This and That

A lot has happened since I last posted.

Here is the rundown.

We moved. Yes again. For those of you that don't know, we were forced to move out of the house we had been renting back in January because it was getting foreclosed on. We looked and looked and couldn't find anything that we liked. Well we found a couple but we were turned down. Each one we liked had several applications. All the others were dumps. Finally we found one that was only month to month (because it too was getting foreclosed on too). That gave us time to find the one we just moved into a week ago. On the hottest day of the year so far. Yeah, that was fun. So for the last week I've been playing, "Which box did that get packed in?" and trying to get unpacked and organized. Little by little it's coming together.

I've had to shop and buy some things for the house. It never fails, the little things you need to make a house livable, how the things that worked in the last house don't work here. Like the basket that I keep all the medications in. I keep all the meds in the cabinet above the microwave. Out of reach of little hands. Well the basket that I kept them in for the last 5 years, the one that worked in the last 4 houses we lived in, didn't fit in this cabinet. So I had to get several smaller baskets to hold the meds.

Then there is the guest bath. I've always wanted a guest bath with a pedestal sink, and I finally have one. Of course I haven't had a guest bath in the last couple of houses, so I had to figure out how to decorate that room. On a budget. Not having a cabinet in the bathroom makes storage more interesting too. I had some silver candle holders in there that my aunt gave me for Christmas several years ago that really didn't match anything in any of my other rooms. I decided to use them, get some white towels, and go with a clean spa like theme for the room. I found a spare toilet paper roll storage container in chrome, as well as an artificial calla lily arrangement in a silver colored pot. I picked up a chrome wire basket to hold the extra towels. Somewhere around here I swear I have a white bathroom rug, but I have no idea what box it's in. If I don't find it by next weekend, I'll probably go buy another one. (then I will find it, LOL) All that's left is to find something to hang on the walls. As soon as it's done I'll post some pics.

I finally got a new phone. After the insurance sent me two more Frankenstein phones, my husband finally got them to agree to send me a BRAND NEW PHONE. The catch, they don't make the pink ones anymore. They still have them in the store, but the insurance does not have any. They tell the hubby they will send the silver phone and maybe the store will trade it for a pink one. Ya, the store said no deal since it wasn't from their inventory they couldn't swap it. So he made yet another call to the insurance, and after they tried to extort another $50 deductible from him, he finally got them to pay for a brand new pink phone for me. Wow, it's only been like 3 weeks now. I tell you one thing. I'm not keeping my phone in my back pocket any more.

Close but no cigar

Here is the latest offering by the Verizon insurance people.

As you can see, they at least got the right screen on this one, but it still has the wrong navigation buttons. Of course it's too late to call now, but I'm making the hubby call first thing tomorrow. I bet you he gets me a brand new phone, not any more of this refurbished crap. He's good at things like that.

F#&king Frakenstein Fone Friday

Monday morning my phone took a dive into the toilet. Brilliant, I know. It's KARMA biting me in the ass for laughing at my husband for fumbling his brand new Blackberry Storm into a sink full of water. I called him "Fumbles" for days. That will teach me.

So of course the hubby was in no particular hurry to call the insurance to get me a new phone. He did turn on his old Curve for me to use and he finally called the insurance on Tuesday. Wednesday my new phone shows up. I haven't even touched it yet and he's already on the phone bitching about the trackball not working right. Fabulous.

He gives me the phone and tells me he will go to the Verizon store the following morning to get it swapped out for me. I finally get to try and use it and I immediately see what the deal is. The trackball works only about one out of every three times you push it.

So yesterday I had to work, so I left without my phone so he could take it to the store. I get home from work and he tells me that, of course, the trackball didn't act up at all in the store. Figures. He did however get the insurance to agree to send me out a different phone. It should come today.

SO last night I'm looking at my phone, and something just doesn't look right. I look up on Verizon's site and find this picture. This is what my phone is supposed to look like. This is what the one that went swimming in the potty looked like.

The phone the insurance sent me looks like this.

Notice something wrong??

It looks like they took pieces from this Blackberry

and mixed it up with a pink one.

