To Blog or Not to Blog

and now

2010-03-11T14:12:00.000-05:00

we may be kicked out of the office I want to cry.

Why do I find titling my posts the hardest thing to do

2010-03-11T00:53:00.002-05:00

I had a doctor appointment the other day. I don't go to a doctor, rather a nurse practitioner who has been my medical provider for almost 15 years. It was time for a physical so she could keep prescribing for me. Being uninsured, of course the money was a concern but even more than that I didn't want her to see me as I have become.

Never a beauty at the best of times, I have not sunk into old age gracefully. I'm missing teeth, my glasses are held together by wire and tape. I'm fat, frumpy fat. I'm trying to grow out my hair one more time but it's taking forever and I've taken to pulling on it when stressed and that's not to mention the hideous rash spread across both of my lower legs and has been there for nearly two years.

Even worse, if things could get worse, I feel poor. We've never had much money but now I am suddenly aware of all I never had. I'm not talking diamonds. I had one once but we had to sell it to pay the mortgage. I'm talking lights that work (you know what electricians charge), furniture that matches or wasn't picked up curbside. Maybe buying new clothes once in awhile and NOT have to go thrift shopping for anything. I would love to go on one of those art retreats like art and soul but that will never happen. I carry all of that around with me and more piles on me each day. And I was sick for so long with the flu and then an abcessed tooth that I find I have become so very very fragile.

My birthday was a wash. Oh yes we got the snow that I requested and for the first time in years the husband gave me a present of his choosing. Usually I get nothing. This year the sons couldn't even be bothered to WISH me a happy birthday and they managed to avoid the lets all go out to dinner for my birthday dinner, till I gave up. Even a person or two who I thought was my friends and was very indignant last year that the men did nothing for my birthday, did not even wish me a happy birthday this year.

I am now broken. Younger son treats me like I'm something nasty he stepped in. When he speaks to me I hear an unspoken dumb shit at the end of it and definitely do hear the most evident heavy sigh at the beginning of an answer to my questions to him. Simple things like what would he like for lunch? heavy sigh and then some answer. He comes home and says nothing, not even hello. He did make me one cup of tea one of the days I was sick but I think he was just feeling guilty because he brought the sickness into the house.

I'm not laying the blame directly on him. Other things have conspired in the breakage of mine. False friends, useless dreams, pain, disappointment. It's in every line on my face, the slump of my shoulders, the sag of my clothes.

And then I have to go for a physical.

The receptionist was stunned when I had no insurance card to show her. I had to leave the cost of the physical with her as a deposit and then pay the rest once the appointment was over. It didn't matter that I had been going there or 15 years, So I handed over the $200.00. I had no choice. I need my meds. Then the nurses aide who took me back was so sweet and friendly but I didn't want to speak much because she would see those missing teeth of mine.

Well to cut to the chase, Jane (my np) was her usual sweet self. Gave me the scripts I needed and even asked if I'd like something for the abcessed tooth as she and I well knew that I wouldn't be seeing a dentist any time soon. Do you know what dentists charge. Most of all she wrote down that it wasn't a physical but a follow up and that saved me $105 that was mostly sucked up by all the scripts even with Wal-Mart prices. It was a bit of a lift to my spirits but I am too broken to be mended. And since no one reads this blog anyway. I suppose they will not miss it. The broken promises, the false friends, the humiliation, the poverty, the always ready to rescue someone but am never rescued in return..... it is all too much. And I am broken.

PIssing and moaning and feeling sorry for myself.

2010-01-29T00:26:00.002-05:00

I hae been sick for nearly a week and don't feel as if I am getting any better. If I ad healthy insurance I would go to the doc but who wants to pay $100 plus to have someone tell you you're sick and you just have to ride it out?
When I man is sick he gets to piss and moan and lay about the house while when I am sick I am doing data entry from home and was requested to do a load of dished and woken from a nap because some idiot at the office didn't read his computer screen and click on what he was supposed to click on. Nor when a man, ok the Husman is sick I handle it all while all he has done is nudge me to make sure a mailing will go out this week. After a major 400 data entry items today he says he'll print the stuff out tomorrowna dn I don't ahve to go into the office but then he's be calling me in a panic every fifteen seconds dso I might as well just bite the bullet.

He tells me not to talk and save what voide I have and then spends the evening asking me questions.

He was making younger son's lunch so I didn't get my germs all over the food but I had to stand there in the kitchen instructing him as to how to make a sandwhich (I AM NOT KIDDING) and then raged at me with hate on his face that I was making him look like and idiot. Sorry honey you did that long time ago.

I post on facebook and my posts are ignored. I sent out over 30 Christmas cards got 3 in return. Not even one from someone who is supposed to be a friend. Same friend expects me to remember her birthday but can't be troubled to send me a card on mine, even after we discuss it days ahead.

I am not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. I'll take the express lane please. I just feel lost and lonely and under appreciated and if it wasn't for the dogs nd older son I would feel unloved. Older son has been doing the dinne and younger one actually gave me some meds and a cup of tea. Rocco watched eorriedly as I vomited and Olllie does silly Ollie things to make me laugh.

Yeah yeah I know pity poor me when there are people with real troubles but lie inside my skin for a bit and see how well it fits.

still sick

2010-01-27T00:46:00.002-05:00

and my coughs are no longer sounding even human. I am amazed at the sounds that come out of my mouth when I try to cough. Just try not to cough when your body insists on it. My throat and chest are sore and tonight is the hot vaporiser and vapo rub. I have little to no voice and what I have sounds like Bob Cat goldthwaite or some tween boy who is coming into his grown up man voice. Squawks, honks and bellows. The good thing is that I can't go to work because I can't answer the phone but I can do the data entry at home.

I also got a birthday present I ordered for myself in today. 8 pounds of Turkish Delight. After that another present to me can be a pair of jeans in a larger size.

During my harking, hacking and honking fit earlier today it nearly strangled me and so into the bathroom I ran losing my lunch. Poor Rocco the wonder dog had no idea what the hell was going on but he was right there by my side, forehead all wrinkled and worried about Mommy. Sometimes his devotion can be rather touching. I just wish I was a good enough person to deserve it.

Oh one more thing

2010-01-26T07:05:00.002-05:00

We've already started the litany of he wants to do something for my birthday but it's hard to think of something and he just wants me to let him off the hook. I told him last year that I don't want to hear the "I wish I did something better for your birthday" song because going by past years he DID NOTHING so anything should be an improvment.

I do not understand men

2010-01-26T06:35:00.002-05:00

even though I am surrounded by them. I especially do not understand the Husband.
I am sick. I've been sick since Friday and am getting worse. The husband was all...I'll take care of the meals this weekend only to have him complain yesterday morning that it was an expensive thing to do. He told me to stay home from the office yesterday but as soon as he got in the door last evening I was scolded with a list of all that MUST BE DONE by me because he refuses to do anything connected with the computer because he is the Grand PooBAH and computer stuff is left to the likes of me. I'm not asking him to assemble a computer, or program it or any such nonsense. I'm asking him to open the book of all KNowledge, that holds all the proceedures for things done about the office and DO IT. I'm sicker than I have been since Friday but I MUST go into the office today. I have no idea if it'll be raining or if the office will have heat but Imust go because he WON'T learn how to use the computer,for, if he does all the other Grand Poobahs will come along and strip him of his Poobahness.

At the office I could be scarfing down a lunch while still inputting my data entry or writing contracts or checking court records while the pile of work at my elbow is ever growing. And then the phone rings and my work comes to a screeching halt because not only can Grand Poobahs not use the computer but heaven forbid should the owner of the company answer his own phone despite the fact that he claims we are partners. I guess I'm the computer doing, phone answering partner.

Oh and what is the Grand Poobah doing at this time? Maybe faxing something which means he has to sit at the computer while the fax feeds through the printe/scanner/fax AND play solitaire. I didn't know that solitaire is what makes faxes fax. Must be in the Grand Poobah book of life that I didn't get.

I hate the job. I hate it I hate it I hate it! I am trapped in an office with a Grand Poobah that has to vocalise every nit picky trivial nonsenseical thing that wanders through his head. But should I speak out of turn, I get the stinkey fish eye ans am silenced.

I'e had all of two hours sleep and am groggy and since I haven't washed my hair since who knows when I will have to ewash it to go to the office. I wonder what it takes to get pneumonia?

But the Grand Poobah's moment of the Greatest Poobahness occurred yeaterday morning. I had just finished hacking up a lung which robbed me of my voice and made my head throb and the Grand Poobah looks at me and asks me what I did with the salad dressing. Did he look in the fridge? NO. Or down in the cabinets in the basement? NO. He thought he'd ask me because this way he doesn't have to think of the answer for himself. Why of course let me do your thinking for you. At least thoughts will get thunk.

One more thing. Never ask the Grand Poobah to make the son's lunch because the instructions fluster him when I go too fast and I had to stand in the kitchen hacking up a lung against the sleeve of my shirt trying Not to spew my germs around which is why I askd the Grand Poobah to MAKE the lunch, while he needed to be directed with turkey on white with mayonaise and when I hinted that there should be more than one slice of lunchmeat on the bread he turned on my with hate in his eyes and tole me to stap making him feel stupid. Hey buster I know how to make a sandwhich and YOU asked for MY help.

The office is going to be a real pipsidoodle today. I can feel it.

BTW, anyone need a lung, I have one right here freshly caught.

Tra la

2010-01-19T21:41:00.002-05:00

Things I've noticed.

Those E Harmony commercial where the woman says that as I business owner she needed someone else to find her Mr Right. Take a look at her "business" when the commercial comes on again. She has a metal belt hanger affixed to one wall with stringy looking necklaces on it and across from that is a rack of dresses EXACTLY ALIKE!!! Not to mention ugly as well. What in God's name does she do all day that keeps her so busy. Perhaps she first arranges the blue denim dresses by size, then by color and then by price and then starts all over again. I really do hope for her sake this isn't the interior of her business but some poorly done set used to make the commercial. At least she isn't as bad as the Lee guy in another dating commercial. He looks like he'd bite the heads off chickens and then kiss his wife with beheaded chicken on his breath.

I picked up a paperback mystery at the library... yes, I do read, and part way through wondered if the publishing houses even bother with proofreading any longer. I'm thinking they might just use spell check instead. You'll see aim where it should say I'm and the like. Well this book didn't stoop to something so prosaic. Let me set this up.

The main character was a 80 something ex English teacher who's fortyish, new mother daughter in law lived across the street. Daughter in law is taking the old biddy someplace and the old biddy is shocked that the DIL is wearing a track suit to go to their book club. Less than half a dozen lines later the DIL is answering the cell phone and rubbing a spot out on her skirt, while driving. I guess DIL somehow changed clothes while she was driving as well. But wait... old biddy EX ENGLISH TEACHER you have to remember that say BETWEEN Aletha, Kitty and Erma she's get some good gossip. AAAGGGGHHHHHHHH AMONG YOU MORON AMONG. You can only between two people and among more than two. Good god.

And the wandering apostrophe is back showing up on a dog treat package as KABOB'S. Is it Kabob is or something that the Kabob possesses? You would think that someone in the kabob factory would have mentioned that maybe the apostrophe wasn't quite necessary but maybe this apostrophe was a feral one who just showed up at the factory door and slipped in before anyone spotted it.
NOw I'm not claiming to be the brightest bulb. I finally understood that commercial for Kay Jewlers and their "Every Kiss begins with Kay." slogan. Duh. Can I redeem myself by knowing that a Hippo is NOT a predator? And that adverbs usually have an ly at the end? Oh and I never named either of my sons Toto or Prince or any of the other weird names I run across while doing data entry. And that the Norse god of snow is Ullr (tho I have no idea how to pronounce it.)

What's with

2010-01-11T23:38:00.002-05:00

the weird comments lately? Things about boots and what not. Does someone actually think that I would go buy Ugg boots because an Ugg Boots pimp sent me a comment telling me to? Ha! They didn't reckon with me and my keen brain... I know why they named them UGG boots cause they are UGGly. I could make people sign in when they want to comment but why? If I don't want people commenting on what I'm doing or to read my blog then why put it out there in the first place. HInt hint.
Lttle dog Ollie and Rocco the Wonder Dog love the cold weather. With Ollie's tumor removal last month the vet shaved his back end and now he resembles a little lion and the more snow he can roll in and the more snow he can bring into the house the better he likes it. Rocco just gallops, grinning from ear to ear, leaping into the air, stopping dead and taking off in an instant in another direction. Right now however, he's asleep and snoring. Even wonder dogs get tired out.
Most mornings when we go into the office we have no heat and I wear my coat until after noon. There's a switch to be thrown and the guy in the next office never bothers to do so when he comes in before us. We ave a portable heater in the office that eventually warms the place up but my feet get so cold, I'm afraid my toes with break off and rattle around in my shoes like marbles.
The husband is on a diet. His doctor wants him to lose 20 pounds in hopes that it can head off the diabetes he is developing. I have a doc appointment in March for a physical and the price of it makes me want to scream. I mean $400.00 for a physical? But if I want my meds and I can't sleep without them.... off to the doc's I go.
Boring year so far and I hope it stays that way. Fingers crossed.

Oh and I did a naughty but it wasn't my fault because I never set out to do the nauty but it does make me want to laugh. Ok cackle like a deranged idiot.

2010-01-03T23:13:00.003-05:00

Whew survived 2009

2009-12-31T10:46:00.002-05:00

So far.
It's been a helluva year and I can't believe I made it through.
Our house is still our house but it is still a schedule.
The husband is diabetic, we just found out, and now I have to learn a whole new way for him to eat because, even before this when we are at a restaurant and the server asks him what he wants he always looks to me as if I was carrying his brain around in my pocket. In truth most of the time he doesn't know WHAT he does or doesn't like. So now I'll be factoring diabetes into all of that....sigh.

Since I am trying to hold myself together I just look at the day before me and no further than that. I make no resolutions because I Know I would never keep it and who needs one more thing to fail at?

Enough of the serious crap.

We were in an amish market the other day and over the loudspeaker came a voice saying that they needed a mop and a muppet at the bakery. I assumed that they would take one of the hairier muppets because, really, how much liquid could Kermit suck up. And with kermit being a frog wouldn't he be wet to start with? So I'm standing there thinking maybe Grover or Animal
when the husband realizes that I had gone off on one of my flights of fancy and leans over and asks me what I heard. Seems they didn't need a mop and muppet at the bakery, they only needed a mop and bucket. Talk about bursting my balloon. I was all ready to watch muppets at work but buckets at work are no fun.

Fibro can be fun!

It snowed again last night. Not much but enough to make things white. I just hope no rain follows because our basement flooded last week and we do not want to do that again.

The flood, in its way was funny. The water came in through the basement door when the drain froze over. Older son said he was laying in bed half asleep when he heard little dog splashing his way toward him and then whine at him to wake up. Seems that Little Dog Ollie came to tell older son that we had had a flood. Both sons were furious, of course, to start but by the middle of the day, I'd hear the younger son yell "Marco!" And the other son answer "Polo!". They were on the look out for the Loch Graff monster, talked about fishing and while they did lose some things, they have bounced back well. Even the curmodgeon son.

Little dog Ollie scared us with butt tumors. How come I had never heard that an un=neutered male dog could develop such tumors? Little dog Ollie is 12 but has never acted his age. Since we had him neutered and the tumors removed, he's a spicy little buster who has reverted to puppyhood. Talk about spit and vinegar. He and Rocco the Wonder Dog love playing in the snow. Rocco put his head down and plunges forward like a snow plow with Ollie leaping along behind him much like a dolphin in the ocean. Its hysterical watching the two of them and heaven help any other dog or truck that thinks just because there is snow that the hounds of hell are slacking off. Nope plowhead and leaper are on the job raising hell.

Guess that's it for now. Happy New year.

Doing the math

2009-12-14T23:25:00.002-05:00

Let's see. I was born in 1952. I am 4 years older than my sister. That means that her birth year is 1956. Mmmm let's see. .. 1952 plus 4 equals 1956 so how come my sister claims, on Facebook, that her birth year is 1958? This is the sister that my mother never let me forget graduated highschool in the top 2% of the state. So here is my question. Is she just an idiot or is she lying about her age and if she is lying about her age....FOR GOD'S SAKE REALLY LIE ABOUT IT AND TAKE OFF TEN YEARS OR SO an not just a niggling 2. If she is the smart one, then there is no hope for me.

On a lighter note I came home to discover a nacho bake that my son was doing so I didn't have to even think about dinner. It was delicious as always.

\I worked more on my Christmas cards and am covered with glitter and now I have to figure out who gets my ah hem masterpieces. I would send a homemade one to my sister but after the 1956 fiasco I wonder if she is allowed to handle glitter.

And speaking of glitter, here's a Rocco the Wonder Dog story.

When Rocco was just a mere pup he had the tendency to come into my craft room, pick something out and carry it into the hallway where he destroyed it. One night I come out of the craft room to find the hallway glittered with that thick kind of glitter no one uses much anymore and which I didn't even know I had and there was goofy faced Rocco in the middle of it, covered with it and grinning his big goofy grrin as if to tell me that he CAN craft without thumbs. It's kinda hard to get mad at a dog with glitter on his nose. He's gotten better and no longer steals craft stuff but that's because I always try to have something safe in the house for him to chew. In fact right now he's laying on the bed with me and I see glitter on his butt and he wasn't even IN the craft room tonight.

Hey if I'm four years older than my sister (who is now th spitting image of my mother right down to the punish Sharon for something she doesn't know she did part) and she was born in 1958, then that means I was born in 1054 and am two years younger than dirt. Woopie!

And on that note I say goodnight.

Oh. I have Christmas cards looking for a home if anyone wants to drop me their address

ho ho hum

2009-12-14T01:21:00.002-05:00

I finally got the tree up, no thanks to the dogs who thought that since I was on the floor trying to sort branches that it meant they could crawl into my lap and stay there. Little dog Ollie fits nicely but Rocco the wonder dog is so big, he doesn't actually gets into my lap, rather stands over my lap and refuses to budge until I lull him into a drooling lump by rubbing his chest. And speaking of Rocco the wonder dog... His gorilla girlfriend Eloise Matilda has another fan, our black cat chloe who now sleeps curled up on Eloise Matilda, who, being a gorilla, is black as well. So Rocco the Wonder dog comes trotting down the hallway one night and his butt is even with Eloise Matilda when Chloe reaches out and snags him. Talk about a dooley. Rocco nearly jumped out of his skin. I wonder if he thought Eloise Matilda was getting back at him for all those humping parties he dragged her to. It's hard trying to explain to the dog what happened when you are laughing so hard you have to pee.

So, the tree is up and I wonder when it got so triangular. This is a tree we've had forever but I don't remember it being so... so... perfectly triangular and the tree topper that I thought would be so perfect a match to the gaudy garland and the clay covered balls basicly makes the tree look like it's wearing a dunce cap. So I thore gaudy crap around the base of the topper turning it into a birthday hat. Sheesh.

And I worked on making my Christmas cards. I had a brilliant idea... or so I thought that looked like crap when I made one and so scrapped that and started over. I have my elements ready and now have to assembled them and the comes the hard part of figuring out who I'm sending to. I think I got a total of three cards last year. I gotta get some friends but haven't a clue as to how to go about it.

Christmas shopping is done only the husband wants to spend more, except he doesn't hae an idea what he wants to buy the sons. I say why not let it stand where it is now when only $1 separates the total of one son's gifts from another? Besides I hate shopping and cannot face another store.

Speaking of stores and shopping, I went out last Tuesday and I swear the selections looked like I was in the stores the day after Christmas when everything was picked over and gone. I was in Target and kohls and Kmart and it all had that weary bare shelf look. I wonder if the stores got one shipment of stuff for the holidays and that is it. I did overhear employees of a dollar store discussing the fact that they weren't going to be getting any more Christmas stock in. And this was on December 8. Well I guess when Halloween stuff has to shift over to make room for Christmas stuff what can you expect. I suppose I'll be seeing choclate Easter bunnies in January.

The husband keeps asking what I want for Christmas and what I would really like is for him NOT TO ASK ME A SINGLE QUESTION for one whole day. Sometimes I think the man found a stash of question marks somewhere and thinks he has to use them all before they grow stale. I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't think that I have to answer him. Working all those years in a library has left me unable to let a question remain unanswered. Or if when I did give an answer the husband would file it away in his head instead of asking me the same question two and three times. He says it's easier to ask me than to take the time to think if he already knows the answers. A few of today's gems were. Can you vacuum up artifical tree needles? Is it raining? Is there anything in the dryer? And my all time favorite 'What is this?" That last question is usually asked when I am a) out of the room b) with my head stuck in the oven/ornament box/grocery bag and my butt in the air c) or when whatever he's looking at is so small I couldn't see it if it were under my nose. I also like, 'are their clothes in the dryer?" When I haen't benn in the laundry room for days and is this milk bad. HInt.... milk doesn't usually have lumps. Some days I get peppered with 15 plus questions before lunch and am only able to finish answering a thrid of them, before aother question comes my way, trips me up and sets my feeble braincells along another path.

I wonder where I could get a supply of declarative sentences for him? Cedtainly not in Target or Kohls or Kmart... those shelves are sad.

