Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all ring in 2009 in the way you like best. We don't have any plans this year, so we will probably throw some steaks on the grill and open a bottle of wine. Low-key IS our style.

Christmas was great. The kids got everything they wanted and more. And the adults got lots of cool stuff, too. Rock and I bought ourselves a new tv, because the one we had was so old that we had to use a converter box in order to plug in a DVD player! I seriously think I bought it in college. So we replaced that.

And Rock and the kids gave me a gorgeous amber locket necklace that I have

barely taken off since I unwrapped it.

And I made a commitment to use the amount of money that my dad usually gives me for Christmas to send toys to needy children. And I spent every dime, plus a little more. Which made me feel really good.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope that all of your shopping and running around is done and that you can take some time and relax and spend time with your families. Today is the last day I'm working this week, so I'll have a little time to do last minute things and then relax before the big day. In honor of Christmas, and family, I thought I'd switch things up a bit and tell an old, sweet story today.

Rock and I dated casually for a year or so, then gradually got more and more serious, eventually deciding to move in together. One night, when we were still in the casual dating phase, he called me to tell me that there was a hurricane moving in that night. He wanted to make sure that I had a flashlight and batteries and enough food to get by if the power went out. (I was a 20-something year old female - my entire decorating scheme was candles. I assured him I was good on light.) He also wanted to make sure that I had thought to fill up my car with gas and get money from an ATM, because I wouldn't be able to do either if the power went out. We talked for a little while longer, then hung up. After I hung up the phone, I realized that he had told me he loved me. Not in words, I knew he wasn't ready for that step yet, but by his actions.

God bless us, every one.

Addresses

Jess, Hot and Mona, please send me your addresses!

And the Answers Are....

This game was so much fun. Thank you all for guessing. These must have been really hard, because NO ONE got more than one right! Four people got one right, but not all the same one, which amused me for some reason. The lies are bolded below and the winner of each round is listed.

Round One:
1. My husband was married twice before me.
2. I was fired from my first job (after college) for performance. (This is very nearly true. I was severely reprimanded and came damn close to being fired.)
3. I can play the piano.
Winner: Shelly Overlook

Round Two:
1. I started dance lessons when I was 3.
2. I worked for a US Congressman.
3. I was the valedictorian of my high school class. (Again, very nearly true. I was the salutatorian.)
Winner: Mona

Round Three:
1. I have a friend who is a transsexual.
2. I've had seven speeding tickets.
3. I've stayed friends with every guy with whom I've had a significant relationship. (Nowhere even close to the truth. I have never stayed friends with an ex, no matter what length the relationship.)
Winners: Hotfessional and Jess

Ladies, if you will email your address to me at sm_rl@hotmail.com, I will send you a little something.

Christmas Pictures - FAIL

Do my children have a radar that tells them when I want to have professional pictures of them taken? Last year, in late November, Supergirl fell off the back porch and skinned up her nose. On Monday, Wildman fell and split his lip on the metal seam between the carpet and linoleum in between the kitchen and living room. He's fine, but his lip looks like hell.

At lunch, we played that game where you tell three facts about yourself, two true and one lie and everyone else has to guess which one is the lie. We played three rounds, which is fucking brutal to come up with. So I decided that I would post all three rounds of my facts and let you all guess which ones are lies.

Round One:
1. My husband was married twice before me.
2. I was fired from my first job (after college) for performance.
3. I can play the piano.

Round Two:
1. I started dance lessons when I was 3.
2. I worked for a US Congressman.
3. I was the valedictorian of my high school class.

Round Three:
1. I have a friend who is a transsexual.
2. I've had seven speeding tickets.
3. I've stayed friends with every guy with whom I've had a significant relationship.

Post your guesses in the comments and I'll give the answers tomorrow.

Spying? Really?

Remember the other day when I said I had accepted a Facebook friend request from my former friend Heather's younger sister? Well, today I read this comment on Heather's blog (she was griping because she couldn't get in touch with her sister):
But damn if she can't exchange Facebook notes with my former best friend who I haven't spoken to in 5 years. (She friended the former best friend on a whim, just to see. The funny part is that my sister is basically acting as a spy. *eg* Not for me, for someone else. But it's funny.)
Yes, that would be my mother that the sister is spying for. My questions about this are two-fold:
1. How stupid do they think I am? I know exactly who this girl is. I know who she talks to. I know that any information I post or tell her will go straight back to my mother. Do they think I don't realize this?
2. What exactly do they expect to learn on Facebook? There is pathetically little information available to post. And I don't use the status thingy or post many pictures.
I'm seriously thinking about using the status thing to fuck with them. Like posting, "Shelly is amused" or "Shelly has exciting news" - then when she asks, be like, "I just saved money on my car insurance." What do you think? Am I being petty? I'm just annoyed that they think they are clever for "spying" on Facebook.

