Several teachers saved as many children as they could:

“A crying man described to a reporter how he and others pulled a car off a teacher in the front of the building and found three children she had shielded with her body. “Good job, teach,” the man said, his voice choked with emotion. A sixth-grade teacher told KFOR she laid on top of several children in a restroom to protect them from winds that may have topped 200 mph, and all survived.”

It is irrational for me to be sobbing like this when I am not the one who experienced a personal loss; it almost feels “wrong” because how dare I hurt this bad for them when it isn’t MY agony. Nevertheless my heart just breaks into a million pieces for the parents who had to find their children’s bodies in the Rubble.

Why do some tragedies hit me harder than others? I feel sorrow, of course, when I read about adults or children dying … those things are profoundly sad. However, the tears I shed for most calamities aren’t as copious as the tears that come for other catastrophes. It’s probably down to how relatable to me and my children the deaths are; which makes me feel like a self-absorbed shit. 

My id is an asshat.

There is also the religious issue. Why does God allow these terrible things to happen?  I wind up clinging to the concept of life after death, where everything WILL be okay and no one will hurt ever again, to keep me from losing my freaking mind.

(A neurosurgeon had an afterlife experience and wrote a book about it which I have read recently. I recommend it. The fact the guy was an atheist who has dug into every possible scientific experience that he could think of to explain away the event made it very plausible to me.)

Then I remember that we, as a species, let ELEVEN MILLION children die of preventable diseases every year. Why do WE allow these terrible things to happen? Why aren’t I crying every day for THEM?

Again, my id is an asshat.

Tomorrow I will force myself to blog the happy stuff, because my internal suffering does NOTHING to help anyone. But for today, I’m going to howl and cuddle my precious children.

Since then, without being asked, Sweet Babou has unloaded the dishwasher every time it’s got clean dishes lurking in it. Moreover, he has cooked every dinner, taken out the trash promptly, and has changed every poopy diaper Spock has generated – all on a voluntarily basis and with me actively telling him it was my turn to do it. Although this state of affairs cannot continue (nor should it; I am starting to feel guilty and shiftless already) I very much appreciate his heroic efforts to demonstrate his remorse.

He really is a good man.

This weekend was a little stressful because of all the family who came over to see Lilo in her play (which I will blog about tomorrow). Nonetheless, Sweet Babou and myself got along like … two extremely compatible things that I can’t think of as a metaphor right now. There was extra canoodling, just to make it even better.

Only one thing marred this idyllic weekend; my Dad froze a tiny hemangioma off the end of my nose. It was no bigger than a small pimple, but it would bleed if I rubbed it with a washcloth or against my pillow in my sleep, making it a nuisance. Furthermore, it’s location freaked me out. The last thing I need is a wee tumor staring at people from the end of my nose. I don’t have much vanity but come on, who needs that??

Dad told me no worries. It was a simple matter to freeze it off, he said. I’d hardly feel a thing, he said. You know what I said when he held the frozen carbon dioxide dispenser against my nose? OUCH! That’s what I said.

What my father failed to tell me was that the procedure would leave a dark red circle of flash-frozen skin about a millimeter in diameter on my nose. And I mean dark red. Way darker and way more noticeable than the original hemangioma. Right before Lilo’s play. Where I would see lots of people I knew.

My Daddy was genuinely perplexed as to why this was an issue.

:::headdesk:::

My parents are outside with Spock right now. Spoiling her rotten. I decided to sneak in a quick post to let y’all know what’s up. Lilo’s play is tonight and tomorrow, so I am crazy-busy until then. I promise full details on Monday!!

Hugs, Fokker

I think I am taking this spat way harder than Sweet Babou.

The spat came about because we are both stressed right now. I am trying to get the house ready for the relatives coming today and it’s Lilo’s tech week (which means rehearsals almost every night) so I am running my ass off and feel overwhelmed. Sweet Babou has a deadline at work and people who aren’t doing their end of things are driving him nuts and he is overwhelmed. Fun times.

Anyway, my Sweet Babou worked from home yesterday and he said he would unload the dishwasher as well as picking up the Harry Potter CDs that Stitch got out and couldn’t figure out how to get back in. He forgot to do both of those things. Sweet Babou forgetting to do some of the housework is something that happens fairly regularly. I try to either wait for him to do it or do it myself, but sometimes I nag. I confess. It happens. I hate that it happens, but if I do his chores too often I get really cranky and feel like chattel after which grousing and bitchiness will occur.  Nonetheless I knew he was overloaded at work this week so I was planning on being chill about the dishwasher/CDs.

