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And then this happens. I don’t even know what I was initially comparing or how the scoring went, but I decided Joffrey was the biggest asshole of them all. Nerd life.

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Orchids are among my favorite things to photograph. I must have taken hundreds of photos of orchids over the years. It may be an obsession at this point.
One day I’m getting a macro lens to get even closer.

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On my commute to work today, I heard NPR reporting that Margaret Thatcher had passed at the age of 87. My first thought was “Wait a minute..pretty sure she died years ago.” (This was, oddly enough, not the only time I’d have a similar thought today.  More on that in a bit.)  My next thought took me back to my high school years when I was sadly mistaken that Margaret Thatcher was still the Prime Minister. That wasn’t entirely my fault. For starters, it’s not like I was big into world news during those high school years. I had a hard enough time keeping U.S. politics straight, let alone the political arrangements in other countries. Second, I positively loved to watch the British comedy “Are You Being Served?”, which was years before my time. That show ended up being my instructor for all things British, and by “all things”, I mean whatever they happened to mention on the show. I learned about Punch and Judy, Christmas crackers, and how Paddington Bear was all sorts of awesome. Naturally, as the show was filmed in the 70s to mid-80s, any political discussion was centered around Ms. Thatcher. That was a name that stuck in my head.

Now I should mention that I was not typically so willing to accept everything on television as fact. But this was the early 90s; we had no Internet out there to fact-check.

So Margaret Thatcher it was. That is, until that inevitable day when I had either picked up a world paper or paid attention to the news and realized how wrong I was. I was even asked what made me think she was still Prime Minister, and my answer was “Cause of ‘Are You Being Served?’”, which sounded just as stupid coming out of my mouth as it does reading it here. Why I would think that a show that started production years before I entered this world screaming and throwing punches would be factually accurate at the time of my viewing is one of those mysteries of life that will never be solved. Maybe I just hadn’t given it much thought. (On a side note, I did have to look to see who is PM now as I stopped taking note with Tony Blair. Side note #2- it is NOT Tony Blair.)

As for my thinking that someone was already dead happening twice today? Former Mousketeer Annette Funicello holds that honor. I was pretty sure she had died about 20 years ago. In fact, my dad and I were talking about Ms. Funicello not too long ago and there was an agreement that she had passed away years ago. I thought the Internet was playing a weird sort of trick on me today.

The post How BritComs Threw Me Off appeared first on MonkeyThoughts.

Sable’s out of focus crazy eyes are precious. Poor Bella’s allergy skin is seriously aggravated though. She needs a trip to the beach badly (i.e., the only place that her allergies don’t act up).

So much fluff on this one. 

What is Miss Sable looking at? Who knows. It’s serious business though.

The post Oh hey neglected blog – have some dog pics appeared first on MonkeyThoughts.

Is that not the most pathetic sick little dog ever?
Despite quarantine, the other three began to show similar symptoms. Bart and Ophelia recovered quickly but Bruno stayed sick the longest, and required some IV fluids.

Finally, after I don’t know how many days because they all ran into each other, I had four eating, drinking, playing pups again. I whisked them off to the vet for the spay/neuter, hoping they could start going out to adoption events. Instead, they came back with yet another stomach ailment to deal with. Of course this one has no impact on their energy level, so my house has been rowdy for the past week. Ophelia and Elvis have figured out how to bypass the baby gate I have set up to keep dogs out of the kitchen, and Bart and Bruno have discovered how to pull Houdini acts on me. They are fortunate to be so cute. Elvis, especially. He’s my buddy – the first to greet me and the one always hanging right by me. He also figured out how to scale my garbage can outside somehow. I stepped outside to find him at eye level, giving me a look like “Look what I did!” I’m not ruling out the possibility that the other three dared him to do it.

It’s been a while since I put together a video for some foster pups, but these guys inspired me. Short of meeting them in person, it’s the best way to get an idea of their personalities. And being that there is four of them, they got a longer than usual video.

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It’s not every day that I can catch a picture of Sable sitting still and not being worked up about something. She’s been calmer since Bono left to his adoptive home, even with four puppies in the house. I caught her snuggling with the puppies, so I call bull on her twitches about puppies.

The post Miss Sable appeared first on MonkeyThoughts.

The year was 1999. It was a tripod-hosted site. A little bit of background: at the time, I was married to this other guy and was one of those born-again people.

