OMG...BUNNY? WTH?!?!?!?!

Our cat, Domino, wakes me up every day at 6:30 AM, meowing annoyingly and incessantly for her breakfast (as if the behemoth is going to starve to death).  So this morning, just like every other day, I dragged myself out of bed and schlepped myself to the kitchen to dole out her kitty feast.  While I was groggily dumping Domino's cat food into her bowl (which consists of half-crunchy/half-canned smushy food, with a sprig of parsley on the side of the dish for a lovely garnish...just kidding about the parsley), I could hear the bunny rummaging around noisily in its pen.  (We keep the bunny in an open dog crate inside of Lilly's old baby playpen at night).

Until I actually got a pet bunny for myself recently, I didn't know that all bunnies do this thing called "binkying" several times a day, where they basically get so happy and excited that they can't control themselves, and run around really super-fast, bounce, hop, flip, and go nuts for a while (and it's TOTALLY cute)!  The bunny actually just now performed its nightly binky, so I managed to get some footage of it so you can see what I mean!  This evening I hemmed the bunny up in the kitchen so it couldn't get into much trouble.  Last time I let it run around loose in the living room, it went behind the couch and chewed the phone cord in two!  :{

So I had heard the bunny binkying in its pen as I was making Domino's breakfast, and I just assumed that the bunny was binkying because it was happy that I was about to feed it breakfast, too.  So after I sat Domino's bowl of cat food down to her, I got the timothy grass hay and greens for the bunny, and walked over to the bunny's pen to feed it.  Keep in mind, it's still really dim in the house since it's early, and I had only flipped on the kitchen light, and I'm still half asleep.  So when I got to the bunny's pen and looked down to feed the bunny, THERE WAS NO BUNNY IN THE PEN.  My eyes drifted upward in my groggy state of disbelief, and what to my wandering eyes should appear?  No, not a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer (although I wouldn't have been half as surprised to see that as opposed to what I really saw)...THE BUNNY WAS ON TOP OF THE FREAKING PIANO.

How did it...I...don't...even...WHAT?!?!?!?!?

I seriously thought I was dreaming.  I stood there, still half-asleep, but waking up rapidly, as my mind tried to process this completely unexpected sight.  I shook my head, blinked, rubbed my eyes, and opened them wide, but the bunny was still there, walking across the lidded keyboard, sniffing.  After I realized that yes, this was indeed actually happening, I put down the hay and greens in disbelief, picked up the bunny, cradled it in my arms, rocked it side to side, petted it for a while, and asked it "What the hell did you do?!?!?"

So I put it down in its pen, gave it its breakfast, and promptly went and got the baby gate to lay on top of the playpen so it wouldn't be able to get out again.  I hope.

But how it managed to do that is a little bit of a mystery to me.  The only way it could have gotten out would have been for it to "boing" all the way up onto the top of the dog crate, and climb up and over the edge of the playpen onto the lidded keyboard portion of the piano.  I didn't realize that a little dwarf bunny could "boing" that high!

Lesson learned!  Note to self:  always keep a lid on the bunny!  LOL!!!  Who knew?!?  O__o

Mistakes Were Made...

So I made the mistake of washing my hair (without bothering to take the time to use conditioner, since I was too tired to mess with it), going straight to bed with it wet, and wallering around on it all night long.  This is the result:

Note to self:  I won't be doing that again!

Turn Any Soda into a Slushie With This Tip

I just ran across this trick on the internet.  Check it out!  AWESOME!!!

