Thurzday

This morning, those guys who come around every week to steal your trash showed up. Charlie was having none of it. It is HIS trash goddamit so leave it alone. He made his intentions known, however, the fierceness was somewhat muted by the catfood can he had in h is mouth and refused to put down. Charlie likes to eat al fresco and especially likes to lick the juice from a cat food can. kali likes cat food juice as well so whoever gets the can first holds onto it. despite the fact that the slowpoke to the can gets a bit of catfood instead of just juice, the juice is the prize. Idiot dogz.

And speaking of idiotz. I was watching Toddlers and Tiaras last night. Yes I know, little girls parading around dressed like miniature hookers and shaking their money makers in inappropriate ways for four year olds. Anyhow, there was one family who, or is that whom, I wanted to smack silly. Not only did they have no idea of the use of apostrophe esses, as if "she MY daughter" but their english was so bad, they had to close caption it so we could understand them. Oh no, they weren't emigrants, they were americans but dumb americans. Ok so if that wasn't bad enough, the theme of the pagent was around the world and the girls were supposed to represent individual countries. Al little four year old had Portugal and part of her skit involved bull fighting. There is bull fighting in Portugal, in fact they don't kill the bulls only really piss them off. I wondered then, how many people knew that there was bullfighting in Portugal and was rather impressed that the mother knew. But then we got to She my daughter and can you guess which country she chose? Africa. AFRICA as in the continent of and I'm guessing that She my DaughterAXually thought that Africa was a country. Good god in heaven. MOm... spend some of that time you wasted by arguing with your sistah as to who's routine was the best and get you some EDDICation. Africa, my dear god.

House update, the badly burned joists at the back of the house have been replaced and a floor is in. A plumber comes out Monday to run the pipes, followed by an electrician. Josh was at the meeting with Michael and the builder and filled me in on some things. the basement door will be steel because it will cut better to install the doggie door, the BIG doggie door. We had the dogz with us when we first met with the builder and now he knows how big they are.

We area almost done with our inventory and the tallying of the receipts and I am trying hard to keep my patience in explaining things over and over again to the old Poop. but really... three times in one short conversation. Maybe I should send him an email.

I got a little panicy last night thinking about all we have to get for the house, plus we need to give the sons the money for their losses and I desperately need dentures (hence the pig pic on my Facebook page) and the old Poop wants to go to the ocean in the summer and us with no vacation money. Old Poop tells me that I'll worry myself into an early grave. I don't do this to myself on purpose. It's as if I'm going along all nice and cheery and a nasty little gnome creeps up on me, whispers dire things into my ear, bops me on the head and runs off... giggling and cavorting while I lie sleepless, my gut in a knot. I'm going to catch that creepy gnome guy one of these days and squash him flat. All I need is a gnome gnet. Anyone have one they want to use or should I maybe order one from that country known as Africa.

It's a wonder I can still pass for sane.

Tra La

Going to post house newz here from now on. I don't want to be a pest to my big list. So here goes.

The house may be rebuilt sooner because Michael and I have our minds made up on what we want and don't want and aren't nitpicking over knobs and grains and the like. In fact, I have already picked out my kitchen cabinets as well as the color of the counter tops. I don't want stone, laminate is fine with me. Josh and a buddy will be doing our floors so I don't have to pick the color right away but I know what I want. I also have the kitchen wall color picked out and I thought I had the rest of the rooms but Michael didn't like the green I chose for the living room and wanted the bedroom peach instead. So I'll put the green in my bedroom and Michael can choose the color for his. (we both snore terribly and keep each other awake so separate bedrooms work for us) Michael said he wanted maroon walls. I told him it would look like living inside a mouth. Add white valances on the top and bottom and they would look like teeth and he'd really be living in a mouth.

There will be ceiling fans in all rooms and a deck, that we never had before and will have to be built at an odd angle to accomodate the outside steps to the basement. There will be a new roof, but we have to pay for that but we should have money left over from contents. There will be a dog door in the basement and a bay window for them in the living room because the dogz have fallen in love with the bay window in the rental house and sleep sprawled across the sill like gigantic cats.

I get a BIG closet in the craft room and the builder will even build me some shelves. I'm thinking a light turquoise for that room but haven't decided for certain.

Oh and did I tell you that the front and back will be landscaped close to the house? Can you imagine? Now I just have to wait for it all to be done.

Another bit of good new is that the builder said that the tear it all away in the interior guys who dismantled walls etc, worked faster than he had planned and that is why we may be back home sooner. Good. My dogz need to run

We took the dogz home on Saturday to let them run and, hopefully, poop them out. No sooner were we in the yard when the little dog next door told his people that the dogz were here and he had to GO!! Eventually little dog next door came over with his mother and he was beside himseld with joy. Little dog next door is a shi tzu mix and has always seemed undoglike to me. He seems a solemn little soul who would rather view life than jump into it and get his paws muddy. Boy was I wrong. Little dog next door teased Charlie into playing iwth whimpers and that upraised butt posture that means come on and play. Little dog next door had never been in my yard before, nor in our bamboo and he had a grand time. Then when he was done, he simply went home, with me following him so no one hit him with a car. Besides, I also had to open the gate for him. We're thinking now that we should but a gate in the fence between us, so the dogs can visit back and forth. Kali was so excited to see the next door neighbor that she peed herself and Charlie used his girl voice as he proclaimed his love. Yep, a gate ought to do it. So that's where we are now. I'm not going to get my hopes us about us getting into the house sooner than we thought, tho it is hard to not get excited. All I know is that I want to go HOME.

