I'd taken pictures on my cell phone to put on my mobog area, but mobog isn't working today (and seems to be going through an upgrade), so I just sent them to my email box to post here.
Here's the event, as it happened, in pictures instead of text:
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
I went to a pro hairdresser place today for the first time in at least over a decade to get my hair done. Normally, I just toss any blonde hair dye into my hair that is on sale, but after doing this for 20 years, my hair was pretty freakin' fried.
I'd taken pictures on my cell phone to put on my mobog area, but mobog isn't working today (and seems to be going through an upgrade), so I just sent them to my email box to post here.
Here's the event, as it happened, in pictures instead of text:
I'd taken pictures on my cell phone to put on my mobog area, but mobog isn't working today (and seems to be going through an upgrade), so I just sent them to my email box to post here.
Here's the event, as it happened, in pictures instead of text:
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
On Monday I turned 38 years old... half way to 76, closing in on the big Four Oh, round and curvy numbers, 3 and 8, which I kinda like visually. I spent part of my birthday at the hospital, visiting my dad, my grandfather and my aunt, all of whom are on the same unit just rooms apart from each other. My aunt was already there, has been hospitalized since late last year with an unidentified situation (not cancer) that came out of nowhere (she doesn't drink or smoke) and she was just starting her rehabilitation process when KABLAM! Pneumonia struck, she caught it from a roommate at the rehabilitation center and my dad and grandpa also got the big "P" during visits with my aunt and all 3 of them are fighting it off in different ways. My aunt, by sleeping. My grandpa, by walking around the hospital visiting his kids and some of his friends on other units. My dad, not so successfully, his fevers keep coming back, in spite of all the antibiotics in his system. My dad hates hospitals and has joked that he's going to put ice under his tongue next time they come to take his temp so that he can just go home.
It seems that nothing that happens to this family can happen without it being obscure and surreal, like 3 family members ending up on the same unit at a hospital days apart from each other and just a few rooms away from each other. Like one of my aunts said, if you tried to write a sitcom based on our family using actual real life events, nobody would believe it possible. It has always been this way, for some strange reason. In spite of that, each family member has a wicked sense of humor about it, and an unusually high level of resilience to pretty much anything that goes wrong or just oddly in life.
I'm in the process of quitting cigarettes, and although I worried the Hospitalized Family saga would increase my smoking, just the opposite has happened. I'm smoking even less than I had slated for each day (I count cigarettes and only ration myself so many per day, taking away one cigarette every three days.) Unfortunately, my stomach has been in knots so that might be part of the reason I'm smoking less. Like my doctor said, I kinda tend to push my anger and/or worry right down into the pit of my stomach. I've been pretty much nauseated with concern, but making sure to eat throughout the day so that I don't end up losing more weight again. I haven't weighed myself for a while, but I suspect by my loose pants that I've dropped more pounds, hopefully which I can get back up again throughout the course of this week.
On Sunday, we're taking the kids to see the Blue Man Group show up in Boston. We saw it in Vegas last year and can't wait to see their reaction to it. We're more excited about taking them to see it than we are about seeing it again ourselves. There's certain shows that are like that, where you get more of a thrill out of introducing it to somebody who has never seen it before. I feel that way with certain movies, like Harold and Maude, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And certain music, like Mindless Self Indulgence or old U2 songs that didn't get a lot of air play, like Surrender or Red Hill Mining Town. Or books like Geek Love and Stephen King's The Long Walk (written during his Bachman years.)
I've been writing a new story for my Nikki chick... I initially wanted to start writing it online as a 'work in progress', like I did with Billboard Sky and PTSD, but Nikki requested she be the first and only one to read it as it gets written. It's a comedy, about a young woman who works at a funeral home and falls in love with a guy during a wake, a handsome young guy who just happens to be the guy in the casket. Here's the first few paragraphs of it, it will take me a while to finish it, but once it's completely done and Nikki has been the first and only person to read it in its entirety, I will put it online:
Love's Alive
Chapter One
Nicole had been ironing her pants for exactly twenty-two minutes, and still the creases didn't look sharp enough to her eyes. Feeling it with her fingertips, it felt perfect, but visually it wasn't as prominent as she preferred it to be. Spraying starch once more, she carefully went along the length of the left pant leg from the top to the bottom. She then did the same to the right pant leg, held the pants up and let out a soft groan of discontentment. A song came on that she really liked, softly playing from her 5-CD shuffle-play stereo her mother had gotten her for Christmas four months ago, and while pressing the steamer button on the iron and going up and down each pant leg once more, the iron's plastic handle firmly gripped in her hand, she finally lifted the pants up and blurted out "YES!"