More Tales From The Beach

First of all, while I was driving us to the beach on Saturday, we came upon a ridiculous sight.  Have you seen that TV commercial for car insurance where the guy does a double-take because he sees a car driving in front of him with a mattress strapped to the top of it?:

Well, we got to see that very thing happen in real life, and Jamie documented it with his cell phone:

Soon after, we arrived safely at the beach (without colliding with a flying mattress).  As we were setting up our umbrella and chairs and getting everything situated for the day, it hit me -- the stench of dog sh*t baking in the hot sun.  Needless to say, I was NOT amused:

Shoooooo...!  >:P

There was just enough of a breeze to keep the smell wafting into our faces.  Now, dogs are not allowed on this beach, but we see people bring small dogs in briefly from time to time.  I just knew, based on the magnitude of the odor, that there had to be a giant smeary pile of crap somewhere close by.  Finally, I got fed up with having to endure the horrible stench of hot poo, and grabbed Jamie so we could play Sh*tlock Holmes.  We then began our quest to discover the source of the foul poo odor, and vowed to heroically rid the beach of it by whatever means necessary.

Well, we searched and searched, but never did find a heaping pile of poo.  And strangely, the further we trekked away from our spot on the beach, it no longer reeked of poo at all.  Because of this, naturally, the first thing we did was to check the bottoms of our own flip-flops to see if one of us had inadvertently stepped in some random poo somewhere, but we hadn't (besides, I'm sure we would have noticed it in the confines of the warm car on the way there anyway).

So we abandoned the mission and sat back down at our spot on the beach to regroup.  We noticed that the poo smell was only around our area of the beach, but that there were no piles of poo around there.  But there were, however, two different other sets of people close by to our left, which was the area where the poo odor seemed to be emanating from.  And since (hopefully) nobody in their right mind would park their families amongst a steaming hunk of dog poo to enjoy their nice day at the beach together, me and Jamie finally came to the conclusion that somebody in one of those families had evidently unknowingly creamed a pile of dog sh*t with their sandal directly before coming out to the beach.  Heck, from the horrible way that it stunk, whoever it was must have Riverdanced in the pile!  Sheesh!

Our assumptions were validated when the older couple that had been sitting closest to our left relocated from the premises to sit underneath the nearby pavilion instead.  Whenever they left, so did the poo smell.  So Jamie deduced that they probably have some little "foo-foo" dog at home, and one of them must have unwittingly stomped its load in the yard before arriving at the beach.  Seems quite likely, if you ask me.  Sh*tlock Holmes and Watson Sh*tson crapped cracked this case!  ;D

So after the sh*t snafu was over, we breathed a sigh of relief (literally -- thank God for the fresh air).

But speaking of breathing, then we were met by this sight:

And after lounging in the sun for a good long while, I took a notion to get artsy-fartsy and decided to take a few pictures of the scenery:

And that concluded our unusual day at the beach!  :)

The Great Poplar Tree Disaster!

I was driving us home from the park yesterday evening, and it was coming one heck of a storm.  We were almost home, and I had stopped at a stop sign, when we saw what we assumed was some doofus backing his Jeep up in the middle of the highway in front of us because he had missed his turn.  After the 'doofus' got out of our way, I was able to turn at the stop sign.  It was then that we were able to see that the guy wasn't a doofus after all; he had to back up and go the other way, because a tree was laying across the road, completely blocking it, and the tree had taken down the phone line with it!

Well, since the tree had come down (conveniently) directly across from my brother & sister-in-law's house, I felt like I had authorization to play Daisy Duke and drive through their front yard to get around the downed tree.  

Everybody else had to turn around and go back the way they came, heh heh.

Jamie called 911 and reported the mess, and a cop came on the scene within a matter of moments.  It helped that Jamie fibbed and told them that there was a box of doughnuts trapped underneath the downed tree.  Ha ha, just kidding!  ;)

I drove the car down lower in my brother's yard, and we sat there and watched the events unfold for a few minutes.  I took the opportunity to snap a couple of pictures.

(You can see how the tree brought down the phone line):

Then the cop arrived on the scene.  (The white car is in the process of doing a 57-point turn in the middle of the road, in order to go back the other way from whence it came):

When we finally drove out of my brother's yard and went across the street to our house, we could see that the downed tree (which had been growing at the edge of a small stream) had actually completely uprooted.  So I suppose the sudden storm with torrential rains must have saturated the ground with water too quickly, causing the tree to just turn loose and fall down.

