Thoughts for Monday: Because It's Monday

• Doing some housework this morning, I had to move the Youngest child's scooter out of my way so that I could sweep the entryway. I started to get irritated because it doesn't belong in the entryway until I thought, "I'll miss seeing the kids' toys, clothes, books, etc., sitting around the house when they've grown and moved out." The scooter is fine where it sits.
• Giving Honey Booboo, or whatever the hell her name is, her own show was scraping the bottom of the white trash TV barrel. Giving Ryan Lochte his own show is...somehow worse. Just because he can swim and he's easy on the eyes (Yum, right??)
  
  doesn't mean he has anything knocking around between his ears that is worth putting on television. He is so dumb and I mean that literally. He says the most idiotic things. Did he go to school? Did he graduate high school? American TV is such an embarrassment. 
• I have no idea how to reply to a perfect stranger when they put something like, "I'm going to die alone" on social media. Is it a cry for help or a drama queen looking for attention?
• I have lived places. In all my time as an adult, I think I've had four different cable companies. Time Warner Cable takes the ultimate prize as THE WORST CABLE AND INTERNET PROVIDER to which I've ever had the misfortune of subscribing. The customer service is terrible. They lock you into two year contracts so that you have to continue to pay for awful service. Their equipment sucks (my DVR often records only 2 or 3 minutes of a show and you have to jab, and I mean JAB, the buttons on the remote to get it to respond. I've changed the batteries many, many times with no effect). My Internet connection is so slow that I read a book while waiting for pages to load. Seriously, my 4G LTE connection from Verizon is faster. Their tech support is worse than useless. And we can't watch the Padres, our home team, on TV because Time Warner was too idiotic to come to a contract agreement with them. They are TERRIBLE. 
• I hope my neighbors rot.
• Coffee...gooooood.
• My family has absolutely no understanding of my occasional need to sit in a quiet room without the TV constantly droning. I got up yesterday, Sunday, before the kids and the Mister was out getting his hair cut. I open the doors and windows to let a beautifully scented breeze in off the canyon, grab a book, and relax on the sofa with a cup of coffee. Silence. Only birds chirping outside my window. Every last one of my brood thought I was crazy. I just wanted some quiet.

Changes

Over the years and many moves, we've had the displeasure of having many different neighbors. We've run the gambit from having neighbors hauled off by the police for drugs to neighbors that I've called the police on for being buttholes. I've had screaming matches in the parking lot with neighbors. I've been woken up at two in the morning by neighbors fighting with each other. I've lived in a pet-free apartment building only to have fleas because our downstairs neighbors didn't think the rule applied to them. In Vermont, neighbors lived far enough away from us that they were never a problem. Well, except for the time that neighbors around the corner and about three or four houses down decided to have a live band in their backyard playing terrible music (I mean terrible in that the band had NO talent) hours past the time they said they'd quiet down and there wasn't a darn thing to be done about it because some of the police were guests.That's what happens when you live in BFE Vermont.

Now, I've had really good neighbors too. We were neighbors with a retired couple at our first house in North Carolina. They were lovely people and took to my girls like adoptive grandparents. They were great and made the fact that we lived catty corner from a house that was obviously full of drug dealers (a bad egg in an otherwise fantastic neighborhood) not so bad. We were sure that after living in actual houses for six years in a row that moving back into multi-family base housing was going to be a nightmare.

When we moved in, a family had already been living in the other side of our townhouse duplex for some time. They recently moved out and a new family moved in a couple weeks ago. In the 2+ years that we shared walls with the first family, we didn't have one single confrontation. We could occasionally hear them stomp up and down the stairs and occasionally hear them hang things on the wall (at least that's what it sounded like). They had two teenaged boys but never once did I hear loud music coming from their house. 2+ years and we didn't even know their names when they moved out and vice versa. They were like us in that we don't stand in our front yards gossiping with everyone that walks down the street. They were a dream come true as far as base housing neighbors go. ::sigh:: I was truly sad when they moved out and terrified to see who would be moving in.

Their house sat empty for quite some time. Not sure why. When the people moved out across the street, their house was empty for less than a week. This time of year is known as PCS Season because it is the peak time in which military families relocate. Housing is at a prime and waiting lists are long. We enjoyed being able to watch movies on our home theater system instead of through the TV speakers. Our bass literally vibrates the whole house which means it sits turned off all the time. When the new family moved in, I was bummed.

