Coffee Grounds

2011-03-16T18:02:00.000-07:00

Life is so unpredictable. Just when you think you have a few things figured out, a curve is thrown your way. My teenage daughter overdosed on February second. Luckily, she was not successful. She came home from a bad day at school and just decided she could not take it anymore....her emotional pain was too great at that moment.

Part of me thinks it is attention seeking behavior. Part of me wants to smack her senseless. She has always been a difficult person to live with under the same roof. Always a challenge, always defiant but very ,very bright.

My life has not been my own since February second. I am taking each day as it comes, trying to do what I think is best for her. I need wisdom beyond my years.

Avoidance

2011-01-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

I am sleeping way too much. I really want to hibernate and stop functioning. But I can't because I have children. I oh so want to escape the harsh reality of it all. I have been indulging in my favorite Trader Joe's comfort foods and good beer and playing lots of Word Search on Facebook.

I decided not to go to church this past Sunday because I did not want to cry around people. Although it is probably the safest place in the world to cry, I just could not make myself get out of bed. I need to look up the three stages of grief. I need to get started on my mother's obituary. I need to get my washer fixed. I need to call Legal Aid.

Not facing reality is a coping mechanism that backfires for me again and again. Going numb and not feeling anything are a few more. They all get me to the same place...stuck

Abby Normal

2011-01-22T13:11:00.000-08:00

Adult Child ( I think I finally get it), Codependent, Low Self Esteem, Needy, Failure to Communicate, Boundaries, Rigid, Black and White Thinking, Magical thinking. Stoic, The Hero, Insecure, False Bravado, Desperate, Lonely, Approval Seeker, Fear of Intimacy, Loyal to a Fault, Feelings of Inadequacy, Fear, Victim, Guilt Ridden, Hurt, Shame, Overreacts to Change, Addicted to Excitement, Fear of Abandonment, Paralyzed Perfectionist (that one really suits me). Psychobabble. Jargon. Buzz Words. Lingo.

I live in fear that someone will find out the "truth" about me. What is the truth you ask? I am a fake, a fraud, a phony and someone is going to shout it out to the world. I am not good enough and constantly fall short of the mark. I bounce around like a pinball doing ten things at once never getting one entirely finished.

I may seem aloof, cold and distant but I am aching to be loved and praised. Don't come too close because I will push you away. I can't let you see the real me, way too scary.

Father Doesn't Know Jack

2011-01-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

Saw my father on the corner yesterday and waved. When he climbed in the car, the smell of alcohol and old man nearly knocked me out. Status quo.

Rewind 16 years ago to the birth of my first child. I am in the hospital, alone, calling people with the happy news. I call John's Bar and Grille to leave a message that his granddaughter was born.

Rewind 40 years ago. I see my father lying on the floor, mumbling. I am seven years old but I feel disgust toward him. I feel too old to be a seven year old kid.

It is what it is and it was what it was. My father is and was a liability.

Strange Feelings

2011-01-20T13:32:00.000-08:00

My mother died eight days ago and I am feeling everything at once or nothing at all. I have had an involuntary memory dump way beyond my control. Interesting fact: Cremations are very cheap in the state of Florida due to the high senior population. It is a case of supply and demand. I finally put the news on my Facebook status and I was dragging my feet. It felt crass and I wasn't sure what to say anyway. My Facebook friends care about me. They have also made an assumption my relationship with my mother was a good one. Only a select few know it was not. I refuse to sugarcoat this. I am still struggling with forgiveness. I have been struggling with this concept my whole life. I want to forgive my parents but I can't.

Show me the money

2010-11-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

I just read my last post and it is ironic that about ten days later my mortgage company filed a "First Action" foreclosure against me with my county courthouse. I foolishly did not know this was coming. I thought I was on my way to my second step in my loan modification. I had been told by a customer service representative from Wilmington Trust that "everything looks good". "We just need you to resend your paperwork."

I am good girl and I did as I was told and hoped for the best. I received another letter in July stating Wilmington Trust was trying to reach me and help me save my home. I called the Loss Mitigation rep which is no easy feat getting through the voice mail jail and hold messages. He told me they still had not received my paperwork. The story keeps going but the bottom line is my payments were returned with a letter telling me to call Wilmington Trust's law firm, Milstead and Associates to get more information.