Then part umpteenth of the “cleared spot debacle” happened and I got cranky. The cleared spot debacle is the ongoing tussle over the appropriation of cleared counter space. Like most houses, our counters get junked up with crap. I will need to make something – my tea, the girls’ lunches, dinner – and I will clear a space for me to work. If Sweet Babou sees an available space he pounces on it, even if he just saw me make it, because his brain will NOT make the link between my tidying up and my needing the spot for my use. Apparently clearing his own space is an alien idea all together. He is like the cowbird of clean spots on the counter; he waits until he can lay his egg in somebody else’s nest. It drives me nuts.

He did that this morning. I turned around where I was putting things away in the pantry to find that he had found my space in those unguarded seconds and had spread his things all across it. Seriously, my clear spot was strewn with his sandwich makings. Strewn, I say!

I griped about this and made him (gasp) at least share the area with me so I could pack Lilo & Stitch their lunchboxes. He was snippy with me about this. That rarely happens, and it “flew all over my nerves” as my Grandma used to say. I griped. He griped back.

All was still okay. It was sniping not fighting, if you know what I mean. However, because this is such an ongoing issue and because he was acting put-upon by my unhappiness with it and because I was already strung out like a clothesline – I was pre-heated and ready to bake the cake of conflict and icing it with dissention. When I was trying to fill the girls’ water bottles for their lunchboxes the dirty dishes in the sink impaired my efficacy. I couldn’t put them in the dishwasher, because the dishwasher full of clean dishes and was leering at me in a taunting fashion. I expressed displeasure about the dishwasher, re: he didn’t unload it for me and now I had to because otherwise he would be late to work. Then I almost stepped on the CDs, which I also mentioned in a peevish and annoying tone.

Sweet Babou started “yelling” at me. It wasn’t actual full-bore yelling, but it was yelling for him. He told me he hated it when I was snarky. He hates it when I say petulant things like “Hey, that’s okay – after all as a stay at home mom I am everyone’s personal servant so dump some more work on me.” In fairness, I am an asshat for doing it. It is a shitty form of communication and exacerbates rather than pacifies a quarrel. He was totally in the right about that.

There is no justification for my rotten behavior. My bad actions are mine. There are reasons why I do it though. First, I do it because I absorbed the phenomenon of “loud talking” as a child. This kind social resistance is studied by anthropologists and sociologists as a part of Black Culture but it is a strategy that Appalachian women also employ. In a nutshell, it is a way of complaining or expressing unhappiness that doesn’t address the antagonist directly. You talk to someone else, even if it is yourself, loud enough to be “overheard” so the person knows they have pissed you off. This occurs when the antagonist has otherwise failed to show remorse when you complain in a more direct way. Appalachian men are terrible about about getting a mulish look on their face, sitting a cloud of their offended patriarchal privilege and “ignoring” the “irrational” woman who is upset with them. When they do that, they get a big pile of loud talking.

Sweet Babou also stonewalls me and doesn’t seem to pay any particular notice of my grievances. I know, logically, he does this because of his Asperger’s rather than the misogyny driving the actions of a lot of other men, but my brain short circuits to loud talking by default. The more he retreats into silence, the more I feel dismissed and therefore the fiercer my loud talking gets. I am a complete jerk when I do it.

Clearly, I don’t blame him for his anger. The reason my lip is trembling is because he yelled that he has hated my “snarky comments” for the duration of our marriage. What else had he hated about me or my actions that I don’t know about? I have, upon occasions of personal reflection, point blank asked him what I could modify in my behavior that would make him happier in our marriage. Not change who I am, mind, you – just alter actions that cause him distress. He always, ALWAYS replies that there is nothing he would like me to do differently.

So now I am a mess wondering what else I am doing that is slowly, secretly making him unhappy. Are our fights so rare because we are hella compatible and in love, as I thought – or is the more sinister reality that we don’t fight because he just doesn’t bother or cannot express his angst? 

And what am supposed to do when he is doing his stoic impression of a bump on a log? Just swallow down my ire? Is that healthy? I doubt it, but how do I engage a man who won’t engage back?