Standing at the full length mirror behind her bedroom door, the top of which was almost flush with the top of the door to accommodate for Nicole's height, which was almost six feet, she climbed into the pants and stood admiring how the creases along the sides made her feel very 'put together.' A term her mother sometimes used when decorating the Christmas tree, or while cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Nicole preferred herself to feel 'put together', her mother seemed to reserve use of 'put together' for things outside of herself. Although, there was an exception to that the year her mother bought a particularly beautiful blue and orange suit for work. On the day she'd worn it for the first time, after Nicole complimented it , her mother said to her "I feel very put together in this suit, Nicole, I like the fabric and pattern. It's probably too loud for work, but that's okay. It's loud at the office sometimes. Nobody will hear the suit over the racket." Nicole sometimes thought her mother was a nut. Other times, she thought her mother just had a different way with words.
The ironing board, which Nicole kept folded up under her bed because of frequent use since getting the job at the River Falls Funeral Home, made a squeaky metal sound as Nicole put her white button down shirt upon it and began ironing it methodically. She'd start at the collar, then do the arms, then the back side, then the left front side and then the right front side. Most important to her was the button hole areas, where she'd focus on each button hole area with the tip of the iron, making sure that the button holes were not spread apart from being opened to allow for the button to go through. Once she was done, you could never tell that this shirt's button holes had ever had a button pushed through them.
She'd no idea why she did this with the button holes or why the creases in the pants mattered so much, but they did for reasons in her own head that weren't complicated or disturbing, just Nicole's way of keeping order to her life. The creases and the button holes always turned out just the way she wanted them to because she was, above all of her personality traits, very patient. Gazing at herself in the mirror with the white shirt and black pants, she felt so very put together she wanted to do a cartwheel.
~*~*~*~*~
Nikki told me she loved it so far. I asked her to write it with me, each of us putting a few paragraphs in, but she's too nervous to give it a try. I'm positive she'd do a fantastic job of it, but she's very hesitant. She's got such a good sense of humor, I'm hoping she'll change her mind and jump in at some point. Her writing is spectacular and this would be a good piece for her to hone her skills. Either way, I'm excited to see this story develop. I've got bits and pieces of it inside my head, mostly the comedy elements, but the bigger portion of it is going to just come along as it comes along.
On a goofy note, when I left the hospital after visiting my dad, grandpa and aunt, Kenny and the kids and some family members had a little party for me at Kenny's cousin's house, and the cake had the initials 'NFT' on it, which stands for NarcolepticFitThrower, a moniker I use during debates on a forum. It's also where the term 'Nifty' comes from, which is a name I'm sometimes called on the forum I frequent, as it's easier to type than NarcolepticFitThrower.
I also use the moniker BagOfEyebrows occasionally, or irpaC (which is Capri backwards.) About a year ago, during what is called a 'vanity search' on google, I typed in my monikers and found that 3 seperate individuals have used my monikers on forums I have never been to. The 'NarcolepticFitThrower' moniker is registered on 2 forums, one forum which is a racist forum apparently, and another forum that appears to be a random topic forum. The 'BagOfEyebrows' moniker is registered on a sport's forum. Obviously these 3 individuals saw my monikers (which are too obscure for others to have come up with them) on the forum I frequent and then went and registered the monikers on other forums to use as their own. They say imitation is a form of flattery, but I just found it funny, as the comments made by these individuals weren't flattering nor my opinions on things in life, but I found it comical that they'd copy my monikers and then use them in such offbeat ways on various forums out here in cyberspace. It made me chuckle, because I'm sure to eventually get emails from friends/family members who search my nicknames out here in cyberspace and question me about comments I never said.
Here's a picture of the birthday cake, which had real whipped cream frosting on it, and was so good it made my tummy stop hurting:
http://www.mobog.com/pic.cfm?pic=280999
Today I have the day off, so I'll be catching up on laundry and doing some housework, and also plan to take an hour to work some more on Love's Alive. I've also got 2 other things to continue writing, but I'm not sure my frame of mind today is in the right spot for those. I may hold off on that, and work on it once things get a bit more back to normal for my dad. I've got some soil and seeds to plant, a gift from Kenny's cousin, and may start that project instead, giving my garden an indoor head start this year. I meant to get my vegetable seeds on Monday, but just ran out of time. Kenny's cousin got me some great flower seeds, though, and I think I'll just get those going. She also got me some candles, which I can't wait to light up.
