Happy Taxes

The IRS website says that tomorrow my refund will be direct deposited into my account. I'll believe it when I see the zero's.
Every year I wait the whole 5 or 6 weeks it takes the government to decide if I can have a small percentage of my money back believing they will not let me have it. Don't ask why, I just do NOT trust the gub'ment. Maybe it's a throwback to the days when my Grandparents talked about the "revenue-ers", or just a general lack of faith in my own luck.
Not that I don't have luck mind you. It is just the worst kind of luck available.
My luck experiences have led me to my credo;
"If something can go wrong.. it already did and I just don't know about it yet."
But regardless of luck or the lack thereof, every year I look at that little happy taxes reminder and think "Yea, right." I guess if they don't come this year it would be in keeping with the rest of the curse.
Speaking of curses the TV in the living room caught fire last week. That is TV #2 to die that way in this house.
I am generally not opposed to attrition, everything here on earth is temporary but were the sizzling noises and fire really necessary? Most people find out their TV is dead when they turn it on and it doesn't work. Then they hit the sides in a kind of desperate TV CPR to make it work long enough to watch one last show. It is not normal to be hitting it to beat out the flames.

The only plus to flaming death is I know it is dead,
finito,
so over,
totally gone,
the 52" has left the building,  
outta here.

IF my happy taxes come tomorrow I am going to find a new TV to buy.
I'm looking for anything that doesn't say "Fire extinguisher not included."

Fat Sunday

Today is the Sunday when everyone in America sits around watching 2 teams fight it out with a pointy brown ball on fake grass for 3 or 4 hours with slow-motion commentary and commercial breaks.  I will not embarrass myself with attempts to acknowledge the respective prowess of whoever is playing this year. I know less than bupkiss about football and less than that about what is going on with the 2 teams and yet I have watched this spectacle every year since 1990. I have recorded it for 5 years now since the commercials are so good. This is a strictly matriarchal household.
During the actual game we in my house turn the television all the way down and snack. During the commercials we turn on the volume and laugh, a lot. Having attended more than a few Superbowl parties I know some households watch the game and cheer for whomever they want to win. Considering past years when the whole thing was "time-lagged", this seems ridiculous to me. Your screaming and jumping up and down can NOT effect the outcome of this competition. Now that it is "live" maybe the enthusiasm is valid. The thing is with the sound down, I hear my neighbors cheering and screaming at their TV's. So I gave up and joined them.
Even though I have caved to the peer pressure of a nation in love with it's padded athletes I still don't cheer anyone on or even care who wins. To me it is an excuse to eat a 3" football shaped iced brownie, chips, dip, various salads, hot grilled meats, and drink obscene amounts of soda. The only other times anyone would pig out like this is Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. That makes the Superbowl one of the fattest holidays of the year.
How did food and athleticism ever get mixed up like this? People all over this country are smashing avocados, pouring giant bags of chips into football shaped bowls for everyone to share, swilling beer, grilling anything that doesn't move, and calling it a good time.

I'm just the slightest bit guilty of climbing on the band wagon.
Maybe just one more brownie.

I'm a victim not a psycho

I have decided to blog for 3 days in a row! Yea! Now that the media has been alerted maybe we can get on with it.
Today I discovered that I am politically incorrect. I know,  you're shocked. As a mother of 4 grown children and a Grandmother of 11 you would think I would be a model of old womanish correctness. Really, somewhere along the line while raising 4 kids or helping nurture 11 grand kids you would think I learned some restraint and propriety.
  You would be wrong.
Improprieties sort of fall out of my mouth. It's not that I am striving to be incorrect I was just raised by a family where I thought my middle name was a swear word until I was 10. My family never had the neighbors over and the neighborhood kids all ran far and fast from my parents. Even in the 50's my parents were offensive. I thought "little bastards" was a sweet endearment my Dad had for all children in general, and his own especially.  I thought swearing was an art              and damn my family was good.
"The water faucet won't shut off." was just not a complete sentence to my family. It was " f-)(_&^ water faucet @%$! broken again." The dog was not going out for a call of nature, he was "taking a  $#@!(&  ^^##@". Even when my dad was being really serious and trying to make a point, he would swear and make remarks that would peel the paint off the walls. He threatened me with cursing, he ordered me around with cursing, he talked about work with cursing.
I'm going to apologize up front for this little bit of truth buy I don't think without crude language, it's not natural for me. It's sort of like an accent. It was how I learned syntax.  This is what I was exposed to in my formative years. It's what I am the most comfortable with, it's my  &%#*ing roots.
So the fact that I told one of my coworkers today he would look better in a stripper cop outfit with those RayBan's, that is a handicap of my upbringing. Not inappropriate office language and I am not stalking the paperboy.
 

