Suebob's Red Stapler

I posted over on my weight loss/fitness blog. A progress report…

I make a lot of fun of bad crafts over on my making fun of bad crafts blog, Craftastrophe. But I also buy a lot from Etsy sellers and wanted to share some of my favorites.

I love the idea of a Sw1ffer dustmop thing, but the pads they sell with them have scents that seem toxic to me. Fresh Breeze smells like Chemical Factory. This Etsy shop sells crocheted mop pads for just $2.50 each, so you can dampen them with your own natural cleaner and reuse them over and over. Better for you, your family, your checkbook and the environment.

While we’re talking things that don’t stink of chemicals, Roxana Illuminated Perfume makes the most beautiful natural scents I have ever experienced. I ordered a four-pack of samples and three were so lovely that I can’t decide which to buy in a full-size package. I’m tied between spicy Vespertina, mysterious Lyra, and Page 47, which smells like a day at the beach.

And surely you need some way to keep those pesky guests out of your master bathroom? Will the fear of being pulled into the toilet tank by a giant octopus help? I have one of these in red and I love it. A bit fiddly to put on, but worth the effort.

Three items. All Suebob tried and approved. No paid endorsements, just love for fine products. Go forth and support your craftspeople!

Maybe if I had a TV, I would have seen an ad, and I would have known.

Maybe if I had seen this trailer, like the 4 million people who saw it on YouTube, I would have known.

Maybe if the little senior citizen lady at Zumba hadn’t called it a “lighthearted look at an era,” I would have expected something different. She said DiCaprio was great.

Maybe if one of my friends weren’t a huge jazz fan with a special love for Django Reinhardt, I would have not been misled by the name. I mean, Django. How many Djangos can there be, right?

But none of those things happened. So when Ish suggested a movie after dinner last night, and that movie was Django Unchained, I walked in thinking I was going to see a lighthearted jazz-era DiCaprio biopic, honest to God.

Instead, I spent about 90 minutes out of three hours with my eyes squeezed shut chanting Hare Krishna while Quentin Tarantino splashed the screen with his trademark buckets of blood.

It’s funny, in a way. My tweets about it made Heather Barmore laugh til she cried, which is always a good thing.

Clueless woman, totally different movie than she expected. Duh.

But there’s also a part of me that is seething with rage about it. The arguments over Tarantino and cartoon violence have gone on ever since his first film. I’m still not good with it.

Even when justice is done and the right guy wins while wearing hot clothes and he gets the girl, violence still feels bad to me. I guess I just want my cartoon violence more Wile E. Coyote and less man-getting-ripped-apart-by-dogs.

I’m not ready for a lighthearted look at an era when that era is pre-Civil War slavery. I don’t think I ever will be. Suebob says thumbs down.

I’m still having trouble writing, so I decided to close my eyes and pick a random picture to write about. I’m glad it was this one.

She was the friend of a friend in college. The first time we really spent time together was when we were waiting in a long line to get into a Eddie Money concert in college. Eddie Money was washed up even then, but there weren’t that many concerts on campus, and it was something to do.

Our friends were all on the concert committee, so they were inside saving us seats, but we had to stand in this massive line to get in.

“I live right down the street and I have a big bottle of tequila,” she said, by way of introduction. Okay, then. This chick, Stacy, was cool. We walked down to her place and did some shots and hiked back up the hill and watched the show, and then we were friends all the time. Just like that.

For our senior year of college, we lived together in a ramshackle house with our friend Julie. We could have lived in a nicer place, but this was far from campus and we were out of the student crush, and that’s what we wanted because we were cool like that.

The shack had a hole in the kitchen floor and no heat and the oven door was held shut by string. If you wanted to shut the oven door, you took the string and hooked it to a cup hook screwed into the wall beside the oven. It didn’t really seal the door shut very tightly, but as I said, the house had no heat, so when we wanted warmth, we baked something.

Despite the mild hardships, we also had the Talking Heads and a black labrador retriever and Stacy taught us to make pesto, which was like some exotic miracle thing back then, and we dated cute boys and drank white wine and ate this really good sourdough bread all the time, because that was when people still ate bread. Good times.

Stacy was always responsible and organized, the type of friend you could trust to talk to adults and make a good impression, not like most of us. She was the first person I ever met who owned her own filing cabinet and used it properly, with folders and labels and alphabetical order.

She could decorate, too. While other students were tacking up band posters with color-coordinated push pins and hanging up beach towels over the windows, she had framed prints and curtains she sewed herself, curtains that looked good with her bedding.

She also had a magic touch for slipping into the very best parts of things. If there was a VIP tent, she was in it and the VIPs were chatting her up. No one ever questioned her right to be there. If things ever looked iffy, she grabbed a clipboard, because, as she explained “If you have a clipboard, everyone thinks you work there.”

She made fun happen wherever she went. I’ve been hot air ballooning with her. I have danced like a maniac with her. Built a Rose Float and slept on the sidewalk in Pasadena. Well, ok, nobody really slept. Shopped in San Francisco’s Chinatown for ingredients for a massive, messy Chinese feast with her. Had dinners and breakfasts and Farmer’s Market meetups with her.

We lived together at a different house after we graduated and then she moved all over the place for work and then she moved back but I moved away.

It has been almost 30 years that we’ve been friends. I’m so glad she talked to me. So glad she invited me into her life and put up with me all the times I was cranky and tired and obsessed by men and not very tidy (which was always).

Thanks, Stacy, for everything. You’re a keeper, a beautiful friend.

I posted this on my old blog a few years back, but I thought it would be fun to share again, since it is the season…

I know that you think this is a poinsettia:

But I live in The Poinsettia City, where we have poinsettias like this:

Close up, they look like this:

If you like the white kind, you can go over to my neighbor’s house:

Random Poinsettia Facts:

• Those big pointy colorful things on poinsettias are not the flower. Those are bracts.
• The flower is that weird little thing in the middle. If you want a long-lasting poinsettia, pick one where there is no yellow pollen showing on the flower.
• Poinsettias are from the genus Euphorbia. There are some very weird-looking Euphorbias.
• This may be why the Poinsettia’s botanic name is Euphoribia pulcherrima, pulcherrima having the same root as “pulchritude” or beauty.
• Many people think that Poinsettias are toxic, but you would probably have to eat a giant Poinsettia salad to make yourself sick. The sap of Euphorbias is known to be irritating to the skin, though, so wash thoroughly if you get the sap on yourself. And just to be safe, do not eat the leaves.
• The world’s biggest grower and breeder of Poinsettias is Paul Ecke Ranch in Encinitas, California. They are responsible for all those cool curly, spotty and multicolored Poinsettias that come out each year.
• Poinsettias are one of the most difficult holiday plants to grow. They need to be tricked into blooming precisely at Christmastime, which means providing them with exactly the right day length. Growers cover the little plants with blackout cloth or give them extra light at night to make them think the nights are just the right length for them to set flowers.
• I was a horticulture major in college. Does it show?

Enjoy your holiday season. And buy some Poinsettias.

Your correspondent from The Poinsettia City,
Suebob