better day

at least i am dressed, the bed is made and dinner is in the oven.

trail of tears

this bullshit is straight from some one of my husband's a$$hole friends hurt my feelings, down to the quick. it went on for about 6 weeks then it stopped. but i'm stilling hurting inside by the reason he would have perpetuated this particular brand of crap.

the thing is, he never apologized for it. he stopped doing it but he never told me he was sorry. he even makes jokes about it.

now he claims he doesn't remember it, even though he is the one who brought the subject up.

and i am done. with him.

i have defended him to everybody, so he has used my natural tendencies to make me look like a fool.

when i am done with someone, I AM DONE with them. i don't delete tham from my phone, but i will edit their name  display and make it something ugly yet true and descriptve. i will turn their ringers to silent. after all, i don't care if they call. why should i be bothered by them? i will call them at my leisure.

today i had to set someone's ringer to "SILENT" so i won't be bothered by him. we had a bad argument last night, because of what he did. he doesn't feel like he owes me an apology, so i'm not getting one. i feel i deserve one and i decided after crying a few hours that i really shouldn't care about it at all. if's it's that much trouble to try to be friendly to someone only for him to hurt me that way, his friendship is not worth it. i refuse to take left-overs.

if the phone's not ringing, it MIGHT be him calling.

i will never call him again. ever. for any reason. he can rot in a hell of his own making before i will ever contact him again.

i am DONE. there will be no NICE lee anymore.

he changed my eyes from soft light blue to cold cobalt steel.

i don't want to talk to him. i don't want to see him. i don't want to hear his name.

he has proven how weak he is,.

i am DONE! i can be your best friend or your woprst enemy.

guess which side he is one?

i will be forced to see him for very short periods of time, every once in a blue moon. but i will just ignore him. i will pretend he is the pink elephant no one looks at. i will be present only a short time.

stick a fork in me, i am done!

autopsy of a day

i know, look how many times i am posting! wow! i guess this shows you how much housework is getting done today.

i am still in my pajamas, haven't made the bed and need a bath.

dinner is in the oven. i took a dozen stuffed shells out of the freezer and they are in the oven, smother in alfredo sauce and covered with bubbling cheese. 

after i eat, i am going out to the garden to water everything and plant some lettuce seeds.

then it's bed, bath and sweet dreams.

i screwed up my internal clock by staying up until DAWN! i went out in the moonlight and it energized me! i planted a couple of moonflowers and morning glories in a big pot i have out front. they can curl around the moon with the dangling star i have stuck in there for decoration. i am moving the 4 o'clock seeds (which are finally showing slight signs of germination) into the pot with them, so i will have a clock in a flowerpot. morning glories in the morning, four o'clocks in the afternoon and big white moonflowers at night. i will definitely post this photo when it blooms                                      

coma of love

i'm sure everybody has heard about brett michaels. i really wasn't a fan until i accidentally watched "rock of love" once. then i was hooked.

it's sad, one day he's trumping it up on "celebrity apprentice" the next he's in a freaking coma with a brain bleed.

i have a thoery about that.

i understand donald trump made him remove the bandana. the bandana may have been a torniquet of sorts, it seems. it maybe have been just enough pressure to keep the brain bleed at bay. he removed the bandana and had a brain bleed.

i wonder if it can be spun into a workmen's comp case.

i hope he recovers. i hope he recovers before they start filming "coma of love" and the hospital floor nurses vie to be his private nurse. i can see it now- stripper dances on the iv pole. the scoring goes by the vital signs he displays as they dance.

i'm sure they had to shave his head. but i can see him now in my mind, a bandana tied under the bloody gauze. imagine, he may be bald!

just goes to show, anything can happen at anytime to anyone.

don't let anyone make you take off your bandana.

it's time for a new cake...

any suggestions as to what type of cake picture i should swap out in the photo above? i'm thinking a nice plain wedding cake that looks like it would melt it your mouth. maybe i should show a delicious cake and give you the recipe for it at then end of the month, once you're drooling over it and ready to lick the monitor. any suggestions? any recipes?

things at casa cake are pleasant. i was worried about a few bills but suddenly my husband got his unemployment debit card, preloaded with what seems like too much money. bill worries gone! plus he's cutting the yard next door, front one week, back the next, when he does ours, for $25 a week. you don't have to report anything under $40 a week, so he is safe there. we are actually doing $100 a week better than we were doing when his hours got cut.

