my first painting

This picture was the inspiration for my first painting.

Thanks to my friend Neil for taking me to a gallery and teaching me the basics of painting.

I also found some great painting tips on http://www.about.painting.com/. If you ever want to learn to paint, it's a good place to start.

The picture is of my hand after I broke it, and my pointer finger. The accident happened in Ouray when some asspipe was climbing off route above me and knocked a cinder block sized chunk of ice down on me without even yelling.

So this is the painting. It's called "I broke my hand and now it hurts".



It's not great, but it's my first painting...

posts updated with pictures

Because there are some doubters out there about my stories, I've added some pictures:

http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2009/03/hott-tomato.html
Pictures of the John Lennon guy fondling my feet, Christian and I dancing on a table, our driver, Christian, Rita, and I with one of the germans who bought us drinks


http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2007/02/commodal-concussion.html
Me being pulled out of the resort swimming pool by Gus


http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2008/04/kidnapped-by-pirates.html
My brother and I on the dive boat, me handcuffed to the pirate my brother got into a duel with, me and my brother with the Captain Morgan spokesmodel, my brother passed out on the beach (behind him you can see the bag of schwag CM gave us)


http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-i-dont-have-dog.html
pictures of Forest


http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2008/04/ballet-lessons.html
a picture of me in my ballet costume

and, speaking of sticking things up people's asses

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looking back, maybe I should have stuck it up his ass

Reminding me of another office prank...

I was working on this declassification project for a three letter agency. We were designing a system to scan in all classified documents 25 years or older (EO12958) and make them available to the public. This is the project where I met Rita.

I worked with the team that did the initial survey of the archives. We uncovered approximately 60 million pages of material that needed to be scanned, reviewed, tagged with key words, etc. Our project, it was clear, was woefully underfunded. So we were sitting in a room one day trying to figure out how to create a slide to show how much paper 60 million pages consisted of, with the idea of presenting it to congress to get more cash.

There were a bunch of dumb ideas floating around the table, when I sarcastically said "60 million pages has got to be as tall as the washington monument!" That ended up being our slide (60 million pages = about 27 washington monuments when stacked up). We got more money.

Then the gov got shut down because Clinton refused to sign a bill to keep the gov going because the bill had something in it he didn't like. We were out of work, unpaid, for 2 weeks. We didn't get back pay for those two weeks even though almost everyone on the team had worked through the shut down. Then there were staff cuts. Just when it seemed the morale of the team couldn't get any worse, some bureaucrat decided to give us all "awards". Normally an award is a slap on the ass, free lunch, and a check. This ass pipe instead gave us each a 6 inch replica of the washington monument, with one side having a thermometer glued to it.

Everyone was pissed we had worked so hard and not gotten money. One of the guys on the team, Gordon, turned to me after he was given his monument and said "stick this in my ass and take my temperature".

Instead, I thought it would be funny to glue the monument on the ceiling tile above Gordon's desk. I waited for two days, but he didn't notice it was missing, much less that it was now suspended above his head. So I started taking more stuff off of his desk and gluing it to the ceiling. I glued his stapler, scissors, staple remover, pencils, pens, paperclips and finally his coffee mug. He didn't notice.

Then, at 3 o'clock one morning, my manager got a call because the alarm in our SCIF had gone off. It was triggered by the motion detector. They went all through the SCIF but couldn't find anyone. So the SCIF was on high alert. It was a HUGE security deal. I rolled in around 7 am to find all this happening. Then Gordon came in, and moments after going into his office came out and said "You are in so much fucking trouble".

It turned out the washington monument had finally, due to its weight, detached from the ceiling tile. The tip of it was embedded in the soft wood of Gordon's desk. There was no doubt that the fall was what set off the alarm. He started screaming at me that it could have fallen on his head, and then looked up and saw everything else I had glued to the ceiling, and started yelling more. My manager came in at that point and got to see my little ceiling art project.

