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 |  My American Notebooks |
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** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** When Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing, he kept a series of journals, The American Notebooks. They were part daily journal, part diary, but mostly a place for him to jot down and try out bits of writing he hadn't a full venue for yet. He kept character sketches, odd bits of conversation, and observances he wanted to remember for future writings in his notebooks. This, then, is my place for odd bits I want to remember. When you read this, keep in mind, you are rummaging through my mental storehouse. Check out:
And don't forget to vote for your favorite blogger each month. 
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| There is an air show here this weekend. They got the Blue Angels to come. http://www.blueangels.navy.mil/ My husband almost wet himself in excitement when he heard.  He's been like a little kid all week long."Did you see them, honey?! They flew right over the plant today!!" They practiced Thursday and Friday, zooming back and forth the breadth and length of the valley. The roars of their engines echoing back eerily off the Bridger Mountains. They flew so low over our house a couple of times I wanted to go out and check the shingles. But, oh, they are so....majestic. I GET why my husband is so excited about seeing them on Sunday. He is taking Monilad to the show on Sunday. They are having a hot date without mom.  It's a Daddy-daughter thing.I don't mind. I can't go anyway. I hurt my hip and back and I've been off work for the last week. I can't sit in one place for the required six hours. (I'm on the mend and will be back at work on Monday. No worries.) It's funny, though, what the Blue Angels represent to different people. To my family they represent the best of the best of our US Navy fighter pilots. The exhibitions they give? They are something that the US military gives back to us as a sort of thank you and a way of showing us exactly the sort of training they receive. I personally think it's also a bit like a flying recruiting poster, but I've got no problem with that. I think the military is a noble career to pursue and I'm daily thankful to the men and women who protect me both here and abroad. When I went to work for a half day work yesterday, though, I got two different perpectives on the Blue Angels. One woman I work with is a bit of a hippie. Very eco-friendly, into recycling. Her comments when we were discussing them were that she felt that it was a waste of tax dollars to fund the program. She also felt it was a waste of fuel and resources that could have been put to better uses. I steered to conversation other places before we could get to the war or other touchy subjects, so I didn't find out what she felt about that. Another coworker is a two tour veteran of Iraq. He is currently in the National Guard. He holds the rank of Staff Seargent in the Army and is one of the nicest most adorable kids I have ever met. Even though he's 23 (he looks 16) and married, I keep telling him that I'm going to adopt both him and his wife. I look in his eyes and know that he has seen too much horror, though. He talks about his time in Iraq very rarely, but when he does, he seems very shaken by it. He was a sniper. I noticed him looking out the windows at the Blue Angels flying past and I asked him if he would be going to the air show this weekend and he looked at me very solemnly and said, "No." When I pressed him, he told me that having the fighter jets in the air gave him flashbacks to his time in Iraq. He said, "The only time we saw air support was when we were in a bad way. You didn't want to have to call them in. Seeing them reminds me of bad things." And he quietly walked away. I wanted to hug him. Sometimes it's easy to get trapped inside my own viewpoint and think that everyone has it or should. Stuff like this reminds me that we each see life through our own windows and that just as none of my neighbors has my view of the valley, neither do I have theirs. |
| I seem to be living life out of sync with myself. I go from feast to famine, hot to cold. But that's all in a day of the life of a bipolar. I should be used to it by now. I spent the winter months in a deep dark funk. Barely leaving the house, barely functioning as a part of the family. I also barely wrote. Now, I'm working a 40 hour a week job, volunteering at the library, running the dog all over town for her vet appointments (she's doing really well , thanks for all of your well wishes and prayers  ) and just plain being the Momma and the Wife. I'm writing, too. It's funny; the ideas are just REALLY flowing. But, - and this is the part that is killing me - I don't have time to BLOG!!!!!  I miss you guys. I hear from Amelia that she is blogging alot lately and I really envy her. She also discovered a new blogger she wants me to read, but I haven't caught up with all of your lives. I don't know how she expects me to take on new blogs! On a strange note, our run of odd luck hasn't panned out yet. Sunday I logged on my bank site to balance the checkbook and discovered that someone had fraudulently charged over $250 worth of...something...at two grocery stores in Florida on my debit card.  The bank gave all the money back, but they kept asking if I'm sure it wasn't me.  I said, "Ma'am, do you see that Subway charge on the same day in Bozeman, MT, and the charge the next day at the Walmart in Bozeman, MT?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Why the heck would I fly to Florida JUST to charge $250 worth of groceries in two different cities and then fly back the same dang day?!?! I don't even KNOW anybody in Florida!" She said, "Oh...I see your point." She quit hassling me after that. Maybe I'll play the lottery tomorrow. It's 7-7-07 after all and we're due for some good luck soon.  Hope to see you all soon. I'll try to make the blog rounds ASAP. I haven't forgotten about the pictures of Midnight (or Middy - that's what we are calling her ), I hope to have some time this weekend.Stay cool and for those in Texas, stay dry!  |
| So, our first chemotherapy for Bear went fine. Thank you all for your well wishes. We are kinda in this for the long haul. It's a 25 week long therapy. After week 10 she gets to go every other week, so it's not as bad as it sounds. On another front, we found out recently that my FIL must have a double bypass next Tuesday. Hubby is pretty stressed out. But, I told him not to be, it's an often done surgery and 90% of the people who have it are perfectly fine. Look at Dan. On an up note and I'm sure it will be a surprising one, I came home last Friday with a new kitten. Her name is Midnight. I didn't think I was ready for another cat yet, but the brother of a guy I work with came in to the hardware store where I work carrying Midnight and trying to give her away. I couldn't resist her. I held her and just fell in love. She's solid black with funny white hairs all over, like a woman who is just starting to go gray. (Hence her name--black with stars. )I'll post pics this weekend. It's late right now. BTW--If everyone could stop by and tell my sister congrats..."You surprised to see us, Clark?"  WOOOT!!!!!!! She's still kinda freaking out. |
