Who Is The Soap For?

My wife got this stuff for the bathroom, not to use, but to be used as a decoration. You know, on the shelf, there's some nice looking, pretty soap. It's the kind of thing that I imagine appeals to girls...or at least to some girls, my wife being one of those.

I can't help but chuckle every time I see it, though. Yes, I know that there's an island called Crete, and this is what you call something from Crete. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that the word it makes me think of is actually spelled cretin. That's still all I can think of. It seems like you wouldn't want to be in possession of cretin soap, because that would imply that you are a cretin, right?

Well, guess what, I am the proud owner of Cretan soap. I haven't started using it yet, though. I'll probably need to soon, I suspect though. We'll run out of the soft soap, and this cretin will have to break into the Cretan soap to wash up with it. You can count on that.

Abomination

I never thought I'd look at a package of bacon and turn up my nose, but what the hell is this monstrosity?!?!

It's like on the movies, where they take a great hero, and then they torture him and torture him until he breaks, and then he fights for evil. It's just wrong. Somebody should rescue that bacon and get the damn Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnadust off to see if it's salvageable...or is it just better to put it out of its misery?

Carnivore & Alternate Day Fasting | Another Hard Week, But Things Are Looking Up | Week 71 Roundup

This week was kind of a carbon copy of last week, but a little more so. The weekend involved a big camping trip, which meant I couldn't eat my normal stuff. Did it throw me for a loop? Or did I come out of it with a new attitude altogether?

Halloween Decorations Post #6

Okay, here's a quick one. Maybe I should have included this in the post I did about toys that came from movies, but for some reason, I figured it needed its own post.

So, here are the few decorations that I have from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

We can start with this guy. He's a stuffed Jack Skellington that Rish sent out to me once among the various things he'd grabbed for me at the thrift store.

He has a bit of a wire frame inside of it, though, so you can pose him...but only a little bit. I was able to manage to get him to sit, but that's the best I could do.

Don't worry, there's more Jack Skellington to be had. Here he is again with his cute little doggy, Zero.

This is the Disney Toybox version of Jack. I had to get him one of the times I went by the Disney Store looking for something else. That's also the Loyal Subjects Mumm-Ra from Thundercats there next to him. I left that guy up, because he really fits for the Halloween season too.

Here's another version of Jack Skellington, but the emphasis is on another version here. This is the Jack Skellington from the very start of the movie as they sing the "This Is Halloween" song. Jack comes out with a pumpkin on his head and dressed like a scarecrow. He dances around for a while, lights himself on fire, and then jumps into the well, and comes out looking like the pumpkin king we know and love. Here he is:

I have him a few skeleton backup dancers there as well. Mostly because the Pumpkin King figure is so tall that he needed to be in a large spot to fit, but it looked totally empty if he's the only thing there. The skeletons I got from Big Lots one year. They had them for super cheap, and once it got relatively close to Halloween, they put them on clearance, so I didn't even have to pay the super cheap full price for them. The only trouble is that they have a really hard time remaining standing. The damn things fall constantly. The one on the right in the picture has already fallen and is leaning on Jack's hand to stay up.

Okay, here's the last one:

On the upper shelf there is some figurines that I got at the dollar store. We have Jack, Sally, and Zero in that picture. I actually really like those ones. I love them even more, because they also had a Jack Skellington dressed as Santa figurine on sale at the dollar store as well. I grabbed that one, and come November, I will switch out the Skeleton Jack for the Santa Jack, and leave the rest up. Jack was right. It's fun to mix the holidays sometimes.

Oh, and since I won't be reshowing the same picture in a later post, on the main shelf in that picture is a Mego headless horseman figure I found at Walmart one time. I couldn't pass it up. I don't love Mego figures, but that headless horseman is pretty rad. He doesn't hold a candle to the Figura Obscura Headless Horseman they did a while back, but at $120 versus $8, I can deal with a little bit less quality.

Little Friend

I don't really like our new cat, Freya. She's a lot like our old cat, Juno, who died about a year ago in December. Juno hated me, was afraid of me, and ran from me whenever she saw me. The older she got, the more pronounced it became. She was like that racist uncle you had who was mostly fine until their mind started to go and those private thoughts started coming out all the time instead very infrequently. She had no reason to hate or fear me, but she did nonetheless.

The new cat is the same thing. From the day we got her, she was super skittish and nervous. She spent her first day at our house hiding under our bed and never coming out for anything. My daughter spent an exorbitant amount of time coaxing her out and gaining her confidence...but she's a kid that has little responsibilities, so she could. I did not, and the cat has never taken to me. It's not just because of that, though, because she likes my wife, who is also busy and doesn't waste tons of time soothing a skittish cat.

My kids and my wife say that it's probably because I'm louder than everybody else in the house, so she's just nervous of being around me. I don't know. I tried to take a picture of her for this blog post, this was the best I could get:

She was looking at me as I came up with my phone, and it would have been a good picture, but by the time I had the photo app open and the shot set, she was running away from me. After all, I was near her...that's extreme danger, right?

Anyway, despite being a little turd that treats me like I'm a monster despite never giving her a reason, she can do funny and cute things sometimes. That's why I'm writing this post. This was a super long-winded lead in to tell you about her little friend.

This is a coonskin cap that my son wanted to buy the last time we went to the Alamo. he should have saved his money, because, of course, he never uses it. He had it in his closet for more than a year, but then recently, we found it downstairs. We made Little take it back up and put it away, but the next thing you know, it was out and down again.

