Ida Clare I’ve won a Ploditizer

Dear Creative Chicks,

Like a critically acclaimed television show with no ratings, this little blog has its accolades but no readership.  It has been nominated for a Ploditizer.  Not to be confused with Pulitzer, a Ploditizer is an award for a blog that plods along with scanty posts, few  tutorials, absolutely no curriculum for your little genius home-schooler and a penchant for avoidance of writing posts all together.

“Who nominated you?” you might ask.   Ah shucks, I nominated myself.  Since I created the Ploditizer Prize, I might as well be the first winner and honoree.

It is such an honor just to be nominated.  I got the call early this morning or was that the call of the bathroom?  It was very early so I don’t exactly remember.  I would like to thank the academy: Academy Sports and Outdoors.  Did you know you can order your own trophies, no questions asked?  They aren’t exactly shaped like the Oscar because if you get a trophy here in Big Thicket they’re likely to have deer antlers on them.

l

_-=

I guess there could be a presentation ceremony, but that would mean I have to dress up and send out invitations so maybe not.  We’ve been having an actual winter here, so all my strapless gowns are not practical since goose flesh is so unattractive on anyone but geese.

Besides who wants to wear a strapless gown when you can wear pajamas with feet in them and stay wrapped up in a Snuggie?  Footed pajamas may become one of the Ploditizer requirements along with a good dose of apathy and overwhelm.

Let’s see if you are a candidate for a Ploditizer?

The weather outside is frightful.  The weather inside is just slightly better.
You have the attention span of a flea with ADD. (no offense to fleas intended)
You are drunk on Pintrest and Netflix.
You are in denial that Christmas will take place again this year.
Your modus operandi is the slacker life, you are a procrastinator extraordinaire, a lolly gagger, you know which end of the dilly to dally and you are considered by many to be a flake.
You start many projects, finish few and have a bevy of well used excuses that you drag out at the drop of a deadline.
You, my friend could be eligible for a Ploditizer.
Oh yeah, and you claim to be a blogger.

Since I am now a Ploditizer Winner, I am going to plod on out of here and see if I can come up with something more interesting to write about than this.

Hugs,    

 

Ida Clare, It's Black Friday in Big Thicket

 

 

Black Friday Shopper who has been waiting in line a really long time.

 

 

 

 

Dear Creative Chicks,

It's Black Friday in Big Thicket.  What's in your my wallet?  A picture of Alec Baldwin. Happy?

Sigh.  I am a bargain shopper.  I will hold off buying something I want until it goes on sale.  You never catch me without a 40% off coupon off from Hobby Lobby.  I buy used stuff and am happy to get it.  I shop garage sales and thrift stores, but I just can’t get revved up about getting up early, standing in line shivering in the cold with otherwise normal people who turn into stampeding idiots once the Friday gets black enough to open the doors of a corporate giant needing to balance their bottom line.

You go girl.  I don’t blame you.  It’s a big game to see if you can be one of the ones who cashes in on saving the cash.  I just can’t do it.  I don’t have the stamina to deal with some of the strapping big lumberjacks who may be carrying a weapon at Wal-mart.  After all, there is a reason they’re wearing camouflage clothing.  They think they’re invisible and we won’t see them stealing our hard won X-box from our buggy while we are bent over wrestling a six-year old for a Furby. 

Black Friday in Big Thicket should be named, Black-Eye Friday or Black and Blue Friday, because if it’s a ridiculous enough sale and they have only six of them to go around, somebody is gonna get hurt.

It’s too much for me.  Besides, I’ve got to keep my little digits ready for Cyber Monday where I can spend every dime I have in the comfort of my footed pajamas.

Don’t forget to shop at Shell Out More at Small Store Saturday and Sell Your Soul Sunday!

Me -- I’ll be sleeping off my turkey and dressing binge.

Hugs,

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

May you have a wonderful Thanksgiving! 

Gobble gobble, 

 

Ida Clare it's a Tag Book

Hi Creative Chicks,

Well, yesterday I officially stopped celebrating Halloween. It took me a while to eat all that candy and drink up the left over witches brew. I will admit there are still a few folks I'd like to put a spell on, but I guess they will have to wait until next year or at least until I get a chance to vote them out of office.

Here is a tag book that I have been working on.  I think I already shared the first one as a sneak peak, but that was a long time ago.

I'm going to put a ring through the holes and tie some ribbon around it and call it done.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Hugs,

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween Trick or Treaters! 

