My Life Is Brilliant... My Love Is Pure...

... don't you love that song? Me too. It's so silly, and utterly nonsensical, but it delights us to think that there are men who think like that. Fortunately, there aren't, since we'd want to kill them the first time they fell madly in love with the lady on the back of the garbage truck while dragging the cans to the street.

No... no... no wimpy man for me, that's for sure. I've got myself a very romantic redneck honey who curls my toes and slaps a smile on my face. And in just 6 Saturdays, we're going to take the plunge, and get married. I CAN'T WAIT!!!

Have you ever been around someone that just made your heart ache with love for them? It's so funny. I've known Steven since we were little kids, and back then, when I used to follow him around with my puppy-dog eyes (okay, I didn't start doing that until about 8th grade), everybody said, "It's just puppy love. You'll get over it. No big deal." So I graduated, moved on... tried to forget about him... and proceeded to compare him to every fella I met for the next 20 years. And they all fell short, for one major reason - they didn't make me FEEL the way I felt when I was around him. But that was just puppy love, right?

So why is it that 20 years later, when he finds me on facebook, and we get together, I STILL feel it?? Surely it's just the novelty of the thing, right?? So why is it that 8 months after we started dating, I still get that feeling every time I see him???

Two words, people: TRUE LOVE.

Dang I adore him. So you don't like my sappy trip? Get over it. You're just jealous.

I have to say, 2009 has been the BEST year for me in a long time. My sweetheart and I got together, my eldest daughter, against all odds, graduated from high school, I got a new job that I L-O-V-E, my sweetheart proposed... and now, right before Christmas, we're going to get married and make 2010 a pretty darn rockin' year as well.

Life is good, people. The scriptures say that man is that he might have joy. Want to see what that looks like? December 19 - 7 p.m. - LDS Church. It's going to be a beautiful thing!

Manis, Pedis, and Other Insults to My Intelligence

Yes, dear readers, I do know it has been about 47 years since my last blog post. (Actually, it's been about 6 months.) However, in the interim, something rather strange happened - I got a life.

A few days before my last post, the most absolutely fabulous fellow found me frolicking on Facebook. (That's for all of my alliterative afficionados!) Long story short, my high school crush decided to hunt me down, turned out to be every bit as delicious as I always thought he would be, and 6 months later we're engaged to be married. Yay!

Now what, you might ask, does this have to do with Manis (as in "manicures" for short), etc? Everything.

My 39th birthday is rumored to have occurred last week (I'm still refusing to formally acknowledge it), and my darling mother sent me a little cash with which to fund the manicure I desperately needed before I would be willing to dare take a picture of the gorgeous rock on my finger, to share with the family. So the children and I made the trek to our favorite salon, just to find that our favorite Chinese family actually had the audacity to take their one-day-every-decade vacation exactly when I needed them most! I was absolutely appalled.

But not to be beaten, I marched over to Wal-Mart to visit their competition. Let me just spoil the outcome of this story by saying that is one mistake I will NEVER make again.

First, I am not generally a nail-doing kind of girl. I get my nails done maybe once or twice a year, for very special occasions. On those rare occasions, I (almost) always go see Amy and Scott at LA Nails, whose English leaves a lot to the imagination, but who psychically always seem to know exactly what I want. I say this, having only just come to appreciate their particular gifts, upon realizing that not all Asian nail-doing types have this ability.

For instance, when I walked into the Wal-Mart salon, the rather suspicious looking Asian man behind the surgical mask called out, "I hewp zhoo?" To which I enthusiastically replied, "Mani and pedi for me... just the nails for my daughter..." who dutifully held up her well-chewed fingertips, and promptly got a set of lovely acrylic nails, which were painted in bright red, looking as though they had been painted by a 96 year old half-blind stroke victim with Parkinson's disease.

This fiasco was taking place while I was silently enduring the ice pick and sledge hammer on the bottoms of my feet, under the guise of receiving a pedicure. As always, I reminded myself that I would endure all for beauty, and besides, I couldnt' wait to see how my toes would look when dotted with a color called "I'm not really a waitress" - the most gorgeous metallic red I could imagine.

For the most part, the pedicure was uneventful, if unreasonably painful, as the woman cut one of my big toe nails down to the very quick, and then tried to cover up for this mistake by painting the end of my foot. This would end up being the least of my troubles, though.

