Am I the only person who still hasn’t gotten the whole daylight savings time thing down?

It just seems unnatural for it to be bright as noon when it’s only 6am. Of course, once it’s light outside, my children [who were apparently birds in a former life] are awake and loud and demanding breakfast and cartoons.

So, we’ve all been up since 6 this morning and I’m steadily working my way through a pot of coffee.

I’m rewatching the first episode of Season 3 of Mad Men and am I the only one who feels like there was a missing episode between the finale of Season 2 and the beginning of Season 3? Betty’s all big and pregnant and there are new people in the office who are just there and weren’t really introduced. Odd.

And on a completely unrelated subject, @tomguarriello tweeted a link to this year’s Breeder’s Cup and it was fucking amazing. Really amazing. I’ve always been into horses and there’s just something about a filly winning over studs and geldings and winning easily. Hell, for the first half of the race the filly was practically loping in the back and didn’t seem the least bit concerned. Awesome video. You’ll have to follow the link to ESPN’s Breeder’s Cup page since they’ve disabled embedding of the video. Just go watch it.

So, yeah. Today’s going to be filled with coffee and cleaning since Tucker gets back from Drill tonight. Considering how he picked up the living room before he left, I can’t very well let him come home to a screwed up house.

And thanks to you guys who emailed your support and left comments. You guys rock my socks.

Image|Jack Kendall

Any blogging “expert” will tell you that the key to blogging “success” is to write and write often.

Based on my performance recently, I suppose I’m on the fast track to blogging failure.

It’s just that right now, I feel like I have this basket [mine's one of those old timey wicker affairs that I used to get at Easter. Yours can be whatever you want.] and I can only fill it up with so much stuff.

There’s the kids [and they're space hogs] and cooking and occasionally cleaning and then there’s the two sites that I write for for money and then there’s this site. Add to that the two stories that I’ve started and still need to expand and now you have an awful lot of shit in one tiny, rather delicate basket.

I’m not super strong so some of that stuff’s gotta come out so my arm doesn’t fall off. Cause I need my arm. And I’ve officially taken this device past the point of usefulness.

The point, which I know you already get since you’re a smart bunch, is that when everything is in “my basket” I get overwhelmed and can’t see my way out of the mess I’ve made.

This past month, I got way behind on my work obligations and for the first time ever, I didn’t meet my minimums. That’s bad and it sucked and I had to email my boss and confess to her that I really am a bit crazy and basically that I’m sorry I suck.

I expected to get canned.

I’m pretty sure Tucker expected me to get canned. But, I had done [and not done] all that I could do and I just had to wait on my boss’s response. Luckily for me, she’s a pretty damn understanding person and she didn’t fire my ass. So, now we get down to the reason this site hasn’t been updated in a coon’s age.

This site got “taken out of the basket”.

I just couldn’t do it all – I wanted to and I tried to but based on last month’s performance, I really can’t do it all.

So. Where does that leave me and this site?

I’m not shutting it down because there’s really no need for that. I’m not taking a “blogging break”. I’m just not going to stress myself out about if I’ve written anything here. I have an actual job that I have to worry about and this place is supposed to be somewhere I come to write what’s going on in my head that has to get out. And sometimes, there isn’t anything.

Sometimes, my brain is absolute mush by the end of the day and all I want to do is watch Mad Men online and forget about writing.

Today, I don’t have mush brain and I kind of want to write about the Ft. Hood shootings since Tucker’s in the military and the shootings hit close to home – especially since he’s working on an Army base right now. I also realize that I haven’t posted any pictures of Cara’s rockin’ birthday party or the cake that I made that took me three fucking hours to make.

But, today, I think this is all I’m going to write.

It’s a cold, bright day. Tucker’s at Drill and my goal is to get my work done early and take the kids to the park.

I don’t do enough of that and since the kids do take up the majority of my “basket”, they need to be my number one concern.

Image|Okinawa Soba

Mirrors are scary things.

If you drank a bit too much the night before, you definitely don’t want to see the scary ass reflection that will be staring back at you the next day.

Then, there’s that whole Bloody Mary thing and do I even need to describe that game to anyone? Who didn’t play that in grade school? Well, actually, I never played it since I knew what I would find in the mirror.

