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It’s Saturday. I’m not here. I’m enjoying the last day of Karl’s Summer of Love.

Also, wish me luck. I have a horse in a graded stakes race at DerbyFever.com. I’ve never won a graded stakes race. I WANT to win a graded stakes race. Heh.

Oh, and I am 100% going to make the Better Than a Hot Blogger Calendar. Let me know if you want in. I know Dave doesn’t, but you all should make some noise and let him know we at least want a Little Dave for the calendar. Maybe Little Dave Santa or Bad Monkey as the baby who rings in the New Year?

Happy Last Saturday of Summer!

Yep. That does it. The Comic Curmudgeon or whatever his name is, has like a bazillion votes on the Hot Blogger Calendar. And Wil Wheaton? He’s a celebrity. He’s already in calendars. I’ve decided fuck it. I’m gonna make my own calendar at Cafepress. Motley is May. And I want all the hot gays in it. And Hilly. And Dave. And Karl. I want all the cool people who are so very beautiful to ME in it. The people who are not about the votes, but are about all the other things in life that are important.

I’m opening up my Photoshop as soon as I get home from work tonight. A 2009 Better Than Hot Blogger Calendar. Yeah. That’s it right THERE.

No chocolate pudding photo. I misunderstood Dave. When he said he wanted chocolate pudding and hot pirate wench photos… I thought he meant chocolate pudding photos and hot pirate wench photos. He just wants to eat pudding and look at hot wenches. Semantics. They’ll kill ya everytime. Or at least make it so that you put your foot in your mouth via Flickr photos.

Happy long weekend starts at 5 pm Friday!

Everyone is campaigning. Motley is too busy having a mini-social life at the moment to campaign for herself so I figured I’d pimp her a little. Also, no one is pimping the gays. C’mon people! The gays are beautiful! You’ve got Jester, UncleMonkeyBoy, Gooster, and Justin. (Perez Hilton can bite my left nut.) These people are among the most beautiful people in the world, physically, mentally, and beneath the ribcage, where it counts the most. I want you all to click over to the Hot Blogger Calendar and vote for a gay today!

In order to get to you to vote for Motley, I’m posting a pic of her. On her blog, I posted a pic of the back of her red corset. Here she is all glossied up in the corset before they went to the club. Isn’t she cute? I swear, if she gets more votes than Dooce (I’m not stupid enough to think that she’ll get in the calendar with all those Mommy Bloggers on there) I’ll get her to post her half nekkid ass again in a new pic. The last time she posted her half nekkid ass, her blog was burning up the internet with traffic. Not sure why, but the ass got better traffic than the double D’s.

One last note on this Hot Blogger Calendar thingy. If you don’t wanna vote for Motley, vote for Hilly. Hilly isn’t pimping for votes either. For that alone, she deserves votes. Please click here and go vote for one of these bloggers, even if you aren’t a blogger yourself. They are all worthy of your vote.

Knee update: The work pants kinda gave me a bit of a set back. They’re wool, they don’t breath and when my knee started to swell, they became binding, which led to more swelling all the way down to my foot. The last two days of the week I’m gonna wear blue knit track pants and a pair of Motley’s flats to the office (her feet are bigger than mine so there’s some room for swelling there.) No socks because I swear they were too tight on my swollen limb and just made everything worse. I think the change in clothing and footwear will help.

Also, my hip is a really pretty shade of blue and purple. Same hip I landed on when I fell outta the shower a few years ago. So far, I don’t see any blue and purple on my knees but they sure feel like they should be, and the swelling is just ugly. Three day weekend should be a big help. Thank you all for your kind wishes and helpful advice.

Tomorrow, either here or on Socially Dead, we’ll be posting some pics of Dave’s favorite food because he’s on a diet to help discover what foods he’s allergic to. Since I suffer from food allergies too, I feel really bad for him. He requested chocolate pudding, so one of us will post pudding for Dave. Motley may beat me to it because I’ve been researching how to make it scratch and sniff for him. No luck so far.

Happy Hobbling Thursday!

I promised my straight male readers some heat today, didn’t I? I guess that means I can’t really toss a Marcus in there. Hee hee. That’s okay. I have lots of him on my hard drive.

Before I toss out some hotties this Wednesday, I have a tiny little story to tell. Awhile back, when I first was introduced to Jester here online, he made a joke to me in IM about being the token gay on some blog rolls. I joked back that he wouldn’t be the token gay on my blog roll because that role was already taken. It wasn’t a joke though. There really was a gay on my blog roll before I ever added Jester.

