Sentimental

If anyone read my last post and was all confused as to why I deleted it... I remembered the saying about how if you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all. And, well, I deleted it before I remembered that it had a lot of other nonsense on there too. Oh well.

Anyway. So on one of my mommy board things someone posted those Five questions.. I forget what they are called, something about Friday. (Can I take a wild guess here and say the Friday Five?) One of the questions was if you could be a tree, which one would you be? Instantly I think oak tree. I'm not sure what kind it is, I'll go google and see if I can pull something... apparently its a coast live oak, or something very similar (which makes sense, since there is a music festival every year called Live Oak). When I think of them I smell wood smoke, from the millions of fires I've sat around with friends and family, mostly on the beach. I think of running around the woods or campsites and stepping barefoot on those cupped leaves, they are very stiff and have little pricks on the edges. I think of driving down the highways on warm sunny days, watching millions of those trees crowd the fields and hills and seeing them close and then stop for a brief moment as we whip by. I think of the hundreds of acorns I've collected throughout my life. I think of the first time I got poison oak while camping.. I was 7 and cartwheeling around (why? I dunno) and falling in drifts of leaves, and one of the drifts covered a patch of poison oak. Ha! I also think of climbing. Climbing up and around and along branches, once I went so high I got terrified (I'm scared of heights) and it took me an hour before I could begin inching back down.

I miss those trees. They are always in my memories when I think of my so called home. It's a little sad that I won't ever live near those again. Maybe a different oak tree.

Anti-Blog?

You know want to know a fun waste of time while you are sitting on the comp trying to think of something to blog? Looking at other people's blogs, and then going even further and clicking all the blogs THEY list, and so forth. It's great. I'm wasting a lot of time here!

Actually, I can't think of anything to blog because at least 6 of my 7 available brain slots are busy trying to think of a funny, clever, individual way to tell Caayn that I'm pregnant. Not that I am, or well, to be honest I could be, but since there's no physically possible way to know for certain... err, what? As I was saying... Yeah, everything has been done! Not to mention he already kind of knows. (Umm, okay, we had like 9 solid days of sex. I'm pretty sure he's on to me here.) All that happy crappy aside, I still can't think. There's the whole buying a crib and wrapping it up, which in my opinion is just downright funny. But I would never be able to carry it into the house. I could hire a barbershop quartet, but I don't know where I'd send 'em. Caayn works in a super secret bunker. Not really, but he may as well. The bun in the oven thing is not my thing, the baby themed dinner is kind of twisted (if I served it on baby plates too then it would just be comical...) Hm. I don't know.

Personally, I think the whole girl thing is overrated. Girls get the raw end of the deal, seriously. We bleed monthly, we push humans out of body parts after growing them in other body parts, we get scary hormones that make us raging crazies, we get commercials on tv for yeast infections and feminine odors (seriously, have no commercial makers taken a whiff of a sac in the middle of summer?)... and to top it off, we have a variety of sticks that we can pee on and procede to analyze. It's totally bizarre. There are women who even take the sticks apart. EWW. How close do you need to be to your own pee? It's weird.

Think I'm going to leave you with that thought. I'm evil like that. Plus, I have a forgotten mug of cocoa sitting on the arm of the couch. Good thing the cat isn't as evil as she could be.

Oh and one more thing. If you:

1. 1. Read
2. 2. Read Stephen King
3. 3. Read the Dark Tower series

then I'd totally appreciate it if you checked out Caayn's website. It is Can Calyx. You'll want to check his Prologue link on the left. You won't be disappointed!

A Whole Lot of Psychosis

I wonder how many people wonder why I call myself Phoenix when I refer to myself online. There's only one place I use my real name, and thats on baby forums, because all those women use their real names.

Want to know the truth? I'm a paranoid psycho! I live in constant fear that somehow my father will find me. Isn't that silly? Caayn definitely thinks so. And the really silly thing is that Caayn and I have very blah, commonplace, names. Our last name is totally generic! Yet I use my son's real name, which is way more uncommon. Who knows. When my son was born, I denied any release of information to the local papers, in fear that my dad might somehow be reading the paper. (Regardless of the fact he still lives back in California.)

