Yesterday we drove past a place I lived for almost 8 years, and had the numbing realization that had I not made certain life choices, I would almost assuredly still be living in a 1970’s single wide trailer.
Sobering thought.
I don’t have anything against people who live in mobile homes. Spent most of my adult life in a series of them. Tell you what, upgrading from a 10×50 to a 14×70 that’s 20 years newer really makes you feel like you’re moving up in the world. That monumental leap from fast food service to office assistant. The difference between driving an old beater that is 15 years old and upgrading to one that is only 10 years old.
Even if one could ignore the negative stigma attached to the run-down trailer park, or even a nicer newer mobile home on private acreage, they will probably always be a reminder to me of a life left behind, of poverty and depression, of frozen pipes and temperamental furnaces, of cold winter drafts and scorching summer heat.
How I found the courage to walk away from all of that, I’ll never know. </sarcasm>
Few people aspire to live out their days in a single wide, with an expando if you were lucky, but for some the wheels of fate are slow in turning toward brighter days. I never got the expando, or the deck, or the dream too good to wish for — pipes that didn’t freeze. But what I did have was ‘home’ for many years, nonetheless.
Life had a lot of changes in store for me. I shudder to think that I’ve moved five times in the past seven years, but revel in walking into this house every time I come home, no matter how long I’ve been gone. Home has a floor plan that I found, redrew and modified. Home has walls that the wind does not whistle through. Home has heat that does not fail to come on when it is cold, and even cool air in the summer. Home does not have skirting that blows away in the gusts of early spring winds. Home has a room for each child, and a full basement, and toilets that flush in the winter. (If you’ve never been without flush toilets, you can’t even imagine. Honestly.)
But most of all, home has Love. Love is a strange thing. You can think that you know what ‘love’ is, and learn you were mistaken when you find out what Love truly is. I never understood that I was only loving with half a heart, until it was made whole again. I have been truly blessed. Aaarr.
This is bound to tick some folks off, but it’s my opinion. Maybe you can say something to change my mind, but I doubt it.
I think that the stickers that people put on their doors to tell firefighters how many pets are in their home are possibly the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard of.
Do I want a firefighter to risk his life to save a dog, a cat, a gerbil? Where does it end? What about my aquarium fish, don’t they have the right to be rescued too, rather than be boiled alive?
How am I going to feel if a spouse and children lose a father or mother because that person was trying to rescue a shy black cat in a far corner of a dark basement and was killed?
We love our household pets, and we spend a lot of money to keep them well fed, happy and healthy, and spend time with them every day … but there is no way I want a rescuer going into a burning building unless there is a human life in there to save.
I know there are people that say they treat their cherished pets like they were their own children. Perhaps they should be sending them to doggy day care instead of leaving them alone in the house, if they are that concerned. I’m just saying …
I’ve got my flame retardant panties on, fire away. (Pun not intended.)
I finished Red Dragon and went right to Silence of the Lambs. But I think my favorite of the three is Hannibal. Can’t wait to read Hannibal Rising.
I also want to get around to reading Forever Odd, since the new one is out. I really liked Odd Thomas but I felt so betrayed at the end! I think I even cried, didn’t see it coming because I was so wrapped up in the story.
I don’t like all Koontz books. Some I just can’t get into, and I usually know within the first few pages. I love Mr. Murder, Intensity, Hideaway, The Vision … a few others I tried to start and just couldn’t get interested enough in what was happening to become involved.
Hubby likes these (fillintheblank) ______Slayer books by R. A. Salvatore. I so totally can NOT get into them. GiantSlayer, DemonSlayer, PlaydohSlayer, you know … they have orcs and drows and things that splatter blood when you slaughter them.
The boy is hopelessly lost to sci-fi and fantasy too. Lord of the Rings (in its entirety), Narnia (likewise), Star Wars (any manner of ‘novelization’), Eragon and Eldest, Series of Unfortunate Events (all), Animorphs (at least half), various Goosebumps … and just about anything that has … words on pages. He likes Captain Underpants and Encyclopedia Brown. Heathcliff, Garfield and Peanuts too. And who doesn’t love Calvin and Hobbes. If he has nothing else, he will read boxes, dictionaries (I’m so not kidding—he loves to slip new words into conversation), nutrition labels, instruction manuals written in Engrish, anything. (Unless, of course, he is supposed to read it for school.)
