FYI

I STILL check this blog for updates. Please e-mail me here to be notified of my new site. Peace.

THIS BLOG IS IN THE PROCESS OF MOVING.
If you wish to be informed of the new site's address please either respond to this post (won't be published) or send an e-mail alloverthebored@gmail.com

Shutting up about shutting down

If any one is wondering...no I will not post email info or confidential info!

Shutting down:Part II

I want to make this clear: I am not calling anyone out. A person from my "real" past occasionally visits this blog and although it took me a while to figure it out. . .

My discomfort at having this person read my stuff has been growing for some time and I feel as if it's affected what I write and how I write. It's been a learning experience on blogging. I just don't have that kind of courage. To put it all out there. Not yet. Maybe never.

Thanks to all who are interested in reading more. It never ceases to amaze.

Gonna shut down

I need to shut this blog down due to unwanted unwarranted attention from someone I no longer . . . enjoy.

New site will begin in a month. So if you are interested in being apprised of new site/new name... please shoot me an email (see upper right) or respond to this post and I will email you when it is ready.

THANKS

Written on a diner menu viewed earlier today

(as written)

Specials

Threesome . . . $7.75

On my own

The Boy is taking a nine-day sabbatical from me. Our house. Our life. He's with his dad.

I've been living on bottles of wine, Wheat Thins from the box, potato chips, corn on the cob fresh from the microwave and frozen pizza. I've also discovered that cream cheese wedged between chocolate graham crackers is quite the delicacy. No need to set an example this week.

Although I have filled up the days thus far with home projects and grown-up play dates, the place is messier than usual and I'm feeling increasingly out of sorts. That's what happens when he's gone this long. . .it starts out all "Hey, hey I'm free!" and quickly dissipates to feeling like a robot slowly slowing down on run-down batteries. Maybe it's the wine.

But tonight I got my second wind because of the wind. . .literally.

The long, harsh brutal Midwest winter birthed an interesting summer. Lots of summer rain (which I happen to love) and these last few weeks have been pretty breathtaking. Today was strange in that I woke up at 7 and it was sunny and cool. A bit later, it rained. Sprinkling, really. Then the sun peered out again but it got almost sizzling hot with a heavy humidity. And then it really cooled down......

The wind rattled my shutters and made the curtains dance. The perfume of my backyard flowers floated to me as I lay semi-comatose in my bed ( the semi-comatose a direct result of too much work and too much gulped wine).

That snap of fresh made me wake and finish some things I had started. I felt as if I had just awoken from 9 solid hours. It's so chilly, I had to go and close the windows about 10 minutes ago.

I love these mysterious out-of-season dips and curls in weather. The unexpected warm summer torrent; the chilly nights staved off by fleece or flannel.

I will sleep the sleep of the child who's played outside all day and falls into the bed with clothes intact before melting into the bed.

Telephone Line

I'm debating letting my landline go in a bid to "cut costs." But I'm surprisingly reluctant.

Landlines mean something.They're stable, permanent. Rooted.

One of my longest-standing friend's phone serves as a communicative umbilical cord. Our group, nearly a quarter century old, know that no matter how distant we became, we can always reach out and reach back via her unchanged number. Throughout college, jobs, other jobs, city living, suburban sprawl, marriage, kids, divorces, different careers--she's always had the same phone number. Some of us from the original group split into subsets. But no matter what, we're only one phone call away from reconnection.
We've weaved in and out of each other's lives via her phone.

I've always found something comforting and warm mingled with the kind of childlike surprise of finding a letter in your parent's mailbox with YOUR name on it when I've gotten a call from her that started, "Hey guess who called me looking for you. . ."

My home phone is one of the icons of my independence--changed when I kicked that man out of this house and out of my life.

It's the stability and the weight of the land line that calms me as I walk around the house and yard spilling my life to a dear one, not the breaking and sputtered connection from the slip of the phone delicate enough to break.

I never have to weigh if the caller is minute-worthy on my phone.
BE7 began the first phone number I ever remember back, innocent in it's simplicity and letter-number connection. My parents totally flipped my wig with a pink princess phone for my room one year.

Times are so transient. I think I'll leave this anchor be.

Pissed off

I'm feeling really angry lately. Issues with my ex, always issues with my ex.

First of all, his pear-shaped wife likes to pretend she's his mommy and will shoot off e-mails under his address and pretend she's him. Ass that she is, doesn't she know that I'm an editor? That I possess a scintilla of intelligence (enough to figure the mystery out)? That I look for different "voices" in words? It pisses me off that they think they're so clever, so covert, so smart to "hoodwink" me.

I have to bolster myself to peer at their e-mails, because of the content, the tone, the veiled threats..."pursuant to paragraph three...blah, blah, blah." They believe in the philosophy if they type it, it's true.

J tells me to not let them bother me; don't hand them over the power. Easier said than done. I'm tired of fighting. How do they have the energy to constantly battle and prick and poke? Don't they have hobbies?

Fuckers.

I've tried to ignore them, resist them, use logic, be nice---none of it works. Maybe this is the great lesson I need to learn that I cannot control others' behavior, only mine. Yet, I still get punished. And so does our son. Why can't they see it's harmful to him in so many ways? Why can't they just go on and stop trying to do whatever suits them best, not The Boy?

I'm just pissed. Today. I've only got 10 more years of this.

Morning Drama

Late this morning, I watched as groups of people gathered over the river, which runs right outside my office. A Canadian goose was trapped in the undertow of the recreational dam.

Someone called. "Rescuers" were brought to the scene.

Although a long-armed net and a lasso were brought. . .