My loan modification was denied although I never received a letter telling me as much. I never received a letter from Wilmington Trust telling me they were going to file first action foreclosure either. I found out about that by receiving about 15 odd letters from predatory lawyers telling me I COULD save my home.

Of course, I am fighting tooth and nail. I would really like to hear other stories from anyone out there who has had a similar experience. Especially women who are in the middle of a divorce. I think we need to get the word out that these banks are not helping the little guy but sitting on this money. These loan restructuring/bailout programs have failed. The number of foreclosures continue to rise.

So where is all that money going?

Hope

2010-06-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

It has been quite awhile since I last posted...no particular reason, no excuses...I just have not done it. Things are not as bleak as I had previously posted. My pet sitting business is growing and remaining somewhat steady allowing me to make ends meet and feel above all HOPE. Not Obama kind of hope and not Hope for Haiti but just daring to dream and feel positive. Telling that negative voice to shut up and go away, far away.

Maybe it can and will work out for the best

2009-07-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

I am so sad about Farrah. She was an icon. It feels like a part of my childhood is gone with her. I do not understand why Michael Jackson's death upstaged hers. I think even the annoying hawker, Billy Mays got more press than Farrah.

The documentary about her cancer was revealing and brave and I really wanted her to win her fight. I hope her message is heard.

2009-07-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

It has been awhile. Many reasons, one of them being Facebook which is a tremendous time vortex. BUT it has allowed me to connect with some friends that I have not spoken to in 2o some years which is rather cool. The other reason is online surveys. I probably spend at least an hour per day taking random surveys earning a dollar here a gift card there, but mostly sweepstakes entries. One can hope right?

There are a million other things I should be doing right now, least of all being online. Procrastination or ADD or a little of both? The kids are with their Dad and the clock has begun ticking, only five hours left. What should I do first? Go to the gym or work on a project?

Bah Humbug!

2009-01-04T12:34:00.000-08:00

The holidays are over! YEAH!! I was very stressed and down about buying Christmas gifts for my children. I could afford none, zilch, zippo. Last year we were on a wish list from our church by invitation, this year we were not. I tried to justify my situation many ways. They have enough toys. They have food to eat, clothes to wear, a warm roof over their head, Christmas is NOT about the gifts you get. They will get presents from other agencies, maybe not what they want but so what.
How do you explain to your eight year old and three year old that Santa isn't quite coming the same way this year? I feel guilty even thinking these thoughts but I also feel like I am letting them down. There is so much we do have even though we are struggling.
I was never so sick of people asking me am I done my shopping? Yep I am done shopping because I did not do any OK? We are not doing without (in my 13 year old's mind I am sure we are) but the future is so uncertain.

NOW WHAT??

2008-11-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

What happens to a women who decides to stay home and raise her children and suddenly needs to earn a decent income. Are we called "Displaced Homemakers"? Can we in middle age abruptly re enter the job market and start a new career? Or are we doomed to minimum wage jobs and seasonal help. Is it too late to ask what do we want to be when we grow up?

I am this women and I will do whatever it takes to keep my home, feed my children and stay warm. My pride is nonexistent. I have been a frequent visitor at the county assistance office.
I will take any government service I can get. I will jump through whatever hoops they require. I will provide whatever documents the need even if they lose them several times.

I will beg and plead with my mortgage company to work with me although it is just a group of people in some cubicles looking at screens, working on commissions, making up the rules as they go along. They have no vested interest in my family's future. If they get me to pay, they it's good for them. I will go to the certified credit counseling to stall my foreclosure although I have a FHA mortgage and cannot receive HEMAP. Apparently, I can't make partial payments either with an FHA mortgage.

Where is my bailout?

FEAR

2008-07-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

So far I have only written about the "nice" and happy things in my life. Well... I am scared and stressed like a twig right before its snapping point. I feel the knot in my stomach as I type. Am I going to lose my home? Can I provide for myself and three children (not to mention my six pets)? How can I do this when I have not "worked" for the past 15 years? Am I relevant?

When we started having kids, my soon to be EX and agreed I would stay home. I had the career track corporate job at QVC. Okay, here I am, almost seventeen years later, separated with three kids and no job. Am I still economically viable? I do not yet have a picture for this post. My mind races on ways to make ends meet and still be with my children. How am I going to make this work?

