the juxtaposition of things

this morning after turning the computer on, i was greeted as usual by Yahoo homepage
telling me everything that i missed while catching 8 hours of shuteye.
the headline was: "Japanese woman caught living in man's closet". Apparently a 58 year old homeless woman sneaked into a man's house and lived undetected in his closet for a year. a year. he became suspicious after he noticed that his food was mysteriously disappearing.
on the same page i clicked on a story about brad and angelina's new digs in the south of France. since they're having twins i guess they needed a little more room and bought a 1,000 acre chateau on the French Riviera. Further investigation showed that not only does this new pad have it's own lake, moat, vineyard and forest, but 35 bedrooms as well!
i'm thinking that my whole family and several of my closest friends could sleep in those closets for a year and be pretty comfortable. getting past security may be an issue. a better idea may be to hang out in the closet at their New Orleans or California houses while they're hanging out in France. With two new babies and a new mansion to deal with they'll be way too preoccupied to even think about their stateside cribs!

this doesn't make cents

today i learned that it takes 7 cents to make a nickle.
the world is full of perplexing truths
and trivial realities....
and that is one reason why i find it endlessly fun to be alive.

my small challenge for the day was to try to fill up my gas tank without whining about it to my kids who were onboard at the time. i failed. sounding like a geiser i
couldn't hold back from telling them for the umpteenth time " i remember when gas was $1.00 a gallon".
meanwhile my husband read an article in Reader's Digest (the large print edition pictured in my last blog entry which is given to me by one of my 80 year old customers when he's done with it, and i enjoy it lots because i don't need to use my reading glasses, (ironic that the large print editon therefore makes me feel younger)...anyways Paul read an article about this guy that is obsessed with squeezing every last mile out of a gallon of gas. he gives out specific guidelines for doing just that which Paul has completely taken to heart. He is experimenting with our Toyota which i can no longer drive until his experiment is over. the guy in the article got 30mpg out of his wive's SUV.

my new pal, head of marketing at Chrysler emailed me to see if i had heard about the new jeep incentives..($2.99/gallon for 3 years..or 700 gallons /year)...
she also wanted to wish me luck and contact her if i get on deal or no deal so she can cheer for me. gotta love her..
speaking of cheering..go David Archuletta!

life's simple pleasures, just add guilt

seems like a lot of the stuff that brings me joy, these days also induces guilt.
summer of 1977..slammed on a bikini, grabbed a beach towel, slathered on the baby oil, cranked up the radio...bingo...heaven.
now the sun is a double edged sword, not enough means too little vitamin D, too much
means skin cancer..(come to think of it the baby oil in '77 probably already did irreversible damage).
chocolate, up until recently, a daily staple of my diet, and a great source of comfort to me, now is a no-no because it causes reflux!!!
and reading magazines, (i have always been a mag-hag), has become an un-green activity...trees are killed, landfills filled.
guess that leaves blogging...(am i wasting electricity?) green guilt abounds.
oh yeah, and did i mention the SUV i've fallen in love with?
15 miles per gallon..............
that's enough to take the joy right out of my joyride....
think it's time to read my mags on a blanket in the sun with a bag of chocolate
and some Prilosec while dreaming of my Jeep.