I have a cold, although today, it's much better. Yesterday was a lot of moaning, shuffling, aching and sweating. It was one day of that. I did take some Airborne yesterday, I don't know if that helped it? My mother swears by that stuff. Airborne and DayQuil. Great stuff.

I got to watch some movies yesterday since I was on the couch most the day with the aching and the sweating. First, I watched Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins. It's not an Oscar winner or anything, but it was pretty funny. Although, the two dogs getting it on I could have done without. Then I watched Taking Chance an HBO original movie with Kevin Bacon, who the older he gets the finer he gets. Jesus, he played a Marine in the movie and was in uniform for probably 90% of the movie. HOT. Although, the movie was heartbreakingly sad. Even though I'm a baby eating liberal, I am always touched by military movies. Maybe because my husband is a military man? Maybe because I went to military school? Living in the day to day military life as a spouse it's rarely like what you see in the movies. The movie was about an officer who volunteered to escort a body back home, even though he didn't know the boy, but the boy was from his hometown. It showed that through the week long travels, Americans as a whole, all different walks of life were touched by the death of this fallen Marine. I cried like a baby. It's a true story. All along the trip, everyone revered this box that held the boy inside it. Treating it with the utmost respect and crying for him. Strangers who never knew him, but appreciated him and his sacrifice. It was just a really good movie

After that I came to my liberal senses.. I microwaved the left over kitten casserole and emailed Satan.

Wow, I haven't written here in awhile. There really isn't a reason, other than I really don't want to bore everyone with how much I love my dog.



Ok but now that I'm here...... Ok, I won't go there. Suffice it to say I love him, and I love the kids, and even the cat is coming around and hanging out more.



Other than that, well I don't have much else going on. Staying busy of course, and you know, doing stuff. Last week and the week before I got to spend a lot of time chatting with Tony on yahoo. That has been really helpful with keeping the bitter feelings at bay. When you go a week or two without contact, you start getting a little pissy and even though I'm an old pro at this, I can't help but to take it personally when he doesn't contact me, even though I know it's not because he doesn't want to.

The other day he said the guys in his villa were mad at him because he didn't want to go out. He wanted to stay in and chat with me. I'm sure he got all types of pussy whipped jokes. I told him he didn't have to, that I honestly don't expect him to chat with me EVERY day. Hey, on the old ship, I could go literally a month without an email, so I take every chance we get to chat online as a gift, and never expect it when I shouldn't. He said he knows that, but if he has the time he WANTS to chat with me. He also wants me to put my camera on so he can look at me and the kids as we interact while we chat. Usually, it's me jumping up to let the dog out or get a kid a drink, or making my fiftieth cup of coffee. I think maybe it makes him feel like he's here.

Aislinn had a program at school and she was so cute! They dressed like Egyptians and did a thing called "Temples and Tombs" and they had to do some hand motions and singing. Then each kid had a part in the play, and she had one line and she did so well. I mean, I know hello it's one line, but her voice was clear and she didn't rush through it like some of the other kids. I was pretty proud of her. She said she was so nervous before hand. It's a wonderful feeling to see your child up on a school stage and have them look for you and wave. You think WOW that's MY kid up there.

I guess I had more to say than I thought I did.

It is freaking NUTS how much planning goes into a Disney vacation!! I've been staring at this piece of paper all day now that has "May 4th.. Animal Kingdom" written on it. Because, I plan on us doing Animal Kingdom on May 4th. The main problem here is that you must make table reservations beforehand. How in the HELL do I know what I want to eat for dinner two and a half months from now??

Thankfully, I know a ton of Disney Fan(atics) and that are helping me wade through it all. It's really quite daunting. I don't think we'll do this again for many, many years so I decided to go for it, and went ahead and made reservations at a deluxe resort. We're staying at the Animal Kingdom Resort that has wild animals all over. Aislinn is going to be THRILLED. We're telling the kids we;re going to St. Louis so Tony can visit family. It will take us about 12 hours to drive there. What surprises me is that this Disney thing is Tony's idea. I mean, sure ok we discussed trying to get there sometime, and had kicked around next September, but he did some research and found these amazing deals and said "let's go! Let's do it" I told him today I had a hard time imagining him in Disney.

