Cracker Dreams and Singlewide Wishes

A Book Review

2010-10-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

I was told I should pass this book review on to a wider audience, so I'm following directions.

These were ordered for my branch, so I picked them up because they've been sort of called the girl version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. These books may actually confirm my suspicions that I grew up to be a 12 year-old boy, because I really didn't give a flying shit.

The characters, including the main character, are rather cardboard. The protagonist is supposedly a dork who spends a lot of time discussing her dorkitude, though she really isn't very dorky. Then there are her background BFFS and MacKenzie, the rich, snotty, mean girl, who for some reason spends a lot of time antagonizing a girl who supposedly isn't even on her social level. And then the cute crush and blah, fucking, blah. Watch Mean Girls and you get the picture. There is no growth in these characters so it's like reading a very long and much more boring roadrunner cartoon.

There are about 40 to fucking many pop culture references (iPhone, Tyra Banks, emo, Walmart, Jimmy Choos, etc.) for this series to be relevant five years from now. Hell, I'm not sure if they'll remain relevant through October.

It seems like the author is trying to make it very clear that she's up on all the latest popular must-haves and stereotypes. It is definitely nowhere near DoaWK.

And seriously, there has got to be some fucking newer book series about an average girl's life that doesn't follow this sad ass formula. I don't know yet, because I've only read this one and one of those Clique books.

The Boys

2010-09-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

My mother comes from a family of seven children - or eleven. It depends entirely on whether we're counting half-siblings, step-siblings, and that one daughter of my grandaddy's that technically wasn't his his daughter because she was born eleven months after he'd already been shipped to Korea, but he apparently didn't want her to grow up thinking she didn't have a father. Out of these eleven children, there are eight boys and they've always been known as The Boys. Sure, they're all in their in their late forties and fifties by now, but if they happen to hear someone shout, "Hey, boy!" across a parking lot, one will certainly turn around because he knows there is a cousin, an aunt, a niece or another sibling calling him.

I would more or less describe the Boys as good ol' boys in a sort of Dukes of Hazzard way. Except there are incredible amounts of drinking and pot involved and jail time served is 99% of the time deserved. They're good people in their own bizarre way. They're the last of a breed somehow raised on the idea that it's perfectly acceptable to beat the hell out of someone if they offend you. They're a rough and odd lot and I think my grandaddy probably ate more nitroglycerin trying to raise them than a normal man would have to, but they have their good qualities. I've had a couple of my uncles offer to beat people up if they needed me to. You never know when you might need an ass beater in life. I wouldn't want to have ever had one of them as a father and probably not a brother, but they make right tolerable uncles in the right situations.

Today's story involves my Uncle Bull. (As you know by now, I don't generally share the real names of my family members, but provide other suitable names. Bull's actual nickname was Bull for many years and described him well enough.) Uncle Bull is a good guy and I have a lot of nice memories of him when I was younger, but Uncle Bull is also an alcoholic who is generally not a good guy when he is drinking and I have some bad memories of him when I was younger. My mother always likes to bring up the time she'd spent a good while cleaning the bathroom once when I was four or so and instead of fumbling his way into the house or using a bush like a normal drunk, he decided to take a piss through the bathroom window.

Bull's been through some hard times. Alcoholics usually have those. He has a recidivism problem, so we usually don't see him for months or years at a time. Also, he has some physical defects going on that have come with those hard times. Around 1997, things weren't going well with a drinking buddy and his drinking buddy, under some impression that Bull was about to beat the shit out of him, opted to pull out a shotgun and use it rather than getting the shit beat out of him.

Frankly, the details are pretty sketchy since the drinking buddy shot him while Bull was attempting to push the drinking buddy's truck out of a ditch. Bull's kind of a big dude, but I severely doubt his ability to push a truck out of a ditch and beat the shit out of a drinking buddy from over 10 feet away. The reality is, no one was there to witness the shooting and we're talking about two drunk guys. Who knows what really happened?

As it is, Bull's a hardy sort of dude and came out of it essentially intact except for part of his head. He lost the left temporal lobe of his brain, his left eye, and his left ear. The loss of his temporal lobe affected his word recognition abilities for a little while and he would have difficulty recalling the appropriate words he wanted to use in the early days. Ants were sometimes biscuits and a decorative crow figurine was a spider. That has mostly improved over time, however.

In the summer of 2000, Bull was crossing a main highway in a small town in the next county over to buy something from the convenience store and was wearing headphones at the time and apparently thought this town was small enough that he had little to worry about in terms of road safety. His assumption proved wrong and a poor lady in a minivan knocked the ever loving shit out of him. Amazingly, Bull came out of that scrape a lot better than he could have because he suffered no head injuries. He did have a transected urethra, a broken arm, his pelvis was broken down the middle, and, if I recall correctly, about forty stitches across his back. I helped take care of him for several weeks during his convalescence and that is a whole other story.

Bull survived and moved on with his life as usual. His medical issues, however, had finally reached a state that at one point the prison system called and tried to get us to take him back before his sentence was up. We were basically of the opinion that they took him, so they could keep him. If you're going to provide a punishment for a crime, then it's only logical that you follow through with the punishment even if it hurts you as much as it hurts them.

Bull is currently out of the state penal system and is doing well as can be expected for an alcoholic dude missing a few portions of his head. He's gotten a lot better about wearing his eye patch in public. A few people around here apparently still don't know him - I guess because he spends so much time "on vacation" - and have to learn the hard way that he's a person you really sort of want to leave alone. I personally wouldn't bother a 6'2" dude with a big scruffy beard and eye patch, but some people have to learn the hard way.

Just last week, he forgot to lock his backdoor before going to bed. For some reason, he was resting with his one good ear on the pillow, so had it not been for his dog acting like a freak he'd have never heard the dude who welcomed himself in through the unlocked back door.

I never did get clarification on why the dude was walking into the house in the first place. Maybe he was just lost and walked into the wrong house. It's happened before. There was a whole incident involving Bull and some fried chicken in a house that turned out not to be his, so you'd think he might would ask the dude why he was roaming around having been in a couple of those mistaken house situations himself. Bull's an action sort of guy, though. Shoot first and ask questions later - except he's a convicted felon, so I don't think he's allowed to have guns anymore.

A lack of ammunition doesn't bother Bull though. The lack of a telephone was apparently a minor detail to be worked out, however. He grabbed the dude in a headlock, dragged him out of he house, across a four lane street in the downtown area, and into the Jet convenience store across the street wherein he hollered, "CALL THE COPS! CALL THE COPS RIGHT NOW!"

Bull, still holding the intruder in a headlock, dragged him back out of the store, back across the four lane street in the downtown area, and onto the back porch of his house where he then sat with his assailant still in a headlock while he waited for the cops to arrive.

The dude pleaded for his release several times while waiting for the cops to arrest him. (Or rescue him, depending on who's telling this story, I guess.) Bull wouldn't have any of it and would headbutt the dude and tell him to "be quiet and be still until the cops get here!" If I know Bull, there were a lot of "Mother fucker," "shit," and "fuck me running backwards" thrown into the mix, but my grandma told me this story, so I got it without the full Bull verbal force.

Eventually, the cops did arrive and admonished Bull for "taking the law into his own hands." I forgot to find out what happened to the dude, whether he was released under time served or jailed for bothering a one-eyed, one-eared dude while he was trying to sleep. Personally, I think Bull handled the situation rather well, given past incidents. He called the cops and that's always a good move. Sure, maybe you shouldn't hold an intruder hostage, but I reckon that mother fucker will learn about walking into houses that aren't his.

A Series of Unfortunate Events: Farewell Fair Mater

2010-09-26T19:53:00.000-07:00

I'm well known both online and in real life for my automobile trouble. Things started fine. I bought a 1994 Buick Century in 1997 and was the first person in my family to buy a car in the same decade it was manufactured. I loved that damned car. It was an old lady powder blue and was also the first car I'd ever been in that had automatic locking doors. The locks scared the bejebus out of me - I thought maybe it was some sort of Christine moment and my new car was going to eat me.

We made out okay, though. My fondest memories are the ones involving stupid little Mustangs that would sidle up next to me at the red light and rev their motors. I have no idea why people would antagonize a car that looked like it should be owned by a little 70-year-old woman (the previous owner was actually a little old couple), but they did. So I sat quietly staring over the dark blue dash, waiting for the light to change and then I'd dust the arseholes. God, I loved that car.

Well, that car is long gone - rear ended and subsequently totaled by a Neon. (I hate Neons now.) After a long succession of pieces o' shit, I am now the proud new owner of a 12-year-old Mitsubishi SUV given to me by mom when my sister upgraded last year to a hybrid. The Mitsubishi (or Mitchybitchy as a lot of people call them around here) sat in my back yard for the past year, biding it's time as my "back up ride." It need a couple of hundred dollars of parts and I hadn't quite reached the stage where I'd grown tired of trying to keep the Toyota (affectionately known as Mater in its last months) on the road.

Mater had a whole host of issues. The most disconcerting for me was the lack of a radio. Well, it actually had a radio, but it was in the trunk because I couldn't find a single person capable of wiring it back in to the big gaping hole in the console panel. I suppose I could have taken it to a shop and paid someone to do it, but I'm not willing to pay money for something if I think I can eventually find someone to do the work for free or trade. The great thing is, I know a few people who work on cars. The bad thing was that no one had any idea what was going on with my radio. I missed having a radio incredibly. In the old days, if the kids were being too obnoxious, I'd just stick in a tape and sing myself away to some Zen place in my head. Without a radio, I can't remember any of the lyrics. So I have to sing the same verse over and over until I move on to another verse from another song.

In reality, that was the least of Mater's issues - the radio is just the one that left me most mentally unfettered. Mater's issues are rather numerous, so I will now list them in bullet format because I frigging love lists.

No radio.
A crack in the windshield. (It wasn't a bad crack, but you know how cracks go. Much like my ass, it's just going to spread.)
A major oil leak that I attempted to have repaired three times (and PAID for it) that was never repaired.
A deer attacked my car the summer of 2009. The deer's head took out my driver's side mirror and its ass left a huge imprint on the left passenger door. I will never forget that wall eyed look of "WTF?" that deer gave me right before she spun off into a ditch.
A minor radiator leak.
The air conditioner only worked if it was less than 85 degrees outside.
The heater had vacated years ago.
One of the engine mounts wasn't feeling so good.
The pistons had a habit of voicing their displeasure.
A bushing or some other magical doohickey behind my right front tire had basically given up the ghost and that, as it turned out, happened to be why all of my mother fucking front right tires kept blowing out.
Hail damage on the trunk.
Both of the passenger door handles were broken. (This is apparently a Toyota issue.)
Wild Boy traditionally sits in the back on the passenger's side. One day, he felt he would be safer if he used the child safety lock for that door. Because the outside door handle was completely broken, that door could no longer be opened at all.
Once, I was on my way to the take the GACE in the middle of a thunderstorm and my right windshield wiper flew off.
I thought I accidentally locked my keys in the trunk about two years ago, so I popped the lock on the trunk only to later discover my keys had fallen between the cushions of the couch. The trunk still closed fine, but from then on I could open it with a flat head screwdriver.
The rear end says it's a "Yota" now.

Even for all of it's problems, I was still determined to keep Mater on the road because I believe in getting every last drop out something that I can. I finally reached an impasse this past June, however.

I'd finished my evening rounds for the Census somewhere around 9PM one evening, had picked up the heathens from my mom's house, and was less than 2 miles from home when another bitch ass terrorist dear leaped at me from the passenger side. My first instinct was to swerve into the other lane, but there was a car already occupying the spot that I wanted so my only choice was to take the deer out. I did and I drove on to the house with the kids yabbering on about the deer.

"Did you see it?! It did a back flip over that fence!"
"Let's go back and get it! We can eat it!"

My little Cracker children. Laird bless, 'em. I didn't have room to stick a deer in my trunk. That's where I kept all my Diet Cokes and the car radio.

I was pretty lucky, because while I crushed a radiator support, the impact didn't crush the radiator. It just so happened that while the support was gone, the frame was crushed in just the right manner that it now supported the radiator. The bigger problem, however, was that I now had a whole pile of deer hair where my right headlight used to be and the frame was too crushed to stick another one in.

The deer also pushed the front quarter panel back into the front passenger's side door so I could no longer open the door all the way. The door leaked after that.

As I'd not had time to buy parts for the Mitsubishi and I didn't have time for my car to be down since I was using it to Censusually harrass people, I drove the now one-eyed Mater. My goal was to reach a quarter of a million miles and I was only 25K or so away. I wanted my 25K miles because then I'd be convinced I'd gotten my $1200 out of that car.

The night I took DMan to E/R because I thought he had strep throat made me rethink my goal. Apparently he'd developed a fever and a sore throat one Saturday while I was out Censusing. When I came in to pick up the heathens, he had a fever around 101 and appeared to have white patches on this throat. I'm of the firm opinion that strep throat is not something to play with because I once played with strep throat and ended up with pleurisy, so I have no qualms about going to the E/R if it's a weekend case of potential strep throat. I'd prefer if we had an urgent care center around this hole of a town or even if we still had our old pediatrician. I like our new pediatricians fine, but they don't give your their phone number. Our old pediatrician made it very clear to me once that I was to call her no matter what time. I miss her more than I miss my Buick.

As it turns out, he didn't have strep throat and that was a relief because that meant I didn't have to go into seclusion and miss time from work. No one wants to keep an infectious kid. We were on the way home when I ran into a roadblock comprised of deputies from my county, the next county over, and a few state troopers. I pulled out my license and the deputy asked me what happened to my headlight. I told him a deer attacked me.

"You know you can get a ticket for having a headlight out, don't you?" he said. "Now I wouldn't give you a ticket, but that trooper up there might." The way he said it, you could tell he was totally messing with me, but I played along and pleaded accordingly, "Could you ask me him to let me go this time?" What I meant was "Let me go this time, and my ass will take every back road between here and Hell from now on."

And the deputies laughed at my car. Seriously. My car was so damned sad, that it was a point of entertainment for 15 guys standing out on the side of the road at midnight. That was okay, though, because it was highly entertaining to call people up and tell them cops laughed at my car. It wouldn't have been funny, though, if someone had taken a Flannery O'Connor moment and pushed my car off into a ditch. I keep my Diet Cokes in the trunk and would have deeply felt their loss.

I spent a few brief weeks toying with the idea of either creating a skull and crossbones eye patch for the headlight, uh, socket or duct taping a flashlight in place. I really wanted my 25K miles. While I was mulling over my options, the starter decided it no longer cared to participate in this farce and went on a slow down strike. At that point, I decided I was just damned tired of putting parts on the same old car and thought it would be interesting to put parts on another car for a while.

So one battery, one alternator, and some spark plugs later, I am now the proud driver of a car that actually has less interior space than Mater. But by God, it's got a radio.

For your viewing pleasure, I have included a picture of a beaten Mater*:

Is There Anybody Out There?

2010-09-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

I imagine everyone has probably R-U-N-O-F-T considering I seem have to a dysfunction with establishing a posting schedule.

So, uh, how've you been? How are the kids? I know, I know. It's been a while. I'm a very bad correspondent. Horrible. Unforgivable. I apologize. Can we still be friends?

Life hasn't been so much busy as it has been full of odd moments interspersed with days of utmost apathy - or perhaps not so much apathy. Let's call it moments of self-reflection in preparation for a move in a new direction.

I don't know where the hell I'm going. I'm probably just going to switch from running in clockwise circles to counter clockwise circles. It'll be a nice change of pace.

Moving on - if you'll check my post directly below this one, it's a blog post I wrote for my employer's blog and thought a few people may find it of some use. Check back with me when I fill you in on why I no longer have power steering and how my aunt maced me at the library fair. Fun times! Fun times!

Working for the Man Every Night and Day

2010-09-21T07:35:00.000-07:00

A lot of people have this idea that working from home is the mother lode and you get to sit around in your bathrobe eating peanut butter straight out of the jar while playing Farm Town and someone pays you for this. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that it typically takes two hands to eat peanut butter straight out of the jar (one to hold the jar and one to hold the spoon) and it also takes a minimum of one hand to perform any work-at-home task, so working from home is not always the most fun thing ever.

However, if you're interested in exploring an outside-the-box career path, you should be as informed as possible. Let's start with the pros and cons I've learned from my own work-at-home experiences:

Pros

You really can sit around in your bathrobe if you insist.
Use housing expenses as a tax deduction!*
Save money on commuting to work. Not only do you not have to spend as much on gas; you also don't put as much wear and tear on your automobile. And if you're one of those people always running five minutes late to everywhere, then you greatly decrease your chances of getting a speeding ticket which could drive up your insurance! Now that I think about it, I guess you could save money by wearing your ratty bathrobe everyday, too.
Because you don't have to spend time driving to and from work, you can incorporate more time for yourself and your family.Maybe you can try dusting off that treadmill that never gets any run time before heading over to your desk.
There's a job out there to fit almost everyone.
Many companies have flexible work schedules that you can adapt to your personal or family needs.
You don't have to take an entire day off work because you have to be at home in case this is the day the cable guy shows up!
You're less likely to suffer stress and greatly reduce the chances of catching all the colds that make their way around traditional office settings.
Access to potential jobs thousands of miles away that don't require relocation. If nothing else has caught your attention, then this one should

Cons

If you insist on wearing that ratty bathrobe everyday, you could turn into that slovenly guy who walks around the house wearing a ratty bathrobe and resting his coffee mug on his belly. Don't let that happen to you.
Human beings needs social interaction as a normal part of our mental hygiene. If you work from home and never seek outside relationships beyond your computer screen, you could turn into that guy in the ratty bathrobe. Leave the house and see your friends! Or at the very least, invite someone with laptop over to play Kingdom of Loathing with you.
Working from home turns home into, well, work. If you don't set up your home office in its own designated space your home may lose it's status as a place to relax and recharge and become one big office. Be sure to separate your work from your home so everyone can relax.
Organization, discipline, and motivation is key to working from home. If you lack these skills, then a work-at-home experience may not be beneficial to you.
Finding a work-at-home job with benefits is difficult at best. Many companies prefer to hire "contract workers." Contracting means that you are not an employee of the company, but rather a business entity unto yourself that is contracting with the company.
Because you may be hired as a contract worker, you'll get a 1099 at the end of the year and will be responsible for paying your own federal, state, and social security taxes.
A lot of your friends and family think that because you work from home that you're not really doing anything and you have time to talk, hang out, or take their Great-Grandma Irene to the grocery store and the hairdresser. You have to be firm in dealing with your loved ones and teach them that you have an established work schedule that is not open to interpretation.
Many jobs require special skills that may require you to further your education or have prior experience. Examples are medical coding and transcription, teaching English to speakers of other languages, and web design.
Working from home with children can be a special dysfunctional family sitcom of its own. If you have especially young children, it may be best to arrange childcare for them or perform your work duties around their sleep patterns. If you have older children who are out of school for the summer, then may the force be with you because you're going to need it. A lot of it. See this picture? This picture is a LIE!. In about 15 seconds that kid is going to wonder if he can get his truck inside the computer screen by throwing it. Then he's going to decide he wants a peanut butter sandwich with the crust cuts off and he's going to spend time trying to refurbish the carpet by stomping peanut butter into a nice little mosaic all over the living room floor. Don't let nice pictures fool you! We're talking about real, live children who like to flush underwear and rolls of tape down the toilet when no one is looking.

Forums
If you've weighed the pros and cons and decided that a work-at-home option can work for you, then check out these forums. My favorite so far has been Work Place Like Home. I've included several links to WPLH because they have extensive listings of available online jobs and excellent resources. Unfortunately, you must sign up as a WPLH forum member to read the links. I strongly encourage you to do so if you're seriously interested in work-from-home employment.
Work Place Like Home
Rate Race Rebellion
Work Home Career Kit
wahm.com Work at Home Mafia Freelance Writing Gigs

Helpful Links from Work Place Like Home
Companies that Hire You as an EmployeeList of Online Employers
Non-Phone Jobs
Tips on Researching a Company
How to Work from Home GuideWarning Signs and Red Flags - Not every job offer you receive is a legitimate job. A lot of "jobs" are actually scams that either do not pay you, are trying to sell you something, or are attempting to access your personal information. Always research every company offering you a job before providing your personal information. A legitimate employer is not going to ask you to transfer company funds to your account, nor will they require you to pay a processing fee or purchase special equipment. If it sounds too good to be true, then it most likely is.

In Summary
Having worked a few online jobs, I can say there are legitimate jobs to be found that pay well. I've written for a couple of websites, tried my hand as a ChaCha guide (which I didn't quite find worth my time), scored standardized math questions for Pearson, and served as a Census enumerator. Okay, the enumerator wasn't quite a work-at-home job, but more like a "live in my car" job. The point is, I didn't have to go into an office to do that particular job.

Pay ranged anywhere from $2.00 an hour (ChaCha) to $15 an hour (Pearson.) Depending on your skills, hourly pay can be even higher. There are jobs for writers, typists, medical coders, virtual assistants, web designers, legal secretaries, bloggers, data entry operators, tutors, teachers, accountants, customer service representatives, and I even saw a Craigslist advertisement calling for an experienced Ford mechanic. The trick is to find the niche that will benefit from your skills.

*Consult with an accountant. Basing all of your tax decisions on a blog post by a woman with an English degree is probably not considered a valid defense by the IRS.

Surprise!

2010-06-01T20:37:00.000-07:00

Today I thought I'd share a census story. I was working a little town in an adjacent county last week when I ran across a true freak. This particular town is rather small. Commerce is transacted in either one of the two gas stations, though I did notice they've recently added a keno/video joint next to the older gas station. The police station is in a rather small trailer such as the ones you see on construction sites and apparently they open it when someone feels like checking their Facebook page.

My supervisors are really pushing us to find everyone we can and get all the information so after I spent some time looking at my ill-designed official census map and roaming around streets sorely lacking in marked addresses and road signs, I located this one dude next door to two vacant trailers that were on my list. If a house is vacant, I have to have a proxy declare the house vacant. I can't decide it's vacant all by my lonesome even if a bird did fly at me from a broken window. Luckily, this man was on my list to visit so I thought I'd complete his form and use him as a proxy for the two vacant units. I did manage to complete all my duties, but not without some issues.

I should have trekked it back to my car when I saw the "no trespassing" sign even though that sign does not technically apply to me. Being a good enumerator, I went to his door and knocked. I waited a moment then knocked again. I could definitely hear noise coming from around from behind the house. In an effort to avoid a lot of backtracking, I wrote out a notice of visit form and left it on the dude's door then walked around the back to see if I could spy anyone calling out "Helllooooo! Census!" the whole damned time in case there was some crazy teabagger waiting to jump out at me with a Rush Limbaugh DVD and a 12 gauge.

The guy lived on a corner lot so I ended up walking all the way back around to the side road and decided to head back to my car. As I got in the car, I noticed someone sitting on the porch so I walked back up the steep hill this dude lives on and said, "Hi! My name is KAR and I'm with the U.S. Census Bureau. Do you have about ten minutes to fill out a form with me?"

He said sure and offered me a seat a foot or so from him on the porch. He seemed like a congenial sort sort of person so I sat down since it's easier to fill out this stupid form if I can put everything in my lap. We briefly talked about the weather and somewhere along the way I learned he'd been divorced four or five times, but his latest ex-wife still comes over for coffee in the mornings.

Unfortunately, it seems his ex-wife does not come over for sex. Therein lies the problem. I was sitting on the porch with a horny old goat who put his hand on my knee and eventually asked me if I liked having my pussy eaten while waggling his tongue at me like he's Gene Simmons. (The 1970s Gene Simmons, not that unfortunate Gene Simmons boinking that gum chewing girl in that horrible sex video.) Now I've met a lot of old perverts and I thought I pretty well had the guy in control. I politely moved his nasty ass hand off my knee and told him I was in a very happy 15 year relationship with a really big, brawny dude named Kevin and we had three children. Then I moved on to Mr. Horny's age and date of birth.

In an effort to expedite the process, I decided his gender and race on my own. I'm not supposed to that, but seriously. I've got some old fart offering to clean my boat and I'm just not down with that. It took a few minutes of, uh, redirecting his interests to the census form and I even managed to get him to serve as a proxy. I thanked him for his time and made tracks off his property.

I'd gotten about 20 feet or so down his driveway and was making a mental note to myself to never move to this cracker ass town when he called me from his porch. Like Lot's wife, I stopped and turned around.

"See?" he said. "I have needs! Come back and see me sometime!" And there, in front of the entire world, that fucknut was at the edge of his porch poking his pruney penis out from the porch rails. Well. I have never had a complete stranger whip out his penis so I was absolutely bamfoozled as to an appropriate response. They did not discuss penis sightings in that four day training.

I sort of said, "HAHAHAHAHAHA! I see!" and did the chunky woman double time shuffle to my car. Honestly, I think I was in a bit of shock for some time after that because I went right on with visiting other households like it was perfectly normal for old codgers to whip out their dicks on the front porch in hopes of scoring some census cootchie.

In fact, I didn't even know how to explain this to my crew leader so I simply wrote "Warning: Mr. John Doe is a pervert" in the notes section of the questionnaire. My crew leader is a sort of older upstanding, staunch Middle America guy so when he commented on my pervert notes all I said was "Uh. Yeah. I'n not going back there."

How do you tell such a normal sort of guy that you just had a dick shook at you? It would be sort of like telling my dad if my dad were a normal sort of guy who wasn't convinced that the Secret Service was watching him from his neighbor's RV roof.

So that's the kind of crap you could be getting yourself into walking around strange people's houses. In retrospect, I was very lucky because you never know what could happen. All in all, I've been visiting people for three weeks. Some folks are oddly happy to see me and offer up all their information. Some folks offer me something to drink and some want me to come the next time they grill out. One old dude was drunk at 9 in the mornin, but he was a nice guy and I was pleasantly surprised when he informed me why we have a census. True civic knowledge is sadly lacking in this country. One guy talked so long, I found out he was a cousin to one of my first cousins. Some are agitated by my presence. But other than that one weird freak, everyone has been polite and vaguely normal.

Be good to your census worker. We never know what we're walking into when we knock on your door and we just want to do our jobs. We don't want to see your dicks. The government currently does not have a need for that statistical information.

Hello Darlin, nice to see you. It's been a long time.

2010-05-29T20:48:00.000-07:00

Lyric titles. I can't help myself.

Wow. I can't believe it's been almost four months since I touched base. Things have been very busy in KAR land. A very quick update on the current situation - the funding for my position with the lib-uh-rary is being slashed at the end of June. I will be busted down to 17.5 hours a week at $7.75 an hour. Not exactly a living wage or anything and jobs aren't very forthcoming in this area.

In an effort to try to cover the future I tiny bit, I took on two extra jobs. I am currently an enumerator with the U.S. census bureau and that is rather interesting. Someone remind me to talk about the pervert and that dude with the fucking frozen chicken sometime in the future. (Also, please excuse any typos, grammatical errors, general off-kilter rambling, and whatnot. I have a hard time editing myself on a slow day and I'm trying to post in between busy moments.)

I also spent two weeks as an online scorer with Pearson. For a little while, I was doing all three at one time and that is just damned exhausting and I've hardly seen my heathens. Thankfully, Pearson ended before I did, so now I can just have the two jobs and try to formulate a plan somewhere along the way for the next step. I don't think I really take steps, though. Life has been more like swinging from one vine to the next and hoping like hell I don't grab hold of a snake's ass along the way.

Also, a deer attacked my car while I was driving. It still goes forward, but I was pulled over during a license check and I'm pretty sure deputies were laughing at my car. That was awkward.

So that's the current state of KAR.

As some of you may recall, my last post was about helping my grandaddy. He was a very fastidious man so baths would last anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours because he'd have me bathe him at least twice. At one point, he and my step-grandma, Marie, thought they'd try having a home health worker come out to bathe him because Marie was worried it was too much for me to handle. The lady came out and bathed him. Once. He said, "That was good, now do it all again." Apparently, the poor woman thought she'd failed in some way and couldn't understand that a second go-round was a part of the process, so Marie decided a utilizing a home health worker was not a feasible plan.

In February, we were bathing in the shower two or three days, but by late March his health had deteriorated so greatly that we were reduced to once-a-week baths in a reclining chair. The last bath I gave him was on April 28th. Grandaddy was so give out that he couldn't get out of his chair by himself anymore. I had to pick him up from the chair and hold him while he walked the two feet to the "bathing recliner." He was in a lot of pain, but feeling clean was so important to him that he was willing to bear it.

For the three months I helped him bathe, he always wore his jockey shorts while I bathed him. I'd have to move his legs up and down to bathe them and he'd cup his spidery fingers over his personals while to make sure I wasn't accidentally subjected to seeing grandaddy penis.

On the first weekend in May, Marie called me to help grandaddy get out of his recliner so he could sit on the portable toilet. I came that Saturday and he was exhausted, reduced to wearing a diaper because he couldn't always make it to the toilet. That was the first and only time I saw his business, because he was too weak to preserve that privacy and that's when I knew the time had finally come. That was also the first time I'd allow myself to feel the pain that had been building up in me over those months and I finally allowed myself to cry.

On May 6, my grandaddy slipped into a coma and never woke up. He died around 2:10 that afternoon. When our funeral home people came to take his body, Marie applied lipstick and kissed him goodbye. She told them to leave her kiss and if I know Rick and Larry, they left her kiss on his cheek.

He died on a Thursday and they buried him on Friday. A lot of people were shocked that we'd been so quick to put him in the ground, but that's exactly what he wanted and Marie was so proud of herself because she managed it in 23 hours. (Marie is known for chronic tardiness, so he would be pleased she'd gotten everything completed according to his provided time line.)