They seem okay for the most part. They're a Marine family which is nice. They have two daughters aged 8 and younger than 8. I'm thinking 5 or 6. We hear them thumping up and down the stairs several times a day. I'm sure once we get used to it, I will stop hearing them but it's a big difference from the other family that we heard maybe once or twice a week at the most. Littler kids are harder to herd so I understand them not being quiet on the stairs. So far, there hasn't been any loud music or parties. I haven't said more than good morning to them since they moved in. I'm not looking to make friends. Funnily enough, now that I think about it, I haven't seen the wife at all yet. Just the husband and two kids. Huh.

Anyway, our biggest complaint about them is that one or more of them smokes. It sucks because they smoke outside and I can't leave my doors and windows open to the fresh air because I can smell the smoke drifting into my house. I know this makes me incredibly uptight. It's their house. They pay rent. They can smoke in it. Still, I wish they didn't. ::sigh:: We're all human. Nobody's perfect. We're all boneheads in one way or another. I'm sure they have at least one complaint about us. I slammed a door really hard yesterday being irritated at the kids. I'm sure they heard it.

Thinking back over the years, if this is my only complaint, I should count myself pretty darn lucky. Any neighbor that doesn't have the police called to their house on a regular basis should be considered a good neighbor.

Friday Update

I usually do Five Question Friday on Friday. Lately, I haven't liked the questions so I haven't participated. This also means that my blog hasn't been getting updated because I have less than nothing to say. I've been using 5QF as a handy writing prompt. I was holding out hope that this week's questions would be appealing to me but they're not. No offense.

Summer has gotten off to a slow start. We haven't done anything. The girls keep having sleep over after sleep over to the point where I told them no more until next week at the earliest. The other night, they each had a friend over so I had four girls, three of them teens, in my house. I didn't get ANY sleep that night. I needed a break. When they're not having sleep overs, they're hanging at the pool. I have to say, I'm very thrilled that we have a neighborhood pool within walking distance. There are actually two that they go to even though they have to kinda, sorta, cheat to get into the other one.  Oh wells.

I'm mostly ready for the Oldest Child's 16th birthday. I already have her big present and I just need to round it out with a few smaller things. She wants me to bake her a cake (isn't that sweet of her?) so that's easy peasy. She's not planning a big party. We had to browbeat her into the casual get together that she decided to have. She insisted that she didn't even care to celebrate it at all. She sounds just like me, lol. My 35th birthday is in eight days. I really don't want to talk about it.

I do have something sort of funny to share. Our neighbor across the street moved this week. Well, his family moved to Texas and he moved in with a friend until he retires at the end of this year. Anyway, they really didn't get along with their house neighbor (we live in duplexes). To express their dislike of this neighbor, they tp'd their car using Vaseline to hold the toilet paper in place. LMAO! I love it. I'm really ambivalent towards this person seeing as how I don't share walls with them and they've never bothered me. I really wish that I didn't like them so that I could have gotten in on the action though. I haven't done that since the first time we lived here. Although...we do have a certain person on our street that we really wish the ground would swallow her up. Or maybe an earthquake could knock her house into the canyon. Or maybe a giant pterodactyl could come and pick her up and drop her into a volcano. Hmm. Maybe, if we manage to move before they do, I could get a little of my own back on the way out. That would be fun. But only if her husband was deployed because we actually like him. He's on his current deployment voluntarily because he wanted to get away from his own wife. See?? I'm not the only one that doesn't like her.

And on that lovely and positive note, I'm off.

A-Hole Neighbors Update

Nothing happened but I thought some of you might want to know what I found out.

I talked to our HOA president, not to tell her what happened, but to ask about the areas behind and between fences. She said that is, in fact, private property. The reason I, some of my other neighbors, were confused is that the HOA pays to have those areas maintained so it was assumed that it was common area. It’s not. Where property lines are drawn, however, are still unknown. In the middle I guess which isn’t totally accurate because some people don’t have a fence at all and some have moved their fences to the ditch.

ANYWAY, I can admit my part in this whole drama:  I let my kids play in an unoccupied ditch that turned out to be someone’s unused property. My bad. So, I have told my kids to stay out and have threatened them with their freedom if they disobey me.

I don’t want to fight with these people on a regular basis over something so stupid, and as Dana said, completely asinine. I have better things to do and frankly, I really don’t have the time.