| Last Thursday, BF was playing with Bear and felt something funny on her neck. It felt like swollen adenoids. (Like a little kid with tonsillitis.) So yesterday, we got her an appointment with her vet, Dr. Sheila. Our animals just LOVE her. Sheila took biopsies of Bear's lymphs and also some blood work and sent it off to the university for confirmation, but she is pretty sure that Bear has lymphoma. Sheila says it's the most common cancer she sees in dogs.  I stayed home with Bear today and am waiting for Sheila to call with the results of the tests. My husband cried several times last night. Bear is his baby. I can't take losing another pet so soon. We've already told Sheila that we'll do chemo for Bear. Cost be damned. Bear is like our child. As long as it won't be cruel or painful for Bear. |
| So I finally got a chance to sit down and catch up on everyone's blogs. MAN, I've missed you guys. Sorry not everyone got a comment, but I promise I did get current on everyone's doings. Therefore I will be understanding if no one comments here. It was mostly just nice to get a chance to come in here and, well, just BE.Life has been a bit non-stop lately. I think it's been that way for all of you guys, too. On Wednesday night, Monilad got promoted with honors from the 8th grade. I'm now the parent of a high schooler.  She looked so grown up in her new dress. I'm on hubby's laptop or I would post the pics. I promise the next time I download the camera, I'll put some of the photos in.There weren't enough chaparones for the dance they held afterward, so I did the Good Momma bit and went. She had fun, and she let me (actually she insisted on it) dance with them. We did some line dancing and some rock dancing. It was pretty fun. Her friends get a kick out of the fact that she not only WANTS me at the dances, she encourages me to dance with them. They all say they would die of embarassment if their parents did that.Unfortunately, though, when we got home, she was limping rather badly. When I quizzed her out about it, she said that on about the third dance, someone stepped on her foot. (Not as bad as it sounds, as they have to take their shoes off so as not to mar the gym floor. So whoever did it, stomped on her bare foot with a bare/stocking clad foot.) She said it REALLY hurt at the time, but as the evening wore on it hurt more and more. When I looked at it, it was extremely swollen and bruised along the top just above the middle toe. SIL and BF checked it out as both are on the Search and Rescue team in Antarctica and both have extensive First Aid training. (Hubby was fast asleep.) BF's diagnosis was that he was pretty sure that something in the foot was broken. Nice. My idiot daughter had spent the evening DANCING on a broken foot.  She didn't tell me she was hurt because she didn't want me to make her leave. Kids. We determined it probably wouldn't get worse overnight; Ace bandaged an ice pack to the top of her foot and told her to come wake one of us if the pain changed. We also gave her some Advil.SIL and BF very kindly took her to urgent care the next morning while I went to work. After a series of X-Rays, the docs verdict was that she had chipped a bone in her foot. The remedy? Ice packs and Motrin. The unfortunate part is that she was SUPPOSED to start basketball camp on Monday morning, but I don't think she should go. I just don't think she will get anything out of it if she can't do all the running around and jumping. She and Hubby are insistent that if she feels up to it then she should go. The doctor had given her a very lukewarm and hesitant ok for the camp if she feels better. But, I think I'm going to play the seldom used Momma-card and just say no. I don't pull rank on things very often. I try to pick my battles. I just don't see us spending a bunch of freaking money for her to do this at anything less than full tilt. It's not like this is her junior or senior year and she has a scholarship or her last season on the line with this camp. Anyway, I guess we'll see. Well, I have to get up in the morning to make "Big Texas Breakfast," so I'm going to bed. "Big Texas Breakfast" is what all of my in-laws call it when I make homemade biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs and bacon, etc for breakfast. They love it and all insist on it anytime they come. It's a tradition. I actually enjoy cooking, so it's no big deal, but it cracks me up. I know it's bad form to stuff guests full of cholesterol, but, hey, good food is good food. Night and to you all. |
| Sorry, guys, didn't mean to fall off the planet. I got a new job. I'm working as a cashier at a local mom and pop hardware store. I'm enjoying it very much. (Lots more than the other place!) The pay is good and the hours are incredible. M-F 9:30a-6:30p. I will have the occasional Saturday, but when I do, I won't work the following Monday.  How fabulous are those hours?!I really like the people I work with and the customers are nice, too. We also have houseguests right now. My SIL and her boyfriend are visiting. It's the SIL who is a field biologist in Antarctica for part of each year - she does penguin studies, so I am going to do that interview with them this time. I promise!! I'm trying not to stop my writing, even though I'm working full time, but it's hard. Especially with company. We've been playing games in the evenings. Scattergories especially. It's a family fav. On Wednesday, my daughter gets promoted from the 8th grade, so we're getting excited about the end of the school year. We are doing pretty good on the not spending. It's harder with the company here, because we want to go do things with them (like we did spring for matinee tickets to Pirates 3 - which was AWESOME!!), but overall we have cut our random spending down by about 95%. We are trying to do low cost things like the trip to Yellowstone we did this weekend. We just had gas (WHICH WAS $75!!!! and about $30 for a picnic lunch for all of us.) We've only eaten lunch out once and that was to celebrate a big yearly bonus hubby got. We got Subway....hey, bigspenders. My new job is only about 5 miles from my house, so I can drive home for lunch and check on the dogs and eat a sandwich at home. (And do a load of laundry, start the dishwasher, etc. ) So that's nice.It's a neat drive to work, too. About a mile and a half up the road from my work is a huge Golden Eagle nest just off the road, way the hell up at the top of a really tall tree. I'm pretty sure they have chicks, because one or the other of them is always right at the nest, either perched on the edge of it or on a branch right beside it. They are such beautiful birds.Well, it's late and I've got work tomorrow. I hope I can make the rounds on all of your blogs soon. SIL and BF go home late next week, so I should have more time then. I miss you all. , T |