There are a lot of things I learned in those months. One thing I learned is that while we'd always revered my grandaddy as the all-knowing patriarch, he never stood alone in his duties. Marie was always in the background and she never shined like he did (he was a very charismatic person), but she was truly his other half. I don't think I'd ever understood how so many of us take her for granted until I watched her care for him all those weeks and months and while she'd grow agitated, she'd never think of putting him in a nursing home. Marie has always been a strong woman like that and never expected any special recognition for it. There are very few people in the world like her and I'm not one of them. If I'm going to do something, I expect a ribbon or a gold star or at least a certificate of recognition.

In my lifetime, I've never known any other relationship that was as whole as my grandparents. They did not always agree and they weren't always happy with each other, but they always loved each other and committed themselves to their marriage. That is a very rare thing.

Once, when we still taking showers, I'd walked out to get Marie because she was the one who helped him bathe his other areas. Unfortunately, she'd gotten tied up on the phone and couldn't get away. Worried that he shouldn't be in the shower by himself, I went back in to make sure he was okay.

Grandaddy heard the bathroom door open and he thought it was Marie.

"Hey, sug," he said and it was with so much love and relief. Just so much. I'd never understood quite what their relationship was like that because they hadn't littered the world with giant displays of affection - their love and affection were always kind of between the two of them, I guess. But I could hear all his feelings for Marie in those two words, so I felt myself to be a rather sad replacement for the person he wanted.

"Grandaddy, Marie's on the phone. She said she'd be here in a minute," I told him. He was quiet for a moment and then he muttered "Dammit." Then he shoved his wet underwear out from behind the shower curtain and said, "Here, take these." So there we were, me holding my grandaddy's wet drawers and he waiting for his wife of forty years to walk through the bathroom door.

I thought I was going to be so much sadder than I am, but I'm not. I miss my grandaddy, but mostly I am at peace. My grandaddy lived life on his terms and he died mostly on his terms. I know that I did something those last few months and as selfish as it sounds, I faced my own fears and pain and became someone better for it.

A couple of days after the funeral, Marie and I were sitting in the living room talking about things and she said she'd never seen him smile at anyone sweeter than he did me when I helped him take a bath. Of course, I had to tell her about the day I ended up holding a balled up bundle of wet drawers waiting for her to get off the phone and how much love was in his voice. We had a good chuckle. And that's what we do. We laugh and remember the sweetness of life.

Peace.

The Keepers of Me

2010-02-08T06:49:00.000-08:00

I have a bit of a new schedule and new things to think about so posting hasn't been on the top of my list.

Before I begin, I suppose I should clarify that in the South, we still call our parents mama and daddy. As a writer, I generally tend to refer to them as my parents or my mother and father except in dialogue to ease the . . . overt southerness of it all. However, my grandfather has been my grandaddy and I will refer to him as such in my posts.

My grandaddy has been through a bit in just my lifetime. He suffered his first heart attack when I was a toddler and had another when I was twelve or so. He had a stroke a few years ago that left him incapable of reading. Leukemia and prostate cancer have whittled a big boned man down to less than 120 pounds. He will be eighty in March and time has been taking its toll on a man who was always larger than life itself.

My mom called me a couple of weeks ago. Grandaddy still wants to take a shower - he does not want a sponge bath and somehow it came about to ask me if I could help him do this. So now I come over and help my grandaddy take a shower three or four times a week on the days he's up to doing so. He told me, "You scrub down as far as possible then bathe up as far as possible and I'll get possible."

That does alleviate the strangeness of it all and he wears his shorts in the shower. I keep thinking the feeling of wet shorts must be very uncomfortable, but it he gets to maintain some dignity and I'm not really faced with seeing my grandaddy's possible.

I thought about not writing about it on this because it's such a personal thing, but I've begun to develop particular views on end-of-life care and it is important to me.

I've struggled the past couple of weeks, not with bathing my grandaddy, though he is right particular about how to go about things - but the idea that he needs me to do this for him.

When I was a child, Grandaddy and Marie's (my stepgrandma) house was a constant in my life. My parents moved a lot up until they divorced when I was eight. For some reason, we always moved around the same end of the county so I never understood the purpose in all this constant moving, but I always knew that my grandparents' house would be the same.

The house stood in the same spot. The same door opened into the same living room that held the same couch and the same television and the same people for all the years I needed it. Things rarely changed and there were days I'd stay there when I was too sick to go to school and the same radio station would play the same people every morning - Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Patsy Cline with Slats Jackson calling out the price of tomatoes at the IGA in between songs. Life usually tended to be pretty steady. I don't remember my grandparents ever arguing though some of my uncles would bring their rowdiness there from time to time.

So when my mother called me to ask this of me, I'd never thought to say no. They'd never said no to me.

I have an uncle three years younger than me - the late-in-life child of my grandaddy and my step grandma. He was a very imaginative sort as a child and it was always interesting to see what sort of fun Kenny Lee was going to cook up to occupy us on any given day. Marie called him a few days ago and mentioned I'd taken on the bathing task. According to her, he said, "That's just not normal! That's not normal at all. It's not normal to have to help someone who was so big and powerful when you were little."

And, oh lord, he's so right. I've had to do things in life that didn't sit well with me, but when I allow myself to think very long on the fact that I am helping to bathe my grandaddy, it's as painful as when Wild Boy was born with group B strep and I lived in terror that I would never bring him home. It's different in it's own way though. My grandaddy is dying and there are times you have to accept death as the inevitable outcome of a process. And it's not only that, it's an acknowledging of the changing of the guard. Sometimes it would seem so much easier to always be the child.

Even for all the emotional turmoil of seeing my grandaddy's ribs and his spine, of seeing his eyes sometimes oddly like a child's though his mind is still good, his legs that are smaller than my arms now - it is a great honor to do this for my grandparents.

Whaazzzup?

2010-01-31T20:29:00.000-08:00

I really don't have jack to talk about today so I'll just ramble a bit.

For a while I kept receiving these Bible verses via text message around 10 P.M. every night. It started right after Christmas. I'd look at the unfamiliar number and wonder, "Who in the hell wants me to read Revelations 3:14-22 right before bedtime? Has my dad bought an entirely new cell phone to send me scripture?"

For those of you who have never personally met my father, trust me, he's possibly weird enough to do it. So I finally asked my dad and he said it wasn't him so I thought maybe God bought a Verizon phone so he wouldn't cost me money. Of course, that's a little freaky and does he also send out messages to Cingular and AT&T on their plans? What? I finally asked around long enough and suddenly Tuba Girl remembered she'd given this number to a youth pastor a while back. So apparently God does not have Verizon.

My taxes should be returning soon and I've pulled out the Excel to figure out how much I can get done with it. Provided everything goes well, I should get all the crap that's falling apart handled around here with a little left over.

And speaking of my taxes, I am deep into planning project three. The one where I plant a garden. It's probably considered premeditated abuse among certain circles, but their is something all crackery and earthy in me that tells me I must plant seeds. So in my research I ran across Square Foot Gardening. This method is supposed to be very nearly idiot proof. Well, we'll see.

This is the cost of my Gardening Project according to Excel:

Square Foot Garden	Price	Amount	Total0
1X6X8 cedar planks	13.98	6	83.88
Vermiculite	20	2	40
peat moss	9.87	1	9.87
cow compost	4.77	2	9.54
mushroom compost	4.72	2	9.44
wood lath	7.68	1	7.68
plywood	10	3	30
			190.41

(Excel is pretty cool. It's also where I keep my grocery list thingy.)

If I can find 1X6's for free, then I plan to use them and that will nearly cut my costs in half. However, if I can't, then I plan to spring for the cedar planks as they will last longer.(Plus, I'm sometimes anal and I want it to look nice.) If it turns out the Square Foot Garden is not idiot proof, then I can rip the cedar boards and use them for something else.

Also, the SFG book states I should use five different brands of compost. Well, I can't find five different brands of compost in this damned town. So my dirt is just going to have to deal with an extra helping or two of the same brand of mushroom rot and cow shit and get over it. I plan to actually have a nice compost bin as soon I bother to clean out the trunk so I can steal some pallets. (I don't actually plan on stealing them, I'm sure someone will give them to me.)

In other news, I've applied for an Adult Education teaching position. It is no more than 29 hours a week and absolutely no benefits. I figured at making at least $12.00 an hour, then I will make approximately $60 more a week. If that happens, then this blog will be nowhere near "about a thousand a month." (But let's be honest, was it ever really? That's just the cash money I had in hand every month. The Medicaid benefits for the children are probably worth an easy $350 a month if I had to carry insurance on them as it includes health, dental, pharmaceutical, and optical care.)

Adult Ed is something I've been interested in and this will give me an opportunity to see if I would enjoy it as a career. At this point, I don't know what my move would be if I'm offered the position. One part of me wants to work both jobs for a while if the hours work themselves out right and the other part of me thinks I should just go. We're a very undereducated county and our employment opportunities have shrunk mightily over the past year. If people are going to survive, they are going to have to move past the old attitude that a job can always be found and work towards making themselves more marketable. In that end, I see the need for Adult Education teachers growing and I like to think it would be a safer position for a while than where I currently find myself sitting.

Maybe I should consult my magic 8 ball.

Also, I understand people have been slammed by a virus when they visit my blog. I'm hoping I have that worked out. If not, please let me know! I feel like the mom whose kid brought lice to school and now I have to call all my friends and tell them they're probably infested now.

Later, hookers.

Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt

2010-01-21T19:44:00.000-08:00

Hey hey hookers!

I don't have anything in particular to talk about today other than job security - I hz nun. Actually, I think very few people can absolutely say their job is safe anymore.

You may remember vague references to Matt the Library Assistant in earlier posts. Matt the Library Assistant transferred to the main branch right after Christmas so I no longer have a library assistant. He had mentioned some job security issues and thought it wise to jump over to the big ship while he had the chance. I agreed and facilitated the transfer because I hate to see anyone get fucked out of a job when I already had vague inklings that things may be coming down the pipes. Actually, the inklings weren't that vague:

The state asked that we return $14,000 of our annual funding.
The county has said that they will not fund us for the next five years. While those sorry bastards can up and suddenly force me to take trash service at $13.50 a month when I'd previously been rather happy taking my own goddamned trash to the mother fucking dump, they can't take part of what I estimate to be a gross of $170,000 a month or two goddamned million a year and make it rain over the library. Fine. Whatever. Fuckers. Force services on me that I didn't request and then possibly fuck me out of a job. I love you too, Commissioner Fucker Face. But I'm not angry. Really, I'm not. Just a bit agitated. If I were angry I'd throw that goddamned herbie curbie thing at people.
I like lists and a list with just two things seems sort of stupid so I had to add something to make it right. Sorry.

So I knew something was inevitable not only because funding is being slashed left and right, but because I think I have some kind of root* on me. Evidence: I applied for a teaching position at a neighboring county high school only to find out during my interview with the Gary Glitter look-a-like that they were on the verge of being taken over by the state so they were really in a bind to find already certified and preferably already experienced. They didn't want my greenhorn ass. I then applied for a position as a GED teacher with a local youth development center in August. Yeah. They closed down this past January. So to find out that my job is sitting in perilous economic waters is no big surprise. I think it's because they hired me. (Insert "laughing my ass off" smilie here.)

As things stand now, the superiors that be are looking at reducing the branches to service outlets (I have no idea what that means), cutting it down to one employee per branch/service outlet/whatever and cutting the hours. The idea is still in it's little zygote stage so I have no idea if this will actually happen, how many hours they're going to cut or if I'm also looking at a pay cut. Lah-dee-dah.

I've had hard times before so while I'm concerned, I'm not scared to death and I'm not going to lay awake at night wondering what I'm going to do. While it's not much and certainly temporary, I've taken the test to be a census bureau worker. I do have to say that "I nicked the census man" ran through my mind a lot when I was taking the test. Also, Pearson finally sent me a questionnaire for an online scoring position so maybe I'll hear something from that.

I'd planned on actually picking up one of these as a second job even though I'd previously said I had no intentions of doing so at that point. I should back up and correct myself, I had no intentions of considering if it were not a financially viable option. Both of these jobs pay enough that it would warrant having the food stamps reduced or cut all together. I can walk away from either of these jobs with enough money to continue feeding my family at the level they expect and have enough left over to take care of other things that need to be handled such as trying to reestablish an emergency fund for potential shit like this.

In addition, these two jobs don't have extremely rigid time schedules so I would still be able to tend to my children's various needs. I don't have to request Tuesday evenings off for Boy Scout den meetings or every third Monday off for Boy Scout pack meetings or every other Thursday off because I need to pick Tuba Girl up at 6:00 P.M. or whatever the hell I'm doing on whatever day.

At this point, I don't know whether to try and jump ship and find another job or try to stick it out and see what happens. I like the job. I like my patrons. Well, most of them. Well, the ones who don't shit in chairs. I like my coworkers. I also like books.

While I don't see myself making a career in this particular area of library employment, I did have some vague plans that would have worked nicely around this job. I also wanted to stay here for at least a year because I personally feel that anything less than that tends to look negative on a resume. Not only that, but I tend to be pretty hardcore loyal and I hate to walk out on a bitch when she's down and my library system seems to be looking down.

As for jumping ship, it depends entirely upon whether there is another ship to jump to. Job postings in general have been scarce and we're losing jobs left and right. Local teaching positions usually aren't posted until April and last April they were incredibly scarce. Our local high school did't hire for any English positions and I wouldn't be surprised if they held off again this year. The state is in a fuck of a bind.

And another thing while I'm rambling. I'm wondering if the days of being able to actually have one full-time job is basically over for a lot of people. While I've seen people cobble a living out of holding down multiple part time jobs, it was usually a means to some end - to work around a particular schedule, to avoid drug testing, or because felons have a hard time finding gainful full-time employment. (I'm sure there are other reasons that I'm missing.) However, I think more people who'd previously been able to rely on full-time employment may be forced to look at stringing jobs together like fish on a line.

So that's the shizznit for today. I have a lot to mull over and consider. (Which I always do, I just think about other things instead because I'm turning into some kind of Scarlett O'Hara. Tomorrow is another day and all that shit. Next thing you know, I'm going to kill the rooster, turn his ass into a hat and duct tape my Walmart porteers into a lovely dress right before I run off with my sister's beau when I find out my favorite convict really isn't worth a shit.)

While I'm really not a big fan of Gone With the Wind, I have to give it to Scarlett. She was a survivor - beet root puking, cotton picking, man stealing and all. Stupid as hell, but a survivor.

*A "root" is another term for a hex or curse. I don't know if this is local to my area or what, but I've always been entertained by it. I do know a guy with an uncle who has some acclaim over a multi-county region as a "root doctor." From what I hear, you don't ever want that sumbitch to put your name on an egg and leave it in his front yard. I don't know what that does exactly, but you just don't want it to happen.

Hammer Time

2010-01-19T18:45:00.000-08:00

I don't know if all women love tools, but I frigging love tools. I especially love tools that make big noises - power drills, band saws, circular saws, impact wrenches. I really love the sound of an impact wrench. My weird love of power tool sounds probably comes from a childhood hanging around the school bus garage where my stepdad was the foreman mechanic.

I don't actually have any power tools. Besides not having anywhere to store them, I also don't actually do enough "handy things" to warrant putting that kind of money into power tools. Although, I am seriously considering throwing down the money for a table saw this year because I can't find one I can borrow on any long term use.(That really means no one has magically shown up at my house and given me a table saw.)

While we can't all fritter away our money on neato saws and air wrenches, there are a few tools that every woman needs. I say women because I'm assuming I'm talking to women and we need our own tools. Sure, you could borrow someone else's tools, but I'm a firm believer in a woman having her own "things." So here is a list of basic tools I believe everyone should have.

Phillips head screwdriver

flat head screwdriver - Seriously, a butter knife is only going to get you so far.

hammer - Maybe you want to hammer a nail or hammer that stupid damned toy that won't come out of the packaging.
tape measure - Pretty self explanatory.
pliers - When I pulled the carpet out of my house, I found out that it was stapled to the floor. I guess that's what I get for buying a house one step away from being put together with duct tape, but you know, whatever. The pliers came in handy when I had to pull them out of the OSB board I call subflooring. They can be used for other things, I just can't remember what right at the moment.
wrench - It's just good to have some wrenches. My car wouldn't crank on Christmas morning for some ungodly reason. It's probably the same reason behind my dryer belt breaking at 6 AM on Christmas morning. Anyway, it turns out my battery cables were loose, probably from driving down some damned hard core muddy driveways. A couple of turns with a wrench and I was in the road again.
level - Hanging a picture or putting up a wall shelf works much better if check to see if it's actually level. Unless, of course, you're going for some abstract lopsided look.

Other things I keep on hand:

hacksaw - I have, from time to time, repaired my own water pipes. I need the hacksaw to cut out the leaking pipe and cut the new pipe to size. (Though a hacksaw does not work for cutting down a small dead tree, just to let you know.)
drill - sometimes you just need to drill a hole somewhere.
hex keys - necessary for changing brakes and for certain other kind of screw doohickeys
socket wrenches - changing brakes and other car mechanicy stuff.

If you're interested in buying a set of basic tools for yourself, this looks like a pretty decent set up. Task Force is a fairly cheap brand, but should be sufficient for basic household repairs. Normal people just don't need Craftsman or Snap-On.

I had a nice little assortment at one point, but my father and the boys' father kept "borrowing" them and never fucking returned them. So if I were you and there are men living in your house, I thoroughly recommend you take time to paint all your tools with a nice glossy pink paint and maybe spray a little glitter to just be safe. I bet that would give them a moment to assess whether they really want to run off with your damned tools.

Where we are now

2010-01-18T19:27:00.000-08:00

Never let someone tell you who you are.

Never let someone tell you what you deserve.

Never let someone tell you no.

Thank you, Dr. King.

Little Projects A, B, and C

2010-01-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

I have not made any new year's resolutions as I'm very bad at them. I briefly considered taking up a vice like smoking crank or something just to shake The Man's resolution system but ultimately decided against it as I really can't afford it and I do like my teeth.

I have realized over the past couple of weeks, however, that I'm the kind of person who needs a mission to feel like a person who exists on a real level. (Whatever that means.) When I finally dedicated myself to finishing my bachelor's, I was consumed between maintaining my grades and keeping the kids in one piece. I graduated in May and I've just sort of been . . . drifting since then. I scrambled and finally found a job. (Which was a BITCH in this economy, BTW.) And now I've been drifting through this job, driving the kids to their things and whatever the hell else it is that I do.

Maybe I have actually been productive. I found a job. I feed, clothe, homework school, chauffer and otherwise tend to my children. Help my friends. Clean my house, but mostly I've drifted and I've sort of been okay with that because going back to school dragging three children along for the ride was pretty damned stressful and I've been tired for a long time so this job, even though it doesn't pay shit for beans, has been good in that it's given me sometime to recharge my batteries and figure out what my next step is in life.

Well, it's been eight months and I still don't know what the hell my next step is or when it's going to be. I'm all aflustered trying to decide whether I should go back for an acronym (MLIS, MAT, MFA, FTW) or try to go straight into teaching whenever the local schools decide they're going to hire again or just set my mind on winning the lottery.

So for the moment, I've decided I need a couple of projects to help me focus. I focus best when I have a few things going on. The stress gives me life or something. I don't know. I was diagnosed with ADD as an adult. I'm not going to sit around and explain it all day, but suffice it to say, I think it has something to do with that.

Funny, all those years I thought I was completely surrounded by dumb fuckers and it turned out I might have actually had a problem. That'll cause some psychological hypochondria. (And I'm not entirely convinced the world isn't absolutely covered in dumb fuckers that I must constantly wade through every day of my life.)

So here is my list o' projects I want to handle this year:

Work out at least three days a week.

This has less to do with my weight than it does with wanting to be healthy. I went through a good period where I took really good care of myself. I worked out, cut out all the sugar, and drank plenty of water. However, I fuckered up during my senior capstone, though. I let the stress eat me alive. I couldn't sleep, I quit working out, and I basically lived on snickers bars for breakfast and lunch for a good six months. When you have a routine and you do well with that routine, it's really easy. But falling off once is hard and falling off for months on end is like being swept out to sea. It's so hard to get back to where you were.

House repairs

Two soft spots in the flooring will have to be ripped out and replaced.
Because I put down interlocking laminate flooring, all of it is going to have to be ripped up and replaced because of the two soft spots.
Replace the water heater.
Finishing casing in the kitchen window.
Might as well repaint the walls while I'm putting down new flooring.
Build the bookshelves I want.
Run new crown molding or whatever that shit is called.

Plant a garden (I know I'm setting myself up for failure. I can't help it.)

Many people may not know it, but you can buy vegetable seeds and plants meant for a home garden with food stamps, so I intend to take advantage of that this year.
I am currently reading Month-by-Month Gardening in Georgia and Guide to Georgia Vegetable Gardening.
My plan is to attempt to educate myself about gardens and then plan it all out over the next two months.
It aggravates the flying fuck out of me to consistently fail at something. I'm the kind of hooker who will keep trying something over and over until I can do it. I may takes long breaks in between, but sooner or later I'm going to come back to it until I figure it out. After that, I'll usually just move on to the next thing that's aggravating the hell out of me and completely forget everything I ever learned. I really need to update my internal RAM.

Begin prepping a portfolio in case I decide an MFA is the way to go.

Technically speaking, I know that an MFA is not going to bring me huge megabucks, but I'm basically going to have to go back for a Master's at some point if I'm going to teach so I may as well continue to focus in an area I enjoy. Sort of. Actually, I'm not sure I enjoy writing at all anymore. My intense meh-ness towards writing was a major reason I began this blog. I wanted something that would be fun to write and I didn't have to worry myself into a snickers bar breakdown over word placement and the meaning of my paragraph structure. In that end, things are going fairly well. I get to be basic me here without major Jack Handy thoughts reflected through the lens of a specific area of my being. Or something.
Maybe I'll drop the MFA, go to tech school and major in auto mechanics. Education choices are such a pain in the ass.

So those are my three major projects for this year. If you'll notice, I bolded a few things. These are the things that definitely will get down. The rest of it all depends on how life goes.

My intentions are to regularly update on those projects so at least I'll have something interesting to talk about. I can't walk on here everyday and talk about people shitting in my library chairs like I do at sybermoms. I like to have some variety somewhere.

Later, hookers.

Home is where you hang your hat

2010-01-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

Or in the case of the heathens, home is where you grab the scissors and cut up your hat to make a pair of gloves or a mask. I wish they'd find my damned scissors.

In a burst over cuteness I suggested that we name our tin home to make it feel more "homey" and to create some sort of family unity. I suggested The Burrow because I'm a huge Harry Potter fan and everything The Burrow was is what I want going on in my house - including the meals that cook on their own. I kind of sort wanted to drive home the idea that even though it's a trailer, it's still home and we should be happy with what we have. However, Tuba Girl thought it was extremely cheesy and wasn't going to put up with it. The Heathens Two and Three wanted to name it John Cena.

Until that moment, I didn't even know who in the hell John Cena was as I don't watch wrasslin. (Apparently they were watching it at their friend's house.) I know that it's spelled wrestling, but anyone who watches wrestling calls it wrasslin. My granny called it wrasslin and she watched it back in the day when people wore those weird gimp masks and little ballet tights or whatever those things were.

My granny was awesome. Except that time when I was eleven and she showed me her heart surgery scar and I saw her boobies. I've never quite gotten over it and that's how I know I have my granny's boobies instead of my grandma's. I never brought up that incident up with my therapist.

Anyway, the point is that I did not create any family unity, more like division and argument because the idea of naming my house after a wrassler - some guy who fake-whacks other people and talks a lot of homoerotic, testosterone driven bullshit - was not the symbolism I had in mind. It seems I have a hard time trying to get three children to ever come together and do that neat family thing I have pictured in my mind. I do it best when I piss them all off. Then they have a common purpose.

So they call the house John Cena and I secretly call it The Burrow. I know it's cheesy, but I have lots of cheesy ideas. Mostly, I just try to hide the cheese, but it comes barreling out from time to time.

Welcome to a series of posts about trying to keep 15-year-old man-you-fack-turd home in decent repair. My intentions are to borrow my sister's camera and take pictures of repairs as they go along. If I don't get to that point, you'll just have to deal with my blow-by-blow accounts of ripping out subflooring and possibly accidentally sawing off my thumb.

KAR the Scavenger

2010-01-07T05:30:00.000-08:00

A friend dropped by the other day and while we were talking she suddenly said, "Man, you never pay for shit, do you?"

She was referring to my hodgepodge of Free Shit - the television, the couch, the foosball table I'm trying to freecycle, the snake, the microwave. I officially call myself a Scavenger and I pick things up from an assortment of places.

I have two basic questions before scavenging things:
1. Can I or someone I know use it?
2. Is it so unbearably ugly that I will cry every time I look at it?

(Number two is sometimes thrown out the window when I have to put function over form - such as the case with my fugly fucking couch.)

And in some ways, she's right. I don't pay for a lot of things. My scavenging generally works one of two ways:
1. People may notice I need something and they have that something taking up needed space in their home or storage.. An example would be my fugly fucking couch. It's a really fugly fucking couch and it's falling apart from where the former owner's dog fucking CHEWED ON IT. Generally, I try to fool myself into thinking it's not so bad by tucking a blanket over the seat, but when two or three different people come by, sit on it then say, "Hey, I have this couch I'm not using anymore, do you want it?" then I'm assuming it's probably just as shitty as I'm really thinking it is. I haven't actually gotten another free couch yet, but I'm assuming someone will call me sooner or later to tell me when I can come get one.

2. The other way I end up scavenging is by helping people. I don't intentionally go helping people to see what kind of Free Shit I can get, but it happens. I'm a very handy person for helping to clean out cluttered areas and for moving.

I've moved a lot of people just because that's how we do it around here. A couple of people bring their trucks and/or minivans over, we load their stuff up on the trucks, throw some rope over it if necessary, and move it to the next place. The person being moved may spring for pizza and drinks if they have the money, but it's just as they won't. Generally speaking, helping someone to move is a favor you're investing in that you may call in to be repaid later. Especially if the person you're moving owns a truck.

Anyway, people who are moving often take moving as an opportunity to unload some of their Shit and then it becomes my Free Shit.

Martha Stewart would have mini strokes because it probably looks like the Big Lots furniture section threw up in here, but a chick's gotta do what a chick's gotta do and if vaguely ugly or definitely mismatched is what I have to live with to not have to pay for something, then I'm good with that.

So here is a list of all my Free Shit:

A 25 inch television given to me ten years ago by a former co-worker. I'd just moved in here and they'd just bought a new television so she gave me their old set. This television is actually about thirty years old and I think it may be on it's last leg because I can't read subtitles anymore without some considerable eyestrain and I can only control the volume and change the channels with the remote. Half the buttons have fallen off and the ones that do work or just as likely to do absolutely nothing towards what you want it to do. Poking at the channel three button now turns the volume up. People keep coming over, looking at it and saying, "Goddamn! You need a television!" But until recently, no one has offered me a new television so I still have this thing. However, a friend I spend a lot of time helping out has just bought some huge ass fucking thing that has such a crisp picture that I'd be scared to watch porn on it because who wants to see ass zits in high def? I'm getting her five year old television. Technically, this is not free. She offered it to me for free, but the television is still rather new and I'm a little funky about taking something extremely new.
My couch. Ugly. Dog eaten. Functional. Sort of.
The corner television stand.
The microwave. I may replace this soon because it's a little old.
The "modern danish buffet" came from freecycle.
The foosball table. My best friend's mom was ready to have it out of her house so it made the big "Santa" present for 2008. Except now I'm really ready to have it out of my damned house.
Three cheap five-shelf book shelves.
Bunkbeds for the heathen boys.
A captain's bed for Tuba Girl.
Kitchen stools.
Televisions for their bedrooms. (Initially, I was very anti-tv-in-the-bedroom, but have relented over the years because people gave us the damned things and it was a hassle with four people wanting to do different things at different times. I pretty well extended myself to allowing it for gaming, but it is not hooked up to cable or dvd players.)
the hamster cage
the mother fucking snake - The boys' father ran across some people who no longer wanted their California king snake so we got the snake and the huge aquarium. The snake doesn't do much other than take up space in my house, scare off some visitors, and provide something interesting to watch from time to time. Her previous owners had her some five years and never handled her so she does not like being picked up. If anyone does try to pick her up, she attempts to shit on that person and I just don't care to have stinky snake shit on me. Snake shit really stinks.
a fifties style dresser
an army trunk thingy
a fifties style student desk
a color printer
a resin outdoor furniture set
an assortment of smaller Free Shit like baskets, clothes, small storage drawers, car stereo speakers, books, Legos, etc

I have, of course, paid for things over my lifetime, but my general rule is to wait around and see if I can get it for free or for some minor work. In turn, if I no longer need something, I try to pass it on to someone who may need it.

The two questions in the beginning of this post are very important when deciding whether I need or want something being offered. We live in approximately 900 square feet and I am adamant about making sure we have enough space to actually live. Children tend to be very busy people and I don't want my space so extremely cluttered with stuff that they don't have enough space to run a little, pull out board games, wrestle, or have space to create.

Wild Boy is a Major Creator. At any given moment, he's on the floor building something with Lego blocks, K'nex, Lincoln logs, or sometimes just some random sticks. He needs enough space to work and I need enough space to walk around him.

I used to keep a lot of clothes that people gave me boxed up and ready for when the boys grew older. (I used to do the same for Tuba Girl, but people don't give you as many clothes when children start getting older. I'd say her supply began to peter out when she was about 12.) I rarely ever bought clothes for children during their first 8 or 10 years. When people gave me clothes, I'd go through everything and work through it until I had about two weeks worth of each size and the passed the rest on. Deciding on what I kept was based specifically on how much storage I had available in my closets and under the beds. Everything else went to people who needed it.

However, the elementary schools moved to school uniforms in 2008 and I quickly found out that I basically did not need 85% of the damned clothes I'd saved. I went through all the boxes, saved back enough to hopefully get them through weekends and summers as they grow older then passed the rest off to other people.