This that and other stuff

2009-11-28T00:58:00.002-05:00

Another feast has come and gone and I am ever thankful for oldest son. It seems that he and I can pull a meal together with little fuss or high drama, as if we share a brain. Our kitchen is very small but we move about as if our movements are choreagraphed. ANd, as always, we are forever thankful that dinner was just us, not to mention a few neighbors dropping in, and not some dreadful slog to someone else's house. I have never understood why Thanksgivings at my sister's house was always fraught with danger and high drama. Dear sweet jesus, the gravy is THIN!! The mushrooms need garlic and where are the rolls. Oh dear mother of god! When really what needed praying over was the turkey cooked in a paper bag. ????!!!!!!!!
For some reason my mother and sister thought the only way to cook a turkey was in a paper grocery bag. Even worse, my sister was convinced that when the turkey was brown, it was done and ignore that little button there, that's only for decoration and it doesn't tell you that the turkey is done because the turkey is brown and when it is brown it's done, just ignore the red juice running out of it and the pink meat..... the skin is brown and SO THE TURKEY IS DONE!! But, my god, the gracy, the rolls, the humanity.
It just wasn't bloody turkey meat the year we called it the thanksgiving of the salad since I wouldn't allow my men to eat bloody turkey and my sister refused to let me nuke it. So we had the salad I brought, lumpy potatoes my mother was so proud of because they were real, and our tablespoon of gravy because, well, we were lucky to even HAVE gravy, thin as if was. The best part of those meals was the high drama. My sister and her husband always yelled at each other and then at their sons to come in and eat, while my mother plopped those semi mashed potatoes on my husband's plate announcing for the 10th time that they were real and not out of a package with a stinky fish eye to me because... shudder.... I make mashed potatoes out of a package because I couldn't decently mash a potatoe if my life depended on it. So sister and husband would stop shouting at each other while the rest of us raced through the meal before the the shouting would start again and then suddenly it was over and we had to clean up and put everything away. No offer of any other food for the rest of the day and into the night and when we got home we were hungry. I guess that serve dus right for wanting our turkey COOKED!
When oldest son and I do it, there is no shouting, no drama and lots of left overs. And sooner or later one or another of us will bring up the turkey in a bag and the year of the salad.

My sister hasn't spoken to me since my mother died and she didn't call me until the day before the first viewing AFTER sh called all of the relatives first and then told them NOT to tell me. For the longest time, I thought it didn't matter but now I've decided I won't forgive her. Oddly she has me as a friend on her face book and by her posted pics she is the spitting image of our mother. Don't know why I'm surprised. I think she's been channeling my mother all these years pulling the same nonsense my mother always did.

We have both a ham and a turkey and the sons' friends are welcome to drop in anytime and eat. The kid next door started coming over because he has a very big brother that eats them out of house and home and there was little left. Seems the kid next door has plans to go to mortuary school. Doesn't seem to fit his personality but more power to him. This is the same kid with the Little goatling boy AND I now understand that he raised some baby squirrels and they come when he calls them. I also remember the time when the kid was little and somehow got a bucket stuck on his but and he comes crying down the street heading for home with my youngest son close behind, trying to grab him to get the bucket off.

NO black friday shopping for me unless you count the dollar store. They'd have to be giving things away for free for me to be at a store at 3 am. Why even bother going TO sleep? Ok I'll admit I was slightly tempted only to see what kind of people actually GO shopping at 3 am but my bed refused to release me and so I was forced to sleep all night through. Sigh.

So there it is. My inane ramblings.

I wish you all a turkey NOT in the bag. And a very merry non drama christmas.

stuff

2009-11-08T03:03:00.002-05:00

Today I went to my favorite thrift shop. Somebody stop me the next time I decide to go on a Saturday. What WAS I thinking. I somehow got stuck behind this odd grandmother woman who must have said that she had to get Jordan a pair of antlers about 50 million times. This woman had a kid in a stroller and she repeated and repeated everything until I was ready to scream. This is the same thrift store where the hootie owl woman came up to be half a dozen times to show me the hootie owl thing she found for a friend who likes owls. Holly macaroni I wish someone would take the "talk to me' sign off me because there are times that I don't want to talk to people but fear if I am rude I will be condemned forever in hell with antler grandma and hootie howl woman. Then there was Towanda, a black woman with her hair all up in that crinkly hair top of the heade pony teil which was really rather lovely till she stuck a big god damned fake flower into her updo and walked around with a dozen wreathes hanging from her arm like wreathy bangles.
Then while waiting for the husband to come pick me up... he does Starbucks while I do thrift store... some guy started talking to me about the fact that winter was coming. See... I have got to get rid of that sign. I muslim woman came out of the store with her two kids and headed toward her car and that was enough for the guy to start in on how since she was living in America she should dress like and American while stupid me tired to explain that she dresses that way for religious reasons and that was enough for bigoted guy to go off in some crazy tangent about how them people do have the same god as we do and he hates them all and the reason he hates them is because he served in Nam and knows what those people are like.
HUH??? WHAT??? Did someone move Viet Nam and stick it in the middle of the middle east? When did that happen? And did they ask anyone's permission or just tie a tow rope onto Viet Nam and drag it across cambodia and what not, till the steaming jungles were in the middle of the desert. I think someone would have noticed that. Good thing that the husband drove up about then and saved me from opening my mouth and starting a right old hoo haw. How dare that woman, wear her head covering and leave the store with her two very well behaved children in tow? The nerve!
But you know what disturbed me the most. The idea that this stranger took a look at me and decided I was a hater and he felt totally free in sharing his crap with me. I can't even begin to imagine how hard it must be to leave your country for a brand new one, learn a new language and a new alphabet and try to live your life while dressing in a way that always declares that you are an outsider. Even worse when idiots of your national background think killing is the way to get into heaven. Now that's brave.
Yes I cold have told the bigot what an asshole he was but why bother? It certainly isn't going to change his mind and the woman was out of earshot when he started . I just wonder what it is about me to make him share his views with me. Where is the hootie owl woman when you need her?

Ick

2009-10-21T15:17:00.002-05:00

My back hurts, I have a headache and my toner on the printer just gave out. Which means that the husband asked for the 50th time this week if I have a backup toner. If I had a back up toner would my work have come to a screeching halt? Toner is more than $50 a pop and since we are in danger of losing our house yet again, I buy toner only when I need too. In fact, a new toner should be arriving any time now. It's just that the old one ran out faster than I thought it would. I wouldn't be so agitated but the sun in in my eyes and I have explained the whole overly priced toner thing with the husband I don't know how many times. I Don't know what's worse. Him asking me questions so he doesn't have to think of the answer for himself or me for answering the damn question over and over again. If he can point out every house of every student that he tutored in a 15 year period and it's been seven years since his last session, you'd think he'd remember a password he thought up or the answer to the simplest of questions.

It reminds me of a guy i worked with in the library. He was a library associate and so made more than me. He also was at the branch from the beginning when we all were shelving etc and years into our being there he came over to ask me where the romances were kept. I laughed and played it of as if it was a joke so he wandered away. Another lazy brain, why think of anything when I can ask a lower paid peon.

Sometimes this peon feels like a peed-on.

Random Thoughts

2009-10-20T14:44:00.000-05:00

Why was my F key sticking yesterday and now it's my D key?

How can every city be the most haunted? Really. I love ghost shows and invariably San Francisco, or Salem, or Chicago or wherever claim to be the country's most haunted cities. It's also the same with the most haunted spots. Gettysburg I can see. Ok I can also FEEL Gettysburg. But the Myrtles Plantation with its 2 girl ghosts and one african american slave. Or how about the Winchester mystery house with its ghostly caretaker. How does one ghost make it most haunted? Just because the house was built crazy doesn't mean it's haunted. Just meant the owner was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Baltimore has its share of ghosts. Oldest son felt the one aboard the Constellation and I had my run in in the same cemetary where Edgar Alen Poe is burried though not at his gravesite. Also while the Poe House does not claim to be haunted, it does claim to be possessed. And the dungeons at Ft McHenry.... well, I'm glad they are off limits now. We even have a haunted house in Elkridge. In fact Oldest son's kindergarted girlfriend lived in it an dson often has sleep overs at her house. He was very blase about the whole thing, only telling me he new it was haunted once I mentioned it to him. He even told me where the haunting occurred and it matched with what the book on Maryland Ghosts said.
I am all in favor of ghosts but come on people, every city and every house can't be the most haunted.
Last night i ran across the doozy of them all in a show called Extreme Paranormal.
First of all I don't know how good they were as investigators, mostly because they did not call each other "Dude". Watch american ghost shows and invariably it's 'Dude, this" and 'Dude That'. Then they were doing things with holy water candles and something that resembled tv rabbit ears with electricity sparking upwards like a piece of equipment in Frankensteins lab. But I haven't gotten to the best part. And out of all the ghost shows I have ever seen... I have NEVER seen anything like this.
It seems back in the 18somethings, some guy wandered into the town of Bonito, New Mexico and killed 7 random people before he, himself was gunned down. Then for some reason everyone moved out and the town was flooded and now resides at the bottom of Benito Lake. So now the crazed killer is supposed to haunt the lake. So these guys take this boat out into the middle of the lake AT NIGHT and using some gadget found the deepest point where they think the town would be. As if that wasn't stupid enough, they make some kind of floating circle, star shaped something or other with cups nailed to the boards and a burning candle inside each cup. One of the guys gets IN THE WATER AT NIGHT in the middle of this circle and calls the dead guy while the other two "dudes" go back to shore and build a summoning circle with a ring of fire. So there's one idiot out in the water and two inside the circle with their unmentionables at about falme height when the guy in the water decides he has to go UNDER the water. So the circle guys take him his scuba gear, he gets dressed, goes back into the water and then Frick and Frack go BACK TO LAND leaving the guy IN THE WATER ALONE. They didn't see any ghosts tho the underwater guy managed to speak under waterbut there was a wind on the water that had to be the crazed dead gunman because the wind only blew when they mentioned the crazed gunman's name. Talk about a couple plus idiots. You always scuba with a buddy.
Personally I like the British Ghost Hunting team on the Travel channel. Their most used pieve of equipment is a table and a water glass with marbles comin in a close second. They also ask the spirits nicely and their responses are taps or a whistle and ocassional a returned marble and not once did they have to search underwater. I so love Halloween and all the spooky stuf around it.

Return of the Big Craven Boaby

2009-10-18T12:42:00.002-05:00

Stop right here. Go someplace else. This is not happy, I'm not happy and I'm going to moan and whine. Run Run I tell you. Run for your life.

We lost a client's house. No that's not absolutely correct. It's not as if we put it down someplace and now it is gone. We missed that an auction was scheduled and she never let us know when she got the letters in the mail telling her so. It's part of our contract that they have to keep s informed. I still feel so badly. I can't cry because Prozac won't let me and I was ok till last night but then the fear and sorrow sen it and I did a long sleep which is always a sure sign that I'm falling deeper into my depession. There's nothing we can do about it and since this is the first time this has happened I don;t know how to handle it.

My head has always made me responsible for everything and when something goes wrong it is immediatley my fault. And while I'm busy doing something else my head will suddenly remind me of something 'bad' I once did and the guilt comes in. My 'bad' is not nearly as bad as it could be. It's more stupid things like a lie I told in childhood or if I was rude to someone. My head doesn't remind me of the good I try to do. I suppose because, sinve my bads aren't horribly bad my goods aren't amazingly good.

I head my head. I've needed to call mu doc for a new prozac prescription and now I'm worried that I'll have to have a physical before it is prescribed for me and I cannot afford that.

I really wish I could cry and I wasn't always so scared.

Close but no cigar

2009-10-04T00:05:00.002-05:00

The husband and I went to brunch on Friday and then I went to AC Moore. Part of having our own business, ou can sneak away like this. Anyhow the husband is waiting in the car reading a book. I come bopping out of the store and am settling myself in the car when I look up and who do I spy heading out way? EVIL VOODOO WOMAN! I kid you not. We haven't heard from her since July and not only is she in the AC Moore parking lot when we thought she was living half an hour away but HER CAR WAS PARKED RIGHT NEXT TO THE HUSBAND'S!!!!
Holy crap a needies. I squirched about on me seat and semi whispered to the husband..."Is that Evil voodoo woman (though I did use her name)" he looks up, goggles out the windsheild and the next thing I know we are getting the hell out of dodge. The husband was in such a hurry to get away that he didn;t readjust his seat and so was driving with his tippie toe because that was all he could reach.
Evil Voodoo woman had a dark tan and she looked rather raggedy. She had cut that hair of hers and had drawn on her eyebrows a bit higher and, at first, the husband wasn't certain that it was her...she?... but I knew it was because she was glaring as she headed toward her car. Jeez. I wonder if someone slammed a door somewhere. I think it was her boyfriend who was with her, but he sort of bobbed along in her wake. She didn't look at him or speak to him. But what are the chances that not only would she be in that parking lot but that she would be parked next to us.
It was good seeing her in a way. The husband said she and Mr. Bob Along headed for the new chinese buffet place and things couldn't be that dire for them anymore if they could afford chinese buffet and that he could finally stop worrying about her. Which is good.
Now if we could only get rid of the lebanese woman who has decided that she is going to work with/for us but first she has to dust the whole office because she is allergic to dust and wheat... something she's told us no fewer than two dozen times in a matter of two afternoons. But I am keeping my mouth shut and being good... yes I can be good... and hope this resolves itself without lebanese curses being hurled at our heads. Such is life

Weekend wanderings

2009-09-27T23:51:00.002-05:00

The husband and I went to the free bok place again. I wanted more magazines to tear up and the price is always right. I got the mags and a pile of books that I plan on returning there once I'm finished with them. I did remember to take the empty toner cartridges from the office so that theBook Thing sells to whomever and uses the money for rent and utilities. Again I was amazed at how so many people can wander quietly among the books, selecting carefully when really they could walk out with every thing. Didn't find any spectacular treasures there but on our way in we passed an artist and craftsman store and I just had to stop. It was in a run downish warehouse sort of place but the minute I walked through the doors I was in love. I'm not an artist but I love pretending that I am and so I got a couple of sketchbooks, great bargains, A couple prismacolor pencils, one sharpie and my bargain of the day,fine brushes for detail painting AND with a chunky handle that's great for my sore fingers for.... hold onto your seats... a quarter each. I bought * and could have splurged on the fifty cent ones but the fine ones are what I always need. I've promised myself another visit.
Silly me never realised that we were in the neighborhood of the art institute and we passed another two art stores, that I did not explore. I needed to leave something for another time.
After book thing and the brushes we went for pizza back near home. We love this place and are content to wait while they make our pizza fresh. It was quiet in there and fairly empty but gradually I became aware of a big corner booth behind us. There were 5 young men in this booth, each with a baby or young child. Babies young enough for only baby food and bottles and the young child was just about old enough for a piece of pizza. Just 5 guys, early 20s I thought, hanging out with their kids. And the little ones were so well behaved you didn't know they were there and when one of the daddies (I'm assuming here) went up to get their food another daddy took over, talking to the little one, making them giggle. I have never seen anything like it. It made me want to go up and give each and every one of them a hug. I may be old fashioned,m but I could see a group of young mothers doing something like that but have nev er dreamed that young fathers would step in so readily. And the little ones were eating it up, excuse the pun.
So all in all it was a good weekend that made up for the crappy friday we had. But it's back to work tomorrow. Oh dread.

I gotta get a life.

2009-09-25T12:15:00.005-05:00

Yet another journal page, but can I really call it a journal if I don't leave any room to write? I am a stickler for things being a certain way which is why collage always was so hard for me. I kept expecting things to have a meaning rather than just for decorative purposes.
Which brings me to the internet again and why I have go to get a life. Other than our clients, my husband and the sons I have little or no contact with the outside world and so my view has become internet narrowed and I get all of my interaction from there.
And being as anal as I am, the internet very often bugs me.
Not the internet itself, I know it's not some entity, it it was, it'd probably have a terribly bad breath and a snotty nose and would wear its shorts pulled up to its armpits and black socks with sandals.
There is a memorial site that I visit nightly. Don't know why other than I believe that as long as people remember your name you will live on and so I'd like to think that my
visiting will help someone 'live' on. It's a site that is mostly British and I wonder what the heck they are teaching in British scholls because it certainly isn't spelling, English or Grammar.

Now I know I am a terrible speller and that I should use spell check but if I can't even come close to the correct spelling, spell check is of no use. I know I transpose letters in a word but that's because I'm usually in a hurry.
HOWEVER and it is a big HOWEVER if I were writing up a memorial site I would make certain everything is just so. I wouldn't spell nephew as nefew, your as ur, theirs as theres, think for thing. That's bad enough but I ran across one memorial to a child that was so badly written that it looked almost as if it were a farce. The guy who wrote the memorial using the word nefew also said that when the child died, the post MORTON could give them no reason for his death. The PRESHUSH boy would always be in THEYRE FORTS. The last bit made me think of some game of cowboys and indians along with one of those log forts.

Last night someone wrote that their sister PASTED away. Again my head leads me to somone sitting on the floor with one of those once upon a time jars of paste, the kind with the brush fastened to the inside of the lid. The kind of paste I'm sure most, if not all of us, ate at one time. I wonder if they still make that stuff. Or maybe the sister that pasted away is now a wallpaper hanger on the other side, jazzing up heaven's waiting room with the latest in angelic wallpaper.

I wish I could grab those areful memproials and neaten them up a bit . It's like, when I worked in the library and went to Blockbuster with the kids and it drove me mad that things were not jus in Loose alphabetical order but they hadn't even FLIRTED with the alphabet. I so wanted to alphabetize them but I didn't.

So this is why I need a life. Why I need to get out and among humans, only I don't quite know how to go about it. I used to be funny but that was because I dealt with the public daily. Now it's only the husband, sons and dogs who fill my life and how often can I get away with poking fun at them.

Geez this turned into a pity poor me and I hadn't planned on that at all. Sorry.

2009-09-23T12:55:00.002-05:00

So far this one is my favorite page. You can't see it but the heads have glittered eyes and the spider has a glittered red hourglass on her back to make her a black widow. The die cut spider as well as the die cut creepy house and skull in the other page comes from the die cut Queen, Barbara.

Even better I got in a new Elle magazine yesterday and many of these fashion models will make excellent zombies even WITHOUT me retouching the picture.

I didn't draw the heads, those are from a rubberstamp that I scanned so I could enlarge it.

I do so love halloween, if things turn out ugly it can look as if I meant it that way. No stress collaging.

Internet life

2009-09-22T21:50:00.002-05:00

I am so done with e-bay. Not e-bay itself, mind you. I love e-bay and have a weakness for dollar deals. I carefully bid no more than a buck AND am very careful to click the free shipping button but twice now, once I've won suddenly there is INSURANCE that is required. I won a bracelet for 50 cents AND the insurance was more than the bracelet. I figured maybe I missed it and paid the insurance. So again, when I bid on something else I was very careful about reading the fine print. It was free shipping and handling and the insurance is included IN the shipping and handling only when it came down to it suddenly there is $4 for insurance for a bracelet I paid 9 cents for and since I had plans of taking it apart and doing something else with it I 'won' 2 and yep, the second one has that same $4 insurance. I've already emailed the seller and could kick myself in the butt for not being more vigilant. I'm swearing off my $1 goodies for now and if the seller still wants their insurance money, they can eat it.

I've been a regular reader of Dooce's blog for some time. She now has a hate blog, where she posts her hate mail AND she has monetised it so that other people's hate make her money. So of course I had to go and read it. If the idiot, waving hi!, who thinks I'm stalking her... right, waving high and making that air circle around my temple to indicate crazy... she should read the crap Dooce gets. Gees, if you don't like someone's blog don't read it. And even tho I think that it really isn't all that safe to have her girls pictures on her blog, I wouldn't dream of telling her not to. It is her blog after all

I wonder if I can get my don't like you much e-mailer (I'm far too unimportant to get actual hate mail, mines more dislike e-mailer) to write more often so I can make money on her. Think I have a chance.

I also read the Daily Coyote. Love watching that coyote grow along with his girl dog friend Chloe.

I like face book, only have no idea why my sister added me as her friend. i think it was just a one fell swoop of the address book kind of thing.

Classmates.com says thA TWO whole people signed my guest book in the past month and click here to see who it was and so, Sucker that I am, I click and yes two people DID sign but since I have let my dues lapse, the names are all blurry but if I sign up for the diamond whoopsie doodle package for more than I car to spend, I can SEE who is signing my guest book. Time for the real world to intrude. When I was in highschool I had a polish last name. My classmates as well as most of my teachers couldn't even pronounce Kwiatkowski, let alone spell it and so decades later someone who knows how to spell my name is signing myh guestbook??? Since I was mostly invisible in high school, why would anyone want me visible now. And yes, I sucumbed to the first time I got the look who's lookinf for you email and I recognised only one name and had no clue who the hell the others were.

And I have won the UK Lottery. It said so right in my email. That must be the UK lottery ticket I bought when I was NEVER in the UK. I can't even spell UK I won't need the lottery winnings though because the vice president of Gambia wants me to help him get his money out of Gambia and I will be richly rewarded once I do. Then maybe I could answer the ads for a larger penis or see what hot sexy singles are waiting for me right now. I wonder if Hot Sexy Singles do housework.

I'm not posting a journal page tonight cause I'm on my laptop and the journal pages were scanned at work on the work computer so it'll have to wait till tomorrow. Not that it's art or anything but it livens up the page a bit and since I got my latest Elle magazine with models who only look dead I can really start making halloween pages. Yes, I subscribed to Elle for a ridiculout $6 a year and paid the same for Marie Claire simply to tear up the magazines and pretend to make art.

So that's it for me tonight. I need to google someone's name (waving hi! Quick run and tell) before I go to bed. No, only kidding. I'kk just wait till complacency sets in and them WHAM!!! I came I saw I GOOGLED!

