What a week!

Aaggh! It's been one of those weeks!! The heat has been unbearable and life has been hectic. Looking at it now, as I blog it, it's almost humorous......that's what I love about the bloggy life...... it can make me see the humor. Here's the rundown of my week:

Sunday: 12-hour shift at girls transitional home filled with horomone raging, angst ridden, teenagers......

Monday: Uneventful......worked on the paper.

Tuesday: Agree to watch my friends child, whom I used to nanny for, while she bartended here. Original plan is for child to spend night, child freaks out, friend decides to pick her up - after work at 2am. Since original sleep-over is clearly not going to work, my kid decides that she wants to have a different friend spend the night. Fine. Three girls play nice, eat lots of Freeze Pops and I work on the paper until wee hours of the a.m........first friend finally gets picked up, while second friend and the kid giggle hysterically about farting......we all go to bed.......second friend freaks out at 3am about missing her mom, who lives right down the street. Get second friend to calm down and am again dozing off and dog freaks out on kid at 3:30......kid is crying, dog is cowering, and I'm up until 4am......

Wednesday: Stay in bed until 9.....I thought I deserved it. Am covering my other friends daycare because she has a wake to go to....have to be there at noon......5pm, get home, get crisis related phone call from daycare parent, try to find friend at wake where, obviously, all cell phones are turned off. Know that I must work on getting paper ready to go, but do not have an ounce of energy in me as I have spent the last 5 hours entertaining 8 screaming children in 90 degree heat......I try to drift off in bed, knowing I have to be back at daycare at 7am......can't sleep......sweating like a whore in church because it's at least 105 degrees in our hobbit house ..........snoring mate in my left ear, a snoring kid on the floor to my right and a dog licking her ass under the bed. Awesome.

Today: Wake up at 6:45......did not hear alarm over 3 buzzing fans......swear......a lot.......drag kid off of floor.....throw in car......get dressed without taking shower because I have no time......feel slightly bad for children I will be with today because I am still sweating from yesterday.......walk outside and realize it is going to be 90 degrees again today.....feel even worse for kids. Daycare morning goes smoothly.....nap time comes......very bad, non-napping kids.....tell noisy children they will loose afternoon outside time......4-year-old calls me a "prick".......hmm.......know that if he were my own, I would soap his mouth.....know that he is not my own so I cannot......wish for a tiny millisecond that he was.....then realize that truly would constitute Hell......know that several of the kids' parents are attending same funeral and reception as my friend......know that they are now drinking at Bruno's.......know that this means they will not be by to pick up their children until exactly 5.....quietly swear at parents, then feel bad because they are mourning and deserve to be drinking at Bruno's.....get home, exhausted, wanting only a shower....... publisher of paper calls to tell me it is still not right......need to get graphic designer - who lives in Serbia - on-line to fix mistakes......know that it is too hot in house to cook and I must figure something out for dinner.....future mate, who is sitting in his nice cool basement "man room" while the rest of us sweat to death, yells up to ask what is for dinner, and I bite my tongue so as not to say "I don't know, what the fuck are you cooking?" Know that would be a bad idea....... instead, decide to question him over the open bag of pretzels that are sitting in the basement by asking "How long have these been open and sitting down here?" Argument ensues......words exchanged, mate actually sticks his tongue out at me like we are in 3rd grade and I slam the door to his "man room." Take shower, call my dad and complain.....about everything.......get on-line, to blog and fix the paper......kid opens door to refrigerator and I realize that, in the midst of everything else, something has died in there and no one has cleaned it out......lucky me.....mate storms to bed......clearly we're still fighting.....i now realize it is 10 and I have to be back at the daycare tomorrow........silently acknowledge that I may not make it........

My so-called life

Like Meg, I've been quiet over here lately. Not because I don't want to talk, but because I just don't have much to say. After a nutty week getting the paper done, I have much to do for other clients.....not to mention that I had a serious case of 'writer's block' for one client, which is never good. Then, I come downstairs the other morning and find this on the counter; do you think my mate is trying to tell me something?

