He tells me in his bedroom voice C'mon honey, let's go make some noise

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The great deck experiment

One of the things I love about my apt is the deck. One wouldn't expect to have such a nice deck in a studio apt but the owner built it for himself and because the building is on a hill he was able to build a deck off of the kitchen. The door to the deck even has a doggie flap so Ramona can go in and out at will. She loves being out there. Since she is getting up there in age, it is nice I can afford her this pleasure. Since the arrival of Henry we have had to modify this a bit. We cannot leave the screen door open because we do not want him to escape through the doggie door. This has forced us to put up a doggie gate infront of the doggie flap so we can keep the door open. Stepping over this gate to get to the deck has become quite a challenge for my short legs and I imagine I will fall and break my nose at some point this summer.


On the weekends Mel and I like having our coffee and breakfast on the deck and Ramona usually joins us. Henry feeling left out has taken to climbing the screen door or hurling himself onto the screen so the door swings open with the hope of freedom.
As you can see here...

After much discussion we jointly decided to see if he can handle being on deck with us without running for the hills. It had been a slow, harrowing process. We do not really want an outdoor cat and he can definitely get off my deck, other cats have gotten on it. So we trepidatiously watch him explore, get close to the edge and walk along the railing hoping he chooses us over chasing a bug, squirrel or other creature on his way to freedom. He needs to remember he cannot attack our feet at will if he takes off. It is a work in progress, and might just send Mel to an early heart attack.

Why I am not a golfer

You would think that going mini golfing would bring back childhood memories, but no I actually never played as a kid, at least not that I can remember. I remember playing mini putt putt, but that is another story involving thrown golf clubs and bee stings.
Last night we went mini golfing for Mel's birthday. A couple of weeks ago when driving out to catch a friend's football game we drove by McGolf in Dedham. I thought Mel was going to have a fit when she saw it, she nearly jumped out of the car. So when it came time to decide what to do for her birthday, of course she thought....MINI GOLF. The place is a driving range with a mini golf course and they have a koi pond, with turtles. I think Leigh was going to have a heart attack when I held my iphone over the water to take this pic. She actually had to walk away.


I get easily frustrated when I do not get sport/activity the first time around. I knew this was going to be a problem, but we had a perfect night for golf and 10 of us met for a round of mini-golf. First of all my friends have obviously played before, a lot, because Jro got a hole-in-one the first friggin hole, then preceded to get another one on the last hole. Needless to say our team was not as adept as the other team, they had a number of hole-in-ones and I kept hearing cheers from behind us, or should I say taunts. Suppressing my competitive nature was difficult. At one point I think I said to Mel, "if you hit my ball one more time I am going to throw you in the koi pond", what? it just slipped out. Meanwhile our team was a frustrated bunch. Diane hit the ball like it was a baseball, they kept bouncing out of the hole. My middle finger was up most of the night as my ball now has a complex because I kept giving it the bird. My mini golf connoisseur friends said the course was not that challenging, apparently the lack of windmills and loops was disappointing.
All in all it was a great activity and night, we will definitely go back, it is cheap way to enjoy friends and be outside. The beers afterward made it all that much better.

I could not resist

This is the first time since the first season of American Idol I watched the entire season. And by watch I mean fast forward my Tivo strictly for the performances. I have it down to a science. I have so many issues with this show. I do not understand how they weed out the good singers from the throngs of people that come to the auditions. We see so many bad ones end up in final rounds. I think it is pretty much fixed, but I have to realize it is Fox TV and I go into watching the show understanding it is pretty staged. Other issues include, the homophobic banter between Ryan and Simon, making fun of the people who are overweight, socially awkward and just plan weird. So in the end maybe I should not watch altogether so as to stop supporting such dreck. Either way, I do enjoy watching the try outs and early rounds the best because I love those handful of singers who open their mouths and lo and behold have a great voice. Those moments of the show are the best.
Of course none of these people make it past Hollywood, because many are not marketable.
Last year I stopped watching halfway through because it was boring. Once it gets whittled down to two or three people it is not surprising anymore. The best part is seeing what each contestant is going to sing each week with in the awful themes they pick (Movie theme, Andrew Llyod Webber, Song the year you were born etc). Anyway the only reason I continued to watch this season was because of Adam Lambert and Allision Iraheta, man can these two sing, and you never knew what to expect from them. It is a singing competition, right? If either of them got kicked off early I would have stopped watching. Really do we need another Danny Gokey...so boring and too earnest. I want a little edge from my performers. I do have to say Kris Allen did surprise me a couple of times, he was smart with his song choices, and I loved that he picked the theme from Once, but again I was never wowed. I enjoy Jazon Mraz(he was great on SNL live) as much as the next gal, but I would rather hear someone who can hit a high note and hold it any day. It is more exciting and shows more talent.
I was not surprised by last nights outcome. Though we have had Bowie, Adam Ant, Boy George, and Freddy Mercury(notice all brits), America is just not ready of the likes of Adam Lambert. I am glad Idol let him take such risks each week, which was surprising, but they knew he was good TV and could back up the theatrics with his voice. In the end his ambiguous sexuality, the judges continuous praise and over the top performances did him in. He was too polished, it is obvious he has been doing this for a long time and American Idol is really about finding that diamond in the rough. Kris Allen is exactly that, so I guess it is not surprising he won it all. He is a pleasant, nice looking guy who can write songs, play instruments and sing. The AI marketing machine's dream. I would rather have him over Danny Gokey any day, but we all know who should have won that SINGING competition. I am looking forward to what Adam Lambert does next, we need someone to gay up the music biz a little.

Loved Kiss and Queen but this was my favorite duet of the evening.

Moved

I decided to move my blog to blogspot since returning from Europe. My original blog was at my website www.stephaniemar.com but I had not updated since January. You can see the archive there if you are interested. As much as iWeb is easy to use, although last night I could not publish the changes to my site, it is not convenient. I had to be on my computer to update and by the time I got home at night I was not in the mood to write, or couldn't compose anything longer then 40 characters, hello twitter. Also, I felt a lot of pressure to write long blogs since they were few and far between. As I did in Europe, I like off the cuff blogs much better, they are in real time and spontaneous, and I feel it is in my voice in that moment.
Before I left for Europe I set up our travel blog on blogspot, which I received a lot of great feedback since getting back. Yeah! We loved updating it and now we will have a great archive of our adventures. The best thing was actually being able to blog from my iphone. I installed the Blogger app and it is wonderful. Since we had limited Wifi, we could write a post and save it until Wifi was available. It was perfect. I will not have that problem in the U.S., but the freedom to be able to update from anywhere is more attractive then waiting to be by my computer to update. I really enjoyed keeping my website but now that I am on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter etc the need to pay for Webspace seems unnecessary. So I will probably let it just it lapse when my .mac account comes up for renewal.
It seems that twitter has been getting most of my attention lately, but sometimes you just want to write something longer then 40 characters and I like to list my complaints, er musings.
For example:
Last night I was in the shower shaving, I was trying to pay attention and not cut myself so my head was down. The next thing I know I feel something on my head, I jumped about 8 feet thinking a spider had dropped on me and then saw a fuzzy paw reaching from behind the shower curtain trying to pat my head. I am not sure what Henry's motivation was(attack, attention, love) but he scared the crap out of me. I surely could not tell from the look on his fuzzy face. I was like,"What the hell are you doing, I am trying to shave here". I said it like he would understand. That cat is going to cause a major injury someday. So my point being how could I have tweeted about that?