check this out!

marmalade ho's got some really cute stuff! if you're in the market for cute but edgey customised tshirts and sweatshirts from an independent UK label, then her stuff's for you!

shake rattle and roll!

OOOOO WHEEE!!! it's been a while since there's been a good-sized earthquake here! freaky!

internetting can be tough!

i'm still wrestling with the website and getting it ship shape, though currently it looks like poo!!! today's mission was to get the ssl certificate and dedicated ip address goin', and there's some shenanigans afoot but i'm hoping to have it cleared up tomorrow so i can start listing the existing merchandise!

once that happens, i can start concentrating on all the fun new designs i've got planned for your enjoyment! pow!

there's so much possibility on the horizon it's just really effing exciting.

sploooooosh!!

yesterday josh and i ventured south to check out wet and wild waterworld near el paso, texas - so when the afternoon rolled around, we got our crap together and went to the local pick quick for some cheap tickets, and then advanced token to said water park.

it was the weirdest feeling getting there and driving into the parking lot - i'm not kidding, except for all the cars parked everywhere this place looked like it's been closed for 50 years. we parked our car, grabbed our towels and made haste for the entrance, and slowly realized we could not find where to get into this place! it was obviously open, there were all kinds of people inside milling around with their towels and life rafts and such, but WHERE THE EFF DO YOU GET IN THE DOOR!?!?!

finally, as we walked the entire length of the outside of this place, we saw an open gate at the exit. since we couldn't actually see the entrance anywhere, in we went... and no one cared, so note to self for next time you could probably just walk right in without paying if you play your cards right...

when we got inside the place it was still totally weird, like if you've never been there before it's a little like what the shit?!?! cuz you're expecting water park and you walk into just a regular parky kind of place, with barbeques and stuff everywhere. once we got our bearings, we figured out where the lockers were - stowed our stuff, and off we went to explore!

wet and wild waterworld is a pretty good deal for the money - if you go monday through thursday, it's only 10 bucks. and if you go with food and drinks and food and such you can hang out all day - you can bring charcoal and rent one of their barbeques, too, which was pretty cool. AND you can drink beer. there was beer cans everywhere. i mean EVERYWHERE. we saw dudes standing in line for waterslides drinking beer. it was awesome. beer cans here, beer cans there, beer cans everywhere!

so from what we could tell in our 3 hours there, there are 3 major areas with all the good rides there. the first one has the amazon and alien encounter - amazon's kinda like the white water rafty type ride at wild rivers - very fun, but pretty tame. alien encounter should be called Human Toilet - you sit on a mat, go down a tube, and end up in a toilet that dumps you into a deep pool. IT'S AWESOME.

the next mountain has 2 big slides - one that's another rafty adventure like the amazon, and then THE SCREAMER. i don't know if wild rivers has any quite this fucking freaky, which means from now on there's no excuse when i'm at wild rivers, there's no ride too scary for me anymore. the screamer starts on a platform about 500 million feet in the air. you get in a tube, it's tubey for about 3 milliseconds, and then it's an almost vertical drop the entire way, then it puts you kinda horizontally and shoots you into a deep pool. you come up all discombobulated, and then to add to the fun there's a waterfall that dumps more water in your face as you swim to the exit. i literally almost pooped my pants standing in line for the ride, but it was totally worth it.

the last mountain has another rafty adventure, i think it was called the soaker, but this one was much shorter. you sit on the raft, and it's basically just a big drop and you skid across the water at the bottom. the second time josh and i went on this i accidentally ran over the lifeguard... she was a really good sport about it... then there was another tubey one with a mat, and another set of 2 mat slides - we spent the most time on that mountain cuz the lines were fast and the rides were fun.

afterwards we got funnel cake and ice cream and then we called it a night. went on back to las cruces for some fun times shooting in the desert, and josh put on one of his fabulous fireworks spectaculars! we start the long trek back to long beach tonight - it's been a great 2.5 weeks but i'm kinda ready to sleep in my own bed again.

also did i mention it's my birthday? brand new cars for everyone!

hearts and laserbeams book report: the great gatsby

ok lemme tell you a little story about my history with this book. when i was a junior in high school, i took honors english with one mr. hohl. and it was a cool class, the teacher reminded me a little of a more refined educated chris farley.