Okay, so New Moon

I will confess that I liked New Moon a lot better than Twilight. The biggest reason, however, is that the main "relationship" of the series (Bella and Edward) was on hold throughout most of the book. Edward breaks up with Bella about ten pages in, and then doesn't reappear until practically the end of the book. Which means that there was a distinct drop in the "oh, why won't Edward make me a vampire? i must not be interesting enough for him. yes, yes, he's so wonderful and i'm so plain, i can't imagine what he sees in me. oh, if only Edward would make me a vampire and we could be together forever. he must not want to be with me forever. which i can understand. who would want to be with me forever, i'm so clumsy and stupid and he's so brilliant and graceful and wonderful. and handsome, oh my, is he handsome. have i told you how handsome he is?" And (and I've heard others disparage this) Meyer substitutes blank pages for the months that Bella mopes around after Edward dumps her. I personally was grateful for that choice. Three months worth of whining would probably have made me quit reading the book. Also, there was considerably more dialog and less of Bella's thoughts in this one than the first one. Which is a dramatic improvement in my opinion. Like I said, I think Meyer has captured the voice of a teenage girl, however, that voice is REALLY annoying. And the action is better. It's more plausible and more interesting. The first one had one small action section that took place practically at the end of the book, and it was...just lame. Ridiculous even. New Moon has more action, so there's more showing than telling, and the action in New Moon makes a lot more sense. Characters do predictable things and react to situations in believable ways. The peripheral characters get more development in New Moon, which some of them desperately needed. (*cough* Bella's dad *cough*) So that's what I liked about New Moon.

Now, on to things I don't like about the series as a whole (based on the first two books):

• Bella and Edward's relationship. He treats her like an idiot. (Now, I'll grant you that she acts like an idiot most of the time, but still.) He acts like he knows what's best for her and either does it or makes her do it. He basically acts like he's her father. There is zero mutual respect with these two - it's all one sided.
• Bella's complete dependency on men - she mopes around for months after Edward dumps her and only perks back up when she starts hanging out with Jacob, another guy who likes her.
• Bella's constant talk about college as "Plan B". "Plan A", which Bella desperately wants, is to become a vampire and hang out with Edward. She doesn't want to look at colleges, apply to colleges, think about colleges. I hate to be one of those "BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN" types, but this series was written for YA girls. What kind of example is Bella if she refuses to live her own life?
• Okay, I'll just say it - I really can't stand Bella. Everything around her isn't that bad, but she IS the main character. And I hate her. She's the worst heroine I've ever read. She has zero self-esteem, zero self-respect, zero initiative, zero independent thought. There is nothing that I respect or like about her.

With all that said, I will probably read the last two books. Just to see how bad this series can get.

Am Liar. And Hypocrite, Apparently.

After railing about the first one, I just borrowed the second Twilight book from a co-worker. And I plan to start it tonight.

Oh, shut up.

Short Attention Span Theater

I know "nobody cares what you had for lunch", but my lunch today involved a small mystery. We'll call it the Case of the Purloined Turkey.
For lunch yesterday, I went to the Fresh Market, bought a chef's salad and salad dressing and brought it back to work to eat. On the top of the salad were six rolls of meat and cheese - three ham and cheese, three turkey and cheese. I ate one of the ham and cheese rolls, tore up a turkey and cheese roll and a ham and cheese roll and sprinkled it on the salad. The salad was huge, so I ate about half put the other half in the refrigerator for today. I had eaten all of the ham and turkey and cheese that I had put on the salad, so when I finished, I had three rolls left - one ham, two turkey. I put them on the top of the remaining salad, closed up the container, and put it in the refrigerator. Today, when I got out my salad to eat it, there were only two rolls left, one ham and one turkey. There was also a small piece of lettuce caught in the seal tab on the salad container, which I'm fairly sure didn't happen when I closed up the salad after lunch yesterday. I noticed the fact that there was one less roll as soon as I opened the salad, but I really wanted salad for lunch today (a rare occurrence and not to be discouraged), and I decided that, given that the rest of the salad looked untouched, I would assume that someone had opened the salad container, taken a turkey and cheese roll, and closed the container back up and put it back in the refrigerator. I was a little shocked that someone had stolen part of my lunch. I mean, it was fairly common at the company I worked for previously, but I almost never bring lunch in, so I've never been a victim of having food stolen. And I really wouldn't have thought that my co-workers at this company would stoop to that level.