we're still couponing but i went on a big declutter/spring cleaning kick and chunked all the receipts. can't stop progress. i think last week our big shopping went from $128 down to $98. not great, but better. don't quote me. i have groceries!

i had enough cash to go buy my tags. i got a replacement handicapped parking placard for the missing one that root and chicky claim they never saw. if she's caught with it and they run the number, she's in trouble. i gave her a chance to share but then all of a sudden she couldn't find it. i don't need it often but when i do, i need it. i can't go with out one. i may have started the wifezilla war but it's me with the bum knees, not her. i took it to the cowgirl's house and gave it to her to keep in the truck because we are going on a trip this week.

the basketball diaries

i hated eighth grade. i was really on the fringes of a moderately upwardly social but felt like an outsider. they all lived the opposite direction from me- i lived on the poor side of town. i can't tell you how many miles i put on my orgill brothers bike. i would ride to meet them at different department stores or places to eat. i would have to order the cheapest thing on the menu and water, but i got to socialize. i just barely fit in with them.

during these travels, i made an amazing life-changing discovery.

i accidently found out where the cute phys ed teacher lived. the one who looked like a better-looking tom selleck- a.k.a. magnum, p.i. mustache, tan, sunglasses and i think he wore gym shorts brief enough that they were made by speedo. he caught me one of the sixty million times i stalked him rode past his house and waved at me. i waved back and tried to remain calm. HE WAVED AT ME!

the next time i saw him, he was with the other phys ed teachers- the COOL jj evans/dyn-o-mite dude who had a big afro and wore an afro with a big-black-plastic-fist-o-solidarity afro pick sticking out of the top. they waved me over. i pedaled over and saw that they were hiding a joint. i just walked up to him, took it out of his hand and took a huge toke. big stuff for a 14 year-old girl to do! they all laughed and mr. afro-pete-said, "dang, she's cool!"

we spent the rest of the summer getting high together, me and the two teachers. we would play basketball and they coached me on how to REALLY put some fire in my game. i wasn't afraid to ride my bike for snacks when i was high. pete's car tended to break down and hank- mr. magnum crotch bulge- didn't have a car. his wife worked at a school that held summer school so she worked year round. during the school year, he got the car and she took a bus. during the summer, he was stranded. they would give me $20 and i would ride to kroger to get fritos and cans of bean dip, cans of lipton lemon iced tea we'd stick in the freezer so it would be icy after we finished playing basketball. i never told. no one ever found out. this is the first time i have ever told this story.

so i spent 8 weeks getting stoned with two of my teachers, playing basketball and watching soap opera. i made myself useful by always having papers and a lighter. i helped hank fold the laundry. i was amazed at how small her panties and clothing were. hank actually had leopard print underwear smaller than his gym shorts. eventually after the 3rd week of folded and out away laundry, she would leave twenty bucks with hank to give me, with instructions to call "the laundry fairy" to catch up her laundry. i always tried to give it back to him but he refused. and i never had to buy dope. because of the fairy reference, they called me tinkerbell or tink. i was cool before my time!

school started and i'd see hank and pete in the hall. they'd kid with me, pat me on the back, rub my head and mess up my hair.

it got me noticed by some of the coolest kids. i knew that being cool with hank and pete was a million tiers above being cool to them, so i kind of threw a cold shoulder to all the girls who had tromped my ego in eighth grade. i was so casual in my jordache jeans, striped cowl neck sweater and famolare roller coasters. forgive me, it was 1979. i was trying to dress like mackenzie phillips, minus the mounds of cocaine and heroin.

i still folded his laundry every saturday. hank and his wife would sit in their robes, lounging on their imitation leather pit group and read the paper. after i finished the laundry, she'd pay me and then she'd go take a shower. hank and i got high out in the garage while she was soaking in the tub.

there was another bonus- every time we had a mandatory meeting or prgram during school hours, pete and hank would get me out of going to the assembly to grade papers. then once the papers were finished, i'd head out over the fence behind the school and they'd pick me up in from of a certain house on the next block so we could go to hank's place and burn a couple.*

we still got stoned as often as possible. with their help, i made it on the basketball team. i was fast and good. they came to all the games and cheered me on. we made it to the next to the last tier and then we lost. sometimes we'd meet in a local park and race-walk, three abreast and pass a joint back and forth. i was the monkey in the middle, so i got to smoke twice as much.

