(the) Jebbica

 That’s Manny, who has now been named Macy by her new owner.  The guy in this picture got her for his girlfriend for Christmas, but I knew these two would wind up bonding! (read: she is going to be spoiled absolutely rotten, thanks to this guy)

 Two of our puppies are gone, one is leaving this weekend, and that means we only have one left.  We have been fortunate to find great homes for our babies (sorry, people who came and looked but fed their dogs Krystal and sweet tea!), and I hope we will be able to find a great home for Spinner, too.  The guy who came and got Jimmy today had gone to a certain nearby puppy mill today that we had also visited on our quest to find Buffy (one of the most horrible experiences of my life), and he mentioned that their ten-week-old pups, the same age as our puppies, were at least twice as big and not half as cute.  He also said that they told him “state law prevented him from going to the back to see the parents”.  WTF?  I’m pretty sure “state law” wouldn’t allow for that place to be in business at all.  Either way, I’m glad that guy didn’t have to see the things I saw when I was there.

 
Is it possible that I have never had kids and yet I’m feeling empty nest syndrome already?  The house will be quiet again soon, and our office can be our office again instead of the puppy room.  It’s impossible to keep this place organized when 1/4 of our space belongs to four little furballs!  Even so, I will definitely miss them, and watching them go has definitely been bittersweet!

But seriously.  Someone come and get Spinner.  Two dogs are all I can handle.

Any time my neck of the woods makes national headlines, it’s always for something horrible.  More than likely, when I tell people I’m from Small Town, North Georgia, they generally have no idea where it is.  Such was the case when meeting lots of people from all over American on our high school senior band trip to Disney World.  But when we said, “hey, did you hear about the Noble Crematory Scandal? That’s less than ten minutes away from our school.”  Every single person was like, “oh yeah!  Oh….”

I’ve had to describe my place of residency as “10 minutes from the Noble Crematory Scandal” for years now.  Don’t know that one?  How about the famed Battle of Chickamauga, the most significant defeat by the South on the Union?  Well, that’s where I work! And no, we’re still not over it.  Most people ’round these parts still totally think we’re gonna RISE AGIYUN!

But now, I can describe my whereabouts as being “where that drunk four-year-old in a dress was stealing neighborhood Christmas presents.”

“He runs away trying to find his father,” [April Wright said of her 4-year-old son, Hayden]. “He wants to get in trouble so he can go to jail because that’s where his daddy is.”

The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office report says Hayden rang the doorbell a few houses down and the neighbor answered, finding the child holding a partially consumeed 12-ounce beer.

Wright said, “He got it out of my father’s cooler in the back and how he got it open I don’t understand because it was one of those tab beers.”

But it doesn’t stop there. The report said Hayden then snuck into a neighbor’s house through an unlocked front door, and stole five wrapped Christmas gifts.  One was a girl’s brown dress which Hayden was wearing when police found him.

If this were happening in a movie, I’d probably laugh. And maybe if it was something I’d heard on national news about a place far from here, I might grimace at how sad it was, but probably still smile a little.  But this is here in my back yard, and it’s horrible.  I don’t have any children of my own, but I know what they can be capable of.  My three-year-old nephew, Zeke, was just at my house yesterday, and he totally succeeded in tackling me, making my head thwack against the kitchen tile and then kicked me right in the lady parts.  A couple of visits ago, he locked us out of the house.  Children are smart, and they’re going to get into stuff.  And what they see grown-ups do, that’s what they are going to do.  I mean, if you tell a child, “Don’t say shit!”, what’s he going to say?  So, does the blame lie with Hayden’s mother, who is only 21 and not too far from being a child herself?  The story said she had “childproof” locks on the doors, so it seemed she was taking some sort of precaution.  This is a child who is going to have to have therapy and a lot of it, maybe for the rest of his life.  I would love some more insight on this.  Thoughts? Comments?

So, if you ever need to look me up, I’m thirty minutes from the drunk four-year-old in a dress.  Also, have you seen Squidbillies?  I’m pretty sure that’s my town.

