ZED!

Hey Suzanne!

c a n n o n b a l l

kur-splaaaaaaaaaash

hey mary mac — how’s sac tonight?

Sac is good. How is the coast?

another overcast day with a few sun breaks – fall is in the air. supposed to have a warm up over labor day weekkend but i’ll believe it when i see it

What’s a zed?

glug

hey tuez — how ya doing tonight? long long time ago, in a previous software version, the first comment who see a zero instead of a one… when comment #2 came in, that zero became a 1. folks called it getting the zed

I want to share some good news:

I had my mid year review today. Acting manager (manager went on LOA in May) said I’m exceeding expectations and a role model for other engineers. Next pay day I’ll be getting a bonus that is about 2 weeks pay.

Nice to be getting both verbal, written and monetary recognition!

an izzard.

hey newton – ya shouldn’t have been near that bulgarian judge, dood. how was your day?

*tossing ya a towel*

Okay… Let’s see if it worked… Daniel Ikaika Tuttle…

izzard [ˈɪzəd]
n
Archaic the letter Z
[from earlier ezed, probably from Old French et zède, literally: and zed]

hey wmd — woohoo *snoopy happy dance* you must be walking on cloud nine tonight!!!

WOOT

Nice going wmd!

tut! the video isn’t available? details dood, details!!! don’t make me put my hands on my hips dood

Guess what I did this evening on a walk with the doggies?!

didja find a home for the kittah?

I see orthopedic surgeon the day it hits my bank, told my manager I’d use money to cover copay/deductible… would be taking 2-3 weeks leave in December – we shut down for a week so I’d not be missing as much work.

Yeah, I’m like that.

Oh, so last is first?

Nope. Do you want her?

I killed a rattlesnake with a rock.

fingers and toes dood… be sure to let us know the when so we can put our hands on the monitor for ya

correctomundo. or something like that.

You don’t want to have surgery over the holidays. That would be a bummer.

bailey cat doesn’t get along with other cats :(

wow, a rock ya tossed?

Sorry about that…! I’ll get it uploaded… But, he was born at 5:25 pm he weighs in at 8lbs 1/2 oz, 19 3/4 inches long with a full head of hair…! And a healthy set of lungs too…! ;-)

CT keep trying. Wants to see a baby.

Yum, rattlesnake. Hope you didn’t throw it away….

woohoo!!! how’s little mama?

Probably has great eyelashes too.

How come boys have the best lashes? Ain’t fair.

hey robert — how’s soPA tonight?

Damn, that chlorine gets my eyes.
It was swell here today.
How’s yours?

Nah, it’ll be fine. I get the gift of no more pain for myself.

No babies born around here today….

It was a little snake. We walked right over it. It was on the sidewalk. I looked down and thought “Oh look a long zipper. er….no a rattlesnake.”

I tied the dogs up and went back and dropped a rock on it. I felt really badly about doing it but there are too many kids, pets, etc in the neighborhood. We have had more snake encounters this year than the total for the previous nine years.

overcast — felt like rain but nothing showed up… i wudda welcomed the rain as a change from perpetual gray

CT – you been observing the supernova?

No meat on this little forker.

baby snakes have venom that is just as deadly

not even any zombie babies?

We have pygmy rattlers here that I hear are pretty aggressive. Fortunately, I’ve never encountered either a pygmy or regular. One friend of mine gave up owning dogs over 20 years ago because of the pygmies killing his dogs but that was out in the country.

Where do you live? I forget.

Type Ia supernova in the pinwheel galaxy (in Ursa Major) about 25 M light years away.

The zombies around these parts are all tea baggers. They can’t reproduce because they’ll only fuck themselves….

Floreeda.

We have all kinds of creepy, crawly things.

I do not miss gators in the backyard.

but they sure as shit wanna fuck us

She’s doing great…! She ended up getting the epidermal, and did deliver it without having to resort to the C section…! It was a looong nite and day for her, but, she seems to have forgotten all about it…! He’s a pudgy fellow too…! ;-)

I was up there when Keck 1 was first alerted to it, and saw some of the early images…! ;-)

That’s because they want to fuck anything that moves, they just don’t admit to it. The reason they go to church so often is to get absolved of their sins to do it again.

mother nature has a way of wiping away all the pain and remembering only the love…

its not a sin when they do it IOKIYAR etc etc etc

The only reason women have more than one kid is because they almost immediately forget about how miserable birthing is. You only get the truth out of them immediately following the birth.

I have friends, clients really, who are spending their last night in their home in San Mateo as we speak.
Tomorrow, they climb over the hill to new digs in foggy, damp, but splendid Montara… hardly more that a stones throw from the Pacific.

Now that’s some weather.

I just saw news tonight… been neglecting new scientist the past few days. Sounds like the baby is a supernova baby.

