i am dog-less

there's just way too much drama to recount. how about a list?

• december 9 - sam suffers a stroke and her hind legs are paralyzed
• december 10 - sam is put out of her misery
• december 11 - the kids want a dog for christmas; the hunt begins
• december 17 - bethany the pit bull stays overnight for a trial
• december 18 - bethany doesn't work out goes back to the rescue
• december 19 - bodie/bodhi the australian cattle dog comes home for a trial
• december 25 - hubby announces bodie/bodhi as an official part of the family
• january 5 - bodie/bodhi shows aggression, provoked, toward dylan
• january 22 - bodie/bodhi attacks mom-in-law unprovoked
• january 23 - bodie/bodhi attacks mom-in-law unprovoked and draws blood
• january 25 - bodie/bodhi attacks mom-in-law unprovoked and takes a chunk
• january 26 - bodie/bodhi goes back to the rescue

we spent over $600 on bodie/bodhi, getting her better from parasites and spoiling her rotten with bed, special food, treats, etc. not to mention adoption fees and licensing.  yeah, the irony is that i licensed her with the city one day before her last attack.  coulda saved me 25 bucks had i just waited.  the sucky thing is that i really was growing to love bodie/bodhi, even allowing myself to let go of sam and heal, ya know?

and now hubby says he doesn't want to go to a rescue again, that he wants to get a puppy from a breeder so we know its history and all.  thing is, from a breeder, they're $600 and that's low-balling.  also, most of the breeders around here don't have pups available, only litters, and the waiting lists are long with no guarantee.

i hate not having a dog in the house.  hate it.  hate it.

this is the most emotion i've felt since...well, since the birth of my last child, and probably more than that coz i was drugged back then.

i miss you, sam.  rest in peace...

latest design

playing with photoshop

so del has decided to do the deed and has set the date. we're gonna do this wedding on a true DIY budget so she has asked me to make invites. let's see what i can cook up...

here's the original design:

and here's what i designed when i thought i couldn't enlarge those leaves.

del likes my design. woot! now to add some finishing touches and hope ger can print them out nicely.

keep calm and...

so it's begun. the new year. 2012. i finally got to open the year with someone - in the recent past, it's been me and my laptop while the rest of the fam slept.

anyhow, this is dylan, almost nine, valiantly staying awake with me so he can be a "big boy" and celebrate. (please try to ignore the "rice bowl haircut" his grandmother gave him earlier today. it shall be rectified. this, i swear!)

i tried explaining to him the concept of times square and the big party and the ball dropping but i guess he needed to see it to actually comprehend what i meant. i also told him that he needed to jump as high as he could at midnight - a soriente family tradition - so he'd grow as tall as he jumped. did he jump? oh, yes. he did.

***

meanwhile, back at the farm...

del and i made a pact to not spend money this year. another vow of poverty, if you will. what you may not be aware of, gentle reader, is that i made a vow of poverty only last year and i kept it faithfully until about october when the fish hit the shan and i went berserk and i bought gazillion things for me. selfish things, like makeup and clothes and shoes. and i know you're trying not to judge me and are justifying my spending by saying i work and i deserve to pamper myself, but i assure you, gentle reader, that there is no justifying my spending. it was obscene, i tell ya! online shopping just makes spontaneous spending at 1 am in the morning so effortless, you see.

so, yeah. my last expense was a modest haul from forever and two pairs of booties from amazon, made at the eleventh hour - literally! - of 2011. and now, here we are in 2012 and i'm already jonesing to spend.

to save me from myself, and to avoid the debacle of last year's vow of poverty epic fail, i'm going to attempt to chronicle everything i wanted to spend here on this blog. call it catharsis and a reality check if you will. along the same lines of journaling your thoughts for therapy, i shall list my financial drama here and hope that doing so will keep me safe and sane.

let's see if i can keep this up as i did the 365 picture challenge (which, btw, i'm still debating whether or not to do for the kids this year).

WHAT I WANTED TO BUY:
1. Goshen Yarn in navy or fawn or natural, or...

these were on sale for today only, normally $3.99/skein and no $2.79/skein and i was sooo tempted, gentle reader, but i thought of the boxes of yarn i have squirreled away under my desk at school, of all places, plus the skeins i have in my regular yarn storage and i gave myself a firm "niet!"