The girl is not addicted to reading. It is rarely something she will choose to do to pass the time. She has a shelf full of Saddle Club and Pony Pals, likes Junie B. Jones and a few others. I keep waiting for her to hit that stage where I was as a pre-teen, where ANY book about horses was devoured from cover to cover. I thought I had saved my Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry books for her, but I can’t find them. She has used a couple of her pony tales for school book reports, so I keep hoping that one of these days, she will become that kind of voracious reader that had my mom picking up 5 and 10 cent books at rummage sales to keep me satiated.
Leave a comment with an author or book I might like, given my questionable taste in graphic content. I grow weary of reading my tame Mary Higgins Clark books over and over, and I’ve read the Koontz that I have at least three times each.
Hope it doesn’t look like I’m raggin’ on the old man too much. For the little things he doesn’t notice, being a guy and all, he more than makes up for with things like this:
When I went out to start my car and scrape frost from the windshield, I saw that he’d written “I (heart) U” in the frost on my hood. He does little things like this all the time to bring a smile to my face. :)
By the way, this is Day 9 and he hasn’t noticed. And we actually got to spend some quality time together Monday. (Remember? I shoveled the poop, and he dumped. Good team.)
Not the kind of thing he would notice right away, but all the same … I’ll keep you updated. :)
Went straight from high school into waitressing, fast food, etc. and within a year into office assistant type stuff, did word processing and data entry for a while, then started helping with editing and proofreading a publication … wasn’t long before I was “suggesting” layout changes to the designer, and finally realized the job I wanted to be doing was called “graphic designer.”
One of the great and horrible truths of graphic design, is almost anyone can learn and use the software. There is ugly stuff out there in print because someone COULD do it. But many SHOULD NOT. There is art involved in great design, and not everyone is an artist.
I went to a community college a few years ago and got a certificate that shows I really do know how to do what I’ve been doing for a living for over a decade. There were a few really talented people in my classes, and some that really needed to rethink their career path.
That doesn’t mean that I think everything I do is golden. Most of the time, I think my work is crap, and need validation from my clients. At times, they like what I throw together in minutes better than what I slave over for days. Other times, they take what I feel is my best layout, and change it into something dismal, and then love it more than the gem they destroyed. That is the price a graphic designer pays… their artwork is subject to “critique by committee.”
One of the things I enjoy most about CafePress is the freedom to design my way. Sometimes, I put complete crap out there, in a hurry, and it sells. Other times, I work very hard on a design, tweak until I feel it is perfect and will sell hundreds… and no one bites. Nature of the beast.
I invite you to take a look at what items HAVE sold recently at freelief.com designs and iHope cancer fundraiser by visiting me on myspace and viewing my pics. I’d love to see your comments.
To be honest, I’m not real familiar with Penn and Teller. I’ve heard the names, many times to be sure, but I had never seen what either of them looked like, or sounded like. My first exposure to them was a video I found entitled, “Bulls**t.”
I watched it because it had to do with radical animal rights terrorist group PeTA. You don’t have to know me for long, to learn that I am not an animal rights freak. Rights? Like, to vote? To bear arms? To freedom of the press? Not for critters.
Now, I totally support animal welfare. Because I’m anti-AR does not mean I am pro-torture, or pro-bullfighting, or pro-cockfighting. I believe in treating animals humanely. But that doesn’t mean I believe that my dog has the right to run free without collar or leash, or that my horse has the right to not be ridden on quiet trails in the woods. I don’t think the neighbor’s cow has the right to live a long life of luxury and never be a cheeseburger. I believe she should be treated humanely and slaughtered quickly. I don’t think a deer has the right to eat all of the field corn it wants and never become venison sausage.
I did quite a bit of research on the Humane Society of the United States recently, given their opposition to hunting. I support my neighbor’s right to hunt and eat whatever legal game he chooses, whether it is a cute animal or not. Although HSUS comes off as a more mainstream, animal welfare group, the words of its leaders paint a more vivid and realistic picture. They share the same ideals as PeTA: no meat, no milk or eggs, no leather or wool, no animal use at all, not even pets. HSUS is not the same as your local animal shelter, which probably gives a damn about the animals. They don’t run any animal shelters. They are a political group. They oppose stronger penalties for domestic terrorism. They support legislation that cripples many small family farms.
Your right to swing your arm, ends at my face.
I would never expect someone to blindly believe everything I say. So do some research. Read what both sides have to say about the other. If after all of that, you decide you want to be a vegan, you have my blessing. All I ask is that you don’t try to make ME become a vegan too. I respect your rights, even though I may not agree with your lifestyle. Afford me the same. (Don’t worry, I won’t try to make you like venison. More for me.)
