I was feeling all lazy tonight and so I made chili dogs for dinner (I make them with the tofu hotdogs. Shut up. They’re good.) and Nathan’s whole face lit up! “Wow! That sounds great!”

It reminds me of the time I bought dried mashed potatoes at the store because they were only 99 cents for a big old can and I figured I could do something with them. One night I was in a rush and looking for a side dish and I whipped them up .Polly looked at me over dinner and said, “These are the best mashed potatoes you’ve ever made!” Here I’ve been scrubbing and peeling and boiling…

I have had my hair cut and colored for the first time in years, soaked in a bathtub with a bath bomb, bought some new clothes because all of mine were ruined from painting and cleaning the house that shall not be named, bought new clogs off of EBay, and started reading for fun more often. I still feel a bit off, but I am trying to feel better about myself.  The woman at the clothing store told me that I needed to be resized for a bra and I knew she was right, but after she’d flicked out the measuring tape like a whip from nowhere and trotted off to get me new bras she told me to try them on, bend over, and shake it like I worked for it. I was speechless and almost walked out of the store all together, but my Mom shook her head at me and pointed to the dressing room. I had a panic attack as I tried them on but I must admit, I look better with my breasts up a few notches and some clothes on that fit and aren’t stained.

I won’t even go on about the weather here because it ended up being a letdown with two kids hoping for snow that couldn’t be bothered to stick around. I want to know, what is the mysterious force that eats all of the scarves and hats and gloves every year, forcing me to go out and buy them over and over? At the end of the season I am going to lock them in a safe.

I just finished watching the Libertine. Highly recommended. I tend to watch anything Johnny Depp stars in because chances are it will be good, with few exceptions. This was no different.

Cazzy and Leonardo, I am still preparing to respond to your comments and they are always appreciated. Hopefully tomorrow will afford me more time.

you were here to help me now. To tell me which class to take next term? I don’t know where to begin. To teach me to drive. To be the soft, gentle and patient teacher I have always longed for. To be my cheerleader, rooting me along. To tell me that everything is going to be okay, even if it doesn’t feel like it very often. To hold me and make me feel safe. To tell me that you are proud of me. To not laugh when I ask a question that’s kind of stupid. To advise me on being a mother. To let me know that I can breathe it into life, after dreaming it. God damn you, why did you go away?

The Fixx

Reach the Beach

I miss that album. I am going to ask Alex if he can get it for me.

Thanksgiving was fine. We had a family dinner at my Mom’s Thursday with 20 people or so. My Mom ordered one of those complete meals from the grocery store, actually two of them, because she always fears not having enough food, and there was plenty of everything. I went over early to help her and we only had to pop holes in the plastic and slip the items into the oven and warm up the turkey and the ham. My kind of cooking, reheating. My brother showed up and my Mom was just glowing with happiness. My Mom was worried about having the meal in her new apartment but she did a great job cleaning the place up and stuffing all of the junk into the spare room and closing the door. I hugged my brother before we left and it felt good. He said “Happy Tofurkey Day” and smiled. I think that I can count the number of times we have hugged on one hand.

Yesterday I cooked Thanksgiving dinner for the kids and Alex and me. I spent 8 hours cooking and it took 15 minutes for people to eat. Then we watched a movie, Click, and all was good. It is getting harder and harder to find movies that the whole family wants to watch and that are appropriate for the kids.

I am supposed to be signing up for school but I feel frozen with fear. I haven’t told anyone how I feel. My sister said she is taking a class called “Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll” and she suggested I sign up too. I told her I could teach that class. Actually her college is all the way out on Oregon City and the last time that I took a class there I spent 3 hours there and back on the bus in the middle of Summer. That was a hard earned A, not because the class was hard, it was the getting there that killed me. I am going to stick close to home. I am tempted to take some sort of yoga class or Pilates because I have been having severe back pain again. My sister Maria is taking Thai Chi at the senior center and she said working out with older people is cool, because she doesn’t feel pressured.

Sorry this entry is so boring. I’m off to do more laundry.