Not long after we got home, we began to hear chainsaws running, and knew that they would have the tree cleared up and out of the road really soon.  The phone (and more importantly, internet service), however, was a different story.  I wasn't very happy about having to spend an entire evening without the internet to surf, thanks to this stupid tree knocking down the line.  So it wasn't until sometime this morning that we got both the phone and internet service back.

This morning, we walked over to check out the fallen tree first-hand.  Here's a handy-dandy slideshow of the disaster aftermath (enlarge to Full Screen for best results):

Stupid Toaster!

I hope this isn't indicative of how the rest of my day is going to go.

The stupid toaster was only set on "2", not "Charcoal"!

Meh!  >:P

OMG A MOUSE NEST...psyche!

I was throwing something in the trash can a while ago, and saw that the trash can was full (as usual).  So I pulled the trash can out of the cabinet to empty it and saw this:

I fully expected the wad of fluff to be chock full of wriggly little pink babies with their beady-eyed mother, but THANK GOD it was a false alarm and turned out to only be the wad of crud that I had shaken out of the vacuum cleaner canister the other day that had fallen out of the trash can because it was overflowing.  WHEW!!!  What a relief!

Rack & Choke...?

We were behind this car in the drive-thru line at McDonald's a while ago.  Obviously, its vanity plate is intended to mean "Racing Chick", but Jamie said he's seen the car around town a few times before, and every time he sees it, he can't help but think it says "Rack & Choke"!  LOL!

Lilly's Painting of Domino

Lilly just painted a picture of Domino.

VERY realistic...LOL!!!

My Husband The Author!

My husband, Jamie, started writing some short stories earlier this year for fun.  (Our cat, Domino, who we call "The Big Black Inconvenience", offers her assistance every single time he sits down to write):

OK, so maybe Domino really just causes a literal "Writer's Block".  Talk about a "Writer's Cramp"!  LOL!

Anyway, for Father's Day, we actually published Jamie's first Kindle eBook on Amazon, and there will be more Kindle eBooks to come, as he finishes them and writes more.

Here's the link to Jamie's Kindle eBook on Amazon:
5 Scary Little Tales - Volume 1 - North Georgia Edition

Check it out!  :)

Country Comes To Town

So you know how Lilly is scheduled to be in another pageant next month.  Well, the other day Jenna was down at the mall (which is like, an hour & a half+ drive from here) and picked up a cute outfit from the Justice store for Lilly to wear for the 'casual wear' portion of the pageant.  Unfortunately, however, when she got the outfit home, and Lilly tried on the shorts, they were inexplicably WAY too big!:

The strange thing was, they were the same size as the camo skort from the Justice store that Lilly wore at the last pageant (which fit perfectly and was a size 10...or so we thought).  Upon closer inspection with an electron microscope the next day, we discovered that these peach-colored shorts were labeled size

10 1/2

So upon realizing that these shorts must be some kind of sizing disaster, we quickly determined that we had no choice but to travel back to the mall the very next day to exchange them for a smaller size before they ran out, since they were on sale at 40% off!  Not to mention that we needed to procure a couple pairs of shoes for Lilly to wear in the pageant too.  So......

ROAD TRIP!!!

Later that evening, it dawned on me that this would be my 8-year-old daughter's VERY FIRST TRIP TO A MALL, and that I myself actually hadn't been to a mall in many, many years.  (I know, we lead very sheltered lives here in the mountains).

So the next day, we all piled up in Jenna's van (Jenna, Claire, me, Jamie, and Lilly), and away we went!  First we stopped off at a shoe store in Ellijay, and found Lilly a great pair of sandals to go with her casual wear in the pageant.  We weren't too happy with their formal shoe offerings, so onward we traveled down to the mall.

