I didn’t make it too far today. We didn’t end up hitting the road until 11 a.m., which is very late. I managed to drive for 9 hours, covering 530 miles or so. We got to eat Sonic for dinner! You have no idea how thrilled my children were. There’s not torture worse than watching commercials for a fast-food place that doesn’t exist within 200 miles of your house.

We are at a “hotel” that has a “pool.” Now, I have been known to exaggerate. I freely admit that. But I am not exaggerating when I tell you that this pool was slightly larger than my left breast.

I shit you not. I have the pictures to prove it, and I will post them once we arrive in Florida.

The other significant highlight of our first day’s drive was when we passed a smallish dump truck, out of the top of which stuck cow parts.

Pause, breathe.

Yes, this dump truck was carrying the bodies of dead cows. So many bodies, in fact, that they rose above the top of the truck, visible to everyone who passed. You might be surprised to find that we ate at Sonic AFTER witnessing the dump truck full of dead cows, but we figured that since this particular dump truck was driving pretty slow, we probably had it beat, so there’s NO WAY any of the cows in that dump truck went into our cheeseburgers. Right? Right. I took pictures of the dump truck, but as I was driving 70 mph at the time, I’m not sure how they turned out. I will post them if they’re any good.

While looking for the “pool,” we got lost, and while walking down a hallway lined with hotel room doors, heard the moans and groans of a woman who was REALLY enjoying herself. Grace looked at me with a puzzled expression. Anthony stopped in the hall and said, “Do you think that person is dying?”

I paused, but for a moment, and then said, “Possibly. But let’s just mind our own business and go find the pool.” And on we went.

And the true highlight, of course, is the free wireless internet in my room. True, the guy next door is probably right at this moment perusing my computer for all of my passwords and important information, but fuck it. I needed to post.

Now, I’m going to drink a beer, and then I’m going to go to bed. In the king sized bed. Because that’s all they had left.

We’ll be snuggling. Until I wake up at 3:30 a.m. and beat it the hell out of here.

Well, seeing as it has just NOT been hot and humid enough here in the Chicago area, I am packing up the car and heading to Florida, where it will be drier IN the pool than out.

I am bringing my trusty laptop with me, but there’s no telling if the guy who lives a couple floors above my parents condo will keep his wireless router on, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to connect to the internet or not. If not, I will not be posting, I will be working on my graduate thesis/novel like a good little girl. If so, I will be wasting huge amounts of time, while drunk, surfing the internet, posting on my blog, and reading the blogs of others!

I should be back in a week or so, basically whenever I goddamned feel like it. Try not to miss me too much!

I transferred my 100 things that I wrote back in April over to this blog, and gave it its own page. I love WordPress (aside from the photo-posting issue)! Go read it. I made some updates. You’ll laugh. Well, I did, anyway.

Last week, at Bunco at my friend Jill’s house, I saw this quotation painted on a little tile, hanging in her bathroom:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself. To handle yourself, use your mind; to handle others, use your heart. Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.
-Eleanor Roosevelt

I searched on The Quotations Page to make sure that this was an actual quote by Eleanor Roosevelt. There was a sticker on the back of the tile that said “Made in India” after all. I found a couple of the lines listed. I think it’s more of a collection of quotes rather than one long-winded sentence. But I like it. While I was searching, I came across another one that made me laugh.

A woman is like a tea bag-you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.
-Eleanor Roosevelt.

I really like that one. I think I’ll make it my motto. I love The Quotations Page. I can just surf around on it for hours, reading the intellectual snippets from great minds. Here’s a quote from me:

The second half of the vodka bottle holds less liquor than the first.
-Viki Babbles

Heh. I’m so funny. Really. I crack myself up. And I’m not even drinking vodka right now. I’m drinking Leinie’s Berry Weiss. Which is really just Beer Kool-Aid. But it tastes good.

Here’s some more quotes I like:

I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.
-Solomon Short

We can update that one by replacing typewriters with keyboards.

Last school year, I was on the yearbook committee for my kids’ school. I needed a bunch of quotations about reading and books. This is one of my favorites:

The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
-Mark Twain

I’m on a roll, here. Some of these are just so good!

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
-David Sedaris

(I personally adore David Sedaris. He makes me lol and pimp). (Just in case I’ve coined a new blog abbreviation thingy, that’s pee in my pants.)

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
-Henry David Thoreau

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one’s thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
-Isabel Colegate

Clearly this was before blogging got big! heh

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.
-John Irving

Who I also adore. I think I’d better have this painted on a tile and hang it above my desk.

Okay, enough about writing. Hmm, what else? I don’t even know who some of these people are, but I like what they said.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
-Henry Cate VII

I believe that freedom is the deepest need of every human soul.
-George W. Bush

I wonder who wrote THAT for him?

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.
-Warren G. Harding

(in 1920. I think it holds true for our present time.)

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
-Ray Bradbury, advice to writers.

Ray Bradbury is a very smart man. You should go out and get the recently published biography on him, The Bradbury Chronicles, by my very own teacher from last semester, Sam Weller. It’s a good ‘un.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This is truly one of my favorite ideas. I’m going to think about it for a bit and write more about it later. (Obviously I can’t hold two ideas, opposed or not, in my mind at the same time!)

Something for us to consider in these troubled times, perhaps as we have our bag randomly searched at the train station, or wait in line in security in the airport. Although, it will probably just make us more annoyed. But really, it is an idea to consider. This is a distinctly American sentiment, what Helen Keller says below, and part of why terrorists wish to hurt us so much. They wish to kill this spirit in us:

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.
-Helen Keller

Okay, I’m getting carried away. This is one of the longest posts I’ve written in a long time, although I guess I haven’t really written most of it!