2009-09-21T13:49:00.003-05:00

I'm working on a Halloween art journal and since my blog is so blah looking, I thought I'd post the pages here. And Ta DAH! This is number one.

If you can't beat them...

2009-09-21T13:49:00.000-05:00

DIVERT THEM! I have ants. No not in my pants but in the craft room. To be more specific on the desk in the craft room. The arrive every spring and depart every fall and I'll be damned if I know where they come from. If I saw a trial leading off someplace I could follow it and block it off but no... no trail... no clue... except these teensy weeny pizzy ants as we called them when I was a child. These pizzies crawl all over the desk and all over me and if youo squish one, phew. THEY STINK!

I've boric acided powdered them, I used spray ant kill (phew), Lemon scented linen spray and my old standby spray deodorant. It slows them down, kills some but not enough. It has gotten so bad that I have left the spider who has woven her web In and among storage on my desk alone, even tho I am VERy allergic to spider bites. Anmd still the pizzies keep coming.

BUT U gave come up with a solution of sorts... I spill a bit of soda on a small plate and shove it to the very left of the desk/ The pizzies come along, drink their fill run off with whatever's in their mouth and the never go beyond that plate. I'd rather have them gone but instead of driving myself even more crazy than I am, I now divert them..... and pray for the first frost.

Blue

2009-09-13T21:56:00.001-05:00

Hate Sunday evenings. Always get depressed as if tomorrow it's off to school. Blah.
I swear I'm trying to think of something upbeat but am coming up blank.

I feel as if I've been bullied and misused and wonder why the hell my sister added me as her friend on facebook. She doesn't even like me.

As always.... amazed

2009-09-07T00:23:00.002-05:00

Oldest son and I had a discussion the other day as to whether Rocco the Wonder Dog really IS a wonder dog or are older son and I just more perceptive when it comes to Rocco's 'lamguage'. Older son did the family's grocery shopping the other day and got the dog a variety pack of bones and chews. Since both dogs are picky with their chews, I dumpbed the bag out on the floor and told them to help themselves. Little dog Ollie found what he wanted immediately but Rocco was reluctant. So I'd pick up a ches and offer it to him and with his nose he would push my hand away in a clear, thanks but no thanks. Eventually we found something he wanted but with each and every one that wasn't his choice it was the same thanks but no thanks nudge. If that isn't language I don't know what is.
Now when Older son was just a baby, the Husband often asked me how I knew what it was that Older son wanted when, the Husband had no clue. (I will refrain from any clueless man remarks here). I looked at him as if he had lost his mind and told him that Older son told me. Then when visiting a neighbor across the street with a son three months younger than mine, I was stunned to hear her son speaking. And that's when it hit me. The reason I knew what Oldest son wanted was because he TOLD me only not in english. Through a series of gestures and sounds, he made his own language and taught it to me. Once I got serious tho and made Older son actually tell me in English, did he forget his language and speak so that everyone could understand.
So here's what we're wondering. Do all dogs have a language? Perhaps they are all speaking to us but we don't quite 'get' their language and, as far as I know, there is no Rosetta Stone Language course for canine. Are older son and I unusually perceptive or is Rocco just more verbal than most. Rocco has sounds as well. To the point where Older son knows whent he dog wants the fan on and there's a new game that Rocco asks to play as soon as I come home from work. Ollie isn't nearly as vocal though he has his own language BUT I suspect he gives Rocco the idea of asking for a snack and then Ollie sits back and reaps the rewards.

Oh and that pile of chews that the dogs had to choose from. I never could put them back in their bag because they all disappeared. So far I've found them under the blankets on the bed, under the dog pillow, in one of my shoes, in a half empty Dr Pepper carton and a half a dozen places in older son's room. What especially tickles me is when Ollie hides them in places where Rocco can never go, like under the desk because Rocco is too big and Ollie fits just right. Sometimes it pays to be a little dog.

Maybe we should have named him Stanley Hans

2009-08-26T22:46:00.002-05:00

When Rocco the Wonder dog was a puppy, he lived in this odd puppy store where all the pups were together in pens in the floor and would rollic and frolic and all that stuff puppies do. Rocco the wonder dog was picked on by the other puppies all the time which is why the ex girlfriend chose him. The other puppies wouldn't even let him eat till they were done and so Rocco has a passion for food. Today he has topped all of the weird, watermelon, grapes, broccoli eats of his and not only ate but ASKED for the plate with the SAUERKRAUT on it! And he ate it all! Younger son says that sauerraut keeps you from getting bird flu so I suppose Rocco won't be sprouting feathers any time soon.

When I say that rocco asks, that is just what he does. If he wants something, he gets our attention and then does his damnedest to make us understand what he wants. If it's reachable he butts it with his nose, if not, he stares at whatever it is occasionally shooting looks at us to see if we are getting it or not. Even more remarkable, he won't eat something unless you say he can. I think that the reason why he doesn't steal is that we share things with him, so he knows he'll get it if he's simply charming enough. And for a dog who brings to mind Scooby Doo with those half folded ears, he can be charming. Just ask his girlfriend Eloise Matilda (nee stuffed gorilla).

Rocco eats spaghetti too so I guess the name will stick. Rocco the Wonder dog!

The nicest woman in the world.

2009-08-25T21:52:00.002-05:00

Paying it forward does work even when you weren't planning for it.
Older son is back to laying carpet and he said that, today they met the nicest woman in the world. She gave each of them a bottle of water, made them ham sandwiches for lunch with a beer and at the end of the day gave them each a $10.00 tip. And then older son stopped for a moment and said that it was like me and the guys who installed our pool. I did the same except we had koolaid and I didn't do it for pay back but itis nice to know that sometimes you really do seem to pay it forwARD.

Earlier in the day we were in WalMart ugh and I was looking for a sketch book for myself when I got cornered by a rather flustered mother asking me what a pad of drawing paper was. Huh? Wha? How about a pad of paper that says drawing paper? She wanted to know if it was computer paper, then tracing paper, then news print and I kept trying to help but she wasn;t listening just muttering something about drawing paper. I ade my escape only to have her corner someone else with the question of drawing paper. My answer was there was none since all of that kind of stuff as well as the sketch book spots were empty. This Walmart sucks at stocking their shelves and will probably be out of sketch books etc till after Christmas.
But drawing paper lady is probably like the flying dutchman, forever patrolling the Walmart aisles instead of the seas uttering the plaintive cry of drawing paper, is this drawing paper. A pad of drawing paper.

Sigh

annonymous commenter

2009-08-17T23:56:00.001-05:00

Please tell V how sorry I am to hear about Mollie. Thanks.

Plus

2009-08-17T16:15:00.002-05:00

The husband had his birthday last week and he is offically a plus as is 60+. Which means, he's not the skinny young kid I first married. In fact, the other day, while he was futzing with putting air in his car tires it hit me that he was becoming a little old man. The kind of 'god love him' little old man. Only he doesn't see himself as such. Then I got to wondering, if he really IS a little old man. I mean he doesn't wear black socks and dress shoes with his shorts, nor does he hike his pants up till they look as if they start right below the armpits and gives the wearing a peculiar Humptey Dumptey kind of look. Nor does the husband use the flip up sunglass things on his glasses, or stand, mouth open and oblivious in the smack dap center of a supermarket aisle forcing everyone else to wait till he decides to move on. While the sons refer to him as 'The Old Fart' he sees those his age or older as old farts.

Now the husband isn't totally oblivious to the advance of years even if he does call his liver spots, freckles. REALLY BIG FRECKLES... but freckles none the less and, The Husband, repeatedly finds some old guy in the mirror each morning, one the old lady that's in my mirror goes away.

We've been married forever and while it hasn't always been smoothe we have stuck together as if with a crazy glue. I think er even ended up raising each other. So I guess I'll keep the Old Plus but I have no intention of stopping my teasing of him, reminding him that he is a whole FOUR YEARS older than me. After all, he IS the Old Fart and don't you forget it.

Why toddler in Tiaras

2009-08-07T22:28:00.002-05:00

I like to watch the show toddlers in tiaras and listen to the rather unattractive mothers try to convince themselves and us that their 2 year old loves to dress up in rhinestones and spray on tans and parade in front of strangers. And usually, tho I try to be cynical, I enjoy watching the mothers root for their daughters and tell them they are wonderful except for tonight. Tonight the show depressed the hell out of me.
It had to do with a skinny, talk through her nose, bucktoothed sort of woman who brought to mind some nibbling rodent. Or maybe she wasn't that bad but her appearance was colored by what went on.
This rabbity woman had twins, competing against each other. The so called pretty daughter and then the other one. Now I was an unattractive child, something my mother never let me forget as if I set out to be unattractive just to piss her off. Rabbity woman had her obvious favorite to the point where I wanted to reach into the tv and slap her stupid. Daughter B was the favored one, daughter A could do nothing right. It was obvious in the way the mother treated them, spoke to tem, and dressed them. Daught B had a glitzy dress all rhinestones and poufs. Daughter A had a rhinestone gown with a torn and draggling ruffle that rabbity woman firstlaid such a guilt trip on her for it being torn, going so far as to say the girl couldn't use any of the other dresses in the closet because they blonged to sister B. Mom promised to sew draggling hem onl y to forget and the kid goes to the pagent with a draggling hem that was cut away. By the end of the night daughter A's hair looked like a rat's nest. Meanwhile daughter B is a brat and dad finally steps in and drags her out of the pagent and that is that. So daughter A wins this trophy as 3rd runner up and mom is shocked because this daughter is such a loser.... you don't have to hear those words, it's obvious and then daughter A wins this big trophy for trying her best and doing her best when I swear it really was a you are breaking my heart kind of trophy, Mom is even more shocked and at the end when daughter A is saying how she won, daughter B insists that she won and not her sister because her mother told her so. It's a wonder I didn't throw something at the screen, And now I feel as if I should do something, but what? I know what this mother is doing to this poor child and I want to stop it but how. Maybe the father will see this episode and put an end to things or, and this is a long shot, mom will see her behavior and be outraged with it. Yes I know TV shows like this are edited but A's body language made me want to cry. The damage mothers can inflict.

Whew! Needed to get that out!

Oh and I would rather be known as the smart one than the pretty one any day. But the jury is still out on that one.

At the risk of being a perfect bitch

2009-08-05T23:02:00.004-05:00

I am going to continue the thread and ask that my usual viewers skip this post.
You see, there is someone who periodicly claims I am a stalker and then leaves annonymous comments with no way for me to rebut them because she is too cowardly to leave her email.
THis is for her.. She who claims she does not read my blog and got all bent out of shape to learn that I read hers. She has herself smeared all over the internet and gets upset when someone stumbles across her.
A number of years ago, she inserted herself into my life. I was trying to do a random act of kindness and instead I was saddled with her but since I saw her only once a year I thought I would offer that up as penance for any of the wrongs I had done in my life (catholic you know guilty about everything). So I put up with it for a number of years and then she insisted that I visit her in her mouse hole for yet another convention in her neck of the woods BUT she didn't have the money for the convention and so I lent her $300.00. I offered it as a gift but she insisted it was a loan. All of this she will deny because that is this mouse's habit. She twists things and remembers them wrongly and then gets onher high horse as the injured party. Soon after this loan, I was suddenly a liar, I was this and that and she wanted nothing to do with me. So I waited for repayment and waited and since she changed her email I couldn't contact her, my letters asking for payment fell into some void and so I would checvk the web periodicly trying to find her and get my money back.

And so because I read her blog, I was a stalker.

SO Valerie.... where is the money you owe me? What a convenient memory you have and how you twist things so that you are as pure as the driven snow. Well some snow is yellow as you know. And I know about your father from what YOU TOLD ME. Otherwise how would I know that he died homeless after you threw him out of your home?

AND Miss mouse do you know how disgusted I was when you told me that you thought the kid who played Harry Potter was HOT when he waas only about 12 at the time? I've thought about not doing kindnesses for people, look at you and my kindness to you, but you know something... I still do kindnesses and I will do you a kindness now. I forgive you. I forgive your insanity, your inappropriate comments and the money you owe me. I hope it brings you much joy but, somehow I doubt it. I think Frank is better off without you.

At the risk of being a perfect bitch

2009-08-05T23:02:00.001-05:00

You know who

2009-08-02T23:38:00.002-05:00

Now I know you will blab this to you know who and it must be said that the so called nasty posts I send to she who thinks she is all that but isn't was a comment asking if she couldn't have decided to divorce her husband BEFORE she moved to Florida and where was the money she's owed me for 7 years.

Oooooh nasty nasty nasty.

Also ask her HOW she treated the father she now claims she mourns. Her father who died homeless.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program

How's life?
I go back to the office tomorrow after a stay at home vacation. You would think that with all the people losing their homes we'd be swamped for business but it is a hard road to travel and I'm lucky to still HAVE my home. Funnily I had all the same symptoms today that I usually have when we do come home from being away, sadness as if Summer could last forever but doesn't. I also experience a sense of fear but I don't know where that comes from.

One vacation I nearly lost my mind on a Friday night and was in such a state that it actually frightened the husband. I was keyed up for the remainder of the vacation and on the way home on Sunday, while crossing over the Bay Bridge, I suddenly said... Oh we were robbed, I can deal with that.

When we got home the first thing the sons told us was that we HAD been robbed that Sunday evening when the sons and the kid living with us were out. They were still in the neighborhood just not in the house. So I never know if what I feel is what a fell or if there is some psychic reason behind it. Or maybe all of the years coming home from vacation and not knowing what the rest of the summer would bring. The husband has apologised for all the years of semi poverty but I know he tried his best and so i can't fault him.

So it's back to the salt mines tomorrow and lets hope the Husband and I don't end up killing each other before the day is done.

One more story... just one, I swear.

Once upon a time many years ago when we were newlyish married and living in an apartment the husband comes home from his part time job and doesn't fine me in the apartment. So he jumps to the most logical conclusion that someone broke in, killed me and hid my body in THE DISHWASHER!!! Yep, isn't that what everyone would think. Even before babies I wouldn't have fit in a dishwasher unless perfectly folded but how many killers do you know you can do origami? The husban eventually figured out that A) there was no signs of a breakin or blood B) there WAS no body in the dishwasher (he checked) and 3) since purse and jacket were in the apartment that I must BE somewhere in the building and so he crept from door to door until he heard my voice and was convinced that I hadn't been murdered and stuffed into a dishwasher someplace. Talk about leaping to conclusions. He leaps right past them and into the realm of WHAT WHERE YOU THINKING?

I just found this

2009-07-24T16:45:00.003-05:00

while browsing on line. It was part of a recycled craft blog on making something out o napkins. Doesn't the carrot in the lower left hand corner look like well... a turd?
Or is it only my deluded brain wanting to get home and start its at home vacation and watch the last installment of Torchwood's mini-series.

The queen of cheap

2009-07-24T14:43:00.000-05:00

A question on one of the lists I am on, led me to thinking about my eventual demise. As I get older I know the time is coming and I want things to go smoothly for the men.

And so... being the queen of cheap... I have found a way to have my body dealt with for free. It's this site
http://www.anatomicgift.com/ Which happens to be a hop skip and a jump away from me AND if I donate my organs and tissues to them (I'm an organ donor anyway, my driver's license says so)I get cremated for free. They even pick up the body for free. I mean come on now. How much better can it get than FREE!

I'm not being ghoulish or gory or fatalistic. But we all die, unless you are a ficitonal character or are so famous you will always be remembered while, in its own way is a form of immortality, why throw money away in sticking me in the ground in a casket with all that other nonsense. In Maryland, you don't even need to be in a casket to be cremated. Just wrapped in a sheet with a wad of papers under your bottom to keep the fluids from leaking out and that's it. Cardboard caskets can be gotten for as little as $75.00, but still.... FREE cremation.

Just at lunch, the husband and I were talking about how to save money, how to conserve and cut down which is something we have always done, if not from choice.It must be horrible for these people losing their jobs now with no idea that you can throw some cooked rice into a meat loaf or sloppy joes to extend the servings or take whatever leftover meats and veggies you have, throw them on a tortilla, add salsa and cheese make yourself a quesadilla. Or to shop at thrift shops or be grateful for hand me downs. Oh and if someone offers you something for free, take it even if you don't need it, you will find someone who will.

But back to my death. I suppose I should let the relatives know that this is what I'm planning so they aren't all up in arms that there is no funeral, nor an urn until, at least the tissue harvesters are done with me. Maybe I could write a statement, i'll come up with something. So a free cremation. Come on people. Beat that for cheapness.

Oh for goodness sakes

2009-07-18T22:22:00.002-05:00

Here I sit in bed busily typing away and Rocco the Wonder dog lying at my feet, once I turned th fan on for him, when a noise outside wakes him and he goes running into the living room only to return with the loaf of petrified bread that he has been chewing on for the lat week or so. He drop the bread on the bed, then is off back into the living room where he grabs a chew and then back to the bed and, I suppose that since he had his goodies he wanted to share them with his paramour Eloise Matilda ( a big stuffed gorilla that has become his 'Girlfriend") and so out to the living room one more time to drag Eloise matilda into the bed. I suppose we can guess what happened next, primate passion, hot monkey love (yes I know that gorillas are apes not monkeys but monkey love sounds bette) till Whomp! Rocco oversteps his bounds and he and Eloise Matilda fall off the bed in a tangle of furry legs and bits of fluff. I burst out laughing. Rocco, with his dignity hurt more than anything, humpfs at me, grabs his girl by her next and leaves dragging eloise Matilda with him out inot the living room. Sometimes that dog is just too human.

Summer

2009-07-18T00:43:00.002-05:00

How come, as a kid, summer lasted forever and here and now it is already the middle of July and I STILL haven't unpacked all of my summer clothes. By the time I finally get that done, it'll be Christmas. And we won't even mention the plastic stand up noel light post that I just noticed is STILL sitting in the living room. Let's just say I'm getting a jump on my holiday decorating. And speaking of which, I bought Chinese knotted tassels with bells on eBay to add to the decorations on said Christmas tree. They will go nicely with polymer clay balls and bendy tie dyed fabric bendi dolls and the multicolored garland and the diamond shaped acrylic things on a string, that dress my tree. (it really looks a lot better than it sounds)
But back to the kid in summer thing. While I don't remember much from my childhood, there are, well, I guess sensations that I remember more and a type of mental vignette that is like a mental snapshot.
I was raised in a row house in Baltimore. We had an alley running along the backs of the yards and while we called it an alley it was more of a paed one lane street. Only the only wheeled vehicles that came that way was the ice cream man (we had one that was a dwarf and would walk up the wheel bumper to get to the cold case and I always worried that he's get locked in), the truck with the amusement ride ( I liked the mini roller coaster the best), the Huckster (he had an open sided truck and sold fresh produce and was the father of a kid I went to school with) and the Arabber (like the huckster but with a horse and wagon instead of a truck) Then there was the milk guy and the egg guy and every kid in the neighborhoods that backed up to each other, screaming and running and biking and dodge balling in the alley..
I would sit on the curb where the alley met the street and wait for the street lights to come on. That was my signal to come home only I always dragged my feet going home because one evening I saw my grandmother ride past in a car and since she had already been dead for more than a year at that time, I always hoped to see her again.
I'm sure I was in the alley playing but those times aren't as clear as me playing in the garden. Yep among the tomato plants and marigolds. I would dig shallow canals and lakes, flood thme and then crack out the small plastic animals and pretend that this was thier world and the plants their trees. I'd have whole complex story lines going on with each animal having its own name and personality. They were the cheap plastic not sized to scale or colored to reality animals with their green goats and chickens nearly the size of the calves. Calves that could be pink or green or blue and NEVER the real color. ( I guess those would have cost more)
I also remember my mother INSISTING that I get out of the house and into the fresh air. We had no air conditioning back then and so the windows were always wide open. You'd think I'd get enough fresh air that way, but no... I had to get out of the house and sitting on the back steps reading a book wasn't what my mother had in mind. So I'd go two houses up to Martha's house, join her on her padded glider and the two of us would read books until out eyes were ready to fall out. It now strikes me as odd that I had to sneak reading.
There was a small shopping center up the street and across a busy road, that we were allowed to visit on our own. There was a grocery store and a Read's Drug store and at the far end was a dime store (Oh god I miss dime stores) and I remember snagging small plastic dolls with snap on plastic clothes for some ridiculous price if 10 cents each. Even tho I wasn't much of a doll person these plastic dolls looked almost like grown ups and fit in very well with the plastic animals.
Once a summer there would be an adventure and we would go to the OTHER shopping center that meant crossing two busy roads and walking along a barely discernable path through the weeds to reach that shopping center with its dime store and drug store and grocery store. But it was a long walk and we could only go as a goup and I was always the leader AND still in elementary school.
Summers have never been the same since I grew up. In fact, I remember sitting in a bath sobbing my heart out because my mother had declared that I was too old to play with plastic animals in the tub and I had to put them away. What was the use of growing up if blue plastic pigs and wobbly orange horses could not come along. I still have a love for miniature anything so I guess I never really did grown up.
I miss kid summers even with the specter of school in September looming before me and of the memories I do have of childhood, they are always in the summer.
I wonder what the sons remember of their childhood summers. There were He-Men characters and Gi Joes and Thundercats by the time they played in flooded sandboxes. There was hide and go seek and catching lightning bugs (only to release them immediately so they wouldn't die)and back yard camp outs and naked swimming in the back yard pool after dark (them not me)and walking to the pharmacy for candy (no major roads to cross and pharmacy lady had my home number) and when they were older, trips to the park to fish... again catch and release, if they ever even caught anything and, I guess that same taste of freedom that I had as a kid. Sometimes I think its a shame that we hae to grow up. If I had my way, I'd be a kid forever.

