Happy, happy, joy, joy to the world!

Meowy Christmas, peeps!! ;-)

I have this for my desktop wallpaper at work and my avatar on Facebook. LOL

Season's eatings

Hope the holidays bring you many delicious gifts under the yum-yum tree!

Have an awesome Thanksgiving!

Once again, it's that time of year when we all count our blessings and thank the Great Maker for the good and positive things in our lives. Here are some of the things I am grateful for:

-- recently surviving the H1N1 virus and accompanying prolonged high fever,
-- still having a job (albeit, at times, an extremely frustrating one!) with health insurance and benefits in these very uncertain times, especially for newspapers,
-- all of my dear and wonderful friends, far and wide,
-- my pretty terrific apartment here on the nicest street in Ashland, and
-- having a computer to type this on!

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, full of friends, family and fellowship, not to mention turkey with all of the trimmings and a big slab of pumpkin pie with Cool Whip!!

Happy Halloween from Gwig!

Gwig, the Vampyre King! LOL

Yes, Halloween has finally arrived in Pet Society, the game I have been hooked on since shortly after joining Facebook in June. I have been saving up the gold coins you can earn in the game for weeks now with my favorite holiday in mind. This is the second week the Pet Society shops have offered Halloween items (like clothes, wallpaper, decorations, etc., all for your virtual pet's pad) and I have been on a wild shopping spree. LOL I can't wait to see what they roll out next week!

Above you will see a photo of Gwig's new (and as far as I am concerned, permanent!) Halloween lair. I even bought an extra large room so I could make it super awesome. Note the spooky wallpaper, gravestone, festive cake, witch's broom and skull candy bucket. Some of the decorations even glow in the dark when Gwig turns off the light switch. Can you believe this shit? LMAO

And right now all of the trees in the park are bare and when you bump into them they shower you with Halloween treats. Seriously, dude. I wish they had parks like that here. Ashland Parks and Rec. Committee, get on that, pronto! Not to mention the spooky glow-in-the-dark fish you can catch in the pond. Or the haunted tree in my front garden that bears Halloween candy instead of fruit. It's too much fun!

Takin' the easy way out

I started to write a long and thoughtful post about my life, circumstances and whatnot, but hell, I don't have time for that this morning. ;-) So here is a freaky feline foto for ya instead. LOL Enjoy the sublime weirdness!

Rocktober once again, peeps!

Me likey this time o' year! 'Nuff said...

Autumnal Ashland

This gives you some idea of what the drive to Bayfield on Hwy. 13 is like in the fall.

Fall foliage near Ashland.

The oredock approach in autumn.

September view of the Lake Superior shore.

It's September and I'm officially another year older. The fall colors are starting to arrive and there are already leaves blowing down the street. I love this time of year! (In spite of what comes after it ... or maybe even because of it.) Anyway, it seemed like a good time for a new post and some new photos of the northland.

Snow joke!

Alright, this beats everything! Tonight at the paper (yes, I had to work another freakin' Friday, folks!) I was standing by the back door outside the pressroom and I looked up at the outside light and saw what looked like snow flurries. I thought, WTF? Surely not.

Now it had been raining off and on all day and it was noticeably chilly when I stepped out on my back porch to leave for work. However, I still couldn't believe my eyes. After all, it's August, y'all!!

But the more I watched it come down, the more it looked like snow. It was floating down and very tiny. Not coming down hard and fast like sleet either.

Then I saw a couple of the press dudes coming and asked them to take a look. Both area natives, they immediately said it was definitely lake-effect snow. Granted, it didn't hang around long and, of course, nothing stuck to the ground, but, dammit, it is WAY too early for this shite! LOL

Addendum: I neglected to mention that as I was watching the 5 p.m. news (on my VCR) on NBC, the weatherman said the conditions were perfect for lake-effect snow, but then he went on to say that it was probably too warm and after all, this was August, etc. LOL I did a double take and rewound the tape because I couldn't believe my ears. Too bizarre! Sure makes ya wonder what that nasty beeyotch Mother Nature has in store for us this winter here in the northland. ;-)

Another challenging evening at "northern Wisconsin's morning newspaper"

From the top of the first page,
to the end of the last day...

Confusion that never stops,
Closing walls and ticking clocks...

You just want somebody listening to what you say.

Coldplay
from the albums X&Y and A Rush of Blood to the Head

Skating away...