I received a security violation (the only one I've ever gotten), had to write a letter of apology to Gordon, and was yelled at by my manager for two solid hours. I wasn't worried about getting fired, as I was the only female engineer on the project, but I realized my life for the next few months would not be pleasant.

All glue was eventually banned from the SCIF because first Gordon launched a return attack by gluing my chair to the top of my desk, and then I glued a banana to his desk, and then one day when it snowed and I was working late he and another engineer completely buried my car in snow, so I glued the shovel I used to get my car out across Gordon's desk.

I miss that place. And that group of people.

white elephant

Well, I've gotten no less than 10 complaints today about my sad Forest story, so here's one that's a little on the lighter side.

After September 11th I rotated back to the east coast from San Fran. I wasn't happy about it. I arrived in November and didn't even have a winter jacket.

To make matters worse, I ended up working with a three letter agency other than the one I was expecting to return to. My new employer was staffed with people that I quickly dubbed wall scrapers. They were all pasty white, and when I would walk down the halls they would mash themselves against the wall until I past. That agency employs mostly math and engineering types, all fucking socially retarded.

I was working in this grim little SCIF with a guy who had been fired from another company for trying to kill his manager with a copper head (that is a story for another time). Then this guy Bob started coming by to talk to me.

Bob was a retired coastie, a ginger kid, and a midget (sort of, he was 4'11"). But, he was really nice to me and invited me out to happy hours so I could meet people (though, they were all military types so nothing ever came of any of his attempts to play matchmaker). Bob was also an epic story teller, and if you could suspend the concept of truth his stories were amusing. At least the first 40 times he told them. The endings occasionally changed to give the story a new spin.

Anyway, his cousin, or some other relative like that, was supposedly married to the lead singer of Depeche Mode. And, it turned out, Depeche Mode was his favorite group ever. Because of this he had pictures of them all over his cube. One day he brought in a close up of what ever the lead singer's name is in to work. He said his cousin had sent it.

Around that time it was becoming the Christmas season. We were scheduled to have a white elephant party to celebrate (this was my employer's way of trying to make up for us having to work Christmas day - not that I personally cared). We had to buy a joke gift that was $10 or less, and then we were to pile them up and each person got to pick a gift.

So, I decided to buy a picture frame. Then, I stole Bob's Depeche Mode picture, put it in the frame, and wrapped it for the party. Bob was absolutely hysterical over the loss of his picture. For two weeks after I stole it I would find him going through people's drawers in the SCIF (a huge no no in that environment) trying to find his picture. I told him I thought that I had seen the janitor throwing it away. Then other people joined in on the joke, and we tortured him mercilessly, even causing him to one day move the big, disgusting refrigerator in the break room to see if it had fallen back there.

A week before the party I drew a stick figure picture of a guy playing the guitar, just like his Depeche Mode picture. I put it up in the same spot where the picture I had stolen had been. Then I went by his cube and was like "Oh, you found your picture". He started ranting and raving that he actually hadn't found his picture, and that he suspected someone was playing a joke. I squinted at the picture and said "are you sure that isn't the one you had?" He was like "THAT is a stick figure drawing. My picture was a PHOTO. Don't you remember?"

Other people stopped by his cube because he had posted a bunch of signs all over the SCIF demanding his picture be returned. They all said the drawing looked a lot like the picture he had lost, and couldn't he possibly be mistaken.

The day of the white elephant party I arranged with a woman that had just joined our project, Debbie, to pick my gift. She opened it up and was like "Oh, nice, a picture frame." When she turned it around to show to everyone Bob starting yelling "THAT'S MY DEPECHE MODE PICTURE!" Debbie was like "No Bob, that's just a picture that they put standard in all frames." His head was about to explode, and I couldn't take it anymore, so I started laughing. At first he was pissed at me, but then he laughed, and likely is still telling the story, only his version is probably even longer than mine.

why I don't have a dog

Shortly after I moved into my house, I became friends with my neighbor. I didn't know at the time that he was insane.