After the pedicure, I was directed to the table, where I was left to soak my fingertips, with their nubby little nails, in some rather tingly, garlic-smelling sauce. Then I had a hand-massage administered by a tiny little Chinese sadist, who amused herself by seeing how many bones she could crack in 30 seconds or less. I should probably have been clued in by the green, curling dragon claws she called her own toenails, that perhaps she was one fortune cookie short of a Happy Meal, but I just kept thinking "endure all for beauty!!"

After a few minutes of soaking and bruising, she said to me, "Why you wan nail done?" pointing at my ring. "You get merry?" And I responded that yes, I was getting married, and decided to get acrylic nails to hide my ugly natural ones for the picture of my engagement ring. She then slapped the table so hard my teeth rattled, and her bowl of stingy garlic juice went everywhere. "You wan a fake a nail? Why you say mani when you wan fake a nail?" She then slapped my hands with a towel and shoved me toward the creepy guy behind the surgical mask, who continued to berate me in his barely intelligible English, somehow getting across the point that I had asked for one thing, when apparently I wanted something different.

I have to say... this greasy guy was just waiting for the folks from Immigration and Naturalization to come in for a pedicure. He kept looking at the doorway with these shifty eyes, over his mask, and he about had a stroke when I found his nail salon technician certificate behind the shelf of nail bottles on the table, and I pulled it up to compare his picture to his actual face, and realized they were NOT the same fella.

He then proceeded to slather about 4 feet of acrylic on each nail, until I ended up with a set of totally square, absolutely indestructible semi-French claws. I say semi-French, because the original idea was French, I'm sure, but I'm pretty sure that the original French tips did not start in the center of the nail bed, so they'd be an inch long. I'm sure they also were intended to have some uniformity of shape which in no way corresponds to the Piccaso-esque fiasco which is currently represented on the tips of my fingers.

To add insult to injury, though, was the cost. The sign posted at the doorway said that they charged $20 for a pedicure and $12 for a manicure. However, my total bill came to $70 - and the creepy guy added an $8 tip to the receipt AFTER I left.

So...was this venture a learning experience? Yes. I now know the difference between asking for a manicure and a "full set." And I also know the difference between an illegal hack, and a real nail technician. Next time I go to see Scott and Amy, I'm going to give them a big tip... and assure them that they need not worry about losing business to the folks down the sidewalk at Wal-Mart.

Procrastination

I have always been a procrastinator.   When I say "always" I mean that in the most literal of terms.  My mother carried me 10 months before she gave up and had me removed, somewhat like an obnoxious tumor, which only became more annoying once it was freed.

Nevertheless, this is not about how much I annoy my mother, although I'm sure my procrastination has often been a source of annoyance to her.  This is, in fact, about regret.

I am notorious about procrastinating, and completely unapologetic about it normally.  I generally do, eventually, get around to doing things, and I generally do my very best with them.  But occasionally, something goes awry.

Take last night, for instance.  

I've been enrolled in 2 classes through Capella University for the last 10 weeks, which post all assignments and expectations on the internet before the class even starts.  So you would think that at some point, something in my brain would have registered important things like final papers due, and so forth.  Well, it didn't happen.  

Throughout the ten week period, these two courses (which were both taught by the same professor - no complaints there, best professor I've had from Capella so far) had a schedule which resulted in weekly assignments being due at midnight on Sunday night, at the end of each unit.  So, each week, I would make a point of hitting at least one of the discussion board questions by Wednesday (so I didn't look like a complete slacker), and then everything else would wait at least until Saturday (if it was a really big assignment) or until Sunday night, and get turned in an hour or two (or 15 minutes) prior to the actual time it was due.  This pattern was working well for me.  I did great work, got great feedback, and all was well with the world. 

Until yesterday.

You see, I failed to connect the actual due date of my final assignments to any part of my brain, and had just assumed Sunday at midnight would end this particular procrastination-fest.  And this week, the non-slacking Wednesday job didn't happen either.  I took a sick day on Thursday, thinking I could catch up, and then - ironically - actually turned out to be sick, and got nothing done.