Then there is the reality that I am the one who is going to do the work he didn’t do, and I got yelled at for being truculent about it. I don’t think he expects me to be cheerful about it. He’s a good man and he isn’t consciously ignoring his share of the chores; I am sure he doesn’t expect me to just conform to his lackadaisical view of housework.

He was in the right to be mad that I loud talk and hurt his feelings, and he has every right to say so. Nevertheless, I feel a little hard done by because he didn’t tell me for so long, because I get stonewalled, and because I wind up being the one  who “pays” by doing the stuff he said he would do.

*lip tremble*

So, in the first round of good news, they may have invented a nanotechnology to conquer Type 1 diabetes and some forms of Type 2.  Turns out that:

“researchers have developed a network of nanoscale particles that can be injected into the body and release insulin when blood-sugar levels rise, maintaining normal blood sugar levels for more than a week in animal-based laboratory tests. The work was done by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children’s Hospital Boston.”

Considering Sweet Babou’s a Type 1 diabetic this makes me full of sunshine and roses, people! The more normal his blood sugar, the lower his A1c. The lower his A1c, the longer he will live. I believe it vital to the public interest of Fokkerland that Sweet Babou keep on keepin’ on. Thus. this is hella good news for Team Fokker.

Also some good news, Minnesota has decided to embrace marriage equality! Yay! It has also pissed off Michelle Bachmann! Double Yay!

In further good news, Pablo Pantoja, the State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, has given the racist rightwing extremists who are ruining the GOP for normal people the finger and was so disgusted by their antics that he actually registered as a Democrat. Apparently if you tell someone that his “race” is a determent to America because of their lower IQs, that person is likely to leave in a huff and write you a “fokk you, asshat” letter. Go figure.

And finally, here is something hysterically funny done by the People of Oz:

Frankly, I needed the love because the preceding week had been a nightmare culminating in a heartbreaking funeral. I drove the 3.5 hours down to where I used to live, and it rained the whole way. Thank God my friend Sweet Pea went with me. Sweet Babou wanted to, but I told him it was more important to me for him to stay at home with the girls.

Sweet Pea made the unbearable bearable and I am so grateful she dropped everything to spend all day in a car and with a bunch of strangers at Linda’s visitation.

As predicted, 75% of Linda’s children where being dickheads. Only one of her four offspring was acting like a grieving human being, as opposed to a self-important twatwaffle. Do you know what the non-human kids did? (The “kids” are in their 40s and 50s, but they act like such immature bratty teenagers that I think of them as the kids.) They came into the home Mike and Linda shared and stripped it to the bone. All of Linda’s stuff and even some of Mike’s things they assumed were “theirs”. Mike didn’t have to let them, but unlike them he was so grief-stricken he didn’t have the will or energy to do anything but watch the hyenas tear his home apart. They even took the food out of the fridge.

Seriously. Did the asshats think that was some heirloom Oscar Meyer ham their mother wanted passed down to them? Some traditional family ketchup?  WTF??

They wanted to punish Mike, one last time, for having the audacity to love and care for their widowed mother. Thus, they took his food so he would have to go to the grocery store. Like everything else, going to the grocery store is a big deal when you are emotionally devastated. What kind of pissants do that to someone?

In other shitty news, it’s not just Merida who has gotten an “updated” look. Nope. Disney marketing apparently wants what can only be described as a Princess Kardashian look. Except for poor Mulan whom they have made look like Drag Queen with a botox and face-lift addiction.

I checked, and this is indeed how the Princess cohort looks at Inside the Magic official Disney blog. This garbage is for realz.

Now, I am waiting for Snow White’s sex tape. With all seven dwarfs. And Belle.

I really, really don’t want to go. Then it will be really, “real”. You know?

While I am gone, y’all feel free to rant on my behalf over the fact that Rush Limbaugh is terribly worried, based on a Hawaii Five-O episode, that the kidnapping of the women in Cleveland was part of an elaborate welfare scam rather than ‘just’ the act of a psychopathic rapist.

On Tuesday at a quarter til noon I got in my van so I could go pick up Spock from her YMCA preschool. I usually call Alis around then, because in the car is the only “me time” during the day. Don’t worry. I have a bluetooth knockoff and I am on back roads going less than 30 MPH, so I am not being stupid about it.