...on the thin ice of a new day.

And as you push off from the shore,
won't you turn your head once more?
And make your peace with everyone.

For those who choose to stay
will live just one more day
to do the things they should've done.



from the album "Warchild" by Jethro Tull

Rampenfest

One of the "press monkeys", Brian Z. (Code Name: Ziggy), gave me the link to this video a few weeks ago and I just now watched it via Quicktime. :-) I don't want to say too much here and spoil anything for anyone, but I would just like to say this is quite the clever little, ahem... documentary.


www.rampenfest.com


If you don't want to download the entire video on Quicktime (which is what I did), you can watch it on YouTube. (However, you will have to watch it in segments because of the bandwidth restrictions on there.) Anyway, just type in "rampenfest" or "giant ramp in Bavaria." That should work. LOL

Kind of blue

Sigh...

Stewart vs. Cramer

Game, set and match to Mr. Stewart, I believe. ROFLMFAO!! Check this out!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-july-14-2009/lenny-dykstra-s-financial-career

A change of scene

Howdee, everybody!
I got sick of looking at the fireworks so here's a new image for your perusal. I recently joined Facebook and am totally hooked on this game Pet Society that you can play for free on there. At left is Gwig, having tea in his shamrock-themed kitchen. LOL
You create your pet from scratch, selecting from many different features including their eyes, nose, ears, coloring, etc. Then you have a house and you can earn coins to buy stuff to furnish it with. You feed your pet, bathe it, etc., plus there are different activities like hurdle races that earn you more coins.
BTW: Gwig is named after a baby Ewok from Star Wars. LOL I have the stuffed toy of it from the original release of Return of the Jedi.
My other recent addictions are Kemp's Caribou Coffee ice cream and Blue Diamond BOLD Wasabi and Soy Sauce almonds. (And no, I don't eat them at the same time! LMAO)

Happy Independence Day, America!

Fireworks over Lake Superior at Ashland, July 2008.

Hope everyone is enjoying a relaxing and convivial 4th of July weekend. I am thankful for those who founded our country and for having the day off from the paper. LOL Catch ya on the flipside!

Moonheartgirl's weedking...I mean, weekend update

Greetings, one and all!
It's been a while since I posted anything and so much has happened that I thought it might be kewl to do a summary using bullet points. LOL Here goes:

• Finally filed my 2008 income taxes. I'd be getting a tidy bundle back, too, if I didn't owe so much in back taxes from when I was self-employed. :-(
• I've been enjoying the hell out of The Daily Show and Colbert Report lately. Did anyone catch Stephen in Iraq? It was too funny! Love his new 'do. LOL
• Have had to take five so-called furlough days at work to date and it looks like I will have this coming Monday off without pay as well. Sigh. I just keep telling myself how lucky I am to even have a full-time job with benefits right now.
• I have filed for unemployment for the aforementioned furlough days and it looks like I will get something for my efforts. Yay! BTW: It sure doesn't seem very cost-effective to make us take these days off and then have people filing for unemployment. As one of my coworkers shrewdly pointed out, TPTB will undoubtedly close that loophole somehow in the future. :-(
• I have been talking to other people who have lived here a long time about how it seems to get light out so early and I am happy to report that I am not crazy. It really does! The other morning I was up at 3:50 and happened to go outside and you could already see the dawn coming up! WTF? Hell, the damn birds start singing at 4 a.m., I swear! LOL Ahhhh, exotic life in the northland. PS. I keep reading in the police report about bear cubs sighted in town. Dang it! I want to see them. ;-)
• Is anyone else sick and tired of hearing the GOP whining, crying and carrying on about every move Obama makes? You lost, folks. Get over it already! Suck it up like we all had to for 8 miserable years. It is so sad that many of them really do seem to want him to fail. Oh, and Fox News -- blow me!!
• It was quite the to-do at work Thursday night when Michael Jackson died. For one thing, everyone in the building wanted to make sure I knew about it for the next day's paper. Plus, we first heard about it on the local radio station and it was some little time before AP ran with it. (I had the rare thrill of seeing a FLASH come across the wire.) So McNugget (a silly pressman) kept coming up front to see if it was official yet. He was actually gleeful about it, while I was honestly too busy to care at the moment. I certainly am fed up with the media frenzy already. Jeepers! I was flipping around the channels this afternoon and every station seemed to be running MJ-related programming: CNN, HLN, MSNBC, VH1, MTV... hell, I even saw them talking about it on ESPN at one point! WTF?! Poor Farrah! She died first and was the top story for a few hours. Today she was relegated to a single-line mention in the crawl on CNN. It was all Jackson, all day long.
• I am now up to more than 6,000 hits on this blog. Will wonders never cease?
• I finally went to a dentist and learned that I didn't lose a crown after all. In fact, there was still half of a tooth in there... all jaggedy and shit. The newfangled digital x-rays were horrific in that I could really see exactly how bad my teeth are. LOL The dentist performed a root canal on the spot to save the tooth and now I am scheduled for a deep cleaning/planing/torture session next month. So far, my insurance seems pretty good from work. Keep your fingers crossed!
• FLED SANFORD: That's how The Daily Show described South Carolina's magician governor with the world's best disappearing act. And that was before the scandal broke. They also depicted him on a milk carton. LOL Now there's a story with legs. It ain't over yet, folks!
• I gave in and joined Facebook today. LOL Given my track record (Yahoo 360, Buzztime and Nick.com, just to name a few), I predict its demise within a year. LOL And by "demise," I don't necessarily mean the site will completely die. I just mean it's the beginning of the end, the sure sign of decay, the long, slow descent into crap.

