2008 Archive

2008 Archive – 47,012 words.

January 6, 2008

Almost a week into 2008 and I finally feel I have enough time to post. Sorry about the wait. A lot has been going on.

But before we get into that, as part of what has become tradition here at Blogeois.com, it’s time for THE ANNUAL BLOGEOIS.COM DISCLAIMER. Please take a few moments to read it.

Go on. I’ll wait.

In neighborhood news, The Wall Streets are boxing up their lives in preparation to move back to SoCal at the end of the month. Rumor in da ‘hood says Mrs. Wall Street has left Mr. Wall Street twice, since New Year’s Day. Um, that’s two times in less than a week for all you math lovers out there, leaving him and his newly-pastor-ized father to pack up belongings.

His father, one of those New Age religion pastors who preach that his god wants us all to embrace wealth and drive gold-plated Escalades, gave up his eight thousand square foot/three acre ranch outside of Brentwood to move into a more modest six thousand square foot, rent-free bungalow adjacent his new church. His old home which is mortgage-free will become The Wall Streets new abode, where, according to Mr. Wall Street, money will fall from the heavens via the $1200 per month rent he expects to get from his over-mortgaged home here. Between the mortgage(s), the kids and the spending Mrs. Wall Street won’t slow up on combined with our area’s lack of a seller’s market, he says he’s got no choice but to move and rent the place out. With home rent rates in our area averaging around $1600, I’ve got little doubt they’ll find renters quickly, though I think you can imagine what quality of such I’m certain will move in. My money is on an eventual sell within two years, perhaps sooner when they tire of the evict/repair/re-rent/repeat game.

Anyway, Mrs. Wall Street keeps coming back and bringing the kids back with her. Each time, she spends most of the day standing out at the end of the driveway, a child on a hip, the others orbiting around her feet. When she isn’t talking to Ms. Howler Monkey, she supervises the packing and complains loudly about the weather to whomever might be within earshot. She’s sporting a new dyed and streaked hairstyle that I’m sure is very L.A. style ala Victoria Beckham, and a spray-on tan. It’s going to take a while though to drop the sixty AssPounds™ she gained in their three years of living here but something tells me she’ll be back to her pre-Pacific Northwest condition in no time once she’s back in sunny L.A. My thoughts? Go. Just go and don’t let our weatherized doors hit you in the ass.

On the other side of us, The Dimmers have been exceptionally quiet this holiday season. No drunken singing, no screaming children, no more outbursts about JAVA taking over his phone lines and no more wrecked vehicles. And with no garbage smells coming from their garage, it’s almost as though no one lives there. Almost. I’m sure that’ll change once the weather warms us back up.

Elsewhere on the street, there is a long, slow tragedy occurring within a family known to us. Without being able to describe any details just yet for personal reasons, all I can say at this time is to share a recent comment I heard regarding an apparent dislike for me personally. Something to do with the fact that I have thrived since my surgery three years ago and in the same amount of time, one of their family members, who suffered a similar thing, has had nothing but complications.

Actually, referring to it as “complications” is a mockery. They have required over a dozen surgeries since fall of 2004 and no longer have a spleen, a small intestine, a kidney, most of their colon, half of their lungs. Once a healthy, rugged, somewhat chunky individual, they currently weigh sixty-something pounds and require use of a walker. A rented hospital bed and portable toilet are the focus of their downstairs living room décor. For Christmas, insurance provided a portable electric scooter. To make matters worse, the youngest child, a teen, has been found to suffer from the same. The scooter is assured a future owner.

The dislike, I can only imagine, may come from the fact I am a good ten years older and have no children, no legacy (or reason to go on living in some people’s eyes). This neighbor, young and vibrant just four years ago, has three teenagers. Throughout the year, I can often be found working out front in my yard, uprooting shrubs, planting trees and hauling wheelbarrows of shredded bark dust. Meanwhile, this neighbor, who used to do all the same by the way, is wasting away; the highlight being surviving the amount of time it takes to change over to a fresh oxygen tank.

Since hearing this, do I have a form of survivor’s guilt? Actually, no. I’ve worked hard to get where I currently am physically. Does that have anything to do with the ability to stay cancer free? Probably not. In my mind, it’s all about luck of the draw, and yes, I know that sounds cold and harsh but who’s to say what causes one or two tumors to grow and stay contained until and during removal and others to explode and seed one’s entire insides? I don’t know the answer.

Anyway, I may post more about this in the coming year. Or I might not. It’s a hard subject right now.

January 8, 2008

I’ve spent four of the past six days here listening, albeit not willingly, to the loud, obnoxious sounds of un-muffled gas generators prompted by various neighbors who have decided January is the best time of year to get their homes ‘professionally’ pressure washed. Let’s not forget it’s been pouring down rain for the past week with temperatures hovering around 37 degrees F. Let’s also not forget a goodly portion of each of the homes have white or cream-colored siding and to date, no pressure cleaning company has come anywhere close to getting that vinyl siding clean. Why these four families have forked over what surely is a couple hundred dollars a piece to these incompetent cleaners for the end result of a noticeably streaked home is I beyond my comprehension.

I’m particularly baffled by The Dry Cleaners across the street. Mr. Dry Cleaner is the fussy one of the pair (he buys cars in colors that complement the house, for god’s sake) and all I can think is that he’s just not looking. Mrs. Dry Cleaner on the other hand, still insists that her carved Halloween pumpkin remains rotting on the front porch. I expect she could care less about how the place looks. This is eerily similar to how the original owners of the house felt. He was picky, always trying to plant shrubs and trees to improve things while she simply saw it as a place to change clothes.

Let me stress that I’m really trying not to complain here. I really like it when my neighbors make an effort to take care of their homes. But it should be an improvement. I’m just saying…

Mrs. Wall Street, who is living here at home for the moment, told me this morning that they had an interested family relocating from Las Vegas come to look at their rental house earlier. Then she told me in a rather snippy tone that after she had to get up early [ed: before 11 a.m. – oh the horrors] and was waiting by the door, she saw them drive by, stop in front of the house briefly, and drive off without coming inside. A call to their rental agent confirmed the party was no longer interested.

I had to laugh. This neighborhood ain’t Las Vegas, baby. Welcome to an average Pacific Northwest suburb, though maybe all the baby toys, strollers, and garden implements lying just outside of the paint-peeled front door beyond the unkempt front lawn broke the deal. Again, I’m just saying…

Ah, finally. Looks like the pressure washing crew are breaking for lunch. After working on a short story yesterday for four, mostly uninterrupted hours, it’s time to reread what gems or crap that might have produced.

January 9, 2008

We’ve made some computer changes in the house, overall for the better, but as a result, my backyard web cam decided it was done with all the fiddling around. It’s been a struggle to keep it going with needing to constantly reset it and the computer it was hooked up to, and so I’ve made the decision to retire it. A funeral was held very early this morning, obscenely early in fact. In lieu of flowers or complaints, please toast it’s relatively long life and go buy yourselves one.

There was quite the little game going on between Mrs. Wall Street and potential home renters this afternoon. If she was going to be home when an interested party decided to drop by to take a peek at the place, she would barricade herself in her house until the breeding woman up the street could come down and join her.

Okay, I can understand that. Who would want to be alone in a house with three toddlers and someone stops by that you don’t know from Adam? Okay fine, but each time someone stopped by, Mrs. Wall Street would holler down at the breeding woman who would then load up her mini van with all nine of her children (most toddler-aged themselves) and drive the 300 yards down the street and The Wall Streets house would then be filled with twelve kids and two adult women.

How do you think that looks? Would you rent a house that was overflowing with a dozen diaper-laden, snot-nosed kids? It had to look like that scene from “Raising Arizona” when Dot comes to visit and brings all her obnoxious, unsupervised, getting-too-old-to-cuddle kids. Bats beat against cars, diapers on heads, crayons on walls. What a hoot. I know better than to think all of those kids over there were acting like little angels straight from heaven.

Later in the afternoon when Mrs. Wall Street was on her own again, the rental agency woman arrived. Minutes later, Mrs. Wall Street loaded up her kids in the SUV and drove the 300 yards up to the breeding woman’s house where she and Mrs. Breeder stood out on the sidewalk in the rain and watched more potential renters look the place over. Gee, don’t be obvious or anything.

Later still, with the rental agency woman still showing the house, Mrs. Wall Street left the breeding woman’s house to drive around and around and around the block until the last batch of interested people left an hour or so later. Sitting here in front of the window writing, I counted twelve passes alone. I was beginning to think that they wouldn’t have to move at all if Mr. Wall Street could just get his wife to stop wasting so much gasoline. Between the jaunts around the block and needing to drive a whole 300 yards twice, sometimes three times a day every day (WS insists it isn’t even that far) to the breeding woman’s house in the biggest SUV Chevrolet makes had to burnt up half a tank of petrol at the very least!

Anyway, I got the feeling one of the couples who came and looked at the place was The Ones. A white mini van and a 4-door car, both Fords (not that that matters a hoot to me), two children, one newborn in the car, not sure how many kids in the van, both adults looked very happy and animated when they came out, nearly as animated as when the woman misjudged the driveway and drove over the For Rent sign in the yard. She was on a cell phone when she drove up and when she left so if she was yakking the entire time she was there, obviously she wouldn’t notice the four-foot drop-off onto terraced cement bricks in the back yard that I’m sure will act as a magnet to the kids, or the gaping hole in the deck that once held the algae-filled hot tub (the hole drops four feet into thick, cold mud), or even the white carpet that I’m certain wasn’t white when they were checking the place out but probably will be if and when they move in, if only temporarily.

Yep, I can hardly wait to see what moves in.

January 13, 2008

I’m playing catch-up this weekend because lots of things have been put temporarily on hold either by forces beyond my control or because I drank too much. In one of my rare “I’m deciding to drink something other than coffee, tea, or water” moments, something I only do once every other year or longer, I thought a homemade Mojito sounded good. In the haze of afterthought, today’s most important note to self: Key Lime Cream Liquor only sounds harmless; never so on a stomach half-filled with Thai food. That stuff has now officially entered into the ranks of Southern Comfort, 7-UP, and a hot Jacuzzi on top of a cheese enchilada dinner.

Last week, an area less than twenty miles from us was hit with a rare tornado. We could easily track the line of dark clouds from our library window and were hit with heavy rain and bits of hail but were protected, as we generally are, from the high southwestern winds. It’s the east and north winds we get hit with on a weekly basis, that being on Garbage day.

Just before the day of the tornado, we decided to upgrade our entire home server system to assure we’ve got a ridiculous number of backups of everything we write. If you recall, last year, we had an unusually high number of computer-related meltdowns it seemed and we’re certain it was just a matter of time before we lost important things, like stories and other works in progress. While the initial server set up was easy according to WS, transferring files and getting all computers networked has been long and laborious.

But it hasn’t kept both of us from getting some work done on our current works in progress. In the coming week, we’ve got a sizeable chunk of reading and reviewing to do, a couple of stories to pound out, INK FAQ questions to write up, an OryCon meeting to digest and discuss, and I must, must, must get through those few books and anthologies I’ve dragged my feet over. I’ve got no real excuse for farting around; it’s not like I was hit by a tornado, thank goodness, but that event could and should serve as a bit of a wakeup call. It could all blow out with the wind tomorrow and just think of how behind I’d be then!

January 14, 2008

There are about a dozen Pine Siskins bathing in the shallows of our pond. How cold do you think that is? And why is it little birds feet don’t seem to freeze off? Do they not have nerves in their legs? Can they not feel the cold water or are they just good at ignoring it?

Somewhere while pondering these life mysteries I decided I wanted needed a pool thermometer because I want to know precisely to the exact degree how cold the water is out there. If our old candy thermometer didn’t start at one hundred degrees F. I would have used that. It’s not like I’m planning on making candy ever again. But because I’m sticking to the financial budget this year, I’ll wait before making that purchase and assume that since the water out there is still moving, it’s warmer than thirty-two degrees.

Sometimes I feel so clever I scare myself.

Then again, I can’t figure out the latest camera snafu which I’m sure is something painfully simple to correct (the flash keeps popping up automatically whenever I point the camera at anything and I definitely don’t want that happening), nor can I figure out how to properly and for the very last time ever, convey to WS the importance of returning settings to the original setting on anything electronic he uses. Sure, he can figure out how things were originally set but it’s something that constantly eludes me. Past issues with this, some of which went on for weeks if not years, include having to watch TV in some kind of squished mode and/or with captions on and a comical assortment of problems with computers, DVD players and now possibly, the camera. Again.

Now don’t tell me to dig out the owner’s manual to figure out the problem. I’d be doing that at least once a month if I could find the manuals at all. At least we’re working on getting those manuals in a centralized location that makes sense for once.

Anyway, I’ve pulled the plug on wanting to go shopping twice this past week. Shopping for what? For nothing in particular, not that I ever did much of that in the first place. I just feel like it. It might be because of all the news on TV about how the economy is getting ready to melt down…again. Oh, did it improve for you where you live after 2001/2002/2005? Hmm, never improved much for us here, and no, that’s not because I wasn’t aware of a lack of or a degree of lack of improvement before. I’m one of those old people who purposely watch the news all the time, probably even before most of you were born. I know what’s going on…well, as much as one can be if one were to believe one iota of what’s being reported to the public.

Okay, well, obviously I’m feeling a bit snarky today. I’ll blame it on all those Saturday night alcohol toxins leaving my body. Be gone, you evil Key Lime liquor toxins!

And finally, I really intended to work out this morning. There’s nothing that says I can’t do it later today but that’ll screw up my already-screwed up sleep schedule. So the next logical question should be why didn’t I work out and why is my sleep schedule screwed up?

Well, thank you for asking! Because I’m writing something new and it’s difficult because I’ve never written this kind of thing before. And to be even more cryptic and not to give anything away, let this be a lesson to you: Never, ever, go directly to bed after spending an hour studying ArcJet propulsion.

January 15, 2008

I got a belated Christmas present today. Technically, I should call it a belated birthday, anniversary, and holiday gift, and it felt wonderful.

I had to run to both the grocery store (Limpy food and veggies) and the bird food store. WS is working from home today so after picking up a few things, I stopped at Backyard Bird Shop to load up on sunflower chips and peanut pieces to keep the one Northern Flicker, the chickadees, and all the juncos we’ve got fat and happy. I do love watching the hoards of birds we get in our tiny backyard.

At the shop, I parked and got out of the car and who do I see walking across the parking lot toward me? MsNoManagementSkills! I don’t think I’ve seen her since last spring or summer and OMG! If she isn’t pushing three hundred pounds, then I’m Queen Victoria. She had some kind of slick oily sheen (baby oil?) all over her face and wide neck and she was squeezed into a way, way too small hoodie that had no hope of ever being capable of zipping up.

To be honest, she looked like a trussed up, glazed ham.

I could barely make out her eyes peering out from her puffy face and I wondered for a second if she was ill or having a heart attack or something; even at age 32, that could happen.

Since she was walking right toward me, I said, “Hey, how are you doing?” and she replied, “Good. How have you been?” and I said, “Good,” and that I was just running in to pick up bird food. She said she was picking up Chipotle’s for everyone in the office for lunch and said she had a new job as an assistant admin (a gopher) in the same building as her last job but with less hours because, after being out of work for four months, DorkMaster had a new job that paid well but was located way down in south Portland and she needed the job to pay for gas because even though he’s only been working since New Year’s day, gas prices are already eating them alive.

Naturally and because I’m a caring person that way, I asked if they were still driving both of their big SUVs and of course, the answer was yes. I was not going to get into an argument over the absurdness of that logic and if you’ve been reading here long enough, you already know my intense hatred of pointlessly driven SUVs anyway. To know that MsNo is working less than two miles from her home, yet insists on driving her guzzling SUV to and from work every day (this after she personally told us the reason she got a job close to home was to walk and save gas) makes as much sense as Mrs. Howler Monkey driving her SUV one hundred feet from her driveway to the community mailbox, which happens every single day.

So I said something bright like, “Oh” and told her I didn’t want to hold her up and that it was nice to see her. In usual MsNo fashion, it’s all about her and she didn’t ask a single thing about me or WS but I will say it was nice for a change to not hear her accuse me of trying to be something she hates, that being an ‘old woman daring to wear her hair long or too straight and lightened,’ and for once, she didn’t say a thing about my weight. That was my belated present.

This morning I woke up feeling good for a change, having actually slept last night without the use of anything to make me sleep. Even though I’ve still not been able to get my weight to budge from 151 pounds, I’m still down thirty-two pounds, I liked what I was wearing, liked how my pants fit, and even how the short, fitted jacket I bought last summer finally looked on me. I know I look better than she had seen me in a very long time, if ever.

I know I am at least twenty pounds lighter than the last time I saw her and my face is clearer too. She couldn’t have picked on me for being fat or having ‘screwed up hormones’ that cause my face to break out or any of the things she’s usually so blunt about. And meanwhile, I believe she had to have known she looked less than optimal, something that’s always seemed to be overly important to her. Or maybe she no longer sees that as important.

Her hairline is a good two inches higher than I remember and the hair so horribly thin and short, not to mention plastered smooth and flat to her head. She’s taken to painting on thin, dark eyebrows in lieu of having any natural ones left I guess or maybe she shaves them off now. She’s never worn makeup so the painted-on eyebrows look harsh and stark like angry clown arches unnaturally high on her forehead.

But it was her width that made me blink and shake me head slightly. A linebacker’s width is all I could think. Even now, that’s all I can think of. I’ve seen huge Samoan football players who aren’t as wide. Certainly, this can’t be good for someone whose only five foot five and so young.

Well, I’ve gone on and on enough over that run-in. I hope she finds health in her Chipotle lunches and is happy (she definitely didn’t look it). I probably should have said something about missing her annual Christmas family letter even though that would have been a blatant lie, but I forgot and she looked to be in a hurry. I hope the next time I see her, my weight will be a bit lower, my face clearer, and maybe my hair even longer because for once, it felt good not to be so worried about how I looked in her eyes.

January 19, 2008

Perhaps I should have warned you. The Barrett-Jackson car auction is on the Speed Channel this week. Ten hours today of obscenely rich, indifferent, elitist and sometimes stupidly drunk men and their trophy wives vying to out bid each other for overly pretty, extremely low mileage cars that have been sitting in lost garages around the world for half a century or longer. Cars with matching numbers, that ‘present well,’ and with impeccable history and ‘provenance.’

I’m so hooked.

Part of that is because I drove cars for the Barrett-Jackson auction for six years and loved, loved, loved it. I miss it, in fact, and every January, I get this antsy feeling in my gut because, nearly two decades later, my internal clock says it’s auction time and time to drive other people’s Ferraris, Rolls, Hemis, and everything else built with two, three, and four wheels . But times have changed and I really don’t think they’d let me do that anymore should the opportunity rise again. Therefore, the only way I’ll ever get close to that whole experience again would be to make millions of dollars and attend the auction with the intent of buying a car.

Like I need another one.

Then again, this is part of the reason my ex-show car is sitting covered and mostly forgotten in the garage though I know I’d have to never drive it again AND live to the age of one hundred and ten before it could even be considered collector-worthy.

Okay, maybe to the age of seventy-five.

Anyway, throughout the week and the weekend, I’m watching the auction and writing and reading and trying to get caught up on laundry, vacuuming, cleaning, you know, all that stuff that cuts into auction watching time.

January 21, 2008

The auction is long over. This year, I thought it painfully obvious how bad the economy is going to become with the lack of big spenders (only two or three it seemed compared to the usual ten or twelve), the abundance of shallow pockets and people not willing to bid higher, and general un-enthusiasm all the way around. I’ve never seen and heard so much outright begging from car consignors, auctioneers, show employees, and Mr. Jackson himself. I think I counted half a dozen instances of the word ‘please’ used amid the reassurances that this or that car will never be available at this price again. I should hope not because if they were, the economy would really be sucking.

The auction on TV ended hours before it really does live (it usually ends around 7 p.m. on Sunday) and it left me with the same melancholy feeling it always does. I’m not sure I understand where the feeling comes from – maybe it’s the cars and the excitement that peaks early Saturday evening and knowing everything sold after that just isn’t all that special and the people seem to be pathetically scrambling to find a deal. Knowing that most of the cars will never be together again in the same place, having been bought by people from literally around the world, all the history and stories of the cars together in one place for one week being fawned over by people with more money than brains, now being loaded into trucks, trailers, ships, and planes just to sit somewhere new looking pretty. To me, the cars become like friends and then, are never to be seen again.

For the past few days I’ve been feeling a little stressed. My contact eye is bothering me yet again and I’m afraid eventually, I’m going to have to go have it looked at. Someone recently asked me why I don’t just get glasses and give up contacts and the question always makes me sigh. If only it were that easy.

I have no bridge of my nose to speak of where glasses would sit, thanks to my parents’ heavy hand of discipline and to make that even worse, the flimsy bridge I do have left is full of bone spurs that irritate and swell up to nodules the size of grapes should I rest anything like a pair of glasses on my face. Nothing I can do about any of it except what I am already doing: Wearing contacts, squinting constantly, and trying not to rub my eye which has made me feel miserable because it feels both like something is in it (there isn’t anything there) and that my eyelid is drooping toward shut. Argh!

I’m also stressed because the outside temperatures this week are expected to be below freezing for a few days with the daytime wind chill far below freezing on top of it all. Limpy has been staying inside with us for the last couple of days and will be staying in for the next five days minimum. The adventure of getting him to accept a litter box is the least of the problems. We can’t let the other pets eat his food and we don’t want him eating the other pets food or get into each other’s water bowls. We’ve never been able to get a straight answer out of The Howler Monkeys on whether Limpy has ever been tested for feline leukemia nor do we know if he is up to date on any shots. Our pets are but I still don’t want them sharing litter boxes, food, or water anyway.

That said, he is very well mannered and keeps to himself and our other pets do the same. At night, Limpy is put into the heated downstairs bathroom with his litter box, food, water, and bedding and he’s only spent the night yowling once. The Howler Monkeys haven’t shown any sign of missing or worrying about him and I’m almost to the point of telling them exactly where he is should they ask. But I don’t think they will and I’m not going to ‘fess up until I have to.

Next on the worry list is groceries. WS worked from home all last week because he wasn’t feeling well. I did a little grocery shopping last Tuesday but figured we’d be doing a full trip this weekend. That didn’t happen and with daytime freezing temperatures beginning tomorrow, I’m not certain we’ll have enough in the house to eat all week.

(Of course, we do, but my mind insists that unless the cabinets and refrigerator are bulging, we don’t.)

And lastly (actually, there are a few others but I’m not going to get into those right now), it appears The Wall Streets have completely moved out. So much for that “We’ll stop by long before we leave to give you our forwarding information.” They left a pile of crap on the side of their house that we expect tomorrow’s high winds to blow into our yard, five or six bags of trash along with a flimsy trash can (the lid is already lying in the middle of the street where the can will join it soon), and recycle bins are full of beer bottles. The odd thing here is that Mr. Wall Street didn’t drink beer. As for the crap on the side of the house, WS has already given me permission to throw anything that ends up in our yard over the fence into their backyard. And you know I will too.

There are several different vehicles parked over there now, vehicles no one around here has seen before. Did The Wall Streets already rent out the place less than eight hours after moving out? Who knows, but I can say that the guy who sits across the street in a white SUV for upwards of a half an hour at a time watching the place is creepy. That shit had better not become a habit or I’m calling 911 on him.

The really odd thing is that the rental sign is still posted out front of the house. So did they rent it out or not? Did they park friends inside the place temporarily or not? And maybe more importantly this coming week, do those people know what to do to keep the house’s pipes from freezing? Ha! Doubt it. Wouldn’t that be fun?

January 28, 2008

Recently, although not that recently it would seem, I was tagged by Carissa to participate in a game. here are the rules for the game:

• Link to the person who tagged you.
• Leave a comment on their blog so that their readers can visit yours.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Share the seven (7) most famous or infamous people you have met. Or go with (seven) 7 weird things about yourself. Or with a change and list your (seven) 7 favorite writing websites. Lots of choices!
• Tag seven (7) random people at the end of your post.
• Include links to their blogs.
• Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
I’m going to go with a combination of the above for my Seven Things because I think it’d be more interesting that way. Besides, who wants to be a total name-dropper?

For Famous People, I’m going with a car-theme here because I’m currently writing something about cars.