“ Hurt” by Johnny Cash. Now I love many types of artists, but my relationship with Johnny goes back to childhood when my Mom ordered some song collection from Reader’s Digest because she’s been trying to win that sweepstakes for decades. She even puts her hair into rollers the night before Ed McMahon is due to deliver her check. Anyway, she got this cassette and I was unimpressed with it except for Johnny Cash singing “ A Boy Named Sue.” I had never heard the song before that moment and I took the family’s cassette recorder into my bed and played it, and played it, over and over, every day. It reconfirmed my desire to be a singer one day and it inspired me to write my own song. Following you will find, for the first time ever in the history of written words, the lyrics to the first (but not the last) song I ever wrote.

“You Didn’t Care For Me”

Well I’ll tell you a story that I happen to know

It’s about you and me and we were walking in the snow,

You fell down and you broke your toe

I carried you back, you never thanked me for that, you didn’t care for me

Dun Da Da Da!

There was a second verse about me and his brother but I think you’ve suffered enough. I practiced singing in my room and finally got up the courage to sing my song to my sister Maria. When I was finished she fell on the floor laughing and looked up at me and said, “I’m laughing so hard I have tears running down my eyeballs.” When I pointed out to her that tears were running down her face, NOT her eyeballs, she laughed even harder. Unfortunately she remembers this story and proudly retells it as the funniest song she ever heard, hands down.

When I was in kindergarten returning from Christmas break we had to draw a picture of what we did over the holiday. I drew a picture of a tall fizzing glass of an amber liquid and a few potato chips floating next to it. The teacher or one of the volunteer Moms would come around, ask us what the picture depicted and then write it across the bottom of the paper for us. I proudly told the Mom helper that for Christmas and New Years we had beer and potato chips in the living room. She laughed and said, “You mean your parents had beer.”

“No, we all had beer.” I assured her.

The teacher was notified and after school when my Mom arrived and the teacher got to her she showed her the “deeply concerning” art I’d drawn. My Mom turned as red as a ruby and told the teacher that our glasses were filled with 7 UP with just a splash of beer on top and that it was a holiday tradition she had brought to this country from Australia.

I thought I was in trouble, but my Mom told the story to all of her friends and family, minus my Dad, and everyone laughed their heads off at my picture. Recently I asked my brother, the oldest of us four and the one with a good memory, if I was just crazy, or did our parents give us beer as small children? He said that they did, but that it was a cultural thing because my Mom had grown up drinking Shandys.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Johnny Cash. My Mom finally took the tape from me because I wouldn’t stop playing it and/or singing it. Now I can listen to it and remember the pure joy of a song I thought was so clever, and still do.

P.S. To Jane Doe #4 , good for you for getting the fuck out of there and not suffering through another minute of that sick bastard forcing sex on you.

I am not a big product endorser because I am a cheap bitch and I tend to look for the least expensive products of a quality that doesn’t suck ass. Recently, however, I tried the The Microdelivery Peel by Philosophy. The results were amazing. My skin is clearer, glowing, smoother and as soft as a …, wait a minute I was going to say as a baby’s bottom, but I can’t remember the last time I touched one of those. Of course I changed my children’s’ diapers, but I can’t imagine that I spent anytime rubbing their butts and marveling at the smoothness. So with nothing to compare it too, I’d say it’s softer than it ever has been. It’s possible that it was softer than it is right now when I was very young, but back then I didn’t give a shit about my skin. I was just hoping for a horrible accident that would leave me in a wheelchair and then everyone would love me and pay lots of attention to me. Or I hoped that I would go blind like Mary on Little House on the Prairie and kind natured family members would guide me around and my parents would look at each other and embrace as their eyes filled up with tears and everything would be right forever.

