- Mood:
curious
The other day the neighbor kids appeared in our backyard and started playing on the boo's old swingset. My husband was washing the dishes and all of a sudden he goes out through the back door and starts talking to someone--he was politely telling the neighbor kids that next time they needed to ask first and that they couldn't play on the swingset because it was old and might not be very safe (I noticed he didn't tell them that there is a wasp nest under the slide). He came back in the house and I said, "I'm really a lucky woman." He asked me why and I told him that if it weren't for him I"d probably have grown into the scary, mean old woman in the neighborhood with a nine-foot stockade fence around her yard who the kids in the neighborhood would think was a witch. He just shook his head--I don't think he really believes me when I tell him how antisocial I really am--and then went back outside to tell the kids again not to play in the yard, since in that short time they had come back again. I noticed he was just as polite the second time. I hope the boo grows up to be like his daddy.
It's my 10-year wedding anniversary in a couple of months and the boo has been advising his daddy that he had better start planning something now. This with actually very little secret prompting from me. Because planning is not my husband's specialty most of the time, I was shocked and amazed when he said to me, "I was thinking we could go somewhere/try something neither of us has ever tried before for our anniversary--we could go to a casino/resort. I've never been to a casino and I didn't think you had either. Don't you think that would be cool to try something new together?" A couple of minutes later the boo came in and asked me why I was just sitting there with my mouth hanging open. I told him no matter how well you think you know someone, they can sometimes very pleasantly surprise you.
- Mood:
happy
HairNation hasn't lost its luster for me, either, although I thought it would. After all, how many times can you listen to "Too Young to Fall in Love" by Motley Crue until it ceases to be fun(ny) that you can remember all the words and that you can test the limits of your stereo volume? But the station tends to randomly feature phenomenal songs/bands that I haven't heard for twenty years (three Queensryche songs in one day; a Fates Warning song or two every week, some Dream Theater) just often enough that I can hang in there through the way-too-many LA Guns songs. Visitors to my car think it's amusing that NPR and HairNation are next to each other on my pre-set stations but that's really because when the news gets too depressing, which is nearly always is now, I flip to satellite radio and get down with the Cult. And Winger. Definitely Winger...no matter what Beavis and Butt-Head think.
Incidentally, E Street radio--Bruce Springsteen, 24-7, got tiring after a week. Still on my presets, though. Never did catch "Thunder Road."
- Mood:
grateful
Never mind that the boo would have to change schools, his daddy would absolutely flip about having a 40-minute drive to work, and that the house is in the middle of nowhere and about 20 minutes away from everything except fields and trees. It's still my dream house.
- Mood:
jealous
Any recommendations? The front porch is in shade most of the time even though it faces south but I want to put some pots on the steps too. I know nothing about plants/container gardens/etc. but I'd like to try veggies and other flowering/nonflowering plants both.
- Mood: pensive
The boo has a new nickname. There are moths in my closet--I'm too completely terrified at the moment to worry about how they got there and/or getting rid of them permanently; moths have been my worst phobia for YEARS--but the boo is taking great pride in killing the ones that fly out every night (as I huddle in a trembling heap under a blanket until he gets all of them). The boo's daddy is on furlough next week and I think I'll be adding "scrub the entire closet" to his to-do list.
In other news, my husband is convinced he's going to get pink-slipped soon (he defines 'soon' as any-minute-now) as his machine shop does some downsizing; the parent meeting to which I was invited to 'present' at the boo's school went very well and no one that I feared showed up; I got the Matrix back and it has a shiny new paint job and two new doors; winter seems to be almost over (I hope); the boo lost ten pounds using the Gazelle for a half hour after school every day for a month; we're on litter number twelve for the next-door neighbor's stray cats and the newest litter has taken up residence under our back porch so every time we go in or out the back door we can hear little "mew"s, which even I admit is cute.
