Mostly random with a chance of what the what?

The Chainsaw got me some purty roses for Valentimes Day.



I tried to pawn them off on some neighbors when we left for our vacation a few days later, but no ladies were home.  So I left them on the counter.  When we got home, they still looked ok!  I mean, they were mostly dead, but...they looked ok, you know?



And by ok, I mean kind of sexy in a mostly dead flower kind of way.



So I enjoyed my dead flowers on the counter for almost another week before I sent them off to their flowery grave.

In other news, I went "thrifting" with Roxann the week before we left.  I put thrifting in quotes because neither of our hearts were in it and we didn't buy a thing.  Then we went to Sputnik and had some dranks and ate corn dogs with Becky.  Our table had this awesome artwork hanging over it.



The picture is not so good, but I don't give a shit because I'm an asshole.



Then we all paid with our Hot Butter wallets.  Ahhhhh!

Yesterday I made home made lasagna with home made sauce for the second time, and DANG.  It's so good.  You may or may not know that onions are my nemesis.  I enjoy their flavor if I don't have to bite into them, so I like to use the cheese grater to "chop" my onions.  No chunks here, senor!  This makes me cry 1000 tears.  Any tried and true no cry onion tips, my dear friends?  I cried off mascara I didn't even know I was wearing.



Thanks for noticing the shitty skin I brought home from Florida.

SeaWorld!

SeaWorld is awesome and I highly suggest you go there.  Right now. I think they're open.





I love these flamingos!  Here is a story about a flamingo.  We were driving back to our hotel from Legoland when I saw a bird flying through the sky.  It was pink.  I asked Chainsaw what it was.  He says, "Flamingo."  And then I died from the triumph of seeing a wild flamingo flying through the sky.  That has never happened to me before, and I never suspected it would.  It wasn't even in my wildest dreams because I'd never thought it was a possibility.  Dang!  Time to revise my Wildest Dreams.



We petted some manta rays, which felt kind of gross to me.  Felix and Chainsaw also fed and petted some dolphins, which I did not see.  I believe them.  Mostly because they took my last $14 and came back with fishy fingers.



The Shamu show was AWESOME.  There were eleventy billion people there. It made me tear up a little.  You know when Hootie says he's such a baby because the dolphins make him cry?  It was like that a little.  I understand, Hootie.  I understand.





Felix made a possum buddy.  We later saw his cousin dead on the side of the road.  Sad.



I made this walrus buddy.  For reals.  The walruses might have been my favorite part of SeaWorld.



I could watch these guys all day.  I also liked their across the tank neighbors, the belugas, but the walruses were the best.

After SeaWorld the Chainsaw treated us to a Medieval Times show, which was also super number one badass.  We cheered for the green knight, who is the bad guy!





This picture sucks, but I assume you can get the feeling of how awesome we were while we were there.  I bought a flag.  And I spent a brazillian holes on drinks in collectible goblets/steins.  From now on we only drink like royalty, and you MUST refer to us as milord and milady.

Blur-Drunk

No, I did not forget about ya'll already.  I just neglected to warn you that I was going on a long fambly vacation (slash partial work trip for the Chainsaw).  We spent four days in Miami Beach (South Beach, to be exact!) and drove to Orlando where we went to SeaWorld, Disney World, and Legoland.  It was pretty awesome.

Here are a few of my favorites from the beachy portion, which involved Felix and I entertaining ourselves all day.  That includes occasionally taking my son out for juice and 32 ounce margaritas.  You guess who got what.



Here's Felix the very first time he saw the ocean.







I have an evil story to go with these seagulls.  You're just going to have to keep your pants on and wait a smidge for me to work up the proper amount of giving a crap to upload a video to youtube.  That was kind of dramatic.  I do give a crap, I'm just lazy.  So just chill.  It's worth it.







Felix took a couple sunset pictures of the Chainsaw and myself, and boy is he a... special photographer.



I like this one, but it makes me want to throw up a little bit.