Spreading the bloggy love

For a long time, I have loved to read this blog. I can relate to Melissa's feelings of living in Michigan and viewing it as a total shit hole. Let's face it, I hate it there too as noted here and here. And although I have never lived in Detroit, I did spend many a time there during my college years. My swaying feelings of sympathy and irritation at her constant complaints of their house NOT selling are directly related to when I write the check for my mortgage and when I see my property tax bill. Yes, we live in beautiful, coastal Maine. Yes, our schools are great. Yes, believe it or not my square footage is smaller than yours and my property taxes are probably 4 times what you're paying. I have Jehovah's Witnesses coming to my door with their cute, innocent little children, on a regular basis....sorry, I digress. Can you tell I wrote a big check recently? Anyway, I was more on the irritated side of the scale today until she directed me to this blog and I read this post. I heart Melissa.

Absent

Well, I've been absent this week; noticeably? Not sure about that. Life has been hectic and although my dear mate thinks 'freelancing' equates to 'doing nothing but sitting home and watching Oprah all day,' my past week has proved quite the opposite. The tricky part about freelancing, at least for me, is balancing all the different projects you have contracted out while deciding if you have enough time to take on 'just one more.' Bite off more than you can chew in the first few months and you're sunk. Anyway, as one of my favorite new friends recently said "I'd rather work 16 hours a day for me than 8 for someone else." Most of my last week has been spent working on his newspaper. So, that's that. Nothing else is really going on.....the kid is out of school and also not understanding what 'work from home' means as she is constantly looking for me to entertain her. What ever happened to curling up in a lawn chair with a good book for hours on end? I think there may be some summer camp in her future.

Is this a joke?

Click here & then hit 'show dates' in the upper right hand corner; tell me the first listing you see......

and then explain to me exactly how that works.

Shat everywhere

My seemingly freelance life has been a bit crazy lately......the deadline for the paper is looming near and I find myself writing about things I have absolutely zero experience with....for example a Winnebago Rally (yes, those who love their RV do get to have a great big party - it's called a Grand National Rally) and Tractor Rides (again, the lovers of their John Deer unite!). So, with the kid officially out of school for 1.5 days, I decided that yesterday, I would lend a helping hand to one of my good friends, and run her daycare while she attended a soccer tournament in VT that her son is playing in. It seemed like a good idea at the time; my kid would have other kids to keep her occupied all day, and in turn, bother me to buy her ice cream from the Good Humor truck, much less. Mind you, I am ultra-sensitive to her current situation because she is much like me in the sense that she commits herself to a million things before she adds up the hours and compares those to what are actually in a day. She doesn't really start to back off until she has become a screeching neurotic sociopath and her husband and family have moved in to a hotel.

So yesterday, I was in charge of 7 screaming children, plus my own and my friends' daughter - no biggie. I'd dealt with more than that in one shot before, so I was fine. However, I did not plan on one of them having a mild intestinal issue and another having a full fledged belly bug. It started in the morning when the first one, who is still in diapers, started prancing around the room, giggling while he blew out the room. When I went to change his pants, he had shat - all the way up his back and down his legs. What he really needed was a bath, but I couldn't leave the other kids' alone, so I had to make due with half a bag of wipes and a fresh change of attire. Then, after nap, his sister woke up and immediately threw up, all over the carpet in the daycare room. Again, I've dealt with 2nd time around soup, so I cleaned up, ushered her inside and called her parents. Right before they got there though, she ran in to the bathroom and vomited again, this time, so forcefully that......yep, you guessed it, she shat. Good Lord.