| I see all sorts of books when I'm cleaning and reshelving them in my volunteer capacity at the library. I came across one on Monday that really struck a resonating chord in me. It's called "Not Buying It - My Year without Shopping" by Judith Levine. I finished it today. It's a really quick read. While her politics clashed rather jarringly throughout the book, the underlying message and experiment was intriguing. The author and her significant other (Paul) made a vow on December 31st not to partake of the consumer culture for an entire year. They were allowed basic groceries and staples (toilet paper) but no "luxury items". Otherwise no consuming. No movies - theatre, rented or live; no clothes; no shoes; no eating out; no bought coffees; no books. No spending. They only attended free performances or other free entertainment. Due to my being out of work for five months now, things are getting tighter at the Kittie household. We aren't destitute, but as rampant consumers, we could probably stand to go on a spending diet. So I discussed the prospect with Hubby and Monilad. Monilad was aghast. Hubby intrigued. Could we do it? Brown bagged lunches. No pizza delivery once a week. No DQ moolattes whenever we feel like it. No snacks when gassing up the truck. No unnecessary spending. We've set a three month limit. This summer we are going without. Without any new stuff. We all have clothing and shoes up the wazoo. We have set a strict weekly food budget and we have set some other guidelines about what is and isn't "necessary". I've cancelled my online coffee club. Hubby has agreed to cutback on his snuff dipping in order to hit the weekly not-food budget. Monilad is drafting letters to the child protective people. June, July and August....here we come. I'll let you know how we are doing. |
| Many of you know that I’m an alcoholic. I’m really careful with narcotics, too, after a problem with Vicodin some years ago. I suppose it’s true that some people just have addictive personalities or genetic triggers or something. Today marks my tenth day without a sleeping pill of any kind. That’s the longest I’ve gone without one in about eight years. For the last ten months, I’ve had something to help me sleep every single night until last Tuesday. This Tuesday, I flushed all my pills while Hubby watched me with tears in his eyes. For the last few months, I’ve had more and more mental problems. In January, I started having schizoid or psychotic moments where I started talking to things that weren’t there. That continued up until I quit the sleeping pills. I alternated taking prescription pills and very mild doses of over-the-counter meds. (I took half the recommended dose.) My psychiatrist simply kept throwing more and more meds at the problem, never considering taking meds out of the equation. Hubby and I (OK, Hubby alone ) figured out what the problem was.Every night, I would Jones like a crack head for my next hit of calm. Lying in bed waiting for the pill to do it’s work. Waiting for oblivion to descend. Each morning it became harder and harder for me to get out of bed. Some mornings I would sleep until eleven or noon, having gone to sleep around ten or eleven the night before. That’s twelve plus hours of sleep a night. And I would wake up exhausted and disoriented. Alarms wouldn’t wake me. The phone wouldn’t wake me. Once I did get up, I would wander around the house for hours in a daze talking to things, like a junkie on a bad acid trip. Since last Tuesday, the latest I’ve gotten up is nine, once or twice I’ve been up around seven. All without an alarm. I haven’t talked to the birds or anything else. More importantly, they haven’t talked to me. Each night around ten, I’ve been getting sleepy, going to bed like a normal person and going right to sleep. It’s phenomenal! My memory has also improved. As has my depression. I can complete tasks around the house without it being a huge production. My days have taken on a kind of calming normalcy. I’ve had a couple of long nights staring at the ceiling for several hours. Nights when I would have taken a pill (or two). But I’ve stuck it out and I’m feeling better for it. Even on those nights when I finally cried myself to sleep out of exhaustion. Right now we are shopping for a new family psychiatrist. I’ve been to her four times since the beginning of the year and Hubby and I had to solve this alone. I feel my daughter and I are over medicated in other ways, too, and I want a second opinion on all our meds. I just want us to have normal lives. Just because we are bipolar doesn’t mean that isn’t possible. As an alcoholic, I have days that if white slavers showed up at my door with a pitcher of margaritas, I would cheerfully hand over my only child. If they had a pack of Marlboro Reds (I used to smoke two packs a day.), both dogs would quickly follow her. Now I guess if they were carrying a box of Unisom, I’d trade out Hubby, too. I guess I missed the money-back “Life is Simple” Guarantee. |
| Today I had a cool field trip. My daughter's science teacher is friends with a gentleman who got to go up in the space shuttle in 1985 so he had a brown bag lunch informal seminar today. Although it was really just for interested students, I finagled an invite. It was SERIOUSLY cool. The gentleman's name was Loren Acton, Ph.D., and he is a Solar Physicist. He went up on Columbia in 1985 on a mission called Spacelab 2. It had to do (go figure) with the study of the sun. Before he really got rolling, he gave us the website address of the place where most of his pictures came from. