My Friend

There is this guy that I am friends with. His name is Jesse. I have known him my entire life. We went to church together. We went to school together. We graduated together. But after graduation, we went off to do our own things and lost touch.

Well, right after I started working at the body shop, he was in town on leave from the Coast guard to visit his dad and just happened to stop in to see my boss. I was SO surprised to see him. We have run into each other a few times and talked on the phone a little since then. Now he is a friend on Facebook and his status update yesterday made me proud to be his friend.

His status said that he has decided to do a fundraiser to raise money for breast cancer research. I don't have many details other than he is going to ride his bike a crazy long distance (like across the country) and it will start sometime in September when he gets discharged from the Coast Guard.

His mom died from breast cancer when we were 9. I can still remember how frail and tired she looked right before she lost her battle.

Anyway, he was asking for suggestions on how to get it all started and tips to make sure the fundraising goes smoothly. He also wants to write about the whole process from the beginning. One of his sisters suggested creating a blog or website to help spread the word about what he is doing as well as somewhere to record his experiences. I suggested he create a paypal account for it and get that paypal donate button/widget. I also told him that I would do whatever I could to help him out, whether it be going to the local businesses to ask for donations or building him a blog or helping him get a non-profit thing together. Anything.

If anyone has any suggestions or advice, I would be happy to pass it along to him.

RNC at the Strip Club?

Republican National Committee spent $1,946 at titty bar.

Wow. That is a shitload of money. Totally unacceptable!

Really, who thought that would be a good idea?

For what it is worth, I would be just as flabbergasted if the Democratic party (or anybody for that matter) did that. I have decided to not be affiliated with ANY political party. They all suck right now, in my opinion. But that is enough about my ideas on politics.

I am a fan of strip clubs and even I can say that it was a very bad decision.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when this was discovered. Deep down inside, yes, I am drawn to drama. Especially when it doesn't involve something I did.

Semi Slacker

I had grand plans to make fondant (thanks for the other recipe kimbosue!) this weekend but I got distracted.

I FINALLY got my moms old bread machine. It has been sitting in one of her closets for years. She put it in the closet when she got her new one and hung on to it, just because. She has offered it to me a few times but never could find it when I came to get it.

So my sister was looking for something else and came across the bread machine. Thankfully she remembered that I wanted it and grabbed it for me.

Anyway, I made 3 loaves this weekend. The first loaf didn't turn out very awesome. My brain didn't register that 1 tsp salt was 1 teaspoon salt, not 1 Tablespoon. Gag. That loaf went in the compost without a second thought.

The 2nd and 3rd loaves turned out much better. The bread is a little heavy and thick but they taste amazing slathered in real salted butter (not margarine)!

I was actually making the 3rd loaf when Hubbs got home from his weekend adventure at the lake. Picture me, in the kitchen, wearing my semi-girly apron, shaking my booty to pop music (*cough*Lady Gaga*cough*), and measuring flour. For some reason, he considered it one of the strangest and most funny things he had ever seen me do. He was laughing so hard he couldn't breathe.

Normally I don't like to be in the kitchen, am not girly, and despise pop music. Shaking my booty was the only "normal" thing I was doing. Maybe knowing all that, combined with the whole "she's in the kitchen, lets hope no one gets food poisoning" thing was what was so funny? He won't talk about it so I may never know for sure.

Maybe some time this week I will get around to making a practice cake.

He's Baaaack

Months ago, I posted about a pain in the ass customer hitting on me and using his backward ass slang. Dunno if anyone remembers or not.

Well, Mr. PITA is back. He JUST walked in the office. When I told him that the boss was delivering a car to another shop and would be back in about half an hour, he walked over to my desk and asked "Well, how bout I jus stan heah an watch ya?"

Translation: Well, how about I just stand here and watch you?

I said, "Um, no. But you can have a seat right over there if you want to wait."

Ugh. Then he asked what I meant by no. Hello stupid! You are old and creepy. You think you are hot shit with your old ass hanging out of your sagging pants, just like the gang bangers. If I had to guess at his age, I would say late 60s. He used to work with my dad and his grand kids are my age.

If he was paying cash instead of going through an insurance claim, I would totally have asked him to leave. Why does it make a difference? Because if the customer complains to their insurance company, we can be dropped from their referral program. And we jump through too many hoops to get into their referral programs for me to screw it all up by going psycho on some asshole.

Good News Finally

Hubbs has found out that he can hold a railroad job again. Hooray! He still can't work out of the local yard yet but can work out of a yard an hour and a half away.

Anywhere is better than nowhere. LoL. So that means we can start adding $$ to our sad little savings account and start paying off our debt again. Plus we will have our health insurance back. Yay for no more State Funded help!

He took off to the lake with a few friends this weekend so I am at home alone with the boys until Sunday. I needed something fun to do so I am going to practice my cake making skills.

