I Think I Might Rather Waste My Money on Rent.

We've owned this house since July of 2005. We haven't done squat here. No landscaping, no moving of the brush piles, no garden, nada. I tell myself it was because the boy was small, we had no time (this is true). Now that the boy is bigger and less dependent on us (oy!) I tell myself we'll be able to get all the things done that need to be done. Who am I kidding? It was easier when we had a landlord. Everything was his problem, not ours!

I'm not sure we are cut out to own a house. Perhaps we would have been better suited to a place that already had everything it needed including less land. We own three acres and at the time of purchase it seemed like a good idea. Now all I see is upkeep, and I've learned something about myself, about my husband: we're fucking lazy.

I Must Get Out of This House

Guess what, I'm sick again! Yep...sick again! I looked back on posts thinking it had been maybe six weeks since I last stayed home from work but no...it was a mere 27 days ago, what the hell!

I'm starting to wonder what it is that I'm doing wrong here. Should I be drinking the antibacterial hand wash rather than just slathering my entire body in it? Should I be using the Clorox wipes inside my mouth as well as all over every doorknob and light switch in the house? Why is my immune system betraying me constantly? I don't get it. I eat my five servings of fruits and veggies per day, I exercise...

My creativity is lacking. I've been laying in bed watching t.v. since Monday night. I've been in our bedroom (thank God we got that free t.v. from WalMart) for so long that when I venture out into the kitchen to get a glass of juice the room looks new to me, how messed up is that? Maybe this means when I get back into my car to finally go back to work, that will look new to me too. Maybe when I get back to work I'll have a new job too. Wishful thinking.

Random Thoughts:

Why can't the powers that be at American Idol just lie about the votes to get rid of Sanjaya? It worked at the last presidential election...although I suppose now they're just keeping him around for good ratings. I'm talking about Sanjaya of course. Certainly not the president (sorry, can't bring myself to use a capital "P") for such a tiny little man.

Lost...did anyone watch last night? No, don't tell me. We DVR'd it due to being sick. early-to-bed lame-o's and it's all I could do to keep myself from watching it without Hubs today since he dragged himself to work and left me to my own devices.

Why am I sitting here crying at TLC's "A Baby Story"? That only used to happen to me when I was pregnant. In fact, I haven't even watched this show since I was pregnant. Not a good sign, not a good sign...

Anger Management

Last week, a Cornell student severely beat and tortured a dog he was "taking care of" for a neighbor. The dog chewed through a speaker wire and Mr. Ivy League went totally apeshit over it. He spouted off to the police that he had no remorse, would do it again and knew he would get off with a slap on the wrist.

Reading this news in our small-town newspaper ripped my heart out and truly upset me, as well as a good deal of the rest of the community. I was told by some heartless ignoramus that I was "too angry" about it, that we should feel sorry for the little bastard because of course we as a society have failed him. Whatever. Anyway, in light of my newfound calmness (I say this dripping with sarcasm of course), a haiku:

Weak little bitch-ass
Big man feels good beating dog
Now jump off a bridge

It's Spring Back, right? Or Fall Forward? Or....

I've been around for thirty-five years now. Long enough to have mastered daylight savings I would think. Wrong. Am I the only moron that goes through this every time? Why do I wake up the morning after with a time-telling hangover? Why do we (because I'm including my husband in the stupidity) scramble around the house, checking clocks, asking each other "The clock on the microwave says 10:00, so that means it's really 9:00, right?" No dumb ass, it's really ten o'clock, get with the program.

That's all.

Because I am Evil

No, this doesn't have anything to do with the ghostie-jedi-mind-trick post below. My head isn't going to spin around and pop off. Oh wait perhaps it will, this post is about my mother-in-law. She brings out the absolute best in me.

Today our daycare was closed. Hubs asked my mother-in-law (we'll call her MILFP...Mother-In-Law I'd Like to Freakin' Push...okay that was mean, it's definitely a Xanax kind of day now isn't it?) to stay with the boy while we are at work. Normally I wouldn't ask MILFP to babysit simply for the fact that she never offers to, she usually only likes to act as Grandma when it suits her schedule. Anyway, we're in a bind so Hubs asks her and she agrees.

MILFP and I used to be friends. We used to go shopping and have coffee and eat cakes and smoke cigs and oh yes, we would tawk and tawk and tawwwwwk. Then I quit smoking in 2002. We stopped shopping and sipping and smoking and tawking. It wasn't my doing, I think she felt uncomfortable around me because I wasn't smoking. Or maybe she didn't want to expose me to the smoke, who knows. I don't know the reason because we never talked about it. And up goes Wall One.