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov Mr. (Dr? Professor?) Acton gave an incredibly interesting talk. I was glad that he didn't "dumb" it down for the kids. He used words they were able to follow, but he didn't talk down to them. He opened with a beautiful shot of the total solar eclipse on March 29, 2006, as viewed from Turkey. He said he didn't take the shot himself, as it's a very hard shot to capture. It showed the moon completely eclipsing the sun and the coronas flaring out around from the black moon. It was gorgeous!! He followed that with several shots of sunspots as taken from various telescopes and viewpoints. The sun is a variable magnetic star. A sunspot is a place on the sun's surface where the magnetic forces are being disturbed. The dark spot in the center of a sunspot is a cooler area caused because the molten forces underneath are not churning properly due to the change in magnetic pull. (He used bigger words and explained it better, but I was writing quickly and in the dark! )The neatest shots he showed us were time lapse photos taken from an X-ray telescope that he helped develop. It shows movement of the magnetic forces underlying the fluid flow of the sun's surface. It's facinating! He said he's currently working on a website so that students and regular folk like us can go to a website and view the photos ourselves. After that he told us about his time on the Columbia. He explained that he was classified as a Payload Specialist. Basically that means a visiting scientist, not a regular astronaut who goes up time and again. When they were up, he and another scientist were working on photographing the sun with special equipment. But the space shuttle orbits the earth rather quickly; at 180 miles up it takes about 90 minutes to orbit the earth - 40 minutes in dark, 50 in light. Can you imagine a fresh sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes? There was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait involved in their mission while waiting to be oriented properly, so they had times to take photos of earth as it rotated beneath them. He had some spectacular shots of Massachusetts, Italy, Madagascar, Bolivia, Pakistan, and the desert of Namibia. In the Italy photo, you could see little white dots that were obviously villages along the coastline. It was incredible the amount of detail in the pictures! The science teacher had a shuttle tile and it was passed around for all of us to look at. There was some fear that it was treated with something that made it dangerous, but Mr. Acton allayed the fears. Shuttle tiles are basically made of specially processed silica - sand. Lockheed makes them. Acton was pretty vague about the process only saying it was a "special" one. I read that as "secret". They are very light and he assured us that you could hold a blowtorch to one side of it and hold your hand comfortably to the other side. It's heat conductivity is almost nothing.He made one statement towards the end that I've really been thinking about. "About the only thing you need to send humans into space to study is humans, just about everything else can be done remotely and with robots." He clarified the statement by saying that man was the only animal adventurous enough to want to go into space and reach out beyond his current understanding. I agree, we continue to reach out to space because as a race, we are curious. As long as we have the means, we will continue to boldly go. That gives me hope. |
| It’s officially spring now. My lilacs are blooming. I’m pretty excited about it. Soon my irises will pop up, too. Next weekend, we will sow the wildflowers in my flower garden. We will also be planting my vegetable garden soon, too. We have to wait because every dang year we jump the gun and plant before the last frost and it kills my freaking corn. Well NOT this year, Nelly. We are waiting til the Farmer’s Almanac says to plant. I had a stressful Mom week. On Tuesday my daughter called me about 2:30 and told me that her school had been evacuated and that she wasn’t sure what was going on, but she would keep me posted. I was in the middle of a manicure, so I was kind of trapped in what I was doing. Besides, she seemed pretty calm. About an hour later she called back and informed me that she would be taking the bus home - no track practice. It seems they would not be allowed back into the school because they had been evacuated due to a bomb threat. That’s a bit of a heart stopper for a parent to hear.We watched the five o’clock news when we both got home. Some yahoo had called in a threat to the county sheriff saying only that some school in the valley had a bomb in it that would go off in three hours. Twenty five schools across the county evacuated and were searched by officials and volunteers. It was determined to be a prank. My daughter and four hundred other students from her school sat in a parking lot across the street from her school for over two hours in the sun with no water and no shade because some nimrod thought they’d play a joke. All across the valley children sat in parking lots and open fields for most of the afternoon because the schools had no way to inform parents on how to come get their children early. Not to mention the logistics nightmares involved in signing them out. My daughter said that the kids didn’t know what was going on until about 3:15. The principal came on the intercom about 1:45 and told the teachers, “Teachers, get your grade books and your students and leave the school in an orderly manner. Do not let them stop at lockers and do it IMMEDIATELY.” She said he sounded a little panicked. The problem, we found out later, was that the threat was made at around 11 o’clock and the police didn’t get it until around 1. It was left on a voice mail. The cops started calling around to all the schools, but by then it was almost the time for the supposed bomb to go off. Children aren’t allowed to have cell phones in most of the schools around the valley, but my daughter said that when the kids were finally told that if their parents could be reached then they could be picked up, scores of cell phones came whipping out of purses and pockets. Some idiot teacher went around COLLECTING them, telling the kids that their parents could pick the phones up when they got there. Uh...DUH. How the hell were the kids supposed to reach their parents if you have their cell phone, rocket scientist? Sometimes you have to bend the rules in emergency situations. I guess this dipshit never got that memo.Well, I guess I am mostly thankful that it was a prank and that my daughter is fine. It’s just hard to be a parent in today’s world. Every morning as she leaves for the school bus, I call out to her, “I love you!” I just want her to know that no matter what she is going out to face during her day, she at least has parents who love her. |