When we first walked in to the mall, Lilly was FREAKED OUT by all the mannequins.  Come to think of it, I don't suppose she had ever actually seen any mannequins in real life.

Me, I was kind of overwhelmed because everything was so bright and shiny and clean and nice and fancy and new-smelling, and there was so much random STUFF available for purchase EVERYWHERE!  It kind of freaked me out to be honest with you.  I mean, not in a bad way; I guess it was just kind of sensory overload of fancy stuff I'm not used to.

Anyway, our first stop was the Justice store to see if they had those peach-colored shorts in a smaller size that we could exchange them for.  Crap, they didn't!  They didn't even have any more of them in their back storeroom!  Since everything in the store was 40% off, everything really was flying off the shelves.  So we studied the offerings, and decided that the blue jean shorts would go with anything.  So we took a pair of 8's and 10 Slims into the dressing room to see how they would work.  Lilly tried the 8's first.  They fit all right, but they did seem to be pretty snug.  And I knew that since they were 99% cotton, they would be sure to shrink up in the wash, and become too small.  So Lilly peeled off the 8's, and then she tried on the 10 Slims.  Perfection.

So we whisked them up to the register, where I explained to the cashier that we needed to exchange the 'too-big Size 10 1/2 peached-colored shorts' for the 'just right Size 10 Slim blue jean shorts'.  And that's when the cashier explained to us that their Size 10 1/2 was the equivalent of a SIZE 14.

WHAT?!?!?!?

NO FREAKING WONDER THEY SWALLOWED LILLY WHOLE!!!

How stupid!!!  And the cashier went on to explain that the half-sizes were really basically to fit girls that have the bigger hips.  MEH!!!  Sizes mean NOTHING in clothing!!!  You have to try EVERYTHING on!!!  It was so ridiculous!

Anyway, we finally got all that cleared up.  And lesson learned.  10 1/2 = 14.  Now we know.

Across the mall from the Justice store was the Claire's store, and we decided to get Lilly's ears pierced there.  She'd been asking to do it for a long time now, and I had promised her we'd do it sometime this summer, so I figured there was no time like the present:

I was quite shocked, however, when the lady told me "That'll be $54.50"!!!

FIFTY-FOUR DOLLARS AND 50 CENTS FOR EAR PIERCING?!?!

That's another thing about the mall that astonished me...how UTTERLY EXPENSIVE EVERYTHING was!  I was floored!  This, coming from the girl that sometimes uses a purse that her husband yanked out of the dump...talk about culture shock!

But we had a great time.  We got a pair of shoes for Lilly to wear with her formal dress in the pageant, but I stupidly didn't think to check to see how much they cost before I bought them, so I probably could have found some that were cheaper, but whatever.  They ended up being $26.  Maybe I can get Lilly to wear them more than just once.  :P  Or maybe I can squeeze my dumpy ol' Flinstone Feet into them...sometimes I do wear Lilly's flip-flops...  :/

Then we all got hungry and went to the food court.  Lilly was still too excited to eat, but she was really thirsty and wanted something cold, so we got her a smoothie.  We couldn't get her to order any food, so I persuaded her to partake of some of mine and Jamie's french fries to tide her over.

Claire usually has a serious look on her face, so Lilly followed suit:

After the food court, we checked out the Disney store, Hot Topic, and then me and Jamie waltzed into the Sleep Number Bed store to waller around in their comfy beds.  Me and Jamie have actually been considering getting one of those beds since both of our backs give us a lot of trouble, and I've always wondered what those beds felt like.  They were great!  We did that thing where they use the computer to determine your ideal sleep number setting, and mine turned out to be 25, while Jamie's turned out to be 20.  We both obviously need fairly smushy beds for our rotten backs.  Before we left, the saleslady offered us to fill out a slip for a drawing for a free Sleep Number bed, so of course I jumped all over that.  I would crap if we won one -- it would be a dream come true!  But since the chances of that happening (especially with our rotten luck) is slim to none, maybe if we get a decent tax refund next year, we can get us one of those Sleep Number beds.  Heavenly!  And they last for 25 years!  What's not to like?!

