What a Week!

I don't even know where to start. Let's see.

The kids started school on Monday. The day went well and the kids all liked their teachers. In the afternoon we picked up Kimberly's new glasses. Monday night she was still wearing her old ones and didn't understand why she needed to wear the new ones. Trying to explain that her prescription had changed and the new ones were different in more than just frame color went nowhere. It totally should have occurred to me that the child that has issues with change might have needed a little more coaching to part with her first pair of glasses. I finally had to take the old ones and hide them so she was forced to wear the new pair.

On Tuesday, I learned that my debit card number had been used fraudulently and made a ton of phone calls to cancel the card, file a police report, and try to determine who used my card number. The charge was only $7.74, but the hassle it has cost me is worth much more. My card had to be cancelled and a new one issued. The new card may not arrive for two weeks. I use that card to pay bills online, so I will have to change all those accounts. What a nightmare.

Wednesday I did about 10 loads of laundry while waiting for my new phone to arrive. I did not however deal with the socks, HA. Wednesday afternoon I had a meeting with Kimberly's teacher and it went very well. She was very receptive to the modifications Kimberly will need because of her ADD and I feel very relieved that this year will be so much better than last year. Wednesday night Jay came home.

Yesterday Jay and I spent the day together. It's always fun when we get to just hang out and do normal stuff together. We didn't do anything special, we went shopping at Walmart, Target, and Office Max, but since he is gone so much anytime we can just hang out is precious. Last night we had our first PTSA meeting of the year and we had a great turn out and lots of support. When I got home from the PTSA meeting, I did more laundry since Jay brought two loads home with him.

This morning I woke up at the crack of dawn to take Jay to the airport. He's flying to LA to pick up the truck he is taking to Michigan. He will be home tonight and then he leaves on Sunday. He will be in Michigan for 8 weeks. After I got back from the airport and took the kids to school, I had to go get a dispute form notarized for the fraud with my debit card. When I got home, I got a call telling me the identity of the person who used my card number. I'm so happy that not only has this person lost their job, because that is where she obtained my card number, but now the police will have to track her down and prosecute her. I knew when I talked to them on Tuesday that it wasn't going to be a high priority case for them since the amount was so small. Now that I've done all the detective work for them and have given them the name of the person, they have no excuse but to arrest her. YAY.

What a week!!

First day of school

Today the kids went back to school. It's amazing how quickly time passes. My oldest is in 8th grade this year, the middle one is in 5th, and my baby is in 2nd.

Yesterday there was so much to do to get them ready for school to start. Of course I had to make my day even busier by deciding that the little two should have desks in their rooms and headed off to IKEA which is almost an hour away from me to get them. I'm happy to say though that they are super excited about their new desks, and I'm super excited that they will each have a place to do homework where they won't bug and distract each other.

Hopefully this year will go smoothly. I've drilled into Aimee that she needs to do (and turn in) her homework, no matter how boring it is, Kimberly has her 504 plan in place, and Tiffany has the same teacher that Kimberly had for 2nd grade. If she could handle Kimberly, I'm sure she can handle Tiff. I'm looking forward to a great year.

In addition to going to IKEA yesterday and putting together new desks and chairs, I also finally got the cell phone thing straightened out. It seems that the block that the first guy I talked to Friday night was keeping my unsubscribe messages from going through. While I was on the phone with the 5th guy yesterday, he unblocked it, I sent the text, got the confirmation, and then he re-blocked the phone. I can't tell you how relieved I am to be done with that. I also got the tracking number for my new phone and it will be here Wednesday. YAY.

So now I'm off to work. Have a happy Monday.

Cell phone part 2

I originally posted a shorter version of this as a reply to Slackermommy's comment, but I thought it deserved it's own post since I don't know if you all love me enough to want to read all the comments other people leave me and it's too funny not to share.

Last night I called my cell phone carrier to ask about the charges, that much you know. I was told that they were "premium" text messages, but was still in the dark as to what this really meant. I was told that I needed to do something to her phone to make it recognize the block that the nice helpful gentleman had put on her phone so it would no longer be able to receive these messages.

