You gotta love family.

Jason and his mother are going out of town for a wedding on the 29th and coming home on the 3rd.  J’s mom is very excited to spend some time alone with her adult son.  Jason and I have been together a decade now and out of our parents home to what now adds up to the majority of our adult lives.  Because she was finishing school my sister in law lived at home longer and let’s face it, mom’s and daughters tend to be closer.  J’s also really looking forward to the trip, it’s been almost 6 years since we went anywhere fun and he really needs the break.

But with him being gone there is a small problem.  I work 8 to 4 every weekday and my mom watches Kyle.  Because of his schedule J takes Kyle to my mom’s at either 9am or noon and he also has Friday’s off.  Him being gone will mean my mom has to watch Kyle from 7:30 until 4:30ish and this is going to be hard on her.  So I asked one of my nieces, Nichole, to stay with me that week and watch Kyle in the morning then take him to grandma’s in the afternoon so she could hang out.  She’s all for it, I start planning in my head, I took the Friday J will be gone off so we’ll make home-made-from-scrach cinnomon rolls.  I’ll let her play in my cloest and even try on my wedding dress.

That was until I sent a txt message to my sister.  Her response was very much a meh.  She pointed out it was the day after the twins birthday, I have no earthly idea what that has to do with the price of tea in China but ok.  Nicky might want to stay home.  No, she wants to stay with me.  Most likely because we give her the freedom to be 15 while my sister is like a prison warden.  Hell she barley let’s the kids walk across the street to the school playground.

So my dad calls my sister to find out when they are swapping kids, mom and dad take one of the three on a rotating basis over the summer.  He also mentions the week Jason will be gone because if she won’t let one of the kids stay mom will have to work something out.  My sister blows a gasket.  She’s yelling at my dad that they are her kids  and she might want them to be home and Nichole has work to do.  Tell me, how much work can a girl who’s spent the better part of three weeks gone from home have to do?  What mess has she created at her home?

My dad is having none of it.  He tells her that they don’t need the kids and that she can keep ‘em all.  Of course my brother in law later called to talk about dropping off Lexi and picking up Nichole.

The most amusing part of all this to me is this.  If we offered to take all three of her kids she wouldn’t bat an eye.  You see it’s all about control with her.  We want the kids, she’s in control.  She’s asked to take Kyle over night on several occasions.  It’s a no go.  She doesn’t respect my no smoking around him rule, she had a Pit Bull.  Now, it’s not the breed I object too in this case.  It’s that Kon is very, very hyper.  Loving as all get out but cannot bowl people over.  He’ll she’s put my ass on the floor a time or two.  And because I feel like if I say sure she’ll twist it and figure she’s doing me some huge favor and I’ll ‘owe’ her.

I was only trying to help my mom because having Kyle that long over that many days will be very hard on her but I’ll figure something else out.  The only person my sister is hurting is her daughter in this.  But she’ll never, ever realize that.

The short work week.

What is it about a short work week that sucks all the life out of you? My Monday and Tuesday have sucked giant orbits of suck.

Work is not fun, home is hectic and my omelet just turned into scrambled eggs.  Oh, and my kid hates me.  He clings to daddy, takes grandma his toys and freaks when I try and pick him up.  I’m like a giant kicking post for him lately.

The cats are spitting up hair balls, I spilled coffee on my bathroom rug.  My blueberry muffins taste flat and I burned my hand with the chicken stock.  There is spilled milk on my bedsheets.  Tell me, is it ok to cry about it now?

I’ve had to say the phrases, “stop touching your penis it’s full of poop” “the cats tail is not food” and “for the love of God let me pick that booger PLEASE.”

I keep forgetting to get coffee, my hair color has gone flat and I’ve gotten one of the few periods you get when you have an IUD.

There is a pimple the size of another head just into my hair line.  Yay.  It’s covered up but if I brush my hair it hurts.

My head hurts again, my body is angry at me and my left eye itches.  The right twitches in sympathy.

The monitor has wavy lines.

Short weeks are teh suxzor.

The advertisment crunch

I visit a lot of websites.  Some daily others a few times a month.  Each is different with different people and topics and a different vibe.  Some I join for the lively debate or others the informational content.  One I go to through the day because I keep up with friends there who cheer each other through life.  The one thing they all have in common is the need for revenue.

There are those that charge a sub to pay the bills and keep ads off the site.  These are usually journaling type sites where you post to a journal and then can post to others.  Generally these are there for us to hang out, meet new people with common lives or goals.  We can lose weight together, get pregnant together, talk about our weddings and our daily lives.  Almost none of them are there to make money.