You see, mirrors for me aren’t what they are for most people. Most people use mirrors to check their hair and makeup or to see if they have panty lines. For me, mirrors show me dead people who need help and once they know I’ve seen them, they won’t leave me alone.

I was around six when I first realized that I had this interesting and damn annoying “ability”.

It was late at night and I had gotten up to use the bathroom.

Instead of turning on the bathroom light like I normally did, I just trudged on toward the toilet and something must have caught my eye since I can remember turning to look into the dark mirror. My Aunt Martha was looking at me and she was all kinds of pissed.

I screeched a little girl squeal and jumped away from the mirror and that seemed to piss Aunt Martha off even more. She kept pointing at her wrist and hollering something but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. The next thing I remember is me sitting in a puddle on the bathroom floor and the sun coming in the window that lived in the shower. I guess I never made it to the toilet that night.

I found out a couple of days later that Aunt Martha – who lived a couple of states away with her four cats – had died recently. I say recently since Moe, Curly, Larry and Shemp – the cats – had done an impressive job on Aunt Martha. I guess they were hungry?

At the viewing, Aunt Martha’s daughter Cleo kept going on and on about Aunt Martha’s stupid watch and telling anyone who would listen that the cleaning lady who cleaned  Aunt Martha’s house must have taken the watch. But Aunt Martha’s watch was an old Timex and it didn’t keep good time so why the cleaning lady would want to take it I couldn’t tell you. Even six year old me knew the only person who wanted that piece of crap was Aunt Martha.

And like a proverbial ton of bricks, I remembered seeing Aunt Martha in my bathroom mirror and her pointing her wrist and how pissed she had been and I knew she had been pissed because she was missing her watch.

What the heck was I supposed to do about my dead Aunt’s piece of crap watch?

So, I forgot about the watch. I went to school. I went to my Brownies meetings. Basically, I did all of the stuff that normal little girls did.

Then one night at dinner, I drank a bit too much tea and of course needed to go to the bathroom that night.

I took precautions this time.

I snaked my arm into the bathroom and ran my hand up and down the wall until I found the light switch. I kept my eyes squeezed shut to make sure that I couldn’t see even a corner of that mirror and once I heard the reassuring pop of the switch hitting home, I did my business and went back to bed.

But wouldn’t you know it? I glanced at my bedroom mirror right before crawling back under my covers and dammit if Aunt Martha wasn’t scowling at me from that mirror.

When that happens to me now, when I have a rude spirit, I refuse to even look at them. I treat them like rude kids or rude dogs – ignore their asses until they change their crappy attitude. But back then, I was so screwed up about seeing old Aunt Martha – who I had just seen laid out in her fake gold casket two days before – in my bedroom mirror that I burst into tears and begged her to tell me what she wanted.

Aunt Martha tapped at her wrist like an impatient person who’s trying to get you to hurry up. She tapped and I cried.

Tap, tap, tap.

Then she looked at me with her jaw set and if I could have seen her feet [did she even have feet?] then she was stomping them like a two year old.

I told her that I didn’t know what she wanted from me. Why couldn’t I hear her? Was I dreaming?

Eventually, Aunt Martha must have gotten pretty tired of our game a charades since the old hag flipped me off and kind of faded.

Seriously? What kind of old dead aunt flips off their six year old niece? That’s just rude.

I pulled my comforter over my head and cried myself to sleep.

The next day my mom took me with her when she went to clear out Aunt Martha’s house. Luckily, the four cats had been evicted. Cloe was in the family way and far too delicate to deal with all of her mother’s stuff, so my mom volunteered her services – and mine.

We boxed up breakables until my fingers were black from newsprint.

We boxed up linens. We threw out about a millennium’s worth of old magazines. Playboy? Really, Aunt Martha?

We went through each bedroom and cleaned out the closets.

All in all, we had a very productive day and were proud of ourselves.

I flopped down on the threadbare, cat hair covered couch with about all the force my little six year old body could muster and jumped right back up when something sharp stuck me in the butt.

I screamed and my mom dropped one of Aunt Martha’s priced candy dishes that Mom had been putting in the last box to be taped up. Of course the candy dish shattered into about a million pieces and Mom cursed a blue streak but my butt still hurt!