So we finished all our shopping and browsing, but before we left the mall, we let the kiddos (and Jenna LOL) ride the little mall train:

(Claire, skeptical as usual)

And after the train ride, we took a load off and let the kiddos mess around in the little play area in the mall:

So all in all it was a good day until the ride home, during which Lilly's apparent ADHD went into overdrive, and she made us want to drive off a cliff all the way home.

But other than that, we had a GREAT time!  But it will probably be a while before we go back again...!  ;)  LOL!

Worst. Day. Ever.

Well, actually it's been more of a rash of bad luck over the past week month entire lifetime.

I guess it all started about a week ago when my cell phone fell out of my pocket and dropped straight into the toilet right after I had just pee'd.  I have never destroyed a cell phone before; it was my first time, and of course, I was NOT happy about it.  I instantly plunged my hand into the commode full of pee and retrieved my poor ruined phone.  Yuck.  :P  So later that day me and Jamie went to the cell phone store to get a new one.  Jamie had an older flip-phone that he had abandoned because the camera and video suddenly stopped working on it for some unknown reason, and the cell phone store couldn't even get it to work again when he took it in for them to try to fix a couple of months ago.  So we deactivated that phone and kept it for an emergency spare just in case we ever needed it.  Jamie was limping along with my old flip-phone, which had a camera and video that worked, but we had let Lilly play with it in the past, so it was partially busted, and began coming apart whenever you flipped it open.  So since I didn't really care whether I had camera or video capability on my cell phone or not, we decided to reactivate Jamie's old cell phone for me, and let Jamie have the upgrade and get a new phone.

Well, about $160 later at the cell phone store ($50 of which we'll get back with an inconvenient mail-in rebate, and an additional $30 fee which will conveniently show up on our next cell phone bill), we both got fixed up with our respective phones.  I determined later that day that I didn't like stepping back to a cell phone that didn't have a full keyboard for texting.  And Jamie couldn't figure out his fancy new phone, which I coveted, since it had a full keyboard.  To top it all off, after I got Jamie's old phone, which the camera/video allegedly didn't work on, I tried it, and the camera/video function somehow mysteriously worked perfectly, like it had never been messed up at all.  So that really made me mad.  The only reason I had settled for Jamie's old phone in the first place was because he wanted a phone with a camera/video, and we just assumed that that phone's camera/video capabilities were broken forever.

So we have decided to swap phones.  But there's one more bad thing about it.  I just discovered last night when I was playing a video that Jamie had recorded with his fancy new phone over my computer, that the audio that goes along with the recorded video doesn't transfer.  So when you play a video that was recorded with Jamie's new cell phone on the computer, it has no audio at all.  There is no sound whatsoever.  Apparently it has something to do with something called a "codec".  I'm trying to figure out how to fix it, or get something to help me convert the stupid video files to the proper format, but I'm not very tech-savvy at all, and it all seems so complicated with all that confusing jargon and what-not, that I don't really know what to do, and I'm pretty upset about it.

In addition to the whole cell phones snafu, 

• It's been 80+ degrees lately and we don't have air conditioning because our heat pump is broken
• Lilly's laptop has bitten the dust -- the keyboard no longer works on it, and now the sound on it is messed up too
• I still haven't gotten my car worked on (I still need an oil change and a new valve-cover gasket put on)
• Jamie claims he needs new tires on his truck
• Me and Jamie got Jury Summons in the mail last week
• Lilly sucks -- I'm almost 100% sure that she has to have ADHD, but I don't think her pediatrician would believe me.  Lilly drives me INSANE CONSTANTLY, and I don't know what to do

And today we had a TERRIBLE day at the beach.