On a somber note, Monday also marked the one year anniversary of the death of Dontel Jeffers, a young boy who died while in state custody, in a 'specialized foster care' home. My birthday for the rest of my life will always be shared with this marked event. With his grandmother trying to get custody of him for months, being delayed custody on incidentals like 'proof of no lead paint' and any other little delay tactic the Department of Social Services could use to stall the little boy from being with his family members, the death of Dontel Jeffers was a wake up call to the state of Massachusetts, making citizens more aware of how corrupt and obnoxious the Department of Social Services has become in regards to keeping children 'in the system'.
I spoke recently to a woman who works for an insurance company and her family recently had also struggled to obtain custody of her nephew. We got into a long discussion about how negligent the Department of Social Services as well as the Department of Mental Health have been in actually doing what is in the best interest of each child. She said she was shocked at how the agencies would rather ignore their own rules to seek out family members to take custody of children in need, and agreed it appeared to be based not upon the best interest of the child, but the best interest (financial) of the agencies involved.
It is just amazing at how little has changed in the one year since Dontel Jeffers death. Unlicensed workers still run rampant in the system, kids continue to be kept from family members willing to take them, and hearing this woman's story almost broke my heart that Dontel Jeffers' death hasn't stopped the system from continuing on the same road that led to that little boy's death. I guess the financial gains outweigh the risks. It frustrates me but also inspires me to do what I intend to do in order to keep the positive changes coming to a system that is in dire need of an overhaul. I VOTE, and I will be writing up pieces that clearly demonstrate how obnoxious the system is, and I will continue to make sure each and every individual incident that took place with our family gets reviewed by those in political and legal power, as well as by thousands online, to see to it that it stops. It hasn't stopped yet, but eventually, it will no longer be 'business as usual' for the Department of Social Services or the Department of Mental Health. Their own statistics speak volumes at how badly in need of changes they are. And those changes will come. Society is starting to demand it, and the agencies apparently aren't listening, but they will when they stop receiving requested 'funding' for their 'special services' that abuse and sometimes lead to the death of innocent children. As more families find themselves unfair targets of the corruption and unconstitutional tactics utilized by these agencies.
Three loads of laundry are waiting for me to get started on my day here, so I'm off to begin the housework shuffle. Good music, nice smelling candles, and dirt in my hands, seeds being planted, warm, bubbly soapy water doing dishes, and as many calm, relaxing moments as I can slip inside one day. I've needed a day like today for a week. Hopefully any news from the hospital is good news today.
It seems that nothing that happens to this family can happen without it being obscure and surreal, like 3 family members ending up on the same unit at a hospital days apart from each other and just a few rooms away from each other. Like one of my aunts said, if you tried to write a sitcom based on our family using actual real life events, nobody would believe it possible. It has always been this way, for some strange reason. In spite of that, each family member has a wicked sense of humor about it, and an unusually high level of resilience to pretty much anything that goes wrong or just oddly in life.
I'm in the process of quitting cigarettes, and although I worried the Hospitalized Family saga would increase my smoking, just the opposite has happened. I'm smoking even less than I had slated for each day (I count cigarettes and only ration myself so many per day, taking away one cigarette every three days.) Unfortunately, my stomach has been in knots so that might be part of the reason I'm smoking less. Like my doctor said, I kinda tend to push my anger and/or worry right down into the pit of my stomach. I've been pretty much nauseated with concern, but making sure to eat throughout the day so that I don't end up losing more weight again. I haven't weighed myself for a while, but I suspect by my loose pants that I've dropped more pounds, hopefully which I can get back up again throughout the course of this week.
On Sunday, we're taking the kids to see the Blue Man Group show up in Boston. We saw it in Vegas last year and can't wait to see their reaction to it. We're more excited about taking them to see it than we are about seeing it again ourselves. There's certain shows that are like that, where you get more of a thrill out of introducing it to somebody who has never seen it before. I feel that way with certain movies, like Harold and Maude, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And certain music, like Mindless Self Indulgence or old U2 songs that didn't get a lot of air play, like Surrender or Red Hill Mining Town. Or books like Geek Love and Stephen King's The Long Walk (written during his Bachman years.)
