The question is: will Lance be eating Crow tonight? :eek: 
Since I’ve never participated in a photo thread yet, yuo won’t find me in one. However, this is one I took of myself with my webcam about 2 weeks ago.
We have just returned from a day of sun and fun on the lake. We took our neighbors and one of their kids with us because we hadn’t taken them yet. We had a blast together. We tubed and skied (Christ, that still doesn’t look right), and paddled around in the lake. The sun was bright, the mountain was out, the bald eagles were swooping down on the lake to catch trout, it was all very pleasant.
Now we have to clean the boat up. I hate that part.
Well, better finish my hard lemonade and get to it.
That telephone is spectacular but in a way, pales before the fact that it is wired into the house with pink telephone wire. :eek:
So, all was going well. I leave Washington, D.C. with The Golden Lamp Of Eternally Spotty Sunshine Dangly Bits carefully resting next to me in the car. I’m dampening the sound of forty-seven thousand dangly bits of glass ( crystal? Not sure yet ) and hardware by resting my Macadamia Nut White Chocolate Chip cookies on top.
Interestingly enough, at 4:09 pm on a Friday I found that I was not the only person who was suddenly gripped with the uncontrollable urge to leave Washington, D.C. Nope. In fact, there were so many people who had been gripped all at the same time that I found myself in the kind of Friday afternoon traffic typically enjoyed by citizens of Nassau County, New York and Simi Valley, California. But I digress.
( Side Note: FairyChatMom is a gem. A doll. A sparkling dangly bit all by her lonesome. She and Mr.FCM made me feel so very welcome. My nickel tour of Chez Fairy was rather, shall we say, eye-opening? Let’s just say this- F.C.M. has shared the Before and Afters, right? Some of the choice rooms are a wonder to behold. The flipside is that apparently in their previous incarnations, F.C.M. and her lovely S.O. were State Licensed And Certified Sheetrock Tape and Spackle Gods. Lucky thing, too. Their home improvement techniques can best be described as " astonishingly professional in grade with a subtle and artistic eye towards both practicality and excellent line". ( okay fine. I’m a kiss-ass. At least I’m able to admit it. ). ) **Mr. F.C.M. ** proudly showed me his collection of pneumatically-driven power tools made by a company named Grizzly? He seemed especially proud of the indoor/outdoor wood chipper that can " Handle pretty much anything up to the diameter of a human thigh". :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: 
I’m tooling along on Route I-95 northbound, talking to my pal K. K. and I talked for roughly 5 hours that day. He was heading down the California I-5 from wine country to L.A. while I headed north from FairyChatMom Country to my domicile north of New Yawk City. All is going well when I am suddenly and inexplicably pulled over by a surly slab of a man dressed in skin-tight light gray slacks, an armadillo packed neatly into his trousers, a sidearm that looked suspiciously like a L.A.W.S. Rocket, and the kind of mirrored shades favored by corrections officers in famous Hollywood Movies.
– Slash cut. Side of steamy roadway. Frightened troll driver. Surly officer. Vehicles crawling by. —
Surly Cop: " Say there, New York, any clue just how fast you were going? "
Cartooniverse: " Uh, no Officer, not really. I was busy talking hands-free on my headset while sipping diet soda and eating some Macadamia Nut White Chocolate Chip cookies and I guess my foot suddenly sucked all the lead out of the air and just became a bit too heavy on the pedal".
Surly Cop: " Aren’t we just a comic relief? Why don’t you hand over your driver’s license and regis…uh, hey. Is that a chandelier? "
Cartooniverse: " Why yes Sir, it is. Look at how the individual crystals each capture their fair share of nature’s beautiful afternoon sunlight, schisming the pure white light into a cornucopia of chromatic beauty. Ain’t it a thing? "
Surly Cop: " ( mumbles incoherently as he gazes into the rainbow flickers like an infant who has seen Teletubbies for the first time ) You can…uh… you can go about your business. Have a nice afternoon. Can I have a crystal from it? Nothing big, just a little droplet? "
Cartooniverse ( Feeling rather smug now ) " No. Do you have any clue how many Dopers are after this ephemeral assemblage of baubly delights? "
— Slow fade out —
And with that, I zoomed off. 
Okay. That’s not at all what happened. Aside from the guy who gassed me up in New Jersey who kept looking at it, The Golden Lamp Of Eternally Spotty Sunshine Dangly Bits is sitting here in my office right now. I am not sure what is going to happen next. Evil is afoot in the Cartooniverse household, in the person of the Ice Princess. She may wage war to stop me from hanging it above my desk as I wish to. It is possible, but unlikely, that I may be reduced to stripping off the bright dangly bits and arranging them in a beautiful wooden frame, each one hung lovingly from steel piano wire- so that as the sun sets over L’Office du Cartooniverse each day, I will be bathed in dozens and dozens of rainbows.
Then again, I might just keep it wrapped up and deliver it to SwampBear when I go to Atlanta in a few weeks. Dunno yet. Swampy, the word is that you have been pining after this beautiful work of art for many a moon. Hmmmm…
Cartooniverse
The Stealth Onions.
Band name !!!
