If i put on real shoes i just might get something done..

 

I’m sure im not unique in this but i find the more comfortable my out fit the more lazy  i am.  It seems regardless what they were designed for yoga pants and t- shirts signal a part of my brain that says ” yep not doing shit today” .  Flip flops are for loungeing, athletic shorts are  the daytime pajamas.  Sometimes the simple act of putting on a bra is enough to get me moving in the right direction, jeans and socks, tennis shoes….. Now we are getting serious. Feeling crapy?, how about we do our hair. Just as our outward appearance can reflect the emotional sloth inside, so too can making our self look better give just a little push into giving a dam  and ” becoming a productive member of society”. So since im am sitting here writing this in my scrubby lounge clothes on this grey day with a head ache and an internal countdown till bed time, i guess i will take my own advice a put a little effort into me so that i have some desire to give of me.

Being mom

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You may have noticed i don’t mention my children by name or speak of them very often at all, this is not because  i don’t have stories or am not proud/ horrified by things they do( because i totally am). I just feel their on-line presence belongs to them. Any more online  reputation is the equivalent of a credit score its impossible to erase and hard to get back once it’s screwed up.  But i do want to take this time to discuss  ” being mom” , being mom  at least for me was like someone handing you a costume and saying  you are no longer who you were you will play the part of MOM. As mom you lose your name even your spouse starts to refer to you as mom, ask your mom, where’s mom? Its to the point if i hear my actual name it sounds weird to my ears.  I love love love being mom,it is truly the best job i could ever ask for. But now my youngest is in school  ( has been for a year now ) its time for me to branch out and be an actual entity of my own not” you must be mom…?”  Its exciting , scary and a little sad. I went to my first interview in ten years today, i would not exactly say i nailed it, but i was honest so at least im integrating with integrity.  And never fear the minute one of my little angels thinks her self grown up enough to post something they shouldn’t on-line during their teen years i plan on flooding the internet with all the silly embarrassing things they have done. Untill then we will have to make do with the silly embarrassing things i do.

A horse is a horse of course of course, unless its a dog…

Growing up my family always had pets, between the pets and the children we always joked ” welcome to the zoo” .  We had birds, and fish, dogs and cats , and even a rat my little brothers named after my sister’s boyfriend.  Now  that i am grown i still love having animals in my life, although i don’t want any that are caged i like the kind that are more a member of the family. We have a lovely old lab

who we got while trying to potty train the oldest. Not being above a bribe my sweetie says ” no more accidents and you get a puppy”  thanks hun now we get to house break….  Then a few years ago we rescued one of our strays that keep showing up boom

now a cat ( this one was totaly my fault but the cats are a whole nother story ).  But it’s not a secret my very favorite pet is our mastiff.  I always had small dogs as a child, Scottie’s and chi wa was and i loved them every one . Then one day my husband came home and said a friend from work ended up having a huge litter of mastiffs 13 and had three more puppies then he had arraigned for homes. I was adamant no more pets i care for them all i feed water vet visit medicate, plus aren’t mastiffs HUGE? I went on-line and started Googling mastiffs, all in the effort to show how bad of an idea this was of course. I researched and i looked and i feel in love. Maybe we could just make the two-hour drive just to… You know visit. Yeah right like a pot head  is headed to Colorado for scenery.  When we brought her home she could run under the coffee table she was so small, now  she wouldn’t fit under it laying on her side.

I am so used to her size that i forget to other people she is big, but of all the pets i have ever owned  my squish is the most kind and gentle.  Animals add a little something special to lives I’m  glad i have mine.

Rolling like a nazi (its not as bad as it sounds)

” ug my arm is sore” I say to my husband, and bless his heart even after all these years and knowing the awnser is probably stupid ( and long-winded)he still asks.So you know how you will walk out the door and walk straight into a spider web and you jump and shout and generally act like it was waiting just for you and will now fall upon your jugular like an old school vampire of popular culture ( not the more user friendly sexy vampire)? Ok now imagine riding along on your mower

minding your own business and boom COATED with web, now thankfully we have a big yard because the mower was on its own as I patted at my self  paying special attention to my hair because I have a thing about bugs and my hair.  So after the second time that happened today I decided to put my hand up to ” trigger the web” before my face got to them but after just a bit I realized I was mowing hitler style

and that just wont do, so I grabbed a branch to hold in front of me while I was mowing  more  with of a lance style

( because a knight is much better than a Nazi )and that is how my arm got sore.