I've been writing a new story for my Nikki chick... I initially wanted to start writing it online as a 'work in progress', like I did with Billboard Sky and PTSD, but Nikki requested she be the first and only one to read it as it gets written. It's a comedy, about a young woman who works at a funeral home and falls in love with a guy during a wake, a handsome young guy who just happens to be the guy in the casket. Here's the first few paragraphs of it, it will take me a while to finish it, but once it's completely done and Nikki has been the first and only person to read it in its entirety, I will put it online:
Love's Alive
Chapter One
Nicole had been ironing her pants for exactly twenty-two minutes, and still the creases didn't look sharp enough to her eyes. Feeling it with her fingertips, it felt perfect, but visually it wasn't as prominent as she preferred it to be. Spraying starch once more, she carefully went along the length of the left pant leg from the top to the bottom. She then did the same to the right pant leg, held the pants up and let out a soft groan of discontentment. A song came on that she really liked, softly playing from her 5-CD shuffle-play stereo her mother had gotten her for Christmas four months ago, and while pressing the steamer button on the iron and going up and down each pant leg once more, the iron's plastic handle firmly gripped in her hand, she finally lifted the pants up and blurted out "YES!"
Standing at the full length mirror behind her bedroom door, the top of which was almost flush with the top of the door to accommodate for Nicole's height, which was almost six feet, she climbed into the pants and stood admiring how the creases along the sides made her feel very 'put together.' A term her mother sometimes used when decorating the Christmas tree, or while cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Nicole preferred herself to feel 'put together', her mother seemed to reserve use of 'put together' for things outside of herself. Although, there was an exception to that the year her mother bought a particularly beautiful blue and orange suit for work. On the day she'd worn it for the first time, after Nicole complimented it , her mother said to her "I feel very put together in this suit, Nicole, I like the fabric and pattern. It's probably too loud for work, but that's okay. It's loud at the office sometimes. Nobody will hear the suit over the racket." Nicole sometimes thought her mother was a nut. Other times, she thought her mother just had a different way with words.
The ironing board, which Nicole kept folded up under her bed because of frequent use since getting the job at the River Falls Funeral Home, made a squeaky metal sound as Nicole put her white button down shirt upon it and began ironing it methodically. She'd start at the collar, then do the arms, then the back side, then the left front side and then the right front side. Most important to her was the button hole areas, where she'd focus on each button hole area with the tip of the iron, making sure that the button holes were not spread apart from being opened to allow for the button to go through. Once she was done, you could never tell that this shirt's button holes had ever had a button pushed through them.
She'd no idea why she did this with the button holes or why the creases in the pants mattered so much, but they did for reasons in her own head that weren't complicated or disturbing, just Nicole's way of keeping order to her life. The creases and the button holes always turned out just the way she wanted them to because she was, above all of her personality traits, very patient. Gazing at herself in the mirror with the white shirt and black pants, she felt so very put together she wanted to do a cartwheel.
~*~*~*~*~
Nikki told me she loved it so far. I asked her to write it with me, each of us putting a few paragraphs in, but she's too nervous to give it a try. I'm positive she'd do a fantastic job of it, but she's very hesitant. She's got such a good sense of humor, I'm hoping she'll change her mind and jump in at some point. Her writing is spectacular and this would be a good piece for her to hone her skills. Either way, I'm excited to see this story develop. I've got bits and pieces of it inside my head, mostly the comedy elements, but the bigger portion of it is going to just come along as it comes along.
On a goofy note, when I left the hospital after visiting my dad, grandpa and aunt, Kenny and the kids and some family members had a little party for me at Kenny's cousin's house, and the cake had the initials 'NFT' on it, which stands for NarcolepticFitThrower, a moniker I use during debates on a forum. It's also where the term 'Nifty' comes from, which is a name I'm sometimes called on the forum I frequent, as it's easier to type than NarcolepticFitThrower.
I also use the moniker BagOfEyebrows occasionally, or irpaC (which is Capri backwards.) About a year ago, during what is called a 'vanity search' on google, I typed in my monikers and found that 3 seperate individuals have used my monikers on forums I have never been to. The 'NarcolepticFitThrower' moniker is registered on 2 forums, one forum which is a racist forum apparently, and another forum that appears to be a random topic forum. The 'BagOfEyebrows' moniker is registered on a sport's forum. Obviously these 3 individuals saw my monikers (which are too obscure for others to have come up with them) on the forum I frequent and then went and registered the monikers on other forums to use as their own. They say imitation is a form of flattery, but I just found it funny, as the comments made by these individuals weren't flattering nor my opinions on things in life, but I found it comical that they'd copy my monikers and then use them in such offbeat ways on various forums out here in cyberspace. It made me chuckle, because I'm sure to eventually get emails from friends/family members who search my nicknames out here in cyberspace and question me about comments I never said.