1. Famous People – I drove fancy cars for six years for the Barrett-Jackson car auction and many times, talked to Craig Jackson. In the car world, he’s huge but he talks to LOTS of people and I am certain would never remember a single lowly driver from nearly twenty years ago. I hope to change that some day.
2. Famous People – At one of the car auctions, I met Alice Cooper, shook his hand (and undoubtedly said something silly and stupid) and then drove his car up onto the auction block to be sold. He was selling it to help pay for his comeback tour in the late ‘80’s which was successful.
3. Famous People – During the same auction in the same year, I met Peter Billingsly, of The Christmas Story fame. I didn’t say anything to him because at the time, he was bawling out another driver. Needless to say, Mr. Billingsly was, and may still be, an ass.
4. Famous People – A couple of years ago, I met, shook hands with, talked to, accepted money from and was talked into picking up dinner for (from Ruth Chris’ Steakhouse) Bill Goldberg. I got a hug afterward. He was a nice guy and all, but didn’t smell all that great.
5. Weird Thing about Myself – I absolutely can’t stand to leave stickers on my produce. I peel them off as soon as possible after buying any. It probably comes from something a produce manager told me at my first grocery store job – the stickers can cause the produce to spoil faster underneath and it used to be that produce managers told their employees to put the stickers on bruised spots to cover them up. Don’t know if it’s still true or not. Odd habits die hard.
6. Weird Thing about Myself – I prefer to stand than sit. I guess I’m still afraid my ass will widen if I sit too much like my mother always told me it would. As a related side note, when I do sit, I prefer hard chairs opposed to soft, cushy ones. Therefore, in my mind, cushy chairs equals a cushy ass whereas a hard chair equates to…well, you know.
7. Favorite Writing Website – I have a number of sites I frequent but because I haven’t seen this one mentioned elsewhere and because I do like it so, I’ll name Duotrope, the writer’s database for thousands of current markets for short fiction, poetry and novels and collections. I appreciate all the hard work that goes into making Duotrope and hope to start supporting it via donations soon (as soon as I make my first sale, I hope!).

Seven People to tag for this game:

1. I don’t have seven people to tag back. Guess that’s why I don’t get tagged too often, huh? It was fun though.

January 29, 2008

It’s been an interesting week. A little bit of excitement, a little accomplishment, some revelation, some life and death and a whole lot of teetering on the edge of depression.

The Wall Streets, having moved out two weeks ago, had a pipe burst indoors over the freeze snap last week. Needless to say, no one is looking at renting the house anytime soon. Mr. Wall Street has ‘moved’ back in temporarily it would seem to supervise the countless construction repair trucks that have been over there on and off since Sunday.

We thought The Wall Streets had moved back to southern California but it turns out they are staying with relatives about thirty miles away in Oregon . . . the same relatives that moved here from southern California last year to be closer to The Wall Street’s kids. Rumor has it those relatives were pretty pissed to find out The Wall Streets were up and moving back to SoCal. To ease tensions there, The Wall Streets have moved in with them if only temporarily and now the water damage to the house is going to keep them here for a while longer.

Anyway, it’s all about living as cheaply as possible, as Mr. Wall Street puts it; they are living rent-free with the relatives for the time being because of having to pay for house repairs on top of keeping up with the mortgage payments. He can’t believe the place hasn’t been rented out yet and is thinking of dropping the rent even lower. He doesn’t believe in the whole home mortgage meltdown, something he is clearly a part of having gotten into the house originally via creative financing, but says money-wise, he’s feeling very squeezed.

The man is also clearly an idiot.

In other news, Limpy, The Howler Monkey’s ignored cat, has been living indoors with us for over a week. He is so incredibly easy-going, calm and relaxed, and gets along with everyone. Sure, everyone else completely ignores him and we are still keeping everyone else away from Limpy’s food and water in an attempt to keep the sharing of saliva and germs down and yes, I frequently have to let him into the closed bathroom so he can use his litter box but gee, it could be a whole lot worse.

To date, I haven’t talked to The Howler Monkeys about where their cat may be, nor have I seen any sign that they are missing him. In another few days, I probably let him back out provided the night temperatures rise a little. After all, he does have a heated box out there.

Finally, after six years, my car has been paid off completely. Now, officially, it’s our car that’s rotting in the garage, instead of the bank’s car. Go WS! Still haven’t gotten that oil change though. Think spring for sure.

The Dry Cleaners across the street got a kitten. I can see it sitting in their master bedroom window every day. I get the feeling they are keeping it in there exclusively and won’t let it roam throughout the rest of the house. They are just that kind of people I think. Let’s all hope they don’t toss it outdoors come spring to fend against the coyotes, the awful teenagers on bicycles and the huge increase of street traffic. I can virtually guarantee a kitten won’t make it long outside around here anymore.

And finally, I had to take WS to work today. Yep, sounds like another round of MS is coming. He says he hates driving anymore and the additional reasonings around that worry me.

Anyway, at the entrance to his workplace, someone had hit a cat and I could see that it was a fresh accident, meaning no one else had run over the fluffy, black and white long haired adult. It wasn’t crushed or smeared or anything like that and something told me that if I was really a good person, I’d pick it up and get it out of the middle of the street, if for no other reason than because I’d have to see what was left of it when I picked WS up from work this evening and a little part of me would always wonder, when I first saw it, whether it was still alive then or not.

I really don’t like picking animals up off the street and have only ever done this four times in my entire life. The first one’s tail came off in my hand when I tried to drag the big orange cat’s body out of the road. I was seventeen at the time. Eight years ago, I saw a truck hit a young raccoon and I scooped it up in a towel, still breathing though labored, and left it in the driveway of a nearby family that had both property surveillance cameras and a ‘Raccoon Crossing’ sign on their mailbox. The third was a huge dog, a hundred plus pounder easily, that looked to be sleeping curled up near an overpass. He was in a sleep I couldn’t wake him from.

I stopped to pick up the cat I saw this morning after a trash pick up road crew passed it by. One of the crew actually walked out into the street and kicked at it. Moments later and glaring at the group of a dozen, I gave up the oversized bath towel from the trunk of WS’s car and picked it up. Yes, it was dead but only just I think. It was a very pretty cat and didn’t look to be the outdoor variety. Nothing was ‘leaking’ but its furthermost extremities were beginning to stiffen. Its fur was very, very soft and well maintained almost as though it had been brushed just that morning.

I felt for a pulse for a long time in multiple places to make sure it was dead, then wrapped it in the big towel and left it under an elm tree on WS’s workplace property not far from the street, knowing that a) The company’s landscaping crew would eventually find it and dispose of it, and b) That the poor thing’s body wouldn’t be mashed into a meaty pulp on the street at the entrance of a very busy building. With the rain and hail soon coming, it was the least I could do.

Still didn’t make me feel any better.

So I went on with my morning, picking up pet food for ours safe at home and drove out to the ‘French’ stove we both used to like so much and spent a little money that we don’t have. That didn’t make me feel any better either but it was snowing when I came out and at least driving home in that took my mind off things because as most people know, I do.not.drive.in.the.snow.

And now, having felt good about some things and sad about others, I’m waiting to pick WS up from work and wondering how many days in a row I’ll have to see that blue multicolored bundle sitting under that company entrance tree, or worse, seeing Lost Cat posters go up in that area. Something I feel that I can’t win for trying.

February 1, 2008

Yippee! It’s February, a month I like. The bulbs outside are starting to poke up out of the ground and I suspect that a month from now, things will be blooming already. The primroses out back, the plants that seem to never die, have been blooming since New Year Day even through all the freezing temperatures at night. But today, we’re promised a balmy 43 degrees F. and a night temp around 36. Limpy is officially outside mostly as of today and wouldn’t you know it? The first place he heads is right back across the street to his real home. Of course, he’s been ignored sitting by the front door for hours now but at least I hope The Howler Monkeys don’t think bad of me for keeping him here, inside, for the past two and a half weeks, or that they at least acknowledge he’s still alive (big stretch there perhaps).

We’re doing errands from home today – the landscape lighting guy has been out and then had to leave when the parts he ordered for us turned out to be all wrong. We’re giving away our huge twelve-foot artificial, non pre-lit Christmas tree because it’s so full of dust it usually makes one of us sick and because its a royal pain in the ass to put together every year (six to eight hours just to get it assembled before decorating. It’s too early to decide whether we’ll spend the $$$ to replace it by December. Yes I’d like to but it’s going to have to be a fancy, pre-lit one this time because I’m no spring chicken and wrapping individual branches with lights takes too much time that I resent never getting back. Personally, I’d love to find a LED-pre-lit, slim twelve-footer but they don’t make them yet for the public and the commercial applications of such are a serious chunk of change. They’ll come down in price and years from now, everyone will have one. I’ve got patience.

Over at The Wall Streets, Mr. Wall Street has moved out again after having the entire house repainted white—all the walls were dark green and rust colors and most were peeling badly because apparently that’s what they let the kids do for entertainment while Mrs. Wall Street slept half of every day away. They re-carpeted though I missed seeing what color they replaced the white dirty, stained carpet with (but at least we don’t have a yard full of carpet yarns and scraps this time around), and they had some kind of wood construction work done inside. We think they might have removed the huge attic intake fan he poorly installed last year. You remember; the one that was big and powerful enough to nearly suck up their kids and dog?

Apparently, the rental agency The Wall Streets are using basically told them there was no way the house could be rented as it sat after they moved out, particularly since, and this is a direct quote from Mr. Wall Street, “They said it looked like they (meaning The Wall Streets themselves) had trashed the place before they moved out.”

Ouch!

Well, you know, some people don’t feel any pride of home ownership, I said snarkily to him to which he replied, “We’ve never cared about that. It’s all about making money and getting ahead in the world.”

Okay then. So much now makes sense, and I think we know what we can expect from any renter that they happen to agree to let move in over there. Good to be able to have an idea of what to wrap one’s head around to keep from being unfortunately ‘surprised’ later on.

I so want them to just sell the place and get the hell out. Although there is an issue someone recently made us aware of: Was The Wall Streets home loan written as a Owner Occupied Only loan? Meaning, they shouldn’t be renting the place out? Most are. Hmm…

Anyway, on toward the positive: I’ve spent the vast majority of the week writing and reading like a good little author wannabe. I’m also working toward making sure our house is completely stocked with everything I and the pets could possibly need over the next week or two because WS has to make a business trip out of town for a while. I’ll pick up a bit more fresh produce tomorrow and then I’ll be set. The question that will remain will be what to I do with myself during that time. I’m thinking more writing, more reading, and definitely more sleep.

Yeah. Welcome to the boring life of a writer.

February 2, 2008

It’s moving in day over at The Wall Streets rental house. Slam, bang, ka-chunk! Goes the U-Haul trucks loading ramps all.day.long. hard enough to actually feel through our house sub-flooring. I’m made the decision and voiced it out loud (which automatically etches it in stone if you didn’t know) that I will not compromise my own life, WS’s life in what we want to do when we want to do it to accommodate those people like we did for The Wall Streets.

What am I bleating about now, you wonder? Well, let me explain.

When we built this place, the home lot sizes were supposed to be a little further apart than they ended up in the end. As one of the original dozen who built in this new development, and because WS always wanted a home theatre set up (long before big box stores started selling theatre-in-a-box set ups), we had wiring for in-ceiling speakers installed and he got a big subwoofer so we could watch movies in full, explosive surround sound in our own home. It’s damned cool too…when I’m not whining about how it’ll disturb our closest neighbors, formerly The Wall Streets and before them, the original builders of that house, Mr. and Mrs. SportsOrNothings.

You see, our living room/home theatre entertainment unit wall (the one the subwoofer has to sit against) is a mere twelve feet away from their living room wall; a mere fifteen feet from one of the kids bedrooms. Mr. and Mrs. SportsOrNothings didn’t so much as complain whenever we watched Jurassic Park (the T-Rex scene is incredible in surround sound) or Star Wars Episode All here, they teased us about hearing it in crystal clarity from every room in their house. That was until we teased them back about being able to name every channel and song their teenagers cranked on the stereo every single day when their parents were at work. Never heard another word about it but we stopped using the theatre system anyway.

Mrs. Wall Street wasn’t so polite and flat out screamed through her windows to shut our shit off, even if we were simply watching the news a little louder than normal. Since we knew she slept twenty-one hours every day, it was hard to take anything she complained about too seriously but we tried to be even quieter, and so for the past two/three years, we have had a subwoofer and a home theatre system sitting completely, one hundred percent unused in our living room. A shame since we’ve got a hundred or more DVD movies, countless laser discs (yeah, how archaic, yet quaint huh?) and over a thousand music CDs.

Well, not anymore. Personally, I’m very, very tired of accommodating everyone else with few if anyone returning the favor. If it’s not needing to accommodate someone’s kids, it’s driving on the road and making sure we don’t take up too much space there or in the grocery aisles or using up too much resources or anything to keep some around for everyone else’s next generation. Well WS and I chose not to have a next generation and that act in of itself should count for something in that it assures that much more of the world will be left for the rest of your next generations. I’m tired of recycling, of cutting back, of ‘going green’ (which is just a big fat, money-making marketing scheme anyway I’m convinced). And so, with all that said, when it comes to walking around on tiptoes to keep extra quiet and not living our lives how we would like, anyone who rents that house next door can basically go screw themselves.

I’ve had the stereo going almost all day; that would be the stereo WITH the subwoofer on* and even though I’ve not turned it on at anything past four on the dial (because although I might be ornery, I’m not an ass and besides four on the dial is barely loud enough to hear ten feet away), I might be tempted to crank it a bit higher next week when I’m here by myself. I’d like to believe it’s good to surround oneself with music now and then. It’s not my fault others might be surrounded with it too.

Yeah, I remember when I was a renter – only thirty of my fifty one years alive on this planet and as I remember, it kind of sucked. Who would I be to mess with tradition now?

*this would be where WS might kindly point out that the subwoofer has either been disconnected, has been turned down to it’s lowest setting possible rendering it pointless or that he thinks it’s no longer working. Or he’ll simply say something about that Direct Bypass button that I sometimes press because I feel comfort in seeing its shiny red light.

February 3, 2008

So I’m by myself now for a spell while WS is far away on business and I have to say it’s so quiet here it’s downright creepy, which is kind of funny because I’m usually not a creepy-feeling person. Mr. Dimmer next door is making an extra amount of noise putting his trash out for tomorrow’s pick up: Slamming the gate on his falling-down fence over and over in trying to get it to latch. I swear he’s losing it more and more each week. Rope can’t be latched, doofus! Or maybe he forgot he broke the latch a couple of years back. He’s not spending much time over there anymore with having to work way, way out of town. I guess that’s what construction company blackballing leads a man to when they start caring about feeding and clothing their families for what some might say may be the first time ever.

I was surprised to not hear him screaming at his TV during ‘The Game.’ Always did in the past regardless of who plays and wins.

All’s quiet on the other side. Maybe the actual moving is done. I watched them unload one big U-Haul truckload yesterday and could write a book on what they unloaded. Three new-ish computer desks relatively unscratched or damaged (Sauder put-it-together-yourself styles in ‘oak’ color), two black ‘pleather’ computer chairs—both several generations newer than mine, one dark walnut plate rack/bookcase, a full size box spring and a brand new mattress (from BedMart), two painfully short night stands in dark walnut, one bright white dresser with pale yellow drawers, a fake Ficus tree (half the size of the one we’ve got), and enough fake flowers and baskets to choke the St. Laurence river.

Looks like they have at least one child, a boy about seven or eight with a BMX bicycle who’s already well versed in riding on lawns (not ours yet though). I saw a young girl around nine or ten years old yesterday trying to help unload one of the trucks (there were several) but mainly just getting in the way. I don’t know if she lives there or was a child of someone helping with the move-in.

The night before last, I put Limpy outside for the night because the weather people all agreed it would stay above freezing. Yeah, since when do I listen to those idiots? It got down to 29 degrees F. or something and I felt bad the following morning. Limpy didn’t show back up over here until well into the afternoon and has been hesitant to go back out ever since which is fine. He’s staying indoors with me for the rest of the week, I think. He’s at least ten or eleven years old. He doesn’t need to be outdoors trying to keep his old bones warm when he can do it here (though I think he’s really getting tired of the bathroom even though it is lit and heated and has everything in it he’d ever want except companionship overnight).

I just can’t feel good about putting him out when we’ve got new people moving in; people who don’t know about him and possibly don’t pay attention enough while busy with moving to not to run over him. He’s very curious about anything that’s not the norm in his world.

So I asked WS before he left if he wanted me to do anything for him while he was gone and he just said, “Write.” Okay, that’s a given. I’m currently in the middle of writing something. I also have a couple of old half-finished short stories from late last year that didn’t seem to want to go any further in my head. I just don’t dare dig out a couple of ones I finished last year to work on improving because they were mostly scary stories and not something I want to work on while alone and feeling creepy. I’m still not sure why though.

After I left WS at the airport (at which we had a late lunch/early dinner as a last meal together—gee, that sounded creepy too, didn’t it?), I stopped by a pet store and bought two more pet carrier beds, one for our pets and a smaller one for Limpy in his bathroom. I just need one more to use in the largest carrier, the one I hooked up a warming bed in for The Queen who will officially be nineteen this summer (I was ahead of myself by a year in previous posts about her). She rarely uses it because she’s stubborn that way but the others like it from time to time.

After the pet store I stopped at Starbucks to pick up a bag of WS’s favorite decaf coffee (Surprise WS!): Shade Grown Mexican decaf, and then I headed back to this empty house. A load of laundry, a light load of dishes in the dishwasher and a bowl of yogurt later, I watched his flight tracking online, read stuff online and waited to hear that he made the trip okay.

He’s there just now and all is well it sounds like. Time to turn on the house alarm here and dig out more to read. Just nothing creepy.

February 4, 2008

For some reason, this was a Monday that felt like a Tuesday. What does a Tuesday feel like exactly? Like the week is already well along and instead of fighting it, I’m just going along with the flow – like most people do on Tuesdays. Maybe subconsciously I was wishing the week would just hurry up and get over with. Wouldn’t bother me if it did.

Nothing exciting going on here. It was trash day but wasn’t windy for the first time this winter. The renters next door had a mountain of cardboard boxes sitting out front waiting for the recycling truck to pick them up and had it been windy as usual, those boxes would have ended up you know where. Again, we have someone in the neighborhood who has no clue whatsoever as to what happens to trash if it isn’t weighted down. But they’ve been spared of the consequences this week. Lucky them.

Another sign that people just don’t learn, a neighbor’s teenage daughter from across the street has taken to starting her SUV in the morning, leaving it running in the driveway with the driver’s door hanging wide open while she goes back into the house doing gawd knows what (probably something with her hair because she’s one of those kinds of perky teen queens for upwards of fifteen minutes at a time. That’s supposed to be against the law here in our state but I’m sure her high school doesn’t teach things like that.

We switch now to news reporter Ann Nonymous in the field talking to a local teen who had her truck stolen this morning:

“We’re here with a local teenager who never thought her vehicle would be stolen. Ms. Teen Queen, did you ever think anything of the sort would happen to you?”

Teen Queen: “You know, like, I never, like, thought it would happen to me, because you know, like, everyone likes me. I’m, like, class president!” Bats eyes at camera and blows a kiss over her shoulder to gawking, passing motorists.

Reporter: “Did you know it was illegal to leave your car running in your driveway with the doors unlocked?”

Teen Queen: Giggling, “Like, the keys were keeping it running! How am I supposed to, you know, like, lock it and keep it, like, running too?”

Reporter: “Well, there you have it. Back to you in the studio.”

*bashes head against desk.*

February 6, 2008

Well, the renters have shown their colors and as is probably needless to say, disco is happily thumping here. In the past hour and a half, I have enjoyed The Hustle (twice) while Vogue-ing and Rock-ing my World and pondered the co-dependency habits of We Are Family and being Two of Hearts while Love Rollercoaster-ing and Knock, Knock, Knock-ing On Wood. In the meantime I wish it really was a Thank God it’s Friday day but it could be worse. It could be a Disco Inferno here and during the Last Dance, I could have Boogie Fever and suffering Dance, Disco Heat and pretending to be a Dancing Machine while Turning the Beat Around, and wanting to Keep It Coming, Love.

C’mon, you know the words! “Keep it coming, love, keep it coming, love, don’t stop it now, don’t stop it no, don’t stop it now, don’t stop, oh yeah…”

You see, the renters have drums set up in their garage. Their garage is ten feet from our living room wall and while I love drum music and wish often that I played, I can wholeheartedly say, whoever’s playing isn’t very good. Basically, it sounds like someone is falling over a big pile of junk over and over again…except with more snare.

Now, I suppose I could go over there and ask “WTF?” or I could take along my dinky little drum practice pad and cowbell (because there just aren’t enough songs that feature the cowbell) and ask if I could sit in on the jam session. Or I could call the rental company and chew them out for being so irresponsible for renting a house in a tightly-packed neighborhood to a family of drummers. Or I could yell, “Oh THAT’S JUST GREAT,” slam the door, and crank the pounding melodic rhythms of Trance music. For hours.

One guess as to my choice.

Later tonight, because I’m a people person this way, I’ll switch to something a little more evening oriented. Like 80’s Hair Band music. Get out your lighters and join me around six p.m. in paying homage to the likes of Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, and Great White.

It would also appear the renters have three children, a 7-8 year old boy, a 9-10 year old girl, and possibly a young teenage boy. Maybe it was him playing the drums and if so, the parents ought to set aside some of their rental money for lessons. Or perhaps suing for any lessons he might have already had.

Because our area had a half-day of school, around 1 p.m. a group of pre-teen girls brought the teen boy a paper plate of food and stood around in the front yard laughing as he ate it. Don’t know what that was all about but it could be something worth noting for later. Were the girls smitten with the new kid on the block, or had they put something in the food and found it hilarious that he was eating it? I had once been the butt of a similar cruel joke and it followed me until the day I moved out of my parent’s home at age eighteen.

Earlier today, I went out shopping looking for something specific and couldn’t find it anywhere. On the drive, I passed WS’s workplace. The towel is still under the tree (see post from last week) and wouldn’t you just know it, there are neon pink signs staked up everywhere further down the street looking for a lost cat. Thankfully (but only kind of), the cat in the poster picture isn’t the one in the towel.

I stopped in at QFC, a store we rarely shop at because a) they are simply a higher-end Fred Meyer store and too expensive to shop at and b) because they closed the one closest to our house, and the first employee I crossed paths with was terribly snotty to me. Furthermore, upon leaving the store, another employee, a male manager-type sounded downright sarcastic in addressing me about finding everything I need. I didn’t have a single thing in my hand and so no, I didn’t find everything I needed though I didn’t say so. I left empty-handed. Later, I wondered if he thought I was shoplifting or something.

But instead of feeling all put out, I have to laugh. I worked a total of about seven years in the grocery store business and most of the manager-types I had the misfortune to work under were pricks, perhaps because they knew all they had every amounted to in life was to become a grocery store manager. I’m sure it a perfectly respectable career choice in some circles but it wasn’t back then and I suspect, isn’t really one now either.

Well, the clouds have darkened considerably outside and the next storm looks to be coming in. Sure could have used a sunbreak or two like the day enjoyed yesterday. Maybe tomorrow.

February 7, 2008

Things I’ve learned/remembered from living alone this week:

Laundry would be reduced to about a load and a half a week, tops, while vacuuming would continue at the rate of twice a week, every week. Most of the food in the refrigerator would probably go bad; not because I’m eating elsewhere but because for once, I don’t feel like eating much. It’s safe to assume I’d probably lose weight though I haven’t lost an ounce this week.

Speaking of refrigerators, if and when I should ever live alone again for a much extended period of time, I’d probably opt for a smaller refrigerator and one with a clear glass door. Naturally, I’d keep its contents as neat and organized as I do everything else.

My paranoia level has increased to just shy of my motorcycle riding days – that meaning being extra, extra aware of my surroundings, much more than I usually am and not trusting anything but myself. The downside to this is, well, I don’t really see a downside other than it gets to be mentally tiring after a while but I’d get used to it again.

No more hoping someone else will discover and clean up the cat barf. No more waiting for someone else to make up their mind about something.

The gym would probably be reduced to a lightweight, fold away treadmill and a rack of weights. The rest of the room would house a hide-a-bed oversized chair, a dedicated reading lamp, and more shelves for books. And the carpet would go.

I’d keep my king-sized bed. No negotiations there.

The garbage take-out would remain the same – two cans a week, with nine-five percent of it being used cat litter. I can see now that in my old(er) years, I probably won’t be a stray cat lady. I like helping pets out when I come across them but I can see that our current five pets would be too many. I worried this week a time or two about what might happen to them should anything have happened to me (see paranoia above).

One of the bathrooms would remain constantly clean. I grew up with one toilet (mostly nonfunctional), one bathtub that the cockroaches loved to breed in, with a showerhead I wasn’t allowed to use until I turned twelve. The thought of us having three bathrooms here is somewhat obscene.

That said, I think I’d spend less time keeping things clean because things would be most of the time. Most of the cleaning I tend to do is around pet messes or whatever WS tracks in or leaving lying around and both of those are near-constant.

When WS and I are here together, I often think of our house as bordering on being too small. We basically have zero storage and have had to do some creative, and expensive things to store the stuff we have chosen to keep. But living here alone, I can say this house feels perfectly sized for one person. There are enough rooms in which to keep day-to-day living interesting, enough open space to keep an ear out for what might be going on elsewhere in the house and out, yet it’s cozy, completely self-contained, and functional while looking sharp. But could I live somewhere smaller? Most certainly but I might not like it.

My biggest issue is trying to get used to how much seating we have here, even now, over six months since getting a couch and dining room table w/chairs. I still can’t believe I’ve got places to sit other than in my computer chair and I still feel special being able to do so, as odd as that assuredly sounds. Before the age of computers, I sat on floors mostly and didn’t seem to mind it much.

In a roundabout way, that brings me to the last thing: Would I move elsewhere if I had to. I’d prefer not to, even with the whack-o neighbors. I like my backyard and my garage. I like our decorated stuff and the relative close proximity to places. I like my Mt. St. Helen’s view from the gym and master bedroom windows.