Monk Man is turning 5 in May (OMG) and wants a Sponge Bob birthday. And he REALLY wants a Sponge Bob birthday cake. That is what I am going to attempt to make this weekend. I think I am going to try a sponge cake (boxed if I can find such an animal) and cover it with home made fondant.

This is the recipe I am going to try:
To make your own fondant, melt 16 oz. of marshmallows, with 2 tbsp. of water in the top of a double boiler. Stir until the marshmallows melt. Sift 4 cups of confectioners' sugar into a large bowl and pour the melted mixture in, stirring the mixture until it forms a ball. Turn the mixture onto a clean flat surface, covered with additional confectioner's sugar and knead until the fondant forms a soft, but firm, ball. Add additional sugar until it is no longer sticky, up to 3 more cups. Wrap it in plastic wrap and let it rest for at least 24 hours before using.

Super tough thing to try. Never worked with anything other than tub frosting and even that comes out looking like shit. LoL I will post pictures (good or bad) if I can find the camera.

Oh, and one other thing...........The bathroom has 2 coats of paint on it finally. Now all that is left is painting the ceiling and the trim white and finishing the tile/grout work. Almost done!!!!

Momma on High Alert

So the last few days I have been noticing an older (like 1980s) blue Chevy van driving around the neighborhood. I normally don't pay attention to the junk driving down our street. But this van was driving around and around and around. Plus it looked like the stereotypical child molester van. Cardboarded up windows and all. So yeah, I noticed it. I had just guessed that they were new in the neighborhood and were lost or something.

My next door neighbor, Kari (also my current BFF) came by today while I was feeding the boys lunch to tell me to be careful because she and Mark had an "encounter" with this van and the dude driving it.

She is a big bad biker chick and doesn't spook easily so I am totally taking her advice.

She said that while she was in the gas station yesterday, she saw this creepy guy standing at the door, watching her walk around the store. When she got in line to pay, he came and stood behind her. Her cashier was slower than the other one so the creepy dude was checked out before her. She watched him walk over to the van. She watches him watch her walk across the parking lot and get in her Blazer. When she gets out on the street, he pulls away from the gas pump and follows her all the way home.

Why she went home instead of the police station when she figured out he was really following her is beyond me. At this point in her story I interrupted her and asked WTF she was thinking because now he knows where she lives. She said that she wasn't scared for herself, she was scared for me and the boys.

When she got home and all locked up inside, she called Mark and told him what was going on. Somehow he saw the van parked across the street from one of his friend's house. Mark pulled up behind the van and looked inside. He says that the whole van was full of kids toys. The creepy dude comes out of the back yard of the house he is parked at. When Mark starts to walk up to him to find out why he was following Kari, the creepy dude takes off running.

So instead of chasing him, Mark gets back in his truck, calls the police and tells them what has happened so far. The police run the license plates. The information from the plates comes back clean (not stolen, no warrants, etc) but the police have already heard about the creepy dude.

As it turns out, there have already been 12 individual women that have called the police about this creepy dude. They also said that he is probably targeting not only women but little kids as well. That makes sense because of all the toys in his van.

BUT, then they said that there wasn't really anything they could do until he actually does something.

Wait, hold on a minute. Since when does following a woman home (numerous women) not count as DOING SOMETHING????? Is he going to have to break into a house or snatch up one of our kids before something is done to him?

Heaven help the man if he shows up at my door or sneaks in my back yard. I have a 9mm handgun and I sure as shit know how to use it. It is a Star something and it looks just like THIS one.

So other than having a gun and knowing how to use it, keeping the doors and gates locked, not letting the kids play in the front yard, not letting them play in the back yard alone, and being aware of MY surroundings, what else can I do to protect myself and the kids?

FWIW, I don't think I am getting overly worried about this. We are a small, tight knit town where everybody knows everybody else. We try to look out for each other. Non-locals stick out and word travels fast when something isn't 100% normal, like this creepy dude. Plus there is that mommy intuition that I try to listen to whenever it rears its head.

Bored

I am bored as hell today. I have already blogstalked, read all my forums, checked my emails and cleaned out my purse. It is only, what, 2:30? I am stuck here until 5.

Ugh.

Under Control

I have got to get my home under control. I figured this out while I was tearing the living room apart looking for a Wii controller that had working batteries.

Ugh. We have junk everywhere. I have brand new dishes in the bedroom. I have boxes of clothes to be put in the yard sale (as soon as it gets warm enough to have one) sitting in the living room. I have half of our camping stuff in my pantry and the other half in my gardening shed. The bathroom Mulligan has come to a complete stop for the time being. The door is back up, btw.

Hubbs has decided that we don't have a "stuff" issue, we have a space issue. He wants to buy a house and use the trailer as a rental.

What? You want to move out of the trailer that we own free and clear and buy a house? Get a mortgage?

