My expatriate Australian buddy Jimm in L.A. just sent me this link, check it out.  It’s a hoot!

So today I met up with KathyT, her sister, and her youngest daughter for Huey Burgers (except Melissa had the Huey’s Club, the rest of us had the original Huey Burgers) and just had a fabulous time visiting with them. It’s always great to see Kathy, and her sister Karen is just delightful and funny as well. Melissa’s a really cool kid and is going home with a huge trophy - and is also getting her braces off soon, I hear. (Man, I remember that was one of the best days of my life, getting those things off for good after three long years.)

They had thought about going to Graceland but had decided not to, but they wanted to go to Mississippi since Karen and Melissa had never been, so that was a sort of easily solved two birds killed with one stone. I hopped into the van with them after lunch and we took off down Bellevue, which becomes Elvis Presley Blvd. and then becomes just plain old Highway 51 at the Tennessee-Mississippi state line. (Well, I guess it’s always Highway 51 anyway, but you know what I mean.)

So yeah, we went to Southaven and then even on down into Horn Lake, where Kathy bought a new headlight and the cute guy at Advance Auto Parts installed it for her even though he really didn’t want to.

Then we came back to Memphis, having driven past Graceland on the way down, but since it’s on that side of the road coming back - yeah, we pulled into the pull-off and got out and walked around the wall and gates a bit. Karen took a picture of me and Kathy and Melissa under the National Register of Historic Places sign that I hope will be so bad (because it no doubt will be of me, they always are) that Kathy won’t put it up on her blog. (Haha, just kidding… I think.) And Kathy took a bunch of pics of some of the graffiti on the wall.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun hanging out with them and thanks once again to Kathy for lunch & the company, I had a great time. And my dogs thank her profusely since virtually none of us finished our entire burger/sandwich or fries (I almost ate my whole Huey Burger but not quite), so Kathy sent me home with a literal doggie bag LOADED with french fries and what probably amounted to almost one entire Huey Burger or almost. It was a feeding frenzy the likes of which you usually only see in the wild on the Discovery Channel, Dobie almost took one or two of my fingers off.

What was really funny, though, was Daisy was the only one smart enough to figure out what I’d brought home in the box I was holding when I walked in the door. The boys were completely clueless (*rolls eyes*).

It was a gorgeous day in Memphis today, and since I was in the neighborhood I drove by my buddy Joey’s house thinking if they were outside I’d stop and say hey. But they weren’t, so I just headed on home after a stop off for needed Krogering.

By the way, I actually have a piece of Graceland in my possession - a piece of rock/stone that I think came from a walkway, I don’t think it came from the wall. My mom wound up with it when she was down here in college, I think a friend of hers actually did the actual deed, but yeah, it’s a piece of Graceland circa around 1961-63. Heh.

Since I was compelled to create a new category today called Squirrel Queen Tales, I am equally compelled to add the now-infamous Goosepond Swamp Monster legend to it, and link to the photo of where said Goosepond Monster lives.

Notice there’s no talk of Goosepondery over here.  But I’m still putting my money on ‘Coma.  If anyone can find the GSM, she can.

(Technically I guess the category should be ‘Coma tales, but seeing as how the category was begat of Squirrelly’s now-confirmed ice cream headache remedy that I impudently laughed at when I first heard it, plus Squirrel Queen Tales just sounds funnier…)

There’s just really no time to be spared, so pardon me for this hit & run update.

1. A little while ago, I ate a cheese Krystal - because I was badly in need of food that I could get quick and didn’t have to cook and it was 3 in the morning - and it was unbelievably, horribly, terribly, awfully & ungodly bad. I have never had a Krystal that tasted that disgustingly, putridly bad in my life. Yes, I realize that Krystals are not haute cuisine, but come on - it’s a Krystal. How can you screw up a Krystal that bad?? If I die in my sleep here in a little bit, you’ll know what happened. Blech. A shoe sole would have tasted better I think.

