My Great Kids!

I have the best kids in the world. Within about 30 minutes of getting up this yesterday morning a guy came to the door with a nice vase full of yellow tulips. I love tulips. I knew they weren't from my husband, because I know my husband! Low and behold, they were from my dear Soldier Son and his new bride.

Then about 30 minutes later I got another delivery. This time it was a gorgeous azalea bush! I love azaleas! I have them all over my yard. The azalea was from my sweet darling daughter.

I hardly ever see my kids any more, but they are really the best. I love them dearly and they certainly made my Mother's Day wonderful!

My Cat Got Left Out on the Porch

My poor fat cat got closed out on the screened in porch last night. I didn't realize it till I went out there to vacuum a couple of hours ago.

She. Was. Not. Happy!!!! At. All.

She gave me a VERY dirty look when I opened the door and sashayed by me with a accusatory meow.

After she got over her initial snit, she came up to me and pretty much demanded I pick her up and pet her for a few minutes. She's a little scaredy cat and while she likes to stay on that porch a lot of the time, I'm sure being out there alone all night was no fun at all for her. So I petted her a few minutes and then she got down and disappeared to where ever it is she goes when she wants to be alone and sulk.

I feel bad :(

BTW, I've had her on a diet and put her food downstairs so that she has to walk up and down the stairs to eat. But she still looks like this. We are trying .....

The Pianoman Next Door

My Beloved Curmudgeon and I have moved a lot during our marriage. We've bought and sold several houses along the way. In all that moving we have found a few things have been very consistent for us. Those things have been so consistent that by the time we bought the house we currently live in we were joking about having to make sure those things were in place before we bought it.

For instance, we have always had very interesting neighbors. Interesting as in eccentric and/or just downright odd. Almost all of our neighbors have had the same first name. I won't name the name on the outside chance my neighbor happens to read this. I'll keep an element of plausible deniability for the sake of peace in the neighborhood. We actually thought of asking our neighbor's names before we bought the house. We joked about it, but didn't actually ask. Sure enough, when we met the neighbor closest to us, he had the same name. When my Beloved Curmudgeon and I got back to the house after meeting him we were slack jawed. What are the odds!

Our neighbors have been a source of perverse entertainment for us over the years. There was an elderly couple that lived across the street from us years ago who had the loudest fights. This wasn't the type of neighborhood one would expect this type of behavior which made it all the more entertaining. They would start fighting. She would throw him out of the house. He would stand out in the yard and yell for her to let him back in. She would yell at him out the window and start throwing his stuff out into the yard. He would stomp and snort around in the yard for a while. He'd usually wind up pleading with her. He'd finally get in his car and drive around the block repeatedly. Eventually, he'd pull back into the driveway and she'd let him back in. This happened about twice a week.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but more than a few times my Beloved Curmudgeon and I would turn off the lights and sit on the floor by the window watching them, we'd make sarcastic remarks to each other and laugh like a couple of idiots. Like I said, perverse entertainment.

Every single house we've lived in has had its own form of entertainment from the neighbors. In fact, I think we've provided entertainment for our neighbors a time or two, but that's another story.

Our current neighbor-with-the-same-first-name-as-all-our-other-neighbors is as entertaining as any of them. He is friendly, jovial and I've never heard him and his wife fight. However, he has a tendency to walk around his front yard in red shorts and no shirt .... and he weights at least 300 pounds. Its really not a pretty sight, especially when he bends over to pick up something. He also has a tendency to cook out on a grill on his back deck naked. Yes, naked. I've told my Beloved Curmudgeon I'm not eating any hamburgers he might bring over to share!

We live on a heavily wooded side of a mountain. His house is the only house we can see if we are sitting on our back screened in porch. We sit on our back screened in porch a lot. In the summer you can only make the house out through the trees. In the winter its a very clear view, especially if he has his lights on. Either way, its hard to miss him when he's cooking out. I have given him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he didn't know we could see him. You know, the trees and all. My Beloved Curmudgeon says that of course he knows, he just doesn't care. I admit, the more I've gotten to know this neighbor - with - the - same - first - name - as - all - our - other - neighbors the more I'm convinced that if he thinks about it at all, he really doesn't care.

The thing about this neighbor - with - the - same - first - name - as - all - our - other - neighbors is that he runs a piano business out of his basement. He has a couple of big trucks in his drive-way and picks up and delivers pianos. He tunes the finest pianos in the area, some from his basement. I brought my laptop out to our screened in back porch a while ago and sat down. When I got all settled and quiet I heard the music of Mozart floating over from my neighbor's house. It was beautiful. Stunningly beautiful. I just sat and listened until he stopped.