Of course Lilly started BEGGING RELENTLESSLY as usual to go to the beach not long after she finally got up this morning.  I looked at the weather forecast, and it said there was only a 30% chance of rain, so I decided it would be fine to go, to shut Lilly up.  So off we went.

When we got to the beach, I was struggling to put up our stupid umbrella in the wind, when unbeknownst to me, the stupid gigantic inflatable purple whale that Lilly demands to drag to the damn beach with us every stinking time, even though it's so huge that we can barely squeeze it into the car, had blown away, over to some other people.  In my struggle with the umbrella, I saw some lady's feet standing in the sand in front of me, and heard her voice tell me "Your whale is hungry"!  I looked up from my umbrella struggle to see her holding the damn purple whale, asking me "Is this yours"?  I quit fooling with the umbrella, sheepishly said "Yeah", and took it from her.  I mumbled something about how "I thought Lilly had it".  The lady explained that the wind had blown it over to where she was sitting, and that's why she had told me that it was hungry.  I was mortified.  She went back to where she had been sitting, and I fixed the stupid whale so that it would be harder for the wind to blow it away, or at least keep it in my line of sight so that I would know if it had blown away again or not.

I thought I had my stupid beach umbrella set up good enough, so I whipped out a sandwich from our cooler to eat.  But the wind picked up again, and I had to fling my sandwich down on top of the cooler to grab the stupid umbrella.  I angrily yanked the umbrella down temporarily so that I could finish my sandwich before messing with it again.  And ironically, the sandwich had become a literal sandwich during the blast of wind, which had blown sand onto my sandwich.  So I crunch, crunch, crunched the remainder of my cheese sandwich (bleh  >:P) and when I got done eating, I turned my focus back to the stupid umbrella.

I decided that since it was obviously going to be an unexpectedly extra-windy day, and Jamie wasn't with us, that I would just remove the bottom pole from the umbrella, effectively shortening it to just being able to cover only me, laying in my vintage 80s ugly brown lounge chair.  That way, it would at least be easier for me to grab and hold in place, if a sudden gust of wind picked up again.

Well.  Not long after I thought I had it all fixed up reasonably well, the damn umbrella began violently turning wrong-side-out for extended periods of time every few minutes, thanks to some freak gale-force winds that would not stop.  So I was forced to constantly keep the damn umbrella in a bionic robo-grip to keep from Mary Poppins-ing the hell outta there!  It was HORRIBLE.

We had been there for probably a few hours when the sky got overcast, and a few drops of rain started to come down off and on.  I started packing up our stuff and getting ready to go.  When I finally finished packing everything up, and I was trying to persuade Lilly to leave, the sky got even darker, and it began thundering.  I told Lilly that it was going to start storming, and that we had to leave, since it wasn't safe to be near the water.  Finally we got in the car.  We sat there in the car for a few minutes so that Lilly could change out of her bathing suit and put on some dry clothes (we don't like to use the bathhouse at the beach, because it stinks and it's disgusting).  While we were sitting there, the thunder got worse.  Then it started lightning.  And then came the rain.  Except it was more like being in one of those automatic car washes, where you can't see a thing except for the water blasting your entire car.  So we had to drive home in THAT.