Neighbors are the epitome of evil. Just my opinion. ;)

NaBloPoMo 2009, post 3 of 30

Dog Puke and Neighbor Drama (Loooong Post)

I had a bad day yesterday. All kinds of bad. Be forewarned, there is foul language in this post and it’s long. But kinda funny.

It started out with a knock on my bedroom door when I thought I was home by myself. It scared the holy living crap out of me which isn’t a fun way to wake up. Turns out it was the oldest child. She had spent the night next door and let herself in our house thru the garage which is what I told her to do so it wasn’t her fault. She came in to ask if it was alright if she went to Jacksonville with her friend. I told her it was and went back to bed.

Then, I’m hearing voices and I’m like, “What the heck?” So I get up to see what’s going on and it’s my daughter and the girls from next door and they’re cleaning up dog puke. Since my daughter voluntarily cleaned up the dog puke herself I figured it was one small spot and told them to hurry up and go back next door.

THEN, the youngest knocks on my bedroom door with her friend that she had spent the night with. Oh. Did I mention that there was no school here on Friday? I was totally looking forward to sleeping in on Friday which didn’t happen at all. So, at this point, I have five girls in my house and I’m losing my patience. I told the oldest and her two friends to go back next door and the youngest to go play then I tried going back to bed again. I realized my mistake right away when I’m hearing complete silence. The youngest took my direction to mean to go outside and play which I didn’t want her doing alone and when I was in bed. So I get up to tell her to come back inside and this is when I finally vive up on sleeping in. Oh well.

I walk into the living room to a vomit smell and puke stains EVERY freaking where. What I thought was one spot was at least ten different spots, one of which I suspect was diarrhea because of the nightmarish odor it had to it. I could do nothing but stare in horror at my carpet which I had just had cleaned a month or two ago. I have totally lost my mind at this point. I opened the front door, told the youngest to get inside and all the rest of the neighborhood to get off my porch (including my oldest) and the youngest had her own meltdown on the street which got her sent to her room. So now I have a pissed off oldest daughter, a bawling youngest daughter, two sick dogs, puke everywhere, and I am still in my pajamas. But I’m not crying. Yet.

I grabbed my steam cleaner out of the garage, mixed up some cleaning solution, and went to work on the carpets. Some of it came out but from where the oldest had tried to clean it, not very much of it was coming out at all. This is when I start crying. I went through two tanks of cleaning solution before I gave up. I called our carpet cleaners to see if they made emergency house calls to find out that they don’t and they can’t fit me in until TUESDAY. Meanwhile, I have stains setting in and the puke/diarrhea smell is horrible. I’m crying over the phone too which is humiliating but at this point, I can’t seem to stop myself.

I resigned myself to waiting until Tuesday, Febreezed the hell out of my house, and went to hide in my bedroom and cry for a few hours. I was truly sad and pathetic. Oh. And the oldest didn’t go to Jacksonville with the neighbors because they took two hours to get ready to go and I guess they started bickering with each other. She came home and she and her sister were very quiet while they watched me warily for the rest of the afternoon.

After I had had my self-pity fest, I came out of my room around 2’ish for lunch and the kids decided to get out while the gettin’ was good and went outside to play. My day is finally looking up, right?

The oldest comes in the house about 20 minutes later to tell me that a baby squirrel was being extremely friendly and was letting her and her friend pet it on our front porch. Wow, right? I told her to be careful because they can bite and went about my business. The Mister had come home from work somewhere in the middle of the day so we were upstairs when the oldest comes in crying and saying that the neighbors had yelled at her again. These are the neighbors that live behind us, not the ones with the kids she plays with. Now for a little back story.

These neighbors live on the cul-de-sac behind ours and their yard is directly behind ours. We’ve never talked to these people and they are the only people my dogs have EVER barked at. And I mean out of all the three different neighborhoods they’ve lived in, they’ve never barked at people. Other dogs, yes. People, no. But they bark like mad every time these people go in their backyard even if my dogs are inside. Also, last year on Halloween, they yelled at my kids and a few others to “get the eff out of their yard” when they were running around the neighborhood for trick or treat. I let that go and just told the kids to stay away from them. Then, I started noticing that someone or several someones in that house stand in their back door and stare into my house. I know. Sounds paranoid, but it’s all the time and once I caught them looking into my kitchen with binoculars. By now, I’m pretty weirded out by these people but I have solar screens on my windows so its pretty hard for them to see much and I started keeping my blinds on the backside of my house shut. They’ve also periodically yelled at my kids (and other’s kids) to stay out of their yard over the past year. What the dispute is, is that we have space between our respective fences and the neighborhood kids like to play back there in the ditch. Not the cleanest but I didn’t figure they were hurting anything. That’s where my daughter was when they yelled at her yesterday. There’s a tree back there with tons of acorns and she was watching two baby squirrels eat when they came out and yelled at her to get the eff off their fence and out of their yard.

