AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS DON DRAPER REALLY IS A DICK (no pun intended)?

I think Madmen is an interesting and well done show but isn’t the “main man” really a chauvinistic womanizing pig who is an asshole to other men as well as all of the women in his life? I keep trying to come up with any redeeming characteristics and I can’t seem to find any for him. He is not nice to anyone, except his children, unless he wants something out of them. The more I watch this season episodes it seems like Don is becoming an even bigger jerk than he already was. He uses and abuses everyone around him, am I missing here? He is not the only man in the office who is a creep but he is by far the biggest creep, partly because he is so calculating about all the conniving things he does. Roger doesn’t have any particularly great characteristics but he isn’t a serial womanizer and doesn’t constantly scheme to undermine other people in the office like Don, probably partly because he doesn’t seem to smart enough to do that but in this case that might not be a bad thing. Pete can be sleazy but he also show some morals and conscience now and then which is more than I can say about Don or Roger. The woman in the office are heads and bodies above the men in scruples, usually woman are portrayed as the “catty” ones in the office but in this series the “witches” is the office are men and not women.

I USED TO BE A DRUG ADDICT

The worst part about being an ex-drug addict is that my life is much worse now after I quit doing illegal drugs. What the hell is up with that? I spent thirty years of my life snorting coke and selling a little to try and make my habit more affordable and then after I quit doing and selling coke my whole life fell apart. It seems like there is something wrong with this picture. I gave it all up because it seemed like the right thing to do and then I lost all of my friends and the money I got from selling the drugs and I am now sitting here asking myself if I did the right thing. I guess part of the problem was that I wasn’t that a total addict, I was prescribed morphine and diazepam by my doctor for the immense pain that I experienced from living my life from the age of 3 with a disease called Charcot Marie Tooth. I now have no friends and I don’t do any drugs and I am dying, what did I achieve?

Moonbeam Kitten And The Laundry Basket!

This is another picture book for children I am working on about Moonbeam!

Here is a link to a website I am working on to display them:

http://paradisoenterprises.wix.com/moonbeamkitten#!moonbeam-kitten/ca9n

I better go in here

What's up here

Big fun climbing on the laundry

It's a laundry mountain

What's Under Here?

It's really worth it Mom!

How do I get down from here?

You're getting dirty Moonbeam

Moonshine says it is time for Moonbeam to quit playing! 

Moonbeam Kitten - My project to make this a children's book!

I had my sweetest female cat, Moonshine and a Seal Lynx Point Bengal, give birth to her first kitten about 10 days early on June 4 in 2009 and she was as tiny as a little white mouse (she is also a Seal Lynx Point colored Bengal as well and they are also referred to as "snow bengals") and Moonshine was a little freaked out with her very first and very tiny new baby and she allowed me to help her with it and that was the most rewarding and special experience I think I have ever had.  Because mother's milk doesn't come in for a day or two the kittens have been fed in the womb until they are born and need the colostrum they get at first but because this kitten was so tiny I felt she needed milk as well so I heated up kitten formula (actually it was a combination of kitten formula and powdered goat's milk as each has something the other doesn't) and Moonshine watched as I fed her baby the formula using an eye dropper and then I would give her back to "mommy" and she would nurse her and keep her warm.  She was so early she wasn't fully furred in and there was a lot of pink skin and it also showed more than it would with the more common brown spotted tabby marked Bengals.  Here is a photo of her when she was first born.  Isn't she tiny?

Moonshine the proud mom of the very tiny kitten.

Moonbeam lived and thrived and here is a link to more photos of her in a series I call "Moonbeam Kitten Has A Cow" on a website I am creating to tell stories about the tiny miracle kitten that I took a whole lot of pictures of.

http://paradisoenterprises.wix.com/moonbeamkitten

Another photo of Moonshine and Moonbeam

Moonshine Mom and her Moonbeam Kitten at 2 weeks old!