Tell my aching old lady bones that.

The Ahndjunope Man

2009-06-30T13:09:00.002-05:00

Youngest son had a restricted frenulum as a child and so much of what he said was unintelligble and so we were always translating for him. This also meant that he came up with a number of mispronunciations for words. Hence... the Ahn-dju-nope Man. Ahndunopes are what mail comes in and is delivered by none other than the Ahndjunope man!! I'd be sitting on the throne in the bathroom, I'd hear the pitter patter of little feet and a gruffish voice would announce "Ahndjunope Man!" and an envelope would come shooting from underneath the door. It would be addressed to mom, with a fake stap drawn on one corner and a fake cancellation on top of that and inside would be a letter to me reading I (heart) U. and Signed with the youngest son's name always remembering to put 7 horizontal lines on the E in his name. (He liked the way it looked). Not bad for a 2 year old.

As for his E's. I taught him to write his name rather early. My defense is that no one told me little kids aren't able to write their names. Any hoo younger son held his pen in the oddest way guiding the pen with his ring finger instead of held between thumb and forefinger. Whenever he wrote his name there was always 7 line in his E. I didn't think anything of it until I took him to the County as step one in the process of seeing if his speech could be helped. There were 3 separate tests, a week apart and at the end there was their evaluation.

Casey had just turned 3 at the time and the evaluation went like this.
He knew all his letters other than Q and W (which we called double wary)
His gross motor skills were lacking because he couldn't HOP! (Oh the horror, a hopless son!)
His fine motor skills were lacking as well because he held his pen so oddly. I would have liked to see those women try to write that way. I asked them if they had bothered to show him the 'correct' way. No, they hadn't. I simply handed a pen to younger son, showed him how to hold it and to write his name.
That led into the 7 lines in the letter E and how that was "Wrong". Remember the son was 3. I asked themif they had asked son why he uses 7 lines and again the answer was no. I asked younger son how many lines did a real E have. He knew the answer of three and when I asked why he wrote seven, his answer was because he liked the way it looked. Made me want to reach across the table and smack the woman.

Their final analysis was that younger son had speech problems (no shit) and that he scored as high as a seven year old on all the tests and they suspected it would have been higher if age 7 was as far as the tests tested. And this was done by a three year old, ring finger pen manipulator, 7 line E writer, Ahndjunope MAN!

We did get the frenulum clipped and he went to speech in elementary school and in Kindergarten He had an 145 iQ and in the 6th grade standard tests graded him in the 99.9 percentile of all 10th graders who took the test.

HOWEVER THE KID STILL DOESN'T HOP!

Of Pharoah heads and anniversaries

2009-06-16T14:53:00.002-05:00

The Husband and I have been married for 36 years today. We don't do anything to celebrate simply because 36 years seems like an obscene number of years for anyone to do anything, let alone live with another person without killing them, at least once.
As if it isn't obvious, the picture above is our wedding portrait. You know the big ass one that hangs in your living room. Yes, there I am, butt in the air for 36 years. Should the husband try a move like that nowadays, he would first have to rent a crane to get me into the air. So happy anniversay us and WHAT WERE WE THINKING?

On to pleasanter things. Have you seen the new Saturn commercial with the shiny faced woman who looks as if she had never eaten in her entire life. You could slice cheese with her nose and those cheekbones.... but but but... whenever I look at her, all I can think of is that she looks like the mummified head of King Tut. No fooling. King Tut! The men agree with me and not one of them thought it odd that I even KNEW what King Tut's mummified head looks like. But then when younger son would be hangin out with friends and a question would come up like is an aardvark and an anteater the same thing, they didn't even bother going to the internet, or calling the library, nope Casey would call me and I never had to look an answer up. I have no idea how all that stuff got into my head. I'm figuring that any time now, I'll be running out of room and stuff with be dribbling out of my ears. Maybe I shold invest in a pair of corks.

HUH?!

2009-06-03T10:31:00.003-05:00

Had another of my infamous dreams last night. In this episode, I was in someone's wedding party where the bridesmaids all wore a purple dress of their choosing. The wedding was held in only what I can call a diner with booths which meant that half of the people attending looked forward and the other half to the back. I suppose the bride and groom were to be married up front by the cash register. As for me, my wedding gift to them was meant. An eye round roast to be specific, all neatly wrapped and tied up with a ribbon.

Gotta stop eating animal crackers before bed. Sheesh

NEWS!

2009-06-02T11:23:00.002-05:00

I feel I should send out announcements because I have my first follower.
Something like....
It's a girl, Sharon Graff proudly announces the arrival of her first follower. A saucy girl with a love for dogs and a fondness for oddness.
And as a means of celebration... a journal page!

Let's see what else is new... evil voodoo witch woman called the husband today asking for money because she and her new love got evicted and are now in a motel. Now the husband has told her in no uncertain terms that he was not going to rescue her any more AND she has to stop having her mail sent to our PO Box, both od which she ignored and so he told her again today but the next time she gets in contact with him I'M STEPPING IN and by god, if anyone kills the husband it ought to be me and not the Evil Voodoo Woman. It's not her asking for money that has me irate, it's coming to the husband for him to rescue her again that has pissed me off royally. Which means that my hazel eyes are blzing green at the moment and you wouldn't like me when my eyes are green.

I'm feeling happier with myself because I am getting into this art journal thing like I never could with just collage. And yes the journal page looks like something Teesha Moore might do but remember "imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery". I am hoping to evolve enough so my stuff looks like my stuff and not someone else's. Someday perhaps.

So that's it for today. I'm going to peek at other blogs on my list so perhaps a new inspiration will hit. I only hope that if it does, it doesn't leave a mark.

Just stuff

2009-05-30T22:03:00.002-05:00

Not much going on. Still cleaning the mess in my 'crap room' and doubt that I will ever get it done. I dragged all of my beads out into the back yard so I could sort them and only once I had them nice and neat and tucked safely away in their double decker tool box that I realised that I had a whole tray that needed to be done. Now I had been in and out of the house 111 times which is worse then it seems because every time I went IN the house the dogs went In the house and when I headed out... well you can imagine. But now most of my beads are done and i'll leave that tray for another day when I feel the need to go outside and get the stink blown off me. Later I messed around a bit with my art journals. Yes more than one. I MUST be crazy. Then I made a mistake and started looking at other blogs and I want MINE to look like them. So I guess it's time I actually learn how to work my digital camera so that the pics actually look like something I made and not blurred as if the something I made suddenly came alive and was running for its life. I mean really. How hard CAN IT BE?
As youcan tell, it was another exciting Saturday here in the land of odds. For we definitely are an odd bunch of people, and, yes, animals as well. No one I know of has dogs that can 'talk' and now one of the cats has started a language of her own. It's out littlest cat Isabella and when I am in my crap room with the door closed she will actaully go downstairs to get oldest son to come upstairs and open the door for her. With such ingenuity I've made her her own spot in the room beside my chair. HOWEVER if she starts making collages better than mine, I'll need a spot beside HER chair.

What the......

2009-05-26T22:08:00.002-05:00

hell did I eat before bed last night that gave me the crazy dream I had? I dreamed that Orson Wells called me to ask if I had any Acey Deucy rubber stamps and when I went to his house he showed me HIS collection of rubber stamps that filled 4 pizza-ish boxes. What the hell??????? Orson Wells and rubber stamps? I've had some weird dreams in my time but this one takes the cake.I'M not even an Orson Wells fan, though I sis like him in the movie with Loretta Young and Edward G. Robinson where Wells was a Nazi that escaped Germany after the war and had this clock fixation. But rubber stamps/ Sheesh.

DING DONG THE WITCH IS ME!!

2009-05-18T10:48:00.002-05:00

Yes boys and girls you have read that correctly. I am now a witch. Not only any witch but an evil insane witch. I saw it in someone's blog so it must be true. That is supposed to upset me but I like being a witch. Not too sure about the evil part but insane is good because then I AM NOT responsible for my actions.
If I were a true witch with all the true witchly powers oh what fun I'd have. I'd make money grow on trees. I'd fix sick children. I'd mend broken hearts. I'd make dogs smile and pigs fly. I'd release all trapped souls so they could go to heaven. I would abolish mortgages and with it foreclosures. I'd plant rosemary everywhere just because I like the smell and I'd witch the work week into two days with the weekend the remaining five. I'd love to be a witch. Thank you strange once a friend, you have made my day though I know you didn't mean to. I think that makes it better.
Oh and this strange once friend borrowed money from me and has never made a move to pay it back AND the friendship was destroyed shortly afterwards... I sense a plot.

That being said it is noon on monday and all of my office work is done. If I were a witchI'd witch all the data entry I have to do and let it enter itself. Then the letters would fold themselves tuck themselves into the envelopes.... ahhhhh heaven.
We have a client coming in so I can't really go home and then there will be lunch and I can manage to fuddle the day away, I love fuddling.

There is really not much to say today but I was in an evil witch sort of mood and wanted to crow about my evilness. Yah me! PFFFFFTTTTTTTT strange once a friend.

Welll...

2009-05-12T13:34:00.002-05:00

That all seemed a bit too easy. There is probably a way to attach two at one time but I'm amazed that I managed to attach one. So let's see if I can get the second art journal page on here. Fingers crossed.

Art Journal

2009-05-12T13:28:00.002-05:00

I've wanted to keep an art journal for some time but have always been stymied with what comes first, the entry or the art. Now I know it's my art journal and I have no plans for anyone to see it but still I was stuck but the what comes first. So now I have taken a virtual deep breath and did two pages of 'art' last night and will journal whenever I find something to journal that matches the feeling of the so called art. I did two, entirely different pages and now will try the next step of attaching them to this blog.
So since I really have no idea what or how I'm doing this, I will take a deep breath and ATTACH!!!

hopefully

The Husband

2009-05-07T22:18:00.002-05:00

As much as I love the husband, I sometimes wonder if I am really living IN a sticom and not a life that I thought was... well... real. Mostly thanks to the husband, a rolly polly sort of man with a distinct resemblence to Jerry Garcia (before Jerry died and not the Jerry a mouldering in the grave) and a secret desire to BE Santa Claus. He's smart, he really is, especially with numbers and abstract thought but drop the man in the real world and there is a crisis around the corner. Take this morning.
I roll out of bed, drag myself toward the bathroom and suddenly he's there, telling me something but my ears aren't awake yet and I have him repeat it. Not the thing to do as the Husband cannot just continue from a stopping point but has to go wayyyy back to the beginning of the thought and start all over again. Even worse is when he has to tell me the whole history of a person till he finally gets up to the point where he ment to be and usually it is something as mundane as the person called.
Anyhow, this morning, I finally get the idea of what he's talking about. But first I had to hear that one son's room is leaking (It has been raining forever) and something about towels and a wet vac and the dog barked and the washing machine is broken.
Uh huh wait, go back, what? So I hear the whole story again till we finally get to the washing machine is broken and then he is silent, watching me expectantly and, I swear, holding his breath waiting for me to DO SOMETHING. So I head for the basement laundry room with the Husband so close behind me I can feel his breath on my neck, so I can see what's going on.
Now I don't know about anyone else but I CANNOT concentrate when someone is staring at the back of my head and waiting for me to make the world safe for mankind once more. So I fidgit with this and unplug that plunging myself into basment darkness at the same time. I'm twisting the knobs and unplugging the cords all the while the husband is keeping up a running litany about how the washing machine is broken, how he will have to go to a laundromat, and bring wet clothes home to dry because the dryer still works and we will have to consider calling someone in to fix the washing machine or go out an buy a new one.
Now I WAS STILL NOT AWAKE and since I took a benadryl along with my usual nightly meds I was even foggier than usual. By this time the husband is pacing behind me, repeating the whole water in the basement story and te go to the laundromat etc, till I give up and come upstairs. I bide my time, just waiting for him to leave for the office and once he's gone and the house is quiet, I go back downstairs and discover the washing machine was UNPLUGGED!!!
We have a drain at the bottom of the outside steps that sometimes gets clogged especially if there is a storm and when there is a storm, oldest son, prepares to do battle with a minor flood by getting the pump ready to go. So he unplugged the washer so that he could plug in the pump. Something I hope I would have found earlier if my mind wasn't stuffed full of the Casey leak, laundry broke stuff. So I plugged IN the washer and washed the towels that were a crucial part of the whole event and that, had they not been washed and dried the world would have ended.
Yes, the husband panics. He's a man that stands in the middle of the front yard, holding an umbrella and watching for tornados. He's the one who the minute he misplaces his wallet is running for the phone yelling that we have to cancel his cards and he's the one that woke older son shouting that he can't find his keys and that he has to take younger son to work in 45 minutes and only once the older son is awake and searching his room, does the husband think to look on the hook where the keys belong. Who would have thought? Where they belong.
But to give the man credit when there really IS a crises, he knows what to do. For instance, while near the end of my labor with oldest son, I suddenly went into a seizure. The husband flung himself over my body to keep me from bouncing off the bed and jammed his finer in my mouth to keep me from swallowing my tounge. Though I suppose his halo is tarnished just a bit, when he admitted he knew what to do because he had seen me deal with a cat that went into seizures. Note never pick up a cat that's seizing and hold it against your body to keep it safe unless you LIKE your chest shredded.
So there he is, husband o'mine. I think I will make a plaque for the house that reads "PLUG IT IN". After all, that seems to fix just about anything.

Death

2009-05-05T16:08:00.002-05:00

Lately I've been thinking about death. Not any random death but my death. Not that I'm planning to do anything silly but I'm no longer young and, after all, none of us get out of this life alive.

So I'm wondering what I'd like my death to be. Slow and fading like sunset on a hot summer day when the light lingers and lingers or quick and sudden like a power failure during a thunderstorm.

If it was slow then I could cause people to marvel at my grace and bravery as I face each day. It would give my men a chance to tell me what they normally wouldn't. It would give us all a chance to get used to it and a chance to give away my stuff. I would also have a chance to be magnanomous and forgive my sister her cruelty, as she sobbs beside my bed.

Am I selfish if I choose quick and unexpected. Then I wouldn't have to be brave or give things away and my sister would forever be racked because she treated me so badly. I also wouldn't have people telling me things simply because I was dying and they wanted to be nice. I have a hard time accepting the compliments I get, always suspecting that people are just being nice and don't mean it at all. At least I know nasty people mean it.

I'm not afraid of death. It would just be another adventure and I'm curious to know what follows. I'd miss my men but eventually they would join me again and maybe the next life will be better for us all. OR maybe I'll just come back as a rock. Then I wouldn't care. I mean, how can you hurt a rock's feelings? You might stub your toe on one but then you'd be the one limping. ROck's don't limp. No feet. Of course they have no arms and hands either but maybe it would be mice just to be.

Oh jeez, there she goes again

2009-04-23T22:52:00.002-05:00

Rant and rave time. Or maybe just pondering the foolishness of us mortals.
I watched part of the lifetime movie about the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. It seems as if she was simply acting like any foolish teenaged girl would away from her parents and on a lovely island with a bunch of friends. I'm sure the words she should have known better have been spoken about this. Or that she was foolish or sholdn't have been drinking but something really jumped out at me. She was on a school trip with NO BED CHECKS!!! It didn't matter that she was 18 or had graduated or was going to. If she was on a school sponsored trip and there were chaperones just what in the hell were they thinking. NO BED CHECKS???!!!! When oldest son went to London with the High School marching band in his senior year, there were activities for the whole group to do together and there was times when they went out on their own BUT they always had to check in at a certain time and all gathered for dinner together as well. Even the seniors. Really, how hard is it to pause in your fun to say I'm here and off you go again. What WERE they thinking. Everyone knows how teenagers morph into knuckleheads at times, so didn't ANYONE think, let's make sure everyone is in their rooms at such and such a time and in for the night.

I also thought that the woman who played Natalee's mom in the tv movie was belaboring the southern accent.

Ok and on the what were they thinking angle. There is a blog I read even tho it is rather infantile at times and the author was moaning that she had not achieved what she wanted out of life such as a family and her one true love. What was she thinking? She's married, just moved out of state with her husband so it's the two of them against their brave new world and she's posting for the world to see that she has never found and does not expect to find her one true love. What if her husband reads that. Can you imagine. It would probably break his heart. And yes I could stop reading the blog but I've never actually been able to follow someone about to crash and burn from the very beginning.

Hello blog are not totally annonymous and while I also love reading Dooce's blog, I wonder how safe it is to have her daughter's picture out there, especially when people in her home town recognise her from the blog. I don't even call my men by their given names, hoping to allow them to hold onto a bit of privacy. And as Rocco the Wonder Dog is an affection slut, he doesn't care who know his name.

And speaking of Rocco, he's on the bed with me, with his head stuck under a blanket because the light is in his eyes making it hard for him to sleep. He does this himself. He's still a bit lame from his run in with whatever hit him, but he doesn't even consider stepping past the boundary of the open gates. I'm sorry he had to learn his lesson about getting out of the yard the hard way, but maybe this time it will stick.

The husband and I went out to dinner tonight. At one table this girl whined over and over and over again "I want steak, I just want steak" till I was ready to rush the kitchen and grab the first steak I could find JUST TO SHUT HER UP. It would have been easier if on of the adults with her had answered that whine, but they ignored her and whine whine whine she went. Then a family with two young boys (younger than the girl) showed up and the four of them made less noise than steak eater girl did. KNow why? Because mom and dad were paying attention to them, listening to what the boys had to say and responding. I wish there was some way I could go up to a parent and tell them if they just paid some attention to their kids they might be surprised at the outcome..... but.... if they don't listen to their kid, they certainly aren't going to listen to me.

So that's it from my corner of the world, boring as it is. As much as I grew to hate the library, there was certainly always something to write about.

Evil Voodoo Woman

2009-04-13T21:22:00.003-05:00

Warning.... I'm going to rant and rave a bit because, if I don't, my head will explode and all those thoughts will be set free to populate the earth and it ain't gonna be a pretty sight.

EVIL VOODOO WOMAN. I call her that even though I doubt she does voodoo or is really evil to anyone other than me but Evil Voodoo woman she has been christened. Why? You may ask and who IS the Evil Voodoo WOman and why should we care?

Some history.

Once upon a time the husband had an employee that actually got paid to work for him unlike moi who gets paid in kisses. Ever try to pay for something with a kiss? But I digress. So the husband had an employee who was and is... EVW... I get tired spelling out Evil Voodoo Woman. EVW did not like me from the start. Whenever I was in the office, she'd glare at me and snap at, The husband. The one time I tried to make nice, turned out to be a disaster of major proportions and something not to be contemplated again.

I wasn't the only one on EVW *hit list. She got into a screaming fight with the guy in the next office because he slammed a door and twice the husband had to send her home because she arrived at work in a snit that grew as the day wore on. Her apartment complex threatened her with eviction because of her behavior. For some reason she slept in the living room of her one bedroom apartment and when people came home they slammed their doors and so she got up and slammed her door in response. She snarled at me one day when I 'slammed' a door only I hadn't slammed it, actually, it just closed a little harder because the air conditioner was on in the office and always sucked the door closed. Mostly I didn't like the way she talked to the husband, treating him like a nincompoop when only I am allowed to do that. I married his nincompoopness not her. And before anyone thinks my dislike of her was because I thought she and the husband were, or night have and affair, let me dispell that right now. The husband would never have an affair with her because, quite bluntly she is unattractive in that evil voodoo woman way and is stupid as a rock. I mean she married a guy who she told me was a pig and then wouldn't have sex with him because he didn't want children AND she stayed married to him for 10 years. She also lived in Hawaii and NEVER WENT TO THE BEACH ONCE and yet 15 years later is still toting around Hawaiian phone books with each move.

Sothe husband finally managed to get her out of the office and me in .... which did NOT make her like me any more... and he was ever so surprised at the way an office should be run that he is still commenting on it. He can give me every task he wants me to do in a day and doean't have to oversee my work or constantly instruct me. I've also cut our supply bill by more than half. The work gets done correctly the first time. The work gets done swiftly and I DON'T GLARE at a single person. What really floored me was that the woman used Microsoft word but didn't know about the clipboard feature, which is why I thought she was using word, or.... and this is really really hard to belive KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT CUT AND PASTE! I swear. Once a month she used to update clients records with court records gotten from an online site. Each month she'd print the whole damn thing from beginning to end and sometimes it ran pages. When I took over, I suggested to do it once a week and then asked if he needed everything or just the new stuff and he told me that it had to be everything because EVW said that was the only way to do it. Now our weekly updates run a single page each.

I'm getting to the point I promise.

So EVW left but she wasn't out of our lives. Every once and awhile, she and the husband would go to starbucks for coffee and gossip and the husband still felt responsible for her, in a way. ANd so, I was able to follow the whole EVW story . She lost three jobs in one year. They were all because she got into a fight with someone or threw one of her fits. The apartment complex told her they would not be extending her lease so she moved into another place, pulled the same crap and was told to move on. She rented a room, was asked to leave and then was fired from a job that she had held for almost a year. Again it was everyone else's fault. They were all picking on her because she was asian etc etc. Ignoring the fact that she glares at people as often as she breathes.