They picked a gosh freaking bad day to send my kid home crying over freaking acorns I’m telling you. The Mister and I decided that enough was enough and went out to see what the heck was going on. I’ll admit, I was spoiling for a fight. I’d had a bad day and I was sick of these people yelling at my kids and making such a case over a freaking ditch for pete’s sake. So, the Mister starts out real nice and asks them what’s going on. They said something about how they were tired of our kids playing on their fence. I asked them what was the harm? They said that I wouldn’t like it if they were on my fence. First off all, I probably wouldn’t even notice as it’s a 5 ft tall privacy fence and secondly, as long as they weren’t peeking over it into my house, defacing it, or digging it up, why should I care? This went on for a bit with the woman talking in this reasonable, “we’re nice people and you’re horrible neighbors” kind of voice and I am really starting to lose my cool. I mean really. The Mister is still talking to them in a reasonable sort of manner and my voice is slowing rising with each thing that I say. I don’t even remember what was said at this point. All I remember is her holier than thou voice and that she kept talking over me and interrupting me. I finally lose it and say something about how they are being unreasonable and that I can’t talk to people like them and to stop looking in my effing house. She’s all, “Excuse me?” And I’m like, “You heard me (I’m yelling pretty loud. She heard me and the people in the surrounding houses with their doors shut probably heard me too). Stop looking in my effing house! You people are the worst neighbors ever and you’re complete assholes! You’re asshole neighbors!!” I’m totally screaming at this point and I’m not sure if that’s exactly what I said but I know I used the “f” word at least once and assholes twice. Then I slammed into my house and went across the street to the neighbor whose son plays with my kids behind our house to tell her to tell him that they can’t play back there anymore because I can’t take the fact that these people are assholes and just looking for a reason to start crap with me. I told her what happened and she was pretty unhappy too because they have yelled and cursed at her kids too. She said we should go the HOA president and let them know what was going on but I don’t see how that would help anything and declined. She also told me how they shine laser lights into her windows at night. So, it’s not just us that have been having problems with these weirdoes.

Pictures from two different angles. Click on them to make them bigger.

I completely admit that I could have handled the situation better and that if I hadn’t been wading through dog puke all morning, I would have had a cooler head. But this has been building up for a year now. If they have a problem with my kids, they should come to me, not scream at them and cuss at them until they come home crying. Yesterday wasn’t the first time they had come home crying because of them. Not even the first time this week. Earlier this week, they had been playing with one of those rubber balls, you know the size of basketball but they’re lighter and colorful? Well, the wind took it and blew it into the neighbor’s yard. Not the peeping toms but the house next door to them. This house belongs to an old bat that hates kids I guess. It was my daughter’s ball and she refused to give it back. How mature is that? She also took my strainer that the kids were playing with in the backyard too. The point of that? I don’t know. She was in her backyard putting in her two cents during the confrontation too. I’m sorry. But if you live in a neighborhood with kids, you have to put up with them. They annoy me too on occasion but I certainly don’t cuss at them and steal their toys. This is a young neighborhood where young couples would buy their first house kinda thing. Not a retirement neighborhood. Get a freaking grip.

The peepers also told the Mister (this was after I had left the scene) that instead of worrying about what they are doing that we should be paying more attention to the oldest sneaking out of her bedroom window. Now, I’m not naive enough to think my kids are never going to sneak out at night. I was about this age when I snuck out for the first time. However, I didn’t have to go through two screens to do it. It would be impossible for her to put on the solar screen from inside the house and our doors cause the alarm system to beep every time they’re opened. I’d hear it. And since we always get up before she does, I would have noticed her running out to the backyard to put the screen back on. Sure, she could sneak out but I don’t see how she’d do it unnoticed. At least out of her window anyway. She’d have better luck disarming the alarm system and walking out the front door.