they were my protectors, my fake daddies who got me high. these were the most positive influemces i had during 9th grade. if it were today, i would say they helped me develop self-esteem. back then, we called it courage.

it's a sad state when two middle-aged dopers are the best male influences i had. my mom never came to any of my games, they were at every one. they would even take me out to eat pizza sometimes. i know know that we looked like a bad blind date, two middle aged men, black/white, taking out a little white girl. i'm sure we raised a few eyebrows.

we parted ways when school ended that year. hank's wife got a better job in connecticutt and they were moving there. as a going-away present, she gave me a hundred dollar bill inside a brand new gucci bag. hank added 4 ounces of killer pot. i brought them a tin of chocolate slice-n-bake cookies i made myself.

pete got a job at a sporting goods store and brought me pairs of sneaks sometimes. or socks and t-shirts. my grandmother never questioned him coming by. then he moved away.

and the 3 were down to 1.

they were never inappropriate with me, other than getting high with me. but i would have been out somewhere unsafe doing the same thing.

i miss hank and pete.

blog-o-freaking-riffic

i've noticed that all the mommybloggers (who shall remain nameless here) who make it begin slowly-heck, swiftly in some cases!- begin to move away from the very thing that made them what they became famous for- being a regular person who happens to chronicle all the mundane things that happen from day to day.

hey, i don't begrudge anybody anything they receive that they appreciate getting and that they are thankful to receive. as you may now, i am opening to anybody in the world sending me a car, but i'm really wanting a smartcar. maybe someday somebody at the smartcar corporation will accidentally google me and decide to send me a car to test.

then they get the free vacations.

suddenly, they begin to blog less and less. they handpick a few readers who follow them religiously and they tell them all the dirt. meanwhile, us joe scmho bloggers sitting out here get half the story.

or they do the opposite thing and drag out a point. i mean they want you to repeatedly click their pages. CLICK. i have a fever. CLICK. it's 102 degrees (with picture of thermometer) CLICK. a picture of a keleenex box CLICK.  picture of cup of tea. CLICK. i'm sick : (

5 clicks, which they get paid for. three sentences, 5 posts. dang, they just earned a penny. so now they've got millions of people clicking, the dollars rolling in, just for telling us they are sick.

i think i'll avoid that. i might put up a tip jar to ask for some ridiculous shit, like a big ceramic lucky kitty or more glitter lip gloss.

my green thumb

i have been busy getting my garden cranking. i planted a few tomato varieties- marglobe, early girl and cherry, jalapeno peppers and i moved a wire trellis to the veggie bed for beans and peas to climb on. it looked pretty good.

then the storms came.

my marglobe tomato plant broke near the base of the stalk. i stuck the broken part into the ground because it has a ton of blossoms and then i staked that part. the other part i left in the ground and today i noticed that it is putting out new shoots. hopefully, both parts will live. but i don't think i'll go around and whack all the plants in half.

i am planting herbs next week-end and have to decide which 9 herbs to plant. so far, i am thinking:

• rosemary
• basil- maybe a few different varieties
• thyme
• oregano
• savory
• chives
• parsley

i guess my final choice will be determined by what looks good at the garden center.

my granddaughter is planting her watermelons again, and her brother will plant the cantaloupe seeds. they are eager farmers. i just give them a tablespoon and the seeds. last year we had quite a watermelon patch. the funny thing is, she HATES watermelon! she just likes growing them.

i also planted morning glory

and moon flower vines.

i had sprouted them from seed and hopefully they are hardy enough to grow outside. i love moonflowers, they bloom at night when it's really hot and they smell wonderful!

when my own garden has grown out a bit, i will post photos of my actual garden.

but you get the gist.

i need a gimmick...or a baby

i'm in a dilemma. i'm not sure what i'm doing here. i started out trying to do a frugal blog, but most of the things i do to save money are so automatic, i don't always realize that not everyone is as freaking cheap as i am, so i don't write about it.

i want a smartcar, but it seems as of this day, no one is giving me one.