The boy was born and things got even weirder. Every piece of advice she had annoyed me. She pushed and pushed about certain issues that she had no business pushing about. She thought we were crazy for implementing a schedule, for making our own baby food, for making sure we were home at naptimes. Because you see in 1971 when she was raising kids, they didn't have naps. Her kids never needed naps. Then she will go on to tell you how cranky her kids were. Hmm. Well then.
Homemade baby food was unheard of, wouldn't I feel better if I bought him the jars? My favorite was when at 6 months she felt the need to bring to my attention that perhaps I needed to stop nursing; after all, at six months of age I could be setting my son up for years of therapy, what with flapping my breasts in his face all the time. And up goes Wall Two.

Wall Three is a real bitch of a wall. The day it was put up my son was about 3 months old. I put him down for a nap and jumped in the shower. A few minutes later when I turned off the water I was shocked to learn that someone was in my apartment. There I stood, dripping wet, not to mention naked therefore totally vulnerable ... frozen in fear in my bathroom as I hear a voice coming from my son's room. I fling open the door and there she is, MILFP, standing on our second floor landing, holding my son (whom, did I mention was supposed to be napping?). Apparently she knocked but when I didn't answer felt it was appropriate to come right in and walk up the stairs, take the baby out of the crib and then act as if she hadn't done anything completely fucked up.

So for the last two and a half years there has been this unspoken source of contention between the two of us that of course Hubs refuses to acknowledge. I usually handle it by taking every opportunity to display my Babycenter knowledge when she shares an antiquated mothering tidbit, i.e. "Back when I was raising my kids I only had to blow smoke rings to entertain them, while they were sleeping on their stomachs of course". I know it's probably some mother-son thing, I'm in the new role of mother and wife, I don't know...also it could be me just being paranoid but I don't think so. Right? RIGHT??

Did I mention the time that Hubs and I went on vacation for a week one year, pre-Boy, and we returned only to discover that MILFP and re-arranged our entire apartment? So you see what I'm dealing with.

With the continued harassment I feel the need to exact revenge. Not horrible, terrible revenge. Just that little taste of I'll-Show-You-Who's-In-Charge-Missy kind of revenge.

So I prepare the boy for his day with grandma. I made sure I gave him a few extra of his favorite cold prunes at dinner the night before. Makes for a nice diaper in the morning. I set the tower of DVD's at eye-level so as to make sure he would see them the minute he got up and immediately break into his Dictator routine of demanding which episodes he'd like to see, taking 15 minutes to decide, and finally settling on one right at the moment your head almost spontaneously combusts. Of course then once the DVD is playing the boy turns bi-polar and insists he didn't want to see that particular DVD. He wanted the other particular DVD, and so on, and so on.

I made sure to tell her he likes to have his place settting on the left side of the table when I know darn well he always sits on the right, and any deviation in said seating pattern is cause for a nuclear explosion. I also let her know how much he LOVES to brush his teeth after his meals, and especially how he likes to have help. Not true of course. I told her she should use the Dora cup instead of the Mickey Mouse cup, knowing full well that mass hysteria would ensue as a result of my little plan. Are you thinking I am a cruel person for playing little tricks that would upset my son in order to put MILFP over the edge? Don't worry, he'll never remember.

I come home at the end of the day with a carefree attitude and a smile. MILFP's hair is askew, shall we say, and although she finally quit smoking six months ago I can tell she is jonesing for a butt. She sighs and says it's been a long day. The boy just looks like he is on top of the world. I swear he winks at me. He's my partner in crime.

Ah, it's the little things...

Random Thought regarding American Idol (sorry...)

Sanjaya: No honey, I am not surprised to know you can hula dance.

Some weird, wacky shizzle

Day three of the stomach bug. I stayed home from work today and while at 6 a.m. I was convincing myself that it was because I could toss my cookies at any moment, by 11 a.m. I admitted to myself it was because I wanted to watch the tension between Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselback on The View.

During the middle of the second episode of "My Super Sweet 16" on MTV, the subject of which I truly hope gets what she deserves when she is alone and saggy at her 45th birthday party, I switched it over to the History Channel where they were showing a documentary about ghosts and psychic phenomena. It got me thinking.

While I was never opposed to it, I became much more open to the possibility of spirits and such when I was 19. My boyfriend at the time had a freaky little haunted house that he and his family lived in. A few odd things happened there and ever since when such incidents have occurred it hasn't fluffed my feathers a bit. After all, if we are here, why can't they be too?