No wonder it doesn't work right. F#&king Frankenstein Fone.

Random

I don't have the time or energy to write a long post tonight.

Here are some completely random things that are on my mind.

Tomorrow we get the keys to our new (rental) house.

I haven't packed anything.

Unless you count the fact that I only unpacked half the stuff we moved out of the last house.

In that case you could say I'm half packed.

Or half baked.

I have been feeling yucky all day.

Like I'm getting sick.

I don't have time to be sick, since I am:
Moving this weekend.
Working a crapload next week.

So I keep telling myself I'm not getting sick.

And I should go to bed early tonight.

But I need to take a bath before I go to bed.

I wore flip flops all day.

My feet feel dirty.

I can't sleep when my feet feel dirty.

Is it summer yet?

This happens every year. The day when the kids (or namely just the kid, you know, the ADD kid) just give up for the year. Classwork gets blown off and homework is a nightmare. It's like they know that it's ALMOST summer, so it should be goofing off time, right?

Yesterday I get an email from the teacher. "Kimberly refused to do ANYTHING today, I'm sending all the work home [for you to deal with]." Fabulous. Because I had soooo much extra time in MY evening to deal with homework PLUS three assignments she didn't get done in class.

Yesterday after school we had a meeting to review Kimberly's 504 plan. It went well. We made a couple of changes, took out some stuff that was outdated, and looked at what would need to be done differently for 6th grade. They start switching classes in 6th grade, so things are going to get interesting. Some things were rephrased, much to my delight, since I was a little miffed that the previous teacher's label of "disruptive" had remained in one section. All in all a good meeting, but because of it we had an hour and a half less time for homework and stuff that should have been finished in class.

Needless to say we weren't able to get it all done, so it carried over to today. When I picked the kids up from school Kimberly was rambling on and on about some video assignment she had to do. Now I have to admit I wasn't completly listening. For one thing, I have ADD too, and for another, Kimberly loves to talk. I swear she talks just to hear herself talk. Really. Like she will read the makes and models of all the cars we pass on the road. So I kinda tune her out sometimes. So I'm all whatever, she has some kind of report, it will probably be due in a couple of weeks and we will have some time to work on it. I tell her that we don't have a working video camera and I'm thinking to myself maybe some kinda powerpoint presentation will suffice.

We get home and I tell her to start on her homework, that she has a lot to do, because she has to get the rest of the assignments done tonight too. She asks "so you want me to do tonight's homework first, then work on the assignments from yesterday?" I tell her yes. She goes off to her room. An hour later I go to check on her thinking that she should be done by now and I need to prod her to get to work on the other stuff.

I find her sitting on her bed watching tv. I ask her where her homework is and she pulls her assignment sheet out of her backpack. Wanna take a wild guess what it said?? "Read for 20 minutes. Timeline - didn't do in class. 10 events in her life. She wants to do a video instead of writing." So not only has she wasted an hour doing nothing, we have last night's assignments PLUS now a timeline video thing that I don't have a video camera to do.

So I tell her "guess what? since you spent an hour goofing off AND this timeline thing could have been done in class to begin with, I'm not going out of my way to help you do a powerpoint on it, you are just going to write it." I'm such a mean mommy. For Kimberly writing is the most difficult thing on the planet. Not that she isn't incredibly creative, it just requires the kind of sustained attention that she is so terribly lacking in. So it's in her 504 that she can do alternative assignments that don't require as much writing.

Now it's time to play "let's make a deal". Kimberly loves to try and bargain. Someday she's going to make a great lawyer or snake oil salesman. After 15 minutes of her trying to bargain, now I'm getting frustrated. "YOU AREN'T GOING TO CHANGE MY MIND CHILD, NOW GET TO WORK, YOU ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME TO GET THIS DONE".

Finally she sits down to work. On one of the assignments from yesterday. Answering 3 questions about a chapter in a book they are reading in class. Five minutes later she's whining about how she can't answer the questions because she didn't read the chapter, because she was still working on one of the other assignments that she didn't get done yesterday. ARE.YOU.FREAKING.KIDDING.ME??