The Halloween Wedding

My mother’s birthday has always been a day we have celebrated heartily in our family. She was born on October 31 so for all of my life my sister and I could call her a witch, with a smile on our face. Quite often over the years my sister and I were the only ones around to celebrate her birthday as our stepfather was frequently gone elk hunting on that day. Frequently as the years went on my sister and I had boyfriends, and then her children, that were around for the Halloween birthday parties even if our mother’s husband was not around. Halloween is the third biggest holiday in our family’s life, after Christmas and Thanksgiving. My mother died of cancer four years ago and my sister decided to get married this last year on Halloween, because of the significant place it holds in our life. It was one of, if most, fun wedding I have ever been a part of. It was held at the bar my sister is a manager at and the owner of the bar hosted the wedding. Not only did the owner of the bar host the wedding he “gave” the bride away (our 80 year old stepfather didn’t feel up to going to the wedding) dressed as Count Dracula, my sister’s “blood sucking” boss! My sister and her husband dressed in sort of a combination of “togas” and “roman” themed clothing, kind of like something from the “Gladiator” movie. My sister’s three sons were the combination Bridegroom/Bridesmaids as two of them dressed in “toga-gladiator” outfits and one dressed in a dress, so therefore my analogy that they were combination Bridegroom/Bridesmaid. The “preacher” was a customer and friend of the bar and he dressed as “Friar Tuck”. Almost everyone that attended was in some kind of costume, and there was characters attending that were dressed in simple costumes to those in elaborate costumes like “Darth Vader” and many other characters. The bride and groom entered the decorated patio of the bar to the music of Guns and Roses “Sweet Child Of Mine” with two of the participants dressed as Axel and Slash standing by the “wedding stage”. Friar Tuck convened the ceremonies and asked who was giving the bride away and “Count Dracula” stepped forward and did the honors and then “Friar Tuck” performed the legal ceremony and pronounced my sister and her boyfriend “man and wife” and after they kissed the party was on. To me this ceremony represents what a wedding should be about, a fun celebration of the union of two people who love each other. Happy Halloween!

Dracula Gives The Bride Away

The Dead Chicken Caper!

I worked for a tire company for about eight years when I was younger and the business had three owners, Darrell who inherited the business from his father and he let two other two men buy into it with the stipulation that they did most of the work as he had other things he wanted to do. Sometimes things were a little slow and the owners and the crew would play jokes on each other when they were bored, boys will be boys sometimes no matter how old they get to be. Roy lived a little bit out in the country and had chickens on his place that his wife kept for the eggs. Randy used to be a high profile salesman for a large tire company before he left to become part owner of the place I worked at and because of his “always a salesman” personality he got to go do the public relations type activities for the company so he drove around a lot in a big high profile four wheel drive truck with a flashy paint job, he was kind of a peacock and liked to be noticed. One morning Roy came in to work and told those of us who were already in the office that he had a dead chicken in the back of his truck that he wondered if anyone wanted to use it for crab bait, Darrell was an avid fisherman and crabber and so were several of the employees. No one had any immediate trips planned and then the phone rang and one of our customers from a big car lot called and asked to have Randy come over and pick up a trade in they needed to have some new tires and some brake work done on before they could resell it, the company made well over half of its money by doing business with the used car lots and they also sold the used tires they took off of the car lot cars and sold them to people who couldn’t afford new tires. About then Randy pulled up and came into the office. While he was having a cup of coffee and being told which car lot wanted him to go pick up the used car one of the employees went out front to where his truck was parked and took a piece of rope and tied it around the dead chicken’s neck that was in the back of Roy’s truck and tied it to Randy’s truck’s trailer hitch and threw the chicken under the truck knowing that Randy wouldn’t be walking around the back of it when he left to go get the used car to bring back. As soon as Randy walked out the door Mark told everyone what he had done so we all rushed to the store window to watch Randy pull out with the dead chicken flopping along behind the truck and we all started laughing as the car lot he was going to pick up was all way across town and the best route to take to it was to go right through the college campus slowly, of course Randy usually liked that part since he got to look at the cute girls on campus and smile and wave at them. We were all imagining what a jerk they were going to think he was dragging that dead chicken behind his truck and they would have no way of knowing that it had started out dead or that Randy didn’t know it was back there. Roy even went so far as to call the car dealership Randy was headed to so the employees there could also enjoy watching Randy drive up dragging the dead chicken. Then we all had to wait to find out how much humor we could derive from the silly stunt. About an hour later the car lot manager called up Roy and told him that when Randy drove into the car lot there was not much of the chicken left on the rope but he told Roy that they were all lined up at the window and started clapping as soon as Randy pulled up and got out of his truck. He said Randy then walked to the back of his pickup and saw what was left of the chicken tied there and flipped them off. We of course couldn’t wait for Randy to get back so we could find out how the girls on campus reacted to his driving through there with a dead chicken tied to the back. Randy came back in about half an hour and when he drove in no one said anything we all just kept on working. Randy waited a little bit and then asked who had tied the rope to his trailer hitch. Then everyone started laughing and so did he and he then proceeded to tell us that he started getting suspicious when he was driving through campus and instead of generally being ignored like usual everyone was staring at him and he said at first he thought they were waving at him and then he figured out that a few people were pointing towards the back of his truck but of course when he looked in the rear view mirror he couldn’t see anything since it was on the ground. He said after he drove through campus he was suspicious so he stopped by the side of the road and looked back real quick but only saw what looked like a piece of rope so he just got back in the truck and went on the car lot that was only about a couple of miles away.  He said he wasn’t entirely sure what had been originally tied to the rope because there was pretty much nothing there by the time he had driven twenty miles but he did figure it didn’t start out as just a rope. He laughed as he realized what it must have looked like when it was bouncing on the road behind his truck and why the girls had such strange looks on their faces. It was not the last prank ever pulled there but possibly one of the ones that was talked about the most. Idle minds can be a dangerous thing.