I hate them and hope they rot in hell. Yes. That’s evil but it’s how I feel and I’m not sorry for it. The next time they yell at my kids, I don’t care if they’re throwing rocks through their windows, it’s ON! She probably has 30 pounds on me but I have righteous anger on my side. Their son, who is maybe 18 or 19 invited the Mister over for a fight yesterday too, lmao. Stupid kid.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my day. Drama filled and puke filled. I’ve always said that neighbors suck. I’ve kept myself to myself for a year now and look what happens. I put up wiht a lot from those people, the peeping and the verbal abuse of my kids and didn’t say anything for the sake of peace and look where it got me. Maybe I need to move to Montana where you can buy lots of land and live in the middle of nowhere by yourself.

The Longest Week

I know that I said that I would be back to my Pets Hall of Fame series yesterday. At least I think that’s what I said. But I’ve had a hellacious week and I haven’t gotten back to it yet. I will. Probably tomorrow. I swear to try my best.

I wasn’t even going to say anything until I read Jennifer’s post about her experience at the movies. But now I feel inspired and you all get to listen.

I’m not sleeping. Again. And I’ve had a headache since Monday. Yesterday, I was awake at 3 am and got up out of bed at 4 because I was irritated with trying to get back to sleep. Or maybe I was awake at 2 and up at 3. Who freaking knows at that time of the morning. I get to sleep fine, I just can’t stay asleep. It’s irritating. Blah blah.

Anyway, Tuesday night, both the girls were invited to different friends’ houses for a sleep over. No big deal. I didn’t even have to drive them anywhere which was cool for me. The oldest was told to be home by 5:30 on Wednesday and the youngest was next door so I knew she would be home early. She gives me a call around 9:30 and asks if she and T can come over to our house to play. Sure. Whatever. So they troop over to the house with T’s younger sister, A in tow. Nobody mentioned A coming over too, but what the hell. One more makes little difference in my busy day. So, I tell them to occupy themselves while I was trying to work upstairs in my office. Little did I realize that I was babysitting A and T while their parents went to Jacksonville. Hello!! How do you leave your kids at someone else’s house for a period of time without touching base with them first?? They didn’t roll back into town until 6 last night. By this time, I had fed their kids lunch and dinner and had to deal with constant interruptions to my day while I was trying to freaking work.

THEN!! The girls were outside with some different neighborhood kids playing. The Mister and I were watching TV in our bedroom when we hear the youngest child come into the house yelling, “Leave me alone!!” and crying hysterically. I call her into our room to see what the hell when she told me the other girl, she’s 13 or 14, was tossing her around and the boy, also 10 like the youngest, was trying to pull her out our front door when she was trying to get away. Wtf?!? First of all, you should know that she doesn’t like rough play like that from anybody. Not even her mom and dad. She has a sensory perception thing that makes her overly sensitive to what would be a “normal” situation to other people. But whatever. So I go outside to see what the heck is going on and proceed to yell at the top of my lungs. They really picked a bad day to start a ruckus on my front yard. I yelled at the oldest child to get her butt inside and then yelled at the other kids to take their butts on home. Then I slammed the door hard enough to knock a picture askew. Boy. It was just a bad day. It’s times like those when I have to wonder why I’m the only parent paying attention to yelling and screaming outside. And I would never in a million trillion years drop my kids off at someone else’s house and then leave town for the day without talking to the parents first. What is freaking wrong with people? And lastly, there is a difference between the noises of the terrified and the noises of someone having fun. It shouldn’t be that hard to distinguish.

And to top things off, the Mister checked in for his training yesterday so he’ll be gone for the majority of the summer. It’s not nearly as bad as a deployment but it still sucks royal. It’s 12:30 and I could use a freaking nap.

Being Neighborly and Other Stuff

Last week was spring break for my kids. The whole week was a blur of sleepovers. It began with he youngest sleeping over with a neighbor girl earlier in the week. Monday or Tuesday. Something like that. Then, one of my neighbors asked if I would mind watching her kids for a few hours one afternoon. Well, they were already over playing so I figured why not. While her girls were here, they conspired with my girls to sleepover that night. Again, they were already there, so why not. Then, to repay my kindness, my neighbor offered to keep my kids overnight the next night. Woot!!! An entire night with no kids! Then, Friday night, both the girls were invited to a  respective  friend’s house for yet another sleepover so we had no kids Friday night too. It was nice for all concerned.

As a result of all these sleepovers, I met quite a few of my neighbors. They all seem nice enough but I don’t want to be friends with any of them. How bad does that sound?? My two very closest friends don’t even live in the same time zone as me. I’m tired of making friends only to leave them behind or have them move away. We are currently trying our darndest to move back to California by next summer. If not Cali, it will be somewhere else. I don’t want to make new friends that I know I’ll be leaving in a year’s time. Oh well.