Chicken fried love

I know i have fairly often spoke of the power of food triggered memory. Well today i would like to talk about my husband , and food, and memories. He is a sweet, kind man, with a wonderful impish side. When we met i liked him right away, we had some real tough times i would not of made it thru them with out him. Almost 18 years later we are still in love, however i have not ever had a very high sence of self-worth. He would say ” your perfect” and i would very harshly stress that it was not so. I worried that he believed it and one day would figure out he had been wrong.  I spent years worried i was not very good at all so i stressed and i fretted and was generally clingy and needy constantly trying to be a little better give a little more ( meanwhile becoming a yes man type of different person effectively erasing the woman he fell in love with)  and i fed him ” the way to a mans heart is thru his stomach” after all. It was something i knew i could do well that made him happy.  Well things got a lot real for us some while back, and we started communicating better than ever before. Enough so that  i realised how much time i had wasted being less than all of me, the all of me that he picked by the way. I will not say i don’t still get some insecurities, i do and often. I will forever be my harshest critic.  Today i finally tracked down a dish that he has spoken fondly of since i have known him. A foggy memory of a warm kitchen and a kindly mother of a friend cooking all day a delicious thing called gyoza.  Except from a thirty year old memoire it was yoza, making it hard to find but today i did ( thank you internet).

And drum roll please it was as good as he remembered. But the surprise i have found is that somewhere along the way my feeding him had become a kind of mental lasso, an ” at least this i can do for him” it was a feeling only i had but it was a very real however unacknowledged  thing. But today, today it was an act of love a pure desire to make him something special and it tasted twice as good because of it.

Despite the fact i went to the liquor store the next town over( stupid dry town) and bought ouzo instead of sake so the recipe didn’t get followed quite right.

Takes a classy lady to choke on shower meat.

You know how you open the fridge to grab a drink and mindlessly stick a piece of bacon in your mouth then move on to switch laundry over, and head in to jump in the shower all the while savoring ( spacily chewing like bacon gum) accidentally step on a Dora bath toy ( at least it wasn’t a Lego)thusly jumping straight in to the not yet warm ( cold) stream of water and so inhale a chunk of afore-mentioned bacon? ….  Um yeah me either.

When i was your age i rode a tornado to school up hill both ways…

Today I was thinking about stereotypes and perspective. When I was in grade school one of my class mates had a cousin come visit from California, still to this day I remember how surprised she was we had in door plumbing.  I have found that often people view my state as a cross between the pre techno color wizard of oz, and twister. We have our fair share of yee-ha and howdy, but there is also culture ( I have been told) and an abundance of kindness. While I don’t physically get out much and do a lot of traveling, I have in the recent past gotten to know people from all over via the internet. It’s not the same I know but its a cost-effective start, for instance I realized every thing I knew about Australia was based on crocodile Dundee  and rescuers down under.  My information on Canada was from Canadian  Bacon ( staring john candy) and dudly doo right. Was it just possible every one from California was not  like the cast of 90210.  I want one day to see for myself, but as with most things admitting a problem is the first step. Untill then I will ( try to) reserve judgement and let go of some stereotypes ( while quite possibly living up to others they are stereotypes for a reason after all).

Who’s your daddy?!

Parents are such a defining thing in your life, as we approach Father’s Day i am so grateful to be able to look around and see the positive effects of children on their fathers ( and fathers on their children) . I try to be a ” fun mom”, but it’s not the same as daddy time. Because despite our love for each other and our common interests and goals we are vastly different people, and that is a good thing. Daddy is the balance to mommy, now i understand holidays are bitter-sweet for people who have suffered loss ( or just plain bitter , down right painful in fact for some) and in non traditional households the  counter to mommy is not in fact daddy. Or perhaps the counter to daddy is daddy again, i can not personally write from that perspective so i will leave that to those who can.  In my life the role  of dad was in fact held by two men my father and my step father, who in their way each offered me help and guidance to become who i am.  And then i got married and there was father in law, then we had kids and suddenly my sexy husband became sexy dad ( not in the creepy way that might of just sounded). You see i never knew any of my dads before they became dads, but now i had a front row seat to this weird yet amazing transformation.  As good of husband as he is, i love him even more for the dad he has become. What a gift fathers are, so here’s to you killer of bugs, picker-up of dead things, for giver of dented bumpers, making us feel safe and loved in a world of crap. Thank you dads!

Boom! Thats what I’m talking about.

I found this on pintrest and thought haha kinda funny, but then i read it out loud to my hubby and suddenly it made sence.  The last third always wins….. It’s because the first 2/3 is hungry and the last 1/3 is powered by cake thusly cake makes you stronger… Lesson= eat more cake be strong.

Eyore had it right all along.

I’m feeling very Peter Pan lost boys today, I don’t want to be a grown up it’s just too much. I know im not alone in this, but i often wonder if this is a generational thing. Did we grow up with out enough hardship? Were their people of by gone eras looking around and saying ” being grown up is bull shit”  I want footie p.j.’s and  animal crackers and nap time ( or as the case may be, lemonade, nightgowns and sleeping past dawn) Or is this  just us( me) I know I had it easier than my parents and my kids have it easier than I did. Are we as a generation less? are our feelings  any different then the past? Or are we now, as we were raised to be; just more comfortable speaking of our feelings even the childish unjustified ones?  Just wondering….