That day, just as I picked up the phone to call Alis, a “Linda feeling” came over me. I “felt” Linda. It brought this weird rush of happiness that started me, and I felt like I had been hugged. I knew Mom was going to visit Linda that day, so I called mom’s phone. The time of the call, according to my cell-phone, was 11:49 AM. Mom picked up the phone sobbing, and when she could communicate she told me that Linda had stopped breathing. The coroner’s report says she died at approximately 11:50.

I didn’t cry for at least 15 minutes. That’s how peaceful and calm the “hug” had left me. Unfortunately when that wore off the dam burst and I sobbed all over the helpless, innocent staff at the YMCA. I can’t hide my feelings very well, especially not when I am having a hard-core sad.

I’m also worried about my Mom. She is holding together by a thread. What is really driving her batshit is the sanctimonious posturings of Linda’s kids, who have unilaterally treated their mom like shit for the last 2 years because she had made the terrible error of falling in love again and getting married  to Mike only a few years after their father’s death. They hate her new husband for no other reason than he met their mom AFTER their dad had been gone a year, and then asked her to marry him a year later. They tried to leave Mike’s name off the list of survivors in the obituary, that’s the kind of shit they are pulling.

Initially, Mike and Linda tried to figure out why her kids were being such dicks. They showed them Linda’s will to prove Mike wasn’t getting anything. Nothing had changed. In return, Linda’s only son and her oldest brother came to her house and YELLED at her that she couldn’t remarry because Mike was clearly no good. Their proof? That no man could really love an OLD, SICK WOMAN like her, QED he was only marrying her for some nefarious purpose. Mind you, Linda was not well off and both she and Mike lived mainly on their lavish Social Security benefits. Mind you, both of the men yelling at her were serial philanderers. Both had left their wives for other women. Both had been caught numerous times in affairs.  But they apparently knew enough about real love to know that no one could love Linda because her body wasn’t something they thought was good enough for a real man anymore.

Fuck those misogynistic asshats.

All of her kids boycotted her wedding last June. That hurt her, but she still tried to maintain a relationship with them. While they shunned her, it was Mike acted as a home-care nurse and took her back and forth to the hospitals and doctors visits. Linda, you see, had a lung transplant in 1994. She had stomped all over the odds by continuing to live, but the physical toll to her body from the anti-rejection meds was insane. She was in constant pain, and they only thing that makes me happy about her death is that the pain is gone.

Last Christmas, the final Christmas their mother would ever have, they all had their Christmas together and then came by Linda and Mike’s for a little while. While there, they mostly asked for their father’s things. You know. In case Mike stole that valuable antique lawnmower from the 90s.

It was the last straw for Linda, in regards to person possessions. She changed her will and gave everything to Mike with instructions to give the children things WHEN & IF they asked Mike nicely for them.

Oh, and the sainted father they were punishing for moving on after he died? He very publicly had lover and left Linda for over a year before he came crawling back. The kids blamed their mom that their dad cheated. See, their daddy told them mommy made him do it she was so mean/unloving/cheated first. Yeah. No one has ever made any of those excuses for their own shitty behavior before.

But Linda loved him, and forgave him, and took him back into her life and was married to him a further 20+ years. The harlot.

She also (of course) still loved her kids after they betrayed her too. She kept trying to reach out. Begged them to come over. One child mostly pulled her head out of her ass, but the rest of them even stopped visiting her in the hospital lest they pollute their holiness by speaking to Mike. You see, he was there day and night and never left her side and was taking care of her like an ICU nurse, the evil bastard. I guess to them he was doing just to spite them. How do you cart and ego like that around??

How bad was it? Well her only son deliberately boycotted his only daughter’s baby shower – the one for his first grandchild – just because she invited her grandma and Linda was going to be there. Sans Mike, but even that wasn’t good enough.  His daughter called him and begged, cried even, in front of Linda but because she would NOT cast Linda out and wanted her there, her father stayed away. Linda must be punished for marrying a man instead of letting her son “take care” of her! What a thunder-douche.

Linda really should have named her little boy Oedipus.

Her son finally came and saw her the last week before she died. The other daughters also came round and joined their sister in actually spending time at their mother’s bedside, too.