Our neighbor who walks around his yard unclothed, who cusses like a trucker, is uncouth, is big and burly and could care less what anyone thinks of him, can play the piano with the touch of a fine concert virtuoso.

No one would know that about him if you judged him by first appearance. You could only know that if you sat on my screened in back porch and listened.

The Great Escape

Ha ha!!! My bird, an African Grey, did this same thing last week. We ended up having to wire the doors shut. He then chewed through the original cord we put on the door. We then put a thicker, stronger cord on the door and so far so good.

I just wish I had thought to make a video of his escape!

There are Haunted Houses on Ponce de Leon Avenue

Well, I suppose I'm fixing to tell my age, but I guess since I've written about my grown children on this blog its pretty obvious that I've gotten past 30 now. Just a little over.

The thing is I've been doing some computer work this evening. While I've been sitting here at the computer the television has been on. There was the movie The Doors, which I've seen several times but still like. Right after that there was a documentary about Janis Joplin. I've seen that before too, but watched it again anyway while I was working on the computer.

I don't know why, but something about that made me think of the haunted houses on Ponce de Leon Avenue. Isn't that strange? I've seen the shows before and never thought about Ponce de Leon in connection with them. There was something about Janis Joplin AND Jim Morrison that made me think of those houses. I haven't thought of them in years and all of the sudden I found myself looking up the houses on the computer to see if they had been fixed up or torn down or who knows what. It IS Atlanta after all so there's no telling if something that is there today will still be there tomorrow.

You probably are wondering what any of those things has to do with the other. Well, you see, I grew up in Little Five Points in Atlanta during some turbulent years. I've been back there a few times since I've left and the neighborhood isn't even recognizable to me now. Its turned into a haven for upwardly mobile, free minded, inner city professional types. It wasn't like that when I lived there. Back then, it was an area in transition (how's that for a nice way to put it! lol). The homes were beautiful and at one time had been grand, but it went through a period of .... like I said ... transition. Now the homes have been restored and rebuilt. The shops are open again selling all sorts of new age mystic gobbly gook. You can buy whatever organic foods you want and crystals and candles to ward away any evil spirits that might come your way. Its very che-che these days. Or at least was the last time I was there.

But back when it was an adventure of an entirely different sort. Tonight the music of The Doors and Janis Joplin took me back, in my mind's eye, to what us teenaged kids thought were haunted houses on Ponce de Leon Avenue.

There was a row of grand homes along one stretch of Ponce de Leon Avenue. We called them mansions. They had once been the homes of the well - to - do, but during those years they were abandoned. I don't know why. One of the adventures we had as teenagers was to drive up the long driveways to those houses and gather up our nerve to go into and explore through them. There were all sorts of nooks and crannies. I remember one chair sat in the middle of a large front room in one of the houses. The story was that the previous owner of the home sat in that chair guarding the houses from kids like us who trespassed just for the fun of it. That was creepy. Of course there were the requisite rats nests in corners, garbage strewn around, leaves blown in, spider webs and creaking doors.

Moonies had taken over one of the houses. We walked in on them one day. The house was kept up better than the others, but we didn't know the moonies had moved in. They invited us in, of course, and offered us food they had fed their gods who had regurgitated it back up so that it was pure and blessed and ready to eat. I passed on that. They gave us some sort of moonie blessing and we left. We bypassed that house in our adventures after that.

I see on the internet that the old houses have been renovated for the most part. It looks like they've been subdivided into apartments. I'm sure that property is much too valuable to leave uninhabited as it was in those few years.

You know how a smell or a song will remind you of a place and time? I think that's what happened. I'm betting that at some point in our travels throughout Atlanta in my ever present Volkswagon bug full of my ever present teenaged friends we were listening to those songs on the radio while we dared each other to go into those houses and scared each other with spooky stories and strange sounds. And so, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart suddenly transported me back to the memory of places and times from my distant past.

ARRGGGG ..... I Can't Get Anything Done Today

I spent a lot of time at the computer today, but still got almost nothing done in terms of my blog or making any money.

I keep Yahoo Messenger open on my computer all the time because that's the primary way I communicate with my son. Actually, its the only way. I want to be available to talk with him when he can get online. He doesn't always choose to talk to me, but I want to be available anyway. He has a little fraulein he chooses to talk to online more often than he chooses me. I talk with my daughter numerous times on the phone and on the computer during the day.

