Fruitless Daydreams

Just so we're clear ...

2010-12-05T15:20:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know, it's been a while. Sorry about that. John Lennon said that life is what happens while you're busy making other plans, and I've found that to be quite accurate.

What follows is a rant of the first order. It may or may not be coherent. It will likely contain profanity. If that isn't what you're after, then ta-ta, no hard feelings, seeya later. This is, after all, MY blog, and while you're welcome to visit me and peruse and all, it isn't promised that I'll give a rat's ass what you or anyone else thinks about what I scribble here.

Still here? Okay, then. Get in, sit down, shut up, and hold on.

I have a friend who hasn't always been my friend. She lives nearby, and her children are friends with my children. When she first moved into her house, we didn't get along AT ALL, and the fault for that lies with both of us. I've apologized, and she's apologized, and we've accepted each other's apologies, and life's gone on in a lovely way.

Lately, however (and by "lately" I mean in the last two to three months), she's not been the friend to me that I thought she was, and definitely not the friend that I try to be. I don't have a lot of mantras, but "A Friend Loves At All Times" is one of them. I chant that one so often that my children already know when it's going to come out of my mouth and fling it at me first in rather a pre-emptive sort of way. I've said it to this friend a hundred times just this summer, and she's chanted it back to me as well. The big difference? Only one of us has been living it lately, and I'll let you guess which it is.

Why is it that I say things in confidence and she feels the need to rent a fucking billboard and advise the world at large and in general? Why is it that she encourages me to confide when she's only going to runtelldat far and wide, without the burden of context or correctness? Where does she get off doing this to me?

Better yet ... why do I allow it to happen?

Ooh looka there, that's a fun question, isn't it? "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them." (Thank you, G. Smith, room D204, NEHS! All this time, I'd thought having to memorize that stupid soliloquy would never do me any good bar having to regurgitate it for a grade. I stand corrected.)

Yep, I can CHOOSE what happens next. I am not powerless. I can decide to allow her to continue running over me like I was a possum and she a semi. I can decide to deliver only short, clipped responses to her attempts to open some sort of dialogue. I can decide to remain friends with her, alter our friendship, or cut it off altogether (although I have the feeling that'd be an off-cutting rather along the Hydra lines, if you take my meaning). I can decide to abandon her and her manipulative, backstabbing ways. I can decide to forgive and/or forget.

First, though, I must decide what exactly it is that I mean by "a friend loves at all times". This will require introspection and pondering that I may or may not be prepared for just this instant. To be truthful, I am well and truly pissed off at her right now, and what I find most sad in this situation is that she wouldn't understand why no matter how I tried to explain it.

Yesterday, my child requested and received permission to go to the mall with this friend's daughter (we'll call her Suzie for now) and another darling of that age (let's call her Jane). While at the mall, they met up with some other friends, Suzie and Jane decided it would be fun to ditch everyone else and trot off to another shop, and so they did. When my daughter and the others went into the shop where Suzie and Jane were, Suzie and Jane ignored them all and fucked off somewhere else yet again. They later sent my child a text saying they were leaving, and proceeded to leave without her. YES, THEY LEFT MY DAUGHTER AT THE MALL.

All ended well, of course, because my child knows how to think for herself and doesn't get caught up in the lemming groupthink to which teenagers are so prone, but that doesn't keep me from getting royally cheesed. I got a text from Suzie's mom "just to let you know" that my child "decided" to stay at the mall. (Um, NO, your little bitch decided to be evil and wicked and mean and nasty.) I responded that I'd take care of it, and then got accused of not being myself, of being awful. What the blue bloody fuck kind of world does this need to be for that to be true? You may know, but I do not.

Right ... in keeping with the title of this post, I'll make a statement that will provide clarity to any who think they require it. This is true right this very minute, and may or may not remain so over time. Nobody puts Baby in a corner, and nobody gets to tack me down to anything when I've made up my mind otherwise.

You want to act like my friend? Fine. However, I can tell that an act is all it is, and I will respond accordingly. You don't get the best of me until such time as I decide you have earned it, and after the shit you've pulled, that may be ten minutes after never. When you figure out that making snide remarks behind my back, telling tales, spreading rumors, and stirring shit just for shit's own sake are not the way to be a true friend who loves at all times, let me know, and I'll reconsider. Believing your child is one thing ... being an active party to bullshit is something else entirely. For now, you've chosen an alternate path, and I can't stop it, so I'll just sit back and let you take it wherever it leads you. I reserve the right to point and laugh whenever the situation calls for such, and if I choose to applaud the cosmos when circumstances arrange themselves against you, you have no recourse but to go stare in your mirror to find someone to blame. I've poured out my soul and my substance to you, thinking you'd care, only to find that it's all for your perverse amusement. Forgive me for taking so long to figure out what an evil cunt you are ... it's my Pollyanna gene that leads me to want to believe better. The best part is that you'll never bother apologizing for disappointing me, because you'll never believe that anything was ever your fault.

In the meantime, go fuck yourself.

Howdy.

2010-03-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

"... and so you're back from outer space ... "

Eh, I haven't really been in outer space, although it does sound kinda fun. I've just been doing ten tons of other stuff. Sorry ...

I'm still selling houses and doing loans for houses. It's great fun. If you're joining the program already in progress, I've been your friendly mortgage goddess since January 1994; I sat the state real estate licensing exam (and passed the first time, yay) in October 2006 ... and *poof* ... what had been a career became a lifestyle.

To catch you up a bit more, the children are now 14, 9, and 9 ... it's fascinating how daily changes go past unnoticed, but cumulatively speaking, there's a world of difference. I am, quite frankly, totally in love with my children. It's a really nice feeling.

I'm gettin' older too, as the Stevie Nicks song goes, and the stupid blood pressure meds have me running out of steam way faster than I'm used to, which sucks. Tomorrow we'll find out what revelations the blood has for me, and what ongoing mess I'm going to get to handle. Yippee.

Just now, I ain't feelin' it, and that has to change before my 5:30 appointment. So ... it's off to curl up in front of the TV with Kendall and do nothing but recharge for a short while. Good to see ya ... we'll meet up again soon.

Miss me?

2009-09-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've been busy. Sorry ... but here I am again, and I'm going to go back to my rants.

Soon. I promise.

You've been warned. : )

When It's All About Mom

2008-05-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

So today is Mother's Day ... according to Wikipedia, we Americans thugged the idea off the Brits (something we've been doing for AGES, starting with the colors of our flag) and then changed the date from the fourth Sunday of Lent to the second Sunday of May. (Pretty decent idea, that - how are you going to treat your mom during a period of denial?)

Mark and the darlings were most happy to do whatever I wanted to do, which is ever so rare. I responded first with a blatant misuse of that "anything you want today" - I slept till nearly 1:00, which isn't something that happens unless I'm quite ill!

After the snooze-fest, we went to LaserQuest, where it was free for moms (but not till after 1:00 ... so, you see, that lie-in wasn't TOTALLY me being slothful, it was really saving my family from crushing boredom ... just another example of selfless mom-ness). In our family, I came second to Mark, but I'd never been there before, so I felt pretty good about it! It was kind of frustrating at the beginning, but once I got the hang of it (and found a neat sniper spot on an upper level), it wasn't so bad. Don't get me wrong, now; I won't be paying to go, most likely, but it was okay and everyone enjoyed it.

Having fired and been fired upon, we went to Josette's Pets for my Official Mother's Day Gift. I can't tell you about it yet because I haven't introduced you to that aspect of life, but I will do that soon. Promise.

The Official Mother's Day Gift required fairly immediate stashing back at the hacienda. Once we'd finished that, though, we buzzed Nana and demanded that she and Charlie meet us at Abuelo's for dinner. Nana hemmed and hawed a bit, but once I reminded her that, as firstborn, it was I that qualified her as a mom in the first place, she shut up about my kid brother having rung to say they'd be over "later" and agreed to meet us there at 7:00 as we'd pulled strings with our friend Scott The Manager to get a table booked for 7 people at that hour on one of the busiest days of the year. Dinner was delicious and delightful, of course (and I got a free T-shirt marking the occasion, w00t).

The best bit is that I get to do all this again in a few weeks when Mark's mum is here! YAY!

Shameless Plugs and Siren's Songs

2008-05-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

Let's begin with the shameless plug, shall we? : )

Since Kendall was three, she's been taking ballet. She loves it, and she's perfectly built for it. We live at the far north edge of town but drive into the near-downtown area to go to one certain studio for classes with one certain lady. Miss Shannon is truly talented, an absolute creative genius with patience like you wouldn't believe. I have to tell you how lucky I feel that she didn't shake the Oklahoma dust from her Capezios and take off for New York! There are at least three other studios that are much closer to our house, but they don't have Miss Shannon. She takes students as young as two (in ballet) and she's got classes in all the best disciplines: ballet, tap, jazz, flamenco, hip-hop, and (of course) belly dancing.

Have a look! Everything Goes Dance and Drama

Last night was picture-taking time for Kendall's class. We knew from last year that we wouldn't be allowed to take pictures while the guy who charges for pictures was taking pictures, so I got some beforehand ... here's our favorite:

While we were waiting for it to be our class's turn, the usual bunch of parents wandered across the street to the cute little convenience store to buy Powerball tickets and scratch-offs (yeah, it's to benefit education ... AS IF ... we all aim to be rich! -ha-). Upon stepping outside, we could see some lovely cumulonimbus clouds directly to the south of us, which typically means that somebody's in for a storm. (Better that they're straight south of you, though, since those storms usually move southwest to northeast, so they aren't likely to hit you.) Pretty soon we could smell rain, and the wind got a little weird (which is saying not much and a whole lot all at the same time, because Oklahoma is a darned windy place ... you just have to know what the wind means when it does any given thing).

Well, you know me, don't you? Not only do I have the weather-widget on my desktop, I've recently put The Weather Channel's storm alert system onto the cell phone (because believe it or not, my fat posterior is NOT always in front of this machine). Sure enough, the phone bleeped that I had a message, and it was from TWCAlerts, telling me that there was a severe thunderstorm warning for Oklahoma City. Yep, it looked like at least the southern two-thirds and the eastern half was getting a fair drenching at that moment, so hey, good on ya, glad to know this thing works.

Then the sirens went off. ARGH.

Thank you, John Harder ... friends, this man is married to a woman who loves tornadoes the way I do (which is to say NOT AT ALL) ... he did not complain one iota when he was sent across the street to check the TV at the convenience store and report back as to what was happening. (He did tease me ever so slightly about alleviating the stress of the moment by firing up a cigarette, though, so I guess I'll have to TP his house sometime soon. Sorry, John.) The guy went on these fact-finding errands not just once but several times (because later the sirens went off again, and we had to be sure that a tornado wasn't going to drop right on our heads out of the tiny little cirrus clouds that were straight up in the sky above us).

Let's draw a long story short, shall we? We got done with our bit of picture-taking, then hopped into Thumper The Big Blue Truck to go get something to eat on the way home. Usually, the brats want to go someplace like Olive Garden or Red Robin or Mimi's Cafe. Last night, though, I asked them if they wanted to go "out" or if they wanted to get something to take home, and sit and watch the storms, and the meal-in-a-bag from a place where you don't get out of the car was the unanimous winner.

Of course, that wasn't the end of it. There was another funky storm that blew through later, but it was just a nice tame little squall line with wind gusts up over 70 miles per hour and hail the size of golf balls. No big! : )~

A Nothing Day

2008-04-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

At last, a day that is beautiful and sunshiny! Yes, there are clouds in the sky, but they are of the white fluffy cotton-candy sort, the ones that you can lie down on your back and watch float by for hours. (Okay, with a 45-mph wind, they're whipping by more than floating, but you get the idea.)

I have lots of work today. There are seven refinance transactions that I have to close this month (two down, five remaining), and a couple of purchases too, so I can't be outside enjoying the nice weather. Drat.

Hope you're having a nice Nothing Day too ... or at least a productive one.

Once More, With Feeling

2008-04-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

Oh, the shelter, the fun little claustrophobia-inducing shelter.

We had the shelter installed in our garage in 2004, just after Memorial Day. For the last four years, we've only opened it to either go down and clean it out in anticipation of the storm season or to show it to someone else.

This year, we hadn't yet "opened" the shelter at all when the sirens sounded for the first time (see post of 5 March), and then it happened again in the middle of the bloody night at the end of the month (see post of 31 March).

Now it's getting fooking well OLD.

Last night, not far past 11, I was in bed trying to sleep (sound familiar?) when I decided to check the weather one last time. (Boy, was that stupid; I won't be in a hurry to do that again.) Hey looka here, it's Mike Morgan doing the Safe Spot Shuffle, and of course I am entranced. There's the beginning of a hook echo, and it's got a downdraft and an inflow and (new for 2008!) a hail core, whatever that is. Ooh, it's at the far western edge of northern Oklahoma County! Ooh, it's churning over NW 122 and Council! Ooh, it's headed east north east! Ooh, it's going to drop over Mercy, Gaillardia, the Kilpatrick Turnpike, Lake Hefner Parkway, Quail Springs Mall! Ooh!

Bloody hell, I grumble.

I get out of bed and put on my clothes and shoes and turn off the alarm and get the garage door opener and turn on the mini-TV, tuned to the weather, out in the shelter.

I go back in the house and issue terse little monosyllabic answers to my husband's questions and take another look at the TV and gather up the important stuff and go wake the elder daughter and grab the flashlights and put new batteries in one of them and go out to look at the sky and go back in and go re-wake the elder daughter and go upstairs to get the twins.

Panic! Loathing! Fear! These are the things issuing from my children. The oldest one isn't freaking out openly, but I can see it in her eyes, along with something new: weariness. It isn't that she's weary because it's the middle of the bloody night; rather, she's sick of being hustled out of some lovely dream during a sound sleep in her warm bed to be shrieked and jerked into the shelter, usually getting wet like a drowned rat in the process. I think she's the only one who notices the sirens aren't sounding, but she does me the colossal favor of not mentioning it.

The twins, on the other hand, are very nearly beside themselves. It's gotten so that Kieran doesn't want to go up to bed if it's raining outside, and Kendall is only too happy to follow big brother's lead in this. Together they gather up the cuties and put them in a big carryall bag next to their bedroom door, and each of them puts clothes at the end of the bed in case Mumma comes steaming up the stairs shouting to get up.

I've always lived in Oklahoma, and I've always loved it here ... EXCEPT for the tornadic storms. When I win that damn lottery, I'm going to build a house that is 100% "safe room" material, and then it won't matter about the forking sirens!!

"Get Up NOW, Kids"

2008-03-31T07:49:00.000-07:00

There's a fun song about Oklahoma; maybe you've heard it? It comes from a musical, Oklahoma! The odd high school theatre group will get adventurous and perform it every once in a while ... I'm not sure which one this is, but they did a pretty good job: "Oklahoma! Finale" The musical really doesn't have much to do with the state as a whole, at least not any more (although water rights were one of the first chapters we did in realtor school). No, it's the first line of the title song that I want to focus on here:

Oklahoma! Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain!

Yeah ... wind. Chicago's known as the Windy City, but I think they must just have a better PR department, because anyone who's ever been here during a spring storm would *never* argue that Rodgers and Hammerstein had it wrong. I blogged on 5 March about the fun shelter-opening-by-necessity episode. Last night was a whole different dog.

By 9:00 the twins were in bed, elder daughter was slung back on the sofa with the laptop, the spousal unit was watching telly, and I was parked here doing a bit of catch-up ... when what to my wondering eyes should appear (wrong season, I know, but hang with me here) but the NewsChannel4 4-Warn Desktop Weather widget with many counties lit up in a variety of colors. (The widget pops up a map of the state ... each county is lit up a different color based on the worst thing that's happening there, and there's a legend at the top of the map, plus there's a little crawl along the bottom of the screen that replicates the crawl at the bottom of the TV screen ... you can click on any county to find out what warnings are on and when they expire, plus there's a link to a live radar ... it's TOTALLY nifty ... for the uninitiated (including the short-timer and the non-resident), here's a map: Counties in Oklahoma ... that should help, although you have to scroll down a bit). We're in the far-ish north-northwest bit of Oklahoma County, so anything that floats into far eastern Canadian County is pretty well guaranteed to nail us unless it blows out first (which isn't likely). I was watching as Caddo County, Canadian County, and Grady County went from orange (severe thunderstorm warning) to red (tornado warning) pretty quickly. It seemed fairly certain that we were next, which was very odd to me, as Oklahoma County was gray (meaning nothing's going on for that county - no watches, warnings, or otherwise).

The children hear the storm outside, and the younger two head into our bedroom to watch its progress on TV with us. (Elder daughter can sleep through most anything ... she's her mum's girl, that one!) Midnight comes and goes, and with it no sign of anything awful in our neck of the woods; the twins fall asleep in our bed, so I take them upstairs and tuck them in. Within five minutes, I'm tucked up in my own bed and drifting off to sleep, with the sounds of thunderstorm filtering in from the night outside.

Then the sound outside changes ... and not in a nice way.

Mark is still watching one of the three local network affiliates (NBC, ABC, CBS ... I wouldn't have Fox on unless all the others were dead and gone), and the voices start getting excited about a downdraft and inflow around a hook-echo denoting a circulation (this is tornado talk, and the weather kids will *never* explain it on TV, but if you watch enough of it, you get the idea). This new happening is just south of Mercy Hospital, not far from Quail Springs Mall, just around Lake Hefner Parkway. Mark nudges me and says, "It's us now, it's us, isn't that us?" He hops up out of bed and starts slamming his limbs into clothing as I open my eyes and see the circulation graphics on the TV screen to the accompaniment of Gary England (and bless THAT man's heart ... what are we all going to do when he retires? Perish the thought) ... then the sirens begin, and we know this time it's real.

Really, REALLY real ... wake the children real ... decide what's important enough to grab and leave the rest real.

From the bottom of our staircase, I can shout to reach all three darlings in their bedrooms, which is what I do next. My inner drill sergeant awakens and makes herself known: "KYMBER! KIERAN! KENDALL! OUT OF BED, CLOTHES ON, DOWNSTAIRS, RIGHT NOW!"

The children have heard me shout them out of bed plenty of times, but usually it's because they'll be late for school; I've *never* done it in the middle of the night with the sirens sounding. To their very great credit, they are at the front door with shoes on and jackets in hand, ready to go to the shelter, in record time. I've grabbed a pillow and flashlight, my bag, a hoodie, the house keys, the garage door opener, and the keys to Thumper and Skarlet, and we all head down to the shelter (except Mark, who's gone upstairs to get the bag of cuddly toys that was packed "just in case" but left on Kendall's bed in her haste). It turns out that the Mustang was *almost* pulled up far enough, but it was a bit of a squeeze to get in ... get in we did, though, and it was our luck that the sirens stopped as Mark was getting down the steps (not that anybody noticed but him).

The children did brilliantly. There was no crying, there were no shrieks, there was no panic (at the disco or otherwise, ha) ... there was just our family, performing as needs must when you live on the Oklahoma prairie. We got out of the shelter soaked, because the wind was whipping the rain as we were getting into the shelter, so everyone changed into dry clothes and went wearily back to bed.

Meanwhile, back at the cool desktop weather widget, the same counties that lit up last night are lighting up again right now.

:::sigh:::

But Where Are The Flag-Draped Caskets?

2008-03-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

FOUR THOUSAND

... and for what?