Now, my Mom has overheard the daughters who had ignored their mother on the phone bragging to friends/family in saccharine voices how they were “right there with her until the end” … because they finally showed up in the 11th hour. Linda’s oldest daughter is lapping up sympathy, without a particle of shame that she was too good to stay in her mother’s house during Christmas in spite her mother’s pleadings.  Linda had not been gone an hour before some of her daughters and grandchildren were squabbling over her processions, and completely ignoring their mother’s last wishes in terms of distribution. Mike had to actually get out the will to prevent them from taking “their” things out of the house, the hyena/vultures.

My mother is afraid to stay through the whole funeral because she might start screaming “bullshit!!” when the speakers – all male relatives who couldn’t be bothered to piss on her for the last two years – get up to yap. It’s the reason I am only going to visitation.

Y’all pray or send me good wishes that I don’t start a brawl in the funeral home, because I am not the most placid person in the world when dealing with hypocrisy, religious hypocrisy in particular. Plus, I may have to jump in to help Mom.

First, I found out my friend Linda was being given hospice care. Basically that means after 19 years of miraculously pulling through every hard knock inflicted on her body by a lung transplant, she is dying. She only has, at most, a couple of days left. While I am grateful for the extra years and don’t want her to suffer any longer, I am still hella sad that she will be gone. The world is a darker place without the bright light of her heart in it.

Then I was talking to a friend at the YMCA, commiserating because we were both CLEARLY having a no-good day, when she revealed that she is was so sad because her daughter’s friend just lost his 8 year old sister to fucking cancer. Lilo is 8 years old, too. My heart BROKE for the girl’s family and for the insanity that an 8 year old child is GONE. I am frigging crying right now because of a mixture of dammit & sorrow.

I FUCKING HATE FUCKING CANCER!!!!!!!!!!!!

Really, someone personify that miserable shitty disease and I will happily beat it to death with a pick-ax. Thank you.

Then I had to call the vet because my elderly Yorkie, Penfold, was involuntarily peeing on the floor and then crouching in misery. (Why do my children and dogs act like I am going to beat them? I don’t spank, but they act like I drive them into time out while whipping them with a belt covered in spikes. Seriously.)  The vet tech “made” some time for him to come in. This was not good.

Spock and I took Penfold to the vet where there were many frowny faces when I described his symptoms. Turns out the little guy, at minimum, has diabetes. Sweet Babou is in charge of giving him insulin in the mornings now. Obviously I am happy my doggie didn’t have renal failure or bladder cancer and will live longer, I was not thrilled that he has something both chronic and expensive. Worse yet, we are still waiting on the (once again expensive) blood tests to tell us if there is anything else wrong with the little fella.

Unhappiness.

For those who have not yet embraced this addictive cultural phenomenon of a game, here’s what Pink Bird as Princess Leia looks like:

Thank you, Princess Leia hair. Your iconic buns make it so much easier to make anything Leia-like.

My biggest problem was how to make the cake. I have nada in the cake decorating skillz. Truly, I am the antimatter version of Cake Boss.

However, I have a good friend, Alis, who could decorate a pile of horsehit as a wedding cake and people would be happy to eat it.  Martha Stewart would kneel at her feet, that’s the kind of magnificence she can rock in a kitchen.

Therefore, I did call upon my friend Alis, and I did beg of her a cake. Verily she said unto me that she wouldst maketh me a cake upon which she would place the visage of Pink Bird as Princess Leia. Nor would I have to give unto her an arm and a leg.

And it was good.

Here’s the finished product:

The cupcake Pigs are make of white wedding cake and the Leia-Bird is made of chocolate. People kept asking me WHERE did I get it made and I kept saying “If I told you that I’d have to kill you”. Alis does not make cakes professionally anymore and she isn’t ever going to do it again. Apparently it is a giant pain in the ass. Thus, I was forbidden from passing out cards with her name on them. Which means she remains my secret birthday party weapon!!

MINE MINE MINE!

Stitch was delighted by her cake. The gym where the party was held was some kind of play wonderland, and it thrilled her socks off. The kids at the party also had an awesome time, and fun was experienced all over the place.

Since my beautiful Stitch has toys out the wazoo, her guests were asked not to bring gifts but to make a donation to Heifer International if the spirit so moved them. However, Auntie Alis and her family were allowed to buy her a gift under the Relative Exemption. They gave her the Wii game of Brave and she’s been playing it like a madwoman from the moment we got home.

I am so happy my beloved Stitch had a happy day!