Funny story--although I think maybe ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
meglett will be the only one who really gets it. Thursday I took a group of kids on a field trip to see the new art exhibit in our town and to a chamber music concert by members of our town's symphony orchestra. I was all excited because the art museum is where I did my student teaching, so it's always neat for me to go there; and because the concert was just the string section and some of the pieces had harp solos, and since I continue to make small donations to a savings account specifically to buy a harp and start playing again, it's always exciting to watch someone else play the harp too. Not to mention I was a tiny bit excited to see if the cellist I used to have a crush on in high school when we used to go to symphony concerts all the time was still in the orchestra and to see what he looked like now. Big mistake. Still nice facial features, very tall and thin...but completely gray hair and a Bozo the Clown haircut. Ok, maybe not as long...but you get the picture. 
Still, the music was splendid and the harpist did not disappoint. I just felt very...old.
- Mood:
mellow
Last week, the rental car (another minivan, sigh) I was driving (as I wait until St. Patrick's Day for my recently-dented, only-had-it-for-two-months Matrix (generation 2), to be fixed) stopped working--I got in it in the morning to go to work and the headlights, wipers, heat, radio, turn signals, etc. wouldn't work. The hazard lights did, so I drove up I-77 in pouring rain in the slow lane with the hazards on and drove it straight to the Progressive Insurance 'concierge center' (I must say, they are quite nice) in Akron where they swapped me out and gave me a new rental car. This time it's not a minivan.
Night before last, my mom was out shopping and someone dented her fender as her car was parked at the mall and didn't leave her a note or anything. Hers is a Matrix (generation 2 for her as well) too.
Today, the boo was walking home from school and there was a three-car accident (on our not-really-all-that-busy road!) about twenty feet away from where he was walking--he called me all shaken up because he saw it happen. He was so close to it that a piece of debris hit him in the leg. He called 911 and was pretty freaked out (some driver wasn't watching and rear-ended the car in front, then that car rear-ended the next car, etc.) because he stuck around long enough to see one of the drivers carted off in an ambulence.
- Mood:
gloomy
- Mood:
pissed off
So here's before:
And here's after, about two hours later:
Isn't he cute?
- Mood: amused
Thankfully, there is an airbag and it worked. Left one hell of a bruise the entire length of my torso, though. I'm told it's going to hurt a lot more tomorrow than it does now. Not lookinig forward to that.
As they swept pieces of my car out of the middle of the intersection, my husband drove up; the president of his company had driven by on his way to my husband's workplace and called him and told him "your wife's just been in a car accident up the street from the shop." My husband thought it was a joke until he saw me freezing beside the crumpled mess of my darling blue Matrix.
*sigh*
At least I get a day off work. And maybe a new car. And a longer series of car payments.
- Mood:
crushed
This weekend we (read: the boo) put up the Christmas tree. We have a fake tree, our third, and as the boo was putting it up the stupid plastic things they call a "tree stand" broke. The tree fell over. The boo got mad. After considering various options including a pot full of gravel (no guarantee it would stand up), a real-tree tree stand (not sure it would anchor into the plastic pole on the fake tree), and a new tree (not my choice since then the old tree would go into a landfill), the boo and I got in the car and went to Big Lots and bought another tree (because I wasn't quite up to going anywhere near the mall with the boo, who at the slightest provocation will rattle off his Christmas list in detail). We got the new tree home and my husband says, "you two are nuts; the tree's not broken"...but when I looked at it, it was listing slightly to one side. But being the docile and compliant wife that I am, (*grin*) I didn't argue. Fifteen minutes later, my darling husband was vacuuming and bumped the tree. The tree fell over. My husband got mad. The boo and I, not prone to telling people "I told you so," said, "We knew the tree was broken!" So the boo and his daddy took off all the decorations, took down the officially-broken tree, put up the new tree, and put the decorations back on. Sunday the boo goes over to his friend's house, where they have a fake tree...in a real-tree tree stand. The boo and his daddy consider the various costs of tree stands, fake trees, etc. I admit that the new fake tree does look rather like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. The jury's still out...perhaps this Christmas will go down in family history as the Christmas we put up the tree three times.