I admit it! I have a daddy issue!

I plan on telling Sully that my dad is dead, which is probably wrong in so many ways, but I don't care. And one of these days Caayn and I are going to do our wills, and in it I'll put my wish that my father and any relatives or friends of his be denied any visitation rights. We already agreed to give the guardianship stuff to his father and step-mother. That's my just in case thing. I've even researched the grandparents rights' laws, after having nightmares of my dad trying to pull that crap. He's pulled it on my brother, which is ridiculous because my brother still sees him and allows his children near him. Once he tried to have a contest with my brother regarding his kids--to see who could save up a certain amount of money in a set amount of time... whoever did it would get the rights to raise the kids. Seriously, who is psycho like that? My dad.

Back story: Mom and Dad met, my grandparents said eww don't date him, she said I love him, he said I don't love her! She moved in anyway. They married. 2 years later, my brother. 5ish years later he met Shelly. 6 years later me. 1 month after that he left us for said Shelly. They have 2 kids now, I don't know how old they are, but its a girl and boy. I visited often, even enjoyed going over there. We camped. My dad makes excellent pancakes. One summer I stayed for an extended length of time. They tried to "kidnap" me (as in I was told we were going to visit a friend in CO for a long time, but they didn't tell any of the family, and it was by chance I called my mom and told her..).. There was a lot of stuff in there too, as in them talking mad shit on my mom to me, step-mother trying to call CPS on my mom... 6th grade, my dad tries to get full custody out of the blue. Denied. 7th grade, he calls me to tell me after a family vote they don't want me to visit any more. 9th grade, he tries to visit me in school... He tried having things delivered to my job... (At this point, any contact with him would leave me pretty much hysterical.) I skipped below radar by moving in with relatives, then with a friend. 2003 I met Caayn when he was in tech school at the air base near my town. I was 17. My mother signed the marriage license, since I needed a guardian's permission. (LUCKY my mother had sole custody.) When we arrived here in Minot, the first time we came on base and met with the official people, some high ranking lady told us my father had contacted them saying he hadn't given permission to be married, yada yada... Scared the shit out of me. He tried to sue for the child support he'd paid after I was married, they told him HAHA because he paid only $100 for me (it was actually $50 per child, until my bro reached 18, then they said keep paying $100 since it was so low)...

Thats about it. My whole family covers for me. He tries contacting various family members every now and then digging for info. All of them refuse to give it up. He didn't know I had a son until my brother accidently let that slip.

Pretty crazy huh? You'd wonder why he keeps bothering. It's obvious I want nothing to do with him anymore... I don't understand it. Honestly, I think it's his wife. She's really weird. When I used to talk to him when I was little, I could always hear her in the background, telling him what to say. How weird is that? Sometimes I get so freaked out thinking about it all, I start to wonder if he has ever hired a private invesitgator to try and find me.. It makes me grateful to live on a military base. And makes me worried thinking about when we don't. My step-mother is a teacher. She used to have all my schools inform her on things about me, and they did even when my mom expressly told them not to. I worry about that happening to Sully.

I'm a freak! WHOO! Not sure why I had to get this off my chest. Probably because I got a + on my OPK today, which means hopefully soon there will be another baby, which means I'll have a whole 'nother soul to be worried for. Seriously, why do mothers have to worry so much?

This whole post was a digression. What I was going for in that first paragraph is that all of that is why I refer to myself as Phoenix when online. It's my way of "covering my tracks" as it is. I guess it makes me feel a little safer.

Silly me!

The Wicker Man

NetFlix delivered The Wicker Man yesterday for our viewing pleasure... The remake, that is. I've seenthe original, but it was about 5 years ago and I was probably half asleep the whole time. It was good, but eh. I'm generally not a fan of remakes or sequels or whatnot. The movie made far more sense when it took place on an island off of Scotland, rather than an island who knows where outside of WA (seriously, any island off the coast of the United States will have been thoroughly investigated one time or another, compared to Scotland--who goes island hopping off the coast of Scotland?)

