I grew up in many different environments ... different religious beliefs, different political views, and a variety of economic and social levels.  Because of that, I was never "molded" into any one definitive stance.

My first foster home was a family of hunters & fishers.   Deer, quail, dove, pheasant, trout, catfish ... the freezer was generally filled with a variety of game.  I learned how to handle a shotgun, how to skin a deer, how to dress out birds and how to clean and fillet a fish.

I remember being handed the shotgun one time during deer season and being told to "go for it."  As I brought the gun up and looked down the sight, a beautiful doe turned around and looked me straight in the eye. 

Big. Brown. Doe. Eyes.

Pleading. Doe. Eyes.

I couldn't do it. I handed the gun back and never picked it up again.  I became one of those anti-gun advocates. 

Well, not a real anti-gun advocate but an anti-kill advocate.  An anti-Trophy-hunter advocate.  I don't have a problem with hunting for food. I do have a problem with trophy hunting. Hunting  just to kill something and hang the head on a wall. 

I also see no reason for any body to have an automatic assualt weapon, like an AK47 or a MAC-10.  They have one purpose and one purpose only ... to kill.  And not to kill animals. They kill people. In that regard, I am all for gun control.

At the same time, I see no reason why a responsible, law-abiding person should not be allowed to own a gun for personal protection. 

When I was working in San Francisco and often worked until 10:00 or 11:00 at night, I had to walk several blocks, through Civic Center Park, to the BART station.  There were numerous times that this was not a pleasant experience and having protection would have been comforting.

I made an inquiry into a concealed weapon permit.  I was told that the City/County of San Francisco only issued permits in extremely rare circumstances and there were only a few permits that had ever been issued.  

However, I was also told that yes, I could carry a gun.  If it was in plain sight.

Yeah, right.  I was going to walk down the sidewalks of San Francisco, at 11:00 at night, holding a .357 Magnum at my side.

And make it to the BART station.

Alive.

With no police interference.

I passed on that option.

I didn't think my head would look good on a wall.

"Your parents were alcoholics. You grew up in foster homes. One of your foster mothers was slightly crazy.  You had a B average in high school. You started smoking when you were 18. You broke your right arm when you were 4 years old. You broke your left arm when you were eleven. You broke your left arm again when you were sixteen. You started your period when you were thirteen.  You were sexually active when you were ..."

WHOA! Stop right there!

This is what I heard from my ex-father-in-law one evening during an "argument" we were having over some trivial incidence. It had to be trivial because I don't even remember what it was about.  I just remember him reciting my entire history to me.

And making sure I knew that he knew every good, bad or ugly thing I had ever experienced.

The crazy thing was, I never told him any of this stuff.

He knew the exact time, date and place of my birth; he knew my social security number ... and when and where I applied for that number; he knew the same information for every member of my family; he knew things about my family and my past that I didn't know.

He wanted to make it very clear that I was not on the same level as he was.  I didn't care what level he thought I was on or what level he thought he was on. I just wanted to know how he knew all of this information.

I found out later. When he sat my husband and I down for a casual chat about hostage situations. Hostage situations?!

Because of his position, and his knowledge of top-secret-classified-military-installations-and-missile-locations, should we ever be taken hostage by some third-world-crazy-or-wanna-be-second-or-third-world-leader-sicko-type, it was hasta la vista, baby.

No ransom for us! And because this was a real possibility, the government had to know every thing about every person associated with him.

Enter the CIA-OSS-FBI-and ever other three-letter acronym associated with intelligence (and I use that term lightly!) in this country.  Apparently, I have a very thick file with all of them.

Since I divorced the General's son 30+ years ago, I doubt that these guys are still keeping an eye on me. But just in case they read this blog on a daily basis to see what secrets I'm revealing to the world, there is one thing I finally figured out and I told the General that night we argued ...

... he put his pants on the same way I did ... One leg at a time!

I've been going through old pictures and scanning them into my computer so I can print them out (yeah, I know ... how much sense does that make? But there really is a method to my madness. Honest).

I have very few pictures of my daughter when she was growing up, mainly because 1.) her father threw them all away and the ones he did send me ended up being a part of ... 2.) the butthead destroyed the majority of my pictures before I could rescue them after we were divorced.  I have even fewer pictures of me.