But do I think any of my neighbors might help if I were to find myself in a spot of trouble? Not on your life. I am surrounded by people so far and deep up into themselves they wouldn’t look up if Pat McMahon were shouting they had won the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes. With absolute certainty, no one around here pays any attention to animals, what their own kids are doing, their neighbors, and in ninety-nine percent of the cases, their own spouses. It truly is a dog-eat-dog world in this squeezed-together development and we’ve seen and heard enough arguments to know this is all fact.

But I’ve lived in worse places, much worse, and I don’t think there is truly any one place an older individual could live and feel completely safe and content. Well, maybe a nursing home; one of the good ones where people care instead of pretending to, and only if one was no longer in command of all their faculties.

February 9, 2008

Back To The Dark Side…

…but only because the other side says it is so.

It was a dark and stormy night. By warm, ambient candlelight, I was reading when I heard a whir and a click behind me, near to my ear. I turned and there was Bill, holding a gun to my head.

“You’ve got two choices,” he said and smiled in a funny, crooked little way. “You can remain safe, steadfast, and antiquated until June of 2008, or you can upgrade to Vista now. Your choice but make it quick because soon, your future will depend on it.”

Vista. The sound makes too much of a slithering snake sound in my head. Or maybe that’s just because I’ve seen it, tried to use it and don’t like it one bit. The next upgrade coming down the pike after this one doesn’t look any prettier.

Bill’s retiring this year. My thinking is he’s got nothing but blue skies, or blue vistas, if you will, ahead of him. I’ll be lucky if I can ever retire, not officially that is. No, I think Bill’s gotten enough of my money that he can retire sooner than the other guy, the dark guy, the one he called Steve with a sneer.

He’s right though. I do have my future to think about. I’ve got some hard decisions to make in the coming year and the sooner I sort some things out, the better in the long run. It’s my future and it’s time I invested in it.

“Ah, Bill, Bill,” I smiled back, knowing he had banked on a perceived notion that because I was old, I was resistant to change. “I do have a third option. You and I haven’t been together forever, you know. Before you, Steve and I had a thing going and even in black and white, it was beautiful. But work demanded we forge a relationship, you and I, and I left Steve for you.”

I lowered my tone and looked him dead in the eye

“You had to have known it couldn’t last, you with your plain-looking computers, your plain Jane laptops. Where’s the appeal, Bill? Where’s the glitz, the glamour, the bling? Sex, Bill, do you know what that is because I can tell you Vista ain’t it. Vista was the last straw for me, Bill, the very last straw.”

And just like that, most all that was Bill vanished into thin air with the exception of his face looking lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.

I don’t expect Steve will notice my return. He was always a prick, still is one actually and his keynote speeches are still just as painful to sit through as ever. Maybe his stock will go up point zero zero zero three percent this quarter after my visit last night to one of his clean, shiny, white stores, but probably not even that much. He knew where he was going way back then when I had to bid him adieu. Let’s hope he doesn’t believe in holding grudges. Let’s hope he understood then and understands now what took me so long to come back.

Today I’ve returned to the dark side and boy, does it ever feel bright.

February 10, 2008

First day of backyard cleanup. Boy, what a soggy mess that was but I’m happy to have found the walkways again. You’d never know that we spend days upon days vacuuming up dead leaves last fall for all that remained out there, even though numerous high wind storms. The good thing was that I didn’t find anymore dead birds and that the landscape lighting guy will be able to find the back transformer early tomorrow morning. The bad thing, well, there isn’t a bad thing although I do have a crick in my neck now from so much raking but that’s what aspirin is for.

Under the piles of dead leaves, mostly left over from the Quince that doesn’t drop leaves until near Christmas it would seem, were dozens of daffodil and tulip bulbs trying to send up shoots. After rediscovering we had walkways out back, uncovering bulbs was a second bonus. Tomorrow is yard debris day and after the can is empty, I can start cutting down the dying Frasier Fir. So sad but I’m okay with it. Next goes the White Bud, which was originally labeled a Red Bud, and a few big branches from one of the other pines and the quince. Another yard debris pickup later and I’ll be ready for spring. I think we’ll have one more cold snap, nothing major, and it’ll be nothing but warming days from then on out.

I say that knowing that an hour’s drive from here they topped two hundred inches of snow over the weekend and that ought to take a while to melt (Woohoo, look out spring flooding!)

Yesterday was a much nicer day to be working outdoors than today, both being dry but yesterday there was much more actual sunshine, but I had too much stuff indoors to accomplish, the least of which was relearning bits and pieces of Mac computers.

I knew at some point two things would happen: 1) I’d have to invest in my writing future and my current laptop, weighing about twenty pounds (no joke) wasn’t going to cut it, and 2) the way-ancient laptop I use in the garage for car-related things and as a car security camera, would complete its meltdown. Surprise, surprise, that last thing is progressing much faster than I had hoped. But my current laptop will fill the bill nicely while preventing anyone else from getting back and shoulder sprain with carrying the behemoth around (really, the thing ought to be a desktop machine just because of it’s weight).

The meltdown of the 386 in the garage will give me time to learn the new Mac OS and get comfortable for really, the first time ever, on using a laptop on a more regular basis. This is key because I’ve wanted to embrace going places to write, even out in my own backyard, as a change of scenery from here upstairs in front of a window. Writers need to observe people and situations and listen to dialog in order to write well and true. While my neighbors keep me with enough stories and conversation to write volumes of stories if I wanted to do that, sometimes it gets a little too predictable.

That said, I did have a brief conversation with Mr. Dimmer this afternoon while I was working in my backyard. It would seem Mrs. Wall Street, before she and her family moved out, told Mrs. Dimmer that she told the new renters that everyone on this street was ‘old’ because no one did the things she was interested in; that being shopping, sunning, and clubbing.

Okay, yeah, like our town would ever be a hotbed for ‘clubbing.’ And hello? The pacific northwest isn’t really known for ‘sunning.’ That woman was just weird. I just don’t understand how or why people who are in their late twenties and early thirties are so vocal about anyone a few years older than them are officially ‘old.’ Must be something in how they were raised or how they perceive society labels the rest of us. Gawd help them when they all reach forty. Maybe they will do the rest of us, the ones who never got so stuck on a frickin’ number, a favor and join in a mass nationwide suicide, because dying seems to be what they are all waiting for anyway.

Huh, ‘old.’ Yeah, that must be why there are so many families with young kids in our neighborhood, because they are so old. Jeesh.

And finally, Mr. Dimmer said that The Wall Streets didn’t move back to California like they said they were going to. Nope, they live just across the river in Oregon with her parents. They moved out and rented out their house because it was that or lose it to foreclosure. Why is it everyone who’s ever lived in that house ends up telling lies and making up stories? Yeah, I can see not wanting everyone to know your financial business but when the other ‘adult’ living there is contradicting everything the other is saying, it kind of makes them both look like idiots. Makes Mr. Wall Street coming back two weeks after moving out make more sense now, because I really don’t think he would have driven all the way back up here from Southern California just to supervise carpet laying and wall painting for two days.

Anyway, I met one of the renters next door. She’s nice but a bit reserved as if she knows as a renter, she’s an outsider. Anyway, Mrs. Howler Monkey and I talked to her and after having to retrieve a soccer ball from our backyard (already!) I met their kids and laid down the law. One ball over the fence (and into the fountain) is fine. Any other balls won’t be returned. Lots of wide eyes all around. Yeah, I’m a bitch. I’m also not a renter and so, they can bite me.

February 12, 2008

Yesterday, the weather people were all like, “We had a brief break from the rain but more is right around the corner.”

Being as I don’t watch the local weather reports as intensely as I once did (two of the three local TV news channels reporting their latest weather software upgrade was less than a good idea changed my viewing habits), I went out in the ‘rain’ we were supposed to have yesterday and in pouring down sunshine, cut down the dead Frasier Fir. So sad but hey, now I’ve got some room in which to plant something!

I’ve got a full moon maple on the other side of the fountain that really, really needed to be in a better place if I’m ever going to expect it to look pretty (actually, I’ve since decided to pot it because supposedly, it’ll like somewhat cramped roots), and I’ve got a magenta lilac that has patiently put up with me moving in from one cramped place to another and finally into a large pot. The open space we gave the ill-fated Frasier Fir ought to be just the ticket for the lilac, even though it’ll probably take much longer to become an actual tree than the time of which we’ll still be living here.

I also wasted no time whatsoever in re-filling the yard debris bin with cut up fir branches and more soggy, dead leaves. Only found one dead bird in the process; a much better prospect than I figured.

Today, because two of the TV news channels said it was supposed to be raining again, I went out and started cutting back the area behind the main bird feeder. There are two landscape roses coming out from back there (nearly done), a blueberry I thought was D-E-A-D (but oddly enough, wasn’t – unfortunately, I didn’t discover this until I had cut most of it to the ground – let’s hope cuttings take root!), one definitely dead, six-foot tall vine maple that I had left in place for the birds to perch on, and two half dead-looking, eight-foot tall Hinoki Cypress that may or may not be salvageable depending on how much dead growth I can remove and how badly the Vanderwolf pine will look if and when we cut out some branches.

I love Hinoki Cypresses and so whenever one of the dozen or so I have here looks tired and sad, it’s generally not a happy day for me. I’ve known these two scraggly-looking ones were in trouble for well over two years. I thought originally they would mirror the group of the same planted on the other side of our back property line, but then the little dinky dwarf-eque-advertised pine we planted nearby grew to take up the space of itself and the two Hinokis. Fine, I’ve let them fight it out ever since and it’s obvious the pine is winning. But its revealed another option, one I could have only hoped would show itself. The pine has open branch-work and allows a bit of space for the narrow Hinoki Cypress to grow through. With a little cleanup, I might not lose the two cypresses after all, but it’ll take work (about a good day’s worth once I can get all the way back there). Good thing I’ve begun spring cleanup early.

As a bonus, a first crocus is open today and several of the early daffodils, the ones I uncovered just two days ago have sent up flower stalks.

February 19, 2008

Now I’ve gone and done it. Now I have to get all professional and stuff. Now my time has to be carefully and efficiently rationed throughout the week. Now I’m going to have to train myself to get up early, to forego games of Age of Empires or simply surf the ‘net wasting time and get right to cracking at the keyboard. I’ll have to prepare myself for deadlines, learn to embrace suggestions, comments and questions and I’ll have to learn to smooze, hopefully without too much of that foot-into-mouth syndrome I suffer from.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

Over the long weekend (made even longer because I lumped last Thursday and Friday into it) I went to a science fiction/fantasy convention in eastern Washington. In a nutshell, all kinds of good karma smacked me square in the chest; something I’ll admit to questioning the existence of a time or two over the past few years. From a simple gesture performed for an author on the other side of the country Thursday afternoon to dog sitting another author’s cute Pug Sunday afternoon, I would have been the happiest struggling writer in western half of the United States without the news I received Friday evening.

I won an honorable mention in a little contest called Writers of the Future. It’s my first short story acceptance (because there will be more) and if you haven’t recently seen someone’s face beaming, just imagine someone being told they just won the biggest lottery in the world, the biggest tax-free lottery. Yeah, that kind of beaming.

Okay, in all reality, you can probably tone down that image a notch or two but I can say that after my happy dance in the hotel room while on the phone with the WotF editor I felt like streams of pure sunshine were radiating outward from my face for the rest of the evening. Or something like that. It definitely wasn’t a hot flash, I’m certain.

Anyway, today I’m coming more to gripes with what this all means and hoping not to become a one-trick pony and all that (pretty sure that won’t happen anytime soon) and shortly I’ll be off to go write something some place where ideas will drop into my lap like sap from a sappy tree.

C? I haz wrds. This writin’ thang iz e-z!

February 21, 2008

Accomplishments for the day (and it’s only 2 PM):

De-iced a water valve for our fountain, allowing the fountain to refill itself automatically once more.

Received and petted a certificate (more of a letter really) speaking of my recent writing accomplishment. Yes, I petted it.

Entertained another neighborhood cat that lives deeper within the development. (Thankfully, his owners care about him. How novel!)

Laundry, even the individual one-sy, two-sy items.

Removed remaining Christmas lights from backyard trees.

Edged front lawn and cut back last year’s dead branches on chrysanthemums and dwarf crepe myrtle.

Lamented lack of bark mulch.

Wrote 600 words on current working title.

Caught up all email.

What I plan to spend the rest of the day on:

Reading. I simply must get through a few things before I can progress any further on things I’m writing.

First on reading list:

The Terror by Dan Simmons
Space Magic by David Levine
2nd half of 2007 Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler

Those other 20-some books I promised myself I’d get to will just need to wait.

February 22, 2008

It could have been worse. He’s a big guy packing a lot of momentum. Last night, after a very long day at work, WS stopped at a local sandwich shop to bring home dinner and took a header into the glass door.

The glass didn’t break, thank goodness, but he has a healthy gash above his right eye that probably should have required a stitch or two. Seeing the towel he brought in with him, I estimate he lost about half a pint of blood. You know how head wounds bleed and all.

Being the tough guy that he is and the offspring of a lifelong practical (and hate-filled) nurse, he applied pressure and made sure he wasn’t suffering from a concussion before driving the rest of the short way home. Amazingly enough, he didn’t wake with a black eye, discoloration, broken blood vessels in his eye, or even much swelling. He’s taking excellent care of the wound and I suspect he won’t even have much of a scar after it’s healed.

Reason number 3,117 why a smart husband can be an asset.

February 25, 2008

The bad habit: I should have gone shopping with money I do not have.

The trigger: I got exactly ten percent done of everything I had hoped last weekend would accomplish. The shiny, pretty Windows Home Server thingie we bought and brought into our lives to back up everything important, namely our writing, may be a hungry monster lying in wait to devour all. WS took preemptive steps to workaround that issue. That took all day and pretty much eliminates the point of buying the thing in the first place. Thanks, Bill. You can go retire now before I start a public campaign demanding your server engineers’ heads.

Because, in my mind, all the computers in the house seemed to be occupied with said server snafu/workaround, I didn’t get the writing/editing/rewriting done that I had originally planned. Why I didn’t just sequester myself in the bedroom with one of the two dozen books I desperately need to read pronto I don’t know. Subconsciously I guess it was more fun to be in the way, something I felt I was horribly guilty of all weekend long. I just wanted the two days to go smoothly. I just wanted things to be effortlessly free and comfortable so WS could get his writing done too because he couldn’t get to it last weekend either, and somehow in the process, none of that worked out.

I’m such a control freak.

Today, I’m still not writing but I have a better reason. I’m on the lookout for the mail truck so I can hand deliver a short story manuscript that’s going out to a major publication. That’ll make two manuscripts sent in three days, and that makes me very happy.

So why do I still want to go out shopping? Silly, silly me.

February 27, 2008

Lots of people died today but the only one I really cared about was Boyd Coddington. If you don’t know who Boyd was, in a nutshell, he was a car guy and general all around asshole…like lots of really good car guys are.

I never met Mr. Coddington personally though I had seen him from a far once or twice; once at a World of Wheels car show in Phoenix and once at an early ‘80’s Barrett-Jackson show. He was gruff at both, a no nonsense kind of guy who wouldn’t give you the time of day unless you had more money than sense to your name. I once knew someone, someone I kind of thought of a quasi-boyfriend at the time though he was very rough and very mean, who had had his Coddington wheels almost stolen off his street rod while it sat outside at a crappy little restaurant west of town, and in the process, a center hubcap got scuffed up and broken.

He called Coddington’s Garage, then located just outside Pomona California to get a replacement part and mailed off a check. He waited a year. I took a trip with him to Pomona the following spring but the garage had closed up early that Saturday for some reason. He ended up paying through the nose for a near-identical part at the big Pomona swap meet held at the racetrack out there.

He never did get the actual part he wanted but he did get a reply to a nasty letter he sent to Boyd. In the reply, someone, presumably Mr. Coddington himself, said it would cost him more in time to have an employee pull the four hundred and fifty dollar part off a shelf from the warehouse than it was worth. The reply included his un-cashed check ripped, wrinkled, barely readable, and reeking of dog urine.

That was probably a good day for Boyd. Rumor has it he was very, very hard on his employees, worse to his first wife, downright horrid to most women and children. But he had a decent business sense and a fabulous designer’s eye when it came to cars. I still have a framed Coddington print ripped from a magazine of my favorite Willy’s and for years, I dreamt of having a street rod outfitted with custom Coddington wheels (unless I could afford a set of old school, extra deep, polished Halibrand Magnesiums which are ridiculously expensive and hard to find [without hairline cracks] anymore).

I can’t imagine what his employees are going through right now or his family, ex-wife included. For as hard and callous as he reportedly seemed, it’s a dark day. The world has lost one of the greats yet all anyone can talk about is that ultra conservative snob with the lisp and fat ego.

March 1, 2008

It’s the weekend, THE weekend for the Portland Roadster Show. A month ago today, the Monkey Club called to ask if I would enter my car in with the annual club display. I chose not to return their call because they continue to choose not to believe me when I’ve said my car is retired.

Still, today is prime time and I made the decision a month ago to go meet up with some of the Monkeys (not in my car which REALLY is retired . . . and badly in need of an oil change) to go see what this year’s display looks like. It’ll be the first time I’ve been back to a car show since winning the thing, the best club display that is, for the Monkey Club in 2006, the 50th anniversary of the show. It was the first time ever a non-street rod club had won best club display, and though I’ve been asked many times to head up and build the display each year after, I know that I stepped on some street rod toes that year. Sometimes it’s best to keep the water smooth after making a big splash.

So, with this event in mind upon first waking this morning, I was reminded of another obligation I made to myself this year and that’s to work toward finishing The Car Novel.

It was exactly this kind of morning that Cecil, the good guy in The Car Novel, arrives bright and early at the car show and finds that someone has vandalized his car—soaking the driver’s seat with tire gloss, Armor All if you will, and leaving handprints in the center of each and every mirror tile lying under the car to show off the detailed clean of the undercarriage. Of course, no one is absolutely, positively certain of the culprit except Cecil and there’s nothing he can do but clean up the mess as best he can before the show opens to the public.

Believe it or not, this kind of thing actually does happen but for as much as some would like to believe the police should get involved, that can’t happen. It’s private property first off and secondly, that’s why car exhibitors must sign release forms absolving everyone from any wrong doing before they can bring their vehicles into the building in the first place. And as for hired convention center security, well, let’s just say in my many years of car show experience, I’ve heard and seen a few things that would make rock stars and their groupies blush. Anyone can be paid or persuaded to look the other way.

It’s time for me to get ready to go. I’ll be slipping a notebook into my 50th Anniversary Roadster Show jacket to take along just in case. I excel at note taking and capturing the essence when I need to. After all, I might know a lot about that world, enough to write a book or two about it, but that doesn’t mean I’ve seen it all.

March 5, 2008

Tests. I hate them and have always done poorly on them, regardless if I’ve known the information cold. Lately, I’ve felt I’m being put through a few tests and I think there comes a point in one’s life where I don’t feel I should have to deal with them anymore. On the other hand, if I weren’t tested on everyday things, how boring of a life would that be? I can’t live without them and so, there’s my quandary.

Within the past few days someone I hardly know has told me of personal information I swear was said to see if they’d get a negative reaction out of me. A day later, a couple of someone’s I hardly know, each single-ish and ancient, once-time lovers, felt each other up in a public restaurant to accentuate a touchy point they were trying to make, to me, their only other dining companion. Again, I’ll say, I hardly know these people.

How do I get myself into these kinds of situations, especially with people I think I’d like to befriend, yet hardly know? I don’t know the answer and while it can certainly be interesting to be privy to this kind of information and behavior, none of which I would ever spill the beans over, ever I say, it can weigh heavily from time to time on my mind.

For the record, I didn’t react adversely to either situation, nor was I internally appalled. It’s probably my age. I’ve seen and heard a lot. Such could be the life of a small-town, small-beans celebrity confidant.

March 7, 2008

The past two days have had that promise of spring in the air, so much so that I had to start the annual race to get the backyard in shape. For what, I’m not sure but it sure feels good when it turns into the resort-like feel we designed it as.

One note: For the past eight days, I have found one dead bird, a pine siskin, somewhere in our backyard. Eight birds, eight days. If these were elephants, I’d be in a spot of trouble I think. Donning gloves, I pick each one up and place it gently under a Viburnum or some other shrub out of reach of my leaf rake. The following day, the bird’s body is gone completely. Raccoon? Cat? Over zealous slugs? It’s odd and I’m here to say I’m getting tired of picking up dead birds. Enough already.

Second note: We have a newt! Zoe would be proud of me! But alas! I tried looking him up and I think he’s a salamander at best. Olympic Salamander. Are newts and salamanders the same thing? I don’t think so. Okay, no more bleach in the fountain for a while, ever if we could keep these things around.

I uncovered the patio furniture today and put up the umbrella. Nothing looked too covered in algae, the glass table cleaned up in nothing flat. The cement patio and walkways always look bad though. Nothing I can do about them. Because WS can clean them wonderfully that’s his department (no cleaner in the fountain though because of the newt!).

Tomorrow, rain returns followed by a couple of cloudy days, then more rain. I love the rain and didn’t really feel we got enough of it this winter. But for whatever reason, I’m ready for spring this year and warmer weather. This is a first. Is it my weight? At this time last year, I weighed 178 pounds. I’m sitting at 150 now, on a plateau that has lasted since last August. Is this the weight my body insists on being at? It sure isn’t taking much effort to keep it here though I’d like to lose another twenty. Is this why I’m looking forward to warmer weather, because I don’t feel so fat? Could be.

March 12, 2008

A few days ago we went to see Cirque du Soleil. Good seats, exceptionally good seats if I do say so myself. He picked them. He usually does good with stuff like that.

In the opening, when Cirque characters are wandering around in the audience looking for someone to fit in a colorfully painted coffin, their eyes lit upon Steve. That’s right, Steve, the original Mr. Cranky Pants.

The characters whip out a tape measure. They hold it across his chest. I’m already shaking my head no, not because I know Steve will play his usual ‘stick-in-the-mud’ role but because I know there is no way he’d fit in the coffin.

The characters both shake their heads no in agreement and one of them asks him for a hug. Nice move. Steve stands, gives a hug (a first!) and they quickly maneuver him into the upright box. The problem came when they tried to close the lid. Not happening. He’s about six, eight, a dozen inches too tall.

But he tried and that’s when my jaw scraped the floor. He was smiling, laughing even. Sure, he loves Cirque du Soleil as do I (an important point) but he hates being noticed; something that has always left me confused. The guy is six foot six and two hundred and sixty pounds. Noticing him sort of can’t be helped.

Anyway, they let him out and he sat down and had what he claimed to have been an enchanting evening watching the rest of the show. He talked about it all the way home and over dinner, and well into Monday. Monday night, just for kicks, he looked up all the places the Cirque was headed and from where it came and the cost of air fare to Montreal, home to Cirque du Soleil. Then, for more fun, he looked up seating for the remaining shows here in Portland, which has been extended like it always is. Not to get more tickets but just so he’d know.

Tuesday night, he watched Corteo from DVD, including some of the supplemental material, and then switched over to Varekai, the show that came to Portland the last time around. I strongly suspect he’s listened to the music from the shows on and off since going to Corteo. He’s got all the tracks on his laptop and iPod.

I sat down to watch the Corteo DVD about the time the trapeze artists were flinging each other back and forth and teased him about the size of the guys doing all the tossing. He didn’t smile back but seemed to watch with heightened attention.

He left for work today and I’m pretty certain he’ll return home later. After all, the Cirque du Soleil DVDs are here, all of them, and I think he’s got Dralion cued up for viewing this evening. It’s his favorite. But if he brings home tights and a trampoline, I’m going to start worrying.

March 17, 2008

Bush says we’re not in a recession. Probably true…for him and his rich friends. Hang on, the world economic collapse may be happening right this very minute. Thanks George.

March 18, 2008

First things first. Way to go stock market! Good job on not destroying yourself yesterday or today. Let’s see if we can keep it up for the longer term, k?

On to other things: I’m convinced I’m allergic to my clear contact because it makes my eye itch while my doofy colored lenses do not. Why is that?

Daffodils are blooming here along with the early PJM Rhododendron and Star Magnolia. We’ve come off a few days of warm sunny weather so what could anyone expect except beauty in the garden? The daily dead bird count has stopped here over the past several days possibly because I haven’t been able to get back behind the bird feeder, across four feet of ultra-soggy, thistle hull-covered ground to pick up the last small Pine Sisken body and give it a proper send off. The count will most likely continue as soon as that happens because things sometimes go that way.

Yesterday, instead of writing (because I want to say I was waiting on some stuff but that’s only half-true) I watched “The Pursuit of Happyness.” Now, most would say that’s a happy, upbeat, feel-good movie, the story of someone triumphing over adversity and personal loss.

So why did it depress me so badly? I haven’t a clue. Watching it again later with WS, whom I thought might get something out of it, didn’t help. Maybe it had something to do with WS’s relatively recent admission to feelings of guilt for having so much when others he works with have so little (this is probably a very poor translation of which I take complete blame). So it’s got me thinking, “Why do we have this house? Why do we have a beautiful backyard? Why aren’t we struggling to make ends meet every single day?” and maybe most importantly, “Why do some people make the choices they do and fail while others get by with nary a hiccup?”

