Bless My Homeland Forever....

Wow....I must admit, I have been shamefully absent from this blog.  Forgive me, though...unlike my red hello kitty diary (which had the first entry from 3rd grade and the second entry from 9th grade), I have come back in a relatively short time.  Because I have waited so long to post, I have many things to describe (near death experiences in Chile) and gripe about (israeli teens, chilean men and their personal space issues, people making out in parks, drunken old men in my neighborhood, my mother-in-law and her unrealistic expectations, and shallow american tourists) .....I just have to let you know I'm alive and fully plan to post in the next few weeks......in the interim, let me leave you with this little gem that I heard on a somewhat recent trip to Alcatraz with Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum's family....

OVERHEARD/SEEN ON ALCATRAZ ISLAND......

Father:  "And THAT, kids, is the GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE!  The most famous bridge in the entire country....probably the world... Just think, YOU got to see it!"

Father proceeds to line up 3 kids, wife, and grandparents in front of the bridge and then begins to shoot pictures in a wild Nikon frenzy, all the while ballyhooing about the merits of the VERY IMPORTANT MOST FAMOUS Golden Gate Bridge.......

I really thought about it (I did! I swear!) and decided not to torpedo this precious family moment spent creating special memories and the pictures to document it.....as he did all of this in front of the BAY BRIDGE!  Note to all:  Bay Bridge=GREY, Golden Gate Bridge=RED....

What is WRONG with America that most people cannot name the states, cities, or recognize major landmarks....just one more example of how this country is sliding down the U-bend towards mediocrity.....

I Must Have Done Something Good...

I'm am currently obsessed with the television show "Heroes" in a way that can only lead to mental incapacitation. Since my friend, Bobcat, recommended it to me 3 days ago, I have streamed the first 12 episodes. That would be FOUR HOURS of television a night! I still have 20 or so episodes to go! The real question is, what would you do if you found out you had a super power? And, if you could choose a super power, what one would you choose?

I'll Take Care of You....

I will mention this separately from my tiger-rant.

Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum and I are insane, mad, and mentally unstable, in addition to all of the other laudable traits we possess. We are NOT "mens sans in corpore sano" here, people.

WE KEPT THE PUPPY.

My, um, wonderful, in-laws decided, after ignoring my incessant pleas for reason and insisting that they wanted a baby italian greyhound, as opposed to my suggestion of a young dog of another, less needy breed, that having a puppy who cries at night and is not yet fully potty-trained was too much for them! NEWSFLASH: Having three dogs is too much for me!

So, because Penelope, is the absolute best-behaved puppy in the world, she already follows me around the house believing that I am her infallible alpha dog (read:mommy), and sniffing her new puppy-scent is as addictive as, say, snorting heroin (can you snort heroin?), we decided not to give her away. We are now officially outnumbered by animals 2:1 in this household.

Well, right back 'atcha, mother-in-law-lady! Now, I can turn a deaf ear to your blustery pleas for a grandchild. You have grandchildren...four of them! By the time I am actually ready to push something with 25% of your DNA and a head the size of a cantelope melon out of this fuzzy taco, I will be sure that they never stay at your house, because their crying, un-toilet-trained ways will be much too much for you!

They are cute, though, really...my triple-pack...it does kind of give me itchy ovaries.

Whiskers on Kittens....

So...at the risk of being totally preachy, I want to rant just a teensy bit.

As you may have heard in the news, a tiger escaped from it's cage at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas, mauling three men and killing one. While I do feel saddened that this, shall we say, incident, ultimately resulted in loss of life (both man and tiger), I am really disheartened by the backlash of articles against animals kept in zoos and also by the media questioning the safety of zoological parks. This is RIDICULOUS! How many zoos are there in this country, keeping how many dangerous animals, receiving how many visitors each year without incident? This article, in particular, angers me. Yes, some animals have ACTED LIKE THE WILD ANIMALS THEY ARE, and when they were loosed from their enclosures, this resulted in the maiming of people. No shit, Sherlock...really, a 350 pound adept carnivorous hunter killed what it considered to be large game or a possible threat when it was in a completely new environment....I'm so shocked. Obviously, nobody has read "The Life of Pi", I'm shocked that the book spent so many weeks atop the bestseller list, since nobody seems to have learned anything from it (both about tigers and about the animalistic characteristics of human society).

