A Season for Everything

25 SIGNS YOU HAVE GROWN UP…..

1. Your houseplants are alive, and you can’t smoke any of them.
2. Having sex in a twin bed is out of the question.
3. You keep more food than beer in the fridge.
4. 6:00 AM is when you get up, not when you go to bed.
5. You hear your favorite song in an elevator.
6. You watch the Weather Channel.
7. Your friends marry and divorce instead of “hook up” and “break up.”
8. You go from 130 days of vacation time to 14.
9. Jeans and a sweater no longer qualify as “dressed up.”
10. You’re the one calling the police because those %&@# kids next door won’t turn down the stereo.
11. Older relatives feel comfortable telling sex jokes around you.
12. You don’t know what time Taco Bell closes anymore.
13. Your car insurance goes down and your car payments go up.
14. You feed your dog Science Diet instead of McDonald’s leftovers.
15. Sleeping on the couch makes your back hurt.
16. You take naps.
17. Dinner and a movie is the whole date instead of the beginning of one.
18. Eating a basket of chicken wings at 3 AM would severely upset, rather than settle, your stomach.
19. You go to the drug store for ibuprofen and antacid, not condoms and pregnancy tests.
20. A $4.00 bottle of wine is no longer “pretty good stuff.”
21. You actually eat breakfast food at breakfast time.
22. “I just can’t drink the way I used to” replaces “I’m never going to drink that much again.”
23. 90% of the time you spend in front of a computer is for real work.
24. You drink at home to save money before going to a bar.
25. When you find out your friend is pregnant you congratulate them instead of asking “Oh S*$# what the hell happened?”

BONUS: You read this entire list looking desperately for one sign that doesn’t apply to you and can’t find one to save your sorry old butt.

I had to take the car into Greensburg today to get it inspected. Actually, we took it to Sears yesterday and got the tires rotated, the cooling system flushed, the oil changed and the emissions checked. And why didn’t it get inspected you ask? Because even though I posess a valid registration, I somehow don’t have a nice little 2006 sticker on my license plate. How on Earth can that be, when the stupid things come in the same envelope? The short answer…I HAVE NO IDEA!

So, the new plan was for me to rush to AAA after work this morning, pick up a new sticker and take the car back to Sears. Nothing is ever that easy. I’m standing at the AAA counter, the woman has checked my license, asked me tons of questions and filled out most of a page-long form, then she looks at the registration, which is in Tim’s name, not mine. Oops! The nice AAA lady is sorry, but she can’t help me since the car isn’t in my name. She gave me the form. If I bring it back tomorrow with Tim’s license number and signature on it I may finally have my sticker and then I can get the car inspected. I really thought about taking it out to the car, signing Tim’s name myself and calling him for his license number, but that would be another one of those rules of life I don’t break.

Since I had the morning unexpectedly free and I was in Greensburg anyway, I stopped by Office Max to pick up some file folders for Tim and then treated myself to some uninterupted time at Barnes & Noble. The latter was probably a really bad idea (and this is where the “Somebody Slap Me” comes in). I bought not one, but FIVE books! Yes, it’s sad, but true…..I am a bookaholic. I am dying to start reading all of them. Right now. Today. Patience is not one of my virtues. Here are the books I got. You’ll notice a bit of a theme that honors my little journey to discover myself.

A Trip to the Beach: Living on Island Time in the Caribbean is the true story of Melinda and Robert Blanchard’s neverending trip to the beach. It’s about escaping civilization and following your dreams.

Live What You Love: notes from an unusual life is the Blanchard’s follow-up book. The first words on the inside of the dust cover are “Have you ever dreamed of turning life upside down and inside out, and really living as your heart would have you? Do you push your dreams out to ’someday’ conditioned by ‘if only’? Are you stuck between the life you have and a life you would really love?” Geez…..how could I not want to read this???

French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure is yet another diet book, but it seems different from all the rest and seems like an interesting read whether it works or not. The recipes look pretty yummy, too.

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is going to be controversial, I’m sure, but I love reading about this kind of stuff. I also have to admit that while I was taught to believe that the Bible is the unerring Word of God, I’m not so sure I still believe that it is 100% accurate. It has been in the hands of men for millenium and while God is unerring, mankind is not. Given our propensity for sin, it seems feasible that scripture has been corrupted over the centuries to promote man’s political and religeous agendas.

The LIFE Strategies Workbook: Exercises and Self-Tests to Help You Change Your Life has some interesting exercises and questions to help a person (me, hopefully) take stock of their life.

