Clearly, I Am A Monster

So, I went to a holiday party hosted by one of my old highschool friends last night. There was plenty of eats, fine times, nostalgia, and even a gift exchange. The gift exchange was funny because it was a $5 Maximum Gift Exchange, you know, to make it affordable. I have only had $1 for like 2 weeks now. So I copped out and just painted some bland scenery because I figure that they are all of the age where watercolors of landscapes can be fit into their decorating schemes. (As we are all adults now, we decorate with framed artwork and not posters pinned up to the walls. It is strange)

Anyway, the major drawback is that 90% of my highschool friends turned out to be total breeders.

Anyone who reads this site or knows me at all knows that I really don't like children. Their sounds, smells, looks... they all bother me. And the younger they are, the more uncomfortable I am.

A few people there had honest to god INFANTS there. As in, younger than even one year old. One was 6 weeks old. I could handle that because it was pretty stationary. But the other one crawled, which in turn made my skin crawl. Do you know why? Because it CRAWLED UP TO ME and held onto my pants, clearly wanting me to pick it up. I declined. It insisted. My friends began to call for me to pick it up, that it is "just a baby" and that the action "wouldn't kill" me.

I did not listen.

Eventually the child started to weep, and I still did not pick it up. I mentioned to its mother that it appeared to be crying, and that maybe she should intervene. A photograph was taken of the entire event. I haven't seen it yet, but I expect that it will depict me with my hands in my pants pockets, looking down without expression at a small baby thing that is clearly distressed that, for the first time in its life, it is experiencing the coldest shoulder of rejection ever experienced by a baby of 7 months. I was told that the photo will be titled "Amanda Wood is the Meanest Girl on Earth."

Their guilt and shame trips left me unmoved though. As I explained to them that spiders and babies are the two most horrible things on earth to me. One friend actually picked up the baby and tried to hand it to me, and I had to say "Seriously. Stop." Hard times.

Yes, I have a baby phobia. Actually, worse than that are visibly pregnant women since babies are sort of interesting in that "hey they are a blank canvas" kind of way. But visible pregnancy makes me want to retch. One of my friends there last night was pregnant, but not in a way that you can tell yet, so I kept forgetting, thankfully.

Oh, that was another odd thing. There were only women and babies there, so it was like some estrogen nightmare. I kept feeling very uneasy about seeing all of that evidence of fertility and kept sending messages to my uterus to not get any ideas. One of my childless friends shared my horror, and we chanted "petrify, petrify, petrify" to our wombs under our breath whenever we felt frightened that babies might be contagious.

We are superstitious fools.

So Much Blog Action

Well, in a surprising move, I have decided to blog today.

This is mostly surprising because it hasn't been over ten days since my last entry, but it is MOSTLY surprising because I made an entry in the OMGJ Main Blog already!


That page design is something else. I know a lot of you old folks are fearful of change, but I firmly believe this is a step in the right direction. Jeremy was about to shatter under the pressure of updating infrequently. In fact, the updates were infrequent for so long pretty much because it took so much time and effort for him to make an update that he would just run away from the Internet and hide for days.

So, this step in this new direction will ultimately allow us to update our OWN articles our OWN damn selves, which will be nice. You won't have to peek in every Sunday to see if we did anything that week. Instead you'll have to obsessively peek in every day! MULTIPLE TIMES a day, even. Because who knows when one of us will actually put up an article??? Will it be at 5am Monday? Will it be at 2pm Saturday? Will it be at 3:25PM Saturday?? 3:30PM???

Better keep watching. All the time!

I like the less-cluttered look. Oh, and in reference to Jeremy's blog, I must say that those old original site designs.. Lordy. They are no good to see. This new one is much easier on the eyes.

I'm not a big fan of the girl's eyes, but I am not at all even slightly interested in Anime. Someone pointed out that it is a scene from a hentai, without the cock being seen. I think no normal person would have ever expected that. I figured it was just Jane Anyanimegirl wearing glasses and that was all. I figure that people who aren't hardcore hentai monsters wouldn't think a non-pornographic part of a picture is hentai. But maybe I am mistaken.

Other than that, I have been busy working on about two thousand non-OMGJ projects. I think I am ready for a very nice vacation. Sadly, it is looking to be a Hard Winter, so I will just have to work at a feverish pace until Springtime.

Pounded By Snowfall

Yes, I plan on taking a moment to comment on the weather.

The weather, is of course the last resort of many people when they have painful small talk and chit chat with people with which they have nothing in common. It is brought up after uncomfortable silences and after the other attempts at conversation have failed. Asking about "the kids" or "the parents" or "mutual acquaintances" have led to dead ends. Speaking in vague terms about your job, the other person's job, and the jobs of people you both variously know have worn out their use. You have tried everything you can think of, only the Weather is left. And once the weather is mentioned, both parties feel as though they have both truly failed.

Or at least, this seems to be the connotation that speaking of the weather has gotten for some reason. I, personally, have always considered the weather to be fairly interesting. It may be because I live in an area of the world where there actually is weather. If I lived in San Diego, for example, I might not have much to say or feel about it. "Wow, it sure is another beautiful day, isn't it? Just like 95% of the rest of the year!"

Boring.

But not here. Not in the Midwest. ESPECIALLY not in the Cincinnati, Ohio, region. It is probably not well known by the rest of the world - (because people get information from television and sometimes books, and as we all know, the people who make television shows only focus on NYC, Southern California, Florida, Las Vegas, or the New Orleans area, oh, and occasionally Texas and Aspen, Colorado. The midwest, southwest, south, north, pacific northwest, and all the other countries in the world are all ignored) - but Cincinnati has the most erratic weather of any place on the planet. I know that most people say this about where they live. Look at Jeremy and his talk of Indianapolis' weather. But he is wrong about it being the most erratic on Earth. Indianapolis is pretty consistently a variation of "deadly storms," "deadly heat," or "deadly snow drifts."

Cincinnati has those, too, but it also has "deadly ice storms," "deadly droughts," "deadly flash floods," and "pretty days."

Well, brothers and sisters, one thing IS fairly certain about this region. In the summer, it is never windy, and when it is, that means there is a horrible storm coming. And in the winter, it is grey and bleak and dreary until mid-January or so. Maybe there will be a snow dusting in late December, but it will melt by the next day, which will most likely be 70F in Nature's effort to make us all ill.

But not this year.

Yes, we have had drastic changes in temperature. Freezes followed by tshirt weather followed once again by freezes. However, last week, in this town I live in, we had an ice storm! Well, by "ice storm" I mean "ice shower," I guess because it did not devastate us and crash trees onto my house like the ice storm of late last year, as catalogged in my blog archives. It was less than an inch of ice coating everything. But.. And this is the strange thing.. It did not melt the next day. It did not reach temperatures of 60F+ as we all expected.

No.

It stayed below freezing for a WEEK. It still is, in fact! And tonight, out of the blue, we have gotten 4 - 8 inches of snow! And more is scheduled to fall, I hear.

This weather! This weather is for January or February, or a sad day in March! This weather is for Wisconsin! Not southern Ohio.

And since I am mostly out of touch with local news since I have no antennae for my television, I was unable to stock up on milk, bread, and canned goods, so the old lady in my brain tells me that I am surely doomed, god almighty, I am surely doomed. Heaven help us.

So, anyway, between the unusually severe hurricane season targeting specific cities as if planned, and now my local weather is behaving strangely, I can only conclude that whoever has the Weather Machine is an asshole.