Halloween Group Therapy

Dear Creative Chicks,

If this image looks a little blurry, just toss it up to the jitters of a sugar buzz you have from eating all that pre-test candy and not the fact that I enlarged it too much--the better to read it, my dearie.

I can't wait till Wednesday Night.  I found some purple nail polish and it's going on!  I may go as grape hands.  See what I mean about a sugar buzz.

Now where did I hide the Snickers?

Hugs,

Ida Clare I'm Afraid Halloween is Almost Here

photo: merrymeet.tumblr.com via pintrest

Dear Creative Chicks,

It’s time to tune up your broom because Halloween is near.

They don’t use the term, All Hallow’s Eve much anymore but as a kid, I was confused as to what it meant exactly.  I thought the word “Hallow” was a fancy way of saying “holler” as if you were supposed to save up all your hollering for one night.  Naturally this didn’t make sense because I got hollered at year round for stuff that had nothing to do with Halloween.

However, being the maligned, yet dutiful child that I was, when All Hallows Eve rolled around,  I hollered “Eve” as loud as I could thinking that the hollering was what got you the candy.  My mistake.

Hollering "Eve" instead of "Trick or Treat" at the top of my lungs in a crowd of kids dressed like pirates and goblins earned me a punch in the stomach by Delbert Pinon which was explanation enough that I may have taken the whole Hallow’s Eve a bit too literal.

I guess the trick was on me.

Don’t forget to buy candy and be sure to hoard some of your favorite.  You will never have a more perfect excuse.

Hugs, 

Ida Clare, Swat that Thang

Glamping

Dear Creative Chicks,

Ok, ok, I know I’m supposed to write something uplifting and positive but that’s never stopped me before.
   
Last week, I wrote about the recent trend of Glamping.  For those unfortunate few who don’t know what I mean and weren’t privy to last weeks post, it is where you pretend you are in a Ralph Lauren commercial out in the woods.  What I mean is that it is upscale glamorous camping outdoors jampacked with denial that what usually goes with camping won’t buzz, bite, sting, thunder, leak, blow or rain onto all that glamour.

Glamping

Do you remember those Tarzan movies where the rich industrialist would go on safari and there would be countless natives to pitch the tent, build the fires, cook the food and face the angry lion with only a spear and prayer?  Well Bwanna, that’s what glamping looks like except for the pith helmet and the natives and maybe the lion, if you’re lucky.

What I want to complain about, because I went on my version of glamping last week and no one told the damn mosquitoes that I was there for relaxation and meditation not herky-jerky slapping, stamping and swatting.  I haven’t exercised that much since I was running from the law.

My glamping goal

We’ve had a dry summer like a lot of places and we were blessed with a good rain last week, for which I am truly grateful.  It’s looking less like yard plague and more like yard around here but evidently the love-bug infestation wasn’t burden enough to bear.  No, we now have enough mosquitoes to give every creature with blood flowing in their veins a reason to run for cover. 

I guess they are here for Halloween; the bloodsuckers. 

Here’s a little tip: If you are camping or glamping or just going to the mailbox, you might want to carry your glamorous fly swat or find someone with a spear.
 
Hugs,

Ida Clare, Have you been Glamping?

 
Dear Creative Chicks,

Are familiar with something that is all the rage called Glamping.  It is a combination of the words Camping and Glamorous: two words that have until now never been spoken in the same sentence. My family camped when I was a child and there was nothing remotely glamorous about it.

Glamping is camping that has taken a break from reality.  Camping is a pain in the backside: sleeping in sleeping bags next to a campfire that keeps the wolves away but not the mosquitoes or the cold. 

Glamping is drinking lots of fine wine with the wolf then cuddling under the 400 count Egyptian linens and a down duvet in a four-poster bed so that the cold or mosquitoes don’t matter. 

Camping is roughing it on purpose so that you can experience the great out doors.  Glamping is purposefully making your camping trip luxurious by hauling out precious items to the woods that Goldilocks would find, “just right.”

Personally, I plan to stick to Grumping which is a word combination for Complaining about Camping.  So for all you fellow Grumpers, here are a few questions to ask before you make a trek out into the woods.

Will there be transportation?  Pack mule? golf cart? little red wagon pulled by Huskies? (and you surely know me well enough to know I don’t mean the four-legged kind.)  I don’t know about you, but hiking is only in my vocabulary as it applies to me telling some one to go take one.

Will there be food that isn’t pierced by a stick and held over the fire to cook until I am so hungry I am ready to eat the bark off the trees? 