A Christmas Story is my all-time favorite movie, Christmas or otherwise. I wore out the first videotape I had of it. I’m working on the second. Soon I’ll have to buy it on DVD. I watch it year round. I turn it on whenever I’m not doing anything else during the holidays. It is on most of the 24 hours that TBS airs it each Christmas…I’m not sitting there watching it, but when I’ve got a minute to stop, well, there it is. It is one of those movies I can sit and recite the dialog word for word with the actors and it never gets old. I laugh just as much now as I did the first time I saw it. All of the characters are so good, but the dad is my favorite, probably because I can see a bit of my own “old man” in him. Who can forget the epic struggles with the furnace and the tapestry of profanity that still lingers over Lake Michigan? Or the quick whiff of ozone that meant a fuse had been replaced? Or the arrival of the “major award” straight from Italy (well, the crate did say Fra-gee-lay).

Now, for the second time this weekend it’s time to say goodbye to another fine actor who’s become such a part of our culture that he feels like family.

DARREN MCGAVIN 1922-2006

It’s hard to imagine a world without Barney Fife.

Rules.

I’ve always followed them. My parents, especially my dad, had a long list of rules for how to live my life. It didn’t really matter if I agreed with those rules, not that Dad ever asked my opinion. The lesson was learned early on…breaking the rules was NOT worth it. Now, bending the rules was another story. I did that fairly often or at least often enough to find out that Dad’s rules were inflexible, written in stone. My mom once described my relationship with my dad as a train wreck looking for a place to happen. The funny thing is, I never tried to bend any of the “big” rules. I was a good girl (with a barely restrained bad girl dying to get out).

The bad girl got her chance in college. And she ran with it for all she was worth. Again, the lesson was learned that breaking the rules wasn’t worth it when Dad pulled the plug on paying for college (and he never knew the half of what I’d done). I was home for the summer and he made me go to work at the foam rubber plant where he worked. Every single minute spent laminating, buffing, cutting and packaging foam was torture, but I did meet my husband there. We were married 4 1/2 months after our first date. The one and only time I openly and flagrantly went against my dad.

We spent the first two years of our marriage in Orlando, close to my new in-laws, who insisted we needed to “get pregnant.” So, of course, I did. Then my grandmother, who was rattling around alone in a four bedroom house since my grandfather’s death said with the baby’s birth we needed to come home. So, we did. My grandmother chose rooms as her own, told us which would be ours and promised to let me be the mother and not control our lives. She lied. And I let her. She was, after all, my grandmother and respect for my elders was one of those rules drummed into me by my dad. Tim came to hate living there so much that he found a job in Pittsburgh and moved in with my parents to be close to it. He started out coming home every weekend, but dropped back to every other weekend or even less often as my grandmother became more and more controlling and critical. I was miserable, but how could I tell my grandmother? She’d done so much for us. It took me seven months to gather enough courage to tell her Tim was not coming back and the baby and I were leaving to be with him.

Then there is Tim. Over the years I have let him talk me into things I’ve known would mean finacial disaster. We’re currently in a reorganizational bankruptcy and paying back a lot of debt. I’ve put up with him working hours that go far beyond long. I’ve put up with him hardly ever being here for me or the kids. I stayed through the bouts of severe depression he goes through from time to time. I stayed after finding out that a year of pure hell he put me and the kids through was because he was having an affair. I stayed even though he refused to enter into counseling. Why? Because one of the rules in my life is that marriage is forever whether it’s good or bad and the thought of divorce causes me anxiety that is not to be believed. And because I do love him and I want it to work.

My former church really screwed with me, too. My god, the expectations! The pastors and leaders (all my friends, I thought) really laid it on thick. If I was living the way I should as a Christian I should be at every event in the church, I should be active and involved in many things, volunteer as much as possible, be a specific kind of wife and mother, tithe and have no financial problems, etc. The pressure to meet that standard and the guilt I felt for not living up to it were enormous. Is it any wonder I never felt I could turn to anyone there for love and support to help me get through the messes going on in my life? Still, as unhappy as I was, I played along, always wearing my game face. To this day no one there has a clue that my personal life was in tatters.

It’s been since I turned 40 and started examining my life, that I’ve put a lot of thought into this. My whole life I’ve played by the rules to a) keep the peace, b)please others, c)make people like me. In taking stock, I’m seeing that I didn’t always accomplish those goals and I’ve made myself pretty miserable in the process. I’ve been the daughter, wife, mother, friend, church leader, person everyone has told me to be. The one thing I don’t know how to be is who I want to be. Who am I? What do I want to do? Where do I want to be? I need a roadmap that leads to me.

I was thinking about all of this when I named this blog, because there is a season for everything, but now it’s my season. My time to be whoever I turn out to be.

Tim had to put our pet rabbit, Elmo, down last night. Elmo was old as rabbits go and he was sick…wasting away under his fur and suffering spells that left him so weak he couldn’t walk. It was the right thing to do. Still, I’m going to miss his fluffy cuteness.

So long old friend.

