Happy Birthday to Wa-wa!!

Today (Saturday) is Wa-wa’s birthday!!!  Happy Birthday!!  I hope that you have a day that’s as wonderful and special as you are!!

I’m lying in bed, flipping channels at my mom’s and come across my favorite movie of all time

Because Peter O’Toole is my favorite actor of all time and Audrey Hepburn is my favorite actress of all time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Steal_a_Million

New website I love

Thanks to Pixel for sending it my way.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

Poor, poor Glinda

Well, tonight I popped my cherry….as far as hitting a deer. I was on my way to my mom’s. I was in the far left lane and there was a car in the right lane, about a car -length in front of me. All of a sudden a deer came running across the exit ramp, the lane next to me and into my lane. My view of the deer was obscured by the car next to me. I slammed on the brakes, but it was too late. The deer hit and was flung onto my windshield. Thankfully, the windshield held together and the car behind me was able to stop before it hit me. But Glinda did not escape damage:

And who is my mom most concerned about? Not me….no, I’m being treated as though I did this on purpose. Yes, I went out looking for a deer to hit, because I totally enjoy driving a car with damage to it.

<sigh> Oh sure, she’s a little glad that I’m okay - but she made it clear that I put her through a lot with this.

Monday, I’ll get the insides checked out, but the car is riding fine.

This is how today started…

They had just filled a pothole on the ramp to the highway.  The moron in front of me drove right over it, spewing tar over poor Glinda.  However, I drove on and then ran my hand through my hair some minutes later.  And yes, I had been driving with the sunroof open….and there was a piece of tar in my hair.

It had to get better right?

Some parts of it were.,

Things you can’t tell just by looking at her Part VI

78.  I grew up in an upper middle-class family.

79.  My parents had grown up right after the depression.  So, everything that they purchased when they had money was very close to the best of the best.

80.  My parents are/were very very good with money.  However, that did not pass on to any of us but Bro 1 and Sis 2.

81.  Until recently, I have never ever looked at the prices of anything I purchased.

82.  For 10 years I would spend $150 every 6 weeks to have my hair cut and colored at an upscale hair salon.

83.  However, I now go to Great Clips to get my hair cut and I color my hair myself.

84.  For 10 years I would shop at grocery stores like The Hills Market and (later on) Whole Foods.

85.  Sometimes I would shop at Giant Eagle or Target for groceries.  I do love Target for everything else as well.

86.  For the first time last night, I went grocery shopping at Walmart.

87.  I finally looked at prices.

88.  Yes, I have lived a privileged life, at least money-wise.

to be continued…

That’s going to hurt in the morning….or even now

Let’s see, today I:

• Didn’t get out of bed until 1pm.
• I so need a break from work.  I love my job but I have been burning the candle in every possible manner since September and I. am. fried.
• I then went to my appointment with the oral surgeon to talk about an implant.  Go ahead, get it out of your systems.  Okay, done giggling?  Good.  It’s about a dental implant.  Sillies.  I had to have a tooth pulled even after a root canal and now I need an implant.  It will cost around $2000.  I need to find out how much my insurance will pay.
• Then I bought $40 worth of gas (which just put me above half a tank) into Glinda and headed to work.
• I worked from 4-8 and then I went shopping (more on this later).
• I unloaded all of the groceries, including the giant bag o’ liter for Wondercatt.
• Then I changed her litter….and as I stood and held said giant bag…I felt some pops in my lower back….and I wonder how that’s going to turn out.  Cuz it already hurts if I move the wrong way.

Not a very productive day.  Tomorrow I have to teach 2 classes; Friday 2 more.  Monday is another round of new folks and I have 8 confirmed with the possibility of having 11 total.

But……But….

I also have the week after Memorial Day off. Tra la la la la.  I am so excited.  I just need this break so much.  Yay!!!  During that time I am hoping to go see Tut-Tut and the baby.  I also have plans with Munchesmom - yay!!!  Munchesmom is pregnant with her 4th baby.

And, Miley, Mischa and I are going to go to the psychic one day.  Woot woot!!!