This morning when the child woke up, I told her to bring me her phone. I asked her what she did and she really had no clue. I tried doing this reprogramming thing and it kept telling me "reprogram unsuccesful". So I called the cell phone company again. This time I got another guy who said that the block wouldn't stop the charges. He also helpfully explained what she did.

You know those commercials you see or ads in the backs of magazines that tell you to text a word to a number to get a ringtone, walpaper, or other nifty thing? That's what she did. For a psychic service. When I asked her if she had texted a word to a number she replied "OOHhhh". "What was it?" I asked. She said "this psychic thing". I asked her if the psychic had told her she was going to be in deep shit for running up a $100 bill. She said no. Some psychic, huh?

So this guy tells me that in order to stop it I need to send 5 text messages a certain number and that I should get a confirmation text back from them that it was successful. OK. So I hang up send the 5 texts and wait. 30 minutes go by and no confirmation. So I call back again.

I get the same guy. I say "Hey, I sent those texts and didn't get the confirmation" he says let me look into it, and after leaving me on hold again tells me to text STOP ALL to another number and gives me an 800 number to call if I have more problems. Oh, and he manages to talk me into buying a new phone and extending my contract for another 2 years. If I don't lose the mail in rebate it will only cost me $5.99 for the new phone.

We get off the phone and I send the text. Nothing. So I try the 800 number. It doesn't go through. I get nothing but dead air. Doesn't even start ringing. So I call the cell phone company back.... again. This time I get a lady. She tries the 800 number and comes back and tells me that she got through and what I need to do is text STOP to yet a different number and then follow the instructions it texts me back. OK.

So I do that, and nothing happens, and I decide to try the 800 number again from my phone. It goes through. I listen to all the menu prompts and choose the one for psychic readings. It tells me to text STOP to a number with one more zero than the first guy told me this morning and to wait for further instructions to be sent via text. It also gave their website address for more info or to contact them.

I sent the final text and when again, nothing happened, I went to the website. Found the email form and sent an email asking how to unsubscribe. I still haven't received a response from them. As far as I know I'm still getting charged for this shit. I'm not happy.

My advice, if you have a child with a cell phone, call your provider right now and tell them to block your child's phone from being able to receive these services. Getting rid of them is a nightmare.

Oh and I did all this before going to Walmart and Target in search of the remaining school supplies my kids needed and THEN came home and cleaned my desk. Makes the desk cleaning even more amazing, doesn't it?

Maybe just (kinda sorta) a little bit manic

I'd like to say that I'm joking, but sometimes I really worry about this. Maybe I'm just a psychiatric hypocondriac, if there such a thing. Maybe I should just be happy that I got something monumental done today, but I can't help wondering where these bursts of energy come from. Like the night I stayed up all night long researching a year's worth of Girl Scout field trips. Or today, when I cleaned my desk.

It might not seem like such a monumental thing, but let me put it this way, I moved into this house 361 days ago. The same day we moved in, the guy was coming to hook up the internet. Can't be without the internet you know. We literally had just gotten the desk and the box with the computer stuff off the truck when the guy arrived. I hastily set it up so he could do his thing. I didn't even bother to run the wires to the speakers behind the desk. Later when I came to the boxes with the rest of the desk stuff, I haphazardly put it all on the shelves, to sort out LATER.

LATER is a bad word for me.

Here we are 361 days later and guess what??? Everything was in exactly the same place. The speaker wires were still snaking up from under the desk, around both sides of my monitor, and in front of the shelf that they sat on. The piles on the top of the hutch nearly touched the ceiling. The top of the desk was cluttered with the detrious of daily life, and I had this little one foot wide tunnel with which to see my monitor and type. There were two large boxes filled with bills, bank statements, and other correspondence that needed filed shoved under my bed. The filing cabinet sat empty, serving only as a handy stand for my printer. Two other boxes sit adjacent to my desk filled with crap that I have at various times in the last year dumped off the edge of my desk to deal with, yup, you guessed it, LATER. I won't even get started about the size of the dust bunnies that were living in the midst of all this.

