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Some goodish news amongst the painful crap…
There’s been so much pain lately. Mostly the pain of missing my mom and realizing, yet again, that she’ll never give me a big ol’ hug. That hurts a lot. Then there’s the job search for Ted, where he finds some really promising leads, jobs that sound like a really good match, but they.just.don’t. call. Asshats. Then there’s the homeowners crap, which is almost enough to make me wish we lived in a little cabin out in Nebraska somewhere, rather than a condo/townhouse in the Bay Area, because the finances SUCK right now. Did I mention that Ted’s on the board, so he has to hear about it from everyone? …
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Yesterday
Yesterday I went to Sacramento, to go through mom’s things. Thankfully, Richard and Kathy had gone through her things up in Alaska already, and only packed what they thought she would really want or need down here.  It’s so expensive to move things from Alaska, that it didn’t make sense to ship furniture and so on…so it’s just personal stuff and books. It was nice going through her things, seeing familiar items that I grew up with. I found her photo albums, which was the thing I most wanted to have. I found her kaleidoscope collection, which I also wanted. I didn’t get through everything, though, because it was HOT…
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Birthdays…
Traditionally, I am very punctual when it comes to birthdays. If you’re going to get a card or a gift from me (and not everyone does, don’t be hurt…remember, I’m poor), you’ll get it on time. For some reason, I have a weird gift for remembering birthdays, and it’s important to me that people know that I love them and was thinking of them. I would like to brag about this gift and be especially proud of it, but that’s like being proud of having green/brown eyes, or long fingers, or moles. It’s just how I’m made. I don’t have to work at it. At all. However, it seems like…
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Thursday Lion Blogging
Maya just showed me this video, Christian the Lion, and then I went and looked it up online to see if it were real. It’s real. I dare you to watch it and not get at least a little choked up. I full out cried. Which Maya found totally hilarious, and proceeded to tell the world via her Neopets chat. So what, I’m a softy. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U[/youtube]
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Thursday 13
I saw this Thursday 13 last week at A Gentleman’s Domain, and he got it from his friend, Di. Looks like a cute TT, so I decided to give it a shot. Thirteen Firsts First Job – I’ve told you about my first real job, at Mr. Steak. But I had a couple of odd jobs before that. The first was probably when my friend Jennifer and I would go to Pizza Hut and offer to fold boxes for take out, and in exchange, we would get pizza and soda to take home for dinner. Awesome. Another barter type job I had was cleaning out the horse stalls at a…
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Wanna See My Plumber’s Crack?
(image found here) Remember back in the early 80s, the painter pants? Any idea where a girl could get some plumber pants? Oh, that’s right, any low-rise jeans will show my butt-crack quite nicely. Well, get ready to see my ass, world (not a pretty sight, btw), because guess what I did yesterday? I fixed the toilet. That’s right, me. I’m disproportionately proud of myself. Why is my pride disproportionate? Because it was a really simple fix. The stupid toilet has had a slow leak for a long time now, where the tank drains a bit, then fills, drains, fills, on and on and on, I think about a hundred…
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I am my body
I wrote a post last week about yoga, and (un)relaxeddad made a comment that included this: “It never ceases to amaze me how much our bodies know about where we are and what we need (and how separate we hold ourselves from them except in situations of extremis). ” That comment really stuck with me, and it reminded me of my mom in a lot of ways. She was working pretty hard to try to come to terms with her body, to accept and love it, and to not judge herself because she was fat. She was working with a program called Overcoming Overeating, and I think she was doing…
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Immigration
(photo found here) Every so often, in the argument about illegal immigrants in America, and more specifically here in California, we hear that we need these workers to come to America, legally or illegally, because Americans aren’t willing to take these jobs. The jobs that immigrants take in America, mostly agricultural, are jobs that Americans aren’t willing to take. Well, I stopped awhile ago to think about that, the last time I heard about coal miners getting trapped underground for days, weeks, until they die…I thought, if people are willing to go into the bowels of the Earth to bring out fuel, at the risk of becoming crushed and losing…
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Why?
Why does there have to be a TV wherever you go? There’s a nice spa down the street from our house, where we sometimes go for a massage. They have a stupid TV in the changing room, set to a horrid show, talking about some guy who murdered his children. Not the news, either, some sensationalist channel. So you come out after having a wonderful massage, and you’re confronted with that crap. They also have a changing room for after you work out, and I can understand having a TV there, since some people like to watch the news in the morning, and they go to the gym in the…
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Torture…
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=PtS45bh_INY[/youtube] I wrote last year about waterboarding, and how it’s clearly torture, no matter what the dickwads in Washington think. Well, I was walking Genevieve the other day, and listening to Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me on my beloved iPod, and what should I discover? (I swear, you get better news from this show and Comedy Central than 99.9% of what else is out there.) The U.S. government is being sued for copyright infringement, because they tortured inmates at Guantanamo by playing crappy music over and over again, and they never paid the artists any sort of royalties. Kind of an ingenious way to stop torture, I guess, but I…
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Don’t Hold Your Breath
(image found here) Growing up, my mom was a Libertarian, and being a child, I pretty much followed her lead. Being a Libertarian means never having to say you’re sorry for what the current administration is doing, because the current administration is never going to be comprised of Libertarians. It also meant that I was raised with a large dose of cynicism about politics and politicians. Always told to follow the money, because that’s what makes politicians tick, even if their ideals are high, the reality is that they need money to run election and re-election campaigns. So if you want your favorite politician to be in office, to do…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Flight of the Conchords
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=gZQopX6r-54[/youtube] Flight of the Conchords, ‘Mutha Uckers’ Kookiejar over at A Fraternity of Dreamers has been talking for awhile of her passionate love for Flight of the Conchords. Since we didn’t have HBO, I had no idea what she was talking about. But recently, we decided not to put our life on hold anymore (what with the not moving and so on), and we went ahead and signed up for digital cable, which includes HBO. That means when the time comes, we can watch Big Love. Yay! Also, (and more importantly) we get Sci-Fi, which means we can watch Battlestar Galactica when it starts and repeats of Star Trek: The…
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Purple Hibiscus
Kambili is a 15 year old girl, growing up in Nigeria with her older brother, Jaja, and their parents, Eugene and Beatrice. Eugene is a very wealthy, influential man, one of the few who dares to stand up and tell the truth about the local government by means of the newspaper he owns. Theirs is a charmed life, with Eugene donating richly to the poorer neighbors, to the church, and to the many charities he supports. They live in a compound surrounded by high walls, and they have servants to cook and clean and drive for them. They have cable television and luxurious cars, plenty of meat to eat, and…
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Dinner with the Atheists
The other night, for some reason, we got to talking about saying grace at the dinner table, and how it is often just saying thank you to God for the nourishment and the family, and leaving it at that. I was reminded of a post on my mom’s blog that I came across the other day. It’s a long post, and well worth reading, but the part I remembered was about hearing grace as a child, and how different it was from just, ‘thanks for the food’: At meals with my great-grandfather, he always said grace and always blessed at least the farmer and the cook. Sometimes he would list…