I glared at the couch fully expecting to see a spider or a dagger or a knitting needle – even though Aunt Martha didn’t knit so that was a weird thought – but guess what I saw?

You got it. That stupid fake silver Timex. And the damn thing was still working – though it was about five minutes off.

That night before I went to bed, I turned off all of my lights and stood in front of my bedroom mirror.

I can remember shaking a little bit since being in front of that mirror in the dark was just about the last place in the world I wanted to be.

“Aunt Martha?” I whispered it.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t want her to show up. I’m pretty sure I was just calling her so I could think, “Well, at least I tried”. But Aunt Martha showed up. Actually, she kind of appeared…materialize? Oh whatever. There was this smoky stuff like fog and then she was staring right back at me.

Aunt Martha had her hands on her hips and she was in just about the same mood that she had been in the last time I had seen her.

She started in with her mime hollering and I was more than just a bit happy that I couldn’t hear the old bitty since her screaming tirades were legendary in my family.

How I mustered up the courage to stare her down, I just don’t know but I let her get it all out of her system. When she finally shut up her whole silent bitch fest, I dangled her Timex in front of the mirror and smiled a sly smile.

Aunt Martha lunged toward me like she was going to come through the mirror and I jumped back so fast that I dropped the Timex. I picked it back up and I’ll be damned if I hadn’t cracked the stupid glass on that stupid watch and the stupid thing was still ticking away.

Aunt Martha gave me a stern look and then cracked a smile. She gave me a thumbs up – I never realized Aunt Martha had such expressive hands – and she just faded away.

I still have that stupid watch with its stupid cracked crystal that still keeps its stupid time. But, I haven’t seen Aunt Martha in twenty years and if I have to keep this stupid watch for the rest of my life so that I never have to see that crazy cat lady in my mirror again, well, I’m alright with that.

Now, if only I could get all of these other people in my mirror would leave me alone…

Image|zinov

*Note*

This is a work of fiction. It is MY work of fiction and my concept. Please don’t steal it. Not only would it hurt my feelings but stealing makes you a bad person. And, while I don’t see dead people in mirror, I still refuse to look in mirrors when the room is dark.

I started on this book just about the second that I got it in from One2One Network but other obligations and life in general has managed to get in the way of me writing my review until now.

My opinion of it initially was probably tainted by the fact that I had just come off a marathon re-read of the Twilight Series [Don't. Judge. Me.]

But once I got into the book, I started to like it. The back story was necessary but it dragged a bit for me and when I got through that, I was good to go.

Goudge’s characters are far from perfect.

One is a junkie who got her kid taken away from her because she was too screwed up to be a mother.

One is a book store owner in a loveless relationship to a guy who is a first class jerk.

One is a former “dancer” who serves as a mother figure.

One is a famous author with a mysterious past.

One is a young guy with a love for all things sweet and for one of the other characters.

I liked that the character weren’t perfect. No one in the book was above reproach and they all act a bit irrationally at times which pretty much holds true to how people act in real life and if I’m reading general fiction, I want the characters to be real. If I want perfect characters, I’ll read nursery rhymes and “happily every after” stories.

I won’t tell you the ending because that’s never nice but toward the end, things are wrapped up rather quickly and I felt a tiny bit letdown since there were some character relationships I would have liked to see fleshed out a bit. But, all in all, this was a good read.

Was this a book that changed my life?

No.

Was this a book that I would recommend for a plane ride or a weekend read?

You bet.

Today is probably not the best time to be writing this since I’m sure that if I waited for a couple of weeks, I would have a much more positive spin.

However, Tucker chose today to scan in the pictures that I mentioned in the Porn Drawer post and since I have the images on my hard drive, I have this sick need to share them.

In my last entry, I mentioned not being able to trust my perception and these pictures are a great illustration of that warped perspective.

I’ve written many times about being fat and about how I’ve always been fat and all of that. Except, I was thin for a short time – well, thin for me.

During that time, I bought my first pair of size 12 jeans and I still thought I was fat. When I would look in the mirror, I still saw the same person even though I had shrunk from a size 16-18. My clothes told me I was smaller. Appreciating looks from Tucker and other guys told me I was smaller, but I didn’t see it.