2. I’ve been eating entirely too much fast food lately anyway, which is kind of okay because I never eat anyway and all I ever get is, like, one little McDonald’s cheeseburger, and they’re all of a dollar and I DO NOT HAVE TIME to cook. But let’s not talk about the fact that in the past two weeks I’ve been served (A) a cheeseburger that was between two top buns, and (B) got home one day and opened the bag to discover I had a top & bottom bun with cheese in the middle - and no burger. Wake up, people! I know it’s just an unimportant $1.00 cheeseburger, but it might just be someone’s only meal of the day that you totally screw up.

3. I know I shouldn’t have laughed because they’re both elderly and one’s a little sickly and might be a bit senile, but watching not just one but two of my cats fall off the desk a few minutes ago, within a few minutes of each other, with an empty chip bag (the small 99-cent Big Grab size) on their heads was almost as funny as a few years ago when my elderly then-16-year old cat got his head stuck inside an empty Krystal Chik box.

4. On a not-as-amusing note, Maggie’s (same Maggie as in the pic above) new favorite place to nap is with her head on the edge of my keyboard, which usually eventually occurs to me at some point after being puzzled as to why I’m typing in all caps or ““““` is appearing on the screen again.

5. I am apparently now completely and totally assimilated into the electronic communications world at this point, because now that my fax AND my printer are both borked, and a fax that I needed to get where it needed to go so I could start getting some commission payments didn’t go through because that dinosaur of a mid-’90s era fax that I inherited from my old office is totally dead now… it took about a month for it to finally occur to me that I could just put a stamp on an envelope and MAIL it.

6. Besides the petered out fax and printer, now my desktop is apparently on its last legs too - I’ve known it was coming, was hoping to hold it off a little longer, seeing as how that’s pretty distressing since I do 100% of my work on this computer these days - but it spit out a frightening serious error at me the other day and threatened to not start (but it eventually did). In the course of seeing what I could afford to ditch in an effort to get it speeded up a little and prepare to defragment the drive for the first time in I dunno how long, after going through some other directories, I took note of the millions of Notepad files I’ve got saved to the desktop - and had a bit of a chuckle over the title of some of those files, such as: CLC Links Widget, WP Tutorial, Moved Blogs, kathyt, kathyt Links Widget, More Moved Blogs, B Blogger Template, one simply titled B, B Tutorial (yes, I don’t remember why I felt I needed to make her her own instead of giving her the one I gave everyone else), and Sarcastro Stuff (which reminds me yet again that I STILL need to repost all his old photos one of these days, ugh). Anyway, giggle - yeah, I’m a blog geek.

7. There are angels in the blogosphere and in my MySpacesphere too. Angels, I tell you.

8. I’m so tired I don’t have time to BREATHE, and I don’t have time anyway because I have way too much work and projects to do. This staying up for a day and a half at a time, sleeping a few hours and starting all over again is getting a little old. I’ve been up again for about 38 or 39 hours now and worked straight through for about 22 well, really about 29 or 30, of those, so yeah - ’scuse me if I’m a little loopy right now.

That is all. But seriously, if I don’t at least show up for a minute on Twitter by tonight? Food poisoning. Ugh, a nasty, dirty, filthy shoe sole would have no doubt tasted better. Yuck.

9. (Yes, Lesley and Brittney, I know I shouldn’t eat meat anyway.)

10. (But still - it’s a Krystal! How can anyone screw up a Krystal??)

11. Zzzzzz…

Very much sad about this.

His was literally one of the first Nashville & Tennessee regional blogs I started reading regularly, lo, all those ages ago.  I’m sure there’s good reasons but I’m gonna miss his special brand of humor & views on life in general, cute stories about being a good dad, and absolutely perfect sarcastic wit anyhow.

Don’t you dare disappear on us altogether, & happy trails, pal.