He had a dog, named Forest, a boerboel who weighed about 140 lbs. So, not a small dog. Since my neighbor was pretty sedentary, and more likely to smoke pot than walk his dog, I started taking Forest out with me when I went on my walks. My favorite thing he did on one of our walks was either the time he unleashed a huge stream of drool on the cheeseburger of a girl who was petting him, or the time he decided to stop in the middle of crossing Broadway, a major street with 6 lanes, to drop a deuce.

After a while my neighbor started leaving Forest at my house when he went on travel. We would get up early in the morning to go for walks, and then do the same when I got home from work. Then we would lay on the floor, because at the time I didn't own a couch, and watch movies. He would always try to climb into bed with me when I went to sleep, and I would never let him because I'm allergic to dogs. But it seemed like every morning I would wake up and find him laying next to me, drooling on my head and farting. Also, I would find dog snot all over the house from when he sneezed. I admit I spoiled him. After a while when my neighbor would come home he would have to physically pull Forest out of my house because Forest wanted to stay with me.

When ever Forest, my neighbor, and I went out together he would never put Forest on a leash. I always kept him on a leash though. One day, for fuck knows what reason, I decided to take him up to a park in Boulder to do a hike. By this time Forest was in great shape because we were walking about 6 miles a day in the city. My neighbor was in Arizona getting drunk and watching football.

The hike went great, except that Forest was getting a little freaked out because I had him on a leash and everyone else was letting their dogs run free, even though there were signs all over the park to keep them on a leash. Dogs get a thing called leash aggression when they are leashed and other dogs aren't. It's caused by them feeling vulnerable to the other dogs since they are on a leash and the other dogs aren't. I know that now.

As we were walking down this wide fire road, less than a quarter mile from my car, a family was approaching in the other direction. They had a german shepard, unleashed, and two kids, one 6 and the other 11. The 6 year old was obviously tired and throwing a temper tantrum. He threw himself on the ground and refused to get up. His dad tried to pick him up, and he did that thing kids do where they fold up their legs and refuse to stand up. The dad let go of the kid and he fell on the ground again, screaming and crying.

I was about 10 feet away from them, and had Forest pretty tight on the leash because of their dog. I was standing between Forest and the family because I was worried about their dog. As we walked by the mom said "Oh, look at the dog" and called Forest over to her. I guess she was trying to distract her kid from crying.

The next thing I knew I was on my knees and Forest was dragging me across the fire road. I tried to stop him but I couldn't. Boerboels are very strong, and can pull 1,500 lbs easily. Since I weigh about 120 lbs I didn't stand a chance.

He grabbed the kid by the shoulder and pinned him down on the ground. The parents were yelling but didn't do anything. As luck would have it, the day before I had been talking to Jen, the ex lesbian, about dog bites (her dog had just bitten someone at a party) and she told me that if you grab a dog's nose and twist it they'll let go. So I did that and Forest let go of the kid. The whole incident happened in less than 30 seconds.

The mom picked the kid up and at first said he didn't need to go to the hospital. Then a female ranger came out (the ranger hut was just across from where the incident happened) and they started yelling at me. Forest was hiding behind my legs and shaking because he was afraid. Then random people coming down the fire road started coming up and screaming at me for not controlling my dog, even though every fucking one of them had their dogs unleashed.

They ended up calling an ambulance to take the kid to St. Joseph's children's hospital. He required three stitches, and Forest had broken his collar bone. A male ranger came out as a mob descended on me and walked me back to my car.

As I drove home I called my neighbor. He sent me on a wild goose chase going to almost every vet in Denver trying to find Forest's shot records. It turns out he hadn't gotten a recent rabies vaccination. I was like great. I called the ranger every couple of hours to find out how the kid was, and to ask if I could call the parents. She told me she couldn't give me their contact information because they requested I not contact them.

I called the breeder from whom my neighbor had bought Forest. He was as surprised as I was when I told him what happened. He hypothesized that Forest was already on edge from leash aggression. He saw the little kid laying on the ground crying as some kind of threat. That's why he tried to pin the kid to the ground.