( FCM, thanks for telling me about these threads. May I apply for Acolyte Status for now, with Membership pending after the standard 2 year waiting period? )
Aaah, just how I like my men-- stunned into slack-jawed silence. And blue.
And fer the rest of yas, now you can fully appreciate how much I normally hold back with my posts. Needless to say, I never came up short on research papers. 100% caffeine free, by the way.
I do sort of the same thing with onions. Since I’m usually cooking only for myself, I rarely use an entire onion. So I buy a couple extra onions, mince or process the whole shebang at one time, then freeze what I don’t use. I put mine in a ziplock baggie instead of the ice cube tray, and freeze them flat because I’m afraid it’d make my ice cubes taste funny. This way I can just break off a piece of onion as needed. I do the same with tomato paste and I’m wondering if condensed milk would freeze because my favorite bread recipe calls for only a half can.
VunderBob, except for the mustache, you look almost exactly how I pictured you. I wonder why I didn’t think you had a mustache? How many MMPers have stealth mustaches I didn’t imagine on them? Crow <snerk>
Lissla, are you sure Mr Lissar isn’t a vampire? Because vampires don’t eat anything and vampirism would be the only explanation of why that boy is still standing, not eating most food items the way he does. If you made the muffins into a loaf of quick bread, would he it it then? Fascinating.
Me, I’ll eat anything 'cept tripe, brains, raw oysters, onions or tomatoes. If you cook the last three items, I’ll eat them, but you’d have to cut the cooked oyster into little pieces and hide it in something else. There is absolutely no negotiation on the brains and tripe though.
Cartooniverse, it’s not nice to get my hopes up about the magical powers of the chandelier being able to get the owner out of speeding tickets. Bad Cartooniverse! No cookie!
I’m pretty sure that you were elevated to full member status by virtue of taking that sparkly thing off FCM’s hands. Normally, an offering of chocolate is also required, but I’m thinking that chandelier removal may be an acceptable substitute. That’s up to FCM, however.
And you’ve arrived at a rather convenient time as much of the upthread discussion involves MMP traditions, rules, and inside jokes, including a thorough explanation of Lissla’s husbands.
Welcome!
GT
He eats trail mix. And pita. And peanut butter cups. Do vampires eat peanut butter cups?
Welcome, Cartooniverse. You’ve been a member since '99! How is it that you didn’t know about the MMP?
Someone tried to glare me down about the historical accuracy of the Da Vinci Code. Just before closing, too. His brilliant argument ran, 'Well, so you don’t think all the facts are right. That doesn’t matter, because the Bible’s been translated so many times that we don’t know what the original was like".
I pointed out that we have extant manuscripts from the first and second centuries. He said, “Exactly!”, and glared at me as he walked out. Dude, I’m really sorry to tell you this, but, uh, the New Testament? It was written during the first and second centuries A.D? Prolly not huge sweeping enormous changes all over, and anyway, the Da Vinci Code errors I was talking about were not biblical errors.
I think he thinks that translators work from the King James, or maybe the NRSV. Some people. He really wanted to cow me into agreeing, too.
So that was my evening.
-sniffle- No cookie? You guys are brutal. Good thing I’ve gone on Atkins today. You’ll have to deny me bologna.
I dunno how I didn’t know about MMP. Mine is a quiet cloistered existence. Yeah. Uh huh. Anyway, I’m grateful for the grand welcome.
Listen, that chandelier, it’s a bit like Christine. You know what I’m talking about here. FCM owes ME chocolate.
Lissla Lissar, the man tried to cow you? In a restaurant??? Some men have no class. I’ve read other books by Dan Brown but not the one in question. I know, I know, it’s like being familiar with Joseph Heller’s novels and then saying, " What’s Catch-22?" I’m weird that way.
Oh , I gotta give Mr.FCM his props here in public. He said to me, as I beheld the amazingliness that is the chandelier, " You are going to say one of two things. You will say, " I can’t believe I didn’t take it", or you are going to say, " I cannot BELIEVE I have this thing in my car ! ".
Well, you win my man. I drove home looking at it thinking, " I cannot BELIEVE I have this thing in my car ! " However, it is beautiful. Yet deadly.
:eek:
Bologna cookies would be just disgusting, Cartooniverse.
Lissla, vampires love peanut butter cups. Why Reese’s even has an ad demonstrating to vampires the proper peanut butter cup eating techniques. As for pitas, well just don’t ever get between a vampire and his pita, that’s all I’m sayin’. Now trail mix is a different story. Vampires don’t so much eat trail mix as they use it in place of the soil of their native land. The airlines are forever losing vampires’ native soil, you know.
He/She is right. ( Ashes, Ashes, what are you?). Don’t you remember that old commercial campaign from the 1970’s ?
" Hey, you got blood of the eternally damned in my chocolate ! "
" Well heck, you got your chocolate in my blood of the eternally damned ! "
" Two great tastes that taste great together. "
So, it’s Monday morning. Does this thread die off and we seek out the fresh offering from Master Rue, or do the threads from past weeks live on? How does this work?
Cartooniverse or 'toons as you shall become known in the MMP, may I direct your attention over here?