I figure if you’re going to have what is quite possibly the, but definitely one of the top ten, worst days of your life, trying to balance that out with a minute and a half or so of an absolutely adorable, not born very long (about two months) baby is not a bad idea.

But the other reason is because my mom has trouble sometimes seeing YouTubes, and doesn’t have a MySpace, so this way she can look at her too (we were just discussing said child a little while ago).

This is one of my oldest and dearest friend’s (since HS, and we were roommates in college) sorta newborn, third child and third daughter. Her eldest (now 19) is sorta like a godchild to me (except I’d be a terrible godmother), and there’s about ten years’ difference between all three girls.

My friend is a year younger than me, but already a grandmother, and I think that’s hilarious, though I’ve been pretty good about not giggling about it TOO much. (Plus I might as well get over it anyway, ‘cos pretty soon that’s not gonna be funny anymore anyhow. Most of my friends’ kids are entering college this year or next, some already there. Ugh.)

Anyway, I’m not quite ready to talk about anything else just yet tonight (but I will), so here’s an adorably cute baby.

Oops, I forgot to blog this week, huh?  Wow, sorry.  This week has just been crazy busy.

So even though it has not moved from my driveway since Wednesday, sometime within the last 48 hours the windshield of my not-even-a-year-old-yet car developed a crack.  It’s at the bottom of the windshield (well, mostly) and not all THAT bad, I suppose, but come on, this is a practically new car that doesn’t even have 10K miles on it yet - and it hasn’t been out of my driveway since Wednesday!  I know we had a bad storm last night, but I discerned no hail, and I don’t see any evidence around of why this would have happened, so yeah, I’m not happy right now.  Happy Birthday to me.

Yeah, I don’t usually make a fuss about or even remotely announce such things, but since LiveJournal already ratted me out to Smiley and I guess everyone else on my LJ list, I figured I would go ahead and acknowledge it so I could gripe some more.  Right now I’m enjoying my last seven-ish hours of being able to say I’m 41.  Because 42 just sounds… older.

(Apologies to ‘Coma who is a little flipped out about 42 right now… hee.)

(PS When someone posted on Twitter last week about Gilligan’s Island’s Mary Ann, Dawn Wells, getting busted for weed, I really thought it was a joke and didn’t pay any more attention to it.  Well, I’ll be.)

(PPS Technically I won’t be 42 until 2:24 a.m. so really that’s nine-ish hours of being able to say I’m 41.  Hey look, I’ll take what I can get, even if it’s only two more hours of being younger.)

I wanted to comment today on this post over at Knuck’s because he has a really cool little kid having a birthday today, and the post is a really touching father-to-daughter post even with that special Knuck brand o’ sarcasm (heh), and I just liked it. Having also been an only child and daughter (in this scenario my sister doesn’t count), I dug it (and got just a little bit teary reading it, but don’t tell anybody).

But alas, I have given up all hope of being able to comment on Blogger blogs anymore after months and months of trying and even having consulted with a Blogger/Blogspot expert of sorts, who also eventually gave up trying to figure out why I can no longer comment on blogs on the Blogger platform. When someone who actually was a part of building the damn Blogger platform in the first place can’t even figure it out, I’m sure not going to keep wasting my time trying to.

I love all my Blogger blogging friends, they probably think I don’t care anymore nor read but I do, and I miss being able to comment over at their respective cribs. It figures, and is just my luck, that the majority I would like to comment often on are using Blogger’s regular comment system and not HaloScan or something. Most of these folks I have tried a time or two to get them to convert to WordPress (or ANYTHING besides Blogger) and my powers of persuasion have failed miserably. Or simply, as with some, they just never have had the problems those of us who fled Blogger lo now so many moons ago have had, so they felt no need to move.

Which is okay, really. I still read most of them. I just miss being able to comment at Knuck’s, or Lindsey’s. Or Short & Fat’s. Or Rex L. Camino’s. Or Chez Bez. Or Klinde’s. Or Linda’s. Or Larry Elvis & Curly’s dad’s. Or The Vol Abroad’s. Or Mrs. Bez. Or Dr. Woo’s. Or my out-of-state blog crushes Churlita and Margaret. Or many, many more.