So finally, Friday rolled around and it was time to start thinking about what needed to get done this weekend.  Where I would normally have checked the site to see what was due, I didn't because the computers at school were too busy having a virus, and I had to spend my first several hours at home inoculating my home computers against the same bug.  And then I went to Wal-Mart and turned a trip to pick up one tiny thing (a leaf blower) into a two-hour love-fest with my favorite retail Romeo.  Anyway, I did, eventually, come home, whereupon I ate my dinner while I casually perused my e-mail, checked out a catalog that came in the mail, and generally farted around for a while.  At about 9 o'clock, I decided it was time to get serious, and I logged into my class online.  And served myself one first-class coronary, straight up.

I had e-mail from my professor on both class pages, reminding me that my final discussion board posts were due by 5 p.m. and my final papers were due at midnight.  

I believe I actually shrieked.

Long story short, in the 3 hours that followed I hammered out several (late) discussion board posts, a discussion summary, and 2 fairly high quality papers of 15 and 21 pages.  I was relieved to discover that Capella is located in the central time zone, which bought me an additional hour to work on the OTHER final paper, but I was ill-prepared to write it.  I really had not fully developed even the idea I was going to write about, much less researched it.  So, 42 minutes after it was due, with a heavy heart and a note of apology, I submitted a very inadequate piece of work.  

Then, after addressing my e-mail, I proceeded on to bed, where I should have remained for the next 12 hours (particularly considering that it was 3 a.m. when I finally fell in).  However, my guilty conscience had me up at 8, wondering how long it will be before I hear from my completely disgusted teacher.  

My point:  procrastination has a price.  It is, eventually, quite miserable, and not worth it.  I hereby assert that I will no longer procrastinate!  I will take the bull by the horns and I will be assertive and I will get what needs to be done - done, promptly, and with panache!  

And I'm going to get started on that immediately!  Right after I have a nap.

New Years Resolutions

Having enjoyed a lovely visit with my parents and siblings this holiday season, having had the opportunity to review and relive all of my past choices, I now commit myself to the following New Year's Resolutions:

1.  I resolve... not to marry anyone with more gas than a BP station in 2009.

2.  I resolve... not to doubly insult anyone by mispronouncing the name of their church or the insignificant bit of matter to which I am comparing them (such as accusing someone who is a member of the Episcopal Church of being a part of the "Yep's a Popsicle" church... or letting someone I was trying to call a troglodyte think I was calling them a "chocolate dyke.")

3.  I resolve... to make myself immune to accusations of hypocrisy from people whose blood is a 30% caffeine and 30% tannic acid, by resisting the urge to consume vast quantities of beverages which are capable of corroding metal surfaces.  (i.e.  Coke).

4.  I resolve... to tame the beast within me... as I have been assured I can do with a tube of V05 and a couple of Aussie products.  

5.  I resolve... to resist the urge to eat the Aussie products, even though they smell so deliciously grape-candyish that it will be a significant effort to restrain myself on this matter.

6.  I resolve ... to contain my inner-harpy, even if my children fall moderately short of my goals for them for 2009 (which are very modest, and only include things like admission into Juilliard University, a Nobel Peace prize, and completion of Algebra I [that one's for my 5 year old!]!)

7.  I resolve... to slim down a bit, from something along the lines of an aircraft carrier, to no larger than a frigate, excepting, of course, my feet, which were declared tug-boats by my mother in 1986, and I'm afraid there's no going back.

8.  I resolve... to build a real financial reserve, which doesn't involve any of the lint from my pocket, and is enough of a buffer to at least keep me in pantyhose in case of a real national disaster.

9.  I resolve... to keep the end-goal in mind, and remember each time someone calls me a "perpetual student" that there is no shame in learning, but the third graduate degree really is my limit.

10.  I resolve... to develop a list of New Year's Resolutions which doesn't summarize into "Farts, Fats, Faux Pas and Finances" as soon as humanly possible.

The Clones Are Taking Over

I am disturbed.  I am very disturbed.

(Okay, shut up.  I'm not referring to my mental state.  Or maybe... I am.   Hmmm....)

Either I'm losing my mind, or the genetic pool is shrinking at an astronomical rate, and now we have Stepford celebrities.

Have you SEEN this Zooey Deschanel / Katy Perry / Lizzy Caplan thing?  It's downright weird.