Except we didn't go straight home; we needed to swing by Dad & Patti's house to check and make sure everything was OK, since they're off on vacation.  I finally made it there in the storm, and it was still pouring the rain hard.  I clicked the remote garage door opener, and even though it only took me 2 seconds to run into the garage, I still got soaked to the bone because it was raining that hard.  I put Dad's mail on the seat of his recliner, put more cat food in the feeder, changed the cat water, retrieved the fun noodle that Dad said we could have, and ran back into the car, soaked, where Lilly was waiting for me.  I clicked the garage door remote to close the garage.  It closed, and then I realized that the garage lights were still on.  I knew that they had come on when I had clicked the remote, so I thought surely they would go back off on their own.  I don't have any experience with fancy automatic garage doors or anything like that, so I don't really know for sure exactly what they're supposed to do.  So we sat there, and sat there, and sat there, waiting to see if the damn garage lights would go off by themselves.  It was only a few minutes, but sitting there in the car in the storm made it feel like an eternity.  So I clicked the garage door remote again just to see if maybe that would turn off the damn lights.  No dice.  Of course, it opened the damn door back up again.  So I clicked the remote again to shut the door, and this time I decided to sit there and wait to see what happened with the stupid garage lights.  I tried calling both Dad and Patti on their cell phones to ask them if the stupid light would go off by itself, but nobody answered.  So I decided that I would just sit there for 5 whole minutes, and if the damn lights still wouldn't go off by themselves, then I would go in again and see if there was some kind of hidden secret switch I had to flip to turn the crap off.  Finally, finally after exactly 5 minutes, *blink* the damn garage lights finally went off on their own, and me and Lilly could finally make our way home in the storm.  The closer we got to home, the more the storm slacked off, thankfully.  A little while after we got home, I turned on my laptop to check the news, and saw "SEVERE WEATHER ALERT" blasting on the headline.  Uhh!!! Oh, well, at least we made it.

That brings me to yet another crappy thing.  Remember how I mentioned in a recent post how we couldn't wait to go metal detecting at the beach to see what treasures we could find?  Well, guess what?  IT'S ILLEGAL TO GO METAL DETECTING IN PUBLIC PLACES IN GEORGIA.  I am SO PISSED about it.  We learned of this recently when we were at the beach, and Jamie was talking to one of his friends that happened to be there.  Jamie just happened to mention to his friend that we were planning to do some metal detecting there soon, and Jamie's friend told him that the week before at that very beach, someone was metal detecting, and the sheriff came and kicked them out because of it.  So I looked it up on the internet when we got home, and sure enough, it is strictly prohibited to do metal detecting in any kind of public park in the state of Georgia.  UHH!!!!!!!!!!  That really makes me MAD!!!  I was really looking forward to it, and now we can't even do that!  I am grateful, though, that we didn't have to learn about it the hard way, and it end up being us getting kicked out of somewhere for metal detecting.  That would be awful.

Anyway, I'm just really sick of everything sucking lately.  And the cherry on top for today is that the bunny chewed the entire nose off of one of Lilly's Barbie dolls that was laying in the floor, and Lilly is DISTRAUGHT over it, and screamed and wailed at the top of her lungs about it for several minutes straight.  I promised her I would buy her a new one, and Jamie told her that we could make that Barbie "Bad Nosejob Barbie", or "Accident Barbie".  Lilly was NOT amused.

I can't win for losin'!  Dammit!

I do have one helpful tip to share, though, that I learned about from the cell-phone-in-the-toilet disaster.  The man at the cell phone store told me about this, and I'll be danged if it didn't work.  He told me that if your phone gets dunked in water, to open it up and take the battery out of it as quickly as possible.  Also flip it open if it's a flip-phone, or slide it open if it has a slide-out keyboard.  Basically open the phone up as much as possible.  Then place the phone inside a ziploc bag of uncooked dry white rice (I only had brown rice, so I used it and it worked too).  The rice absorbs all the water out of the phone so that the phone may actually work again, after it completely dries out.  I think I had my phone in the bag of rice for maybe 2 days.  I thought it was stupid and couldn't possibly work, but when I put the battery back in my phone, I couldn't believe that the phone worked again.  I was able to get all my contact information off of it.  One or two of the buttons weren't very responsive, but I could get around it.  So I thought that trick was pretty amazing.  Who knew?  Rice?

So I'm glad that something semi-good came out of all the crap that's happened to me this week!  Pass along this cell phone/rice trick to everybody you know, so that benefit may be gleaned from my misfortune, and make it all worthwhile!