Now I don't blog this to make light of these poor, little, flu-ridden children. I love them dearly and have known them and their parents for nearly 7 years. I blog it because of my outrage surrounding this: When her parents got there, I had her stripped and was changing her.....and do you know what her father said to me? "Does she even have a fever?" I looked at him with a regurgitated chicken sandwich on my shoe, a pair of shit-streaked princess underwear in my hands and his snivelling pre-schooler sobbing in to my shoulder and said "Does it really fucking matter?"

See, I can tell all of you, because you don't know them and they don't know this blog, so it's a win-win. I can now "put it on a balloon and let it go" like my dear friend, who owns the daycare, says so well.

Happy Weekend!!

Why buy white?

As I'm doing laundry today, I find myself questioning, "why buy anything white?" At almost 30, I am seemingly unable to keep even the cutest of cute white things clean. I recently purchased a cute little white sweatshirt from AE.....nice and thin and breezy for the summer season.....upon popping it in the wash today, I see that I have managed to get the smallest little orange spot on it - it almost looks like a spaghetti sauce stain that's been washed and rewashed repeatedly. But I haven't eaten any spaghetti since I bought the damn thing and since I have no idea what it is, I have no idea how to treat it. So, I hosed it down with Spray N Wash and said a few Hail Mary's before I threw it in the washer. This morning, I dumped coffee all down a white tshirt......the Hail Mary's were to make up for all the other words I used when that happened.

Even with the kids wardrobe, I'm dumb. I see these cute little white tops and buy them for her. But why? If you haven't gotten it yet, she is just like me in mind, body and soul. The kid can't stay clean to save her life. You may wonder why I don't just buy bleach, use it, love it. I used to do that, but I gave that up right around the same time Dan moved in; with a landscaper in the house, bleach is really just pointless. By the time there is enough worthwhile whites to bleach in a load of laundry, it's been 6 weeks already and I've forgotten that I own what's sitting in the "desperately seeking bleach" pile.

But I love to wear white!! I goes with almost everything!! What's a girl to do?

I'm headed for a nervous breakdown

in 5.....4......3......2......1......poof! My head just exploded.

You know, it's not bad enough that there are only 2 1/2 days of school left - 2 1/2 days of blissfully peaceful, uninterrupted work time.....it also has to be 2 1/2 days of Hell on Brookview Terrace. I used to wonder why teachers got the summers off, after all, the rest of us work 52 weeks a year. But then, I met my daughter, and I now know why they get this time off. Because if they didn't, there would likely be no teachers left because they would all be in jail for malicious criminal deeds against children such as mine.

The homework request was simple enough: finish reading Helen Keller. End. Dot. Period. So, I sent the kid to her room to do said reading assignment and told her I would be quizzing her at the end, so don't cheat. 40 minutes later she comes down to let me know that, indeed, she is finished with the 6 chapters she was assigned. I quiz her, she fails. I send her back up and tell her to re-read it. 20 minutes later, she comes back to say she's done. I quiz her, and surprise, surprise, she fails again. Why do I do such things you ask? Because I like to make my own life miserable.

After much eye rolling and huffing, she tells me that they actually read the whole book at school and she was upstairs reading a different book - bullshit. I called her on that one, knowing full well that if they had read the whole thing, she would have used that as a reason to not do her reading tonite. So, try again kid. This time, she just starts crying. How do they do that. It just starts.....it's like they crinkle up their little faces, sniffle a bit, and then the tears just naturally come. Are we all born like this? And at what point do we lose the ability to cry on demand? Someone needs to figure that secret out and bottle it - it's worth millions!! Anyway, I finally told her that tomorrow, I will take her to school and she will need to tell her teacher that she lied about doing her homework.....that really got her going. So loud did she scream that I honestly thought the neighbors would call the cops and file a noise complaint. Then she asks in her screechy pre-tween voice "Why can't you ever just let it go? I am going to get held back in the 2nd grade and it's going to be all your fault!" I actually laughed out loud at that, really, really loud. My fault you say? And how can that be? Let me count thy ways:

1. I can never let anything go.
2. I always quiz her.
3. I'm really, really mean.
4. I always have to tell on her to the teacher.