When I look at the pictures of Michelle, I try to imagine her as tiny as she was. When this picture was taken ... 

... we had just brought her home from the hospital. She was three weeks old and weighed in at five pounds.  Except that she wasn't lumpy, I could have been carrying a small sack of potatoes!

Little did I know that that tiny little bundle of joy would grow up to look like this ...

 

In thumbing through these pictures, I also happened to find my senior picture from high school ...

*sigh*

At least she looked like me when she was a baby.

Having lived in El Paso for a short time 30+ years ago, my perception of  Texas was cactus and rocks ... dry, dirty, hot and waterless. When we moved to the Dallas area in January, I was pleasantly surprised with trees, lawns, clean streets and cool weather.

Granted, the weather has changed and it's now heading to triple digits.  However, the trees are all in bloom, the lawns are green and well groomed, and there is an abundance of swimming pools and sprinkler systems.

I know because we have all of this. The pool was already here, but we did have a sprinkler system installed and have spent the last six months diligently taking care of the lawn so it is now a wonderful, thick carpet of green.

All of that is about to change because there is now a water shortage in Texas.   We just received a notice from the city that we are in Stage 3 of water conservation.  What does this mean for our beautiful green carpet?

It means it's about to be killed.  We are being restricted to watering one day a week. ONE. Even in California, when we had water shortages, we were able to water every other day ... your house was either odd or even, kind of like the gas shortages of the 70's.

Not here. And there was no "trickle-down-cut-back-slowly-stop-using-so-much-water-or-we're-going-to-limit-ever-body-to-one-day-a-week" warning.

Nope. This was a "as-of-June 18-you-can-not-water-your-lawns-except-on-your-designated-day-see-the-enclosed-map-for-your-zone" notice.

However, we are permitted to keep swimming pools filled. Which is a good thing. There's no lawn in the back yard so I won't have to look at dead, dry grass.

Now if I can only figure out how to over-fill the pool so that it flows into the front yard. 

Without going through the house first.

Men ...
pee on the toilet seat;

Women ...
clean the toilet seat.

Men ...
blow their nose in the shower;

Women ...
clean the shower.

Men ...
throw bread down and make sandwiches directly on the counter;

Women ...
clean the counters.

Men ...
put one plate in the diswasher and expect an award;

Women ...
clean the rest of the kitchen.

Men ...
drop dirty clothes anywhere they happen to take them off;

Women ...
clean up, pick up, and wash up.

Men ...
teach the dog to retrieve birds in muddy marshes;

Women ...
clean the dog.

Hmmmm ... does anybody else see a pattern here?

Are we crazy, or what?!

Okay, so I've had two days of quiet (except for the dog barking at every little sound) and I still have a list of things I want to get done before Tom gets home tomorrow evening. 

I spent the first day enjoying the feel of the TV remote in my hands. Of course, now that I have complete control of that 50"-super-plasma-flat-screen-majesty-that-every-man-in-america-dreams-of, there is absolutely nothing interesting to watch. Go figure.

There's nothing on the to-do-list that is extreme.  They're all small things, such as organize the garage, give the dog a bath, finish organizing the computer room, scan old pictures ... easy-breezy little tasks. 

Somehow though, I just can't get motivated enough to spend several hours in a 200 degree garage putting together a shelving unit and figuring out what goes on which shelf.

The dog bath is another story however. 

Angel loves to swim in the pool. I can't swim alone. She has to "help" me.  As soon as I push off from the side and head to the other end, she jumps into the water (well, she doesn't "jump" ... she walks down the stairs) and her little legs start dog-paddling like crazy.  When she catches up with me, she climbs up into my arms wanting to be held, all the while her little paws still paddling away.

This sounds really cute, I know.  But remember, Angel is a 60 pound lab-retriever mix. 

And she hates baths.

Now I'm thinking, why not just douse her with doggy-shampoo while I've got her in the pool, right?  It's like a huge bath tub anyway.

Wrong.  Doggy-shampoo and chlorine do not mix well.  It's not a chemical reaction. It's trying to dunk a 60 pound dog covered with slick, soapy, shampoo, who is convinced that you are trying to drown her and all she wants to do is get away and hide.