In other news…

It turns out that when a military brat turns ten, he or she is supposed to get their military ID card. We found this out the hard way and also discovered that the girls took their social security cards to play with and now we can’t find them. You need your social security card to get your military ID. Do you know how ridiculous it is to get a replacement social security card? Did you also know that you can only get ten replacement cards in your lifetime?

Don’t even ask how the dieting and exercising is going. Fine. I’ll tell you. My street “run” really threw my routine for a loop. I was in pain for the entire week last week. My left foot had this burning, shooting pain along the outer side of it and both my shins had swollen knots on them. As a result, when I tried running on the elliptical on Tuesday, I could only go for two miles before I couldn’t take it anymore. And that was the last time I tried. I’m getting back into my routine starting tomorrow. I swear. I have an appointment today or I would have started today.

I have more to post but I need to hit the shower so I can get ready to go. Laters.

On Being Consistent

The only thing consistent about my blog lately is that I update inconsistently. Funnily enough, it’s not because I haven’t had anything to say. Lots of stuff has been going on in my little world of late. Now I need to figure out where to begin. It’s been a while.

First off, I’ll start with some good news. I took on a new client this week. Yay!! It more than doubles my work hours and the pay is really good. I love starting new projects for clients because it keeps things interesting and me interested in working. I hate monotony where my work is concerned.

Even though I now have two steady clients, I applied for a third last night and I’m also thinking about volunteering at my local library. I talked with them last night and they said that they don’t have many volunteers at all. The only thing is that I’m not sure how much spare time I have now that I have two clients. I think I’m going to wait a couple weeks to see how much work this is actually going to be before committing myself to volunteer work. I’d feel bad if I said that I could help out and then discover that I didn’t realistically have the time to do so.

Next up, the teacher thing…I don’t really have a resolution to that. I talked with her teacher and she denied having told the kids that bringing in something for the party was mandatory. Normally, I’d be more inclined to believe the adult but I had three different kids tell me the same thing when I casually brought it up to them separately. Also, this teacher doesn’t have the best track record for being reasonable. Having decided not to make a big deal out of something that turned out to be a non-issue (I’ll explain why next) in the end seems silly. I dunno.

Why was it a non-issue? Because the youngest child ended up missing school half of Wednesday, and all of Thursday and Friday anyway. She came home from school Wednesday with a fever that ended up going up over 103 degrees and involved a trip to the hospital and a round of antibiotics. We’re still not sure what she had. The Navy doctors prescribed penicillin guessing that she had strep throat. They guessed because they didn't have any rapid strep tests and it took six days to get the lab results of her throat swab back. I find it disturbing that they arbitrarily prescribe antibiotics with them losing their effectiveness due to over-prescribing but what do I know. And btw, I still sent in the snacks that I bought for the party and the youngest’s Valentine’s cards so that they could be given out to her classmates.

Anyway, remember a while back when I blogged about how some neighborhood kids came to my door after dark to ask if they could use my cell phone to call their friends? Well, we got a knock on our door Monday and someone from child protective services was standing there. Turns out that these same kids were almost hit by a car on our street while they were playing in the street after dark recently. I have no idea when or who almost hit them. NO, it wasn’t me that called. While I don’t necessarily agree with letting young kids out after dark and I found it really annoying that they thought it was okay to ask neighbors to use their phone  to call a friend, I didn’t think it was dangerous at the time. I didn’t know they were out playing in the street after dark too. Well, after knocking on some of my other neighbor’s doors, they went to the parent's house and questioned them. I don’t know the results of all that, but if I were her (she’s a single mom) I would be so embarrassed that I would probably look into moving, lol. I didn’t let my kids run roughshod over the neighborhood before, but now I’m keeping an even tighter reign on them. I stressed their rules and told them that if they break them, not only will they be grounded but they won’t be allowed outside unsupervised anymore. I told them that they could probably guess how often I would feel like sitting outside in the heat to watch them play, heheh. I also discovered a black scratch down the side of my car the same height as a scooter’s handlebars. I had to tell some of the neighborhood kids to stop playing in my driveway around my car (my kids were inside and weren’t even playing with these kids at the time.) but it turns out I was too late. My kids don’t have scooters because they were dopes and left them outside in the front yard to get stolen at our old house. Irresponsibility doesn’t get you a new scooter at my house. I would be so angry if I found out my kids were playing in other people’s driveways or around cars in general. That’s why we have yards and sidewalks for pete’s sake.