Anyway, now that I look at some of the other products by Philosophy I am inclined to buy more, even though they cost more than I usually spend on clothes for five years. Whoever is titling some of these is a genius. How can you not want a jar of moisturizer titled Hope In a Jar? I’ve been looking for that jar my whole life. And When Hope Is Not Enough, haven’t we all felt that from time to time? Hope And A Prayer is available for believers and those of us who eschew the usual being grateful for our blessings for open mockery of church goers because they have to get up early on Sundays too for waiting for something really scary and fucked up to happen before we get down on our knees, or cuddled into the fetal position in bed weeping and praying to God until out heads ache. Don’t even get me started on Help Me and Save me. I have two bottles of those products, but I call them Prozac and Klonopin.

Now I have detailed some very expensive products for faces that may or not be worth it. I feel obliged to offer up a cheap beauty tip for the shiny people. You know if you’re one. If you wear makeup even powder doesn’t reduce the shine, not for long. You risk caking on so much powder to reduce the shine that your face looks like a sick mask. Even if you don’t wear makeup you can be shiny too. I’ve seen faces you could see your reflection in. What to do, you ask? Well, I tried those little oil blotting sheets that sell for too much for too few. One day as I patted my nose and forehead in the restroom at my former job it occurred to me that the consistency of these little sheets I was paying too much for was rather like the toilet seat covers they supplied in each stall. What do you know, it worked. So if you find yourself out and about and turning shiny, go to a public restroom, take a toilet seat liner, fold it into fours, press it to your face and viola, no more shine. What the hell, take a few. The horrors us consumers with weak bladders and /or small children who have to pee or worse yet poop endure in most public restrooms is enough to make it okay to snatch a couple oil blotting face sheets for free.

I saw two men in the produce section, shopping. Man number 1 reached out and touched the pre-washed (?) bagged lettuce and turned to his shopping partner, “Is it safe to buy lettuce yet?”

“I don’t think so” answers his friend.

“I miss lettuce”, the first man says, loving caressing the bag like one might touch a long lost love.

Edited to add scary lettuce/spinach story http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12536902/

Here in Oregon we have a bottle bill which basically means that on certain items, such as soda pop and beer you pay an extra 5 cents per can or bottle and then you can get that money back when you return the bottles and cans to a store. Years ago they use to have bottle count boys at different grocery stores. They might have had bottle count girls, but I never encountered one. You would enter the store with your bag or cart filled with items to return for deposit, approach a cashier and try to make eye contact with them, and then wait for the cashier to pick up their black handled phone and say, “Bottle count on check stand 11”. I was always faithful to this system, dutifully bagging up our returnable containers and walking to the store with them. Then they put in a new system on the outside of most stores. This bottle center is a do it yourself feature where you feed the bottles into a machine and when you’re done a receipt with the amount you’re due spits out. There is a name across the top of this place, but I can’t remember it. Maybe it the “Do It your Fucking Self Bottle Center”, I don’t know. When they first put these in I continued to take my bottles to the store. The majority of the people using these machines in line before me were homeless people living their lives off of the Oregon bottle bill. To them, the “Do It your Fucking Self Bottle Center” was like the bar Cheers, a place to gather where everyone knows your name. They would laugh and talk and swig beer, pass cigarette butts they had picked up off the ground back and forth, and angrily press the help button when one of the machines would malfunction, which it always did. As I stood there waiting for my turn I could smell the booze and urine emanating from their bodies, an all too common eau de cologne of poverty, homelessness and alcoholism. When we moved to our current house almost three years ago I was working fulltime and the nearest grocery store was further away. I gave up on the bottle returns, choosing instead to just place the bottles and cans with my other recyclables and put them out on the curb instead of walking and waiting an hour to get $1.20. Time is money too, I told myself, but in reality I just didn’t want to deal with the depressing task of the “Do It your Fucking Self Bottle Center”.

What I didn’t realize was where the people I witnessed at said center were getting their bottles and cans. They come by my house several times a week now and dig through my recycling bins looking to make 5 or 10 cents. We don’t drink a lot of pop or beer here, but it never stops them from coming, some on foot, some on bicycles, some pushing shopping carts and some with the dexterity to ride a bike while pulling a shopping cart. Some of these people are respectful and leave my recyclables as neatly sorted as they were when I put them out; others fling paper around, spill cans in the street and break glass. One more than one occasion I have seen someone in front of my house taking an empty bottle of vodka, or scotch or whatever we have and removing it from the bin raising it to their lips while their greedy tongues try in vain to get one last drop from the bottle. At these times I feel a sense of revulsion and sadness dueling inside of me. There must be a better way, an answer to the frighteningly large homeless population here, but I have more questions than answers.