| Yesterday I started my new volunteering job. I know, some of your eyes just bugged out of your heads after my last blog entry. Let me explain.... A while back I went and signed up at my local library to be a volunteer. Why, you might ask, since I am apparently a cynical, heartless witch who cares for no one and nothing. Well, that's not true. I have compassion and I am a caring person. Honestly, I am. I'm just picky about where I share that. I'm not a big Drew Carey fan, but I once watched him play Jeopardy (?). (It might have been something else. It's been awhile.) At any rate, the charity he raised money for wasn't AIDS or Hospice or any of the other trendy charities. It was the Cleveland Public Libraries. That's his charity of choice. When Alex quizzed him about it, Drew said he owed it to them because they helped to educate him. Right on! That's a charity I can get behind. Libraries DO help educate people. If I ever hit the lottery, I'm setting up a charitable trust for my local library. It's one of the few charities that I would help with the money. Back to yesterday. I went in and met with the volunteer coordinator and she trained me in what I'll be doing for them. It's not hard, but it was a bit involved. Basically I'll be combing through the new books and pulling the older ones, changing their status in the computer, cleaning them and then getting them ready to be shelved in their general sections in the rest of the library. The computer work can be tricky, you have to be paying attention, or you can change them to a strange status in the computer and they can get "lost" in the library. They were excited to get a computer savvy volunteer. Alot of their volunteers are older men and women who are great with the pulling and shelving, but not so hot on the computer. I enjoyed doing it. There were other volunteers to talk to. It was quiet and calm in the library. I love being around books. It reminded me of my time in school. When I was in junior high and high school, I volunteered at my school library. I did everything in them. Reshelve books, rearrange books, pre-read books to make sure of their content for the librarian, repair books, you name it. I would even go in early in the summer to help her label and jacket the new books. That was always so calming. Just you and the books. I love the smell of books. That slightly dusty, musty smell. That smell is one of my favorite things about bookstores and libraries. I love the hushed murmur of voices that exists in bookstores and libraries. Being quiet in a library is one of the first rules children are taught and it carries over to adulthood. People just speak in quiet tones in the presence of large quanties of books. I love the idea that sitting in precise rows on all of those shelves are thousands of worlds that, with the simple crack of a spine, I can be carried away to while never leaving my comfortable recliner. The thoughts and memories of thousands of writers are contained in a single building. So much information. So much knowledge. And it's all there at my fingertips, for the simple one time three dollar price of a library card. I think if I ever went back to college, I wouldn't get an English degree. I might minor in writing, but I'd major in Library Sciences. I've always wanted to be a Librarian. Imagine getting to work with books every day. Now there's a job. |
| *Warning: this is a serious blog entry almost guaranteed to piss off some folks. I don't do those very often. If you came here for whimsy, turn back now. Ok, if you stayed, prepare to be stunned by my callous disregard. I read a lot of disparate blogs here onsite. Three recent entries from three interesting and excellent writers here onsite have spurred this entry from the conclusions I reached while reading them and the resultant comments I left. The entries (in the order in which they were written and in which I read them) are: "For Your Reading Enjoyment" by Robert Waltz  , "Invalid Entry" by David McClain  and "Invalid Entry" by Problematic Content . Whether you are a reader of these particular writers or not, I recommend reading each entry. All are thought provoking. Robert's entry will link you to an offsite article to which I will refer often, if you don't read it, this entry isn't gonna make a lot of sense to you. I'll wait here. ~whistles quietly to self~ Back? In the article in Robert's blog, the author gives the definitive number of people we can care about in any personal way as 150 at a time. Although the article is definitely written tongue in cheek, I would bet that that is a pretty accurate number. Think about close personal friends you had WAY back in the day. They've been updated and replaced in your Monkeysphere by more pertinent people in your current life. People come and people go. That's the way of life. Now for the callous disregard portion of the entry. Are you ready? I could personally give a fat rat's ass about all of the people dying in Africa. They are outside of my Monkeysphere. I honestly think of it as natural selection. This is nature's way of clearing out the human population. There are more people on the planet than it can currently (or in the future) sustain. This is a minor housekeeping situation. Nothing more. Same thing for Katrina and the other hurricanes and natural disasters. I personally haven't contributed one single dollar to Katrina victims and I purposely make sure my spending dollars don't get funnelled that direction if I can help it. If Yellowstone goes up, I don't expect anyone to come help my ass. It's natural selection. Bleeding heart, liberal assholes who expect me to give, give, give until it hurts to help some jackass I don't know, piss me off no end. Some one I know and care about? I'll give them everything I have, no questions asked, no repayment neccessary. They are in my Monkeysphere, and in my world you take care of your own. But if I don't know you, stay the hell out of my pocket and go talk to someone in YOUR Monkeysphere. Stay out of mine. But what about the milk of human kindness? You might ask. Sorry. I don't have any of that. Another thing I don't support is Habitat for Humanity. That's the biggest drain on resources and waste of good money in our country. For forty hours of work, FORTY HOURS, some wastrel family can OWN a brand new house that a bunch of feel good, goody-two shoes slapped up for them. That's one week of work. You know what the rest of us work to own our houses? Twenty or thirty YEARS of forty to sixty hour weeks. They did a check back on a lot of those houses that were given away and do you know what they found? The houses were trashed. You know why? People don't respect things given to them like they respect things they actually earn and that they have to pay for themselves. So what is my point to this whole wild entry? Think about your Monkeysphere. Now think about the Virgina Tech tragedy, Katrina, the war in Iraq, the plight of the people in Africa. How many of those things REALLY impinge on your Monkeysphere? For some of you the answer is, yes, they do. Think of zwisis, for her the plight of the people in Zimbabwe is pertinent and within her sphere because of her family. Some of you may have family or friends serving in Iraq, so maybe the war is impacting you personally. But for many of you the answer is none of them really do. I know that's true for me. So I haven't shed a tear or lost one minute of sleep about any of it. Sorry. Sometimes the truth hurts. |