Although, as I ate my tampered-with salad, I remembered that when I first started here, we used to have a snack tray which would come up short of money every month. This was a tray of little crackers, brownies, gum, etc. that was placed in our office by a vending company - so it was the same kinds of snacks that you can buy in a vending machine. I don't know exactly why we had it as there was a snack machine on the first floor of our building, but whatever, it was there. It operated in the honor system. Each snack cost $.60 and there was a hole in the tray in which you deposited the money for the snack you took. I very rarely ate snacks from the snack tray, but when I did, I would put in a dollar, giving $.40 extra for my snack. I knew a few other people did this, too. However, every month, when the vending company came to pick it up, there was not enough money in the tray to cover the snacks that were gone. About six months after I started, our head honcho got fed up with paying the difference out of his pocket and told the vending company to take the snack tray out. So it's been gone for about three years now. Now, we're a small office, and we've turned over a great deal of our staff since the snack tray days. If we accept as a premise the fact that a person who steals snacks out of a tray that operates on the honor system might also steal a turkey and cheese roll out of an individual lunch in the 'fridge (not necessarily a foolproof assumption), that does narrow our list of suspects to about seven people. Of those seven, I know one of them did the same "pay a dollar for a $.60 treat" trick that I did. So she was not the snack tray thief. At the time, there was a lot of suspicion on one particular guy, but he's since left our office, so maybe he wasn't the snack tray thief after all. I do have one strong suspect from the snack tray days, whom I think would not be above stealing out of a lunch. But I just really don't like the guy, so maybe that's why I think it was him. If we reject the premise that a person who will steal out of a snack tray will steal out of a lunch, then we have the whole office as suspects. Only one person knew that that was my salad, and I really don't think he was culprit, so it couldn't have been personally directed at me.
So the question is - who moved my cheese?

Realization

This isn't what I planned to post today, but something just hit me. When I first broke contact with my mother, I was completely paranoid about her knowing any information about me or my life. I didn't want to know I was pregnant with Wildman (which was over a year after I stopped talking to her), didn't want her to know that we call him his middle name instead of his first name, etc. (She did find out that I was pregnant - my uncle and cousins visited from out of state and I told them. And I made sure word got back to her when he was born - I told her brother - I'm not totally heartless.) I didn't really examine why I felt that way, but looking back, I think it was fear. I didn't want her anywhere near me or anything of mine because she always took over. (Small example, when I was in college, Bath and Body Works Freesia was my "signature scent". When she wanted to pick out some Bath and Body Works stuff for herself, she immediately wanted to get Freesia. She wanted to hang out with my friends, she wanted to come to college and go to stuff with me, and on and on.)

Today I realized that I don't mind if my mother knows some things about my life. Recently, my former friend Heather's younger sister friended me on Facebook. I thought about for a day or so, then accepted the request. Yesterday, my oldest friend Amy, whose parents are very good friends with my mother, and with whom I had lost contact about 5 years ago, friended me on Facebook. I accepted the request, and I just finished writing her a very long, very detailed update on my life, my marriage, my job, and the kids.

I'm not ready to interact directly with my mother yet, but I don't feel as protective about my life anymore. Odd - growing up, I shared a lot with her. I felt sorry for her because she didn't have a love relationship anymore and had very few friends. I'm pretty generous by nature and I felt like I had so much and she had so little, so I tried to share. Then, when I got fed up, I shut her out of my life entirely. Now, I'm willing to let her in partway. I wonder where this will go.

Updates

I offered my husband anything he wanted in bed last night...

Why? Well, aside from his general wonderfulness, HE FIXED THE WASHING MACHINE yesterday. Yes, it had been broken since the end of August. Yes, it took Staber a month to send the new circuit board (Staber - awesome washing machines, crap support). But the glorious sound of clothes washing IN MY OWN HOME was such music to my ears I could barely stand it.

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Happy Monday!