- Mood: cheerful
The ER must not have really believed him either in spite of the x-ray, or else they're just mean, because they didn't give him anything special for the pain. We've been dosing him with not-children's Tylenol and Advil (the boo is officially as tall as me and only 40 lbs lighter than his daddy according to the ER, so we've graduated to real pills and not the cherry flavored liquid stuff) but he says it's not helping. So right now the boo is watching old Mr. Bean episodes and giggling his head off as I try to keep his mind off of the pain in his toe. I love listening to the boo giggle...but I'm trying really hard not to think about his toe. We don't go see the bone doctor (same one as in May) until Wednesday.
- Mood:
stressed - Music:Mr. Bean theme music
The university which owns such a majority of my current, seemingly never-ending, teaching license renewal credit hours as to make it impossible to transfer to anywhere else to finish said license, has implemented, beginning on the first of next month, a 2.9% charge for the privilege of using my debit card to pay my exorbitant tuition. That's $70 for what my spring semester hours cost (do the math and you see why I use the word 'exorbitant"). Greedy bloodsucking bastards.
And to make me feel even more bitter, I'm still waiting--after 36 credit hours (yes, that's right, and nine more to go)--to actually learn something that is even remotely relevant to the job for which I am supposed to be training. Welcome to why public education is a flawed system.
Did I mention the 'greedy, bloodsucking bastards' already?
- Mood: aggravated
- Music:murder by numbers--the police
- Mood:
enthralled
You are all probably aware of my ongoing battle with my weird next-door neighbor about the twenty-at-last-count-but-there-have-been-k
But this isn't about him.
This is about the new neighbors who just moved in to the house that for the past few years has been unoccupied. This is about their two completely wild and scary pug dogs. And their lack of leashes. Or responsible owners. The day after the new neighbors moved in (insert comment here about how my husband was still recovering from his high blood pressure resulting from when they parked a pickup truck in order to unload furniture in the yard...on our yard), I was walking up the sidewalk from my garage to my house when all of a sudden I was surrounded by some rather excited, barking, circling dogs that I had never seen before, who tore out of the neighbor's yard and straight for me. They obviously thought that I was a burglar trying to get into my--I mean their--house, because they seriously would not let me move an inch toward the house (insert comment here about how I found out later that the cat neighbor was watching the whole thing from his porch while he fed the cats), and I didn't budge for fear they would bite me (or I would drop the 323097643324 things I was trying to carry in the house). I was out there for ten minutes. No joke. Call me a chicken. Finally the dogs ran away, but at no time did the neighbors come and get their dogs, in spite of the fact that their back door was open (it was closed when I looked out the window as soon as I got in the house).
A couple of days after that, I got home from work and opened the new people door we put on the garage so the cats couldn't get in and poop (they found a loose board on the side of the garage instead) to find my backyard full of three people and two dogs--the same dogs who had caught me and the people who are obviously my neighbors but whom I had not met yet. They were chasing the dogs--who were in the cat man's yard by this time--and I politely asked them to keep their dogs in their own yard. As if.
So...this morning the boo opened the front door to walk to the bus stop and the two dogs came racing up the front stairs of our porch and he said they tried to bite his feet. He said the neighbor came out and said, "they won't bite you," but that the dogs were scaring him, and he said they actually bit his shoes.
My husband says I can't do anything until someone actually gets bit, and then I can call the dog warden. I'd rather not wait until someone's bleeding. He also told me not to start trouble...and I don't want to start trouble, but...
...for the first time I really don't like living in the city. Seriously; the cats were just a nuisance. Now I have noisy neighbors (they are that too) who don't care about controlling their dogs.