I wonder if the hose will reach into the garage?

**FLASH**  My father, welding something on the side of an old pickup, my sister sitting on the top of the pickup rail, the welding tank exploding ...

**FLASH**  Standing at the top of a double, spiral staircase overlooking a grand ballroom, my father standing in the doorway, telling us not to slide down the banisters ... just as we did ...

**FLASH**  Seeing the baseball bat coming straight at me, hitting me in the mouth, crying as I ran inside to my mother, being picked up by the giant, red-haired doctor that made house-calls and promised me that I was not going to die ...

**FLASH**  My father beating the crap out of my step-brother and his friend because they took me into town at 10:00 at night to get a milkshake and my father thought they had evil intentions ...

**FLASH**  My stepmother handing me the wool coat on a hot summer day and telling me it was my turn to mow the half-acre front yard ...

**FLASH**  Running inside a new house and being greeted by a huge, fluffy, gray cat ...

**FLASH**  Skinny dipping in the lake with my three best friends and hearing a whistle high up on the rocks ...

**FLASH**  Sitting on the hood of a maroon corvette and daring the guy that owned it to tell me to get off ...

**FLASH**  Walking down the aisle with the guy that owned the maroon corvette ...

**FLASH**  Heaving up my guts for three weeks in a dark, rank hotel room in Rapid City and realizing it wasn't the flu ...

**FLASH**  Waking up in the middle of the night on a dark highway outside of Rawlings, Wyoming and knowing that I was having a miscarriage ...

""FLASH**   Hearing the doctors say I had lost a lot of tissue and it was my choice to either terminate the pregnancy or continue and responding that I would keep my baby ...

**FLASH**  Two months early, three hours of labor, one big push and my baby girl took over every beat of my heart.

 

I hate math. Always have, always will.

It was my worst subject in school and I avoided it like the plague. Oh, I took all the prerequisite math courses - the ones required for graduation - but to voluntarily sign up for anything math related, forget it.

Which makes it pretty ironic that I ended up in a career in accounting.  I never have figured out just how I managed to become a Senior Project Accountant and a Project Analyst, and I can only attribute it to the advent of computers.  If i had to rely solely on using my head and my fingers, I would have been in trouble a long, long time ago.

Which is why, when this was sent to me in an email, I could fully relate to it.  Ma and Pa Kettle's math makes perfect sense to me.  It's much more logical than all that other crap they teach you in algebra or calculus or trig.

Heck, using this math, even I could have been an engineer!

After reading sister-friend Stephanie's recent post about the Hollish language, I couldn't help but think about some of our travels.

As I've mentioned before, driving across the country with sister-friend was a real experience.  There were numerous times we would be cruising along, watching the scenery, enjoying each other's company and suddenly, she would wake up, wipe off the window sludge, and yell "Pissarooni!"

Well, that definitely was a clue that we needed to stop ... soon.  Occasionally, it was due to her need for one of those tampoon things but more often than not, it was just the pissarooni.  However it never failed that once we were back in the car, heading back out on the highway, I would look at her and have to give a subtle reminder to hook up that trappy thing.  And after I ran over a few braille bumps, she got the message.

One evening in New Orleans, we were standing in a crowded bar listening to people make fools of themselves singing on a stick, and trying to carry on an intelligent conversation above all of the flabbity-blab.  No sooner had we finally snagged a table than some drunk wobbled over and tried to push his way in.

"Hey! Smally-up!" he warbled, sloshing his beer and spitting something out of his mouth on to the floor.

At this point, we decided it was time to make our exit. As we got up to leave, my left foot decided not to follow the rest of my body! I was adhickled!  The drunken bozo had spit a huge wad on gum right under my left foot!  After much anti-adhickling, I finally managed to remove my shoe, and hobbled outside.

I remember it was a warm, autumn evening and as we made our way back to the hotel, the sound of those outside dongy-things ringing in the air and the fragrant smell of fluffers invading our senses, we both looked at each other and almost in unison, said "Damn! I am so flabberbaffled! Where in the hell are we, anyway?"

Somehow, we actually managed to drive all the way from California to Maine without getting lost once.

It was more like, at least, a dozen times.