WanderingAmylessly 2.0

"I'm not superstitious. I'm just a little stitious." -- Michael Scott, regional manager Scranton branch Dunder-Mifflin

We live in a small- to medium-sized Midwestern college town. We have our share of public intox and impaired driving arrests. We occasionally have a bum stab another bum on a park bench (recall the blog from a few months ago). I personally was witness to a homeless fellow committing a lewd act on one of those park benches while I was traveling the bike trail a couple years ago. Overall, though, we're considered a safe community. Or at least I thought we were. However, in the past year there have been more than 35 reports of sexually related assaults or what police have dubbed "forced fondlings," during which some guy -- there's some debate as to whether it's more than one offender -- lurks in the shadows near downtown and attacks women, grabbing their various parts and otherwise violating their person. And last night a man was arrested on charges of attempted murder, willful injury, intimidation with a dangerous weapon, eluding, drug possession with intent to deliv...

Partly because my husband is ga-ga for all things bicycle and I'm the most awesome wife in the world, and partly because I'm now obsessed with my spinning classes, I rented a movie about a cyclist last night. I had low expectations. One, I'd never heard of the movie before. Two, I'd never heard of any actors in the movie. Three, the last such film I rented from Blockbuster looked like someone made a home movie. In one take. With bad lighting. And microphones from a portable karaoke machine. I was beyond "pleasantly surprised." The Flying Scotsman, a 2006 film nominated for five BAFTA Scotland Awards for best actor, actress, director, film, and screenplay, depicts the true story of Graeme Obree, a champion cyclist who built his bicycle from old bits of washing machines and won his championship only to have his title stripped from him. It also delves into his mental health problems, which are not specifically spelled out but which I've read include a longsta...

I'm a sucker for a trashy romance novel. It can be romantic suspense, historical gush, paranormal erotica, or the basis for the next Lifetime movie of the week. I'm not picky. That said, I do have a few minor complaints about overused phrases, corny setups, and euphemisms for humans' nether regions. Not that I have room to criticize, when I've only written nine chapters of my supposed "Great American Novel" and the first chapter includes a wacky combination of protagonist, battery-powered romance aid, and a boatload of guilt over what's being done beneath Granny's hand-pieced quilt. I happened across a readers' forum on Amazon.com , titled "Author Quirks We Notice & Love (Or Hate)." Can we say, "Critical, much?" Nothing gets past these militant romance readers. Still, I found myself laughing out loud and completely relating to many of their observations. We continue to read these authors despite the flaws, putting even more ...

On a recent trip to St. Louis, my kid showed he preferred this to the Golden Arches. Didn't come with fries and a toy, but it did include a tram ride to the clouds and a bird's eye view of a baseball stadium and a mighty river. And now he's officially part of the statistic... Each year, approximately a million visitors ride the trams to the top of the Gateway Arch. The trams have been in operation for over 30 years, traveling a total of 250,000 miles and carrying over 25 million passengers.

Let's hope the prosecution doesn't fu** up this time. A hearing is set for Tuesday to consider bail for O.J. Simpson, according to the jail's Web site. Simpson is jailed on charges of robbery, assault, burglary and conspiracy in connection with a sports-memorabilia heist in Las Vegas. May he stay behind bars where he belongs. Lying, murdering bastard.

The Primetime Emmys have been on for 15 minutes, and we have yet to see one winner make an acceptance speech. Ray Romano...it's been two years since your show got the ax. No one loves you anymore. SHUT UP.

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I am helping out a friend by letting her 6-month-old lab pup, Jack, out in the midafternoons to do his various functions so he doesn't have to be locked up in his crate so long while his person is at work. I recently found out a rather amusing, and perhaps unfortunate, fact associated with Jack and the training he's undergoing to be a good dog. You know, the commands one gives to make him do his bag o' tricks and get biscuits galore. Picture it. I'm in the backyard, tossing his ball, telling him to FETCH. He brings it back. I say GIVE (ok, so he doesn't get this one at all...give basically means "hold that sucker in your mouth with all your might while I yank and pull and tug.") Then I tell him, Jack, SIT. He sits. I tell him, Jack, DOWN. He lies down. Then he pops up and heaves all 50 or 60 lumbering pounds of himself right onto my chest with his tree-trunk sized slightly muddy paws. I give the command. Again and again. I get no response from him. The nei...