Now maybe you have a hint of why this is such a big deal for me, and how I might wonder where the energy came from to tackle this task that I haven't been able to face for four days short of a year. How today, I looked at the desk and said, I think I'm going to clean this today. Spent the next four hours clearing it off, putting everything on my bed so that I would have to finish it or sleep on the couch, and then tackled it, bit by bit. Sorting through all the envelopes, filing all the contents. Using up every last file folder I owned and filling a trash can with the empty envelopes. Dusting off the dust bunnies and returning all the cd's to their cases. Finding things I borrowed from people and desperately need to return. Culling all the kids crap and giving it to them to go clutter their rooms with. Ignoring everything else while driven to complete this task.

That's the thing, the opposite of LATER is NOW. I can't seem to do anything in between. I either do something or I don't. I can't work on something, set it down, and come back to it. This is what happened the last time I tried that.


Maybe, hopefully, this is just one of the ADD traits, and not a sign of a label much more ominous, but I still worry. I wish I had taken a picture of the desk before I started, but here is a picture of the end result. I am just a little proud of it. Note the fact that no wires are hanging out in front of the shelves and I have a nice open space with which to work. YAY.

Cell Phone + 12 year old = Expensive Bill

Today I got my cell phone bill. Strangely it was $100 more than it usually is. Since we have a plan that gives us more than enough minutes every month, I went in search of an explination. What I found was that my 12 year old had downloaded 50 or so "premium text messages" at $1.99 a piece. I didn't know such a thing even existed. I'm still not entirely sure what they are. What I do know is that after a pleasant call to customer service her phone is now blocked from receiving them. I also know that she's going to be babysitting for free for the forseable future.

Updates

I was reading through my older posts just now. I like reading what I write. I crack myself up. Hopefully lots of other people think I'm as funny as I do. In reading my old posts I came across a couple of posts that I felt required updating. So here you go.

Remember when I told you that Lizards Can't Swim? Kimberly fished a dead lizard out of the pool and then decided it needed to be buried? I even included a nifty picture of the burial? Well about a month ago I found a box in my garage labeled "Do not open. Lizard inside" Yup, you guessed it. Apparently after the burial, Kimberly decided she wasn't done playing with the dead lizard and robbed his little lizard grave and played with him some more. Then she decided to stash him in the garage for safe keeping. Well let me tell you, by late June it's a nice 110 degrees here, and it probably gets up to like 130 in the garage. Not the best place for keeping a 4 month old dead creature. Eww. I threw the whole box away and didn't even peek.

On another note, remember in March when I proudly told you I had finally sorted the sock basket. Well, I can now, not so proudly tell you that it hasn't been touched again since. In my defense we haven't had much need for socks in the last two months with the kids out of school and all, but I'm still pretty ashamed.

Lastly, remember when I told you about our 504 meeting. It went so well. I was so encouraged. Well by the time I got the actual printed version in my hands I was not happy with how things were worded so I sent it back asking for certain things to be corrected. The teacher then countered my corrections and refused to sign off on it. We ended up needing to have two more meetings with the District 504 supervisor on hand to mediate. Of course she understood where I was coming from and the fact that I was 100% right on everything I was asking for. As a bonus, she even suggested some really cool shit I hadn't even thought about. The end result was, the day before school ended we finally had our 504 plan in place. It only took all year. The teacher still wasn't thrilled with the fact that she had to sign off on it, and I wanted to say "Why do you care? It's not like you are going to have to do any of these things since there is only one day of school left", but I didn't. I think maybe she was worried about the other teachers kicking her ass when they found out about it.