Will add more soon!


For some reason the bullet points dropped out when I switched templates. Sorry about that. :-(

Coldplay catharsis

After getting absolutely hooked on Coldplay's "Talk" video (which, incidentally, you can scroll down and watch on this blog), I recently purchased two of their albums: "X&Y" and "A Rush of Blood to the Head." Now I can't stop listening to them! In addition to the aforementioned tune, among my fave tracks are " Speed of Sound," "Fix You" and "Clocks." If you haven't heard these guys yet, check them out on YouTube. They are most excellent!

Awesome Ashland!

The famous Soo Line oredock at sunset.

Downtown Ashland's lumberjack mural honoring the region's logging era. It's painted on the side of an actual J.C. Penney store, too. Timberrrrrr!

Ashland's Main Street and Bay Theater at night.

An oreboat chugs into Ashland.

Chequamegon (pronounced Sha-wah-muh-gun, by the way) Bay at Ashland.

Squidmania

Happy Squidbillies Vol. 2 DVD Release Day, y'all!

Hell yeah, I got me sum strange! I went and pre-orderified that there sumbitchin' new DVD picture box set featuring them good ol' Cuyler boys. I can't hardly wait to get me that digitalized shiny metal circle for mah TV lookity box. LOL

I am planning my own private release party (complete with Glug, mutated chicken wings, old thermometers and party likker, of course) for this weekend cuz I should have that puppy by Friday. Wooo-hoooooooooo!!

An Ashland landmark at risk

Take a good look, folks, because this historic structure is rapidly deteriorating and has been deemed a safety hazard. It's been slated for demolition for several years now and someday they probably will tear it down. Or blow it up! LOL Unfortunately, with all of that concrete and steel, dynamite could be the easiest way to accomplish that sad end.


To quote Warren Nelson's "Ore Dock Pockets" song from 30th Star, an ore boat "comes easing on into its landing."


Here's a cool old photo of the ore dock from 1930.

Here comes Peter Cottontail...

...leaving his trademark bunny trail!

HOPPY EASTER, everyone!!

Bite the heads off a couple of wabbits (preferably chocolate) for me, will ya? ;-)

Happy Easter, 2009!

Believe it or not, yours truly will be setting the Lord's table this Sunday morning, folks. Yes, I somehow got roped into altar guild duty at St. Andrew's. LOL It's a long story, but as it stands, I will be there bright and early on Easter morn, measuring out the sacramental wine and counting the Communion wafers. Then it's off to work for a fun-filled evening of getting the good people of Ashland their morning newspaper. ;-) Thank you, God, that Ashland still has a daily paper! Amen.

Ashland's artistic side

Here are some of the downtown murals for which Ashland is known. Depicting scenes from the city's history, they were painted by Kelly Meredith and Susan Prentice Martinsen between 1998 and 2005. The murals include scenes of lighthouse keepers, lumberjacks, early grocers and pioneers who settled the region. One of the most amazing murals (pictured directly above) stretches half a city block and portrays sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines from different eras. All of the faces are based on real veterans who have lived in and around the Ashland area.