Boots

Ah, music.  How just the sound of a song can take you back to a particular time and place.

Yesterday, SS and I were talking about . . . something . . . and it reminded her of the song, These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, and I started to sing the song.  I could hear it so clearly in my head, and I was four or five years old again, in my memory.  I had to smile, and then I downloaded the album, Boots, by Nancy Sinatra.  Go ahead; listen to some of the samples of some of the songs.  If you’re close to my age, that sixties sound will be familiar and I hope will take you back to pleasant memories.  If you’re quite a bit younger than I am, or young enough that your parents are close to my age, you’ll probably be rolling your eyes and laughing.  My sister showed this picture to her husband this morning after I emailed it to her and he made a joke about her stylish clothes.  She said to him, “Hey, don’t talk.  All your childhood pictures have people with beehive hairdos!”

But man, what great memories that album brings back for me.  Sister had it and played it fairly often.  The Amazon page I linked to above says it was originally released in 1966.  This picture is from 1968.  Sister had just turned 11 and I was 4 1/2.  See her boots?  Aren’t they cool?  I grew up following her around like a puppy, adoring her and thinking she was just the coolest human being ever.  She’s still one of my very favorite people.

After I downloaded the album, I played some of the songs and couldn’t stop grinning and dancing in my chair.  I remember, especially when hearing the music at the end of These Boots, after she says “Are you ready, boots?  Start walkin’”, standing in our living room with Sister and doing The Pony and The Swim.  Anybody remember those dances?

I especially remember the part of The Swim, where you hold your nose and raise your other arm above your head and “go under the water”.  I loved that part.  I could really wiggle those hips when I was little.  Or at least I thought I could.

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And in other news, I wrote my first 1733 words of NaNo this morning between midnight and 1:10 am.  Woot!  Woot!

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Kind of Funny

I think I have actually been drunk maybe three or four times in my life.  I’ve been tipsy a few more than that.  I’m just not that much of a drinker, for the most part.  That’s not for any particular reason, other than maybe that food has always been my poison.

But last night, I drank an entire bottle of wine in about three hours.  It was great wine, and I was spending time with SS and having a great time, and before I knew it, it was gone and I was feeling no pain.  I slept like a rock and woke up feeling not-too-bad.

As the day progressed, the minor headache I woke up with got worse, but then it finally got better by sometime late this afternoon, after some Excedrin and decent doses of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and chocolate.

The funny thing is, that probably was a hangover, yet I still felt better than I used to feel every day of my life.

Go figure.

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A Therapy Related lolcat Pic

“I Want” Wednesday . . . I Want To Know

Today’s question for “I Want” Wednesday is “What Do You Want To Know?”

Oh boy.  I want to know so many things.  There are so many things I wonder about on a regular basis, but I’m not sure whether they fit into the “want to know” category or if they are more of the “sure would like to know” variety, such as why cats purr and dogs don’t, or why some people don’t wonder about things the way I do, or what is going through my cat’s mind when she bites me (only occasionally, thank goodness).  But there are also those burning questions or problems, things I really, really, want to know, among them:

I want to know . . .

1 . . . a foolproof way to pick winning lotto numbers.  Even if it only worked once.  Yeah, I know; lots of people want to know that.

2 . . . how to build a database driven web site.  I’ve bought so many books over the years, and tried online courses, trying to learn PHP and MySQL and various other languages, tried database software, tried building a FrontPage (I know; I’m still in the dark ages) web site with an Access database, and I keep running into brick walls and caving under the massive overwhelm that falls over me.  I have never been so intimidated by a learning project before in my life.

3 . . . just how many hours of sleep I require.  No matter how long I sleep, it never seems like enough.  I’m just saying.

4 . . . quantum physics type stuff.  I wish I knew somebody who could explain those concepts and theories to me in language I could really wrap my head around.

5 . . . what kind of shoes my therapist wears.  She only wears socks in her office.  I have asked her if I can see her shoes at my last session, whenever that will be.  She didn’t really answer.  She said, “Shoes?  What are shoes?”

6 . . . where all those rolls of electrical tape are that I remember buying over the last few years.

I also have several religious questions and questions about societal issues and such, but I don’t want to make this entry a very deep and heavy one.  I’m in a “keep it light” frame of mind right now, but that might be a great topic for a future post.

So that, I s’pose, is it, for now.

Anyone else want to know anything?

Maybe I’ll add more items in the comments if I think of them.

Ten on Tuesday – Favorite TV Characters

I’m participating in “Ten on Tuesday” today.  Since the most recent entry is Ten Things You Think Are Cool, and I recently started a Bliss List that I would just end up repeating if I did that one, I decided to look for a topic that would be different.  I found the August 4th entry, 10 Favorite Characters From Television.  I started the list a little slowly, until it dawned on me that the characters probably don’t have to be from current shows that are still running.

So, here is my list (not in order of preference):

1.  Bianca Montgomery, All My Children

2.  Tad Martin, All My Children

3.  Melinda Gordon, Ghost Whisperer

4.  Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory

5.  Allison Dubois, Medium

7.  Audrey Penney, Ellen

8.  Regina Newly, Samantha Who?

9.  Samantha Stephens, Bewitched

10. Dharma Finklestein Montgomery, Dharma & Greg

Boxing Kitty

This is cute, too!