Earlier today I got online with the intention of blogging something. As soon as I logged on two Yahoo Messenger windows popped up, one from my son and one from my daughter. That's very unusual because they usually tag team me. With him in Iraq and her in Southern California they are on completely different times. It's uncanny how as soon as one of them logs off the other will log on. They've been tag teaming me like that since they were babies. Their entire baby years are a blur to me. When I would get one of them to sleep the other would wake up. When I would get that one to sleep the first one would wake up again. That went on for seemingly years and I rarely slept more than an hour at a time. I tease them now that they obviously have some sort of code to let each other know when its time to get on line so that I'm at the computer way too many hours.

Today was an exception, they were online at the same time. My son sending messages to me in German because he's learning German and my daughter sending messages to me in Spanish cause she just does that. So I'm flipping back and forth between their messages and Babel Fish. My Beloved Curmudgeon is flipping the television channels between World War II documentaries, some show about truck drivers driving across ice roads (a show I have seen before a couple of times. Sadly.) and some boxing match from years ago. I asked him if he knew the outcome of the boxing match. He said he did, but kept watching it.

My son likes for me to send him photos so he can see what's going on here. My daughter was sending me photos so I was forwarding them on to him. I think they were talking to each other as well. The photos she was sending me were of her and her boyfriends on the beach, at Disneyland, and where ever else they'd been in the last few days. I told my son that she told me she's in love with this guy. 'She's always in love with whoever she's dating', he replied. I could see that he was looking through the photos. I wrote, 'Well, she's acting different this time. Very different than her other boyfriends.' He immediately replied, 'I want to see how he acts.' Woah. I watched as my son continued to scrutinize the pictures of his sister with 'the guy'. This guy has no idea that he's not only up against Beloved Curmudgeon but my daughters brother as well. I hope the guy isn't easily intimidated. If he is, he won't make it in this family.

At some point I became aware that I had been unconsciously moving myself around to get out of the way of our animals. I kept moving my laptop around because one of our dogs insist on curling up right under my feet and no matter how I move he moves so that I have to move again. The other dog watched this from across the room silently laughing because she was passing gas so badly I kept threatening to take her downstairs. The more I threatened the worse it got. Our cat was laying kinda on the couch and kinda on my shoulder so that when I moved to accommodate dog #1 she was inconvenienced and finally pranced off in a huff to curl up on the window sill.

To top it off, our bird was talking a mile a minute. His talking is usually white noise. I'm so accustomed to him that I don't really hear him until someone comes over and is shocked at his talking ... and how loud he is.

As I became aware of all the activities around me and that I was actually uncomfortable because I was accommodating ANIMALS I realized why I was getting in a foul mood. 'Do you see this?' I asked my Beloved Curmudgeon pointing at the dog at my feet. He just chucked and told me to push him out of the way if he was bothering me. Well, he won't move if I push him. Beloved Curmudgeon has to move him because the animal has no respect for me whatsoever. Beloved Curmudgeon laughed and made no move to make HIS dog move.

Worse still, both dogs and the cat can open the door between the den and back porch if the door isn't shut tight enough, which it usually isn't. They don't know how to close it, but they open it often. So I'm up and down closing the door back. Its maddening.

We have 3500 square feet in this house and all I want is a little corner of the couch to sit on with my laptop. Yet we are all crammed into this one little area. The animals are laying all over me and one of them just stinks. If it weren't so hot outside I'd take my laptop out to the back porch and make sure the door was shut very tight. But then I'd be watching my naked neighbor on his back porch.

No wonder I'm crazy.

I Feng-Shui'd My Bedroom

I decided to feng-shui my bedroom. It’s been arranged the same way since I moved into this house and I thought a little change would be nice.So I shoved the bed over to the corner. This isn’t as simple as it sounds.

That involved moving carpets around that were under the bed - that took some serious muscle. Moving the bed, moving the other pieces of furniture, etc.

The first night the room was feng-shui’d I fell out of the bed. I then fell out of the bed when I got up the next morning.

The second night I fell out of the bed and fell out of the bed when I got up the next morning.

The third night I moved everything back the way it was before. My Beloved Curmudgeon insisted on it.

Here’s my question. Why - WHY - would my body still be subconsciously oriented with the room rather than the bed?

I mean, I remember getting up and rolling out of bed and plopping on the floor. In my subconscious I thought the bed was the way it was before. So when I hopped out of the bed I was oriented in such a way that I fell out.

What’s with that?

There Are Uses for Dogs in the House

Dogs serve many purposes. They protect us, love us unconditionally and do stupid things that make us laugh.