Then there are those that are attached to stores.  These boards are usually heavy on the content for the product being sold.  Like candle making on a candle making supply website.  Often the boards are just there to let people help each other out with their hobby/business.

But here are the ones that lose people but don’t care.  These boards are maintained by companies who use these boards to sell ads so that they can make money.  The money doesn’t come back to the posters who’s views are what generates the ad money and once they start with one small one then the blow up into bigger and more annoying ads.

Kaboose.com is about the worst I’ve seen yet.  They start off with a few banner ads.  Then they are all along the side and sometimes you get pop ups.  The ads are supposedly tailored to the link you are reading or the cookies on your computer but I’ve never really found that to be the case.  It’s almost always a mis mosh of things that people think you’ll like.  If I’m on a scrapbooking board I get ads for birthday party kits, mini vans and Disney vacations.  The reasoning is that all scrapbookers are SHAM’s who love mini vans, wear Mickey Mouse sweats and die over the chance to throw their 2.5 kids a blow out birthday bash.

Now the newest idea is to take a word, such as groceries, then link that word to an ad.  Isn’t that just lovely.  You’re making money off the fact I’m already visiting the site.  Now you get the added bonus of using my words to link to other ads so you can make even more money.  All the while all you’re doing is pissing me off to the point you make me want to leave your site.

The thing is that these companies don’t care.  There will always be someone else who’ll come along who won’t mind these things.  Who might not know that once the site didn’t have so many ads that your computer slowed down each time you opened a page.  The limits will continue to be pushed because the internet always has new people join.

Frankly I’d rather pay a fee to avoid being told I should buy Tide or Bounce and that I should have a Honda in my garage and how much happier my son would be with Grranimals clothes.  I don’t need to have almost all of my daily life be one large commercial and I’m starting to worry that I won’t be able to keep my son from these companies that scream to his mommy about how much easier life would be if she only bought Glade!

Oh, one last thing.  I notice once the ads start the moderation ramps up.  As if these brain dead troglodytes miss the whole point that they were able to get the price and the advertiser based on the amount of people who log in and view each day and that those people were coming for the train wreak threads.  No, they want to make everything happy and clean so that Huggies won’t be advertised along side a thread with a topic with boob or period or I hate *insert public person’s name*!  Well maybe not the period thing.  Then they could sell me Always.

Damn Darcy

This last summer J and I had a friend staying with us.  The short version of his sad tale is that his mother is insane.  I’m not sure it’s clinically insane but I do know the women is one crayon short in the box.

And so Darcy stayed with us a summer to try and think without her yelling at him in Mandarin at the top of her lungs while she gave the dog thing she has an ice cream cone.  Somehow the PO got the idea in their minds this meant Jason and I moved.  It took us a while to notice the problem because almost all of our mail continued to make it to us.  Our car bills, WE, Time Warner, and bank stuff.  You know the letters you run out to get.
Meanwhile stuff was being sent back.  And suddenly we figured out even that wasn’t consitant.  I have gotten cards that have two envlopes.  One that got to my mail box and the second with the yellow sticker stating we’ve moved and we have no forwarding address.  All the packages our most generous friends sent us for Kyle arrived.
The final shove is two fold.  Our insurance cards have not yet arrived even though I’ve called 5 times and we are now stalking the mail box for Kyle’s birth certificate and his social security card.  As it’s now 6 weeks we are getting nervous.

So I call our insurance company in a good pissed off mood and ream the rep out that yet again our cards are not at our doorstep.  A manager finally called me back today and she finally told me that our cards are being returned saying we don’t live where we live.  Well now I get even more pissed.  Mostly because it took 5 people to tell me something as simple as that.  I mean, really, how hard was it to do that?  Yes it took longer than saying “Well Ma’am, I’ll send them out again.”  Fucking lazy people.  Also I’ve fired reps on the spot who have spoken to me the way I was spoken too over the course of the last 5 months from those people.

So anyway, before I get off on a rant I can’t control, I called the Post Office and the lady there said that it wasn’t anything they’d done on their end.  Someone at the main branch here must have decided that, but she did agree with me that it’s more than weird some stuff is getting through.

So what does this mean?  Jason or I, most likely him, will have to go to the court house to get another birth certificate for Kyle then take that to the social security office to have them reissue his social security card because without these things we can’t get him insured.  Given that right know the kid has cost us almost $8k in medical bills if we had to pay them out of pocket, we are sort of in a bind to make sure it’s done.

So all this mess I lay at Darcy’s door.  In fact blaming Darcy for everything is somewhat of a sport for me and our friends.  I think this one might win the weekly “What was Darcy’s fault” pool.