So she loses this last job for threatening a coworker and then her roomates throuw her out of yet another place adn she's faced with homelessness. NO I have to say that all along the husband was helping her with money to the tune of almost $2,000.00. We had the money then from a re fi on our house and it was done without my knowledge. I doubt I would have thrown a fit because I don't want to see anyone homeless either even EVW but she was only BORROWING it. (right) This last time, we had no money to offer and so with a stroke of luck she managed to rent a niche. A small hastily made 'room' of sorts next to the furnace in the house where she had once lived before, owned by a guy she had once dated but didn't like. Can you see where this is going? She got in a fight with the guy who threw her out and she ended up in a homeless shelter where SHE FOUND HERSELF A BOYFRIEND!!! I swear to god. When she described the bf to the Husband and he passed it on to me it sounded as if she found herself and imitation the husband. The boyfriend had found a job and a place to live and so she stayed at the shelter.... till... she got into a fight with someone and the shelter threw her out. She moved IN with the boyfriend, and tomorrow they are being evicted. She gets unemployment and her expenses are a third of her income and and were even less while she was in the shelter but she's let her car insurance lapse and the rent on her storage unit that holds her furniture and she's hiding her car because she hasn't made a payment in months and they are looking to repossess it.

And so here we are, she on the phone with the husband during working hours pissing and moaning about her lot in life and then she and the boyfriend on the cell phon e pissing and moaning to the husband once the work day was done and we were on our way to run a few errands before heading home. pisspiss moan moan.

I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!

Back when she was living in the niche the husband was so worried about her being homeless that he was actually losing sleep and then some health issues cropped up and he told her she couldn't keep running to him with her problems. He's on meds now but still we have our own worries to keep us occupied. And as much as we feel guilty about not offering to take her and her boyfriend who I refer to as Poor Dumb Sap in, we have to cut the cord. Yes D-E you told me to do that some time ago. This time, the Husband has said it and has said that her friendship is too expensive and too one sided. I suggest that he call and tell her that but he says he's going to let it fade away but he's said that before and here we are dealing with this crap.

I don't know what they are going to do and while I feel sorry for Poor Dumb sap anything we do for him we'll be doing for her and I can't have that any more.

So there is all is. If this were fiction it would be rejected as too implausible. I wonder if there is such a thing as an Evil voodoo Woman repellant. I'll need a barrel of it.

Hippity Hoppity

2009-04-12T21:25:00.003-05:00

No dyes eggs for us, or big choclate bunnies. The sons are grown and I need choclate like I need a hole in the head. Neither are their fancy dress up clothes. I can remember once upon a life, visiting a dozen stores or so to find just the right purse to match just the right shoes I had found to go with just the right easter dress. HA! Now, when I find a purse and yes it is a A purse, i carry it until it falls apart and am stunned when it actually goes with something I am wearing. When my mother died she had 75 pairs of shoes (74 of them pinched her feet) and a purse to match each color. I have six pairs of shoes but mainly because I got some great end of season sales and walked away with red velvet flats for $1.25. Oh and I guess we really can't count the shoes I used to wear when I worked with the pigs and only save because of the smell. No euwwws please, they mostly smell like hay and sunshine. god I miss those pigs.
Speaking of pigs.... the oldest son made they easter meal and we ate like pigs. he grilled steaks, made his new favorite fried rice/w curry dish and did some magic to a plain bag of frozen green beans. I don't like green beans but I had two helpings. Oldest son had also cooked last weekend and made his rice, pork chops and the green beans. His friend and my third unoffical son, Chris had a plate and then his seven year old daughter wanted a plate and then her friend wanted one and there sat the little girls chowing down despite the fact that they HATE green beans and rice. I wonder why it is that anything the oldest son tries turns out wonderfully. The same for the second son. This is only the start of his second year with the company he works for and he got the largest raise of all the workers. Wasn't much of a raise but it was the largest. Some day, he'll discover what it is that he really wants to do and then look out world.
Rocco the Wonder Dog is almost his old self after his run in with a car and a mightily bruised butt. He still walks about with that spread legged gait babies with full diapers adopt, but he is getting better.
Business is picking up and I am overwhelmed with trying to get my mailings out, while tyiping up new contracts, faxing letters, answering phones and all the rest while listening to the husband piss and moan about what he has to do. I am becoming very good at ignoring the pissing and moaning. I don't have the time to listen. Still I guess it is better than working at the library but not nearly the fun of working with pigs.
I made the mistake of looking at some artsy blogs and depressed myself. Why can't I do stuff like that. I must have a niche somewhere if I only knew where.
Anybody got a niche going spare?So back to easter.... I enjoyed it so much... definitely much better than those family go to buffet things we had to endure when the boys were young. My sister never could control her sons and it was downright embarrassing to be seated at the same table with them. Once, the room actaully applauded as we all left and another time youngest son wanted to know why he and his brother had to behave when my nephew did not. I simply told him that he and his brother were my sons and I expected better from them. I've been thinking a lot about my sister lately and I have finallycome to the realization that she 'done me worng' with this whole mother's death, funeral thing and the crap she pulled later. but no... I'll have to save that for another time, when I'm not too tired to come up with a full head of steam and really let it rip. Stay tuned.

Watching

2009-04-05T07:19:00.002-05:00

The husband and I went to one of those buffet places for lunch the other day and while he was getting his second or third helping I was free to let my eyes and my thoughts roam.

Seated within my line of vision were two mentally challenged men and their care givers. And while the en were men they were both seated in wheelchairs with a sort of tray attached and each wore a bib. The one man caught my eye because he would break into a big grin, laugh, rock a bit in his seat and then start it all over again. He wasn't disruptive, he wasn't loud. He was better behaved than some adults. Each man had a caregiver with him but the caregivers were too busy chatting or talking on the phone or anything else to give either man any attention. They weren't neglected, they were ignored.

Now I'm not pointing a finger at the caregivers. It's got to be a heartbreaking job and so I think they are entitled to a break whenever they can get it. The men had their food and were content just being.

Then the caregiver for Happy guy put a slice of cake in front of him. He did his best to use his fork. He tried and tried but the cake wouldn't give him an inch. If I had been with them, I would have cut the cake into chunks but maybe he needed the challenge, maybe he enjoyed it. He concentrated hard but kept failing only getting a few crumbs, then he picked up his cake with his left hand and put it on his fork, where it promptly fell off. Still without a sign of impatience or frustration, he picked up the cake with his free hand and ate it that way... all the while holding onto that fork.

When the husband got back I had tears in my eyes. I so wanted to go up to happy guy and give him a hug and tell him good job but I knew I wouldn't. I was a stranger and may have frightened him. That I didn't want to do. I just wanted to acknowledge his tenacity and so I suppose I am doing that here and now.

Once I wanted to work with challenged children only then they were called retarded. My mother put a stop to that saying I didn't have the strength for that. She may have been right but who knows. So I have had an affinity for the challanged and even if I only give them a smle or say hello, I hope that maybe it would have helped just a bit. We had challenged adult men working as dishwashers at the coffee shop where I worked in High School. Bobby and Vinnie. Bobby was round and cute a bubbly and told the waitresses everyday that he loved them. MOst ignored him. I would tell him that I loved him back and he would laugh, tell me he loved me and then scurry back into the kitchen. Bobby had downs syndrome.

Vinnie was a cranky type, intent on doing his job and not flirting with the waitresses. He rarely spoke or smiled but did his job well. It was easy to interact with Bobby but not so Vinnie but I made certain I always said hello, mentioned the weather or something mundane and moved on without expecting anything in reponse. Occasionally, just occasionally, I would see a smile start to creep up on Vinnie but I said nothing and just chalked that up as a win for me.

However what I hold the closest to myheart happened when I was a teenager. I was shopping when I grown girl came flying at me, arms opened and outstretched. It was clear that she wanted a hug and so I gave her one. Oh lord I have never been hugged like that again. She had her whole heart and soul in that hug and in the middle of it, she told me she loved me and so I told her I loved her back. About that time he mother came rushing up and the look on her face was heartbreaking. I saw fear, pure outright fear which I guessed was caused by her anticipating the worst kind of reaction from me. It took her a moment to register what was going on and the disbelief on her face has stayed with me ever since. It seemed her daughter was always doing that, rushing up to people for a hug. Not all people and mom never knew when it would happen but and I'm only guessing here, not everyone was receptive to hugs from a stranger.

I may sound like I'm bragging, that I'm mother Theresa or something. Lord knows I'm not. I just like to think that maybe in my small way I helped a bit. Maybe this is my way of going up to happy guy, throwing my arms around him and telling him he did a good job. After all. Isn't that what we all need?

Vinnie

aaaaaaggggghhhhhhhhhh

2009-04-02T15:11:00.002-05:00

Pigs a Poppim by sharongraff on Polyvore.com

now I just have to remember how I managed to do this. A computer genius I am not.

try 3

2009-04-02T15:07:00.002-05:00

let's see if I can get this from polyvore

second try

2009-04-02T15:04:00.000-05:00

Let's see if it works this time

Just trying

2009-04-02T15:03:00.001-05:00

to see if I've actually gotten the hang of this posting a picture thing. Could it be this easy?

It's official

2009-03-24T17:46:00.003-05:00

Rocco really is a wonder dog. He was hit by a car Saturday night. The vet says that's what caused his wounds. He has a bruised butt, and belly and a vicious wound that goes nearly to the bone and a few other nicks and scrapes and that's it The vet couldn't believe it and justkept telling me over and over again that Rocco was such a lucky dog. He also told Rocco that he, Rocco, was lucky to have a smart mother. It seems that I did everything right , down to making sure Rocco drank and checking the color of his pee. Oh and cleaning the wounds and laying on the neosporin. Rocco spends most of his time asleep but about three times a day he starts 'singing' and then eventually gets to his feet and heads for the door where I follow him around the yard hoping for poop. We're supposed to monitor him closely and that's the only bodily function he hasn't done yet though he acts as if he needs to. The vet said milk and dulcolax will help him go. I feel like a voyeur following him around the yard and staring at his bruised butt. He keeps giving me these embarrased looks over his shoulder and I don't much blame him. With a yard as big as ours, the dogs just go to their spots and do their own thing, without mommy chasing after them with a plastic bag and a scooper.So now I pretend that I'm not staring at his butt and urging the poop elves to do their business so that Rocco can do his. I wonder if there is a saint of poop. It seems that theres a saint for everthing else.
Rocco has always been a vocal dog but now it seems as if he almost has words. He starts telling me something and then ends up singing ending up sounding like some kind of hound chasing who knows what. All he needs to do is just go to the door when he goes out but I suppose a wonder dog can trumpet if he likes. after all... it is a wonder that we still have him.

Did'ja ever notice

2009-03-22T21:13:00.002-05:00

that when you finally seem to be getting your head above water, something comes along and shoves you under? Rocco the WOnder dog is hurt, only we don't know by what. A neighbor said she heard a dog get hit by a car sometime between 11pm last night and midnight but Rocco was already in the house then, and I know for certain because I made a run to Wal Mart for neosporin and Wal-Mart closes one set of doors at 11. Then one son thought Rocco might have tried to scoot under the fence and now the latest is that he was attacked by a racoon. It's the vet's tomorrow and I hop he can tell us more. I've cleaned the wounds and neosporined them. We've made certain that Rocco has eaten and had something to drink and we've been fussing over him a little more than usual. And of course, being me, I've spent the day worrying. tho not more than usual. Whatever it costs us tomorrow so be it. We just need the Wonder dog back.

Bye Bey February

2009-03-02T02:07:00.002-05:00

I am so glad that Feb is gone. It means another late mortgage payment but what the heck. It's starting to almost feel 'natural'. Feb was a bad month for aches and pains. First of all Rocco the Wonder Dog started favoring a back leg, nothing much only an occasional limp and I was beginning to suspect that there was no limp at all, he really just wanted some0ne to lift him onto the couch or the bed. Then Little Dog Ollie had one of his back spasems which left him nearly crippled. I gave him his prednesone and permission to pee in the house if he had to. He got over that but it took longer than usual and then ROcco walked around with a front paw in the air for almmost a week and no sooner did that pass then my knees decided that they would only bend with a great deal of pain and a strange rice krispies kind of sound. I kept waiting for it to go away but finally gave in and asked the doc for something for pain. THat's the thing with fibro... you never quite know whether the reason you hurt is fibro or you really hurt yourself. Well the pain is finally starting to go away and now I have a cold. Even worse, I did not make a single thing this weekend and spent most of the time trying to sit in one place and sort stuff and was making a good start when I suddenly ran out of energy and swept everything into a carton and said the heck with it so now Ihave a bigger mess and more things to sort than before. I also slept alot. and I do mean alot. I had three naps today. And speaking of naps.... how about that expression sleep like a baby. I wouldn't want to sleep like a baby, it means I'd wake every three hours wanting to be fed and end up wet in the morning.

Earlier today the squirrels on the roof sounded as if they were holding ther winter olympics and after the 40th circling of the roof, I pulled down the attic ladder part way to let it close with a bang and scare the squirrels off. The husband said that Rocco was asleep on the couch and snoring away and when the ladder boomed, he (Rocco not the husband) shot straight up off the couch , legs going even before his eyes were open and hit the ground running. Not TOWARD the sound but away. THat dog is such a goof. When he was playing at being Baron Von Limpgimp, he had beenn given the remnants of a taco bell taco salad and with the bits to chew gone, he wanted to work on the sauce remaining, only the plastic container kept sliding across the floor. Now he couldn't hold it with his bad paw and couldn't hold it with his good paw because.... well... I guess because he's right handed. So being the wonder dog that he is, he bough it over to me for me to hold it for him. I didn't even think about it just took it and held it. The husband was amazed that I knew what the dog wanted and to tell the truth I have no idea how I knew what he wanted. I think he used his wonder dog mind control on me. Maybe he is a wonder dog after all.

I have seriously lost my mind

2009-02-26T23:47:00.002-05:00

Picture this.
I get into my car with a grunt and much carefully moving of my body... this crazy winter on again off again weather is havoc on my tender fibro'd body. So there I sit, blinking away tears of pain and I see this shopping cart come rolling by all on its own. No packages no person, just this shopping cart rolling along the main aisle, picking up speed but its course is straight and true. And what do I do? Do I run out there and nab the sucker before it alters course and rolls into someone else's car... oh no not me. I shout, and I do mean shot.... Run free little shopping cart, run free....
As if there's a herd of wild shopping carts grazing behind the super fresh and my cart is running to meet them.

And here I was wondering if I really needed my prozac. I guess I had my answer.

I wonder if herds of shopping carts are territorial. We definitely know they have a pack mentality because you usually see them in clusters and it's a rare cart that choose to wander off on its own.... unlike mannequins who are much more solitary and prefer out of the way places. I mean, why would these bubbas on the real crime shows claim that when they were up to the jock straps in swamp water huntin gators or whatever and they stumble across a dead body the first thing they think is that its a mannequin. I mean why else would there a a mannequin in the swamp in the first place if they were herd beast like shopping carts and teenagers? Some questions are ment to be pondered and never answered but I do tell you this, with my luck I would see a body floating in the river and get all bent out of shape yelling that there is a body in the river only to have the cops and the fire and rescue and who knows who else and make their way down the bank of the river, to the water to discover that the body was only.... wait for it... wait for it.... a mannequin. I think it's time for bed.

Brother Can You Spare a Dime

2009-02-25T22:34:00.003-05:00

or $14,000.00.?
The woman from the second mortgage company called today wanting to know if we had the $14,000.00 so that we could 'buy' our $140,000.00 second mortgage from them. If I had $14,000.00 don't you think we'd be PAYING our mortgage.
And so, that phone call managed to sneak in past all the barriers I've tried to put up to insulate myself from all things negative and the walls they came a tumbling down. So now I'm all weeping and would be all pmsy if I wasn't as old and dirt and PMS went the way of that time of the month. Now I'm in a continual what would be PMS funk. I'm sad and feeling sorry for myself and maybe if I din't hurt so Goddammed badly most of the time I could deal with the rest of the crap. Now I have a knee that's killing me, and my stomach is upset and the rash that would not quit has sprung up on the other leg. Maybe if another birthday hadn't been ignored I could handle it all but comeon now. What if you had a birthday and got only one card and that wasn't even from your family? As for gifts....I disremember what they are. Even when my mother was alive, I was never invited over for cake or something and if I wanted my present I got it only when I took her to lunch for HER birthday. I mean, doesn't it smack of something more than greedy to call your mother and say , Hey, I'm coming to pick up my present, ave it ready. Shouldn't it be more like a I have your gift, when can you come and get it sort of thing. You'd think I'd be used to being ignored on my birthday and there wouldn't be any Christmas gifts for me either if I didn't tell the husband exactly what I wanted or bought it for myself and gave it to him to wrap. Geez, no wonder I'm so blue.

did I mention that I HURT???!!!! Two flights of steep steps to the office each day is starting to look as hard as climbing Mt Everest but Everest has to be easier what with the sherpas and all of that.

And so we are back in the mess we were in before Christmas, and the clients are nowhere to be seen. The husband even had a go around with one of our remaining clients who claimed that since he paid us acertain amount we were now obligated to keep him in his house for as long as we could without seeing another penny from him. THis is a pain in the ass client who pissed and moaned last week telling me that I hadn't emailed him in two weeks when I had just done the email five minutes before AND had proof that I sent him one on the week before that. This guy is the sort that will cause trouble, I can feel it. Our contract makes it very clear that it's a month to month thing and not one lump sum.

I guess it's time to increse the prozac. I wonder if they come in the industrial sized barrel and not a piddling bottle. I certainly need something.

Too bad I don't drink.

Even crafting has hit a crafter's block.

Just call me little Suzie Sunshine.

Where's a pig when you need one?

craft classes

2009-02-08T01:17:00.002-05:00

I've tried as well as I can to find some craft group to join only I'm coming up empty. So I thought about classes. I should find some classes and went searching on line. I ran across a polymer clay fest that will be held only about a half hour away from me and I got all excited until I read the cost of this clayapalloza. $350.00 for the weekend. Holy crap! I checked to make sure I wasn't seeing extra zeros where there weren't any and it said $350.00. To play with clay. I also tooka quick look at what is supposed to be taught that weekend and I have to say, I expected much more for my $350.00. I like clay but not THAT much. Even a local-ish stamp store wants $75.00 for a class. Holy crap once again. As for local craft stores... well... I've already managed to master most of what they offer. In fact, I am so done with beads though no suddenly they seem to be the hottest thing. A Local Michaels' even has its own bead room. I suppose I'mm forced to wander as a solitary soul trough the craft wilderness that is Maryland. I wonder if I can convince the dogs that they want to share some crafts. I could teach them how to make a pair of earrings and they could teach me how to hide rawhide bones in my shoes or tear the stuffing out of a stuffed toy with my teeth. No. I think I need actual humans. Dang.

Musing

2009-02-03T00:25:00.002-05:00

I think I watch too much TV, I'd put music on while in the craft room but my decent cds are at work and I can never remember to bring them home. So on goes the Tv and I find myself watching anything that isn't on the three major networks. The other night I watched something about little girl beauty pagents but this one was a bit different. Little daughters and their mothers would be competing against each other for the title of Royal Supreme Whatever of the whole wide world. Or something like that. The show focused on three mothers and their daughters and what a trio of doozies they were. There was the white woman with her long gray hair whose talent was twiring a baton. Now WW was a biggish woman and being big myself I hold no prejudice about size HOWEVER biggish women should not twirl batons while dressed in spangly spandex AND have an unspandexed middle and so all the spandexed flab from bottom and top ooshes out in the middle like the ice cream in a melting ice cream sandwich. That was only topped when she appeared on stage in a bathing suit. Now I wiggle and jiggle myself and wouldn't dream of prancing about on stage with so much white flesh exposed that it blinded the judges. Then there was the African American mother whose eyes seemed to be permenetly stuck in the wide open surprised mode. Either that or she had no eyelids. She wasn't bad looking but her constant critcisim of her daughter made me want to reach into the TV and throttle her. The last mother daughter were latina. Mom was beautiful but daughter looked like every other two year old Latina kid I've ever seen. She was adorable but strong minded and did what she wanted to do no matter how much gay daddy tried to coax her into doing something else. Ok now someone will call me a homophobe. I'm not. But this big mincing man MADE his wife and duahgers's costumes, did their hair and makeup and had that prissy voice that you hear on flagrantly gay guys on TV. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had gotten up there AND pranced around. Which brings me to America's Next Top Model or something like that where one contestant was worried that while in a shot at the beach the water would dissolve the tape holding her Mr Winkie in place. Yep... she was a he.

Shees.

Then there's that really weird religious family with the continually pregnant mom and 18 or 19 or 20 kids all whose names begin with J and who claim dancing is a sin.

Not to mention Hitler and the Occult. Is the Shroud of Turin real and the Ovation TV program about the deaf down's syndrome woman who wraps things with strings and fibers and stuff and it's called art. Outsider art which is simply art done for yourself and not for critics or to sell. So now I can call myself an outside artist. It's nice to know where I fit. Of course that means I passed on the reality cow boy show, the monday night sitcoms and Star Trek re runs, not to mention the 80 billionth time that particular law and order episode was on. I just gotta remember those cds tomorrow.

Outside Artist signing off..

Oh and while watching ovation TV I got inspired creatively and did three small collages and started wokring on figures made of stained class pieces with model magic heads. I hav GOT to learn how to take a decent pic.