It's just not right. This isn't supposed to be happening. Weren't we told that we were going into Iraq because Saddam Hussein had WMD and wasn't afraid to use them? And wasn't it also that those WMD could obliterate the UK and big chunks of NATO nations within 45 minutes of their launch? And wasn't it also that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had very strong ties to al Qaeda and (gasp!!) Osama bin Laden? And weren't we going to be greeted as liberators? And weren't the Iraqis going to fling roses at us? And wasn't it all going to be over in five days or five weeks or five months? ... but no, not five years? ... and yet, there we still are. Operation Iraqi Liberation, indeed ... no wonder the name got changed from O.I.L., eh?

So let's use that last graphic this way:

LOL - The Bushies are out of their minds ... they can't honestly think anybody will believe this shit.

OMG - Colin Powell actually SAID that?!?! Good God, you can't mean that people are believing this shit?

WTF - Nobody slapped that freak non-Texan down before he uttered those sixteen words? And now he's actually sending troops to Iraq??!! I DON'T BELIEVE THIS SHIT!!

RIP, you brave sons and daughters of America

who swore your best to America

believing you were fighting to protect America

and found out too late you've been betrayed by America.

Big, Bigger, Bigots

2008-03-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

So I've lived in Oklahoma my whole life ... 41 years, 1 month, 25 days, and counting. That might not seem long to you if you're one of my, erm, better-established friends, or it may seem an eternity to someone who's obviously stumbled across this blog TOTALLY by accident (go away, whippersnapper, we geezers have nothing for you - ha). Either way, it's all I've got, so WTF-ever, just deal.

Forty-one years in Oklahoma can be full of everything or devoid of anything, depending on the subject at hand and one's particular point of view. In my case, it's both, which is sometimes fun to try to describe; it's The Great There/Not-There ... let me (try to) explain. When I say it's "full of everything" ... that means good. I mean, *really* good. When I was a kid, we used to not be so watched-over; even now, people will stop and help you if you're pulled over to the side of the road with your hazard lights flashing; if you get caught short a nickel or a quarter or whatever in the convenience store, somebody behind you in line will offer up the difference and tell you not to worry about it when you begin with the round of profuse thanks and apologies. When I say it's "devoid of anything" ... that means bad. I mean, *really* bad. Don't get me wrong; we have traffic and pollution and drugs and crime and awful people who do mean things to others. However, pound for pound, we have more of the other bit than we have of this one.

And then I get up the other day and I'm snooting through the news, as is my wont, and I come across this story: Oklahoma Pol's Screed Vs. Gays Sparks Furor ... which made me wonder. I mean, *really* wonder. So then I went to watch the video myself ... I'm Listening ... which made me wonder even more.

I wonder why people are so eager and happy to believe someone when they *say* they're Christian without waiting for physical proof. There's a Mohandas Gandhi quote that I really like that says, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ."

I wonder why people want to rant and rave about something being an abomination according to a cute old incomplete mythological anthology when they cherry-pick the bits they like and talk down the bits they don't. (Levitican law, anyone?) It's not just Old Testament stuff, either; there are plenty of bits in the New Testament that Xians roundly ignore:
>>> At the church I attend, some women lead a Bible study. What is the best way to tell them to shut up? We must not have women speaking in church when 1 Timothy 2:12 forbids them to do so. And does this also apply to the choir?
>>> Many of the women in our church wear jewelry. Since women are forbidden to wear jewelry (1 Peter 3:3) what is the best way to tell them they are going to hell?
>>> I want to obey 2 Thessalonians 1:26 and greet all the women at our church with a kiss. Why do I get strange looks from them when I do - especially from their husbands? What about French kissing? And should I also be kissing the husbands?
>>> Recently, I have asked several women in my church to marry me since it is permissible for a man to have many wives (1 Kings 11:3). Why do I continually get rejected? People at church are beginning to talk.
>>> There are many unbelievers where I work and because we are forbidden to associate with them (1 Corinthians 4:11), I am wondering how best to tell them to keep away from me. Would a sign on my desk do the job?

I wonder why people don't bother to think for themselves.

(NOTE: I don't mean any bashing by this post. Well, not really, except for as regards the hypocritical assholes who want us all to believe that they've better than the rest of us - they're not - and that they truly care whether any certain person is going to hell - they don' t - and that they'd love to help any certain person be saved - they wouldn't. Well, now I think about it, yeah, I do mean to bash. You people aren't any better than anybody else. Sugarcandy Mountain isn't really there, guys.)

Trying to Avoid a Trip to Oz

2008-03-05T06:20:00.000-08:00

If you're an Oklahoma resident (past or present), you'll understand.

If you aren't one yet but could wind up being one at some future point, take heed.

If you've never had the privilege of living here, and Fate never determines that you are sufficiently worthy (which is cool, we won't hold it against you ... not everyone can be Okie ... the world needs Texans too ... although no one is yet sure just why ... heh), then this will serve as a nice piece of light fluffy prose at which you can smile and nod and perhaps even chuckle a bit before promptly forgetting it as you turn your attention to the broader scheme of your own existence.

Anyhow, if you weren't here Sunday evening, then too bad for you ... you really missed a stellar time.

We begin, as always, with a bit of background.

Several years ago we installed an in-ground tornado shelter in the garage. (We looked at safe rooms too, but they cost at least 3x as much and required what promised to be some fairly major construction.) It's one of those one-piece molded jobs that you see at the fair, the kind that you just drive the car over. We put it near the garage door, because our house is L-shaped, with the short bit being the garage and the front door being in the angle, and it's easier to walk out the front door into the garage than it is to scamper through the whole house and go out through the laundry room. Trigger (the convertible Mustang) parks over the door to the shelter, although he's not supposed to be parked right on top of it. However, Trigger usually only gets pressed into service once or twice a year, spending the rest of the year with a flat battery and at least one matching tire. Whoever used him last didn't pull him up very far ... no big at the time, but GREAT BIG as it turned out later.

We hadn't yet "opened" the shelter for this year (i.e., sweeping out the assortment of insects that congregate there from the end of one tornado season to the beginning of the next). It's one of those things that's on your Round Tuit list, because hey, it's only 2 March and it's been really cold outside except for the completely gorgeous last two days (first warning sign ... warm air + cold front = warm air rises and cold air drops and winds up making a fun sideways cyclone sort of thing which eventually sits up on its end from the cloud and drops down toward the earth) ... and then the sirens start.

It's pitching down rain in buckets (with said rain whipping and twirling and blowing in every direction, natch), and Trigger was parked on top of the shelter. First I have to find the keychain (I have one boasting a key collection that puts most prison wardens to shame) and the garage door opener (because it should be on the damn hall table but things look a far sight different when my innards have turned to jelly because the sirens are sounding) ... click the door opener to open the door (but it doesn't work until the fourth go, causing me to be sure that I am going to die today) ... squeeze into the teensy little space between Trigger and Skarlet in the garage and try to get into Trigger without door-dinging Skarlet ... test the two Ford keys to see which one is Trigger's, which is difficult because my hands are shaking like anything ... turn the key one click ... put the Mustang in neutral ... shout at Mark (who has FINALLY got himself outside to help me) to push it toward the west wall so as to be able to access the shelter entry portal ... throw the Mustang in park (and ignore the stupid grindy noise because it won't matter at all that I've stripped the gearbox if we're all dead) ... open the shelter ... go down into the shelter and squish all the spiders and crickets and other squatters, and knock down as many fantastic examples of arachno-architecture as I can find so that the children don't fuss ... find the little bitty TV that we keep in the garage for just this kind of thing ... try to remember how to turn the damn thing on ... tune in Mike Morgan because Gary England has the night off ... prepare to herd everyone down ... sirens stop ... go back into the house, put down bag and flashlights and other necessary things that have been snatched up (passports, foreign currency, file of birth certificates and marriage licenses and property deeds and car titles and other stuff that really should be in a safe deposit box in a vault that will withstand this shit anyhow) ... the sirens start again ... curse a blue streak ... repeat above procedure.

It all sounds like a truly awful sitcom episode, doesn't it?!?! It was a dark and stormy night. Car is parked on top of garage-floor shelter. Car has dead battery and flat tire. Add three frightened children plus one near-panicked Oklahoma-born mum plus one English transplant who isn't afraid of this weather because damnit, he's English, and by-God, we survived the Blitz and we'll survive this (and never mind that he was born 27 years after the Blitz ended). Hilarity ensues.

I would have been laughing my ass off if not for the mortal danger of it all.

Epilogue: the temperature dropped like a rock all Sunday night, and Monday morning was dead cold with a very low wind-chill index. While I was in the kitchen getting breakfast for the twins and a cuppa for Mark (elder daughter K.C. had already hopped on the bus), there was snow blowing about. It's been chilly for the last two days. Kieran and Kendall have learned at school that "if March comes in like a lion, it goes out like a lamb" ... please, let Granny's old saying be true this time!!

Changes Aren't Permanent, But Change Is

2008-02-29T20:39:00.000-08:00

So you may have noticed that you had to click an acknowledgement before wandering into my cyber-parlor today, yes? I decided that some of my friends - who are loved just as dearly as any other of my friends, so y'all don't be getting any stupid ideas about somebody being more loved than somebody else - might not really like some of the things that I post. These "loved as much as any of the others" friends are rather ... um ... lily-livered, if I can use that term. I'm not convinced that they'll stay quite so long or come back so often after they've seen that bit.

Six weeks and two hours and forty-three minutes ago, I quit smoking. I don't feel better, I don't feel happier, I don't feel much of anything positive. The fact that I haven't ripped off anyone's arm and beaten them to a pulp with the bloody stump is really the best part of it all so far. I know it will all be hugely beneficial to me physically in the end, and I know that the house and the vehicle and my clothes aren't so smelly anymore, and I know that this makes me less of a socially ostracized individual.

BUT DAMN IT, I FEEL LIKE HELL.

sigh

Constant Cravings

2008-02-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

Forgive me, Phillip Morris, for I have abandoned you. It has been five weeks, two days, fifteen hours, and forty minutes since my last cigarette.

Hail Marlboro, full of taste; the lighter is with you. Addictive are you among full-flavored filtered, and addictive is your low-tar offshoot, Marlboro Lights. Yummy Marlboro, nail in the coffin, satisfy us smokers, now and at the hour of our death from lung cancer or tuberculosis or emphysema or something else related to our having ingested you for years and years.

It seems that k.d. lang had it right ...

Let's Dance ...

2008-02-22T23:45:00.000-08:00

Ah, the rites of passage ... how I dread them. (heh)

Tonight is the Valentine's Day Dance at DCMS (and never mind that Valentine's Day is a week and a day behind us -- ignore that man behind the curtain and focus on what's in front of you, please!). Elder daughter is meeting friends there, of course, since they are all FAR too cool to arrange to meet any boys. (The pool for the date when that situation changes is available upon request.)

So, precious Kymber got home at 3:20 and quickly changed into a shirt that buttons down the front, then off we went to have her hair done. Back home, I did her make up and she got dressed, then we took some pictures so we can all see how great she looks for her first dance!

*** LATER THAT SAME NIGHT ***

Kymber had a great time! I asked her about dancing with boys, and she turned her nose right up, saying that a boy had come over and started dancing with her, but once she noticed, she promptly moved away. We can hardly wait till the next dance!

On Weathering The Storm

2008-02-09T22:22:00.000-08:00

Today, Kendall and I went to Sophie Crain's funeral (Laura was Kendall's kindergarten teacher, and we decided to give both Kieran and Kendall the choice of going or not). It was a beautiful service, filled with music and tears and many people who wanted less to say goodbye to a precious little girl than to say "we're here for you, we love you, we care, we stand with you, and we want you to know that" to the family she leaves behind. We sat with my friends Vicki and Betsy, near lots of other DC moms and teachers and such. Some gentlemen in Army uniforms sat a bit further down the pew from us, which turned out to be a good thing, as they needed tissues and hadn't brought any (so we shared).

Kendall was incredibly good ... we'd talked with her beforehand, letting her know that sometimes it's necessary to put a lid on her natural ebullience for the sake of decorum, and that this was one of those times (although she'd be perfectly free to hand out from her inexhaustible supply of hugs). She walked quietly, sat quite still next to me through the service, and somehow managed to convey a solemnity that I hadn't thought possible of most 7-year-olds (but *especially* not Kendall) through the entire enterprise. She was a bit different on the way out than she had been on the way in, and I was about to ask her if she was all right when she said, "It's not fair, Mumma, is it, that Mrs. Crain's baby girl died?" A hundred different things went through my mind in a very short time that seemed very long; what I finally said was, "No, sweetie, it's not fair, but sometimes life isn't fair, and there's nothing anyone can do about it." This nugget of maternal wisdom was met with a rather heavy sigh from the child, who was quite pensive the rest of the way home.

Fair? No, it's not fair. It's not just. It's not right. It's absolutely the saddest thing there is (or definitely high on the list, if not number one on this particular hit parade), and this was without a doubt the saddest funeral I've ever been to, bar none (and that's likely not just my opinion, either; United States Army soldiers were sitting down the row from me, sobbing like I wouldn't have imagined grown men would do in public).

Life isn't fair, though, is it? We shake our heads and mutter at Life, we shake our fists at it, but in the grand scheme, what are we? (Hint: Go download the Kansas tune "Dust in the Wind".) It's not about what's fair, or at least I don't think it should be. Nope, I'd rather spend my time making lemonade (or, if we're running short of water and sugar, I'd say that a salt shaker and shot of tequila would be an acceptable substitute). Let's face it, every once in a while, Life stirs up an unbelievable shitstorm, and there's nothing you can do but tuck your chin down and get through it. If you're lucky, you've got friends who will hold your hand and bear you up so that when the storm finally clears, you're not too different from when it began.

And on that note, an offer: Some people haven't got friends like that -- friends who will sit and listen without judging, friends who will know when to hold your hand and when to argue with you, friends who can ask the hard questions and get truthful answers from you (or at least make you think about what the real answers might be). Some people don't think they've got friends like that. Some people suffer from a lack of friends altogether, having only acquaintances that aren't really all that close.

The offer? If you ever need a friend, give a shout. I'll sit with you, and hold your hand, and listen to what you have inside. A very wise man once told me that if we weren't supposed to look after each other, there would only be one of us here, and I believe that with all my heart.

Loving Sophie

2008-02-07T07:03:00.001-08:00

It's quite rare that I can't find the words to say, but today is one of those days. Forgive me for posting nothing but a bit of cryptic text ... you'll have to clue in for yourself today, I'm afraid.

Jeff, Laura ... please accept our deepest condolences. What you are facing now is unimaginable and seemingly unbearable, but know that you are surrounded by people who love you and will do whatever we can to take care of you. Anything you need, you have only to ask.

Sophia Claire Crain

25 September 2007 - 7 February 2008

Sleep well, little angel.

Two Very Long Weeks.

2008-01-31T20:09:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow (that's Friday 1 February) at 8:00 PM Central, I will have been officially not smoking for two weeks exactly. For some reason, I just haven't lit up, and the further I've gotten from my last one, the less I've wanted one even when I've wanted one, if you know what I mean.

I've got a pack with a lighter here on my desk, just like always, and my ashtray is here as well. There's a pack in my bag, one in the inside pocket of my favorite jacket, one in the "throne room", one upstairs in the games room, and two (one current, one backup) in Thumper (no smoking allowed in Skarlet The Zippy Red Car anyhow). I also have a full carton and a half-full carton here in the office. I haven't thrown out any cigarettes, any lighters, any ashtrays. All the stuff I need to spark up and feel the sanity that nicotine brings is right here where it's been for the six years we've lived in this house. If I threw it away, then it would be like I was a naughty child being punished, which would likely result in me sneaking off to the laundry room or the garage or the back staircase the first few times, then just going right back to it without missing much of a beat.

I feel better. The coughs that bring up a quart of gunk and make me sound like I should be in the TB ward have nearly ended. I am hungry ALL THE DAMN TIME but have fallen deeply in love with chocolate-chip chewy granola bars (100 calories per bar, 10 bars per box, 2 boxes for $3 at Target this week, woohoo); still, I can feel my jeans getting a bit snug and it's only been two weeks. (Guess next I'll have to dust off that godforsaken Bowflex that's in the holiday suite.)

The family is being very supportive. The twins know that Mumma's going to be a bit snarly because she's quit smoking, so now whenever a rant threatens, they run to give me a hug. Elder daughter sees my hands start to twitch and fidget, and then reaches over and holds my hand to shift my mind somewhere else (and really, how many 12-year-olds do YOU know who will hold their mum's hand in public?). Mark needs only to hear me scream "I WANT ONE" to jump into action -- his anti-smoking move is to drop me into a Rhett/Scarlet kiss!

Just thought I'd let you guys in on the reason why I've been a bit quiet lately. I'm pretty proud of myself, mostly because I have not reached in through anyone's left nostril to rip their lungs out, even though there are a couple of local realtor assholes who richly deserve it. So far, it's all good, going just a day at a time (with chewy granola bars and warm cuddles and hand-holding and big lovely smooches to help).

1 Day, 4 Hours, 9 Minutes ...

2008-01-20T10:08:00.000-08:00

... or, if you prefer, 1689 minutes (which is 100,800 seconds). That's how long it's been since my last cigarette.

I started smoking in August 1984, when I was 17 and beginning my senior year in high school. I had a job at a nifty store at the mall called Cricket Alley. Pretty much everybody who worked there smoked, so I picked it up too. I mean, hey, I had to dress like them, answer the phone like them, act like them, sell like them ... I had to learn all of those things, and I suppose I just learned to smoke like them as well.

I've smoked through the last twenty-three and a half years pretty well without pause, except for stopping while pregnant with elder daughter because it made me ill (not with the twins, though, but that's another story which you should definitely find out about before you go hatin').

Mark quit a year ago next month, and I'm really proud of him. He was quite a piece of work for about six weeks, but we persevered and won. He kept telling me that if I was cooperative, I'd be quitting at the same time, but I thought that one of us would likely wind up on the floor in a puddle of blood (and there was a good chance it would be him), so I demurred and kept on.

For some reason, though, I've decided now it's time to stop. I don't know why the idea's got into my head, and I don't know how long it will stay. I *almost* quit a couple of years ago after the three-plane trip to England (OKC to Dallas to Boston to Manchester ... smoked in OKC, plane was late leaving Dallas, barely saw Boston, no smoking till Manchester ... I went about 10 days only smoking at the pub). Guess we'll see if I can really do it this time.

One day, four hours, twenty-one minutes ...

Perspective.

2008-01-16T08:27:00.000-08:00

So today I get this email from my friend John in Kentucky. It's really rather awe-inspiring. Well, you know how I like to inspire awe (or pass along stuff that inspires awe, if I wasn't clever enough to come up with it myself, ha), so I've popped it in here. I apologize if the pictures are a bit small here, but you should be able to click on them to enlarge them. Hope you enjoy it.

We think Earth is a pretty big place.

In our part of the solar system, it is.

But when compared to some other parts, it isn't.
When you pop in our life-giving Sun, it's even less so.

Beyond our Sun, the universe gets even bigger. Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky.

It is more than 1000 light-years away. NOW how big are we?

It gets better ...

This is a Hubble Telescope Ultra-Deep Field infrared view of countless galaxies that are all billions of light-years away from Earth. This is a close-up of one of the darkest regions of the photo above.
Humbling, isn't it?

NOW how big are we?

How big are the things that are upsetting you today?

KEEP LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE.

A Bright Start

2008-01-01T19:52:00.001-08:00

You know me, right? I'm the girl who'd rather go to the mall than the laundry room any day, and this day was no exception ... let me explain.