Tony and I have spent a lot of time chatting via Yahoo instant messenger. Sigh. These little chats have made me fall in love all over again. I look forward to the chats and never want them to end. We talk about everything, from what the kids are doing, to things we'd like to change about our relationship. Of course we also talk a LOT about sex. We remember things we've done in the past, we talk about what we're going to do when he gets home, things we'd like to try, and even things we don't really care for. I've learned some surprising things though. One thing is he DOES get mad when I won't have sex with him. He says sometimes he has to really try to not let me know, and he will lay in bed long after I've been asleepp stewing over it. This surprises me. He always seems so accepting of my rejection. He said he doesn't want me to ever feel bad or do anything I don't want to, so he just shuts up about it. Another thing that surprised me is that he finds my glasses of all things extremely sexy. I mentioned getting contacts and he said No, he likes my glasses. He said he never had a thing for glasses, but once I got them he just finds them so sexy. When he said that I blushed.

A little a this, a little a that

We're half way through the deployment, and this is when it starts getting hard. The newness of it all has worn off. I'm tired of the kids in my face 24-7. People have stopped calling to make sure I'm ok. The other day, Tony wanted to chat online, and he got himself a webcam. I hate webcams, because all you do is look at the person typing. I told him about oovoo and how we could talk through the cameras, but he didn't download it. Anyway, as he is sitting there in the quiet villa, with guys going in and out and cracking jokes with him like some type of dorm, drinking his beer and talking about his upcoming weekend off, I honestly wanted to claw his eyes out. I was struck with such a white hot flash of bitterness, it surprised me how strong that feeling was. It probably stemmed from the fact that here it was 3 pm and Aislinn had just come home from school, and everything was crazy here. So, while I'm fielding questions, breaking up fights, fetching drinks, telling kids to do this and that that last thing I want to see is him sitting at 10 pm his time, chillin' with a beer.

I find the bitterness creeping up at different times lately. Like the stress of care packages. You should always send your overseas loved one care packages, yet the same is never expected of the overseas person. I don't get that. Especially this time around. He's not on a ship, they've only been to sea once, he's living in a house in town. He can't send a package? He couldn't send the kids birthay cards? I mean honestly. Here I am busting my ass to make sure he has a package, a package of stuff he can buy at the store, just to show how much we love him, yet no one thinks "Hey has he sent YOu anything?"

That is another thing. Everyone always thinks I should be SO accomodating to him. He's the one that is gone. This probably irks me the most. Look, as much as we want to romanticize this whole deployment thing, he's not getting shot at in Iraq. There I said it. People hear "deployment" and think he's off defending the American way. No. He's not. He's working on a broken ship and coming home to the Villa every night to watch movies. Don't feel bad for him. Truly. He's getting paid for this. Trust me, I get that it's hard for him to be away, but you know.. gotta figure if you JOIN THE NAVY this shit was going to happen. Just sayin'. I guess you could say well you gotta figure if you marry a man in the Navy this is going to happen. He wasn't in the Navy when we were first together. He joined.. behind my back. So you know there's that whole aspect of it too.

Meh so you know.. it doesn't get easier the longer it lasts, it actually gets harder. Not only are you kinda done at the half way point, you're also on end of it, and you are also excited as the end is in sight. That takes a lot of energy, reigning in your excitement.

On a more positive note, Aislinn will be nine on Sunday. I just can't believe it. I had a parent teacher conference yesterday with her teacher, and it was a good one. We've been in contact through out the year over Aislinn's homework woes. Basically the teacher told me that I should not allow myself to get sucked in by helping her. She said that she should no longer need me to sit right there, and help her. Thank God. It has really gotten on my nerves. She also told me not to check her homework to make sure it's right. I admitted to her that I had kinda stopped that for awhile because it just made my night SO much easier. Aislinn would freak out when she would see me marking things wrong on her homework, and start crying. So, in turn she was to afraid to write answers down, she wanted me to verify the correct answer BEFORE she wrote it down. As you can imagine this was frustrating. This was our conversations for homework:

"Mom? I think this answer is five. Am I right?"
"I don't know. Are you?"
"Can you check to see if the answer is five?"
"No Aislinn, just do your homework, I'll check it after and if it's wrong we'll go over it together"
"But! Why can't you just tell me if it's five?"
"Sigh"
"MOM! PLEASE!"
"No, Aislinn. It's not my homework ok?"
"But, I don't want to write the wrong answer down!"
"Don't worry about writing down the wrong answer"
"But, jajdkakdkjakjdaddk" (this is her blubbering and crying)
"Geez, Aislinn crying isn't going to give you the answer is it?"
"I just wiajdkasdfajsdfafjjf"
I walk over and look
"No, the answer is not five, there happy? Now that is it! Ok?"
"Sniff. Thanks mommy"
"No problem"
"Is the answer four?"
"AAAAGGGGGHHHHHH"