I was also pretty pissed because all of the uniforms, so far, have had to be bought new. I shuffled through the two local thrift shops, but local children had previously so rarely needed khakis or polo shirts that if there were any available, they were snatched up before I got there. I still regularly check the shops hoping to catch a couple of things, but haven't been lucky. I'm going to have to buy more uniforms pants soon as little boys are rather rough on clothes.

I know this very long post is titled KAR the Scavenger and I plan to keep it, but the point is not really how I score Free Shit. The real point is relationships. My scavenging is a result of being an active participant in my world. When you reach out to the people around you, those people will reach out and hold your hand.

People in my life have done a lot for me and they don't just do it because I'm poor or deprived or some shit because the majority of the people I know are in the same position I am in. People help me because we are friends, family, community. Because they know they can depend on me to do the same for them.

Yeah. It's some sappy shit, but that's how I score Free Shit.

Happy January!

2010-01-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you all, but I was very busy in December so I decided to take a hiatus from blogging. (See the post regarding the Gingerbread Man Advent Calendar.) I am back now with a current plan to post Monday through Thursday. I'll be taking the weekends off because I try to spend it vegging with the heathens.

I don't have anything major lined up today but I really want to talk about my Christmas presents. Traditionally, I try not to be a materialist and I typically don't ask for things for Christmas because I'd much rather make sure the children get things they need or want from family members. If people ask what I want, I ask for things for the house because we always need something. In that vein, I received a set of silverware, washrags, pots and plastic cups all which were very much needed and appreciated. (I really like to drink from plastic cups because glasses make my water taste funny.)

The silverware was oddly very exciting to receive. I don't know about you people, but in my house there is some silverware troll who constantly runs off with all the damned spoons. A few months ago, I realized we were down to one spoon and no frigging forks after I'd prepared dinner. We had to rotate the spoon. HAHAHAHAHA (Of course, I went out and bought some cheap spoons and forks the next day, but it's disturbing to be caught with one spoon to eat. This isn't Little House on the Prairie, dammit.)

On to other things. There are two things I have wanted for a long time now. One is a Wii. I've wanted one since they first came out and never felt like I could justify making a large purchase like that.

The other is a KitchenAid mixer. I've wanted a KitchenAid for well over twelve years now and I had no actual qualms about making that purchase, I just never had the money to spend on it. Well, I say I've never had the money to spend on it, but I probably have at some point over the years. I do have a minor martyr streak and have a hard time spending money on things that are just for me.

Well, my mommy and sister must love me bunches and bunches because they bought both of those for me this year. I don't know how they did it, but I know they did it because they felt like I needed a nice Christmas.

At first, I felt a good bit guilty because I didn't think it was something they could afford, but I pretty quickly came to the decision that what my family members can afford to spend on me is none of my business. Gift giving is a two part business. Not only does the giftee have the joy of receiving, but the gifter finds joy in giving to others. I know that if I give someone something, the last thing I want is someone asking me why or how I would spend so much money on them. I gave it because I want them to enjoy it. So I wrangled that out with myself before acting like an asshole full of shitty questions.

The kids and I are really enjoying the Wii and my sister has come over a couple of times to play Dance Dance Revolution with me.

My mixer (a Pro 600 in copper, by the way) sits on the danish buffet I scored from Freecycle last week. It's so pretty. (The mixer, not the buffet. The buffet is nice, but it's no KitchenAid.) I still pat it's big round copper head every time I pass by it. I made more buckeyes (them there Christmas balls) the day after Christmas just to see how it would do. It's so much easier. I think I'll have a lot more time to make even more balls next Christmas.

Also, DMan and his teacher gave me something incredibly special. A few weeks ago, the elementary school sent home these stupid fundraiser letters. Apparently, parents could buy a book of their children's work for the low, low price of $25. I was busy paying for Tuba Girl's trip to Disney (that was an awesome experience for her, BTW) so I didn't have $50 to put toward buying two books for two children when I see their work everyday.

I don't know how or what his teacher did, but apparently every child in her class received one of the books to wrap as a gift for a parent. When he dragged his gift for me out of his book bag on Christmas morning and I unwrapped this book, I was truly surprised and touched. It's a very beautiful book and I can tell he put some work into the stories he created for it. I get the warm snuggles or some shit every time I think about it.

I also love home made presents, especially when I know the person put a lot of thought and meaning behind it. (I'm very prone to making them myself as funding is pretty low around here.) The boys' great grandmother on their father's side has a large family and very little money. If there was ever a woman who should start a blog about how to manage so much on so little, it should be Nanny. She knows more home remedies than I'll ever remember and is usually a good go-to person for sound advice. This year, she made books for all of her family members, including me. <3

For all the young children, she wrote down a story about a little squirrel she'd been telling her great grandchildren for several years, made copies, and bound them ribbon.

She did something similar for the adults. She wrote down several family recipes, had copies made, bound them in ribbon and wrote a dedication:

"This book is dedicated to all of my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and all their husbands, wives, and mothers and fathers of their children."

(I fall under the "mothers and fathers of their children" part.) It's something else I will always cherish.

And finally, I have not received it yet, but my mom knits and crochets. Nearly every year, she makes each of us a blanket. My sister's was very complicated as it was set to look like piano keys so she hasn't had time to finish mine. And actually, mine is supposed to look like a sort of patchwork quilt and she said it's a good bit more involved than she'd originally anticipated. I must have a dozen or more afghans she's knitted for us over the years. She does very nice work and I'm very appreciative of them on nights when it randomly dips to below freezing around here.

I've decided I have to include a picture of my sister's piano key blanket:

It's pretty awesome. (The one underneath is something my mom made, too.) My sister has played piano since she was five or so and she is a music education teacher at one of the local elementary schools so she was rather amazed and awed by the blanket. Or afghan. Or whatever you call something that has been knitted. I wish I could knit but I'm a very impatient person and my entire life motto is "If you can't duct it, fuck it."

This was an entirely selfish post about me, me, me! Merry Late Christmas everyone! Or Happy Hannukah! Or Happy Holidays! Merry Kwanzaa! Or just Festivus! Sure, I'm late, but the spirit in which it was intended is all good.

Why I public school

2009-12-11T10:33:00.000-08:00

Because I pay a couple of hundred dollars in property taxes every year to pay for the local school system.
To adequately home school and teach a child something requires an ability to pay for and/or access books and resources I'm already paying for through my property taxes for the low, low price of a couple of hundred dollars a year (plus never ending fundraisers.) That Bunsen burner in Tuba Girl's science class is already paid for.
Because I want my children to walk away from a childhood of education with an accredited diploma. Not a diploma that will require earning a GED and then being forced to start off in a two-year college or a technical college if they wanted to go to a four-year university. I'm sure there are accredited home school programs out there and I'm just as sure I cannot afford them.
Because my local school system does not integrate home schooled children into their extracurricular activities. Without public school, Tuba Girl simply would not be Tuba Girl. She'd be Stay at the House Girl.
Because I want my children to meet other little heathen children and learn to socialize outside of their comfort zone.
Because I want my children to be able to qualify for the HOPE Scholarship their first year in college, not later on down the road.
I love my children very much, but if they don't get the hell up out of my face for some amount of time, mommy is going to have a nervous breakdown.

What do you have?

2009-11-25T09:39:00.000-08:00

Right before I was felled in the Battle of Strep Throat, I was in the middle of preparing a long Thanksgiving post on all the things I was thankful for in my life. I have many things and many wonderful people who have made my life very rich. However, the longer my list grew, the more . . . sentimental things got as I explained what this person or that person meant to me. I just don't deal in sentimentality all that well.

So I thought I'd let George Berger sum up my Thanksgiving post for me.

Happy Thanksgiving! Spend it with the people you love.

It's been a while

2009-11-24T06:51:00.000-08:00

(Why is it I always steal my titles from song lyrics?)

So I'm not an everyday blogger. Sorry about that. I developed some creeping crud that left me speaking in tongues and begging for a firing squad. It started off as a chest cold, then quickly invaded my sinuses. Finally, a strep throat assault did me in. Maybe strep throat doesn't affect everyone that way, but it seems to throw my ass to the ground and beat me about the throatal area with pointy toed boots. (Yes, I know throatal is not a real word, but I'm claiming it my right. I was a creative writing major and I figure there must be some sort of special perk, like getting to make up words, involved in that.)

So you know what the strep throat means? There must be a major holiday right around the corner! And according to my calendar, why yes, it is Thanksgiving on Thursday. No KAR holiday is complete without some agitating and sometimes freaky issue taking place. Last year it was the sprained ankle from falling down a step (yes, one step) three days before Christmas. My sister picked me up from work and made me go to the emergency room on Christmas Eve because she was convinced I'd broken it and I got to spend Christmas Day impeded by a soft cast or some such thing.

At leat it wasn't broken, but I quickly found out that I do not make a very patient patient and I don't think I will be one of those people to grow old and senile with any sort of grace. I'm apparently going to rage against the dying of the light and maybe throw a can of Ensure at a few people to carry the message across. I'm going to old people prison. And if I do, I'm taking a few bitches with me so I can create a little old lady gang.

I would like to say Tuba Girl is turning out to be a very nice nurse. If I had to give her a name, I think it would be Nurse Wratchet. She means well, but she's pretty adamant about following her directions. She kept trying to make me eat when I couldn't even swallow my own spit and she kept calling people to tell them I was sick and I wouldn't eat and the next thing you know, my mother thinks I'm dying. As a mother, I am apparently not allowed to get sick. It upsets the fulchrum. She's a great kid. She told me I took care of her all the time when she was sick so she wanted to take care of me. <3

So, I'll be back soon hookers with something possibly infotaining. I'm still trying to get myself together.

Making Memories with the Heathens

2009-11-17T19:13:00.000-08:00

I can't remember when I started this, maybe when Tuba Girl about three or four, but every year we make an activity advent calendar. Basically, we make gingerbread men out of brown paper bags, I write a special activity on one of the gingerbread men then glue another gingerbread man on top. We decorate the little fuckers then string them up on a piece of yarn or something and hang it along a wall or bookshelf or whatever is available that year.

(I'll try to post pictures of this later since I caved and bought a really cheap $20 digital camera. I think it's one of those disposal deals and it's pretty shitty, but better than nothing. I want to send it to Disney with Tuba Girl. If she loses or breaks it, at least I haven't lost a major investment.)

I found this idea in a parenting magazine years and years ago and we've done it ever since except for a couple of years when finals were pushing me to the brink. I like to start my advent activity calendar ASAP. Just for shits and giggles, here is my list of activities. They aren't set in stone and are very well liable to change between now and the actual day of the activity depending on if things have come up.

My List of Special Memory Making Activities

11/27 - decorate the gingerbread man calendar
11/28 - pull out the tree, ornaments and decorations
11/29 - My godchild's birthday party
11/30 - Discuss a charity we'd like to give to.
12/01 - Go on a nature walk at the recreational park and pick nice pine cones. (For a later project.)
12/02 - Wild Boy's Birthday. We'll do something he is interested in such as playing a board game or watching a favorite movie.
12/03 - Make bird feeders with the pine cones.
12/04 - Decorate tree and drink home made hot chocolate. (I'll put up the tree and string the lights while the kids are at school so they won't have to wait through that. I never put up the tree until after Wild Boy's birthday.)
12/05 - Wild Boy's birthday party
12/06 – Christmas Parade
12/07 – Watch Wild Boy's Christmas movie pick. (Mondays are usually stressful days so I don't like to actually plan anything on Mondays.)
12/08 – Write Christmas Cards to troops? (This is a question mark because I need to find out if I should switch this to an earlier date so that they'll get there in time.) Possibly, I may change this to Christmas cards for the elderly or something.
12/09 – Write letters to Santa.
12/10 – Make Christmas ornaments
12/11 – Christmas at the local arboretum
12/12 – see the Nutcracker (We see the local production of the Nutcracker every single year. The only year we didn't attend is the year Wild Boy was born. Relatively speaking, this is an expensive event for me because it costs nearly forty dollars for a family of four to attend, but it's something we really enjoy. Well . . . I think they enjoy it. Mostly, they end up driving me up the wall, but I'm determined they're going to get some damned culture somewhere even if it's just watching a bunch of four-year-old ballet students run up and down the stage pretending to be mice)
12/13– Watch Dman's pick of a Christmas themed movie and continue making Christmas ornaments.
12/14 - Cub Scouts Christmas Party
12/15– make book marks to give as Christmas presents. A lot of our family and friends are voracious readers so I thought bookmarks would be cute and useful. I'm big on the useful in terms of presents. Either useful or edible. I thought the picture ones would be really cute for the grandparents. Bookmarks may make cute teacher gifts, too. Haven't made up my mind about that, yet. Usually, I try to give teachers a sort of teacher supply gift bag on the years I can afford it.
12/16 – Watch Tuba Girl's pick of a Christmas movie and finish up any undone ornaments or other crafts I may have figured out by then.
12/17 – A treasure hunt? (Still playing with this idea, it's new.)
12/18 – Aunt Brina’s house. Aunt Brina is not a "real" aunt, but is my best friend. We have dinner and open presents at her house the last Friday before Christmas and have been doing this for five years now. If the Friday before Christmas turns out to be Christmas Eve or Christmas Eve Eve, then we work it to something else.
12/19 – Look at Christmas Lights
12/20 – Watch my movie pick and make candy. (I should actually be close to finishing up most of my Christmas candy making activities by this point, but the kids like to help so I plan to set this day aside to let them do that. My kitchen is a bit small and counter space is a premium. I also have these minor claustrophobia issues so I have to be mentally prepared to have more than one person in the kitchen helping. It's weird. I'm weird. You people all have your own weirdnesses so LEMMELONE.)
12/21 – Watch A Christmas Story. My absolutely most favoritest Christmas movie ever.
12/22 - Make homemade play doh for some of the cousins. I'm sure the parents with carpet will hate me.
12/23 – Nanny R's house.
12/24 – Granny J’s house
12/25 – Christmas! We wake up Christmas morning, open presents then go over to my mom's house later in the afternoon. We may go to Nanny W's house sometime in the evenings, depending on how the kids are doing.

It's very hard planning the holidays when you have a lot of family who seem to think you should come to their house on Christmas Day. The only person who is absolutely guaranteed to see me on Christmas is my mommy and that's because I promised her and I have her only grandchildren. It took a few years, but we have a basic arrangement about how to spend Christmas with family members.

Of course, this doesn't always work for everyone. We've yet to settle out a specific day for Nanny W so that's why she gets squished into Christmas evening. Also, my dad has been a bachelor for over 20 years so he spends the Christmas holidays with us. This means he goes nearly everywhere we go including my mom's house.

My parents have more or less made their peace over the past couple of decades, but spending time around my father can be . . . stressful. He has some shizoparanoid delusions of grandeur and persecution going on.

My father does not rest his prophesying even on Christmas day. Fun times. Fun Times. His main topics of conversation include but are not limited to:

the "Mark of the Beast"
When the World is Going to End
How Each and Every President's Name Equals to 666
How His Name Equals to 666
How Every Current President Since Reagan has Possibly Been the Antichrist
How he May Be the Antichrist
How He is Going to Run for President
The Super Computer in Texas called "The Beast"
America as Babylon the Whore
How to Recognize the Mark When They Try to Implant it in Your Skin
He's Moving to Israel
Homeland Security is Watching Him (they probably are)
Mother Fucking Benny Hinn
His Government Has Set Him Up and a fun variety of other great family conversational topics.

My mom doesn't mind him being in her house, but the rambling ticks her off after a while. Last year she asked me why I didn't just tell him to shut up and I told her I couldn't do that because even though he is crazy as hell, he's still my parent and I'm trying to respect him and shit.

She sat clicking away with those pointy knitting needles a few minutes before she finally hollered, "Shut the hell up, Dave!"

That seemed to work and we went back to digesting the Christmas feast in relative peace. My dad gets along with my stepdad really well, though. They both never talk to people, they talk at them, meaning the other person in the conversation rarely, if ever, has an opportunity to speak and unless he or she is one of the few, the brave, the rude, then he or she just sits there drowning under the drone of a steady conversation of no interest silently praying to God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any deity of their choice that an airplane would fall on the house. It's not long after the praying that the person being talked at slips into a catatonic state.

So my dad and stepdad talk at each other and they seem to have a great friendship somehow. It also seems to help that my stepdad is nearly deaf after thirty odd years of working on school buses. He doesn't know what the hell my dad istalking about half the time.

Well, there is my Christmas activity calendar and a couple of random stories. The kids love the calendar and it's something they look forward to every year. I have a lot of fun with it, too.

Circle, Circle, Dot, Dot, Now You've Got Your Cootie Shot.

2009-11-16T11:14:00.000-08:00

Sorry no recent updates, peeps. I've been crazy busy trying to plan out Christmas with a google calender and everything! I've decided this year is going to be the year that I have it all in order. And thank you so much, for those of you who recommended gift ideas for Tuba Girl! They're on my list and I've also managed to use your suggestions as a springboard for other possible ideas.

I'll update on Christmas proceedings along the way, but I had this random Lice Thought today and thought I'd talk about lice. I detest lice. I suppose everyone does, but I seem to have super creeped-out aversion to all things parasitic. Which is one of the major reasons I won't have a dog or cat or pretty much anything else that may shit worms at any given point.

I'm a pretty strong chick about some things. My friends call me to removed their tiny little garden snakes from their yard and I handle emergencies pretty well. But I cannot pick ticks off a dog. I will hurl. It's just one of those things. So we don't do ticks and fleas or worms or any of that shit.

Now my kids do end up with ticks from time to time and I've successfully managed to handle that. But those are my kids. I am required to do so by natural law. Dogs are not my children. They're on their own.

Anyway, back to the lice thing. It randomly crossed my mind how lucky we've been because we haven't had a bout of the creepy crawlies in over six years. (Of course, the minute I post this, we're going to end up with some hardcore new kind where the nits are buried under the scalp and they come oozing out of their nostrils or something equally horrific.) But all the same, I'm very pleased that I have three children in public school and they haven't come home crawling with . . . things. It really creeps me out. Horribly. Seriously.

The Great Lice Battle of Ought Three was brought on by a woman whom I knew in a round about way, but I didn't exactly consider her a "friend" or someone that I even want to associate with on any personal level. However, as noted in the Stinky Motherfucker files, I tend to be overly polite to dumbasses.

I don't know why. Maybe it's the train wreck factor. Maybe I'm scared they'll go crazy and burn down my house. Or maybe I'm just stupid. Unless someone is purposefully rude or mean to me, I rarely ever make my displeasure known. And even when someone is purposely rude, I tend to either not recognize it or just keep going about my business because I have shit to do.

Anyway, this damned chick showed up at my house one summer when Wild Boy was about six months old. She's a pregnophile of some sort. She adores being pregnant. She also can't afford all those damned kids. But whatever. Her life.

One thing, though, that I've noticed about woman who love being pregnant is that's about it. The children are some unfortunate by-product. I don't know if it's just a local issue or some widespread weirdness, but a lot of women love being pregnant because it infuses a little drama into their life and keeps the focus on them. However, the end result is a baby and the baby is only good for attention for so long before you have to go off and get another one. I think this chick, the last I heard, was on pregnancy number eight.

I was "visiting" with this person in my house (and by visiting, I mean wishing she'd shut the hell up and go away because I'm about to miss fucking NAP TIME) when I idly looked down at six-month-old Wild Boy. I'd just had him returned to be by my company's eight-year -old child who'd spent several minutes holding him on the living room floor trying to talk him into eating a teething biscuit.

I looked down at Wild Boy, looked up at all these damned people in my house, and then looked down again until I was sure I had his watermelon baby head in focus (that's his daddy's head, not mine) and proceeded to nearly have a screaming hissy as I picked a louse bug off his head and squished it between my fingernails.

I gaped at it a minute, stared at this woman sitting in my living room with a bottle propped up in her baby's mouth and her four other disheveled children running around my house and my heart sank. Eventually, I managed to get my unwanted company and their "company" packed off and home without freaking the hell out and immediately began damage control.

This was not my first bout with lice and I actually spent six months battling the little fuckers a couple of years previous because Tuba Girl kept contracting it at school. I learned a lot that year.

What I learned is that, generally speaking, the lice shampoos do not work very well anymore. Like most anything else, the bugs are adapting to the shampoo and they don't always die. So while it's a good idea to start with the shampoo, it doesn't end there.

Step 1: Shampoo everyone's head with the lice shampoo.
Step 2: Go through hair with a nit comb. You need to handle maybe about five strands of hair at a time and then pen that section up when you're done. This is serious work and you can't just comb through as if you were brushing.
Step 3: Wash all linens in hot water.
Step 4: Bag up all stuffed animals and any blankets that cannot be washed in airtight containers for a minimum of two weeks.
Step 5: Vacuum all carpets.
Step 6: Boil all brushes, combs and other hair items.

This is basic stuff. However, as I said before, the shampoo doesn't kill them as well anymore. On top of that, the shampoo is very expensive and can break a person's budget. If you don't kill every last bug and remove every last nit, then you highly stand the chance of re-infestation. AND(!), if you send your child back to school, he or she can catch it again especially if you have not notified the school that your child has had lice.

Whenever your child has head lice and you discover it on your own, please, please notify your child's school so that they can do head checks and make sure other children aren't infested. If you don't do this, then you're creating an endless cycle and you can spend hundreds of dollars trying to get rid of this shit because it's not all taken care of at the same time.

There are a lot of natural remedies I've discovered that are pretty effective in murdering lice. You can use them in place of the pesticide shampoos or in conjunction. The last couple of times we had this, I only used natural remedies instead of the shampoo. The boys were very young and I didn't like the idea of putting pesticides on their head. I was as successful in getting rid of the lice as I'd been with the shampoo treatments.

Things I've used to be effective:

Vinegar rinse - rinse the infested person's head with vinegar as this helps to loosen the glue nits use to hang around on your head. You can either do a whole head rinse or dip a cotton ball in vinegar and run it down the strands of hair you are about to comb.
Comb out hair a few strands of time using a fine toothed metal nit comb. Drop the eggs and/or bugs into a bowl of vinegar to kill them.
Olive Oil - (You can use whatever can you want. I just bought a big gallon can of the shit.) Douse each person's head in olive oil, wrap in saran wrap or shower cap and leave over night. Other people swear by mayonnaise, sunflower oil, and Vaseline among other greasy products. The idea is that you are suffocating the bugs. (This doesn't do anything about the nits, however.).
Wash with dish detergent to cut the oil out. It may take a couple of washings and to be perfectly honest, I was never able to quite get all the olive oil out of my own hair whenever I washed it. I looked like a sad little white woman attempting to do some dastardly Jheri curl, but I'd rather be greasy than lousy in the long run. We did the olive oil thing every three days for three straight weeks because I'm creeped out by bugs and shit living ON MY HEAD.
Make your own lice repelling shampoo. I don't know if this really, really works or not, but I did it because when it comes to getting rid of lice, I'll try anything short of standing nekkid on the interstate. I bought a cheap lavender shampoo, added 20 drops of lavender oil, 20 drops of olive oil, 20 drops of rosemary oil, and 20 drops of tea tree oil to the bottle. I can't remember the exact reasoning, but it seems like I remember the rosemary and lavender oils were supposed to repel lice and tea tree oil is just some good shit in general.
Shampoo regularly with the lice repelling shampoo and check routinely for the possibility of a new infestation.

Getting lice is a real pain in the ass and I hate it something horribly. As I said before, as soon as that lice infested chick left my house that day I immediately set to work and pretty well headed the whole situation off at the pass.

The thing is, the crazy whore showed up at my house about two weeks later asking me to watch her kids for a little while so she and her husband could go out for their anniversary. I told her I couldn't because I hadn't been feeling well. I was trying to not be rude and tell her she'd given us bugs on her last visit so I went with the "not feeling well" bit. Which, in truth, I wasn't. Wild Boy had a lot of ailments going on at the time and it was hard keeping up with him, two others, the house and all this other crap on four hours of sleep a night and maybe an afternoon nap if stupid people didn't show up at my house. I was continually "not feeling well."

However, this was the kind of woman who doesn't really give a flying shit about anything and remains insanely oblivious to much of the world around her. I stood at the door trying to say no without being rude and screaming something like, "Get your lousy ass out of my doorway!"

Finally, when one of her little infested children shot between my legs and ran to my daughter's room, I looked at her and said,"I really can't keep your kids. We have lice." Although, I'd actually taken care of it. I lied because I thought it was would work much like saying, "We have the bubonic plague" or something like that. Except it didn't.

The crazy woman looked at me and said, "Oh! That's okay! We have it, too. I've got the medicine and stuff at the house so I can come over and help you get rid of it. I was going to handle it before school starts anyway."

No.thank.you.

I don't know who kept her little infested children for her anniversary, but I know I spent the rest of the summer virtually secluded dealing with the second bout of lice she brought to us. Oh, good times.
Good times.I was very happy they moved right before school began so at least her children were no longer going to KAR Elementary.

So that's how I've dealt with lice. I've found it to be pretty successful. You may want to try checking out some websites to see what may work best for your family.

Next time, amigos.

Teens and things

2009-11-11T04:06:00.000-08:00

So here is a general request from those interested in helping me a bit.

I mentioned in an earlier thread that Tuba Girl will not be getting many Christmas presents under the tree (except for the necessary stocking) as I've spent a large amount of money on her band shit.

However, I'd really like to make sure she has a few little things under the tree and I thought it would be nice to make her a few things. (Provided I can figure out, have the time and supplies to make it.)

So far I have a scrapbook kit for her Disney trip. (I thought it would be nice to let her make it herself.) She has also requested butter milk fudge.

So people, hook me up with some ideas and links of neato things one sousaphone-playing, emo/goth girl may like. It has be cheap and easy. Remember that I cannot do things that involve crocheting, knitting, sewing. If you suggest something with a knitting pattern, I will mentally stab you with those pointy sticks.

In other news, this is a cool website: http://www.instructables.com/

Christmas Balls. Christmas Balls. I've got great big Christmas Balls.

2009-11-09T19:32:00.000-08:00

Until such a time as I get my shit together and finally finish projecting the costs for all my appliances utilizing the Killa-Watt meter thingy, I don't really have anything vaguely frugally/parenting/financial to write about.

I was really entertained with the whole process until I checked out my fridge and the meter told me it was costing me approximately $60 a month for my fridge and I knew I had to be doing something wrong. It turns out I was. I forgot to put a zero in the appropriate place. Details. Details.

But don't worry, I'm not going to measure my electricity usage down to the penny. I do have some shit to do. Using this has made me aware of a couple of things, such as the fact that I always forget to cut off my computer speakers. They're kind of shoved to the back so I tend to forget about them.

Also, I'm going to attempt to cut back on the furnace use. The main reason I've entertained such a high bill all these years is because Wild Boy had reactive airway disease (RAD) the first four or five years of his life and extreme temperature negatively affected him. So I paid the bill to keep him comfortable.

Luckily, he seems to have finally outgrown it so while I'm not going to spend my life freezing in the winter or sweating in the summer, we can pull back on it a little more since weather and temperature changes do not affect him as they used to.

Anyway, I'm going to post the Christmas Balls recipe. Technically, they're called buckeyes, but no one around here calls them buckeyes. I suppose maybe it is a little odd to name a candy after a nut that can kill you.

Every year for the past eight or so years, people call me up around the beginning December to ask me shit like, "Hey! You gonna make me sumathem balls this year?" So they're just Christmas Balls.

I don't know how I got to be the official Christmas Ball Maker, but I am. Maybe it's because the balls/buckeyes don't require a whole lot of indepth cooking skills. They're relatively easy to make; just time consuming.

Technically, you can search "buckeye recipe" and find a thousand different possibilities. I didn't make the things up. I don't possess that sort of creativity.

Here's a basic recipe with no picture because I am not going to start making them tonight and I don't having a functional camera that isn't attached to a phone. One who reads this blog has to be someone not horribly bothered by visual aesthetics. You are appreciated.

Buckeye Recipe

2 lbs. powdered sugar (This recipe is not diabetic friendly.)

3 cups peanut butter (Smooth or crunchy. I just prefer crunchy peanut butter.)

2 sticks of margarine (You could use butter, but that's some expensive shit when you make as many as I do every year.)

1 tsp vanilla (It really is best to buy pure vanilla. I'm going to make some from scratch one year if I can just quit drinking all the vodka.)

1 package of Almond Bark (You could use some chocolate chip/paraffin concoction, but I don't like to add to my issues.)
wax paper and toothpicks

Cream the butter or margarine or whatever the hell you're going to use with the peanut butter and vanilla. (This actually requires a mixer. Just spend the ten damned dollars because everyone needs a mixer. Now personally, I want a blinged out KitchenAid stand mixer. This is not a passing phase. I've been waiting on one to magically appear in my kitchen for something close to 12 years. One day, it will be mine. Oh yes.It will be mine.)
Add confectioners sugar until a desired consistency is mixed. This is somewhere around the point where you can touch it with your fingers and it's not gooey, but not so full of powdered sugar that it crumbles. (Also, if you're going to try to double the recipe, don't do this with a hand mixer. I burned out a moter that way. See? That's why I need a KitchenAid.)
Roll the peanut butter/powdered sugar mixture into one inch balls.
Lay the wax paper across the counter.
Melt the almond bark on a double boiler. Be careful, stir constantly over medium low heat. Do not let boil!
Using a toothpick (or cradle the peanut butter balls using two forks) quickly dip the balls into the chocolate mixture, covering the balls about 3/4 of the way up. Work quickly before the bark begins to harden in the pot.
Lay on wax paper to dry.

So that's the Christmas Balls recipe. I think I made somewhere around 1500 balls last year. This, along with peanut brittle, are my two main requests.