Bella Daddy Blog is the name of his blog. His name is David and I’ve known him, and loved him, since high school. I knew his mom, his brothers… He is a part of my family, went on vacations to Washington with us, and lived in my parents’ house when he had trouble with his step dad. Over the years we lost touch. I think we hooked up once or twice, but then he found me during a really important time in his life, the birth of his first child two years ago. The story of Bella, and of David’s life now, is an amazing one.

I guess the reason I’m telling this story is because a couple of things happened yesterday. One, Gooster twatted about getting his first invite to a gay wedding. And two, David sent me a link to the photo album of his trip to Italy with his partner and their daughter. Their kid is cute as can be, but the photos of David with Vince showed me something that I knew with my head, yet hadn’t really seen with my eyes. (We’ve been talking online. I have yet to meet Vince.)

David has it all. The love, the kid, the whole nine yards… and I am so incredibly happy for him. The photos of him with Vince are like looking at photos of Jester and UMB together. There’s that indefinable oneness, that sense of just incredible happiness. It brings me much joy to know that David has that. Here’s a link to the photos, so you can see for yourself what I’m talking about. Their happiness leaps right off the screen at you. Gay or straight, I don’t know how anyone can not see the love in these photos.

Europe 2008

Okay, now that I told you the story of my token gay, I’ll give the straight guys some hotties. *snicker*

Yeah, that’s a dark haired Hilary Duff. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

There’s Keeley Hazell like I promised.

A little taste of Naomi Watts…

And a repeat of Liz Hurley for good measure. (For Dave, ya know. He’s dealing with a diet so we must show him some love.)

Oh, and I really can’t do this without at least one male hottie. Since he got such raves the last time I posted him… here’s Brandon Boyd.

BTW, I decided on a pen name, stole it from my favorite character at the Bar actually. If I ever get something accepted for publication, I will then build myself a real author website at LexValentine.com. For now, it points to Winterheart.com. I was really excited when I clicked the button to register the domain yesterday. Now, I really have to get cracking on my writing projects, which are listed on my WIP (works in progress) page at Winterheart.com.

Update on the knee… still swollen, but not as bad. Still sore and stiff. Gonna try to go to work. I have a feeling I won’t make it the whole day because the damn thing is bound to start swelling again, requiring a few hours elevation. I can walk, albeit rather stiff legged, so I’m off to the office.

Have a great humpday!

You know how I always get after Motley, even here in the PRB, about taking out the trash? Well, all the little things I ask her to do, that she doesn’t do, caused a little problem last night. A magazine (Elle Decor) was knocked to the floor. I asked Motley to pick it up. She didn’t. Later on, I attempted to step over it, stepped on the corner of it in my flip flops, had the glossy pages slide against each other beneath my foot, and because I was already trying to step over the damn thing in a narrow space and had my balance off kilter, I went down like a tranked hippo.

I hit my elbow and shoulder on the big Rubbermaid tub the fan sits on. I hit the fan with my hand. The foot on the magazine twisted as did the knee on that leg. My hip hit the corner of the bed. Both knees skidded on the carpet, and I whacked my head on a box as I landed on my face. Ow.

Today, I am black and blue. I am swollen in places that are not supposed to be swollen. I’m not in a very good mood, and I can’t wait for the cupcakes to get here. (Groceries arrive between 10 and noon, but I’ll be at the office.) I’m a very unhappy camper today because now my bad knee, which has had no deterioration in about 2 years, is gonna need an xray. I don’t like the way they poke and prod it for those. It fucking hurts when they poke and prod it. And I’m pretty sure my 2 years of holding steady on the condition of my cartilage, tendons, ligaments, and joint are over with. My pain management will probably be out the window too now.

So far, I’m managing on Tylenol, but the aches and bruises are bad enough that 3 of the arthritis strength have me barely hanging in there. I know they won’t give me any pain meds either, and I’m not sure I want them anyway. Once I start taking them, I depend on them to “mask” the pain, instead of learning to manage it. I got myself off the Darvocets before and down to occasional Tylenols. I prefer that things stay that way so I’m not totally unhappy that I have a doctor who doesn’t prescribe Vicodin or Darvons.

Anyway, I’m having trouble sitting for very long so I don’t know how today is going to go. A couple hours at the office and I may come home crying, although my chair is very comfy there. The problem is more the suit. Tailored suit pants in a wool blend, socks and shoes… all on the parts of my body that just want to soak in the hot tub. I’ve been doing okay sitting around in my undies. Putting clothes on and sitting for several hours is gonna hurt like a muthafucka.

