I'm so sadly lacking in computer skills....

I just thought I'd get that out in the open.

After being inspired by insiteful writings by both Ivyblogs and blueviolet, I have decided to make a confession.

My ideal family life, I have very sadly realized, is very heavily influencd by.......The Brady Bunch.  I'm a complete loon!  Except in my own fantasy, I'm more like Alice than Mrs. Brady.  I mean Alice had it all together, man!  She was the top dog in that household.  The what, one or two episodes where she was on "vacation" the whole damn house just fell apart.  She made breakfast, lunch and dinner by hand every day for eight people, effortlessly. She was patient, kind, and always knew how to solve your problems. She could simultaneously bath the dog, give a lesson in volcanos, and vaccume the livingroom.  She was also capable of letting the children do many creative and always very _messy_ projects, but still had the house looking spic and span the very next day.  My God!   Did that woman _ever_ sleep?  She was more like, Robo-Alice! 

Why? Why is this my criteria for judgeing my own achievements?  These are obviously hideously ridiculous goals, only to be attained by a hollywood tv staff and an army of set dressers.  I know that I was always heavily influenced by what I read and watched when I was a child.  But until I really made myself think about it, I didn't know how much it really played into my life currently.  Even working only part time, I have a lot of guilt about leaving my child with someone who doesn't chare my own standards of achievement.  And by achievement, I mean that I wake up every day (okay 98% of the days) thinking, what will we do today?  What will we make?  What will I teach my son?  How will we spend our time?  Granted, I mostly have our schedule pretty booked, but maybe this is why!  I'm literally trying to keep up with the Damn Brady's!  AGH!!! 

Thanks Ivyblogs and blueviolet for paving the way for me to make this somewhat disturbing revelation.  Revelation is the pathway to contentment.

Right?

Well, I got the man off to the airport again.  He's gone for another three weeks.  Sheesh.  This week, I'm working three days, and then it's yard sale, baby!  I love the idea of having a yard sale!  I've never actually done it, I don't think. Maybe once when I was really young.  Hey, if someone wants to buy my old junk, more power to them! 

Yesterday was my BIRTHDAY!!! Hurray!  Hurray for my mom who went through torture I hopefully will never, ever know.  She went into the hospital at the first sign of having contractions.  (I'm pretty sure, that was the first mistake, but she didn't know any better, you know?).  According to my dad they immediately gave her a big shot or morphine for the "pain" which stopped the contractions for like, three days!  Actually, they didn't stop completely...they just didn't _do_ anything.  My mom said that she got no sleep for three days, never dialated beyond 3 centimeters,  and had a raw spot on her lower back from rubbing it durring each contraction.  ugh.  Around her, all women who were having their babies, yelling, screaming.  What a picture!  After the third day, her doctor decided that a C-section was in order, and  I was (finally) born on June 1st, 1971 at 6:39pm.  And her good childhood friend, Claudia was the nurse who cleaned me up.  They had grown up together.  My mom had to ask if I was a boy or a girl, because no one offered the information.  And they took me away.  She didn't get to hold me for a long time.  I have seen a couple of brand new me pictures, and they look just like my son.  Two peas in a pod!

Sick Sick Sick. 

What is it with men and illness?  I went to bed last night with a fever and a sore throat.  I also got up at 7 with my son and made him breakfast and tried to tidy up the living room.  All while the male counterpart slept.  Then I went to get my hair done, because, a girl has to have her hair done once in a while!  I came home, still feeling pretty miserable, and was greeted with, "Well, do _you_ like it?" (meaning, of course my very red, and blonde hair.)  I went to the couch and tried to lie down.  Got about 10 minutes of rest and then had to get ready for WORK, because, unlike someone else I know, who is apparently crippled by the missling leg of his Y chromosome, I feel an obligation to fulfill my promises.  I work in a store where the air conditioning is broken and we have nothing but a simple box fan, which is right now blowing aroung all of the cotton wood in the world, which I'm allergic to.  It's hot.  We're busy.  I'm flu-ish.  I probably shouldn't be at work at all, but I know there is no one else to take my shift, and I feel guilty about calling in sick when I was obviously well enough to get my hair done.  Oh well.  Came home from work with a 101.6 degree temp and still the sore throat.  Can I rest?  Are you serious?  No!  The man has to go out to a club where he might be getting some work, beause it is important to make an appearence.  An appearence that will undoubtedly last until well after midnight.  Luckily my little angel is tuckered out from playing outside and no nap, so he takes a bath and we read night-night stories about dinosaurs and he climbs into bed without any fuss. 

Lucky me!  I do feel lucky that I can keep going even when I don't really want to.  I feel lucky that I'm home to read stories to my boy and to see his taking in new information. He is so amazing!  He must have my genes! 

