I am woman. Hear me grumble.

First of all, to any and everyone who read my last post and said, “Feed, wha??” Becky is the winner! Although the contest is highly-imagined and/or retroactive in nature. Becky, you win some big, fat admiration. Alas, it’s from someone who is prone to reading astrology newsletters and poking at her tonsils with Q-tips excessively… so take it with a grain of salt. Anyway, I will do my absolute best to enlighten all the rest of you… You see that symbol down to the left on my side bar… the one that looks like an orange box with 2 white arcs and a dot inside of it?? That has SOMETHING to do with my feed. RSS feed, to be more specific, which is blogging vernacular well beyond this woman’s comprehension. For more information, call your local smarty-pants. Otherwise, go to Wikipedia. They have a really handy definition. All I can tell you is that FEEDS are yummy. Although I suspect most of you already know this. Mine come in a pretty little email which includes all of my favorite people’s updated blogs. The story goes that the feed update keeps me from blog-hopping ten times a day. (I blog-hop, anyway) But, actually, they are only scrumdiliumptious when everyone’s feeds are working correctly. MINE hadn’t been, evidently. So if you receive an RSS feed update thingy for my particular blog, you weren’t getting FED, so to speak — grumble number one.

Grumble number two: (I see a LIST forming here.) — MEN! Excluding those that have a thinking brain, as opposed to those that only have squishy mass taking up space between the ears. To the squishy-mass-brained men — may I recommend a visit to this guy!

When I’m not producing fiction for cash, I work in the fields of science and agriculture. Question, friends: what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a job that requires knowledge of, say, soils and irrigation implements? A man, maybe? A tall, strapping fellow who always has a toothpick hanging out the corner of his mouth and boots of some sort adorning his large feet, be it hiking boots or cowboy boots… always MUD-covered boots?? If your answer is NO WAY, I want to reach into your computer, grab you by the collar and kiss you. If you said, “Wow, she’s got talent for reading minds!!” Then, we’re hanging up now. You see, I am ANGRY, to put it mildly, at the people of the world who assume that I am the secretary or the cleaning lady or the student trainee when they walk into our local field office. When a customer says, “Oh. Nobody’s here today??” upon the realization that I'm the only one to help them in the building, I want to reach over the counter, grab their nose and twist it, saying, “That’s right! And NOBODY is touching your nose right now, can you believe that??”

Grumble number three: ME. Yes, me. Again, back to my last post. Once I was all done bitching about feeds, I thought I was giving my internets a present by sending you off to read blogs that made me laugh that day… One about a crazy nun… Thank you, Kevin. The other about a fictional crime… or so I THOUGHT.. That second one there came courtesy of novelist Joshilyn Jackson. And, I’m regretting posting the link because, she did actually have a bad thing happen to her! And NOBODY should laugh till their sides hurt about bad things happening to other people. (Laugh to your heart’s content about your own bad things.) But her story just had that “I’ll tell you the rest of the story tomorrow *wink wink*” ending, and so I assumed wrongly that there was some sort of catch… A “HAHAHA! Gotcha!” finale. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. And so, while her presentation of the events that transpired was told in a way that made me roll with laughter (as they always do), the REASON I was laughing wasn’t funny after all. So, I’m sorry, Ms. Jackson, for the horridity of your circumstances. Now that you’ve posted a continuation and I know that it was REAL and SCARY, I feel like an idiot for saying I laughed about it. Although I did. Because, somehow, you have the genius ability to make something as serious as wrongful arrest be very, very funny!!!

Anyway, I had more grumbles, but I’ll save them for a later… once I’m sufficiently over my man-hate and self-loathing.

You may now return to your regularly-scheduled weekend…