I’ve been wondering if he’s tired of admitting he has a BMW car (even though that’s only because he literally can’t fit into other cars, front or back seats, especially in less-expensive ones) and a shiny sports car (a completely paid for one as of last month) and a beautiful house and almost perfectly behaving pets and decent computer technology and even a half-way supportive spouse.

The stories he tells sometimes of the grief some of his coworkers suffer through make them sound as if they were living in a fourth world country under their own roofs. And I wonder if perhaps he’s too far removed from struggling. He’s the kind of guy who purposefully won’t remember how bad things once were both before we met and after whereas I can’t help but to think of it at least once a day. Do I ever feel guilt for having the life we currently have? No way! I wasn’t expected to live through my childhood, a fact stated daily to my face by my parents. Is that extreme experience what it takes to not feel guilt for pulling oneself up into a better life?

I wonder how many other people feel guilt for what they have. Is this what drives religion, volunteering, and/or charity donations, the three things I personally have big problems with?

March 26, 2008

Geez, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Confession time: I was out of town. The last writer’s convention of what I am calling my convention season was held in Seattle over the past long weekend where I got to rub elbows with people who have more talent in their little finger’s hangnail than I could ever hope to have in my entire body…if I weighed seven hundred pounds.

Last month I attended a different one of these things, different part of the state, basically the same people, and at that convention, everything under the sun went right for me. Not so much this time around. This time, everything seemed to go not as smoothly. I was a pest, a hanger-on. I felt I had nothing better to do than to hunt people down and once I did, I was at a loss as to what to say to them. Certainly, nothing of any interest and soon, I could detect on their faces, just slightly, that look of “get me the hell out of here” whenever I walked near. It was awful and yet somehow, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t all that bad but I’m a writer, or at least trying hard to be and that’s how things seemed to appear in my mind. Yes, I really was a bit of a pest but I stopped myself and attended more panels than I really wanted to. It was either that or go sit in the crappy hotel restaurant and eat. Well, eat if and when the waitresses decided to actually wait on anyone.

Did I mention the hotel staff was on strike? Yeah, those waitresses too. Didn’t have a problem getting my room cleaned or receiving fresh towels, but those waitresses. I’d be surprised if anyone left them a tip the whole weekend long. I heard nothing but bad things about the service and everyone was right.

As is usual after I got home I needed a day or two of sleep. Pretending to be cheery and upbeat for days on end when I really don’t’ feel that way seems to take all energy out of me. Maybe I try too hard. Probably did this trip for certain.

Though I did get to meet people I wanted to meet and talk to a few I didn’t think I had the guts to talk to I’m glad I won’t be attending any more of those until November. Now it’s time to get back to writing short stories, creating inventory they call it, so I have something to back up all those cheery and upbeat lies I told.

Editor’s Note: It’s snowing right this minute. This IS the end of March, right?

March 27, 2008

It snowed briefly yesterday; big fat flakes that didn’t have a hell’s chance of making it close to the ground. Most people probably missed seeing it but might have heard the icy pellets pummeling their windows if they stopped to listen. People don’t listen anymore, choosing instead to fill their lives with stuff that drowns out everything that should be more important – kids, phones, games, voices in their heads, unfound accusations. And when someone who does listen calls out those who don’t, who insists responsibility be taken for the world they have created for the rest of us, guess who’s seen as the oddball?

March 27, 2008

That’s it. I’m done. I’m done trying to fix him, trying to get him to see the results of his actions, of his attitude, of his voice, what he says, his mouth. I have given him more of my time and effort than I have given myself and there is something terribly, terribly wrong with this. He has issues he chooses not to fix. He is happy where he is and with what he does to himself and others. Or else he is incredible dense and does not want to realize or take responsibility for the harm he causes to both himself and others.

I can no longer try to help. I cannot allow his words to cripple me over and over again. That is what has happened and I have recently begun to think suicidal thoughts, not of killing myself but thinking that death wouldn’t be so bad. It would end his never-ending quest to bring grief into everything last thing I hold dear.

I am tired of trying. I am tired of playing cheerleader. I am tired of him, his voice, his face, his presence. Go elsewhere, Steve. Take your angry self and go ruin someone else’s life. I’m done with you.

March 31, 2008

This morning I received an email from Google saying they have disabled my Google AdWords advertising because I impose a significant risk to those advertisers.

???

Was it something I said? Maybe one of my neighbors now works for Google though I seriously doubt it. Was it my slow down in posting? Not enough linking to marketing sites? Too many links to marketing sites? Maybe I was getting too close to receiving that first hundred dollar check. It has taken me only three years to build up my account to seventy-one dollars. Google AdSense only pays after the first one hundred is made.

Okay, fine. Blogeois.com looks cleaner without all the ads, things I didn’t like anyway. But I was trying to get the page to pay for itself, you know, in paring back the expenses in every little way possible and making money on anything else I might be able to.

I’ve been toying with this year being the last for Blogeois.com as a personal journal. MsNoManagementSkills is pretty much out of our lives and I’m not as angsty about things as I was when I was working for that dot com company that treated their employees like crap, (only to later discover The Big Ass Corporation that bought that company out treated employees even worse). I could go on and on about our yard and garden but since every square foot has been planted, there’s really nothing more to say about it that isn’t any different than the same blather posted the year before.

I’m not doing car shows anymore (until 2012)but I do still do laundry, vacuuming, and taking care of WS when he has an MS exacerbation. No exciting blog entries there. I guess I’m using this place more for venting about neighbors, most of whom have decided to either move elsewhere or closet themselves indoors year ‘round in lieu of being social like everyone was once (before DrunkTank Willie spread his vicious lies five, six years ago – lies that are still making the rounds) or sprucing up the deteriorating development that’s rapidly approaching it’s ten year mark. Sure, living next door to renters ought to prove interesting, already has a little, but how tiring would complaints about that get?

I’m working hard on my writing now trying to make a go of it in the short story world first, the novel world later; neither has happened yet. I’m not outdoors as much as I used to be, not inadvertently eavesdropping on those living around me, not able to glance up and notice what The Dimmers or Cap’t Dan might have flapping out their house windows as the trees we planted to block such views are finally starting to do what we’d hoped. The photography thing hasn’t panned out much; we don’t go many places as we had once thought we might and gas prices are going to keep those ideas quelled.

No definite plans are in the works to shut Blogeois.com down anytime soon but Google deciding I’m not fit does put checkmark in the possible column. Just so you know.

April 6, 2008

This weekend was annual Portland Auto Swap meet weekend and for the first time ever, I finally went. Something has always come up in the past, or I have forgotten about it until too late. I like car-oriented swap meets, the bigger the better and even though it rained and I walked about five miles all told, I proclaim this swap meet GOOD.

I saw a couple people from The Monkey Car Club; one wanted only to argue as usual about nothing, didn’t see a few people I honestly wanted to see and talk to, and saw literally tons upon tons of junk – both good and bad. I saw the car I’ve love to own, if only I had an extra twenty-five thousand lying around, and an even better car for that extra forty-thousand that’s probably lying next to the twenty-five wherever that is. Of course, I have no place to park these cars, both convertibles or in one case, completely topless (ooo-la-la!) so my thinking would be that WS’s car would have to move outside of the garage and brave the elements day and night. Really, it would serve him right for not letting me have a three-car garage before we had this house built.

But I really couldn’t do that to him or his car which I really do like. It’s not his car’s fault that it’s not a tubbed, burnt orange 1933 highboy roadster with camel-colored interior and a blown 409 engine. Maybe someday that’ll change. I’m not going to hold my breath.

I saw lots of old farts and several young ones too. I called my trip alone to the huge, sprawling swap meet a ‘re-emersion’ into the car world. Come a month or so from now, it’ll be time to dig out The Car Novel again and start back up with editing the first half so I can finally write the second half before the end of the year. I am going to do that this year. Finish the story that is. I made it one of my 2008 goals and I really hate not making my goals.

Anyway, at the swap meet I bought a hat because most of the meet was outside and this being the Pacific Northwest, it was raining! It’s a baseball-style hat, black with black and white checkered flames because that’s so me. Yes, I was terribly stylish in my coppery orange, fitted suede jacket, jeans, clogs, brown purse slung over one shoulder, and black and white flame baseball hat. Would have been worse if my hair looked like something on a drowned rat. I also bought a red SoCal coffee mug that I won’t use until I’m ready to dive back into the novel. I am such a slut for anything from SoCal. Don’t know why but there is it regardless.

I also picked up lots and lots of car show flyers, not because I’m going to any of them but because I like having them around. They keep me informed on what’s happening around the area, who’s still holding a show, who isn’t, who changed their entry rules and fees, who’s still remembering it’s about having fun, not a medium in which to line one’s pockets. Someone today asked if I still had my car and if so, did I ever take it out. Yes, I said, it sits in my mostly clean garage under a soft cover and needs an oil change badly. No, I don’t take it out driving much and won’t until, at the earliest, 2010.

They frowned. “That long?” I assured them 2010 was only a year and a half down the road. I’d prefer to wait two years longer after that, to take it back out on the car show circuit during it’s tenth year anniversary, and as long as I’m keeping myself neck-deep in writing, I don’t think that’ll be too hard to do. Imagine how pretty it’ll be then, all uber-shiny and pampered gloss black next to those other ten year old sports cars that have a decade’s worth of wear and tear on them. If I control myself for that long, my car ought to still have less than twenty thousand miles on it (although JUST under). I’m thinking those other car show participants are going to hate seeing me and my car and you know, I just wouldn’t feel right with it being any other way.

April 7, 2008

I’m halfway through two stories: Working Title and YAWT (Yet Another Working Title – pronounced ‘yacht’ here at B’s landlocked Garden Inn & Resort) and last Friday I hit the proverbial wall. Not writer’s block for if I truly suffered it you wouldn’t be reading this, and you all know I usually have something to blather on and on about. It’s just a wall. My stories aren’t talking to me or anyone else as far as I can tell. Usually that means they need to sit and percolate. But here’s the thing: I don’t feel I have time to wait. Push the stories and they may suck in the end. Don’t push the stories . . . and they may still suck in the end if an end ever gets written.

C’mon B, be professional and all that. Work through it. Prove to yourself most of all that you do indeed have what it takes to become what you really want to be — a cat juggler! No, no, a writer, an author, a wordy, oft-misunderstood rock star! A legend in your own mind!

Been there, done that.

It’s April. I really need to remember to schedule things to see and places to go for myself during the month of April. April is my depression month. Not quite spring, too close to summer (summer being a time of year I’m not terribly fond of). Doesn’t make one whit of sense but there it is.

Of course by stating aloud that April is depressing makes it so. I’m somewhat proud of myself for not saying it until just a minute ago even though I’ve felt off and somewhat emotionally paralyzed about nearly everything since, oh, let’s see, April 1st.

But at least I know now, having made it so in my mind. Perhaps saying it is half the battle of getting through it. Maybe my stories sensed I was being moody and just maybe, since acknowledging it, they’ll start talking to me again (and SOON dammit!).

Or maybe I just need a nap. Until May.

April 14, 2008

Because we were promised warm dry weather this past weekend, I worked toward tackling one of my biggest must-do spring list items, and in the process forgot about shopping, laundry, and an important meeting, forgot to eat once or twice, and probably countless other things that I would normally fret about accomplishing during the same 48-72 hour period of time. But somehow, I feel okay about it.

As soon as I saw that the local weather people might, might, just be right their weekend forecast, I tried to order a load of bark mulch to be delivered so I could whip our yard into shape. What better way to banish depression than to work one’s self half to death, I figure. But no, everyone else and their mother had the same idea and I’d have to wait weeks before the weather would cooperate again.

Or would I?

Thursday I drove WS to work and did a little investigative work into the loamy world of pre-bagged bark mulch. Did you know there’s such a thing as ‘color-enhanced’ mulch that’s guaranteed to keep its reddish color for a year? I strongly suspect this is the product Mrs. Howler Monkey has been using since this is the exact reddish color of the chunks of mulch Limpy carries in his fur year around. And since we love the water retention and weed barrier protection of bark mulch yet only spread the stuff once every other year and have to live with the beautiful color fading to dull, dirt brown within a month or two, what a great product to find!

Now, Lowe’s, whose claim is low everyday prices, sells bags of color-enhanced mulch for $5.47 a bag. Our front and side yard alone would require a dozen bags. Ouch! On the other hand, Home Depot sells a similar product for $3.99 a bag. Now we’re talking.

For all you math-heads out there, I’ll admit this: The bags are a whole lot more expensive than a seven yard delivery of mulch dumped in one’s driveway, but there are advantages to bagged mulch over bulk mulch as you might imagine. Convenience, the year long color-enhanced thing, trusting that what’s delivered is the actual amount paid for, not having to wait, not having to work ten hours straight to get a mountain of mulch out of the driveway so as to get one’s car out of the garage, etc.

Guess which one made more sense to me this year? Guess what I did all weekend long? Guess what I’d still be doing if the sun didn’t have this annoying habit of setting or that the rain/hail hadn’t returned today?

I’m not even going to mention the pallet and a half of cement retaining wall block I did get delivered last Friday morning, and that I haven’t touched other than to get it pre-staged throughout the back yard. But I will say our front and side yard is finished as is the back grotto area and most of the immediate fountain space. It looks wonderful and I still have half a month to get the rest into shape.

Oh. Did I forget to mention I want all this done before May 1st? Well let’s not get muddled up in the details, besides, I’ve got work to do.

April 16, 2008

I’m having a love/hate relationship with our local weather this spring. Yes, it is technically spring here. I know because I was out in it for the two days it occurred last weekend. It got up to 80 degrees F. here. I got some color in my skin and I sweated buckets. Two-thirds of our total yard area looks wonderful with all the trimming, weeding, and mulch spreading, and I feel accomplished about that amount of finished work. But I’m never going to love the hot weather that I know is just up the street and around the corner.

On the other hand, being as it was very warm over the weekend, I had to keep an extra heavy eye on WS to make sure he wasn’t over-exerting himself or getting overheated. It’s that time of year. Sometime between the middle of April and early June is when he’s most likely to have his first hard MS exacerbation of the year; the kind where he can’t walk for a few weeks and/or gets severe double vision, and as his caregiver, I have to do every big and little thing here by myself.

But because that hasn’t happened as of yet, I’m liking this chilly wet weather even though it means I can’t do much in the way of finishing the yard work. There’s still 126 blocks of retaining wall for me to put into place, plus 113 cobblestone patio brick waiting for me to dig out the saturated ground first. While it’s possible I won’t be able to finish both projects before my self-imposed May 1st deadline, I’m hoping the best will happen in that WS’s MS won’t flare up at the same time the weather decides to cooperate because if both happen at once, the back yard won’t be finished this year.

And so, the middle of the week is here. It was supposed to be sunny today and tomorrow with highs in the low 60’s. I originally planned on spreading four or five more bags of mulch and getting one side (about half) of the retaining block laid. As it is, I was able to spread one bag of mulch before calling it quits.

It’s about 2:30 p.m. here and we’re socked in with temps around 48 degrees. It’s sprinkling out and the local weathermen are quasi-predicting snow, or at the very least heavy hail for much of this coming weekend; highs in the 40’s, as if we’ve gone back to mid February. Needless to say, no yard work will be done this coming weekend unless forecasts change radically between now and then.

They’ve been wrong before.

April 20, 2008

This has been a fun weekend. If it weren’t for the weather that I’m enjoying so much, I might have something to complain about. I don’t, but I’ll tell you about it all anyway.

Snow was forecasted for our area and sure enough, we got some! Got some hail too and ice and a bit of freezing rain. Okay, in all fairness, I’m not terribly happy about buying that flat of spring geraniums or those two tomato plants or half a dozen petunias last week and now needing to keep them in the slightly warmer garage where they are getting all thin and spindly and yellow but if they can hold out just one more week, I think they’ll pull through.

Yesterday morning, we woke to a leaking toilet in the master bedroom. Our flooring can handle water sitting on it up to a point. We’re now changing towels twice a day under the tank where a bolt rusted itself through the bottom. We’re now waiting for Lowe’s to call us next week to deliver and install a new bigger and improved toilet, one that WS has probably been pining over since reaching maturity. Normal sized commodes are barely big enough for normal sized people. WS has never been normal sized. Since we have to replace the thing anyway, my thinking is if he can afford it, why the heck can’t the man have a little comfort when sitting on the pot?

Yesterday I also discovered another reason not to like the renters next door. Oh, I haven’t mentioned much about them, have I? Trust me, that post is coming. Boy, is it ever coming.

I predict a miserable summer for both us and them. I’ll also say a new sound can be heard on our street. No, it isn’t the constant whacking, thudding, crashing sound of the renter’s kids skateboards while their oldest works for hours, day and night, trying to learn how to flip the thing. Nor is it listening to the youngest take a metal-ended bungee cord and beat the living crap out of the property’s trees and shrubs. Nor is it the drums the oldest whacks and crashes every day for an hour between three and four p.m. out of their open garage twelve feet away from our house (‘played’ with extra enthusiasm whenever someone passes on the street).

Nope, it’s the sound of a clock ticking. Tick, tick, tick, the sound of the minutes before I call the rental company and lay into them for 1) being so irresponsible for renting a home in a densely-packed neighborhood to a family with a teenager learning to play the drums, 2) for renting a two vehicle home to a two-driver family with three cars who rents a room out to another driver with two cars and has between them five, sometimes six vehicles jockeying for parking out on the narrow street that was built with the intention of no one ever parking on the street, and perhaps most importantly, 3) renting to a family who’s kid draws crude images on the community mailbox with a permanent black marker and invites over pre-teen boys who scream such endearing things to each other like, “Two, four, six, eight. Let’s go home and masterbate!” and “Suck my boobies!”

I scrubbed the penis off the mailbox yesterday. I did it while it was snowing. Had to use scouring powder.

After finding it thrown up into our yard twice, I finally took the big block of wood the skateboarder uses to jump with and tossed it in the trash. I’ve replaced the large river rocks we use in our landscaping twice, from their driveway. I’ve pulled the blooming weeds from their ignored, dead side yard (even though they have weekly lawn service that should be doing this) in hopes of preventing our yard from bursting out in mass dandelions. We’ve listened to hours of loud drum playing and noticed the kid only plays then when trying to impress his friends or anyone passing by, or when he spies one of his parents turning onto the street, returning home from work. We’re on to his little game.

The kids, three of them with the oldest a fourteen year old half-brother followed by an eight and seven year old, are unsupervised for hours after school, exactly what Mrs. Renter told me and Mrs. Howler Monkey would never happen. Yet it is. Regardless of that, there is no excuse for the same behavior to occur on weekends when all the vehicles over there prove parents, adults allegedly, are home. What kind of crappy place did these people live in/get evicted from previously and why do they think they can get away this stuff with it here? Where are these people when obscenities are being yelled by their offspring, or when the mailbox is being defaced?

Inside playing Xbox, is the neighborhood rumor buzz.

Woe is them if that’s the case, because it’s not going to be much longer before at least one of their neighbors will be on the phone trying to get them evicted.

May 8, 2008

Yes, it’s been a while. No excuses but here’s what’s gone on around here over the past few weeks:

My ISP has pulled some major changes in the way I upload entries here. Uploading takes three times as long and I have to delete everything first before I can update. Way back-asswards if you ask me. After being with this company six years or so, count me very unhappy.

A new writer friend has been diagnosed with colon cancer. He’ll be 45 next month and hopefully still will celebrate his birthday if his surgery goes well tomorrow morning. Go get checked, now. Yes, I’m talking to YOU.

Got all 216 retaining blocks laid in our backyard before May 1st. Haven’t started on the 113 cobblestone patio blocks yet due to the weather. Also spread twenty-some bags of color enhanced bark mulch after a day of transplanting, moving, and digging out shrubs that needed attention. Our backyard looks fabulous.

Have regained five pounds (now at 155 lbs). The extra half inch diameter each of my biceps now sport may or may not be partly to blame. Regardless, I now back on Phase One of the South Beach diet (some daily variances may occur) as is WS who gained back about the same.

Had our front yard publicly admired by some neighbors who nearly 9 years ago told us gardening and yard work was for anal people who thought their shit didn’t stink. I dunno, I guess my floral scent was just a luck of the draw…

Am being courted by Competition Boy and Drill Sergeant Dave to return to the original sports car club I was a member of back in 2002-2004 (not to be confused with The Monkey Club) before leaving due to too much drama (of which The Monkey Club are world record holders of). Why would I ever consider returning or at least hanging out with these people again, especially since I won’t take my car out until 2010 at the earliest? Hint: I’m back to work on my Car Novel which just happens to be all about car club drama. Refresher course? Hmm, could be. You may experience lighter blogging here throughout the summer due to novel writing.

Threw a hissy fit over the renter’s kids at the renters themselves. Turns out their kids are ‘angels’ and would never tell a lie. Apparently, all those thrown rocks near our backyard windows and the daily barrage of loud foul language coming from the kids’ mouths when we’re sitting quietly on our own front porch are just me and WS’ imagination running wild. WS proceeded to talk to the rental management company and without being able to say too much more due to potential legal action, we were told we are basically SOL because, as adults without kids, we’re overly sensitive to the sounds of children.

Renter’s oldest kid has his friends flipping us off at every occasion now. Can’t even drive down the street without getting the bird from some punk.

Have discovered allies in both Ms. Howler Monkey and Mrs. Dry Cleaner, both of whom can’t stand the renter’s kids. In coming months, will test the waters on the feelings of others living nearby.

Discovered that Ms. Howler Monkey has contacted Mr. Wall Street, owner of the rental house, and complained about his rental family. Unfortunately, the rental management company doesn’t consider this a formal complaint unless they get the call themselves. It’s safe to say Ms. Howler Monkey wasn’t pleased on the least to hear this.

Limpy has been harassed, has had rocks thrown at him, kids chase him, and dogs set loose on him over the past week. Thankfully, Ms. Howler Monkey has witnessed nearly all the attacks and has a heightened sense of concern over her cat. It is unfortunate that Ms. Howler Monkey’s own young kids seemed to have lumped me in with the renters when it comes to harassing Limpy and now screams at me to leave his cat alone. (Young dood, if you only knew how many times I have rescued your cat…)

Discovered a frog the size of my hand living in our backyard. I’ve named him Zech (like Tech but with a Z).

Earlier this week I had an extreme allergic reaction to a foil packet of Albacore tuna; so bad in fact, I took a Benadryl and wrote down what was happening just in case I was incapacitated by the time WS got home from work. I can’t remember a time when my head and heart pounded so hard nor when my face and chest turned so bright, screaming red, which is saying a lot since my face flushes red at the drop of a hat.

And finally, have enjoyed the extended early spring weather and not needing to use the air conditioning. But enough is enough for a while. If it’s not too much to ask, we’d like our lone tomato plant to stop whining about how cold it’s been. Don’t go all surface of the sun on us, but a little sunny warmth here and there would be nice.

Thanks for reading.

June 9, 2008

Apparently I was right on multiple fronts. WS’ MS is the remitting/relapsing kind. So is our relationship, again, after his extreme steroid treatments. Things are rough right now. His walking and speech are nearly back to normal. Our talking might resume next week. Uncomfortable silence and avoidance is the rule right now. Outside developments this evening didn’t make things any smoother.

Over the past month, I’ve had the very, very strong feeling that my mere existence is irritating to most everyone I come into contact with, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors alike. It’s an awful feeling and though I want to believe it’s just some kind of paranoia brought on by gawd knows what, the feeling is nearly overwhelming. It doesn’t make sense but it exists regardless.

About a month ago, I attended a function in which everyone was required to RSVP publicly via email the same morning of the event. I was the last to respond, and within an hour of doing so, all but one person cancelled. I wrote it off as coincidence. I went to the event anyway and that one person didn’t show up either. No problems. Things, like life, come up.

A couple of weeks ago, I apparently pissed a few people off and made another one cry. I suspect it was because I wouldn’t lie nor could I bring myself to do so. WS says I have an over-sense of responsibility, something he now says isn’t a bad thing (although that wasn’t what was expressed the first time it was said.) I’m still not sure how that’s a bad thing.

Over the weekend I went to a gathering at which I met someone who previously professed to have wanted to meet me for some time. Once we met however, they were sorely disappointed. They couldn’t seem to want to get away from me fast enough. They thought I was something else entirely, someone who could help their career. I don’t know how they might have come up with that idea because I’ve never represented myself as anything but what I am.

This evening, WS and I were told to move away by a highly irate Mr. Dimmer over the latest ball his kids hit over our back fence. WS handled the incident with the kids who came to the door asking for their ball back. He reminded them of our widely known rule: The next time it happens, you don’t get the ball back. It’s the same rule we tell all the kids who have ever lived alongside us and the rule we told The Dimmer kids some five years ago. And yes, because I know what most of you are thinking: Yes, we are assholes. Yes, we are those people who yell at your kids to stay out of our yard. Yes, we’d hope you teach your kids to have respect for others and their property but that’s not the case with The Dimmers. It is us who must bend to their wills.

WS went and fetched the ball. If I know WS, he glared at the kids when he gave it back to them. I know I would and have done just this myself. Little Screamer Dimmer, the young daughter who cries if you look at her longer than five seconds, went home and cried for her father who marched, literally Marched to our door and called WS an asshole to his face. Then he called us both liars for telling him that a ball comes over the fence from their backyard at least once a week when weather permits kids to play out back. I routinely toss balls back over the fence on a weekly basis during my daily garden stroll. But nope. Mr. Dimmer didn’t want to hear it.