And the alternate ending was LAME. Caayn suggested it'd be funny if the alternate ending was that the guy actually died in the scene in the beginning... It turned out that the "extra" ending was that before they sacrificed him, they put bees on his head and broke his legs, and then sacrificied him. Seriously?

The best part though was the credits. The movie was dedicated to Johnny Ramone. SERIOUSLY? What was that? Did he play a part in the movie, or have anything to do with the original, maybe? No. It appears to just be randomly dedicated to him. *headdesk*

I feel like being a little indignant just for the sake of Paganism. Movies worldwide aren't very kind to Paganism, or they are demeaning. The Craft? Charmed? Oh well. Not all Pagans are uber feminists or run around vanquishing evil or sacrificing innocent folk. Ah well, its not like I'm going to do anything about it.

Just thought I'd share.

OH! One more thing. Some guy on the Colbert Report the other day made a joke that was downright hilarious. He said that geeks are better than nerds, because geeks get the job done. Seriously. I wanted to give the guy a high-five. He was one of the better interviewees on the show. (I critize the people he interviews on whether or not they can handle themselves against Stephen's barage... some of them get so flustered they don't know what to say, some take him too seriously, others joke, and then there are the folks who hold their own against him. I always cheer them on.)

Thats it.

Mr. Claus Doing the Dirty Work

Do I really need to say anything? Yes? Okay. We came home one day awhile back and Santa was definitely picking up dog shit in someone's backyard. Needless to say, we got pictures.


Bear with me, I have more pictures coming in another blog entry...

Junk And Stuff

Caayn has taught Sully a new phrase. "Oh drat!" Which comes out sort of like "Oh dwat!" It's highly amusing. There's a dragon on a kid show called Oswald (I want to say his name is Leo, but I forget for certain) and he is definitely gay. He's a very effeminate flouncy type of Chinese dragon, who goes around saying "Oh drat" and "Woe is me"... its very funny! (Official statement: nothing against being gay.)

And that makes me think of that comedian guy that was just on Comedy Central the other night. Demetrie or something like that... The guy with the Large Pad. Whatever, I can't repeat the joke because my memory is too bad. I just spent like 5 minutes writing out the joke, only to sit and look at it and realize that I'm probably missing a chunk of it... Anyway. He was hysterical. I could never go see a comedian. I find just about everything funny, so I would just sit in the audience laughing so hard that I'd start crying. It'd be funny, until I DIED!

Anyway, enough nonsense. One of these days I am going to make a second little link box thingy and I'll put all the blogs I read on there. It'd be a hell of a lot easier for me to check them, rather than dealing with clicky menus and arrows and junk. Plus, then everyone could experience the hilarity of Rude Cactus.

Is American Idol over yet? I hate that show. All I want is some ice cream and to read my damn book. I bought A Feast for Crows the other day, only to realize that it had been SO long since I read the first few books that I had no clue what was going on... so now I have to read the first ones again. And they are so so long... Good, but long. Ugh. Anyway, if I go read and eat ice cream in a room where people are singing, I'll probably get drawn in. There is nothing worse than getting drawn in to a terrible tv show. Trust me, I do it all the time. (Can I say weird obsession with Charmed?)

Vampire Hunter D

So I'm basically using NetFlix to torture Caayn. I keep coming across movies I haven't seen in forever, and then sticking them in the queue without telling him. They email you saying they are shipping the movie, which I usually delete, and then by the time arrives 2 days later, I have totally forgotten what movie is showing up... Yesterday it was Vampire Hunter D. It's this old anime thing about, well, vampires. Go figure. Now, I haven't seen it in like 7 years maybe? I dunno, a long time. Caayn was dubious, to say the least.

Well, we got mostly to the end when it started to skip and then stopped working altogether. Tried cleaning it, and blowing out the little disc tray thing on the PS2.. no good. I reported it as dead on NetFlix, and we'll send it back on Monday. Caayn was ticked though. Something about how he had wasted all that time watching it and hadn't even got to see the end. Hehe!