Do you see how much time gets wasted? Why homework lasts two and half hours? She won't go do her homework upstairs, so its 2.5 hours of being absolutely silent so as not to distract her. The teacher said read the direction with her. If she still pushes on the whole "I don't get it thing" (something the teacher says she DOES NOT do at school) then do the first one with her, and stress that was all I was going to do. Then ask her how long she thought it would take her to do that particular thing. Set a timer for 5 minutes more than she thinks she'll get it done. If the timer goes off and she's not done, set it aside, even if unfinished and say Mrs. Morgan (the teacher) will help her tomorrow, but more than likely she'll have to skip recess to do it. Then move on to the next. The hope is that if we work together, if she realizes that what happens at school affects home, and vice versa, she'll stop farting around and focus. I plan on getting a pencil box while out today, and sharpening a ton of pencils and filling it with erasers as this is another stalling tactic of hers. Break teh pencil lead know it is going to be a hassle to get a new one sharpened. Bite the eraser off so we have to find another pencil with a decent eraser. What's hysterical is that she expends so much energy NOT doing her homework, energy that could be used to JUST DO IT GOD DAMN IT!

She is so smart though. I just want to focus this energy into more positive things you know?

Speaking of smart... here are a list of Louies commands he can do consistently:

come
leave it
drop it
sit
lay down
Shake

wait.. I make him wait at his bowl when it's time to eat, I put his bowl of food down and he must wait until I say ok, then he goes to the bowl and eats.

get the ball... this one is when he has dropped the ball too far away. I feel as the master I shouldn't have to go and get his ball to throw it. He should bring it to me. So I say "Get the ball" and he knows to bring it closer. Whatever it takes to get me to throw it, he'll do.

What we're working on

Beg ...he really just wants to jump up and snatch the food out of my fingers. I can't figure out how to get him to stay on his butt.

Roll over...he got this one right away this morning, but he rolls on his back not all the way around.

Other one... shake with opposite paw.

There really is no other reason to teach him these things other than 1. I think it's kinda fun and 2. I think it keeps him on his toes mentally. He's such a curious little guy. I watch him around the yard, and I've honestly never seen such a curious dog. You can just see his mind working. It's so me to get an ADD kinda dog. When we do the tricks, he likes it. I'm sure its the food in my hand he really likes, but I also think he likes his little mental work out. I love to watch him try to get around the tricks to get the treat. When he sees the clicker in my hand, he immediately sits, and then will go through the gamut of tricks without me asking. Like he knows usually shake is the last trick to get the treat, so he will immediatly shake right off the bat. The clicker is what sealed it for us. Louie hears praise from us all the time. So, having that CLICK lets him know.. Yeah good boy you did it! Then he knows the treat is coming. What's funny is I've started to chain the tricks together. Sit and then lay down and then shaket before he'll get the treat. After lay down though, sometimes he'll look at the clicker willing me to click it. Then huff a bit when I don't and then goes ahead and shakes.

The cat.. she's a cat. She eats poops and sleeps. She doesn't do anything cool.

Jonny is doing well. Loves school, becoming a little man. Still my snuggy butt.

If there is one thing I can't stand... it's yard clutter. My sister is laughing since she's seen my yard in the past. I'm not talking toys, I'm talking junk. Stuff people refuse to throw away. Growing up, I don't ever remember having a lot of yard clutter. "Dirty" houses had yard clutter. Boxes and bags of stuff that never quite made it out to the curb.

Imagine my embarrassment that we have yard clutter. It's driving me nuts. I just went out there and threw a bunch of stuff away, but I'm just PISSED in general. Tony is a pack rat. A slobby pack rat. I can't even begin to tell you how many beer bottles, soda cans, and packs of empty smokes I found out there "thrown away". I use quotes because they were thrown away in something that was not a trash can. It's the same way in the shed.

This is the one thing that shows how differently Tony and I grew up. Although, by my family's standard I'm a mess, on Tony's family standard, I'm down right Martha fucking Stewart. I get having a few and leaving them to collect on the table outside. I can eve see leaving them there over night. What I don't see is how can a fucker be so lazy as to throw them away in a tub that is literally a few feet away from our dumpster. The only thing you have to do is open the gate to throw them out. Then, since fifty bottles and cans are in there, lets just pile other trash on there so that the kids now mistake it for trash, and when I ask them to take out the trash from the bathroom they throw it away in there, and the bags of poo they've collected in the yard, that has now been rained on, and we've got a nice gross slurry of beer, piss and poo water.

Barf.

Can you tell who found this treasure and had to clean it up? It's been sixty consistenly for a week now, so you can imagine the smell. I taped a plastic bag over one hand, had tongs in the other and a towel coated with deodarant around my nose.

Happy Valentines Week! Woohoo.

