Ingredients:

1 Star Trek:TNG apéritif
2 fingers Oban
1 (each) chaser Buffy and Notting Hill

Result: one very amusing evening. Day Three of vacation for the worn-out engineer, in fact. By 9:30, Jeff was laughing at all of my jokes, not just the funny ones.We've gotten a little spoiled in the past few weeks; our exposure to TV commercials is fairly limited now that we have a TiVo to speed through them. Tonight we picked up on the tail end of Notting Hill, and had no buffer to zap through commercials.

So he (see Oban) and I (see mental tiredness from finishing new cat.net skin) watched commercials, and made fun of them with the best middle-of-the-evening gusto we could muster.

Until we got to the inexplicable commercial, that is. Seemingly unconnected images flashed by. It took us a few seconds before we both realized that every shot was zeroing in on the hindquarters of the people we were watching.

"What is this, a butt commercial?"

"No idea."

Bad things are bound to result when friends bring digital cameras to my house. In this case, many cute kitty pictures were taken. My original intention was to make a skin based off of an interesting road sign near my house, but as usual, the creative muse doesn't always listen to sound advice.

"We've got hot dogs available for fifty cents at the concession stand. Hot dogs, fifty cents, come and get them while they last. We've also got hot fresh pizza, a dollar a slice. Come and get it while it's fresh…"

Despite bricks, insulation, and drywall, we can hear the noises from the nearby softball field. If our house is quiet at the time, we can make out most of what's being said over the complex's public-address system. When we first moved in, our neighbor joked that it was difficult, some Saturday mornings, to keep from turning off his lawnmower and wandering over to the softball field, spare change in hand.

Enough of those odd little musings. Tonight's storms have done their damage and moved on, and we had nothing this time except a lot of wind and more rain. Even skittish Edmund slept through it, so it definitely was one of the weaker storms we've had this week.

I've been toying with the idea of giving myself a bit of a mini-vacation from posting here for a few days. I know that won't happen, though; the best way to guarantee that something entry-worthy will happen tomorrow is for me to definitively announce tonight that I want to take a few days off. So consider this an officially wishy-washy statement of saying something like this:"I really want to take a day or two off from this, really I do, I swear, but I know that by saying anything to you that I've totally jinxed things."

Storm season is back amongst us again, blowing through in a succession of muggy afternoons and dark-grey clouds. It's later than usual this year, having decided to wander in and get revved up only towards the end of spring. Several nights this week, Jeff has had to shut off the weather radio multiple times.

Sometimes I love my accent like I love having a hole in my head. I've noticed that on trips yankeeward, at least one person will say the dreaded phrase:

"You have a southern accent! How cute!"

"Why…thank you." (Of course, in the way I speak, that comes out more like "Whaaaah, thaink yew." This is the point where I start to cringe.)

"Say something!"

"What?"

"Anything!"

Groan. Ok, time to don my best educated-Arkansas accent. "I hate being asked to do this?"

"How CUTE!"