Good advice for everyone

May 14, 2008

1. Pisces (2/19-3/20)

   Getting caught up in the past is not something you should be doing right now — there are too many important opportunities in front of you, and you can’t afford to be distracted by things that have already happened and don’t really matter anymore. Instead, you need to be living in the present and realizing what is possible in your life. So put away your old photo albums, pack up your journals and start making plans for your future than have nothing to do with your past.

Tut-Tut’s baby girl

The Divine Miss E.  Too adorable!!  Almost makes me want one….almost.

Update on the Leap of Faith

So, The Professor said that he is more focused on our friendship right now.  Boo hoo for me.  Ah well, can’t win them all.

Things you can’t tell just by looking at her Part V

66.  I am done being a friend to people who are not a friend to me.  What do I mean by that?  It’s this - the “friends” that only call when they need to talk.  The ones who call when they have nothing to say but are ready to listen to you - those are your true friends.

67.  I have never voted in my life.  And yes, I have bitched about George W. I suppose most people think I shouldn’t because I didn’t vote, but it’s my one vote against, oh over a million?  It wasn’t going to make a difference.  I know, I’ll hear it on this one.  It’s more that I think the system is so frakked up, I just can’t stand to be part of it.

68.  I think that the more walls you put up, you become a prisoner of your own creation.  One of the reasons I’m so open and honest on here is that I refuse to be imprisoned by my own thoughts or emotions.

69.  I think you can love Carly Simon, but not James Taylor or vice versa.

70.  I love to kiss.  It’s probably my favorite part of any romantic relationship.  Kissing is heaven for me. As long as he’s a good kisser.

71.  If he’s not a good kisser….he won’t be good at anything else either.  Trust me, I’ve tested this out.

72.  I love snuggling and cuddling.  I nuzzle into the neck and that’s my happy place.

73.  However, if it’s time for sleep, you need to move to your own side of the bed.  I get too hot (temperature-wise) and claustrophobic otherwise.

74.  I love sex.  I love the sensations, the closeness, the textures.

75.  And as I’ve said before, if things are not right in the bedroom, they’re not right anywhere.  All of your friends who say, we don’t have a sex life but we’re closer than ever…bullshit!!

76.  I think it’s a personal choice as to how long you’re in a relationship before you start having sex.  Sometimes you just know and sometimes it takes time.

77.  I don’t think it’s possible to include others in the bedroom and not damage your one-on-one relationship.  That’s just my personal opinion.  Granted, I’ve never been open to trying that, either.

to be continued….

Then she shouldn’t frakking be allowed to adopt!!!

Madonna too busy to attend Malawi adoption ruling

By Mabvuto BandaTue May 13, 2:38 PM ET

U.S. pop star Madonna will not attend the final court ruling on her request to adopt a Malawian child because she is busy with other engagements, her lawyer said on Tuesday. (Really? Mani/pedi?  More awful plastic surgery???)

The High Court is expected to approve Madonna’s bid to formally adopt 2-year-old David Banda at a final session on Thursday. Malawi’s government and David’s father — his only surviving parent — have endorsed the adoption.

“We are going to court on Thursday, but Madonna will not be there because she is not coming,” Madonna’s lawyer, Alan Chinula told Reuters. “The judge has indicated that he cannot object to her being absent when making the ruling.”

Chinula said Madonna had “other engagements,” which he declined to disclose.

A court clerk said Madonna’s lawyer has asked for a later court date — the singer’s third request for a postponement — because their client “had other business matters to deal with.” He confirmed the judge could go ahead without her.

The adoption has been controversial, with critics accusing the government of skirting laws that ban non-residents from adopting children in Malawi, a southern African nation ravaged by an AIDS epidemic that has left more than 1 million orphans.

But one of Malawi’s fiercest critics of Madonna’s adoption bid, the Human Rights Consultative Committee, said on Monday it was no longer interested in pursuing the case, removing another obstacle.

Madonna began adoption proceedings in 2006, and David has been living with the singer and her husband, film director Guy Ritchie, in their London home since then. She took custody of David when he was 13 months old after his father had placed him in an orphanage following the death of his wife.

David’s father, Yohane Banda, told Reuters Television this week, “This is what I wanted, that Madonna should keep the child.”

Reuters/Nielsen

What a frakking horrible excuse for a human being.

