OOBH Stew: Oscar Edition

Good Monday morning!

Who watched the Academy Awards last night? Show of hands...

(nodding head)

Okay, yup, yup. As I expected. Not many of you watched it all, and to be perfectly honest, neither did I. I get really bored during awards shows despite all of the sparkly celebrities, but I make it a point to watch the half-hour red carpet pre-show and the first 30-45 minutes of the show.

In this post I'm gonna hit the high points... right up until I went to bed.

I adore Neil Patrick Harris and he can do no wrong in my book. He opened the show Vegas-style with glitz, feathers, and a few off-color jokes that I'm sure bugged any prudish viewers right off the bat. Harold & Kumar reference = win.

Best of all, he sang live and nailed every note. LOVE.


Steve Martin & Alec Baldwin hosted, and they were okay. I love me some Alec and his delivery was spot on as always, but Steve seemed terribly rehearsed and stiff to me. Too much set up/punchline/laugh going on there, ya know? They wanted it to seem like they were riffing but they were clearly not.

Alec could have pulled it off; frankly I think next year they should have Alec and Tina Fey host!

One of the first commercial breaks of the night brought us an ad that made me stop and ask, "WTFF?" aloud.

News Flash!
Whoopi Goldberg routinely pees herself.



Ummm, oooooookay. Thanks for that, Whoopi.

Charlize Theron's dress made me crave sugary cinnamon buns for some reason. Odd.



Gabourey Sidibe (from Precious) looked beautiful. Yes, she's a big girl and it must be a stylist's ultimate challenge to outfit her for an event like this, but I love this dress!



The Brat Pack did not age well.



The John Hughes tribute started off so great, then became overly-long and uncomfortable, yes?

I supposed Jennifer Gray might have been there but no one would recognize her post-surgery mug anymore. Judd Nelson looks like a homeless terrorist and Alley Sheedy looks like she hasn't slept or seen the sun in several years. That shapeless black nightgown she was wearing certainly didn't help matters either.


I *heart* this man.



I know he is old enough to have fathered me, but I would still hit that like I was in a Toyota with a stuck gas pedal. What?

Miley Cyrus has terrible posture.



I just want to roll her shoulders back, knee her in the small of her back, and pull her head upwards. Take some yoga or horseback riding lessons or something, girly!

Sandra Bullock won. Good for her. As Jim put it, this movie was her "Erin Broccoli-Bitch." It's so not my kind of movie; in fact we got a bootleg copy of it from J's brother and kept it for a couple of months but never watched it. Meh.

I've always liked Sandra for some reason; maybe because her sister owns a bakery in Montpelier, VT, and Sandy showed up on opening day and slung some danishes to help out. I'm easy like that - I like when celebs act like normal people.

I admit it, I totally laughed at Ben Stiller's Avatar get-up.



I couldn't help it; I giggled. The fact that James Cameron seemed peeved by it only added to the awesomeness. Speaking of that....

It was a great night for ex-wives! Way to stick it to your a-hole ex, Kathryn! Woohoo! Any time I can see James Cameron taken down a few notches is a good night as far as I'm concerned, and how better to get revenge on your ex than by beating him at his own game and looking fantastic while doing so? Vindication.... Enjoy it, Kath!

Again, I haven't seen The Hurt Locker because I don't typically like war movies, but I might have to check this one out out of principle alone.

That's all I've got! I'm sure there were many more photos and moments to discuss, but I needed my beauty sleep, yo!

Did I miss anything?

Shouldn't you buy me dinner first?

I had my first Speech Therapy appointment on Wednesday due to my craptastic post-throat surgery voice, and it was an interesting experience. The therapist, Joyce, is a lovely woman with whom I felt instantly comfortable, and we sat in her little office and made strange sounds at one another for over an hour.

Par-tay!

She had me count to ten, say the days of the week, do scales (I can only get up to a weak "Fa"), and basically just try out different things to assess how badly old Lefty the Vocal Cord is stuck, then she taught me some exercises geared at getting him moving again and/or making Righty compensate for his lazy ass. The exercises were odd, and I definitely felt like a fool doing them. Seriously, one of them involves pushing on your chair and making guttural angry animal sounds.

I swear I kept it together right up till the point when we got to "O," because you know how my mind works: I was thinking about how I was showing her my "O Face" and we had just met.

Me: "O," (breathe from diaphragm)
"O," (breathe from diaphragm)
Her: "Good."
Me: "O!" (inhale)
Her: "Excellent!"


Me: "Okay, I'm done. Wanna cuddle and watch TV?"

Awkward.

With a little bit of luck and some hard work I hope to regain an audible, clear speaking voice, so it's worth the embarrassment. Plus, I get to tell people that I have to go work my glottis and relish the look on their faces.