Note the Jesus fish. And that awesome drop shadow. Each page was a different color. I positively loved gradients. That dove actually flapped its wings and there was a midi loop. Oh, and Web Rings! Who can’t forget Web Rings? Now I know what you’re thinking: Who are you and what did you offer? The Who Are We page was under construction. I can only hope that I had an animated construction guy on it, but a lot of the images are not archived. The offerings consisted of awful, horrible pamphlets that were heavily overcharged for. I was not the brains of the operation, funny enough, so I just went along with whatever my ex said. That also sums up most of our marriage. My brain checked out for a few years. (I was young and stupid, after all.) There was one pamphlet written by my ex that consisted of all the ways “men were dogs”. I couldn’t tell you the point of that pamphlet (or brochure, as my ex used to call them, like we were a damn tourist attraction). I think I wrote one, complete with cute ducks and a pacifier, on how having a baby really doesn’t need to change your life. (Again, young and stupid, what the hell did I know? Also, I would like to point out that at the time, I was not a party-type of person and I had pretty much no friends thanks to my stupid life choices, so of course my days of staying in and doing nothing had not changed at all.) My ex also wrote one about his life story, because no one has ever screwed up their life royally with drugs before, and thought that people would easily give up hard earned money to have it printed on a piece of paper, folded up and mailed to them. He’d make a really good blogger, come to think of it. Suffice to say, it really wasn’t a well-laid business plan.

Jump ahead to late 2000/ early 2001. By this time, I have divorced my ex, grew a backbone, and had a little bit of an anger issues. Not necessarily in that order:

THIS is more awkward and embarrassing for me to admit to than the first one, and I was on the fence about coming clean here. But hell, why not? So despite the divorce and my insistence that I did not want to talk to my ex any more, he seemingly refused to accept that we were no longer together. For several months, I was on the receiving end of all sorts of emails, calls, and letters from people I didn’t know telling me what an awful, horrible person I was for divorcing him while he was..er..uh..unavailable. (That’s another story for another time, perhaps.) See, if this stuff happened in these days, it would be strange people tweeting at me and poking me on Facebook, no doubt. My, have times have changed. Those were handwritten letters telling me that I sucked. How quaint. Anyway, so here is the result of a really angry 21 year old deciding to splatter the internet with this shit.

Yes, before MonkeyThoughts, it was “Home of the Nakie Monkeys”.

…

Dear god, I thought I was such a badass. I cringe just looking at this. At that point I was stepping far enough away from the church to throw in a “What the f***”, but not far enough to not censor myself. Oh and it’s complete with a winky face afterwards. I must have thought that was the pinnacle of edgy and that all those God-fearing people who came my way where going to be like “Wuuut!?!” and run away. Add the tattoo  name drop, as my ex hated tattoos and this news would no doubt get back to him and make him rage (or so I was thinking). The most cringe-worthy moment comes here:

my tattoo doesn’t blink- I don’t think… I can ask my man about it..he sees it better than I do. *wink wink*

Not only did I wink-wink, I ADDED A WINKY FACE. Also, that particular tattoo is on the back of my shoulder, not somewhere explicit. And the man? There was no man at that time. I was clearly trying to get a rise out of people. Again, thank god there was no Facebook at the time cause who knows what I would have done to embarrass myself.

Just a few months later, I somewhat came to my senses and replaced the above with a cleaner, partially saner page:

I’ve removed the particularly passive-aggressive language or identifying markers. Look, I’m all for embarrassing myself, but that was little too shameful. The first paragraph was an explanation of version one of the site as told by an angry woman. Take note of this sentence:

 We have a new addition to the family, so you will probably see pics of my new baby boy, Orion.

Orion was a dog, and I managed to make it sound like I popped out another kid and went hippy twee with the name. Why? Because I figured it would stick in someone’s craw, no doubt. I would have been a therapist’s dream.

Two months later, I really came to my senses and took it down for good. I went back to school, got my shit in order, and didn’t make a return to the personal web scene until 2004. While I’m sure that I have some cringe-worthy moments in the archives, none of them hold a candle to that site.

Let this torrid tale be a lesson to you, kiddos:

1. Tiled backgrounds are horrible – especially of Jesus fish.
2. Midi files should never, ever be resurrected.
3. Never spew your personal issues all over the internet, especially if it would embarrass future, saner you.
4. Tattoos are not edgy or shocking, unless you’re Amish.
5. If you are trying to “shock” the one person who has never heard an expletive, don’t ruin it by censoring yourselves.

I need to find a way to sign off everything with “CRAZY MONKEY GIRL WUZ HERE”.

The post My First Web appeared first on MonkeyThoughts.

The foster puppies had us up before 6 this morning. After braving the rain, they were more than eager to get back inside and play. I was good for about an hour or two, then I headed to bed. Brunch was much needed when I woke up. One of these days I’m going to need to visit a place that serves mimosas for brunch. Speaking of alcoholic breakfast, am I the only person who finds the concept of a Bloody Mary positively disgusting? I’m not a tomato juice person to begin with so I don’t see how alcohol could possibly improve that abomination.
Tomato soup = delicious. Tomato juice = the creation of a crazy person, no doubt.

The post Sunday Brunch appeared first on MonkeyThoughts.

Just one of my four foster pups. Still waiting for Bono (my other foster dog) to go to his adopted home, which should hopefully be today. He is very uneasy around the new puppies. It’s not like I can blame him. If I had four new stinky puppies run at me wanting to play, I’d hide too.

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