When my neighbor called later the ranger gave him the family's contact information and he called them. Because I didn't own Forest I could have washed my hands of the incident but I didn't. I went to every court meeting, and every meeting with the rangers. I paid to have Forest put to sleep and cremated. I agreed to split the cost of the law suit that soon showed up.

In court I was eviscerated. "Witnesses" who were no where near us when the incident happened said that the attack lasted at least 15 minutes. The mom said that Forest dragged her son 1/2 mile down the fire road. I think the parents were upset that they had done nothing to help their son so they were taking it out on me. They said the whole family needed therapy to get over the incident. I couldn't help but think that if a fucking dog bite sent them into such a tail spin they could never survive the real world. The mom also said I never called the family to see how the kid was doing, an utter and outright lie. It was also the worst lie for me because everything else she had said to that point, I could chalk up to adrenaline and mis-remembering things. But to say I didn't care about her kid? I wanted to kick her in the fucking cunt for that.

The male ranger spoke on my behalf and said that I was the most cooperative person they had ever dealt with. He said that I could have left the scene (which is true) but I didn't. And I found out, doing research, that the park where the attack happened has one of the largest number of dog biting incidents in the entire country. Probably because none of the fucks who live in Boulder leash their dogs.

To which I would also add, of all the places I've lived, Colorado has the worst behaved dogs and dog owners. In the past year, I've been to three parties (and I don't go to many parties anymore) where a dog bit someone.

It took two years, but the law suit was settled. My neighbor not only doesn't speak to me - he does shit things. He used to have his friends call my land line at all hours of the night and say things to me like they were going to come over to my house and rape me. He tried to have my now ex-boyfriend's truck towed, saying it was an abandoned vehicle. He did that three times in one week. He pulled my hummingbird feeder off a branch of his tree that hangs over my yard, broke it to pieces, and threw it on my patio. He smashed the hood of housepest1.0's car and ripped the Honda logo off of it. Let all the air out of the tires of my car when I had parked it in front of my house. Among other things...

I still have nightmares about Forest biting the kid. For months after I played the incident over and over in my mind, wondering what I could have done to prevent it. And I remember driving Forest home after. He was sitting in the back seat and he put his head on my shoulder and refused to move it even if I tried to shove him back. When we got home he wouldn't leave my side and would run after me if I broke contact with him.

I had to drive him to a shelter the day after he bit the kid, where they quarantined him to make sure he didn't have rabies. When we were driving there I think he knew. He put his head and front paws in my lap the whole ride there, which he had never done before when we were driving around.

The night before he was put to sleep I went over to my neighbor's house to hang out with Forest one last time. He crawled into my lap (as much as he would fit into my lap, anyway) and stayed there until I left. I finally left because I couldn't stop crying. It wasn't just because Forest was going to get put to sleep. It was the whole shit situation.

Oddly enough, the kid that got bitten was also named Frankie.

I was advised by my insurance company, who settled the lawsuit, not to get a dog. I have a cactus instead. His name is Gunter. He hasn't bitten anyone. Yet.

Kandy S, better rehire your lawyer

This total cunt knocking twat of a human being hit Jake 2 October 2008. At the scene of the accident she gave me her insurance card. It wasn't until I got home and contacted my insurance company that I found out she didn't have insurance.

A month later I was contacted by my insurance company because Kandy had hired a lawyer who contacted them. They told to get an estimate on fixing Jake. I was on the road so I asked my house pest 1.0 to make my car available to the agent. The stupid fuck nut left my car parked in a zone where they ticket, even though I reminded him to move my car, so I ended up getting a $25 parking ticket. HP1.0 said he would pay it, but didn't, so the cost of the ticket ended up being $40, with a late fee, that I had to pay.

The cost to fix Jake was $500.03. I sent the estimate in to the lawyer, as requested via a letter he sent me. I should have known, after calling them 5 times to make sure they got my paperwork, that things were not going to go smoothly. I got another letter saying I needed to get the car fixed, and show the bill as paid, before the matter could be considered further. I got Jake fixed and sent the bill to the lawyer.

