Back to Reality

For those of you who actually subscribe to this nonsense, I apologize for letting so much time, and so many events, to pass uncommented-upon. I shall try to rectify this horrendous error in the briefest manner possible.

1. Yes, I know Obama won the Presidency. Yes, I know that my dreams of seeing a female Republican in the White House have been crushed (at least until 2012). I survived Bill Clinton, I will survive this affront as well. However, I will note that if the man actually puts Hillary into any cabinet position beyond Secretary of Janitorial Services... well... anything I could possibly add to the end of that sentence would make me a target for the Secret Service guys, so I'll just shut up while I'm ahead. Even I can bite my tongue (mostly) for 4 years.

2. The world has changed in 3 months. My 20 year class reunion came and went, and being a teacher and a single mom, I was too broke to manage to attend it. That really annoys me. You know what annoys me more? I just learned that my best friend from high school (Cindy) has been living just a few miles from where I lived until I moved here!! And I had no clue. Which of course makes me wonder if SHE had a clue... and if she was just avoiding me because she heard all of those lame accountant jokes I've been telling for the last ten years. Honestly, knowing she's an accountant now, I might have to reconsider my position on how unbearably boring accountants are, because she was always the most fun person I could remember.

3. We moved (again). As much as I loved the farm (and I did)... cramming my three kids and myself into a tiny 450 square foot cottage, even lost in the middle of some awesome acreage, got old. Something about tripping over a box of dishes on the way to the toilet that tends to get you over the small thing rather quickly... Anyway, we're in Chiefland now. Here's the ironic part:

So I decided to home-school my middle child after her hospitalization, but I wanted to keep her supervised. So managed to make arrangements for her to spend her days at a local real estate office, doing virtual school assignments on her laptop. But driving 60 miles to go back and forth from Bell to Trenton to Chiefland to Trenton to Bell over and over was putting crazy miles on my car (and when gas hit $4.98 a gallon, I thought we'd be switching to peanut butter without the jelly!). So I finally decided to see about renting this awesome house that was sitting vacant next to our church in Chiefland for the last 3 years. We got it, so she'd be able to walk back and forth to her "school" at the real estate office. But immediately upon moving in, she stopped going, and now they're going out of business. Regardless, we love the house. (My bedroom is bigger than the entire old house!) And we're here to stay until directed otherwise.

5. I've gone back to school. It wasn't a hard decision. My student loans, after consolidation (because they were previously at $1150 a month!), are now at $551. My "highly qualified" teacher pay, for someone with 11 years of experience and 2 graduate degrees, nets me $2800 a month, after the health-insurance leeches and taxation. So there's not a lot left to throw around, while supporting 2 children and a very expensive high school senior who is now, technically not a child any more. Thus, I decided that rather than continue throwing over six grand a year at my student loans, I might as well collect another degree in hopes that it will help me overcome the stumbling blocks in my career created by the state financial crisis. I am pursuing my Ph.D in Special Education Administration through Capella University. It's an enormous amount of work, but very interesting, and it is the primary reason I haven't found time to post anything lately. Writing this gives me a guilty conscience when I've got three discussion posts due.

4. My inclination is to make a rant about my darling 18 year old daughter, but I think she's worth an entirely separate entry.... so I'll rant about my 5 year old son instead.

HOW can a 5 year old possibly out-grow a pair of pants in ONE week? I swear, he got these gorgeous pleated khaki pants for his birthday (Sep 29) and he wore them to church on November 9. But by the 16th, they were too short by at least an inch, and we couldn't button them! I would think that they had shrunk, except I didn't wash them. (Hey, he only sat in a pew in church in them, for pete's sake. I do have SOME sense of responsibility to the earth and to my electric bill. I'm not washing clean clothes!)

So I took him to target last night, and we looked for new pants in a 6 slim... found some that fit beautifully... but they didn't have a single pair of pants that were appropriate for church for under $14. What is that about??? Who can send their child to church in $40 worth of clothes? He's a boy!! He'll either destroy them or wear them out in 2 months!!

Sheesh.

Okay, so I bought him some sweat pants instead. No, he can't wear them to church. I'll stress over that problem at about 9:30 tomorrow morning.