Wishlist

2009-01-25T00:59:00.001-05:00

An internet group I belong to has a wish list posted on its site. It's for things one wants that, perhaps someone has and doesn't want and so the item goes to a new home. I've wondered what I'd wish for and I have come up with a list but few if any of my wishes can be easily filled.
I want a pig.., not any pig but Dottie, the last pig in my charge when I was still doing petting farm.
Since I can't have Dottie, I want a goat.
I want a real life in person friend, though to be honest I probably woudln't know what to do with a friend if I had one. I'm not much of a telephone person and I haven't a hint as to how to make and or be a friend.
If I can't have a friend how about some craft group so I can talk creative stuff with someone whose eyes don't glaze over or thinks that the only creation that's great is the one that is predominantly red (sorry husband)
I want there to still be dime stores. Not any kind but the old one with wooden floors worn smooth by countless feet, and counters of stuff instead of everything hanging from a peg.
I want to figure out collage.... I mean how hard can it be? Paper on paper would seem so simple and yet when I see collages in magazines I can't figure out things like.... why is there a number in the collage, does it mean something? Is it the color of the number, the shape for god's sake why is there a number on the damned thing an dhow come I don't GET it!
I want to take photos of my craft stuff that are good enough so I can try to dump some of my dolls on etys and get them out of the house because they are starting to jostle each other on the shelves and I;m afraid a fight will break out at amy moment.
I want it to snow. One long day of snow with the men at home and food in the fridge. One day of snow isn't too much to ask, is it?
I want to be happy but I haven't figured out what it would take to actually make me happy.
I'd like to get my sense of humor back. I don't know where it went once things got dire. If my sense of humor could help me survive my mother and the diva crap my sister pulled then where is it now when I really need it.
Mostly I want to feel... well if not loved... how about liked? I don't want to be one of those poor people whose funeral consists of the hearse and one car following it. How sad is a funeral where no body comes. When I see small ones like that, I want to pull my car into the line just so There is more than one car.
Most importantly I want to make a mark on the world. It doesn't have to be big or splashy, just something to justify my life.
ANd lastly I wish I wouldn';t always get like this when a birthday looms. Ish.

Musing

2009-01-14T09:06:00.002-05:00

I'm sitting here this morning with Little Dog Ollie curled up next to me, I got to thinking about how old he is and how dreadful it's going to be when he goes and then my mind carried me further and I thought about my own passing.

I've heard of the tunnel or the white light and that your loved ones who have gone ahead are there to greet you. If I can have my druthers, I want to be greeted by those who really love me, my animals. I can picture it. My childhood dog, Taffy, long and low to the ground, who taught me how to love. There is Bo, my first cat, who went far too soon and Neba the greatest cat in the world who also taught me what love is. I mean, this cat would join newborn kittens or puppies in their box when Mama went out for a walk or a meal. It didn't matter that Neba was male, he loved babies, the human ones as well. There are more cats: Poppy, Alex, Robin, Twirly Twiggins, Honey, Vincent, Patchwick and Pip. MOlly and Scamp join Taffy, the two of them finally cured of their mange and happy and healthy. Emily, my dear little dog with the go funny foot who limped when she walked but used all four feet when she ran. She knew her time was coming and so,while the husband and I were on vacation, she got out of the yard at night and was hit by a car. Suicide to spare me watching her fail and die. And my Mutley with his arthritis and his congestive heart failure and his happy funny face. His body will be wiggling all over, he'll be grinning at me and he'll be giving ME m&Ms each night. now THAT'S a welcoming committee

Alias Rocco the desk dog

2009-01-09T00:34:00.003-05:00

First of all you have to know that we have a small house. A very small house and so, when the holidays come things need to be shifted around the living room to accomodate the tree. Not that we have a lot of furniture in the living room, just a tv a desk and a sofa and a small drawered chest. This year we shoved the desk under the big front windo and put the tree in its place. Of course Rocco the wonder dog had to inspect it and make certain all was well. Then, and I have no idea how this happened, the chest was pushed to the side of the couch and the desk butted up against it and there was a folded blanket on the desk top and sitting there in all his scooby Doo glory was Rocco the Wonder dog. It seems that sofa chest desk made a series of easy steps for him to get to the desk topthough he has been known to fly up there propelled from somewhere mid room. eh desk to
Once upon a time when we had furniture arranged a different way, Rocco could lay on the back of the couch and watch the world go by, but we changes the furniture and his sentry post was gone. And now it's back and there he sits, either upright, his funny half bent ears at alert as he scans the yard for possible villians. Ralphie might have had his bb gun but we have Rocco. We are safe from random squirrels, cats, a trash can being blown down the street, not to mention the fed ex, Ups and the USPS folk who dare to deliver packages on our street without permission from Rocco. Luckily the guys who come by to steal the garbage come before Rocco is awake because there will be no garbage theivery on his watch.
His best day as Mighty desk watchdog was when there was a cat across the street, some random movement in the yard AND the chinese lady across the street dared to head toward her car to go somewhere. Rocco told them in no uncertain terms that they were not to even THINK about his house.
He's not on this vigil alone. Eloise Matilda his stuffed gorilla remains on the floor but he has carried his rather big toy lamb up there to use for a pillow to prop up his head so he can lay and look out the window.
Since the desk was a second hand give away desk and not something expensive and wonderful, I think Rocco might just have a permanent post and if I ever figure out my digital camera and learn how to add pics to this blog, we might all get to see a big brown scooby doois sort of dog and his fluffy white lamb protecting us from rain drops, woodchucks and delivery trucks... all from the comfort of the front window.

The Goat Whisperer

2009-01-06T01:41:00.002-05:00

I was actually out in the yard the other day without my cadre of body guards, namely Little Dog Ollie, Rocco the Wonder Dog and Chloe the cat who thinks she's either one of the canine boys, a dog or knows she's a cat and just likes to tag along with one of the canine boys. It's a rare happening when I get to leave or enter the house without any one of the three or all of them leaping and running and bringing me things to look at. I swear it takes me longer to get from car door to house door than it takes me to drive home. Anyway... as I was saying I was out in the yard with the body guards inside and as I headed for the Husband's car so we could go off to the office together, I heard the Little Goatling boy from next door. LGB has two canine brothers, Toby who has a special bark just for me and Scooter who unfortunately reminds me of my spooky nephew. Scooter always seems to be very serious, as if plotting some dastardly deed while masquerading as a long haired bundle of fluff.
But there was LGB a maaa ing and a baa ing and a bleating and I bleated back as I headed for the fence and little Goatling boy just trotted his little goatling butt over to me so I could rub the top of his head. Now I've been talking to LGB since they got him only this was the first time there wasn's some idiot dog in my way making a fool of himself trying to get my attention. When I got in the car the husband was amazed that the goat came right over to me and let me pet him. It was as if I was some kind of goat whisperer he said. So it is official. I do speak goat as well as pig, dog, cat, woodchuck,and well human, of course. I bet Rosetta Stone doesn't carry those in their library of language learning courses.

Odds and ends...

The fibro is flaring badly and as ever I'm mishearing again.

Did you know you can get a SHitty card credit card? And the other phone companies are still nipple and diming you to death.

We lost one of our clients in the business because he is going to jail and can't afford to pay us any more. As for his wife and kids, well he's going to let the church take care of it. As for why he's going to jail... he owes the IRS back taxes in the amount of $5,000,000.00. Yep five million. He's gotten 5 years but may be out in 3. And speaking of Rosetta Stone, another of our clients worked for them as a voice on a cd. The man had a lovely deep voice with a delightful african accent.

Oh and I got Rak'd (random act of kindness)the other day. I was searching for marshmallows in the big Wal Mart super store and couldn't find them in candy so I thought I 'd try hot choclate figuring they might be there but I couldn't find hot choclate either and I was griping to the husband that I couldn't find the hot choclate when two ladies came up to me, told me they heard about the hot choclate hunt and they led me to the hot choclate and .... they were customers of the stores and not employees.... the employees of this walmart spend a vast amnount of time standing around gossiping which might explain why the shelves always look bare. So now I know how the cashiers feel when I buy them a candy bar to say thank you. It just made my day.

It's late so I'll say good Naaaaaaaiiiiighhht.

A big juicy kiss right on the lips.

2008-12-17T22:30:00.000-05:00

I rarely go anywhere and when I do the Husband usually goes with me but today I had enough of living and working and riding together and set out on my own to a nearby dollar store. I did the dollar store thing and then went to one of those odd lot stores in a smallshopping center and as I got out of the car, I met a pair of big brown eyes and before I knew what was happening, Henry came running over to me and planted a big wet one right on the lips. And until that moment I didn't even know Henry but Henry's mother on the other end of the leash asked if I liked animals while I was being kissed good and proper. I told her I did and she said she figured so because Henry told her he needed to come over and see me. I have had that happen before people who claim that their dogs avoid strangers are telling me this while I'm being kissed within an inch of my life. Talk about someone having animals magnetisem!
Of course I always ask the pet parent first if I can touch and then I always get to the dog's levell with hand outstretched and wait for them to yea or nay me. Luckily I haven't been nayed yet. So the high light of my day was a big wet juicy kiss from Henry.... However.... I wish he hadn't just finished eating right before he kissed me.

One of those end of year letters I 'd love to see

2008-12-15T22:28:00.000-05:00

I hate those holiday letters that some people include in their cards. I know those people must be proud of kis/hubby/self but they tend to scream at me that I'm a loser and my husband has not won the nobel prize or the sons have discovered the cure for the common cold and I am not starring in a Broadway play. I'd like to see a truthful letter something like.....

Well it's been another great year in the Numbnuts family home. Little Bubba managed to keep himself out of jail this year (as long as we ain't countin' the weekends) while Little Bigger Bubba has found himself a new career wrestling alligators. He likes the job well enough but its a horror on his costumes. Sis has a new boyfriend and she has moved with him and his grand and his great grand children in a lovely little commune in the hills of West Virginia. We think this is the big love of her life cause she really doesn't much mind the cow bell he wants her to wear.

Pa finally got himself unwedged from the booth at Denny's where he gt stuck sometime back in August when there was more Pa than space between booth back and table edge. He's enjoyed his Denny's vacation and was sorry to see it end when the denny's management ripped out the table and freed him. He could have stayed longer but the managment said he was starting to smell and was putting people off their food. Hell, you'd thing they never saw flies buzzing around someone's head before. As for me, I still have my two front teeth though five others have been lost this year alone. Makes it easier to brush and I always thought chewing was over rated.

Well that's it for us. We're wishing you a happy holidays and a good new year and if you should need a bail bonds man... I've got a couple of numbers I can give you.

Love to all

Maybeliine.

Of course this is all made up. I've lost only four teeth and I do like to chew.

Memories

2008-12-13T00:17:00.000-05:00

When the sons were little bits of boys, we had a problem getting little boy hands into their mittens. Either the fingers would cram together and try to fit in the thumb spot with the thumb or the thumb would want to join the fingers and once I actually pulled a mitten over a pacifier because the kid wouldn't let go of it. And then I had a brain storm and made up a story about Mr Thumb and the Finger brothers and how Mr Thumb had his own place and the finger brothers all lived together. Somehow it made sense to the sons who in toddler speak called them Mifler Flum and the Finger Brolies

Older son little boy then was all eyes with a fragile air about him. Younger son was... well... cherubic. Rounded cheeks, blue eyes, blonde hair and an infectious giggle. And yet he was typically younger son, a smaller verison of the man he is today. You needed to know this to understand the sheer importance of what happened one cold day.

We were neatly sending Mifler Flum and the Finger Brolies to their respective residences and I casually wondered aloud why Mr Thumb lived alone. Younger son with an angelic innocence looked at me and said. "because he farts". Not one to laugh at something a child says simply because it would cause whatever that was to be repeated ad infinitum, I then mused that I didn't know thuimbs could fart. 'Sure they can.." darling blue eyed little boy said and then held up an unmittened hand to me "Wanna smell?"

Thumb farts..... who knew?

For the love of Gaud

2008-12-10T15:27:00.000-05:00

I have always had an affinity for all things gaudy. I have no idea where it came from only if it shimmers and shines I love it. And the more it shines and shimmers and glitters the more I want it. Crystals, rhinestones, glitter I want it all.

So there I was in a dollar store and found what had to be the world's ugliest albeit shiniest garland. It was mostly silver but there were chunks of color in it as well. it was one of those garlands that went with nothing. HA. Or so I thought.

Then I was in the really junky thrift store and found these big plexi glass diamond shapes on a string (I think they were meant to hang in a doorway as a clattery curtain. Of course I bought them. They were shiny and the crow part of my personality could not resist.

Let's not forget the cloth bendable multi colored dolls I got on vacation one year for a remarkable 4 for $1.00 and since I love polymer clay so much and found glass balls cheap I covered the balls with clay making some of the most outrageous ornaments you have ever seen.

Today I put this all together on my tree. The ugly garland looped around. The diamond shams cascade from top to bottom, the dolls perch on limbs and since the tradition Santa on the top of the tree just didn't go, I made a tree topper out of glittery wire garland that I got at a dollar store. I turne don the lights and WOW!
despite all the ugly and the glitter and the weird, I managed to put together a great tree. Who knows what I'll do next? Maybe I'll even end up wearing socks that MATCH!

It all started when the guy across th street died

2008-12-10T09:14:00.000-05:00

He had lung cancer which everyone kept saying was getting better and then he was dead. So the Husband decided it was time for him to upgrade his life insurance. (The guy across the street was younger than the Husband and I). And so, the Husband contacted a life insurance guy who sent out one of those pee and blood collector people and we waited only to discover that the pee and blood people said that not only did the Husband have high blood pressure BUT diabetes and that there was problems with his kidneys. Holy or maybe not so holey CRAP. The MIL died of diabetes while the FIL died of kidney failure. It was enough to make me run screaming into the night. To top it all off, the Husband's ex-employee known here as wicked voodoo everyone looks at me funny because I'm asian woman lost yet ANOTHER job and was to be out of her rented room by yesterday. I had a 10 minute taste of wicked voodoo everyone looks at me funny because I'm asian and what is with all the slamming doors woman, in the office one day when out paths crossed and I can only imagine what she was ranting to the Husband about. So not only did the Husband have his health to worry about and our business (which is doing better) but now there was the picture of wickied voodoo everyone looks at me funny because I'm asian and what is it with all the slamming doors and it's not my fault I was being harrassed woman living in her car, or under a bridge but I suspect if she was living under a bridge that, eventually, the trolls would kick her out. But I digress.
So there we were with sickly Husband and all the rest of the crap. So the Husband screwed up the courage, went to a real doctor where they took his blood pressure and did the whole blood and pee thing only to discover........

are you sitting down?

That other than high blood pressure and a bad choice of friends there was nothing else wrong with him!!! Woo hoo. We can't figure out why the life insurance blood and pee woman got it all wrong and I;m wondering whether she processed the fluids herself at her kitchen table using the chemistry set she got for Christmas when she was 12.

All I do know is that the Husband is fine and I was and am actually happy... an emotion I am not overly familar with. Who knows. Maybe it will be a good Christmas after all.

As for wicked voodoo....well you get the idea... she's not living under a bridge or in her car but in a cubby hole of a room next to a furnace in a friends house. Some friend. He's charging $200.00 a month to live in a cubby hole but I guess it beats living i n a box or under a bridge. What I do know is that the trolls are happy that the underbridge is still theirs and they can slam all the door they want.

Whew

2008-11-27T22:34:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving is nearly over. Ii hardly had to do any cooking at all because oldest son took over, telling me that I had made dinner for so many years it is now time for him to take over. Which is basicly the same thing I told my parents when we got our first house. So there we were with a 20 lb turkey and equally big ham and enough sides to float a battleship. As soon as the button popped on the turkey the men came running. Not just mine but the periphiral men who are friends of the sons. Oldest son LOVES being a host and he was beaming as his friends lined up. Younger son said it looked like a soup kitchen and I had huge plates enough for everyone. My men eat on big round serving plates instead of taking two regular plates. We ate and ate and ate some more and now it's a rock band in the basement as they play guitar hero.
Oldest son and I even rememenised (god why can't I spell tonight) about turkey in a bag and the day the turky ran pink and he ate three plateloads of salad. I got to thinking about how my mother never would have opened her house to my friends and she must be spinning in her grave because gasp shudder, cringe a couple of the guys were black. She didn't even like the fact that there was a greek family on her block. Yes I have mother issues and even though she's gone, those issues surface regularly. But I am thankful for her as well. She was the perfect example of what I didn't want to be as a mother and I have, perhaps, spoiled the sons some but what the hell. If you can't spoil your kids who can you spoil? And if you can't open your doors and feed the neighbors, well who can you feed. It isn't even as if the neighbors don't have food of their own... it's just that everyone else in hte neighborjood eat late in the day while we usually eat about one.

And now I have a confession to make. I am not as benevolent as I would like to be. It seems that evil voodoo woman has lost yet another job and her unemplyment hasn't kicked in because she had ot pay back the unemployment form the last time she was fired. This makes five jobs in three years and her landlord is threatening to throw her ouyt and while I did toy with the idea of inviting her to dinner I didn't. Maybe I should have but I had enough of tense Thanksgiving when my mother was alive and my sister still speaking to me and I like our easy breezy thanksgivings that my men and Ii have.

Sauerkraut anyone?

inist \iutar gitaruar aur hero.

Sauerkraut

2008-11-26T23:12:00.000-05:00

Here in Bawlmer Merlin we have sauerkraut with our Thanksgiving turkey. Don't know why only that it's the way it has always been. Of course that makes people living outside of Merlin (bawlmerese for Maryland) look at us as if we were drooling out of our ears. Cranberry sauce for god's sake or those sweat potatoes with the burned marshmallows or even that stupid green bean dish with canned onion whatevers sprinkled on top but SAUERKRAUT?
My mother's sauerkraut was rinsed within an inch of its life and cooked with fresh polish sausage and barley. Fresh sausage was an unappealing gray color and the barley was soft and mushy. My own sauerkraut comes from a can and is slightly rinsed and for years I ate it alone so I always bought a small can of it. And then, older son shocked the hell out of me and made the sauerkraut for last year's thanksgiving. It seems that he discovered that he LIKED IT!!! Now to realise how odd this is, this was the kid who for his first six years of life was serenaded with "Eat Josh Eat' at every meal. One thanksgiving at my parents, they nagged older son so that his eyes filled with tears as he leaned over his plate and threw up everything he had eaten. He was only three but it was enough for them to leave him alone that year. So you can imagine my surprise when he made sauerkraut, unrinsed with no gray lumps of sausage but cooked with a green apple and a pig tail. (forgi ve me Dottie and DearHeart) He got the recipe form a friend's mother who has also introduced him to fried chicken, collard greens and mac and cheese made from scratch. He's cooking it now and my stomach is already grumbling at me. Older son has always been a help at thanksgiving. he and I seem to work as if we possess a single brain. When we used to go to my sister's or my mother's it was alway sbedlam at dinner, people flying around the kitchen, my sister calling upon Dear Sweet Jesus to make her gravy thicken, my mother proudly claiming she made REAL mashed potatoes and not that STUFF from a box. (Hey! The men love boxed potatoes) The mother and sister never wanted to come to my house and so we went there each thanksgiving but I finally put an end to it, the year we had pink turkey for dinner. My mother got the idea of roasting the turkey in a paper bag. Why, I have no idea. My sister followed that cooking tip and one year as she carved into the bird it ran pink. The meat was pink the juice coming out of it was pink and when I suggested that it wasn't quite done she told me it was because the skin had turned brown. When I tried to microwave opur meat, I was told that I as not allowed, that the meat was done and nuking it would make it tough. It was a good thing that my contribution was a salad because that's mostly what we ate. I still get queasy just thinking about it. I'll concentrate on the sauerkraut smells instead. Yum.

HMMMMMMMM

2008-11-25T22:12:00.000-05:00

I am in a bit of a quandry though I'm not sure it's big enough to qualify as a quandry. To make a long story short, I sorta signed up to classmates dot com not planning on actually joining and somehow three people have checked my site and signed my guest book. I didn't even know I had a guest book. Anyway, there is no way I can find out who these three people are unless I become a gold member which translates into... give us some money.... So here is my quandry (I swear I'm spelling that properly despite the underlining the computer insists upon aS if to taunt my lack of spell-a-bility) I want to know who is checking me out , I really do but I'm not sure I want to know enough to pay for it. Besides, I was NOT the most popular kid in high school and so I have no idea who even knew I was alive then, let alone wonder if I am alive now. Some days I wonder if I AM alive. So why should I spend money to find out who was interested enough to look me up while I'm thinking they probably looked me up because they couldn't remember who the heck the polish girl was. There were two polish girls in my grade, me and a girl named Janet Equallylongpolishnameasmineski and everyone was always mixing the two of us up. We looked nothing alike and while I am not a raving beauty, poor Janet was downright odd looking. So now are they looking for me or for Janet Equallylongpolishnameasmineski?
My maiden name by the way was Kwiatkowski and I could spell it in kindergarten. But I'm wandering. So do I spend the money to find out? And if I don't why can't I let it go and allow it to keep pestering me. or find out and then be disappointed? AHHHHHH!!! decisions decisions.
Oh and ever hear of the saying about "damning with faint praise"? Want to know what it said under my graduation picture in the yearbook? Cheerfullness and kindness beget each other. gag. They must have gotten that from "The Book of What to Say in Yearbooks About People You Know Nothing About Nor Care to Know."

Of course the best one in that yearbook was under the kid who spent most of his life with a camera hanging around his neck. His read, "A Picture is Worth a thousand words" and sine he hadn't shown up picture day there is only a gray rectangle saying Picture not available.

But the very best of all was in a friend's yearbook. She went to the High School that my sons went to and since she and I are the same age we were both in high school when people weren't so ready to take offense. In one picture there are a couple of African American girls eating something and the caption reads.... Mmmmm those BROWNIES look delicious. If that happened these days someone would be strung up by their petard.

SO do I don't I do I don't I do I Don't i do?

