My favorite piece of spam from today:

  Dear Beloved,
As you read this, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday.

It’s nice to know that someone is thinking about me, even if he’s pawning the notion that we’re all going to die off as a fresh idea.  Oh, and requesting my bank account information so he transfer me some of his wealth before he goes.

My favorite piece of junk mail from today: 

Dear jenallday.com,
Blah blah blah, time to renew your domain.  Blah.  Blah.  Send us $30.  Thanks.

Okay, maybe that’s not a direct quote, but it wasn’t from the company that I purchase my domain through, so I’ve already ripped it up and thrown it away.  Before I realized it was junk I spent the walk home from the post office thinking about it.  Really, was I willing to pay to renew this domain?  What’s even going on here these days?  I have no idea what direction, if any, this place is going to take.  However, I’m sticking it out, because it seems to be the closest thing to doing what I love, and that’s what this year is all about.  But more on that later*, we’ve got Months in Review to take care of.  Like five of them. Which is not. at. all. daunting.  Holyshit. *cough*

*I really do hope to get around to this place more often, but I don’t even know quite what’s keeping me away.

I’m sick.  It’s been nearly three weeks of coughing and stuffy noses.  And also, there was the fever.

I wasn’t feeling so great the day of Jeff’s birthday.  I tried to believe that it was just lack of vitamins and that I wasn’t drinking enough water.  Also, it was after the holidays, I was surely just run down and tired.  We laid in bed almost the entire day following his birthday, Jeff because of the 20+ shots he’d done the night before, and me because I just wasn’t feeling right.  We managed to crawl upstairs sometime that evening and take in some TV.  I knew something was wrong when I woke up a few episodes of CSI later and realized that I had pulled off my socks, rolled my jeans above my knees, and thrown all four blankets off the couch.  I took one look at Jeff, his shoes on because his toes were cold and an afghan wrapped around his shoulders, and knew I had the plague.  I’m always the cold one.  Ridiculously colder then everyone else.  Yeah, something was definitely wrong.

The next time I woke up, to Jeff asking me if I was still breathing, I burst into tears.  Boys, best friends or not, are very much unskilled at handling the Female Crying Scenario.  All he could do was offer every cold remedy he could think of: soup, drugs, juice.  I vaguely remember sobbing something about not feeling good, and my death being imminent.  Hi, I’m lots of fun when I have a fever!

The next thing I knew it was six in the morning, and I had no idea where I was.  I’d fallen asleep on the couch again, waking up from the alarm going off downstairs.  Just enough life force left in me to stumble downstairs, smack the hell out of that alarm, and fall asleep for another seven hours.  One more wake up crying episode later I managed to drive home.  Not the smartest decision I’ve ever made, driving with a raging fever barely able to keep my eyes open, but let’s face it:  When you’re sick nothing is better then your own couch.

And that’s where I’ve been ever since.  It’s definitely the plague.

Oh, I lived through my birthday week.  Did I not mention that?  It was a blast, and very full.  And I am tired, very tired.  Still.  If it makes you feel any better about my neglect I have lots of lists written out of things to write about.  No, don’t believe me?  Well, I could take pictures of them (since I’m too lazy to actually type) and post the picture here?  No, still not good enough?  Probably because you realize it would take me a week and a half to post a picture any way.  (I don’t just neglect you!  That suitcase is still sitting in my bedroom like some kind of masochistic obstacle course as I vault out of bed to hit the snooze every morning.  Ok, six times every morning.)

Here’s a picture.  The Atlantic, pretty much my favorite place.

And a bonus picture, me landing from my home planet of AllWeDoIsNap.  You’ve probably never heard of it, but let me tell you, the journey is long and tired making.

Obviously, I’ve started uploading pictures from the Florida trip, so go hang out over there and amuse yourselves.  I’ll be back with pictures from birthday week (If any are suitable to print, that is.) and the many reasons I hate Christmas another day.  Maybe tomorrow.  Maybe not.  Don’t hold your breath, just stare at a pretty castle.

If this doesn’t distract you I don’t know what to do.  I have a couple hundred pictures of gators back here, how bout that?

I’ve been back from Florida a week now.  I haven’t accomplished anything other then drinkin and sleepin.  And I did start one of those things that adults have to do in order to sleep indoors and afford to eat.  That is literally all I’m ever going to say about that here.

Why does vacation mean you have to come home and sleep for a week to recover?  I haven’t even finished unpacking.

What?  I think it’s a nice accessory to the room.

The trip was great.  It was a whirlwind of family, gators, theme parks and beaches.  We jam packed just about every day and my feet paid the price.  Pictures will appear, promise.

For now I need to catch up.  Everything in my life is disordered and chaotic.  Check out what I discovered when I finally cleaned out my purse for the first time in a week and a half, and then multiply that by the bedrooms and the truck and you have an idea what things are looking like right now.  Messy, and a bit like I have a mental disease.