Weep for the loss, it's a fluff-less world.

Today I discovered I am dying. Little hints of it are everywhere in this house. There are NO sources of chocolate anywhere here. Who would believe that in a month where I spent literally a thousand dollars on food this could be true?
It must be the Hostess guys corporate screw up trickling down to the household level. I always have  Ding-Dongs, Ho-Hos, and Twinkies stashed somewhere in the house. The Snowballs pink gooey goodness is always blatantly on display in several rooms.
It is a mortal imperative to have chocolate where small grandchildren and older, smarter children just can't find it. Now that the baking empire has fallen my stashes are finally all tapped out. (insert heavy long-suffering sigh here) and in a post apocalyptic baking world there just isn't any reasonable replacement available. Why oh why can't someone make a decent fake ding dong?
Nothing says living the dream like a Suzie q and a diet Pepsi. The taste combination is just indescribable. Plus, the irony.. a diet drink with a 1,800 calorie cake... get it get it?
They just took it away? Now all I can get is a cardboard box with a similar enough to be recognizable label yet dissimilar enough inside to make me want to eat the box instead knock off.
Don't even get me started on the available sweets in the cupboard. All we have here is vanilla pudding in a box. Bah.. Vanilla. Is that even a flavor or just the absence of Chocolate?  Someone bought this box in this house? Isn't vanilla free since it grovels so far below chocolate? Did we not see the chocolate pudding and just knocked this into the cart by mistake? Is there a universe in which vanilla is a choice and not a mistake?
So here I sit at the end of days feeding vanilla pudding to my 100 pound dog so Britt won't know I dumped all her hard work making me pudding in a fit of  IT'S NOT CHOCOLATE.

This also begs the question
  
What did they do with all that marshmallow filing?

Worst job interview ever

You know one, I know you do. A person who knows EVERYTHING, has done EVERYTHING, has had every cool adventure, and who wants to re-live how cool they are right now with you.

This random guy shows up at my work today for a "job interview". Nothing abnormal there, we hired 4 guys this month so far. He was wearing a BUDweiser beer red jacket, cowboy boots, and jeans. Still not too weird, most of my co-workers spend their Marlboro points on clothing advertising beer or cigarettes. He knew a name of the interviewer and seemed like he had it all ready to rock n roll just like any other applicant.
Until one of my coworkers came off shift walking through my desk area and remarked casually that he (the applicant) better watch himself with those red-headed women and showed him his black eye.  I think my coworker was hinting to the guy to sit down and fill in the application and leave the receptionist alone, or else.
This random goober just jumps in front of my coworker and says; "Oh, I have martial arts training." And proceeds to spend the next 5 minutes wrestling a man who could not quite grasp what the heck was happening. He moved his arms around in vaguely Egyptian poses and said stuff like "Here just go ahead and hit me." and a lot of "Ofcourse you would just move your arms like this and then, you are OK".  All the while I am sure I had the same shocked look of horror as the rest of the people in my general area did.
The coworker of mine knows the value of his job (since he has one) and would not cooperate.
So the random man just grabs his arms and starts showing him how to throw a punch  and defend against it.  It looked like every Kung Fu move my 7 year old grandson ever demonstrated for me in the last 3 years only less professional.
Then he spent the next 20 minutes explaining how he knows all these people who are famous and how he sent $500.00 each to the paramedics who rescued him from his near fatal accident. How he could not even talk or pee, or eat for a long time after that but that the doctor did some sort of whatever after the accident and it saved his faculties eventually. (I was wishing modern medicine hadn't been quite so advanced right then.) He rambled on about Ferrari's and strange bonding moments with famous people until I nearly lost my mind. The really astonishing thing was how he never let my coworker get a word in edgewise. It was like that guy on TV who wants to talk you into buying his greater, newer, less expensive, product. I have never met anyone with a greater capacity for malarkey. He went zipping through all the male hot button subjects like a jet.  Cool cars, yea he has driven millions of them. Injuries. Celebrities. Martial Arts.