Usually when we ask Henry what he had for lunch at school, he says "I don't know." Actually, that's his response to pretty much every question we ask him about his day. So my ears perked up when we asked him earlier this week about what his noon meal was, and he said, "I had teeter-totter foods." "Teeter-totter foods?" I questioned, wondering what sort of cockamamey concoction the preschool was serving my child. He was adamant. "You know, teeter-totter foods. They are round and you dip 'em in ketchup." Oh. TATER TOTS. (Note: There needs to be a new function on the Google translation program. It's one thing to translate from French or Italian or Spanish to English. It's quite another to decipher the cryptic linguistics of a 3-year-old.)

A report published last month showed that two-thirds of U.S. adults and some 25 million children are obese or overweight. When I read that recently, I almost swallowed my sugar-free gum and spewed my Diet Pepsi. So in the sense that it is helping some of those obese Americans lose their weight, I applaud NBC's show The Biggest Loser . However, after watching tonight's episode, I'm concerned that the emphasis on quick weight loss isn't very realistic and might do more harm than good to Fat America's psyche. The show, billed as "the first reality series where everybody loses," brings together a group of "severely overweight participants" competing to drop the most pounds and gain $250,000. Contestants are put through their paces, tongue-lashed, kicked and humiliated by a personal trainer over 15 episodes in front of a TV audience expected to exceed last season's U.S. viewer average of 8 million per show. From what I can gather, these people -- ...

I know I lost more than the scales indicated this week. The sushi last night sabotaged me. Do you KNOW how much sodium is in soy sauce? It's like I salt-cured my insides. I'm the poster-girl for water retention. At any rate, see the results at the bottom of the page. I've made my weight loss progress tracker a permanent fixture on my blog. I'll update it once a week, usually on Mondays.

I blatantly stole this from Ari's blog , where it had been equally swiped from some other guy's MySpace page. You. Can. Only. Type. One. Word. Not as easy as you might think. 1. Where is your cell phone? Purse 2. Your boyfriend/girlfriend? Hubby 3. Your hair? Short 4. Work? Freelance 5. Your father? Anxious 6. Your favorite thing? Hugs 7. Your dream last night? Forgettable 8. Your favorite drink? Sumatra 9. Dream car? Mercedes 10. The room you're in? Disaster 11. Your pet? Maggie 12. Your fears? Overwhelming 13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Smiling 14. Where did you hang out last night? Couch 15. What you're not good at? Patience 16. Eyebrow rings on the preferred sex? Unattractive 17. One of your wish list items? Lottery 18. Where you grew up? Kansas 19. The last thing you did? Shopped 20. What are you wearing? Shorts 21. What aren't you wearing? Makeup 22. The website GoofyAuctions.com (filled with eBay spoofs)? Huh? 23. Your computer? Lifeline 24. Your lif...

Want some inspiration? Check this out. CNN.com is running a series about people who have lost amazing amounts of weight, through a variety of methods from gastric bypass and lapband to plain old diet and exercise. One couple together lost something like 500 lbs. I can barely tell they're the same two people. I figure if one woman can lose 300 pounds and look so incredible, my 40 is NOTHING. It should just slide right off. Right? Well, like I said, I am inspired. I think I'll keep the pics around to look at a few months from now when I'm grumbling about having to avoid the Christmas candy.

Did you hear that the woman who plays Pam on The Office is getting divorced? This, after falling down the stairs in the spring and breaking her back? Not a good year for her, I guess. She'd better win the Emmy she's nominated for. Or it's three strikes and you're out. Ouch. Set your Tivo for Sept. 16. Watch the celebration. Or the carnage. And admit it. A tiny little part of you hopes that she's secretly involved with John Krasinski, the guy who plays her on-screen love, Jim. There's gotta be more to the chemistry than good acting, eh? Check out the way he's looking at her in this previous awards show red carpet moment.

It's defined as "a form of high-intensity exercise that involves using a stationary exercise bicycle in a classroom setting." What it actually is: an hour of torturous, masochistic, somehow addictive form of physical exertion that includes pedaling while standing up on a bicycle and cranking the resistance to a point at which your legs begin to quiver and you feel distinctly as though you may a) pass out, b) cry, c) throw up, d) all of the above, not necessarily in that order. It also involves sweating so profusely, you could wring the Indian Ocean out of your jersey at the end of class. And of course, it is led by a tanned, toned, sickeningly adorable trainer (coincidentally named Amy) who remains perky throughout the class, telling witty stories and joking with the regulars (while the rest of the class struggles to pull oxygen into our searing, breathless lungs). It's called Spinning, and I always thought the people who did these classes must be insane. I still thin...