| I mowed the yard today. I don't mind doing it really; I hate leaving it for Hubby because the poor man has so little free time as it is. I'd rather he spend it with us. Our neighborhood is made up of 1/2 acre lots. The first time hubby mowed our yard with a push mower he finished, showered and drove immediately to Sears and bought a riding mower. Last year he taught Monilad how to use it. She's ok on it, but unfortunately, like her mother, she has a tendency to mow over the black rubber edging.  Hubby gets testy when we do that. So now we just mow wide of them and he comes along later - usually on the weekends - and weedeats the long bits by the rock. It's noisy on the mower, but when I'm up there mowing back and forth and round and round, I enter a little Zen-like meditation state. It's kind of peaceful. I like seeing the progress of each pass and seeing the patterns I am creating in the lawn. Hubby always makes very careful up and down, evenly spaced, parallel lines. Mine sort of flow in waves around the half moon gardens that flank each side of the back yard and in strange circular patterns that ripple out from our fruit trees. Like the rake patterns in a sand and rock Zen garden. Hmmm....probably a parallel there. For about an hour and a half or two hours I'm free to think my thoughts and just be. You can't really hurry through lawn mowing. It takes as long as it takes. I know the neighbors get tickled when I mow our yard because I wear a big floppy orange straw hat. It keeps the sun off my neck. And I know they look because we have that kind of neighborhood. You know what I mean. It's a nice neighborhood where you notice things. Like the Lawn Nazi. And the fact that the people across the street NEVER close their blinds. (No, we don't look in their windows - their TV flickers out on the street at night, it's weird. It shows up because we don't have streetlights in our neighborhood. When it's dark here, it's dark!)We all know what the other folks drive, we notice if people get new cars or boats or what have you. We know whose spouses stay home and whose work. We notice strange vehicles and we remark on them across the fence or when we see you out getting your mail. "How are you doing? Are you having company? Noticed the car with the Nebraska plates." It's a loose knit neighborhood watch.The other day I ran next door and borrowed two cups of milk from my neighbor because I realized halfway through making dinner that my daughter had used the last of ours on her morning cereal. My neighbor laughed and happily got it for me. She has borrowed flour from me before. It's the kind of neighborhood that when you notice all the neighbors have mowed their lawn this week, you go out and mow yours so that you aren't the shaggy lawn on the block. Lawn peer pressure at its best. I mowed ours third this time, we weren't last. Tomorrow I've got to go out and do something with my flowerbeds. My neighbor across the street got the drop on me there, but my iris' are better than her daffodils, so I can live with it. I love life in the suburbs. |
| Sofie is an evil little daschund. I know. Y'all have seen pictures of her cute little butt and don't believe me. Right? Here are some of her misdeeds. Every morning when my daughter leaves for school, she tells Sofie, "Go get in bed with Momma." And Sofie races up the stairs and hops up onto the end of our bed. In the winter, she would come quietly to the top of the bed and nose me gently until I lifted the edge of the covers. Then she would happily burrow down next to me and sleep until I was ready to get up. We would sleep as long as I wanted to. If she needed to potty or wanted a drink, she'd slip out quietly and do her business then come ask to burrow back down. If I had a migraine or was sick or anything, we'd sleep all day like that. She was HAPPY to do so. As long as she was with the Momma and the Momma kept the heater in the bed on, she was one content little weiner dog. WELL, NOT now that it's Spring time, buddy. Last weekend, Hubby rented some contraption called a power rake. It digs down in your lawn and REALLY rakes up the old dead grass and deposits it in a layer on your lawn. So then Hubby and Monilad spent several hours raking up what this thing pulled up. Then they hauled it to the two gardens in my back yard and Hubby is going to mulch it into the soil when he tills. Sofie spent the entire day at a dead run. She LOVED being outside with them. She ran her little butt off. So now in the mornings when Monilad leaves, she tells Sofie, "Go get in bed with Momma." But what Sofie hears, apparently, is, "Go stomp on Momma's head until she gets up and plays outside with you." GAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!I don't WANT to play semi-fetch in the backyard with a hyper daschund at 7:30 in the morning on a rainy/snowy Montana spring morning.  And forget ignoring her. On Tuesday I ignored her. I yelled at her to leave me alone and sent her away. I woke up about 20 minutes later when she came back. She was romping all over the bed carrying something in her mouth. I wasn't wearing my glasses and it was dark in the bedroom. Finally, I caught a glimpse of it as she disappeared under the sheets with it. It was a mowmuffin (one of those compressed cakes of mown grass that stick to the underside of your lawnmower, about the size of a bran muffin) and she was shredding it all over my quilt and then IN my sheets. Yeah. Thanks, Sofie. I had to vacume my sheets and bedding before washing it. Boy, was I shouting. She is the hardest little dog to train, too. I swear that Dog Whisperer guy would beat her with a stick if he had to deal with her for half an hour. She refuses to come when you call her. She thinks its all a big game. She just runs away laughing. And, yes. She laughs. I swear, you have to see the look on her evil little face. She'd make Mother Teresa kick her. And then when you are really worked up to a good hate for the evil little beast, she lies in wait for you. She waits until you are completely exhausted and all your defenses are down and then she runs up to you, carefully licks your air - somehow knowing better than to actually lick you - and then curls up sweetly in your lap and falls asleep, looking like a tiny little angel. She's evil, I tell you, completely evil. Invalid Photo #1005220 |