Christmas Cards for Noah

2009-11-07T19:28:00.000-08:00

I caught this over on Saving for the Farm this morning.

Five-year-old Noah Biorkman has reached the end stages of his battle with neuroblastoma. He is now receiving hospice care as he is not expected to make it to the new year. His request was that he and his family celebrate Christmas this weekend (November 6 -8, 2009.)

Noah's mother is requesting Christmas cards for her son. Please take the time to send a card.

I've searched his name and this is legitimate. His Facebook page requests that you consider putting a dollar in the card which will be donated to Neuroblastoma research and the Make-a-Wish foundation.

I hope Noah has a wonderful Christmas.

Noah Biorkman
1141 Fountain View Circle
South Lyon, Michigan 48178

(However, don't go riding by trying to hang out with Noah or anything. That's just a bit damned creepy.)

Get out of my yard, you whippersnappers!

2009-11-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

I have to say this story is actually about what happened this morning, but I'm a sucker for back story so I am assuming those of you who regularly read my posts also have a fondness for random details.

I once had a neighbor who was a dumbass. (This should not be a surprise.) This particular neighbor had a bad habit of having himself thrown in jail. We will call him Method Man.

During his time living in my quaint tin neighborhood, Method Man spent a lot of time hanging out with Drug Dealing Neighbor. It was a nice relationship for them. I must add that like I have known Drug Dealing Neighbor for many years, I have known this particular fellow since grade school. I know his cousins. They all rode my bus at some point or other.

Also, Method Man and I are distantly related on my mother's side, through my grandfather's people. Not close enough to attend the same family reunions, but related enough to be able to count back to the connecting ancestor. However, I would still prefer to call him a former neighbor rather than a distant cousin. If I chose otherwise, I'd have to recognize my distant kinship to a large percentage of this county. As it is, one of my uncles has recently begun dating Drug Dealing Neighbor's mother. So things are starting to look funny around here especially considering a neighbor I do like had married the former husband of my boys' great aunt so she started showing up to some of those family functions.

Now that I've vaguely outlined the familial issues abounding here, I'll move on to today's long-winded tale. Many moons ago, this former neighbor spent some time manufacturing meth as his income source. (Get it? Meth/Method Man? I crack myself up.) The situation was more than a bit disturbing. How is it that backwoods mother fuckers who never finished the eighth grade suddenly consider themselves chemists?

Apparently, Method Man became very paranoid about his illicit activities. Instead of forgoing production of a lye-filled drug that was very likely to blow up the entire neighborhood, he called the state Bureau of Investigation.

He turned himself in, you ask? Why no! He called and told the investigators that Drug Dealing Neighbor was manufacturing methamphetamines. Now, why you may ask yourself, would a man call law enforcement officials on a person he considered to be a good friend? Because that shit fucks you up.

Within a day or two of having narced out Drug Dealing Neighbor as a meth maker (though he wasn't) Method Man went to Drug Dealing Neighbor's house and confessed. According to all reports, he provided detailed information about the conversation and begged forgiveness from Drug Dealing Neighbor. Method Man cried profusely.

Now, I don't know about you, but if a friend tried to sic the po-lice on me for something I wasn't actually doing, but was trying to cover his own ass, I'd be one pissed off bitch. Seriously, seriously pissed off. I don't think I'd ever speak to that person again and I may stick a potato in their tail pipe, because no matter how good a person I try to be, I can be a vindictive bitch at times.

Don't get me wrong, Drug Dealing Neighbor was upset. Agitated. Aggrieved. And yet, Method Man still continued to come over to his house and hang out. It's really sort of odd to see some sort of Christian forgiveness going on betwixt two drug addicts, but that's more or less what it was. One would expect a fist fight at the very least and maybe a shoot out for large scale anger displays. Drug Dealing Neighbor is just a good guy for all his stupid, illicit activities.

Sometimes shortly after this, Method Man was in a rolling meth lab explosion. (A rolling meth lab is simply a fancy name they give to labs set up in vehicles.) The other two guys were blown to jelly bits, but Method Man survived with burns to his eyes from which he has largely recovered.

Method Man went to prison for a while after the explosion. I don't know why. He'd always seemed to be a bit of institutionalized sort of person. Needless to say, we went some years without seeing MM until I randomly saw him at a local church fall festival two or three years ago. (I haven't renounced my heathen ways, I just don't have an insane vendetta against churches or god.) It seems that Method Man finally found God in prison and it seemed to have stuck. He settled down, had a baby with a former girlfriend (I am unclear as to whether they married or not) and for the most part, gave up his indulgences. This meant that we went a number of years without seeing him in the hood.

Until this week when he began rolling up and down the driveway to Drug Dealing Neighbor's house on a four wheeler. "Ah shit," I thought to myself. "My peace and quiet is about to be fuckered five ways to Sunday." For the past week, there has been a lot of four wheeler riding up and down my driveway, but no spectacular displays of fuckwittery. Until today.

As I sat at my desk this morning eating popcorn for breakfast and working on my "novel" I heard a strange, high pitched "WHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRR!" emanating from somewhere near my house. My first thought was that it sounded like an electric screwdriver.

"Shit, is someone stealing the siding off my house while I'm in it?"

My home is made of aluminum or tin or whatever and a person can get a decent bit of money at the salvage yard if they chose to steal my fucking siding.

I sat there another moment waiting to hear other possible siding stealing activities. Finally I decided maybe I was being paranoid because the economy is causing some unwarranted theft issues around here and went back to my business of writing offal.

In another minute or so there was a knock at my door. I gave up on the shitty novel and peeked out the spy glass. It was Method Man. What the hell?

Curiosity slays me so I answered it.

"Uh. I was driving through your back yard and there was this hole . . . "

Apparently, Method Man was going to utilize my backyard as an exit point to visit some friends behind the park or some such shit. There is an area in my back yard where the the little pretend fence has been for a number of years and their are no trees. Instead, it's just a bit of undergrowth thin enough a truck or SUV could drive over it with no problem.

What Method Man did not realize in the years that he has been gone is that my heathen boys have been busy examining careers in archeology and engineering through hands on training in the back yard. So that stupid dipshit, instead of knocking on my door to ask me if he could drive through my yard took it upon himself to do a general visual sweep of the area (with one functional eye) and deem it passable.

Had he knocked on the door, I would have said, "Yeah, sure. Whatever. But look, there's this big ass hole right in front of the area you want to drive through so you might want to be careful about it."

But he didn't. Subsequently, his friend's SUV ended up stuck in a hole about two or three feet deep so I carried him down to his mommy's house so he could have her pull it out with her truck. They spent a good 30 minutes or so tearing up the grass in my back yard and burning the rubber on his mother's tires to pull this automobile out of my children's excavation site.

(I don't really care about the grass. My neighbor's lawn mower seems to be nonfunctional at the moment so I can't cut it until I can find another one to borrow somewhere. I finally get a moment to cut the damned grass and I can't find a stupid ass lawn mower.)

I have to say it's the best belly laugh I've had in days. There is nothing like looking out one's living room window and spying a car jammed into a hole in one's back yard. I'm a horrible person and found myself very entertained by Method Man's description about how life was going along just fine and suddenly he found himself tipped over so far that he could see very clearly that I truly need to cut my grass.

Without further ado, here is a picture of the . . . accident. Once again, excuse the shitty fuzziness that is my camera phone.

(Also, that big pile of shit to the right of the car is not my yard. That is apparently the defining barrier between my yard and Drug Dealing Neighbor's yard. DDN has lived here 11 or 12 years now. I saw him cut grass once. It was an amazing moment.)

Blah, Blah, Blah.

2009-11-04T19:33:00.000-08:00

Sorry, no real entry today. I've decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year so I'm trying to pound out a couple of thousand words a day of true offal. It's horrible. Very horrible stuff. I don't have a plot and I keep introducing random characters and then abandoning them a couple of paragraphs later. It's like writing on crack. Or too much Diet Coke.

Have any of you ever read Ann Lammot's Bird by Bird? If you're interested in writing or are a writer, then you should read it one day. There's no "real" technical writing advice, but she helped me to calm down a year or two ago when I was freaking out over my senior capstone. I was convinced I was going to die and leave reams of horrible work for everyone to read and giggle over and I wouldn't be there to defend myself.

This thing I'm doing for NaNoWriMo is what she calls the Shitty First Draft. Unless you're some sort of writing genius, a story or poem rarely comes out whole and seamlessly joined together. You have to start somewhere and it helped me a bit to know that everyone writes Shitty First Drafts. I doubt this will ever turn into a real book, but I'm catching bits and pieces that may make good short stories later. It's my "writing savings account" in case I decide to go back for an MFA. I'll have some things I can hopefully clean up and use for workshops.

If you've never participated in NaNoWriMo, do it this year! Start tonight! You'll only have to write a couple of thousand words a day to make it to the end. There's no real prize awarded. Participants who complete their SFD recieve a certificate of completion and a the knowledge they've essentially written something. There's an old saying that everyone has at least one good book in them. Let the first stages of yours out. Put it down on paper. (Or save it to your hard drive. Whichever.)

In other news, I discovered Tuba Girl owed thirty dollars in school ID badges and I'm a little damned pissed. She is currently my servant in exchange. I also may potentially have a snake on the loose in the house, but I'm not entirely sure at this point.

I have a couple of things planned this week that I'll write about later. They include: attending our KAR Elementary Day at the local arboretum, putting new brake pads on the Car That I Refuse to Let Die (or wrangling someone else into changing them for me), building a small solar oven, and something else, but I forget what. If you're interested in other things, let me know and I'll see what I have to say about it. If I don't know anything about it, I'll eventually get around to investigating, trying it out, and writing. I have one more Stinky story left before I move on to Crazy Gloria. (It's like I'm a fucking magnet for the crazy.)

And Christmas is coming! I seriously have to get my ass in gear. I may even post a couple of recipes. Sure, they'll be candy recipes and you can find the majority of them on a box somewhere, but they're recipes. Christmas is the only time of the year when my Culinary Goddess shows her form in the shape of buck eyes, peanut brittle, taffy, meringues, and fudge. If I could feed my kids candy for dinner, then I'd be considered an awesome cook. Somehow, though, it doesn't seem to work that way. And then we do some crafty shit like the gingerbread countdown calendar. Have to start prepping for that. I fucking love Christmas.

So bear with me and I'll make up for it somehow. If you're participating in NaNoWriMo or are going to participate, let me know and keep me updated on your word count.

Merry Christmas from the Family

2009-11-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

(Here is an obligatory link to the song referenced in the title.)

Christmas is a-coming and I haven't even seriously begun dealing with it. I picked up a couple of items for Tuba Girl at a flea market sale and picked up some half-priced gummy creatures from the Halloween candy section yesterday. They'll make interesting stocking stuffers. Not as interesting as the cockroach clusters I picked up one year, but interesting.

The cockroach clusters were the most awesome thing ever. They were nicely detailed and had some sort of disgusting orange Tang sort of powder in between the layers that added to the grossness. They also had a nice heft to them. If I remember correctly, they were so gross the kids refused to eat them. They weren't bad. Crunchy and chewy at the same time.

I was talking to Tuba Girl yesterday about Christmas. I told her that, frankly, she wasn't going to get as much as the boys under the tree because I have spent a shitfuckingload of money on her band stuff and she's getting to go to Walt Disney World. Hell, I'm 33 years old and I've never been to WDW. At this point in my life, I don't think I'd want to go, but it was the big thing when I was growing up. It didn't help that my dad told us every year that he was taking us to Disney up until I was 25 years old. My dad's great on ideas and good intentions, but he's never made a lot of money and taking us to Disney would have seriously eaten into his pot budget.

Never tell a kid you're going to do something without a clear plan to actually make it happen. My kids get so pissed at me because I almost never commit to anything. Unless I can know without an absolute doubt that I can buy something, do something, or take them somewhere then I tell them quite honestly that I don't know. My dad is basically a good guy, but his word has never been very solid with me. He'd have made a better hang out buddy than a father.

Anyway, I told Tuba Girl not to be looking for a lot under the tree because I've basically spent 7% of my annual income on her band fees, shoes, lost gauntlets, band trips. I think I'm going to send her off with a couple of disposable cameras and make her a scrapbook from the trip. That's basically going to be her big present unless things change.

Being 15 (yet an often insanely irresponsible heathen) she should be old enough to respect what's going on and how much has been spent on her this year. She was cool with it - very calm and understanding. And then out of nowhere she demanded to know if "Santa" was still going to bring her a Christmas stocking. "I can do without presents, but I have to have a Santa stocking!"

So I see that my careful stocking shopping all these years has paid off in great memories. Enough memories that she wants her damned "Santa stocking."

Honestly, my stockings are a frugal person's nightmare. I can easily drop thirty or forty bucks per stocking. (I told you I wasn't necessarily better at handling my thousand or so dollars or month. I just wasn't going to spend my children's childhood letting them do without. I've read too much damned Rick Bragg for that kind of parenting. That dude has a such a huge chip on his shoulder you could stick him in a bowl for bithday parties and never run out of Shoulder Pringles.)

My stocking spending habits aren't liable to change since I tend to spend a good portion of the money on necessary items and try to put real consideration into what I'm buying for the stocking. Cheap dollar store toys are a rarity. Instead I try to buy something I know they will actually need, use and/or enjoy for a longer period of time than what a dollar store dealio is going to provide.

Things I always buy:

Toothbrushes
A tube of toothpaste
Sample sized shampoos, conditioners, body sprays, body washes or soap
Bubble bath
Chapstick
Other HBA sort of things I can't remember
A Christmas ornament (Each child gets a Christmas ornament each and every year. They will have a nice collection to start their own Christmas trees when they grow up and move away. Of course, they have to be settled down and not living in some frat dorm where the ornaments are liable to get broken because they're very special to me, uh, them. The ornaments are very special to the kids. Dammit.)
An apple
An orange
A piece of interesting candy (think cockroach clusters)

I also include toothbrushes and toothpaste in their Easter baskets every year. If I remember correctly, you're supposed to buy new toothbrushes every three months so that helps me to remember to do that in the early part of the year. I buy kid specific toothbrushes and stuff, not the cheap Family Dollar 5-pack deals like I do the rest of the year.

Other things I've included in stockings over the year specific to the kid:

Small box of Legos
Wallets
Funky socks
Bon Belle nail polishes
Combs
mini hairbrush
E.L.F. make up
mini sized board games
pencils, pens, and/or crayons
Glue or other office supply things.
mini tubs of play-doh
small craft supply sort of things like glitter or foam shapes
A tomigotchi (that's old school - something I remember from way back in the day when I just had the one kid.)
Cool ski hats and/or gloves
Fart in a bucket toy thing (That one was so cool and I had the best time with it.)
Neon bracelets
card games
Individual packs of Fruit by the Foot
Hair bows and shit
Temporary tattoos
Hot Wheels
Collector cards like Pokemon
Batteries
$1 DVDs (I can't find these stupid things anymore. I miss them.)
A bit of whatever the particular child may be interested in. This year, DMan may get some math related things appropriate for his grade level since he's on the Math Team. Wild Boy loves animals, specifically snakes, so maybe some kind of interesting toy along those lines. Tuba Girl loves music so maybe interesting earrings or some shit with a musical slant to it. Oh, and I just realized I'm buying a phone card to stick in her stocking. It's something I'll need to buy anyway so I can kill two birds with one stone by making it a gift. I'm horribly devious at times.

So that's the Christmas stocking tradition. I'm sure I haven't provided a complete list of things that have been shoved into their stockings over the years, but that's the general idea. (And I mean really shoved in there. I artfully shove, cram, and wrangle things in there with a nice display poking out of the top.)

The Great Ass Wipe Debate

2009-11-02T19:38:00.000-08:00

Sorry I have been remiss in posting regularly. Life is rather busy and I'm feeling a little chagrined because I spent entirely too damned much on stupid ass Halloween costumes. I used to make them every year, but I've found that all my children apparently go through a "thing" between the ages of six and ten where homemade Halloween costumes are not cool. So I entertained two booger heads with their uncool costume issues. And I make awesome costumes.

Actually, I sometimes will spend just as much on making a costume as I would in just buying one, but since I always used basic shirts, pants, or long sleeved onsies as the base for the costume with the actual "costume" parts made to be removed, I came out fairly well since the most expensive parts could be stripped down and added to their wardrobe. The Cat in the Hat year was my most awesome. Tuba Girl was the Cat in the Hat and the boys were Thing One and Thing Two.(Click title to view full post if you're interested in seeing the instructions. My new three column format doesn't seem to work with breaks.)

My problem with this year's Halloween costumes is I now have two ninja outfits that are going to serve very little purpose other than as, well, ninja costumes.

On to other things - the great ass wipe debate as noted in the title.

I bought Great Value toilet paper for the past month. I bought six packs at a $1.27 per pack. Not counting taxes, I spent about $7.62. However, I came highly close to running out after buying only one pack the first week and stopped at the Family Dollar where I picked up a four-pack of generic toilet paper for $1.00. In all, I spent $8.62 in toilet paper. On top of that, I nearly ran out last night and had to borrow a roll of toilet paper from a neighbor. It's odd, but not something we don't do from time to time. If I'd had to run down to the convenience store to pick up one roll of toilet paper, that would have cost me 79 cents. So in the long run, I have not saved money with this toilet paper.

And then it hit me when I actually bothered to comparison shop between Scott's and Great Value.

The Great Value brand costs 12.3 cents per unit while Scott's cost 7.7 cents per unit. (I can't remember the units used to measure, but I do remember the units were the same so I know I'm really coming out better in the long run with the Scotts. Here is a quick link on unit pricing if you somehow don't know about it. There's also a little quiz to see if you caught the basics of it. Turns out I am an excellent comparison shopper when I remember what I'm doing.

On top of the price, it was really getting on my frigging nerve to go through a roll of toilet paper a day. Instead of about 8 or so of those empty toilet paper rolls from the Scott's, I ended up with about 30 damned toilet paper rolls in the trash. (Although I did store some of them to use as seed starters next spring. Undoubtedly, I'll need cheap things to start my plant murdering next year.) Either way, that definitely ups the amount of trash output coming out of my house thereby increasing my damned trash bag costs. Trash bags are one of the non-food items that I always buy name brand. I've tried those cheap ass Ruffies and wasted more time and money because of split bags than it was worth.

So the final outcome is I will stick with Scott's toilet paper as it actually the cheapest (yet still comfortable and effective) that I've found so far. I bought a 12 pack of Scott's toilet paper for $9.24 this morning. It should last about six weeks unless we're hit by some shit-slinging virus in which case all bets are off.

I'll try to keep things flowing better, but I've also chosen to compete in NaNoWriMo this year and I'm already behind which seems to be the story of my life. (HaHa)

Cat in the Hat and Thing costume instructions.
I've never been too good at home maker sort of things, but if it involves cutting, stapling, gluing, or hammering, I don't do too badly.

Cat in the Hat
    * Cat in the Hat hat (I splurged and bought one because I love the Cat in the Hat and I had a great time wearing it around town sometimes.)
    * long sleeved black shirt (preferably a turtle neck)
    * black pants
    * white gloves
    * white sticky back felt
    * red sticky back felt
    * black fabric paint in the tube (whatever you call it)
    * black eyeliner pencil

   1. Cut an oval out of the white sticky back fabric and place it on front of the shirt to serve as the Cat's stomach.
   2. Cut a basic Cat in the Hat bowtie shape from the red sticky back felt.
   3. Outline the bow and other parts of the tie with the black fabric paint. Check Cat in the Hat pics to get a general idea of where to add black lines. Let dry.
   4. Stick bow on the neck of the black shirt.
   5. That's it. Dress your kid and draw cat whiskers with the eyeliner.

Things One and Two
    * Red onsie with sleeves and legs or long sleeved red shirt and pants
    * blue spray on hair color
    * white sticky back felt
    * black fabric paint

   1. Cut ovals out of the white sticky back felt.
   2. Paint "Thing One" and "Thing Two" on the ovals with black fabric paint. Let dry.
   3. Place the ovals on the front of the shirts or onesies.
   4. Spray kids' hair blue.
   5. Dress in the Thing suits.

Later, you can rip the sticky back felt off everything and use it over.

Stinky Mother Fucker: Trauma at Wal-Mart

2009-10-29T19:44:00.000-07:00

I can't remember exactly when this particular incident happened, but I'm pretty sure it was last spring. I'd run into Stinky Motherfucker enough after the Save-A-Lot incident to know to keep my distance and keep moving as quickly as possible.

Around this time, I had all three children in a drama class through the local Allied Arts. For $10 per child, they received one afternoon of acting instruction per week over a nine week period (it may have actually been twelve weeks, I can't remember) that culminated in a skit performance. My smaller two attended for one hour on Tuesdays, while Tuba Girl recieved an hour and a half of time a week. You can't even begin to beat $10 for something like that. It gave them something interesting to do, allowed them to investigate or develop interests and talents, and made me feel like I was doing something productive at a great price. (This is the frugal/money management part of my blog.)

I usually spent the time Tuba Girl was practicing as a chance to do any quick running while I was still in town. Somewhere between leaving my last class and picking up my children, I'd managed to rip a hole in my jeans.I caught it on a screw or something I suppose. It's hard to say because I'm a very clumsy person and spent a lot of time being referred to as a "bull in a china shop" as a teenager.

The hole unfortunately, was somewhere just below my ass, right at the top of my thigh. Not huge, but I knew it was there. I didn't have time to go home and change, but thought I was rather in luck. From maneuvering around in front of a bathroom mirror, it didn't seem the hole was showing my ass and I was wearing a large button down shirt that seemed to cover the hole as long as I wasn't too active. I resolved not to shop from the bottom shelves.

On this particular afternoon, I went to Wal-mart to pick up a few groceries and things. I met my old high school Algebra teacher over in the tea and coffee aisle where she turned me onto some superfruityhippiemangopomengranatecolorectalcancerprevention tea or something like that. We talked a few minutes and I made sure to stand and walk away at such an angle that hopefully she couldn't see the hole in my pants should my shirt not actually be covering it at all times.Other than that, I tried to do my shopping as if I were a perfectly normal person doing her grocery shopping in fully functional blue jeans. I'm really glad People of Walmart had not been created at that point.

After picking up the tea on her recommendation, I hoofed over to the breakfast aisle with two small heathens in tow trying to remember what it was I had decided we really needed. The amazing pretty yellow of a box of LARA bars caught my attention and while I was in deep concentration over the ingredients list, some asshole tapped me on the shoulder and said, "HI!"

Seriously. Don't fuck with me while I'm reading a box. I'm trying to figure out what dihidroxyde guano monojedinuclear sulfates are. It takes a lot of work to break down the Latin shit to see if this product is going to kill me immediately or later on down the road. Besides, I'd wasted my socializing time speaking to my 50 year old Algebra teacher who seems to have decided somewhere within the past couple of decades that heavy black eyeliner is becoming.

I frowned up at the interloper. I had on my frowny eyebrows, crazy squint eyes, and pinched lips to let this person know that I did not have time for this banal shit. I expect people to pick up facial cues because I actually don't say a whole lot. If I'm particularly angry, I try to keep my mouth shut because I can be a very mean person when I don't intend to be. It's probably a self defense mechanism. It allows me to continue to mill around in general pop.

So who am I frowning up at other than a smiley faced Stinky Motherfucker. Shit.

"Hi!" I said and went back to staring at my box of LARA bars.

Stinky, it appears, is wearing the exact same shit the last time I ran into him at the parking lot of KAR Elementary. (The parking lot incident happened after the Save-a-lot Turmoil and was the first time I became aware that Stinky Motherfucker has children attending my fucking school. This is my school I've been a parent here for more than ten years. I'm a fourth generation KAR Elementary student. Oh mah god. I have seniority. Leave. Now.) Anyway, so it's worth noting he's wearing the same greasy ponytail, molestor mustache, nasty plaid coat, and whatever the hell else he wears. I imagine he has an entire closet full of pre-greased plaid coats.

I look up from my happy yellow box for a moment and stare at him. Stinky is in the middle of some tale about a water leak under his trailer that the water department refuses to fix because it's on his side of the meter, but that's unfair because it's a water pipe so the water department should see about it. And, if I remember correctly, it ran their bill up so high their water was cut off.

Dude. Just fix the fucking pipe. You need a hacksaw, some pipe, some couplers and a can of that blue shit. If I can do it and not cut off an arm, I'm almost willing to bet Stinky Motherfucker can do it. Pipes aren't always rocket science.

Stinky rambled off about something else while I went back to staring at the ingredients section. And then I realized this mother fucker is never going to shut up. Besides, I have children with me this time and what if he goes off on some random discourse on how he likes to stick his dick in a rusty tailpipe or something else equally mentally disturbing?

Finally, I put the LARA bars back on the shelf because I was tired of looking at the box and I was tired of listening to this son of a bitch. "OK! Well, I have to go pick up Tuba Girl! Gotta go!" And I ran off while Stinky Motherfucker was in the middle of telling me to "come by and see us sometime!"

I grabbed whatever it was I could remember to grab and made my way over to a register. My former Algebra teacher came in right behind me at the checkout and were discussing job opportunities. I was trying to keep everything peppy and whatever hoping maybe I would be able to consider her an "in" if anything came up at the prep military school where she was currently teaching.

We were in the midst of discussing the health benefits of bananas when Stinky Motherfucker walked to the register in front of me. Out of the twenty or thirty frigging registers available, he chose to walk to the one right in front of me.

What the fuck am I? A goddamned magnet? Go away, Stinky! I'm working up a mother fucking job. This is how jobs are made in this town. It's not what you know, it's who you know and I needed my loopy ass teacher to remember that she knew me in a positive manner. Not with some Stinky Motherfucker talking about his ass gasket stretching techniques or whatever weird shit he does with Wife Thing.

I briefly nodded to acknowledge Stinky and then pointedly turned my head back to Algrebra Teacher. That is a direct sign that a person is already engaged in a conversation and you should just go have your goddamned meat roll of ground beef and gross of Mountain Dew scanned and leave me alone.

Except Stinky Motherfucker did not leave me alone. As I was simultaneously passing my grocery bags into the buggy and making my goodbyes to my new best friend, the Algebra teacher who may help me get a job, Stinky slowly backed up.

And suddenly, I felt the odd jab of Stinky skin at the hole of my pants while Stinky Motherfucker leaned over my shoulder and said loudly, "You have a hole in your pants!"

There were so many decisions that had to made in that single frozen moment of time. In nanoseconds, I had to process the fact that Stinky Motherfucker had poked his finger in the hole of my pants and decide what was I going to do. There were questions I had to discuss with myself and there was not enough time between action and appropriate reaction to adequately give them my full attention.

Did I ever want to be allowed back into the Wal-marts? Would they charge me with cruelty to children if I explained why I did it? Did I really want the last impression a potential reference see is that of me flinging an almighty fit and beating the shit out of a Stinky Motherfucker? Oh. What to do? What to do? Why me? Why?

Still attempting to talk to my Algebra teacher, load my buggy, process the situation and keep my cool, I quickly brushed his hand away from my personal being, quietly stated, "I know that" while never turning to look at him. I made my goodbyes to my former teacher and did the double time chunky woman shuffle out of the store.

DMan and Wild Boy obviously weren't picking up that I was ready to leave immediately because they proceeded to attempt a quarter coup over by the claw machine.

When I refused to stop and actually threatened to toss them both in the buggy if they didn't move now, they asked me why they couldn't have a quarter. The best I could work up was a, "We have to get the hell out of Dodge." It's all I could say without transforming into a shrieking wreck of pissed-off shock in the middle of the parking lot.

And that is the kind of mother fucker Stinky Motherfucker is. Not only is he crude enough to loudly note in front of the entire Wal-mart register area that you have a hole in your pants two inches from your ass, he's the kind of mother fucker to quite literally point it out. He's the kind of mother fucker to rip down the mental defense you had going on in terms of how bad things really were back there.

In short, Stinky is one uncouth mother fucker.

Bullshit Swiss Family Robinson Redux

2009-10-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

(This is a post I pulled off an old blog. I wrote it in the spring of 2008, so while it's a little dated I feel it works within the scope of this blog.)

I took all of my children to Lowe's a couple of weeks ago and we picked out all kinds of vegetable seeds, herbs and flowers in homage to my sudden raging desire to make something grow. This happens almost every spring. The sudden urge to plant and become productive, to create sustenance from dirt and sunlight overwhelms me and I come up with huge, wonderful, awesome ideas for herb gardens, vegetable gardens, day lilies and fruit orchards. (Don't ask me where the fruit orchard would go, I live on a third of an acre. But it's a great idea.)

This is actually the first time in several years I've tried planting anything. I've been in school working my way toward a job that will allow me to pay off my massive student loans and between that and children and children in school and children randomly puking from the top of the bunkbed, it's been a bit hectic. I held back on that deep, instinctive nature to play in dirt.

It is for the best as my gardening abilities are not really abilities so much as depraved and sadistic activities. I've killed nearly everything I touch and was dubbed The Dark Gardener by a concerned family member when I was still a teen.

But this year finally caught me. My children are older. My goth girl is 13. The boys are 6 and 5. I'm a senior now and I thought they would be more interested in gardening. I am also suffering with an insane case of senioritis. I don't wanna play with words anymore. I want to pump gas for a living or dig ditches. I want to grow things. It became plainly apparent to me one Sunday that the best way to foster a sense of family unity while simultaneously ignoring my homework was to plant a massive garden.

As we speak, I have successfully transplanted the sunflowers to the front yard and they are still green. I did kill a hydrangea a few days before. The hydrangea, though, was on clearance and already looking a little green around the gills so its demise is not entirely my fault. Now, I have watermelon, hot peppers, bell peppers, chives, mint, pole beans, cow peas, lavendar, oregano and a strawberry bush all growing up very nicely in their little greenhouse thingies. I don't even know where I'm going to put all this stuff. Maybe I'll borrow a bit of the neighbor's yard.