i know mommybloggers are the hot snot right now, but what about those of us whose children are grown and not a criminal? nothing exciting happens. no one cares that he's 26, has a wife, a job, a mortgage and 2 kids. he's as boring as i am.

i need a baby. i could write about my beautiful glowing pregnancy. i could tweet during labor. i could post cutesy videoes and pictures of my baby making the gas-passing smile. i could post pictures with cute captions, so it would appear my child is doing the news and making snappy commentary. yep, a baby, that's my ticket to fame and fortune.

but somehow, if i were able to conceive at the age of 45 after 25 years of infertility, it would take a miracle of science. if i want this:

"i wub ooo, mama!"

i would end up with this:

"mom-may, somethin' stanks up in this joint!

my bad! grab me a fresh pamper! 

warm up the butt wipes this time, woman!

hey, pop me out a boob while you're up!"

and besides, my imaginary baby seat wouldn't fit in my imaginary smartcar.

a camping adventure

i have always been a camper. my mom and her husband took me to california when i was just a baby. i went to monterey pop when i was 1. then they dumped me at my greatgrandmother's house, where i lived for the next 15 years.

then i camped with the girl scouts. i was in a troop with a bunch of little snots, whose parents could always afford the best for them. they had everything new and pretty and fun. i had old camping stuff from my grandmother's business. yes, our family was so into camping that my grandmother founded a cahin of camping supply rental stores, which she later sold for a small fortune.

my husband was a camper also. his family would go camping and fishing once a month. we got our son into camping. we even have camped out in the backyard.

but something happened that turned me off camping forever.

we went on vacation before school started. we drove to a friend's home near mobile and spent the night with her. the next day, we packed up our son, her two kids, my friend and their new tent.

when we get to the campgrounds at mobile beach, she realizes she left the directions for the tent at home and she has no idea how to assemble it. my husband and i laid it out and we struggling to get it assembled when the man who was camping on the next campsite came over and helped us. he had the same exact tent that we did! even the same color! he was a great help and very friendly.

my friend and i made dinner while my husband took the kids down to the beach. she had a boy the same age as root and they were already good friends. she also had a little daughter, about 20 months old.

after dinner, we walked on the beach. when it got dark, we put the kids to bed and then we started drinking wine. she drinks a lot more than i do, so while i was just a bit tipsy and warm, she was rolling around i-love-you-guys drunk. finally, we went to bed in the tent and i fell fast asleep.

a few hours later, i woke with a start. i still don't know what woke me up. i discovered  my friend was gone! i figured she went to the bathroom, but she still hadn't returned 10 minutes later.

i woke my husband up and we headed out to find her.  i check the restroom, not there. not on the beach. we were searching the campgrounds, discussing how horrible it would be if she had wandered in the ocean and drowned, when there were a series of blood-curdling screams from the other side of the area, near where we had been sleeping.

we ran over and saw our friend crying and the people from the tent next door- the nice friendly guy who helped us was yelling and his wife was crying hysterically. he was holding her back so she wouldn't fight  my friend.

after all was said and done, it seemed my friend had gone to the bathroom and somehow wandered into their tent instead of ours (because they were identical and she was drunk). she laid down with the couple and fell asleep. then she woke up again and oculdn't find her kids or my son. she thought they had been abducted. she began screaming, woke up the wife, who began screaming at the stranger sleeping between her and her husband, and woke up the husband when she was trying to slug my friend.

yep, she wandered into the wrong tent and slept with strangers.

i went back to sleep.

at 6 a.m. the tent fell in on us. i still think the couple next door sabotaged it after the issue the previous night.

i never went camping again.

my life was "the office"...

i used to work for a very good company. i was phyliss. i had a very bad boss. he was horrible. he makes michael scott look like a role model for communicating with others. he was always doing crazy stuff, like very other yearly review would say the opposite of the review before it but not on shades of grey. his comments ran from "fails to provide management with timely updates" to "too dependent upon feedback from management to make decisions on her own."

i would spend my time doing his work while he sat in his cube cruising the messages he got from his personal add ( he was serial cheating on his gay lover) or trolling the world of warcraft chatroom. yeah, real management material.

yea, like i went from never telling you anything, to telling you too much? he had no idea of the crap i FIXED before it got to be a situation.

when i went on medical leave, they hired 4 temps to do my job. four. 4. four. 4 4 people to do my job. 4.

