Category: The Adventures Of Cynical Woman

So my adventures in hair color continue. I was blonde and pink for a brief few days this weekend, in preparation for dying my hair blue and purple. I make a lousy bright blonde, but don’t look half bad as a strawberry blonde. It was not to last though, as I really wanted the blue and purple hair. It’s almost to the shade I want it, but the blue isn’t dark enough nor solid enough. I still have quite a few light streaks so I will be dying my hair again this weekend. I’ll post pics once the final shade has been achieved.

Wild fires in the Great Dismal Swamp. Earthquake just outside Richmond. Hurricane Irene. It all happened while my parents were visiting.

To be fair, they were in New York with my sister the day the earthquake hit. But they had been with us the week before and came back to us a couple days after. And then stayed all through Irene, even though my folks swore they were headed out to Pennsylvania on Saturday, the day Irene was supposed to hit us.

They ended up staying though. My parents aren’t careless when it comes to driving, and I think my mom and dad really wanted the extra time with the grandkids anyway. And in spite of what I drew above, this did not turn out to be a disaster. The days before, during, and after the hurricane turned out to be the most pleasant of their visit. I just thought it was strange that they came to stay with us and all hell broke loose in the natural world.

For the record, I look a hell of a lot like my mom, except that her hair is much shorter, and not pink. And Princess looks like exactly like me. And these days my mom looks an awful lot like my grandmom, and my sister is sort of a dark, slimmer version of me, or my mom. Or maybe my grandmom. All the women in the family look an awful lot alike. Except for Pixie, who’s a blonde version of my dad, right down to his evil laugh and practical jokes.

Kids are back at school now, and next week Pixie will be going to kindergarten full day. Right now, she’s on a half-day schedule, which really chops up my work hours. But hopefully next week I’ll be back on a regular schedule. You’ll know for sure once I get back to blogging on a regular basis.

Ciao!

She’s under that moptop somewhere…

Yes, I dyed both girls’ hair pink. No, it had not washed out by the night befor school orientation. So yes, I had to dye their hair back to a natural color, and yes, you can still see pink in both shaggy heads. And somehow, Princess managed to lose her glasses and didn’t realize it until the day of the school orientation. We searched everywhere for them but couldn’t find them. Then on Saturday they turned up… In her underwear drawer.

Plus a few days before school started, Princess pulled out 17 worksheets that she had been given at the end of the school year previously to do as summer homework. If my mother hadn’t been there to help supervise Princess while she got her work done, I think I might have killed that kid.

Anyway, school started yesterday and I’m looking forward to getting back on a regular schedule. Once Pixie starts up full days of kindergarten in two weeks, I should get back to the old blogging schedule. That’s the plan anyway!

Enjoy your Tuesday.

My family is in town, so I’ve paired down my schedule drastically this week. Thus instead of a full comic strip, I present to you this, a portrait of Pixie at the end of the summer…

And just to clarify, no, she’s not allowed to have pink hair or tatooes at Catholic school.

This is a true story. In response to Rick Perry’s “National Day of Prayer,” some folks on Facebook decided to do a “National Day of Debauchery.” I was sort of looking forward to this as an excuse to be slothful that day and spend all morning eating ice cream in bed while watching cartoons, but as it turns out, Hubster volunteered us to be elsewhere that morning, doing helpful things.

We spent four and a half hours on Saturday pulling up weeds, edging lawns, trimming bushes, raking up dead grass and leaves, etc. I am still sore from all this work. The girls helped, of course. After all, it’s there school and I’d kill them if they didn’t help. And with the four of us working, we managed to clean up a nice patch of the school yard. Other volunteers trimmed back trees, moved dead branches, all sorts of dirty work. Needless to say, we were one very tired group of volunteers by the time we were done.

So I got dirty, but I didn’t get to participate in a Day of Debauchery. Or did I? After the volunteering, Hubster took us out shopping for clothes and school supplies. It was a tax-free weekend in lovely Virginia, so he intended to hit as many stores as he could to get everyone what he needed. And I have to admit, all that shopping did make me feel pretty debauched. I got 3 pairs of biking capris, a new pair of shoes, and ice cream before we left. That’s a pretty good haul, in my opinion.

But the debauchery is definitely over now. I’m back to being mom/writer/artist, trying to keep up with all my responsibilities and deadlines. Next week my own mother shows up, so you better believe I’m scrambling now to clean house before she gets here. Though I do wish I could take a break.

Hmmm… maybe I can convince Pixie to watch cartoons with me all afternoon while we eat ice cream in bed.

So I had a little melt-down last week when I got overwhelmed by social media. You see, prior to last week, I had never had a Facebook account. Mich kept threatening to set me up with one and on Wednesday she finally carried out that threat. But setting up the Facebook page wasn’t the problem, in and of itself. It was what came afterward, my attempts to interconnect my various sources of social media, that caused my melt-down.

