Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: March 2026

  • Still chipping away at the diversions

    I’m also still chipping away at the broken links, and I found myself fixing a link on post shown below in some fancy intra-blog link style that you may never see again. No idea how that happened. The post from 2010 is similar to the AFI best movies posts, in which I beat myself up…

  • The state of Gary on this, the day of his birth

    Seventy-two years old, and forty years married. I’ve always thought year four was the worst year of marriage. Is year forty ten times worse? Kinda. Yeah, kinda is. I’ve always known that one of our hurdles is how we deal with illness. He’s a baby, expects to be spoiled; I was raised by stoics, expect…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 3/19/2026

    So this is where I left off … I liked this one. Looks flat though. Hope I don’t futz it up.

  • ShowMe: part the third

    Naked ladies! ShowMe had crossed the line. The Board lost their minds. The December issue of ShowMe would not be going out until their penalty was decided. Instead, the magazines would sit locked in the ShowMe offices while the Board conferred. ShowMe held a drunken party at the editor Noel Tomas’ apartment, attended by the…

  • ShowMe: part the second

    ShowMe had a variety of editors, but it was always a college humor magazine. It always had photos of pretty co-eds, jokes, cartoons, and a pre-digital layout. It had to be profitable, so there were also lots of ads, sex references, and pandering to college rivalries (lots of references to how vacuous the girls at…

  • ShowMe: part the first

    Mom worked for a while on the University of Missouri college humor magazine, ShowMe. A remarkable number of college stories stem from the nine months she worked there. Before she landed there at UofM in Columbia MO (Mizzou), Mom went to a local college for two years where she wrote a column for the school…

  • TWIL: How to fix a Toto toilet that makes excessive noise when you flush it

    We have Toto toilets in both bathrooms. I love mine: it flushes with a satisfying ka-chunk-whOOOssshhhh sound that hits me in my solar plexus. The one in Gary’s bathroom was installed a year after mine. It was lovely at first, but in the last year his ka-chunk-whOOOssshhh sound has turned into … ka-chunk-whOOOssshhhh … ka-chunk…

  • The mystery of cousin Cindy: solved

    Here is the impossibly perfect cousin Cindy. Blonde, petite, sporting a mod ‘60’s turtleneck, not a nonsensical purple/white number. She is actually my second cousin. I believe her grandmother was Jerry’s Mad Aunt Jo, my grandfather’s sister. Her mother was the sympathetic woman Mom stayed with during part of the separation. The only other thing…

  • My arm further turns on me

    Here is my arm. The bruise at the top exactly matches the edge of my home office chair armrest. It showed up last Friday. When the lower bruise arrived this morning, I spent some time lining my arm up with the edge of the desk, the rest of the armrest, the laptop. Until I recognized…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 3/12/2026

    So this is where I started a few weeks ago … This is where I’m stopping … And this was the goal. That’s a wrap on that. I like doing this though. Expect to see everything I got sick of go through this process for a while.