Does anyone known of a postage paid return program for children? I think I might need one of those envelopes.......

Busy, busy weekend

Agh! I'm so glad that the weekend is over. This was the weekend of the kid's sleepover at the hotel, which turned in to "just a sleepover with one friend on the condition that we have a big BBQ with all my friends in a few weeks that should include a slip-n-slide and lots of water balloons, please and thank you very much." So, I thought I was in the clear....silly me. After 8 hours of digging out flower beds and re-planting all kinds of shit in the yard - which was clearly neglected by the previous owners of this abode - I went to pick up the kid's one true BFF. Syd chose to see the latest Pirates of the Carribean, which wasn't that great, and her friend, bored to tears, fell asleep on my arm.....for the last two hours of the movie. Needless to say, driving a manual transmission home with a prickly arm at 11 o'clock at night, was challenging. Then it was fighting over the sleeping situation when we got home, until I lost my shit and went all 'mommy dearest' on both of them. This morning, it was a fight over where to go for breakfast. BFF wanted to go to the breakfast buffet at the Marriot.....what?!? And the kid chose a local greasy spoon, which we go to all the time. My budget was the tie-breaker and we headed for the greasy spoon. Then today was more yard work with a little bit of actual writing work thrown in, just for good measure. The series finale of The Sopranos will cap off the nite and then it's back to the regular grind tomorrow.

How was your weekend?

This is what I'm dealing with here

Apparently, June 22nd marks National Bring Your Pet to Work Day.......I'm wondering if this qualifies me?? In all seriousness, truly, this is what every day brings for me. The cat perches herself right in the middle of my computer, as if she doesn't get enough attention. And try as I might to move her, she just repositions herself the minute I stop petting her. The dog, whom I didn't get a picture of, sits impatiently next to me, nudging me with her nose until I take one hand off the cat and give her some love too. If the cat repositions to my lap, the dog nudges the cat in the ass to push her off; it's like working alongside two small children. Having a pet in the workplace has statistically shown increased productivity in the little worker-bees; I however must disagree. If your animals are as needy as mine, you're not getting squat done.

As an aside, please, no comments about the insanely messy state of my desk. It needs to be cleaned - desperately. In fact, yesterday, I convinced myself that if I just took the whole day to rearrange it and sort thru files, I would be brilliantly inspired and creative again. In actuality, I was looking for a way to procrastinate on what really needed to be done - go figure. So I'm off, to do what needs to be done - wish me luck!

Saving the World

I do what I can when it comes to saving the world. However, I don't do nearly as much as some others. One small and simple step I took was to subscribe to this daily tip email newsletter at ideal bite which has been fantastic because every single day, I get these great little tips in my inbox. And they're useful and easy, which is a nice bonus. A few weeks ago, it was simple ways to reduce your carbon footprint, which by the way, even though I do most of our dishes by hand and turn off lights when not in use, etc, etc, I was amazed at how much energy we were still wasting; I tried their tip about plugging everything into a power strip and then shutting off the entire strip when you leave the room.....cut my energy bill folks!! Today though was an exceptionally exciting newsletter, and I'm sure some of you will agree; it was all about online swaps. I know for a fact that many of you are swappy little fiends, just like me, so here are the places ideal bite recommends - have fun!!

bookcrossing: leave your used books in designated public places and register said book on their website - they will send out an email alert for others to go find it. If you don't want to register it, just start leaving your used books in public places for other to find anyway.

freecycle: want it? look for it. don't want it? post it for someone else to take off your hands. there are lots of local members in lots of different towns, so check out this site, click on 'groups in your local area' and join a few to find new treasures for no monies!!!

swapagift: ever get gift cards you will never use? post them here and get some cash.

lendlist: this is a great place if you need to borrow something, or you have something you don't mind lending.

zunafish: cd's, books, dvd's and video games for $1/trade? count me in!