I tell her to go work on the timeline and I start thinking of how to solve this little dilema.
I search online for the answers.
No luck.
Maybe the library that is 3 minutes from my house has the book.
Nope.
Call Barnes & Noble.
They have it.
Hold it for me, I'm on my way.

Forty five minutes later I'm back with the book. She's finished the timeline and showered. She reads the chapter. She answers the questions. It's 10:15 and she finally goes to bed. Bedtime is supposed to be 8:30. Tomorrow she will be tired. When she's tired she has bad days at school. So her inability to get her work done yesterday is going to snowball and ruin our whole week.

I just want it to be summer. No more school. No more homework. I'm done too.

The cure for what ails you is candy.

I have this thing about taking the kids to the doctor. I pretty much try to avoid doing it as much as possible. Not that I don't believe in modern medicine, but I also believe in my mother's intuition and the knowledge I have gained by the umpteen thousand trips to the doctor I have already made with my children. Sometimes it's better to just wait it out.

My husband however thinks that they need to go every time they sniffle. "That's why we have insurance" he says. He's gone a lot though, so usually I let things ride. If they have a cold, they get tylenol, fluids, and rest. Why should I go pay a $20 co-pay to have the doctor tell me that. And why would I want to risk exposing them to something even yuckier while we are there. Like the time Kimberly thought she had scurvy, and I thought it might be strep. I took her to the doctor to find out it was just a plain old ordinary sore throat and you know what happened? She picked up pink eye from some other kid in the waiting room.

Last week Tiff had a little bump on the underside of her tongue. She showed it to me and I pretty much ignored it. It looked like she had just irritated it, and besides, things in your mouth usually heal pretty quickly. I figured it would go away on it's own in a few days. Then a couple of days later she showed it to her dad. He flipped out. "We need to get her into the doctor today." "what do you mean she showed it to you days ago and you ignored it?" So the next morning I'm sitting with her in the doctor's office. The diagnosis - blocked salivary gland. The prescription - sour candy. Yup. Candy. So like she would have been cured come Sunday anyway, without the trip to the doctor? So we go to CVS buy every kind of sour candy they sell and I take her to school. I write a note to her teacher saying "yes the doctor really did say she needed to eat this candy" and go about the rest of my day.

Then Saturday right after the carnival, my mom notices that the topside of Tiff's tongue is looking odd. Starts saying stuff like Scarlet Fever and my hubby is eating it up. That night he went out to run some errands and while he was gone she starts complaining that her mouth hurts and shows me that she has several canker sore looking things inside her lip. Crap. Urgent care here we come. He comes home, we eat dinner, I tell him about the latest developments in her mouth and he says call the quack doctor back. Because of course this has to be some case of the doctor misdiagnosing her the first time, even though the candy totally made the bump go away. It couldn't possibly be that she caught some other thing while we were there. So after dinner it's off to urgent care.

Now one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my entire life is a Pediatric urgent care that is open every night and all weekend long, because you know your kid never gets sick during regular business hours. It's always at 5 pm on Friday, or 9 pm Saturday like this was. Even all the regular urgent cares were already closed. It was a bit of a drive but way better than the emergency room which would have been the only other option. There wasn't even anyone else in the waiting room when we got there.

We see the doctor and he says it's a virus. Very common in kids but usually seen in ones a little smaller than my 7 year old. Of course she sucks her thumb so I totally get how she's getting things that little kids that can't keep their hands out of their mouths get. Being that it's a virus there is nothing to do but wait it out.

My husband totally doesn't get that antibiotics don't work on viruses. If they have a cold, he thinks they should get a prescription. No matter what is wrong, if you don't have to go to the pharmacy when you are done at the doctor's office, the doctor is a quack. In the car on the way home after trying to explain to him why this doctor did not give her any medicine I thought that I should just start asking the doctors to give me a prescription for something harmless that I could go to the pharmacy and fill because as long as I came home with that amber bottle, my husband would be satisfied and wouldn't even notice if it was filled with vitamins.