Things that aren't cool

First would be my refrigerator. It's on, but everything in the freezer defrosted and my milk was warm. It's no longer producing that wonderfully cold stuff that keeps the food from going bad. Basically it's just a box with a nifty light inside now. Luckily it was the spare fridge in the garage, but it still sucks. I'm still waiting to hear from my landlord on whether or not she's going to be able to get caught up on her payments and keep the house I'm living in, and since most houses don't come with fridges, I may have to buy a new one soon. Do I have money to buy a new fridge? NOPE. I don't even have money to fix this one right now. I called the repair people at SEARS and they told me it would be $70 to come look at it and then more for the parts and labor to fix it, OR I could buy their maintenance plan for $250 and it would cover any repairs up to $500. They won't let me find out what's wrong with it before making the decision. The way my luck goes if I go with the $250 service plan, it will be a $5 part to fix it, and if I go the other way it will need $500 worth of repairs. Since it's a spare fridge, I decided to wait.

The second thing that is not cool is the comment spam I've been getting. Random people are leaving me comments hawking things like stickers. Really??? Just because I mentioned that I liked the show Ace of Cakes doesn't mean that I want comment spam that some company now has stickers based on it. What in the world would I do with them? Yesterday I got another one, but I deleted it and don't remember what they were selling. I didn't think much of it until I got the sticker one today. I know I haven't been posting in a while so maybe this has been going on for a couple of months and I'm just now falling victim of it, but it's not cool. My blog is for people who are interested in what I have to say. Not a forum for some company to hawk their stickers. If someone wants to advertise on my site, they can pay me to do it, or they can bite me.

Way overdue recipe

Ok, Ok I know. I had been wowing you with weekly recipies when I first started blogging and lately there haven't been any. I realized after awhile that I had a few killer quick and easy recipes, but after I posted them all here, I quickly ran out. I didn't have the time to constantly be on the hunt for new ones and try them before posting, so my recipe segment died.

This summer while I've been stuck at home, my friend Alisha turned me on to the Food Network. I've always avoided this channel because I thought that watching other people cook was about as exciting as watching grass grow. Not to mention that Emeril guy yelling BAM all the time is just about the most annoying thing ever (well after Dr. Phil anyway). Come to find out they actually have some pretty cool shows. I love Good Eats, it's very educational even for the kids and I love the sock puppet bacteria. Challenge is another good one. I like the cake ones the best. Speaking of cake Ace of Cakes is super cool. All of their cakes are beyond amazing. During this time my oldest has been inspired to become a pastry chef. This is the same child that not long ago wanted to be a doctor. Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to be a doctor, but I think it might be more fun having her make us desert, than having her diagnosing everyone in the house with things like Scurvy. Not to mention the school is a little more in my budget.

As exciting as all this is, I bet you are thinking "Hey she promised us a recipe" about now. So here it is. One night a week or so ago, I really wanted to make a chicken pasta with alfredo sauce. The only problem being, I didn't have any ready made alfredo sauce in the house, and didn't have any heavy cream on hand to make homemade. So it was off to internet land to find an alfredo sauce recipe I could fudge with what I did have in the house. This is what I found.

Quick and Easy Alfredo Sauce

1/2 cup butter
1 (8oz) package of cream cheese
2 tsp garlic powder
2 cups milk
6 oz grated parmesan cheese
1/8 tsp ground black pepper

Melt butter in non-stick saucepan over medium heat. Add cream cheese and garlic powder, stirring with a whisk until smooth. (I seriously recommend using a silicone whisk so you don't scratch your non-stick pan. Teflon flakes are not a yummy addition to any meal. Also I'd like to note that it doesn't exactly get smooth. Once the cream cheese completely melts it looks kinda curdled. Fear not, it totally starts looking normal again in the next step.) Add milk a little at a time, whisking to smooth out lumps. Stir in parmesan and pepper. Remove from heat when sauce reaches desired consistency. Toss with hot pasta to serve.

Along with this sauce I prepared 3 cups of penne pasta, sliced 2 chicken breasts into bite size strips and sauteed in a little butter and garlic, and steamed about 2 cups of broccoli that I had chopped into bite sized pieces. When everything was ready I tossed it all together and added the sauce. Totally easy, and totally yummy. Enjoy.