However, it’s birthday week, and the celebration/punishment has begun.  We did family dinner at my favorite restaurant on Friday.  This included a large pink cowboy hat made out of balloons and my grandmother climbing on a saddle.  Saturday night was an impromptu night at a bar near the house.  I don’t remember much of that night except being forced many shots, even though the official birthday celebration isn’t until Friday.  If the way I felt after Saturday night is any indication, I’ll be lucky to live through this week.

I thought I was doing excellent on the Birthday Freak Out Meter* until I cried at the bar Saturday night.  Geez, you cry once a year around your birthday and you start to get a reputation as a drunk crier!  My goals for the rest of the week are:

1.  Don’t cry, pansy.
2.  Do some laundry or clean something, seriously.
3.  Sleep, I’m going to need it for the next goal.
4.  Live through it.  Man, when did I become such a light weight?

*Oh, you didn’t know that every year around my birthday I lose my shit?  Where were you last year?  Compared to last year (Code Red:  Hit the Deck!) I am ACING the Birthday Freak Out Meter!  We are firmly in a greenish-blue area so far, however this is subject to change, quickly, based on the number of shots I am fed.

When we were kids we were often sent to stay with my grandparents for a few days.  They lived in a small town in the mountains a couple hours from here and we always had a blast.  Grandma would feed us full of food, and the story goes that she also used to “trim” our bangs.  It drove my mom crazy when we’d come back to town with short ass bangs because it took Gram a few tries to get them straight.

A few years ago my sister was pretty serious with a boy who had three kids, two girls and a boy.  My mom and I would watch them every Saturday morning while my sister and her boyfriend took parenting classes.  Imagine my surprise when my own mom broke out the scissors one day to give the girls’ bangs a “little” trim!  She, luckily, had more restraint (or skill) then my Grandma and got their bangs straight when they were still long enough to look decent.  I just couldn’t believe that the woman who still brings up in conversation that my Grandma cut my hair without her permission would turn around and do the same thing!

Maybe I should have been less surprised then when I talked my nephew into sitting very, very still while I cut his hair Thursday night.  That may have been the strongest evidence yet that I am, in fact, turning into my mother.  It also shows that this gene improves as it’s passed down through each generation, because his mother hasn’t noticed yet!

Hold on just a second!  What the hell happened to September?  Where is this year going?  How am I so far behind on everything?  I’ve been unemployed for ten days, shouldn’t I at least be caught up on some things, the blog, pictures, my anal calendar?  Yeah, there was the requisite celebration of my liberation, three nights of steady partying, and I was still getting over the cold I caught at my favorite bar.  And then I went to California to see the beach.  I came home and developed a particularly lovely strain of bronchitis and I’ve spent the last four days laid up on my new couch in a codeine haze.  But still… over a month behind and jobless.  October is starting out with a bang.

And why have so many of my favorite writers given up their websites or gone on hiatus?  I’m sick, and I’m jobless, and I need your entertainment!  And then you look at this sad thing… am I doing the same and just not admitting it?  Seven posts in September.  Haven’t written a thing about the trip across the country, don’t plan to write a thing about my job situation, wouldn’t know where to start on my family/boy problems.  Am I out of things to say?  Is this going to turn into funny videos and pictures of other peoples kids? 

Don’t ask me, I just (barely) work here.

Things are really busy.  My sister and niece moved out and my house has been a complete wreck since.  I climb out of the shower and wander into both bedrooms just to find some knickers.  We have no couch, and I caught the plague that was going around my favorite bar.  Instead of taking care of myself I spent three nights drinking and smoking until four in the morning and now I have no voice, although I feel fine.  I’m in the middle of trying to get the Month in Review post for August done, only 25 days late at this point.  I’m three weeks behind on pictures, I owe several people emails and I need to burn a fist full of CDs.  I started a new pill and my face is breaking out, I’m still covered in bug bites.  There’s a whole season of Lost on DVD to watch.  I’m still trying to put the trip Jeff and I took into words, let alone start making his scrapbook and mailing pictures to his Grandma.  I haven’t slept more then six hours a night in over a week, and I’m eating once a day.

So, I have tons to do.  I, however, spend hours each day laying in the chair in the living room staring at the TV and filing my nails.   I guess this is what unemployment is supposed to look like?  How should I know, I’d been at that job two soul shattering years.  It’s undetermined what my mental status about this is, but my nails look great.  I leave in four hours to drive to California.  I haven’t seen the ocean in far too long, and I need it most right now.  I should probably go to sleep, but I need to shower and pack first.  I’ll be back soon.

This September has been full of anniversaries.  Kris, Brandi, and Zach’s birthdays.  The one year of my first post on this website.  The two year anniversaries of my job and the car accident that ruined my back.  September 11 was Jorden’s first birthday, the five year anniversary of the terrorist attacks,  and the sixth anniversary of this.  Nearly every day of the first two weeks of this month has held some significance.  I wouldn’t even realize how strong it could be until this weekend.

Five months ago my sister JoAnn and my niece Tatum moved in while Jo sorted some things out.  The time with them has been awesome.  Not having to come home to an empty house and having someone to talk to helped heal some of the things that I let get out of control being alone in this house for the seven months prior.  I slowed down, I relearned how to have serious conversations.  I got to see Tatum learn to walk and run, climb (and take a few headers off) the stairs, give those open mouthed toddler kisses.

