I'm Brian Fellows!

Our new house has a huge yard, as most of the places in this area do, with lots of fertile and virtually undisturbed places for wild things to breed. At the old place, we had our share of birds (That bird is a LIAR!) brought in through the dog door by my hunting cats, but that was about it. They look harmless like this, no?
Usually they were either bloodlessly dead, or still alive enough to swoop around and scare the bejesus out of me; but feathers are easy to vacuum up and if you open a door or window, they'll fly right out pretty quickly. So no big stress.

But here? I'm thinking of getting my own cable access show so I can share all we have learned about local critters.

First came the ants. Hundreds, nay probably thousands of them streaming into the small bathroom. We caulked like fricking Schneider from One Day at a Time, and even called in the big guns professionals to exterminate. But still their armies came. To the point where I started to get a little tweaky, like feeling ants crawling on me when there were none…..and that they were on my clothes out in public and everyone would come to know me as the freaky insect lady…

I nearly came unglued at the open house at my son's new school when I found one walking on my arm while sitting at his desk. I had brought them with me and infested his school! OMG!! Can they trace the colony back to the ones at my house using ant DNA? Shit! Kaptain Klonopin had to rescue me from that panic attack! A few weeks later, when I was stable enough to venture to casually mention it, he told me there are ants in that particular classroom all the time, and they had been there long before open house. Whew! At least they're everywhere, not just here. Wait! They're EVERYWHERE? Where's my Klonopin?

I work BLUE!

Sorry, the title is not an Arrested Development/Blue Man Group reference, but a comment on how I roll in general. I love the cusswords. And since setting up this baby...
I have been giddy like a schoolgirl over the stuff I can stitch onto fabric. Of course I first tried Singer's practice design in the only color of embroidery thread I had lying around since the machine arrived before the thread sets I ordered. Oh, and I had to use clear thread for the bobbin for that same reason. Pretty? Note how the stem is jammed up in the flower......
Once I started in with the fonts things went straight downhill...

My homage to a funny Dane Cook bit. I blurred out 2 of the letters, but you know what it say, right? Can I say that on blogger?

Whoo-hoo! Maybe eventually I will make something sellable.

Invisible ME doll!!

You know how a bunch of times in your life you have had these really killer ideas? Just revelatory shit that could have made you a millionaire or changed the world for the better? Or at least forever? (Like my dad thought of the computer mouse way back when the first Apples were publicly available.) But you were too busy getting stoned or too broke/lazy to navigate the impossibly pricey and lengthy patent process? Or you never went to med school so the type of research you wanted to do might be misconstrued as "serial killing" or "mutilating corpses" and you couldn't get ahold of the Raelians no matter how hard you tried (Claude, dude, it's just ME!). Er...

Anyway, a very long time ago I had this freakish revelation that although I had lived with the same innards my whole life, I had never seen them. What does my heart, MY heart, not a general heart, not the frozen cut in half old dude's heart from the textbook, but my own heart look like? Do I have any weird anatomy? I think I should be allowed to monitor my liver as a preventative health thing anyway. I have pics of one measly ovary and my now disembodied uterus (FU uterus!...thanks for growing the babies but that other shit was torture!), but that's it.

(Guess which one this is! First right answer that sends me your snail mail address gets a very special expanding "magic towel" of the planet Uranus. Seriously.)


I dreamed of inventing a medication of some sort that would temporarily, or what the heck maybe even permanently render skin translucent enough to see through. The ultimate ANTI-TAN!! So Goth! It would be neat to display your inner junk in a belly shirt (Hey! Nice pancreas!) And it sure would cut down on exploratory surgeries and X-rays and expensive scary stuff like that. So, how far did I get in my experiments to develop this wonder chemical? Well, I tried that Michael Jackson skin bleach on a spot for awhile. No dice. That's about it. (They laughed at me at the university. Really. Mostly when I told them I was only gonna take philosophy/religion classes, but no math.)

Thank goodness some "real" "credentialed" scientists have gotten on this. I guess their way to see a panoramic view of the organs is probably a lot more technologically sexy. Probed....heh.

FUTURA!!!

Well, I finally did it. I gave in to my baser desires and bought an embroidery machine. Having spent decades DIYing clothes for fun and profit, this was the next logical step. I'm not a sewing machine snob; I love my old Singer for regular sewing and I have a very basic Brother serger. Plus I am not rich, so the high end machines were out of the question. Viking, Janome, etc all cost more than I have paid for most of the cars I have owned. I decided I would only get one if I could get it for $500. Thanks eBay! My CE-150 has arrived!! I plan to chronicle my use and abuse of the thing. I am starting out with basically 0 knowledge and the lowest end machine that you can get new. Let's see what I can do.

Canine instinct a cure for cancer?!

I think I have something worth looking into here. Sure I have had a lot of crackpot theories but Sharon Moalem's book Survival of The Sickest ended up PROVING a few of them!! Thank you Mr. Moalem.
Here is my latest one, actually my husband came up with it last night and it immediately made sense.