Then he told us to move if we don’t like it.

Then he marched around the neighborhood and appeared to be trying to drum up support for his cause, whatever that might be (perhaps he’d like everyone to sign a “Happy Asshole Card”) amid wild gesturing and sudden movements. I suspect he also went over to The Renters, the family everyone but he is having problems with and since then, we’ve spent the evening being flipped off by numerous neighborhood kids left and right. I’m honestly expecting our house to be vandalized, if not overnight then sometime soon.

Let’s see, I wouldn’t lie yet been called a liar twice in the past couple of months, WS once. WS was called an asshole loud enough for neighbors up and down the street to overhear (not that we care about that – the kids on this street could drown out a low approaching 747; what’s more swearing and shouting?). I disappointed a few people including one who thought I was something I’m not. Even with living here four years longer than The Dimmers, we’re told, nay, screamed at on our own doorstep, to move “if we don’t like it.”

What’s the world coming to when someone trying his hardest to get over an MS exacerbation has to go through this kind of crap? What’s the future hold for me when I’m feeling that I can no longer speak my mind? I’m trying to keep in mind that Mr. Dimmer, out of yet another job for a few months and probably not taking his medication, both things he tells the world at the drop of a hat, is under a lot of stress and things probably caught him on a bad day. But other people have bad days too. When do people stop thinking of just themselves? When do people start taking responsibility for their own actions and the actions of their kids? When do people start owning up? It used to be common sense. We’ve bred this very thing out of our offspring.

That’s all I’m going to say about any of this. Unless police and lawyers get involved and maybe even then, I’m signing off for a while and giving everyone else a rest.

June 10, 2008

And then, just 24 hours later, we get an extensive apology from Mr. Dimmer. He said he found out that indeed, balls and other toys had been coming over the fence with some frequency. Glad we got that all straightened out. Then, out of the blue, Mrs. Dry Cleaner walked over and thanked me personally for standing up against The Renters’ out-of-control kid and his language problem.

I won’t trust Mr. Dimmer as far as I could throw him and his entire family because he truly is the neighborhood loose cannon and nothing says he won’t rethink his apology and go off again. It’s happened before.

But the thank you from the Dry Cleaners came completely out of left field. Wow, I’m still reeling. Could it be that I did something right for this neighborhood for a change?

So I’m considering this one and a half corrections of the “I’m irritating everyone” phase I seem to be going through. Maybe, given some time, some of the other things will work themselves out for the best. And in the meantime, I’m taking Kristy’s comment advice and Mary Lou’s to heart. And then I’m getting some sleep. It was a very long night last night.

June 12, 2008

And then the relationship took a shit. I feel as though we’ve jumped back in time when WS used to only want to sit around while at home and watch TV or work on his laptop. I don’t know how much longer I can hold onto my sanity here.

Last month, we went to a car club meeting. I voiced my concern over driving my car all the way out to Suburban Chevrolet, a fifty-two mile round trip, and paying a hundred and thirty dollars for them to change the oil in my car, something I haven’t done for almost three years. The people at Suburban don’t treat me very well as a customer but that’s only half of it. I don’t want to put extra miles on my car if I’m only going to have to sell it probably sooner than later. And yes, I do believe it’ll be sooner than later. The economy sucks hard, we’re in debt over our eyeballs, and it’s just a matter of time before the Corvette becomes pointless.

WS was all for going to the meeting last month. I figured they were the best people to teach me how to change my own oil. But they could only teach me on a day when I had something already scheduled; something I probably should have cancelled anyway. It was a writing thing, something I went to alone, as most of the writing things I want to do are because I have, most of the time, a desire to write stuff that will be published. WS does not share that desire.

WS knew tonight’s meeting was coming. He accompanied me last Saturday on the club’s tech day, the day I was supposed to learn to change oil but ran out of time with. The club members there told us about the upcoming meeting. We talked about it in regards to needing to know what we needed to do before paying dues. Yet last night, when I brought up the meeting, WS flashed his sour look and claimed to have forgotten. Then he claimed to have forgotten today all day at work too, a day he previously said he’d only work a few hours as it was the first full day he was back at work after his MS exacerbation.

He didn’t want to go to the meeting. He didn’t think to bring home anything for dinner, something else we had talked about before we went to the previous meeting. I’ve been through this before and it stinks of WS disliking having to do anything other than watching TV and working on his computer.

June 26, 2008

Just because one whines about something doesn’t mean it’ll get any better.

Selfishly, I longed to go awhile without hearing about anything MS related. I even mentioned it once or twice in passing. I ought to take a second to appreciate that single MS-free day last week even if it was a day in which I wasn’t home a good portion of.

WS is walking around normally as if he never had a major, life-upheaving exacerbation three weeks ago. No speech slurring and no wobbliness, but that doesn’t mean life can go back to normal. Not now, not ever again. Things have changed.

We both went to his MIR checkup last week at which the neurologist WS likes was supposed to be able to tell him whether his MS had progressed or not since his last MIR. Naturally, you’d think it had. After all, MS is a progressively degenerative disease. Everyone all up and down the chain of doctors and technicians forgot to check his last MIR records so we had to wait until this week to hear the answer: “Uh, Yes, it has progressed, enough so you’ll will have to radically change your medication and method.”

Basically, WS has outgrown his MS medication.

He uses Avonex, administered once a week with a three and a half inch needle rapidly inserted deep into a thick muscle, usually his thigh. There aren’t too many places a three and a half inch needle can go. Currently, there are six types of MS medication he can use. Unfortunately, four of them cause a little thing called ‘heart toxicity’ which sounds every bit as bad as it is. Basically, the medication causes your heart to die. Could happen rapidly, could take a year or two or five. No one really knows why some people die right away and others linger for a while longer.

Either way, he’s not interested in taking that kind of medication and I couldn’t be happier. (Woohoo, counting small victories here.)

That leaves the other two kinds; one he is now outgrown, the other is a daily injection with a shorter needle and no known side effects.

That could be a good thing or a bad thing.

The good thing is there are no 24-hour flu-like symptoms like with the Avonex he takes now. Another good thing is the other medication is supposed to not cause severe depression, but because I now see that WS has been depressed his entire life, way before he ever knew he had MS, I have to cross that plus off the list. Something tells me he’ll still be every bit as depressed and depressing as he ever was.

Negatives are becoming clear as we run across the implications in our heads. A daily injection means travel for longer than a day is off the table again in my opinion, a shame really since he’s taken strides to deal with his 10-minute hamster-bladder issue. Daily injections will need to be taken at the same time every day. Since we feed The Queen every day around the same time, setting up a similar injection time won’t be much of a problem, unless there are side effects from not taking it within the same hour or three (depending on our schedules, work, etc.).

The progression of the disease itself is a negative, as anyone would expect it to be. But entering this stage means it’s time WS stop dragging his feet around setting up a will and looking into long term care insurance while he can. It’ll only get more expensive the longer he waits.

It’s high time we both crank down the spending and start aggressively paying down our bills (again) because if he should lose his job (with even more layoffs coming in the future – will it ever, EVER end??) we will be so royally screwed that certainly we will never recover. I may need to reevaluate whether it costs us more for me to stay home and not bring in money, playing housekeeper/caregiver when necessary, or to find a job at age 52 with a history of exercise- and cold and flu-induced asthma and with no education or skills to speak of, knowing that I’ll need some form of transportation or money for the bus that doesn’t stop anywhere near our house, money for work clothes, Taco Bell uniform or whatever, etc., and money for all those little niggle-y expenses that go with holding down a job. Will I make enough to justify working outside the home again or will I just be working to pay for job costs? Been there, done that!

So, like I stated in the beginning of this entry, whining about this doesn’t mean anything will get better. Things, in my opinion, have remained about the same. Some victories, some utter failures. I still can’t say boo to anyone without pissing them off or hurting feelings. The neighborhood has gone to hell in a hand basket since The Renters and Mr. Dimmer have decided to become best of friends. And Saturday it’s supposed to reach 100 degrees F. here. Lovely, just all so wonderfully lovely.

September 5, 2008

Is summer over yet? Almost? Let’s hope so. I’m not a fan in the least. Too hot, too loud, too much to do and did I mention the heat? Yeah, okay, let’s move on.

I apologize in advance for the length of my absence. I figured I’d give it a month at most. I had planned on posting August 1st but stuff got in the way, some good, some not but that’s where all the good whining comes from, right? Let’s dive in then.

Good things: I auditioned for and gained admission into another writing group that’s full of mostly published authors. I feel horribly way over my head at the moment but then again, I’ve only been with them for a month. It’ll get easier and hey, I might actually figure out what I’m supposed to be doing after a while.

I received another Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest and those rapscallious Scientologists still haven’t asked for my soul. No money for Honorable Mention but it’s a feather in my writer’s cap.

I’ve been religiously working out since, um, months and I’m convinced my arms and shoulders are mere years now from saying, “Back Off, Bub, unless you want to be bent into a pretzel.” Even more frightening is that I am running, running I say. Yes, it’s true. I can now run a twelve minute mile…if I were indeed running an entire mile. Actually, I’m dying after a third of a mile and have to slow down to a walk but I’m working on my endurance. Ought to hit that one mile mark about the time my arms look like Arnold circa 1983.

Limpy, The Howler Monkey’s ignored cat is still around and looking good considering the warm weather when he usually loses half his long, thick fur. We’ve been brushing him almost every day and haven’t seen anyone else take a swing at him or try to run him down for almost four months. No doubt he’ll spend time with us indoors again this coming winter. He’s got to be going on twelve or thirteen years old now, I figure and his bones surely must feel the cold.

All of our pets are still with us, The Queen, Cameron, the Feral One, Zooot, Seth, and Maxx. Their room was finally painted just this past weekend in fact, which marks the end of last year’s painting project. (Shh, don’t tell that to the few holes I need to patch and paint in the livingroom.)

In the so-so column of happening things, WS had to change his MS medication to one he’s required to take every day instead of once a week. The good thing is that the new needle is a little, dinky, skinny thing less than half an inch long. The old needle was three and half inches long and thick, like something an insane person would take a core sample with. He’s much happier with this medication and says his lifelong depression has lifted. Me, I’m not so convinced, and have stated so with my usual, “Been there, heard that, got the Lucite trophy for long suffering tolerance to show for it.” His recent admission of thoughts of suicide back when on his old medication blind-sided me and still has me feeling like a care provider idiot and failure. That’ll take some time to get over. I’m not going to say anything more about this.

Moving on, I still haven’t changed the oil in my car but I have taken steps toward learning how to do it myself. All I’ve had to do was con a certain group of people to like me again after I left their group three years ago. No, it’s NOT the Monkey Car Club (ugh, spit, sputter, icky taste, ugh!). Instead, I’m back with Drill Sergeant Dave and Competition Boy and the ORIGINAL sports car club I started with when I first bought my car. So far, so good. They’re still basically the same, loud, obnoxious, boastful but with a whole lot less drinking and driving, thank gawd. Only took a major drunk driving accident to cure most of that. Yes, I typed most, not all. I’ll continue to avoid those particular morons like the plague.

No, this doesn’t mean I’m driving my car again. Not until 2010 at the absolute earliest, 2012 if I can hold out that long. It’s still sitting in the garage, loving covered with a soft car blanket and hooked to a battery tender. The weird thing is, these people in this club were okay with me stating, right up front that I wouldn’t be bring my car to any of their club events. No one else has been able to get away with this to date. I think they like me more than I give them credit for, or maybe I’m just setting myself up for something bad down the road. I don’t care. I wanted to learn how to change my own oil (it isn’t as simple as it sounds) and I can’t afford to pay someone else $130 to do it for me. Ridiculous.

Bad things include us not being able to afford much of anything anymore. We’ve cut back everything we could with the exception of a few things that were pre-planned. But it’s all good. I mean, we supported the economy for years. It’s time to let others take over.

WS recently survived yet another lay off at work. They seem to come ever six weeks now, the notices of letting go. A neighbor a couple of houses down who worked in a department near WS, a heavily religious man with seven kids, was just let go last week. It drives me crazy wondering when the shoe will drop because one day it will. The plant and land has been sold; the company is leasing space back from the new owners for the remaining employees. Good thing we stopped spending money, huh?

I’ve gained ten pounds recently. I blame it on a combination of eating out over the summer(even eating South Beach-ish in restaurants doesn’t cut it because who knows how much butter and crap they add to seemingly ‘healthy’ food) and working out to gain muscle and upper body strength. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get down to my dream weight of 120, or even 135, not if I want to keep lifting weights which is important to me being post menopausal and all. But as long as I can get back down to 148-150 pounds sometime soon, I’ll be happy. As it is, here I am, entering fall and I can’t fit into most of my cool weather clothes (from just five months ago!). Nope, Not.At,All happy. I only have myself to blame. It’s not like someone fed me cookies in my sleep.

The Renters still live next door. In some perverted twist of the universe, all the neighbors save The Dry Cleaners think the skateboarding teenager, forever known as the Big Fat Liar or BFL, is the hottest thing since Wi-Fi. He still plays his drums in the garage, playing just as badly and as loudly and usually only to show off to neighbor kids or when he sees his parents coming home from work.

Last week the neighborhood had a whooping cough scare courtesy of The Big Fat Liar. BFL was rushed to the hospital and brought home hours later after tests were done with a new bike and a (ninth??) iPod. While riding his new bike and trying to act like he’s the shit, he coughed up a storm at and around the two dozen plus kids who live on this street now. It’s a joke, don’t you know. No one seemed to show concern or care. The next day, he loudly told everyone his tests showed no whooping cough. Whew, glad his parents can afford to buy him every cool thing on the planet while having to rent a house. Here’s a tip: Save your money, buy a house and move the f**k out!

Oh, and all those houses that were up for sale in our development last spring? Still up for sale. Every last one of them. No joy there, but then again, no new batch of troublesome kids either.

There’s probably other stuff I’ve forgotten to mention. I’ll probably remember half of it the moment I post this but I promise to mention them if I do. And I promise to pick back up posting here again, even with my web hosting place still blowing goats. Can’t have everything all puppies and rainbows, can we?

Thanks for reading, thanks for keeping on me to post. Your comments and email meant everything.

September 8, 2008

Today, outside, kids and garbage litter the street. The new school year’s been in session four days and already, kids have a day off. And because it’s Monday and trash day, the first of the pre-autumn winds have emptied the recycling bins of neighbors who insist, year after year, of putting their paper bin on top where it’s openly exposed to the breeze. Kids are having a field day darting bikes and skateboards around the blowing sheets of newspaper, computer printouts, fast food cups, and wrappers and defiantly staring down vehicles who try to do the same.

In a development where nearly everyone has a big backyard, it’s as if no one has one for kids to play in. Or maybe nowadays it’s considered low-class to do so. “My kids wouldn’t be caught dead playing in our backyard,” yet they’ll risk life and limb by teaching their offspring that they hold rule over what the street was built for. Interestingly enough, WS discovered online last week that in our state, it’s illegal to allow children to play in the street. Yeah, I’d like to see someone, anyone, try to enforce that law.

I ran for five minutes this morning on the treadmill, speed walked another minute, and walked briskly for another twenty followed by a bicep/triceps workout. Enough for today already. I had to push myself to do any of this because a) I didn’t want to get out of bed, and b) I feel sluggish because I ate sugar and white flour over the weekend. Yeah I know, bad me but I had a good reason (isn’t that always the case?).

The reason: Exactly twenty years ago last Saturday evening, I laid eyes on WS for the very first time at a BBS party (Bulletin Board System – pre-Internet days) his roommate threw for his most active, core group members. Actually, anyone could have shown up but the only ones who did were people who didn’t need to be driven to and picked up by their parents which in the end, turned out even better because alcohol was served. Through that evening’s early fuzzy navel haze, I turned to the apartment’s kitchenette and saw a hulk filling a hallway. It was WS lumbering out from his bedroom where he had been holed up, him not being much of a party person.

His presence was well known on the BBS’ political message forum, and his intelligent yet stinging commentary on the state of the nation and thoughts expressed by others not as well informed were legendary. But I, who despise politics even to this day, steered clear of that message base and barely posted a peep elsewhere.

Even so, he noticed. The rest is history. A few weeks later, he shocked the tight BBS community by asking me to move in. We both shocked the same by marrying a little over a year later. Another couple who met at the same party got married shortly after we did, in part because we did, and divorced a couple of years later. A few others had children (out of wedlock) and went their separate ways. Three have made good livings from legitimate work; two did a nickel a piece for fencing. One’s whereabouts has been unknown for almost two decades after he and his family, who once owned most of an island in Puget Sound, were devastated by bad stock holdings and risky business ventures.

Out of that core group of people, we stand alone and damn it, we deserved to celebrate.

Was it worth it, the Saturday night éclair a piece, the two different baby cakes shared, the six-inch cream cake with cocoa sprinkles and curlicue fondant icing? Mostly yes. If anyone had told me twenty years ago I’d be living the life I live today, I would have called bullshit. If someone had told me I’d celebrate by eating an éclair, 2/3’s of a baby cake and half a small cream cake, I would have asked, “Only half a cream cake?”

September 10, 2008

I took advantage of the sweet, temporary silence from BFL’s skateboarding (give it a rest, kid!) yesterday evening and sat out front for a while. The sounds of late summer are beautiful as long as they aren’t interrupted by the constant banging and thrashing of unsuccessfully flipped skateboards or the profanity that comes from the inability to perform an Ollie once, twice, ever.

No, just the sound of birds in the trees and the soft gurgle of various neighbor water fountains marred only by the ragged breathing of Mr. Dimmer who I thought had decided to take up jogging to battle his ever increasing waistline. But no, that kind of thinking only gives the guy too much credit. A neighbor across the street called out to the tripping, stumbling, panting Mr. Dimmer, asking if he had indeed started an exercise program.

“Not hardly,” Mr. Dimmer managed to spit out. “Gotta get the blood pressure and heart rate up. I’ve got a lawyer and an insurance agent coming by in a little bit and I’ve got to prove I’m too much of a health risk to get a job.”

Some things never change.

September 12, 2008

It’s that time of year again. No, I’m not talking about cool autumn air filled with the hint of ripening apples and wood smoke. No, it’s the time when I inadvertently fill every weekend with events, activities, and the like and wonder how the hell I’m going to get through it all. Literally, every weekend from now until the third week of December is jam-packed with stuff I have to do, places I have to be. I’ve gotten into the habit of taking my 2008-09 calendar book everywhere (literally a book – none of those trendy, electronic, mamby-pamby, “Oh gee, my battery is low,” PDA things for me!) and boy, oh boy, has that turned into the best idea ever.

Actually, now that I’m looking at the third weekend in December, I do see Saturday is filled. Okay, make that every weekend from now until the fourth weekend in December filled. I think I’ll go ahead and pencil in that weekend for myself, to sleep.

Which brings me to the real point of today’s entry: The recent email from my old, long-hated boss, MsNoManagementSkills.

“It must suck being old. I’m not as young as I used to be that’s for sure. I’m having a hard time getting out of bed in the mornings. [DorkMaster] is too. He’s going into work late because of it. I don’t know how you do it.”

Let’s refresh our memories together, shall we?

I’m 52 years old. MsNoManagementSkills is 32 years old. I spend my days writing, gardening, reading, fretting about bill and the economy, and exercising. She spends her days eating, working, belittling others, eating, shopping, eating, and lamenting being old at 32 years old. What must suck is being her.

September 14, 2008

You all are probably tired of me whining about the constant skateboard noise around here since The Renters moved in less than a year ago. Okay, point taken. But I have to add one more bit to that whine – it’s gotten much worse just since last weekend.

For whatever reason, The Howler Monkeys, who originally disliked The Renters every bit as much as I do, have decided the oldest Renter kid, otherwise known as BFL (Big Fat Liar) and the only kid on the block to have a skateboard thus making him the origin of constant noise because he literally spends upwards of twelve hours a day trying to flip his board, is A-Okay. Now, the young Howler Monkey kids have their own skateboards. Now, there are four kids banging and crashing their skateboards out front, trying to flip them hour after hour after hour every single day. Thank gawd for the four hours BFL is at school Monday through Thursday.

I want to open the window (because the noise I’m talking about is LOUD through our closed and locked windows) and yell, “GIVE IT A REST!” But I know it would do no good. To make matters worse, Ms. Howler Monkey has set up those ‘Children at Play’ signs in front of her house to ‘protect’ her kids while they play illegally in the street (which indeed is considered illegal by the laws of the state we live in as are those Children at Play – Slow Down signs). One of the games of skateboarding seems to be periodically shooting their skateboards under passing cars. Or just standing in the street and acting like the vehicles are trespassing. It’s so bad, vehicles have to stop and wait for the kids, mostly for BFL, to get out of the way. It’s not because he doesn’t see the vehicle. He laughs about how ‘funny’ it is to make people wait on him You’d think that shit would only fly for so long.

I don’t know what changed from The Howler Monkeys seeing The Renters for the blight on this neighborhood that they are; what most of the rest of us see, to being good enough to strongly influence their children’s play activities. All I can say is, sadly, I think what we need around here is a good case of a broken arm or two.

September 15, 2008

Well, here we go again but this time, I’m going to have to let it go.

It would appear that someone has either dumped or turned loose a young cat in our neighborhood. I estimate it to be between nine months and a year old, most likely female (don’t care one way or the other if it’s pregnant because there’s nothing that can be done about it if it is), claws intact (thank goodness in our coyote-patrolled development), medium gray fur with a white chest and white feet, and an incredibly loving personality. It’s been living under a shrub in our side front yard since Friday. It wolfs food from Limpy’s bowl and is clearly lost.

It hit near 100 degrees F. here today and the sound of our backyard fountain proved to be too inviting. I found it in our backyard twice around noon, caught it mid-leap once actually going after one of our last, dwindling squirrels. Unfortunately, once a stray cat makes it into our backyard, shortly after it becomes raccoon fodder or coyote bait because there isn’t a fence between us, Cap’t Dan, and the wilderness beyond.

So out front it went again. Then I walked the street knocking on doors and asking if they had lost a cat. Wouldn’t you know, no one had or would admit it if they had. All the while I was weighing the options, and belittling myself for worrying and not being able to care less like every single person on this street does about animals, their own or otherwise.

My last hope was a nearby neighbor who regularly arrives home late from work. No joy there. It’s not his.

I plunked it for the fourth time out of our backyard and carried it out front to show the neighborhood kids. Surely, they’d know where it lived if it belonged around here. Nope, if it does, no one’s talking.

As of yesterday, it’s coat looked and felt very well maintained and I was certain that meant it had gotten out from someone’s house. Today, its white feet are dirty and its paw pads are starting to roughen up. I’m beginning to fear it’s another dump job. And unable to increase our numbers, I’m going to have to let this one go and hope for the best.

September 20, 2008

Geesh, what a week! I was a mad woman, running about doing this writing thing, that writing thing, meeting this big local author and having dinner with that big local author, meeting with that writing group and let’s not forget that other writing group either. Today was the last of it for a week, so what do I come home to early this evening?

My last shred of hope toward humanity dashed.

It would seem that we still have a ‘girl gang’ problem in our neighborhood and they were stealing/kicking the two newly-purchased pumpkins we had sitting clear up by our front door. The ones I just bought to make our entrance look inviting to the guests we had over last night.

You know? I don’t think I or anyone else should have to keep putting up with this kind of everyday petty shit.

WS stopped them in time after I nearly screamed and needless to say, shortly thereafter I moved the pumpkins along with the pots of blooming chrysanthemums into our backyard. We’ll just have to enjoy them from the partially-blocked view sliding glass door and the neighborhood be damned. I should have stopped being concerned about how this street looks a long time ago. I will no longer go out of my way or go above and beyond in keeping it looking nice. The first pumpkin I see smashed in the street or in someone’s driveway or yard will make me smile because it won’t be mine. Nor will I be marching over to the main girl gang leader’s house. It’s the rental MsNoManagementSkills used to live at and the gang leader’s parents claim to not speak English.

Needless to say, I won’t be participating in Halloween dress up or candy bribery hand out this year. What’s obvious to me is that last year was my final year for that and god help this bunch of pre-teen thugs if I catch them up around our house ever again.

September 22, 2008

Good thing I moved everything out from the front of our house Saturday. With my hectic schedule now through late December, it’d be my luck that I’ll go off for a day and think everything will be fine upon my return, only to discover otherwise.

A neighbor has a smashed pumpkin on her door step this morning. That sure as heck didn’t take long. Looks like it was one of those painted face pumpkins I saw at a local store the other day, the kind that costs more.

The grey and white kitty is still around though it was chased down the street yesterday by kids, yep, some of the girl gang on their bicycles (Can you just imagine what they’ll do when they start to drive vehicles?). Now the kitty’s in our backyard, on the shared fence with The Renters, waiting to catch a bird or squirrel. Sigh. Why can’t there be a shortage of cats in the world and everyone clamoring over each other to adopt one? Unfair, said as though life ever has been.

Later today, a neighbor girl is supposed to stop by to see if the cat belongs to a friend. As the story goes, this girl was supposed to be watching pets of her friend’s family when they all went out of town – that’s both the friend and her family AND the girl that was supposed to be watching the pets. Oopsie, she kind of forgot her duties. The friend’s family isn’t back from parts unknown yet, but sometime over the past two weeks, someone broke into the house and released all the animals, and now, somewhere in our area are two ferrets, a gerbil, a parakeet, a cat, and enough crickets to fill a 10 gallon aquarium. Apparently, the crickets were for a school project. Ah, kids nowadays and what they can get away with.