while i was generally a really good student in school, for whatever reason i was SO not into reading the great gatsby when it came up as our next book. it's quite possible i decided it was boring from the cover art, cuz the copy i picked up at barnes and noble has the same painting on the cover and SNORESVILLE. i ain't gonna lie to you, i totally judge books by their covers. it's what hooks me in when i'm wandering through aisles and aisles of fiction. who's got cool cover art, i'll check out what that one's about.

so anyhow, apparently no one else in the class was doing the reading either, and our teacher caught wise. one day we all walk into class and get the news that shit, we're having a pop quiz on the great gatsby. and it's an essay question. shit shit shit.

i think there maybe was one or two people in the class tops that weren't pooping their pants as they sat down and stared at their blank sheet of paper. what the hell do you write about a book when all you know is it has a stupid looking cover?

a few minutes into the pop quiz, mr. hohl left the room for some unknown reason. and at once, EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE CLASS whipped out their copy of the book and proceeded to write the essay using the book's description printed on the back cover. pure comedy gold. everyone finished their essays before the teacher came back, he collected the essays, and we never saw them again...

come to think of it i don't think we ever really talked about that book again, either...

so anyways, as part of my steph's not reading enough campaign, i thought i'd read the great gatsby to kind of make up for the whole not reading it before and then cheating on the test, thing. and what the hell, i TOTALLY should have read this back then it was dope!

the great gatsby by f. scott fitzgerald

ok so this book is about a dude named nick carraway - he was from the midwest, minnesota i think, and wanted to leave to go be glamourous in new york. so he decides he's gonna learn to sell bonds, and while i have no effing clue what that means, he does and that probably makes him a financial type dude. he possibly yells buy buy sell sell all day long into an old-timey phone, because this took place back into 1922 and the technology just wasn't that good yet.

so when he moves to new york, he lives on west egg. do west egg and east egg actually exist, or were they made up for this book, does anyone know? apparently the snooty old money lives on east egg, and the flashy ooooo that's my shit that's my shit new money lives on west egg. so nick decides to rent a house on west egg with a dude he met, but something fell through so he's livin there all alone.

it turns out he's living next to this jay gatsby dude, who throws crazy effing parties every weekend. like CRAAAAAZAY parties every weekend. i don't mean every saturday night, i mean they are all weekend long parties. the awesome thing is the people at these parties have no effing clue who gatsby is, and they make up all kinds of wild shit about him. kind of like those snl sketches about bill bradley, remember those? where those dudes sitting in a bar would yell things like "TO BILL BRADLEY!!! HE ONCE SWALLOWED AN ENTIRE BEAR WHOLE BECAUSE HE SKIPPED LUNCH!!!"

anyhow, moral of the story is no one really knows who bill bradl- i mean jay gatsby is. like they heard he's an oxford man which is a fancy way of saying he went to school there, but they also say he's killed a man and is into bootlegging and all kinds of crazy crap.

so getting back to the west egg east egg thing, i guess no one really hangs out together from those two neighborhoods, but nick has a cousin daisy who lives on east egg with her husband tom. nick goes to meet them for lunch and meets daisy's buddy jordan. jordan's a golfer, and kind of a jerk, i guess in her first big golf tournament she cheated to win... but in her defense golf sucks, so i guess i don't blame her.

so nick and jordan start hanging out, nick meets gatsby at one of his crazy parties and they find out, small world, that they fought in a battle together during wwI so they kind of know each other - i don't remember how gatsby knows nick is related to daisy but he concocts a scheme to meet daisy at nick's house...

before he went to the war, apparently gatsby slept with daisy - it's been five years and she's married now but he's totally living in the past and wants her back. so he invented his whole identity to be all high-falootin, with wild parties and a huge house and cars and servents and on and on just to impress her cuz her family had tons of money and that's all she cared about... she was kind of a jerk, too...

so gatsby and daisy start having an affair, and eventually her husband tom finds out, and he's effing PISSED. which is awesome because he's cheated on her all throughout their marriage and that was totally fine. so there's a big fight when everyone's taken a trip to nyc together, and when they're all heading back to their west/east/easter egg homes they're taking two cars - tom tells daisy and gatsby to drive together cuz he wants to be all macho they can't hurt me...

but then on the way home, daisy is just a shitty driver to begin with let me tell you, daisy is driving and accidentally runs over myrtle, who is tom's mistress. daisy and tom are all freaked out and so they keep driving, and then when tom's car (second in the 2 car caravan home) gets to the scene of the accident he freaks out, and the mistress' husband freaks out, and there's just general freaking out all over.