| Have you ever noticed life's tendency for the little things to snowball when you aren't paying attention? If you get sick or distracted for a couple of days, suddenly your whole family is wondering why they are wearing the dregs of their sock drawers and eating with plastic utensils. Bam. Life snowballed. You are sitting on a mountain of laundry and there isn't a clean inch of counter space in your kitchen. I'm not sure when it happened, but when I opened my email today, I had 185 emails sitting in my inbox. Only 22 were new, they've been stacking up for a while. I guess I just kept ignoring them or thinking that I was taking care of them as I went. I like to do that when I can. But suddenly here I find myself with 10 pages of apparently unresponded to corespondence. What must you all think of me? That's how I feel when I think about the fact that I've had a half written book hanging around my neck like the Mariner's albatross for almost a year now. It somehow snowballed on me when I wasn't looking. Hubby and I have been talking about it and I realized that I did good work when I was working under a schedule with daily quotas and deadlines. I was a little frazzled, but by God I got it done. We think that maybe that's how I'm going to have to approach this rewrite/edit thing. As a Nano project. So....I'm doing a May NaNo rewrite of my book. I know there is information about that on the NaNo site, so I'm going to have to go read up on it-see if they can offer any tips or tricks on rewriting or editing. Unfortunately, Hubby and Monilad will have to step up around the house if they don't want to sit around in mismatched socks, mountains of laundry and eat lots of takeout. Now I'm off to deal with some of these emails. Maybe I can stay on top of them this time. Probably not. |
| Because you would have missed the part where I was gainfully employed. I quit my job on Saturday morning. The whys are irrelevant to anyone but my family and I. Suffice it to say, it was not what was advertised. I was VERY proud of myself in that it is one of the only jobs I've ever left that I didn't go out in a blaze of glory. I went out proudly, quietly and with dignity. The bridge is still there even if I never look back down it. I didn't torch it. They even gave me the option to burn it, but I resisted temptation and instead of writing out the real reason I was leaving, I simply circled the "voluntarily quit" option on the termination paperwork. ~shrug~ Why become gossip for a bunch of people I don't care about? Why become a coffee klatch story to be repeated to newcomers? Ca sera sera. Right? Next! I'm just glad to be back here. The long hours there were one of the reasons I left. I specifically asked to only work 25-30 hours, yet she would schedule me for 39 every week. I have a family. I have a dream. I have bigger, better things to be doing. And this is one of them. I missed you guys terribly. Sorry y'all were the first thing to give in my busy life, but writing, unfortunately is always the first thing out the window when I get busy. I know that's bad. I was still jotting things down in my little notebooks, but I didn't do any real writing the whole time I was gone. Bad me. I guess I'm not a very good juggler. I like to think that when the dust had settled I would have slowly added writing back in, but I guess that's a bad approach. I should approach it as adding the job on TOP of the writing. Never giving it up. Hmmmm..... This bears pondering. On a lighter side, track season is upon us. Monilad is participating in various events. When they are in junior high, they encourage them to mix things up so that they get a broad feel for all the events. She has participated in several things, even javelin. One thing she won't do, though is something I did when I was in school (many moons ago...), the triple jump. Basically it's the long jump, but with a hop and a skip first. She says she's tried it in practice and she always stumbles instead of skipping. That's my clumsy little child. A trip chip off the old block. I've got to go, there is a track meet this afternoon and I've got to fax some resumes before I go. Try, try again on this job thing, right? Wish me luck finding a good one this time. |
| PlannerDan did a really good blog a few months back about when you get started with new stuff and it feels overwhelming. He called it "finding your level" or something. It was very philosophical and deep, as only Dan's entries can be. I've been thinking alot about that entry this past week. Today is my day off of my new job. I want to be all excited and tell you all how wonderfully fabulous my new job is and how incredibly excited I am to have found it. I can't and won't lie to y'all that way. Do I like my new job? Yyeesss. I do. In a wildly exciting kind of way? No. Not really. ~shrug~ And I guess I'm too old to pretend I do. It'a a nice enough job. It's not super difficult. I'm kind of in my natural element what with talking to people and organizing things in the shops. Dusting and straightening are right up my alley. I've worked in three of the four shops here in the area now. (Two of the other shops are in distant towns and the last is the cavern shop that isn't open yet.) The fourth shop is past security in the airport and I don't have the necessary FBI background check and TSA training to be in it yet. That won't be for a few weeks. Working there is new and different. I'm not angry about it. I'm a little sad still about not being home and being a full time writer, for whatever the reasons. It's hard sometimes to feel you are seeing a dream die, even if that isn't what is happening. I'm 35, almost 36. I'm aware that this is a job, not a career. It's what I'm doing until I win the lottery and can travel full time.  Which I hope is soon.I'm not angry about my job. It's a nice enough one. I go in everyday at my appointed time, I do it cheerfully and politely. I am pleasant to both my customers and my coworkers. But...somewhere in my heart of hearts, I know it'a a meaningless dance for form only. I'm not really there. I'm somewhere in my head, living out fictional lives. Trying to capture them on paper or keyboard the best I can. I'm a writer. All week long I've not touched this keyboard. My computer has sat down here cold and lifeless. And although I've carried a couple of journals with me, today is the first time I've cracked one and written anything in it. I also didn't submit anything for the month of March for my Submit It! group. I have felt like a woman in mourning. I've been mourning what couldn't be right now. So, today, I pushed through the pain and this entry is what you all get. I also wrote down a dream from last night in one of my journals. I'm going to play through the pain, coach. I still have the dream to be a author. It can't happen like I thought it would, but damn it, it will happen. Because, above and beyond everything else in my life......inside, I'm a writer. I'm a teller of tales; I'm a dreamer of dreams; I'm a liver of other lives. I just have to figure out how to work all that in with the reality of Teresa, sales clerk; Teresa, mother; Teresa, wife. I know that soon I will find my level. Soon I will work this out. Dan told me I would and he's never lied to me yet. |