Oh well. And for the record, the night before that I made him watch Benny and Joon... It's an old Johnny Depp movie with Aidan Quinn and Mary Stuart Masterson. It was like my favorite movie for a long time when I was little. Poor poor Caayn.

We also went downtown yesterday. I bought some stripey pajama pants. As if I don't have enough pajama pants that I don't wear. Seriously, when are girls supposed to wear these? I'm like morally opposed to wearing them in public, and I generally don't wear them around the house since I'm a klutz and am known for falling down the stairs... Oh well. I'll wear them on the weekends until I fall and then curse and throw them in a drawer and not wear them ever again. Heh.

One more thing. Jacks Big Music Show? Shame on them! That is like Sully's fave tv show besides Blues Clues, and the new season freakin' blows. They changed tiny things for what appears to be no reason. But I know. They've become PC. Instead of Jack and Mary yelling "Come in!" when someone rings the door bell, they now yell "Who is it?" even though the person still barges in... Small, but dumb. Seriously, it doesn't flow at all. And Prudence, the musical genie they released to be a yodeler? She's been on the show twice, and neither time has she yodeled. Are kids supposed to forget the last season? It's lame. AND the Schwartzmen quartet is no longer all doo wop, now they sound like the Beach Boys. I like the Beach Boys, but they were one of Sully's favorite singing groups on the show and now he grimaces when they are on. Silliness I tell you.

A couple came over on Friday to look at the kitten. They said they'd call on Saturday to get her... they never called. Anyway, enough rambling of nonsense..

The Dr Says

Sully went to the dr. Remind me to use a stroller next time I take him somewhere by myself in the winter. I was carrying a huge blanket (to keep him warm walking from the car to the building), my jacket and scarf, his jacket, Robert the stuffed dog, my bag and his hand.

They weighed him. I think he weighs something like 12-13kg. No idea what that is in lbs. Then I had to carry him, his various items of clothing, said jackets, blanket bag and dog into the waiting room because apparently there weren't any rooms available. I don't understand drs. The room we were in was identical to the room we went in later, why could the doc just come in the first one!?

We ran all around the waiting area and up and down the halls while waiting. Finally the dr showed up. Sully has some hardcore brusing on the inside of his upper lip (I almost started crying it looked so awful), some cuts on his lips and one of his top teeth is pushed backwards. Its not loose, but the gums could be swollen. And the tooth -could- be impacted, we don't know.

What does this mean? Sully has to go to the dentist now. Oi. He's not on our dental insurance yet, so that means hunting down his SSN which is in some box that we haven't unpacked yet... Then once he is on there I can call someone. This freaking sucks. My poor little baby!

Windchilly

Before I go any further, I have to tell you about GA. It was good. I wasn't disappointed. I love that show. Thats it! I'm not one for spoilers, so I can't share what happened.

Now, on with the post. So this morning the temperature is -21F. With the windchill, its -43F. Yeah, baby! That is downright cold. However, speaking from experience--its about the same amount of cold as -60F. :P So yesterday when I drove Caayn to work and the dude to daycare (I paid $65 for the week on Monday, thinking I would still be working, so he's finishing out the week) I suggested that he wear his facemask, since he has to walk a long way in the cold. He was like, "No, the wind is blowing at my back, I'll be fine. If its still blowing that way when I leave, I'll wear it."

Fast forward to 2:30pm when I'm picking him up. The wind is still blowing and I think it was a little colder, but I don't know... He jumps in the car all frosty and covered in wind tears. His ears are pretty much white. We drop off some paperwork and then go home. By the time we're home (and we listened to the Steve Miller Band all the way there, let me tell you) his ears were thawing out. BUT he freakin' got frostnip in one of them. BECAUSE HE DIDN'T WEAR A FACEMASK. Dork! It was very very swollen all night, and only looks a little better today. If he had to walk any further, I'm willing to bet he could have gotten something more severe. And it is SO hard to find anything relating to frostbite in this form. Most sites talk about it in relation to prolonged exposure. Up here in the Frozen North, you don't need to be out more than 3 minutes to get frostbite. The first year we were here, it was -60 for a couple of months I think. In under 30 seconds, exposed flesh can freeze. Yeah. Like I tell my family though, the weather ain't bad when you don't go outside! (Boy, I don't think any of them can comprehend that kind of cold. I'm from the Central Coast of CA. If it drops below 50, it is COLD!)

