This is freaking hilarious! Excellent satire. I think this is my favorite part:

"Sorry to you Hillary Clinton and the entire women’s rights movement, but according to the bible you are “[not permitted to teach], nor to have dominion over a man, but to be in quietness”. In other words, the Bible says you need to shut the fuck up. That is unless, of course, you’re a dirty wicked sinner. Then you can be president all you want."

Usually when I'm on Facebook, I'm totally blind to the ads. I'm so used to ridiculous ads that pull up my friends' profile pictures, or use scantily clad models, or at just freaking weird, that I just ignore them. Except when all my ads start showing up Norwegian--that is hilarious.

This particular add caught my eye, though, simply because the text on it was very oddly written. If it was a ploy, it worked: I stopped and looked at it, and eventually determined that the weirdly written word was "extravagance". But I also noticed the other end of the ad:

At first I thought that her shirt was just billowing up, but then I saw the bust definition. Seriously, her boobs are bigger than her head! It's ridiculous. When I saw the ad, and on a subsequent page another one for the same game, the first thing I thought was "Looks just like the Evony ads." I did a search, and chances are that Kingston is basically the same scammy game.

Since I'm not a gamer, I don't really know much about it, but the idiocy and blatant "BEWBSBEWBSBEWBS" tactics of their ads really aggravates me.

(This is a sponsored post about a product I like.)

I've always been a reader, for as long as I can remember. I remember being hysterically upset at about five years old when I threw up on one of my books--I guess I didn't understand it could be replaced. That was around the same time that one of my teachers read "Little House On The Prairie" to my class, and I was captivated. I got the rest of Ingalls' books from the school library and read them obsessively. When we went to the family reunion in Missouri, my parents made a detour to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum. I was in heaven. I still remember the smell of the place, and the gleam of light on her father's fiddle. My dad bought me a complete set of her books, and by the time we'd driven home to Colorado, I'd read every one. I still have that book set, actually.

Since then I've been addicted to reading, but I've been somewhat limited by real-life obligations and money. There are a lot of books that I got from the library, or from Booksfree.com, that I couldn't afford to buy. I've thought about finding them online, but that's always been a ridiculous headache. For example, I've read Kim Harrison's "Dead Witch Walking", but I don't own it. A couple of times I've wanted to look up something in it, while reading later books in the series, but I wasn't going to go buy it just for that. I've looked online a few times, but it was almost impossible to find it.

So I was pretty excited when I read about the pdf search through ebook-search-queen.com. I didn't find the whole of "Dead Witch Walking"--the pdf files weren't in place anymore--but I might have if I had an excerpt from inside the book. Most handy is the fact that you can limit the search by pdf, txt, ppt, doc, or rtf results, so I was able to eliminate the millions of pages that mention the book without containing it.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting search site, and I'm bookmarking it!

The other day when I was at the store, I realized I've never tried gouda cheese. No particular reason, I'd just never gotten around to it. I'd used it in Mousehunt, but never eaten it. There are a lot of cheeses I've never tried, actually; I've pretty much stuck to cheddar, swiss, and mozzarella most of the time. Oh, and parmesan, I love me some parmesan. But I was bored at the store and decided to try something new. Quelle suprise!

So I got a half a pound of lightly smoked, thinly sliced Boar's Head gouda cheese, and it is freaking heaven. It's incredibly creamy; I've never eaten just cheese on bread before, but gouda is creamy and moist enough that I ate the entire half pound on slices of shepard's bread. So amazing. This particular type had a very, very light smoke flavor, which I don't always like, but in this case it was just freaking perfect. There are no words for how much I love this cheese. I'm going to have to start going to the grocery store during regular business hours, when the deli is open, just for that cheese.

Another excellent "Straw Feminist Weekly" from the women at SP. I especially love this:

"THE SPINSTERS, THEY ARE LEGION. YOU CANNOT NAME THEM ON A RESPECTABLE SHOW OR THEIR SEXLESS SPIRITS WILL TAKE OVER THE CAMERAS AND SHOW YOU FROM A BAD ANGLE."

I had dinner with my dad tonight, even though I really just wanted to stay home.

A month earlier, he'd said he didn't need or want a girlfriend--that women and cars just caused him problems and cost him money. So I was surprised when he told me he had a new girlfriend the last time I was at her house. Or rather, he rhapsodized about her. It was rather sickening, actually, and upsetting. This woman is somebody he dated before my mother; it's also somebody he continued seeing after he married my mother. It's also the younger sister of someone who was a good friend of my mom's. It's very similar to the woman he was engaged to after my parents split up--kind of creepy, really.