As for the healthy lifestyle thing, well, I’ve slacked off a bit in the last week. Instead of working out 7 days a weeks, I slacked off to 3 ::blush:: I kind of have an excuse though. The elliptical machine has started making this really high pitched squeak that makes you want to stab out your eardrums. I’m not ready to run out in public yet. I’m too insecure. There. I admitted it out loud. I had to get gas in my work out clothes this morning (the Mister ran it out of my car and I wasn’t anticipating having to stop) and I was pretty embarrassed, lol. The Mister is going to take a look at our machine tonight so I can get back into the habit again. Eating right is still going good though. We had two days where our dinners were less than stellar but we're still doing good overall. It’s starting to get to me psychologically however. Constantly keeping track of how much I’m eating and how much exercise I’m getting is a little depressing. Also knowing that I can’t eat at the brand new Dunkin Doughnuts that just opened like a block from my house is also depressing. I loves me a chocolate cream filled doughnut gosh darnit! They are over 300 calories a piece though and most of that is from fat. Big surprise, right? Still :( The only thing that keeps me going is that I’m still losing weight. Not as fast as the first week which is to be expected, but it’s still coming off. My jeans fit nicer nowadays.

And now I’ve got to hit the shower (I managed to put in a bit of time on the elliptical this morning) and get some work done. Yay!! Work! Woot!

In My Neighborhood

It snowed again. This snow is much wetter than the other snow so it’s mostly slush. Weird thing about it is that the last time we  got snow, school was cancelled while it was still raining. This time, it was actively snowing and at a good rate and school wasn’t even delayed. Not that I mind. I get much more work done when the kids are in school, but it was still a bit intimidating being out on the streets with people that can’t drive in the rain.

Also in my neighborhood…

We got Bailey back in 2005. She has lived in three different houses. We got Hannah in 2007. She has lived in two different  houses. In all that time, with all the different neighbors, my dogs have never barked at people. They don’t bark at the mail carrier, the UPS delivery person, the neighborhood kids, people on a stroll, nobody. That is, until a couple weeks ago. I’m not sure if we got new neighbors or if they are just behaving differently, but every time the guy that lives directly behind us comes out of his house (our backyards butt up against each other being separated by privacy fences.) Hannah goes crazy barking at him, scratching at the back door, and jumping at the fence. She does not  like this guy. It’s weird. Even more weird, the oldest child and I saw him standing inside his house, staring out his patio doors, and into our kitchen yesterday afternoon. He wasn’t just glancing, he stood there for several minutes. It was so odd that I closed all the blinds at the back of the house. I know it’s probably wrong to judge a person based on how your dog reacts to them, but her behavior is so out of the ordinary and then the watching our house, I’m beginning to wonder what the heck is up with this guy. I’m probably just being paranoid.

Also in my neighborhood…

One of our neighbors moved yesterday. They moved into their house a day before we moved into ours and they are already moving. We’re sad about it because their daughter is friends with my daughters. She’s a sweetheart too. She calls me Miss Trisha and gives me a hug whenever she sees me. The turnaround time in my neighborhood is huge. There are several houses for sale and for rent and there’s only two streets. That also makes one wonder about the neighborhood. Oh well.

Living healthy update…

Prior to typing this entry, I was on the elliptical. It was a pretty good workout and no nausea, lol. Last night for dinner, we had seasoned tilapia, broccolini, and corn. We were supposed to have polenta with it but I bought the wrong kind and it looked like nasty, gooey, slop in the pan. The recipe was another one from Cooking Light. For the day, I was 382 calories under my total allowed for the day AND, I wasn’t even hungry. Nifty, eh?

Now that I’ve stopped sweating, I’m off for my shower and breakfast. Oh! That reminds me. Something that I’ve added to my daily routine is a glass of Cranergy. I honestly can’t stand the taste of the stuff. For one thing, I hate artificial sweeteners and for another, it has a celery taste to it which is odd considering that isn’t an ingredient. Even so, it gives the most awesome energy boost that lasts for several hours and it’s only 50 calories per 12 ounces. You can’t say that about coffee or soda. At least not the coffee or soda that I would normally drink trying to perk myself up.

Ok. Enough. I’m off