2. Keep Calm poster

does this even need an explanation? i mean, come on! wouldn't this poster look super cool on the wall of my new classroom? if anyone is reading this and has access to this poster or a printer who can make this poster for me, i will pay you cash money...argh! no, i can't! no spending! [insert wail of despondency here]

this is gonna be harder than i thought.

sigh.

stupid effin' sweater...

so it's now officially a month and i'm still plugging away on this damnable thing. i probably shouldn't say that - or even think it, for that matter - since it's gonna be my mom's christmas present and what if i put some "like water for chocolate" mojo on the thing? still, i really am tired of this project and i wish i could pick another up but my nature dictates that i only work on one thing at a time so i'm pretty much stuck.

i would actually be done with this thing had i not run out of yarn ONE INCH BEFORE FINISHING THE LAST SLEEVE. so i had to order more online and had to set it aside until the skein came but when i did, i actually stopped to scrutinize the sleeves and i realized that i never did decrease every inch from the armpit like i'm supposed to so it's pretty damned shapeless and even if i pretended i meant to do it, the cuffs are just too wide for regular and too narrow for bell.

so what to do? any other non-knitter would never know the difference. but i would. and since it's for my mom and since it's the first time she's asked for something knitted from me, i feel it ought to be close to perfection. but i've been at this for far too long and it's getting to be more a chore than a pleasure.

sigh.

i know what i'm gonna end up doing and i'm just not looking forward to it...

the prodigal emotion returns...

...and i'm hoping it's only here for a visit and not to stay.

i rushed out the house today because a. i wasn't carpooling and therefore had to get on the road immediately or miss that tiny window of no-traffic opportunity on the 10 freeway and b. i wanted to avoid the MIL. in the process, i breezed past a whiny, needy aly and a solicitous, wistful dylan in my haste to GET THE HELL OUT.

if it's not yet apparent, reason b was the primary reason for my mad dash for freedom. we've been at odds for the past 2 days now and, being women, we have perfected the art of civil silent treatment. i know i can keep this up indefinitely - our house is big enough - but the kids get caught inadvertently in the crossfire and that's what's bringing on the guilt.

stupid prodigal emotion. thought i'd gotten rid of it several lents ago.

anyhow, my levels of guilt are legion, but for the sake of brevity and because i have to let the kids in in less than 15 minutes, let me just highlight the most heart-piercing (although, oddly, also the most seemingly petty) incident of guilt inducement...

dylan has this routine where he stands in front of the garage door - or the front door, depending on which point of egress i choose that day - and seeing me off for work. he's done this since he was little, ostensibly to "watch my wheels go", but nowadays i wonder what goes on in his little man brain. he always looks so wistful, like he wants to go wherever i'm going but knows it's not possible. most times, we've gotten ready at the same time so he's dressed and primped and opens the car door for me, suffering a quick kiss on the head if the boys have come to pick me up and tolerating a hug when i drive myself. sometimes, i leave early and he's still in his underwear so he stops short of the driveway and just watches me leave for the day. regardless, he always expects me to roll down the window, call out "have a good day; i love you!" then give him a honk of the horn before i zoom off. (i've even trained the boys to give him the honk when they pick me up for carpool).

today, it was the same routine, albeit rushed because of the aforementioned reasons. nothing new. same old, same old. right? but dylan actually picked up my rolling cart so it would clear the threshold on my way out. and he actually hugged me back when i asked for one instead of impatiently standing there as is his wont. and when i told him it was GNO (girls' night out), he looked so crestfallen that i almost half-decided to call and cancel.

so, yeah. that's it. i pull out of the driveway and head out - yes, i honked - and it seemed very normal. but something was plucking at my heartstrings and when i examined it during the long drive alone to work, it articulated itself thusly: dylan is a boy. and he will outgrow his "momma's boy" phase soon, never to return to that simpler, sweeter place. in fact, i realize now that he's already been pulling away from me. it's been a gradual process, as most things are, but it's happening nonetheless. i told myself i was relieved that now it's "greg's turn" when dyl chose to hang with his dad instead of going to the mall with me, or happy that i got to spend uninterrupted "girl time" with aly. but in truth, i wasn't really happy or relieved - i was in denial, trying to bury the ache of losing my son under these less painful emotions.

