over the meadow and through the woods...

i'm off to mom's house today. i would have already left, but i made an appointment of sorts in town here at around 9:30, and while most people would be thrilled to get appointments over with, i don't know if the appointees would appreciate me knocking on their door at 8:30 this morning. i'll wait till almost 9:30, i think.

so my appointment is with this lady who might finish my gram's quilt for me. since my gram died nearly 5 years ago i've been carrying around this unfinished quilt from home to home (i've moved ... 6 times since then) and i would really like to get it finished (i'd really like to finish it myself, actually, but i'm scared to near it with a needle). it's nearly 8 feet squared and really nice -- i've gotten in approximately dated to the 30s. but there's this guy who always comes into work and ships singer sewing machines and he told me he sells them mostly to quilters, so i asked him where i could get this finished and he called his wife and put her on the phone and her friend is in town for a few months (snowbird, i guess) and could do it. so i told them i'd drop it off on my way out of town so she could get a look at it. i'm so excited!

i bid on a new phone for my mom. she broke the last one, so she's completely without a phone except ian's that his dad pays for. so i bid on one for $40. hopefully i get it because she's been without a phone for awhile and i can't afford one of those really expensive ones. it's only at $26 right now and there's 2 hours to go, so we'll see when i get home if i won it or not. it's a LG-VX510 (i think) -- the little black flip one that they have -- it's actually the same one she just killed, so i know she'll like it. she's been through 3 phones since i gave her the phone and started paying her service, which was 1 1/2 years ago or so.

i think i'll take my sister geocaching today. she always asks if we can go and i stopped leaving the stuff in my car, so this time i'll throw it in there. also i'll take my bowling shoes in case she wants to go bowling. since she's growing up, i've become so much closer to my sister than my brother. when he was young we were inseparable and she was the outcast because she was a baby and was very needy. plus i couldn't tow her on my bike. i could take him anywhere, and i did, but i tried to tow her once and she stuck her foot in the spokes and almost broke her leg -- quite literally. we were all crying, and that was the last time that ever happened.

but now she's 12, which makes ian 14 and he's hopeless right now. if i'm not an animated video game, he's not interested (and no, i'm not a video game). but she always wants to hang out with me and know about my interests and spend the night -- like we're friends, and it's very cool. i wish they lived closer (but christen doesn't because then they'd always be over.) i'm only 24, so the gap seems to be getting closer as she ages. she looks up to me and i can ask her questions to make sure she's not fucking up her life, and what to watch out for so no one takes advantage of her like they did me. and she knows what happened to me when i was her age, so she's better off. my stepfather is her "father", but she's adopted so that doesn't have to stop anything in his mind. and she's damn cute.

it was my first real 6-string...

bought it at the five and dime. played it till my fingers bled. was the summer of '69.

i made creamy chicken pasta for breakfast. maybe i'll have a toaster strudel for lunch. you know, for balance.

i had a really wierd dream last night, but i don't remember all of it. -- there were children (mine) with downs syndrome, and lots of shooting near my old high school and some sex (not with the children -- what are you, some kind of perv?) and ... i just can't remember it, but it was really wierd in a kind of good way. maybe it's because i went to bed when christen was still playing gta san andreas. i tried to play but i can't drive the dern car. i get stuck in a back alley when i'm trying to take a whore to her john and lose the pimping mission trying to pull back out.

i wasted two hours of my life last night reading a fern michaels book. never read a fern michaels book. it was one of the ones that melissa gave me and i thought "well, i've never read a fern michaels books so what the hey." no. bad idea. it had so many errors and was so confusing without having a knowledgeable plot to begin with ... ack! i can't believe i read the whole thing. yes i can, because unless i lose a book, i will finish it one way or another. and it only took 2 hours; it's not like the book was hard to read or 800 pages or anything. no worse than sitting through dogville. that was 3 hours of my life.

i feel it necessary to justify my lack of caps. jordan criticized me last week saying that my grammer was terrible (how dare he?) because i don't capitalize anything. well, maybe i don't feel that any one word is more important that any other word. i am no more important than you or bob or scuba. so there. or maybe i'm just lazy and am used to ms word capping everything that should be.

in my father's house (cue christian music)

my parents split when i was 5. i don't remember much of before i was 5 except a few hefty duty fights, and i do remember my room. i remember our oscar fish (look it up, it's a damn ugly fish) committing suicide by jumping out of its tank in the living room and flopping into the kitchen and dying on the linoleum before we got home. he had done this before but we had been able to rescue him before death. i remember my mom telling me when there wasn't a santa claus because we were poor and she didn't want me to think that when i didn't get the appropriate amount of gifts that i would think i had been bad (although there was that little bag of coal in my stocking every year. ... some jokes never wear thin.) i remember learning to ride a bike without training wheels (they put me on a 10-speed and pushed me down a hill) and i remember my dad leaving on my birthday and taking the coffee table so we had my cake on a cardboard box.

but after the split i only remember certain things about being at my dad's house. they are all good memories and i relive them sometimes.

-- wrestling. i hate wrestling, but when i was over, dad and i would watch it and mimic their moves in the living room. they wrestled, we wrestled. i think i won a few more times than necessary, and i think my dad body slammed me more than neccessary (but it was great fun).

--swanson's chicken and dumplings. dad couldn't cook, really, so everytime i went to his house and stayed for lunch or dinner he brought out the can of swanson's. i haven't had this as an adult so i don't know if it's any good, but it was dern tasty at dad's house. if i was there for breakfast we had ...

--eggs over easy and limp bacon. he liked the meat part of the bacon cooked and the fat limp and uncooked. i can't eat it that way now, but it was good there.