We stayed up late last night to welcome in the new year, turning on (and up!) the stereo in the games room, covering the pool table with an old sheet (because I am INSANE about anything bad happening to the gorgeous blue felt), and popping the cute little widgets shaped like champagne magnums (only on the table, please ... if you get it all over the carpet, you will have the pleasure of picking it all up tomorrow, thank you very much). Mark decreed that the darling brats could stay up as late as they liked, but I went to bed about 1:00 (oh, don't start ... you must remember that I'm the oldest member of the household).

I woke up at 7:00 (a false start; I'd been so bright as to neglect to un-set the damned alarm clock), promptly went back to sleep, and then woke for real at 11:00, getting up to feed the little monsters that populate my immediate environment. We just generally hung out till about 2:30, when I realized that the laundry room is a disaster area of the sort that usually comes with a declaration from the governor and a National Guard detail, and decided we'd go shopping so that I wouldn't have to face the horror of sending my children to school naked.

Off to Penn Square Mall we went (Quail Springs Mall is much closer, but Kieran outgrew Baby Gap a couple of years ago, and he needed stuff ... the Gap Kids that used to be at Quail Springs has been gone for a few years now, and the only one left in town is at Penn Square), gift cards and other assorted plastic in hand. Everybody got new duds (including me), K.C. scored a sound-soother that she's been wanting ever since I got mine (it's lovely to sleep through a thunderstorm, except in the springtime, when God's Own Original Light And Sound Show always brings the potential for the blaring of the tornado sirens, a thought that makes it rather difficult to sleep through thunderstorms), and StrideRite enjoyed our visit for many new pairs of footwear for the twins.

After the procurement mission, everyone agreed on Red Robin for supper. The waitress was very nice, and (warning -- Proud Mumma Moment directly ahead) she mentioned more than once how very polite and well-mannered the children are. That is THE coolest thing ... it's almost enough to make me wish everybody else's progeny were little toerags all the time (but only almost).

At home again it was time to do a bit of work in advance of tomorrow's onslaught of phone calls. I've got a buyer in a short sale that isn't ever going to happen, two brothers looking to purchase a "crash pad" (their words, not mine), a listing to do for one of my friends' parents, a really fun client buying his first house, a vast and varied assortment of other realtor-duty clients, and a stack of mortgages (both purchase and refinance). If I get bored by or finished with that list, I suppose I could always go back and clear out the laundry room.

Cheers --

Counting Down

2007-12-31T18:23:00.001-08:00

We're nearly done with the year; there are three hours, thirty-seven minutes remaining as I type this. What have we done? Well, business was good ... we had a great time in England and Paris ... the children are growing like little (and not-so-little) weeds ... our circle of friends has expanded a bit more with the addition of a lovely lady working at one of our favorite stores who just happens to be from the same town as Mark ... elder daughter has decided to live with us and go to DCMS ... there are just so many things for which I'm thankful.

With all the horrible things going on around the world (Bhutto's assassination, the continued waste of American lives and treasure in Iraq, Cheney's thinly-veiled threats toward Iran, genocide in Darfur, hunger and disease and pestilence and famine and so many other horrible tragedies that go on in individual lives every day that never make the news, a dear friend moving to Alabama), I am thinking of how lucky I am.

I have the great good fortune to be married to the man of my dreams, to have three healthy, intelligent children who love and care deeply for others ("They're better than you deserve" is how my mother puts it, and I must admit that I can't argue), to have a job (two, really) that I truly love, to have the warmest, funniest, best friends a girl could ever hope to have, to live in what is unarguably one of the finest nations on the planet (and to have a two-term limit for the idiot who is resident at 1600 Pennsylvania, thank God) ... and for lack of other terms, to have ENOUGH. Any one of these things on its own would be cause for gratefulness on my part; having all of them is nearly overwhelming at times.

In what may or may not wind up being my parting thought of 2007, kindly allow me to share with you (or remind you of) the lyrics that Prince wrote once upon a time. Maybe he was feeling the same way then as I am now, maybe not. Any way you slice it, this sums it up for me at the moment.

Don't sleep 'til the sunrise, listen 2 the falling rain
Don't worry 'bout tomorrow, don't worry 'bout your pain
Don't cry unless you're happy, don't smile unless you're blue
Never let that lonely monster take control of U
Be glad that U r free
Free 2 change your mind
Free 2 go most anywhere, anytime
Be glad that U r free
There's many a man who's not
Be glad 4 what U had baby, what you've got
Be glad 4 what you've got
I know my heart is beating, my drummer tells me so
If U take your life 4 granted, your beating heart will go
So don't sleep until you're guilty, 'cuz sinners all r we
There's others doing far worse than us, so be glad that U r free
Be glad that U r free
Free 2 change your mind
Free 2 go most anywhere, anytime
Be glad that U r free
There's many a man who's not
Be glad 4 what U had baby, what you've got
Be glad 4 what you've got
Soldiers are a marching, they're writing brand new laws
Will we all fight together 4 the most important cause?
Will we all fight 4 the right 2 be free?
Free (Be glad that U r free)
Free 2 change my mind (Free 2 change your mind)
Free 2 go most anywhere, anytime (Free 2 go most anywhere,anytime)
I'm just glad, I'm just glad I'm free, yeah (Be glad that U r free)
There's many a man who's not (There's many a man who's not)
Glad 4 what I had baby, (Be glad 4 what U had and)
Glad 4 what I got, oh yeah (for what you've got)
Oh I'm just glad, I'm just glad I'm free,yeah (Be glad that U r free)
Free 2 change my mind (Free 2 change your mind)
Free 2 go most anywhere, anytime (Free 2 go most anywhere,anytime)
(Be glad that U r free)
(There's many a man who's not)
I'm so... (Be glad 4 what U had and for what you've got)

Best wishes to you and yours for peace, happiness, health, and prosperity in 2008!

Double The Fun!

2007-12-29T06:04:00.001-08:00

Ah, Boxing Day ... and elder daughter's birthday! How could you not have a great time on a day like this (she asked, tongue firmly in cheek)?

K.C. decided a few years ago that it would be a good idea to fetch a good running buddy and go do fun girly things on her birthday rather than have a party at a time when lots of people are out of town. So ... each year she identifies which running buddy she'd like to hang with for the day, and Mumma (that would be me) sets it all up. This year she selected friend Jasmine (known to those who love her as Jazz), the elder daughter of Andrew, one of our English friends. The conspiracy began earlier this month when we were all at a holiday shindig hosted by some Aussie pals (and can I just say that they absolutely had the clue ... all the adults were on the ground floor of their three-story home, with the little girlies in their daughter's room on the next level, and the boys and the older kids at the top in the games/telly room ... we could say whatever we wanted in the kid-free zone without having to look around first or apologize or anything ... great concept!), the idea was hatched, and we were off on our way.

When K.C. asked if Jazz could be the birthday buddy this year, we immediately said yes, of course ... so then she asked if a sleepover could be part of it as well, and we immediately said yes, of course ... so then Kendall (having heard this bit of the chat) asked if Rose (Jazz's little sister) could come for a sleepover too, and we immediately said yes, of course ... so then Kieran (having heard the negotiations thus far and figuring, obviously, that his chances for a similar response were better than average) asked if Haze (Jazz's kid brother) could come and hang and stay as well, and we immediately said yes, of course. (It's one of those things where you're in a festive holiday-spirit sort of mood, and it's not till the next day or later that you realize what you've done and quickly begin stocking up on tranquilizers and alcoholic beverages, which are sure to be the only way you'll get through the night, and silently thank your stars that you haven't got an older son who'd want Jazz's older brother to come and crash as well.)

Boxing Day dawned (kind of) with a snow shower in progress. Undaunted, we set out for Andrew's house, armed with several MapQuest pages (one with general directions, three with the streets in the area in varying degrees of close-up); it turned out to be very straightforward and we found it without any to-do of any kind. Having fetched one participant, and with the promise of returning later for the other two, we set off.

First stop was the bank (clever Mumma had forgotten to stop there before getting on the road to fetch, one of the myriad of benefits to being a blonde ... d u h), and then to Barnes and Noble, where we enjoyed a tasty lunch at the cafe (with Starbucks, yay) and procured some reading material for later use. These basic human requirements met, we zipped over to the mall for the main event.

This is the day spa where we'd booked in for K.C. and Jazz to enjoy manicures, pedicures, and the delights of the shampoo/style (because let's face it, there's not a lot that feels better than having someone else wash your hair).

Being that nail-do items were the primary items on the order of business, the ladies were first detailed to the all-important selection of lacquers for their adornment. (I have to admit that I nixed the idea of any black, purple, or dark blue ... evil me, suppressing the natural urge to express one's teenaged self via goth and goth-esque decoration. Oh well.)

Varnishes well in hand (and soon to be on hand, ha ... yes, I know that was lame, but I *will* have my little joke, so just keep moving, nothing to see here), the pedicures began.

Next was time for the shampoo and style. (I didn't get any photos of the manicures or the initial bit of the hair part, since I was back in one of the massage rooms ... and yes, I know it's not my birthday, but I still claim a bit being as I gave birth after being 16 days overdue). Jazz has lovely hair that is naturally curly, but it looked sleek after the stylist was finished with her. (It's important to note that when we went back to her house to fetch her two younger siblings, her older brother asked what had happened to her hair ... to Jazz's credit, she didn't punch him!)

K.C.'s hair is very thick and straight, so of course she wanted it curled (which doesn't hold very long because of the weight of her hair). Isn't that how it always goes?

We shopped for a little while, thinking that K.C. could spend some of the gift cards that she got for Christmas (clever girl, she always wants gift cards because she knows I'll take her to the mall on the 26th and she can buy exactly what she wants - and twice as much of it), but it seemed that everybody else in town and their third cousin from Peoria were already in the stores that she liked, so we left and went to Target to procure fun things to eat for the evening and a birthday cake. (See notes on birthday cake below.)

After Target, we headed back to Jazz's house to fetch Rose and Haze (and met the eldest, Ash, who was quite pleasant). Then, once everyone had been secured in the Big Blue Truck, we went to Mazzio's to pick up pizza, and then back to our house to let the odyssey begin.

Jazz and K.C.

Haze and Kieran

Rose and Kendall

Right, so now about the cake. While we were at Target, the elder girls were way less than impressed with the selection of cakes available in the bakery cold-case. To be honest, the variety wasn't very big (there were exactly three half-sheets and two quarter-sheets) and the color themes were quite limited (two of the half-sheets and both of the quarter-sheets were done in red-and-green Christmas bits, and the other half-sheet was a Baby Einstein caterpillar). Therefore, they met with no resistance from me when they decided to bake the cake themselves, especially since Jazz promised they would tidy the kitchen after making it. All my unvoiced concerns turned out to be for naught (I LOVE it when that happens!) and the cake turned out to be both beautiful (in a rather interesting sort of way) and delicious. (The kitchen was spotless too ... I walked in to find Jazz on her knees scrubbing the floor!)

Jazz is rather a brilliant artist (as well as being a top-notch student, a great cook, and just a very wonderful all-around human being). Her birthday gift to K.C. was a picture that she'd painted herself, having been inspired by the "Particle Man" video by They Might Be Giants. The picture is of Particle Man, Triangle Man, Universe Man, and Person Man. (I'm told that one might find the music video on YouTube, should one be interested in viewing it for oneself.)

We sent Kendall and Rose to bed about 12:30 (yes, that's AM, but this is Christmas break, and it's not like they had anywhere to be the next day). Kieran and Haze sacked out somewhere around 1:00, and K.C. and Jazz tell me they last looked at the clock somewhere between 2:00 and 2:30 (it was after Jazz and I had made some sausage rolls so she'd know how). The next morning was nearly silent until 11:00 or thereabouts, when little cuties began rolling into the kitchen to have pizza for breakfast. We played all day, until around 4:00, when good-byes were said, and our guests and I piled back into the Big Blue Truck to take them home. It was really a wonderful time for everyone, and even Mark and I enjoyed it. I can honestly say that for a while I wondered what the hell I'd let my big mouth get me into, but as it happened, everything was most delightful. All of the children were well-behaved and well-mannered, everyone slept well, and to top it all off, the tranquilizers and alcohol went untouched. I haven't heard how Andrew spent an evening truly on his own, but we all had such a lovely time that Mark and I have no qualms about repeating the night again sometime soon!

Christmas Evening

2007-12-25T21:28:00.000-08:00

This evening we went over to friends Sean and Mary's house. They'd lost power earlier in the day but it had been restored by the time we got there (with of course no clue as to why it had gone out in the first place ... thanks, OG&E ... I thought monopolies were illegal? Oh well), so the lights were bright and the fellowship was warm (although that would have been so even if the power hadn't come back on).

Mark's gift from Sean and Mary was a lovely big bottle of vodka, which he cracked open straightaway to enjoy (mine is a huge bottle of Chambord, which is really nice when mixed with a sweet white wine - think Riesling - and consumed very quickly, resulting in a total inability to do anything requiring sobriety in about half the time of normal drinks).

Here is Sean, always a gracious host, and especially festive today ... the sequins give him a really delightful Graham Norton look that is sure to be the envy of at least two nations once this gets posted ...

Mary is Sean's lovely wife (and the origin of the yummy sausage roll recipe). She had surgery on her hand last week, poor lamb, but is recuperating well in very stylish jammies!

This is Wilfried. He's not really cross-eyed, but he *is* French ... 'nuff said. (Je sais, je sais, ferme ta bouche! Quelle surprise ... quelle dommage! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha)
Elder daughter was counting the hours left until midnight and her birthday, but seemed to have a nice time too, especially since her boots made her taller than me.

Here are Emma, Kieran, and Kendall, who are not far apart in age and always enjoy hanging out together. (Notice the girls have matching smiles!)

This is Cole, who turned 3 last month. He is a man of few words, but he and Kieran had fun playing Don't Break The Ice and making (and destroying) different sorts of towers with the Jenga blocks.

This is Cole's mum, Jeannie, who works with Sean and Mary at the OMRF. She allegedly gives really good foot rubs!

After the visit, we drove around for a while looking at (the utter lack of) Christmas lights on houses on the way home. It was after 10:00, so maybe folks had them turned off, but wouldn't you think that Christmas would be THE DAY to have Christmas lights on?

As I finish writing this, I'm yawning my head off and (almost) regretting that last glass of wine. Goodnight ... hope your Christmas was wonderful!

Christmas (Un)Wrapping

2007-12-25T11:10:00.000-08:00

The brats actually let us sleep till 8:00 this morning! They came bouncing in, the three of them, filled with smiles and shouts and giggles. Poor kids ... their mean parents weren't quite ready to wake up yet, so we made them pile in bed with us and watch TV for about half an hour before saying it was time to go see what had transpired overnight in the living room.

Within a half hour, chaos reigned.

Still no word on how all that's going to get tidied up, but no matter. It's Christmas!

Kymber (also known as K.C. to those of us who've known her all her life) got a JVC system with a wicked subwoofer (her mother's daughter *g*) through which she can play her iPod, a game for her Nintendo DS, a book and book-light, and gift cards to American Eagle, Aeropostale, Claire's, and Bath & Body Works.

Kieran got a gaming chair (you plug the Nintendo DS into it; there are speakers on either side of the headrest, and you can either set it straight on the floor and rock in it or attach a pedestal), a bunch of Star Wars figures, books on Star Wars and dinosaurs, some winter weather gear, and a new game for his Nintendo DS.

Kendall also got a gaming chair and a game for her Nintendo DS, plus a Barbie and a bunch of Barbie clothes, two fairy books, some cold-weather wear, and a toy veterinarian set with a cute little puppy-dog.

Of course, all three monsters scored big on the candy from Santa, who also brought them each a gift card from Gap ... guess he knows how they like to shop.

Mark got a nice-sized wad of cash (cleverly disguised as a deposit into his golf account for spending as he sees fit). Santa brought him some more cash (there's a rumor that the cash was actually supposed to be gift cards to Buffalo Wild Wings but due to licensing arrangements these can't be produced at the North Pole, and by the time he got to BWW they were all out of the cards) and some chocolate golf balls.

I got the pleasure of seeing smiles and hearing laughs from my husband and children, the promise of having to clean up the mess, and some lovely memories! In my stocking were a couple of books and some tasty lip gloss. Oh, and I got this ...My friend Mary gave me her recipe for sausage rolls, so I decided to try making them for breakfast. They came out really well and are (if I might say so myself) very tasty!

We're off to visit some friends shortly, where there will be more gifts and smiles and laughter and the lifting of beverages to toast the day.

I hope most sincerely that your Christmas is filled with warmth, light, laughter, and love. If you're missing a loved one because s/he is Over There, please know that we will raise a glass to them and send up our most fervent hopes for their safe return to you. If you're far away from your family, maybe today's the day to go make some new friends and create some traditions all your own. Most of all, though, here's wishing for peace on earth and goodwill to everyone.

Christmas hugs to you and yours from me and mine!

And I Thought "Pre" Meant "Before"

2007-12-24T17:16:00.000-08:00

Monday afternoon I went to the Hallmark web site to pop an e-card off to some folks. I expected to see sale advertising (it is, after all, "that time of year"). I did *not* expect this, though ...

Oh, where do I begin?

Do "pre" and "after" cancel each other out, leaving only a Christmas Sale? What does George Carlin have to say about this? Is it something to include in future oxymoron lists? How is anybody advertising an after-Christmas sale before Christmas? Come on, everybody knows that we all take a 36-hour breather (from 6 p.m. on the 24th to 6 a.m. on the 26th) and then revisit the frenzy with one hand full of gift cards and the other holding bags with gift receipts for the god-awful sweater or pinafore or blouse or whatever that our favorite spinster aunts bestowed upon us. Since when does Christmas Eve count as a day to advertise what's next? I don't know about where you are, but our local rag (the Daily Disappointment or the Daily Joke-lahoman, depending on who's doing the telling) is crammed full of circulars on Christmas, all wishing us the happiest of holidays in teensy type in the upper left corner while "DON'T MISS THIS SALE! DOORBUSTER SPECIALS TILL 9 A.M. ONLY!" is shrieked at us in 32-point Helvetica. As one last snide aside ... I ventured out to the mall after seeing this, and after enquiring was informed that the Pre-After-Christmas Sale was only for online shoppers (not available in actual stores staffed by actual people who actually live in your same area code). Nothing purchased online today would ship today; nothing would arrive until Thursday at the earliest. How sad. Somebody's marketing department needs a bit of Zoloft!

Happy Xmas

2007-12-24T07:11:00.000-08:00

(Thanks, John.)

So this is Xmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Xmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young
A very Merry Xmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Xmas (war is over)
For weak and for strong (if you want it)
For rich and the poor ones (war is over)
The world is so wrong (if you want it)
And so happy Xmas (war is over)
For black and for white (if you want it)
For yellow and red ones (war is over)
Let's stop all the fight (now)
A very Merry Xmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Xmas (war is over)
And what have we done (if you want it)
Another year over (war is over)
A new one just begun (if you want it)
And so happy Xmas (war is over)
We hope you have fun (if you want it)
The near and the dear one (war is over)
The old and the young (now)
A very Merry Xmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now
Happy Xmas

Relief.

2007-12-20T20:43:00.001-08:00

UPDATE: It turns out that the little post the temporary crown was hanging on had broken into five pieces, which is what caused the abscess. Dear Dr. Lars dug them all out of my jaw, cleaned out the pit, and sutured it shut to heal (without once saying "yuck" or "gross" or excusing himself to have a big heave). He then proceeded to bond a cute little tooth-esque widget in so that there's not some big funky hole, and explained to me with all due gravity that I must ingest the antibiotic four times daily or risk not only not getting better, but actually getting worse. I may not drink from a straw for at least a week; I must cut way down on tobacco intake with an eye toward the Q-word (that's Q-U-I-T -- shudder); I must not bite into anything with my front teeth.

