The corpsmen and I were having a lengthy discussion of good vs. great movies, and of course this came up: (Sorry I can't embed; just clicky-click)

http://www.familyguyfiles.com/peter-hates-the-godfather-video/

"Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, I mean you never see.... ROBERT DUVAL!"

My new(ish) job has me back to 12 hour shifts with a rare, blessed 8 thrown in once in awhile.  Being a poor widow woman, I rely heavily on my mother and the graces of the local Boys and Girls Club for the kiddos.  This enables me to work long hours, knowing that my children are cared for and, more importantly, not performing unsupervised experiments on each other or burning each other in effigy.  The way this works is, my mother comes over in time for me to actually arrive to work on time, gets the kids off to school, and then they take a bus from their respective schools to the Boys and Girls Club for a few hours until my mom fetches them home again, jiggity-jig.  FB, despite being far too cool for this, can be relied to arrive at the Club albeit with much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.  SoS, on the other hand, looooooooves the Boys and Girls Club, and will often end up thereon my days off instead of taking the bus home.  Mind you, he is reminded which bus he is to take on a daily basis, which, in good nursing school fashion, he can repeat back verbatim.  Now, this child has a memory to rival Rain Man's.  He has, without consulting a map or signposts, gotten my mother un-lost from the woods.  It is a rare day he doesn't actually know what he's doing; I think we can agree on that.  Apparently, today he "forgot" and came home instead of going to the Club, where all activities are SUPERVISED.  An hour and a half later, my mother went to pick the boys up and found out, after FB searched all over the place, that SoS had never checked in.  She races to my house and the boy is outside, garage door up, bike and scooter out, Knucklehead McSpazatron staked out in the front yard, and my poor retired, neighbors out in their front yard, probably praying for someone to come home, for the love of SHIVA!  The neighbor had fixed SoS's scooter, more than likely got his ear talked off, SoS had staked the dog out because, "we hadn't done it in awhile, and (he) wanted to do it one more time."  I'm just glad he didn't let Crackhead out and ended up chasing him through the county.  Long, fervent conversations on safety followed.

In all the hubbub, my mom meant to make some dinner for the kids before SoS went to Scouts, but SoS's adventure threw off her schedule and they didn't have time to wait for the meatloaf to finish.  So, she left instructions with FB on when to take dinner out of the oven and got SoS McD's to go.  When she got home she discovered that FB had eaten 7/8 of the meatloaf and 6 of the 8 biscuits were gone.  He swears he only ate 2 biscuits and the other 4 must have been devoured by the dogs.  These are some talented dogs, peeps!  They were able to lift those four biscuits individually completely without disturbing the pan.  I'm going to have to hire these guys out for delicate micro-processor building. What is it about tweeners and teenagers that lead them to believe the adults in their lives have the IQ of your basic cabbage? 

There are a few things I should never do.  Let us first propose that most nurses are under medicated, OCD germaphobes.  As such, cleaning carpets is best left to the professionals, or at least, some method that does not allow one to view the product of the cleaning.  Because, right now, I'm debating whether I should demolish the house and just start over.  Frankly, if what I've seen the last few days is any indication. we are living in a disease ridden hovel, furnished in smut and dog hair. 

I actually started to write this several days ago and fell asleep in the middle of it.  I took it as a sign.  Of what, I have no idea.  


Just a small comment on the government shutdown that didn't happen on Saturday.  Being a federal employee in a health care setting, makes me an essential employee, and thus there was no hope of a furlough and I better show my face at work.  As I have noted to my father (who worries incessantly about me being a single working mother) I don't make a shit ton of money, but I make a LOT of money, and if I'm hurting it's because, basically, I'm an idiot.  Even with my predilection for all things Target, I have enough to meet my needs and most of my wants.  So, I'd have to use my tax return to pay for necessities instead of buying a Tempurpedic for my birthday.  Oh, gasp!  I'd have to wait to buy my luxury bed item.  My outraged stemmed from thinking about the troops in forward areas who wouldn't get paid, or even my poor little E1s to E3s, some of which have little mouths to feed, trying to live on half pay.  And good for Navy Federal who said they would cover the other half the paychecks for their members.  Awesome!  Until you realize, these people will get the retro pay, all in one lump sum I'm sure, get absolutely raped on the taxes and then Navy Fed will, rightly so, want their money back.  And so these poor kids will be back in the same boat.  Meanwhile Congress and the CIC, bitching and moaning about we're so sorry, we have no money to pay our service members.  Hey!  Here's an idea:  take a leaf out of Lee Iacocca's book (literally!) and pay yourself $1 a year salary until we're out of this hole.
/rant off

Okay, I just smashed my soapbox into kindling; so here's my theme song:

Talk about mudflaps, my girl's got 'em!

