Dogz

I wonder if we tend to adopt odd dogs or do they become odd once they become ours.

Case in point, Charlie and Kali. He the size of a lion, she of a mixed heritage of what has to be two of the most obscure breeds.

Charlie has taken to sleeping in the bay window in the living room of the rental house. Like a cat, only Charlie must be 100 pounds or more. It's the silliest thing to see this big old beast snoozing away as peaceful as can be.

Kali has not avoided the odd either. First she climbed a tree when she lived with Charlie and Josh at the neighbor's house till we found a place for all of us. Climbed a tree and sat in the crotch of that tree grinning like a fool. We have no idea WHY she climbed the tree only that she did.

There's no tree in the yard of the rental house. There is hardly any yard at all but there are two bushes and Kali perches right in the middle of one of the bushes as if sitting in a nest. I think she does that to stay away from Charlie.

Both dogs love bubble wrap and envelopes from China. Just china... not Israel or Great Brittan or Canada but China. I've just discovered that they can play for the longest time by themselves with something as simple as a tennis ball carrying it up the steps then letting it go watching it bounce down the steps, step by step, till it's nearly at the bottom then whoosh down the stairs and into a mouth.

There is a new thing that is happening. Josh works nights now, coming home sometime around 11. If I should be in the craft room upstairs and Michael decides to go to bed, the dogs come get me, so I can go downstairs with them and open the front door so they can sit at the storm door and wait. It didn't dawn on me one night when Kali came up to get me and I tried to shoo her away. She went, returned with Charlie who took my wrist in his mouth and then gently led me downstairs to the door. I'm not about to leave the inner door open and the storm door unlocked while upstairs so I settle with them and wait.

Now if I could only teach them to do housework, life would be perfect.

And so it continues

I sometimes wonder why I have an Oddz Bodkinz kind of life.  Do other people have such strange things happen around them or do I just notice it more than others?  Of course, I have had stranger things than usual.  A short list is I went to high school with a guy who ended up as a mummy on a mountain.  Another young man I worked with died suddenly and haunted the workplace.  I lived in a haunted house and now work in a haunted building.  I was in a bank robbery and we chased another batch of bank robbers decades later.  Then there was the serial killer who live down the street and the fire in my house and my ongoing adventure trying to get my life back in order.

Then there are the winged things and the double digits that I don't even WANT to think about, except that it had started again.

Now this.........

I knew Christine Jarrett.  We weren't close friends or anything, but volunteer mothers in our oldest sons classes.  She was always happy, always smiling an loved her sons with a fierceness that was beautiful to be seen and then she disappeared, walked out on her husband 21 years ago with $4,000 in her pocket.  It made no sense.  She would never leave her boys.  But Christine was gone and has been gone all this time.  I've checked the missing persons sites over the years, the Charlie Project, Porchlight International, things like that as well as the Maryland Missing Person's website etc.  I would look at her smiling face in her oversized glasses and pray deep in my soul that Christine would come home someday soon. 

It was impossible for Christine to come home since she never really left spending the last 21 years buried under the shed in her back yard.  The husband raised the sons in that house, steps from their mother's body.  The police claim that they hadn't enough evidence to go any further than a missing person's report all those years ago but we who live in Elkridge know how little the county and the police think of us. 

This has hit me hard.  I suppose I don't want to give up the dream that Christine will come home to her boys.  .Rest well Christine.

Bodkinz life

The husband just left the office to fire our public adjusters. Two months after the fire and nothing has been done to start rebuilding. Not certain if he CAN fire them but fingers are crossed.

And now onto other matters.

We are in a rental home of a lovely street. Quiet and friendly like normal streets and not our home neighborhood where the crew hang out across the street sitting on coolers because I guess stealing a chair or tow would require too much effort. Yes, Sharon is thrilled with the neighbors but our home is our home and back we will go... eventually.