My face is nearly back to normal (except for the right side of my top lip, which seems a bit stupid still, but I'm sure it will pass) and the pain is almost always controllable with a lesser amount of Darvocet and some ibuprofen. I really feel much better now!

Thanks, Lars! : )

Toothache (and Major Ick Warning)

2007-12-13T18:38:00.001-08:00

Warning.

Danger, Will Robinson.

There is some serious gross-out further down in this post.

I won't get upset if you choose to stop now, I promise.

One bright and shiny day when I was 10, I got into a bike race with one of the boys from down the street. (There were only four kids in the neighborhood ... my kid brother and me, and two brothers down the way.) I was actually winning, and turned my head to look over my left shoulder to see just how far behind he was. Unfortunately, my hands/arms moved in opposition, and I steered without looking bang into a curb. From there, I was catapulted ass-over-teakettle into the precious little rock garden out in front of the house three doors down from ours, where I landed face-first on some lovely big sharp-ish rocks, breaking off one of my "grown-up" teeth at the gumline. The pediatric dentist slapped some dental Bond-O kind of stuff on it and said, "That oughta hold it for a while."

Seventeen years later, I had a massive toothache. It seems that although whatever my parents paid that dentist was likely one of the best deals they ever got as far as I was concerned, the roots of the injured tooth had spent all this time gunking. The dentist I saw in my late 20s thought at first that it might be a tumor when she saw it on the panoramic X-ray, but no, it was just a really big abscess, cause for the first of many root canals on that tooth.

Flash forward to now. I've got a crown on that tooth, and it's been bugging me for the last couple of months. (Yeah, it's a temporary crown that's been there for three years and was supposed to be changed to a permanent one three months after the temporary was done, but when you have three children and eight companies and God knows how many clients plus household stuff like laundry and dishes and cooking and paying bills and such, you tend to kind of put yourself last most of the time. I kept meaning to get it fixed to the perm one, but never did. Here's my catalyst, though.)

This damn tooth has been hurting somewhat for at least three weeks. I've been able to keep everything on an even keel by ingesting copious amounts of Tylenol and Motrin, but yesterday was just more than I could take (or more than the meds could knock back, whichever). I made an appointment to see an after-hours-only dentist recommended to me by my dear friend Wendy The Title Goddess; I rang her on Tuesday afternoon but the first spot she had was Thursday evening. I lived through Wednesday, but only just.

Thursday morning I woke up to a really wild surprise. (PLEASE make sure you are seated and have put down all beverages.) It ain't pretty, and it ain't comfy. (Ick Warning!!) This is another massive abscess ... and it's broken through whatever little membrane there is between the roots of each tooth and escaped into the canine tooth region, which is how it got all up under my eye, over my top lip, and over my cheekbone to within about an inch of my ear. Worst of all, it makes me look old and tired and not very happy.

I called my friend Lars. Lars is a prosthodontist (a prosthodontist is a dentist who specializes in prosthodontics, the specialty of implant, esthetic and reconstructive dentistry ... cosmetic dentistry, implants and joint problems all fall under the field of prosthodontics). I 'splained to him like I've 'splained to you, and he bade me show up pronto-pup-quick, which I did. I got lovely nitrous oxide and four shots -- two to numb, one to numb and to kill infection, and one just to kill infection -- and Lars started carving. I already knew I was one of the weirdest people on the planet, and you guys know it too, but add in to your standing knowledge the fact that I LOVE ROOT CANALS and you'll see just how off I truly am. Lars is going to fix the whole thing over time (the "Rome wasn't built in a day" theory -- and he's not jerking me for cash, either ... today's enterprise only cost me very little, including the X-rays, and I was there for nigh on three hours), and I will (hopefully) have the smile I've never had but always wanted.

Lars has a son, Harrison, who was in Kendall's kindergarten class last year and is in Kieran's Cub Scout den this year. Lars is the committed grown-up that comes to the meetings with Harrison, so I know him pretty well from that. His wife Vicki is one of the most wonderful women I've ever had the pleasure to know (and privilege of calling friend); she was the class mom for Kendall's class last year, is a class mom again this year, and helped me host a baby shower in October for Mrs. Crain (Kendall and Harrison's kindergarten teacher, who had twins to add to her two other children). She is a hoot and a love and I adore her. The picture below is of Lars and Harrison at our first Cub Scout meeting; the picture after that is of Vicki (she's on the left; Rachel is on the right in orange, and she's another gloriously cool woman, but that's another story for another time).

So ... now I feel a little bit better. The swelling is still fairly pronounced, and I can still feel the mass of pus (and it moves around, which is beyond gross ... but if it moves up too close to my eye, it squishes tears out of the tear ducts, so I have to encourage it further south toward my nose ... eeeuuuwww factor 200), but the Darvocet is helping and I'm going to bed soon.

Much love to all of you ... sorry about the photos ... hopefully I'll have another picture to send you in a year or so with me sporting a brilliant, dazzling smile!

Paradoxical Juxtapositioning

2007-12-12T05:37:00.000-08:00

You know how I feel about the fundamentalist evangelicals, right? I think that being moral is fine, but being moralistic is not. I think that having good judgment is great, but being judgmental is not. I think that the sheer smarmy quotient of "We're not perfect, we're just forgiven" is beyond thwap-worthy. Most of all, though, I honestly and truly believe that these folks are in for an extremely nasty shock when they finally get to meet Saint Peter and are told that they had it all wrong.

So then factor all of that (literally) holier-than-thou mess into the Presidential campaign, and see how certain kids are truly pandering to these folks. But, one might wonder to oneself as one slogs away at the campaign offices of one of these fine Republicans, how do we tell who amongst the voters is also amongst our base? Which of these masses might be one of our core consitutents, so to speak? Well, I'm glad you asked that ... your friendly intrepid blonde has just the guide to help. (Any of you cute kids who want to print this out and keep it in your wallet next to that stuff you have to render unto Caesar for the sake of handiness, feel free.)

With a tip of the hat to Daniel DiRito at The All Spin Zone!

The Top Ten Ways to Identify
An Evangelical Republican

10. They're opposed to sectarian conflict in Iraq but in favor of sectarian politics in the United States.

9. They're opposed to homosexuality and same-sex relationships but they'll vote for a presidential candidate who does drag and lived with two gay men if he can beat Hilary Clinton and her "typically" unfaithful heterosexual husband.

8. They wouldn't dare vote for a Clinton given Bill's disgraceful sexual antics in the White House but they're happy to support a candidate who used New York City funds to carry on an adulterous affair.

7. They criticize Democratic candidates for suggesting they would only nominate pro-choice judges to uphold the law of the land while they require their own candidates to pass religious litmus tests in conflict with the law of the land.

6. They're in favor of abstinence only sex education even though it leads to more unwed teen pregnancies and more parent sponsored abortions (call it the evangelical version of NIMBY - not in my back yard; NIMBU - not in my babygirl's uterus).

5. They're in favor of the separation of church and state if it involves opposing a congressional inquiry into the fundraising and spending habits of leading televangelists but opposed to the separation when it comes to selecting a presidential nominee.

4. They support candidates who endorse more funding for AIDS in Africa while embracing a candidate who favored quarantining AIDS patients in America as well as having Hollywood fund AIDS research instead of the government.

3. They tout Ronald Reagan as their political icon despite the fact that he was unable to acknowledge the toll of HIV on gays in America or even utter the word AIDS ... while they and their churches now run around talking about saving Africa from the ravages of HIV ... as long as it doesn't involve condoms.

2. They talk about their Christian values while they favor denying health care treatment to the children of illegal immigrants. Family values apparently stop at the water's edge (that would be the Rio Grande river).

1. They'll never make enough money to truly benefit from George Bush's tax cuts for the rich or condemn his doubling of the national debt but they're happy to call the Democratic candidates who support an increase in minimum wage and favor a national health care system unacceptable tax and spend liberals.

Bonus Qualifier: They abhor the fact that Jesus was tortured, mocked, and condemned to death without due process but they're damn sure in favor of waterboarding and disregarding the principle of habeas corpus while indefinitely imprisoning war-on-terror detainees.

So put that in your oxymoron pipe and smoke it (along with the tobaccos labeled "Compassionate Conservative" and "Moral Majority" and "Religious Right").

The Day The Sub-Prime Died

2007-12-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

This is sooooo funny ... okay, maybe it isn't something *everyone* can understand, but it's not exactly the kind of thing limited to industry inside-insiders. I can post definitions for whatever somebody doesn't get, if you want, but for now, just sing this to the tune of Don McLean's "American Pie" ...

The Day the Sub-Prime Died

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that yield spread used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
All those mo-fos I could finance
And I could pay my bills off for a while

But then September made me shiver
With every good faith I'd deliver
Bad news on my e-mail
I just lost one more sale

I can't remember if I cried
When I saw the Fremont start to slide
But something touched me deep inside
The day the Sub-Prime died

So bye-bye, B\C money supply
Sent my package to four lenders
But they all asked me "Why?"
And those good old boys were on a crack induced high
Singin', "This'll be the day the loans die ...
This'll be the day the loans die."

Did you write some B\C loans?
Did you blow bucks on an iPhone?
Did that nut Cramer tell you so?
Do you believe in rate control?
Can FHA save your buyer's soul?
Why is underwriting today so damn slow?

Well, I know you'll have to cut those fees
And you're wondering who has moved your cheese
Bernanke's on the news
You can't afford the MBA dues

I was a semi-rich middle-aged broncin' buck
With a lead generator and a lot of pluck
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the Sub-Prime died

So bye-bye, B\C money supply
Sent my package to four lenders
But they all asked me "Why?"
And those good old boys were on a crack induced high
Singin', "This'll be the day the loans die."

Less Than Zero

2007-11-28T07:02:00.000-08:00

So I get this email yesterday:

-----Original Message-----
From: Senator Jim Inhofe inhofe@jiminhofe.com
To: UNDISCLOSED-RECIPIENT
Sent: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 9:56 am
Subject: I'm proud of my zeros.

Dear Friend,

Zero?!!

If I had come home from school with a zero on my report card, my mother would have been none too pleased! But these days I'm proud of my zeroes and other low scores.

That's because they aren't school grades, they're congressional vote ratings from various liberal special interest groups.

I think you'll agree getting a zero is a good grade... I've received zeroes from these ultra-liberal groups and others:
NARAL Pro-Choice America
the National Education Association
the American Immigration Lawyers Association
the Human Rights Campaign
Planned Parenthood

Of course, the opposite is also true. These are the scores that would have put a big smile on my mother's face...perfect scores of 100 from, among others:
the American Conservative Union
the National Right to Life Committee
the Christian Coalition
the American Security Council
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
the League of Private Property Voters
the National Rifle Association (I got an A+)
Americans for Tax Reform
the Family Research Council

I don't stick my finger into the wind to decide how to vote. I don't look at polls or run "focus groups." I vote on solid, conservative principles: limited government, free enterprise, individual liberty, a strong national defense, and traditional family values.

If you agree with me on these issues, and if you agree a "zero" from these liberal groups is a good thing, please help me keep fighting for you by signing up to volunteer in my reelection campaign today.

Please visit http://tracking.technomania.com/cgi-bin/track.cgi?11-11448-205099-49015 to learn more and to join as the newest member of Team Inhofe. We need to build the biggest and best grassroots team to win, and I'm counting on your support.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email. If you are no longer interested in receiving contact from my campaign, please feel free to click the unsubscribe link below.

Sincerely,
Jim Inhofe
United States Senator

Paid for by Friends of Jim Inhofe

Well, you guys know me ... here's my reply.

Dear Senator Inhofe,

I appreciate your excitement at getting zeroes from certain groups. However, those are groups that I support either by being a member or by regular donations both of time and of treasure. I therefore don't agree that your zero grades from them are anything about which to be overjoyed.

I'm not sure why you would be ecstatic about getting a zero grade from the National Education Association. Our teachers are some of the hardest-working people in America, and they are in our schools with our children because they truly care about our nation's future (let's face it, they certainly aren't there for the financial rewards). I know several teachers in our school district (Deer Creek, one of the "richest" in the state) who regularly pay from their own pockets for necessary supplies and rewards to promote their charges' thorough comprehension of the subject material. America pays its sports icons more in a year than most teachers will make in a lifetime; isn't there something wrong with that? Our educators struggle with decreasing budgets to meet increasing test-score requirements, and yet you cheer at the NEA saying you support them less than nearly everyone else in the Senate.

NARAL promotes a woman's right to choose and have control over her own body; it, along with Planned Parenthood, fosters education with regard to contraceptives and choices, and supports the availability of birth control to women of all social and economic backgrounds. If abortion were not legal in America, hundreds of women would die each year as a result of botched back-alley abortion attempts. Until such time as legislators come up with a way to ensure that men meet the financial responsibilities that accompany parenthood without fail and without delay or subterfuge, criminalizing abortion shouldn't even be a topic of discussion. As long as the termination of an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy is legal, it will be safe. Just because abortion is legal doesn't mean every woman facing an unwanted pregnancy is rushing out to get one; it just means that the choice is available to them. It would not be completely outside the realm of logic to state that men should have no voice in an abortion decision until men are becoming pregnant and facing the choice themselves.

The Human Rights Campaign seeks the establishment and enforcement of equal rights for all Americans without regard to sexual identity or preference. All of us are human, Senator, and we all long to love and be loved. The continued oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans is nothing short of unconscionable; it belongs in the past with oppression based on one's gender and the color of one's skin. Anything less won't do.

I'm sure by now you've determined that while I am one of your constituents, I am not one of your supporters. To be honest, Senator, over the last few years you've made rather vocal pronouncements that have made me cringe. The Republican Party is not what it was under Lincoln, sir, and America is dangerously off-course, due in large part to the GOP's "compassionate conservatives" who are certainly the latter but not at all the former. Surely the Christian Coalition is aware of the Commandment that Jesus proclaimed as the highest: "Love thy neighbor." For you to receive failing marks from the nation's educators, advocates of those who would become Americans, and a group seeking to ensure that everyone is free from oppression doesn't speak terribly well of you and suggests that you pay enough lip service to Christian values to get the Christian vote, but that you are ignoring the man for whom the movement is named.

Sincerely,
Donna Sowerby
Oklahoma City, OK

(I got a mailer-daemon ... guess he's not ready to hear from me yet. How very representative of his ilk, though ... "I'll stuff my views up under your nose so you can't help but know them, yet I'm absolutely not interested in what YOU think"!!)

Christmas Before Thanksgiving ... Argh!

2007-11-20T22:08:00.000-08:00

Usually, I'm the kind of girl that gets downright narky when I walk into a store before Thanksgiving and see Christmas stuff on display and for sale (unless it's a place like Hobby Lobby, and then I understand that some people make gifts, so there it's okay). Today, however, after the children got home from school, Mark and I were facing the question that plagues so many families ... "What do you want to do?" "I don't know, what do YOU want to do?"

This kind of discussion can go anywhere ... but on this occasion, it ended at Home Depot. A weird place to end? Sometimes, sure, but not this time. My brilliant idea was to go look for a new Christmas tree. The one we've had since our first Christmas in this house is 12 feet tall and is a major pain in the posterior to put up, light up, decorate, and take down ... as a result, there have been more years than not when we've just left it up all year. Back in May when it finally got stuffed back into its boxes and shoved back into the storage shed, we made a shaky sort of agreement that maybe this year we'd get a new one that wasn't such a hassle.

A review of a few websites showed that none of the artificial trees available this year in the usual places really grabbed us. Mark was bemoaning the lack of any truly outstanding choices, when I said (totally without thinking, as is my wont) that the only real alternative (besides not having a tree at all, which is NOT an option when you have three children) was a *real* tree. Mark's face lit up like -- well, like a Christmas tree, and he said that would be just the thing. We'd do it this year, and if it proved more of a bummer than not, we'd buy a new artificial one next year.

The children, of course, were all in favor. I haven't had a live Christmas tree since I was a wee lass, and I had only vague memories of going with Daddy to find one that was more Christmas-y than Charlie Brown-esque, so after a telephone consultation with Mom, I rang the local Coit's Root Beer place. They always had a stand at NW Expressway and Meridian, although I couldn't remember seeing it there in recent years (perhaps because I wasn't really looking for it). The nice lady that answered the phone told me they'd start selling them on Friday ... but damitol, I'm an instant-gratification American, and I wanted it TODAY! Mark popped up a search and found that Home Depot sells real trees, so I rang them and found that yes, they had some available for purchase as soon as we could get there.

We got a really nice Douglas fir, six feet seven inches tall (the guys measured it to make sure it would be okay tied to the top of the big blue Expedition on the way home). We popped in to Target and bought some new lights and a new star for the top, and here is the result ...

It smelled so delicious, and looked so lovely (even though it shed about a pound of needles between the door and its spot in the living room ... note to self: buy a new dustbuster) that I decided to bring out The Bald Santas.

The Bald Santas are So Very Special to me, it may be difficult for me to explain.

My maternal grandfather (Thomas Emmett McGee, jr. ... but forever known to his grandchildren as Ho-De-Ho) was bald, and loved Christmas. He died in February 1978. At some point, my grandmother began collecting bald Santa figures, because they made her think of Ho-De-Ho. She would get them out every Christmas, and we little darlings were admonished not to touch them lest they be irreparably harmed (and while I couldn't swear in court that we never laid a finger on any of them, I don't believe any of them ever came to an unnatural or untimely end at our hands). When I got older (notice I didn't say "grew up" ... *g*), I bought a few for her at Christmas time, but they're very difficult to find, so there weren't many. When she gave up her apartment in the senior community where she lives and moved into the assisted living wing, she couldn't take all of the stuff she'd kept with her after selling her house. I am the lucky one to have inherited The Bald Santas, because in her words, I was the only one who seemed to care about them. I've not brought them out since receiving them, because I would be the one admonishing my little angels not to touch them lest they be irreparably harmed, but tonight I felt like it would be okay. I fetched the bags from where they were stored, and began to tell my children about our Ho-De-Ho and why we have The Bald Santas. Tears began rolling down my face (as they're doing again now), and I hoped my Ho-De-Ho could see that the family tradition is being continued.

So ... Wednesday morning is work, Wednesday afternoon is shopping and a bit of preliminary cooking, Wednesday evening is a bit more work, and Wednesday night is tree decorating. We've got friends and family coming over for Thanksgiving dinner, and while we've had people over for the last couple of years for the event, for some reason this is the first time I'm really looking forward to it.

Opting Out

2007-11-19T07:23:00.000-08:00

So the other day I open an email from someone that I like a lot ... let's call her Lola, just to keep her nice and anonymous (and because I don't know anybody named Lola, and because it's one of the best Kinks songs ever). Lola's the kind of girl whose convictions go very deep. She and I have an agreement not to discuss sports (she's a Sooner, I'm a Cowboy), politics (she's a Republican, I'm a Democrat), or religion (she's an evangelical fundamentalist, and I'm ... not). Our children play happily together -- indeed, we've known each other since before any of them were born -- and everything's good in the neighborhood.

OR IS IT??

Like all the rest of us who have email inboxes, Lola gets emails from time to time that she shares with other people. Sometimes she sends them to me, and that's where this story starts.