Tell me about it. I am a Louisiana girl. nutria, water moccasins, gators, gars, rattlers and cajuns.

Yep, but mother and father peoples will be doing their own wiping several times a day for the next few years….

i checked out montara before i bought the little cottage by the creek in the redwoods…

i like to think my time there helped prepare me for life on the coast – there were several nights that first winter when i could hardly sleep worrying about the creek rising

hahahaha aint that the truth!

At least the Cajuns can cook.

Yea, they can cook rattlers, nutria and gators.

squirrel even

Montara is good if you need to get to an actual town on a semi-regular basis, without having to be IN one. It certainly isn’t solitude.

Sure is pretty though.

I’ve been birthing a story. So far its head’s out:

Harvest
A short story by
Robert L. Arend

Caleb Ratigan struggled to reach for the bags held forth from the skinny fingers of the young woman. The heat, combined with the oppressive humidity of mid-July, was wilting. Each second his cramped Ford Focus idled in the drive thru lane of McDonald’s added to the misery of not having the money to afford repair of the car’s dead air conditioner. All of it seemed to amount to an evil conspiracy by all of Heaven and Hell to punish him for being so fat he could barely walk. He set the bags of super-sized cheeseburgers, French fries, two apple pies and a strawberry milkshake on the passenger seat and eased the car forward and onto the highway.

Caleb intended to wait until he was back in his apartment, where he could enjoy both the food and the comfort of his bedroom window’s air conditioner, but the aromas escaping the bags proved too tempting. The steering wheel he gripped with his left hand rubbed against his belly while his left hand fished in the biggest bag for French fries.

It was when Caleb was approaching mile marker 48 that his car’s engine stalled. Unable to restart the engine and terrified to be stranded on the expressway as mercilessly honking vehicles swerved around his, the hapless man shifted the transmission into neutral and opened the door enough to exit his car. He planned to both push and steer the Ford Focus to the berm of the road, but only managed to get his seatbelt unfastened before a painful white light flooded his eyes and blinded him.
***
Nabalk increased the power on the harvester beam. “That’s at least a three-hundred pounder.” He maneuvered Caleb into the garment stripper, and the naked Caleb into the green gel of a curing cylinder.

“Dagoit,” Pukdat complained, “the trunk is jammed.” She activated the slimmer.

The thick colbrita panel moved over Caleb’s abdomen and pressed down until Caleb slipped completely into the cylinder and under the surface of the curing gel.

aliens?

But, but, but, I have a Justin Wilson cookbook and he didn’t cook any of those things. However, once one gets done whipping up his recipes, and with all the drinkin’ involved, there is no telling what went into it.

What’s a nutria?

Hey Senator, I like it there very much. If it weren’t so far from my work, I would have moved there, or El Granada, a long time ago.

i think they are sorta like a large rat, like those packybera thingies

yup, a large river rat kinda creature

Yep. And earth is one big cattle ranch for them, only the cattle R us. They harvest discretely through the year, and their processing plant is on the dark side of the moon….

Funny, I suddenly feel a little hungry.

ooooo *cue creepy music*

I used to go to Half Moon Bay often when I lived in San Francisco. I love it down there, too.

Did you know people kidneys make great Kooshka?….

A nutria is a big rodent from South America that got loose in the deep south a long time ago. Nutria.

Kooshka? What is that some kind of Slovak dish?

Okay, I was able to tweet the clip… Here’s the beaming Mom and baby…

look at that smile on her face!!!!!!

For any FDLers who dabble in fiction writing, dump vampire & zombie novels. The market for them has peaked. The next big thing is going to be novels about Aliens….

had more snake encounters this year than the total for the previous nine years

And you don’t work for Obama.

Congrats, CT

Back to work today. Went surprisingly well.

hey et — how ya doing tonight?

Nope, it’s a kind of Alien sausage….

wOOt !!!

Popping the Bubbly … Congrats to the Tuttles !

Nice!

Mahalo, ET…!

yea, like I said a Slovak dish. :)

hey petro – how’s toronto tonight? *banging head on desk* i shudda thought of the bubbly…. thanks dood

Congrates, CT and Mrs. CT!

Mahalo, Petro…!

I’m well. Summer is over in Wasilla. After work I went mushroom hunting and found a perfect Boletus edulis that had twin stems that joined in the cap. Mushroom omelette for breakfast.

Ms ET returned to work this week too. She’s out on the Kuskokwim delta until late Friday. Just me, Strider and the cats on the lake.

welcome to grandparenthood tut — tis a totally different hood and a lot more fun

I can see your shit eating grin from 1,700 miles to the north. Double congratulations.

Hugs to the new mommy … she’ll really appreciate all the help in the coming months.

Robert’s recipe is from the mountains of New Guinea.

your garden sure did well this summer. i’ve been enjoying the pictures you have been posting over at your place, esp the recent ones from the hike

Be careful Suz.

the story is good, too.