Turns out, Freya really likes it. She was getting into his closet and pulling it out, carrying it around in her mouth and taking it with her wherever she wanted to go. She would lay with it in corner of the room or on the window seat. My daughters even said they once caught her grooming the thing, licking its fur presumably to clean it off like it would do for itself or like some cats do to each other when they are particularly well bonded.

I guess the Davy Crockett hat is her little friend. It makes me shrug. She wouldn't have to do that if she wasn't so intent on hiding under the couch whenever I'm around. I'd be her friend, but I guess the hat is quieter. It rough to be a rambunctious male in today's society. It's just not built to accommodate us any longer. Sit still and be quiet, or you aren't welcome. Even our pets have taken that to heart.

My First Patreon Address Available Just This Once On The Regular Anklecast Feed

Okay, everybody, my first Patreon Address is now available to all...but just this once.

It's my first time doing a Patreon Address. Rish Outfield and Marshal Latham have been doing them for a while and I thought I ought to take their example and make a Patreon Address as well. In this, I talk about my goals for the year, month, and even day that I have set for myself, and how well I have achieved them. If that kind of stuff interests you, then check it out and see how it's going.

This one will be on the regular feed, because I want people who don't subscribe to Patreon will know that it exists, but from here on out, this will be a total Patreon exclusive. So, subscribe to the Patreon group and keep getting access to this podcast.

In the future, there will be more Patreon exclusive content. So, don't miss your chance to get it.

As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.

So, you can find the episode on The Anklecast feed or you can download it by right-cllcking HERE. You could also just click the play button below. That'll work too.

So Much More Of Those People

I said in the end of my last post about this that it would certainly be something that got out of hand quickly. I, who had aspirations of filling my back windows with stickers of the places I'd visited in my life, was able now to make my own stickers at any time. What would I do? Well, go overboard of course.

The first thing I did was take scans of the stickers that Temu sent me in grossly over-exaggerated proportions. Then I asked my daughter to make versions of those in a normal size. So, I now have a normal-sized version of my Grand Canyon sticker along with my St. Augustine, Florida sticker.

That St. Augustine one, I think, is my favorite. I loved that freaking lighthouse, so I couldn't resist getting the sticker. I was so sad when it was way too bug, but now I get to use it after all.

My daughter also made me the Mesa Verde sticker that came too big. The normal-size one looks good.

But that certainly wasn't where I stopped. I could make my own freaking stickers if I wanted to! So, of course, I was going to do that. There was a spot on my window that was likely to remain empty unless I made a sticker that fit it perfectly. It had to be tall and skinny, which seemed like the right place for a tree-shaped sticker. I just did that with the Muir Woods sticker from my last post though, so I tried to come up with something else. I figured, a lighthouse would work. 

I love lighthouses. When I was in my early-twenties, my family took a trip to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and they had a lot of lighthouses there. We went to a few of them, including the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and the lighthouse on Ocracoke Island. 

I asked the AI that I usually use to design my book covers with to make me a picture of the two lighthouses, and was surprised to find that the Ocracoke one looked pretty close to correct. So, I cropped it, and created this sticker.

I measured the spot on the window to make sure the sticker would fit, and my daughter printed it out for me. Now, that empty spot is filled in nicely.

While I was at it, I couldn't find a good sticker for the Bahamas, which I had visited on a cruise once back in the nineties on that same trip where we went to the Outer Banks, but also just this year in February. I'd ordered a sticker from Temu that I didn't really like that much, but now, I could make something much better.

I again had the AI make me a picture, this time of a white sand beach with palm trees. I sifted through the various options, and settled on this picture that I designed into a sticker.

We printed it out. We didn't even have to worry about making it fit in any little nook, so it could be a normal shape and size if we wanted. I like how it turned out.

There was one more place I thought I ought to put on my window. I had a sticker for Cancún, San Diego, San Francisco, Park City, and New York City—all cities that I've seen in the last ten to fifteen years or so. One big destination that I didn't have, though, was New Orleans. We visited that city for the first time not long after coming to Houston, and have been back a few times since. I love that place, despite the fact that I lost (or was pickpocketed) $100 out of my shorts pocket and also dropped my off-brand GoPro camera into the swamp while I was there.

I had looked for good NOLA stickers on Temu, and come up empty-handed. But I could make my own now, folks! I found a sticker that had a good bit of art, but had a crappy design. I cropped the crappy design elements out, and redesigned it for myself, coming up with this look:

If you're wondering, yes, that's the same font I use for Rish Outfield's name on all of his book covers. It's a good looking font. We printed out the sticker, and now, it's on my back window.

So, I added another six stickers to my window. This can't go on for much longer. This is what it looks like now.

Not a whole lot of space left. I can probably fill up both of the side windows, but the middle one needs to remain sticker-free. That's where the rear-view mirror looks. As much as I love covering my window with stickers, I need to be able to see what's going on behind me more.

There are still some places I'd like to do stickers of, though. One place I loved as a kid was in far Northern California called Lava Beds National Monument. It was a network of caves carved in prehistoric days by lava flow. It was so fun exploring our way through those caves. I'd like to do a sticker for that place. I'd have to make my own, though, because I can't find any place online that has one for sale. Maybe the AI can make me a cave that looks good enough. We'll see.