Joyce's office walls have pictures like this everywhere:



Remind you of anything? Yeah, me either. (smirk)

So that's that. Every Wednesday for the next 11 weeks I will sit in a small room and grunt out vowel sounds until people can hear me again. Joyce took a little video of me reading about rainbows (hey, I didn't pick the paragraph) and I look forward to the day when I can marvel at how bad I sounded back then.

I'm having a good voice day, something that has replaced good hair days in my little corner of the world. Joyce taught me that if I turn my head to the right my voice is louder, so I moved my phone at work to my right-hand side and now when it rings I take a deep breath, turn my head, and pray something good comes out. Of course, when I told Mala about this new quirk of mine she reminded me of a chick at our TV station who insisted on running the audio board even though she was deaf in one ear. When you spoke to her she would lift up the hair from the good side, cock her head towards you, and instruct you to speak into her good ear.

Great, now I'm the Deaf Audio girl. Perfect! Come sit on my right side, sugah, I need to tell you something....

Hope you all have a lovely, boisterous weekend in my honor. Shout, shout, let it all out. Do it for me (and Johnny)!

TMI Thursday: It's Raining Men

As always, if you want more TMI goodness, go check out LiLu's TMI Thursdays and get yo' freak on!

Today's chapter in the sexual education of La Bev is from the early teen years. It's no erotic journey from Milan to Minsk, but it's my story and I hope you like it.

Growing up in northern Vermont was pretty far from city living. Aside from Burlington, a small city for which I have infinite fondness thanks to the time I spent at UVM, the closest city within driving distance happens to be in Canada. As luck would have it, the drinking age in the province of Quebec is 18 and the bartenders were notoriously lax about checking IDs, a fact which meant that Sherbrooke won over Burlington every time we decided we needed a bigger night out than our po-dunk town could offer.

As teenagers we would make the 90 minute trek up I-91 North to Sherbrooke whenever possible. Back in those pre-9/11 days, one needed just a drivers license and a smile to get through the border, and I'm still amazed to this day that 3-4 giggling teenagers with several contraband cases of Molson Ice in the trunk routinely made it back across the border to Vermont in the wee hours of the morning.

Montreal is an even larger city, and at 2 hrs and 40 minutes away, it was closer to us than Boston. Combine proximity with the fact that the U.S. dollar used to dwarf the Canadian dollar and you can see why school officials chose to send us to the "world next door" for field trips. We'd go see plays, have special weekend trips, and go to amusement parks. We loved us some Montreal.



On one of these trips we took a big yellow school bus (no, not a short bus) up to Montreal and saw Les Miserables. After the show we were turned loose on the city for a couple of hours before we had to head back to VT. Since I am now and have always been a rather... ahem... lascivious gal, it didn't take us long to locate one of the city's finer sex shops.

My little gaggle of girls and I poked around (heh heh) the shop for quite a while, ogling the multicolored dildos and vibrators, daring each other to touch things that oughtn't be touched, and giggling like mad. When it came time to leave I decided to be very daring and buy a souvenir, so I went to the magazine rack and picked the first glossy magazine with a naked dude on the cover that I saw.

Clutching my smut to my chest, we boarded the bus and sat way in the back before furtively examining the contents of the magazine. It came as a bit of a shock when we realized that the magazine was not intended for us at all; not "us" as in teenagers, but "us" as in females. We hadn't made it past the table of contents before realizing that I had accidentally purchased a porno mag for gay men.

We still read it, of course. ;) The pictures were still nice, and the stories were... enlightening, but it really wasn't a turn-on in the slightest, and before we had reached our home turf we had already grown tired of it.

The problem was, how to get rid of it? I couldn't just dump it at school for some poor custodian to find, could I? So I took it home and hid it carefully until I could find a way to surreptitiously dispose of it.

Days and weeks went by, and I sort of forgot about my dirty mag, but never completely. One day my parents left me alone for an afternoon and I realized that this was my chance! I seized the thick magazine along with some wooden matches and went out to the back yard, where my mother kept a large metal trash barrel. She used the barrel to burn junk mail and bank statements, so I took my private shame and threw it into the barrel, then lit a match.

The colorful pages began to blacken and curl and I stood back to allow the thick plume of black smoke to escape. It was a windy day, and suddenly the wind picked up and a gust blew a wall of smoke directly into my face. While I coughed and sputtered and examined myself for bits of burning material, I realized with horror that the wind had caught chunks of the burning magazine and they were fluttering out of the barrel... fluttering away in the wind.

I panicked and raced after them, but there were too many! It was raining penises and waxed chests and lusty chiseled jaws. I stomped out a full page of flaming peens before finally getting on my hands and knees and seeking out all of the smaller pieces that had scattered hither and yon. Just when I thought I had it all picked up I'd find another dick just lying there, smirking at me.