This one is the only one that is not blurry, and someone appears to have fallen asleep in the middle of everything.





If you stare at these long enough, you might start getting a little blur-drunk, which is a term I just made up for when a blurry picture makes you feel a little drunk.  Does that happen to you?  I guess I could also use the term dizzy instead of drunk, but what fun what that be?  This was a vacation.

Click through on any picture for more beachy goodness.  Unless we're facebook friends, then you done seen em already.  You can even cheat and see a sneak preview of the rest of my vacation pictures, but you're going to have to wait for stories.

The Tooth Fairy

Let's take a few moments today to talk about someone behind his back.  Let's make it even more exciting by ruining our chances of ever getting caught by talking about someone who can't use the internet behind his back.

The person in question woke up one Sunday morning looking like this:



A few hours later there was a tooth in a hand and a face that looked like this:



As you can (maybe) see, the new fang was already coming in, so we did not have to suffer looking at a gappy grill for too long.  Now its next door neighbor tooth is also loose and has quite the replacement growing in behind it.  I would seriously like to know who these new teeth think they are.  They are huge and have no business trying to fit into such a little space.  Oh well.  I hope they know what they're doing and don't cause us to spend eleventy billion dollars on orthodontics in the future.  I can't believe I have such a big boy!

In other news, packing and laundry.  Here's another quick confession:  I put off hand washing clothes forever (possibly even wearing said articles of clothing more times than I should...eew).  I've actually completed this unnatural domestic chore a couple times now, and I have to say that I kind of like it.  In fact, it's sort of fun.  I like to put some water in the bathtub with some special hand washing soap, soak a few things, swish, rinse, and (this is the best part) roll it up in a towel so I can squish it.  SQUISH!  Then I hang them to dry and leave the drying rack up for 3 months and put it away just in time to hand wash again.  Weee!

Art Journal

I bought myself the gift of Red Velvet Art's Art Journal All Year E-Course in an effort to be more artsy.  So far I've discovered that I really enjoy painting pictures I've torn out of books.  It feels naughty to destroy a book!  Luckily, the thrift store offers many choice books at a price that makes me A-OK with the destruction.  Anywho.  Here's the first page of my art journal.



Making this page was so fun that I have to resist the urge to paint on a cat picture for every page.



For my love list I turned this snazzy Anthro girl standing next to some bigass trees into a cute little gnome girl hula hooping in the forrest.  Awww.



And here is my into page.  Once again I destroyed a book, and I feel zero percent guilty about it because it was the worst romance novel of all time.  You guys know I read a lot of that shit, and this might be the first one that I didn't finish.  The story sucked.  The main character refers to herself in third person, and her name is Glenda.  You like Glenda, no?  No, as a matter of fact, I do not like Glenda.  I also don't like that for several pages I was pretty sure your main man meat was a bad guy out to rape you, but I guess he's not.  Whatever.

Sorry about that tangent, but not really.  So I was minding my own business making this page when it dawned on me that I put a motherflipping bird on my head.  My cat picture has a bird on its head.  So the first two pages of my book have bird heads.  I am one of the (apparently) few people who don't find the "put a bird on it" thing very funny.  Perhaps I haven't given it enough chances.  Napoleon Dynamite took me a couple watches to really enjoy.  There was a many week gap between creating those pages, and the bird thing was completely unintentional.  You like Glenda, no?

Also, I considered not posting this page with a couple personal sentences on it (I have a picture of it without the words).  In fact, I went back to delete it from my flickr account, but in the end I kept it up.  Just trying to keep it human here, folks.  My world isn't all glitter and sunshine, but that's ok.

I have a lot going on today.  I need to go see if I can scam some Apple Care on my phone (slash bff), see if I can get my wedding ring made a little smaller, bring some wallets to the Fancy Tiger in Denver, followed by thrifting adventures with Roxann plus corndogs.  That's right.  Corndogs.  Happy Wednesday!