Nor a freak snowstorm was going to keep me from going away for the weekend, but Mother Nature sure did try. We woke up at 7:00 Saturday morning to very cold temperatures and snow flurries. By the time we left home at 9:00, the snow was creating a virtual white-out and we had 4 inches on the ground. It was rough driving at first but the further east we went, the better the weather got. By the time we had gone up the mountains and come down the other side, the sun was shining and there wasn’t so much as one flake in sight. We actually ran the car through a car wash to get all the crud off.

Weather aside, we had a good time. Going down we had a late breakfast at Bob Evans in Breezewood, officially known as “The City of Motels,” stopped at a big Harley-Davidson shop in Chambersburg-our friends have a bike and Tim wants one-and stopped at a couple of little shops. We checked into the hotel early enough to relax a little and get ready for the shrimp fest. The food was good, the company fun, but we didn’t win on any of the tickets we bought. We joked that we were saving our luck for the Power Ball drawing, but apparently we’re saving it for something else I don’t know about. Yesterday we stopped at Battlefield Harley-Davidson in Gettysburg and then hit a lot of the antique shops on the way home (do you have any idea how many there are along U.S. Rt. 30?). We stopped at a buffalo farm too. We were going to buy meat, but holy cow (no pun intended), is that stuff expensive! We settled for a couple pieces of jerkey and I bought Tim a silver money clip with a very nice raised buffalo on it. He bought me a turquoise ring.

Megan and I have just been hanging out together today, enjoying our day off. We were at Fashion Bug as soon as it opened for their big Presidents’ Day sale. All regular price items were 40% off and clearance sale items were an additional 20% off. Meg found a cute shirt, pajamas and a necklace. I’m kind of leary of putting much money into clothes right now. I want to lose weight. I’m trying to lose weight. Buying a bunch of clothes right now kind of seemed like setting myself up to fail, though I did consider buying a swimsuit in a size much too small as incentive, but it was still kind of expensive after the discount so I passed, reasoning that it was a lot to spend on something I might not get my butt into (undermining myself??). Anyway, I did find a cute shirt and a new pair of Sketchers. Then we hit Wal-Mart for groceries. Lots and lots of groceries. I hate grocery shopping so I tend to put it off until I have to go….and then it’s a really huge chore. Meg had some money so abandoned me in favor of her own commercialism. She bought a big yellow bean bag with a smiley face on it and a John Deere computer game. She is a country girl at heart so a game that allows you to plan, build and manage a farm sounded waaaayyy cool to her. I admit I might have to give it a try, too.

So, that was our weekend. Nothing much else going on around here, though I think maybe I’m progressing (mentally at least) in my midlife crisis, but that’s another thought for another day.

Oh, thank goodness it’s finally, finally Friday. This has been the longest week ever for some reason. Guess it’s that mid-winter slump. Whatever it is, I am sooooo glad to have arrived at the end of the week and there’s an extra bonus….IT’S A THREE DAY WEEKEND!!. Tim and I are leaving town in the morning, heading east over the mountains to Fairfield, which is very close to Gettysburg. The Fairfield Vol. Fire Dept. has an all-you-can-eat shrimp and oyster feast every February as a fundraiser. Friends of ours have been going for several years and last year they invited us. It’s a long way to go for a shrimp dinner in a town I never heard of before last year, but the dinner isn’t really the point. It’s just nice to get away and we stop anywhere that catches our eye going down and coming home.

Have a great weekend and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. (wink, wink)

Good grief, this is so embarassing I don’t even know why I’m telling you about it. I could just keep my fingers still and no one would ever have to know about the depths of my airheadedness. I opened the screen to start typing a post and the cursor kept scrolling left to right. I couldn’t get it to stop. I was cursing Blogsome quite colorfully. Finally, I pushed myself away from the computer in disgust. The @#&*!#!! cursor stopped moving.
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(do I really want to admit this?)
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(What the heck, I can’t feel any dumber)
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The cursor wouldn’t stop because…….I had been leaning forward and my boob was pressing on the space bar.

I’m feeling just a tad stressed today. I won’t bore you with details, but I will share some of the things I found looking for some relief.

Remember mood rings? Along with all the other ‘glorious’ relics from the 70’s, they’re back. Here’s a virtual mood ring to find out your emotional state.

You Are Depressed

No doubt about it, you’re feeling very down. Maybe you’ve had a bad day, or maybe you need help. Either way, make sure to take good care of yourself right now.

Already know you’re in a bad mood/feeling stressed? Find some relief shooting paintballs at smileys that pop out around the office.

This company offers all kinds of products to help you cope with stress.

Are you an emotional eater? If you are, then you know stressful times can drive the best of us to grab the chocolate or chips. Here are some foods that help you manage stress.

Looking for a traditional way to relax? How about fishing? You can’t go wrong with a boat named “Stress Relief.” And if the fish get the better of you, thereby giving you more stress, you can play this game to get even.

Finally, I found a website selling the Orgasmatron. I’ve actually seen this at our mall. In fact, I’ve tried it. It’s not quite what you think.