Anyway, I wish I had one of those microchip scanners. The grey kitty has a tiny bald spot on the back of her neck and maybe it’s a microchip spot. Maybe it’s from living under cars. Limpy has one of those himself and I know for a fact he doesn’t have a microchip. Come to think of it, one of our pets had a bald spot in the same place when we first got him and he wasn’t micro chipped either. Probably just as well. A microchip only tells who (once) owned the animal; not how good or bad the owner is. I’ve been canvassing the area for going on two weeks looking for Lost Cat flyers and haven’t found a one. I suspect no one’s looking for this sweetheart.

Okay, I’ve got to go rescue that blue jay. Happy Autumn!

September 23, 2008

The tale of the kitty from yesterday hasn’t ended happily. The girl refused to come by to identify the cat on whether or not it belongs to her friend. Her father said he didn’t think it does, said he was able to get out of his daughter that her friend’s cat is orange. This kitty is gray and white.

I say her father was able to get out of his daughter because sometime during the little vacation her and her family took, she turned ‘emo.’ That or else puberty has hit late. Anyway, apparently, she never even told her parents that she was caring for a houseful of animals, her father suspects because she wanted to go on vacation instead of following through on her duties.

Now he can barely talk to her at all and to make matters worse, she’s hanging out with The Renter’s kid, Big Fat Liar, next door. Turns out, she’s in love with the little creep. Last evening, she stood forlornly in the middle of the street, texting, while BFL crashed and banged ten feet away on his skateboard. Both heavily dressed in black (she’s even streaked her blonde hair dark), they loitered in the street and forced passing vehicles to drive up over the sidewalks to get around while the pair glared. I was hoping to catch her attention to ask if she was going to look at this kitty that’s now living under damp ferns in our backyard but she refused to acknowledge me and glared instead. Another kid turns to The Renter’s dark side.

So, because I knew it was going to get cold last night (at 6 a.m. it’s thirty-eight degrees here) and because it’s back fur was criss-crossed with slug trails yesterday morning, I tried to teach the kitty about Limpy’s heating pad box out front. Unfortunately, it didn’t want anything to do with it. Argh! Why does this have to be so difficult?

September 24, 2008

Kami from Jestablog kindly took the homeless kitty in late last night and at last word, it hadn’t eaten but was walking all over laps, purring, rubbing, and drooling. No name yet. It’s got what may be an expensive vet appointment coming up rapidly to get tested for Feline Leukemia, shots for everything else, flea drops, ear mite drops, and maybe a spay or neutering (depending on what sex it is – not clear on this one).

Kami says it’ll be an indoor kitty like her others. Even though she’s on acreage way out in the country, she’s got every bit the coyote/loose dog problem we have here in town plus mountain lion and other things that outdoor kitties would have to worry about. My mind won’t be at ease until I know her vet visit went well, bills are paid, and the kitty is settled in. If you’d like to help in any way, a note or card or anything, maybe just a comment that says thanks for taking this poor kitty in, please let Kami know. I’m certain she’s like to hear from you.

October 1, 2008

Welcome October! As you might have guessed, I’m a big fan of October (no longer of Halloween unfortunately due to vandalism on my street). The cooler air, colorful leaves, apple harvests, red wine, and the hint of wood smoke in the air. This is my time of year!

The weekend was fun and exhausting all at once. We took WS’ s car up north to autocross it; something I did for the very last time thirty years ago this week. Way back then, my first husband, who knew upfront that I was into fast cars, put his foot down and proclaimed that all Sundays were created for all-day church-going, to repent for the previous week’s sins.

The thing about that was, to me at least, is that I was a pretty good kid. Didn’t lie, steal, or cheat, unlike him who spent Saturday night with the neighbor’s wife or worse, my sister. But as his wife, come each Sunday, I had to sit alongside him in a pompous church built by uppity rich people for uppity rich people and repent for his sins, not spend my time out on a racetrack somewhere doing that other satanic pleasure: Driving fast.

Last Sunday, I don’t think I did too bad considering I had a thirty year pause.

Monday, I needed to stop by my doctor’s office to get my asthma medication review for 2009. Wouldn’t you just know it? They insisted I had to have a complete physical first. Why they couldn’t have told me that when they called me last week, I can only speculate on. I think they did it to justify the twenty dollar copayment. I also think they aren’t keeping very good records because I’m almost certain I had a complete physical last year plus tetanus shot (something I’ll touch on in just a bit).

Now I realize some people are good with getting a complete physical every single year. I’m one of those who feel that if everything it feeling good, I’m okay with going every other year. That’s just me. But previously, my doctor was fine with doing a medication review every third or fourth year. Plus, they now insist they didn’t see me last year, nor that I got a tetanus shot, something I distinctly remember getting because my arm was sore afterward.

Well, I had to get another physical. Everything’s fine. I had to get another tetanus shot, this time with some anti-whooping cough stuff added. And that’s when everything went to hell.

An hour after getting the shot, I fell into a deep depression; the kind where I wanted to burst into tears over nothing. That was odd. Later in the evening, I felt extra tired and went to bed early whereas I could barely sleep a wink. My arm where I received the tetanus shot felt hot and swollen (though it didn’t look swollen) and by morning, I couldn’t lift it. At all. Honestly, it felt as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to my upper arm and then yanked my shoulder out of joint.

A call to nurse treatment was in order. They said, “This is normal. Take aspirin and ice it.” I can assure you that by Tuesday night, with the amount of sheer pain I was feeling and me being someone with a much higher-than-normal pain tolerance, that this was anything but normal. I was cranky, impatient, and pissed and yes, I will never get another one of these ever again in my life. In fact, I will walk out of my doctor’s office if they even bring the topic up again.

I’ll end with saying if this amount of pain and incapacitation was normal, we’ll all hear a lot more about it. It’d be high up in the deck of excuse cards as to why employees called into work sick. As it was, I couldn’t even raise my left arm to type and had to hen peck with one hand at a few emails I had to answer yesterday. I shudder to think about how long and awful a day would have been had I had to dig ditches, wave traffic flags, or assemble burgers for eight-to-ten hours.

Today, Wednesday, my arm is still sore but one tic less so than yesterday. On the 1-to-10 pain scale, 10 being out of my mind crazy with pain, this morning I’m at a six-point-five. Slowly, very slowly, I’m able to raise my elbow slightly above my shoulder. I still have that sledgehammer-to-the-arm feel though it’s beginning to feel a bit more like having a deep, 48-hour long charley horse. My fingers are no longer tingly and the strength is returning to my left hand. My wrist still feels out of whack as if I had twisted it weird or slept on it oddly.

It’ll all get better with time. It had better. I have a six-hour drive to make early Saturday morning and I’d really rather not leave my left arm at home.

October 3, 2008

Another car thing this weekend with WS’s car (not racing, or at least not intentional racing) and then I’m done with car stuff until mid-December. WS decided not to try his hand at autocrossing his car next weekend so I’m clear to do all the rest of the stuff I have on my ever-tightening schedule which now includes fun stuff like several pet vet appointments and a mammogram. Oh joy.

Yesterday, before the rain and after my arm and shoulder started working normally again, we brought in the outdoor table umbrella and all the chair pillows, stacked and covered up everything for the winter, and took inventory on how many empty pots I’ll have to put into the storage shed after the annuals in them die down. Six empty pots I think. Seems like a lot but then again, we didn’t grow much in the way of potted veggies this year. And for the first time in a lot time, now that we have a small storage shed, I won’t have to go out to hunt and retrieve my stack of empty pots when the winter winds set in. Nor will the stack take up patio space. I think I’m almost completely organized inside and out. Almost.

October 6, 2008

Interesting weekend. Spent too many hours snaking through rainforest-y back roads of central coastal Oregon with eighteen other vehicles, spent too much time standing in a too loud, too warm hotel room schmoozing with people I had purposefully at one time, edited from my life, and took an oddball, turned-around, unplanned and slightly irritating side trip on the way home that took us two hours out of our way. But all in all, we had a good weekend, made a couple of bucks at a casino, and have now officially seen more of the Oregon coast than not. I would have loved to have stopped at half a dozen spots to take in the beautiful stormy seas and bracing cold ocean air (one of my most favorite of smells) but the long day and evening before combined with an unexpected early morning trip down to North Bend had me champing at the bit to get back where, once again, I discovered that indeed, Dorothy was right. There’s no place like home.

Except that’s where insomnia lives. Even after a very, very long and emotionally draining couple of days, I was only able to nap for an hour last night, then snapped awake and sat up until four a.m. doing half a dozen bothersome things that I had let pile up over the past month and eat away at my mind. WS was able to sleep, hard, as apparent by his snoring which he only does now when he’s truly exhausted; this after going to bed well before dark.

Today, for me, it’s back to trying to settle into a routine that’ll take me through December: Up relatively early, minimal caffeine intake and less food, an early workout including an hour (or more if I can force myself to take the time away from other things) on the treadmill followed by writing time. I simply must start taking this seriously; all of it. I’m tired of getting close to establishing a routine on some of it while letting other parts slide and then dropping it all like a rock after the least little thing happens. Like last week when I did two strenuous car things and then had that tetanus shot debacle. Must get more activity into my life. I didn’t need to completely stop my treadmill work for an entire week but I did.

Must take vitamins. Poorly, I keep trying to time when to best take my vitamin D because it makes my face break out a little and I don’t want to slather on the makeup in a poor attempt to cover redness and zits for my weekly Tuesday writers get together and weekend writers’ group/car group/general out-in-public appearances.

Must edit my waistline. Despite lots of walking and generally eating light, the past two weeks have not been kind to my mid-section.

And most of all, I must, must, MUST get back to a writer’s mindset. I’ve been doing little of any writing lately other than to peck away here and there at the few rejected stories I have in my depressingly thin inventory folder.

Yes, all this will come if I just get off my own back and let it, but when things starts keeping me up at night, I know it’s time to open my eyes, take stock, and make changes pronto.

October 7, 2008

Is the economic/world financial crisis news getting to you yet? We’ve been running scared for so long due to WS’ job worries, we barely feel anything anymore. Emotionally detached a little I guess you could call it. Yesterday, a very good friend of WS and another close co-worker were WFRed. WFR stands for Work Force Reduction. The corporate world doesn’t even call it being laid off anymore nor do they give you much notice. Everyone expects to be let go on a Friday but on a Monday? Welcome to the New World. Now gather your things and get out.

For the record, I’ve got a dozen job listing sites bookmarked for easy access including AARP’s Jobs for those over 50. And I’m becoming familiar with each and what’s out there just in case I have to find something in a hurry. Yesterday, we official shut off our nightly landscape lights for the rest of the year. On timers, these small lights lit up our backyard fountain for three hours every night. If our area didn’t regular freeze during the winter, we’d shut down the fountain too but if the fountain’s underground pipes and above ground pillar plumbing freezes and cracks as a result, repairs would run into thousands of dollars. We’ll consider shutting the whole thing down next spring to save the extra expense on our electric bill.

We’d done a good job paring down our monthly expenses, paid off a few credit cards, and closed a decade old bank account that held all of thirty-two dollars. Our stock market account is holding steady – because we aren’t in stocks but bonds. I still have a nice car with less than twenty thousand miles on it and it’s completely paid off. That’s good should we have to sell it at some point. We aren’t behind on our mortgage. I’ve got a twenty in my pocket and National Novel Writing Month begins November first. Guess what I’ll be writing about?

October 8, 2008

The Dimmers had their cable and Internet shut off yesterday amid lots of angry shouting. “How am I supposed to find work now? What am I going to tell my kids?” Mr. Dimmer hollered to not one but two Comcast servicemen who paid two separate visits to his house.

I dunno, maybe one of those phony lawsuits you’ve been racking up against Fred Meyer’s, JC Penney’s, Starbucks, Albertson’s, Boston Market, U.S. Bank, Microsoft, Home Depot, the Playboy Channel, and the federal government will come through for you. Or maybe, because you can’t or won’t pay your property taxes, car payment, or garbage collection bill either, you should just move like you told us to do a few months back or a stupid ball thrown for the five hundredth time into our backyard.

Speaking of not paying for garbage collection, The Renters haven’t had their garbage picked up for two weeks. The trash truck just passes by their house every Monday, leaving the cans full. Yet The Renters can afford weekly yard maintenance. Or maybe they aren’t paying for that either and the yard crew’s a little slow on the uptake.

Buffalo chili for dinner tonight. I’ve been looking forward to this for months.

Thirty-five minutes on the treadmill yesterday, walking mostly, half an hour today with very light weight lifting afterward. Still have five pounds to lose before mid-November, but at least its back down to just five pounds.

October 15, 2008

That had to have been the fastest week on record for me. Every single day/evening, save one, I had something or somewhere I needed to be. Regrettably, I also had to add three more events to my October calendar making it nearly packed full through November 1st. November is only slightly less full as is the first 2/3rds of December. Sure, thing are very busy right now but I’m getting through it all just fine. Looking forward to November even and getting that future National Novel Writing Month story out of the way. It’ll be smooth sailing from then on.

Neighborhood news: The new ‘game’ in the neighborhood is two-fold and created by the girl gang: Game Number 1) Riding their bicycles or scooters in the street. Whenever a car pulls into the development (development entrance is 100 yards away), the girls throw down their bikes/scooters quite violently, roll on the asphalt, and scream as though they have been hit by the car. In the meantime, the driver(s) of the car(s) which didn’t come within 100 yards of hitting them, have to pick their down the street to avoid writhing children’s bodies. Hilarity ensues, I suppose.

Game Number 2: This one involves someone driving down the street (what the street was intended for originally, not for kids to play in, I believe). When the car gets close enough, the girl gangs literally throw their bikes and scooters under the car presumably trying to get it close enough to have the car run over it. Even more hilarity ensues as evident by the girls screams of laughter.

Now what do you think would happen if someone were to actually run over something or someone? History here has already proven that parents will take the word of their kids AND the friends of their kids over an adult or any adult witnesses.

Welcome to what America’s suburban kids do to entertain themselves in today’s world.

October 17, 2008

What is it about contractors and their inability to do what they say they will?

We’re having the outside wood on our house sealed and painted, an unexpected but sorely needed job that I’d never in a million years be able to do myself. We simply don’t own nor have room to store the 32 foot ladder that the job would require. We’ve mentioned to each other over the last few years how our house eaves and trim work had started peeling but the talking never went any further. The other day, WS discovered someone on the next street over was having their exterior painted and he jumped right on it.

However, since then, the cost of having the work done has risen from a little over a thousand dollars to just over three (but with ALL the work needed being done instead of only half). Additionally, the business owner, who has impeccable references, licenses, and business standing (WS researched this guy to death – what he loves to do), has shown up an hour late to finalize our contract, hasn’t called before sending a crew member out yesterday like he said he would, and this morning, isn’t here when he said he and his crew would be.

This is exactly why I don’t have anything to do with finding or contacting contractors anymore (past fiasco with interior painters, cement pourers, landscapers, yard maintenance workers, and the fountain builder taught me this). It’s stressful to watch WS go through all this waiting given that he’s having to re-arrange his job schedule to accommodate this painting contractor; this during a time when time spent away from the office could count toward a future lay off.

If I were to come into work late consistently or showed up later than the set schedule, citing this reason or that, I’d be fired. I’m beginning to believe that this is why contractors become contractors, so they can set their own hours, with contracts which, after signed, gives them the excuse as to why they don’t have to be where they say they are going to be when they say they will be. If all workers in the world came up with a similar contract saying their employers will pay them regardless of when they showed up for work, just as long as they did the work eventually, I think things would fall apart rather quickly. Yet everyone lets contractors get away with it. It’s like politics. Say and promise one thing, do something completely different and on a completely different timeline. Ridiculous!

Yes, I realize I’m anal but damn it, why am I the only person on the planet who insists that work be done when it was originally agreed upon? Why am I the only person who does things when I say I’ll do them while everyone else gets a free pass to skate on their own timelines? I’m so tired of feeling like I am being lied to.

Notice to contractors and everyone else: Don’t say you’ll do stuff if you know you can’t or won’t or if you know you’ll end up saying, ‘Sorry, something came up.’ If I sign your contract and I’m expected to pay you, that’s not my problem. Your time is not more important than mine especially when I’m paying you, not the other way around.

Really, I ought to have figured out long before now what WS’ time is worth and start deducting such from the cost of contracted work when the work isn’t started or completed with the agreed upon time. Wouldn’t that create a firestorm? Of course, I’d have to say that up front, before a contract is signed. And yeah, I bet we’d end up doing a whole lot more work ourselves as a result. No one would want to have anything to do with us…which is exactly my point. Too much compromise has been given to contractors, so much so that now that’s the norm. Someone needs to start the swing back to the other side.

October 20, 2008

The painting guys arrived a couple of hours after I posted my contractor rant. Not one crew came but two and boy, let me tell ya; it was like a swarm of locusts crawling all over the house. Shortly afterward, the fog and clouds burned off and the painted began in earnest. By four p.m. the job was finished; yes, all of it, even the cleanup areas that we wanted attention to. Impressive. Expensive, but impressive.

So far two neighbors have asked about the contractor. No one asked if we were fixing up the house with plans to move and I didn’t offer any leading sarcastic quips pointing one way or the other. No, we’re not moving but we’re learning to like seeing the look of anticipation in their eyes and the obvious question on the tips of their tongues. Let them think what they will. They always have anyway.

In other news, our side of town is building a new Humane Society building which is all fine and good but instead of building it miles away, close to the freeway like was originally planned and decided upon, the city changed their minds and are building it (already!) less than a mile from our house. What’s even more disturbing is that it’s going in next to an outdoor shooting range! WTF?!?

What’s even more disturbing to me is that we regularly hear loud gunfire coming from this shooting range on any given day and night; sometimes it really does sound like a war is going on (absolutely NO exaggeration here). Unfortunately, the new Humane Society building is closer to our house than the shooting range. Does this mean we’re going to have to listen to frightened, unwanted dogs barking and howling all hours of the day and night? I’m willing to bet on it, and that I can barely stand to do.

I have such a ridiculously hard time dealing with abandoned, unwanted, throw-away animals as it is, which is why I try so hard to help out animals dumped in our neighborhood. I cannot live close to a pound. My mind can’t fathom it. The Humane Society in our town does not have a good reputation for what happens to animals in their ‘care’ and is regularly written about in the local paper (and I’m sure many of these organizations around the country don’t have good reputations either – North Phoenix and San Diego are notorious for their animal abuse and euthanasia practices while officials looked the other way). The confessions from ex-workers and volunteers are the worst and I can no longer read about them in our local papers.

As a diehard animal lover, I can’t let myself think too much about what’s going to go on there, in that building less than a mile from my house, where countless animals, future generations of animals not yet born, will be killed because people don’t want them or can’t keep them. I weep for not being able to sit on my own tiny front porch soon without hearing howling day after day. In my mind, there will be no difference between living near that building and living near a mass graveyard, with the only exception being that the animals interned within it might, might, not know they’ve come to the end of their rope. Yes, some animals are rescued and adopted but the percentage is so small comparison to those that don’t. It’s heartbreaking.

I’ve already made the decision to stop driving down that road, the road that is the closest, less crowded main route to convenient shopping and the freeway for us, and if the economy and the housing market, WS’ job fears, and our wallets weren’t so bad off, I’d say it was time for us to move somewhere else. It’s not possible at this time and in the meanwhile, the new Humane Society building (I REFUSE to call it an animal shelter because any sheltering occurring there is soooo temporary) will be finished by year’s end, just in time to start the killing for 2009.

October 23, 2008

Busy, busy, busy. Have I stretched myself too thin? You betcha! And as a result, I’m beginning to receive snarky email from people who feel put off. Who would I be to remind them they had been found guilty of the same in the not so distant past? When have I ever been this busy before? Um, never? It’s true. Like it or not, it’s my turn.

We’ve bought ourselves an early Christmas present – a 12-foot, pre-lit Christmas tree. Never again should it take fifteen-sixteen hours to assemble and decorate the dusty, pipe-cleaner style behemoth that we came to abhor setting up every holiday season, not to mention the dread of having to fix all the broken branches and the constant vacuuming of fake needles. Ugh. Not to mention getting sick every year because of the disturbance of the thick layer of a decade’s worth of dust coating it all and whatever chemical pollutants that old tree released into the air.

Nope, I’m thinking setting up this new tree, still in the box and sitting in our entryway, that from start to finish it ought to take maybe six hours, tops, and only because I’m picky about decorating. Last year we created a ‘harvest’ themed tree with little actual ornaments on it but lots of autumn-toned things: Flowers, ribbon, feathers, leaves, birds in nests, etc. Interior decorators will tell you that this has been all the rage in the design world for a while, including setting up a ‘harvest’ tree earlier in the season. Like in early November rather than December. Obviously, this only works if one is to use a fake tree and not a real one.

And that’s where the story circles back around to us. We don’t do real trees (ever since the emotional disaster of ’91). The pets would eat it anyway and who likes to clean up pine needle barf everyday? We’ve got our fake trees and now, we’ve got a pre-lit one. . . which WS wants to put up this weekend already.

Who would I be to say no? Merry Christmas to us. In October.

October 24, 2008

Mixed news today. On the good side, we spotted our very first opossum in our backyard, drinking from our fountain. This IS good news because we believe the opossum population (one we thought dead) reflects the health of the remaining wilderness around us. We’ve been here nine and a half years and have never seen an opossum. That’s been terribly strange.

This one was small and thin and now we know why the grapes we set out nightly for the raccoons are going much more quickly. For the record, we set out grapes because it keeps the raccoons from emptying our bird and squirrel feeders. We like raccoons. We’re not afraid in the least of opossums and tried for years to keep a small population of them alive back when we lived in The Pit (rental house lived in before moving here). The rumors about opossums are just awful in our town and to date, I’ve found all to be nothing but lies invented to justify killing them. I say we tried to keep small population alive back then because neighbors routinely shot or beat them to death with shovels. Grown women I worked in a typing pool of all things with would gleefully tell stories about how they were actively teaching their children how to kill a female opossum and then beat it with the hopes that still living offspring would crawl from the pouch only to be stomped upon until dead. These are horrible events to witness, especially so because one once happened in my own backyard and when I tried to stop it, I was threatened with a shovel beating of my own.

No, opossums aren’t bad. Give ‘em a fright and they’ll freeze and hiss with open, tooth-filled, saliva-dripping mouths because they are scared shitless, not because they want to cause you bodily harm. Give them some space and let them go on their waddling way and the land will be better for it. Trust me.

In not so good news, my mammogram went fine (the technician was a bitch and a half) but my blood work came back showing my cholesterol levels are way high. WTF? I’m eating healthier than I ever have before, I’m exercising four, sometimes five days a week (ran seven minutes yesterday, walked another ten), and I’ve kept off twenty-five of thirty pounds I lost last year. Now I have to worry about heart disease and stroke?

Actually, I’ve never been far from worrying about having a stroke. My mother died of a massive one when she was 47 years old, but the difference here is that at an inch shorter than me, she was double my weight and then some, chain-smoked since high school, refused to take her high blood pressure medication, drank often, and ate boxes of candy and gallons of ice cream often in one sitting.

I, on the other hand, don’t have high blood pressure, never smoked other than that three-week period of time in high school when I tried unsuccessfully to impress a boy, have almost always watched my weight, don’t drink often and usually only an occasional glass of wine with a home-cooked dinner, and I haven’t even had ice cream in a couple of years. Other than cheese, my weakness and usually lower fat content cheese at that, I don’t generally eat high fat food.

So there’s only one reason for this, okay maybe two reasons: Heredity and age.

Well, crap.

October 27, 2008

Saturday afternoon and we were elbow deep into making our famous Buffalo Bourguignon when who should knock on our door out of the blue? Mr. and Ms. SportsOrNothing!

You remember them. They used to live next door, in the house Mr. Wall Street bought before he turned it into a teenage rental dive. The SportsOrNothings were the family with two teenage twins who entertained us endlessly with ditched school naked hot tubbing, drunken fire pit parties, and paint balls shot over the fence at our fountain. When faced with four-year college tuition for the pair, Mr. and Ms. SportsOrNothing decided it was time to give up their house in the city and buy a cheap, lonely trailer in the woods. It also gave ‘man’-opausal Mr. SportsOrNothing free rein to quit his good paying job to find work as a volunteer assistant high school sports coach. That didn’t pan out. Neither did the golf course caddie job. Or the used sports car salesman job. He’s still looking for a job . . . but a job on his terms. Luckily, Ms. SportsOrNothing still works at the hospital. She joked about heart attacks being something that would never be outsourced.

Their son, The Sports King, who was expected to turn pro in either baseball or football or maybe both as Mr. SportsOrNothing used to tell it, and make the family rich beyond all wildest dreams, dropped out of college shortly after a year and is now a minimum wage working stiff with a steady girlfriend while The SportsOrNothing’s daughter is in her senior year of college, has toured most of Europe, speaks a foreign language, and will probably kick ass in whatever career she decides to enter.