The upshot to to my problems is I have found out how generous people are and not only my lifelong friends but total strangers. It restores my faith in humanity. I do have resources beyond my bank account. I am learning to ask for help which I am NOT very good at doing. I have lost any sense of pride and applied and fought for any public aid I can get for us. My credit is completely ruined with the selfish help of my future EX. I am 45 years old and starting over. This is the same age when Mary Kay founded her company...so there is hope, right?

2008-05-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

I guess you could say I am an animal activist. This picture is a beautiful sight but the lives of the dogs are anything but...they literally are running for their lives. We adopted our first greyhound about seven years ago. My oldest daughter brought home a book from school about retired racers and it had an 800 number on the last page. Once again we hit the books to learn everything we could about the breed. Kristina was our first Grey.

We are now on our third greyhound, not by choice but by circumstance. His name is Duke aka Riding Shotgun. We renamed him after adoption. He is very sweet and looks similar to the fawn colored one above. Greyhounds can have many issues...negotiating stairs, separation anxiety, house breaking problems, etc. However, our hounds each relived their puppy hood once they settled in our home which was a treat to watch. More stories and info to come later...

Knight, The Rooster

2008-04-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

We have a rooster, actually he's a Colombian Brahma Bantam Rooster who was airmailed from Texas when he was 2 days old. I had no intention of EVER owning a rooster, however, my cousin raises poultry and let my girls "borrow" two peeps. The plan was to return them when they became too much too handle. Well, the poor, little yellow one named Lucy died the first night at our home. The black and white one named Knight thrived in his newspaper lined fish tank. We had no idea he was a male because sometimes the peeps are "sexed" and sometimes they are not(apparently it is a cost issue).

Peeps are aptly named because they peep nonstop until they try to crow. Then it is peep, peep, peep, cock a doodle peep and so on. This is when we suspected he was a rooster. Little did I know, I was a Mamma Hen whom Knight happen to imprint upon. He would follow me around outside when he was little and come when I called him and clapped my hands. Knight like to sit on my foot while I would garden. People would drive down our quiet street and stop and say "Hey, that's a chicken!!!" My girls lost interest in him and I fell in love.

Knight grew up fast and ugly...he started to lose his downy feathers and grow adult feathers. For awhile, he was partially bald and quite unattractive. His comb and waddle were becoming more noticeable. By the way, we read up on all this chicken lingo. He outgrew his 10 gallon aquarium and luckily a neighbor donated their ferret cage to us and Knight went to live on our front porch.

He began to crow at sunrise and was quiet by sunset. Everyday, I would let him out of his cage and he would hop down the steps to to our front lawn and scratch and peck for insects. Life was good. I soon became known as "the chicken lady" to the neighborhood kids or "Hey, it's the Rooster house!!"

Chicken manure is an excellent fertilizer and it is actually sold at garden centers...who knew?

It's A Small World

2008-03-18T15:05:00.000-07:00

We went to Disney World this past July. It was our family vacation mixed with business, mostly business. It was the beginning of the end for my marriage. My step father passed away last Spring and my Mother is in a nursing home in Florida so I thought "Okay, here's a chance to take care of her estate and have some fun too." Well, it turned out to be the vacation from hell.

I booked our vacation on Expedia and since I had not been to Disney since 1989, I was not familiar with our hotel choice. It sounded good from the reviews and location. Our flight was delayed at Orlando due to lightning, which meant we could not get off the plane. It also meant we could not get our luggage until it was deemed safe for the ground crew. This translated into no stroller from the gate to the luggage carousel. No big deal right? Wrong! Three children, one of them in my arms, carry on luggage and a 1/2 mile walk. We probably waited about 2 hours for our luggage, then about one hour for our rental car which put us at 8pm. Now we had to find our hotel. Since we arrived at our hotel so late they released our room. We were given a room with one queen bed and a cot. It does not work for five people...so we had to take a smoking room with two queen sized beds.

OK, so now it is about 9:30 pm and my kids are so cranky and hungry. Did I mention we were delayed in Philadelphia too because of runway traffic? We also had some problems because my son did not have a Boarding Pass and I had to get in line and wait while the rest of my family waited by the metal detectors. Another reason I had chosen our hotel was because of the free shuttle to the Disney parks. We were unaware that July is South America debutante/sweet sixteen month. The hotel was jammed packed with teenaged girls, speaking rapid fire Spanish. It was a tidal wave of teenagers.