What sucks is that I see it now.

I look back at these pictures and I can remember how I felt about myself at that time. I can remember how I saw myself and things I said about my body.

Hindsight is 20/20 though because I can NOW see what everyone else was seeing. I can see that I was damn skinny [for me] and I looked HOT. Like, smoking hot. And I’m not someone who compliments my looks. I suppose I can say that I looked hot then because that person is like a different person. In some of the pictures, that girl wasn’t married.That girl hadn’t had kids.  That girl’s biggest worry was how she was going to pay for college and how she was going to handle her boyfriend being gone to Boot Camp.

Looking at these pictures, I’m sad.

I’m NOT happy with what I look like right now but I can’t gather up the drive to change anything. All I can do right now is bitch. So, look at the hotness that was me about five years ago and cross your fingers that one day soon, I’ll find that girl again.

Girl in the Box image|lulazzo [non vede, non sente, non parla]

Pretty much the only New Year’s Resolution that I remember for this year was that I was going to use this website to better track my moods. There are a couple of problems with that.

First, I have a very, very hard time writing when I’m feeling “low”. In a way, I guess I could just go back through this site and find the five or six day periods with no new content and assume that I wasn’t feeling so chipper during that time.

The second problem is that New Year’s Resolutions are pretty much doomed to fail the second you make the resolution. Or maybe that’s just me?

I watch those drug commercials for depression meds and while I see some of me in those actors, it goes a bit deeper than that. Right now, my fingers feel like concrete blocks – they really are that heavy. My head feels that heavy too but I’m going to assume that’s just my huge brain.

The real problem with these times is that I can’t trust myself.

I don’t mean that I’m going to hurt myself or my kids or Tucker [though he deserves it sometimes. I KID!]. What I mean is that I can’t trust my perception on things. Do I feel like shit because I’m getting sick or do I feel like shit because my brain is wired wonky? Am I so damn tired because I stayed up late or is it the depression sucking my energy? When people give me odd, hateful looks, are they really even looking at me?

It’s a scary, scary thing to not be able to trust yourself because if you can trust anyone, yourself should be the first. Right?

I’m so hypersensitive to things right now and it drives me crazy. Really.

Tucker knows how down I am right now. He doesn’t give me a lot of shit because he knows that this will pass and before long, I’ll be running around with all kinds of energy and a renewed passion to write and work out and take over the world. At least he knows what’s going on. At least neither of us is in the dark.

And I really feel the need to mention my kids right now.

I’m not neglecting them. They still get their teeth brushed and they still get bathed. They still get disciplined when they deserve it. They’re still are cared for and read to and loved.

I realize how lucky I am to have such a supportive husband and I realize how lucky I am that my low points don’t get so low that I’m debilitated and that my family suffers.

But I really want a nap right now. And a steak. Anyone have a nap and a steak I can borrow?

Image|kevindooley

One of the worst feelings is that of being a prisoner in your own home.

[There was some other dribble here but it was specific to TWO nights ago when I was writing this and since I apparently suck at completing blog post right now, I deleted that other stuff and put this in instead. You're welcome.]

When you open our apartment door, you hear a “beep beep” noise because of our unactivated alarm system. The alarm system had originally been a “selling feature” of this complex but we never got it activated and the “beep beep” is a nice notification that the front door has been opened.

Every night – since we moved in – the alarm has beeped loudly at us until we hit “motion off”. It used to beep at 8pm on the dot but here recently, it’s been delaying the annoying beep until around 10pm. No big deal. Just hit the “motion off” and you’re good to go.

So, tonight, everyone was in bed. Tucker was watching some video on his laptop and I had come inside to get a drink.

I opened the door, heard the loud annoying beep that let me know it was time to hit the “motion off” button and I hit the button. And the alarm kept beeping at me. Except it didn’t stop. No matter how many times I hit “motion off” it kept up that annoying, drawn out beep.

I consider myself rather gifted with electronic devices so I hit the “system override” button and that apparently REALLY pissed the alarm off since it let lose with this noise that can only be described as jarring.

None of the subsequent buttons I pushed shut the damn thing up and by that time, Tucker was in the living room telling me not to touch anything else. Yeah. Like pushing buttons NOW was going to hurt anything.