--denorex shampoo. in college i started getting anxiety attacks that started with a bad case of ecsema (sp? anyone?) and would scratch my scalp raw and even a little sticky. so i got some denorex and i was seriously transported back to childhood. my dad used denorex almost exclusively, and when i spent the night i would have to use that smelly dark brown shampoo too. good times.

atari-- dad had one of the ones that had a white ball you rolled around instead of a regular controller, and we'd play pong and snake for hours and hours and hours and hours ... well, you get the drift.

--wide brimmed straw hats and cheap plastic sunglasses. my dad is a surveyor for the city, so he wears these ugly straw hats and sunglasses. when i was little he'd always leave them on the passenger seat and i'd invariably sit on one or the other, ruining it. there's a guy who comes in to OD regularly who wears the same straw hat and the same uniform (white polo shirt with the city seal and khakis) and i get a little homesick everytime i see him. the first time i gushed at great length about how he looked like my dad, but he really doesn't. he just walks the same and wears the same clothes.

--buttered noodles. this one is from before the divorce, but i attach it to my dad so i'm including it too. dad was on a bowling league when i was real small, and every thursday night we would go there while he bowled and then we'd have dinner at the little restaraunt there. i was a picky little shit and i wouldn't eat anything on the menu so the cook took pity on me and would make me buttered egg noodles for dinner. i completely forgot about this until college when i picked up a bag of no-egg egg noodles for beef stroganoff and had a bowl of buttered noodles and freaked out when i remembered. for a week after i ate nothing but egg noodles for dinner.

i think that's all the memories i have of my dad in connection with my childhood. i've used many of those memories in poems and short stories ... so they're copywrited. hehe. i began an actual relationship with him in '96 when everything came out about my stepfather's sexual abuse.

trailers for sale or rent...

...rooms to let, fifty cents.

i listened to the swingers soundtrack on the way to work today for a change of pace. most of the album is so good, and then you get stuck with "she thinks i still care" or something like that. oi. but it had "king of the road" on it (not really a great driving song, i kinda need something faster) and "you're nobody till somebody loves you." ahh, great stuff. i love tooling around in my little car with the ultra black tint and the nifty rims and 50s music blaring out of the car. gives people a nice reality check.

i talked to jesus about how he had to change his bank account because someone got his numbers when he ordered checks last month. now i'm worried -- i'm glad i didn't uncheck the box for fraud protection that cost $1 per box of checks. i don't know what they'd do, but i'm happy for protection. that's why i'm on the pill, after all. (oh, and jesus is pronounced hay-zeus, you heathens. but it's really funny at work when he puts something on hold and the packaging says "hold for jesus. will purchase friday." i always get a giggle.

went to the mall to buy pants with christen and i kept trying to fall asleep on his shoulder. i think this time change is effecting me pretty bad. the biorhythms are off and everything. i always wake up at 9 at the latest now (before it was 10:30 unless i was sick) but i'm tired by 7pm. hope my body catches up to the earth one of these days before march when it goes forward again.

which describes how you're feeling all the time ...

i wonder if i write in single lines if it'll fill up faster.

if you can read it easier.

but then it looks kinda wierd.

of course, there are fifty-one characters per line.

so if i filled most of the fifty-characters ...

yeah, it could work.

okay, that was an exercise in futility. i had to go to the bank today and spend $1.50 on 8 checks so i could pay my bills this month. i forgot to order checks. okay, so i didn't forget. i haven't had to order checks in 2 1/2 years, so i didn't realize when i went to pay my bills that i didn't have checks to pay them with. today i ordered these adorable froggie checks -- fernando in the blue convertible did it for me. i tried to have a fudgecicle (is that how you spell it? looks kinda wierd) for dinner because christen decided to eat without me and we didn't have any bread for pb&j but it made me feel icky so i had ramen too. now i just feel all over icky. and there's nothing good on tv. law & order, where are you when i need you?

i started another book last night. it's alright though, because i finished it today. cold heart, by ... oh heck, some hard-boiled writer. it was actually pretty good, in the murder she wrote sort of way. i don't know where i put one door away from heaven so i figured i'd pick something else for the night. i got really into it and was reading today at work (those drawers under the till have to be good for something) and finished when i got home. sometimes i love easy-peasy reading sometimes.

i need some sleep, i think. dern 7am worktimes.

more tomorrow.

quite possibly more tired than when i woke up.

i'm tired and my head hurts. and when i blogskim all i get is politics. somebody shoot me now.

i take that back. i also get hong kong, random anime stuff, and steel houdini penis cages.

i need to get out of the house, so i think i'll see if jordan wants to go to target or barnes&nobles or something ... update -- he has class so maybe i'll go to b&n myself. i've spent far too much time home today, since i'm off, but i'm afraid of spending more money. hmmm ... jo ann's fabrics isn't particularly far away ...

ummm ... oi is all i can say.

castor conceded. south carolina here i come.

i wish, but you know i won't get off my butt and move. the lease is up in august 2005, and we'll see what christen and i have decided by then. probably nothing, if the last 2 years is a shadow of things to come. i did, however, finally put up some things on my profile (books music interests, you know the dealio) and started blogskimming by that. i was just annoyed by those blogs that come up when you hit "next" that say "upgrade your explorer right now!" and you have to keep closing the little buttons that jump up. they annoy the crap out of me. also, when people spell things wrong on purpose like shortening words like people to ppl (is this trivial pursuit? i think not). and little cutsy type ... arg! so i made a profile simply so i could look at other people's blogs a different way and not have to deal with all that pain in rear.