This morning he tells me he wants me to her back to the pediatrician. "Why?" I ask. "To get a second opinion" is his reply. Really, how about to waste a third $20co-pay and maybe get yet another nasty germ. No.Thank.You. He wasn't too pleased with my answer and we pretty much didn't talk all morning, but I didn't take her to the doctor either, so I guess I won that one.

Why do I do this to myself?

I have issues with saying no. Either that or I'm way overcompensating for my own childhood. My mom worked all the time when I was a kid. Every day I came home from school to an empty house. She had no choice. She was a single mom and if she didn't work, I wouldn't have a house to come home to, or condo as it was. She was never on the PTA, I never played soccer, or took gymnastics. I always wanted a playhouse, a dog, and to learn to do cartwheels, but those things required a yard.

So I have this compulsion to do all of them now. My kids have a yard and two dogs. They had the playhouse and the little tykes slide tube climby thing before they outgrew them. They've done dance, gymnastics, guitar, swim, children's theatre, girl scouts, soccer, you name it. And as if that's not enough, I'm the freakin VP of their school PTA too.

My absence from bloggy land is explained by the event that I organized last Saturday. Our school had it's first school carnival in 3 years. And it was awesome of course. Sure there were some bugs that needed working out. We ran out of prizes halfway through causing me to have to make a mad run to the party store and throw toys in my cart like I was on a game show. We ran out of cotton candy and the dunk tank broke on the second dunk. Considering that I had absolutely no clue how many people were going to show up and no previous experience with a carnival at this school, I think it turned out pretty good. The kids had fun and that's what it's all about. Of course I spent every waking hour for the last two weeks working on it. I'm glad it's over, but part of me is thinking maybe we should have a fall carnival too. I didn't get any cotton candy.

Easter

**Due to the fact that my router decided to stop sending signal to my computer the other night when I was in the middle of writing this, it sat in my drafts for a couple of days. **

I figured I needed to balance the negativity of the last post with something positive about Easter.

I like Easter, but since I'm not very religious, it isn't about celebrating Jesus' resurection for me, it's all about the candy, coloring eggs, and the Easter Bunny. Totally commercial and sugar laden.

Easter is the time that my very favorite candy comes out, PEEPS. Now I know that you are going to say, "Oh, but they have peeps for every holiday now, pumpkins for Halloween, trees for Christmas, hearts for Valentine's Day..." and to that I say no way. Peeps are for Easter and Easter is for peeps. I will not eat a peep that is shaped like anything other than a bunny or a chick. And I'm a purist when it comes to my colors too. No friggen green or blue bunnies, OK?? Pink and yellow only. **Eww yuck, I was at Target today and they had orange and red bunnies and chichs too. RED like bloody bunnies and chicks. That's just wrong.**

Easter is also the time that I get to get all artsy with egg dye. I'm particular about dye too. It has to be the kind that needs vinegar. The others don't make colors as vibrant. I'm all about leaving them in there forever and making the colors REALLY dark, or making rainbows on them by carefully dipping them in all the colors starting with yellow on the whole thing and then dipping each end until I have a complete rainbow.

OOOh, and don't forget chocolate bunnies. Now I'm not big on chocolate any other time of the year, but at Easter I have to have the biggest chocolate bunny they make, Bunny Big Ears. Maybe this is why I don't eat much chocolate the rest of the year, I get my fill on Easter. I'm in love with Bunny Big Ears for very sentimental reasons. Even after I was too old for Easter Egg hunts and baskets full of candy and goodies, my dad always got me a Bunny Big Ears on Easter. In the years since he passed away I have always bought myself one. You would think that maybe my hubby would catch on and surprise me with one, but just like the hearts at Valentine's he just doesn't notice that kind of stuff.

My kids, even though they are 12 (almost 13), 10, and 7, wake up Easter morning and want to hunt for eggs. Of course this might be partially due to the fact that I've been known to put spare change in plastic eggs.

I'm also super excited that we are gong to do an Easter egg hunt with my friend Maria again this year. Last year's egg hunt was super fun.