Have you seen any of these? Classics... DEAR WORLD, WE TRIED OUR BEST SINCERELY, HALF OF AMERICA AT LEAST IN VIETNAM, BUSH HAD AN EXIT STRATEGY SEND THE TWINS POVERTY, HEALTHCARE & HOMELESSNESS ARE MORAL ISSUES REMOVE BUSH'S FEEDING TUBE BUSH SPENT YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY ON HIS WAR I'D RATHER HAVE A PRESIDENT WHO SCREWED HIS INTERN THAN ONE WHO SCREWED HIS COUNTRY DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM -- Thomas Jefferson NOBODY DIED WHEN CLINTON LIED ANNOY A CONSERVATIVE; THINK FOR YOURSELF GEORGE W. BUSH: MAKING TERRORISTS FASTER THAN HE CAN KILL THEM ASPIRING CANADIAN STEM CELL RESEARCH IS PRO LIFE HATE, GREED, IGNORANCE: WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION I'LL GIVE UP MY CHOICE WHEN JOHN ROBERTS GETS PREGNANT HOW ON EARTH CAN 59,411,287 PEOPLE BE SO DUMB? TRUST ME, I NEVER TOLD A SINGLE SOUL TO VOTE FOR BUSH (Jesus)

Wow. What an interesting medical phenomenon... WASHINGTON -- Former U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn died Wednesday after developing a blood clot in her Virginia apartment, said a statement from her family. Some people get a blood clot in their veins. Or in their brains. She got one in her apartment. Could someone please show me that exact location on a diagram? And not just any apartment, but HER VIRGINIA. Ouch.

I am so confused. I know Larry Craig is even more confused than I am. But I'm still confused. I'd like to know when it became a crime to make a move on someone. See, allegedly this senator from Idaho was arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover cop in a bathroom at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. First, who's to say this sex was supposed to take place in the bathroom. There was so much foot tapping and hand signaling apparently going on, maybe he was suggesting some sort of more private place to play. Second, no one actually had any sort of sex at all. He didn't grope anyone. He didn't even touch anyone at all from what I gather. Third, no one ever said anything about this being a prostitution sting, so no money was to change hands. It wasn't as though he were soliciting a prostitute for sex. So what is the crime? If it were a crime to hit on someone, 99 percent of people in bars would get hauled off to the slammer. Beware, people. Flirting may be a felo...

As a mom, having someone determine that your 3 year old baby boy looks like Alice Cooper is beyond nightmarish. Prince Harry, I'm more pleased with. And yes, the guy getting cut off is Al Gore.

I caved and did one of those "celebrity look-alike" scan sites, where they take your photo, compare it to famous people in their database and come up with those you most resemble. Does the fact that they thought I looked like six men (one of whom was Larry King? Whoa, he's like 115 years old! Another was Phillip Seymour Hoffman...Capote?! Really? Hellooooo...) and only two women disturb anyone but me? No wonder my husband is watching so much ladies' tennis. http://www.myheritage.com

Before you all go feeling so sorry for my husband over his lack of bodacious babes to admire during the U.S. Open, take note. He just sent me this link . Along with the news flash: There's still hope. She's seeded fifth. And she plays on TV later today! You'll have to click the link to gawk at Ana. I'm through posting tennis lovelies here.

After reading my last blog entry, Tim immediately google'd Agnieska. He found her photo. His first response: "She looks like she's 12." And in the same way he's not a foot tapper, he's also not going to be chatting with Chris Hansen on the next To Catch a Predator, either. His next response: "She ain't no Maria." Such a...man.

Stunning news came from the U.S. Open today. Defending U.S. Open champion Maria Sharapova fell victim to a stunning upset by Agnieszka Radwanska, an 18-year-old from Poland. Radwanska took her 6-4, 1-6, 6-2 in a third-round match today. What wasn't so stunning was my husband's reaction. When I said, "Ohmygosh, Maria Sharapova got beat" he gasped and moaned "Ohhhh nooooooo." I inquired whether his great disappointment was in anticipation of watching a less-than-stellar next round of tennis with an inexperienced player...or whether he simply felt anguish over not being able to ogle Maria through the finals. "That. Oh yeah. That." He is such a...man. And not the toe-tapping-in-the-bathroom kind either. More the traditional "doncha just love it when her skirt flies up like that...excuse me while I wipe the drool from my chin and adjust my jockey shorts." Won't it be my luck if Agnieszka's sexy supermodelesque, too.