cue dramatic music, this is our scene

Good Omens love +Twilight mocking=WIN.

I got slightly ambitious tonight and made french onion soup. It was good, but not amazing. Hmm. Anyone have any hints about what makes delicious onion soup? (I think part of the problem was that I didn't saute the onions long enough. I'm too impatient to be a good cook. Also, note to self: sourdough bread, while delicious, is not the idea bread for french onion soup.)

I also made cupcakes, because when I made my birthday cake last week I made twice as much icing as I needed for the actual cake. However, I didn't notice that the batter was supposed to make around 24 cupcakes and tried to squeeze it all into 12. Whoops. They're gigantic cupcakes! But at least they are tasty.

In other good news, I got a gym membership at World Gym. Yay! I bought it online last night and used it for the first time today. The World Gym in P-town has a number of advantages, particularly that it's really close to my house and almost directly on the route between my house and work. I'm currently debating whether to go after work, or before work. If I go after work I'm hungry and yet too tired to make dinner once I actually get home. But getting up early enough to work out, shower, and then get ready for work? Yeah, don't know if that will happen. I'm going to try it tomorrow and see how it goes.

I have a title for my NaNo project, I think. Now I want to make a pretend-cover for my book. It's so sad, I've lost all of my Photoshop skills. They were never more than meager skills, but I could do *something* with Photoshop and now...not so much. *sigh*

reminiscing about the crazy people in my life

Totally randomly:

Every once in a while, I think to myself, I should use the tag feature in LJ more regularly. And this always degenerates into me rereading back entries that actually WERE tagged.

And this time, I happened onto my 'Ray' tag.

Oh goodness.

For those of you who weren't on my F-list back in the bad old days of 2005, Ray was a guy that my mom was sort of dating, ish, kinda maybe, for a while. And he was crazy. (And a super-alcoholic.)

My personal favorite story about Ray was the time that he set our backyard on fire. For the linkphobic:

Mom and Erica and I went on vacation in New York state that spring and got Ray to house-sit for us. Now, let it be said right off the bat: putting Ray in charge of the house was not a great idea. Erica and I were openly predicting that the place would be trashed by the time we got back. However, we were not in charge of this decision - Mom was.

At some point during the week, a drunk-as-usual Ray decided that the grass in our backyard wasn't growing well and needed to be burned back. Okay, fine. However, instead of calling the fire department or getting a fire permit, he decided to light a fire himself. While drunk. On a windy day. Right next to our house.

Luckily, the wind wasn't blowing towards our house; unluckily, it was blowing towards the woods. In a rare moment of sanity, Ray realized he couldn't control the fire and called 911.

As the story goes, at least four police cars, two fire trucks, and an ambulance showed up at our house (maybe it was a slow day, not that there are many bury days for the police in the DFC). As as result, there was actually a rumor going around for a while among my sister's friends that we had died in a house fire.

Ray did NOT see fit to inform us of this event. The only reason that we found out is that he forgot to hide the ticket/citation for lighting dangerous fires. Gotta say, there's nothing like coming home from vacation to find an ominous pamphlet on your dining room table that says "Fires: Will YOUR Home Survive?"

It's a lot funnier in retrospect, now that Ray is safely a memory and Mom is engaged to a nice, SANE guy (and denying she ever dated Ray, LOL).

Okay, I'm done with the random anecdote. It does make me snicker, though.