**Check out the latest!! Mom calls yesterday morning before I left for work. Tells me that her brother is going to be in town this week and is leaving Saturday. Due to that she's decided to do Easter dinner on Friday night. The Friday night that I.HAVE.TO.WORK!!! since I took off Sunday because I expected the invite to be for EASTER Sunday, not the Friday before. Can you hear me ROFLMAO??? Yup, LIFE IS GOOD!

Holidays

I have a love hate relationship with holidays. I love them for the candy, presents, and cute decorations, but I hate being required to go to dinner at my moms for every one. Sometimes I just wish that we didn't have holidays at all, or that I lived on a different continent than my mom when they come around.

Yeah, it's that bad.

Since I was young, I remember my mom being a raving bitch for every single holiday. She gets up at the crack of dawn to start cooking and tries to get all Martha Stewart for a bunch of people who would be happy with a hot dog. There is the inevitable trip to the grocery store that I have to make to pick up the one item she forgot to purchase when she did her shopping for the event. Yup, even if it's just me and the kids coming, it's an event. Following that comes the bitch out for taking so long at the store, what did you do that it took so long and now everything is going to be overcooked by the time the whatever was missing the ingredient is done. Somehow she forgets that there is only ONE store open on major holidays and that everyone forgets one thing and they are all at that ONE store which is horribly understaffed because they gave everyone the day off because it's a HOLIDAY. Then there is the obligatory oohing and ahhing over the overly fancy food, because if you don't you are an ingrate, followed by the mandatory cleaning of the kitchen and washing up all the dishes because it would be just rude to make your hostess feed you and clean up after you too.

So here I am with Easter a week away, already having panic attacks about the upcoming event.

I thought about trying to weasel out of it, making other plans and telling my mom "Oh sorry, I didn't know you wanted to do something and so I made these plans", but I know she would see right through that one. If I was ordered to come over for dinner for a minor holiday like St. Patrick's Day, of course I should know without being ordered that I am required to be in attendance at Easter. So I'll keep my afternoon open and wait for my marching orders which I'm sure will arrive sometime next week.

Unless I could move to Australia before then.

I think I'm addicted to my job

Really, seriously, I like it that much. I haven't blogged in a week because I've worked so much. And you know what else? Last week I averaged even more than my highest paying job ever. Now that I'm getting the hang of it more, I'm making even MORE money. When you have a hubby that hasn't worked since November, money is a really good thing. So I can't stop myself. Every time I have an opportunity to work, I do. It's crazy that I can go in for a few hours and walk out with a wad of cash. I still can't get over it.

I had to take today off because we were getting our taxes done. Yeah, I know, way to leave it to the last minute. In my defense, we didn't have the money to pay the tax guy, and since he kinda wants to get paid for his work too... it had to be left until now. Good news is we will be getting some back, even after sending a chunk to Michigan and paying the tax guy his rather hefty fee. Gotta love having to file federal plus three different states.

They gave me tomorrow off too. Two days off in a row. I was really tempted to try and pick up a shift or two, but I decided that since these were my first days off in 8 days, I should maybe take them and relax a little. Absense makes the heart grow fonder and all that stuff.

Tomorrow we get to go see the house we will be moving into in a couple of weeks. We've seen it once before, but that was before new carpet and paint. I took some pictures, but not enough. I have great pictures of the closets, but couldn't tell you what the rooms look like. It's got fabulous closets. I'm actually going to have my own linen closet in MY bathroom. For a packrat like me that is beyond awesome. Unfortunately the house was designed by someone who doesn't cook because it is lacking a pantry. Really? Like it didn't occur to this person that people might actually need to store FOOD somewhere in the house? So the hubby is going to have to build a pantry into one of the closets off the kitchen. We need to scope out the particulars of that little project. We also forgot to take a tape measure last time. Our couch is rediculously huge and we need to figure out how it's going to fit.

After that, one of my friends is taking me to lunch for my birthday. Yeah, my birthday that was over a month ago. The last time she offered I ended up picking up a shift and working instead. I swore I wouldn't flake on her again this time. I am kinda thinking about having her take me to the restaurant where I work though. I think I'm having withdrawls.

Hopefully I will have time to blog about something other than my fabulous job tomorrow too.