The problem though (besides buying more plants than I have yard) is my secret desire. Picking out the plants and the lawn cultivator and the cheap frigging garden rake that does not stay all in one piece I had such wonderful dreams of being a loving little single parent family unit. My daughter would divest herself of the Robert Smith eyeliner and we'd wear cute little matching sunhats with gingham ribbon as we talked about her day at school over the watermelon patch. My boys would gamble about in their cute little buster browns and perfectly coifed hair with the little wave in the front, pulling weeds willy nilly while exlaiming over the size of the tomatoes. Okay, so maybe it's a little too cheesy for my tastes, but my point is we'd radiate love, happiness and togetherness. We would be A UNIT.

I think the neighbors have been blowing their pot smoke through my bathroom vents because I was obviously out of my mind. I should have known to leave Lowe's without spending the money. One stomped because I wouldn't by the Venus flytrap. Another kept climbing up on the plant tables and jumping off. And the other developed a random one-time bout of diarrhea right before we were ready to check out.

It was all downhill from there. My UNIT dissolved into whining messes. I made the mistake of only buying one garden rake and everyone wanted to use the garden rake. No one wanted to actually touch the dirt and the whining reached a crescendo when my oldest informed me I was so unfair and no one was making me dig up the yard and no one made me clean house and no one made me cook, I did it because I wanted to and it was unfair for me to make her dig up the front yard.

Oh, my poor little Orphan Annie. I sent her to her room until they found a cure for puberty.

So now I have all these damned sprouting things in my house and only a third of my back yard dug up. My kids think it's the hokiest thing ever. I'm left out there all alone while they run around the yard with the neighbor kids and I festered over my inability to create unity. What the hell it is about me that cause such disjointed behavior is beyond me. Maybe it's the hair. I've never successfully pulled off one cohesive thing in my life. My plants always die. My children act like war combatants, demanding and vying to be heard over everybody else until I hide in the closet with a key lime pie and pretend it's all perfectly normal. My cars . . . you know what. I'm not even going to talk about my cars. That's a whole can of worms that should be discussed in therapy. Unless it can be put together with duct tape, I'm apparently incapable of pulling it together. Maybe I should just duct tape my plants to the ground.

But I have discovered one thing. When I stopped trying to involve my children in the gardening to create the perfect White Trash Stepford unit and stopped grousing because they whined, I discovered it was quiet. Apparently the best way to get my children to ignore me is to stand in the yard with a lawn aerator and a garden rake. For the first time in countless years, I was left virtually alone for an hour while they played with the neighbor kids.

As I step-punched-twisted holes across the back yard, I thought about my capstone portfolio due in two months and I wasn't quite so hysterical about it. I could begin to feel the form and the ending of my brilliant masterpiece that will be the bulk of the portfolio. That little freak in my head who runs around with her hands ripping out her hair while declaring the apocalypse was upon us went somewhere. Maybe she took a nap or went looking for the rest of the key lime pie. And even though my hands were starting to blister, I kept going across the yard because I was calm. I had my hands in something and somehow it gave my ideas a shape and a feel.

I didn't want the peace to go away so I ignored the dishes in the sink and the clothes in the washing machine and the obvious fact my five year old was slowly divesting himself of his clothing in the back yard. We had sandwiches for dinner because it was late when I finally went back in the house.

My thesis leader dude has been telling me to breathe for three months now. Every time I saw him, my whole being was in an uproar and I was absolutely sure I was on the verge of an aneurysm or a stroke. (The facial tics may be more indicative of a stroke.) And he kept saying to me, "Just breathe. Take a walk and breathe."
Of course, being the nutbag I am, I only nodded at him like it all made perfect sense and then ran to the bathroom so I could rant by myself:

"Breathe?! Breathe?! I don't have fucking time to breathe. I'll breathe in May after grades are distributed. But there is no breathing now! No time for breathing! What crunchy hippy granola zen goddamned bullshit. I don't need to breathe. I need someone to tell me what to do."

So I've been directly ignoring everything everyone has said for months and drowning in my own hysterical melodrama. Then I haphazardly set out to plant a garden in this random stab at creating this family idea that I keep seeing around town. How does my middle son's teacher manage to walk out the door with triplet boys and they are all wearing shoes, socks and presumably underwear and they sit so quietly in public? What is she doing? Bribery? Duct tape? Nyquil?

So far, I've failed miserably in creating a garden of togetherness. But someone should remind me to tell Stephen I've started breathing again.

Why I Think Living Naturally is a Good Idea

2009-10-27T18:36:00.000-07:00

Bear with me on this one.

Up until last spring, we hadn't had any pets in a number of years. I really couldn't afford them, didn't have time for them, and hate the things cats and dogs bring into a person's home. Fleas. Worms. Apparently ass glands that need squeezing or something. Oh my god. That is gross.

Of course, the kids have begged for a pet for a long time. I spent a lot of time feeling guilty for depriving them of oneness with the animal kingdom and spent many random mind blanks by entertaining myself with visions of Timmy and Lassie, Jack and Laura, Old Dan and Little Ann, Ribsey and Henry, Hagrid and Fang, Cerberus and Hades. You know, a kid and his dog. Whatever.DMan received a few dollah bills for his birthday and made up his mind that he wanted a pet.

One Tuesday after his birthday, we were roaming through a local thrift store waiting forTuba Girl to finish her $10-every-nine-weeks drama class when I came across a hamster cage in great condition. Tuba Girl had a hamster when she was much younger and I somehow find rodents easier to deal with than larger animals prone to fleas and shitting in your shoes. Besides, our home is small and I'm not willing to give it up to some aggravating ass dog. Hamsters have their own homes that fit right on a counter.

I totally hyped up the hamster deal until DMan thought it was the most awesome thing ever. It was so awesome, we went right to the pet store and bought two hamsters right that very moment. In retrospect, I should have researched the whole thing a bit because it turns out I somewhat assumed the owner would never let me walk out the door with a male/female pair.

But he did and I did. And within a couple of weeks, I had to buy another cage after a crash course in caring for 14 baby hamsters.

Now, if you haven't yet understood how my title works with my story, you haven't given me time to connect the dots.

I do honestly believe we should live more naturally than we do.We should pay more attention to our bodies, to what we're putting into our bodies, to our hearts and souls and the world around us. That sort of crunchy, hippy dippy shit that gets me called out in real life when I pull something philosophically relative to the idea out of my ass.

Back to my hamsters. I separated pimp daddy from the mother as soon as I realized I'd actually bought two fucking hamsters. In all honesty, I counted back from the minute she spit out those babies to the day that I bought the pair and I'm pretty sure that bitch was knocked up when I gave her sanctuary in my home. Or they were "premature." (Shyeah. Right. *wink, nudge*)

I followed the directions and avoided cleaning the mother hamster's cage for the duration of the babies' confinement. (That was not pleasant.) Fed her well, making sure to cook a bit of egg whites everyday to keep her protien levels up. Just like a nursing human, protein and an overall healthy diet are important to a nursing hamster.

Hamsters who don't receive the necessary nutrients are prone to eating their babies to reabsorb those nutrients in an effort continue caring for the remaining babies. A mother hamster may also eat an unhealthy pup since its chances of survival are minimal. Hamster owners are told to never bother the baby nest because if the pups' scent changes, the mother may not recognize her own children, view them as interlopers and eat them.

Also, the bitch may just be batshit crazy and eat her babies for no particular reason at all.

I never quite knew whether my mother hamster was just taking care of natural business by eating sickly babies or if she was batshit crazy, but I'm pretty sure that has to be one of the two reasons since I thought I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing in terms of helping her be a good mother. She ate about 5 of the 14 pups.

I have a few stories about how I've ended up with this damned mini-zoo, but today's point isn't really about pets. It's about crazy ass people who think we should live as unevolved beings. Sure, animals give birth alone and they've done it from the time a baby animal of any kind thought it would be great to pop out of a vagina. However, animals also eat their own young or abandon them if they're not worth the time. Animals do not sit around thinking about how they should live, they just do it that way because that's the natural order of their life. Humans were supposedly born with enough sense to know that at least one "professional" should stick around to put a pair of scissors underneath the bed and to catch the football when it comes popping out of the chute. It definitely cuts down on the infant mortality rate.

The first time some MegaCrunchy nutbag eats her sick baby to reabsorb it's protein instead of rushing it off to the hospital and then blaming every medical professional but herself for the death of her child, then we might have something to talk about.

And on one hand, if I look at it objectively, I think that's not a bad plan at all. Everyone is complaining about how we're overpopulated and it's straining the earth's food supplies among other things. Maybe we should just be eating the sick and the infirm instead of propping them up in a false social system of "concern." Hell. The Donnor party did it. Maybe it's like eating veal.*

*I must note that eating soylent green is not an original idea of my own. Also, I have no idea if veal is good. I like to give my cow meat a running chance at life.

Your Local Library Constantly Whores itself to get Your Attention

2009-10-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

I thought, being a library system employee, you may want to know that. Library systems generally rely rather heavily on the number of patrons they serve for funding. The more people utilize their services, then the more money the library receives and the more services the library is able to provide.

Every local library is different, but I'm sure most have a website detailing various services. As an example, I'll give a listing of things my library offers:

Books (duh) - libraries try to stay on top of the newest books to keep the patrons coming in.
Audio books - A lot of people like these, but I can't get into them. Audio books offer me too much opportunity to roam around in my mind and then next thing I know, I have no idea how in the hell I reached chapter 23.
Periodicals - You name it, they may have it.
Online databases
Holds - My library system is part of a larger over all state system so patrons have access to over nine million books in 140 counties. That's frigging cool.
DVD and VHS - We are actually phasing out VHS movies, but we have a rather wide assortment of movies and educational programs available for patrons. I recently had Ping Pong Playa added to my branch DVD collection. It looks . . . bizarre. I'll definitely have to check it out.
Video games - This is a new section recently begun at the main branch. While the collection is still rather small, it's very popular.
Meeting rooms - home school groups, tutors, and other types of folks sign up to use our meeting rooms. I remember I attended a free or low cost (can't remember which) floral arrangement quick study sort of thing some years ago and walked out with a rather cute little Christmas arrangement for my office.
Geneology resources - I don't know if all libraries have this, but we have a decent collection for our state and all the surrounding states.
Bathroom sex - technically, we don't offer this service. However, it seems that people think bathrooms are not only great places to piss on the toilet seats, but a decent place to get your bizness on. I don't recommend having sex in a library bathroom. Seriously, I've been scrubbing forty years of mold off the bathroom floor. Do you really want your ass scraping across places like that?
Summer reading program - we have summer reading programs not only for children, but also teens and adults.
Movies nights or movie afternoons - each of our branches offers a movie afternoon once a month while the main branch offers "pajama night" where patrons come in for an evening at the movies.
Computer access - Technically, our computers suck donkey balls, but free is free and you get what you get. It works for basic services. I would like to request that you mother fuckers stop getting on myspace since I've explained time and time again that it's crashing my computers.
Wi-Fi hotspots.
A variety of children's programs including puppet shows, story time, and toddler time
The Georgia Kill-a-Watt program - this is something we've recently implemented. It's really awesome.
Someone to answer your weird ass questions such as "What does 'not on task' mean?" and find that book with that picture of the apple on the front cover - also known as a reference librarian. My branch does not really have a reference librarian. It's just myself and the library assistant, but my library is fairly small so I don't have a very hard time finding a book if we actually have it on our shelves.
Copying, printing and fax services - these are services most libraries will charge. While 25 cents may seem like a lot for printing, try buying a computer, printer, ink, paper, and IT guy to see how much cheaper you can do it at home.
Head phones and jump drives - very reasonably priced
Baby sitting services - along the same lines as bathroom sex - not really, but people don't seem to mind dumping their kids from time to time.
Annual book fair - the local library system has been holding its annual book fair in an effort to raise money for 30 or so years now. In addition to selling used books, the system also holds a bake sale, breakfast items, sandwich items, children's games, flea market items, a magic show, a clogging show and a few other things of interest to the community. If I'd had more money, I would have made out like a bandit. As it is, I bought a really cute little pocket book and an Asian-inspired serving tray set for Tuba Girl's Christmas pile. (Yes, I sometimes buy my kids used shit for Christmas or birthdays. If I know they're really going to like it, then I'm on it like David Hasselhof on a cheeseburger. Well, maybe I'm not as messy.) Also, I bought 8 LP records! I got Fats Domino and Billie Holiday for myself and picked out about 6 records of classical music for my sister, who is an elementary school music education teacher. She'd been complaining that she didn't have any decent classical music compililations for her classroom and I couldn't resist. If I'd been smart, I'd have saved that for her Christmas, but I was so excited, I couldn't help myself. I picked up all that by waiting until the end of the market when they slashed everything to half price and got it all for ten bucks.

Those are a few of the things my local library offers. We constantly strive to reach out to the public so we can grab their asses, throw them through the doors and count them with our little people counter clicker things. Check your library's local website. Not only does my system have a website, we also have a blog where we are constantly updating what's going on, new items available for check out, and general interest updates about what we're doing. Check Facebook for your local library, also. We've recently created a groups page so your library may have thought of doing the same.

Definitely check out your local library. It's not your mother's library. And speaking of "not your mother's library," our motto is "Access to information for all." While the main branch does choose to keep some of the "racier" material behind the reference desk (i.e. Jenna Jameson's autobiography) we are not your children's mother. (Links to a story about women who are confused about the nature of their jobs.)

Much like a parent should monitor what a child watches on television, it's up to a parent to monitor what their child reads. It is not my job as a library employee to decide what little Timmy or Shanteria should or should not be reading. That's is your damned job so if you drop your kid off and she comes home with The Joy of Sex in her bookbag, it's purely your fault for expecting strangers to monitor your child's reading material. Do you let Ted Turner decide what your child should watch? Okay then.

And while it's your job to monitor what your child reads, it's not your job to monitor what other people read.

It's been a hellish weekend full of so much fucking fun I'm about to bust, so today's blog is all about frugally utilizing the resources you are already paying for in the form of taxes. The library is pretty frugal. I think someone once figured that each person in our county pays about $35 a year in taxes for library use. You can't even take a family of four to the movies for that amount.
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Baking Soda is my June Jesus

2009-10-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

I suppose June Jesus requires some minor explanation. Over at that bitchy mommy's board where I spend most of days, there once was (or perhaps still is) a certain poster who went through phases. I have a tendency not to pay very much attention to things, but it seems that she found Jesus one June.

I don't where He was because I've always been a bit worried He might be lost in my closet with those decorative pumpkin decorations I bought on clearance a few years ago. Anyway, she went through a brief Ulti-Christian period, which is cool. This was right after immersing herself in a particular job and around the same time as trying to play ubersingle mommy.

But then it seemed Jesus was replaced by roller derby, taking half-nekkid pictures, and using the word "retard" as an online insult. Or something like that. I don't know what all. I don't pay a lot of attention to things but did come to realize she wraps herself in whatever her new "thing" is completely. As tight as pig meat wrapped in cheap sausage casing. Or a woman bound in red saran wrap. Which, amazingly, looks much the same as cheap sausage.

So June Jesus is the latest personal stage, fad, or preoccupation a person goes through.

The point is, baking soda is my new "thing." If you remember this post about my cleaning supplies habit, I've been working toward reducing my purchases. I did buy a bottle of store brand bleach when we were going through that UNCLEAN staph/cellulitis/leprosy issue, but I don't think I could ever quite quit the bleach. Maybe. One step at a time. The first step is admitting I have a problem.

Earlier this week, I was wiping down the stove top when I finally decided to employ the baking soda in a little deep cleaning exercise. Hol-ee Shit. My stove has never, ever looked this good. It looked so good that I lifted the stove top and cleaned the crud underneath it with baking soda and vinegar. The experience was so awesome. Enlightening. Lovely. I didn't have to scrub any harder than if I'd pulled out the Greased Lightening or Simple Green or whatever else I had left in my stock pile. It was so awesome that I cleaned my toaster oven and microwave with it.

I wasn't quite as successful with the toaster oven because some Tuba Girl decided to cook some muffins or cupcakes in there a while back. She overfilled the cupcake thingies and they proceeded to drip over into the bottom of the oven and they seem to be cooked on there very nicely.

For a woman who doesn't get out and do much, I'd say it was almost an orgasmic experience. Well, maybe not orgasmic in the true sense of the word. More like when you have to really, really, really sneeze and it takes a moment to build. Then it's just such a relief to finally sneeze. Sort of like that.

I was so excited that I bought more vinegar and baking soda to do something about the grout in the bathroom at my library.

I don't know how things work in other library branches, but it turns out I'm also the janitor. When I applied for this job over the summer, the job description stated I would be responsible for making sure the building was clean and in working order. I took that to mean I would be doing spot checks or something along those lines.

Wrong. The previous branch manager stayed on long enough to train me. At the end of the day, she said, "I usually just sweep one room a day. You'll want to wipe down the tables every once in a while."

I stumbled around a moment before I finally said, "So, uh, I have to clean?" Yes. Apparently so and she proceeded to show me the supply closet.

Holy shit. This job is almost like being at home except the building is even uglier. I get to clean, make children mind, and ask people to please bring me my mother fucking books back.

But that's cool. I need a job and apparently an English degree will currently get you something with built-in janitorial duties. At least I don't have to wear a hairnet. And I make Matt the Library Assistant clean the shit off the toilet seats. There's just a limit to what I can handle and the day I walked into the boys' bathroom to find little ass prints of poo all around the seat I screamed like a girl and said that was his job for the day.

Amazingly, he still seems to enjoy working with me. In all fairness, I have cleaned piss off the toilet and possible pubic hair out of the sink, so it's not like I make him handle all bodily functions. Also, to date, I've been lucky enough to not have the mayor of a neighboring town come up to my desk and say, "I'm sorry, but I have just shat on your floor." True story from the main branch. And I do believe Mayor Crazy Bitch has some sort of ass gasket problem anyway because previous stories about town include her having shat in the fake tree pots at a laundromat in her own town.

I've been here for almost three months and during that time I'd been happily sweeping and swiffering away at the bathroom floor. I was rather agitated by the ugly collection of dirt in the crevices and corners along the floor, but the main branch seems to be full of people who may not be actively cleaning their own homes and their cleaning supplies for my building include a Swiffer wetjet, magic erasers, latex gloves, and paper towels. One cannot conceivably clean something well with those kind of supplies.

I picked up a couple of those little green scrubby pads a couple of months ago and brought them to work. Last week, I decided I'd had enough of the grit hanging out in the bathroom so I wore my jeans to work on Friday, put old newspapers down on the floor, donned my latex gloves and set to work with my little scrubpad.

It took a few minutes, but I began to realize the tile grout was not originally black in color. That was a rather disturbing moment and I spent the next 45 minutes scrubbing with pads, scraping with an old pen, and pouring liberal amounts of Pinesol all over the place. I need a sandblaster.

Earlier this week, I tried bleach and a scrub brush but had to give up when I realized there is no ventilation in that bathroom and spent the rest of the day with bleach clinging to my nosehairs.

So today I brought in three boxes of baking soda, a gallon of vinegar, an industrial size scrub brush thingy with a long handle, and my mom's wet/dry vac. Maybe I should wait for the main branch to send over my requested cleaning supplies, but damn. That grout is BLACK. I can't take it. That's fucking nasty. Totally and completely. My house isn't clean by any means, but we're not walking around on forty-year-old mold.

Anyway, the baking soda/vinegar idea was a little more successful that the previous bleach and Pine-sol attempts, but only by a little. It's going to take a lot of scrubbing. My neighbor, who works for a professional cleaning company, suggested muraic acid, but changed her mind when I said there wasn't any ventilation for the bathroom.

So those are my current updates on my cleaning supply habit. I like baking soda a lot.

The End.

P.S. It's probably going to be a busy weekend with two birthday parties, a band trip to chaperone, and a house to clean other than my own so I'll holler at you hookers later. I did want to throw this link out there before I forgot, though.

http://www.5dollardinners.com/

Someone over at Free Jinger suggested it to me. At first, I was worried I was going to be flipping through a lot of tater tot casseroles and hot dog soup recipes, but it doesn't look too bad though I still haven't had time to seriously investigate it. I plan to give it a good onceover before my next grocery shopping trip, though. If anyone tries any of the recipes, let me know how they are.

Speaking of food, we tried Jalapeno and Potato Soup a couple of days ago. It was okay. Not as thick as I would have preferred since I have these weird texture issues. Plus it gave me some of the funkiest gas I've had in ages. It was bad. Really, really bad. Frankly, the recipe wasn't good enough for me to put up with that kind of smell wafting from me arse. Chili, yes. Potatoes, no.

The rest of my previous paycheck

2009-10-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

I left off my paycheck tally with $112.51 in the bank. Here is how the rest went:

$5.70 - dry cleaning Tuba Girl's uniform
$33.28 - gas for the second week
$14.00 - a trip to Wendy's after I changed the tire and was too lazy to cook. I wrote about it somewhere. The heathen boys' school earned a $1.40 from our trip. Yaaaaay.
$7.00 - field trip money for DMan.
$6.50 - field trip money for Wild Boy
$1.98 - hand sanitizer for work. Working with the public has suddenly made me slightly germ phobic and my building budget is so minute that Germ-x is not even on the radar.
$1.68- Suave lavender conditioner
$1.68 - Suave lavender shampoo (The shampoo and conditioner should actually last a couple of months.)
$2.48 - freezer bags to separate my hamburger meat
$1.00 - Family Dollar toilet paper (a four pack apparently lasts four days)
$1.00 - a five pack of new toothbrushes
$1.00 - toothpaste
$2.54 - some more Great Value brand toilet paper. I bought two packs this time, so hopefully it will actually last a full two weeks. So far, I've spent a little less than five bucks on toilet paper, so if I can figure out how many packs I need to buy a month, it may actually cut my toilet paper costs in half. I like the Great Value brand tp fine, it's just a bitch because it seems to run out rather quickly.
$15.00 - a phone card for Tuba Girl. It said I have to pay up again by November, but I'm hoping this bitch will last through December. If not, then it's really going to agitate me. I have very little experience with prepay phones, so I'll have to test the waters with it. Basically, texting doesn't cost her anything as far as I understand. As long as no one calls her, then she doesn't actually use any minutes. Or something like that.
$1.00 - fifty cents for each boy child to wear a hat to school last week. It was a fundraiser for Jay's Hope, an area organization seeking to help families of children with cancer. For all my personal dismissal of religious matters, I'm still a spiritual sort of bitch and I get teary eyed every time I read about that little boy.
$2.40 - tights for Tuba Girl
$.82 - taxes

That leaves about $13.45 out of my first October paycheck. I'm going to leave that alone and try to pretend it's not there.

< . . . >

My second paycheck, after taxes and whatnot left me with $504.70.
Bills for this paycheck:

$193.00 - light bill. This is my actual light bill for this month. The previous payment was carried over from August. I have one window unit. Not only does August and the early part of September tax my window unit, it taxes my bill.

Like I said, this bitch ass trailer can hit 95 degrees in the evening. After spoiling myself due to Wild Boy's years of Reactive Airway Disease (another post, another time) I'm just not about to spend one more minute lying in a bed with sweat running down my ass crack. I live in a SUBTROPICAL REGION where where air conditioning is available and I damned well plan to take advantage of it.

(And a moment to rant here.)
I know those who lived here in the years before me didn't have air conditioning or central heating systems. I grew up in several houses that didn't have either one. I don't remember being horribly hot as a child, but I do remember being colder than hell and hanging out around that potbellied stove in the living room a good bit. You'd think by the 80s, the world would have moved up, but a lot of us hadn't.

Also, the thing about those houses is they were built differently than mine. The house with the potbellied stove must have had walls at least eight feet high. I'll have to ask my mommy. During the summer, I really don't remember it being that bad because the hot air rose toward the ceiling.

I also spent a lot of time out on my stepgrandaddy's old farm place as a child where there were no AC or heat units to handle business. Being built even earlier in the century, perhaps even around the end of the 19th century, the walls were 10 feet tall or so and it was built with a dog trot hall to let the breeze flow through. (I remember it getting pretty cold, though. If you've ever lived somewhere without a regular heat source, you know that feeling of suffocating under five or six blankets. Once you were in bed, you were in bed.)

Here, have a picture of my stepgrandaddy's old home place.

Maybe I'll make up a whole post about temperature control or something.

/rant out

$50.00 - car insurance. I don't carry comprehensive on this car since it's an old beater I picked up for a thousand.

$75.00 - Cable. I think that should finally catch it up. I called the 1-800 number last week and said $40 was my limit for cable and internet so they worked with me. Perhaps I will eventually buy one of those outside TV antennae thingies and an HD picker upper thingy and let the cable completely go. But jeebus, someone's going to have to go out there and figure out how to set the damned antennae up- dig a whole or pour some concrete or get on the roof or something - and that someone is going to be me. Rargh.

Man. The kids were a bit pissed when they figured out we don't have cartoon channels anymore, but that's something they'll get over. I didn't even have cable when I was a kid. They didn't run it out that far.

I also didn't have air conditioning or central heat, but there's just a point where you have to decide which part of the civilized world you're going to hang onto and I choose to hang on to the part that maintains nice temperatures in my tin box.

$40.00 - Tuba Girl's band trip. I'm getting close to finishing this bitching ass trip off.

Things I have bought out of this check:
$10.00 - storage bowls. I can't remember the exact price because I can't figure out what it is on the receipt.
Maybe I could have saved old margarine or cool whip bowls, but that would require buying things like that on some regular basis.

$3.66 - duct tape. If you can't duct it, fuck it.
$7.96 - plastic sheeting. I plan on going full white trash this winter and wrapping up my useless windows in plastic wrap.
$5.70 - dry cleaning Tuba Girl's uniform again. Her final competition for this season is this Saturday so I should be able to get by the rest of the season with Dryel.
$33.37 -gas for this week
$1.92

That leaves me with approximately $84.09 until next Friday.

There are things I've paid for that I could have just said no to - Wendy's, field trips, tights, hat wearing, and band trips. But honestly, the only thing I'm really edgy about is the trip to Wendy's. It wasn't necessary and we went because I didn't want to cook.

The rest of it - meh. I want my kids to enjoy life some. On top of that, the day I actually say "No" to donating a dollar to a children's cancer society is the day I should just wrap myself up into my misanthropic blanket and refuse to get off the couch.

Stinky Mother Fucker: Trauma at Save-A-Lot

2009-10-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

To clarify, Stinky Motherfucker will most likely be a multi-post story as our . . . acquaintance has been long and varied. Also, these stories have very little to do with frugality (or my lack thereof), money management, parenting, or anything else vaguely related to this blog. These will just be the tales of a boundary-lacking man who seems to haunt the cheaper grocery stores and most anywhere else I ever thought I may go to shop or wait in peace.

I cannot begin to actually know when I met Stinky Motherfucker or why in the hell he keeps showing up in my world other than the fact that a county of 50,000 people is obviously not large enough to prevent our accidental meetings.

To recount our mutual "friends" or "neighbors" requires some thought as the relationships here often overlap. The earliest I can recall having met Stinky Motherfucker was sometime around 1998. He married or shacked up with (I'm not sure as to which) a woman a couple of years older than me who used to attend the MethodistBaptistGossipist church I once attended as a teenager.

In the early years that I knew her, she was a nice looking young woman; neither being ugly nor beautiful. Rather, she was a country looking sort of girl with nice hair, good teeth, big cheeks, and was well-kept in overall appearance. I think the years of being with Stinky Motherfucker must have taken their toll on her as the last I'd seen her she was missing several teeth, developed a monstrous gunt that lapped to her knees, and could never seem to find clothes that fit outside of knit fabrics. It was a hard downfall and I realized just how far she'd fallen when I once saw her in the Piggly Wiggly wearing a dirt bead necklace. Hereafter, I have always referred to her as Wife Thing.

A dirt bead necklace, for those uninformed, is something a grown woman should never, ever be seen wearing in public. Many children will spend entire days outside and develop one, but a child should not leave the house looking in such a way. A good parent will always wash some of the crud off a child before making an impromptu run into town.

This type of necklace is simply a collection of dirt and sweat that has collected into the crevices of the neck until the gunk takes on the appearance of a dark choker-like necklace. I don't know what happened to Wife Thing, but it must have been some horrible pyschological disturbance to allow one's self to appear in public in such a manner.

So I first met Stinky Motherfucker through Wife Thing. At one point, Stinky Motherfucker worked with my boy heathens' father at a local factory. He was known as Stinky there because it seemed that he was rather stinky.

Sometime later, Stinky Motherfucker, Wife Thing, and their children moved next door to my granparents, Great Daddy and Grand Marie. It seems that Stinky and Wife Thing's personal hygiene extended to their house keeping skills and things were not well in their home. They seemed to distress my grandmother.

I have, over a period of years, run into Stinky Motherfucker at the elementary school, the doctor's office, the circus at the National Guard Armory, grocery stores, and various other places. In all these years, Stinky Motherfucker's appearance has not changed. Whereas Wife Thing was once a woman of some seeming personal self-respect, it seems Stinky Motherfucker was born wearing a Chester the Molester mustache, 1984 tinted metal-framed eyeglasses, a scrawny and greasy ponytail, baseball cap, beer gut, and dirty plaid jacket.

While I try not to spend my life stressing on people's personal appearance because my own seems to at times disturb people - my best friend's father once asking her if I was on drugs and mumbling something about my hair - Stinky Motherfucker's adult rendition of Pigpen is just one more thing to add to the list of personal and social skills he so dearly lacks.

I painfully became aware of Stinky Motherfucker's boundary issues in the produce aisle of the local Save-a-lot one evening in the spring of 2004. It was one of those rare occasions where I had the opportunity to shop without children tagging along to beg and scream for all the brightly colored things within their grubby little reach. Living a baby-filled life for a couple of years by that point, I was pretty happy about stolen moments of solitude over by the frozen vegetable aisle.