“There but for the grace of God goes I” has entered my head more than once, and I’m not even a believer.

As I stated in my last entry, Polly has been sick. She has been sick off and on for over a month and although I’ve taken her to the doctor’s and we even spent a night in the ER I haven’t gotten anything more than a “She has a virus” from the doctors. I took her back in on Thursday and demanded that tests be done, blood and urine and X-rays and whatever it took to determine why she can’t shake this. Her pediatrician was concerned as well, and he ran every test I asked for and then some. We walked out of there with three prescriptions; one for an antibiotic because her phlegm is green and the doctor wanted to kill any infection, one for pseudoephedrin because she is severely congested and you can’t buy that over the counter anymore thanks to the meth making tweakers , and one for a cough syrup that contains codeine because her cough keeps her up all night long and I have been pulling my hair out trying to help her with steamy showers, a humidifier and metholatum rubbed on her chest, all to no avail. There was a bit of trouble at the pharmacy over the pseudoephedrin because our insurance refused to pay for it. I picked up saltines, popsicles and 7 up while I waited for the pharmacy to communicate with our insurance company. After some time I took Polly home and put her in bed, waited an hour and took the bus back up to the store to see if the medicine was ready yet. Exasperated, I finally told them I would just pay cash for the pseudoephedrin.

Back at home at last Polly told me the only thing she felt like eating was chicken noodle soup. Digging through the cupboards I found only one can, which I heated up and gave to her. Torn between going back to the store again in the pouring rain and coming up with an alternative I decided to make chicken noodle soup from scratch. Now I am a vegetarian, have been for 18 years, but I do cook meat for Alex and the kids. I have never made chicken soup before but I figured it couldn’t be too hard. When the soup was finally done Polly was asleep but Nathan and Alex eagerly ate some. Nathan sad it was so good, but next time please make it with more noodles, and Alex declared it the best soup I had ever made. After spending about 2 seconds on cloud nine from his compliment (he usually doesn’t have much positive to say about my cooking) he added, “Because most of the soups you make are crap.” I was shocked and instantly angry. “What about my cream of potato?” I spit back. “Oh yeah, that one is pretty good.” “What about my lentil?” I had to keep going. “That one is crap.” I left him to his soup and went back to wash dishes.

Friday night Polly had no appetite, a fever of 102.2 and was vomiting. She had also had two shots at the doctor’s office, flu and pneumonia. The arm she had the pneumonia shot in was swollen and red. Alex insisted she be taken to the Emergency Room right away, but instead I paged her doctor and waited for him to call back. Alex paced around and got ready for work, certain that she was having some sort of reaction to one of the shots or one of the medicines and googling to see if he could figure out what was wrong with her. I held her hair back as she puked and listened for the phone. This is the closest Alex and I have come to an argument in a very long time. Having been at the hospital with her recently I couldn’t imagine waiting for hours in the waiting room while burning with fever and vomiting would do her any good. Finally her doctor called me back and said that her temperature wasn’t high enough for concern and that as long as she was urinating four times per day she wasn’t dehydrated and there was no need to take her to the hospital. He asked to see her back in his office next Thursday. I spent the night on the floor next to her bed. Alex called in anyway, certain she was having a reaction to something.

Most of yesterday was spent tending to her and I was relieved last night when the fever finally broke.

When she was finally hungry I went to the fridge to get her some soup only to find that there was only half a bowl left. I warmed that up and fed it to her. When I commented to Nathan that the entire pot of chicken soup I had cooked was gone, he said, “You need to make more of that! That stuff was good!”

It is presently Sunday morning and I am right back where I started, wondering whether to make another pot of soup from scratch, for my conscience, for Polly, or to just go to the store and buy the stuff in a can.