See, who needs Mapquest?

I promised I would write a follow-up review once I purchased and received a pair of $8 eyeglasses from Zenni Optical.  I actually received my pair a couple of months ago–the day my apartment and car flooded, to be exact–but since I was dealing with all of that stuff, then eventually it wasn’t fresh on my mind anymore, I kind of forgot about it.  I was reminded of that post earlier this week, however, so I thought I would take the opportunity to share my experience with the incredibly cheap glasses.

First of all, can I just say that I hate wearing glasses?  I love the way glasses look on other people, just not on me.  For one thing, I am blind as a bat.  So, no matter how stylish the frames are, the lenses themselves are going to shrink my eyes and make me feel like I look like a fish in a bowl.  A good chunk of my life has been spent as a fish in a bowl.  I didn’t even realize I had these huge deer eyes until junior year of high school, the glorious year that, after my glasses broke and my dad fixed them by soldering a coat hanger across the top and taping the middle (in high school! Can you imagine the terror?!), I got contacts.  And it was an instant change on my life.

After all, who could forget sophomore year:

I am pretty sure that, until I  can afford Lasik and can then wear glasses as an accessory and not a necessity, I am destined to look dorky in glasses.  Case in point:

Regardless, one cannot wear contacts all the time, and it is important to have a backup pair of glasses for those days where you lose a contact, are dealing with allergies, or are just too lazy to put in your contacts and eyeliner and all that stuff.  I went quite a few years where I didn’t have a backup pair of glasses, so if anything happened I was just SOL.  Lucky for me, nothing happened, but when RAM came into our area, I signed up and got my first backup pair.  My eye exam from them was great, and I wound up getting a pair of Armani eyeglasses, and it was all completely free.  They look like this:

I know. I am hard-pressed to find normal pictures of myself wearing glasses.  I usually won’t take one if I’m wearing them.  And if I am, I slide them down my nose so my eyes don’t look like coke bottles.  I digress!

The Armani pair has been a great pair, and it is impossible to beat free.  I still thought it would be nice to have a backup to the backup, just in case.  I wasn’t having any luck finding any bargains, even at the places that were supposed to have glasses for $24.95.  By the time you factored in my heinous prescription and reduced thickness lenses and all that jazz, I was looking at a minimum of $300, and that was for cheap frames.  So, when I heard about Zenni Optical, I was pretty excited.

By the time I actually had the money to order my pair, they no longer had the frames in the color I wanted: brown.  But they did have black ones with red arms and black flowers, so I opted for those.  The initial price for these frames with prescription is a flat $8.  Of course, they have extra charges for extra things, like bifocals and various tints, but they include anti-scratch coating, UV protection, and lens edge polishing and beveling, a lens cloth, and a case into the price.  My left eye surpassed their flat rate prescription threshold, so I had to pay an extra $9.  Shipping is a flat rate of $4.95, no matter how many pairs you buy, it is always $4.95.  So, my grand total?  $21.95.  Apart from the free RAM glasses, I’m pretty sure that is unbeatable.

When they came in, it was nice to see how durable they actually were.  I was afraid they would be so flimsy that they would arrive broken, but I haven’t had any problems out of them in that regard.  I wouldn’t say the free case is a big selling point or anything, because it is basically just a cheap plastic case. The prescription itself is pretty amazing–I can see better out of these than I can with both my Armani glasses and my contacts.  The design was cute enough.  The fit was good.  I did not have to wait especially long for them to ship–about 2 weeks.  The only real problem I had with these glasses was when I first got them, after awhile, the arms would start to really press into the space behind my ears and give me a headache.  A quick visit to my local eye doctor remedied that, though, because they adjusted them for free.  I’m pretty sure most places will do free adjustments.  Maybe they’re not Chanel or DKNY or anything fancy, but that is pretty much a non-issue for me.  I’m all about looking as good as possible for the least amount of money possible, and these have been a great pair of glasses at a great price.  Even if I do look goofy wearing them.

Overall: A+.  I would most definitely recommend them.