*sigh*
On a completely unrelated note, we had a very, very, weird eating-out experience a couple of weekends ago. This one doesn't fall under the weird-waiter category, like most of our other weird eating-out experiences. This one was creepy weird. We went out with the boo and his friend to this Mexican food restaurant that's been in a neighboring town for about three million years. I think it's an interesting place to go because it's decorated all weird--the outside walls are pink, there's a giant wooden chair (the seat is as high as my head) in the lobby, there's a little gift shop, eclectic stuff all over the walls, etc. And the meals are served on metal plates which I think is cool. All the same the place is kind of creepy and I've never been able to put my finger on just why, but I've felt it. My husband, of course, thinks I'm nuts. So we go to this restaurant with the boo and his friend and as soon as we walk in the door the boo gets all weird and I can tell he's going to cry. Keep in mind this is the same kid who is always coming his hair and other I-am-very-conscious-of-my-social-appeara
So now that you're all convinced that I am a nutso animal-hater...
- Mood: bitchy
To celebrate, here's what happened to me today:
1. Went to pick up the boo from 'lego team' practice. Since someone with whom I went to high school has a step-child in the same school, I steeled myself to potentially see someone I didn't really want to see. Mostly I don't ever want to see anyone; last week the boo's friend's mom and I were at Mc Donald's at 10:30 at night where we had gone to escape both of our families (the boo was over at their house and I'd gone over to pick him up) and I saw one of my former students. He was a really neat kid and ordinarily I would have loved to talk to him but not at 10:30 at night when I was lookin' like I was ready for bed (since I thought the only place I'd be going was to pick up the boo). So anyhow I go to pick up the boo at school. As another aside, I had a slushy in the car for him from the NEW SONIC up in P**tage County!! WOOHOO!! Back to picking up the boo from school. I'm standing there in the lobby waiting and this red-headed woman about my age comes up to me and calls me by my maiden name and then tells me her name: she's this girl who I thought was my friend but who read my diary in 5th grade and then went to church and told everyone what was in it and they all made fun of me. Lovely memory to dredge up. Really I could have gone through the rest of my life never having seen her again since 5th grade and been perfectly happy. Why she even came up to me and introduced herself I will never know but luckily I was so stunned that I didn't have a chance to claw her eyes out. I told the boo I'm never picking him up from school again.
2. Did I mention THE NEW SONIC already? Three words: blue coconut slushy.
3. Sometime during the day today my brother-in-law came over and put the lock on our new garage door. No more cat poo! The boo says they're now just pooing under the front porch. *sigh*
4. The boo's daddy went to the doctor's after work and his blood pressure and cholesterol are great. I didn't think it was worth mentioning that the only way I would consider them truly great was if they were at the levels they are now without the blood pressure and cholesterol medicine. I said happy and encouraging things instead.
5. I bribed the boo on the way home to get a haircut--I swear Children's Services is going to come and take him away for neglect 'cause his hair looks like no one takes care of him. He's trying to grow it long (I don't have a problem with that part, just the 'growing-out' part where it looks like no one's taking care of him). On the way back from the haircut (I won--he got about 1/48th of an inch cut off but now he doesn't look so...unkempt) the boo's cell phone rings....and it's a girl.
Time goes so fast.
First the boo said I wasn't allowed to tell anyone (he also said that no, he didn't really want/it really wasn't necessary to have the "sex" talk right now and that it was awkward enough talking to a girl on the phone when he was in the car with me (like that was my fault?!)) but then he changed his mind and told me I could tell whoever I want...so I am! Hello, world!
- Mood: cynical
- Music:kiss--love gun
- Mood:awful
I know this person--she helped me with the plays at this district when I taught there--and I am almost completely surprised. Definitely saddened.
Ex-Fairl**s teacher admits sex with teen
In the interest of full disclosure I must admit here that there was only one student who I would have ever considered, well, attractive, and that was when I was only a couple of years older than he was (he was a senior), one of my first few years of teaching. And even then I really didn't consider it very seriously.