Do you have a favorite quote, one that inspires you or drives you? If so, please leave it in the comments!

I just moved the typepad blog I had started as an experiment to the new Go Go Gonia’s domain, and cancelled the typepad account before I had to start paying for it.

They sent me a confirmation of the cancellation, headlined in large, bold letters, WE’RE SORRY TO SEE YOU GO!! and THANKS FOR CONSIDERING US!!

Why do I feel so guilty? This is how I get sucked into hiring people I shouldn’t and volunteering for things I don’t want to do. I’m a SUCKER!!! You’d think it was tattooed on my fucking forehead.

I really want to move to my new home, Viki Babbles. I’m all atwitter about it. I’m playing with WordPress, making categories, figuring things out. Trouble is, nothing has been moved over yet. I don’t want to make things more difficult for the lovely Heather, who will be making this move for me, and WordPressifying this beautiful design. And if I post over there, no one will be reading, because all of the blog surfing services I am on point to this blog, and I don’t want to change that until the new blog looks pretty.

Why am I spending so much damn time freaking out about this? I should be spending my time blogging. It doesn’t/shouldn’t matter where the posts are. When the time is right, everything will get moved and be fantastic. Patience, grasshopper.

Okay, so here’s the little bit about Macaroni and Cheese. It’s really not about macaroni and cheese, but more about my sweet son. Last night, I didn’t feel like cooking. I had a stomach ache, and the kitchen was a disaster area. Plus, no one was really all that hungry at the alloted meal-cooking time, so I told them they were all on their own. Which is really a stupid thing for me to do, because by 9:30, inevitably, they were all starving. So I whipped up a box of Kraft mac n cheese. Of course, I really didn’t think I wanted any, but Kraft mac n cheese is a particular weakness of mine. I filled three bowls, one for the hubby, one for the son, one for the daughter, and asked that if anybody didn’t finish theirs (of course, the hubby was done with his bowl before I even got this request out of my mouth-he positively INHALES food), to please pass the remnants on to me.

Wonderful son came to me at my desk, with about three bites left in his bowl. “Here you go, Mom,” he said. So thoughtful, he is. Then he said, “I would have finished it, because I’m still a little hungry, but I wanted you to have some, too.”

Isn’t he the best? And when I tried to get him to eat the last few bites, he refused, and insisted that I eat them.

However, that just made me yearn for more mac n cheese. So I made another box. And ate pretty much the whole thing.

This is as great a way to celebrate nearly one year of blogging as any; I have gotten my own domain.

Within the next couple of weeks, VikiBabbles.com will have a revamped look thanks to Heather at Ciao! My Bella. Until that time, I will not really be posting here too much, just playing around adding links and categories. I hope that doesn’t cause any problems for Heather, or make her job more difficult, but I have no patience whatsoever, and I like to play with WordPress.

I just wish I knew an easier way to post photos. It doesn’t seem to be a very easy thing to do-as it stands, I am using Flickr, and I don’t like writing my posts from Flickr. Half the time, Flickr gets flaky and says that the post didn’t work, and then I go to the blog (actually, I’m referring to GoGoGonia’s, where I’m posting about my family and our adventures.) and see that it actually posted six times. It’s kind of annoying. Not that I ever got Blogger images to work at all.

I have really been a slacker as far as good posts lately. Really, this has been easing in over the last six months. What is it? Am I bored with blogging? Am I bored with writing? (God, no, say it isn’t so!) Do I have nothing to say? Have I lost my sense of humor about life? I really have no idea. I should make a goal, a committment, to writing one decent post per day.

So, here I go: the committment. I promise to post at least one decent post per day, okay maybe 5 days per week, let’s say. And by decent, I mean I can’t just write something stupid, like, “Hey, look! It’s raining outside! Isn’t that great?” I have to actually WRITE something DECENT, as in WORTH READING. Because if it isn’t worth reading, it’s really not worth writing, now is it? It’s just a way to pass some time. And I really don’t want that to be what this is all about.

Hopefully, with my own domain and an updated look (yes, I know that my blogspot blog just got a redesign a few months ago, it’s just going to be fancified and wordpressified), I will be inspired to be the blogging master that I was for several months. All those months when I attracted some wonderful regular readers. I feel I disappoint them all every day I don’t post, or every day I post some lame crap. I’m sorry for disappointing you, dear readers. Don’t leave me. I swear I’ll be better! Right after I get back from Florida!

Maybe I should have saved it, for posterity. Or quoted it. But I really didn’t want to call attention to this doofus who told me I had a great site and then listed three links for free “health” care!

I love that I could just click on that little garbage can in the Haloscan comment window and say “Bye, bye comment spammer!” I actually did that. I said, out loud, “Bye Bye, Comment Spammer!” I think there might be something wrong with me.

Nothing that going to bed won’t fix. Good night, all!

Oh My GOD!

It’s RAINING! Can you believe it? An honest to goodness full-on, blow-out THUNDERSTORM!

It’s even getting wet on the ground under the trees this time! I might have to go outside and run around in it, do a little thank-you rain dance kind of thing.

But I’m not going to bother turning off the sprinkler. Because you know what? This summer, we’ve learned to know better than to trust that it will rain longer than 10 minutes.

Rain, rain, don’t go away. Stay around the whole damn day. My flowers are all half dead, dammit! Bring them back to life!

This site has yet to officially move to its new home, but I did set up a site for informing the world (and my family!) about the (mis) adventures of me, my husband, and my kids. I put some pictures we took at Lollapalooza this weekend on that site, so if you care, head on over there.

Go Go Gonia’s!