Somewhere, a Deity Laughed. Loudly.

Yesterday morning, it finally got cold here in the Deep South. Morning temperatures were cold enough to require that I go out and let my car start warming up before I actually had to sit in it to drive anywhere. Somehow, it's ok for me to be cold when I run outside half dressed at 6 AM (it's still dark, so no one can really tell if wearing a robe or just an oddly flowing dress), but Heaven FORBID I be even a little chilly once I'm fully dressed and sitting six inches from the heater vents in my car. Wish a scarf wrapped around my neck. And gloves on. And a cup of coffee in my hand. Spoiled, a bit, hmmm? So yesterday I ran outside, no coat for my arms, no pantyhose on my legs, just a skirt and shirt that did nothing to hide the fact that my skin was pruning (the plucked chicken look is VERY good on me), jumped in my car, cranked the heat knob all the way up and turned the key...and nothing happened. No click, no clank, no "I'm-going-to-die-now-so-goodbye-til-you-figure-out-what's-wrong-with-me". Just...nothing. And that's when I noticed that the overhead light was barely on. Usually, it's almost blinding in the pre-dawn time, and it wakes me up almost as much as the extra-strong Colombian blend that I brew for myself. It might have even been flickering. As was the light on the dash that lets you know a door is open. And the drivers door had swung shut behind me - as it does every time I get in the stupid car when I don't pull up enough in our driveway. I had left a door open...and I hadn't driven the car in almost two days. My battery was beyond dead. It had decomposed and become engine manure. Fast-forward to me running in the house, surprising my husband by making actual words come out my mouth. For my mother's sake, I won't repeat what I think I said. Most of it would get me fined if I said it on national television. Hubby spent 20 minutes looking for his jumper cables, before we figured out they were probably a casualty in the divorce. How we went four years without noticing that... I race to Wal-mart in his Big Ole' Truck- sans makeup, which when combined with the look of utter fury on my face scared a couple of people and three stray dogs into the next county. I bought the most expensive jumper cables they had (somehow spending lots of money made sense at the time) and raced back home. Hubby takes over the manly part of the duties - meaning he went outside in the cold while I sat inside on the couch cursing at myself quietly to the cats - and hooked my car up to his Big Ole' Truck. He tiptoed back in the house, swerving in a wide arc around the couch, and we waited about 15 minutes. At which point he went outside and came back in and told me in an "I-Know-I-May-die-For-This" voice that I needed a new battery, and so I would have to take the Big Ole' Truck to work. In the rain. And now I was going to be 45 minutes late leaving, which meant that I would be in rush-hour hell once I got to Montgomery. I like driving Big Ole' Trucks as much as the next gal - more, if the next gal happens to be my best friend - but Hubby's is not an automatic, and I hate driving in rush hour in a stick shift. And it doesn't handle rain well. Not to mention I would have to move all my necessities - makeup, hands-free cell phone stuff, my lunch, my coffee cup. But not my CD's because the Big Ole' Truck has no CD player or Tape Deck. It's like I'm living in the 20's when I drive that thing. So I cursed some more while hubby called a friend to hitch a ride to work and told me to pick up a battery on the way home. Fast-forward to 4:30 PM (work was no more crazy than usual - which means I only had to visit the happy place deep in my mind two or three times to keep from strangling my boss.) I walked outside, mentally preparing myself to deal with afternoon rush hour traffic. Getting off base takes twenty minutes of mostly stopped stop-and-go traffic, because the main gate is closed to outgoing traffic right now. The Interstate is a mess because they're widening it right at the busiest part of the whole thing in Montgomery. And as I walked outside, deciding if the emergency mantra was warranted, something hit my head. and my shoulders. And it was cold. Sleet. And that's when I looked up at the sky and said, very quietly, "You Win. But I have more wine at home than I can drink in one night, and nothing is going to keep me from it." That thought sustained me through the next hour and a half. People in Alabama DO NOT know how to drive when anything resembling winter precipitation happens. And I was in a Big Ole' Truck that reacts to anything close to ice with shudders and brakes that suddenly decide they need a vacation. I made it home in one piece, with a new battery in the front seat beside me. Hubby gets home thirty minutes later, and "gets ready" to change my battery. This included some grunting and other male noises while he pulled out the tool set that has instruments in it that neither one of us can find a use for. But we have them in case we ever need them! We're Prepared for anything, we are. He goes outside to begin the process while I start heating up some homemade French Onion Soup and chopping up veggies for a salad. He came inside to get gloves at one point (later I found out that the windchill was 24 degrees at the time), and I offered my beautiful turquoise Magic Scarf, which he refused using words like "ridiculous". I guess being wrapped in turquoise fru-fru would make changing a battery in freezing temperatures somewhat less manly. Whatever. I didn't care, because the first thing I had done when I got home was open a bottle of red wine. And I was self-medicating as quickly as possible. If I'm going to drop over $100 in one day, I DON'T want it to be on parts of a car that I not only don't look at on a regular basis, but that get dirty and gross. An HOUR - and two more glasses of wine later (it would have been three glasses, but I did have to handle the womanly role in this tragedy - hold the flashlight), we were done. We were eating and drinking and watching Star Trek. Because that's how we celebrate a job well done in our house. By drinking too much and watching geeky shows on TV. We live the high life.

What I'm looking at while I should be working:

Art Garfunkel's reading list.
"Since the 1960's, Art Garfunkel has been a voracious reader. We are pleased to present a listing of every book Art has read over the last 30 years. To view a list of Art Garfunkel's favorite books, go to "Favorites". This book list has been divided into several pages to allow easy downloading. Each page indicates the author, title, date of publication and number of pages (when available)"

The missing period at the end of that last sentence really bugs me.