| Today I accepted delivery on my first piece of what I consider to be adult furniture. Hubby bought me a new dining room table. Woo Hoo! I'm an adult now. Before now, all I've ever had was hand me down furniture. Our bed was part of the dowry...his. It's a waterbed frame, nice and all, but still.....not mine. His dresser and bedside table? Both very nice antique cherry pieces that were handed down through his family. Both...not mine. My dresser? A very nice piece that doesn't match his furniture that was given to us by a friend who got new furniture. Not really mine...and are you seeing in your mind's eye how horribly Frankensteined my bedroom suite is? ~sigh~ It's all very nice furniture. And I'm thankful I have it. But it'll never appear on the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. My living room furniture? Secondhand. Nice, but secondhand. My office furniture? My husband's original home desk and a cheap Walmart computer center-thing. And two wooden filing cabinets. All very cobbled together and make do. But, hey...it works. My former dining room furniture? We got this from the same place as the living room furniture. It was just cheap crap. I was thankful to have it, though. Because before I had it, I had a tacky glasstop and wicker dinette set. ~shudder~ It had seen better days. With my former dining room furniture I was down to only two chairs that my my family hadn't destroyed. Yeah, flimsy ass chairs. We aren't a tiny family. These chairs were made for pixies or something. I would like to go on record as saying that I never broke one of them. I liked the table well enough I suppose, it was a farm table lookalike, veneer kind of thing. But the chairs just sucked. But my NEW furniture. I feel like a grownup. I have my own dining room table and big heavy wooden chairs. It's a big square counter height table. But if you have more people over you can flip out the edges all around and it becomes a larger round table. (Or you can just flip as many of them out as you want.) The salesman told my husband it's a good poker table because the dealer can be on a flat side and the players can all be on round sides. He didn't know it, but that was a good pitch to Hubby. It's made of Knotty Birch and is kind of Oak colored. Maybe a little darker. The chairs are a little shorter than a barstool - think of a chair that would fit perfectly at your kitchen counter. They have an "X" back. Can y'all tell I'm excited? We also got Monilad a new bed because she had been sleeping on my husband's childhood twin bed. Yeah....It was 30 years old. They don't throw ANYTHING away in my husband's family. Hey, we were glad to have it all these years. But, since she's a big girl now, too, we picked her out a new futon with a real matress (not once of those flimsy regular futon matresses). We figure she can keep it through high school and then take it with her to college. If nothing else it will be a good couch and extra bed when she has her own place. She also got a new computer desk. It's only a Walmart computer center thing, but hey....we all have to start somewhere. |
| Back when we went to the King Tut exhibit, I picked up a little pamphlet with Activities for Families. There are some cool activites inside, inclluding how to mummify an apple slice. One of the little sections was about Life in Egypt and what they ate. There was a recipe for sesame seed cookies. They looked really good! There's no sugar in them, because they didn't have access to refined sugar. Instead the sweetness comes from honey you put with the shortening. They also have whole wheat flour. So I made them today. OMG. They are delicious!! You roll them out and then cut them with cookie cutters. Then you spread a sesame seed and honey mixture on top of them. They are very delicate and sort of cake-like. I think they would make a wonderful tea cake. I love when I find an old recipe or at least an adapted old recipe. It's like a window into the past, I think. Makes me feel a connection, sort of. Is that weird? Probably. PS- I didn't print the recipe here because I don't have the rights to it, but I would be happy to pass it along to any and all interested parties as long as you don't post it. Just drop me a line. |
| This last week, Hubby and I have been making a concerted effort to build more one on one time into our week. Small dates and just time spent together, little things really. The summer season will be here soon and with it comes his usual crazy 60 to 80 hour work weeks. So we've decided to be proactive and start instituting together time now so that it's a habit by the time the long days hit. On Thursday we went to my favorite date place in the world. The local hot springs. It's cheap and relaxing. And you can go for as long as you feel like. We stayed an hour on Thursday evening. We were home by 8pm and when we got here the ham I had cooked in the crockpot was done and Monilad had made some Au Gratin potatoes to go with it. Yum. Hubby and I have decided to make it a weekly trip. Every Wednesday night. (Thursday is good TV night and because they are 7th Day Adventists, they close the springs from sundown on Friday night until sundown on Saturday...so neither of those days is good.) Tonight we did something that always signals the return of spring to me. We hit the driving range. My back is feeling it! LOL (I have an ugly swing that tweaks my lower right side.) We were only out for an hour again, but that was plenty of time to split a large bucket of balls. It was good to get back in the feel of it. When you hit a golf ball after a long winter of, well, NOT hitting a golf ball, your mind gets in the way alot. Each swing is accompanied by a silent little checklist the mind does with the body: Head down? Shoulders relaxed? Arms straight? Left one locked? Feet set? Far enough apart? Too far? Weight distributed correctly? Remember to follow through. Don't grip the club so tight, you are strangling it. That's good. Remember to pull the club, not push it. Turn your feet on the follow through. When you've hit enough balls, you can stop doing the checklist with every swing. Instead your body remembers and just sort of adjusts for you. I think they call it "body memory." Writing is like that, I think. Those first few poems, those first couple of short stories, whatever, you have a lot of running dialogue in your head. A writing checklist. It's hard to measure up against it sometimes. But, I think, the more you exercise your writing gift, with blog entries, poetry, short stories, private journaling, what have you. The more you create "body memory." You just know where the words go and more or less how things should flow. You can paint a picture with fewer strokes and less effort. The writing just comes more naturally. Unlike my ugly golf. |
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