Being totally out of the coolness loop, I hadn't heard of any of these folks until the kids and I recently picked up a really weird movie thing (like a mini-series, really) called Tin Man, which I primarily wanted because it had Alan Cumming (whom I think is hot in a painfully weird, almost Peewee Herman kinda way) with a zipper on his head.  Anyway, the girl in the movie, which is a bizarre take-off on the Wizard of Oz story, is Zooey Deschanel, famous enough that I had seen her before on something, but not enough that I had a clue who she is.  She turned out to be a decent actress, so when I saw a picture of her on the internet, with the tag line "She kissed a girl... and liked it" I was a little disturbed.  Then, it turns out, the article claims this isn't the same person.  Yet looking at the picture, it surely was.  So I went and got the movie box.  (Okay, I sent Katie to get the blinkin' movie box.  She's 15.  Isn't that why we have teenagers?)  I held the box up to the computer screen, and honestly... the similarity is so strong that I had to google it.  And sure enough, it turns out that there are thousands of folks out there freaking out over the same thing I am, sort of.  Because its not just the two of them.  There's another one - Lizzie Caplan - and it's just downright creepy how much they look alike.  People have posted all kinds of thoughts about how they were separated at birth (several years apart!), but I have my own idea.  Here's how it goes...

So about 30 years ago, there was this nerdy scientist guy who bumped into a really hot girl at the A&P.  He was just knocked out by how gorgeous she was, and he got a little bit obsessed.  And when she dropped her purse in line in front of him, and a comb fell out, while he was helping her cram her stuff back in the bag, he discreetly pocketed the comb, which he took home to snatch her DNA from, to use in the first major human cloning project.  Now, he wasn't really interested in the medical benefits associated with cloning.  He was more of the wimpy, geeky genius type, who was so obsessed with his own empty life, that he was more motivated by the attempt to recreate his dream girl.  So he cloned her.  Several times.  And obviously, with some success.  Of course, then he had the significant trauma of realizing she was an infant, and before she was old enough for him, he'd be impotent.  So, being a dork, he decided on the next best thing - a social experiment.  He took his "triplets" and sent them to three totally different families in totally different places all around the country, to be raised by families with different values and lifestyles, to see if when they hit 30, they'd have the same favorite color, or all marry a guy named Brian.  His plan backfired, though, when he failed to realize that the type of hotness in question could potentially result in his special girls falling into the public eye.  And now, of course, he has gone into hiding in a cave in the mountains of Montana, in hopes that no one ever realizes that he manipulated human lives in hopes of creating his own Galatea.  

What does our adoration of these cookie-cutter women say about our society?  Hmmm.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe it says that we like tiny women with big bangs.  :)  (sorry... couldn't resist).  

I'll tell you what worries me though.  How many of them are out there who are NOT in the public eye?  And what have they done with my hair-dresser????

Zabby, the Hair, and the Great Disappearing Brain

Zabby is my 18 year old fabularious wonder-daughter. She's very unique (her Senior Superlative even says so!). She's got this unbelievable waist-length hair, and this cool, gypsy-meets-molly-mormon kind of style: very modest, but quirky and funky and colorful. If it sparkles, she's all about it. She'll wear 25 bracelets simultaneously, with a broomstick skirt, a mohair vest, and pearls, and totally pull it off. She looks like that kid they're always trying to portray on t.v., but always end up going too trendy to get it right. Anyway, did I mention she's gorgeous? She is, when she makes the slightest effort. Like in the prom picture that I'm 99.9% sure I'm going to post on here. (Okay - it was more than the slightest effort - but I kid you not, she's fabulous with just lip gloss and a hair brush.) Problem is... she's one of those funky individuals who just couldn't possibly give a flip.

It's nigh unto impossible for me to believe that she in any way descended from my mother who literally, to this day, at 62 years old, will not go to the garbage dump without lipstick on. This child is perfectly happy wandering out the door with no shoes, no makeup, and no sign of a hair brush (as long as she has a funky hat).

Okay... enough about her looks... now on to the missing brain. :)

It helps to understand, as you ask yourself, "how can any self-respecting mother let her child go around like that?" that I keep telling myself she's smart enough to know better. But it may be that she's smart enough to know more than I do!

Her IQ is in the rather astronomical range of 141, which you would immediately assume translates into someone who is so smart that she wouldn't even need school. But the truth is... she's so smart, she needs a secretary. She can't tell her left shoe from her right. She never knows what day of the week it is. And she's been known to run into posts. (Admittedly, it was while walking and reading a book at the same time - but it has happened more than once!)