On the upside, the list of folks my powers of persuasion to move to WordPress worked on (or someone else moved indirectly because of it, thanks to some of those) is WAY longer than the Blogger holdouts, as well as the ones who never went to the Dark Side in the first place, so I guess I shouldn’t grouse too much.

No, this post wasn’t meant as a sneaky way of tossing out some link love, I just wanted to bitch about Blogger again ‘cos it sucks. Hee.

On another note - hey, I just noticed I got written up at AnimalShak a couple of weeks ago, sorry it took me so long to notice. I’m not the most observant crayon in the box some days.

I miss all my blogging buddies. My apologies for not having been around and for this place’s total uninterestingness of late. Unfortunately the lack thereof kind of reflects the amount of creativity in my head right now… totally blank.

I can’t really write much more right now - for one thing, I’m leaving to head out of state for the holidays in a few hours - all I can really say write now is things are about as bad as they possibly could be and I’m just trying to keep my head up and keep moving forward, so bear with me a little while longer. The Zone’s not dead yet.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and just know I miss you all and think of you often. And hope maybe I’ll get to see some of you in the spring or something. Talk more soon, I promise.

Wish I was going to be at the SF sendoff soiree & birthday party for a true Nashville rockstar, this awesome young lady, this weekend. I just can’t get away, folks. I miss you all tons… and Brittney, I wish you and Kevin and Tootie and Cooper only the best and so much success on the West Coast… but I know you don’t really need any luck. You will be fabulous. Au revoir and knock ‘em dead, girl.

Woo!  I finally got the opportunity today to meet yet another person I’ve “known” online for somewhere around 13-15 years, another of the Hoodoo Gurus faithful (and ‘Mats fan, she’s a Replacements fan too) from way back when in the original early days of the congregation of fans around the world online.  Nese is from Texas and had trekked up here for the weekend for the big Webb Wilder shindig in Knoxville and was coming thru here on the way back, so I met her downtown at the Hard Rock on Beale Street and we had a fine afternoon lunching and visiting… and what awesome weather, couldn’t have picked a better day.  And naturally, she is awesome.  So woohoo!

I gotta say it was awfully weird hanging out downtown though.  Once upon a time I spent a significant amount of spare time in downtown Memphis, especially hanging around Beale and the riverfront on the nicer weekends, and the last several years I am almost never down there.  So much has changed… and I don’t know that I’d really say for the better.  To me it looks kind of just dressed up to look prettier.

My love-hate relationship with this town continues.  Strange, I don’t even really remember when I used to just love it, though I know once upon a time I did.

It occurs to me I haven’t changed my iMood from “awake” in I dunno how long, but the thing is, it’s usually right anyway.  I am awake most of the time lately.  And if I’ve fallen asleep, I don’t know it ‘cos I’ve done it accidentally… so I can’t change it, since I don’t know I’m asleep.  Right?

Makes sense to me.

The good thing, I guess, about feeling stressed and under pressure more than usual is that when I’m like that - when there’s a LOT of stress and pressure - I don’t wanna do anything BUT sleep.   I predict a lot of sleeping this week.  That may be of the good.

Thinking of Aunt B. and ‘Coma today, and everyone and anyone else who needs some extra good thoughts.

I got nothing today, but in flitting around the Great Internet Void today I notice that my friend Travis L. Harmon and his comedy partner, Jonathan Shockley - these days known as the guys from Red State Update - were the cover story of the Nashville Scene a couple of weeks ago.