It came to an end this weekend when she moved out into a beautiful house.  There are things I won’t miss, being crammed into this tiny room, sharing a bathroom, Tatum waking me up from naps by hitting me in the face with a hiking boot.  But it goes without saying that I’m sad to see them go, and not just because Jo took the straightening iron and I have to spend the next week moving again.  Seeing my niece nearly every day and having my sister here to talk to has kept me relatively sane the last five months, and I’ll miss that. 

On Thursday the 14th we celebrated Anti Biddy and Biddy nights together at my house.  JoAnn cooked a fabulous meal (I’ll miss that too, actually eating meals that involve the stove) and we had a fabulous time.  We piled into two vehicles and drove out to see the house that they will be sharing with three other girls, one of them my other sister.  The house is perfect, and I was glad I got the opportunity to see it.  I’ll never see it again.  Because exactly a year before on the 14th of September my other sister and I got into a huge fight.

We fought like cats and dogs when we were kids and all the way through high school.  I vowed once before to never trust her when she said something incredibly hateful during the year I was sick.  A few months after I moved home from Virginia she graduated from college and moved back to Phoenix.  After two years of barely maintaining a relationship we were suddenly together all the time.  She became my best friend.  She destroyed all of that with one blow a year ago.  She moved out of our house three days later and I’ve only spoken to her twice in the year that has passed. 

I take a lot of heat from people who don’t understand how I can not speak to my own sister, especially from people who met us when we were in our good period.  The fact is I would never be asked to accept that kind of behavior from a boy or my father, but it some how gets lost in translation when it’s a girl, and she’s your sister.  The way she treated me that night is enough for me to write her off.  The way she has continued to treat my entire family in the last year is enough to keep me angry.  And the way she flipped out this weekend because JoAnn showed us their house has made me spit nails for the last three days.  A year later and she can still get me so fired up that I’m screaming.  Just the mention of the word “couch” and I was shouting.  She continues to control other peoples lives with her drama and it infuriates me that there is no way to make it stop.  Such is family I guess.

I don’t worry about JoAnn living with her.  JoAnn is a beautiful, strong person who doesn’t let anyone control her emotions.  If anyone can be given the credit for the slight progress that has been made in mending my family’s relationship with her it’s JoAnn.  If anyone is capable of helping her let all the hate go and move on it’s going to be JoAnn.  My sister is lucky to be getting Jo as a roommate, and she’d be more foolish then I give her credit for if she didn’t realize that.

********

As I wrote this in my head I kept getting side tracked.  It simply wouldn’t come out as I had planned it to.  It was supposed to be a quick post about the amount of anniversaries this month, and then specifically how strange it is that my sisters both moved out of this house on this weekend, one year apart.  I had intended to write about the difference in their exits until it blew up in my face again on Friday and ended up feeling quite similar to last year.  I don’t carry this with me on a daily basis and I resent when it affects those I love.  This ended for me a year ago, I just wish she felt the same.  I wish I could tell her to either take the steps to fix what she’s crying about or shut the hell up.  How one fight between two sisters can affect an entire family is beyond me, but I’ve grown weary of this story.

I cannot believe that you are a year old.  This year has flown by and you’ve grown so much.  It’s safe to say we had some fun.

“Guess you had to be there, guess you had to be with me
Today I finally overcame trying to fit the world inside a picture frame
Maybe I will tell you all about it when I’m in the mood to lose my way but let me say
You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes it brought me back to life”
3×5 - John Mayer

I finished writing about the first day of my trip today.  It was three pages long, and it doesn’t say enough about how great it was.  Thinking maybe I won’t be posting all of this on the internet after all.  Maybe I’ll do a “highlights” version after I finish the other seven days.

***********

Today is the two year anniversary of starting my job.  Today is also the two year anniversary of getting into the last car accident.  Maybe it was a sign, “get rear ended on your way home from first day of work?  Both these situations suck, run away!”  My back is still a wreck, and my job eats my soul every day.

Quick!  Sandwich the suck with something happy.

***********

One of my sisters and I frequently used three terms that are still stuck in my head.

Sabbatical - Swearing off of something for a set period of time.
Tsunami - Nothing in sight and then… wow.  Boys every where.
Mile Post - A specific marker you have in your mind that divides your life, before/after.

Right now I’m experiencing all three.  It’s uncomfortable.

Well that wasn’t as happy as it could have been…  Well, you’re stuck with kid stories.

***********

Zach watched as Lindsey stacked charcoal so we could barbeque some hot dogs.  She doused it with lighter fluid, the threw on the match.  When flames began shooting out of the barbeque the newly minted three year old growled “Fire!” with that look on his face.  The pyro gene was definitely passed on.

Tatum was a crank pot today and sat on the porch with her eyebrows all scrunched up.  She is going to be a master at giving boys the hairy eyeball.  That’s my girl.

Jorden has learned the high five.  And the baby is going to be walking full speed any second now.