As I believe I've mentioned before, FB's bed is a captain's bed that requires great feats of strength and agility to make.  Why I thought this bed would be a good purchase was, no doubt, influenced by my having a six foot tall, 200 pound man conveniently located in my house at the time.  Since that is no longer the case, I dread making the damn thing.  For some reason, I only had one set of sheets for this bed, which required me to strip the bed, wash sheets, and remake all in the same day.  Which is more effort than I really want to exert in any given moment.  So, I bought new sheets.  Yay!  And this week I stripped his bed, and Voila!  I had sheets to put on it right away!  Now, to get to the point of this post.  So, I have this stupid HUGE mattress off the bed so I can make the far side of it before I flop it back on the frame and make the rest of it, and I'm sweating like a diabetic in a candy store from lifting, turning, stretching, and climbing over all the crap all over the room despite telling him 95 THOUSAND TIMES to clean his farooking room, and I'm getting all dreamy eyed about the smell of clean sheets when I look down and see, on my hormonal 12 year old's bedroom floor, one of my thongs.  And not the definition of thong from the '70s, mind you, my 2011 thong!  Of course, the rational, analytical part of my brain knew, knew, that it had been stuck to the sheets with static cling from the dryer and it fell off when I shook out the sheets, but for a split second that was drowned out by the reptile/monkey boy part of my brain absolutely screeching "WHAT THE HELL IS MY THONG DOING ON HIS FLOOR????"

w00t!

This Is My Anthem Lately.....Seriously.

The Cat From Hell has become extremely loving and sociable. After 11 years of his tyranny, I can't tell if he is on his way to The Happy Hunting Grounds or if he has finally made the decision to slay us in our beds in the dark of night.

Last week, when the kids were on Mid-winter Break, yet another excuse for teachers in our district to have a week off (and yes, Spring Break will be coming up in a couple of weeks, the kids and I went to Michael The Extremely Gay Hairdresser to get coiffed. Michael decided that we needed to start trending my hair into a blonde, chunky bob. And so he has started the gradual transition. The First Born only gets the very tippy ends of his hair trimmed, to maintain the cool teenage long hair look (heaving a sigh of relief that Justin Bieber has now shorn his famous locks) and the Spawn of Satan likes his hair military short, so, in his words, to avoid the need to scrub a lot to get his hair clean. This also precludes the need to comb, style, or really, manage his hair in anyway whatsoever. I am fine with SoS's hairstyle choices because he looks cute with his hair like that and if it gets too long he starts hacking into it with a pair of scissors. So Michael cut his hair to his specifications; not bootcamp shorn, but short enough to not cause any problems. I had this Monday and Tuesday off and worked Wednesday. SoS came to say goodnight Wednesday night while I was brushing my teeth and, as I leaned over to kiss him goodnight, I noticed some light colored spots on his head. Upon closer inspection, I realized that he had cut his hair to the scalp for a major part of the top of his head. Had this been the first time this had happened I would have handled this situation with some sort of decorum and calm. As this was the third time, in a year, I sort of, um, lost my shit, shall we say.

I yelled about how I had paid good money for a haircut just last week and why did I bother if he was just going to hack into his hair, why did he hack into his hair, he looks like an idiot, did he really want his friends to make fun of him because they will, I should just shave his head if this is what he was going to do and WHAT WAS HE THINKING?!? He in turn was bawling, he didn't know why he did it, he didn't want his head shaved and so on, so on, so on. There was a pile of hair on the bathroom floor, in the garbage and, for some reason, all over the toilet. I stomped downstairs and got the clippers, stomped back upstairs and bent his head backwards over the sink while I shaved him. The clippers need to be sharpened and they caught on his hair, pulling his head back as I went along his scalp. With every pull SoS exclaimed, "Ow! Why does it hurt?" I pointed out that if he had left well enough alone, he would be pain free and in bed by now. Because of the havoc he wreaked, I had to shave his hair down to the point where he no longer looked as if he were suffering from a bad case of mange. Which, is to the scalp. Meanwhile the First Born is taking a shower behind us and out of the corner of my eye I see him get out of the shower, dry off, and, without making eye contact, slink into his bedroom to get dressed. He then came out, brushed his teeth, said goodnight, and went straight to bed without our usual conversation about not reading in bed after I have declared lights out. He was just trying to avoid being caught in any crossfire, I'm sure. Mama was lit and he was toeing the line to avoid my notice. SoS got into the shower to rinse the hair off, got out and tried to explain his position. Unfortunately for him, I wanted to part of any words coming out of his mouth, dried him off in a manner that may have removed skin and then made him find his scissors while I stood there and continued to vent my spleen. This is when I noticed the piles of hair in the bedroom as well. Personally, I think my children will require therapy at some point in their lives. The only question is how soon and on whose insurance.