Insomniac Rambling

It's 2:30 in the morning and I can't sleep. Might have something to do with the three hour long nap I took from five to eight p.m. but maybe not.

I've got a lot on my mind. In the last 12 hours I almost decided to move my family to Michigan, and then talked myself out of it. Talk about a whirlwind. I'm slightly impulsive. Have you figured this out yet?

A lot has been happening since I last blogged. I've been recuperating from my seizure incident and am happy to report that I appear to be in perfect health. I haven't been able to drive though, so my activities have been limited. Being cooped up in the house with kids all summer is about as much fun as a root canal.

Remember a while back I blogged about quiet time, yeah, there hasn't been any of that here for the last two months.

So I've been thinking a lot about how not fun it is being a pseudo-single mom. You see my husband works out of town so when he is working he is gone. We need him to work eight or nine months out of the year to be able to pay for nice things like a roof over our head and something more nutritious than top ramen to eat every night. Not that top ramen isn't yummy.

Single moms have my utmost respect. I don't know how they do it. On top of everything I do, manage the house, pay the bills, cook, clean, taxi the kids to soccer and other activities, oversee homework, make appointments and actually remember to deliver the kids to the doctor, dentist, orthodontist, and eye doctor, they actually have to WORK to make the money to pay for every thing. On their own!!! Not that I don't work. I have a fun little job that I do during the day while the kiddos are in school which allows me to contribute a couple hundred dollars to our monthly budget. I don't have to worry about making enough to pay for the roof, food, and other essentials. My hubby rules in that department.

With that said, living apart from your one and only true love for any amount of time blows chunks, so I keep trying to figure out how to fix it. If my hubby worked only in one state it would be simple, live in that state, but life isn't that simple. His latest job is taking him to Michigan and it appears that it might be for longer than his usual 3 month stint. It might be 6 or 9. So the plan was hatched to move there for a year. For a girl who grew up in sunny California and then moved to even more sunny Arizona, living somewhere with snow sounded kinda fun. Think of the blogging I could have done about the evils of snow shoveling. Everything was on hold waiting to get the call that he was going for sure.

Today that call came. He leaves Friday. All of a sudden we had to figure out how to make our plan a reality. But after much deliberation, u-Haul rental quotes, input from the children, etc. the hubby and I decided it made more financial sense to stay put. Damn finances. Can't I win the power ball already? So here I am getting ready to face another several months being the one woman show.

Which brings me to gratitude. People are always asking me how I do it. My biggest secret is I always try to think about how lucky I am. I have many friends who have spouses in the military. Many of them have dealt with their husbands being gone for a year at a time. The most my husband is ever gone is three months and nobody is shooting at him or trying to blow him up. In comparison to them I have it easy. When I start to feel sorry for myself having to manage the kids and the house alone, I think of the single moms that have to bring home the bacon too. No matter what comes my way I can always look at it and see that even though it might seem terrible on the surface, I'm still quite fortunate. Sure I might rant now and then (my blog might be boring if I didn't), but after the ranting is over I always find a way to be thankful.

I don't wanna

If it's not one thing, it's another. How's that for a cliche. After having such a fabulous (insert sarcasm here) year, hubby getting hurt, me getting sick, etc. Now I find out that my landlord is having issues paying the mortgage on the house I'm living in. Another victim of our souring housing market. So after living here for a year, I'm now faced with having to move. AGAIN. Grr.

I don't like moving. I don't like finding boxes, packing all my stuff up, and lifting those boxes to move them somewhere else. I have a lot of stuff. I suffer from being a pack rat. Moving forces me to go through all my stuff and face the reality that I probably don't need all of it. I have a whole car space in my garage filled with boxes of stuff that haven't been unpacked since the last move, but I know that the minute I get rid of something I will then, of course, need it.

Then there is the fact that we really like this house. It fits us. It's got a great layout, and a pool! What are the chances that we will find another house to rent as teriffic as this one. The whole thing just makes me sick.