She's a cosmic underachiever, though. Where she is probably one of those kids that was meant to find the cure to cancer or something, instead, she inherited from me a bad case of the Idungivacraps and from her dad a bad case of the Nofreekinways. So instead, she's going to be the artsy-fartsy type. She's an incredibly gifted artist, and an amazing writer, who has already been published, and hopes to one day support her aging mother with the millions from her first novel. (Hey! Thirty-eight IS aging!! I didn't say OLD!)

So, as you can see... she's my pride and joy. She's my heart's devotion. She's the apple of my eye. She's the bane of my flipping existence!!!!

Let me tell you about her grades....

This, her senior year, is the first year I haven't been at the same school with her, and it's been a disaster. We missed out on the senior ads in the yearbook deadline, because dunder-butt never even noticed they were announcing it (every day for 9 weeks). And we narrowly missed ordering her cap and gown and invitiations for graduation for much the same reason. (And WHOSE idea was it that we order such things in October of the Senior year??? Probably the same doof-ball who decided we needed class rings in 10th grade, senior portraits 10 days after the junior year is over, and who told Wal-Mart to start putting out their Christmas stuff before Halloween.)

Ahem...anyway... this is the manner of her life. She is the poster-child for attention deficit disorder (as I'm typing this, she's scooping up her little brother in a bear hug, and knocking a plate of pizza onto the floor. Argh!!). Despite the fact that her mother was her assistant principal from 10th-11th grade, she could never manage better than mediocre grades (LOTS of B's), and actually ended up with a C in BAND (no, I'm not kidding) because she failed to turn in ONE STUPID WORKSHEET!!!. (Yes, I know it was over a year ago, but I'm having some trouble letting it go.)

Anyway, so she's a month away from her final semester in high school, with a 3.23 GPA, hoping to get into BYU, having never managed to take the ACT test (even though I kept writing the check...and she kept forgetting to turn in the paperwork!). Getting down to the wire (they want all their Freshman applications in December), she finally managed to take the test, but it was the perfect picture of Murphy's Law.

On the day of the test, she realizes she has no calculator (we stopped on the way and bought one) and she has no picture ID (couldn't buy that - and couldn't get a driver's license because we were afraid to let her behind the wheel). Luckily, they recognized her, and let her in. But, in true Zabby fashion, got sick as a dog in the middle of the test - I'm talking full-out stomach wrecking diarrhea sick - and they wouldn't let her go to the bathroom. She moaned and whimpered and sweated all the way through the first part of the test, just to streak to the bathroom during the break, and not make it back until they'd already finished the entire math section!! Then, of course, she wasn't done being sick... and long story short, $42 later, she comes out of the testing room and says, "Mom, I don't think I did very well...."

Well... what could I say? The kid was sick. So I tried really, really hard not to anticipate the score report. I knew it would cause me pain, so I just went ahead and forked out the money to have her re-tested. Then... the scores came. And I'll bet you can see this coming...

If you know anything about ACT, you probably know that the scores range from 1 to 36, and most people get between an 18 and a 25. To be competitive at a school like BYU, which has pretty darn high standards, you really need the upper end of that range, along with a high GPA, great church leader recommendations, etc. We knew that the October test wasn't going to help her in THAT quest....

And then we got the scores.

Genius-child, beloved offspring of my loins, miraculously produced... a 34 in English, and a 34 in Reading... in spite of the fact that she was sick. She didn't get a regular composite score, because she missed the entire math test... and she got a 24 on the Science (ONLY better than 72% of all the students taking it), which probably has to do with the fact that she hasn't taken a science class in 2 years.

When one sees scores like that... and then hears her excuse for "getting distracted" when she was supposed to be getting her homework done...(its like her brain just disappears!)... one gets a little ... nuts. And she's been doing that stuff for...oh, about 18 years now. So I'm off my flipping rocker, and I've got no one to thank but Zabby, the Hair, and the Great Disappearing Brain. (Okay, that's a huge exaggeration. But you'll have to wait to find out where all my gray hairs came from until Katie is 18, and I can feel a little better about roasting her on the Internet!)

I love my Zabby... but I swear... she'd better marry a rich man. That's all I'm saying about that.

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.