I think he is normally kept in a dark little room somewhere and only allowed out once a year to speak to other people. I think he was in a desperate rush to show us all how truly COOL he is. (As if the jacket did not do it for me) I think he normally takes anti psychotic drugs daily and missed a dose.

Having been warned by several emails the interviewer did not spend enough time listening to his stories and wanted to focus on work. At the end of it this guy starts saying things like "I don't want to get tough here, but I need a job now". By then I was wondering if I would need therapy when this guy left. So he stops by my desk, knocks on it and says "Hopefully I'll be working here in a couple of days!"

Honey, I'm sorry. The best you can hope for is not being arrested if you come back.

Whoa there Nellie

I started this blog back up because I want to keep track of something I call "the curse".
For emperical research and data recording, I am using this blog.
I am cursed with a curse. and this is how it goes:  Sunday, January 6th I paid tithing. By the time I got home from church the heater in my house was shot and would not churn out a fart's worth of btu's. When I left it was working fine. After BD rewired it and reset virtually every electronic device known to exist in the house, I lost my phone.
 The cellphone is part of the curse and this is how that goes: I own only 3 kinds of cellphones
the one with no bars or reception in my home
the one that is totally drained of power
and the one that someone else is using right now.
So it showing up missing is not that unusual.... except right now I also have a car that hooks up to the cellphone and it could be working in the car for me if I could find it.
Last year in October my boss of 7 years decided to sell off the business and thus I got among my parting gifts the above mentioned car, which don't get me wrong... totally rocks. However I did have about 3 months of palpitations over where I would go to work and when. Thankfully, I got a job right away, and here comes the curse... both the other women I work with were there when he presented me the brand new car: fostering resentment on an epic scale for the new girl. Plus both of them have a really bitchy outlook on having someone new there sucking up their airspace evidently. These are my "trainers". Ha ha. Luckily, I can only suck so much before someone notices and forces one of them to tell me something.
Next part of curse: Appliances. Our water heater does not work right. If you want to use hot water at my house you need 3 hours notice to heat it up. My 7 year old grandson can start the water heater up. The thing NEVER has worked in 6 years and we have replaced it 2 times.
Neither does the refrigerator. There are 2 dead refrigerators in my back yard. I bought a brand new one when we moved in here. It lasted about 4 years. Robert bought 3 since then and on Wednesday of this week, the newest one of those died. The newest one will be delivered Monday.
This is stove # 3 we are currently killing. It looks like if you took a stove from the 1970's and broke several places off, beat up the outside, and rolled it in oil (well maybe a fire too). It works a lot of the time, which is better than the last 2.
Next part of the curse: Computers. Some will argue with me on this one but I am telling you my luck with computers is just terrible. I can't get black Bart (my laptop) to do anything. I just want to watch a dvd.
Anyway the last part of this darn curse is physical;
I have a HUGE toothache. I have dental insurance so I would go to the dentist, but both the top and the bottom hurts. It happens a lot. It will stop if I eat enough decongestants, so it is not my teeth.
But I can not seem to keep it under control.

new year

I am not a new year celebrating kind of girl so I went to bed at 9 ish. Now that it is January 1, 2012 though I have a few things to be grateful for from 2011 and thought I should jot them down.
I had a job.. all through the recession that has been so far I kept my job!
We did have paycuts and layoffs, but I survived.
I had a car.. A pos held together with duct tape and way beyond banged up, but functional.
I have my children and their children to love.
That's all I really need.