2012 Confessions!

I haven't written anything here in so long that this big white text box is a scary place.  I'm going to break the ice with a magic trick.

See that pile?  What's on top?  A blue fleece blanket, right?  WRONG.  It's my Snuggie.  That's right.  This is both a magic trick and a confession.  I bought a mother flipping blanket with sleeves at a consignment store for $5 many moons ago (reading light still in box!), and let me just say this: IT'S AWESOME.  I'm just embarrassed enough of my snuggie love that I invented this magic trick.  If I fold it up real special, it can be disguised as a regular ol' blue fleece blanket in my blanket pile.  The true magic might just be how warm a fleece blanket is, but I can't lie about how awesome those sleeves are when trying to eat snack and be warm at the same time.  

Other confessions:

I have a pretty bad potty mouth and I'm not afraid to use it.  I think I have been afraid to use it here because I don't want to offend anyone, but fuck that noise.  Good chance that Hot Butter posts in the future might contain a word or two that your grandma might not appreciate.  My grandma too.  She thinks "fart" is a bad word.  

I am probably nuts, but I believe there's some kind of freaky 2012 magic in the air that is messing with people.  I'm going to circle this back to how I started this confession and end it with this:  Since the beginning of 2012, I feel like I'm the craziest of all time (and that's ok!).

Speaking of probably being crazy, I put in my two weeks notice at the old day job, and next Thursday is my last day.  I'm excited about new opportunities.  I'm sad about leaving an awesome job and the coworkers I love (who shall remain to be my weirdo friends in the future!) and also a little jealous of the people who still get to work there, but I'm firm in my belief that my reasons for leaving are stronger than the reasons to stay.  I'm pretty lucky that I can decide to quit my job without lining another one up first, and I'm a little bit scared that I'll have problems finding a new job.  Chainsaw says I shouldn't be because I'm awesome and everyone will want to hire me.  Ok.  Got that universe?  Crazy 2012 universe?  You want this shit.

Ok, that's enough for now.  I don't want to get all overwhelmy with my confessions.  I do want to be HERE more and in a more present, personal way.  I hope you're all ready for this jelly.

Loves,

Ashley McCrazypants

Yes, this panda is real (to me and Felix and Laureal). 

P.S. This is my 327th post, which is my birthday number of posts, which is awesome and I'm way happy about that! 

Scary Stuff

I had a living nightmare the other morning.  When I have to ride the bus to work, I get there more than an hour early and inevitably end up at one of the nearby thrift stores.  I thought the luck of the mighty bald eagle (I don't know where this stuff comes from) was with me when I spotted an almost full rack of beautiful vintage dresses.



I took an armload to the dressing room, where something horrible happened.  None of them fit me.  Some were too big, some were just a little too small.  I couldn't zip them the last couple inches.  I don't have very good altering skills, so I couldn't talk myself into buying the too big ones.  I knew they'd just sit there and never get altered.



I'm sure at least some of you vintage lovers will understand how that morning took a page from one of my scariest dreams.  A rack full of vintage for cheap, and none of it fits!!  Ahhh!

Oh well.  50% off day is coming soon.  I might be able to talk myself into buying one of the dresses that was too big if it's still there.  In less scary news, I got a message from them on facebook saying I won a $10 gift certificate.  Not sure how I pulled that off, but I'll take it!!

Back to scary.



Felix loooooves Halloween, and so do I!  I decided some spooky decorations were in order this year.  We took a trip to Hobby Lobby and Big Lots, and this is what we came up with so far.  The lights are candy corn colored!



Felix is obsessed with this thing.  The LED eyes change colors and move back and forth.



And let's be honest here, I might be obsessed with taking pictures of it.  They all end up having maximum awesomeness.



In Hot Butter news, I'm still working on a big stack of Half-moon Handbags.  I've also been contacted about doing a wholesale order, so there will probably be new wallets in the future (if I ever finish those bags!).  Hope everyone is having a great week so far!