I have blogged before about one of my dogs having and inexorable hunger for TURDS. Well, what I didn't mention is that before I noticed this daily habit she was diagnosed with cancer, of the rectum that is (rectum? Damn near literally killed 'um!) . We were told she didn't have much time left, so we actually even got the third dog so the second dog wouldn't go all Grover (Somebody get that muppet some freaking Prozac!) on us when the first dog died.
At last vet visit, a miracle!! She seems to be in complete remission! My guess as to what cured her? Consuming her own turds.

I have read an article about booger eating
being somewhat akin to getting a vaccine.


So poop eating has to have some benefits too, right? I submit to you that it may hold the key to curing cancer. We'll probably have to have this pioneering research done by the Raelians (They're not busy right now, right?) or somewhere in Mexico or Thailand, or Oregon. Who will be the first brave soul to try the Pooshake (Patent Pending---and we'll try and make it tasty somehow.....)? Sometimes, dare I say even many times, these things turn out to be that simple. For example menstrual blood being a rich source of stem cells? Pre-hysterectomy I could have provided enough stem cells to coat the planet like the Sherwin Williams logo and cured the WORLD!!

Go, go coprophagia!!

I can't help but notice that only 1/3 of my dogs have a poop fetish. Why does the German/Rotty/Shepard mix crave the taste of poo and the pit bull/mix breed duo do not?

Perhaps it is because she is the oldest dog, with questionable dental quality left, and eating the easy to chew food is like an old person eating the overcooked veggies at the local all you can eat buffet. And it has to be easy on the digestive system too. I mean how much more processing can that stuff require?

Interestingly she seems to have pretty strict criteria for which pile she consumes. She doesn't seem to be too picky about whose brown eye blinked it out, but she does seem to be very finicky about texture. I have watched with fascination as she hones in on just the right one, sniffing closely and deeply for several seconds before deciding to either let it ferment a bit longer, or dig in. Like a human sniffing the cork of a fine wine.

(I still haven't figured out how to tell if she is mostly just recycling the same pile over and over again...I mean I am curious, but is that really where I want to spend all my research money?)

As close as I can figure she prefers the outside to be a little crunchy, but the inside still soft. Like a 3 Musketeers.


Mmmmmmm, candy.

Kitty Kat Transport 2.0

Version 2.0 featured update based on the many lessons I had learned from 1.0. First, hand sewing those letters on was a giant pain in the ass, and didn't offer the impact I was looking for. So somewhere I found some iron on letters. I think leftover from some project in an old Dynamite magazine.

Much better as far as readability and amount of effort required for the end result. Then I made sure this time I chose a leg from Levi's Jeans, nice heavyweight denim. I reused the strap from 1.0 and this time made sure to really anchor it both on top and bottom with tons of stitches that, frankly, look like monkeys may have sewn them. Whatever.

This time was a success as far as the look I was after and durability. Sadly, though another design issue quickly became apparent. The leg piece was just too long and narrow and the kitten didn't seem to want to be confined that far down. But this time I did manage to make it all the way down the block to my best friend Angie's house for a quick game of, "Guess what's in the bag!". But I carried him home in my arms, and the carriers were never actually used again. Interesting that they ended up being saved for all these years.

My First Time

Okay, I can't say for sure that this is the first thing I ever made from fabric all by myself, but it is definitely the earliest example I have of my hand sewing technique. (It hasn't gotten too much better!) I was 9, and I had just gotten a new kitten, a white little fuzzball I named Pegasus, after the mythological winged horse, and I wanted to take him everywhere with me. He was too big to fit in my pocket like some rodent pets I had owned in the past, so I used a the leg from some jeans my mother had made into cut-off shorts to fashion a kitten carrier. So ahead of my time! Everyone has a version for their little dogs now!

From the big ugly green sewing basket that used to be my great grandmother's, I managed to find some different colored threads and stitched this masterpiece...freehand if you can believe it! In an early show of personality, I purposely misspelled cat with a "K" so the name of the bag would match my initials, K.K. The bag didn't serve its purpose very long, as the hand-sewn carrying strap turned out to be no match for the weight of my kitten. (No kittens were harmed though!) The strap was reused in the new improved 2.0 version.

The Curse of Eclectic Taste

Some of us are just born with it. It isn't much of a handicap if you're ridiculously wealthy. However, if you are like most folks and are living a life of mostly-just-keeping-the-bills-paid, it can be extremely frustrating.

When my personal sense of style first started to whisper to me that the unspoken but universally accepted late 70s/early 80s public grade school "uniform" of an Izod shirt and Jordache or Calvin Klein jeans was perhaps not all there was in the world, the clothing and accessories I could find at the stores were, for the most part, not especially appealing. And often not in my price range. Not to mention the fact that I am shorter than average and not junkie-skinny. Oh the years I endured ill-fitting, well, everything! And I began to realize that I just didn't want what everyone else had. I wanted more. I had no choice but to try and make it myself.