The rental home is lovely but stark. Words echo and there are blinds on all windows but not a single curtain to be seen. I'm not about to go out and buy curtains and drapes that I may never need again but I have jazzed up the living room a bit with one of those party streamers that unfolds into a chain of flowers. Yellow flowers that I am using as a swag above the living room by window. I also bought some house plants, planting them in dollar store bowls or 69 cent thrift store containers. A row of slightly scorched, slightly stinky polymer clay people sit on the rim of the splashboard over the kitchen sink. Last night I used poster tack to put some pictures of food on the kitchen walls. I rescued this huge graphic design catalogs that I found at The Book Thing. The catalog has wonderfully thick pages with great images so a decorating I will go. I suppose I could HANG a picture the normal way but I don't want to put any hole in any walls. So tack will do.

More poster tack and pics help decorate the craft room walls, a room I am not comfortable in yet. And I cut what may look like lollipop shapes and stuck them horizontally out of the window frame just because I could. (If i had a camera I'd take a picture)

I'm now looking for fish pictures for the bathroom and which I had my Xyron super duper laminator/magnetor/stickifier thing that got burned up in the fire. I'd laminate the pics and make them last longer. But... we have $20 to our names and no idea when we will make more so I make do with what I have. Maybe if the rental house was jazzier I'd feel more at home, but it has this hotel kind of feel that makes my stomach hurt.

Of course the dogs are trying to help by shedding their hair everywhere and sprinkling all the rooms with a confetti of my bedroom slippers. Sometimes I fear I will never see home again.

But my friends on the Big List have been great sending me notes of support and card which go up on the wall in the craft room. I;ve been getting boxes of goodies too and cannot believe how generous people are.! So generous I may never have to go to a craft store for the rest of my life.

I do try to make the best of it. I really do. I've made the best of things for so long you would think it would be second nature but it isn't. Maybe once I can plant some flowers out front, the dogs would trample anything in the back, and be able to buy some furniture that will be mine forever the rental will start to feel more familiar and not like I have to be totally dressed and not in what passes for my jammies, before I come downstairs. Of course maid service would be nice and I hope you are all proud of me because I am doing much better in keeping the place neat than I ever had at home. I love having a dish washer, hate electric can openers and my fridge is as clean as the day we moved in. Now if I could just teach the dogs to vacuum then they could take care of their own shedding hair! I could knit myself another dog, albeit a small one, if I only knew how to knit.

Thats it from Bodkinzville. I'm interested in seeing what new crises will arise as I'm seeing the repeating numbers and winged things again. As in birds sitting on the front windowsill of the rental home and sitting there watching what's going on inside. Too creepy for words.

Shudder.

The Bodkinz never lets you down

Ah yes. Life after the fire with an independent insurance adjuster doing nothing and a house sitting as if frozen in time, stinking of smoke and soot and despair and feeling abandoned.

When we were looking for a home with a yard, Josh was not quite two and Casey wasn't dreamed of, but he was there, a collection of cells in hiding. We pulled into the drive way of a small house with a huge yard and TREES real live full grown trees! We lived in a fairly new townhouse community then and the trees there were still in their toddler stages. This house we were looking at had TREES and lots of grass and a fence. The house was smaller than the town house but that didn't matter for the moment we pulled into the driveway we knew we were home.

There was a feeling, pulling from the hot, bright sunlight into the cool tree shadows of arms pulling you close and holding you safe. The house wasn't much, a small rancher, no dishwasher no air conditioning but it was home. We did little decorating over the years simply because we didn't think of it. Most of the walls were paneled and those that weren't never bothered us enough to paint. However with the bedroom that had once been the sons and decorated by them with shaped sponges dipped in paint (with my permission of course) I never would have painted. It was my craft room and I loved seeing those shapes and remembering when the sons were little and laughed all of the time.