Stinky was walking in as I was walking out and he nodded to me. Not recognizing him, I vaguely nodded in return and moved the largest key on my keyring to sit between my first and second fingers. I did not know him and he has all the appearance of a type of man you should be prepared to stab in the eye with a key while simultaneously kneeing him in the groin. I thought it best to be prepared.

I'd not been in the store long before he came back in and found me perusing shitty heads of lettuce.

"Don't I know you?" he asked.

Looking up to stare at him, I responded that I wasn't too sure about that. Stinky began to repeat his litany of former run-ins, whom he'd married, and the fact that he lived next door to my grandparents. My oft-misfiring synapses connected all the dots and I put my key away.

We talked of normal things for an all-too brief moment. Everything after that I've tried over the past-half decade to erase from my dirtied mind. I've only been partially successful.

Why is it that I always remember the things I want to forget, but forget the things I'd prefer to remember? I wish I'd spent more time discovering my Grandmother's secret. She once forgot an entire husband. I should have paid more attention to her thought processes before she died.

It began with, "Wife Thing left me for some guy from Michigan that she met on the Internet."

By offering my deepest sympathies to Stinky Motherfucker, I apparently gave permission for him to step out of the realm of normal conversation into the depths of the stinkiness of his life. I can't recall the exact conversation, but I remember all to well the main subjects and if I have to spend my life with those images stuck in my head, then so do you.

I can't remember who had the children during all this romantic shuffle, but there was something about a trailer, a leaky pipe, and Wife Thing having s-e-x with Michigan Boy while Stinky Motherfucker was on the phone with her.

He got to the part about how much Wife Thing liked cunnilingus just as a white-haired old codger using his Save-A-Lot buggy as a walker shuffled past us. I briefly wondered if I could be cited for public indecency just by being a non-vocal party to this conversation. Then I wondered why in the hell I was standing over by some shitty lettuce listening to this fucking freak detail the sexual exploits of himself and his Wife Thing.

Maybe I am just too Southern in some ways - I don't know how to cut people off for fear of being rude. And what is it about me that sometimes induces people to tell me the weirdest, freakiest parts of their lives? Do I look as if I could empathize with a man whose wife has run off with another man and then had sex where he could hear? (And why didn't this creepy mother fucker HANG UP THE PHONE?!?) Maybe underneath the shaggy hair and my crazy eyes, there's some sort of secret look that states I Give a Shit.

The truth of the matter is, I think I just love a good train wreck. I couldn't stop myself from listening. Couldn't pick my head of shriveled lettuce off the shelf and just walk away because this type of freakery can't just happen to anyone on an everday basis. For some horrible, dark reason it was up to me to listen and record Stinky Motherfucker's loss in my own already-addled brain.

Also, on the one hand, I feel rather sad for Stinky Motherfucker, Wife Thing, and their children. How can people manage to walk through life not knowing when to shut the fuck up? Where were their parents when they were supposed to be teaching you about personal space and how to read the body language of others? If there was ever a need for a handy dandy Social Cues Educator, these people are desperately in need on one.

Then when I step back from my socialist bleeding heart and look at the whole picture, that's just one creepy mother fucker and I sure as hell am never going to go hang out at their house no matter how many times he's informed me where they live and entreated me to "stop by and hang out." Especially when I know their family has had a recurring lice issue. Getting lice is one thing, but being known as the family who keeps lice is not something to encourage social visiting outside of the grocery store.

So that's why I don't go in Save-A-Lot anymore. While I can't resist ogling the bizarre, I do try to reduce the opportunities because I am trying to be an upstanding citizen. It helps if I don't actively seek out freakery. The fact that Save-A-Lot has shitty produce has nothing to do with it.

For the record, Stinky Motherfucker and Wife Thing did work out their issues in some sort of way. I don't know how exactly, but I know it did involve keeping Michigan Boy in the house for a while. I don't like to think about anything past that.

Pardon my Progress - of sorts

2009-10-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

It came upon me today that I must have a three column blog. I don't know why, but the idea possessed me so now I'm in the middle of trying to put it all back together. I'm rather sad that I can't seem to get my quick response clicky thingies to show up. They're showing in my settings, but aren't showing on the actual blahg.

Also, I want one of those tag /topic cloud thingies. Where would one fine a nice code for that? I'm too idiotic and old to do anything much past cut and paste since the last time I took a computer class the Apple IIe was the most up-to-date thing available.

Thanks!

P.S. I don't moderate the responses, so please feel to post. I don't, however, accept responses from anonymous posters. My personal opinion is that if you really want to comment, you can at least take five minutes of your time to create a troll with a name. Nothing looks more insane than a blog response from all kinds of "anonymous" people who all have widely differing views. Jeebus. Provide me a little entertainment. Give me a name so I can make up horrible things about you in my head.

Dinner Fail

2009-10-20T08:51:00.000-07:00

Doesn't Apple Cheddar Soup sound like the bomb? I thought so because I love apples and I love cheese. I thought, "What more does dinner need?" Well, dinner seems to require a close attention to details because it turns out I made a big pile of shit that no one could technically eat.

Everything started off really well. The onions were nicely sauteed, but things got a little hairy when I couldn't figure out what to do with the apple cider vinegar. If you read the directions, the person never clearly states to add it to the potatoes.

I decided to be adventurous and add it during the initial potato stage anyway because the directions say to bring to a boil and you cannot boil onions and potatoes in a tablespoon of olive oil.

Boiling vinegar is really rather sort of horrible, even if it is apple cider. The kids were freaking out over the smell and pronounced it inedible before I ever even got the soup off the stove. See? That's how they are. Always complaining and they had no idea I had to add a milk roux thingy at the end that I was secretly hoping was going to magically neutralize the apple cider vinegar. Just have patience, little heathens. Dinner will be magical. Spectacular. Cheesy.

Secretly, I wondered if I was killing us all by boiling this crap and who ever thought cooking with vinegar was wonderful in the first place? But I long ago learned that one should be careful about voicing self doubt out loud. Most assuredly, it only provides people with actual voiced fodder to confirm my idiocy. I've learned to just pretend like I know exactly what I'm doing at all times. More times than not, I am probably wrong. But at least once every great while, I'll come off with a genius maneuver and am restored to semi-normalcy.

Except the milk did not neutralize the vinegar and I was stuck with a vinegary, shitty soup of magnificent shitty proportions.

Later, after I declared it inedible and we had sandwiches followed up by a fruit crisp that did turn out nicely, I spent a lot of time staring at the recipe wondering where I went wrong. Some of the comments stated the soup was "bland." I thought perhaps this particular person had dead taste buds because while it didn't taste good, it was far from bland.

I've included the recipe so you can see for yourself where I went wrong. Apparently, vinegar had nothing to do with this recipe.

Did I ever mention I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder some years ago? Usually, I manage to roam through life one way or the other, but on several occasions I get snared in the details.

I think we'll try this again next week with actual apple cider. I'm going to have to surprise the kids with it somehow, though, because they're dead set against it after last nights fiasco.

Ingredients

1/2 cup finely chopped onion 1 tablespoon olive oil 2 med baking potatoes, peeled and diced 2 cups apple cider 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme, crushed 1/2 teaspoon salt dash cayenne pepper 1 med apple, peeled and chopped 1/2 cup milk 2 teaspoons corn starch 4 oz sharp cheddar cheese, shredded ( I use Cabot 75% reduced fat sharp cheddar)

Directions

In a large sauce pan, cook onion in olive oil over medium heat until tender. Stir in potatoes, thyme, salt, and cayenne pepper. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Add apple. Return to a boil. Simmer covered for 5 minutes or until potatoes are tender. ( I use a hand held blender to puree the soup now as my family prefers not to have it chunky. It can be left chunky, though.) In a small bowl, combine milk and cornstarch, stir into soup. (I add Fibersure to this also, to add fiber to our diet. This can be left out but will change the calorie and fiber count of the recipe.) Cook and stir until bubbly. Slowly add cheese, whisking until cheese is melted. Serve in bowls, top with apple slices and peppercorns. (Garnishments not included in nutritional count.) Makes six 1/2 cup servings.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time!

2009-10-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

People tend to spend a lot of time preoccupied with food. I first began to realize this some years ago when I was an office assistant.

Around 11:30 every morning, some case manager would roam from office to office and ask, "Where are you going for lunch?" Except no one ever asked me where I was going for lunch because I rarely ever went out to eat. After roaming around enough offices, the case manager would finally decide she liked where a particular case manager was going and send out his pick up order with her.

Weaks Grocery grew to be rather popular when he put in a hot pick up deli or something along those lines. Of course, it was a bit of a shuffle - picking up lunch. Weaks is located in a poverty area of town so the case manager who went would have to be one who didn't have a lot of clients in the area. Also, Weaks was a well-known area for drug dealers to situate themselves. So while everyone was secretly hoping to get the drug dealers out, everyone secretly wanted Weaks to keep his nose clean so they'd have a convenient lunch pick up.

These conversations took place everyday for over five and a half years. I bet if I were to hang around in the hallways tomorrow morning, it would be the same thing. It's okay though. I've come to think it's normal.

I hang out on a bitchy mommy board and someone is always talking about food. WFD? or What's for Dinner are commong everyday threads. I've stopped reading them a long time ago because someone is always talking about their fresh baked French bread with the crispy crust, the wild rice hand picked from the paddies that morning, and the succulent foi gras basting in a roux of white wine and EVOO. Or something.

I don't know. I can't cook. Well, technically, I can. I just don't do it very well. Basically, I can crank out some sort of one dish meal that the kids may or may not eat. They hated the African peanut stew but loved the spinach lasagna. One week, they adore chicken noodle soup, the next week it's like I'm trying to feed them shit on a stick.

If it's made in one dish, one pot, or one pan, then I am a generally semi-successful cook. Add a couple of side dishes, and life goes straight to hell. Something will burn. Heathens One through Three have never accepted Cajun Blackened Mac and Cheese as a real dish. So we're one dish meal kind of people with some raw vegetables thrown to the side.

That's the theory, anyway. Some days are just shit and we end up eating shit food like hot dogs or lunchables. Finals week, for the record, were known as "Someone Better Heat up the Pizza because Mommy has Lost her Damned Marbles trying to Pound out Three Papers and is Reduced to Wearing a Hat because Someone Lost the Hairbrush" Week. It's nice to not have to worry about papers and finals these days. I'm trying to get back into the groove of being an actual parent and not a parent/student.

Rain's schedule caught me completely off guard this year and I didn't realize that she'd actually need food and stuff on Friday nights. I suppose I thought for the cash I'm putting out all over the place for band, a nice dinner somewhere would magically present itself for her. Oh well.

I spent a lot of last minute afternoons trying to pick things that would travel well and still be filling. They weren't very cost effective, but I didn't have the actual cash to sign her up for the pre-game pizzas. I finally sort of have it worked out with cashews, rice cakes (which are not filling, but she wants them), water, and a lunchable.

We have a lot of stand-bys we've developed for days we don't get home in time to cook. They include:
Barbeque chicken and fresh vegetables
Spaghetti and Garlic Bread
Chili
Breakfast
Tacos
Chicken Noodle Soup

(If we never quite make it home, I'm not above buying lunchables and a fruit bowl. I feel like an ass handing out lunchables for dinner, but what in the hell else do you eat on the go if you're too strung out to remember to pack some sandwiches? Usually what happens is I have no idea we were ever actually going to be gone past 7:30 and then I'm all screwed. I'm catching the hang of it, though.)

The aforementioned meals (not the lunchables) are things everyone is sick of eating, so I've been trying to shake it up with new recipes. If they're worth a shit, I'll let you know. Of course, it could also be that my menu plan is full of absolutely wonderful dishes, but either I can't prepare them or my children won't like them. It's a garuantee that at least one of the three will voice displeasure over the evening meal. I keep telling them this is not Burger King; you can't have it your way.

It seems not to matter so I always have a lot of standbys for the heathen that won't eat. Peanut butter sandwiches, apples, lettuce, cereal. They can take their pick, but it must be something they can prepare themselves because my name is not Mel and they can pretty well kiss my grits.

I'm writing this blog about food and I have no idea where in the hell I'm going with it. What do you people want to know?

I went shopping yesterday evening. Between Walmart and Kroger and two grabbing, begging boys, I walked out with $250 worth of food. That will last us approximately two or three weeks, depending.

I try to make it a nice mix of healthy shit and some plain shit shit. Like Ramen noodles. I consider Ramen noodles shit food. Ramen is the shit you eat when you can't afford to buy anything else. But they damned love them so I buy a 12 pack box each month. I figure if I let them have some shit food, then they won't freak out when they get older and discover there is a such a thing as Ramen. Here, have a grocery list:

Fruits/Vegetables

2 heads of Romaine lettuce
7 pounds of pears - They were on sale at Kroger and Tuba Girl really loves them.
8 pounds of Granny Smith apples. - On sale at Kroger and I have some plans for them. I might pick up another bunch of Honey Crisp apples before they go out of season, but they aren't something I can buy every time I go shopping.
Broccoli sprouts - to go on the salad and on my mary jane bread
Chives - for baked potatoes. I actually managed to grow some chives once. Very briefly.
Green onions
Sugar snap peas - for the salad
3 bags of baby carrots - 10 for $10 at Kroger. The kids like carrots and I plan to add it to some shit since they were on sale.
4 cukes
3 lbs of bananas - potassium is good for you and shit. And did you know you can open a banana from the bottom? I had no idea.
baby spinach

Grains

2 loaves of Arnold Healthy Multi-Grain Bread. - BOGO at Kroger. One for now, one goes in the freezer. It has three grams of fiber and two grams of protien so that's not bad. Plus, it doesn't have any high fructose corn syrup in it. I try to keep the HFCS to a minimum.
Hemp bread - that one is mine for lunch.
Hodgson Mill whole what spirals - BOGO at Kroger. I have a dinner planned for the bitches if Tuba Girl will stop cooking them when I'm not looking.
12 pack of Ramen noodles - shit food.
Brown rice
1 huge ass bag of Malt-o-Meal fake cheerios

Dairy

2 packs of Trix yogurt - HFCS. No like. Kids love.
4 pack of Greek yogurt, honey flavored - I try to expand my horizons a bit. I bought some vanilla Greek yogurt last month that tasted like shit. I was promptly told I was eating it wrong so I thought I'd try it one more time.
Daisy sour cream - You can't have gringo chili without sour cream. And baked potatoes. I've tried the store brand sour creams and they all seem to suck ass.
2- 8 ounces of Great Value pepperjack cheese. - Damn, I love pepperjack cheese.
1 lb of Great Value butter - I try to use the real shit because it's better for you.
3 packs of Blue Bonnet margarine sticks - more shit for my Christmas baking.
2 lbs of Great Value sharp cheddar block cheese - We are cheese hounds. I adore cheese. Extra sharp cheddar, pepper jack, goat, feta, bri, mozarella. Cheese frigging rocks.
1 gallon of Great Value skim milk.

Meat

cheap ass sausage patties
Wal-mart brand ham
Five pounds of ground beef
1 pack of frozen chicken breasts

Canned/Other

4 cans of Bush's chili beans (on sale, usually I buy the cheap shit) - HA! The weather is finally cold enough for my special gringo chili.
3 jars of extra crunchy Great Value peanut butter - We don't actually eat that much peanut butter in three weeks. I'm stocking up for my Christmas gift giving. My balls are very popular.
2 boxes of chocolate jello pudding
dried thyme
cumin
black pepper
sea salt
Great Value olive oil
1 Great Value can of diced tomatoes.
2 packs of Buitoni tortellini - I recently discovered two out of three heathens will inhale tortellini. Maybe it's something I'll learn to make (hahahahaha) but for right now, it makes a quick easy meal for hardcore days.
Great Value brand cashews
1 pack of Halloween candy - for Tedrick, the Library Halloween Pumpkin
1 pack of almond bark - stocking up for Christmas balls.
Baking Soda
Taco shells

Looking at my list, I realize there are certain things I do tend to buy name brand over store brand, such as sour cream, yogurt, bread, and tortellini. Most of the name brand stuff I bought outside of the previous listed were on sale and comparable to store brand stuff, but the other things are things I won't budge on either because it really does taste better or because of the ingredients. I'm not a master ingredients person, but I am constantly trying to cut the HFCS back as much as possible and you'd be surprised how many different types of yogurt and bread have it. Why? Why in the hell do I need processed corn in my dairy?

And a request:

Goldfish crackers, 2 packs of fruit roll ups, 1 pack of rice krispie treats - shit food. My mom picks up my boys for me every afternoon. This is the only thing I really miss about my former life. I was usually very successful in rearranging my life around their schedule so I could pick them up from school and take them home. They'd usually snack on whatever was available. My mom, in addition to picking up my children for me, does a lot of running for other people so they rarely ever go back to her house after she picks them up. She requested portable snacks that wouldn't be very messy. So far, this is what I've come up. I try to vary it up and have done breakfast bars, peanut butter crackers and other things, but the smaller heathens were with me this afternoon and this is what I caved to. This should last a couple of weeks.

So this is my request. Does anyone have any ideas about snacks that are portable, not very messy, healthier, and cheaper? Apples, bananas, and most fruits are prone to being squished and leave behind cores, peels, etc that she really doesn't want in her car. (Which is not really anything I want in my car, either.) Sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, trail mix are things prone to be thrown all over the car so that's kind of meh. I'm not opposed to making something, but it can't be complicated and needs to be shelf stable. KTHXBY.

Angel Food Ministries

2009-10-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

I briefly mentioned Angel Food Ministries in my last post and thought I'd give a little more detail.

Angel Food Ministries is a non-denominational organization started about 15 years ago in Georgia. It is supposed to be non-profit, but if I remember, there were some funky issues with nepotism and crazy high salaries for organization leaders.

However, if you are looking for a relatively budget-friendly grocery option, Angel Food may be something you want to look into. I'll be honest, I don't like a lot of their food and quit using it some years ago when I realized I don't know why in the hell I would eat breaded chicken and steak except for the fact that I was extremely broke and looking for some way to feed my family.

I wasn't even quite sure what I was supposed to do with breaded meat. Bake it? Fry it? Grill it? I think the correct answer is supposed to be "fry it" but I do not fry due to personal safety reasons. I try to get all snippety with people in real life and tell them I don't fry because it isn't healthy. That is a good point, but the truth is frying is a damned dangerous sport. I don't like to participate.

I think their menus have improved a little and they do have things in their "options" boxes that I want. Since my mother has kept my children so much for me this fall so I could go to work and volunteer with Tuba Girl's band stuff, my children have eaten more than a few dinners at Chez de Granny. To compensate for what she spends on their meals, I have started buying an Angel Food box for them each month. It costs $30 and is supposed to feed a family of four for a week.

Though it seems they aren't jamming lots of breaded meat into the box, it's still pretty heavy on the meat side. This month's $30 box included chicken tenders, fish sticks, a center cut of ham, a pound of groud beef, steak stir fry strips, and 1.5 pounds of New York strip steaks.

I'll be honest. Outside of hamburger, salmon, ground venison and chicken, I don't really know what in the hell to do with meat. Pork chops, roast beef, tongue, brisket, lamb, duck, turkey - these are things that confuse me. I can cook a roast beef, but everytime I buy one I end up staring at it wondering where on the cow's ass it used to be located. The rest of it is just a mystery.

I like meat, but I don't like large lumps of it. I prefer it not even resemble the animal it used to be affixed to. That's why I always buy boneless or ground. So the Angel Food box with it's boney hams and steaks is just out of my scope of edible right now. If I really had to pinch a food budget out somewhere, I'd probably utilize it more and get over my boned and/or breaded meat issue. Well, actually, I have gone throught that phase and I'd rather not run back through it any time soon.

So while the Angel Food box doesn't really work for me at home, my mom usually knows what to do with it so the kids get something to eat and I don't bust her grocery budget.

On the other hand, I calculated the cost of the fruit offered in October's Special #4 and considered it an excellent deal for my house. I figure I probably got about $30 worth of fruit and vegetables for $22. That's a savings of $8 for shit we're actually going to eat.

Anyone can utilize Angel Food. In fact, most volunteers I've met really want everyone to use it because the greater their numbers, the greater their buying power. So I really do encourage everyone to give it a look over every once in a while to see if they're interested in any of the specials.

I did not use Angel Food for a long time because in order to buy the "specials," each buyer was required to buy the "Signature box" (see the breaded meat issue earlier in this blog). However, it has recently come to my attention that one is no longer required to buy the Signature box so I can actually just buy all the fruit my fridge will hold and never have to really consider the meat issue.

I find the fruit to be comparable to grocery store fruit. The fruit isn't abused, mishandled, bruised or mushy. It's no honey crisp apples, but so few things are in this world.

Since this is a Christian charitable organization, a buyer does most usually go to a local church to purchase the food by a certain deadline. (Somewhere early in the second week of each month, if I remember correctly.) The food is then shipped to the churches and the buyer arrives early the following Saturday with her own box or bags to recieve the items. In the past, it used to take two weeks for the food to return instead of six days and this was something else that turned a lot of would-be buyers off as two weeks is a long time to wait for food when you're on a tight budget.

Some people don't want to go because they don't want to deal with churches. Others don't want to go because they don't like the host church. The first host church here was actually full of batshit crazy fundies and I wasn't too big on picking up my food from there because, well, they were batshit crazy.

I don't care if that first one was giving away free expired bread from Kroger, there are just certain levels of batshit I'm willing to deal with and they were just off somewhere enough for me to give it up. I don't remember what they did, but it was enough to turn me away from free coffee cake.

But every church is a different experience and I've rather liked the last two host sites I've utilized over the years. Other than the experience with my first host site, most volunteers are pretty friendly, outgoing people. They usually tuck in a little recipe planner and Angel Food Ministry booklet into my box. Sometimes I may get a little extra Jesus literature, but no one, so far, has tried to lay hands on me and suck out the demons.

In the end I'm relatively cool with Jesus literature. They're doing their thing and I'm doing mine. I figure if I invite myself to utilizing their charitable organization, I'm sure not going to bitch about a little passive soul saving technique.

So there is my review on Angel Food Ministries. There's damn good deals to be found in these times of woe and want.

Come back tomorrow when I go over my grocery list in painful detail!

Oxycontin mixed with Jack D. Put it in a cup, it looks like ice tea.

2009-10-15T18:51:00.000-07:00

Seriously. It's been a bitch of a week. A brief overview for your perusal.

Saturday
Chaperoned a band trip to a competition. I was pleased with how well those little flag brigade girls behaved. When one parent found out I was chaperoning the brigade bus, she patted me on the shoulder and said, "Good luck." That leaves one a little apprehensive about how matters may go.

Maybe the lady was confused because they behaved well. No one was knifed. I never saw any brass knuckles or people bent over mirrors sucking up mysterious powders with a straw. It wasn't anything like the Dangerous Minds idea I had going on.

We finally made it home around 1 A.M.

Sunday
I don't remember much of Sunday very well. It turns out that hanging out in busses until 1 A.M. is not good for me.

Maybe I went over and cleaned my mom's house. Like I said, my people do a lot for me and I try to do for them. I don't think I did very much, though.

Also, an older gentleman I used to "sit" with last year died. He was 94 years old and he hadn't been doing well for a while. I've never had any really nursing assistant experience, but I was in desperate need of a job since my last employer up and died on me and my gentleman needed someone to heat up his coffee and help him bathe. He was also a special friend to my eight-year-old DMan.

I spent half the day trying to decide whether to tell him then or wait until closer to the funeral because I didn't want him to be upset all week at school. I finally opted to tell him on Sunday because I didn't want him to find out from someone else or realize that I'd withheld information from him.

DMan experienced a good bit of dying the summer of 2008. Death is not something you ever want your family to experience, but it happens and we have to deal with it the best we can. I lost two uncles (one of them being my employer), a great uncle, a cousin, and a chiropractor. While I didn't take my children to all of the funerals, they did attend a couple of wakes at their request.

DMan was upset about his special friend and it took a good while for him to work through the initial sadness. I emailed his teacher to let her know what was going on with him so he didn't have to try to explain it on Monday.

Monday
My daughter magically developed a staph infection on her leg that required an after work trip to the doctor and antibiotics. This is my second kid this year to develop this shit so I asked the doctor if I was doing something wrong.

I bleach all the sheets, bleach the tub, bleach towels, bandaids and bandaids and bandaids, think about bleaching out my brains, tell them not to stick their fingers up their nose and flick their boogers, yet I don't seem to have achieved very much. He said there wasn't very much I could do. Basically, he said "shit happens" but put it in nice medical terms. I'm still thinking about giving them a can of clorox wipes to use at school.

All four of us actually went through a round of this about three of four years ago. It started off with Dman who developed some weird, disgusting, greeny black puss thing one summer after being bitten by some kind of insect on a Friday. By Saturday evening, it was really freaking me the hell out because I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Fearing that he'd been bitten some necrotizing mosquito and his leg was going to rot off before Monday, I took him to the emergency room.

The doctors and nurses all agreed it was some sort of spider bite and they'd been seeing a lot of these "spider bites."

Then Tuba Girl was bitten by some flesh eating fucker a couple of months later and the doctor said it was a spider bite.

I spent months beating the hell out of necrotizing spiders. Previously, I was a sort of live and let live chick. Stay out of my line of vision and you were safe. Now I was Arachno Hunter.

Months later, I developed some weird pimple in my nose after a snotty cold. When it started to eat my face, I realized that either these were very tiny, sneaky spiders or there was an entirely different problem at hand.

After having my children treated by one emergency room doctor and a couple of pediatricians, I finally had someone tell me all about cellulitis. It was a wonderfully enlightening experience and I now I want to run around shouting, "UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!" So that was Monday.

Tuesday
Tuesday was looking good until the flat tire incident so that put me off. After I changed the tire, I splurged and took the kids to Wendy's. I was damned tired and I can't afford to drink to cover the stress of weeks like this. Besides, it was for a good cause. Sort of. The local area schools routinely partner with restaurants and name it "KAR's Elementary School Night!"

(Okay, well the school is not named KAR Elementary, but the real name is not something I'm going to share with strangers who may turn out to be freakier than the people I know in real life. Besides, I've been a KAR Elementary parent for over ten years so it's my school.)

A share of the proceeds go to whichever school is being sponsored by the restaurant. I was tired. I was starting to get really pissed off about how long this week was shaping up to be and I sure as hell didn't feel like cooking. So I tossed $14 into a vat of greasy fries and called it an evening. The boy heathens also recieved homework passes. It was worth it to me.

Wednesday
Wild Boy had his follow up appointment with his pediatrician at 9AM. Thankfully, it wasn't a long appointment and I had plenty of time to take him to school and get to work on time.

Things were clicking along pretty well so I stopped at the Family Dollar to pick up some toilet paper, tooth brushes,and shit since it was on the way to work. The thing I discovered about that Wal-Mart brand of toilet paper is that one pack only lasts a week. If hadn't bought more on Wednesday, we'd have been wiping our asses with the stray dogs out in the yard.

When I got back in the car, I realized I couldn't find my phone. After a very long and gas-wasting trip around the county to retrace my steps, I was forced to go work phoneless.

I found it later. Apparently I dropped it in my front yard when I was in a hurry and it spent the day being rained upon by the forces of my life. However, much like myself, it came through a little damaged but still serviceable.

Thursday

Picked up some Honeycrisp apples. Honeycrisp apples are the frigging bomb diggity, yo. If you've never had a Honeycrisp apple, then you need to pick one up today. These apples only hit the stores in the fall and then you don't get anymore until the next year. The name says it all. Honey. Crisp. Apple.

These aren't those mealy mouthed McIntoshes or piss ant little Granny Smiths. These are apples. Real apples. I wish I had a Honeycrisp apple tree. If I rubbed a lamp and a big blue genie popped out and told me I could have anything I wanted, I'd wish for a huge orchard of ever-bearing Honeycrisp apples trees.

Where was I? Oh, my boring blog about my boring week.

Leroy the Lover showed up at work today. Leroy is a fucking 65-year-old nutbag who seems to have taken some sort of "special shine" to me. The last time he was at the library, he left me with a very special religious tract about how there are real angels (good ones and bad ones!) right here on Earth! I wouldn't mind the religious tract so much, but Leroy is a sort of . . . prophet of the Binny Hinn-TBN network type. Also, Leroy just over shares his particular world view. It's a world view deeply in need of Thorazine. I am ever so pleased.

After hearing about Leroy's life for ten minutes or so and catching a definite whiff of the special ass funk/dog shit breath aroma of Sun laundry detergent, I abandoned him to Matt the Library Assistant while I went and alphabetized all the books. Again.

After work, I took my Tuba Girl back to the doctor to check up on her leprosy. Cellulitis. Staph. Whatever. It's all starting to feel the same in terms of UNCLEAN.

I was ever so happy to discover that Stinky Motherfucker takes his children to the same doctor. I do not have time to explain Stinky Motherfucker. To give a brief overview, Stinky Motherfucker is that one damned dude that seems to randomly show up from nowhere and have no fucking concept of boundaries and personal space. One day, I may devote an entire post to Stinky Motherfucker, but not today. I spend a lot of time wondering what I've done in a past life to warrant having this person popping up in all the places I go.

Stinky Motherfucker finally left after hinting at needing a ride home. I'm sorry. Stinky Motherfucker and his strep throat filled children must take the Stinky Motherfucker cab. I do not want to be in the doctor's office next week for strep throat.

Finally, we were the last ones left in the lobby when the nurse noticed us. It turns out no one pulled our file, put us down as having come in, and seemingly lost our initial sign in sheet. There was nothing to indicate we were there other than our very tired presence in the lobby. Yaaaaay.

Tuba Girl is healing nicely. Tuba Girl also needs to come back in Saturday morning for a real check up and the Hep A shot. We're late on that one.