Then...nothing.

So I called my insurance company back to see if they could do something to help me. No, they said, because I didn't file a claim with them, because the cost of the repair was equal to my deductible. Because Kandy had not done enough damage to my car, I was basically on my own instead of having an insurance lawyer following up on the accident.

So I started a phone call campaign to the lawyer's office. I called every day, assuring them that I would continue to call until the lawyer talked to me. He finally took my call, after 3 weeks, and said he was contacting Kandy, and would let me know in a few days what was happening.

I waited. A week went by. No word from the shit bag lawyer.
I guess shit bag and lawyer are redundant terms so I could have just said lawyer.

I called again. This time the receptionist told me that the lawyer was out of town. She couldn't tell me when he'd be back. The next day I got a letter from his office saying he no longer represented Kandy.

I was livid. I called the office and asked for her home address and contact information. They wouldn't give it to me. I researched her on line and found out that, although there was no address listed, she had an account on linkedin. I contacted the place where she said she worked on linkedin and they said no one by that name worked there. I'm not sure if they were lying or not, but I decided I was going to track Kandy down if I had to hire a professional investigator.

I paid $4 to have a search run on her on ussearch.com. The results were shit. I knew they knew she had an address in Denver, but it wasn't listed on the report they sent me. When I inquired how to get the Denver address they said I would have to pay additional money ($20) to do a further search. I was like I don't think so fucko. So I sent them an email saying I wanted my money back. They refused to refund it, so I called them on the Denver bullshit. I've been wrangling with customer service for a week. I got an email from them today with her Denver address without having had to pay additional money.

Further, I've requested a copy of the accident report from Denver PD. The bitch is going down. I've researched how to sue her in small claims court, which I am going to do as soon as I get the accident report. A sheriff will soon be knocking on her door to serve her papers.

The reason I am so pissed is that she hit my car, then lied to me about her insurance, then sent me on a wild goose chase with the lawyer, and has had no repercussions for her actions. If she had been honest with me at the scene of the accident, or contacted me to explain why she wasn't going to pay for my car, honestly, I would have written it off. But now, no. I don't even care if I don't recoup a dime from her. At least I will know that my judgement is sitting on her credit report for at least the next 7 years. Every time she tries to do anything that has to do with money, she's going to think of me. Fucking cunt.

And if I do get my money back, I'm going to donate it to a school fund that helps buy books for public schools, on the off chance that the reason Kandy is such an irresponsible, stupid lying asshole of a human being is that public education failed her.

The moral of the story is never piss off a jew. We're vengeful.

Hott Tomato

The story of what happened the night I got a concussion in St. Maarten...

After Rita and I had dinner at Mezzanotte's we headed back to our hotel. We were trying to figure out what bar we were going to go to. We were tired of the resort bars and we were also trying to avoid three Canadian guys, one of whom bit me on the head before cutting off one of my corn row braids. The other two guys were nice, but boring.

There was a close bar that we could have gone to, but our new friend Gus had been thrown out of it the evening before and we decided to never go there again. I can't remember what he did, but I think it involved taking his clothes off. Anyway, we decided the best course of action would be to find a bar that was far enough away that the Canadians couldn't find it and that there was little chance that Gus had been thrown out of it.

We went into the lobby and found the resort driver, a tall guy from Jamaica (I think he was about 6'4"). We had met him three days before when we were walking back to the hotel from Cupisco beach (about 3 miles from the hotel). As we were walking down the side of the road we saw a bus coming towards us, and then the bus turned around, and then pulled up next to us. A guy with dreds was yelling something but we couldn't hear him. I was like "Rita, do you think the bus guy is trying to kidnap us?" We were debating running when suddenly we recognized the bus driver as an employee of the resort. He gave us a ride back to the hotel and that's when we became friends with him, and he would drive us where ever we wanted to go.

At this point it was about 1030 at night. Rita and I were a little buzzed. We asked the driver to take us to a good bar. We were both somewhat dressed up so he decided to take us to Hott Tomato, the coolest bar on the island. We asked him to come get us around 130 and went into the bar.