Our city started curbside recycling pickup this week. The postcard notice which told us they were starting it came a month ago, so I, ever the observant person, started collecting stuff in our bright blue plastic bin the day the notice came. A couple weeks later I actually read the whole postcard and realized we were going to accumulate a heck of a lot of stuff in a month. It's been driving my husband crazy ever since...so there was much rejoicing on Monday when it was trash pick-up day and the recycling and the regular trash could go out to the curb (this is one week after my husband called me at work to tell me someone had stolen our trash cans, which were as old as our tenure in this house. "You know you live in the ghetto when...").
As I pulled up to our garage this afternoon, home from work, I noticed the recycling still sitting next to the garage where I proudly hauled it bright and early Monday morning. My calls to the city sanitation department have gone unreturned. I am, however, thinking of just sticking it all in my car and taking it to one of the county recycling center. I'm worried someone's going to steal my pretty blue recycling bin too. Still, that wouldn't help me figure out if they just skipped us by accident or if they just collect the recycling on a different day. *sigh* I continue to faithfully deposit all paper, cans, plastic bottles, etc. in my brown paper grocery bag in the corner of the kitchen until I can bring in my pretty blue container. Not so sure about my other household members, though.
Work: it becomes clearer every day why I spent as much time as possible in my districts last year. Was in the office today and had to listen to double-entendres between the youngest member of our team (engaged) and the new guy (married) all day. Really just wanted to crawl under my desk and give up on the world.
- Mood:
indescribable
It's because I keep driving past/behind/in front of someone I once knew while I am innocently driving to work/home/various school districts that I wake most mornings with an ache in my jaw from clenching/grinding my teeth in my sleep. Either that or the clenching of teeth is because I just don't ever get any time to myself, or because it's only the third day of work since summer break and I'm already stressed, or it's because I'm worried about my husband's continued absence from work because of his shoulder. Or all of the above. What's certain is that one of these times when I'm just drivin' along, mindin' my own business, and all of a sudden I'm in front of/behind/passing a little dark red neon I'm going to end up either hitting a tree or hitting, well, it. Hitting it is becoming increasingly more tempting. Today I was on the way home and I passed it about two minutes after I left the office, just as I was starting through a traffic light, but not quick enough to prevent my neck from swiveling and taking a good, long, hungry look. Damn it. Why should I even notice?
Damn, damn, damn.
So it's the third day of work (deliberate subject change) and I have spent two of the three days training the only person who actually applied for the other job they finally created (it's ok to give me five districts, apparently, but once we got up to seven who needed gifted coordinator services they decided to hire an additional person). This person is not certified for the job, knows nothing about gifted, and so of course who gets to train them? At least they're taking the two districts to which I would rather not return.
I know, I know, what ever happened to staying positive? How's this: took a day off yesterday and spent all day in the little historic village south of here watercolor painting outside in the sun (ok, technically under a tree in the shade; I'm not crazy). First painting in fifteen years. That can't be a bad thing and the final product (ok, semi-final; it started to rain and we had to go home) wasn't as atrocious as I feared it may be. The boo was impressed, but he's a kid. His daddy didn't even notice.
- Mood: bitchy
As if the boo breaking his arm back at the end of May wasn't bad enough, a couple weeks ago at work the boo's daddy had a 400-lb. air compressor fall on him. Luckily--and no thanks to the shoddy safety precautions taken by his workplace that enabled the accident to happen in the first place--he was only bruised on the outside and muscle-pulled on the inside, but he's been off work ever since waiting for his muscles to heal so he can go back to being functionally right-handed again.
In line with our recent injuries-complicated-by-other-medical-is
But I am thankful to report that all are healing well, the blood pressure's going down, albeit slowly, and I haven't cheated too badly on Weight Watcher's since starting July 3 (5.8 lbs so far, not counting this week). I figure someone's got to get in good enough health to see the boo graduate from high school.
- Mood: gloomy
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