As we didn't leave the doctor's office until 7:30 PM, I did not have time to cook dinner so I picked up sandwich shit for dinner from Wal-Hell since it's right across the ever loving street from the doctor's office and went home.

My cellphone calendar sounded a little reminder around 8 PM. I am due to start my period tomorrow which inevitably explains how the world has ceased to rotate on it's normal axis.

Plans for the Weekend
I will be manning the concession stand at the high school football game until sometime around 11PM tomorrow evening.

Saturday, we will have to pick up the Angel Food by 8:30 AM, bring it home and have Tuba Girl at her doctor's appoint by 10 AM. The children's paternal side of the family has scheduled a family reunion for later in the evening. I still have not gone grocery shopping at all this week. I've been snatching random shit like apples and sandwich ingredients.

Maybe I will go clean my mom's house on Sunday, but this week is seriously starting to get to me and I want sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

On an up note, I will try to remember to post something tomorrow that Mr. J wrote in 1978. Mr. J is the guy who volunteers to keep our library lawn nice and flowery. He also lost both of his legs to undiagnosed diabetes a few years ago. It went undiagnosed because most construction workers don't make a whole lot of money and most construction companies are small affairs that can't afford to offer insurance.There may have been resources to help him, but I'd guess they're hard for a guy from a farm in backwoods Georgia with a limited education to locate.

But you know, Mr. J is like the most awesome damned dude ever. I don't know if he ever gets depressed or wants to tell people to screw off, but that is one guy who really plugs away at making every day count. He's big on being a solid member of his community and wants to serve as inspiration and motivator to the people around him. He rocks.

Put Your Money in Someone Else's Mouth

2009-10-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

I was going to post a well-researched blog on the effects of imperialism in developing nations, but I'm busy so this is what you get.

I've read a lot of nattering banalities about how we should be thankful we have so much more than a large majority of the world population. I don't discount gratefulness. I am extremely grateful, but there are lot of issues with comparing the economies and lifestyles of countries with vast economic differences.

Let me begin by stating that I will not be talking about "third world countries." Third world was a coin termed sometime after the second world war to describe the state of the world with the US and economically leading countries being called First World countries while the Soviet Union retained the right to be called a Second World country all on its own. Everything else was considered a Third World country. With the fall of the Soviet Union, this no longer applied so countries were eventually shuffled into developed nations or developing/emerging nations depending on their GDP. So I will be talking about developing nations.

I do not on any level disagree that the the majority of Americans are much better off than the majority of the world.

Sanitation laws have been passed so we, the common people, aren't allowed to dump our trash in our rivers. (Though these laws don't really seem to do much about big industry polluting our environment.) Even when those laws are breached, we have access to fairly clean water through water treatment plants.

Government insurance is offered to those of us too destitute or incapacitated to go out and earn it. More than a few people fall through the cracks, but the essential safety net is there.

Food programs insure that the least among us do not starve or are forced to live on substandard and nutritionally lacking diets.

Housing projects, while sometimes not up to standards they should be, provide many with basic shelter.

In this country, most state child protective services agencies require parents to provide adequate housing, food, clothing, and medical care. If a parent is not able to provide what is considered the basic elements of child rearing, then there are resources available to help provide those necessities.

Parents in the United States are required to provide the basics for their families. By failing to provide what has been outlined in CAPTA, parents can be held liable for neglect. Parents in developing nations often cannot provide these basics, and as far as I know, they are not legally required to do so nor are there government-designed programs to help the destitute provide child necessities. So to compare differing national economies and how to exist or subsist within each one when there are different societal requirements is a failure in logic.

I truly wish that one day all nations will have the ability to provide the same, if not better, requirements for its citizens. Adequate shelter, education, consistent medical care, healthy food and clean water should never be considered luxuries. They are a right for every single human on earth.

Until such a time as this becomes possible, there are many organizations struggling to improve the living conditions in developing nations. I suppose if we're all going to spend time marveling at how rich our nations are, then we should be utilzing our wealth to help these nations lesser than us.

(Unless of course, all this talk was just a shame factor like when you tell your child to eat his mashed potatoes because there are starving children in China. In which case, I want to know exactly how this works because then some poor American kid is stuffed to the brim with more mashed potatoes than he can handle while the poor Chinese kid is sitting over there wishing he had some mashed potatoes. Pretty ineffectual in doing anything for anyone.)

So without further rambling, here are links to charitable organizations I've researched and put together specifically for those who are truly concerned about the plight of the malnourished and underhoused in developing nations.

< . . . >

Heifer.org - Named one of Forbes' magazines top ten charities, Heifer provides livestock, plants, and education in sustainable agriculture to impoverished people around the world.

Clean the World - CTW takes a two-fold approach by recycling hotel soaps and shampoos. Just by providing soap to underpriveleged families, diahrrea related deaths can be reduced by up to 60%.

Americares - Named one of Forbes' Top Ten charities, Americares provides international disaster relief int he form of medicine, medical supplies and aid to people in crisis.

Help the Children - "Help the Children’s mission is to increase self sufficiency by providing food, clothing, personal care items and medical supplies without regard to political affiliation, religious belief, or ethnic identity."

Bread for the World - Formed in 1972, works to influence U.S. policies addressing world hunger. Currently lobbying Congress to pass the Foreign Assistance Revitalization and Accountability Act.

Namlo - Founded in 1999 by Magda King, Namla fights poverty through education.

Habitat for Humanity - Seeks to eliminate homelessness and poverty housing throughout the world. Home recipients earn "sweat equity" by helping to build their own homes.

There are a host of charitable organizations aimed to help the poverty stricken in war-torn and developing nations. If you don't find these amenable, run an internet search on "best international charitable organizations."

I'll be honest, though. All of these organizations are just a drop in a very leaky bucket. Maybe it's time for the world to band together and lobby for the cancelation, or at least the reduction, of "third world debt." If you've never read about the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, now is the time to do so.

KAR Trouble Part II: The Howling.

2009-10-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

I'm a little calmer this evening. My boys' grandmother took me to work. My mom and stepdad picked up my rim, had a good used tire put on it, then brought us all home.

My family really does a lot for me. I try to help them out in turn when I can and to appreciate how much they do for me. If it weren't for them, I'd probably be walking a lot and it's a minimum ten miles to get anywhere from my house. And then there's that damned alligator. I don't like alligators enough to want to walk by one.

Having said all that, I thought I'd take a foray into how to change a tire KAR style. You'll have to excuse my blurry pictures. I took them with my camera phone and it appears there's a big scratch on my lens.

We'll go step by step. First you need a flat tire. Feasibly, you could easily change a tire if you wanted to without having a flat. But why? Driving a car to the tire place usually means someone will actually put one on for you. I know it's hard to tell this tire is flat, but trust me on this one. The bitch is flatter than Paris Hilton before the boob job.

< . . . >

The next thing you'll need is a tire to replace the flat one. I discovered this when I put the spare in this exact same spot a couple of months ago only to discover it was flat. Changing a tire is a really agitating ordeal unless you have the hook up with things like a floor jack and an impact wrench. So doing this twice for no particular reason other than you couldn't tell the spare was flat calls for a lot of stomping around in the yard and cussing.

This is my new used tire. The tread is not as good as the tire I'm taking off since that tire was new, but that tire also happens to be beyond repair.

By the way, I really love an impact wrench. They make the coolest noises. It's sort of like "RER RER RER WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR." Sort of, but not quite.

(P.S. I told you I needed to cut my grass.)

< . . . >

Next, shove all the newspapers you haven't taken to the recycling center to the side and pull your jack out of the trunk. Around here, this is commonly called a suicide jack. It comes standard with most cars and isn't considered very reliable or safe. This is not a jack you'd ever want to use to change your oil or do anything else that would require sticking your head underneath the car as you may find that your head will not be removed from underneath in the particular shape it used to be.

You'll also want to grab your tire iron, but I forgot to take a picture of that.

< . . . >

Center the jack underneath the frame of the car according to the instructions. If the ground is very wet as it was today (and basically has been for the past two months and that's why I haven't cut my grass) then I suggest you walk over and snatch a piece of the Boo Radley fence from the neighbor's yard. I wouldn't suggest snatching it from neighbors who live there. Get it from the crackhead ones who stole electricity and then R-U-N-O-F-T. Maybe some would consider this stealing, but I just like to think they're being good neighbors in absentia. Besides, he didn't seem to mind other men borrowing his "woman's" vagina, so I hardly see the harm in a bit of rotted wood.

Now that you have it centered, leave it alone a moment and lets move onto the nuts.

< . . . >

Break the lug nuts. You don't actually break them. You break the seal on them. Loosen them up. Tickle them a little. Make 'em happy. But that's after your twist the shit out of them with a tire iron.Changing a tire is a sadistic ordeal.

You may notice I don't have a tire iron. I have a huge ass Snap-On wrench. That's because the Japanese hate me and no real tire iron fits deze nuts.

What I usually do since I rarely have an impact wrench is to fit the socket onto the nut, then stand on it and bounce around until the lug nut finally turns to the left.

Also, the standard rule is too loosen and take off lug nuts across from each other or something thereabouts. If the socket is on lug nut one in this picture and you move in a clockwise motion, then you'd go straight across to take off lug nut number three. Or four. Depending on what one considers straight across. As it is, there is no lug nut three to take off of this tire because someone lost some nuts before I bought this damned thing and I never remember that I should buy nuts to replace them. Who thinks about this shit until they're looking at a flat tire and how often is someone lucky enough to develop a flat tire right in front of Auto Zone?

< . . . >

Once you've loosened your lug nuts enough that you can remove them by hand, take them off and be sure to set them in a safe place. Finally, raise the jack high enough to get the old tire off and the new tire on. This part makes me nervous sometimes because I have had a jack fall before because the ground was too soft. While I've never had my head squished because I'm at least smart enough to not go sticking my head under a car being held up by a shitty jack, it does increase the time it takes to get the damned tire on the car. I will never be asked to join a pit crew anywhere.

< . . . >

Once you take the tire off, this is what you find - rotor, brake calipers, brake shoes, and all that good shit. Not a whole lot of excitement going on here. I need to get the brakes changed soon. I don't like the brakes on this car. They're weird.

< . . . >

Finally, you want to set your new tire in place. Yaaaaay.

< . . . >

Almost there. Screw the lug nuts back on in a cross fashioned order like I explained somewhere else around here. My feet are sticking up there to hold the tire closer to the rotor so I can get the lug nuts threaded as far as I can.

< . . . >

Finally, lower the jack down and tighten the lug nuts. Always be sure to lower the jack first or you'll never get them tightened since the tire will turn freely when not on the ground.

Also, make sure the lug nuts are as tight as you can possibly get them. I do this by repeating the "standing and jumping on the wrench until the nuts don't turn anymore" routine.

Always tighten the lug nuts. I saw a tire fly off a car once. I don't know what the hell happened. All I know is those poor bastards were stuck sitting on a four lane road while the tire ambled off toward the curb. It was one of the more interesting things I've seen. Which makes me wonder about how boring my life must be at times.

So that's my How To post for today. You won't get a whole lot of recipes from me because my cooking skills are minimal at best. If I wanted to try and shoot a line of bullshit, I'd say we were raw foodists. But we're not. It just turns out fruits and vegetables are a lot easider to cook if you peel them, cut them, and lay them on a plate.

KAR Trouble

2009-10-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

I have a flat tire. I hate frigging cars. I hate the fuckers. Tires and brakes and leaking seals, oh my.

So I walked outside five minutes ago, got in my little dilapidated piece of shit that I'd just cleaned out this morning (why do my kids keep taking their socks off in the car?!) and proceeded to pull out of the driveway. Except the road has changed. It's no longer flat, but bumpy. When did my road become bumpy? It wasn't bumpy this morning when I took the heathens to school. So what changed?

I pulled over, took a gander at the right front tire and there is no air in it. Who stole my air? Someone stole the damned air out of my tire. What is the world coming to when you can't even have air? Rarrrrgghhh.

I just had this tire plugged a couple of months ago. It was a brand new tire and within two days I ran over some kind of stupid nail that flattened it to the ground. The boys' father came over and plugged it for me. I'm a bitch on a budget and I can't just be off buying new tires all the time when that was a new tire.

Well, I suppose I'm getting a new damned tire today. I don't know what I ran over because I don't have time to jack the bitch up before I go to work and stare at it. I have to go to work, so all this is going to have to be handled later. I'm paid by the hour so someone basically has to be dying for me to decide not to go to work.

The boys' grandmother is going to take me to work this morning since I currently don't have a spare. My mommy and stepdad are going to stop by, pick up the rim for me and get another tire while I'm at work. (This is what I'm talking about when I talk about my support network. You need people.) I'll change it out when I get back home.

Man. Tuesday is just a bad day for this kind of stuff. Why can't it happen on Saturday or something? Stupid cars and their stupid issues. I'm buying a horse. With a sidecar.

Payin the Cost to be the Boss

2009-10-11T19:47:00.000-07:00

Things would be financially better if I got a second job. I've thought about it more than once, especially with Christmas coming and I fucking love Christmas. I love the traditions we have. I love the magic that you can create for kids and the joy I receive from their joy. I'm a big Santa Claus liar.

People have said that it's wrong to lie to your children. Honestly, if the worst thing I've ever done to my children is instill a belief that some little old white guy in a red suit uses a magic key to get in our house and leave presents, then I'm not going to stress myself. I didn't get Santa as a kid. I received presents, but there was no Santa. So having grown up in a non-Santa world, I want a Santa one.

Tuba Girl is 15 years old and has never directly said she doesn't believe in Santa. I think we're both pretty clear on the matter, but as she grew older and realized the truth, she didn't go off in a tangent and ruin it for the younger two. We had this little quiet conversation about how everyone is really Santa in their own way, so Santa technically does exist.

Tuba Girl still plays along because she remembers the fun in it and doesn't want to spoil it for someone else. Not like that asshole little Kyle Wilson who tried to tell her there was no such thing as Santa in the second grade. I bet Kyle's parents would have been pretty pissed if I'd ran off and told Kyle there was no such person as Jesus and it was silly for him to sit in church every Sunday morning listening about places he cannot technically say he's ever been to on vacation.

I'm not saying there isn't a Jesus or a heaven or hell or a great big boogey man Satan throwing stumbling blocks across your narrow and rocky path. All I'm saying is that's one person's belief and I'm not going to tell someone they're wrong to believe it's so. I believe in Santa Claus so it's pretty shitty for people to go around trying to convince my kids that he's not real.

I digress. Sorry. The point is, I could get a second job. And I could let someone else help my children with homework, feed them dinner, make sure they're bathed, take them to band and boy scout's, attend their PTO and watch their plays in a gym with bad acoustics, tend to their questions and concerns, read some Roald Dahl to the younger two, talk about sex with the older one, put them all to bed and by then I may as well give them to someone else because I'm not a parent anymore. I'm a woman paying for some kids I don't have time to raise.

Much like my money and time management skills, my parenting ideal takes on a free range approach. I believe in giving them space to grow and make their own mistakes, but I think I should be there at some point.

I actually have a lot of guilt issues about the years I spent chasing down the degree that has yet to serve me a viable purpose. Between trying to keep the house sort of clean, explaining to my employer that I could not personally rearrange the entire banking system to suit his needs, and writing papers about how that damned bull represented Jesus Christ in Greenleaf, a lot of things I wanted to do with my kids were pushed around to last minute, harried deals.

Christmas wasn't as fun for me. (Bite me. I'm selfish.) A lot of traditions were missed or squished into a tiny time frame. Birthdays were some horrendous affair that always fell around finals. I don't know how in the hell I managed to concieve children to be born either the week of or the weekend following finals, but I managed to do so quite nicely.

There's a trade off with a lot of things I have do as a parent. I could find another job and work extra hours and lose time trying to parent these heathens in the process. Or I could keep the one job I have now, hope something better eventually crawls out of this godforsaken economy and work with the money we have.

Or, as it has been noted by people, I could move somewhere with a more promising job market. I don't want to do that either. As a single parent, my support network is important to me. It is important to my children and I can't see ripping them away from the people who care about them if I can make it happen here.Tuba Girl would shoot me and probably refuse to leave. She is a member of an award-winning band and that means a lot to her.

I want my children to grow up and move away from here - to go see the world and everything it has to offer. But I also want them to know what family means. The strongest trees have the deepest roots. (That was really corny. Sorry.)

Anyway, it would be wrong to say that I don't have any options other than the one I'm currently utilizing. I do have options. Everyone has options. These other options, however, are not the options that I feel would be best for my family. Every family is different. Every child is different and you can't fit them all into one mold.

/blahg out

KAR, where is your house payment?

2009-10-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have noticed that I did not list a mortgage in my last post. That's because I don't have a mortgage, bitches. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA (Pretend that is maniacal laughter.)

When I bought this . . . house ten years ago, I made a little more than I do now as an office assistance for the local Department of Family and Children Services. What I really wanted was a huge log cabin with two bathrooms, mudroom, office, wrap around porch, gym room, solar energy, a pool, five bedrooms, ballroom, guest house and ten acres of land.

What I got was this 900 square foot tin box sitting on someone else's property. After carefully reviewing my finances, the box was what I could afford and still be able to eat. I paid $235 a month for some 108 months to become the proud owner of my very own home. Including the lot rent (which began at $60 all those years ago) I paid an average of $300 a month for housing. This was around 30% of my income.

If I recall correctly, this is the average percentage of one's income one should put into living arrangements. If I'd bought anything cheaper, I'd be living in a cardboard box decorated in Frigidaire designs. Anything more expensive and someone just doesn't get to eat. (At that time, I had one child and was more or less capable of handing most expenses on my own.)

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Why would you buy something that doesn't appreciate in value? You'll never get the money back that you invested into the trailer."

I know that, but that's what I could afford. If I had opted to rent a home all these years, I'd have paid a minimum of $400 a month for a place to live. And that's living in some crowded town area where everything is all asses and elbows. I've lived in a rural area most of my life and the idea of sharing a wall with anyone sends me into some claustrophobic breakdown.

On top of that, I'm just like everyone else in the world and I want to own my own home, such that it is. If my daughter wants lime green walls, I want to be able to paint the walls lime green. If I want to randomly paint a chalkboard on the wall, then I want the opportunity to do that.

It's a trade off, though. If something breaks, that's on me. Circuit breaker boxes, water heaters, polybutylene plumbing, crumbling subflooring, some kid throwing a pair of underwear down the toilet - those are my responsibilites. Some fucking shitfaced asshole dumping his cats out here because "they'll find a nice home" and then the stupid ass cats pick my house to gut out my insulation and have fucking kittens - that's all on me to replace.

Boy, I'd really like to find these delusional animal dumpers and give them a good kick to the crotch. Seriously? Why pick a trailer park? Do we really look like we can afford your extra animals? Why don't you assholes drive uptown and let that bitch in heat out in front of the three story brick home with the pool in the back yard? Ya pansy mother fuckers.

The upside to being a homeowner is I don't have to fight with a landlord to get important repairs completed and I've learned a good bit about house repairs in the process. The downside is I don't have a landlord. I have to get these repairs done with my own limited money and time, which is the case with the any home owner.

I've been lucky that my roof seems to be in good shape. Of course, I'm also scared shitless to climb up there and look at it in case my happy ignorance is dispelled.

My trailer park isn't quite what you would imagine. Or maybe it is. The only reason I ever moved here was because the trailers weren't set out in rows belly to ass so if you open your front door you're staring right at someone's back door. I always imagine it as sort of like a couple of small wagaon trains. The homes are laid out end to end with about thirty or so feet of space between each one with a fairly decent back yard and a nice little front yard. I have enough room my children can run and play and I could plant a garden if I could ever get the bitch to live. I am the Dark Garder. My superpower is killing off plants with a single stare.

The thing about trailer parks is some fucked up cracker always moves in and just messes it up for everyone. Not every park dweller is a white trash cumdumpster, but you do get those with their issues.

The only other person who has been here longer than me is the neighborhood drug dealer. All in all, he's not a bad guy. I've known him since he was ten years old. His grandfather was our county commissioner and lives down the road from my parents. His mother stocks my produce. He . . . I don't know. . . doesn't have good sense.

Once, I called the cops because I was convinced someone was manufacturing meth in the hood. We actually ended up talking about my neighborhood drug dealer and they all agreed that he was a real nice guy and just didn't know what in the world was wrong with him. He's a really nice guy. I don't think he's actually dealing anymore as the traffic through his yard seems to have significantly slowed over the past year or so.

Then there were the two crackhead sisters writing stolen checks from their mother's church and selling off blow jobs for crack. I think one of the sisters has cleaned up rather nicely and I hope the best for her.

And there were the really freaky people with the Boo Radley fence. A Boo Radley fence, for the uninformed, is a warped, weathered and unpainted fence some crazy methface stuck in his front yard. I'm all for being proud of one's yard, but seriously - a fucking fence? In a trailer park? A crappy Boo Radley fence? I especially loved how his druggie friends would take up the driveway with their shitty trucks because he'd fenced off nearly all of his parking.

That's what snorting that shit does for you. Next thing you know, you're living in a trailer park with some shrill screaming little 19-year-old, hoping for knob jobs on the down low from the manly bitch next door while your wife gets the house.

They were seriously some fucked up people. The guy made decent money, but apparently the electric bill got in the way of their drug bill so when their lights were cut off, they broke into the meter box and set up their own "free" electricity. Of course, when the electric company finally noticed, they cut the electricity off and issued a warrant for theft of services.

That apparently didn't stop their proclivity for failing to budget for utilities and crank, so it happened a couple of more times. And once their water was cut off so they ran a water hose from the neighborhood drug dealer's house to their house so they could have water. I don't quite know what they did with the water as they didn't appear to be the type of people to bathe with it or anything. I think they used it to water their plants which, amazingly, thrived in a crack yard.

I was really glad when they moved away. Another neighbor took it upon herself to remove the horrid fence.

It's fairly peaceful around here since the knob slobbing sisters and the utilities borrowing crankfaces moved away. I haven't seen a deputy in months.

My neighborhood is a working class neighborhood. With the exception of the former drug dealing neighbor, it's a drug free neighborhood. Everyone here is raising children and we work toward providing a safe environment. People speeding through the driveway get called out and told they can cool it or not come back. There has only been one fight here that I've ever seen and it was over the electricity stealing crank faced girl. Her "man" was off in jail for something or other and she is apparently not one to do without vaginal company.

As one of the pugilists was driving off, he stopped and apologized for causing a commotion in our neighborhood. My neighbor and I accepted the apology and informed him that it would be best it not happen again as we do not allow violence in this neighborhood. What people do in their own homes is not our business, but if carry it over into the potential viewing area of children we take it upon ourselves to put you in line.

For all the issues some of these people have, they are some polite mother fuckers.

Even former drug dealing neighbor has been a good neighbor. Except for the traffic flow and that DEA bust, he keeps his business to himself. He helps his neighbors and keeps us informed on the trashier 'hood inhabitants. In fact, he was fairly instrumental in getting the crazy people with the Boo Radley fence to move. Even drug dealers just want a little peace and quiet.

If there is any bonus to living next to drug addicts, it's the opportunity to enhance the drug talks with children. All I have to do is point out some black toothed mother fucker with a cro-magnon forehead hunched five inches over his chest as if his spine had somehow not genetically developed to allow his neck to hold his head up instead of forward and say, "You see that guy right there? That's what drugs do to you. Not only do you get to spend your life thinking cheetos and ham sandwiches are a "meal," but you get to look like the evolutionary process excluded your gene pool from moving forward."

So that's a little insight into living in a trailer park. Other than the trailer part, it could just be some little suburb somewhere. Everyone gets shitty neighbors sometimes and it isn't like you get to ask for a background check and five non-related references before they move into your peaceful neighborhood.

Pay all these bills, feed all these damn kids, buy all the school shoes, buy all these school clothes

2009-10-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

Okay. So none of my kids are addicted to Polo. I don't think they'd know a name brand if it bit them in arse.

I bet you people gave up on me ever posting again since it’s been two whole days. Fear not, oh Faithless Ones! I have returned for more fun and adventure in KARland.

It has been a bit busy with a mangled trip to the E/R, another visit to the E/R because someone forgot to write my child's name on the prescription, a trip the pharmacy once or twice (twice, actually, because I didn't realize this problem until I got to the pharmacy), a trip to the pediatrician for follow up. Life gets busy. Everything is cool now, though.

Today’s post, I suppose, will be a general update of my financial status since I am too blah to stick to an actual thread today.

Last Friday, I received my two weeks' pay with a net of $504.58 and have since been rather busy trying to simultaneously spend it and hoard it. I figure these numbers are already boring enough, so I’m not going over the details of my gross wages.

(I changed "horde" to "hoard" because someone pointed it out. Did I mention I'm horrible at editing my own writing and synonyms sneak up on me? But thank you for pointing it out. I promise I really do gots my English degree and all. I just don't do too good with them thar homophones sometimes. Also, punctuation basically boils down tossing in a heaping handful of commas and soupçon of dashes. I like dashes, so I try to limit my intake.)

Briefly, my actual bills paid this week:

$80.00 lot rent

This is something that really chaps my ass some times because I'm paying someone else money to squat on their land, whereas if I'd been more intuitive ten years ago, I'd have bought a trailer and a piece of land.

$58.00 cable/internet

Two things about this. My actual bill is about $75 a month, but I'm still playing catch up from a period in between when I graduated this past spring and when I actually found a frigging job. I've tried a couple of times to downgrade to basic cable because I really just want the local channels, but apparently this is as basic as cable gets around here now!? I don't know what in the hell happened, but I have a friend who works at the cable company who said I already have the cheapest service one can get. I'm confused over that one and we're going to have a come to jesus meeting one day about what the hell happened to basic cable.

As for the interwebs, I have specifically used that for the past five years for school, several different jobs, and job searches.So until the past couple of months, it was a necessity. I'm not giving up my interwebs because it still comes in handy. But I think I actually did get this dropped down to the lowest service available. These bundling deals aggravate the shit out of me. Just give me a price. Stop trying to sell me specials.

$63.60 electric bill

This is only part of my electric bill. The rest comes out of the next check. My house is rather badly insulated and that was something I was hoping to remedy with my mad tax refund, but it seems I'll be replacing subflooring and flooring instead.

$75.00 band trip fees

Yeah. We discussed that one.

$50.00 water/garbage collection

My water bill used to run between $20 and $35 a month and I was okay with that. But then the county decided it needed more revenue and came up with this crazy plot to require everyone in the county to pay for residential pick up. I was really sort of pissed about it there for a while because I somehow managed to take it as the majority of the county citizens, including myself, were too damned stupid to figure out how to dump trash and I've been dumping my own trash for an inordinate number of years.

So they tacked on a $13.50 waste disposal charge on to my water bill and you don't have the ability to option out. Well. You could, but then they'd tack it on to property taxes. I've come to terms with it more or less. Actually, I kind of sort of like it because as long as remember to lug my hurby curbie down to the road, I don't have to lug trash to the dump in my car. I'm also preasantly surprised they haven't been taken out by errant cars and four-wheelers considering we have no sidewalks.

Plus, I also realized my paycheck is partially funded by county taxes. I'd rather not lose it because I balked at paying an extra $13.50 a month.

So far, that leaves a grand total of $177.98 to last for the next two weeks. Which is pretty good if nothing untoward happens.

Here is the break down of the extra I've spent outside of bills:

$31.01 - gas

I always try to make a tank last me two weeks, but it never seems to actually work that way. It takes about a tank of gas every week. I’m really glad gas has gone down so much, though. Back when it reached it’s high point, it was costing me $70 bucks to fill up every week and I never went anywhere more than where I had to go. I didn’t visit my best friend for over a year and I only saw my mom once a month.

$10.00 - Generic Bactrim

Before going to much further, I'll briefly explain the E/R trip. Wildboy bumped his head rather hard last week that lead to a cut which actually managed to abscess. I couldn't get him to the doctor on the day that I wanted and he actually managed to hit the abscess in the car and it made one of the goriest messes I've ever been exposed to. This coming from a woman who once helped take care of an uncle who'd been run over by a minivan.

Due to a snafu with the Medicaid review, my case manager did not finish the review which lead to Medicaid services being dropped. I realized this a couple of weeks ago, so while she was quick to remedy the situation, it left our current cards obsolete.

Luckily, the E/R and the doctor's office have these neato little computer databases that interface with Medicaid and they were able to provide care without payment up front. The E/R would have seen him regardless of my ability to pay, but the doctor's office requires $75 up front regardless if you do not have proof of insurance. So I'm really glad the doctor's office was able to do that. The pharmacy, however, apparently could not so I had to pay for the meds out of pocket. Ten bucks isn't the end of the world though, so it's good.

$1.27 - Great Value Brand Toilet Paper.

I'm going to see if this is more cost effective than the Scott's.

$9.50 - Motor Oil.

I’ve taken my stupid car in twice to have the stupid oil leak fixed, but the stupid oil is still leaking so I keep having to buy stupid oil. I’m thinking about getting the Hanes book and trying to repair it myself. I’m either bound to fix it or find myself without a car.

$1.88 - Candy Corn.

I bought it for the regular kids who come to the library, but I kind of sort of actually ate it. I hate candy corn. With a passion. But I'm also a sugar fiend so I horded it and ate it anyway. I'm feeling a little guilty about that.

$1.52 - Bleach.

I know I said I was going to make my own cleaning supplies this month, but my kid had some kind of funky abscess on his head. I feel a deep need to bleach things.It's one step at a time, people.

$6.97 - Tampons.

Grrrrrrr. I even asked her last week if she thought she'd like a sea sponge. That was a no go to. Something about it being gross to re-use things that you use for stuff like that. (Which tells me the flannel ass wipes would not go over well with her)

$3.74 - Bandages.