one of them quit at 4:30 and told them she wouldn't be back again, that she had never been so insulted or disrespected on a job before.

amen, sister.

shoot ahead, after i have been let go and i know i am not coming back, i get a call from a friend in human resources. she tells me that my boss is in jail for stealing goods from the company, like 3 million. they are trying to keep from going to the authorities. they don't want it to leak it to the press. their creditors would have a conniption fit. he aroused suspicion when he purchased a home on the river in cash.

they want me to come back and help them find dirt on what he has done. from what they could gather, he dogged me while i was on medical leave and told everyone i didn't know what i was doing. he changed the processes i had in place, proccesses i might add, that were thoroughly documented and every kink fixed so it was a smooth cycle.

he had the returns process discontinued. so instead of keeping track of returns, removing it from the store's inventory and making sure it is actually returned by the trucking company, he stopped doing all that. he simply had them send the furniture once a week to his house.

yeah, real thought out.

the crap hit the fan when inventory time came and managers were finding their jobs on the line for shrinkage, items lost being things they had returned that should have been removed from their inventory.

and every issue led right back to his new process, and the truckloads of furniture he was having sent to his house. he had a big sale on saturday mornings and sold it out of his garage. he had every interior designer in town beating down his door to buy designer furniture.

hr and security escorted him out the door when it was discovered. he had to make the walk of shame. i was told the entire office clapped when he walked out. usually they make everybody go in a meeting, escort them out, then hr cleans up the office to box up their personal items and we would go out of the meeting to find them gone and their office stripped to the bare walls. but they made an example of him, message being: don't screw with us!

i refused. they didn't need me then, why should they need me now? no one ever took my complaints seriously. why should i take their issues seriously?

i found out later that they had him arrested for theft, he served 6 months and was ordered to repay $885,000. i hope he got 500 years probation too.

yesterday, out of curiousity, i looked him up on the internet. he has a new job. i found his resume. he states his reason for leaving the company as "mission work overseas." he also lists his prior experience as an operations manager at a trucking company, which was actually his lover's job.

the little devil inside me wants to call his new job and be sure i "keep management informed with timely updates" so he will get fired.

but something tells me he won't need my help. the truth will out him, every time.

"i don't work for you!"

an amish experience

i went to the amish community about 60 miles from here with my horse friend the other day. after getting the horse shod for an amazingly small amount ( we always double his fee and round it up to the nearest five, so we make sure we give him a living wage), we drove around to a few of the houses. some of them have things for sale and they have a small shed used as shop. at one of the houses, i met a very nice elderly woman. she had no teeth and little granny glasses and was totally gray under her bonnet. i thought she was about 60.

there were a bunch of children around, so i asked her how many children she had. she HAD TO USE HER FINGERS to count to 14. then she amazed me by telling me that 2 of the toddlers were HER CHILDREN and the other 3 were grandchildren.

the she told me she has a baby in the NICU "in town" that had been there 7 weeks!

my mind thoroughly blown, i told her about my son and how big and strong he is at 26. she smiled, so i hope it helped her.

then she told me the kids speak dutch until they go school. she showed me some furniture her husband was making to take to the hospital to thank them- very nice! she said they didn't want to accept "aid" but they had no choice. so he was making the most beautiful rockers for the mother and children in the nicu, to help pay back. i'm glad they were smart enough to accept help and not let their child die.

at this point, i was crying. she patted me on the hand and said, "don't be sad. things will all work out. the lord will always be with my child."

then i went crazy and spent all my cash on her wares. now i'm surrounded by jams and jellies and relishes. i'm having to make meals from the pantry beause i blew part of the grocery money on canned goods. once i told my husband the story, he said it was cool. good thing he likes jelly. i forsee a lot of biscuits and eggs in our immediate future.

then i got to wondering how much the hospital bill for 7 weeks might be up to by now. and how hard it must be for her to be so far away from her child in the nicu. she would have to go by buggy and horse to visit.

now i wish i had offered her the use of my cellphone so she could check up on her child. i hope someone is acting as a liason and bringing her word of her child's condition. maybe they are mailing her postcards on a daily basis. i was just so conflicted. i want to help her but i don't know how.

it was an eye-opening experience.

anybody want a jelly biscuit?
 
i bet my imaginary smartcar could beat her buggy in a race!