During the 2004 presidential election, Lola sent out a mass email that had a rather indignant tone; it seems that one candidate's wife had the temerity to say that the other candidate's wife hadn't ever held an RJ (that's Real Job for ye uninitiated). Lola took umbrage with this for a wide variety of reasons. However, there was more to it that I thought Lola must not have heard yet, and I wanted to draw her attention to it. In my job, I must tell several people the same thing at the same time, so I'm prone to click "reply all" and then go about the telling ... and that's what I did this time, too. Lola and I went back and forth for a little while, and then it seems that someone on Lola's mailing list decided they didn't need to be privy to our squabble. Lola then emailed me and told me to stop sending mail to everyone on "her" list, because they were getting irritated. I sent out a quick apology to the list in question, and ceased and desisted.

Flash forward a bit to spring 2006, and here's Lola sending out another mass email with yet another subject that I found narrowly construed. I composed an epic and once again clicked "reply all" ... equal time, right? Wrong! Lola sent another email, incredibly huffy in nature and tone, telling me that I was spamming her friends and that I should stop immediately. (I did ponder the thought that she'd spammed me first, but only briefly.) I mentioned that if her friends were that important to her, she'd either use the blind-copy feature for the outgoing email or leave me off the list.

Everything was hunky-dory for a while, and then last week, another mass email appears from Lola. Did she blind-copy everyone? No! Not wanting to engage in a war of words at a time when work and children and life in general have me quite busy, I sent back an email asking her to PLEASE either blind-copy everyone or just stop sending me emails of this nature! The email in question was a forward of some drivel that allegedly came out of Ben Stein on some Sunday morning talking-head show ... and it wasn't that said drivel is something that mutates and morphs from being mostly real to containing only shreds of truth, it was that I'd held up my end of the bargain by NOT hitting "reply all" but Lola couldn't hold up hers by not sending me this crap (or at least not sending me all her friends' email addresses in the bargain).

The email that started this round was a variation of the one you can find here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/benstein2.asp

Lola emailed back:

"fine - I'm not sure I understand what you're objecting to though. I am confused that you seem to think our Chrisitan views are different - all Christians believe the same thing I thought. You do still believe don't you? Just asking cause I love you."

ARGH. I couldn't take it any more. Here is my reply:

I hope I can put this in a way that won't come across as offensive, but I'll give it a try, with apologies in advance in case I fail miserably!

I object to the idea that the whole world is against Christianity. It isn't. What it's against is the persecution of any one faith or creed. Nobody likes to be bullied or shouted down or made to feel as though their beliefs aren't valid just because they're different from yours.

I object to the notion that pop culture has replaced basic morality for everyone who doesn't go to church and/or wear their faith on their sleeve. It hasn't. What it has done is given people a common point of experience, and I think the writer of the original email objects to "Nick and Jessica" (which in and of itself should tell you how bloody old it is) and secular humanism replacing sectarianism.

I object to an email that says that atheism is being shoved down our collective national throat because the Constitution says it should be so. It doesn't. It also doesn't say that Christians get to shove their religion down the throats of anyone who isn't possessed of their same system of beliefs.

I object to claims that aren't true (Dr. Spock had two sons, both of whom are still alive and kicking) but get passed all around anyhow because they're about God and someone might think we're awful if we *don't* send them along.

All Christians do have one basic similar belief, that being the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God and the promised Messiah. Beyond that, all bets are pretty much off, aren't they? Baptism is done when you're a baby, unless you have to wait until you're old enough to confess with your own tongue, and it's done by sprinkling water on your forehead, unless you have to be dunked all the way under in a huge tub of water. Communion is an imitation of the Last Supper -- bread to represent the body of Christ (unless it's crackers or wafers) and red wine to represent the blood (unless it's grape juice). Women can be senior ministers (unless they can't), but they can't wear jewelry or make-up and they must wear skirts all the time and they can't cut their hair. Only men must lead the church, and they may not marry (unless they can). That's not even scratching the surface, either. Add in so many different "translations" of the Bible, and it's no wonder people get confused.

What I believe isn't at issue here, and it's truly none of your business anyhow. I don't lie, and I don't cheat, and I don't steal ... in short, I do my best to comply with the notes that Moses allegedly brought down from the mountain (although I must admit to being human and boffing up royally once in a while). Since you asked, though, I'll tell you. I don't go to church because I don't think God made me so stupid as to have to be told what to think. The last few times I've been in a church for a service other than a wedding, christening, or funeral, I was told to dig deep and vote for this one or that one and to shun the other ones because they want to destroy America. I don't believe that, and even if I were so gullible as to fall for it, I don't think it's the pulpit's duty to engage in that sort of coercion. (Yes, it is too coercion, because it implies that if I don't do as I'm told by that human being up there, I'm on the fast-track to hell no matter what else I do.) I take the Bible with a whole cup of salt (maybe it's Lot's wife?) because a bunch of men got together at the Council of Nicaea and decided that this bit of writing will go in, but not that one. (Ever notice there are exactly two books written by women in the Bible? What about the Gnostic Gospels and the Nag Hammadi scrolls? The Apocrypha? What are they, chopped liver?) I also take issue with it because it was mostly retold legend until somebody wrote it down, and it's been translated and "revised" umpteen zillion times until it's watered down and says exactly what some certain bit of "Christianity" wants it to say. And really, how about folks like Oral and Richard Roberts, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson? Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack van Impe? Oh, and my current favorite, Ted "I am not gay and I didn't have sex with a guy and he's lying except for the part where he says I bought meth from him and used it with him" Haggard. What in the world is all that about, anyhow? Send me all your money so I can promote the Lord's work (right after I buy a nice new Rolls Royce and a massive house and a new mink for my wife and pay off the city council and that cute little honey I hung out with at the convention a few years ago) ... yeah, super. What I believe doesn't matter; it's what I *don't* believe that matters.

I don't object to getting email from you, just like you don't object to getting email from me. I know, though, that if I send you something going on about how the conservatives are doing nothing but enriching themselves and their cronies while trashing the environment and killing our sons and daughters in an illegal and unjust war and lying and stealing and cheating and perverting the Constitution (and W *did* say it was a "goddamned piece of paper" ... so put that in your "he's such a wonderful God-fearing man" pipe and smoke it) to pursue and achieve their own selfish ends, you're going to throw a hissy fit of the first order.

It's about RESPECT, my friend, which you seem to only want to receive, although (in your own terms) it is more blessed to give.

Just learn to use the fucking BCC feature, would you? Pretty please? That's all I asked.

Hope you and the family are well ... love you muchly, see you soon!

Love,
Donna

So why am I posting this here? Because I don't think Lola cares enough to bother reading through my reply, that's why. It seems that the right-wing types only want to say their piece and aren't all that fussed about anyone else's views or feelings. If you're sick of people shoving their religion down your throat, perhaps you could use some of these arguments next time you get into it with someone who's determined to convert you. Good luck.

On Running Oneself Ragged

2007-10-02T07:14:00.000-07:00

Twenty-four hours ... one thousand four hundred forty minutes ... eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds. That's all any of us has in a day. What we do in that time is up to us (well, to an extent). Cram in as much as you like, use a shoehorn if necessary; just make sure that what you do is done well and with your whole heart. Otherwise, what's the point?

Lately I've been stacking up commitments left, right, and sideways. For instance, son Kieran is now a Tiger Cub Scout ... which requires an "adult partner" ... which is, of course, me. (Oh, and I'm one of the den leaders, too.)

Daughter Kendall sooooo enjoys her ballet classes! She's quite the little performer, and she seeks to "make an impact" on people around her whether she's onstage or off. (I'm not totally convinced that she doesn't go through it all just for the flowers, though!)

And so where's the "me" time, you ask? Well, let's think that one through. I have the Realtor thing going on, which requires that I physically go and show houses, write contracts, facilitate inspections, attend closings, and such like that. I do the mortgage goddess dance too, in which a lot can be accomplished by phone, but I must meet up with clients at least twice in most cases (that's once to sign application documents and once at closing). On Mondays we have Kendall's ballet right after school and Cub Scouts of an evening, with supper shoved down somewhere in between. Weekdays during normal business hours, I'm expected to answer the phones and get loans done; weekdays after hours and weekends I'm supposed to be showing properties or holding open houses or something of that nature. Add in the June Cleaver stuff (cooking, cleaning, and laundry - not that I do any of those things with any sort of regularity), and I have to schedule things like eating and sleeping. (Thank goodness I can breathe while doing other stuff!)

Yes, I am busy beyond belief most of the time. Yes, I collapse every night and mentally chastise myself for things that I meant to do/should have done during that day but didn't. Yes, I fret about not exercising enough and not cooking for my family and not doing so many "typical mommy" things. It's all for the greater good, though (thanks, Grindelwald), or at least that's the line I use to pacify myself about it. I guess I'm trapped in a "if I don't do it, who will?" mentality. (I don't really know where it came from, but origin is less important than facility at this point.)

I am less concerned with having time for myself (usually) than I am about making sure that my children have what they need, looking after my clients, and just generally taking care of the world in general. One day (too soon, I hear), the children will be grown and gone with families of their own, and I'll get to retire (totally preferable to the "die with your boots on" scenario that I'm more likely to wind up with). I'll have "me time" then, won't I?

Hmm. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Are there guarantees that I'll wake up in the morning, come back in one piece from that trip to the grocery store, survive the walk out to the mailbox?

Guess I'll go book a spa day!

Crash Goes The Mortgage Market

2007-08-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

From the email inbox this week:

"Hi Donna,

Well, I've been hearing all the scare stories on the news and from my investment firm about the terrible situation in the mortgage industry these days. I know you have a better handle on it than probably most of the talking heads. Do you think there is going to be a problem with me getting a mortgage? I'm really sick of all the stories about banks backing out of mortgages at the last minute already! What is your experience these days? Of course I am nervous with having already put down a sizable deposit toward the house!

Thanks for any words of wisdom."

You would not BELIEVE how many emails like this I've had this week ... one client even emailed asking, "Am I going to lose my house?" (My reply, for the record, was, "As long as you're making the payments on time, no!")

You'd better grab a cup of tea or coffee or Jack and Coke or something ... this is going to take a minute! : )

People are always going to buy houses, and people are always going to refinance the houses they've got for one reason or another. The mortgage market isn't going to disappear. The feds are being rather myopic (IMHO) about it all, because if we flew airplanes or built cars, they'd be falling all over themselves to bail us out (but we don't, so they aren't).

What's going on now is essentially a crisis of confidence, but on an incredibly massive scale. Let's say that your asset portfolio includes a few accounts with a local brokerage -- your friendly neighborhood Waddell & Reed office, maybe (since I have a client who's a W&D broker, ha), a guy called Jim. You and Jim sat down and plotted your long-term goals and a strategy to reach them. The strategy included buying some mortgage-backed securities (MBS), because everybody knows that they're one of the most stable investment vehicles around -- after all, wouldn't you do pretty much anything to avoid foreclosure? Sure you would, and so would everybody else, which is what makes MBS so attractive. So you tell Jim to purchase MBS bits with a certain percentage of your portfolio amount, and to keep that amount level with each contribution you make to the account. Life is good!

One day you're listening to the news while puttering around doing something else, and you hear that there are a record number of foreclosures going on all around the nation just now. You think to yourself, "What? How can that be? And hey -- I'd better call Jim and tell him not to buy any more MBS for me." So you ring Jim, and you tell him, and he says okay. A couple of weeks later, you're watching the late news before bed, and you start hearing how subprime mortgages are total crap, and how they're horribly risky and it's some talking head's opinion that they should never have been available to anyone ever. The talking head goes on to say that subprime loans and loans with little or no income or asset verification (we call them stated-income or no-doc loans) are going to be the things that crash the whole mortgage market. "Oh, no," you think to yourself, "I've got to call Jim NOW and tell him to get rid of all the MBS in my portfolio!" So even though it's late, you hit Jim's beeper, and when he calls back you tell him that first thing in the morning, he's got to get rid of ALL the MBS you've got, so he does.

Now ... take you ... and multiply it by about 30 million individual investors, loads of life insurance and annuity companies, and a boatload of pension funds ... and see where the trouble comes from? You heard someone say something about something, and that initially set off a little bell that says okay, we won't buy any more of those ... then later you hear something more about it, and that sparks a panic in you to get rid of them before they do so much irreparable damage to your retirement and investment funds that you'll wind up living in a refrigerator box under an interstate bridge.

The scariest part of it is that this is eerily similar to the lack of confidence that led from the stock market crash of 1929 to a run on the local banks and then to the Great Depression. The biggest difference between then and now is that we have CNN, MSNBC, BloombergTV, and the World Wide Web to make sure that the hysteria can spread far and fast.

The truth of it all is that there ARE more foreclosures going on this year, and it IS a record number. However, what the talking heads aren't saying is that it's nearly the very same percentage of all outstanding home loans that's been foreclosed on every year for a long time. Look at it this way: if there are 100 mortgages made every year, and 5 of them go into foreclosure the next year, there is a 5% foreclosure rate. If there are 1000 mortgages made in any given year (a new record number!), and 50 of them go into foreclosure the year after that (also a new record number!), then yes, there are 10 times more foreclosures than there were last year ... OMG, eek, the sky is falling! Oh, but wait ... it's still a 5% foreclosure rate.

The fact is that the mortgage rates have been so low for so long that there are far more loans out there to be foreclosed. Since real estate prices have been up as well, mortgage loan amounts have gone up proportionately, which leads to a higher dollar figure in foreclosure than ever before. It's simply statistics, but Joe Average only knows what he heard from Peter Jennings -- that there are ten times more foreclosures this year -- and has the knee-jerk reaction that you had when you heard, resulting in your calls to Jim to get your butt out of those MBS right the hell now.

So why are so many mortgage companies going under? Why did Countrywide have to draw down $11.5 billion in credit lines this week? Why did the Federal Reserve bend its own very strict rules for Citibank and Bank of America? It's liquidity ... the ability to continue funding wholesale mortgage origination on a daily basis.

There is an event in Mortgage Land known as pooling, which is where loans are assembled by wholesalers from many different sources, then grouped together by the characteristics of each individual loan (credit score range, loan amount range, fixed or adjustable, loan term, and a bunch of other things) and sold in a pool into Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. You want to understand what happens to a mortgage after the loan is closed in order to grasp the whole enchilada (and it's shredded chicken with ranchera sauce, yum).

Let's say that I'm the First National Bank of Donna, and I have $50 million that my board of directors has set aside to make mortgage loans. I set my retail rates and fees to be competitive with those of the other mortgage lenders around me, and I let people know that I'm ready to make loans. Soon, I'm a busy little mortgage maker, and before too long passes, I've loaned out all $50 million to happy homeowners. So ... now what? It's taken me eighteen months to loan out $50 million, all secured by real estate mortgages with terms varying from ten to thirty years. The local marketplace knows I'm here, and it knows I do a great job, and there are more people who want me to do their mortgages. I can either turn them away, telling them that it'll be ten to fifteen years before I have enough of my $50 million back to make them a loan ... or, I can sell them to someone else. At that point, I look through each file and make sure that it fits the rules that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have set down for notes that they will purchase, group them together by type, then box them up with a note on the top of each box saying what's in it. I can choose whether to continue to take the payments from my borrowers and hold their escrow accounts (known as "servicing retained"), or whether to kiss them off lock, stock, and escrow to someone else (known as "servicing released"). By selling the notes upstream to larger lenders (or in some cases, directly to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac), I am constantly replenishing my $50 million loan proceeds account and making a premium (usually expressed as a percentage of the dollar amount of the loan) for each loan I sell. Ah, capitalism!

Everyone is having a rough time getting the international marketplace to remain jazzed about the American MBS enough to keep buying them. The UK is teetering on the edge of a similar meltdown (we exported our subprime and no-doc ideas to them, and it's jumping up to bite them on the posterior too, although their PM was most recently the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as such has a clue and took swift and decisive steps to stop it there), which isn't exactly inspiring other nations to think our MBS are so great.

So, then, the short version of an answer to the question above is that if you have good credit (which we define by a credit score of 620 or higher) and easily documented income and assets (meaning that you can produce either pay stubs and W-2s showing what you make and/or tax returns that reflect your actual income and statements from your bank or investment firm or 401K in the US that indicate what you've actually got stashed - underwriters aren't typically excited in a good way about offshore accounts or money hidden in the name of a child), then no, you aren't going to have a problem getting a permanent mortgage. The rate may not be as low as what we've had over the last three years, but if you fit into the box that I just described, you're typically not going to have a problem getting a loan for your house (or your car or your boat or your college education or whatever).

The people who are going to have problems in the very near future (like starting last week, ha) are people who have some or all of these factors: low credit scores, high debt ratio, derogatory credit information (even if it's too old to impact the score), difficulty proving income and/or assets, and little or no assets in reserve after closing. There will always be FHA and VA loans, too, since they were created by an act of Congress. It's just that for certain chunks of society at large, getting credit is going to become rather difficult and it's going to stay that way for a while, maybe forever. At least it'll stop (or seriously curtail) this tendency we've had lately as a nation toward buying beyond our means. Homebuilders may not like it, but I really don't think it'll wind up being a bad thing.

Oh, and I haven't heard about any lenders backing out of things at the last minute. Lots of investors are performing major surgery on a lot of programs -- or suspending them altogether for the time being -- but most of them are doing that in response to their funding sources telling them they have to in order to continue having any funding liquidity at all. The only lenders that I know of who are "backing out" are ones who are slamming shut, and you can't really expect a loan to be funded by an entity that isn't there anymore. This has happened a couple of times in the last several weeks (although thankfully not to any of the files that I've got going), and the biggest end result of it so far is that the lenders who are still there are getting backed up with submissions being transferred to them to take up the slack. In the main it's a matter of more time spent waiting for underwriting attention, because suddenly the 25,000 files that were at XYZ have to go to ABC, DEF, GHI, JKL, and MNO, who were humming happily along but now have to accommodate an additional 5,000 files apiece.

One further note: Just because a lender goes under doesn't mean that anything awful is going to happen to a home loan that you've already got. The promissory note that you signed at closing binds the lender as much as it binds you, but it also binds that lender's "successors and/or assigns, as their interests may appear" (which is what shows up on your homeowner's insurance declarations page in the mortgagee clause, so if you've ever wondered what ISAOA/ATIMA means, there's your answer). If your loan payments include monthly escrows, you don't need to worry that those funds are going to be lost, because escrow accounts are federally protected and can't be seized by creditors or anything like that. Your servicing will transfer to another entity, but they have to keep to the note. Whatever your loan amount, interest rate, and maturity date were on the date you signed will stay the same. All that can change are your loan number, the name of the lender to whom you write the check, and the address to which you send that payment (or the website where you pay online). CAVEAT: If you've got an automatic draft set up, then you will most likely have to set it up again with the new servicing entity, because the banking system doesn't allow that sort of payment method to transfer without an overt act on your part.

Hope this helps; sorry it's such a book. Don't be shy about asking questions if you have them! If I don't know the answer, I'll find it for you.

Post-Summer Musings

2007-08-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

I'm so sorry not to have bored you with musings since June, Fair Reader! This is what I worried would happen when I started this blog (well, one of the things anyhow), but no matter. We're all here together now, aren't we?

Last time we met, I was becoming ever more churlish at the Pollyanna-esque chipperness of Hector the Gate Agent at O'Hare. (We finally did get out of there, landing in Manchester nine hours late ... no word on what befell the other travellers who were using the same plane on subsequent flights.) Since then, we enjoyed England together as a family, Mark and I learned some things about Paris, and we discovered that one should *always* put one's duty-free purchases in one's checked luggage after clearing Customs if one has purchased anything in liquid form and means to carry it to one's final destination (otherwise, one will get home with perhaps less than what one spent $125 on at the duty-free, whether said purchases remain sealed in their duty-free bag with receipt plainly visible or not).