On an interesting personal note, Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum was working at the hospital when the mauled victims were brought in. He said the wounds the victims acquired were quite gruesome. I probably shouldn't post a vivid description of the injuries on the internet, but, I will say, Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum was totally right. Don't mess with tigers.

I will say that it seems suspicious that this tiger performed a nearly impossible feat of jumping a concrete moat. I have seen this moat on the countless number of trips I have taken to the San Francisco Zoo, none of which resulted in loss of life or limb, and, really, this would be practically impossible without some human assistance or negligence. They are currently investigating these possibilities.

It would have been nice if the media could have used this story to raise awareness about endangered species. This way, at least some "good" could have come from the senseless deaths. It seems much more likely that the critically endangered Siberian Tiger (a species with approximately 500 odd left in the wild) will become extinct before another tiger escapes from it's enclosure at a zoo. Please save the tigers....

I Need Someone Older and Wiser.....

Conversation sans puppy (While heading to pick up the Italian greyhound puppy we bought for my in-laws for Christmas):

Fiddle-dee-dee: "I really feel like we're adults now....I mean, we want to keep the puppy, but we know we don't have room for three dogs."


Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum (wordly chuckling): That's your definition of adult...(pause...more derisive chuckling ensues)...that's like saying "Congratulations, you're an adult, you moved out of the way of a speeding Semi.""


Conversation Anno Canis (After I have been up all night with the puppy, given the puppy a bath, kept her from eating electrical wires, and fed her breakfast, all while Foe-Fum tried his best to distract her with his loose shoelaces):

Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum (snuggling the puppy to his face while proclaiming himself to be "Daddy"): "We should keep her...we don't have to tell my parents we got her for them."

(I shoot him the Look of Death)

Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum: "Well, she's not the same size as a Semi!"

The Sound of Music

I want a blog. Everyone's doin' it. All of my friends have blogs and I am boderline-obsessed with several blogs of absolute strangers (see: dooce and bitemycookie). These ladies are funny and irreverent in a way that makes you feel like you are their friend, even though you know nothing about them. As I discussed with my friend Yellow (see: toabrightyellow), while goofy and funny-looking, I'm not particularly interesting on paper. So, this is my attempt to actually organize the thoughts flying around, bruising the inside of my cranium, set them down on paper (errr....sort of), and also to edit them.

Making a blog is not easy...coming up with a fun, relevant, and/or snappy title without totally giving away my ultra secret identity is a task that prompted me to eat half a bag of holiday m&ms. In the end, I decided to create a theme blog, and, while I'm not a) Austrian, b) a nun, c) a governess, d) Julie Andrews, or e) a goatherd, The Sound of Music is my favorite musicalphenomenonofalltime and I really admire Maria. And, we are similar, in that we both have blonde hair, love to twirl on the hillside, and we both love young, handsome Chistopher Plummer in breeches (with a whistle).

I ran into some problems trying to link this to my Flickr account. Apparently there is a very scary and disturbed young man with a similar account name that Flickr wants to link to. So, do not be fooled, the scary pictures of said young devil are not my photographic commentary! They may be on my slideshow, but they are not mine.

If life were ideal (which it clearly is not, since I am not married to both Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum and Patrick Dempsey) I really believe that, instead of ipods, we would be hardwired to have our own soundtrack. It would sort of be a like a mix-tape that plays just for you in your head. It requires no earbuds, it has no spin wheel, and it does not come in a really cool metallic shade of pink. It just is. The soundtrack area of the brain, snuggled up against the primary auditory cortex and the motor cortex. It would always be music that is apropos of the situation, it would not be distracting, and it would always, always be a song you actually enjoy. So, this is why I wanted to have a Sound of Music themed blog (besides that it is my 2nd favorite movie of all time). Perhaps this blog will serve as the soundtrack of my life, the sound of my personal music.

So, this is where I lay it out. Put the proverbial smackdown on my life. Keep in touch (I am notoriously bad at this). The hills are alive, my peeps, and I don't just mean that in connection with Lauren "LC" Conrad.