At his house it was nothing for the vacuum cleaner to do it's own thing in the living room. Windows and doors opened and shut by themselves. A lazy susan liked to spin on it's own. Early in the morning you could always smell a strong odor of alcohol in the downstairs bathroom and no, it wasn't because we got shitfaced the night before. After a particularly disturbing evening with the Ouija board, it was decided that the damn thing just plain needed to go. It was taken far away, only to show up in the driveway a day or two later.

Years later, my then future sister-in-law moved into an apartment with her spouse and small son, who had meticulously packed his entire Star Wars collection in boxes and stacked them into his closet in his new bedroom. The next day, her spouse was pushed from behind while he was shaving in the bathroom. He smashed his head into the vanity over the sink. There was no one behind him. That same day her son opened his closet door only to find all of the boxes he had carefully put away completely flipped upside down and stacked in the exact opposite way that he had left them. A few weeks later, and uncoincidentally about a week before they ditched the place, my sister-in-law had a friend over for dinner, who bitched her out royally for not introducing her to the man in the black suit who had stood quietly in the kitchen the entire time she was there. For some reason the friend was the only one in the room who could see him. My sister-in-law had had enough at that point, packed her stuff, and got the hell out.

My husband and I moved into an apartment in 1996, we lived there for nine years before buying our house in 2005. At one time the house was a one-family home, that was converted into a duplex years later. The elderly woman who lived on the other side during our stay there was born in that house, and lived there with her mother for 40 years I believe. Her mother actually died in what was our spare bedroom, which later became the boy's bedroom upon arrival in 5/2004 until we moved. If you were downstairs in our living room you could often hear footsteps overhead, but no one was up there. Not in body anyway. But in spirit. My husband, not so much a skeptic as a scaredy cat, refused to admit that he too heard the footsteps, but I know he did. At the time we had two cats, who I believe are much more perceptive than humans in this instance. You can't deny when two felines in the middle of a dead sleep both snap their heads up to stare at what we can only describe as "nothing".

The last experience of this sort that I had was about two months after our son was born, in that apartment. It was early summer and I was washing dishes in the kitchen, looking out at our backyard through the window over the sink. For a split second I blinked and there, standing at the bottom of our stone patio steps, was a small boy, maybe four years old, with jet black hair and innocent red lips. He had a short-sleeved, button down shirt on and blue shorts, black patent leather shoes. I looked at him and wondered where he had come from. The husband then came up behind me with the baby and I looked over my shoulder at them. When I looked back, the boy was gone. Of course the husband will say it was post-partum pregnancy hormones, but I like to think that whoever he was, he trusted me to see him. And I did.

Attention Lauren Conrad

Your friends suck. I mean, they suck ass big time. Get yourself off of the MTV boat and get a real life somewhere. Maybe they are just editing out what a possible bitch you really are and you really deserve all this getting-screwed-over-by-your-best-friends nonsense. But if you really are as nice as you appear to be, you have horrible taste in friends. Ditch all of them and move to Paris.

See what happens when I'm sick? Far too much time watching mindless television.

I'm sick.

Well, it got me. The dreaded intestinal virus. I have spent the day alternating between freezing and sweating, and trying to figure out how best to keep my germs away from the boy as Daddy went out on a road trip with Papa to buy the boy's third birthday present - a swing set.

The boy's third birthday is not until May, but we saw a great deal on this swingset for $288 as opposed to $1000+. $1000? For a swing set? The angular rusted swingset of my childhood shudders in horror over that one.

Luckily the cashier had fiddlesticks for fingers and rung the blasted thing up for $75 as opposed to $288. Husband also purchased a t.v. for the bedroom so we will stop spending our nights falling asleep on the couch, waking up at 4 a.m. to drag ourselves into the bedroom, only to get up for the day in an hour and a half. His total bill should have been somewhere in the neighborhood of around $600, so it's literally like getting the swingset for 75% off and here's a television set for free. Normally I am the kind of person that had I been there, would have pointed out the mistake, paid full price, and expected to hear angels singing and be showered with confetti at my honesty, when really all I hear is my own voice in my head saying "damn, I should have kept my mouth shut."

But not today, I feel no remorse because after all, I wasn't there, I didn't have anything to do with it. These things happen. Husband says he didn't realize the mistake until he got home. I questioned how he didn't find it odd that his total was less than half of what it was supposed to be, to which Papa responded, "sometimes that's best".

I'm going to check my lottery numbers, after all, I'm feeling lucky! But first, a visit to the porcelain god...