I Know, It’s Not A Written Entry . . .

. . . but these are too cute!

qui

Saturday Six

I have a longer blog entry in the works, but I have some things I really should be taking care of right now and I want to get something posted for today so I don’t mess up my NaBloPoMo effort for the month.  I found a fun meme for Saturday.  It’s the Saturday Six.  This week the questions are random rather than part of a theme.

1. How do you feel when something is scraped down a chalk board? If it’s something like fingernails, my skin crawls, but if it’s an eraser, I don’t feel anything specific.
2. If you won a big amount on a lottery, what would be the first thing you would buy? The first thing I would probably buy would be the gas to drive to Tallahassee and collect the money, and dinner for my family and friends, to celebrate.
3. Cheese or Pineapple? Cheese.  But pineapple is good, too.
4. Elephant or Mouse? For what purpose?  I wouldn’t want to try to navigate on my computer with an elephant.
5. What’s the first object you see in your room that is yellow? The picture of peach slices on the box of freezer bags that is sitting by my computer (I used them to seal up some items I recently mailed to someone and I never put the box away).
6. Early riser or late sleeper? Late sleeper.  Late to go to sleep and late to stop sleeping.  Late, late, late.  That’s me.  And that’s why I’m so late getting going on those aforementioned things I have to do today . . .

More later!

Thursday Thirteen: Most Brilliant Ad Campaigns

I hope I’m doing this right.  I hope I’m allowed to use the graphic from the Thursday Thirteen site.  It looks like a lot of other bloggers have created their own graphic.  I could do that, if I end up doing this on a regular basis.  I hope the note on the Thursday Thirteen site about it being gone doesn’t mean it’s too late for me to start doing this, since it looks like a lot of fun.

If I understand it right, I get to pick whatever my “thirteen” list is about.  So, I’m going to make it about thirteen brilliant (in my opinion) ad campaigns / commercials, since I’ve been planning to blog about some of them anyway for a while.

Alrightie . . . (in the order they come to mind; not necessarily in order of preference)

1. The Progressive Insurance Commercials with Flo – I really like Flo.  Sometimes my sister and I imitate her.  When the first commercial came out, we got a kick out of saying to each other, in public, “WOW!  I know, I say it louder.”

2.  The Geico Gecko Commercials – I never get tired of that little guy.

3.  The Geico Cavemen Commercials – Especially this one, because, well, I’m in therapy, and my therapist is smart.  And I know, at this point, it appears that my whole list is all about insurance company commercials, but that really is just a coincidence.  I would like to ask, while I’m on the topic of Geico commercials, however, what the hell their advertising people were thinking when they decided to start running those creepy googly-eyed money commercials.  Somebody ought to be fired over those, especially after the Gecko and Caveman commercials.  I have been known to change the channel to avoid watching the “money” ones.  I’m just saying.

4.  I can’t find a link for this (if anyone knows where one can be found, please do share!) – Back in the late 1990’s, there was a series of radio commercials that cracked me up.  They were for a wine cooler, I believe, but I don’t remember the brand.  They used gender stereotypes.  One, for instance, was a group of women talking at a backyard barbecue.  One woman comments on another’s lawnmower or something, and the other proudly tells her the width of the path it will cut, kind of with that Barney Fife sort of chest-puffed-out way.  Another woman talks about putting in a swimming pool that summer, then adds, ” . . . but it’s not like my husband’s gonna help me” and the others laugh that knowing laugh that says they understand that her poor husband couldn’t know anything about putting in a pool.  Stuff like that.  They were just so funny, though.  Much funnier than I can do justice to by trying to remember how they went.

5.  The Clearblue Digital Pregnancy Test Commercial – I haven’t seen this version in a while, but I loved it when it used to run.

6.  The Nestea Plunge Commercials – This was a brilliant ad idea.  Didn’t they start in the 1970’s?  I can remember them from when I was a kid, and I remember immitating them with my friends and my cousin every time we went swimming.

7.  I Can’t Believe I Ate The Whole Thing – Annoying as it may have been, everyone I knew remembered it.  This link is to the remake with Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle.  I cant believe I can’t find the original.

8.  The Mac vs PC series of commercials – Really funny stuff.  And more therapy humor at the very end.

9.  Reeses “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter” commercials – And I’m linking to the one with Robby Benson, because I really, really, really liked him as a kid.

10.  The “Dude, You’re Getting A Dell” commercials – I found a couple with the guy, Steve, but couldn’t find any with that actual line that he became famous for.  Before his pot bust rendered him virtually invisible, that is . . .

11.  The old Slinky commercial – Everyone my age can visualize the Slinky going down the stairs, and can remember the song.  Has anyone seen the not-G-rated parody, which comes to mind every time I hear that song now?  *snicker*

12.  Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun – ‘Nuff said.

13.  Lee Majors Hearing Aid Commercial - Ok, it’s sad, too, but also smart to put his name behind it, as most people who are of an age to use a hearing aid used to watch The Six Million Dollar Man.  Now be honest, didn’t you hear that bionic sound in your mind?

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A.M. Radio

This song is just plain fun, especially if you are near my age.