Anyway, the last time I was there he was going on and on about this woman. Apparently he's loved her for thirty years, and she's his true love, and she the love of his life, and by the end of the night I wanted to tell him high school wanted its drama back. It was rather upsetting, actually--he implied that he never loved my mother, than he always wanted to be with this other woman, and he was completely oblivious to how upsetting that was to me. I've known my entire life that I wasn't planned, and that my parents would probably have never gotten married if I hadn't been conceived. But before, I always sort of felt like that was okay, because they loved each other even though things went spectacularly wrong in the end. The things he was saying, though, just seemed to negate all that, and I couldn't find the words to explain it to him--especially when he started in with the "Don't you want me to be happy?" crap.

I was almost sure this woman would be there tonight, but she wasn't. But he talked about her all night--Tonya this, Tonya that, Tonya Tonya Tonya. When he started telling me how they discovered while talking that they'd both kept track of each other for the last thirty years, I just burst in to tears. It was just to much, to think he'd spent my entire life wishing he'd been with someone else, which would've meant I was never born. He didn't mean it that way; he's a very face-value type of person. He was utterly confused when I started crying and when I finally managed to explain it to him, because in his mind it had nothing to do with me and it was ridiculous I'd even take it that way.

I don't know that he quite believed me when I explained why I was upset; I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm jealous or afraid he's going to abandon me like my mom sort of did for a while after she re-married. Because he decided to go in to that and start trashing me mother, we got into an entire different line of conversation, which is where the possible progress comes in.

Ever since they split up, he's insisted that he won't ever be in the same room with my mother again, for any reason, no matter what. When I had sinus surgery last year, I begged him to put their issues aside so that when I went under I could have both my parents there, and he refused. He's been saying for a few years that he can forgive her for what she did to him, but not what she did to me. I've tried and tried to tell him that I've talked to her, I've cleared the air with her, and she and I are fine--so why can't he let it go?

Tonight, I think I finally managed to get through to him, and he said that for me, on certain occasions like when I graduate, he might be able to deal with. It's more than I thought I'd get from him. I've got at least another year and a half to work on the graduation thing, so hopefully I won't have a) forgo walking in my own graduation ceremony or b) chose a family to exclude.

He also told me tonight that Tonya is terrified of meeting me, which I find rather hilarious, actually. I guess he told her about how he dumped his ex-fiancée partially because of her attitude toward me--I didn't know it until later, but she'd given him an ultimatum and said he had to cut me off and never help me again with money, or my car, or anything, because she had to come first.

So Tonya has extrapolated from this, I guess, that if I don't like her she might be out on her ass. Too bad that's not true--I freaking hated the 21 year old brat he was dating a couple of years ago, and all I got was "don't you want me to be happy?" But I have nothing against Tonya. I don't know her, after all, and the reasons I'm upset aren't really about her. I just hope that if my dad follows through on his hints about running off to Vegas, that they do exactly that. I hate weddings anyway, and I think I'd sob through the entire ceremony if I had to watch either of my parents marry someone else. My mom got married without any of her family there and didn't tell me until a month later; I almost hope my dad does the same. Never thought I'd say that.

God I love Family Guy!

For several years now, I've said every year that I'd do NaNoWriMo "next year". If you don't know what I'm talking about and don't want to visit the site, I'll explain: It's basically a challenge to myself to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I actually have written that length novel before, although it took me a hell of a long time--and it sucks. I started it on a notepad when I was thirteen, and a few years ago I wrote a horrible ending just so it'd be finished and I'd stop thinking about it.

Anyway, I'm finally doing it this year. Or at least, that's the plan. It's day three, so I ought to have 5000 words by now to be on schedule. But I forgot about it the first day; yesterday I didn't make time; and tonight I feel like I have too much to do to work on something that's not "mandatory". But I've got to make time; I want to do this.

So far I have 524 words, which is at least a start.

and bought another humidifier. Mine died a sad death, and with my financial woes--and the fact that I was hoping to replace it with an identical one, but it's been discontinued--I've been without for several months. Not so good with the sinus issues--I swear I could feel my sinus lining cracking, and I've been getting daily headaches. Doing my lovely disgusting sinuses rinses helps, but it's also hard to do as often as necessary to really help--I can't do it too close to bedtime, or it runs down the back of my throat while I sleep. I can't do it before work, because for a couple of hours afterward if I lean over the salt water runs out my nose. So basically, I can only do it when I'm home for the next three hours without sleeping or heading to work.

So I bought a $20 humidifier at the Wally World. It seems to be working fairly well--my room already smells misty--although I prefer the kind that puts out visible mist. But I'm looking forward to going to bed tonight, snuggling into my warm fluffy comforters and falling asleep to the hum of the fan and the smell of mist.