Tuba Girls’s new bandos shoes have created some blisters on her feet and I really debated buying cheap, regular band aids. But I know when I do that for my own cruddy feet, it really doesn’t improve the situation by much. So I bought these cushiony things that are supposed to be for heel blisters. Tuba Girl is on her feet a lot carrying a some monstrous instrument, so if it actually helps to cushion her blisters, then I’m good. If not, then I’ll never buy them again.

$4.95 -Ground chuck.

A family member asked me to pick up a thing of hamburger meat and they would pay me back next week. “I will gladly pay you Tuuuesday for a hamburger today.”

$1.60 - sales tax.

112.51 What's left to last until Friday of next week. So that should definitely leave me enough for gas and other minor incidentals that come up, such as having Tuba Girl's band uniform dry cleaned for a competition and possibly adding more minutes to her phone.

Someone gave her a prepay phone and as long I keep a few dollars on it, she can text all she wants since it doesn't cost anything. It's had $2.95 on it since it was given to her a month ago and the amount hasn't changed. I think you do actually have to add money to it every so often or the service stops or something like that.

With a kid gone out of town a lot and coming home after midnight, a phone is good to have. Until this year, I'd refused to get her one because it wasn't in the budget and she wasn't really going anywhere that I felt like she needed it. At fifteen though, she's all over the place and needs to be able to contact me.

So that's this evening long post. Maybe tomorrow I'll post about free shit. Same bat time. Same bat channel.

(P.S. I'm horribly prone to typos and virtually incapable of self-editing, so just overlook me the best you can. One would think an English major would be consciouentious of these things, but I'm just not one of those English majors. I'll edit your posts for you if you like, though.)

Bubbly Scrubbing Bubbles Tickle My Fancy

2009-10-04T18:08:00.000-07:00

I mentioned my cleaning supplies addiction in another post. It's an issue I have and I realized that, like toilet paper, it's something created by The Man that I buy into a little too heartily.

Remember those Scrubbing Bubbles commercials? That was probably my favorite commercial as a kid. The bubbles were fun, but hard working. They worked so I didn't have to. Life was brighter, cleaner, happier. Life became a nice cartoon full of scrubbling bubbles that said it was fun to clean tubs.

I'm 33 years old and I still, for some reason, totally buy this. Well, and the stuff actually works. I use it to clean my stove top, my toilet, the bathroom counters. It probably won't be much longer before I start cleaning my car with it. Or course, I'm probably killing off the world with cancer causing carcingens, but I don't have time to think about that. My tub is clean within a matter of minutes, dammit.

On the other hand, I've never bought the first box of Calgon. The commercial horribly altered my mental status everytime it came on in between Little House on the Prairie and The Price is Right.

What was I supposed to make of this woman upset with the baby and the traffic and her boss and whatever else was impeding her hope for a Zen mindset? And then the baby is thrown into a worling vortex with all those loud, horrible things. Finally, the lady is out of her body binding, over secretaried clothing bathing ever so peacefully in a bath full of bubbles.

But not bubbles that clean, mind you. Not the happy cartoons promising a happy, clean life. No, these are Alzheimer's bubbles. The woman can forget the traffic and the boss and her baby. Oh my God. Where is the baby? Where is the baby?

It always made me think mothers didn't really want their babies and had no problem tossing them into a whirlpool with a shitty male chauvinist boss. I mildly feared that I'd one day find a shiny box of Calgon in the bathroom and then where would I be? What would become of me, the poor girl who just wanted to watch Laverne and Shirley and wish for bubbles that did all the work for me so I'd have more time to watch Laverne and Shirley? Oh my god. Maybe my mother wanted more time for Laverne and Shirley, too.

At any point, that ad may have worked for the stressed out women of the Eighties. But if the daughters of the Eighties are anything like me, they shudder every time they happen to notice a box of Calgon in the HBA section.

I've spent some time thinking of my cleaning supplies addiction since I mentioned it a couple of days ago. I love them. The boxes and jugs and cans are bright and appealing. They scream, "Buy me! I'll make you happy!" It's an odd thought that I rely so much on color to buy things when I have absolutely no problem buying cheese wrapped in black plastic.

I have a lot of theories rolling around about my problem. The first is I don't like cleaning. I hate cleaning. I adore having a clean house, but I hate cleaning. Maybe I think that these products are actually going to do "all the work" for me and I keep buying them under that delusion.

Maybe it's just because like everyone raised in a consumer society, I like to buy things. But considering that I have a limited budget, I can't really buy things without some guilt issues. My shoes are too big or falling apart or scuffed beyond repair. But I can't allow myself to buy shoes until I'm walking out of them because shoes do not benefit anyone but myself.

But cleaning supplies. Ah. Every house needs cleaning supplies. Children need a clean home. Therefore cleaning supplies are a neccessity. I can take guests on a meandering walk-through of my cluttered and over crowded house and show them my collection of Scrubbing Bubbles, Dry Erase Markers, bleach, toilet cleansers, Mean Green, Krud Kutter, Pine-Sol, and Simple Green products and it's supposed to infer that I do clean. That cleaning is very important. It's a show and tell lie. I'd rather mow the grass or read a book than spend one moment of life scrubbing something.

I tend to spend more on cleaning supplies when I am angry. When the boys' father decided he'd find life more fitting if he had an extra woman, I scrubbed everything in sight. A little after the time I discovered her surrepticious presence in my life, we saw each other in the grocery section of Walmart. We talked for a little while because I was determined to be the better woman. To be civil and mindful that she was a victim of an asshole. It turns out she was also batshit crazy, but that's another matter.

At any point, as we talked, I kept readjusting the new broom and long handled scrub brush so it wouldn't poke other shoppers. I was buying the scrub brush because it was something I needed to clean the tub. I'd also loaded myself down with a Pine-Sol and Mr. Clean Magic Erasers and whatever else I could afford to scrub the shit out of my life. I suppose I have an unconscious belief that if I clean hard enough, then all my problems will be carried off by those happy bubbles.

Scrub the baseboards? Faithless Oedipal man gone. Clean out the cabinets and throw out old spices? The crazy bitch who cut me off in traffic is dust. Scrub the filter in the stove vent? The cruddy seals leaking oil in my ancient car is of no consequence. It's a weird quirk.

My angry cleaning is probably some "positive" feminine channel I utilize to appropriately express my discontent. Positive if scrubbig the top layer off a plastic tub while squishing every violent word and thought into a fire-proof safe is considered positive. But I'd much rather drive over people, then get out and kick them in the ass. Somehow, expressing one's anger in the exact way one prefers is deemed "socially unacceptable."

So today's post is a quick psychological study of why woman may spend money on cleaning products. On top of all that, I think I'm just supposed to buy them. I get kind of excited about them. I realized that before I started this blog. It came to me when I bought this.

It promised me a fresh toilet bowl for something like two weeks. Well, first off I couldn't figure out to use it so I wasted four . . . servings because I kept putting it in the wrong place. Apparently you shouldn't put it right where the water flows into the bowl. On top of that, the cruddy hard water stains have not magically disappeared. I'm a little disappointed.

I can't sit here and tell you how much money I spend a month in cleaning supplies. If I had money, I bought cleaning supplies. Because, you know, I needed them. I've said before that I don't necessarily do a better job of handling my money than the average person, but that I believe I my children shouldn't do without any more than they have to. Cleaning supplies fell under the "must have" list.

However, there are a lot of cleaners you can make that are supposed to be better for the environment and they are infinitely cheaper. Care2 is a great website for hunting down how to do such things. This month, I'm going to focus on breaking the scrubbing bubbles addiction. I'll let you know how it goes.

Quality of Life OR Why I'm Sending my Child to Disney World

2009-10-02T06:23:00.000-07:00

Today is bill paying day and I suppose this is going to be a bit more serious than previous posts. I sat down this morning and sent off checks for all my bills and then I used paypal to send off $75 for Tuba Girl's band trip to Disney World at the end of November. The band will be performing in a Very Important Parade or some such and it costs $450 to get there.

To clear up any misunderstandings or assumptions that may be going on, I accept government benefits for my family. I work and I accept bennies. Sometimes I'm perfectly okay with that and at other times I'm not okay with it. I have to realign my thinking from time to time and think about whether what I am doing is the best possible solution for my children in terms of providing.

Mostly what I want is a job that will pay for everything they need so I don't feel I need those benefits. But this was the job I got. I'm thankful for this job because there are so many of my people who don't have jobs. (By "my people" I mean the people in my county. They're mine whether they opt to deal with that or not.)

At any point, I've seen various comments on the web that people who accept Food Stamps or Medicaid for their children have no right to expect "extras." That you should take that money you set aside for your child's activities and spend it on food or insurance. (When you figure out how I can pay for insurance and food on a hundred bucks a month, let me know.) Basically other than saying that the poor are incompetent money managers they also mean that lower income children should suffer as befits the poor.That poverty begets austerity and everyone should just suck it up and get over it.

That's their opinion and they can shove it up their ass. My children did not ask to be poor and I sure as hell am not going to expect them to live their lives according to how others think we should be living. Ramen noodles and hot dogs are not a nutritious dinner. Sitting in your front yard playing with sticks and bottle caps is not going to teach you shit about what's out there in the world. (Although I'm not opposed to playing with sticks and bottle caps from time to time. It offers an opportunity for creative thinking.)

My daughter has a loving abide of music. She has a need as a human being to bond with like-minded people. She deserves an opportunity to expand her horizons beyond this trailer park and it is my job as a parent to give her every opportunity I can to do just that. I once told someone that I really can't afford for her to be in band, but I also can't afford for her to not be in band. The experiences and knowledge she receives through playing the sousaphone are not experiences and knowledge I can give her at home.

My boys are in Boy Scouts and that is not a free enterprise. It costs money. But it also gives them an opportunity to bond with other children outside of school. It gives them a sense of belonging to a community. They have the opportunity to interact with adults who take a concern in their well-being. I'll pay for that. Even though I'm not too big on the god deal, I can be a flexible person.

My goal in this life is not to find peace and contentment in my poverty. My goal in this life is to find peace and contentment in being the best damned parent I can be. If that means dropping my pride outside the DFCS door or doing without something so my kid can go wear a wool elevator operator uniform and drag around a huge ass instrument, then that's my job.

My goal is not to keep my children in poverty and constantly remind them they're poor.My goal is to give them every opportunity I can to get the hell out. To go be productive members of society who can remember what it's like to not always have everything you need or want and treat people accordingly.

My goal is to raise children who never bitch about how all their money goes to "welfare queens" and "sorry ass" people. For every "sorry ass person" there is a child somewhere who needs an opportunity to rise. I want them to grow up and remember what's been done for them so they can do for others.

I also know that people in third world countries are infinitely poorer than I am. But guess what? I don't live in a damned third world country. I live here - supposedly the greatest country in the world where people can rise above their obSTACKles. People don't rise alone and they don't rise if someone thinks they can keep a boot on their neck and demand they rise on their own. If I wanted to raise my children as if we lived in a third world country, I'd damned go live in a third world country.

So yeah, while our food may be paid for by taxpayer money, I don't exactly find myself beholden to pushing my children into doing without to fit into someone else's ideal of what the poverty ridden should be doing.The rest of the world doesn't get to decide the quality of life my children should receive. That's on me and my goal is to give them whatever quality I can get.

$985 dollars minus $75 for my child's band trip leaves $910.

Great Scott!

2009-10-01T07:14:00.000-07:00

If you thought I possibly couldn't discuss anything more mundane than laundry detergent and my period, you were wrong. Today, we're going to discuss toilet paper. And for the unprepared, this is going to be a frank discussion about shit. Honestly, you can't talk about toilet paper without excrement. It's the whole reason someone thought to invent toilet paper.

I still know a lot of people who used outhouses as children and even into adulthood and they always speak fondly of the glossy sections of the Sears & Roebuck catolog. While they may have great memories, I don't see trashcans full of shitty Sears catalogs in their bathrooms. No, typically I see Angel Soft or Charmin brand toilet paper.

So while wiping your ass with catalogs and corncobs may have been a great time as a younger person, apparently it's not something people actually want to do anymore and not only do they really not want to do it, they don't even want to wipe their asses with that cheap forty grit toilet paper you can pick up for a buck. Oh hell no. They're going for the full comfort of quilted double ply. Can't say that I blame them.

In addition to washing a lot of clothes, we also apparently use a lot of toilet paper. I've fiddled around with different types of toilet paper. I've tried the 40 grit single ply and found I basically had to use twice as much to wipe me arse than if I'd just splurged and bought the nicer shitpaper. So that didn't seem to economical.

Now, hardcore frugal types and tree huggers tout flannel ass wipes over paper. I'm not exactly going to say I would never do that, but it just doesn't fit with my aesthetic right now. When all my children were little, I used cloth wipes out of old towels and that worked pretty well. Had an entirely different laundry basket and all that good rot to keep the nastiness away from the regular clothes. I'm only half crunchy tree hugger since I lived by disposables. I tried cloth when my first was born and I'm just too shot out for all that. I did let my kids run around naked a lot. I beleive everyone needs a good airing out.

And the more I think and write about this, the more I'm starting to eyeball flannel asswipes. Why am I automatically dismissing it? How is it going to inconvenience me? Do I really want to wash shitty flannel? What happens when I have to pee and all the flannel is covered in poo? Do I have time for this shit? How much time am I going to have to spend snaking flannel out of my pipes before my children remember they don't flush these? I'll think more on it later. I do have to say that people who actually go out and buy flannel ass wipes are a little weird. Dude, Just buy some flannel and wipe your ass.

At any point, I currently use Scott's toilet paper and I spend about ten dollars a month on ass wiping materials. (So deduct $10 from the $990 I have left after I buy my daughter's tampons and laundry detergent and that leaves $980. Except I've now made my own laundry detergent and have enough supplies to last me for some eight months. So I guess beginning this month I actually have $985 left after basic supplies. Or do I divide that ten buck initial start up fee over an eight month period and count that? I think that tends to be more of a . . . hypothetical cost analysis rather than an actual "What in the hell do I have to pay out this month" analysis. If that makes any sense. I guess. I don't know. Screw it. Let's just say I have about $985 a month to work with this month.)

Scott's is one ply, but it's surprisingly nice - comfortable and effective. There's nothing I hate worse than ineffective toilet paper. I used to buy Angel Soft but it was just . . . too soft. And Charmin is just too damned expensive. I'm not paying that kind of money just to wipe me arse.

I've also stolen toilet paper from the university last year. I was really broke. Seriously, deeply broke. The transmission in my car went out in oncoming traffic and my water heater followed suit shortly thereafter. Life is messed up when you start eyeing the forty grit toilet paper at your place of higher education as a "good find."

I really don't like to think I was "stealing" it, though. The cleaning services folks always changed the toilet paper roll in the stall when it got down to about a third of a roll. (They were those big, industrial sized rolls of paper.) Well, then they'd put the "leftovers" on the counter in the bathroom and I watched that toilet paper for months before I finally got broke enough to take some home. Sometimes it would be gone within a day and other times it seemed like the same used roll would sit their for a week or more.

I finally decided that someone needed to do somnething wtih that toilet paper and I decided that someone was me. I never did really know if the cleaning services folks put that paper on the counter for starving students to take home or what since no one ever put up a "free toilet paper" notice, but I saw it as a sign that my needs were being met somehow and took it home. Hey. You do what you gotta do.

I think I'll just call this post a day. I have to go think about these flannel asswipes some more. If anyone wants to link a cost-effectiveness site, that would be cool. Or figure it up for me since I'm mathematically disinclined. I don't know if having to wash and dry (using water, electricity, detergent, and bleach) is really any more cost effective than just spending the ten bucks in toilet paper. I don't know our bathroom habits that well to sit down and know exactly how many loads of flannel ass wipes I'm going to have to clean to keep everything covered in the bathroom. All I know is we are very regular people. Four people every day, at least once a day. If I'm feeling particular happy, I'll go twice. So yeah. Throw a sister a bone.

The Touch, The Feel of Cotton. It's what's in my washing machine.

2009-09-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

Today's story is about my recent homemade laundry detergent trial. We wash a lot of clothes. The boys, DMan and Wild Boy, are required to wear school uniforms. Generally speaking, they wear about two outfits a day since I make them take the uniforms off as soon as they come home. I try to get them to wear the same home outfits a couple of days in a row, but that typically doesn't work well since the these clothes are what you would call . . . active wear. Basically, they're liable to look like coal miners by dinner.

My 15 year old, Tuba Girl, is a messy kid who, even after all these years, still doesn't understand the concept of putting clothes away. I know she keeps sneaking clean clothes into the washing machine and that agitates the flying crap out of me. I swear one day I'm going to take the time to sit down and determine what it's costing me to keep rewashing her clean clothes and then start chasing her around for the money like a crazy collections officer.

"YOU OWE ME 7 CENTS FOR THOSE TWO PAIR OF CLEAN PANTS I JUST WASHED AND DRIED FOR YOU! AGAIN! IN THREE MORE YEARS, YOU'RE GOING TO OWE ME 5000 DOLLARS JUST IN WASTED WATER AND ELECTRICITY! NO COLLEGE FUND FOR YOU!"

Seriously, I have to figure out how to cut down on this rewashing business. Opinions taken, but don't bet on anything happening with it. I've told her she can just wash her own clothes, but she just keeps rewashing the clean ones. Perverse child.

At any point, we use a good bit of laundry detergent. Typically, I buy Purex or Xtra, depending on whichever is cheaper at that time. Sometimes, I fuck up and accidentally buy Sun because for a long time I kept forgetting what it was I bought. I just knew it was in a greenish bottle and cost me about five bucks.

I can't even begin to describe the smell of Sun. They should just write Ass across the bottle because it's like they managed to capture the essence of Swamp Ass, blended it with a touch Dog Shit Breath and sold it as a cleaning agent. And I don't if people buy this shit on purpose or they're like me and keep picking up the wrong bottle by accident, but that is the funkiest detergent I've ever exposed myself to. I hate Sun and I'm so pissed off at myself when I realize I've just funked up my clothes. So I usually end up washing clothes with Ajax grapefruit dish detergent until I can go buy some more crap for my clothes. We smell fruity, but it's better than Shit Breath Swamp Ass.

Anyway, I know some online bitches that I happen to like and they're a good information resource a lot of the time. Someone linked to a laundry detergent recipe website and I decided I have enough time in my life to try this. I picked out a recipe, headed off to Walhell to pick up my washing soda, ivory soap, and borax about midnight last week right after my daughter got through delivering a kick ass tuba performance at the football game. Her tuba section blew the rival tuba section out of the water. I didn't actually see that since I was volunteering in the concession stand, but any band my clothes wasting kid is on is going to kick any other band's ass.

I finally rounded up all my heathens and we headed home where I slept until 2PM the next afternoon because I wanted to and I could. I spend a lot of time running on a sleep deficit. (I'll talk about the Valerian Root another day.)

At any point, I dragged out of bed and began my laundry making process. I'd already melted the ivory soap and was in the process of measuring out my washing soda and borax when I realized I hadn't bought washing soda. I bought frigging baking soda. So now I was all in a quandary because I basically just spent 10 bucks to make endless laundry detergent and I didn't know if I was going to end up with some kind with birthday cake in my washing machine.

I turned to my trusty interweb services to figure out just how badly I'd screwed up. Apparently, the more caustic washing soda tends to be more effective for stubborn stains, but baking powder is just as good at neutralizing odors. Which I guess works well since I picked the damned huge baking soda box up in the laundry section. I have a bad habit of glossing over important details. Like reading big yellow boxes in the laundry aisle. Writing this, I've also decided I seem to shop by colors. Which sort of disturbs me.

SEE?

I tried it out anyway and my clothes seem to be fine. The boys' father came over to visit them on Sunday and I made him sniff a load of laundry to make sure it smelled decent. I try to give him small, easy tasks to complete. It seems to work for him.

The detergent seems to be working just fine. I used recipe number one in the link I posted and it made about 175 ounces of laundry detergent. I filled up two old laundry detergent bottles then had some left over in the pot I used to make it. I'm not too good at figuring up these costs things, especially since I threw out my freaking receipt before I wrote all this shit down, but here goes an estimate. (I like estimates. Concrete answers tend to be a bit off putting for me. That covers about my whole life.)

I typically spend five dollars a month on laundry detergent. (So out of that $995 left over after tampons, I had about $990 after laundry detergent.) Well, this weekend I spent approximately ten dollars on supplies to make my laundry detergent and then stored it in old laundry detergent bottles so storage hasn't cost me anything extra.

I'm thinking I can make a minimum of 525 ounces of laundry detergent with the supplies I currently have. That's a damned lot of detergent. So if I use a quarter of a cup (which equals out to something like two fluid ounces) then I have enough stuff on hand to wash something like 262 loads of clothes. Considering that I wash at least one load a day, I shouldn't have to buy any more of this stuff until sometime around June or July. Deducting the 10 bucks I spent to buy the supplies, I think I have just saved $30 over an 8 month period. We'll see how long the stuff lasts.

Now, of course I could sit down and try to figure up the amount of electricity I just used in boiling the water but I have shit to do. Like write about making laundry detergent and I find the cost of running my stove negligable considering that I like to run my air conditioner.

My clothes don't seem to really have any kind of smell and I guess I could get around to buying some essential oil to add to the detergent or something. But I guess since they don't stink and they look pretty clean, then I'm just going to go with that. I don't that paying extra for a smell I've come to associate with clean is something worth worrying over. The laundry detergent smell is just one of those things designed by THE MAN to make you buy shit you don't need.

Maybe next time I'll talk about my cleaning supply fetish. Which is kind of odd considering I hate cleaning house.

A Mitt to Catch the Clotty Flow of my Inner Woman

2009-09-29T20:40:00.000-07:00

One of the most basic things I've ever done in terms of saving money is to evaluate and change what I use during my lady time. You know, when my Aunt Flo comes to visit. When I take Carrie to the prom. That week when Miss Scarlett comes home to Tara. Those days I'm rooting for the Crimsom Tide. In other words, my menstrual period, people.

I do not use pads or tampons and there may actually be a few of you left out in the world who don't realize there are alternative, eco-friendly, cost-effective products. I'll just throw a link discussing alternative products here since I'm not going to spend my time discussing each and every one. I've only tried one other thing before finding the love of my hormonal life.

I tried the instead cup for two months, but it turned out to be a disaster. No matter how I tried to remove the thing (which looks a lot like a cheap diaphram) I ended up with a bloody mess all over the place. It looked like a zombie vs. vampire free-for-all in the bathroom. That did not make me happy. I do seriously hope I'm never suspected of a violent murder because those special CSI lights would highlight a very weird blood spray pattern in the bathroom.

I was hesitant about trying things like the diva or the keeper menstrual cup since I had that messy instead experience, but one day I sucked up my concerns when diva ladies swore it was a millions times better than the insteads. I paid about thirty bucks nearly seven years ago for a silicone rubber cup that looks like some sort of freaky liquor jigger. And I've never looked back.

I'll briefly give an economic breakdown of what my period costs me per month. IIRC, I bought my diva through an online auction. Including shipping, I think I paid about $35. I've used it every month for something like 6 and a half years. That breaks down to approximately 44 cents a month and .08 cents for every day of my five day "special lady time." A diva cup lasts an average of 10 years when treated correctly. In ten years' time, that breaks down to .29 a month or .06 a period-having day.

Frankly, I love the thing and not just because it's really cheap. I love it because it works better than pads and tampons. I've never had an accident. Once you learn how to use it, you can quite literally forget that it's there. With pads, I feel like I'm waddling around on a padded two by four. And unlike with tampons, I don't have to figure out what to do with the string when I have to pee.

Basically, you stick the diva up your business end and unless you're some kind of bloody gushing geyser, you can leave it in all day long. It holds about half an ounce. I know this because it comes with these fascinating little measure markings. For the first year, I constantly checked my output in case I ever randomly needed to know that I throw out about 2 ounces of menstrual matter a month. (I'm sure you find my output fascinating, too. Everyone should.)

On top of all that goody goodness, I don't have cramps when I use the diva. A few other women have remarked on this interesting note and I think it probably has something to do with shoving our pelvic floor back up to where it used to be. When Lady Scarlett finally flounces back off to Atlanta, you throw the diva in a pot of boiling water and it's magically clean. I know some chicks who put theirs in the dishwasher.

I like how it's easy to clean unlike cloth rags. The last thing I really need is to add one more thing to my laundry bill; having to incorporate more laundry into my day, more water to wash them, more bleach to sanitize them, and more electricity to run the washing machine. And then, seriously, I am truly an undomesticated woman. They'll probably end up in the sock basket and then I'm stuck trying to figure out where I put the things. I figure the two cups of water and the ten minutes it takes to boil it once a month is just damned negligable and I'm not going to spend my life figuring out tenths of a penny. I do have a life, people. Sort of.

I've tried to talk to a few people in my real life social circle about the wonders of a diva and more than a few have given me a rather horrified look and exclaimed they can't believe I stick some sort of cup thing up there and it just holds the blood in all day long. It's apparently gross.

I don't think they're thinking this through clearly because I don't exactly see what's so hygienic and normal about sticking a piece of bleached and perfumed cotton up your twat to hold your bloodflow and then pissing on the string if you aren't careful. Gross is having to look at and smell a bloody dead rat wad of cotton every time you pull down your drawers to sit on the toilet.

I tried talking my daughter into buying a diva cup a couple of years ago and it turns out she's one of those people who give me a horrified look. Yeah. So while my period is going to cost me about 29 cents a month, hers is running about five bucks a month. Or $60.00 a year. Or $300 from the time of her menarche to until she's 18. So from my approximate $1000 a month income, I have to remember to actively deduct about $5.00 a month for her preferred brand leaving about $995.00 a month for bills and whatnot.

Damned kids and their pressure to participate in "traditional" (read advertised by THE MAN) period handling techniques. Anyway, there is my frugal me story for today where I threw in some random numbers so it will look like I'm absolutely consumed by my money or lack thereof.

But I'll tell you a secret. While I do put some effort into reducing certain costs, I do that so I can try and provide a fuller life for my children. It's not about saving money just to say that I can. I need that money to pay for some bandos for the Tuba Girl. And I also refuse to give up air conditioning on any level. I live in a subtropical region and my house reaches 95 degrees on any given summer evening. I'm a wimpy American and I'm okay with that.

From KAR, with love

2009-09-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

Okay. So here’s the deal. When you’re a kid in high school, you don’t think about anything past high school. Unless, of course, you happened to have been one of those extremely intelligent people who could see into the murky crystal ball future of adulthood. Or you had parents who rode you like a donkey all the way through college. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of those kids. I was the invincible kid. The one that thought she could drink and have lots of unprotected sex with her stupid mouth-breathing boyfriend without suffering any consequences.

Hey. Some of us have to learn things the hard way. There just isn’t any way around it if you’re like me and just happen to schedule a lot of free time for ramming your head into brick walls.

So what happened is this: I had a girl with the mouth breather fifteen years ago. She changed my life in a lot of ways. I had to grow up and try to become an adult. It's been a long road and in looking back, I wasn't always as much of an adult as I thought I was. I'm hoping to one day afford therapy when she finally realizes she's been raised by a 12-year-old boy stuck in a sagging woman's body.

Seven years after my oldest, I had a boy with a redneck. This one wasn’t so much a mouth breather, really more of a sloth. A three toed sloth whose concept of time is not one that moves in traditional linear patterns. Upon hearing someone had recently died, he'd say, “I just saw him a little while ago.” This would lead you to believe that perhaps he saw the deceased just yesterday swilling coffee in a grease joint. But “a little while ago,” it turns out, could mean five minutes ago, yesterday, or that period of time right after they took up all those self-serving cigarette machines out of the Shoney’s and Huddle House restaurants. It’s hard to say with him. It defies all logic. At any point, a little while later, I had another baby with the sloth so then I suddenly had three kids and not enough money in my job to cover business.

I could go on rambling a long time about my life, but I’ll just suffice to say that I’m now a 33 year old single parent raising three children in a trailer park on the wrong side of the county and my grass needs cutting. (That’s not a euphemism for sex or drugs or anything. My yard actually needs to be mowed.) Sometime in the midst of raising all these kids and paying bills, I managed to finagle my way through an English degree right before the economy tanked.

So now I’m a librarian living on about 1000 bucks a month waffling around trying to decide if now is the time to go back for a Master's or if I need to focus on boy scouts, band recitals, dinner plans that are constantly scrapped, and trying to figure out if the remote is behind the damned couch.

This blog isn’t really about the story of my life. Or maybe it is. But right now, this blog is supposed to about about making it on that kind of a paycheck.

I got this idea from this other freakily insane woman who brags on raising and feeding her three children on less than a thousand dollars a month. Yeah. That woman also believes that dental care is a luxury and that sliced cheese is an actual dairy product. And it’s okay to store babies in Rubbermaid bins. And that swishing shitty diapers around in a bucket full of soapnuts is somehow supposed to effectively clean diapers enough to prevent rashes.

I'm not saying I'm making more effective use of my money. I'm just saying that forcing your family to do without while you pay your tithes in money given to you by the government is not a type of martyrdom I care for my children to experience. However, I'm not going to spend all my time talking about how she and her husband are batshit crazy for failing to effectively meet some basic needs for their children, but rather offer up an alternative way of attempting to provide.One that doesn't expect my children to do without basic comforts and whatever sort of extracurricular, enrichment type activities I can wrangle up for them.

It's also an opportunity for me to try out new frugal type shit and post inane comments on it. Or I can also take the opportunity to crow about my plumbing prowess and very, very basic carpentry and mechanic skills. Or maybe to just bitch about all the shit that's currently broken that I can't afford to buy replacement parts for until tax refund season.

So here’s my version of living in relative poverty. It's not a lifestyle I consciously chose or endorse as a good way to live. On the other hand, I didn't exactly plan against it, either. Being an undomesticated type of woman, planning has never been one of my strong points.