Funny how they put all their eggs into the son’s basket and lived vicariously day-to-day, minute-by-minute on their son’s sports interests and accomplishments, and sorely ignored the daughter for most of her life only to have things turn out so differently than planned. Maybe they’re hoping their daughter will step up to the financial plate.

Anyway, Mr. and Ms. SportsOrNothing wanted to hear about how the neighborhood was getting along and naturally we dished, though mostly we whined about Mr. Wall Street and how he’s renting out the house. The SportsOrNothings were shocked their old place was now a rental house but as I recalled, they told us before they sold it they thought Mr. Wall Street seemed like a guy who would do such a thing.

Then The SportsOrNothings invited us out to their lonely trailer on two acres in the woods for an early Sunday afternoon visit. Said they’d call Sunday morning to give us their address and directions. An hour before their call, I commented to WS how I didn’t believe for an instant the day would go as planned.

They did call but it was to cancel our visit. Wants to reschedule but will call back sometime in the future to do that. We still don’t have their address or directions nor care, really, one way or the other. Nothing gained, nothing lost, but that Buffalo Bourguignon sure turned out well!

October 28, 2008

I quit using Unisom over a month ago. I used it to stay asleep every night. I’ve got some kind of weird sleep pattern that has me fall asleep late, sleep soundly for ten minutes, then snap back awake only to lie there for hours wondering why I only seem to sleep well (and only for two to three hours) after 6 a.m. Clearly, this is no way to get a good night’s rest or function reasonably well the next day. I hate taking anything to sleep because I hate anything that becomes a habit (yes, eating falls into that hatred too most of the time for me yet I still have five pounds to lose). Simply put, I do not want to live out the rest of my days addicted to a sleep aid.

But I feel exhausted nearly every day now. I’m exercising four to five days a week, for less than an hour each day; just enough to get me to fall asleep and usually stay asleep. The problem is I don’t think I’m getting a good rest because come noon the following day, I’d almost give WS’ left nut to be able to take a nap without feeling guilt OR compromising that night’s ability to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. Since I’m fairly certain WS is fond of his nether bits, I don’t take naps; those being yet another thing I don’t want to become addicted to.

But dang, I’ll say it again. I feel exhausted almost all the time now. What’s up with that?

October 30, 2008

It’s no big secret I’ve spent my life waiting to get old if for no other reason than to get away with things under the guise of being ‘eccentric.’ The fact that I do some of those ‘eccentric’ things during the course of an average day is worrisome to most people; yet magically, isn’t a bother once an elderly person has reached that ‘eccentric’ age.

Imagine if you will how many years I’ve been rubbing my hands together in anticipation of age. Frightening, isn’t it? Maybe now you see my point.

So yesterday, I received one of the first things that reputedly, every old person covets: An AARP card. I remember, back in the day, when I used to comment about how I couldn’t wait to be old enough to own an AARP card just so I could demand .015 cents off an order of Wendy’s fries. Nowadays, I don’t even eat fries and as it turns out, Wendy’s doesn’t accept AARP card discounts anymore so there’s one misconception out the window. Young people would tease and tell me to save my card for more important things such as adult undergarments or denture cleaner. Ha-ha. Yeah, laugh it up now, kids. You’re all right in line behind me.

Like I was saying, I was looking forward to getting my AARP card, even though it’s not free like I had been led to believe for so many years. Is anything free anymore? This card might have been once, long ago, but let me tell you what: They might want to make it a little less expensive if they plan to keep up the shoddy way the actual cards look. Mine came, not with raised, embossed lettering like a credit card as I would expect, but flat with the first letter of my name mostly rubbed off and when I unstuck it from the rubber cemented envelope, the corner peeled back way too easily, revealing a paper top over a thin cardboard base.

I’ll bet when your kids get their AARP card, it’ll be back to being be one of the best, coolest-looking, shiny-shiny things worth owning. But for now, I feel cheated.

October 31, 2008

No one came to our door tonight for trick or treats which was good because we weren’t playing. It was nice to not be driving insane by the pounding on the glass.

National Novel Writing Month begins momentarily, in nine minutes, at midnight, and yes, I’m using this blog entry to warm up my thinking cap and my cold fingers.

November 6, 2008

It’s been an interesting month thus far. I’m doing well in the National Novel Writing Month challenge and am halfway to fifty thousand words as of today. WS is closing in on me word count wise even though, as usual, he’s under tremendous stress this month. I’ve cancelled several events I had scheduled for November to free up my overscheduled month but am going ahead with several others that people depend upon me attending.

I’m going through the house today trying to look at things with fresh eyes and on the hunt for wasteful things, mostly at this point things that waste electricity, things I can unplug, perhaps for a very long time if not permanently.

Yes, today is another one of those days, the biggest, most important day of them all so far; the day when WS finds out one of two terrible things: whether he’s getting a pay cut or whether he’s been laid off.

Because you see, while everything else in the world is going up in price, companies whose CEOs have to dig a fraction of an inch deeper into their outlandishly huge bag of gold coin in order to pay for fuel for their children’s private jets, rapidly become annoyed at having to do so and in retaliation and to keep the billions flowing in, are allowed to cut their employees pay, even those employees labeled, “Superstars.”

Sad but true. Even now, I’m waiting for his phone call to tell me which decision was made, which list he was on.

I now understand what our President-elect meant when he mentioned something the other evening about him not being the savior everyone was looking for. The thing is, I don’t think the other guy would have been one either; I just don’t think he would have had the balls to openly admit it.

November 14, 2008

No, I haven’t taken another leave of absence. It’s November and for me that means National Novel Writing Month. I’m writing, just not here as often until I pass the required fifty thousand word finish line which ought to be sometime soon. Very soon. WS is somewhere around the thirty thousand word mark. Go WS! This is his fifth year in a row for doing this; originally he did this to support my desire to give it a try. A big “Go You!” and “Keep Going!” out to him.

Finally tomorrow, after nearly three years of mostly sitting covered and ninety-nine percent well-cared for, I’ll be changing my own oil in my car tomorrow. This is BIG and long, long overdue.

The only thing that has saved my ass on this, actually meaning saved the engine on this is that the car had been driven less than three hundred miles on the oil that is in it yet is fairly regularly started up every other month. The dipstick still shows a slight golden tint to the oil and the level is perfect. Tomorrow, not only will I save well over a hundred dollars in changing the oil myself (a piece of cake if you get to know someone with the right tools: a car lift or a low rise jack and jack stands) but a big weight will be off my shoulders for an entire year.

I so needed to get this done last year, the year before actually but the powers that be prevented that. Potential damage to my car was prevented too in that the dealerships in my area that used to do this procedure all, every last one of them, have poor to unacceptable customer service ratings and have for the past four years. Why, in a million years, would I want to take an investment car (oxymoron term there) to a place that is more likely to ruin the car than to do what I want them to do, and then pay for their ‘service?’

I guess that’s what I get for not buying a gas guzzling SUV, huh? Because those are the vehicles at these dealerships that get all the attention now. No, really. Those places absolutely hate seeing my kind of sports car. They say they can’t make any money off of doing service on them and all their owners are divas.

Oh really?

Seems to me if we could just get half of the customer service your people bend over backwards giving Escalade owners and stop doing stupid shit like filling our gas tanks with diesel fuel, wiping down our cars with brake fluid-soaked shop rags, swapping out our high end Sears DieHard car batteries for leaky, recalled Delco ones, stealing our stock stereo equipment, and taking our cars out for high speed lunch blasts just so your mechanics can say they hit triple digits in traffic, we might not be so inclined to play the diva roll.

By the way, I’ve had at least one of the above examples done to my car. But I don’t like playing diva so I’ll just save everyone the hassle and do everything I can myself from now on. It’s not like I couldn’t. Back in the day, I used to rebuild engines on a monthly basis and most of them actually held together. *snort*

Okay, more on this later as well as some neighborhood news. Also, why Limpy can’t officially become our cat; a decision our rugs will thank us for.

November 16, 2008

I did it. I changed my own car’s oil and I can’t begin to tell you how good it feels to have done it and done it myself so I know it’s been done right. I had lots of knowledgeable people around plus a cheat sheet of my own research to refer to just in case some of those people thought it would be fun to play jokesters and screw me and my car up. And wouldn’t you just know it? There were a few of those people there who insisted that I was doing it all wrong.

Fortunately, they were in the minority and eventually, each one of them were called out, not by me but by the likes of Drill Sergeant Dave who to me, has become a much kinder, gentler version of his old self from years past. The one thing that hasn’t changed is that no one wants Drill Sergeant Dave calling you out for intentionally leading someone astray and thank goodness for that. Not that I listened to any of them anyway. I’m too bull-headed for that, you could say.

So beforehand, I had to listen to four hours of macho man talk (boob and blonde jokes mixed with boasts of my engine is bigger than yours) and caught a ration of crap from everyone attending the car club tech day event who apparently thought I didn’t have car of my own. One guy went as far as to say he thought I only hung around the car club hoping to find a sugar daddy – WTF?

Served me right I suppose. It has been three years since anyone has seen my car. When you figure three fourths of the car club is made up of members who had joined within those past three years, and seeing as I don’t drive my car to their once-a-month meetings, I can understand how people might think differently.

But now that THAT has been mostly straightened out, maybe more of them will accept me as a club member.

Fat chance. After all, I changed my OWN oil. Obviously, I don’t care about getting dirty. So much for getting chummy with those spotlessly clean, holier-than-thou wives…

November 20, 2008

Well, we knew it would happen sooner or later. The time has come. Limpy is on his last legs. Thankfully, The Howler Monkeys have taken him back inside to let him sleep comfortably warm and dry until his end. At least we can hope he’s inside and not cooped up in the cold garage with their Howler Monkey dog.

Over Halloween, he spent some time inside with us and while brushing him, I instantly became aware of exactly how skinny he had become. He was also very wobbly on his feet. His breath positively reeked as well and from what I could see, it looked like his teeth were pretty well on their way to rotting away. When he was with us, he barely ate, but then again, we only fed him dry food. As soon as he got a whiff of The Queen’s twice daily wet food, he demanded some. And we obliged him about a tablespoon each time.

Finally, one morning I got up and found he had peed on one of our oriental rugs. He always did seem to have a bladder the size of a camel’s. Luckily I got to the mess in time but that meant Limpy had to be put back outside. It had stopped raining and the sun was out and that seemed to be his favorite type of day.

Later on, before we left for an appointment, I walked over and talked to Mrs. Howler Monkey about him and how wobbly he seemed to be the last time I saw him (which was that morning after I put him outside but I hadn’t told her that part) and she seemed very put off that I was mentioning him at all, saying over and over, “Well, he is fifteen years old.” As if that makes everything all better. Saying he was fifteen was the third different age she had told us he was. Seemed like she kept pulling an age out of thin age.

She said she knew how skinny he was, a completely opposite stance from the one she took just a few months ago when she called him her fat cat, and that for the past week, he had been allowed inside to sleep in her closet where he was comfortable.

Hmm, seems one of us isn’t paying attention because he was in our house over the same period of time, sleeping and eventually, peeing on our rug. I wonder who was sleeping in her closet all that time?

Anyway, she kind of blew me off and everything I had to say and when I finally got a clue that she really didn’t want to talk about him anymore and I walked down her driveway, she called out that should anything happen, we’d be the first to know.

I guess having him put to sleep would be a whole lot better than to find him squished in the street early some morning. For the record, we saw him outside that night when we got home very late but haven’t seen or heard about him ever since. The holidays are coming and traditionally, they leave for a week or so. I don’t think we’ll see him again.

November 29, 2008

At the two-thirds point of a long Thanksgiving weekend, a list of things I’m thankful for:

Nearly being over this horrible cold I caught last weekend. *cough cough ugh*
A swell roof over our heads and income.
Friends.
Toys, tens of functioning electronic things, dozens of unseen movies, and hundreds of books to read and reread…because once again lean times, they are a’coming.
Discovering the South Beach diet and feeling better than I have in decades.
Nineteen years of mostly marital bliss. I’d be lying if I said it was 100 percent.
Confirmation that Limpy has indeed passed. I’ve never forgotten an animal that one way or another has come into my life. He’ll be no exception. Miss you already, handsome boy. Peace be with you.

December 1, 2008

Welcome December! Boy, has the year raced by or what? Parts of it seems so to me while at the same time, it feels like it was years and years ago that we watched New Year’s Eve fireworks off the top of Seattle’s Space Needle. Was that less than a year ago? Weird how parts of the year fly by while other parts seem to drag.

Around these parts, December first usually brings about some kind of change here at home. I expect most of the leaves to be off the trees and raked up and mostly, that’s happened. Today’s the first day of the holiday season that we turn on our Christmas lights. That’s not going to happen because we decided, along with help from the horrible renters next door, that we aren’t going to put up outdoor Christmas lights. Who wants to be vandalized? Obviously, numerous neighbors have excitedly raised their hands and screamed, “Oh, me, me! Pick ME!” Too bad for us, those neighbors have decided that The Renters and in particularly Big Fat Liar Renter kid (BFL kid) is all that and a bag of bailout offers. They probably won’t be vandalized. We, on the other hand, because we stood up to BFL kid back when everyone cared about the neighborhood, surely would be. Playing the proactive role, we’re not giving them the chance.

But it’s all good. We save pennies on electricity and the cost of purchasing new LED lights. Over the weekend we donated nearly every string of old power-sucking Christmas lights. That wasteful time has passed. When personal finances improve, something that’s not likely to happen for a least a year or two, we’ll think about going LED. For the time being, we still have the big tree downstairs (non-LED lit unfortunately) and the string of rice lights on the mantel. That’s it for us this year, but you know what? It’s still beautiful and to me, that’s what matters. Christmas for me has always meant decorating, not buying stuff.

Which all brings me to the real reason for this entry: Personal finances. Yes, I should have listened more to the likes of J.D. from Get Rich Slowly. I’ll get it eventually. Some things just take a little longer to get through. No, we’re not losing the house. Yes, we still have some income coming in. Yes, we’re carrying a LOT of credit card debt. Yes, we have a plan moving forward. That plan switched on this past weekend.

WS has done a fabulous job with handling the budget over the past five years, a huge job in itself and done while he was working a high stress job (which continues to threaten employees every third week with further layoffs). Now is the time for me to take some of that burden off him and let him focus on his job. That is, if he can keep his focus off his growling, empty belly and dimmer lighting around home.

You see, I’ve taken back the budget and well, there are going to be some changes made around here.

*clue ominous music

Yes, I’m a wee bit more tight-fisted. Okay, I’m a lot more tight-fisted. I’ve lived with close to nothing before. Twice. For years upon years. I’ve eaten dry cat food for a month because I had literally nothing else but clothes on my back and a paid-for roof over my head (weren’t divorces in the seventies fun?). Before WS and I were married, once a month I slept with someone I feared just to receive eighty dollars on which to survive while I was trying to graduate from a quasi-business school. I also broke into the same feared person’s house every other week and raided their freezer for food. I didn’t want to go back to eating Meow Mix. I did graduate. The school was shut down a year later. My ‘degree’ became a ‘certificate’ and now means nothing in the real world.

That’s not to say I didn’t’ learn anything. I learned how to survive and so, how cool was it to find someone else who knew a little about how to survive when close to everything is taken away? Before I met him, WS was homeless for a short spell, had roommates who stole every last thing he owned plus locked him out of his own apartment, and had a mother who financially abandoned him after shipping him off to a full-time trade school down in Arizona. He ended up selling homework for food money. Smart kid he is. He also ate nothing but popcorn for three months straight and lost something like seventy pounds. The photos are horrifying.

I’m not cutting our finances to those extremes, but as close to it as I can get away with.

We’re starting with our TV. We’ve had Dish Network satellite for ten years. Over the past year or two or five, we’ve become rather disillusioned with Dish Network and their downloading information off the satellite at the most inopportune times and the flakey DVR units that randomly erase good stuff. Additionally, other than news (something we both get more off the Internet than anywhere else) we generally use TV viewing as a kind of sleeping pill. Turn on the bedroom TV, put WS to bed, and he’s out like a light within five minutes. Never fails.

Tomorrow, we’re switching over to local channels only, meaning Portland Oregon news because even though we live in Vancouver Washington, a completely different state of the union, we might as well be called North North Portland for as much Washington news that is available to us over the air waves. We’re going with Comcast, our existing Internet provider which has bundled local TV service availability all along for no additional cost to us. We just never used it because we had satellite and for whatever reason, we were okay with paying for the same thing twice. Making this change alone eliminates Dish Network’s monthly fifty-five dollar drain from our budget.

Fifty-five extra dollars. That’s a nice chunk of change. Only three hundred more a month to cut to quit bleeding red and begin living in the black.

Next up, bottled water service, insurance deductibles, phone services (our land line – we have never owned a cell), electric, gas, and gasoline usage, and finally, groceries. Snip, snip, snip. Over the next month, let’s see how much I can trim from the edges before my usual whining goes up another notch and WS and I are at each other’s throats. The key is to not look at this as a permanent, forever and ever thing (or should I?) and to remember that we’re in this together and we’re survivors.

Besides, I say, spreading my arms wide and looking about the room, look at all this cool stuff we have to occupy our minds!

December 2, 2008

Within the hour, we will be satellite TV free. Earlier I watched ‘Casino,’ my last movie from satellite. It was the heavily edited version, made for general TV viewers, horribly so for those who love it’s original foul language-laden original format. Somehow, both the movie and its edited version seem appropriate for the day. Shall we count down the hour toward a near TV-free life together?

While wandering out back looking at the piles of leaves I still need to rake up, I overheard Ms. Dimmer talking on her cell phone (because short of covering my ears with my hands and screaming, “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!” I couldn’t help but hear that woman yelling into her phone on her back deck) and it sounds like she was just laid off from her job. Tragic.

Notable statements shouted:

“He said he paid the bills. I had no idea we were in trouble.”

“I have no problem with her decision. What I have a problem with is that she won’t talk to me because of my husband’s ex-employment there.”

“Yes, he was caught doing the same thing when he worked with my brother-in-law and he was fired.”

“I don’t want to lose the house.”

Curiously enough, the county records do show a fourth lien placed upon their house within the past quarter for not paying taxes. How many is allowable? How many before our street gets the death sentence (and resulting lower home values) of a ‘Bank Owned’ for sale sign posted in their yard?

Well, so much for raking leaves. What was supposed to be simply a grey day has turned to showers. Yes, I can still rake leaves in the rain but since I’m still coughing from last week’s cold, I probably shouldn’t.

And with that, the Comcast guy has just driven up. Perfect timing.

December 3, 2008

The weekend seemed a perfect time to work toward finishing up that final organization goal I had for 2008 and for the most part, it worked wonderfully. Specifically on my ‘organize everything’ list was to sort through and get rid of the hundreds of bunches of fake flowers I bought, used, and have stored over the last decade. It makes me sick to think of all the money I spent on those things but each one I remembered fondly when I think of how nice (I thought) they made the place look. Now I can hardly stand the sight of them.

Last year, someone told me only old women like fake flowers much as they do knick-knacks and anything with glitter on it, especially if it’s a sweatshirt. Okay, guilty on the fake flowers and glitter but only during Christmas and never on a sweatshirt! Knick-knacks? Never was that kind of gal.

Speaking of glitter and on a somewhat humorous side note, MsNoManagementSkills, my old boss who just happens to be twenty five years younger than I and who cannot stand the thought of growing old, goes out of her way to pointedly point out to friends, family, and strangers alike how old they all look, yet loves glitter like nobody’s business. If we were to truly believe only old ladies like glitter, guess what that makes MsNo?

Ha! *snort!

Anyway, yes I have glitter. Too much glittery Christmas stuff and believe me, if I knew a way to get all the current glitter off all that Christmas stuff without damaging loved decorations, I would. Gladly. Can’t stand living with the stuff seemingly until June. Seriously, I think I shit the stuff at least until April or May.

But as of today, most of the fake flowers are gone. I saved a duffle bag’s worth which is a whole lot less than the duffle bag stuffed to bursting plus three plastic flip-top totes crammed full. Additionally, I organized what I saved into seasons because that was always a big issue, again with the glitter. The duffle bag stores fake Christmas foliage but also stored spring flowers for the door wreath. Everytime I changed the look of the damned wreath, glitter ended up everywhere like it was tossed willy-nilly all over.

Well, that’s coming to an end right quick. From now on, spring will be separate from winter and winter will be separate from summer and fall.

It’s almost as the gods intended.

December 5, 2008

I still have a to-do item written on our kitchen chalkboard to get rid of more fake flowers. Since we’ve decorated our Christmas tree with mostly fake flowers and foliage for the past two years, it’ll be until the tree comes down before I can get rid of more. But not all will be tossed in the trash or packed in a donation box. Most of it is newish fake stuff, stuff we’re not willing to throw under the old lady bus just yet. But those ancient hydrangeas? OMG! Those things saw better days over half a decade ago.

The weathermen say it’ll be dry most of the week and if so, good. Before I catch WS’ cold (the one he caught from me), I need to try my darnest to get the rest of the leaves swept up. Only then can I truly relax this month.

Did you catch that? It’s a lie. I can’t relax until the rest of the roses are dug out and dumped which comes after the leaves are swept up. And the tomato pot is dumped. And that chrysanthemum pot is emptied because who wants to look at that dead thing all winter? And then I ought to rip out the stuffing of those window boxes just so it’ll be done once and for all. I swear I thought I was doing a good thing by filling them with Styrofoam and matting but all they have become is a great home for bugs. Clean ‘em out.

Then finally, once the leaves are gone and all that other stuff is done, I can spray down the cement with the lightest of 30 second Cleaner. Just in preparation for spring and to get rid of the stained mess the leaves made.

No really. That’s all I have left to do this year.

Hmm, I keep doing it, don’t I?

December 7, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a local Science Fiction convention where I happened to have received this wonderful cold that won’t seem to let go of my lungs. During that convention, I was invited to and attended a small party put together by a couple of writer friends. And during the party, and as I am apt to do way, way too often, I pissed someone off.

This usually starts innocently enough. Believe me when I say I’m the very last person to know that I made someone mad. It seems to be a thing that has followed me through most of my adult life. Anymore, if I get through an event that lasts longer than six or eight hours and don’t hear about how I pissed someone off, I can’t help but feel that either I wasn’t doing my job or that perhaps I’m getting old and tired.

Anyway, that Friday evening party was wonderful. After an hour or so of talking to other writers, most of whom I truly admire and wish to hear more from, I noticed a gentleman in attendance who is a friend of a good friend and to whom I had been told I ought to introduce myself. We see each other time and again at the writing events at such conventions around the area but I had never approached him officially. What better time than at a smallish party when he isn’t under the onslaught of his multitude of fans?

Or so I thought.

I waited nearby as he talked to another writer, one who went on to win a fairly major award later in the evening, and then stepped up and said my name and that a mutual friend had told me I ought to introduce myself. Completely true and sounded innocent enough, I thought.

He got within inches of my face and shot back with implied heavy annoyance something to the affect of wondering if my friend thought life would be vastly improved by meeting me. After the briefest of moments in which I admit I was a little taken aback, I replied that no, I thought my life would be vastly improved if I met him.

Without saying another word to anyone, he left the room. Just got up and left. Someone nearby who knows me a little commented on how well I seemed to pick my fights.

Not at ALL my intention.

I only saw this guy one other time all weekend, when he was sitting at a table doing a book signing. We did not make eye contact.

Anyway, again, while I haven’t been dwelling on this event in the least, my subconscious must have been because early this morning, around 4 a.m. I believe it was, I awoke with this incident running through my mind like a derailed train could plow through a glass shop. Could not get back to sleep. So I got up and set about writing this gentleman a passive, guilt-accepting apology letter.

Do I think I did anything wrong? Not on your life. Do I think an apology letter was in order? Hard to say. The writing world is a very tight-knit business. Everyone comes to know everyone eventually. You can’t get around this. It doesn’t pay to make enemies. That said, do I think this guy was an ass? You betcha. And in cases like this, I tend to fall back on a tried-and-true rule: I vote with my dollars. If I like you, you get some. I’ll buy your book. If not, you don’t and my wallet stays fat. I’d like to think my money is just as good as everyone else’s. Perhaps I’m wrong and if that’s the case, I probably should just keep it. He might have enough anyway.

I’m sure he has a very good explanation, even for the little ol’ nobody I am. But I came home from that convention with an extra twenty dollars in my pocket I had planned to spend.

December 9, 2008

Switching over to guerilla budget tactics has been interesting so far to say the least. My head’s in the right place and my motivation is high. This may change somewhat as we approach those final last days before Christmas when I usually feel depressed about us, once again, not really celebrating the holiday with gifts. It’s just the media getting to me. I really don’t want to exchange gifts. I’m trying to change my thinking and I think I’m making headway.

Last week, we had hair cut appointments. WS’ hair grows incredibly fast and he can no longer let it grow down to his butt like he used to be able to get away with at his employer. Too bad they don’t pay their employees to look professional.

I, on the other hand, will look seriously into giving up coloring mine next spring. Coloring my hair is an extravagant expense I can no longer afford. However, my normal color is somewhat horrifying with patches of grey mixed with a watered down mud shade. Does not look professional or well cared for, even when freshly washed, dried, or styled. Poor hair genes or something.

