A Welsh Wordless Wednesday

Read the BBC News story behind this picture, it's worth it.

Wordless Wednesday: Rockin' Brit. Lit

My average in my British Literature class. Boo-yah!

Wordless Wednesday

Yes we can....

Best Part of Waking Up...Is a Plumbing Crisis in Your Cup!

One of my favorite days on the calendar is a casual one by all accounts. It's the Sunday following the “fall back” daylight savings time at midnight Saturday. This is one Sunday I savor above all others.

{waits of the gasps of “heathen!” to subside}

I love waking up on a cool fall morning, buried under my comforter, to the pleasant surprise that I really have another hour of sleep available to me. It's not quite as pleasurable any day after this because I soon compensate for the gift by staying awake for an extra hour (or two) so by the next week I'm as sleep deprived as I was before DST.

No, this is the one day that the extra hour is at its most pure, unadulterated goodness.

So imagine my displeasure at being awakened this morning by the sounds of Ms. Krazy losing her mind in the kitchen and of pots and pans spilling out onto the floor. For the record, as it's important to the story, all of her big cooking pots and pans are stored in cabinets beneath the counter top and partially beneath the kitchen sink.

I tried to discern if early morning double-broiler toss was a CRISIS, crisis, or inconvenience. Ms. Krazy has a flair for the dramatics at times, so not every crisis (lower case) is a full fledged CRISIS (all caps). Fortunately, most are mere inconveniences that can be rectified easily and with a minimal amount of fuss.

As the entire contents of the lower cabinets were purged with a force that would make our Viking ancestors beam with pride, I reached the conclusion this was not an event that would allow me to throw the covers back over my head and feign ignorance about the entire thing. The Extra Hour had now completely slipped through my fingertips.

*le sigh*

Long story short. It was not a burst pipe (crisis), nor was it a leaking pipe behind the wall (CRISIS) it was this:



The washer that connects the pipe to the bottom of the sink had, after a decade or two of abuse from well-water filled with hard minerals, given up the ghost. With the washer crapped out, the pipe was no longer attached to the bottom of the sink and when all the water rushed out of the sink, it promptly wound up spilling over onto the pots, pans and miscellaneous flower vases before seeping out onto the kitchen floor.

A mild inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, the flood of water on the kitchen floor just made it look bad. I went to the home improvement store, bought a replacement washer for $2.75, pulled off the bad washer, popped on the new one and attached it to the sink.

Peace and harmony were once again restored upon Kasa de Krazy.

Fare thee well Extra Hour of Sleep. Until we meet again next fall....

Wordless Wednesday - Gettin' My Vote On

For those wondering, it's the back of my iBook (Whopper the Workhorse)

For the love of a good t-shirt...

I have a couple Halloween shin digs to attend this year and while dressing up is not a requirement, who wants to be the stick in the mud who shows up in a t-shirt that proclaims “this is my costume”.

So I've pondered on what was the most half-assed costume to make, for cheap and for comfort. I won't go into details, exactly, until this weekend after the party #1 but suffice to say it meets the requirements of dressing up, but not too much, and still having a good time with a minimum amount of effort on my part. Wooo!

Integral to my costume is a white t-shirt splattered with blood stains (no, I'm not going to these parties dressed an extra from a Quinton Tarantino movie). Easy enough, right? Just need a white t-shirt and a bottle of fake blood. Cheap and easy (a lot like me)

It had to be a white t-shirt. The effect of blood stains, fake or otherwise, tend to be dulled on a colored t-shirt. Not a problem, I thought. After all, I am the High Priestess of T-Shirts That I Seem to Hoard Because Can You Ever Have Too Many T-shirts? (the answer? yes). I have t-shirts spilling out of my drawers and taking up precious closet real estate where Grown Up Clothes Belong. Surely there can be an old soldier somewhere in there that can be used as a willing sacrifice for Halloween. It's not like I'll throw it away. Please. It'll languish in the closet for another 360 days until *next* Halloween when I need to use it again and because I'm of the mindset that you never know when you might need a blood splattered t-shirt.

I like to think that I learn new things about myself every day and today I learned that I don't have nearly as many white t-shirts as I would have thought, given the sheer size of the t-shirt collection. There's my white t-shirt from the ill fated Appalachian State vs. UNC basketball match in 2000, my freshman year, but that shirt is still in my current rotation of Often Worn. Besides, I like the artwork on the back and it's a good conversation piece.



(The game was atrocious, but the shirt kicked ass)

There's my white Jimmy Buffett t-shirt from a concert a few years back, but as it's 2 sizes too big, it's been relegated to A Good Shirt to Sleep In. Besides, the loud parrot artwork on the front would drown out fake blood splatters easily.

There's an ancient Western-Alamance All American Brigade t-shirt, mostly white, and a size too big but again the logo takes up too much space on the front. That one goes to the Goodwill pile. It feels good to know I'm taking steps to thin the herd out a little.

There's a white t-shirt from a cross country meet my junior year of high school (1998), one small little logo front & center but otherwise a likely candidate. Except this shirt is so soft and so comfortable and I still occasionally wear it out in public, although truth be told I use it more as a Shirt To Wear While Exercising/Running and you certainly can't have too many of THOSE shirts, so it stays.

For every white t-shirt I find, there has to be at least 5 colored shirts, dating as far back as my freshman year in high school (1996). For every colored shirt, there's one or two tie-dyed shirts that because they are a multi-colored visual bonanza, are immediately disqualified for consideration.

Finally, after nearly an hour of digging through drawers, my closet and the dirty laundry hamper I come across The Shirt. It's in the very bottom of the very last drawer in my chest of drawers. It's a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt, circa 1997 Myrtle Beach SC when I went there with The Herd. It has a Hard Rock logo on the left breast but is otherwise unblemished on the front. It has dulled with age, yellowed slightly, an effect that could probably be reversed with some Tide w/ Bleach for Colors (but why buy an entire jug of that for the benefit of one shirt?) It has been well loved, time to give it a proper send off, smear some fake blood over the front and call it good.

Except, I thought, I should probably try it on. Make sure it still fits, because wouldn't that suck if it didn't? So I slipped in on and....

(You know where this is headed don't you?)

I had forgotten how much I loved this shirt. Because it's been washed 1001 times it's as soft as cashmere, it has the right amount of give, it's just the right length (not too long so I feel I should tuck it in but not short enough to scare small children).

Rational Kyle is screaming at me “You haven't worn that shirt once since you wussed out on putting in the Goodwill bag last December! Bloody that sucker up and let's go read something that will enrich our minds!”

Irrational Kyle argued back “hey! This is still A Good Shirt, despite it's appearance. So what if you don't ever wear it out in public? You work at home! There are plenty of opportunities for you to wear this fabulous shirt. Besides, you *do* need some Tide w/ Bleach for Colors, you just don't know it yet. Now, let's go read a smutty romance novel”

After all the searching, what did I wind up doing? Going to Goodwill and buying a white t-shirt for $1.00 that I have absolutely no sentimental attachment to. I should have done this in the first place and saved myself an hour.