Is FDL slow for anyone else? Or is it just my internets?

Forkin’ pissing me off and I even rebooted and everything.

Saving Suz

Very slow for me, too.

Slovaks are direct descendants of the ancient aliens who first started small people farms before consolidating to form Galaxy Harvest Corps and went global with mass production, harvesting, and processing….

tis working fine on this end — i’m using firefox

thanks babe *smooch*

congrats on snagging the happy lucky 100 wmd!!!

I knew there was another reason Ron is sooooooooo weird about his food.

Congrats wmd … passing bubbly all around !

party

I’m using Netscape, but I have to turn my laptop sideways to read comments….

It is.

I think part of the reason I moved to AK in ’73 was that I had had several close rattlesnake encounters rock climbing and river rafting in 70-72 that got me to freak out over them more than I should have. The closest thing we have to snakes where I live are frogs. Tiny ones.

I’ll take a grizzly over a water moccasin any day.

*cough* … Slovaks are Scientologists ?!!

Based on your time stamp, I’m at 5 minutes and counting.

That’s to Mary M, as the reply didn’t seem to register.

Ah – you updated from the version where you have to turn it upside down.

champagne

That’s great! Congrats, Tut!

If I confirmed that, you’d have to kill me….

what browser are you using?

You also have Sarah and I’ll take a snake over her any day.

Yeah, and the video of Mrs. CT & baby plays like a thready black&white silent movie….

CT congratulations! They are both beautiful, look at her cheeks!

Ron went to take out the garbage a month or so ago. He heard this weird spinkler type noise that he thought was coming over the fence from the neighbors yard. He moved the garbage can just a little and heard it again. He realized it was a rattler. It was a BIG one. The sound was loud, sustained and CREEPY. I held a flash light while he killed it with a shovel. It had eight rattles. We always ask for forgiveness from the snake but somehow I don’t think that counts for much. The two cats stayed on the roof for a couple of hours after that. They won’t go on that side of the house anymore.

Firefox.

My internet must just be hiccuping.

hey margot — how’s ohio tonight?

maybe you should turn around and give those nsa folks the traditional one finger salute and tell them to get their forking white van off your tubes

I’ll take a grizzly over a water moccasin any day.

After encountering a few of each in Lousyanna and the Canadian Rockies, I’ll stick with the wild boars here, thank you very much…! ;-)

So that is who has been hanging outside of my house all those years.

Wild boars. Yum, with truffles….

You also have Sarah and I’ll take a snake over her any day

she’s transitioning to Arizona, where she has a lot of snake company. also, she is so past shelf life pull date. I haven’t written about her at my blog in weeks and weeks. and – unlike some of my colleagues, I am not going through withdrawal or DT’s.

I give up and will go to bed, since it’s after 2 on the right coast.

CT, please post your pics again tomorrow.

Can’t deal with this slow internet connection.

i used to have them all the time parked on my tubes when i was at the cottage. i think their experience with my special (exlax) brownies taught them a little respect

g’nite tuez

If aliens harvested Sarah Palin, she’d be only good for yeekicha….

I skinned the last one I killed on the Yakima River. It had 11 rattles. I still have it somewhere in one of my boxes out in the shop. It was about 40 inches with the head. 37 inches as it is, rolled up.

You baked for those forkers?! Good job.

Man, you have some Gaul …

Congrats CT!

hooray mary!

yeekicha? pet food? fertilizer?

they shudda known better than to show up when the ground was littered with forks

hey ks — how ya doing tonight?

Gaul is like caviar to the aliens….

Its a kind of marbled Limburger cheese….

sheb

If we keep talking about Scarah, I’m leaving.

Just kidding, but I did hit a wall on her about four weeks ago. Hard to express it in words. There’s something evil in the way a lot of GOP figures have created careers out of fear and hate, going back over decades. But knowing her for over 20 years, witnessing what I have about her, especially since 2008 – she is unique. Enough said.

ps – I’ll be hosting the fdl book salon with Joe McGinniss when his book on her comes out. sometime in October.

It’s very pretty, very fall-like. Now if only I had some roast green chiles I’d be in heaven.

ooooooo *rubbing hands together gleefully* i’m soooo looking forward to that salon et!!!

hi y’all!!!

only warm here today and a spurt of more heat the next coupla days.
Protests and court cases against our Gov.Brownback’s shenanigans here continue and amp up.
Second week of school here also means town is busy again.
over and out ;)

Are you a writer/author ?

I’ve been working on several non-fiction Books – yoga/meditation

Sweet dreams, tuez…! I’ll be working on getting both the miniclips I took up on YouTube…! ;-)

Love how you bring “forks” up in context, Suz. Have you ever been to the town of Forks, Washington, up the coast from you about 200 miles?