It took several hours but I finally got everything properly destroyed and picked up, but I had learned my lesson well: next time, just throw it away in the McDonald's bathroom or something.

Oh, and get better porn.

WTH am I lookin' at?

This morning as I drove to work I was feeling rather charitable, so when I saw the chance to let an old man in a giant sedan merge in front of me on a busy street, I took it. I knew immediately that doing so was a mistake.

First of all, no courtesy wave. Rude.

Secondly, he proceeded to go 5-10 mph below the speed limit for the entire 13 mile trip to Bedford, making sure to leave a good 2-3 car lengths between himself and the car in front of him. Every time he saw a police car or a pedestrian he'd slam on his brakes just in case. There was literally a mile-long line of cars behind him, with me leading the slowly crawling parade of coffee-deprived fools.

The real cherry on the crap sundae was when I finally got a chance to pass him. I pulled up alongside him at a traffic light and willed myself not to glare at him, but I did sneak a quick peek at him to see what exactly I was dealing with and was instantly rewarded with the sight of him thoroughly cleaning out his nostrils with his gnarled old finger. His wife sat slumped in the passenger seat, seemingly catatonic and not tall enough to see over the dashboard.

Of course, that scene pales in comparison to what Elliott witnessed this AM, but hey, this is NH, not America's Wang. We can hardly compete.

At any rate, I was inspired to show you a few other odds & ends I have seen over these past two days that also made me ask, "What the hell am I lookin' at?!"

First, Courtney Love has never looked better, right?


(photo courtesy of Dlisted)

Has she turned into a cracked-out Muppet? What is that thing on her head? Why does her skin look like a waxy orange peel? Why, Courtney? Whyyyyyy?

Next, at least Lindsay looks amazing.


(photo courtesy of WWTDD)

Are those motherhumping HAMMER PANTS? Why I oughta.... Girl, I will strangle you dead for wearing those if I ever get close enough, so watch yourself. And what in the world is that fur thing? Where are the Peta people with their buckets of red paint? Even if it's fake, it's hideous!

Why does this make me so angry? I really don't know. It just does, alright?

Last but not least, as I was watching Psychic Kids last night (shut up) I saw a promo that made me question everything I know about television.

Who the HELL keeps giving Kirstie Alley TV shows?



Jeez Louise! She's nuttier than squirrel poop and not the slightest bit funny. Also, this yo-yo dieting thing is really annoying - just be FAT already. Embrace it, sistah-friend. Nobody wants to hear about it anymore. So you're fat. BFD. She wouldn't even have a "career" if it weren't for her inability to step away from the deep fryer.

Frankly, what bothers me most about her is her hair. Why blonde? WHY? Remember on Cheers when she had that gorgeous lustrous thick brown hair? Why must she peroxide herself thusly? IMHO, it makes her look even fatter!

Okay, I'm done ranting for today. I think.

Thoughts? Concerns? Bring it.

Electricity, E-lect-ricit-y....

Hey now! Good weekend?

Mine was good, yes. I woke up exhausted today despite having gotten enough rest, which is always a great feeling, yes? Nothing like draggin' ass on a Monday.

Last Thursday night we got hit by a killer rain storm here in New Hampshire - hurricane force winds of 95mph were reported, and I believe it! It sounded like a freight train roaring past my house, and as always I worried about little things like trees falling into my home and killing us all dead. Turns out I was right to worry; our friend Mala's house did have a run-in with a 100 foot Pine tree, but thank goodness no one was hurt!! I'm sure she'd love to write about it on her blog but since they're still without power or cable, you'll have to take my word for it.

We lost power for about 24 hours, but our new generator kicked serious ASS so we really didn't have to sweat it like all the other chumps. You see, last winter we had an ice storm that knocked us off the grid for a mortifying FIVE DAYS. Yes, five days without heat or running water, and my 1 year old son came down with a raging case of diarrhea on day 2. NO FUN. We kept saying we'd get a generator, but didn't... until November when the power went out again and stayed out for over a day and I pulled a diva move and took to my bed. When Jim found me in there with the covers over my head, he immediately went to Lowe's and sealed the deal.

So really, my family has my tantrum to thank for being warm and cozy this time around. You're welcome, family. Any time!

The cable stayed off until Friday evening, however, so my half-finished batch of OOBH stew went unposted. Don't worry though, it'll keep.

On Saturday night we got a babysitter and went out to celebrate our friend Laurie's birthday. We had an absolute BLAST, and I'm not gonna lie - I drank like a fish. Glug glug! I don't even know how many drinks I had, but it was nearing double digits for sure. I started off with Cosmos, ended up with Newcastle Brown Ale, and had a few pineappley shot things in there somewhere too.