Travis and I hung in the same crowd back in my old college days in the ‘Boro, and I have on my bookshelves a VHS copy of an early video comedy effort he and some mutual friends made back when they were still in high school, so it’s been a big kick to watch his progression to now becoming nationally known. I wrote here on the Zone a while back about how our initial meeting way back in 1987 didn’t go so well, but in recent years we have caught up and chatted off and on and a nicer and more pleasant guy you couldn’t meet, so I’m doubly thrilled for his success. It’s awesome when good things happen to good people.

The Red State Update bits (all of which can be found on YouTube and the guys’ site) are what’s made them so famous now, but I leave you with one of my favorite Travis and Jonathan bits, Travis and Satchel, which both makes me laugh and creeps me out a little ‘cos Satchel both looks and sounds a little bit like one of my older male relatives (and dummies kinda freak me out anyway). Enjoy…

I think our friend on the West Coast, Magniloquence, put it best recently when she said this:

It’s mostly just… I fell off the internet. I do that.

…which is exactly what happened to me, starting in June after the mega-dustup at Nashville is Talking - which just kinda wore me out, really, my brain was too tired for a while after that to function - but I kept on trying until sometime in July, and even posted once in August. But for the most part, I couldn’t find time and energy to blog, and dropped completely out of the regional Twitter scene, and like Mag said - I just fell off the Internet, for a while. Or at least parts of it.

But I have been reading when I could, and slowly making my way back to the land of the blogliving. I’ve been reading all this time really, when I can and where I can… but the last few weeks things have started falling back into place where I can maybe find at least a little more time to get back to being an active voice in the community, not only regionally but with WordPress stuffs as well, and all that other crap I always inevitably find myself right in the middle of eventually.

One thing I KNOW I’ve got to do if I’m going to start trying to sort of keep up again is trim down the number of blogs in my feed reader, because it just got out of hand. So much good reading out there but just not enough time. I’m going to whack it down to the locals and a scant few others elsewhere I never want to miss, and the rest I’ll just have to live without. The number in my reader had grown to epic proportions, and one just can’t keep up with as many as I was trying to on a daily, or even weekly, basis.

There are some blogs I’ve tried to read almost daily - since I canceled cable some time ago, dinnertime for me is usually blogreading, heh - and I’ve definitely tried to keep up on what was born this summer to try to hold the regional community together, the fabbo Music City Bloggers, since that way I could kind of keep an eye on everyone as a whole at once and got to where I depended on that for my local and regional blog fix. My hat’s off to my friends and colleagues there - you guys truly picked up the torch and ran with it and it’s fantastic.

I still tried to read NIT when I could, but (as we all know) there for a while it seemed to be about everything BUT what Nashville and regional blogs were talking about, so it became a less frequent stop. Though when I dropped by the other day, I was kind of pleased to see that - at least on the surface - it seems to be more like what it always was, and what it should be if it’s going to continue to be called Nashville is Talking.

In the interim of being mostly away, I missed a lot of milestones and a lot of moments I wish I hadn’t… but I was there, it was just that I was reading or behind most of the time, but of course that’s not like actively being there and participating in discussion or leaving notes. For instance, I have had to catch up on my fellow WP fan Jon’s joy at being a first-time new dad in fits and spurts (she’s adorable, Jon and Katie!).

I missed my dear pal Hutchmo’s birthday and didn’t get a moment to wish him and the lovely missus a happy 30th wedding anniversary (Happy Both, my friend!).

There was the recent news of Lintilla’s upcoming surgery (keeping you guys in thoughts and prayers, Slarti).

Ivy’s grandmother passed away, which made me sad (I am so sorry and please forgive me someday for not having read about it until much much later, Ivy).

Brittney is moving to San Francisco and taking the reins of REAL big city blogging out yonder (congratulations and I’m so thrilled for you and you will be fabulously successful, I know!).

The Vol Abroad spotted what I agree (of course!) is a horrendous case of bad parenting.

The aforementioned Magniloquence! In freakin’ Robertson County, ON CASA DE COYOTE LAND… I saw pictures! I am so bummed beyond belief that I missed out on this opportunity to meet