No the house sits there and my heart breaks each time I see it. Not so much for the loss, for it is a substantial loss but for the house's crushed spirit. This house had always held so much whether it be love, or laughter or tears or people or pets or stuff. It was home for throwaway kids who would come and stay until it was time for them to move on. It was a place to get a meal when you were hungry, or a shoulder to cry on or whatever someone needed. Now it is so empty and lonely and the things that made it home sit in a dumpster in the driveway.

The dumpster.... I managed to save some craft stuff. Bits and pieces stinking of soot and smoke but too precious for me to throw away. With the information we were give by our so called friendly public adjusters I had no idea when I could replace any of that and crafting helps to keep me close to what passes for sanity with me. I didn't take everything over to the rental house with me, there were too many bins, hastily stuffed on that day when they cleaned out my craft room and brought some, but not all of the stuff out into the yard.These bins and the random containers were tucked under an awning that came off the house and then covered with a tarp and we were carrying the thing to the rental a bit at a time.

And then we discovered that someone had been in the dumpster taking whatever out of it. Ok, someone said, it's trash, so what. Wait. The tools in the shed weren't trash, they weren't even IN the house when it burned, nor were our beach chairs now stripped of plastic and cloth so the aluminum could be recycled. Then there was my lovely garden swing, half disassembled now. And the awning was missing and someone had been through the craft stuff, not bothering to put anything back, leaving lids off bins and things blowing in the wind.

I lost my mind. We who have so little, had someone picking at our bones and the GODDAMNED NEIGHBORS STOOD AND WATCHED AS THEY DID IT. Didn't think twice. Didn't call the police, didn't confront the thieves. NOTHING!

There is a house across the street where the Hag and her daughters live. I would need a to write a book to list all they have done to drag the entire neighborhood into a slum with them. As for now, they have people living in trailers in their back yard, and in their garage and charge $50 a week for people to sleep on their couches. There are always crowds there, drinking and making sleep impossible and all the rest. I had enough and told the entire world. Later one of the Hag daughters were offended that I was out in the street screaming. Right. That family had NEVER had an argument behind closed doors. They always fight out in the street for the world to hear. It incensed Casey and Josh is on a low simmer. And Ifeel so fragile.

As if that wasn;t enough, we now have learned that much of what the independent adjusters told us wasn't true. That they put us in a home with rental furniture that cost $2000 a month and not counting TVs I could have furnished the whole rental house for that and would have had furniture to take back home with us when our house is rebuilt. We also discovered that we could get another advance from the insurance company and I wouldn't have had to spend all that time with soot up my nose trying to clean things. And with the rent of the house and the ridiculous price for furniture we will be out of money and homeless in 5 months and the independant insurass adjuster had done NOTHING to get the rebuild going. Not even having us meet with the contractor etc. Calls go unanswered. Now they are grinding those picked clean bones into dust under their feet.

I try to cling to the good. My neighbors who kept Josh and the dogs for that long and still welcome them when we bring them back to run in the yard... the dogs, not Josh tho Josh does stop there each night after work. My rubberstamp list friends who have been so generous, sharing their goodies with me so now I can throw the stinky stuff away. The young lady at the hotel who offered me a bag of clothes for fear that I could not afford to buy some. The chef at the same hotel who presented us with a gift of a fruit basket. Not to mention anyone who will sit still and listen to our woes and offer sympathy. Sometimes tho that bad tends to overwhelm the good. I try to shake it. I do and then I think of my poor lonely house with no one to give it heart and I cry.

I'll get through this. I always do. I have big dogs who will lick my face dry and sons who love me and treat me as if I were special and a husband who puts up with me.

Speaking of dogs...... We looked out into the rental house yard. A small yard with two shrubs and in the middle of one of those scrubs sat Kali, grinning her little doggy girl grin and driving Charlie crazy because he can't reach her while she sits IN the bush.

We have a love seat pushed under the bay window in the living room. Often time you find the dogs, their front paws draped over the back of the love seat, Charlie's butt planted firmly onthe seat while Kali needs to stand, when she isn't standing IN the bay window. The sit there side by side, always touching tails wagging in the same rythym turning to grin at me and then go back to warn people that they better not DARE cross that street. If they do, well the dogs have tounges and they know what to do with them.