Seriously. Cover exposed body parts when its cold out, okay folks? Even my dog won't stay outside more than 5 minutes when its this cold, and he's the idiot who will stay outside in a blizzard even though he wants in really bad. (He does this annoying thing where he'll beg and scratch at the door to come in, but when you get to the door and open it, he runs away. Dumb ass.)

On another note, Sully fell down the stairs last night. We have two sets of stairs, one going upstairs, the other going down. They are both only like 7 or 8 steps. One of his favorite games right now is to put his blanket over his head and walk around. Well, he was in the walkway by both of the staircases and threw the blanket over his head. Before I could get to him to keep him from them, he went down. It was so awful. He started crying, I screamed... OMG. There was blood all over his mouth. Its hard to tell what is injured, but we know one of his upper teeth is wobbly. Caayn looked in there this morning and said it looks like he cut the inside of his upper lip all to hell. I've got an appt at 11:00 for the ped to see him. Hopefully everything will be okay. Poor fella. I feel so guilty for not being able to get there fast enough.

And one last thing. Mothers are the weirdest breed of people. As you'll have read, we are trying for baby #2... I frequently post on some baby boards on a website called BabyCenter. Seriously, women share things that you ordinarily wouldn't share with other folks. It cracks me up. And then once you have the baby, there are whole discussions about your child's poop. Is that weird or what? It's nice because you can get WAY more information about things than outside of the net, but its still weird. :D

I lied. I have one more thing. I am a TERRIBLE blogger! There are a couple of other blogs I read, and they post these teeny little things. Not me. Nope. I'm a wordy bastard! And the funny thing is, I'm normally pretty quiet. Well, with anyone who isn't my Caayn. I chat his ear off pretty much nonstop.

Thats it.

GA

Forgot to mention: There is a NEW episode of Grey's Anatomy on tonight. FINALLY! I feel the need to run around in circles, squealing and doing a funny little cat dance. So, what I'm saying is everyone had better be tuned in tonight. Even if you don't watch the show. (And if you don't, you'd better start. It's the greatest show in the universe.)

For Shame

Shame on me. See? I start a blog and what do I do? Stop posting. Geez. Anyway, here I am.

Lost my job on Monday. Literally! Since we cut our hours so far back, we only have enough hours for oneperson to work and the lady with the full-time position gets prefrence over the lady with the part-time position. I got squeezed right out. Oh well, its not like I mind. I was going to quit later this month anyway. Yeah, you heard me. I can't take the pressure! Plus, I'm hoping for a positive pregnancy test at the end of the monthish, and I'd like to enjoy my remaining time with the Sully-monster before we add a new baby to the mix.

You want to know the perks to not working? I clean. I unpacked like 4 boxes since Monday. Thats more than we've unpacked since we've been here. (I may be exaggerating.) My kitchen is clean too. It's nice.

Abby is still gone, thank the gods. That last couple who took her home called a few days after they picked her up to let us know that she was doing superb with them. Caayn and I cheered with joy.

You want to know the dark underside to staying home? I get weird obsessions with tv shows. Back before I started working, my obsession was Judging Amy. Why? I have NO idea, considering I never ever watched the show back when it was still airing new episodes. I had better shows to watch. Now its Charmed. Caayn teases me, but I can't help it. TNT shows 2 episodes in the morning and two in the afternoon. I ONLY watch the morning ones, and never the afternoon ones if I can help it. Why? I dunno. I'm a freak, I'll admit it.

And now, I have things to do. Errands that can be run, from my telephone. :D This should be fun.