. . . the goose made it out on his/her own. After an hour and a half of struggling, the goose broke free of the whirlpool and waded to shore where a healthy gaggle of geese welcomed its return. They stood by the whole time.

The first thing he/she did was engage in a looooong stretch.

Then he/she began preening. Soon after, they all took off. Together.


And the rescuers headed back amid rounds of applause.

Woman sues Victoria's Secret claiming thong injury

Fri Jun 20, 2008 12:06am BST
LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - A woman who says she was hurt by her thong panties when a metal clip flew off and hit her in the eye has sued Victoria's Secret, saying in a TV interview on Thursday that the injury caused her "excruciating pain."

Macrida Patterson, a 52-year-old Los Angeles traffic officer, told NBC's "Today" show that she suffered cuts to her cornea from the small piece of metal that had been used to secure a rhinestone heart onto the blue thong.

"I was putting on my underwear from Victoria's Secret and the metal popped in my eye. It happened really quickly. I was in excruciating pain. I screamed. That's what happened," Patterson said on "Today."

Patterson's lawyer Jason Buccat, who also appeared on "Today," said the metal staple caused "severe damage" to her cornea that required a topical steroid.

The product liability lawsuit, which was filed on June 9 in Los Angeles Superior Court and first reported on the Smoking Gun Web site, seeks unspecified damages.

A spokeswoman for Victoria's Secret, which is operated by Limited Brands Inc, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Reuters

The Scorpion's Tale

There's a fable that goes something like this:

A scorpion wanted to cross the great river and sought a "vessel" to carry him across. He approached a turtle about carrying the scorpion across the river on his back.

"Oh no, scorpion, I couldn't take you across the river. You would bite me and I would die."

The scorpion mused,"I can't bite you because if I did, I would die too. Don't worry."

The turtle thinks this over and decides it makes sense. He invites the scorpion to climb upon his hard shell. The odd pair swim out in the river, the turtle feeling more confident with each swim stroke.

About halfway through the river, the scorpion attacks and stings the turtle in the tender flesh of his neck. As the turtle begins to sink, taking along the scorpion with him he said, "Scorpion, why, why did you do that? Now we will both die."

"I couldn't help it. It's my nature," said the scorpion just before death.

I've been trying very hard to to change many, many habits--all destructive and harmful. Not a one of them doing me a bit of good. And as I, for the seemingly millionth time, rake over the things I didn't do and did do--things that I have not done and done over and over again. I wonder why, why can't I seem to change behaviors that aren't necessarily helping me out, making me grow?

So I pose this question: how much of your core can you really change, really expect to change and conversely, how much of your scorpion do you have to simply accept?

Does it depend on how deep the water?

There's No Place Like Home (down on the farm)

"The next time I go looking for my heart's desire, I won't look any further than my own backyard; if it's not there, then I never really lost it to begin with," Judy Garland playing Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" emotes emphatically.

Dorothy utters that line to publicly punctuate her epiphany that she had the power all along and that "there's no place like home."

Rewatching it with The Boy last Friday night left me oddly disturbed (and I'm not talking about the exploitation of the "little people" either).

I used to get a warm and fuzzy feeling reminiscing about the flick. I remembered the message being that home is a comforting, safe place to lay your head down.

But now I'm not so sure if there isn't another message reflecting a sign of the times.

Dorothy takes charge and runs away to save her beloved Toto from unwarranted extermination. For this, she gets repeatedly "punished" by a powerful wicked witch.

It's only when she wakes up in her own bedroom on the farm that she feels safe and all remains right with the world. She emphatically promises to never leave the farm.

To never leave the farm.

In the 1930s, farmers across the country battled voracious insects and the harshest and longest of droughts in history. This destroyed families as well as lifestyles. Many lost their farms, either by force or by mass exodus. Many young men reinvented themselves in government jobs building roads and bridges instead of tilling soil. The weather eventually abated and the government installed programs (finally) to assist rural America, but then the country was well into the 1940s and many had moved on from farming.

Maybe the big Hollywood machine decided to infuse a little subliminal message that farming good, leaving farm bad. A Big Brother type-message to the young that they shouldn't seek greener pastures in the big cities. Because bad things might happen.

Or maybe it was a hidden nod to the dedication and persistence of so many farmers who stuck it out and survived this horrible period of time.

In any case, there were definitely departures in the movie from the book. The Kansas-based scenes played a huge role in the film, not so much in the book. Baum depicted Oz as a real place, rather than the symbolism of dreams and desires. Dorothy, in writing, only utters "there's no place like home" once early on and does not use it as a mantra/portal to get home.

I can forgive the subliminal. What I can't forgive is that we never do find out if Toto perishes at the hand of Miss Elmira Gulch or not.

I need closure. Really.

The Dream

I awoke on a bad note. A bad dream haunted my early morning moments.

I dreamt that men in the middle of the night broke into my garage stealing everything housed in there--furniture, boxed items to give away, tools my father had given me--and left it barren. (My garage is stuffed with things that I haven't distributed yet and the garage looked empty--but clean.)

They left the garage door half open, that's how when I drew the curtains I knew something was amiss. They stole my car, too. I felt in the dream that my ex-husband had something to do with it, but I don't know if my suspicions were true.

I stood in the damp, darkened garage stunned. I cried. I called the police. I think the robbers drove by taunting me.

I wondered why my dogs hadn't barked, alerting me to the crime, but soon realized that because I had allowed them to sleep on my bed (a luxury I rarely allow)--they didn't hear anything.

The police were called but were no help.

I think I've had this dream before. What does it mean?

I have a lot to say; I just can't speak right now.