Fairly busy weekend

This weekend was a pretty busy one. Saturday Aislinn had Girl Scouts field trip. We went to Home Depot to do their monthly kid's project. Has anyone heard of this before? I wish I had known about it before!! Once a month, they offer a free project. The kids do it, and then they get a pin for the free apron, and a certificate saying they completed that project. Then, as if that wasn't good enough, they give them free lunch!! They get a hot dog (a BEEF hot dog, not one made out of anuses and beaks, well unless they use cow anuses) chips adn a juice box from the little lunch cart outside. It's smart because, you get the kids in, and the parents start looking around and buy stuff. Of course, this is when the vendors, and the employees are out in full force with demos and stuff. Even the lunch guy benefits because, if the kids are going to have free lunch, mom and dad will probably get a philly cheese steak, or an italian sausage too. Gotta love smart marketing. Being.. you know, poor I am immune to the pressures the sales people put on me. But, I will look around next month to maybe get some ideas for the house.

After that, we took the girls caching. We had a lot of fun. We found all the caches in that particular park. Aislinn's GS leader has recently gotten into caching, and has really, really taken to the hobby. She started before Xmas and already has 120 something finds under her belt. As of Saturday, we had um.. 15. We've been doing this almost a year. After the official Girl Scout outing, we went to some other spots taht had been giving me trouble that she had already found and played hot and cold until I found them. Caching is funny, because you become kinda paranoid in a caching kinda way. When you can't find the cache you get home and you think.. "Was it the acorn? I don't know, the acorn was just laying on the playground in the mulch, it can't be the acorn just lying loose like that, usually it's attatched to something. But, what if it fell off. Remember the pine cone* so is it so far fetched that it was that acorn. FUCK I bet it was that fucking acorn." An acorn would be welcome. There are some people who get ever more devious.

*a pine cone cache plagued me for MONTHS. Someone hid the cache in a pinecone that had fallen behind the fence, and I just knew it wsa the fucking pinecone. I was right.

Aislinn is a natural cacher, because she always thinks outside of the box. Take for instance there was one that I looked for and couldn't find, andwe went again with Tani so she could hold my hand. She kept insisting I was looking RIGHT AT IT, and all I was seeing was a huge power box. Nothing sticking out, poking off funny, skewed. It was just a huge power box. Aislinn walks right over to the "serial stickers" and says "Here it is" and pulls the stickers off. They stickers were actually a magnet and upon further inspection, the serieal letters was the name of the people (sans vowels) who had hidden the cache. On the back was magnet with a log to sign. WTF?!? When I asked her how she knew, she just shrugged and said "They looked too thick to be stickers" Seriously, my mind was blown.

We went again yesterday and found all the caches in the park near us. It is a lot of fun to cache with other people. So total for the weekend, I added nine finds to my total, so I'm up to 24. W00t!

I made reservations for Aislinn's bday party at a paint your own pottery place, and ONE person has RSVP'ed thus far. I'm starting to worry. It's two weeks from now, but still. I want her to be able to have friends there.

This cracks my shit up

I regularly go to http://www.perezhilton.com/ and recently read on there this quote...

"Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that [Harry Potter author] Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and [Twilight author] Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good."
- Stephen King tells USA Today

What is even FUNNIER are the comments following this tidbit...

That is absolute Bullshit … he is clearly jealous of her new found fame

He is an old hag who wants some of the attention!!!

Well F*** YOU Stephen King!

Bitter much, Stephen?

The man has gone senile.

This is a man who has written a a book about writing and who has had another author write a book about his series of books . Never mind the fact that he reads every book within this genre of horror/fantasy. If it has vampires, dragons, mind readers, boogie men, yadda, yadda, yadda he's read it, or it's on his night stand to read. He is one of the leading critical voices. If Stephen King is quoted as saying he likes it, I know I will too. He's like the geeky version of Oprah and her book club. Also, have I mentioned the man is going BLIND and manages to read a book a day?

Even if you don't like his books, you still have to give the man credit for being a leading force in the literary world in our time. Sheesh.

I am a big girl...

Yet here are the tired clothing choices for us big girls

Animal print
fake velvet
rhinestones
wild prints (Don't get me wrong I like prints, but sometimes I'm SICK of prints)
sheer sleeves
kimono tops
huge eyelets (is that the correct term? Where there are hole designs around the neck?)
Biased cut tops and or dresses
big, flowy dress pants (everytime I go to a wedding or something similar all the big woman wear these and I've had a pair about six years ago)
Pant suits as really my only option for "dressing up"
Shirts with attatched "jewelry"

Maybe because I'm you know... poor, these are the only options available to me. Looking through a small catalog Lane Bryant sent me everything was beribboned, festooned, flowy, and bedazzled. You can't get a damn tshirt at LB without rhinestones.

Sigh. I'm in a bad mood. Time for bed.