't theirs just to keep feeding the beast that is the "audience" only now the fast bloggers  think that blogging isn't fast enough and have moved to other venues like Twitter where they can crank out little mini 140-character posts because the impatient cow readers can't stop long enough to read a long blog post anymore but whatever.

Of course, that's not why I called you here today. Today I want to tell you about a book I read called Is It Me or is Everything Shit? The subject matter of this book has not one annoyed author, not fourteen annoyed authors, but three insanely annoyed authors: Steve Lowe, Alan McArthur and Brendan Hay. The subtitle of this book? Insanely Annoying Modern Things.

This is a book of rants. My God, I thought I ranted, but these guys really bitch and moan. A lot. It made me wonder if you guys get sick of my complaining all the time because I could only take this book in small doses before getting annoyed by all their annoyances. You probably can't tell by the title, but have I mentioned the foul language?

They wax cynical about everything from politicians to China to tech-gagdetry to Kabbalah to things by which even you and I are annoyed. They hate "lists", which is funny, because their book is one big long alphabetical one. And I don't like lists either, especially in book form. It's a built-in bookmark, where all you can think about is how much you have left to read, rather than becoming really engaged by the text. The only book that pulled that off for me was A.J. Jacobs' The Know-It-All because there was a bit of self-deprecating humorous narrative throughout that moved the story along and allowed us to like the author. These other guys come across as a pile of snarky superiority complexes.

Okay, so maybe they don't mean for you to sit down and read this all in one fell swoop. I would keep this one in the bathroom, where it seems to belong. These blog-post-length blurbs might be perfect for that 2-15 minutes of "privacy time". That's right, potty-mouth humor for the potty, because this book swears like a sailor.

Is It Me... contains hundreds of short bursts of vitriol and anger and profanity, a minefield littered with F bombs. I would assume this book is more appropriate for the man on the can, meant to be read by the male persuasion during his own bursts of what-have-you. (And if you female types didn't appreciate that last bit of humor, then this is exactly what I mean).

And by bathroom humor, I don't mean to say that this is a book full of fart jokes, and redneck humor, far from it, in fact. I'm only suggesting the bathroom because of logistics. You could also read this book, say, while in line at the ATM, but not at the DMV, because now you're talking about too long of a stretch of time there. It just depends at which acronym you are standing in line.

This version of Is It Me... has been adapted for American readers - it's original version being published for the UK. Apparently we Yanks wouldn't appreciate the previous manifestos slamming The Tube or Graham Norton or the hundreds of TV versions of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels, or Fish and Chips, or whatever it is those Brits have over there on the other side of the Pond.

While this reader found the book funny at times, it falls short of hysterical. Some of the longer, less profane, entries feel genuinely angry, while others feel like the anger is forced: diatribe for the sake of diatribe. Did you ever see that Dick Van Dyke episode where Buddy, played by Morey Amsterdam, is such a versatile comedian, they throw subjects at him so he can make up a joke about it on the spot? It's kind of like that. With a curse word thrown in to "make it funny".

So if you're looking for a gift for the guy who has everything, who can handle more F-bombs than a season of The Sopranos, who reads above the 9th grade level (the vocabulary and writing style is oddly literate - that must be an "English" thing), and enjoys reading humor in small doses, consider this for Christmas. If you held a gun to my head demanding stars, I'd give it three out of five. It might have gotten four if they had not exposed a lack of confidence in their own humor with all the F**Ks and SH*Ts. I'm no prude but profanity, like exclamation marks, are much more effective when used sparingly.

* * *

For those of you begging for a photo of my Cute Butt award that I mentioned in my previous post, here ya go!

And I stand corrected. It is not a Cute Butt award. It is a Cutest Tush award. I hope you will find it in your butt - oops, I mean - heart to forgive me.

And speaking of awards, here are a few more bestowed upon me in the past few bloggy days:

I would like to thank Blicky Kitty for this rather large honor: The Blogs Worth Stalking Award. Thank you, Blicky Kitty. A hilarious award from a fellow Hilarian.

I would also like to thank Shan over at Last Shreds of Sanity for this Encouraged award.  Thank you, Shan, for this encouraging honor!

I would also like to thank Jennifer Susan over at Amongst Other Things for this award.