True heroism and humanism at its best

Polish Holocaust hero dies at age 98

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA, Associated Press WriterMon May 12, 12:35 PM ET

Irena Sendler - credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets - died Monday, her family said. She was 98.

Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.

President Lech Kaczynski expressed “great regret” over Sendler’s death, calling her “extremely brave” and “an exceptional person.” In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler’s name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto - and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory,” Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families - most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps - Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.

“It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child,” Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler’s team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. “Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.”

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members - a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo.

The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body - but she refused to betray her team.

“I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity,” she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska’s biography, “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler.”

Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.

After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.

“A great person has died - a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak,” Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marek Eldeman told TVN24 television.

In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland’s communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Sender’s “courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind.”

Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland until recent years. She came to the world’s attention in 2000 when a group of schoolgirls from Uniontown, Kan., wrote a short play about her called “Life in a Jar.”

It went on to garner international attention, and has been performed more than 200 times in the United States, Canada and Poland.

Sendler, born Irena Krzyzanowska, said she lived according to her physician father’s teachings, arguing that “people can be only divided into good or bad; their race, religion, nationality don’t matter.”

She married Mieczyslaw Sendler but they divorced after the war’s end. Sendler then married fellow underground activist Stefan Zgrzembski, and they had two sons and a daughter. One died a few days after birth. The second son, Adam, died of a heart failure in 1999.

Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughter.

Things you can’t tell just by looking at her Part IV

51.  I am not always kind.

52  I am not always the best version of myself.

53.  I am incredibly lucky in my friendships.

54.  Though, my friends know that there is always a line in the sand with me.

55.  It takes a lot to get me upset.

56.  It takes a lot to get me upset enough to tell you that I’m upset.

57.  You have to get me upset over and over again before I will kick you out of my life.  But….I will if you push me that far.

58.  I don’t just let a friendship that’s going downhill fade away.  I tell you it’s over, so that we’re both on the same page.

59.  It’s not for me to be mean, it’s for closure for both of us.

60.  I don’t take it that far until every button has been pushed over and over again and we’ve tried to work it out.

61. No one is harder on me than me.

62.  I expect perfection out of myself.

63.  I expect a lot less from everyone else.

64. I don’t dislike all men for what a few have done to me.

65.  I think women have the ability to be just as awful in relationships as men do.

to be continued

How I feel today

How - Lisa Loeb

i didn’t come this far for you to make this hard for me.
and now you want to ask me “how?”
it’s like - how does your heart beat, and why do you breathe?
how does your heart beat, and why do you breathe?

why did you come here?
you weren’t invited.
and you’re on the outside - stay on the outside.
and now you want to ask me “why?”
it’s like - why does your heart beat, and how do you cry?
how does your heart beat?

and there are some things that i’d like to figure out.
there are some things that i can do without -
like you and your letters that go on forever,
and you, and the people that were never friends.

with all the things that you could be,
you never could learn how to be me.
and now you want to ask me “how?”
it’s like - how does your heart beat, and why do you breathe?
how does you heart beat, and why do you breathe?

Leap of faith

May 12, 2008

1. Pisces (2/19-3/20)

   Relying on your analytical skills for business and financial decisions is smart, but why use them when you’re contemplating your next romantic move? Logic does not apply to human emotions — emotions apply to human emotions. So think with your heart and be open and honest about what you feel. You can’t predict how someone else will act, you can only believe them when they tell you how they feel. If you don’t like the answer, at least you know that you can move on without having any regrets.

********

In that vein, I sent off of missive to the person for whom I’m having feelings.  We’ll see what happens.

Things you can’t tell just by looking at her Part III

33.  I was born bald with blue eyes.

34.  My eyes turned green when I was 5.

35.  My hair was blonde until I turned about 5, then it started darkening into ash brown with red and blonde highlights.

36.  I found my first gray hair at 16.

37.  I am now completely gray, so I color my hair.  My mom was completely gray at 27, so I knew I would have to color my hair early.

38.  I still resent it, but that’s besides the point.

39.  I failed my driver’s license test on the first try.  It was the maneuverability part - I had a ‘77 Bonneville and you know that they move the cones closer for the actual test.

40.  I was so upset I walked home from the test, with my mom driving beside me - Honey do you want to get into the car now?  NO.