(kidding!)

Epiphany!

It all started with Bob Barker.  (ha!  not many stories can start like that, eh?)  I was watching The Price is Right, one of my sadistic indulgences when I'm actually home at that hour of the day.  I was folding laundry, or something equally as mundane, and it caught my attention that one of the contestants on the show was a member of my sorority.  Not from my college, but the same one, none the less.  I know, many people I know have given me much grief about having been affiliated with a sorority, but, what can I do?   ANY way, it was kind of cool, because ours was small and not widely known.  AND she won big. She won it all, baby. (do you watch the price is right?  she won BOTH showcases at the end!  Makes me want to go sign up!)

I got on line and tried to find a network of some kind where I could tell the "sisterhood" that I just saw one of our own win the big one, but all I found were shameless plugs for people who are trying to decide which greek house will best suit them. (I'm so glad I'm not in college anymore! this is a good gage of how "old" you're getting)  I was looking around and I did find an e-mail address, so in a fit of spontinaity, I e-mailed our central office to find out my membership status. Turns out I'm on the Alumna list, even though I never graduated from college.  And I think I owe my chapter money.  I was not a good club member.

The epiphany..I'm getting to it!! I promise! 

I was in the shower later that day, (which in it's self is a bloody miracle, my hair has never been so greasey.  when greg gets home one of the first things I'm going to do is lock myself in the bathroom for a three hour soak.) I started thinking about the young women in college now.  We were not that different.  It really wasn't _that_ long ago, was it?  (Okay, 12 years is kind of a long time...) And I've been thinking about the whole woman's body issues (see previous post) and how since I would never want to give up any rights to my body, and I couldn't expect any other woman to give  up her own rights, even if I disagree with her choices, and I was thinking that there had to be some other alternative.   My girl friends and I had a conversation once dealing with women's sexuality in which we discussed something kind of like abstinence, but not really. More like, woman empowering themselves to make conscious desicions about who they want to make babies with.  And that's when the epiphany came.  I feel so strongly that what we've been taught as "feminists" has done so much harm to our very womanhood.  We have the right to "choose" what we want to do with our bodies, but how many of us actually make a conscious choice?  Not I!  I did it and didnt' look back until I saw two little pink lines on the pee stick instead of one. Viola, baby! Here you go, lady, decision of a lifetime.  Now it's the really tough one.  I think that if women took it upon themselves to really counsel other women that would be a huge step in the right direction for feminism.  We need to counsel each other about sex, love, babies, birth, relationships, and most of all, making our _own_ choices.  Not letting the moment make the decision for you. 

How does the sorority tie in? Well, imagine me (ha!) going to my old chapter (for starters) and offering to do talks about just that sort of thing. Not birth control, necessarily, but talking about real choices and what a difference they make in your life.  I could enlist my dear friends  (if they would come) to come with me and we could have a kind of a forum to talk to these young women.  Like a kind of mirror - us to them.  The vision I had in the shower was me making the date with the chapter president, myself and a couple others then showing up at the house at the appointed time and setting up lunch.  Making the girls lunch, eating, chatting sitting on the floor in our stocking feet and talking openly about what it means to your body, mind and psyche to have a child, have an abortion, have a miscarraige, to go without sex, to have sex with everything that moves, to get std's.  Whatever.  And just taking care of them for a few hours and showing what it really means for _women_ to educate _women_. 

THAT, my friends, is my vision of feminism.

Well, then, only a week until the "man of the house" returns.  ONE week.  Ack!  so many things have fallen behind.  I payed the bills today, though. It's always a relief to get that taken care of.  I doubt I'll have much time to post once he gets home.  I'm going back to work on the 14th.  *sigh*  It was so nice to not have to go to work for a while! 

Back when I was in high school, we used to swagger down the hallways chanting, "Hurray, Hurray!  The first of May!  Outdoor screwing starts, Today!!"

We thought we were so cool....=-)

Today was, in fact, so beautiful that if my partner had been closer than 3000 miles away, I may have considered such a thing.  Alas, he was not.  And frankly, I just haven't been in the mood, lately. 