I told him that he was going bat-shit crazy. Especially since he hasn't worked in 16 MONTHS!

His response was, "Don't you want new furniture?" Duh? No new furniture. Especially if it comes with a mortgage. Dummy.

I would LOVE to have a house. And we could totally get a house for cheap cheap cheap right now. But I don't want to have a mortgage. Ever. Did I mention he has been furloughed for 16 months?

It is very realistic to pay cash for a house here. A decent 3-4 bedroom 2 bath house runs around $50-75k. If we ever get out of credit card debt, the car paid off and his ass back to work, we could easily save up $75k in about 2 years. My goal is to save up enough cash to have BIL come from Colorado and build us our house. He owns his own construction company and builds AMAZING houses for the rich people in ski towns.

So my answer to the stuff/space issue is to tackle 1 room every weekend. That would include:
1) Pulling every single thing out of the room
2) Deep cleaning-walls, floors, vents, lights, closets
3) Addressing any issues (like socket covers, burned out bulbs, holes, paint) immediately
4) Organizing junk into 4 piles: keep, throw out, yard sale and donate
5) Find everything in the keep pile a home in the room
6) Take the throw out pile to the dump, box up the yard sale pile and take the donate pile to the local donation places

And then move on to the next room. It doesn't sound like much fun but I think if I stick to it, I can get it all done in 2 months. And then all I have to do is maintain it.

That makes a lot more sense than buying a whole new house. It would be psuedo-moving. If I make Hubbs help he might realize just how much work moving really is.

T-Ball

T-Ball sign ups are tomorrow. I already put a notification in my phone to remind me. Plus, Monk Man overheard Hubbs talking to someone about it. There is no way in hell he is going to let me forget to get him signed up.

The only problem is that he doesn't have the required Birth Certificate. When he was born, the hospital gave me a Certificate of Live Birth thing instead of a Birth Certificate for some reason. I have never been given any problems about using it and I am keeping my fingers crossed that I can continue having no problems about it until I can find the time to take a day off to get the real thing.

To Add Fuel To The Fire

On top of all that nonsense I posted about earlier.....

I get home and Bobblehead is still in the same damn diaper I put him in this morning. How do I know? They use Pampers and we use Parent's choice (because I am a cheap ass).

This is such bullshit. There are 5 able bodied adults there. There is no reason that he should have to sit in a wet diaper all day. Someone could have changed a diaper. It isn't even the first time this shit has happened either.

Ugh. Time to look into daycare (that we can't afford) for him now too I guess.

Toxic Family

Like I don't have enough issues to deal with anyway, now here is all this mess!

Monk Man is sick. We had been giving him breathing treatments all weekend and the cough seemed better this morning. He didn't have a fever or anything, just a cough, so he went to daycare.

The daycare lady texted me, saying that he had been coughing non stop since I dropped him off and she was afraid it was going to make him barf. I sent my mom over to pick him up since I am swamped at work and she lives right next door.

He wasn't at my mom's house an hour when she called and said that I needed to come pick him up. I told her I was the only one at the shop at the moment so there wasn't anything I could do. I made the mistake of asking what the hell was going on because, after all, he had only been there for less than an hour. How much trouble could he really be causing?

As it turns out, he wasn't the one being a shit head. It was my dad. My father was picking on his 4 year old grandson. Again. This time, every time Monk Man coughed, my dad would start screaming at him to cover his mouth or run to the toilet. Then he would go on and on about how he "doesn't want fing god damn barf all over the floor because the kid is being a baby". THAT is the exact wording that I heard come from his own mouth while I was on the phone.

Umm, excuse me? What did you just say to/about my son?

Being fed up, I bluntly told my mom that she just needed to take the boys to my house because I wasn't putting up with that bull shit directed towards my kids.

Seriously, if you want to be an asshole to your own kids, fine, that is your choice. But don't EVER be like that to mine and let me find out about it.

Ugh. I am so pissed off right now I could go over there and just punch him in the face. What kind of person treats a CHILD like that? It isn't like Monk Man can control it. He has a cough!

My dad didn't used to be like that. I don't know what the hell his problem is but it had better stop right now if he wants to see his grandsons.

Monk Man LOVES my dad. And my bitchy sister. He worships the ground they walk on and they both treat him like shit. It has gotten worse and worse in the last few months.

He begs to be able to go to my mom's house instead of daycare. This morning was bad. He kept crying "I wanna see Papa!" I asked him why he would want to go somewhere he was treated so badly and hugged him.

Anybody have any advice before I start punching people?

Of course there is the obvious answer, don't let Monk Man over there. But when neither of us can leave work, what else can I do?

The easiest (really, it is) option would be to pack up the family and move to where Hubbs could hold his stupid railroad job and I would be able to stay home with the kids but that isn't really possible right now either.

I need a drink.