Will there be wifi?  I don’t know about you, but I can live without Facebook for days if I have to.  If the phone rings in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?  Heck yeah, especially if it is a stupid ring tone.  Why do you think suburbia is being over run with wild life?  They are sick of technology.

Before you attempt to go camping or glamping you might want to have a blood test.  Not for the mosquitoes, but to see if camping is in your DNA.  If you find you are descendents of Lewis and Clark; great.  If not, you might be descendents of Lazy and Clueless.  Lazy and Clueless have a tendency to forget to bring matches or toilet paper.  Lewis and Clark know how to find their way home again.  Lazy and Clueless think that the lady on their GPS knows to turn left at the big rock just three trees past the wild boar trail. She doesn’t.

Find out which group you belong to and go camping or glamping at your own risk.  Me, I am headed for the woods back behind my house with a lawn chair, a library book and a candy bar.  If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know I misread my genealogy.

Hugs,

What TGIF Really Means

Dear Creative Chicks,

Well, it’s TGIF or Thank Goodness it’s Fried! 

We here in Big Thicket like everything fried and I’m not just talking about the new lower calorie French Fries at Burger King.  Really, Burger King?  You think low-cal fries are going to make up for that creepy king mascot you used for years frightening a whole generation of children into the arms of a clown named Ronald?  But already I am getting off the subject.

We fry any thing that can’t still jump out of the skillet and we prefer to dip it in batter first, so imagine my surprise while at the food court at Sam’s Club, when I watched dumbfounded as a man brought to his table a rotisserie chicken and plastic cutlery where he proceeded to crack open the packaging on the chicken and dig right in.  (I don’t exactly know what to call the place where they sell hot dogs and a coke for the tasty price of $1.75.)

Does this seem odd to you?  No plate, no napkin, no woman to be embarrassed for him: his only companion; the required smart-phone substitute for a human lunch partner and his greasy fingers that tapped relentlessly on the screen when they weren't chicken grabbing. 

Note to self: Have my own cell-phone checked for salmonella.

What’s next?  Bringing the container of Bluebell and a wimpy plastic spoon to the table while texting to your friends on Facebook, “Hey look, Sam’s has the five-gallon size of Cookies and Cream and I’m not leaving until I’ve eaten it down to the cardboard. Whoo Hoo! TGIF:  Thank Goodness it’s Frozen!”

In Big Thicket, going out to eat is one of the things we have to do that passes for entertainment.  Eating as entertainment.  Now that I think about it, I kept waiting for this brute to wrench the drumstick from the carcass, rip the meat off the bone then throw it over his shoulder in Henry the Eighth fashion.  Now that would have been dinner and a show.

As for you, if you’ve gotten this far, reading all the way to the end, you too can say: TGIF:  Thank God I’m Finished!

Have a great Friday,

The "I"s Have It

Hello Creative Chicks,

Do you remember that annoying exercise that teachers would put you through when you didn’t know how to spell a word?  “Look it up in the dictionary,” I was told more than once and my response was always the same dumbfounded grunt and whine, “Uhhhhhh, how am I supposed to find it in the dictionary if I can’t spell it?”

Then spell-check came along and the heavens opened up and words that used to baffle me roll out on the page with the greatest of ease.

However, sometimes my spelling is so bad that spell-check writes me a snotty little note, “Dude, look it up!  I need a better clue.”  When I can’t get close enough for spell-check to make an intelligent guess, do I resort to a dictionary?  Well no.  That would be wrong.

Google, with its anticipatory reaction to my crappy spelling pulls my brain out of the dirt.  Do you mean convenience?  Yes, I meant that instead of that other word I was spelling.

Why in the name of blogging am I wasting your time telling you something so mind-numbingly boring?

I am certain I had much wittier, more intelligent things to write about after a morning marathon of coffee and Pintrest, but I got all tangled up in spell-check because the “I” on my keyboard is not working unless I pound on it repeatedly.  Ths This has accounted for some very nteresting interesting yet tresome tiresome sentences.

There seems to be something blocking the key like, oh I don’t know, dead love-bugs or maybe some cookie crumbs, though how cookie crumbs got there is a true mystery.  Doritos, I can understand. 

I bought some of that spray-air to clean off the offending muckity-muck, but that would mean I would have to actually find it to use it.

Note:  In the sentence above spell-check would like to substitute muckty-muck with murkily-muck, musketry-muck or my favorite and most apropos: mockery-muck.  As soon as I can get the mockery-muck out from under the letters on my keyboard, I’ll get back to you.