It was a karaoke party, and I was definitely a little irked that my bum vocal cord kept me away from the mic. Thankfully I also love to dance, so at least I had something to do. I did a stunning interpretive dance that was equal parts Vogue, Thriller, and Burlesque, with just a touch of The Robot thrown in for good measure. I know, you don't have to say it - I rock!

The birthday girl deemed her new signature shot, The Laurie, "DELICIOUS!"



I am a very affectionate drunk. Surprise!



Lean back: I want to make sure to get both my chins in... and if you can see up my nose too, that'd be greeeeeat.



Needless to say, I was a hurtin' puppy yesterday morning. I woke up at 7:30 still drunk, staggered downstairs for water and ibuprofen, then went back to bed till 11:30. Big props to my husband for holding the fort/rising at 6:30 with the kids to make it all happen!

Now I'm back at work with an assload of boring work-type things to do and an irritable boss who just got back from a weeklong vacation in Florida and doesn't seem to realize that we've been in a state of emergency around these parts. Jackass. Time to buckle down and make myself useful I guess. If I must.

Have a good one!

TMI Thursday: How I Dented My Derriere

As I was flipping through the Restricted Section of my mental library this week and pondering which juicy tidbit I should share with you all on LiLu's TMI Thursday, I realized that many of my stories fall into three categories:

Crazy things I've done while drunk
Amusing vomit stories
Dirty, dirty sex tales

I've already talked about the first two, and I told a story about gettin' jiggy wit' it last week, so I need to mix it up today if I want to keep things fresh, am I right?

Today I will tell you a tale from my childhood, and you will like it, goddamn it.

Today's tale: In which I scar my ass for life.

I was maybe 6 years old, and it was summer in Vermont. My grandmother and her friend Lilah were visiting from New Jersey, and I was all juiced up on excitement and Freeze Pops. My father owned a furniture company, and for some reason he had rented a U-Haul for the day; I suppose his delivery truck was otherwise occupied. He and his workmen were loading heavy furniture up into the truck via a big wooden ramp.

For some reason that now escapes my logical adult mind, I saw the wooden ramp and decided it looked like a... GULP... slide. While the men were inside getting another helping of back pain I crawled up the ramp and yelled out to Grandma and Lilah, "Hey! Watch this!"



I sat my previously-unblemished six-year-old ass down on the wooden ramp and slid.

Does that not just make you CRINGE to your very CORE?! Good lord!

As the 4" long wooden splinter embedded itself firmly into my right butt cheek, I proceeded to scream like a banshee. My grandmother came running to my aid, but there was clearly not much to be done right then and there.

Thus it came to pass that two white-haired little old ladies in their late seventies each took hold of one of my arms and together hauled a screaming, crying child half a mile down the street to our house.

Once at the house, my mother sent me to lie face down on her bed and arrived moments later armed with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a pair of tweezers. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, closing her eyes for just a moment, before saying words that I'll never forget, "Well, Pookus (shut up), this is gonna hurt."

She wasn't lying. It did hurt, and if I had known swear words I'm sure I would have used them and no one would have blamed me for doing so. I cried and shrieked and she muttered and prayed until she had plucked every bit of wood from my little bum, cleaned the wound, and sent me whimpering away.

I don't remember what the scar looked like for many years; kids honestly don't think about stuff like that, and how often do you examine your own rear end? I do remember as a tween that the mark was still there, and was still slightly purplish and hard. Eventually the color faded and just left a thumb-sized indentation, which remains to this day.

And that, my friends, is how I ruined my chance of becoming a thong model. If it weren't for that one little mark.... Ooh, curses!

ha ha.

The End.

(Not Really) Wordless Wednesday

AKA: Cleaning off the pictures from my cell phone day!

Here's my pride & joy debuting his new alter-ego: Captain Underpants! Yes, he came downstairs with his drawers on his head and proceeded to prance around doing superhero type things. I thought the (faded but not gone) skid mark stain on his forehead and his missing front tooth were especially nice touches.

We're so proud.


Yet another example of my Mad Parenting Skillz: my youngest was home sick last week. He didn't feel much like eating all day, so when he asked for some Cheez-Its I obliged, only to find him passed out in the bowl 5 minutes later. Awwww....



This one was taken by my husband, who then texted it to my phone. Here they are on the chair lift of the local ski hill near our house. Look at my big kid! Yet another hobby that they can share without mom. I'll be in the lodge, drinking spiked hot chocolate and reading a trashy novel if you need me....


My little guy is following in his big brother's footsteps, if this photo is any indication!! Look at that sassy lil' fella. I love this kid so much, they should name a country after it.




Finally, holy hat hair, Batman!

And yes, I know my kid's a fashion plate in this outfit. Just be glad he's wearing pants, ok? I always am (even though I hate pants).



That's all I've got, but be sure to show up tomorrow when I embarrass myself with more TMI Thursday fun!