Minor Sacrifices

2008-11-24T09:31:00.000-05:00

I've gotten used to making daily sacrifices to the god of ice cubes. NOt that I had much of a choice. It seems that anytime I go into the freezer for ice, one cube always escapes to go skittering across the floor and hiding itself away where it will slowly melt into an obvious puddle which then compells the husband to point at it and say "Who peed there?". Since we have dogs and cats, well, if it was pee, there is a culprit of sorts and yet I find myself so tempted to fall to my knees and hug his knees sobbing, "It was me! It was ME! I PEED ON THE FLOOR" As if my creaking knees would allow such a thing. So I;ve come to accept the whole ritual of the sacrifical cube but now a new sacrifice has cropped up. that is the sacrifice of the envelope.
We have a toner printer at the office and for some unfathomable reason the first envelope of any batch tends to print too small forcing me to ge tup, turn of the printer, turn it back on and try again, all the while muttering threats under my breath, like how I'd like to take it home and have SOMEBODY pee on it. That would show it. Ha! I'm sure there's and easy way to prevent such a sacrifice other than me sticking a sacrifical envelope in first and small print on that over and over.
I suppose it could be worse. At least I'm not an indiginous INCA and therefore not cutting out heart and chopping off heads. the house is messy enough as it is.
I have this week off and hopefully I can unwind from the grind of endless data entry and letter printing. I'm already planning on not leaving the "crap room' ....... Oh God I just realized!!! Ther's polymer clay sacrifice going on in the crap room. Sign.

Flying cars and other stuff

2008-09-18T22:57:00.000-05:00

The husband and I were on our way to a late lunch and taking a highway to get there. He was driving and I was daydreaming when I suddenly see this car take to the air as if it had been driven off a stunt ramp, soar into the air over both sets of guard rails and come to earth in a cloud dust to be proud of. it landed nose down and for an instant I thought it would flip over but the back end settled in a rather anticlimactic way and there isd sat on the grass divider between the lanes, facing in the absolute wrong direction. Of course there had been squealing and ginding and the note worthy dust cloud. The Husband pulled over to call 911 and I noticed.... much to the shame of Maryland drivers that only guy in a truck pulled over to see if he could help. Everyone else went wizzing by while the husband dealt with a butthead 911 operator who seemed to want to know every picky little thing, after, he she it debated as to whether we were calling the correct 911. Oh for god's sake ! The car had been airbound. It may have left the ground in one county and came to rest in another but DOES IT REALLY MATTER? Let someone in authority get out there and THEN decide which county it is in.

After lunch the husband took me to the local Michael's for the latest issue of Somerset Studios (I really should have a subscription) and discovered a bead room in the process of being readied for a grand opening. I swear I am always ahead of a trend. I've done the bead thing and now am ready to move on just when the rest of the world starts to catch up. I scrap booked photo albums 20 years ago using brochures and photos and ticket stubs and post cards from a trip to disney world. And at one time I had close to 100 house plants before every tom dick and harry started selling plants.

I watched the little goatling next door and his buddy their little dog that's a shi tsu something mix, roam around the yard together as if they were a herd. If two can be called a heard. Apparently neither the goat nor the dog realise that they are two different animals and that some dogs EAT goat. And on the vein the little Goatling's owner's mother told me there was a dog in their yard that had jumped the fence from my yard and had gone after little goatling. The dog was the same color as Rocco the wonder dog only Rocco was having a barking competition with the big dog TOby that lives next door with little dog and goatling, and totally ignored it all. I guess Rocco learned his lesson when he was giving little goatling hell and little goatling charged the fence head down right at Rocco and when the head hit the fence it made a satisfying thwang kind of sound and if Rocco the Wonder dog had been wearing pants at the time, he would have peed them. So now Rocco pretends that the little goatling next door doesn't exist but I do see Rocco watching him from the corner of his eye, feining his disinterest. As to who the goat chasing dog was, beats me. Little dog Ollie could never sail over the fence Rocco ois more of a climber than a jumper. Little goatling's owner's mother told me not to be surprised if I find little goatling in my yard some day. If goatling can jump up onto their cars, he can come over the fence easily.... and probably scare the crap out of rocco, I guess it's a good thing, after all that Rocco doesn't wear pants. I'd probably be the one stuck washing them.

Owl WOman

2008-08-14T23:35:00.000-05:00

Oftentimes I am convinced that I have some kind of cosmic kick me sign attached permanently to my back. Only this isn't a kick me sign. It's more like a "Hey! Hi! Tslk to me" sign, legible only to those who can see invisible signs or whose voices read the sign to them.
Today it was the Owl Lady.
There I was in my favorite thrift store for stuff... as opposed to clothes. Stuff is anything cool that suddenly you cannot live without, like any stuffed toy that sings or whistles or peeps or worse... sings the winnie the pooh song in a piglet voice over and over and goddamn it why won't the thing shut up already? that you stupidly buy Rocco the wonder dog just to watch him run around the yard showing all the neighbor dogs and the little goatling, what he's just been given. Or forks, key chains, plastic animals.... stuff like that.
So there I was perusing the stuff and wondering at the person who made a cigar box purse BUT neglected to a) switch around the top of the box so that the opening of the purse is to the top and not on the bottom and B) why there was no clasp at all to keep the lid shut no matter which way round you carried it. I was minding my own business, came around the corner and was way laid by the OWL WOMAN. Not that she was an owl or looked like an owl. Instead she found this god awful hard plastic owl that hooted when you turned it on. If that wasn't bad enough the thing's head turned white it hooted and the hoot was more of a breathy kind of hoo hoo sound that would have had real owls looking at each other and uttering WHAT in stead of hoo. Owl woman was enraptured of the owl and insisted on hooting it for me. I smiled, made some innocous remark and head on my way. Or so I thought. Owl woman followed chattering about owls and her neighbor and Halloween. I managed to lose her in the men's underwear aisle (who would buy used, elastic sprung out not quite whitey or even tighties anymore but baggy and grayies just doesn't have the same ring as tighie whities.
Thinking I was safe, I zipped around another corner heading for craft supplies, mostly yard and ugly ribbon, when...OH MY GOD! I was owled again. Owl woman popped up in front of me asking me if I had seen this... the owl... and making it hoot just for me. It was obvious she had forgotten she had ever spoken to me before. Then I got a good look at her. THink Carol Burnett doing a take off of Norma Desmond with the mascara stripes and the lipstick wandering off mouth and heading straight for the ear.
Now I can't be for certain but it certainly looked as if Owl woman's eyebrows were applied using a sharpie, in the dark, during an earth quake. One eyebrow attempted to follow the ridge of the brow but the other one was making a break for it and was planning to hide out in the woman's hair. Very bleached blonde with very dark roots.
She way laid me three more times before I decided to pack it in and go check out. I doubted I could stand one more Hee Hee from the owl and..... there I was... heading for the cashier. The coast was clear. I made it. I started unpacking my cart and..................
Yep. I got hoo's once more. I was partly convinced that when I arrived home the woman would be waiting for me with that god awful owl.
No fear. I'd just pull out Rocco's piglet and pooh her hoo.

Stuff and nonsense

2008-08-09T00:33:00.000-05:00

What a disappointment the opening ceremonies were for the Olympics. Somehow I expected something flashier, or maybe gaudier, from the chinese. Big scrolly things and people running around on a ball that looked like ants on a peach just did not do it for me.

The goatling nest door (his name is B by the way) is no longer a sad goatling in his pen AND he has found himselof a herd of sorts if one goatling and a small long haired dog can be considered a herd. Little goatling won't stay in his pen so he doesn't. Instead he roams the yard and bleats for his people to let him into the house. So now I deon't feel so badly for him. He even has a place in their basement to sleep. I thought I'd get much more of a chance to get my fingers on the goatling when his people went on vacation but the 18 year old son is staying home and he will care for the goat. RATS. Foiled again.

In my neck of the woods, oldeest son is growing a beard with a definitely piratical look to it. All clipped and neat and in a line. If I could figure out how to draw on this, I could illustrate but for now lets just say I like the look of it. Of course the husband has had a beard forever but that's because he has a non existant chin. Luckily both sons are chinned.

I swear that on the Vonage phone commercial the guy says that the regular phone company "Nipples and dimes you to death" and while i'm not quite sure how you nipple someone, it is intriguing to just think about. Also summer must be apostrophe breeding season because I find them cropping up on signs where they shouldn't be. Usually to make a word that is supposed to be plural, possessive instead. Free kitten's make me wonder just what personal belonging of a kitten is free or the kitten is.... what. Random wandering apostrophes and the near extinction of the adverb as we all drive "safe" Now I worked in a bank with a safe inside a vault and the library had a little safe in which to stash the fine money but I had never dreamed that they coould be driven. I wonder how many miles to the gallon a driven safe gets. And I am still toying with the idea of buying a cheap doll to tear apart so that the next time I need to fill up my tank I could tell the gas station guy that I wanted an arm and a leg worth of gas and drop those parts on the counter. Of course some of the attendants I've run across would have to have the arm and a leg explained to them and where's the fun in that?

Writer's Block

2008-07-27T07:54:00.000-05:00

I think I jinxed myself when I promised to be funny and quit my whining, pissing and moaning. NOw I open the laptop, log onto blogger and sit here and stare at it while my feeble mind desperately tried to dredge up something, anything to say... and come up blank. I read on another blog that the way to get over blogger's block is just to write and so I will. I have no dooubt this will be a train wreck but hang onto your undies, here we go! CHOO CHOO!
I have discovered that I am multi lingual WITHOUT ROsetta Stone. YOu know that commercial where you learn to say something about a horse and rider and one of the spokes people can't find the word tutor in her own language as in 'It's like you have your own... pause what is the word what is the word... person in your house teaching you the language... I think the word is TUTOR or if we want to go back to basics YOUR MOTHER! Why not just send some foreign speaking mother to your house. I bet she'd teach you the language fast enough.
Multi-lingual ... ok so the train of thought got slightly derailed.
I speak a number of languages.... english...or maybe American would be a better description because the TV insists on putting captioning on people speaking such exotic languages like Irish, New Zelander and Africaaner, basicly anyone with an accent.

MULTI LINGUAL MULTI LINGUAL AND STAY ON TRACK!

I speak American, Pig, Dog, Cat and now GOAT! Who knew I could speak goat? I didn't but when I hear the little goatling next door maa ing from his pen I talk to him AND he shuts up, listens and responds. NOw just because I speak goat doesn't mean I understand goat and maybe I should have a goat Mother sent to my house to teach me the goat language with pictures!

I still covet a goatling. The one next door neatly hops over the fence of his pen, crosses the yard, up the steps to the front deck and stands by the front door, maaing to be let in. And people say goats are stupid. HA! Maybe they should name the goatling Einstein. (I do have to learn the animal's name)

The King of the Knuckleheads has finally been served and we have a restraining order not that I think it will do any good and now we don't have to face the judge from Hell any more. Geez if they ever sent her to someone's house as a tutor... perhaps teaching legalese, they would learn the language in no time flat to avoid her having to look at them as if they were something smelly stuck to the sole of her shoe. She yelled at a guy in her courtroom because he had his arm around the woman sitting next to him.

Court story. We were sitting waiting for the show to begin... Oh the court to begin... when I was approached by a woman with a paper in her hand telling me she was from the Domestic Violence Center in the county and wanted to give me the paper with their services. I thanked her and told her I didn't need it and then she gave me that gentle "oh my poor dear" look and urged it on me again. I explained that I was only there for moral support and that look of distress deepened. Anyhow I finally explained it to her and she went her way. NOW the husband for all his faults has NEVER laid a hand on me. He did once kick me in the mouth but he was practising his karate kicks and I walked up to say something, got too close and walked into a kick. The husband is considerate and polite and thoughtful and before you think I married a gem, he does not listen to me, asks questions doesn't bother to hear the answer and asks the question again and again until he gets an answer he likes. I've managed to somewhat put a stop to that when he asks a question I would have no reason to have an answer to, I tell him I'll check, pull at the neckline of my shirt, gaze down at my boobs for a moment, the shake my head and say something like Nope... got nothing there. He thinks it's hysterical and I think you should all be honored to know me because according to the husband I KNOW EVEryTHing! choo choo!!!!!
Enough of this rambling nonsense. I need to go into the craft room and figure out my gotta have colors for polymer clay. Michael's has a sale and I'm just down to the ugly colors at home. All aboard.

Self Correcting Dogs and other stuff

2008-07-19T08:29:00.000-05:00

Have I ever said that I have the cutest dog in Christendom and beyond? It's true and while he is not mine, exactly, he still looks at me as mommy. Ollie the wonderdog is a shitzu powderpuff mix. A powderpuff is a japanese crested only it has hair. Ollie will be 11 this year and has lost none of his swagger. He still races anything on wheels that comes down the road and wins, still bosses Big Dog Rocco about and melts my heart whenever I look at him.
Once upon a time, many years ago, before Prozac, Ollie did something wrong (he was still a new puppy) and I yelled at him. He gave me this penetrating stare, trotted over to my sneaker, backed up to it, lifted his butt a tad and SHIT IN MY SHOE. And then, and then he looked me the the eye again made a fwoof sort of breath and walked away. I haven't yelled at him since. Of course I haven';t needed to because Ollie was trained by Uberdog Mutley who is gone but will never be forgotten.
Fast forward. Ollie has one bad habit occasionally he chews on things of mine but they are the oddest things. Crystal dangles hanging from my purse, the plastic clasps on my lap top bag. The other day my purse was on the floor and Ollie neatly extracted my cell phone from it and chewed on the antenna. When I found it I immediately knew the culprit and simply looked at Ollie and said in a wounded voice, "Oh Ollie what did you do?" I didn't yell, didn't swat just sat there and sighed. In a moment Ollie was in my lap for a snuggle. I told him to leave me alone for a bit and Ollie jumped down. BUT... and I didn't notice this immediately, he left behind his favorite stick as if giving me something of his for what he had done. OLdest Son said Ollie was giving me the stick to use as an antenna. Of course I forgave Ollie.
NOw big dog Rocco is much the same. When he does something wrong, I don't even have to know that he did something wrong or what it might have been all you need do is look at the dog and see it written across his face. The worst punishment for him or for Ollie is to tell them that you are not talking to them and ignore them for a bit.

oTHER sTUFF
The KIng of the Knucklehead has been upgraded to "Stalker' from destructive pain in the ass but his peace order has STILL NOT been served. It's a good thing that KOK is such a knucklehead and keeps doing ztuff because the last request for a peace order expired so we got to request a new one.

The kid next door has a goat. A black teenaged pygmy.... the goat, not the kid. I am experiencing a pang.... more like a three pronged pitchfork... of envy so fierce that i'm afraid my heart may break. When I gave up the idea of ever having a pig for a pet, I thought I'd love a little pyqmy goatling. I fell in love with one when I worked the Petting Farm and I wasn';t even IN the goat pen. So now the kid next door has a kid and I am eating my heart out. I'm not even sure I'll have a house by the end of the month and certainly cannot add any more creatures to the household. But come on now, powers that b e. Did you have to rub my face in it?

ROCCO AND THE huh?

2008-06-24T21:15:00.000-05:00

Rocco the wonder dog was stretched out on the living room rug chewing on an already chewed on bone that he unearthed from the basket of previously chewed bones and bits of torn apart toys, that is a mainstay of his life. Rocco lives to chew and puts such single minded intensity to it that I swear a bomb under his backside wouldn't interrupt him. Perhaps not a bomb but we have this big mother of a self watering thing for the animals that we bought at wal mart and only fill half way because if you fill it all the way, it starts to sprout algae before the animals empty it. Well there's rooco chewing away when for no reason the self waterer starts glugging and Rocco being Rocco had to get up and check it out. There her stood peering at it , nose nearly in the water. First he tilted his head to the right but that wasn't the right position and then to the left because, hey, maybe he can hear better that way and then when that didnt't help he did his long lazy stretch on the kitchen floor, eyes never leaving the waterer and there he sat till it stopped glugging. Then he got up and now he is staring at me as if he knows I am writing about him. After all he was only doing his job. It IS HIS DUTy to investigate everything and heaven help us all if someone dares to slam a car door, or even thinks about stepping out into their yard without notifying him first. And trucks...how dare they come up his street and A) steal the trash B) take oldest son away to his job and or 3) Dare to deliver packages to anyone but he. Oh and for the plane now flying over the house... that only gets growls. I used to call Rocco the mayor but am now thinking maybe he ought to run for president. I wonder if they's put a doggie door in the white house front door and would I have to get him an oval basket of prechewed bones and torn apart toys to fit the oval office?

I haven't been funny lately

2008-06-24T09:25:00.000-05:00

I haven't been funny lately (but I have been redundant...redunadant). I used to be funny, hysterical, roll your eyes at what I said and waiting till you are alone before laughing out loud because what I said was SOOO outrageous you really shouldn't condone that behavior funny.
I don't know what happened exactly but I have become sad. As if something had broken my heart. I don't like being sad but I am.

HOWEVER

I am going to try and put on a funny face. It may take time, since I'm out of practice and it may be at someone else's expense but I need to get my funny muscle moving again, otherwise... well I wouldn't want to be around me otherwise. So bear with me and let me see if I can find something humorous.

Oh yes. International market. Suddenly I love that place though I wish it didn't smell so strongly of some sea creature that's been living at the bottom of a sludge filled canal for a bit too long. No pig or cow heads yesterday ... I guess all the heads were sold over the weekend... why heads? Do I even want to know.

ANyhow I was in produce this time. Me and a number of lovely hispanic or is the proper term latino people. And I do mean lovely. Children with huge dark eyes, babies with a fluff of dark curly hair, buxom mamas followed by smiling fathers. t There I was wondering HOW to cook cactus and why you would cook cactus and marveling at how yucca looks remarkably like a ... well... bull pizzle and is it really coated with wax? The yucca not the pizzle. There was what I thin was a fruit that had hair and spines AND was green when I spotted the good old fashioned I know what to do with it green peppers that I had been looking for but hadn't reckoned with the... cue dum da dum dum music... the plastic bags from hell. SOmeday I want to meet the guy who designed plastic bags from hell and make him open one, to be used as a parachute, and kick him out of a plane. I have a problem with opening ziplock bag with my fingers who occasional feel as if I amd sporting cucumbers on the ends of my hands, so pbfh are the bane of my existance. Ripping them from the roll is easy but then trying to get it open.. I try to pick the sides apart, then roll them between my fingers, then start flapping it like crazy till I realise that I am trying to open it from the bottom and then turn it right side up and have no better luck. So I'm shaking the bag like mad, muttering to myself when I look up to find a latino man smiling at me gently. Without a word He offers me his open plastic bag and takes mine. I felt like bursting into tears. Silly, isn't it that a plastic bag can reduce me to tears. MY plastic bag superhero

things just keep getting better

2008-06-23T20:55:00.000-05:00

We went to see the State Attorney today. First of all I was made to feel unwelcome. It was a small room we'd be meeting in, I was told and the quarters were tight. Well yah, if you put a big goddamn conference table into a closet sized room, the quarters are going to be tight. Then, once we settled in this room, the state attorney peered at me and wanted to know what I was doing there if I didn't SEE anything. Uh duh. First of all I'M THE WIFE and secondly, I HEARD things. It got better when we were told that the threat and the subsequent breaking of the windshield didn't count because they could only focus on the breaking of the side window and can't do anything about the breaking of the windshield because we need a PREPONDERANCE of the evidence which translates into... you live in the poor section of the county so screw you. But wait..there's more. The King of the Knuckleheads did not show up for court on Friday because he wasn't served and UNTIL HE IS SERVED we just have to keep going back to court friday after friday until the end of time. And why wasn't he served? His town has one cop. That's it. Of course then the state cops can serve it but.... as you can see I have a lot of faith in the judicial system. So nothing is going to be done. Good luck and goodbye.

And if that isn't bad enough, I ran out of my meds. I take flexeril that is a muscle relaxer that makes me sleep. I have fibro and for some reason a muscle relaxer works better than a sleeping pill. I was running out, called in my refil and when we went to pick it up on Friday the pharmacy didn't have it... and it was after doctor's hours so I Had to wait till today to call it back in. Now my nurse practioner is so good to me and I knew the screw up wasn't on her end. Sure enough she had faxed it but they never recieved it so they ordered it again. The husband went to pick it up (he has money, I don't) and was told the bill was $900.00 plus dollars. You read it right. $900.00 for flexeril and prozac, one month's supply. It seems that our health insurance dropped us because we paid the bill late. In fact, the husband paid it on Friday over the phone AND has a confirmation code. Which does me no good for tonight and since I've had no muscle relaxers since Friday, every muscle in my body hurts and I haven't been able to eat much because it hurts to chew and swallow and all the rest. And now I itcha nd my nails are ragged andf I look like I got into a fight with a rose bush and the bush won.
Can't wait to see what tomorrow brings. A tornado probably. Oh and today's client was a no show. Yah,

juice on the king of the knuckleheads

2008-06-22T21:27:00.000-05:00

The husband and I are going to the State Attorney's tomorrow to give our statement on the ex contractor, king of the knucklehead's assault. the old chinese guy across the street who said he saw it suddenly didn't so we can't use him. I went with the husband to court on friday but since the police hadn't served the restraining order on the kok we have to go back next week. the husband started to piss off the judge because he just wouldn't hear what the judge was saying so I sent him my evil woman voodoo vibes to shut him up before I had to bail him out of jail. Me with a whole $1.21 in my purse... in change. Unless they would also accept half a roll of certs and a tin of some terrible ginger candy that I bought just because i liked the look of the tin. So then when we got home I had a brain storm, fired up my trusty laptop and did a judiciary casesearch on him. Whooo nelly. I found 10 count em 10 cases he was the defendant in. Two malicious mischiefs, one peace order (what they call a re3straining order) two assaults, one dui, one deer hunting out of season, one not cutting the grass and two that I couldn't make heads or tails out of. So even though we may not have a witness the guys history speaks for itsself. We hope. And while we owe the guy money, we did pay him what his estimate was and still owe him (he thinks) the remainder, So it isn't as if we stiffed him altogether, I just wish this was over and I could get back to my life. With all the data entry I have to do lately, I have no time for court and crap like that. I haven't even been to the international market with its disturbing beef head with the teeth, though we are out of fresh veggies and dog bones. Wait. Bones for the dogs to chew and not the bones OF dogs. Whew.