We waited for the shuttle the next day for about 45 minutes and we told by the front desk that this was a third party contract and they had no control over the times. We basically had a good day at Magic Kingdom, it was HOT, HOT, HOT but hey it's Summer and it's Florida. The lines were long except for a few FAST PASS rides. We could not agree on where to eat dinner so we postponed it (mistake). Our second mistake was to rely on the shuttle schedule to be accurate. We wolfed $ 50.00 worth of hot dogs to try to make the 10:15 pm shuttle, missing the spectacular parade and fireworks but we would beat the homeward bound crowds, right?

The 10:15 pm shuttle did not arrive until midnight. Samantha thought we had to live in the Magic Kingdom parking lot, forever, and was hysterical. Every bus that came our way got our hopes raised except when we saw it was the wrong number. Repeated phone calls to our hotel and the bus company did not produce any results. After sitting in the hot, deserted parking lot and feeling grimy and exhausted our bus arrived. The passengers were dropped off according to the hotel's status (better hotels first our hotel was last). We actually passed our hotel several times before we finally arrived.

I was never to thrilled to see hordes of chattering teenagers in my life. I complained to Expedia and our hotel . Expedia gave us a $50.00 credit and our hotel gave us a free breakfast coupon for Au Bon Pain. The rest of the vacation (the business part) had a few hitches... my husband backed the rental car into a pole damaging the bumper, our departing flight was at 8 am and the airport was about a 90 minute drive plus the rental return and accident report. We split up and my husband took the rental and I got the boarding passes, checked the luggage. When we met up again and got in the security line we had minutes to get to the gate. My son's Pirates of the Caribbean sword caused some problems and we were told not to brandish it. We ran to the gate just as our flight was backing away. We missed our plane! This actually worked to our advantage because we had had a three hour layover in Atlanta and it shortened it by 90 minutes. We literally travelled for 12 hours.

Dark Shadows

2008-03-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

"My name is Victoria Winters. The sun shining on Collinwood does not illuminate the evil lurking within..." Yes, another of my childhood favorites. I have recently rented the first few episodes and I still love it. It is campy, lots of mistakes, and very low budget but the music and suspense are priceless. I remember rushing home from school to watch it with my grandmother, but not really "watching" the show more like hiding behind the loveseat or a pillow and peeking at the TV screen.

This wasn't some puny, little TV either. This was one of those behemoth consoles with a hi-fi stereo, a turntable and a cassette player with a counter! No remote but it was made out of some high gloss wood and it must have weighed at least 500 pounds if not more.
After the show was over, my grandmother and I would enjoy Fig Newtons and hot tea and I would never admit I was even the least bit scared, lest my mother put an end to the whole thing.

Samantha

2008-03-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

My middle child is named after this show. The name Samantha means "good listener" in Hebrew. I loved this show growing up and still will watch it on TV Land. I thought Elizabeth Montgomery was sooo beautiful and clever. The evil mother-in-law, Endora was also one of my favorites because of her wild outfits and makeup as well as her relationship with Darren. I still refer to nosy neighbors as a " Mrs. Kravitz" but most people don't get it.

The Boots are Back

2008-03-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Boots are back!! Take a guess...it is Miss Stepahnie Nicks aka Stevie Nicks. I am a HUGE fan and have been one since the seventies. I only missed one concert in my area and that is because I had just given birth to my son. I would see a show in my hometown and then travel to the next closest state. I have probably spent over $ 500 on concert shirts.

Now that I am older, I refuse to sit far away from the stage. It takes creativity and persistance but you can get decent tickets for not much over face value from Ebay or Craig's List or even the box office. I got lucky this Summer and was able to buy 7th row seats at the Atlantic City Borgata Hotel and Casino. I did not buy the tickets until the morning of the concert!

How can she walk in those heels?

2008-03-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

One of these days I expect to come home to find my basement door torn off its hinges and my 10 month old German Shepherd puppy walking around with it stuck on his head. He pokes his head thru the cat door to see what's going on. He actually fit through the door when we first got him but he doesn't realize he has grown considerably

Ramblings

2008-03-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

I often wondered why anyone would Blog and here I am blogging away...why would strangers be interested in what I think? I find myself reading their blogs so hopefully it works both ways.
I am a dinosaur in many ways because my PC is ten years old with the original printer, I do not have digital cable, I have only had a cell phone for 2 years and it's prepaid and last but not least I still send HANDWRITTEN Thank you cards.

So this is my first blog and it is random but I warned you. I have not had a complete, coherent thought since my first child was born.