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,