The twins started first grade last week, and K.C. started sixth grade. How are they old enough for that when they were born yesterday and we've had them forever??!! I feel so mortal.

"Oh, That Sucks."

2007-06-28T22:34:00.000-07:00

That's what Hector The Gate Agent said to me earlier.

He saw us dragging into the departure lounge around 11:30, you see, and he comes over with this big smile all on his face, and he says, "Hi! How've you been since I saw you not all that long ago?" (Total cheese, and not just because he reeked of insincerity, but also because when I called his bluff and actually TOLD him how we've been, he suddenly found lots of other things to do.)

When I told him that the best part was that the stupid vouchers that he'd said were good in the bar were actually NOT good in the bar (and we therefore wound up with a $50+ bar tab that we could have done without), what did I get? An apology? No. An offer of reimbursement in trade for a receipt? No. Any sort of empathy at all? No.

I got, "Oh, that sucks."

D'you think maybe he's taking personality and sincerity lessons from George W. Bush?

Your Seats Are Confirmed ...

2007-06-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

... however, apparently our flight is not.

It is 11:00 PM CDT and we are at O'Hare in Chicago. In fact, we've been at O'Hare in Chicago since 2:05 this afternoon - fully 25 minutes ahead of schedule. Amazing, eh? Yes! Fantastic! And we'd got our boarding passess at OKC, so we were feeling quite savvy in just hopping into the queue for the security point.

And then we got to the scary bit.

Oh, we had all the liquid and gelatinous substances in the proper and prescribed 3-1-1 format. We all took our shoes off, and each of us was holding our own boarding pass in our own passport, and I had the laptop halfway out of the wicked cool new rolling laptop carryon thingie I'd got at Circuit City, ready to stick it in its very own Dull Gray Security Tub for scanning. No, the scary bit started when we'd stood in the freaking line for 45 minutes, only to be told that our flight was "very, very late" and that we had to go back to the BMI ticket counter for a chat. Ever the intrepid travellers, we went.

Well, yeah. Apparently there's a mechanical failure on the plane that was supposed to leave Manchester at 11:05 this morning and get here at 1:05 this afternoon and then sit and wait for us to get on it and leave at 6:30 this evening and get to Manchester at 8:05 tomorrow morning and then sit and wait for kids to get on it and leave at 11:05 - but I think you get the point, yes? No, no, the scary bit is that WE ARE WAITING SEVEN AND A HALF HOURS TO GET ON A PLANE THAT HAD "MECHANICAL PROBLEMS" AND THEN FLY FIVE THOUSAND MILES ON THE STUPID THING.

Oh, but BMI coughed up $10 per traveller in food-court vouchers, so that's okay, isn't it? Hector, the guy at the ticket counter, told us they were good at the bar, too.

They aren't.

>sigh<

Get Me Outta Here.

2007-06-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's one more week until we're on a plane (well, two planes, but that's not the point). I have told everybody I work with (realtors, title kids, appraisers, wholesalers, etc.) that I'm going, and when, and my return date. So everybody has all their stuff done already in order for it to be accomplished while I'm still here ... right?

Wrong.

No, no, quite the contrary. Starting last Friday, I've had at least three calls a day about new deals. I'm not bitching, mind you, because I'd be in a right mess if the phone wasn't ringing. It's more that there is no way in hell that I'm going to get all these loans done, get the laundry done, get the house tidied, and get packed to go without being forced to either hire someone to help me or letting go of the eight shreds of sanity I've been so parsimoniously saving for this holiday.

What gnaws at me is the fact that the calls I'm getting are from people that have bloody well known for as long as six months that I'm leaving. Heck, some of them are people I talk to at least three times a week, and they know how jazzed I am about being somewhere else for a while. Instead of being able to have a nice, civilized wind-down during these last few days, I'm going to be beavering away like a rabid animal, trying to get everything accomplished. Adding insult to injury, I've had four different people ask me if I'm taking letterhead for pre-qual letters and if I'll have a scanner to send them (since I won't have an outgoing fax - I mean, I could use Uncle Brian's, but why would I do that to his phone bill?), and if I'll be able to receive faxes.

Let a girl have a break, already! ARGH!!

Cue the Alice Cooper track ...

2007-06-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

Kieran and Kendall have successfully completed kindergarten! There was even an awards ceremony of sorts (but at least they didn't do that stupid graduation thing ... those just strike me as being ridiculous beyond belief, unless you're actually finishing a diploma or degree).

Every child got a reading award, as we'd spent the last three quarters reading a sent-home book every evening and signing off on a "we did it" sheet. Then each child got an award in a specific category: art, math, writing, or science, and four students from each class got a library award.

Kieran's award was in science. He likes to learn about and discuss things like robots, dinosaurs, bugs, and cause-and-effect. Kendall's award was in art, which is well-deserved judging solely by the number of works that she's done in various places around the house (different media - crayon, marker, pencil, pen - on walls, doors, tabletops, etc.).

Kendall with her Art award and Kieran with his Science award

Kendall and Kieran with their reading awards

We got totally and completely lucky in whatever draw there was to determine who got which teacher. Mrs. Crain and Mrs. Lewis are very different in their teaching styles, yet they are both quite effective and achieve fantastic results! They each ran different class schedules, yet were happy to coordinate activities (holiday parties and feasts, etc.) so that I could be with each of the twins at the right time, without having to choose one or the other. Besides being absolutely the best first school teachers we could have dreamed to have for Kieran and Kendall, they have gone far beyond and become friends as well. Ladies, a very special and heartfelt standing ovation to each of you for your warmth and loving and accommodation and caring ... and everything else.

Kieran and Mrs. Lewis

Mrs. Crain and Kendall

So, on to the great summer adventure ... our annual pilgrimage-in-reverse to England, where we will hang out with Mark's parents, visit Paris, travel to London for the launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, go to the seaside, and anything else we can dream up. We're back at school on 15 August for Meet The Teacher day, and then first grade *officially* begins on 16 August. Woohoo!

In Memoriam

2007-05-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

Today's edition of Daily Kos has an item titled "In Memoriam: Buddy 'Doc' Hughie (for Soonergrunt)". You might want to have a look at it now, and then come back. It's okay; I'll wait.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/25/45345/4649

*hums a little tune*

Got it? Good. Now here we go.

Sadly, the America that Buddy (and I, and so many others among us) grew up in doesn't exist any longer.

Every single one of our kids Over There has someone here who loves them, someone whose world will suffer irreparably for losing them, someone for whom a knock at the door is going to forever be paired in their minds with death and the collapse of dreams and the waste of the future and the loss of hope.

What every single one of our kids Over There HASN'T got is a president that gives a rat's ass about anything but Staying The Course, and a vice president willing to discuss the national energy policy he formulated in secret that obviously requires cannon fodder as some sort of ritual sacrifice to the Oil God, and a Congress with sufficient spinal steel to put its collective foot down and say no, dammit, this continuation of hostilities and death and maiming and draining of the treasury is NOT what the American people want, and we're going to shove it down your wannabe-Texan throat until you gag and choke on it like it was a pretzel and come to the realization that we were elected to stop you.

This Memorial Day, I'm remembering who got us into this mess and refuses to do anything at all to get us out. I'm remembering who blasted Clinton for not having an exit strategy for Kosovo, yet refuses to put one together for Iraq (Think Progress » In 1999, Bush Demanded A Timetable ). I'm remembering who started out swearing he'd get somebody "dead or alive" but now declares it "not our priority" (Bush Quotes about Bin Laden - BuzzFlash Reader Commentary ). I'm remembering the identity of he who proclaimed himself The Decider, and then apparently decides not to properly equip those going into harm's way or allow us to see the flag-draped coffins as they come home or provide proper medical care for those who somehow manage to make it back alive. I'm remembering wondering why it was more important to spend time reading about a pet goat than getting to a place of safety and keeping a Florida elementary school off the strike list.

I'm not sure why The Liberal Media isn't doing more to cover the articles of impeachment that have been introduced. I'm not sure why The Liberal Media isn't up in arms about having the First Amendment right to a free press abridged so grossly. I'm not sure why The Liberal Media isn't saying anything about posse comitatus and habeus corpus and Real ID. I'm not sure why The Liberal Media isn't chatting about the lack of the children of chicken-hawks (i.e., those with surnames like Bush, DeLay, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Lott, Brownback, Romney, etc.) in uniform on the front lines (or hell, even the rear echelons, as they seem to be nearly as dangerous lately).

What does become clear is that there's no panacea, no easy cure, no simple answer, no straight lines between dots to connect. We keep getting tossed placebos and sound bites and buzzwords and flashes of what passes for brilliance in neo-conservative think tanks.

PNAC got its new Pearl Harbor. What we need now is a new Boston Tea Party.

Ballerina Baby

2007-05-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

For the last several years, we've been overseas during the spring months. It's never been a problem (missing out on tornado season couldn't ever be a bad thing for me, ha), but we've had to forego certain things that might have been nice ... like ballet-class photos.

They're kind of like school pictures, really. There's one of your little darling in a cute pose flying solo, and there's a group shot of the whole class doing something equally adorable. Kendall started taking ballet at age three, and we've never had these pictures because we've always been gone in May when they've been taken.

Not any more.

The photos won't be available for some time, but your intrepid über-mommy did manage to catch a cute one of Kendall with another cutie from her class outside while we were waiting for another class to be finished ...

I'm not sure what their recital song is this year, but judging solely by the costumes, it's something country. We were allowed to watch the individual pictures being taken (although we got kicked out for the group shot, and the photographer did snarl at one parent for the incredibly gauche act of whipping out a camera phone to take a picture while the solo picture was being taken ... nice, eh?), and it occurred to me that with Kendall's missing teeth, she looked all kinds of hillbilly in that getup. Shame they didn't have a hay bale and a banjo and a big jug with XXX on it as props!

Cinco de Mayo

2007-05-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

Yep, it's the fifth of May. I have no clue what significance this holds to the Hispanic community, and I'm sure I'll get dissed far and wide for it. However, we have had a lovely day followed by a lovely evening and I'm now headed for a lovely night's sleep, to be followed all too soon by tomorrow morning's lovely hangover.

This morning was ballet class as usual, followed by showing houses (four today, four tomorrow, and hopefully one of them will be The One for this buyer). Then we met friends Sean and Mary and their daughter Emma at Abuelo's for dinner and ale. Afterward, we returned to our hacienda for further ale and playing on the Wii.

Um ... that's it. I'm smashed. I'm happy. I'm going to bed. Tomorrow I shall pay for my sins and see (albeit hazily) the errors of my ways. Aren't you impressed that I can still type? Sheesh.

(Can you tell I'm feeling guilty for not posting for two months?)

And Whether (Spelling) Bees Have Stings

2007-03-02T21:03:00.000-08:00

Kymber (elder daughter) won her school's spelling bee in January. This is major because her school is comprised of fourth, fifth, and sixth grades ... and she's in fifth grade ... and she beat ALL the other kids. Nana (that's my mom) and I went to watch, and shrieked like happy banshees when she won!

Her victory at her elementary school entitled her to compete in the county-wide spelling bee in February. She didn't win, but she did a fantastic job all the same. (Note to the Lincoln County Spelling Bee organizers: head football coaches aren't known for their diction, so perhaps it would be good next time to either choose an English teacher or at least make sure Coach Whoever clears the marbles out of his mouth before speaking.)

Here is Kymber with her EXTREMELY proud Mum and Nana!

WAY TO GO, BABY!

Bad Reputation

2007-02-26T20:14:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time (and isn't that how the best stories start?), I was happily waiting tables at the coolest restaurant in Oklahoma City, the Eagle's Nest. (The place is still there, but it's owned by other kids now, and it's called something else ... plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I guess.) It's at the top of a round 20-story building just off Northwest Highway, and the outer ring rotates ... as you can imagine, it was formal dining, and the wait staff wore tux trousers, tux shirts, bow-ties, and matching vests (lucky for us the tips were good enough to keep up with the dry-cleaning bills). I had a bunch of regular customers who'd ask for me when they came in, and one day, one of them (Michael) was sat in my section with another gentleman (Jon, although I didn't know that till later). In preparation for dropping off their tab, I asked if there was anything further that I could do for them, and Michael responded by asking what I knew about finance. I answered quite honestly that I knew nothing of it, that I couldn't balance a checkbook (still can't, for the record) and that if my sorority house hadn't had a test file, I'd have flunked Econ instead of getting a D. He told me to come chat with him after lunch, that he had a position available that he thought would suit me. I was of course intrigued, and that's where my career as your friendly mortgage goddess began (although it wasn't officially official until January 18, 1994).

So flash forward 13 years, and I'm still in it. By now I've been a loan officer, a processor, a wholesale rep, an escrow officer, an underwriter, and I've worked for a mortgage banker, a mortgage broker, a bank, and a credit union, along with two wholesale mortgage companies. I've got a pretty good grasp of the whole situation, and I can (and do) give little seminars to my first-time buyers so they'll understand as much as possible. I find this to be very helpful in making sure my clients don't make bad decisions that will catapult them into horrible things (like foreclosure) later in life.

When first I embarked upon this grand odyssey, what I knew about mortgages was that my parents used to have one but at some point had got rid of it. I learned it all from the inside out (reading the Fannie Mae Selling Guide and writing a summary of each chapter, hanging out with kids who performed each of the necessary functions in a transaction such as appraisers, credit folks, abstractors, title attorneys, closers, pest inspectors, home inspectors, surveyors, the list is extensive) and then got the baptism by fire. It was kinda cool, because I didn't know what I couldn't do, and so therefore I acted like I could do everything, and I very nearly did! It got me a reputation for finding a way to get things done.

All this time later, I've still got this "bad" reputation. I suppose it's good if you're a buyer with more than just a couple of hickeys on the old credit report, and I have some dedicated and faithful realtor clients who not only send me their business but recommend me to other realtors who are having a difficult time getting a transaction closed due to buyer financing eligibility issues. The part that gets me is when they call me and say that so-and-so told them that if I can't do it, it can't be done.

Don't get me wrong, this rather feeds into my happily arrogant "get the lesser mortals out of the way, get the whiners belowdecks, and let's get the damn thing closed" ego. It just bothers me sometimes to think that when a client calls me because of this type of referral, they hang all of their hopes and dreams on me. I didn't create the credit situation, after all, and no one (not even me ) can be expected to create a file that makes an underwriter happy about forking over the cash when it's evident that someone doesn't pay attention, much less a bill.

So here's today's hint, and it's for free: if you want to buy a house, get your hands on your credit report and have a look. Heck, I'll look at it for you if you can get it to me. I can tell you what an underwriter is going to see, and what you need to fix, and how long it will take. I can help figure out which things to address and which to ignore, and I know which ones are no big deal and which are the equivalent of a stake in your heart (followed by having your mouth stuffed with garlic, your head severed from your body and turned face-down in the casket, and said casket pitched into a running river ... in a mortgage sense, of course). I'm pretty good at being rather blatant with the honesty when I see a report that indicates that someone doesn't need a realtor and mortgage lender so much as they need a bankruptcy attorney and maybe even a priest.

Sorry if I disappointed anyone with the title of this entry ... but good grief, what did you think I was going to post about??!! : )~

Hail to Thee, O Cimarron

2007-02-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, Kieran and Kendall got an invitation to a birthday party for Mason, a boy in Kieran's kindergarten class. It was a great party, with two tons of stuff for bouncing (it was at Pump It Up), pizza, juice boxes, cake and ice cream, goody bags - you know, all the stuff that makes a kid do. There was a weird bit, though (and how could there not be? That's just how my life goes) ... I knew one of the other moms there (well, two, actually, but that's not really relevant here) from one of the hallmarks of my growing-up ... Camp Cimarron.

I knew the lady looked familiar, but I had to use the mental person-morph widget (that thing in your head that puts different hair styles or colors or makeup or whatever on someone and changes the background until you get a hit on a composite and realize why you know them). At last I asked if her name was Rochelle, and yes it was, and hi, I'm Donna, we were CITs together at Cimarron in 1984, and we did a Hollywood Night where we all dressed up and lip-synched to "Let's Hear It For The Boy" (because Footloose was THE movie that year). She was stunned at first, and then happily surprised, and we got to chatting (like you do) and it was great. She told me that she'd been in touch with a bunch of the "alumni" from Cimarron, and got me up to speed on some people that I'd not thought about in years. We yapped for an age, and then she asked if I had an email address, and she'd make sure I got put on a list of other Cimarron people.

Then today, I had an email from Edi - that's Miss Fozzy to you - with a "what's been up with you for the last 20+ years, here's what I've been doing, oh and did you hear that Cimarron's closed for this summer, and they're talking about selling it." Talk about a ton of bricks.

Cimarron is where I learned to ride a horse, got used to cold showers, learned some way cool cookout recipes (and it went way beyond s'mores - who knew you could make a pot roast with a campfire?), and essentially spent most of my summer from age 11 until graduation. It's a Camp Fire camp, one of two owned by the local council (it used to just be the Greater OKC Council, but I think they've changed the name) - the other is DaKaNi, a day camp, where Cimarron is resident camp, where you pack your sleeping bag and plenty of underwear. It is a completely integral part of my childhood, inseparable from some of my best and fondest memories. (Don't get me wrong, I went to DaKaNi too, and it was lovely, but there is just something so intangibly special about Cimarron ... I could never explain it, but there are hundreds if not thousands of girls who know just what I mean.) How in the world could it be tanking? Sell Cimarron? To me, that's sacred ground. I am hugely saddened today. My head knows that everything good ends someday, but I have long harbored dreams of sending Kendall to Cimarron on the bus, and driving up there myself to be a "mom counselor" while she's there.

What was it like? The songs, the flag ceremonies twice a day, chapel on Sundays (absolutely non-denominational, really a role model for the kids in government who seem to need to pander to some religious sect or other), cookout nights, watching the sunsets from Inspiration Point, the mini-golf course that was lovingly created at the site of the "old" swimming pool (which was just "the swimming pool" when my mom went there), the counselors with cool made-up names that started with Miss (and some got pretty creative, like MissChievious and MissPlaced and MissCellaneous and such, although there were also equally great counselors with equally hip made-up names that didn't make up a word, like Miss Apatchey - who was my counselor the very first time I went - and Miss Suby and Miss Bird and Miss Tadpole and Miss Muffin and Miss Gopher and Miss Buddy ... our group of CITs wound up being Miss Fozzy, Miss Bliffy, and MissStake - that was me - although I don't know what Carrie and Espanta's names were ... and it was such a big deal when you found out a counselor's real name), being freaked out by the way the statue of the Cimarron Lady watched you no matter where you went in the Lodge, free swim in the afternoons followed by canteen time (soda and candy bars, yay!), coffee cake on a Sunday morning before chapel (and did I mention how cool chapel was, with all of us dressed in white t-shirts and shorts, even though nobody ever thought to sweep off the benches and we all wound up with dirty bums), and of course the Council Fire on the last night, where all the counselors gave out bead sheets and patches denoting how many years each camper had been there, and each living group gave its counselor something they'd made on the sly during the session, with many tears and hugs as we all filed out afterward. That's only skimming the surface, but geez, I know so many other women have similar memories.

I can't believe Cimarron's in that kind of trouble. I've got to go now, because I have to help figure out how to stop it.

WoHeLo! MissStake signing (and sighing!) off for now.

A Tale of Two George Ws

2007-02-19T19:39:00.000-08:00

It's Presidents' Day ... the day when we (theoretically) celebrate American presidents. (When I was a kid, there was no such thing; rather, we celebrated Lincoln's birthday on the 12th of February and Washington's on the 22nd ... but I digress.)