I have a blog, obviously. I have a podcast. I have two Twitter accounts. Which reminds me, I have another blog. And I’ve got a Flickr account. And oh yeah, a Tumblr blog. And did I mention I’m on Google+? I knew I could interconnect the Twitter feeds to the Facebook pages, but I’ve been having problems with Twhirl, the application I had been using to get my twitter feeds. Mich set me up with TweetDeck, which is very different from Twhirl. And since I’ve been having problems using Google+, I put Google Chrome on my netbook, hoping it would make life easier. But then I found out Twitterfeed was still set up to log me in only through OpenID, which I hate because I’ve never used my LiveJournal account, so I had to contact their tech support twice to reset my password and login…

You can see why I had a melt down.

On the plus side, the folks at Twitterfeed were very helpful and things got solved quickly. And I found an app on Facebook that automatically posts any new images I put on Flickr to my fan page for Cynical Woman. And I will eventually learn to like Tweetdeck, though not the Google Chrome version because it doesn’t do half the stuff I need it to do, apparently. And I’ve gotten the hang of Facebook, I think. But Google+ is just too damned clunky to use on my netbook and keeps losing messages as I type them…

Yeah, maybe I will join that convent and take that vow of silence after all. Or not. I never have been able to keep my mouth shut. Anyway, here’s where you can find me these days!

Facebook – Helen Madden and Cynical Woman

The Heat Flash Erotica Podcast – a free audio podcast of adult speculative fiction

Flickr

Tumblr – With a Cynical Eye

Twitter

Google+ – just search for Helen Madden. I’m too damed lazy at this point to figure out the hyperlink to that account.

So there you go. Now you can find me on the interwebs. Have fun!

This actually happened. One of my best friends, Patricia had dinner with us on Friday. She and I went out to pick up the Chinese food we ordered, and the weather was swelteringly hot even at 7PM that day. We were sweating when we came home from our short trip out. The moment we walked in the door though, Hubster yelled at us to come see what was on our back deck. This is what we found…

Yes, that is a squirrel melting on our deck. He apparently had been there a while, and he stayed still even though he had an audience of 5 gawking at him through our back window. I was able to grab my camera and get this shot before he finally decided to amble off and go melt some place else.

According to Mich, this is what squirrels do when it gets too hot outside. She told me she has a similar picture from this weekend and she’s sending it to me today. I’ll post it here when I get it so you can see more of this bizarre melting squirrel behavior.

Mich swears the old steamer trunk I’m restoring is not big enough for me to fit inside. Mich is so nice, I’m pretty sure her comments are not a slam about the size of my butt. 😉

In any event, the restoration is coming along, though I think it will be a few more weeks before it’s done. I can only work on it a day a week, it seems. When I do, I spend hours scrubbing and scraping and sanding and oiling and polishing. Then I’m dead tired and sore as all get out for the next few days. I usually recover just in time to get back to work on the dang thing.

But it’s coming along nicely, and hopefully before summer I will have it done and then be able to store all my art supplies in it. Or take a very long nap in it. One of the two.

I’m running late today, so I’ll be quick about this one. Suffice to say, Princess has decided to make a movie, which I think is great. Except that I keep having to explain to her what a budget is and what our limitations and abilities are.

The movie is entitled “Electro-Cat!” and we have already begun preproduction. We’re still working on the script (for some reason, Princess wants to write “War and Peace” even though I’ve explained YouTube will only allow 10 minutes max on movies). We’ve made a set/backdrop from some packing materials that came with our new vacuum cleaner, and we’ve made 4 of our “actors” out of poster paint and old toilet paper tubes. Trust me, this will make sense when I post more updates on the movies.

Anyhoo, I’ve got to scat. There are not enough hours in the day, and I have a movie to help produce now as well as my own work to do. I’ll hopefully post updates on “Electro-Cat” as things progress.

True story. The kids and I went to the beach last Friday along with my best friends and their kids. Pixie was running around playing in the sand because she’s too scared of the waves to even dip her toe into the water. She kept racing up and down the beach finding seashells and bringing them back to me. Then while I was chatting with one of the other adults, she came running up shouting, “MAMA! I FOUND SOMETHING FOR YOU!!!” And then that darling child of mine tried to hand me a rotting turtle corpse.

It was BLECH! Missing the top half of its head plus half of one of its legs. It was all black and gushy red and rotting and I just screamed and screamed and screamed as my darling blonde Pixie toddled toward me holding its rotting corpse… Finally, I got her to drop the damned thing far enough away from me that I could then grab her and haul her kicking and screaming into the ocean to wash the dead turtle zombie cooties from her chubby little hands. Sadly, we had no Purell.

Events like this are what make me realize how much Pixie is like my dad. I mean, the kids looks just like him, if my dad were really short, blonde and female. They certainly act alike. When my dad was a boy, he convinced his baby sister to hand his mother a dead rat. He also left a dead skunk under his mother’s mattress and once shot the poor woman through both ankles. He swears that was an accident. What’s really bad is that I’m named for my paternal grandmother.

I wonder how long it will be before **I** get shot through both ankles. Accidentally, of course.