Slurp!

Stuffity stuff stuff

Survived another rainy weekend in the rental house. When am I going to start calling it home? I need to get some of that poster tack stuff so I can start hanging things on my craft room wall in the hopes of making it feel like mine. As for the rest of the house, I hate to admit it, it's just too damned CLEAN! The only clutter is on the dining room table and it really isn't clutter. I;m working on a puzzle, I drop my purse there and there is a stack of carryout menus that we haven't thought of a better place to stash them.

This house is bare. The kitchen could hold a narrow table but doesn't. We have counters and appliances including a microwave but that's it. I have two pot and the frying pan from hell... I swear that even water would stick to that pan. Silverware of course and cooking utensils and when I stuck two butterfly magnets on the silvery fridge door, I stood staring at them as if I were in a museum someplace and they were Monets.

The dining room has a long table (the leaf is in) and started with six chairs. One went downstairs into Josh's room, one upstairs to the craft room. That's it. Table, chairs, my purse and a pile of menus. That's it. One piece of art on the wall, no curtains. Oh there's an area rug. Beige and a dog chew bone.

The living room is a sofa and a love seat, two end table with lamps (one doesn't work) a coffee table and the tv. Small screen on a low cabinet. No curtains, beige rug. I have managed to collect 3 plants and saved from the wreckage this wierd beaded figure made from garden mesh, with wire arms, polymer clay head and woven with a boatload of beads. It's small but it's mine.
Oh and one piece of art on the wall. Upstairs the bathroom is a bathroom. I've added a sea shell I saved from the wreckage and this cute mini toilet eraser set from Michaels. And on the back of the toilet another Michael's find a glass flower bowl/candle holder with strawberry scented crystals in it. There is a shower curtain... white and black towel and white towels and a rug on the floor. That's it.

Small bedroom has a twin sized bed in it a chest one night table and a beige rug.

Big bedroom a queensized bed one nighttable. I had to trade in my dresser for Josh to get a recliner in the basement. Luckily there are built in drawers in the large closets. No curtains in either bed room but there are plastic shades that do nothing to keep the sun out.

Small bedroom is painted beige, big bedroom, terracotta and the craft room a sort of orange. The craft room holds a tv on the other nightstand from the big bedroom a narrow table I got at a thrift store and the dining room chair. it has a closet with a sloped floor that makes it impossible to store things in so I have piles lining the wall, and two book cases of wire that I retrieved from the wreckage. The craft room has a particular smokey funk to it.

The basement aka Josh's room has a queen sized bed, a beige rug, beige recliner, a ches, tv and two night stands. Again no curtains.

Thee are polymer clay people who mostly survived the fire sitting on the splash board of the kitchen sink and two knick knacks that I saved. I'm still unpacking stuff I saved and stashed int he yard at home. We are bringing that over slowly one day at a time so I don't know what other knick knacks I'll find. Hopefully something bright and cheery. I wanted some begonias and or geraniums for the window sills as well but they aren't in the stores yet so I'll have to wait.

I really don't want to buy curtains for this house when I'll have to buy curtains for home. Insurance will not be giving us any more money until we right up the lists of things lost. Try it sometimes. Pick a room and list every little thing in it from memory. You'll be surprised at how hard it is.

As for clothes I have a pair of shorts and 3 shirts for summer and only a little more for the cooler days. I tried hitting thrift stoeres but some of their stuff is more expensive than Walmart. I miss Goodwill with their clothes by the pound areas where I bought an entire winter of sweaters and turtlenecks for myself for a whopping $7!

Well.... I am supposed to be working but can't concentrate. Haven't been able to since the fire with so much stuff swirling in my head and prozac now making me sick to my stomach so I've not been taking it and mellow no longer describes anything in my life.

LOve to all. me