George W. Bush went to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, to celebrate the occasion. It was the first time since originally stealing the office that W had been to Mount Vernon, and according to the article at msnbc.com, he traveled by helicopter and made some remarks that led to laughter (among these being that "the first George W" didn't look "a day over 275" - which is not funny for a minute in light of the fact that Thursday would actually be Washington's 275th birthday). He also declared that "the father of our country believed that the freedoms we secured in our revolution were not meant for Americans alone."

Bollocks, says I. The current George W (and for the sake of differentiation, let's call him CW - and the C stands for Current, although you may have a somewhat different word in mind) is no more a student of history - American or any other - than the keyboard upon which I'm typing. The Founding Fathers wouldn't have dreamed of interfering with the government of another nation by any means, nor would they have been sufficiently arrogant to deem it right and just and proper and (dare I say it?) holy to export American-style democracy as though it were a consumer product. Rather, can't you just imagine John Hancock surmising over a nice snifter of brandy that we'd fought and bled and died to be separate from England, and if some other country wanted to wrestle itself free from the tyrannical bonds of the entity currently in charge, they'd have to do the same? Come on, CW, these guys pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to each other and to the new nation. You would never pledge your life (you were too valuable to go anywhere near VietNam, weren't you?) or your fortune (because it isn't really yours, is it - you've squirreled your life away puttering about at one failed venture after another, and those nickels you value so highly are handed down to you from antecedents who got them by hook or by crook or by trading with the enemy during WWII) or your sacred honor (you can't pledge what you haven't got, after all, and there's nary a shred of you that's either sacred or honorable).

It's worth noting here (again) that CW traveled by helicopter to Mount Vernon from the White House. That's BY HELICOPTER, folks. CW needed Marine One to go the grand distance of sixteen miles. So much for his State of the Union plea to all of us to reduce our fuel consumption in order to diminish our dependence on foreign oil. If you're going to lead, George, then lead by example. (What am I saying? Of course you're not going to lead by example. You're not going to lead at all, are you? No, you're here to pillage and plunder and make history. Fret not, though - we'll all be laughing when the history books quite rightly describe you as the worst president of the modern era, with every possibility of being remembered forever as the worst in American history.)

I am offended at my very core that this transplanted Texan, this conspirator-in-chief, this common thug who seizes first and asks questions later (because Dallas needed a new stadium, eh, George, and those people who rightfully owned that land that you seized by eminent domain were just squatters on YOUR property, weren't they - kinda the same way that all those Iraqi people have been living for thousands of years on top of YOUR oil), this smirking chimp whose second utterance of the presidential oath of office was even scarier than the first (because let's face it, there is no need to preserve, protect, or defend the Constitution - that "goddamned piece of paper" - from anyone but the very man making the pledge), this George W of the 21st Century would even remotely consider putting himself in the same league as George Washington.

My 42nd birthday is the day after the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States. The inauguration itself will be a gift that can't come soon enough.

And Iran, Iran so far away ...

2007-02-18T19:38:00.000-08:00

Have you noticed? This week in the news, the Bush (mis)administration is once again thumping the war drums. They're putting forward the same kind of lies and bullshit that coerced the nation to a tacit assent to the war in Iraq. "Iran is supplying weapons to al-Qaida in Iraq!" "Sheik So-And-So is hiding in Tehran!" "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is making nuclear weapons!" Yeah, the sky is falling, the Soviets are coming, and we know where Saddam's hiding his WMD (they're in Baghdad, and north and south and east and west of it somewhere). Thank God we've got Democrats in Congress now to stem the tide.

Be real. The Iranians haven't been terribly happy with the US since Eisenhower caved to the Brits (who were telling him that Mossadegh was a commie) and joined them in Operation Ajax, handing Pahlavi a lovely little tyranny on a platter. Eventually, the peasants revolted, culminating in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and leading Iran to become the nation it is now.

All anybody wants in this lifetime is self-determination. Why is it that our government seems to be so intent on telling everyone else how to live? Doesn't that make the US a dictator? Please, Nancy, keep us out of Iran. We have enough terrorists as it is ... invading Iran will only serve to make more.

SOTU? STFU!! (Or, Much Ado About Nothing)

2007-01-23T20:22:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning to dread January. First it's the New Year's hangover, then my birthday, then the State of the Union address. It hasn't always been this way ... the New Year's festivities weren't quite so intoxicating ... my birthday was more of a celebration than a reminder of mortality ... and the presidential chat was filled with past accomplishments and hope for the future.

Not any more.

Tonight we were treated to more whines from the same hymnal that W's been using since the turn of the century. Apparently we're all dumb as rocks, because he's changing neither words nor message, just the order in which they appear. Rumor had it that our (p)Resident would be discussing things that were important to us, but what did we really get? He's called for a reduction in dependence on foreign oil every year, but nothing in that vein has been done. He wants to promote healthcare that won't bankrupt the average family, but nothing in that vein has been done. Environment ... nothing. Education ... nothing (unless you call No Child Left Behind something other than underfunded, and I don't). Economy ... nothing (but what was that malarkey about eradicating the federal deficit? How's he planning to pay off that $87 billion he borrowed from China to start this Iraq war? Is he selling Laura, or renting out a twin?). Osama bin Laden (okay, he's only appeared since the 2002 address, but still) ... nothing. Nothing ... nothing ... nothing. I guess W's just talking about what's on HIS mind ... come on now, say it with me ... NOTHING.

George, dude, do something. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. You have made your rich corporate friends richer, you have prevented scientific research that could benefit millions of Americans, you have mortgaged my great-grandchildren's futures, and for what? Nothing.

Let me put it in a different light for you. I expect Nothing from you, because Nothing is all we've ever gotten. On 9/11, when you were told we were being attacked, you did Nothing. Your promises of accountability in the Plame scandal came to Nothing. Your pledges of support to the people of New Orleans have brought them Nothing (but Brownie did a heckuvajob, eh?). Your efforts to privatize Social Security (which were really just a transparent attempt to siphon off what little there is to that program anyhow) resulted in Nothing.

Y'all see a trend here? Have you gotten sick enough of Nothing to demand Something instead? Dammit, I grew up in the wealthiest, most productive, most emulated, most admired nation on the planet, and all of that is slipping away ... for nothing.

Lordy, Lordy

2007-01-22T19:52:00.000-08:00

The day I've been dreading for the last ten years - since I turned 30 - arrived. We were supposed to have yet another round of bitterly cold weather with nasty freezing and frozen precipitation, so nothing had been planned. The children were aghast at the thought that Mumma would have no birthday cake, but they were pacified by the thought of blueberry muffins with candles in them! Welcome to the downhill slide, I thought to myself more than just a few times in the days (and weeks) leading to the day.

But ... it's all okay, and pretty much the same as it was the day before. I didn't suddenly sprout horns. There's not a neon sign over my head that says DONE WITH YOUTH. Deep creases and wrinkles did not appear all over me from nowhere. I'm just me, like I have been for a good while now.

As it happened, there was no storm to speak of this weekend. It spat snow and ice bits and freezing rain for a while on Saturday, but it wasn't for long, and there wasn't much of it, and it didn't seem to hang around. We went to our favorite Japanese hibachi steakhouse for dinner to celebrate (and took a REAL birthday cake for Mumma ... plus one for Mumma's darling cousin Becca, the only other girl on the McGee side, who turned 21 in the really awful storm that DID happen last weekend).

You may already know that I'm the kind of girl who has what she wants. I figured out that if I want something, I can go get it for myself. I don't need someone else to get it for me, and I generally don't need permission from anyone to get what I want within certain parameters ... wouldn't buy a house without discussing it with the spousal unit, for example. I am old enough to have heard Helen Reddy describe being Strong and Invicible on the radio when I was a little kid, and I believed her. This is all wrapped up into one big feeling that is difficult to explain, but totally enjoyable from inside my skin. It presents, however, a small issue to the spousal unit at times like these ... what do you get the girl that's got everything for a milestone birthday?

Well ... you give her a trip to Paris, apparently.

The simplicity and practicality of it are stunning. We'll be in England this summer anyhow, and England is way closer to France than Oklahoma, so it makes sense to go from there, especially when you consider that Mum and Pops are always looking for time to spend with the twins that doesn't include "parental interference". We found some flights from Manchester (yay, another two hour drive through the #@%&ing Pennine Mountains each way) to Paris, and a hotel that isn't a fleabag, priced unbelievably low on Travelocity ... bought them ... and we're off.

Hmph. Maybe I should turn 40 next year, too.

To Boldly Go ...

2007-01-16T19:25:00.000-08:00

... and "go" is definitely the operative word.

We have been inside since midday Friday. There's only so much laundry you can do and so many movies you can watch and so much sleep upon which you might catch up before cabin fever sets in and you begin to wonder if there's anybody else left in the world besides you and the people in your house. It's not the best wonder there ever was.

Today is friend Harold's birthday, so Mark took the decision that he was going to go to the Hornets game with a bunch of the boys in celebration. I then took the decision that if he could go clear downtown, the children and I could surely make it out to the mall area for dinner! We all got bundled up snugly, I spent twenty minutes hacking ice off of the three-ton sport utility vehicle, and off to Red Lobster we went.

It was REALLY nice to go out. Kieran and Kendall were exceedingly well-behaved, and supper was great (mostly because I hadn't had to cook and wouldn't be doing the dishes). As a treat, we popped into Barnes and Noble on the way home (and yes, Mom, it really IS on the way home) to get some books to read since there's no school again tomorrow. We made it home safely (although we're still waiting for Daddy to return from downtown), and somehow it now seems like a good idea to go watch a movie!

Cabin fever ... it isn't just for "The Shining" anymore.

Not N-Ice.

2007-01-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

It's cold. Somehow it seems wrong that it could be this cold in Oklahoma, when we routinely have summers that begin in April and last well into October, with temperatures exceeding 100F for days on end, and eight to twelve weeks go by wtih no rain. On Thursday last week, the high temperature in Oklahoma City was 68F ... on Friday, it was 39F ... on Saturday, 23F ... yesterday, 24F (ooh, a warming trend) ... and just now, it's 19F outside with a 4F wind chill (for you folks in the metric lands, that's a -7C air temp and -16C wind chill).

I went into the front bathroom a little while ago, the one that has a north-facing window, and came out with my feet feeling as though I'd gone for a walk outside barefoot. Even in the utility room, I can feel a chill from the garage. (Would that I could use that as an excuse not to do the laundry ... sigh.) Outside there's ice on top of snow on top of ice on top of snow on top of ice, so it isn't fit for driving or playing or walking or anything-ing. The children and I are about to drive each other round the bend! Oh, sure, we made blueberry muffins on Saturday, but those were gone by yesterday afternoon. I do have some brownie mix and sugar cookie dough, though, and I suppose I'll make some of those to use to pacify the little monsters.

If not for the incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, I'd be pfffting at global warming just now. Brrr!

George Is Upset ... Hand Over More Cannon Fodder

2007-01-11T19:20:00.000-08:00

I read the news today, oh boy ...

Oh, wait, that didn't really happen. Darn.

Well, hey, how about this one, then?

Nope. No joy there, either. Drat.

What is it, this thing that's got me all anti-Bush today (or at least that tiny sliver more so than usual ... that bit that makes it so you'd notice)? Why, it's that rally-round-the-flag line of crap that the (p)Resident spouted at us all last night. That's what's got me cheesed, that's what's got my knickers in a twist, that's what's had me in a proper grump all damn day, and that's what I'm going to snarl about now.

So, King George decided to take responsibility. How wonderful for him, but what comfort will that bring to the Americans who have lost a loved one in this military action? How will his mea culpa serve to cure those irreparably wounded by his folly? It can't. It won't. That ship sailed right around the time that he posed on an aircraft carrier less than five miles from its berth in San Diego proclaiming that our Mission had in fact been Accomplished ... but wait, that was nearly four years ago! What are our people still doing there? Hell, why did we go in the first place? (Rhetorical, rhetorical ... I already know the answer. There's a reason why the name was changed from Operation Iraqi Liberation, ya know.)

The recently retired American general who was in charge of the Iraq mission was quoted as saying that more troops wouldn't help. The commission appointed by Boy George to promulgate all those recommendations said that more troops wouldn't help. Why is he going against the counsel of people who've actually been to war? It's said that Gee Dubya was "upset" by Saddam Hussein's hanging. Well, hell, George, what did you think would happen? Did you envision something less than what our nation has been perpetrating against prisoners at Gitmo? Something humane, perhaps? Dude, this is the guy that you whined about for ages! This is Saddam Hussein, the man whose name your father couldn't (or wouldn't) pronounce properly, the man who killed people under his leadership, the man who allowed his son to gleefully maim/torture/murder Iraqi athletes who didn't win, the man you vowed to GET. Well, you got him, and you handed him over on a platter to the people against whom he'd committed these atrocities, and NOW you're "upset" that he was executed? WhatEVER.

It's time to make some changes.

Kindly notice that there has been no peace to speak of in the Middle East since recorded history began; the arrogance of this fortunate son isn't going to change that, no matter how hard he stomps his foot and demands it. Any Americans who still believe it was our place to dictate the style and nature of government to another sovereign nation need to cash that reality check and realize that this is worse than Vietnam - which Bush and many of his cabal avoided. Iraq had WMD at one point, yes (because we gave them over to curry favor with Saddam against Iran after Khomeini had taken our citizens and embassy hostage) ... but no longer (because Bush the Elder promised US support for an uprising against Hussein after the first Gulf War, which promise was promptly reneged upon, leading to Saddam's use of all manner and sort of nasty US weapons against his own people). The whole premise for military action was a fable (and Valerie Plame was a casualty - do Karl Rove and Dick Cheney still work at 1600 Pennsylvania?).

The intelligent, courageous, and proper thing for the new Congress to do is to require testimony under oath from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, and the others who led us down this garden path - and to remove them from office for high crimes and misdemeanors, then turn them over to The Hague for crimes against humanity. America's standing in the world has been compromised enough. Our failure to police our own leadership will be the catalyst for our downfall.

My friend Elsie sent this link to the Keith Olbermann commentary on last night's travesty of an Iraq "plan": http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/01/11/special-comment-on-the-presidents-address/
There's a list at the end of losses sustained by this particular administration that isn't to be missed. (And please, none of that "liberal media" garbage ... at least not while Condi is chirping the praises of Fox Faux News. Blurk.)

So much for getting Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," eh?

If It Says "Cheap" -- There's A Reason

2007-01-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was still kind of wonky about not having bought plane tickets to go to England this year; events conspired in 2006 to keep me so busy that I blonded the whole enterprise until the last couple of weeks of the year. So, last night, I requested and received from the spousal unit permission to make the purchase. ("What? You haven't bought them yet? Good God, woman," is what he actually said.) I'd got it narrowed down to two different (yet remarkably similar) routings and prices ... we chose one ... and off I went to make the purchase.

Mistake #1: Buying plane tickets from a website that doesn't have a customer service phone number ANYWHERE online.

Mistake #2: Buying plane tickets from a website that no one you know has ever used.

Mistake #3: Buying plane tickets from a website that doesn't advertise any sort of a customer satisfaction guarantee.

Next time I go to do this, I shall remember my dear darling friend Lori the Travel Goddess (she's at Boarding Pass Travel in Norman, OK - it's in the book - and the value of the service this woman hands out as a matter of course far exceeds the value of the $20 per ticket you pay for an actual human being to handle your world ... she knows all kinds of cool stuff, and I can't recommend anyone more highly) and ring her. I think it might have cost me another Franklin or so per ticket, but I'm going to have to spend that much on Rogaine and Pepcid (and possibly Prozac) after dealing with the people who are in (air quotes here) customer service at the travel website that I used to book this trip.

This is where I would normally wonder aloud what else could go wrong, but I think that might be too close to spitting in karma's face with this trip. In most other situations, I would use this space to go on a wild and raving rant about the devaluation of personal service in the modern world, but I'd really rather not re-live the whole thing. It was that awful. Instead, let me just say to the world at large that if a website promises Cheap Tickets (heck, if that's the name of the joint), there's a reason why they're so cheap ... and after seeing card charges totalling $500+ more than I thought I was going to pay, I have to think that their respect for consumers is cheap too.

A Tabula Rasa

2007-01-01T09:08:00.000-08:00

For the most part, 2006 was a great year for me. Business boomed (our little mortgage company closed 53 loans) and expanded (I got a real estate sales license and closed my first sale the same month that the license was issued), the children blossomed (the twins started school, and elder daughter kept her straight-A record - and grew to within an inch of my full height). It's the year that I first got to go to Scotland and see its two major cities and some of its history (although Loch Ness is still on the to-do list). It marked the beginning of the end of my 30s and saw some fairly serious weight loss for me (and all I had to do was dump the Dr Pepper). I got a cute new toy at the end of July (Skarlet is a red convertible, and driving her is a joy nearing euphoria). Oh, and let's not forget 2006's crowning achievement - the collective pink slip handed to the ruling Republican't majority in Congress (in my daft little blonde head, it's tantamount to putting the GWB administration on notice that America isn't going to put up with its force-fed bullsh*t any longer).

It did have some down days, though. My beloved (step)dad, Dale Patrick, shuffled off his mortal coil at the end of September. A dear friend's new grandbaby born in December has some pretty serious heart problems (two-edged blade there: new baby, yay; heart problems, boo). England got excused from the World Cup after an Argentinian referee with an ax to grind punted Wayne Rooney in the quarter-final match against Portugal (0-0 in regulation time, 3-1 to Portugal on penalties, with Beckham out to injury - who knew puking was an injury? - and Rooney sidelined with his red card). And in Iraq, America tallied up a total of 3000 service member deaths so far (scratch your head and wonder why we're still there - nay, why we went there in the first place).

All things considered, though, I'll mark 2006 down as a success. Hope you can do the same.

Elder daughter was at Nana's house to ring in the new year (they've always been close, but have gotten more so since Patrick's exit), so it was just the spousal unit and the twins and me for the event itself. The plan was to go out for supper, then come home and watch "It's A Wonderful Life" ('cause your obdn't svt here hasn't ever seen it all the way through). We ventured out about half past eight, stopped in at our friends Sean and Mary's house (Sean's from England too - Mary is an Oklahoma girl - and Sean's parents arrived on the 30th for a fortnight), and then went to Abuelo's to eat. Upon arriving home, though, we couldn't find the DVD that we know is around here somewhere (if you've never seen/heard George Carlin's routine about STUFF, go find it and watch it - it's not only riotously funny, it's also quite descriptive of our house). Ah, but "The Producers" was on, and Mark and I had seen it in the West End last time we went to London (although poor Mark was in pain the whole time, being crammed into a seat built for a 5-year-old), so we watched that for a while. Mark started snoring about 11:15 (which is typical for him after eating at Abuelo's). I put the littles in their 2007 jammies, we sat and watched the seconds tick off the clock, wished each other Happy New Year, and then off to bed we all went.

The only New Year's resolution I've ever been able to keep is the one I made a few years ago ... not to make any more New Year's resolutions ... so instead of droning on about all the myriad things I'm going to do/not do in 2007, I'll end with a midnight photo of Kieran and Kendall.

Happy New Year!

On Being A Tourist

2006-12-30T21:40:00.000-08:00

I'm way behind schedule, I admit it. Oh, it isn't the loan files - they're in good shape. The books are up to date (through November anyhow; I'll finish them once I've got the December bank statements) and from there it isn't far to TurboTax and the dreaded Infernal Revenue Service and Oklahoma Tax Commission filings. All of the invoices are paid, the household items are handled, and the sink's clear of dishes. The small stuff's all caught up.