I’ve had Phone issues … will call you this week !

much love to you all!!!

indian summer days are fine in ks — i’ve gotta few in my memory banks

I kept telling ya to hire a publicist, bro…! ;-)

Haven’t heard from Joe since he disappeared into his Vermont cellar before Irene. He was going to listen to a lot of Leadbelly and do research on Bruce Springstein.

i’ve not been. it seems every time i think about planning a trip up to washington state, something happens. this year it was brakes deciding they didn’t wanna brake anymore. car goes into the shop for repairs to the master cylinder/brake booster thur.

backatcha ks

Ya, but da Fookers don’t work for free …

oh my

Glad to hear that; been worried about you w/o a car that works.

Here is part of a short story I am working on:

The door slides open and I see the sign on the doctor’s office.

Dr. Gray Rogers, M.D.
Urology Clinic

I walk into an empty waiting room filled with Franklin Waugh Limited Edition Cottage paintings. The paintings are neatly arranged around the room, one above every chair. The room drips with stickiness and pink light emanates from each work. Waugh is my least favorite schlock painter. Or maybe my most favorite schlock painter, when I am not taking myself too seriously.
The nurse behind the counter takes my insurance card as I put my name on the sign-in sheet. No one else has signed in all day. I take a seat under a dappled stream running in front of a stucco abode with a wisp of smoke curling from a cute, cute, cute chimney. I try to lose myself in my Wired magazine but I am sensorily overwhelmed.
A young physician’s assist calls my name and leads me to the doctor’s inner sanctum. As I walk into his office, I am amazed, horrified and delighted to find a large mahogany desk with a nondescript man behind it surrounded by the most in congruent array of artwork. Penises surround me. Paintings by Franklin Waugh and medical illustrations of penises alternate around the room.

An uncircumcised penis,
a gingerbread cottage,
an erect penis ,
a lilac cottage,
a suspensory ligament of a penis,
a twilight cottage,
the male urogenital system,
a overly sweet hidden cottage,
and an old medical illustration of a penis all hung dangling from bulldog hooks. I suddenly have a funny taste in my mouth. All of the penis illustrations are about four feet high. The cottage paintings are small by contrast. They are perhaps 30 by 24 inches. The houses are in wide golden frames that look like someone had taken a pastry tube to them. The penis posters are stark in black frames with red borders. But the piece de resistance is a twinkling, electrified blue and purple cottage set perfectly over the desk of my newest doctor. This is one massively unexpected installation piece of blinding and scary proportions.
Wow, I am thinking. Just wow. I hope I don’t laugh and pee my pants.

i found out when my mom is coming up next month and am gonna have to start saying fork instead of fuck again. she’s flying in from phoenix on the 20th, is going to stay with jen that night and then i pick her up and she stays here until the weekend, returns to jen’s house and jen is taking her to the airport on the 26th

i’m doing the i’ve got to clean house freak out that a visit from my mom always triggers

margot, my downstairs neighbors have been wonderful as has the landlord’s son. i baked a fruit crumble and took it down to them yesterday as a thank you.

ohmystars — i like that senator

Mahalo, Margot…! I was surprised at how aware he was…! He kept looking around and following the flashes and noises…! ;-)

That’s going to be a scene from a movie. I don’t even care what happens, that scene is enough to pitch it (to me, anyway).

What would your mom do if you said fuck?

As teenagers we used to go into the kitchen while my mom was cooking and say, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck…
She would collapse to the floor in a fit of giggles. It always worked.

julianna was studying us as intently as we were studying her. her eyes were full of wonder and taking it all in

Thanks Margot. I never thought about it like a movie.

If you click the link, it will take you to my Amazon page, which is full of pretty book covers under which my short stories reside, along with those of other great writers:

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3ARobert%20L.%20Arend&page=1

I am also the short story editor for Circle 8 Writers Group anthologies:

FB page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Circle-8-Writers/163212760355932

she’s the one who created The LQQK

Good lord, Mary. I just got an erection, and I’m no where close to gay….

the girls call her nana white gloves and she loves to polish her baby grand with a bar of ivory soap because it gives it a better shine

funny man.

Ms ET’s carrots.

time for me to head out pups. i’ve been fighting a head cold or allergies or something this week and it’s been fighting back.

thanks for letting me hang out with ya tonight. g’nite all

You better get to work, girl.

Why is it I clean for my mom and my daughters? Something is wrong.

Ding!

Nite Suz. Feel better!

You should take up writing. You really, really know how to set up a scene and make the reader feel like he/she is sitting in the middle of it….

Thanks. heh.

Sweet dreams, Suz and ya’ll…! *g*

I am off to bed, too. Tomorrah is anotha day.

I hate this awful beer commercial (song) w/ every fiber of my being.