Hurricane Preparations

The balcony squirrels had to come inside today where they will wait out the hurricane with B and me this weekend.

They look terrified, don't they? Poor little things just don't have the nerves for this.

Oh Squirrely Night

And they asked me, "Casey, is there any way your desk decorations at work could become even more insane?" And I replied, "Yes, yes there is."

"You have to have faith that your friends will always provide you with new, crazy shit for your desk," I said. Thanks, G.

Weird Shit I Found In My Childhood Room: Blast From The Past Edition

My little sister is just about 18 months younger than me, which means that for most of our childhoods we were close enough in age to have the same interests and desires at any given time. This changed when we became teenagers and her interests leaned more toward Destiny's Child and my interests leaned more toward getting drunk in the orchard.

But as children, at least, we were on the same page. As a result, when any normal child would have x number of a certain toy, we would have at least 2x of that toy.

Who remembers Littlest Pet Shop?

I sure remember them. You know why? Because I have at least 65 Littlest Pet Shop sets in my childhood room at home, that's why. I wish I had gotten a shot of the whole thing, but I wasn't really thinking and just wanted to capture the the general chaos that is the Littlest Pet Shop shelf in my room.

And yes, that's a flutter pony butt on the bottom right of the picture. You may ask me what a flutter pony is, but I will only reply sadly that if you don't know, then you totally missed out on the best movie that 1986 had to offer.

Note that this picture is not from my childhood bedroom. This picture was taken just now on my kitchen floor. Yes, I own this on DVD. Yes, I keep it with me at all times. Yes, I can still sing the "Nothing Can Stop the Smooze" song.

If there was one toy we had too many of as children, it has to have been My Little Ponies. My sister and I loved these things to death, and I would guess that far and away they were the most played with toy in our house from about 1988-1994.

I only took this one picture, but I think it begins to capture the chaos of the My Little Pony shelf (with overflow seating for precious flutter ponies on the Littlest Pet Shop shelf above). There are two rows of ponies here, adults in the back, kids in the front. I am particularly fond of this picture because it showcases the random horse toy thrown in haphazardly with beloved ponies, and also the poor Barbie whose hair we chopped off in the summer of 1995 with Jewel's first album playing in the background.

I wish I had a picture of the whole set up, pets on top, ponies on bottom, but I don't. My task when I was home a few weeks ago was to clean out my room and get rid of a lot of stuff, but I couldn't bring myself to part with these beloved toys. They're all packed up now in a big plastic bin under my bed with only the Polly Pockets and my dollhouse for company.

Damn, I forgot to take a picture of our twenty Polly Pockets!

And Mom, whatever happened to our 25 Quints? (Five times the fun!)

Squirrel Stuff I Own: Balcony/Garden Squirrels

I am often asked, "Casey, you have so much squirrel stuff that is meant for display inside a home, but how oh how will you announce to the world at large that your home is a home for rodent lovers when you have no exterior squirrel items?"

Well a house isn't really a home until you acquire garden squirrels, and it appears that our house is finally a home!

My friend E dutifully acquired these for me and I just adore them. We don't have a yard of course, but they sit out on our balcony and keep us company while we drink beer and watch the sun set over Manhattan.

I'm not much for gardening, really. I've killed every plant I've ever owned, including our beloved Bonsai tree, Sputnik, whom I found horrifically shriveled and dry on our window sill one morning back in 2009.

Luckily, now when we do have a garden or a yard some day, I can be assured that at least two little garden inhabitants will remain happy and healthy, particularly since they require neither weeding nor watering.

Weird Shit I Found In My Childhood Room: Jazz Wolf

When I found this item in my childhood room, I collapsed on the floor in a fit of laughter.

B immediately pointed out that "you don't even like jazz." I told him that if that was the strangest thing he could see about this CD then I must have married the right man.

I have a very vague recollection of purchasing this through some sort of multi-CD deal, which I believe went something like "Buy Two Whale Songs CDs and an Enya CD and Complete Your Ticket to Lifelong Celibacy by Purchasing Jazz Wolf for only $2!" How in the world could 13-year-old Casey turn that down? This is probably during the same period when I would hole up in my room with the Timothy Zahn Star Wars books and my collage of planets and blast Enya's Watermark via my sweet 3-CD/2-Cassette stereo. (This stereo came in very handy later when I discovered I could record CDs onto cassettes to play in the tape deck of my sweet 1987 Ford Ranger with hidden rifle rack. Sadly, I did not figure this out until after I had purchased Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP on cassette.)

One wonders just how I could be so awesome and so entirely lame at the same time.

Weird Shit I Found In My Childhood Room: Queen Adele of Romania

As I mentioned previously, I spent part of my recent vacation cleaning out my childhood room. Now, most of my actual childhood stuff had been previously packed up and put in a trunk for safekeeping, so for the most part I was sorting through random stuff I acquired between 1996 and 2004.

Apparently there was an ongoing clearance sale during that time at the Store for Weird Shit because I sure found a lot of it.

This is Queen Adele of Romania. Her head is made of a dried apple, her arms are made of baby blue pipe cleaners, and her body is made from an empty Henry Weinhard's Private Reserve bottle. Note also that her castle is made of old clothing and shoe boxes, lovingly painted white and blue, and that the curtains are both red velvet and ill-made.

To be fair, this was a sixth grade project. I'm not really sure what we were supposed to learn from this. Creativity, maybe? It clearly wasn't meant to help us learn history as there was no Queen Adele of Romania (Google it), and I certainly didn't learn how to sew properly. This project made only slightly less sense than the time we were forced to trace a Canadian province (which was clearly an intelligence test that I failed because I picked Northwest Territories while everyone else picked Saskatchewan).

Anyway, I sure was entertained by this discovery, although when I first opened up the shoebox containing Queen Adele I was terrified and thought I had come across the corpse of a rat in a dress (not an unfounded fear in my world).

Squirrels In the News: Squirrel Flashdance

I just returned from vacation on the West Coast, and actually have things to post about now, but due to the red-eye flight we took last night from Seattle to New York I'm not exactly in fine form for blogging. I've provided you with this comic in the meantime.

You're welcome.