Your next stop, ideal bite - sign up for their newsletter.....I pinkie-promise you won't be disappointed!!!

Stupid Song Lyrics

I'm not sure how many of you out there listen to what is playing on the Top 40 stations right now, but as we made a 16 hour drive yesterday to get home, we listened to a lot of XM, primarily because you couldn't get any other stations to come in. So, between CNN Newsroom and Disney Radio, the kid and I flipped thru some other stations and I really listened to what some of these lyrics are. Some fine examples of what is popular right now.

Mims with "I'm hot coz I'm fly, you ain't coz you not.....this is why, this is why, this is why I'm hot." and the ever popular Fergi with ".....up in the gym just workin' on my fitness......" I mean, if you really think about this, you can actually just throw these in to every day life.

"Hey honey, where ya been?"
"Oh, up in the gym just workin' on my fitness."

How does this music sell? And what's worse is that the 8-year-old kid knows ALL the lyrics. And LIKES them!!! For a child who used to ask to listen to Simon and Garfunkle, this is both depressing and disturbing to me. Am I getting that old where I've become a crankity old woman who can't stand the mainstream? Or has music just gotten really bad?

If you've got bad lyrics, send them my way. I think I'm going to build a whole library of them so I can just randomly throw them in to converstations once in a while, you know, just to keep it fun.

I don't heart NY.

There, I said it. I might even make a t-shirt that says it too. I really don't heart NY, well, at least the thruway portion. While I was making the 5 hour trek across that state, I got popped for driving while chatter boxing on my cell phone. Yes, silly me, I left that ear piece thing at home and I refuse to purchase a Bluetooth thing because I think they look completely ridiculous. Plus, only really important people should be sporting those things, people like Secret Service guys. What's I'm unsure of is if I actually got the ticket because I was talking on my cell phone while I was driving or if the cop gave it to me because I had the audacity to question why it was a)not posted anywhere along the 271 miles of the thruway that I drove and b)perfectly legal for drivers to be texting and checking the email on their Blackberry's while flying past me, clearly exceeding the posted speed limit. After all, I didn't see them getting pulled over.

I was informed, not so nicely, that it is posted along the thruway, on one little sign right as you enter the state and that yes, the only illegal thing to do with your cell phone while driving was talk on it, and if I think the law should be changed I should probably contact a legislator. Hmph. I was also politely asked why I did not choose the handsfree option and just chat that way - I wanted to tell him that if he wanted me to change the way I talked on my cell phone, maybe he should just buy me a new one that had a better handsfree option; however, I bit my tounge and shut my mouth. Probably a good idea since I had the kid in the car with me and she was already worried that I was getting arrested.

Alas, I will not follow the advice of a friend and avoid paying the ticket. Little Miss Me does not need an active warrant, no matter what state it falls in. As a Criminal Justice major, I would carry a bit of guilt with me over that one. Although as luck would have it, I, like so many before me, appear to be doing everything I can to avoid using said degree; instead I am actively pursuing freelancing on a full-time basis - as a writer no less. A few grant proposals for a few non-profits, some writing about a new summer television show and working with my new favorite friend, Aaron, on his little newspaper, The North Iowa Buzz. How exciting!

Starbuck's Whore

It's true. I believe the first step in recovery is to admit that you actually have a problem. I'm guessing that shelling out $5.00 for a cup of coffee that I can probably make at home qualifies me. A new Starbuck's drive-thru opened not far from my house while I was gone on vacation, much to the dismay of my beloved mate. I allow myself a very small stipen each week for spending money, which I'm pretty sure is not going to cover 5 days a week of a $4.07 venti non-fat, no-whip cafe mocha. Maybe I should get a job at Starbucks.....I mean really, you probably get free coffee. So, not only would I be making money I would also be recovering $20.35 each week in spent funds; I'm not sure how that would play out in my 12-step Starbucks program though. It's amazing how women can justify anything, isn't it?