when this particular epiphany hit - somewhere between the milliken and haven exits - i was crushed with the guilt of rushing out of the house without spending a few, precious moments savoring that hug or complimenting dyl's chivalrous lifting of my rolly cart. how many more times will this happen before he becomes too cool for mom? before he decides sleeping in is infinitely more rewarding than standing in front of the garage door, shivering in his underwear, to see me off? when will he become sullen and closed off and refuse "sleepovers" in his bedroll at the foot of our bed because that's for babies?

these questions may seem petty and premature, but can you blame me for trying to guard my heart from shattering? because it's inevitable, you know. a mother's curse. i can only hope that when it happens - the vanishing of my baby boy - i will be able to replace him gladly with the man i hope he becomes.

i HAVE to blog about this!

OMFG! LMAO! yes, yes, i know. how dare i blaspheme the english language by invoking netspeak? but those are the knee-jerk reactions that express how i truly felt after reading this (i think she had me at "teacher/mother"):

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Will Meyer sue for copyright infringement?, November 13, 2010
By S. McKinney (Indiana)

This review is from: Evermore: The Immortals (Paperback)
Sometimes I wish I hadn't decided to become a teacher. I'm very glad to be the mother of two daughters, but the double-whammy of teacher/mother means that I feel like I need to read the books the kids are reading so that I'll be able to offer considered opinions.

With the Harry Potter series, it was all a delight. The Series of Unfortunate Events was clever satire and fun to read. Thankfully my students and my daughters were too old for Percy Jackson and the Olympians, but then I got stuck with the Twilight books and spent a lot of time wanting to eat my own head, they were so incredibly fundamentally awful.

And now I get to read them again! With different character names, to be sure. And in these Immortals books, we are now dealing with, well, immortal beings rather than vampires. But honestly? Everything else is exactly the same. Even the cover of the book is a blatant rip-off -- there's even a similar FONT STYLE.

In Evermore, we have a girl with an evocative name (I still haven't stopped rolling my eyes over "Bella Swan," and now I have to deal with "Ever" and I may never get my eyeballs back to where they should be and that was only, like, the FIRST PAGE.) The girl with the evocative name has to move across the country to live with an adult who is completely incompetent in the care of a teenager, but that's okay because the girl has no need of supervision. She is a woman of the world. Luckily for Ever, her weird lawyer auntie is rich, so Ever gets to drive a speedy little Miata instead of a rusty old truck AND she gets to live in a cool mansion in a gated Orange Beach community instead of in Charlie Swan's dumpy house in damp Forks, Washington. You should note that both vehicles are red, though.

Ever is also more fortunate in that she does have a couple of friends, but they're losers in the out crowd (we take a brief foray here into ripping off The Princess Diaries) and she feels as much veiled contempt for them as Bella feels for the young folk of Forks.

And then a NEW BOY shows up at school. Everyone is just flat-out crazy about him. He's obviously wealthy, has looks that could shame Adonis, is brilliant at all subjects without the apparent need to study, is mysterious, is hot and cool by turns (which drives Ever nuts - too bad she wasn't able to read the Twilight series in her world; she could have dealt with Damen's nonsense with a snap of her fingers.) And strangely enough, despite the fact that there is nothing special about Ever, he is immediately and irrevocably attracted to her.

We have to hear a lot about how awesomely awesome-tastic Damen looks. A LOT. Not quite as much as we had to hear about flipping Edward. Alyson Noel managed to restrain herself from telling us about the sweet fabulousness of Damen's breath, a small mercy for which I was very thankful.

A bunch of stuff happens, but if you've read Twilight, you already know the plot. There are parts that make sense and parts that make no sense at all and the message of the book really sucks -- lots of underage drinking and drunkenness, lots of lying to authority figures, lots of cutting school; like Twilight, it's a list of Things Teenagers Can Do to Eff Up Their Lives, only of course there are never, ever, ever any consequences. Noel threw in some reincarnation and some chakras and some transcendental meditation and....a psychic? Hmm. Okay, whatever. Anyway, she tried to throw us off the Twilight scent, but we all have that stench coating the inside of our noses and we can recognize it from miles away, as far from Washington state to southern California, I'd say. Wouldn't you?