Most of my adult life, people often commented about how I really needed to do something with it and you know, I actually looked forward to a time in my life when I could afford to do just that. Took me forty-eight years to get here to a point where I could have my hair done once every eight weeks. Previous years spend coloring it myself in the privacy of my own home ended with my hair being extremely brittle and sparse and my scalp wildly irritated because of the harshness of home hair color products. I am not willing to go back to that. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Anyway, the hair place we go to was having a Christmas party for their customers during regular business hours. Tea, cider, coffee, plates of cookies, and other appetizers were available and while I am still ninety-nine percentage committed to the South Beach diet (of which I have kept 33 of my original 35 pounds off – go me), I wasn’t going to go home hungry to a mostly empty fridge and cupboard. Not to let an opportunity for free food pass me by, I ate a plate full of cookies and drank orange spice tea. WS refused to eat anything and so, he ate all the left over spaghetti in the fridge once we got home. Nothing left for dinner.

I don’t think his head was in the right place.

Next week, we have a Christmas party to attend. Unfortunately, the ‘free’ food won’t be free. We paid our party fee (twenty bucks a couple) a month ago before finances fell into the toilet. The painful part was not being able to get our money back and that everyone’s required to bring a gift (no gag gifts).

Having absolutely zero dollars to spend, I’ve had to get creative to come up with the required gift. No problem. Desperation is great for creativity.

This will be first time I have re-gifted anything in my life. But it’s not a crappy thing I’m re-gifting. I’m just not going to say what it is here. It’s a car club thing and I’m certain it will be appreciated. In fact, the last time I saw these people, this very item was longingly mentioned. Since I never used it and never will nor has it ever been opened, why not re-gift it? No one knows I’ve even got it. It should be perfect and the cost? About a buck in wrapping paper (that I bought back in 1999, the last time I thought we might have a gift-laden holiday).

I wrapped it this afternoon in preparation and I felt worse for reusing a beautiful ribbon from a gift received last year than for what was wrapped up inside.

What to re-gift next year? Ha! I won’t make this mistake again. These people are too expensive. Next year we’re not going to any Christmas party!

December 12, 2008

WS has just been told that for the third year in a row, he and no one else in his department will be getting a raise. Additionally, they have changed the rating system used to assure employee raises for the future. A high rating means a raise. A low rating means no raise. That makes sense. So is it any surprise that every single employee is now rated low? A simple justification for not having to pry all those millions from the fists of the CEO in a year when the company performed well compared to all other competitors who did not. Perhaps Mr. CEO and his family need to refurbish another private jet.

One of the main reasons we are having difficulty with our budget – everything else has gone up in price over the last four years but our income has remained the same. I guess we’d better get used to it.

Guerilla budgeting continues.

In lieu of refurbishing anything but our finances around here, beginning mid November, we lowered our programmable thermostat to sixty-eight degrees, unplugged Limpy’s outdoor heating pad after he passed on, didn’t put up outdoor Christmas lights, shut down all outdoor lighting (back and front yards and porch lights), and unplugged unnecessary items to keep phantom electric use down. We have eight light bulbs left in the entire house to replace with energy efficient ones (six Can lights on dimmers, two sconce lights also on dimmers). The budget doesn’t allow for the purchase of replacement bulbs as of yet but its coming. And according to our latest electric bill, we’ve saved about ten bucks so far. Go us.

We have a single Christmas tree up and decorated but only light it on weekends and then, only for a couple of hours. Seems pointless almost when everything else is so dark.

Additionally, we’ve shut off TV satellite feed, reduced largely unused phone and various monitoring services, slashed bottled water delivery, and are cutting back on gasoline usage. We’ve vowed not to use our gas fireplace for the rest of 2008 and throughout 2009, have adjusted our hot water heater temperature, and will continue to use only cold water for washing clothes and the lowest possible setting for drying them (we switched to these last two items over five years ago).

One interesting thing we’ve discovered during our voluntarily shut down of some expenses is the un-solicited willingness of those companies to lower their monthly cost to us. The TV satellite company and our credit monitoring service were both willing to cut their monthly costs by up to forty percent. Shows you how high their profit margins are, doesn’t it, as well as exposes their fear of losing customers. We had already made up our minds on getting rid of both of these items but moving forward, we’re planning to take this information to use with other services we don’t want to eliminate completely but need to cut back on a little. If they’re willing to cut what they charge by just a bit, we’re more apt to be a life-long loyal customer after this financial crisis is over.

WS is going to begin calling credit card companies next week to see if they would be willing to lower our interest rates. We didn’t have any luck with this ploy two years ago when they all but laughed at us but it’s worth a shot now especially with federal interest rates dropping to very low levels. All they can say is no again. All we can do is keep track of who was cooperative and who we’ll be paying off first and not ever returning to. Screw you too CitiBank.

We’re also looking into switching pet food from our vet-prescribed formula (a hundred bucks a sixteen-pound bag every seven weeks) back to less expensive Iams food (at about fifteen bucks for a twelve-pound bag). Careful monitoring of our pets’ health will be key in making this switch permanent. The last time we made such a switch, we lost two cats and nearly a third to quick-onset fatty liver disease brought about by refusal to eat. We have far fewer pets this time around and we are better educated as to the warning signs of serious problems. Currently, we have three months of expensive vet food stored in our pet emergency kit and half a bag of Iams food (leftover from feeding Limpy). Keep your fingers crossed.

As for our own food costs, we’ll be heading back to shopping at WinCo and staying away from Fred Meyer’s except for the few items we cannot get at WinCo. Those few items are the cheap, plasticized plates we use for feeding The Queen (whose food is mixed daily with drugs to keep her going in her old age), non allergenic cat litter which is cheaper at Fred Meyer’s than at WinCo amazingly enough, and one or two other items that escape my mind at the moment.

Meat will be considered a premium. WS will have to deal with that. He’ll live, especially knowing that this won’t last forever. Luckily for us, we love veggies that most grocery stores sell cheap – squash, kale, spinach, parsnips, turnips, and rutabagas, cauliflower and leeks, etc. You know, the veggies most consider old people food. We also love brown rice and dried beans and just happened to have an upper cabinet full of both. When those run out, we’re okay with restocking both from WinCo’s bulk food bins. We’ll watch out for the weevil worms.

Combined with our usual careful rationing of the fresh veggies we already had in the house after our big pre-Thanksgiving shopping trip, we’ll easily be able to go until the second half of December before we’ll need to grocery shop again. My reformed budget allowed two hundred dollars for groceries sometime between December first and the fifteen. Not needing groceries until after the fifteenth puts that money back into the budget and, I am very happy to say, puts us in the black for the first time in a year.

Unfortunately, between the fifteenth and the thirty-first is a whole ‘nother matter with us being about three hundred in the hole, but we’ve still got some tricks up our sleeves plus the benefit of time itself. We can and will get through this, plain and simple.

December 15, 2008

It’s almost ten a.m. and the temperature is hovering around twenty-six degrees F. That’s pretty much going to be our high today and we couldn’t be more thrilled about it. It snowed here over the weekend; Saturday brought puffy flakes that melted on the streets but stayed on the grass for an hour or two, Sunday brought six hours of teensy-tiny flakes that turned into ice and stayed overnight.

We’ve got quite the breeze blowing outside, typical for our usual trash pick-up day. Luckily for us, the breeze is keeping neighbors’ cans, recycle bins, and trash from staying in our yard. There looks to be a sizable pile of all the above down the street, across a main thoroughfare, and piled up against a neighboring development’s fence. I wonder how many of our neighbors will actually notice they are missing a can or bin and go wade through that garbage gyre looking for what’s theirs. For how often people around here ‘forget’ to take in their cans after pick-up, often for days upon days, I doubt very many will care one way or the other. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s got to be expensive buying new trash cans every other week. Maybe they think the garbage men take them?

The wind chill is what’s interesting out there. Reportedly, we’re between zero and seven degrees. I was outside earlier, well dressed for it I’ll add, and I didn’t think it was all that bad as long as I wasn’t being hit in the face with wind. I could see how this would suck and I feel for anyone out in it and anyone’s pets who have to live in it. I refuse to talk about Capt’ Dan’s two yappy Pomeranians. They’re quiet now. Let’s hope they’re using the energy to stay warm. Another story for another time.

Our daytime temperatures aren’t supposed to get above freezing for at least a week (32 degrees F.). Our nighttime temperatures for the week won’t get above the high teens. Almost twenty years ago, when WS moved me here from my near-lifelong home in the desert southwest, my desert friends all concluded that I’d have the worst time acclimating to the cold here. A person just can’t go from a hundred and twenty-four degrees to minus sixteen. They made it sound like that would happen overnight.

WS promised that this area would snow and/or ice up every winter. Well, it doesn’t snow or ice up here often at all it turns out; you know how childhood memories sometimes makes things seem bigger, better, or worse than, in reality, things are. But in the first winter living here, it did snow and the temperatures got down to sixteen degrees and although I still can’t drive worth crap in the stuff, I did just fine. Took to it like a duck to water. I think all those years living in the hot desert might have been a mistake. Obviously, I was built for cold weather.

I said cold weather, not colds as in sickness. I’ve got another one, the kind that gunks up sinuses with brightly colored goo and makes ears crackle and hurt. I must have come into contact with something nasty over the past week. Knowing me, I probably shook a nasal miner’s hand and then felt the uncontrollable need to rub my eyes or bite at a hangnail and bam! Just like that, I’m hacking and bubbling all over the place again.

I cancelled my appearance at a writer’s meeting last week and hope that I don’t have to cancel going to the car club Christmas party this week because of how I feel. I’m pretty sure I’m over the hump. What will make the ultimate decision is the weather. Snow is forecasted again for Wednesday and Thursday and perhaps yet again next Sunday. The party falls in between. I’d hate to waste the twenty bucks we already paid (non-refundable) but that amount’s not worth losing one’s life over. Sure would be nice to get rid of this Christmas gift though.

December 16, 2008

This morning, WS seemed all confident and self assured. Not about anything in particular, just seemed to ooze self confidence about everything.

This afternoon, the exact moment I started talking about going to Drill Sergeant Dave’s house this coming weekend, he shriveled up into a whiny little boy. Soft spoken, stuttering, un-assure of anything; couldn’t even answer the simplest of questions. Everything asked of him after that seemed as if I were throwing him flaming hoops of fire. He said, after I told him his personality seemed to have changed as fast as a light switch being flipped, that talking about going to Dave’s threw him for a loop and that he wasn’t as confident about going over there given the earlier weather forecast as I seemed to be.

Can something seemingly that minor throw his brain into a near shutdown? Good grief! I thought everything was going great and he didn’t seem to have any problem with us driving into Portland today (me behind the wheel). I have been left completely baffled and confused by the abrupt change of personality. This has definitely put a damper on my day, a day that started out so nicely. All I can think now is, “WTF?”

December 17, 2008

It’s mid December and the kids in our district haven’t had a full week’s worth of school since it began in August. It’s been nothing but three and four day school weeks every week. Can’t blame it on the economy and schools cutting back. Financial problem stuff didn’t even start until well after school started. I’m worried about what this is teaching the kids of today. Even now, a school teacher friend of mine says all her class wants to talk about is getting the next day off. It’s become a huge distraction that she thinks will translate over in later life to high absenteeism in work life.

Here in the ‘hood, I’ve heard neighbors complain about their kids having to come home to empty houses since both parents need to work now (to pay for all that crap they don’t need maybe?). It’s even worse when once or twice a week, the kids don’t even need to get out of bed in the morning when the parents are rushing about trying to set up some kind of irregular babysitting service.

Or worse, like work life WS has to tolerate most days; the parents simply bring their broods to work. He can tell horror stories about the increased noise levels, sick kids playing and sleeping in the aisles and in cubicles, the interruptions and general daycare feel to the place. All this in a professional office environment with sensitive equipment and high level meetings, where they don’t allow spouses to visit for fear of company espionage yet it’s perfectly acceptable for scads of toddlers to crawl, pee, and puke up and down the thinly carpeted maze of occupied worker cells.

I’ll admit that the idea of daytime parent/teacher conferences, the supposed reasoning for most days off around here, wasn’t even though of back when I went to school (obviously which was in the dark ages) but these meetings did start showing up around the time my much younger siblings were attending school. Every one of them was affected negatively by it. I say negatively because, in my opinion, that taught them the unimportance of doing something every single day. It taught them that nothing should be routine. It was one of the key elements that seemed to have taught them that having to show up every day to class or to a job or to life in general was irrelevant and trivial, and to this day, not one of them has been able to hold a job for longer than a year, a relationship for not much longer. Why should they? Grown adults showed them such things weren’t important.

I know, I probably sound like a bitter old woman who’s bemoaning the fact that I had to go to school every single day when today’s kids get shortened weeks, but I can assure you that’s not it. Sure, I didn’t want to go to school but I feared the fate that awaited me at home with an unemployed mentally ill father if I didn’t. I was bullied daily at school too but I went anyway. As I age, I see whining, lazy, unscrupulous people running businesses, politics, and the country around me and wonder if maybe they had been held to the same standards in school that I was; would that have been so wrong, and would it have made a difference?

December 19, 2008

This part of this blog entry is for WS: Yes, I’m sick again. Another cold, this time bacterial-based I think. Haven’t been able to breathe out of my nose for a week and my left ear hurts and has been crackly and blocked for nearly as long. No, I’m not trying to be annoying when I ask you to repeat stuff. Yes, I’m taking aspirin for my ear ache. No, I’m not going to the doctor. Been here before, know my own body, and know it’ll go away soon.

Yes, I’ve been trying hard to not touch much and to use Clorox wipes after myself. Yes, I still think I’m over the hump with it but thought you might want to know that last Saturday, when I told you I was going to lie down for an hour or so before we had to leave the house, I wasn’t lying down because I was tired. I really, really felt awful and for the most part, the rest of the evening was a blur.

And you should know I’m blaming Wal-Mart.

I vowed I’d never step into another Wal-Mart as long as I lived. I’ve been to the very first one every built back when I took that terribly ill-fated ‘vacation’ with my redneck roommate in 1987, yes, that roommate who later became my stalker with a fondness for strangulation. I’ll never forget the welcoming his Arkansas aunt/second cousin gave me by burning the very bed sheets I slept on that first night. I was a whore don’t you know, all divorced and living on my own for nearly ten years and living in sin with her nephew/first cousin even though that was done at separate ends of a house; it was that or I’d have had to live in a cardboard box under a bridge.

But WS had a good point last week when we were fretting over our finances. I was saying something to the effect of how our budget would be fine, hell, it’d be perfectly fine if we just didn’t have to eat.

He said we might want to use Wal-Mart as a tool. He swore he never wanted to go into a Wal-Mart himself for reasons only he could explain, but he said he was willing to go into the one closest to our house and do a little price checking against the cost of our usual grocery purchases at WinCo and Fred Meyer’s.

And so he did.

He came home with good news. Ninety-eight percent of groceries we usually buy would indeed cost less at Wal-Mart. The added bonus was that the store wasn’t depressing inside like WinCo is. Nothing like seeing people standing in the aisles at WinCo literally bawling their eyes out because they don’t have enough money to buy milk and toilet paper (true story). Him saying we ought to use Wal-Mart as a tool to get ourselves back into better financial shape hit the nail on the head for me, and so, the following evening with exactly ninety dollars in cash in our pockets, off we went.

I was determined to keep a good attitude. I thought of adopting a pompous English accent or spouting a funny little quip to the greeter who would, undoubtedly, greet us at the door. I changed my mind at the last minute. Didn’t want to make that much fun out of it.

We entered on the grocery side of the store, having heard that most people have a hard time bypassing the clever, scientifically designed display items set up to entice patrons to spend more than they originally planned. We got right to work and stuck religiously to our food-only list. We avoided the meat department almost entirely other than to ask if they sliced whole hams (they don’t) or if the deli department did should we be back to buy one for Christmas dinner (the deli won’t either). Scratch that Wal-Mart ham purchase.

We found the produce department woefully lacking in about half of the kinds of veggies we like; no kale, parsnips, or rutabagas; sad looking lettuce and onions, but we found wonderful deals on others. Gala apples – a dollar a pound, jalapeno peppers – twenty five cents a pound. Score and double score! We found a good deal on yams but because yams weren’t on our list, we decided to wait and WS would come back for them in a day or two. By then, unfortunately, their yams had gone from thirty-nine cents a pound up to ninety-eight cents a pound and he couldn’t afford as many as we’d planned to get. Just as I’d heard, prices change everyday at Wal-Mart, a ploy to get customers to buy spontaneously with the belief (or fear) that most things will go back up in price the following day. I’ll watch for that in the future and vow to stick to our lists regardless.

We ended the evening with a bill of eighty-two dollars and some change. Got all but one thing on our list. Will we shop there again? Sure will. It’s a financial tool, a good tool especially given the location is less than three miles from our house compared to an eight mile trip to WinCo. Next time, however, I’ll try harder to avoid sneezing people and won’t touch the shopping carts, particularly somewhat slimy-feeling cart handles, without wearing gloves. Whether at WinCo or Wal-Mart, sick people are sick people and I need to try harder to avoid them all.

December 26, 2008

Ah, Boxing Day 2008. Don’t understand it but for some reason, it speaks to me. It makes me think of all the things to come organization-wise; a paring down from having too much clutter and pointless stuff. We’re not taking our tree down yet or clearing the mantle or buffet of Christmas décor but I feel the desire picking at me.

Instead, I reorganized the kitchen island and swapped our holiday tableware for plain, undecorated plates and bowls. Slowly, over the course of the next week, festive decorations will seem to melt away like the snow outside as we enter that simpler time of year. We’ve vowed to lighten up our living spaces, removing stuff usually out on display to give the place a different look, one that matches our drive to clean up our financial house. When that world improves, we’ll celebrate having stuff again by ‘rediscovering’ it. It’ll be like shopping for décor without actually buying anything!

Up until this morning, I walked in the snow every day for up to forty-five minutes, gearing up toward working out regularly again. I’ve got ten pounds to lose before Valentine’s Day after all. Last night’s walking was treacherous at best with the snow being half-slush, half-ice, and both a foot thick. A few times I caught myself before twisting an ankle and was glad WS wasn’t out walking with me. Needless to say, there’ll be no more walking outside until this stuff is gone.

That’s not to say I won’t try to clear a path out back to the bird feeders today. Our driveway and front sidewalks we worked three days in a row to clear earlier in the week look fabulous today. A clear oasis amid a vast foot-deep icy bog. I probably should have been working out back just as vigorously. The cardio benefit is completely worth the effort for me.

December 28, 2008

We nearly had a pet emergency yesterday, one that we wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about because we couldn’t get out of our own driveway. Had we needed to rush a pet to the animal hospital, we would have had to shovel a car’s width path through mounded snow and ice just to get ourselves out into the snow and slush-rutted street. And that’s where we would have surely gotten stuck because the snow and ice was just as bad the entire length of the street. The stuff blocking the end of our driveway was the worst and nearly three feet deep in spots. The bad thing is, we started that pile when we cleared our sidewalk for the final time three days ago. We didn’t think we’d need to go out anywhere until after the first of the year. Goes to show what we know, which is nothing. An emergency can happen at any time, and no matter how prepared you think you are, in reality, you probably aren’t.

Seth, the cat who graced Blogeois.com on Christmas day, the sweetest cat in the world, decided, for the first time ever, to check out the top of our buffet table while we were shoveling snow in our backyard. The buffet table was where we had a pile of South Beach recipe dark chocolate chip cookies stashed. And he ate a few.

If you don’t already know, chocolate, especially dark chocolate can be deadly to dogs and cats. The smaller the animals, the worse the effects before seizures and eventual death set in. Weighing in at ten pounds, Seth had basically eaten half a dozen chocolate chips and there we were with no way of getting him anywhere for help.

While keeping him within eyesight to watch for symptoms, I did quick research online to educate myself on what to look for and for what I could do, if anything, should he take a turn for the worst. At most, he was quiet for the rest of the afternoon and sat in the same spot for a few hours. No tremors or shaking, no accelerated breathing or heart rate (that I could tell by watching him and by touch), no diarrhea or vomiting, no seizure, coma, or death.

Looking back, I probably should have called our vet, but I know they have been closed most of the week due to the snow storms. I realize now I could have called the local animal hospital who would have undoubtedly told me to bring him in immediately (if for no other reason than so they could charge us the two hundred and ten dollar ‘walk through the door’ fee). They would have told me to find a way to get there, to find a way out of our driveway be it begging a neighbor (who were all mysteriously gone yesterday – after Christmas shopping?) or to call a taxi (which would have taken at minimum two hours to get here and figure out how to get down our treacherous, icy-clogged street). Both options, with high fail rate percentage possibility, would have upset me worse that I already felt and I’m certain, would have blurred my reasonably clear thinking, something I felt I needed at the time for Seth’s sake.

But had he taken that downward turn, you bet I would have been on the phone and clawed and crawled to other houses to pound on doors for help. I was lucky. He barely seemed to be affected by it at all and I relearned the lesson I know with every other pet we have, that being to never trust even the sweetest of cats.

So, today, with the fear of what could have happened still fresh, we cleared the street in front of our house. Literally the entire street. With two shovels, we broke up ice, cleared ice dams, and unclogged frozen storm drains not just in front of our house, but in front of The Dimmers, The Renters, and the poor, unemployed Mormon family up the street whose storm drain, located at the end of their driveway, hadn’t been cleared of leaves, branches, or muck in the nine years any of us have lived here.

Alone, we shoveled snow, ice, and slush far enough across the street so if needed, we could get WS’ car out and pointed in the right direction. And not a soul helped. For all the able-bodied men, women, and children living on our street, most of whom we knew for a fact were home (and probably watching from behind curtains), a good portion of whom we had watched slip and fall trying to stand on their own driveways and sidewalks, it took a man with MS and a fifty-two year old woman with asthma and an ear infection to clear sidewalks, a gutter, and two storm drains in less than two hours. How pathetic is that? Any faith I might have had in anyone else living on this street, that any of them might actually care, has been irretrievably lost. None of these people care about anything or anyone other than themselves.

But to all this, we were rewarded with a rapid melt of entire sheets of ice. Once the near-frozen water trapped underneath had an escape route, all we had to do was stand around and clear the occasional ice dam that reformed on the paths toward the drains. Four hours later, that three foot tall mound of snow and ice that ran the length of the street was reduced to a foot in height. Forty degree temperatures helped with the rest.

WS thinks he wants to clear the sidewalks and gutters and frozen drains across the street tomorrow. It’s so bad over there, I had to find an alternative path to get to the community mailbox late this afternoon, and even so, I had to step in a foot deep reservoir of water to get to the still ice-encased sidewalk. Personally, I think he should just let Mother Nature do the work. We’re on a warming trend and most of this stuff should be gone by mid-week. By that time, anyone who noticed our handiwork, which probably won’t be anyone, truth be told, will simply laugh at us for working so hard for what they would see as nothing. After all, they all own SUVs and 4x4s that can go anywhere. We’re just those stupid, weird people who like low-to-the-ground sports cars and thusly, we deserved to remain trapped in our home.

December 29, 2008

Switching over from WS being in charge of our budget for the past five years to me being in charge should have been an easy deal hardly worth mentioning. It’s been anything but.

I’ll be the very first in line to stand up, wave my hands, and tell the world that I’m nitpicky and like things to look and behave a certain way. Much like WS likes things his way. And he did a grand job of making the budget his own.

However, I find myself having to say over and over, “But it’s MY budget now” as he attempts to get my dullard brain wrapped around what I can only see as a bloated, purposefully convoluted, over-processed, over-engineered method of set up (kind of like Microsoft software) in which every third bill is paid in a different way via a different methodology and on a different timeline, all of which needs careful, near-hourly monitoring to make sure everyone gets their money on time. In fact, during our spirited discussion that lasted hours beyond my desire to actually pay any bills today, I pointed out that I had watched him slave over the budget every week for the past five years and didn’t understand why it needed to be so confusing.

He smiled at me like Einstein must have smiled at a newborn. He sees it all as a finely tuned machine that needs only the slightest of human touch as if for no other reason than to admire and caress the exquisite handiwork.

I feel that time equals money and no one should have to spend that much time every week on something that supposedly ‘makes things easier.’ If given my choice, and it should be my choice because it’s MY budget now, I’d just write out the damned checks when the bills came in, pop them back into the mail, and be done with it.

But now, half the bills don’t even come in the mail anymore. Oh no, you have to go to their website and pay it there, but only if they don’t already have your bank information. If they do have that information, you just have to make sure they haven’t changed their billing address on you (a ploy often used to incur late bill charges) or to make sure the amount is correct. But wait! Lucky us in that a couple of bills are so regular, we can practically set our clocks by them. They pay themselves and we don’t need to do a thing . . . except to make sure all the information is still relevant and that there’s money left to pay them. Details, we must always check the details.

This all makes perfect sense to WS. If this should all take extra time, so be it. Beauty in the process demands time. The added bonus is that the bills are paid.

The problem with my overly simplistic thinking is that we’d have to pay almost ten bucks a month in stamps and processing by going back to writing out checks, which is the way I used to do the budget for the five years before WS took it over. WS’ way costs us nothing but the already present Internet connection and time.

Hmm, ten additional dollars a month we don’t and can’t afford, or time.

Okay, take my frickin’ time already. I guess I wasn’t using it anyway. But can’t we at least get rid of that ugly green on black color scheme?