Superfluous Baloney

Hungry little friend in the garden:

Tomb where Andrew and Rachel Jackson are buried:

Slave cabin (two families per cabin):

More action from the garden Bzzzzzzzzz:

The tree from Pan's Labyrinth that the toad lived under:

Long term resident:

This has nothing to do with The Hermitage, it's just damn funny:

Well, at the ripe old age of 29 and 3/4 I have discovered finances scare the shit out of me. Particularly my own. For the first time ever in my entire life I am attempting to actually plot out all of my paychecks and bills for an entire month throw in some plus signs and a whole lot of minuses and then see what the last number looks like. I think this may be called a budget or some such nonsense. See, I've always just figured I would inevitably be broke if I actually took the time to look at where the money goes (or is supposed to if you're one of those weirdo types that pays your bills consistently) so surely it made much more sense to ignore the whole thing all together and as long as I didn't bounce a check along the way, what harm was in it? Well, last week I bounced a check. *GASP* And it scared the crap out of me. Mostly because I can't figure out which check it was because I didn't write it in one of those register things and I don't have duplicate checks. Yes, now I'm sure you see the dilemma...

Well, that little incident freaked me out enough to convince me to sit down with a little excel spreadsheet and get this shit figured out once and for all! I did it and it wasn't as bad as I thought and I'm not nearly as broke as I had anticipated. In fact, I'm much better off than what my negative little mind had convinced me of. So of course, I am assuming my little formulas and pluses and minuses are inevitably incorrect. I must be broke, I have to be broke. I've always been broke dammit. Mind you I have doubled my earnings over the last two years, but I always assumed I had increased my expenditures to match it thus I must still be broke!

Despite my efforts to detail each week's bills and each week's salary (we get paid weekly where I work...a budgeting moron's dream come true) and figure out where the hell all the monies go I am convinced I had to of done it all wrong since the final number was in fact in the black rather than the red. So I promptly emailed a copy to my father (Dads know everything) and my boyfriend who is a financial genus with an engineering degree. Certainly one, if not both will be able to point out my errors thus reaffirming my firm belief that I am in fact a brokeass.

4. Tyson Ritter from The All-American Rejects:

• You
• And You

A little more summary from me since Wikipedia basically sucked on that one:

Something about this dude, Thadius Beaumont, being a twin when he was in the womb but the twin didn't survive and was not fully absorbed into his body. Parts of it remained in his brain causing him tumor like symptoms when he was younger that manifested themselves as bird noises only he could hear. They operate and discover the twin in his brain (who even had two teeth, one of which had a cavity. Poor thing never saw the benefits of Crest Fluoride Treatment toothpaste.) His parents, being the nut jobs that they were, insist on burying the twin in the family's plot. Hullllloooo, that's creepy. This allows some evil like entity to run amuck in Thad's life later as it attaches itself to this former twin and gives it life. Also assisting in breathing life into this "never really existed" twin brother, are the numorous books Thad wrote under the pen name "George Stark." George is everything Thad is not and everything Thad doesn't have the balls to be. Suave, graceful, cutthroat, and eloquent. Some guy threatens to blow the whistle on Thad's alter ego so Thad decides to go public with his darker persona and "bury George." This pisses George off and sends him on a blood thirsty rampage.

I was disappointed. This flick didn't scare me or captivate me or even mildly entertain me. The only force that motivated me not to change the channel was the thought that I could now proclaim loudly and proudly that I had survived a Stephen King flick all alone. Timothy Hutton was fairly decent, but the actress that plays his wife, Amy Madigan, has always bugged me. She's just so tomboy plain Jane in everything she is in and her scratchy kind of nasally voice rakes on my nerves a bit. The concept was pretty interesting for this but I don't think the screenplay probably didn't pay proper homage to King's nasty, twisted dark side well enough.

Overall this film wasn't even really all that suspenseful. The true blessing for me was that it also wasn't gory, thus why I managed to stomach the whole thing solo (that and the fact that I watched it midday, radiant sun beams pouring in from the outside. Oh yeah, and the commercial breaks helped too.) The way George killed people wasn't even cool. Although maybe most of the good stuff was edited out since it was showing on basic cable television?

Overall Rating: Didn't scare me which means it probably wouldn't scare most preschoolers either.