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7 Quick Takes Friday!

7 Quick Takes Friday!

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 5:15 pm by Calah Alexander

7 Quick Takes Friday! 2017-03-09T17:15:30-05:00 Calah Alexander

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Teehee

Lately I’ve been having an existential crisis over my About Me page. (I know, could I get any more navel-gazing? If you’re thinking not, brace yourself for the next paragraph…s.)

See, I have two family pictures I can use for that page. One is a pretty good picture of everyone in my family except me and Sienna (and Sienna has been refusing to do anything but make ridiculous faces lately so she doesn’t count). The other is a mediocre-to-bad picture of everyone else except me.

Two days ago I put the one that’s a better picture of me up. I also like it slightly more because it’s in color and so are all the other pictures on that page. But the last two days I’ve been dealing with this nagging feeling that perhaps I shouldn’t sacrifice the visual appearance of my entire family on the altar of my own vanity. I realize this is probably the stupidest and most ironically self-absorbed train of thought I’ve ever had, wondering if I’m being too vain in my handling of the “About Me” page of my blog, but I’m still having it, and it’s still bugging me, so I’m blogging about like one would suck the rattlesnake poison back out of a wound. (Not me. I would never do that. But someone else might, if they lived in 1890 or were a character on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.)

I’ve decided to let you guys decide which picture looks better, and I’m bracing myself for the very real possibility that my inbox will quickly fill up with variations of “are you effing kidding? No one cares but you, pick a picture and get over yourself,” which is advice I should probably take ahead of time and erase this quick take. But I’ve already spent time writing it, so it’s gonna stand. Plus I can use the picture comparison for quick take #6.

(I’m sorry for the huge gap between these pictures. Blogger sucks lately.)

Picture #1, in color, with my chin tilted at the appropriate angle to minimize photographic evidence of double-chinnery

Picture #2. Charlotte and the Ogre are the big winners in this one, looking cuter than cute (Oh, sorry, I guess the Ogre looks “distinguished and professorial”)

Cast your votes below, or chastise me for my vanity, but either way, know that I am in no way responsible for Sienna’s rockin’ side-ponytail in either of these pictures. That was my mom’s doing. She’s got a thing for side ponytails. I’m convinced it’s a direct result of trying to raise little girls in the 80’s.

Tired of hearing about the things that keep me up at night? Then don’t click on the link attached to the above picture. Also don’t note that all this crazy shiz is happening within a one-to-three-hour radius of our current location.

Also, why would you be tired of hearing about the things that keep me up at night? If you’re a reader of this blog (which I assume you are, otherwise I’m not sure how you got here but I deeply apologize for it) you know I’m slightly-unhinged-bordering-on-legitimately-crazycakes. And you either love me in spite of it or find my particular brand of crazy amusing.

And anyway, it’s not like I’ve ever done a full-blown post on the things that keep me up at night.

Alas, since I have literally no idea where else to take these quick takes and my children are hovering around me anxiously saying, “are you done yet? Are you done yet?” I’m afraid that today is the day in which that post shall become a reality.

At least it’s in the form of quick takes.

So without further ado, here are three other things that keep me up at night.

Shudder, shudder, shudder, shudder, blech.

I hate spiders. I know they’re part of God’s creation and keep like, some sort of insect population in check or something but seriously, did God have to make them so creepy?

Guuaaahhhhhh.

This is made even worse by the fact that we moved from a place where the only poisonous spider was the brown recluse to a place where we had to worry about black widows and brown recluses to a place where we have to worry about brown recluses, black widows, red widows and brown widows. Add to the fact that Liam suffered what several doctors identified as a “necrotic spider bite” from an apparently invisible spider, and yeah. I have nightmares about spiders.

I also check everyone’s sheets and the undersides of beds obsessively before anyone gets in, shake out blankets, rustle curtains daily, and bang shoes against the ground before we put them on.

And freak out regularly when I see anything even remotely resembling a spider, even though they usually turn out to be either crumbs or fuzz.

I hate spiders.

When I’m not laying awake freaking about spiders or listening intently for zombies to come crashing through the glass doors, I’m usually terrifying myself by imagining some version of In Cold Blood.

Really, the idea that a human being would slaughter an entire family for basically no reason at all is incomprehensible to me. But it happens, and it’s not exactly rare anymore, thus I lay awake at night listening for noises and check on my children obsessively anytime I happen to wake up. I’m not sure what I hope to accomplish by losing sleep over a hypothetical and extremely unlikely situation that is entirely out of my control, but…well, crazycakes, remember?

Most nights, though, I lay awake mentally berating Stephen Moffat for what he did to River Song.

I’m sorry if you’re not a Whovian (no really, I am sorry for you, but you can fix that by going to Netflix right now and making your universe infinitely better and brighter), but Moffat took a character who had sparkling, limitless potential and just…murdered her. Worse than murdered her. Made her just a side-show, a footnote (and a pretty deranged one at that) in his tale of Amy and the Doctor.

I can never forgive him for that. All the good things he brought us…Matt Smith, the fez, the Weeping Angels, vampires and Van Gogh, even Rory, glorious Rory…all of it combined cannot outweigh the hideous injustice done to one of the most remarkable characters (sadly, only in potential now) to ever grace the Whoniverse.

I actually think I’m going to cry now.

For more coherent and far less navel-gazing quick takes, go see Jen! Happy weekend, everyone. I’ll just be over here, bitterly cursing Stephen Moffat all the way through the zombie apocalypse.

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