Luckily, our apartment manager lives right across the hallway from us and as I was scooping a crying Cara out of her bed, our manager was calling the maintenance guy and getting the override keycode.

The whole ordeal took a grand total of probably five minutes but that alarm was LOUD!

I carried Cara around and she whimpered in my shoulder and Oliver slept through it all. And then, he woke up right after our manager left and the house was quiet. By the time all was said and done, we had both kids in our bed and I finally went to sleep around 2am.

Fun times.

Image|mybloodyself

Our apartment building butts up against a nature preserve.

This preserve was a major selling point for us when we looked at the apartment since Cara’s room [now Ollie's room] has a great view of the woods and it’s almost like we’re in a house instead of an apartment.

Well…if you ignore all of the noises from above us. But, if you look out Ollie’s window, it really is like you’re so close to the woods that you could touch them if you were stupid enough to lean out a second story window.

Anyway, about a week ago, I started hearing a couple of owls hooting back and forth.

For all I know, they may have been hooting since we moved into this place but since our windows have been shut and the air conditioner has been on, we just couldn’t hear them.

So last week, I opened up our bedroom windows, went to bed and snuggled under the covers and found myself strangley comforted by the hoots. I fell asleep and didn’t think much more about them.

And then it continued. Every single night.

Last night was the worst.

Owl A started up with his hooting. He hooted all by his lonesome for about five minutes – a hoot about every 30 seconds or so.

Then, Owl B started hooting. He hooted every time Owl A would shut up.

So, basically we had continuous hooting for an hour. Hoo Hoooo. Hoo Hoooo. Hoo Hoooo. You get the idea.

Tucker, who I had thought was asleep, turned over to me and through clenched teeth told me that if he “had a shotgun right now [he] would shoot their fucking heads off”.

Apparently the owls kept Tucker up too.

Image|left-hand

When you’re in young and in college, you look for all kinds of ways to make easy money with minimal effort.

My best friend knew a guy who was a manager at one of the Papa John’s places in town and she just knew that she could get BOTH of us jobs.

I needed money to pay for books and tuition and I didn’t have anything else going on so I figured, “What the hell?”.

I rocked that job. I was on the fast track to becoming a manager [in my head anyway] and I could even toss the pizza dough like you see those guys in the movies do. Yay, me!

In the month that I worked at Papa John’s, I had a damn good time.

I got to drive around town in my new car, crank up the stereo and see parts of the town I grew up in that I had never seen before.

Only once did a drug dealer [alleged] with a total sweety of a white pitbull [cliché much?] pay me for a $12 pizza with a $100 bill.

By the close of that first month, I was doing great with the tips. Big boobs and pizza delivery usually equal big tips. I’ve decided that the size of tips are directionally proportianal to cup size. I had an equation written down somewhere but I lost it. Just trust me on this.

So, anyway, I was doing a last run before the end of my shift and I cut through a parking lot to get back to the store faster.

I was turning right and I looked right, left, right and everything was clear. I executed an almost PERFECT right hand turn and then I heard a loud CRUNCH.

My mind basically shut down when I heard the CRUNCH. All I knew was that I had hit something and the first thing my addled brain did was throw my car into reverse.

And I reversed right back over a kid’s bike…the bike I had just hit. Fuck!

I pulled forward to dislodge the 10 speed from the undercarriage of my car and threw it into Park.

By the time I scrambled out of my car, I was in tears since my brain had finally caught up with my body and I had finally realized that I had just crunched a bicyle…which probably had a rider at one point.

The rider, a 14 year old boy, was on the grass and was obviously shaken but not hurt. I don’t remember much after that except for my manager asking if the bike was still outside and could they mount it on the wall.

The days passed and I basically forgot about hitting the bike. The cops had told me that the kid was in the wrong since he had been riding his bike on the sidewalk and going against traffic. I made my pizzas. I made my deliveries and carried on with life.

And then, about two weeks later, I got a phone call from my mom telling me that the postman had a letter for me that required a signature and dude wouldn’t let my mom sign for it.

I raced home and found the postman, signed for the letter and ripped it open.

It was a notice that my ass was being sued.