How can it be?

2008-06-18T22:06:00.000-05:00

With all the crap going on with vandalised car and the like, the husband and I actually forgot that Monday was our wedding anniversary. Our 35th. I have been married far longer than I was single, and while life hasn't always been rosy, it has been interesting. I should have suspected something, considering where we met.... at a funeral. Now before I sound like a) a brazen hussy who hangs around caskets picking up men or b) so cold hearted that I'm checking out the guys while some loved one lies in a casket, let me tell you that the funeral was for a friend's grandfather and I was there since she was my friend and the huband was their because he and my friend's cousin were roomates. The minute I clapped eyes on him, I had the oddest sensation in the pit of my stomach, as if I had swallowed feathers or bubbles or something. How could I have resisted him, him so dapper in his wide lapelled suit with his flowered shirt and equally wide tie, hair hanging in his eyes, sideburns and a fu manchu mustache... it WAS the 70's after all. He says it was my legs he noticed first and since I have always been rather uh ah buxom, to have a man notice my legs first was a change. We went out the night we met.
Now meeting at a funeral wasn't quite odd enough for us. He proposed the night after the bank robbery I was in. He proposed in a Spencer's gifts between a poster of Raquel Wells in her cave woman bikini and Mark Spitz and his gold olympic medals. Ah romance. BTW I lent him the $10.00 he put down as a deposit on the engagement ring. He did pay me back.
And so life went on. We bought a house, had kids and rubbed along the best we could. Somewhere along the line we developed an esp between us that I had assumed all married couples had. It was handy in the time before cell phones when he was out evenings tutoring. If we needed Milk or something I'd just think it and the majority of the times, he'd walk in the door with it. Or he'd stop at a pay phone and call before he came home, asking me what I wanted. I discovered how odd it was when one day when I worked at the library< I wanted him to get something on his way home and I mentioned something that I was going to think at him and get him to call. A few minutes later when the phone rang I said I would answer that it was for me. It was and it was the husband. After the call was over a coworker was convinced that I was pulling a priank and the husband and I had prearranged it. I was just as convinced that all married couple did that. In fact today, the husband got into the office before me and as I was packing up my stuff to head for the office, I picked up the camera then answered my cell phone. It was the husband asking me to bring in the camera. I still am convinced anyone who spends that much time with another person can do the same thing.
My mother once told me she wanted a better life for me> I got a life with a man who encourages me to stretch my wings and my mental muscles, who gave me two great sons and turned out to be an equally great father, who accepts my crafting even if he doean't quite understand it and who can still make me laugh. We've had our black times too but all in all I doubt that I could really have done better. Hey the man stood up to my mother, a woman who could render me a gibbering idiot with one look, for me and if that ain't love try this....HE GOES GROCERY SHOPPING WITH ME, at a bag it yourself place no less. Enough said.

Pissing and moaning because I doo it so well.

2008-06-12T18:08:00.000-05:00

AND dOO IS RIGHT. Up to my armpits in doo.
First of all the husband owes a guy money. Hell we owe everyone money. Anyhow this particular guy who is going down in history as the king of the knuckleheads, did some work for the husband on rental properties he had at the time but have now been sold. Knucklehead gave the husband a quote of $400.00 and when the work was done, the bill was 4 times that amount so even if we had the money we weren't going to pay his whole bill. So yesterday at 9am ther's a pounding on the door and when I answered it... I swear it looked like one of the sons' friends, it was knucklehead wanting the husband. Who was in bed asleep. Ok so I lied and told him that the husband was at work, ya na ya na and then he went away but came back. By that time the husband had put on a pair of shorts and his shoes so he talked to the guy. I went into the bedroom to change, heard the husband cry out and a strange sort of whomp of a noise. Seems that the king of the Knuckleheads grabbed up a hoe from inside of our yard, the husband got shoved,his nglasses went flying and the whomp had been the knucklehead smashing the window. Then the guy left, taking the hoe no less and today when he called thr office to threaten the husband, he acted as if he knew nothing about a broken window.

Ah HA! but we have a witness, albeit the really old chnese guy from across the streert who wears a sarong while in the garden and speaks little english.

so now knucklehead's merry band of men are supposed to show up here on saturday to beat the money out of the husband. The husband had the call on speaker phone so I could hear it all. Yippe yah, now I have something ELSE TO WORRY ABOUT.

BUT maybe not. Knucklehead is in his 20's. The husband will be 60 in August, and very out of shape. SO needless to say, the sons were furious but, even better, the sons' friends are furious and plan on doing some ass kicking of their own if the merry men show up. I guess thenn they wouldn't be so merry. I told the husband that he should be flattered that the various young men in the neighborhood are so angry.

So with all of this going on my head has been spinning and my mood low, until we get an env elope from an old client with a $500.00 check in it as a token of his appreciation for services rendered years ago. This client is a doctor who is working on a cure for aids ans says that he is close. He has now gotten funding from the Ivory Coast and will be flying there next week. I would like to think that if this guy does find the cure that in some little way we helped. After all the husband did cutthe doctor a break on the fee. So while life sucks ther is, sometimes, a glimmer of light.

The chick is back in the nest.

2008-05-27T14:49:00.000-05:00

YOungest son has moved back home. He says it sucks but he'll just put up with it. Sounds rude and terrible, doesn't it? Had I ever said anything like that as a kid my mother would have made my life a living hell. But for me, I have always urged my sons to tell me what they think and this is what he thinks. It does suck because he has been on his own for years and now he has to come back. He won't get his license back until March and couldn't fin d an affordable place near work and I invited him back. I am going to have to learn to not treat him as my son but as an adult sharing the house. I am sure it will beinteresting.

So over my pity party

2008-05-19T21:21:00.000-05:00

I had a good cry and then wiped my eyes and had a plate of spaghetti. Then I baked some banana bnread and berated myself for being such a baby. So now I'm bad to my old self and actually found humor in something, I bought a cd on ebay and never noticed that it was coming from china. The sender's name is Ding Dong Feng. Poor guy. His name sounds like a rude joke. What are some parents thinking when they name their children. The husband was watching some political thing and the guy that was talking had his name beneath him and his name was Karl Marks. FOR GOD"S Sake!!! What idiot named their kid Karl Marks? When I worked in a bank we had a customer named Robin Hood and another time someone was depositing a check from the state of Arizopna and the state treausrer's name was Jesse James,Sheesh.

Trying so hard

2008-05-19T12:14:00.000-05:00

I'm trying so hard to be positive, to be strong, to be accepting when all I am is a quivering mess who wants to be anyone but me. I feel so alone and so afraid and so damned useless. Not only can we not make our mortgage payments but now the house is up for a tax sale auction. I see no way out, I see no solution. I've tried. I really have tried. I tell myself if we lose the house then we can move and I won't ever have to catch up on my cleaning here. But who would rent to us. Can we take big dog Rocco or do we have to find a new family for him? MY HEART IS BREAKING AND i DON'T KNOW WHERE to turn what to do. My head hurts and there's a burning coal in the pit of my stomach. I could take losing the house and all if I just knew that it would all be ok. I wish I had friends who I could feel free with. Feel free enough for me to dump my crap on them with certainty that they wouldn't hate me forever. But how can I dump this garbage on anyone?

International Market

2008-05-15T22:56:00.000-05:00

In my search for turkish delight (I said it was addictive) I went into what was advertised as an international market but turned out only to be the type that carries asian and hispanic items. The minute I stepped through the door, I saw that they had a remarkable price on grapes and as I journeyed further through produce I spied the asian ugly fruit. I have no idea really whether it was fruit or some kind of veg but some of these lumopish things looked as if they could suddenly open their eyes and spring for your throat, or sprout wings and fly around splattering your head with fruit.
Ah. But I was not to be deterred and I searched out the candy aisle, which I admit would have been a awhole heck easier if I knew just WHAT the packages were advertising. Tgere was white ricish looking stuff and other stuff coated in sesame seeds and more stuff with those big eyed smiling creatures that the asian marketing people think are so endearing.. Frankly I was on cutsey wrapping overload so I escaped into the meat section which was unfortunately too close to the fresh fish section with its pong of things from the sea best left uneaten.
Compared to the many tenacled thing and the whatever that looked like nothing more than some prehistoric insect, the ugly fruit was rather pretty.
And then, settling my imagionary pith helmet firmly on my head and tightening my grip on my equally imaginary machete, I slashed and burned my way into ....THE MEAT SECTION!
Ok. Now I am a person who has to have sauerkraut with turkey and eats steamed crabs by forcing my way into the shells and so I know that ewveryone's tastes are not the same but I swear that some of these meats left me with two great questions. The first of them was how do you eat this and the second was why.
For instance, the Pig Heads. Yep just the head. I didn't look too closely at it for fear I might recfognise the pig but what in god's name would you do with just the head? Or the split cow hooves, the chicken legs... not drum sticks but the scaley leg part complete with the claw. Is there even any MEAT on that? Then I wandered past the duck. There I had a choice... with head or without. Personally i prefer my food to NOT be looking at me while I eat it but that's only me. There was goat...smoked and unsmoked, cow feet whole and split... I can see that. I'd prefer not having to split my feet. What do you do with a fresh pig's ear? I mean other than give it to your dogs as well as some creature's intestines, a black chicken... really the skin was black... pigs feet, that my father loved to eat..and pig's tails that help jazz up that sauerkraut I was talking about earlier. There was rabbit and unicorn...just checking to see if you were paying attenion and a steer tounge that looked to be the length of my arm.
HOWEVER.
I am leaving the best till last... I think the prize was the bull pizzle that, if it really is the uh ah bull's manly equiptment as someone once told me a pizzle was then been a manly man type a bull and whose uh um winkie must have started somewhere near his forehead. That big long steer tounge was a shrimp in length when compared to the uh um... pizzle.

the store left me with one lingering question....How hungry was the first guy that decided a pizzle was good to eat, or a foot or a claw or those gelatinous things in the fish bins that looked like something the pig head blew out of its nose. Or for that matter the crabs I am so fond of. Really, how many pigs ear would one have to eat to actually HAVE enough to feel full and pigs feet are mostly bone and why leave the head on anything you are going to eart?
But then once i stopped finding the weird meat I discovered that their normal meats were actually very inexpensive and as soon as I have the money, I'm going back for more of that thin sliced rib eye (enough to feed me and two men as steak subs and for under $3.00) and that eye round that is the size of a small child for under $15. Four meals out of that baby at the least.
BTW no turkish delight so I may just have to try the recipe I found online. I wonder if I can find a recipe for bull pizzle.Anyone wanna come to my house for dinner?

Turkish Delight---was it?

2008-05-14T19:14:00.000-05:00

I have achieved a life long desire... I had my first turkish delight candy. Edmund sells out his family for in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I bought a small package with the traditonal lemon, rose and mint. I loved the lemon and the mint... in fact it could become addictive... the rose however... sigh... picture cheap rose soap and now bite in to it. Yep. Rose flavored turkish delight. Shudder. It took most of the night to get the taste our of my mouth but now I have to find a local source for turkish delight, though I don't know where to begin. Is it really turkish and if it is why did I find a recipe for it in a grteek cookbook and then there was the book I was reading that mentioned turkish delight and the reason why it was made and what the sultan and his concubines used to use it for. Use your imagination remembering words like warm, delight, delicious. I really do hope it was all part of the fiction of the novel that I read and not that my new passion... bad choice of words.. really wasn't used for passion. I mean...it's sticky how would you ... never mind. I really do not want to think bout it. Turkish delight. yum.

Like a boomerang

2008-05-09T23:42:00.000-05:00

Younger son may be moving back home for awhile. He wants to live on his own but rents are crazy and since he has to depend on us for transportation he has to be close by. So unless he finds someplace else he'll be moving back in here, at least for a while. How does older son with the whole basement of his own taking it? Very well. He's already planning how to divide the basement again AND he's given himself a project to get the laundry room in order so I can store there instead of in the cubby he made me. I hope moving back here doesn't break younger son's heart but I'll like having him back under our roof and I think he'll enjoy someone cooking for him again. Whatever happens, we will adapt.

Oh for goodness' sakes

2008-05-05T15:57:00.000-05:00

As if life isn't stressful enough now younger son has to find a new place to live. He was sharing a house with a bunch of guys. One of the guys is the son of the owner, Friday the owner came over and told everyone that they have to be out by the first of June because they are a bad influence on his son. Younger son is the ONLY one who has a full time job, stays in his room, pays his bills and doesn't drink or do drugs. Now he has to find a place to live fairly close to us because we are his transport for another 10 months or so and he works in the area so he doesn't want to go too far. Of course I am fretting. I thought I had one son settled and it would only be the three of us, husband me and older son that would have to find a place when we lose this house.
I know they say that god gives youonly what you can handle. Does he have to keep using me as his guinea pig? Sigh. I'll survive this. NO MATTER WHAT!

If only I didn't feel so lonely.

This one has to be the best one yert

2008-05-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

Heard on the tv on one of those true crime shows that I can't seem to avoid. And this was said with a straight face. And I quote "It was no way for her to spend the rest of her life lying dead in a box for three weeks."

nuff said

ow ow ow

2008-05-01T20:09:00.000-05:00

I've been doing so much data entry work lately that my hands hace gone numb. Too bad my shoulder muscles haven't because they burn like the devil and my hand hurt too much for crafting...huh? wha? gulp! No crafting why whatever will I do with myself? I'm thinking about making some card on the weekend but am totally without inspiration at the moment. I'm always moaning about how forgotten I seem to be but DUH (mental slap upside my head) if I want mail I should SEND mail. AS I said DUH.
I also wonder when I will finally get the nerve to put stuff up for sale on Etsy. My problem isn't making the stuff or struggling through the awful photos I take, but coming up with a name for my etsy store. I think I've got one now only I have to see if that's already taken. I thought I'd call my store Fripperies. I like the sound of that AND I can even SPELL it. THat must mean something. WHo knows maybe I will be an instant success and we can live off the fruits of my talents or the docs will adjust my meds and I come back to the real world.

personALLY I prefer LalA land.

Is it just me?

2008-04-28T19:14:00.000-05:00

I was watching a show last night called something like Nazi Scrapbooks from hell about this photo album that had been sent to the Holocaust museum in DC. The scrapbook held 116 photos of Nazis just enjoying life. Laughing and joking and mugging for the camera. In one photo one of the women was pretending to be heartbroken because they had run out of blueberries. The owner of the album was an officer name Houck w,ho was a medium high officer at Auchwitz, as were all the others in the photos. In fact this Houck guy was tried at Nuerenberg where he insisted that he hadn't hurt anyone himself and that he hadn't even been on some ramp when the Jews were unloaded from the cattle cars. So now this show had people checking a known photo of this Houck guy with a photo of some officer standing on the ramp with his back to the camera.
The curator who received the photo album looked so seriously at the camera and said that it couldn't be Houck in the picture because he told the war crimes trial that he never hurt anyone and he wasn't on the ramp and he wouldn't lie to the court and when they determined that the photo of the guy was this Houck character the curator got all indignant because the Nazi LIED to the court. HELLOOOOOO!!! The guy was NAZI and this woman is irate because the GUY LIED to the courts. A NAZI AT Auswich no less and heaven forfend, the guy lied to the courts.The woman needs to get a dose of reality. Imagine... a lying Nazi. Well I guess if the Pope was once a Nazi Youth they couldn't have all beem that nad even if they did LIE TO THE COURT.

The GRILL

2008-04-20T22:42:00.000-05:00

Despite our ever present money problems the Husband and I did something we rarely do. We splurged! While shopping in Wal Mart, the Husband wandered to where they have the summer stuff all set up and while looking at loungers he spied THE GRILL! THE GRILL deserved its name to be written in caps because it is not a grill it is THE GRILL!!

Oldest son has become the household cook and he love to grill. He has a cheapie grill bought at wal mart last year while what he really wanted was to build himself a grill out of bricks. While we aren't exactly sure that we will be able to keep the house THE GRILL seemed like a good alternative so we bought the monster brought it home and told Oldest son that it was a birthday gift... ignoring the fact that his birthday isn't untiul July 5.

At first Oldest son didn't seem too taken with it but then he and a friend assembled it and every time I looked out the window yesterday ther was someone new in the yard admiring it. THE GRILL is a big sucker whose coals can be lowered or raised and has its own little door to scoop out ashes and is big enough to barbeque Rocco the wonder dog, if we so wanted.

Today was the designated first cookout day and by evening's end on Saturday young men were showing up bring, among other things, a haunch of pork.. basicly a should and a leg... no hoof thank goodness, a london broil, a package of chicken breasts, a rack two packages of hotdogs and a choclate raspberry cheese cake. Hotchee mama! Unfortunately bad weather made cooking nearly impossible because it kept lowering the temperature in the closed grill. Did I mention it had a thermostat built in? So while the quarter of a pig and the london broil are f done and the chicken breasts not removed from their packages we did have the ribs, the cheese cake and the hot dogs as well as my contribution of a pasta salad and oldest sons hours of trying to cook.

I wish I could have bottled the excitement that grill brought to the whole neighborhood. Think of young men and a new car... that was Oldest son and THE GRILL. The shiny handles were admired, the charcoal bed raised and lowered, the side vents opened and closed, the thermostat inspected and i swear someone even kicked the tires.

As for oldest son, my responsible rabbit, while he didn't run around yelling yippee he did take pictures of the grill with his phone to send to friends and each time he came into the house, he told me of some new feature he discovered. May he cook well and long.

Of Bigfoot et al

2008-04-07T10:32:00.000-05:00

I am a believer in most things weird. I know ghosts exist and would love to think that Big Foot and Nessie and all the rest are real as well. Just imagine how much more exciting life would be with 7 foot tall primates and throw backs to the jurrasic period running around.
So yesterday I was watching some discovery channel about the hunt for big foot. I should have known what I was in for when some supposed expert says, with a straight face, that the mountain gorilla was believed to be a legend until 1958 when one was spotted in africa. Uh Huh. Let's get this right oh he who sounds like he knows. It was 1901. At least he got the continent right.So now two teams are converging on the forest. One team male one team female. Both are searching for Bigfoot. First of all it's an all woman team because it seems that Bigfoot is drawn more to women than men. So the women strap their cameras to the trees, cut up apples and then move about the forest singing lullabyes and Christmas Carols. I KID YOU NOT. One owman who had been camping in the area earlier and had been visited by something in the night playing with her tarp, brought, a tarp. I think bubble wrap would have been better.
Team two, the men, with their expert whatever just strapped cameras to trees and then set out bait to draw the Bigfoot in. NO apples for them, these are manly men. Instead they hung Onions in the trees, cd discs and wind chimes. And in another place along with the onions cds and windchimes they sprayed with trees with a essential oil of wintergreen. Isn't that sort of like taking coal to Newcastle? There in the WOODS for god's sake. Don't you think there was enough tree smell already. They weren't even spraying the trees to mask human scent. Instead they sprayed the trees to make them smell like...well... trees.
Yabba yabba yabba.The women are wandering around the woods in ecstasy over broken twigs and mooshed down grass. While the men are stringing more cds and onions. Personally I thought they ought to add some glitter glue, markers and paper and let bigfoor create his own tree art.
So the show grinds on, the people go back to retrieve their cameras and share with us, endless pictures of deer and elk until one of the women gets all excited about something dark in the lower right hand corner of one picture. Couldn't even see the thing even when the show kindly circled it. What is it, what could it be, could it be... just the rear end of a truck passing by on THE ROAD! Come on ladies. A road? Why not just set your camera up in a MC Donalds parking lot and see what you get. As for the men. They got more pictures of deer with some elk thrown in for good measure. Sheesh. What happened with these two groups. Were they sitting around one day and just decided hey let's go find big foot without giving it any thought.
If it had been me, well I probably would have been out there yelling "Soooeeee bigfootbigfootbigfoot' but then I don't claim to be ann expert.

All was not lost, I then wandered over to ancient egypt night on another discovery channel and to my delight involved were two of my favorite egyptologist. Dr Nassar somebody or other and Nadia what's her name. Dr. Nassar is Egypts head guy and a tomb or a mummy case can not be opened unless he gives his permission and is in attendance. You would think this would be old hat for him but he was as excited as a kid on Christmas each time something was opened. In fact, one time, he played father and told the photographers and journalists crammed into a tiny tomb that if he heard one word out of anyone, they were all out.

As for Nadia, she is thes arftifacts expert and was as thrilled over a mummy case of pillows as she was over what she thought would be an unknown mummy. Her unknown mummy case was without mummy. Instead it had clothing and jewelry and ornaments and textiles and the like and when someone asked her if she was disappointed she was in raptures telling them that what they had found was better than a mummy. These things that they just found they had never found before. I love the enthusiam of the two. Especially Nadia doing her work in a hot tomb while dressed in long sleeves with the muslim head scarf on. Sweat rolling down her face, she's beaming at the camera and thrilled with her work.

So I guess last night started with the ridiculous and ended with the sublime.