Doll-A-Day 188: Gene in The King's Daughter Plus a really lousey story

    First of all, WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?! All summer The Selfish Giants, otherwise known as The Neighbors From Hell have been laying low. They haven't caused any trouble yet, so I have been over here waiting for the other shoe to drop, as the expression goes. Well, it finally dropped, but off of someone else's foot! The crabby neighbors on the other side have reared their ugly heads. Regular readers will know how hard I have been working on the vegetables I planted this summer. I have been watering and weeding and moving plants around like crazy. I had 8 or 10 stalks of corn that were 2 or 3 feet tall on the other side of our previous garage, (which we tore down last summer.). Yesterday I went out to check on them, only to find that they had been weed whackered down! Ken confronted the neighbor and was told he, (the neighbor, not Ken.), had cut them down because they 'looked disgusting'. Whaa??!! What looks disgusting about an innocent row of corn stalks? They were growing on our property too, so I don't care what they looked like, you can't cut them down! They were growing on a little foot and a half strip of dirt we own, beside the 2 or 3 feet of dirt they own, on the side of the house they never even come on except to mow that narrow strip of grass. They don't even have windows that overlook it. And there is a piece of fence at the start of it where their front yard ends and they fenced off the side from their front  yard. (And I might add that, all these years, there has been a piece of fencing that comes across from their property and was nailed TO our garage, which kept people from walking through that thin strip between their house and our garage.Obviously the previous owners of their house and this house managed to coexist rather well and worked together.) Ken asked what the guy was going to do to make amends. The guy said he would come up with something by the weekend. Today he came with two packets of corn seed. Yeah. That's going to make up for all the labour of digging and watering and weeding and all the time the stuff had been growing. That seed might not even grow by next year, and I certainly can't get anything by planting it this late in the year. What a stooge. I really can't stand that guy. I already couldn't stand him and his obnoxiously loud giant truck. (He ran their drain pipe under their fence and made it come out on our side. So it pours water and washes the dirt from the slight rise--the ground is higher than the driveway---out into our driveway. When I told him he would have to move it, he didn't even look at me or acknowledge that I was speaking. I waited. Finally I said, "I'm talking to you." "I hear you." He never did anything though, and I told him a second time. In the end I got tired of it and filled the pipe with dirt and rocks and buried it under rocks so I didn't have to look at it.Did I mention that I really can't stand that guy?
  Today's doll is one Ken bought me recently for a present,Mother's Day,I think. (Mother's Day is a couple of months after my birthday, and my presents for both were scattered over a couple of months, so I'm getting confused.) She's Gene in The King's Daughter.

Yeah, that's supposed to be her castle in the background. Don't make fun of me.

Since Gene is supposed to be a movie star, her doll titles are movie titles.

Would have been a great picture if it hadn't been for that stupid chair leg in the background.

But somehow trimming it out doesn't make it better.

The box to this Gene is much bigger than the normal Gene box, so it kind of gives the impression that the doll is bigger too. She's not though. I can see that the box might be wider, because her dress is huge. It didn't need to be so much taller though.

There's lots of nice detail to the dress.

I wasn't sure about this hairdo though. It looks like the king's daughter had a rough night. She's got a bad case of bed head.

Is anybody else getting Gillian Anderson out of this picture?

The hair is actually supposed to look like this though. I'm warming to it.

At least she's a red head.

 I feel like this doll should have elbow joints. She just needs to be able to grab that skirt and hitch it up and run. (Of course, the running would require some extra stuff too...)

Her choker, which is just a satin ribbon with a snap on it, kept turning around.

It's a shame her shoes don't show, because they are really nice. My camera didn't want to focus on them,so this is the best you get.

Gene is the creation of Mel Odom, and sold by Ashton Drake.

The latest Gene has a different look. She's more modern looking. I prefer the original Gene.

That's it for today. See you tomorrow.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

  I wrote earlier this summer about my crazy neighbors and how they were making my life miserable. That was a lot of my summer. Our garage was in bad shape, so we had to take that down.

This is what a two car garage looks like when you cut it up and stack it neatly (sort of.).

  Fuzzy nearly got his throat slit undoing the garage door. Apparently you have to unhook something to loosen the tension before you undo the spring...or something. I had been freaking out, telling him to get his head out of the garage door before something happened. But of course, he's 18, so he just said, "Everything's FINE." and went on. The next thing I know he's in the kitchen with blood pouring out of his jaw.SEE?! Why does nobody listen to me?! Ken took him to the emergency room and he got stitches. He had a couple of nicks in his neck too, and it chills me to think that if the cuts on his neck had been as deep as the ones on his jaw he would probably have bled to death before we could have gotten him down the street to the hospital.
  Ken also kept trying to take the garage down from INSIDE it. Who is that crazy? I was in a constant state of nerves until the thing was down.
  Anyway, now that the garage is down I have to look at even more of my neighbor's ugly fence, (That thing looks like it belongs behind a convenience store.)AND their stupid sign:

  'No leaning'. I like to go out in the yard and do this...

Danny Kaye defying gravity in "Wonder Man".

...and there's not a thing they can do about it!
  Seriously, what is the deal with that sign? I mean really. Did they think I was going to squeeze behind my garage, in the foot and a half between the garage and their monstrosity...I mean fence...with my nose to the fence---because that's the only way I could have read that sign. They have another sign on their front gate...the one with the padlock on it...which says '...and do not touch the fence'.Why do they think I have an obsession with touching their fence? Personally, I was glad they put it up, (Apart from the fact that they jumped the property line. But we won't go there. They will, but we won't.), because then I didn't have to look at them, or even pretend to be friendly. ("We hope you don't hate us." Well then why do you do so many things to MAKE me hate you?) I just want to ignore them, and have them ignore me,but they keep making that impossible.I mention the padlock because of it's weirdity. They bother to padlock that gate, but if you go around to the other side of the house to the driveway, or to the back of the back yard,you can just walk into their yard. (In the picture of the 'garage',that corner of the fence where the sign is, that's where the fence ends. There's no fence around that corner.) So what good does the padlock do? It's SYMBOLIC, obviously. They are locking us out. Like I want in. It's like the American flag they put on the side of their garage, facing us. Not on their house or even where they could see it properly, like a normal person would do. They put it there, kind of AT us, obviously a dig at Ken, who is from England.(Their way of saying 'Limey go home' I guess.)
  Every summer they do something to mess up our whole summer, and then lay low in the winter, feasting on their kill.("Ha ha, we ruined their summer again!")I won't even go into all the stuff they've done, like pouring trash cans full of poison into our yard until they killed the huge rose bush that had been planted in the 1940's, or putting a pile of 'cat food' in our yard (to poison our cat or someone else's?), or throwing glass into the other neighbor's dog pen, and then trying to sneakily feed the dog some 'left over noodles', or stealing a piece of the other neighbor's yard by fencing in an L shaped section by the property line because it's a rental and the people didn't know any better . Gad! For not going into stuff, that's a lot of stuff. All I did was have branches growing in their air space. (Ken questioned how far up the property belongs to them and when it becomes God's.)
  Apart from crazy neighbor problems there were the basement floodings and we're STILL disposing of the garage pieces. (Anybody want some free garage?) I am tired. I need the winter to recuperate.I'll need the strength. There'll be another summer next year...