Hugs,

Bloom where you are planted!

The other night when I was painting this entry for my art journal, I was too lazy to walk over to my computer to ask my know-it-all friend, Googlie for a quote to go with my picture.  All my little pea-brain could come up with was this one, “Bloom where you are planted,” so I decided to use it.  I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on how much the laziness of the artist contributes to the outcome of the art.

Anyway, as with any quote worth repeating until it is a cliché, it got me to thinking about how well I have been blooming since I was transplanted here to Rancho Wrecko, my three-bedroom fixer-upper in need of carpentry skills, power tools and a home improvement budget.  Some days I think I’m blooming and then some days I’m in the blooming idiot category. 

This house came to me when I was one dead battery away from being homeless.  I had been planted along with the sum total of all my worldly possessions in my car.

Ida Car is a four-door wonder.  She makes me wonder if I’m going to make it to my destination whenever I leave the house.  Every journey is an adventure.  Not that I am opposed to adventure, but sometimes you  just want the pleasure of knowing that car trouble isn’t in your immediate future and that you won’t be that person who leaves those steel-belted crumbs on the highway as a means of finding your way back to grandma’s house.

Ida Car has a lot of character.  She gets her chalky color from a paint job so unattended to that it has never had a wax job.  She doesn’t mind, as ladies everywhere know that once you start waxing, you can never go back.  Ida Car does get the occasional trip to the car wash where the water pressure is strong enough to dislodge the enamel from your teeth which is what is required if you want to get the dead love bugs off your windshield.

As a side note, if you get the opportunity to come to Big Thicket you might want to wait until the Love Bug Love Festival is over. It’s not something the Chamber of Commerce advertises since Love Bug couples are acting out inappropriately in public.  Me screaming, “Get a room,” has no effect.  Since the only way to kill a Love Bug is to accidentally swallow a mouthful (that’s where the blooming idiot shows up) or run them down with your car, I vote for the latter.  Ida Car is an expert in Love Bug annihilation and seems to kill with no remorse.

I have driven better, faster, sleeker cars, but none who have meant as much to me as this little sedan who was my home away from homeless when I had no where else to go.  She took me to job interviews, friend’s houses with couches to loan, and for a while to a state park where at night, I counted the stars through the moon roof that one know-it-all man in my life promised would leak every time it rained.  Ida Car may leak Havoline on your pristine driveway, but her moon roof keeps me plenty dry.

I’m not sure I am blooming here, but Ida Car is.  She likes the slower speeds, easier parking down town and when she is ready to be put out to pasture; I am going to plant her just like this:

 Are you blooming where you are planted?

Hugs,

Ida Clare, I gotta a secret!

Wouldn’t you love a Secret Garden?

Where will magical thinking get you?  Well, you could ask J.K.Rowlings or J.R.R Martin; we already know where it got them.  Or you can ask Ida Clare and I will tell you where it gets me.  Aside from the impossible dream of earning back my investment in the Texas Lottery, magical thinking sends me outdoors to a Secret Garden with low humidity and a temperature in the 70’s.

My Secret Garden has a spring-fed water fall and an old fashion swimming hole that is never muddy and turns me into a beautiful mermaid whose hair floats gloriously through the sparkling water and then dries beautifully without conditioner, hair gel, or something called: got 2 be glued blasting freeze spray.

In my secret garden, I am friends with the fairy folk who tell me stories about olden times when I used to be Princess of Quite-A-Lot and not The Dowager Queen of Big Lots, about how I used to rule the Forty Acre Wood instead of stalking the bargains of Dollar Tree.

My secret garden has a hammock filled with designer pillows and a gossamer throw from Overstock Dot Bohemia Wagon.  I take long uninterrupted naps there where my dreams of financial security and emotional stability come true and I seldom need to raise my voice to anyone with the exception of the occasional troll who wanders in from the hinterlands, otherwise known as Big Thicket.

(The trolls are bad this time of year just before hunting season starts. The whitetail deer keep them thinned out by poking them with their antlers in their beer guts where all their courage and bluster comes pouring out in a puddle and they stumble on back home wondering why their guns are limp and don’t shoot like usual and why they now have no desire to go back into the woods.)

Oh I could go on and on but you get the picture. The possibilities are endless in one's Secret Garden.

I’ve included some photos today of places that look magical to me.  I hope you get to visit your Secret Garden very soon.

Hugs,