I wonder why...

things that happen to strangers affect me so. I remember reading in a newsletter from Animal rescue about a man who had lost his job and was to become homeless. He made arrangements for his beloved cats to go Animal Rescue and then the man killed himself. I suppose he felt that he had no other options. I can understand that. I've felt that way myself at times so maybe I just empathize with the total hopelessness of it all.

Today Dooce posted about a tweet she received about a man she follows who may be in serious trouble only to have a follow up tweet sometime later stating that this man, too had killed himself. She posted some of his other tweets and my heart bled for the man. If only he had someone who could have taken him into their arms and told him everything might be bleak but he would get through it. Even it if wasn't true and things would never really get better maybe the hope would have given him strength.

For decades we had been in danger of losing our home. I worked full time for years and the husband tutored but we never made enough and I spent those years scared to death of losing the home and having us out on the street. By us, I mean the sons who were little then and depending on their parents for everything. How much easier it would have been if someone, somehwere would have told me that if the worst did happen, we would NOT be homeless, that there was a place for us to go, it would have made things easier for me. I still would have worked but the fear would have been kept somewhat at bay.

This is why I have always told my sons that when they do move out and if something happens and they need to come back home, they are always welcome. Of course, right now I don't have a real home just a rental one but it is a safety net... just in case.

So if anyone out there in blog reader land ever needs a safety net., look no further. I'm here, arms open wide, ready to catch you.

Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater

Had a wife and couldn't keep her
Put her in a pumpkin shell
and there he kept her
very well.

Yep, the rental house craft room fits this kid's rhyme perfectly.

The orange room as driving me mad. The table I was using in it was too small and I was so frustrated. This weekend we got me a five foot long table, that folds in the middle that JUST about fits the room and makes crafting so much easier. I think I can now stand the room until September, now if I had some inspiration.

Still working on that god awful inventory list. Everytime I sit to go over it again I'm reminded of what I will never have back. The first issue of KIdstreet News that I had written for. The article about Casey and his group that won the International Film Festival in D.C., the Star trek phone prize I won for Josh, and everything I had ever written since I was in the first grade. I wrote my first story the summer after first grade. It was about a kitten who was lost and who ended up being adopted by a mother rabbit and her hairless newborns. The new born rabbits loved the little black kitten. He had fur the bunnies didn't.

I never stopped writing from then on. I realize now it was an escape from a harmful childhood. It wasn't so much physical abuse, tho the belt was taken to me twice, but the emotional abuse that left me feeling as if I am a waste of skin and totally useless. In my writing I could be anyone. I could do anything and so I wrote and wrote and wrote... and lost all of it.

I shouldn't let this loss bother me and it usually doesn't but there are times it hits me so hard that it brings tears to my eyes but I don't cry. I tell myself the people and animals are safe and what more do I want?

So I take a breath and I go on. A bit wobbly but I go on.

On the up side. I looked at all my craft stuff that was sent to me and that which I bought as replacement and have come to a realization. I really don't need any more. Oh maybe a bottle of rubber cement or tape or something like that but no stamps or stamp pads or pape4r and the rest. I can quite happily craft with what I have.

As for clothes I have enough shirts and pants for 6 days at work and enough at home relaxed clothes for about that same time and that's enough as well. Shopping for replacement etc has shown me something I never noticed before. I keep buying the same stuff over and over. Round necked or v necked t-shirt either short or long sleeved and a pair of jeans. I look at blouses and the like but I buy the t-shirts, long sleeved and short. Different colors and patterns of course but the same style over and over. So I am now done buying replacement clothes for summer. No more clothes shopping, something that make me want to jump, ok hobble, for joy! I even have 2 count em 2 pairs of sneakers. one for winter one for summer. I just hope that nothing comes up where I have to be an adult and 'gasp' wear a dress and/or heels. Then I'm lost. For now, tho, it's one less thing I have to fuss with. Who needs the rest of the stuff? the books and pigs and knick knacks and all? Oh yes I liked what I had but now I can buy new, if I even bother. So while m y head tends to drag me down at times, reality pulls me back up and then the oddz bodkinz part of my life steps in and I walk out into the back yard and find Kali sitting in the middle of a bush and grinning like a fool. How could anyone be down with a bush sitting dog? Charlie wisely stays out of the bushes but he does love to sleep in the living room's bay window. Just like a cat only the cat, I do have, doesn't like to sit in the window.

ODDZ BODKINZ FOREVER!

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.