Here's a picture of the birthday cake, which had real whipped cream frosting on it, and was so good it made my tummy stop hurting:
http://www.mobog.com/pic.cfm?pic=280999
Today I have the day off, so I'll be catching up on laundry and doing some housework, and also plan to take an hour to work some more on Love's Alive. I've also got 2 other things to continue writing, but I'm not sure my frame of mind today is in the right spot for those. I may hold off on that, and work on it once things get a bit more back to normal for my dad. I've got some soil and seeds to plant, a gift from Kenny's cousin, and may start that project instead, giving my garden an indoor head start this year. I meant to get my vegetable seeds on Monday, but just ran out of time. Kenny's cousin got me some great flower seeds, though, and I think I'll just get those going. She also got me some candles, which I can't wait to light up.
On a somber note, Monday also marked the one year anniversary of the death of Dontel Jeffers, a young boy who died while in state custody, in a 'specialized foster care' home. My birthday for the rest of my life will always be shared with this marked event. With his grandmother trying to get custody of him for months, being delayed custody on incidentals like 'proof of no lead paint' and any other little delay tactic the Department of Social Services could use to stall the little boy from being with his family members, the death of Dontel Jeffers was a wake up call to the state of Massachusetts, making citizens more aware of how corrupt and obnoxious the Department of Social Services has become in regards to keeping children 'in the system'.
I spoke recently to a woman who works for an insurance company and her family recently had also struggled to obtain custody of her nephew. We got into a long discussion about how negligent the Department of Social Services as well as the Department of Mental Health have been in actually doing what is in the best interest of each child. She said she was shocked at how the agencies would rather ignore their own rules to seek out family members to take custody of children in need, and agreed it appeared to be based not upon the best interest of the child, but the best interest (financial) of the agencies involved.
It is just amazing at how little has changed in the one year since Dontel Jeffers death. Unlicensed workers still run rampant in the system, kids continue to be kept from family members willing to take them, and hearing this woman's story almost broke my heart that Dontel Jeffers' death hasn't stopped the system from continuing on the same road that led to that little boy's death. I guess the financial gains outweigh the risks. It frustrates me but also inspires me to do what I intend to do in order to keep the positive changes coming to a system that is in dire need of an overhaul. I VOTE, and I will be writing up pieces that clearly demonstrate how obnoxious the system is, and I will continue to make sure each and every individual incident that took place with our family gets reviewed by those in political and legal power, as well as by thousands online, to see to it that it stops. It hasn't stopped yet, but eventually, it will no longer be 'business as usual' for the Department of Social Services or the Department of Mental Health. Their own statistics speak volumes at how badly in need of changes they are. And those changes will come. Society is starting to demand it, and the agencies apparently aren't listening, but they will when they stop receiving requested 'funding' for their 'special services' that abuse and sometimes lead to the death of innocent children. As more families find themselves unfair targets of the corruption and unconstitutional tactics utilized by these agencies.
Three loads of laundry are waiting for me to get started on my day here, so I'm off to begin the housework shuffle. Good music, nice smelling candles, and dirt in my hands, seeds being planted, warm, bubbly soapy water doing dishes, and as many calm, relaxing moments as I can slip inside one day. I've needed a day like today for a week. Hopefully any news from the hospital is good news today.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Today a steady snow has been falling since this afternoon. No wind, just snowflakes falling from the sky, covering the trees and roads... everything was covered within an hour, and now it looks like a good five inches is out there. It's very pretty, and when Winter came home from school, he said "it is so quiet outside," and went back out on the porch after he tossed his backpack inside. He stood there just listening to the snow fall. I went outside with him after a few moments, and it was very nice to hear nothing but snow falling softly. It was literally *that quiet* outside, you could hear the bigger flakes hitting the ground now and then. About an hour later, KC did the same thing, on the back porch. He wasn't in the room here when Winter got home, had no idea we'd listened to the snow earlier, but he literally went onto the back porch (in just his socks! :o ) and enjoyed that peaceful sound of quiet snowfall. :)
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