wilson, the mistress' husband, decides to find the hit and run car. because back in the day there was like 2 cars on the road. so when he heard oh it was yellow he asked around a tiny bit and found out it was gatsby's car... actually i think tom told him that. so wilson goes to gatsby's house, where he's lyin' on a raft in his pool, shoots him and then shoots himself! action packed!!!

and then since nick was one of gatsby's only friends, he was in charge of the funeral... and no one came to the funeral, and it sucked, and nick decided new york sucked and he moved back to the midwest the end!!!

howdy from new mexico!

the boy, the dog and i have been in new mex for the past week and a half and are here for a week more, sorry for the silence!

it's funny how our moving plans change constantly and consistently - as always a brand new plan is in the works, still involving getting outta southern california, and still involving moving east, but this plan involves moving quite a bit further east than originally discussed which makes me so excited i could puke. details to follow!

what else what else - step brothers comes out friday and i can't wait!

annnnnd today i am wearing pants, aren't you proud?

p.s. the new fall group is in the works and i can't effing wait to show y'all what it's all about! if you're into forest critters then the new stuff's totally for you!!!

at the movies with gene shallot

i just wanted to share josh and i saw the get smart movie today, and it was AWESOME!! i've been waiting for this movie like some people are waiting for the new batman flick.

while his cameo was super short, my favorite part hands down was bill murray. first off, super hilarious. number two, i get this really super nostalgic feeling when i watch movies with him in it - like he kind of reminds me of a really nice version of my dad, before i knew any better. so it's weird when i see him in movies sometimes, because he's an amazing actor and really fucking funny, but then it's sad at the same time so there are times where i just end up laughing and crying at the same time.

so uh... there's that. go see get smart!

hearts and laserbeams book report: white oleander

ok so when my buddy justin found out i was reading this for my second book report he point blank asked if i was only going to read boring novels, and where was the explosions and fire. AND whenever he asked if i was done with it yet, he'd call it white boreleander.

listen up buddy, just because it was an oprah's book club selection doesn't make it a snoozefest! read on:

white oleander by janet fitch

ok so this book is fundamentally about a superbitchy mother and her daughter learning that her mom's a jerk.

so the mom is super obsessed with being a hoity toity snooty poet and loves making fun of people behind their backs because they're not as pretty or smart or cool as her or whatever, and she feeds this crap to her kid constantly.

she meets this dude barry who likes her a lot and he starts showing up at parties and poetry readings she's at all stalker high school style and she won't get with him because he's fat and uglee and whatever.

i don't remember what changes, it happens pretty early on and this book was like 450 pages long which isn't as much as the unabridged version of the stand but is still pretty long... anyways all of a sudden they do hook up and she's all into him and oh shit did i tell you this mom is a total ho and has all kinds of one night stands with guys because they're hot and then writes poems about it after? yeah she a ho and she doesn't ever try to hide that from her kid astrid.

ANYWAYS, so the mom's going out with this barry dude and then finds out he's a player and that he's started seeing someone else.

AND SHE EFFING MURDERS HIS ASS.

so then she winds up in prison, right? the awesome thing about this book is that it wasn't about her and her effed up brains, it was about her kid that got left behind in foster homes. this kid, you feel so bad for her because her mom pretty much effed up her brain and she doesn't know how to deal with this shit and she ends up in some pretty messed up situations.

throughout the book she's in 6 different foster homes and all of them are shitty! even the one that was good ended up shitty cuz the mom killed herself! good lord! are all foster homes really that messed up? cuz daaaaaaaaayum!!! one foster mother shot astrid! pow kablammo!

so yes. long story short it's about astrid going through foster care, but more so about her realizing who she is while she's free from her mom's craziness. it's about her realizing who her mom is, and separating herself from it, and it was awesome. end of the book is really good, i ain't gonna lie to you.

if you dig stories about people in shitty situations learnin how to deal and getting out of it this book's for you!

ratings:
4 hearts - there wasn't much to hate about this book at all! loved it! pow!!

1 fart - there is some pretty fucked up shit that happens to the kid astrid... so there's that. pow pow!!!

oh sweet!!

i'm working on redesigning my website, and part of that is figuring out how the eff to get my blogger blog to show up on it - apparently wordpress works better with zen cart, but that means abandoning 6 years of blogging on this site! no way jose!!! stay tuned while i figure out how to get images to show up on my site! pow!

the end!