There we were assaulted by Germans who kept buying us champagne. They tried to talk to us even though they didn't speak English and we didn't speak German. We moved from a table to the bar, thinking that they would lose interest if we were not as geographically close to them. Plus, the bartender was hot. His name was Christian.

As soon as we sat down Christian handed us two drinks. We were puzzled as we hadn't ordered drinks yet. Christian said a guy bought them for us and pointed to a corner of the bar where a guy who could have been John Lennon's twin brother was sitting. "He's a famous artist" Christian said when Rita commented on his looks. We were like great, a famous artist bought us drinks and we tipped our drinks to him to say thanks.

After settling on my bar stool I had kicked off my sandals and had my feet resting on a rung of the bar stool. I was sipping my drink, flirting with Christian, and starting to have fun when I suddenly felt pressure on my foot. Then Rita screamed. I looked down at my feet and saw the John Lennon artist guy examining my sole.

I pulled my foot out of his hands. "What in god's name are you DOING?" Rita asked him. "I am an artist" he said. We were like "We know". And then he said "She has beautiful feet. I want to sculpt them".

At that comment Rita started laughing so hard she almost fell off her bar stool. My feet are ugly. They're wide with strange looking toes. And back then I was running 6 miles a day at least, so all my toe nails were either missing or in various shades of grey black. I started laughing too, but that's because my feet are ticklish and he was caressing the bottom of my foot. I looked at Rita and she said "Oh, let him rub your foot. He did buy us drinks." There's a reason she gave me the nickname Bait.

After a few more seconds of having my feet man handled, and Rita laughing at me while taking pictures, I pretended I had to go to the bathroom. I gave Rita a signal to meet me outside on the beach, where Hott Tomato had tables set up. The tables were all empty because it had been raining lightly on and off all evening. I figured we could sit out there by ourselves and not be harassed anymore by the bizarre patrons of the bar.

Christian brought us drinks, and that's when Rita looked over at the parking lot and noticed that our bus driver was sitting in the bus. So we went over to the bus. "I thought you were going back to the hotel" Rita said. He told us he couldn't because he was off work and as soon as he went back he'd have to turn in the keys for the bus. He had been dozing in the driver's seat waiting for us.

We were like "You can't wait here in the bus. Come into the bar with us." He protested but Rita doesn't take no for an answer so he reluctantly followed us into the bar. There was dead silence as we walked in with him. And that's when I noticed, hey, there's no black people in here.

We sat outside on the beach and bought our driver drinks. It started raining so we went inside and cleared out a whole section of the bar because apparently some Europeans are afraid of black people. I don't remember too much about the rest of the evening except that Christian grabbed me during a tango and pulled me up on a table to dance.

Shit, now I remember. That's why Gus got thrown out of that bar. He was trying to dance on a table and broke it.

The driver took us back to the hotel around 330 in the morning. Christian showed up at our hotel room a few minutes later. I didn't know what to do so Rita was like "Oh, just go for a walk with him". So we went for a walk, albeit a short one, from my hotel room to a secluded hot tub on the beach. We got in and he started trying to kiss me. I was like "dude, what are you doing" and he was like "I want to make love to you". So I was like "do you seriously think I'm going to sleep with a guy I just met?" and he said "we're sitting in a private hot tub and you're in your underwear". Good point. But I decided it was time to put on my dress and go to sleep, so I told him good night and went back to my room.

I should mention that Rita and I had to catch a noon flight, and here it was 5 in the morning. Plus, I hadn't called my boyfriend the whole week because I was busy flirting and kissing random guys in bars, and I thought maybe I should give him a call so he couldn't say later in a fight that I hadn't called him my whole vacation.

Ech. I called him and left an unintelligible message on his voice mail.

Well, you know how the rest of the story goes. I ended up with a concussion.

Here's a pic of Christian, me, one of the Germans, Rita, and our driver. I told you he was tall.