41.  I passed it on the second try - used my brother’s Corsica.

42.  I have to date received….7 speeding tickets and 3 parking tickets.  Personally, I don’t get upset about those things, as I often know that I’m at fault to begin with.

43.  I have no fear when I drive.

44.  I actually don’t fear death the way most people do.  I don’t believe that this is the end-all, be-all of our existence.  No one has gotten out of it alive.  I just don’t want to suffer.

45.  I believe that I’m only in a race against me.  My life is not to be measured up against others.  It’s mine.  My journey, my path.

46.  I believe in psychics.

47.  I believe in ghosts.  Remind me to tell some of my own experiences on here.

48.  I believe that there are miracles.

49.  I think that if you don’t have kids, your health insurance should cover your pets.

50.  I believe that you have more than one soulmate - some are just friends, some are lovers, some are both.

to be continued…

New Favorite Song

“Say” - John Mayer

Take all of your wasted honor
Every little past frustration
Take all of your so-called problems,
Better put ‘em in quotations

Say what you need to say [x8]

Walking like a one man army
Fighting with the shadows in your head
Living out the same old moment
Knowing you’d be better off instead,
If you only could . . .

Say what you need to say [x8]

Have no fear for giving in
Have no fear for giving over
You’d better know that in the end
Its better to say too much
Then never say what you need to say again

Even if your hands are shaking
And your faith is broken
Even as the eyes are closing
Do it with a heart wide open

Say what you need to say [x24
"Say"

Take all of your wasted honor
Every little past frustration
Take all of your so-called problems,
Better put ‘em in quotations

Say what you need to say [x8]

Walking like a one man army
Fighting with the shadows in your head
Living out the same old moment
Knowing you’d be better off instead,
If you only could . . .

Say what you need to say [x8]

Have no fear for giving in
Have no fear for giving over
You’d better know that in the end
Its better to say too much
Then never say what you need to say again

Even if your hands are shaking
And your faith is broken
Even as the eyes are closing
Do it with a heart wide open

Say what you need to say [x24]

Happy Mother’s Day

I loved to watch Laverne & Shirley when I was younger.  One of my favorite episodes was the one where the girls went to win a competition for new mothers.  Now, neither of them were pregnant, but they both faked it with beach balls.  Of course, they were found out right away, but Laverne pointed out that every woman is a mother to be.

Not all of us want human kids - I’m quite happy being the mother to Wondercatt.  So, to all of my fellow pet mothers, Happy Mother’s Day.

For those of you who have taken the leap and reproduced tiny versions of yourself and your life partner/spouse/significant others/exes or chosen to adopt a bundle of joy, I wish you a wonderful Mother’s Day as well.

For those of you who hope to grow your family at some point, I wish you well.  Again, in each of our own ways, we are mothers.

Weekend Update

Jane, you ignorant slut!!  Oops, was channeling Dan Akroyd there for a second.  Tee hee hee.

Friday I was supremely exhausted and slept most of the morning away.  Then RRASK took me to lunch for my birthday (yes, I’m still celebrating) at my favorite Chinese restaurant.  She also bought me this beautiful plant.

She’s so good to me.  I am so lucky to have the wonderful and amazing friends I do.

Friday night I went to a Tastefully Simple house at Cinbad’s house.  It was so great to see her and some other friends from Happy Acres.  They are all doing so well - it’s so lovely to see it.  Cinbad’s house is absolutely GORGEOUS.  She and I have the same color/decorating style and to see it brought to fruition was just so amazing.  She did an amazing job.

Saturday I went and ran some errands, then picked up Wa-wa.  That lovely lady came over here and scrubbed my kitchen and bathroom while I organized as much as I could in the time we had together.  I can see carpet!!  I can walk around without tripping!!  I can picture using the living room!!

We had a lovely dinner and watched some movies.  Fine family fun all around.  Again, I don’t even know what I do to deserve such wonderful friends, but I hope that I can keep them and do them justice in the end.

Today, I had planned on going to see my mom.  However I have decided that instead i am going to relax, vacuum the carpet that has miraculously appeared in my condo, and run errands.  Tomorrow I have to go to Cleveland to teach for the next 2 days.