I was maybe 19 at that point and had no money to my name. I had a car that I was making payments on. I had student loans. Sure, I had a shit ton of books, but really? Were they going to take my books and try to sell them?

I called my step-mom, since she was co-signer on my car, and she told me that she would take care of it.

Apparently, the parents had recently been dropped from my insurance company for false claims and my step-mom thought that the parents were suing me out of revenge. I don’t remember how much they were suing me for, but it was a lot.

My step-mom talked with the parents’ lawyer and the guy actually asked my step-mom to tell her who I was working for so that he could just sue my employer. Class act, that guy.

In the end, the parents dropped the suit and I went on my merry way but I had to quit my pizza making job since my insurance didn’t cover that kinds of thing. [Who knew?!]

I’m just happy that I didn’t have to sell my books.

Image|suburbandk

“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone.“

We bought our “truck” – that’s what we call our SUV – back in 2004.

Right after we purchased the “rig”, we started filling it with our crap and one of the things that landed in the middle console was a Ziploc bag of used disposable cameras [Remember those?] and used film.

Neither Tucker or I knew what was on that film but we were pretty sure that some pictures from when Tucker was at A-school with the Navy were on at least one of the cameras and probably some pictures of the dog. We couldn’t in good conscience toss a bunch of potential pictures so in the truck they stayed.

That film has hung out in the console of the truck till today.

We went to Target to get some bread and milk and an external hard drive for my laptop since I’m sending it off to Dell tomorrow to get worked on and Tucker took it upon himself to bring the baggie into Target. To give you an idea of how old this stuff is, the baggie is [well...was since it's now in a Target dumpster] a pale yellow color and not totally transparent any longer. Heat does crazy things to plastic.

When all of the little paper film envelopes were filled out, we had a grand total of seven rolls of film to be developed.

Think back to your college days for a second.

Did you ever take pictures of yourself that maybe weren’t so flattering? Maybe a shot or two of you in the bathroom mirror in a horrible party shirt or maybe of you at the bar when you had one drink over when you should have stopped?

Yeah. Me either.

So, tonight, Tucker and I were talking about what might be on that film. He only remembers taking one of those rolls of film so that means that SIX of them belong to me. And, since I have the memory of a retarded goldfish, and I can’t remember taking ANY of those rolls of film, we’re left having NO clue as to what’s on them.

For all I know, there could be boob pictures on that film – not necessarily my boobs since I had a roommate for about a month who liked her boobs just a bit more than she should have.

This also means that some unsuspecting Target film person is going to have the fun, fun time of developing all of those rolls of film and they are going to know what the film contains before we will.

Needless to say, I’m NOT going to Target tomorrow to pick up those pictures. I’m doing the yellow noble thing of staying home with the kids while I send Tucker to pick up the incriminating awesome pictures.

Several years ago, before I met Tucker, I had a friend who worked at Walmart and she just happened to work in the film developing part. She used to come to school [high school] with tales of the store’s “porn” drawer. Apparently, the technicians were supposed to confiscate any nude pictures and destroy them. BUT, instead of destroying the pictures, the “associates” would confiscate the risqué stuff and put it in a box in one of the bottom drawers at her work.

Every so often, they would pull the pictures out of the box and take a look. There were times when we would be at lunch and she would giggle under her breath and when we would ask why she was laughing to herself like a crazy person, she would tell us that the person who had just walked by had several pictures in the porn drawer.

I wonder if this Target has a porn drawer?

I wonder if any of the pictures on these rolls of film would deserve to be filed in that drawer?

And then, to counter all of this anxiety over a proverbial Target porn drawer, I’m a little bit excited to see what’s on these rolls after having lived so long in our truck.

These pictures are almost like a time capsule back to before Tucker and I got married. Back to when I lived in an apartment in the ghetto that rented for $375/month with all utilities included. Back before kids, back about twenty pounds.

However, the film manager lady pretty much assured us that heat is a very, very bad thing for film and this film lived in a vehicle that lived in the Florida heat for four years. The chances of any pictures turning out is down there close to Kanye West turning into a nice guy.

The suspense is killing me but I figure if we’ve waited this long, we can wait another ten hours.

Image|sparkieblues

Twilight Zone Quote|Wikipedia