Dilbert: Why does this remind me of my best friend?

THE WORK FILTERS ARE BLOCKING MY ACCESS TO BLOGLINES!!!!

deep, cleansing breaths.
In-Two-Three-Four, Out-Two-Three-Four.
{sob}

Irony?

{Overheard} "Maybe if she spent less time talking on the phone then she would have time to get the job done instead of trying to create more work for someone else." --Conversation that my department's technician had on the phone with a co-worker. They spend at least 30% of their day talking on the phone or in person. More if my boss isn't here. My boss isn't here today. Two days ago, I spent about an hour doing various tasks that she "didn't have time" to do. Thank God I'm not a supervisor. And before you accuse me of eavesdropping - her desk is against mine. If she didn't want me to hear, she wouldn't have said it.

The Weekend

High: He loves my Chicken Parmesan! I am the best Stepmother, EVER! Low: I had to work on Sunday, so I don't get to go to his Lacrosse practice match. (Yeah, that almost counts as a high since I'm not a sports person - but there's always a chance his mom will be there and get upset that I'm there. So it's a tough one to call). Maybe I'll make Stepmom of the year in...oh, five or six years when he's in his mid-twenties and takes to living on the streets, getting piercings that I won't want to know about and blaming me for all of his problems. High: He still gets disgusted when he finds his dad and me kissing in the laundry room. Which means that we spend a lot of time kissing in the laundry room. In effect, this is a double high - I get kissed and he gets grossed out. Low: We made the mistake of asking about a female that he took to a dance. Wow. I didn't see that response coming. What I considered an overly-dramatic reaction he considered a reason to be grateful that he didn't throw green beans in my face. High: I didn't find any articles of his clothing gracing the living room floor Saturday morning (I NEVER ask what he's doing in the living room on Friday nights that makes him take his clothes off after his dad and I go to bed. After all, he doesn't ask what I do with MY clothes after I go to bed. But I'm still curious. And just a little bit scared. That is MY living room floor, and by golly, if anyone's going to do something gross on it I want to know so that I don't do anything gross in the same spot.) Who knows what will happen this weekend?

The Pursuit of Happyness

I don’t go to many movies. Considering it costs almost $20 for the three of us to go to one, it’s something I don’t try very hard to fit into my budget. And we get such an indecent number of movie channels on our digital cable package so that I really can’t justify it that often. StepSon goes a lot, though, so he usually picks what we see, because he’s usually seen everything that I want to see, and I absolutely will not pay for him to see a movie twice. Call me the hard-nosed, cheap-skate stepmother from Hell (you wouldn’t be the first), but there you have it.

So last month, we went to see The Pursuit of Happyness.

First of all, let me say that I hated Will Smith’s hair in this movie. It was horrible. He’s still a hotie…but this hairdo made him considerably less so.

And his son, Jaden, completely blew me away. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, he’s got the talent coming at him from both directions. (And in case you’re wondering, his hair was…very big for a five year old).He didn’t play an “I’m-so-cute-don’t-you-just-want-to-pinch-my-cheeks” role, and he didn’t play an “I’m-a-five-year-old-so-I’ll-have-a-tantrum-every-ten-minutes” role. He was just a real-live-honest-to-goodness, one-minute-I’m-happy-one-minute-I-want-candy” kid.

The movie made me uncomfortable, but that was something that I had a hard time acknowledging, because to acknowledge that is to have to admit that I know there are people all over the world who have to make those kinds of decisions every day while the hardest thing I decide some days is whether to wear gold or silver earrings with my blue sweater and black skirt. Deciding that a bathroom in a subway is the safest place for your son to get a night’s rest is not even on the same level. And somehow, knowing that the movie has a happy ending didn’t make it any easier to watch scenes like that.

But perhaps one of the best things that I can say about this movie is that it is still making me think about it three weeks after I saw it. And that’s really why I’m writing all this down. I still find myself wondering what kind of choices I would have made if I were in that position (or those positions). My stepson didn’t like this aspect of it. His take was that he goes to the movies to escape from reality, not to watch it unfold with no escape (because the hard-nosed, cheap-skate stepmother from Hell won’t let you leave until you’ve gotten every penny’s worth of money from your movie ticket.) But I told him that he’s never had a reality like that. And chances are that he’ll be lucky enough that he’ll never have to witness the parts of the world that DO live like that, unless he makes a deliberate effort to do so.

In the end, the movie was good. Not stellar. Definitely long in parts, but the closer you get to the end, the better it gets. And it won’t surprise any of you who have ever been to a movie with me to know that I cried, even though there really aren’t any surprises along the way in the last 30 minutes or so. The emotions were real, and that was all that mattered to me. And I think the closing scene was probably my favorite part of the entire movie.

I clicked on a blog and they had a link to a word of the day and this is what I found...

"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
"When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."
--Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass

I bought three chickens this weekend. http://www.globalgiving.com/pr/1200/proj1159a.html These are the kinds of initiatives that really can make a difference in someone’s life. $10 to me is going out for lunch and getting sushi. For the above people, it was three chickens – that they’ll have with them for more than a 3 hour period. A couple of my other favorites are: Oxfam International Modest Needs

What's a Web Blog?

Blogs have been around for years now; years longer than I knew about them, that's for sure. In the past few years, the internet's gone nuts with them. They're all over the place. But you already know that.

So maybe someone could explain this to some media types. I'm too lazy to go looking for more examples than THIS, but I've seen the phrase "web blog" more than once lately. And it drives me just as crazy as when some says the phrase "PIN Number". So, for the record:

Blog = web log

Web Blog = You Look Stupid.