If you don’t see me on Twitter or YIM for very long at a time, you know it’s cause I’m off crying in my coffee about my bruised and battered old body. Pray that the cupcakes work to ease my misery.

UPDATE: I tried putting on my suit pants and shoes and socks. It’s far too uncomfortable. I’m gonna call my boss and finish the stuff I was working on from home then head back to bed to elevate the knee. Later, a trip to the radiologist. Oh, joy.

Hope your Tuesday isn’t trippin’!

First of all, let me thank Hilly for letting me guest post at her site yesterday. It was a lot of fun and the Cupcake Girls photo amused me all day! Also, I found Certifiable Princess’ comment so funny I had to check out her blog. And I totally laughed my ass off. She’s a lot like my bitch Mary, so I put her in my feedreader and on my blog roll.

It’s Monday and I feel short on time. I’m sitting here in my towel trying to put together a Marcus Monday post for you and I’m running late. It’s been unbearably hot in my house. I’m not sleeping well. In fact, I’m all out of sorts this morning because I didn’t hear the alarm when it went off at 6. I heard it when it went off again at 6:15, which totally threw me into one of those “moods”. I don’t sleep very soundly so I usually am awake by the time the alarm goes off. I went to sleep so late, and slept so poorly that when I did hit the zone, it was early morning and I missed the alarm by 15 minutes. Have I said I hate being late?

Now, I feel off kilter. I dislike that too. I’m sure I won’t stop feeling panicked until I’m at my desk at the office sucking down Starbucks Caffe Verona. Thank god for a nice dark blend of coffee. At any rate, I don’t remember what I was gonna talk about this morning or which picture I was going to use. Maybe I was gonna tell you all how Jen the Redneck Romance Writer has been encouraging me lately. The woman is amazing. She’s a great cheerleader. She got me to sign up for this Yahoo group of authors from Liquid Silver Books. They were tossing out hot book excerpts most of Sunday.

For some reason, this was like a burr under my saddle. All day, I kept thinking, I can do that! So I went to Liquid Silver and looked at their submission guidelines, and pulled out that freaky dream I had that ended with little red monsters… and I started working it into a piece for their Quick Silver line. The hero has a pussy sounding name, but the heroine’s name is… Jen. HEH.

Oh, yeah. I remembered what I was gonna write about! All those excerpts were from published or about to be published authors. Then there were two excerpts that shocked me to the core. The woman who posted them acted like she was just like any of the other authors there. However, the quality of the excerpts was so far below the others that I think I threw up a little in my mouth.

The writing had bad grammar. It had bad punctuation. It had no capital letters. The excerpt was written badly too. I kept thinking to myself, “rough draft” just to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. Then I checked out her website (not a real website but one of those popular places where you have friends and post stuff) and found a post of hers where she said she’d submitted this work to a bunch of publishers and one was interested. Now, I really had to go rinse my mouth out.

To say I was shocked is pretty mild. I mean, we have Bar writers who write in the same unpolished style as this woman, but at least they know when to use a capital letter! I think I got a little pissed. How could a publisher be interested in something that was so poorly put together that I had difficulty following it? It read like someone was on the phone gossiping to a girlfriend!

In the end, I just figured that the woman was blithely spinning along acting as if she was one of the authors in the group, when she wasn’t yet published, and that everyone was sort of ignoring her and her bad writing to be polite. I mean, I hadn’t seen anyone reply to her the way they had to the published authors. So I ended up feeling sorry for her. I wouldn’t have had the balls to post an excerpt from the Bar in a group where the excerpts were supposed to come from published authors. Some people are just oblivious, I guess. It just ended up being a surreal thing.

Anyhoo, here’s a Marcus to enliven your Monday if you’re female or gay. You straight guys may have to wait until Wednesday for some heat. I think I have a naked Keeley Hazell in my photo collection for you. Hmmmn.

Oh, yeah. In anticipation of me getting my shit together with this writing thing, I updated winterheart.com to look more like an author site. *sigh* Yeah, I’m gonna do this. How can I not with such great cheerleaders as the Bar writers, Susan from West of Mars, and Jen in my corner?

Have a great Monday!

I am not here today. I am over at Snackie’s World trying to figure out if I can eat the cupcakes on her tree. Hmmn. That sounds like a euphemism for something sexual, doesn’t it? You should totally head over to Hilly’s and see if it is a euphemism! After all, I do kinda have a rep for writing naughty things so you never know what I might have in store for…

Have a great Sunday!