They have a lot of faults. They stink things up, rub up against the wall and leave marks that have to be scrubbed off, drool on the carpet, nudge the back of the newspaper when you are trying to read it and much, much more.

Tonight I found another good reason to put up with all the aggravation they cause though.

If you drop a raw egg on the floor and have to go across the kitchen to get some paper towels, wet them and come back to clean it up. By the time you get back to the refrigerator to clean up the egg, the dogs have already cleaned it up for you. Shell and all.

They'll stand there licking their lips with innocent looks on their faces and believe they have tricked you into believing they didn't lick up the egg. You will semi-scold them but secretly be happy they licked it all up.

They do have their uses.

My Life and Feminism

I've spent my entire adult professional life competing with men in the work place. I've had a lot of successes and a few disappointments. Over the years I learned the truth and adjusted myself to the business world accordingly as best I could.

Women's liberation was pretty well entrenched in our workplace psyche when I started my professional career. I remember starting out with the naive assumption that it was a level playing field. I thought if I worked hard I would succeed. I thought hard competent work equaled success in the business world.

Even back then it bothered me that the women's lib movement made the assertion that in order to be taken seriously we had to dress, look and act like a man. Remember the styles of the 1980s? The broad shoulders, the short masculine hair styles, jackets and scarves that looked like neckties? I wore those things to my job. It didn't make any difference. I was still paid less than my male counterparts. I was still hit on by the men at work. Men still patronized me as a cute little thing rather than as a serious colleague. I still had to be twice as tough as a man to be taken seriously and that only succeeded in getting me called a bitch.

The parts that really bothered me were the pay and the fact that men would work games on me, as a female, that they would never consider even trying with a male colleague. It also bothered me that women's lib didn't seem to value femininity. I thought, and still think, that the feminine has a lot to offer and should be valued equally. I don't believe it's necessary that we are all the same in order to be of value to society.

Another thing that feminists did was increase a woman's work load. I've been accused of being a workaholic. When I've heard people say that about me I wonder where that comes from. I never wanted to work as hard as I worked. I thought I had to. I felt guilty if I didn't. Think about it for a minute. If your house is a mess who is blamed for that? The woman. It doesn't matter if she works 60 hours a week and the man in the house works 40 hours a week. It is still her responsibility, in most people's minds, to keep the house and feed the family. In the past, the man was the provider for the family. He still mostly is, but it has changed so that if the family is struggling financially more and more people blame both the man and the woman. If we are honest with ourselves we do see it that way.

The result is that most of us are chronically exhausted and not much good to anyone.

In an odd sort of way, women's lib devalued both the feminine and the masculine. We were supposed to all morph into some kind of androgynous being that none of us really found attractive or wanted to be. Remember Prince? I never have understood what was wrong with appreciating and celebrating the differences. We both bring important characteristics to the table. Ying and Yang, the perfect circle of completion and all that.

When I look at the feminist blogs in the blogosphere I see self-hate and man-hate. I'd be willing to bet the women who write those blogs have not had to compete with men for jobs and respect in the business world. They couldn't make it with that kind of skewed thinking and complete lack of appreciation for the masculine and the feminine.

After all this time it hasn't changed. Human nature is what it is. You can not make a woman into a man or a man into a woman (most of the time!). The question is whether or not we can learn to appreciate what each brings to the table.

A few weeks ago I had a life changing experience. It was one of those things that happens that leaves you feeling like you've been kicked in the stomach and you're not quite sure where the lick came from. This followed on the heels of another experience that already had me thinking about how I had been living my life.

I learned early in my adult life that life is neither easy nor fair. I don't mean that I learned that intellectually, I learned it at a level that I understood it and quit expecting fairness or an easy road. Once I understood that, my life became easier. I quit being so angry when things did not go my way. I was able to look at events in my life more philosophically and objectively which helped me make more rational decisions about the direction I would take things. I was better able to forgive myself for my shortcomings.

Through the years I learned that I had a lot more gumption and courage that I would have ever known I had. I learned I could go toe to toe with pretty much anyone. It's been a long time since I have felt intimidated by anyone in the business world. I learned I was competent, capable and efficient. I learned I could do it. I could compete, even on an uneven playing field.

I learned that life is still not fair or easy. But that's okay.

And now I know that it's okay not to do that anymore. I don't need to. I don't want to. I've spent a certain amount of time immersed in self-pity and anger. But the bouts of self-pity are starting to be further between and of shorter duration. I have spent a lot of time exploring ways to free myself from the brutally political world of business.

I'm starting off in a new direction, a new venture. I don't have to prove anything to women's lib or anyone else anymore.

After all this time, I'm still standing.