Nope, I'm behind on vacation.

Usually by this point in the year's festivities, we've got the e-tickets firmly in hand (or at least in the in-box) for our annual pilgrimage-in-reverse to England. I love it there - it's beautiful, and it's different, and when the phone rings, it isn't for me (or if it is, it's somebody wanting to do something fun). So, tonight I spent three hours snooting through booking websites (Expedia, Cheap Tickets, Orbitz, eBookers, American, Continental, Delta, United, and British Airways) looking for the path from Oklahoma City to Manchester that would have the least impact on the bank accounts.

Why do tourists get gouged? I mean, apart from one trip at Christmas, we've always gone in the spring (because there's nothing I like better than leaving Oklahoma for tornado season). The most we've ever paid for tickets up to now is something like $3000 ... but I'm staring at a minimum of $3950 here, and that's if we load up the big blue truck and drive to Dallas to catch a plane (involving a three-hour drive each way, gas for said big blue truck, and a month's worth of parking at DFW, which would cost $650 all by itself). Flying out of OKC, the minimum price is $4250, involving a six-hour layover in Chicago on the way home. I can only imagine how icky the whole thing would get (and how quickly I'd see my beloved annual sabbatical head straight down the drain) if we had to pay for a hotel in England for the whole stay.

Seriously, who came up with this stupid idea? I have to be missing something major somewhere. There can't be anybody who honestly thinks that it makes sense to crank up the prices during vacation season to the point of making it financially impossible for people to go on vacation. Some airlines now require that you bring your own pillows and blankets if you want them, and some offer you the indignity of the $8 snack box, while nearly everybody wants to charge extra if you want a paper ticket rather than the flimsy e-ticket (which is a cool thing at Disneyland, but not so easy to get to when the ol' surfboard modem is having hot flashes). You don't dare pack everything you think you'll need, because there are weight limits and excess charges if you exceed those limits with your luggage.

Argh. It's a good thing for the airlines that the blonde values her sanity enough to pony up these ridiculous prices just to get away from a ringing phone.

Anniversary of an Arrival

2006-12-26T07:30:00.000-08:00

People celebrate the immediate aftermath of Christmas in different ways. Some folks get up at the butt-crack of dawn to revisit the shopping frenzy of the day after Thanksgiving. Some enjoy extended holidays by meeting up with extra-familial others for fellowship. Still others turn thoughts to the New Year that's soon to arrive, plotting parties and lists of resolutions. There are any number of combinations of these and other activities that can occupy the day after Christmas (known as Boxing Day in certain "civilized countries" where football really is played with the feet).

None of these things are in the offing at our house. No, we have a different way of doing things on 26 December. You see, it's elder daughter's birthday, and therefore warrants its own special considerations. There's another whole story that goes along with our precious Kymber Cathleen's entrance to the world, and I won't bore you with that (at least not now), but this seems an appropriate time and place to celebrate her.

She was born at 9:45 PM CST on Tuesday 26 December 1995, and was named for two women who were among my closest friends at the time. It was felt that a name both special and unique was crucial for this little creature, something that could be cutesy for a small child yet that could be modified to reflect growing maturity and independence as time marched on. Therefore, Kimberly Ann and Kathryn Anne were tailored to become Kymber Cathleen, and we decided to call her Kaci (her initials, adapted, so as not to offend either of my two friends by calling her the other one's name).

I don't have any of her baby pictures scanned to put in here, but trust me when I say that she was a most beautiful wee lass, always smiling and giggling and laughing. She exhibited an amazing grasp of language and communications skills even from being quite small, and has always been a warm and loving being with a seemingly endless supply of hugs for giving away. She accepts others for what they are ... she's tolerant (and even embracing) of the wide and various differences between people ... she loves unconditionally. Besides that, she's a voracious reader, a straight-A student, and a true beauty. Heck, the only real gripe I have with the kid is that she's only shorter than I am by about an inch, and I expect to be looking up at her when I start laying down the law about what time she'll come in once she starts driving or (gasp, shudder) dating!

Her idea of the perfect birthday has changed over time. It used to be that we needed a party with her friends and gifts and cake and such. Today, however, it's a smaller event: we will fetch one of her friends and go out for a fru-fru girlie lunch, then hit the day spa for pampering (massages, facials, manicures, pedicures, makeup, and hair up-do for the little darlings ... with a massage also for me ... who says there aren't perks?). This evening, we'll meet up with said friend's family at Shogun, a Japanese hibachi restaurant, for dinner and cake.

So, then, here are some proud-mommy photos of our darling Kymber Cathleen on the occasion of her eleventh birthday.

K.C. as a cheerleader on Halloween

(with Kieran as a Power Ranger and Kendall as *the* Princess)

K.C. at her first game as a cheerleader

K.C. up to bat

K.C. holding Isabella, a friend's daughter

K.C. this morning, still in her jammies

What lucky people we truly are to know this delightful individual. Thank you, my sweet monkey-angel, for being all of the things that you are. I love you!

'Twas the night before Christmas ... reprise

2006-12-24T22:39:00.000-08:00

Wow. That's all I can say. Wow.

I started just after high noon, with fear and doubt in my heart (neither of which are traditional holiday heart-feelings). But let's call it Miracle on Memorial Road, because the final sallying forth for Christmas 2006 was not fraught with tension and strain and fighting over parking spots and the last {insert hot toy name here} or anything like that. No, really, it was great! (This brings new fear, though ... I might put it all off till Christmas Eve EVERY year if it's going to be this easy!)

I started at Barnes & Noble. Found everything I wanted, up to and including recommendations from a member of their staff who (a) had actually read everything he was telling me was so great, and (b) wasn't 50 pounds of bad attitude in a 25-pound bag, and (c) conducted our chat with a smile on his face that was (or at least seemed to be) totally genuine. WTF? Have I somehow failed to notice a rip in the space-time continuum and sauntered unknowingly into Bizarro World? I felt sure that my next stop would be light-years worse.

Retailer #2 on today's hit parade was Target. Now really, if ever there was a mass-market place that you are certain will be a sh*tstorm in the few hours before the Christmas shopping season officially ends, it's gotta be there, right? Wrong. The shelves were stocked (with notable exceptions of the two new game consoles, but so what, I have one of those ... WOOHOO!), the staff were smiling and helpful without that look in their eyes that reveals that management has force-fed everyone 100 mg of Valium, and hey looka here, I got a great parking space. That's two in a row. What gives? It all had to end soon, of course. It couldn't be any other way.

At the mall, I had to park out in western Iowa (or what passes for it in northwest Oklahoma City). Aha, I thought, this is the telltale sign. It's far enough past noon that everyone's gone home from church, changed clothes, and bolted to the mall (it's okay, Granny, we'll hit the food court when we get there). Gotta quote Steve Martin here: "But NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" I zipped from shop to shop, quickly finding that which I sought and getting through the payment stage with the greatest of ease (with one notable exception ... Gap had exactly two people at the cash-wrap, leaving four registered unmanned and resulting in a 20-minute wait). Gift boxes were offered! Duplicate receipts were had just for the asking! Customers were warmly wished a happy holiday! Surely this isn't the real world? I nearly decided not to bother with the last place on my to-do list (the grocery store), being overcome with a totally unnatural terror that I'd get caught in the police sweep that would surely follow a fistfight erupting over the last smoked Butterball. How would I explain THAT to my mother?

With fear and loathing in my very core, I ventured off to Albertson's ... when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a FRONT ROW parking space. As I maneuvered the three-ton sport utility vehicle into it, I was absolutely confounded. Entering the store, I found plenty of shopping carts that didn't seem to be mating, followed by a smiling and happy employee dressed like an elf handing out a flyer of today's "last-minute" specials. Alas, they were out of refrigerated sugar-cookie dough and shredded Velveeta! OMG, what's a girl to do? Why, a girl's to ask the nice person cheerfully filling the empty sugar-cookie dough bins with toffee dough, and thence be directed to the baking aisle, where a girl would find plenty of blonde-proof sugar-cookie dough mix, and thence to the pasta aisle, where there were blocks of Velveeta to be had that simply begged to be shredded lovingly at home.

Honestly, I don't know what to think. My husband hasn't pestered me mercilessly until I reveal what's in the packages with his name on, my children have been even better behaved than usual (and really, for the most part they are more angelic than monstrous), and elder daughter's dad (the starter husband) has been quite civil (if not exactly cordial) in chats about how to most effectively transport her from Home A to Home B.

It's been looking a lot like Christmas for weeks (months, in the stores) ... but today, at last, it FEELS like Christmas.

Wishing you and yours the happiest of holidays!

'Twas the night before Christmas

2006-12-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

Nearly done. Nearly done. I've been saying that for days now, and yet every time I think I've gone for the last round of procuring, I discover that while I may be closer to achieving the elusive "done" than I was the day before, I'm not really anywhere close. :::sigh:::

The spousal unit's gift was easy, as was shopping for elder daughter. Mom's is done, grandmother's is done, friends' are done. It's the twins that present the issues. They have at least a kajillion toys scattered all over the house in various states of completeness, and bringing more into the house just because it's Christmas seems something of a travesty, a bad joke. I came of age in the 80s, that blissful era of conspicuous consumption, but there seems something very wrong with allowing my children to get and get and get ... and then get more. If I could just get them to take care of what they've got, it might be different, but until that happens ...

So I think this year, instead of mountains of boxes wrapped under the tree, they'll get maybe one or two more gifts from Dad and Mum (your friendly blonde stood in line for a Wii, and that counts as one big'un), and then we'll start a special new tradition. I think we'll do one of those child-sponsor things, and maybe they'll expand on the social responsibility that we nudged them into at Halloween (rather than having monstrous bucketfuls of candy - which typically results in wrappers and chocolate smears in places where they shouldn't be - we trick-or-treated for UNICEF ... and bless whoever put UNICEF commercials on Cartoon Network or the Disney Channel where the little monsters could see them).

With that in mind, though, I've still got tons to do. My in-laws live something like 5000 miles away, so I am tasked each year with purchasing birthday and Christmas gifts and tagging them as being from the grandparents. That remains to be done, along with the baking of cookies (chocolate chip for Santa, decorated sugar for the extended-family do) and the preparing of the Christmas Dinner menu. (I'm not scared of roasting a turkey any longer, but I took the easy way out for this little festival and bought a smoked tom that only wants thawing and heating ... it's the side dishes that are going to take time that I really haven't got.)

So then it boils down to logistics. The mall and the big-box kids are all going to slam shut at six o'clock this evening (presumably with a great sigh of relief tempered with trepidation over the masses that will jam the parking lots on Tuesday), so I've got to map out this final round of fetching very carefully in order to maximize my acquisition prospects. The spousal unit has also chosen today to propose that "we" go shopping for my gift. (I swear I'm going to design a new family crest bearing the motto "Never do today what you can put off for six weeks"!)

Here goes ...

Wii Wii Wii All The Way Home

2006-12-03T09:40:00.000-08:00

Now I know how Charlie Bucket felt ...

I GOT A GOLDEN TICKET!!!

Yes, that was me, out of bed at 5:45 CST ... into the shower to wake up ... then on with umpteen layers of long-johns and four pairs of socks (not that they helped) and out into the 23F (12F wind-chill) morning to start Thumper, the trusty Expedition ... then after Thumper had time to warm up, off into the breach in hot pursuit. You see, I'd been out on 19 November at an ungodly hour (although not ungodly enough, as it turned out) to get a Nintendo Wii on the launch date at the urging of the spousal unit. ("For the children!" Uh-huh.) I'd first gone to Circuit City, where there was a thoughtful sign in the window saying ...

WE HAVE 13 NINTENDO WII UNITS FOR SALE ON SUNDAY 11/19

... I was number 14 ... so I went to Toys R Us, where the line was far less long (and the wait was on the south side of the store, out of the chilly north wind). I seemed to be fairly well in the hunt, but as the opening hour approached, several individuals materialized out of the parking lot to join the line ahead of me (and just exactly how that works out, I couldn't say ... but somehow it didn't seem either nice or fair). At five minutes ahead of the magical moment, someone from the store came out to hand out tickets for the units they had available, starting at the front of the line and working back toward where I stood (and the 50 or so others after me). At three people ahead of me, the poor guy handed over one last ticket and said, "I'm sorry, everybody else, that's it, that's all we have for today, and we don't know when we'll get more." There was some massive grumbling and gnashing of teeth, but those of us who hadn't been there since midnight the night before (or fortunate enough to have jumped the line) eventually wandered off. As it turns out, the fellow who'd ventured out with the tickets was someone I've known since fifth grade (yes, that's a long time ago, but boys don't typically change much ... most of them don't wear makeup, although some do shave their heads or grow ZZ Top beards or whatever ... but this one hadn't). I said hello, and he offered condolences for my not having got a ticket. Being me (and not the shy retiring type), I asked when some more were coming. He looked around to be sure he wouldn't be overheard, and then told me that he'd know a shipment was coming the day before it got here. I gave him my business cards and asked if he might give me a ring when he knew some were arriving, and bless him, he said he couldn't hold one for me, but he would do his best to phone when notice came that arrival was imminent.

Yesterday morning I got the call, and today I was up before the sun in order to have a chance (better than that of a snowball that's crossed the Styx) at getting a Wii. Thumper got me to the store at about 7:00 ... I was number 16 in line ... and the wait began. By 7:30, my toes were a bit numb; by 8:15, I didn't seem to have any feet at all. At 8:55, someone came out and began handing out tickets (wow, have I been here before?), but we'd been far more alert to folks appearing in line that hadn't been there all this time (and in fairness, there wasn't any of that this go-round), and so one of the tickets found its way into my hand! WOOHOO!!! (I really did feel badly for the people behind me in line ... but not badly enough - or mercenary enough - to sell my ticket.)

We trooped into the store in an amazingly orderly fashion (to be honest, I was expecting a scene out of "Death Race 2000") and into the area of the store where the games and such live before they're off to good homes. I got an extra remote (but not an extra nunchuk -- those were gone in a blink) and sleeves for the controllers, then got in line to make my purchase. Soon, I was the proud owner of a Nintendo Wii, two remotes, one nunchuk, two sleeves, Ultimate Alliance, and Zelda. Did I already say WOOHOO!!! (Sorry ... couldn't help myself.)

Six hours after emerging from the shower, I'm off back to bed. I'm just about able to feel my feet again (and yes, I know that the awful prickly/tingly thing going on in my feet means I don't need to see about having them amputated due to frostbite, but that doesn't make it a NICE feeling) and the layers are making me a little snarly.

But hey, I got a Wii ... WOOHOO!!!

Tree's A Crowd

2006-12-02T18:47:00.000-08:00

Firstly, many thanks to my loving spousal unit (the most fantastic man in the universe, bar none) for the title of this post. He's just so darned clever!

Today's fun family we're-still-snowed-in task was decorating the living room for Christmas (other bits of the house will get done as and when we can be bothered over the next couple of weeks). Since we'd bought some cute little trinkets to put on it for this year (gotta have a new look, right? I mean, just because it's a tree doesn't mean it should be stuck wearing the same old thing year after year), I asked my darling husband to fetch the stockings and Santa hat down from the upstairs "just stick it in there, we won't need it for a while" closet/disaster area. He brought them down ... along with a few big shopping bags full of unused tree-dressings from prior years! Too bad, too late, I'd already opened the snowflakes and Nutcracker ornaments, so everything else will get shoved back into the upstairs closet for another day, unless there's some other tree somewhere that just shrieks out for doing up.

Here's the view with the camera flash on ...

Then here's one that's MUCH more shiver-up-your-back, taken by said spousal unit (who knows how to turn the flash off -- something that's remained a mystery to me until tonight) ...

And finally, a photo of my precious Mark, together with twins Kendall (on the left, wearing her Cinderella costume from Halloween ... hey, a holiday's a holiday) and Kieran.

Owing to the Blizzard of November 2006 (and no, it probably wasn't that drastic in terms of what people in Maine and Montana and other bits of the Great White North get, but for us it was major), some bits that Mark had ordered for the outdoor display haven't arrived yet, so I'll leave the posting of the exterior extravaganza for another day (like one when it's actually out).

Tomorrow I must venture out into the wild ... there's shopping to be done, and it's of a sort that requires anyone wishing to actually acquire a ___________ (I'll fill that blank in for you later) to be at a certain venue at or before a certain time in order to have any hope of actually procuring one. Argh, the things we do at Christmas!

The Gargoyle's Relent

2006-12-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

Freeze at last, freeze at last ... we got Mum to let us freeze at last! (Kieran couldn't find his gloves, so it turned into a life lesson ... if you don't put stuff away properly, it won't be accessible when you truly need it!)

It's Snow Fun ... Volume II

2006-11-30T21:47:00.000-08:00

Note to self: next time Gary England says that Oklahoma City's going to get five to ten inches of snow, BELIEVE THE GUY and get yourself to the grocery store before it happens. Otherwise, you're just begging for a trip out in this ...

Honestly, I've never been so glad to own a gas-guzzling ozone-killing road-hogging three-ton sport utility vehicle (sorry, Helen). Forget that gas is $2.09 per gallon here (and believe me, I pitched a hissy like no other the minute it got past $1.25 ... it was 89 cents a gallon when I got a driver's license, and I truly believe that anything much past a buck is a total mockery in a state where we grow the stuff). Forget that our fine city has something like three snowplows and six salt-and-sand trucks for all 800+ square miles. Forget even that I'd been quite nonchalant in not bothering to go yesterday ... bloody hell, the Marlboro stash was gone, and I had to go!! Sigh.

It was a most harrowing trip in super-slow-motion down the Lake Hefner Parkway and across the Britton Road overpass to the Albertson's. Some twit was rightuponmytail for at least three miles on the Parkway, and only decided to sod off and go around me when I kept tapping my brakes. Once I got there, though, it wasn't bad ... not counting the four people working at Albertson's, I was one of three people in the whole place!

(Further note to self: get some of that quit-smoking prescription stuff and some Nicorette gum ... SOON.)

It's Snow Fun (or, there goes that Mother-Of-The-Year Award)

2006-11-30T16:22:00.000-08:00

Are you sure you want to read this? It is, after all, being posted by someone who's come smooth out of the running for any sort of cool-mum nod. Apparently I thought it was more important to do inane and stupid things (like tidy rooms and do homework, which at kindergarten level is learning to read by reading every book upon which one might lay one's otherwise idle hands) than to go outside and play in Nature's white confection. Alas and alack, cried my short people, how are we ever to develop into truly well-rounded human beings who might make positive contributions to the world if we don't get to go out and play in the snow??!! (All right, so it wasn't necessarily so eloquently said as that, but you get the idea.) My mom DID say I'd pay for my own raising at some point, but silly me, I thought it wouldn't be till the little toerags were of ages that ended in "-teen".

Post The First (Insert Trumpet Fanfare Here)

2006-11-30T12:03:00.000-08:00

So, my friend Mary in Connecticut has been after me for ages to crank up a blog. I've continually said no, because (choose your favorite reason) I haven't got time, I haven't got anything to say, nobody really cares what I think, etc. Today, however, it is snowing like anything (by Oklahoma standards, anyhow ... two flakes hit this town and everything screeches to a shuddering halt, hopefully without any point of impact) and I am bored stupid. Yes, I could take the short people out to make snow angels and snow people and snow whatever else, but really, it's COLD outside, and so therefore I make my timid way into the blogosphere. God help us all ... !