On the page for the day was a little early mother's day shopping, for myself,as it turned out!  My mom is swell!  She bought me a little bird bath for my yard. It's so pretty!!  Gawd I'm old.  If ever I'd thought, whilst shouting sexual May Day cheers through the halls of my 'ol alma mater that one day I would be thrilled at the prospect of a new bird bath, I would have run for the highest mountain and engaged in some kind of sexual, drug ridden, anarchist ritual that involved killing of as many memory cells as possible.  But there it is, beautiful, and sitting on the stump of the sacrificial Chestnut.  The next tree to go will be the huge (taller than our relatively small two story house) overgrown christmas tree, planted by the past tenants.  My mother, who is, to my advantage, also the landlord, has visions of a pink Dogwood in it's place.  I'm down wit dat!  (I'm tryin' to be hip here...tryin'!) I have had guilt about chopping the thing down.  It is a beautiful tree, however, it was planted in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I remember driving by the place after they planted it and asking, "what were they thinking?? In ten years, that thing is going to dwarf the house!".  I was right.  I just had no idea at the time that _I_ would be the one living with it. 

I also emptied out my storage unit that has been my catch-all for about 3 1/2 years now.  Most of the stuff left there is junk.  I've got it in the garage waiting for our late spring/early summer garage sale.  if all goes well, I'm going to make a crapload of money on all this junk!  I have an attic full of stuff we haven't layed eyes on since we moved in two years ago, and a book about feng shui that is very convincing.  Clutter be damned!!  And in the process of clearing space for more junk in the garage, I actually did some good rearranging, so that you can actually get to stuff!  Wow!  My bicycle was sitting in there, too, throwing guilt at me from being neglected for so long.  Hold up your handle bars!  We'll be out for a spin in no time!  My son rode his trike up and down the block for a while. Now that he's got the peddling down, we have to get him to steer....

Last night at about 9:30pm, I was sitting on the couch reading my book.  The child had gone to bed earlier, by some miracle.  I heard a thundering sound, and at first, thought it was a truck.  We live on a pretty busy intersection.  Then more thundering, and more!  Wow!  It was a huge lightening storm!  The thunder was just crashing around us, like the storm was right over the house.  Then, like out a movie, the sky opened up and it _poured_ like I have not seen it pour in a  LONG time.  I actually got up and watched out the window for quite a while....it was very impressive!  It was so loud on the roof and our little aluminum chimney, I was afraid of my son waking up, but he slept soundly through the whole thing. Wow, again!  After about 10 minutes, the rain slowed down, but it didn't stop until after I went to sleep, which was about midnight.  Mother Nature was throwing a tantrum last night!!  And it was a good one! 

I'm stylin' now!  I've got my new fancy shmancy video card that lets me take still right of tv or video camera. In fact, it lets me watch tv while I'm on the computer.  I'm doomed...   And I've got a new-to-me monitor that  is a flat screen or mostly flat...definately more flat than the last one.  It's very nice!  I might just hang out here and look at it for a while....

Today was a good day.  We didn't do diddly-squat!  I think my dear son was relieved to stay home all day, because he was contented enough to let me read most of the day!  His new loves are doing dishes and vacuming with my little dust buster vacume.  Isn't that great?  Pretty soon I won't even need a housekeeper!  (haha!)  The only time we left the house was to go to the grocery store, and the boy fell asleep on the way home, which is about three blocks!  Why, I hear you asking, are you _driving_ three blocks to go to the store?  Well, our beautiful weather did not last, and it was pouring again this evening.  *sigh*  I'm glad I got the lawn mowed on Sunday!  It looks so much nicer when it's trimmed.

I was thinking today about fences, and different ideas about fences.  I used to not like them because it made the yards with them seem snobbish and uptight.  Like, don't come into my yard and mess it up!  I have to keep everyone out!  But I've noticed since I got my fence, which is not that attractive (cyclone), that I feel more like it's _my_ yard.  Like we have this definate division of that's the side walk, and THIS is the yard.  It's really motivated me to do a lot of work on it.  Part of it is because once you put a fence around something, it's kind of like a huge picture frame.  People tend to notice it much more, (or at least i percieve that they do) and it would be silly to frame something that is ugly, or unkept.  So while I'm not a huge fan of fences, I think that this one has been motivational, and a little inspiring. What a nice change!

What are you reading?:  From the corner of His Eye, by Dean Koontz, Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, by karen Kingston, and the Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan.

What are you drinking/eating?: Ravens Wood merlot, California wine

What are you wearing?: my favorite red sweats and my black long sleeved Old Navy t-shirt

What are listening to?:  My three year old (almost) son trying NOT to fall asleep in his bedroom

What did you do today?:  Talked on the phone with my partner, church with mom, lunch in the park, birthday party for my brother, mowed the lawn, read my Dean Koontz book, played with my son

Any TMI?:  I was a little overwhelmed today, wondering if my son's anti-social behavior is the sign of something I've done, or if it's just another phase that he is going through.

What has blown your mind lately?:  Thinking about myself, and how I've always seen myself as lazy, but then making lists of stuff that I've accomplished, and noting that I rarely have a day when I do "nothing".  It must be something else....