ETA; Okay, I heard it again last night, and this time I maxed the volume. Then I went and pre-ordered the CD.

If Led Zeppelin and The Grateful Dead had a baby, this is what it would sound like…

These pictures don’t do it justice. You can read more about it, and watch a pictorial of it being raised, at Ridge Road Station.

And listen, party safe tonight. Seems that every year some dumbass blows a couple of fingers off. Don’t be that dumbass; or the rest of us will seize every opportunity to make fun of your stupidity for the rest of your fingerless life.

it’s so rich, so pure, so flawlessly executed; it darn near makes me cry.

We’re self-indulgent, arrogant, bottled-water guzzling, Hummer-driving egotists. Petroleum is used in virtually every aspect of our daily lives. We consume oil, not to mention all other resources, in HUGE volume, with little thought to consequence, and little respect for the planet or the other species we share it with.

Did you know that it takes approx. 17 million barrels of crude oil just to produce the bottled water we consume annually in this country? That’s 17 million barrels. And that’s not counting the transportation to bring it to the store shelves, where we’ll happily pay $2 a bottle for it. WTF?

But hey, lucky for us, we are at the top of the food chain. So who’s to stop us?

Besides, who needs coastlines anyway? Or wetlands. Or manatees…

And, for the first time in his life, Mr. Kewlstuff appears to be suffering from seasonal allergies. He stops whining just long enough to sneeze. To impress me with how gravely ill he is, he actually went back to bed, not once, but twice last weekend.

Having suffered from allergies most of my adult life, I can say, without hesitation – welcome to my world wuss.

It’s been discussed ad nauseum, but I’ve yet to hear a plausible explanation as to why the world stops revolving when a man isn’t feeling well; but when a woman has similar symptoms it’s business as usual.

You don’t have to be a bra-burning feminist to see that women take a back seat when it comes to being sick. I can’t prove it, and I’m sure they’d deny it, but even the medical profession is guilty of treating ailing men with deference. Don’t believe me? Read on…

Mr. Kewlstuff had his gallbladder removed just two months before I did. After surgery he was taken to his room where his very attentive nurse poked her head in every 15 minutes, checked his vitals every hour and even fluffed his pillows. Fluffed. His. Pillows. He was served a light lunch and released.

Fast forward to the same hospital two months later. I wake up after surgery right back where I started; in a pre-op cubicle made of curtains. Even though the surgery had been scheduled eight weeks in advance, I apparently took them by surprise, and there was no room available.

They finally moved me to a room later that afternoon and told me I’d be discharged after dinner. A couple of hours later, someone from dietary presents me with a plate of mystery-meat swimming in gray gravy. Seriously? Gravy? For a post-surgical gallbladder patient? Hey, did you notice I haven’t mentioned a nurse yet? That’s because not one nurse had entered the room.

Another hour passes. Finally a nurse comes in… but it turns out she’s not there to see me. Nope. She’s there to take my ambulatory IV pole for another patient. Faster than I can object, she hooks my IV bag to a stationary pole attached to the bed and leaves.

Now I’m trapped in the bed, and my Type-A personality, which had been sedated all day, woke up in overdrive.

So, despite Mr. Kewlstuff’s protests and face-palms, I took the IV out of my arm, got dressed and said “You need to go tell the first nurse you see that they’ve got five minutes to get those discharge papers in here, or I start pulling IV’s out of everyone on this floor.”

See, I can say stuff like that and he only half-believes me, so that was not the message he relayed. But he still had a nurse in there, papers in hand, in about 30 seconds. Because he gets me. Which is the only reason I don’t kill him when he’s sick, no matter how much he whines.

I’ve been working ’round the clock and barely noticed we’d made it through February and into March. But there were subtle hints; the days are finally getting longer, my African violets are blooming and I’ve even heard rumors of daffodils popping up here and there. If the temps hold in the 40′s through the week as predicted, the snow should be gone by next weekend. Not that we won’t get more snow, because winter never leaves willingly around here. But what we do get will be short lived. I just keep telling myself that in less than sixty days the hummingbirds will be back in town, and that means we can finally go outside unencumbered by thirty additional pounds of winter-weight clothing, sweaters, scarves, gloves, coats and boots.

Things should be winding down in the office over the next couple of weeks, and I can get back to my regularly irregular posting schedule. Although it seems I’m more popular when I don’t post than I am when I do, because my feed subscriptions have almost doubled since January. Go figure.

My schedule was insane yesterday. I keep the office door closed to prevent the dogs from wandering in and molesting clients, so unless there’s a loud crash, I’m fairly oblivious to what’s going on in the house. I had no idea that at some point yesterday afternoon the pup got bored, stole the cushion off the back of the love seat, managed to unzip the cover and chewed through the inner liner.

I would have given anything to have seen the look on Mr. Kewlstuffs face when he came through the backdoor and discovered stuffing strewn from one end of the house to the other. For a second it looked like we’d just been robbed… then she greeted him, smiling, with the evidence still hanging from her mouth.

He did a decent job of re-stuffing the cushion before I got out of work, but I find the whole story hard to believe, because this is how I found the little angel when I finally emerged from the office.

Anyway, it could have been worse. She might have chosen one of the *non-removable* cushions from the back of the leather couch instead.

Oh, and to whoever is bombing my kewlstuff mailbox with pharma offers, listen, if you’ll stop spamming me, I pinky-swear that if and when I find myself in need of Vicodin/Percocet/Viagara, I’ll let you know. ‘K?

Hey, I just realized Sunday is VDay. You know what that means right?

More wine. (WTH did you think I was going to say?)

Have a great weekend everybody.