They can’t. I cannot express in words how funny it is to see a chicken attempt to fly rather than walk on ice. They can’t fly, either. The only thing less graceful than a flying chicken, is one attempting to walk across ice.
I spent the first part of my day off work cleaning out horse stalls. A dreadful job any day of the week, but particularly foul when it is cold and wet, and stalls are flooded, and the scraping of the shovel against the rubber floor mats creates this brown sludge that cannot be defined. To make it even more pleasant, the stalls had not been fully stripped and cleaned in weeks, as we haven’t shut the horses in the barn due to the unseasonably warm weather. That is, until Ma Nature dumped a few inches of rain on the existing deep mud, and topped it off with a solid half inch or better of ice.
When you walk across this, you can see water moving below the ice and above the dead brown grass. It is treacherous walking. It is even more difficult pulling a giant dump cart meant to be attached to and hauled by a garden tractor, full to the top with cold manure slop. Did I mention the two flat tires? That is why I married a big strong man. I shoveled, he dumped. It is a good partnership.
Three clean stalls later, I realized that the chickens weren’t coming in from the coop to the horse barn for treats. I went out to the coop to add another layer of wood shavings to their bedding, and couldn’t even get them out of my way to do that. It was then that I got to watch my first “chicken meets ice” incident.
One hen hopped right out of the coop onto the ice and went skidding and flopping like a fish out of water. She may have not turned visibly red, but I know an embarrassed chicken when I see one. The rest of the hens were a bit more wary. One tried very unsuccessfully to fly straight to the horse barn. Remember: chickens can’t fly. What they can do, is flap miserably for a few seconds, just above the ground, and then crash viciously to the unforgiving ice below, slide skidding and flopping (again, like a fish) and attempt take-off once again into the slightly more graceful act of “flying” … it took about three cycles of this before the hen made it to the ice-free barn aisle. The others looked around at each other and me like, we really don’t need the extra chicken candy, thanks anyway.
So my next half hour was spent making a chicken sidewalk. I raked and scraped and shoveled the dirty hay and manure dust and various dry litter from the barn aisle and hay storage area floors, and sprinkled it along the quickest route from the barn to the coop. A skid-safe path for my little friends. Then I tossed out their candy (scratch grains) and let them enjoy picking through the wood shavings in the newly cleaned stalls. They do a great job of spreading out the horses’ bedding for me.
I’m sorry, this blog really needed video, and I didn’t get any. I hope I did a good enough job of painting the visual for you.
(Chicken photo above is our bantam silkie mix cockerel, Fluffy.)
Tomorrow I’ll be going to the local homeless/domestic violence shelter and donating a variety of clothes, toys and household items collected from co-workers over the past two weeks.
No one asks why I choose to support a domestic violence shelter, versus giving outgrown or unneeded stuff to a thrift store, for instance. I think it is one of those things that you don’t really think about unless it happens in your family.
• What is abuse?
Domestic violence touches too many lives for it to be hidden and reside quietly in normal-looking houses where the victims live in denial, fear and shame.
I don’t think of myself as a victim. I went through some stuff. It was nothing compared to what some go through. It challenged me, but it did not defeat me.
I chose to forgive. I know that a lot of people cannot understand how I could do this, but I did it for me. Being unforgiving places an unnecessary weight on your shoulders; a blackness that stains you. I will never forget what is in my past, but I do not let it rule my future. Remaining angry at someone doesn’t hurt them, but the negativity can ruin you.
• Cycle of violence
In leaving, I was born again. Not in the Christian sense, but as a whole individual person, emerging from a cocoon. The support I received from family and friends was phenomenal. With their help, I have accomplished more in the past six years than in my entire life before that. The power of a positive outlook is amazing.
Life itself has not gotten easier. There have been very trying times, critical amounts of stress, even despair. Frustration and sadness, fear and anger still exist in life… but having love, security and support where there once was the absence of such things, makes even the most painfilled days much easier to bear. I could never say enough positive things about my new husband, and how accepting he is of my every flaw. And oh, they are many. Like the stars.
Check into your local domestic violence “safe place” and see what you may be able to do to help someone without the network that helped me emerge. Our local shelter has a website with a list of immediate needs for their families. Many times, a woman (or man*) will have to leave in the middle of the night with the children and nothing else; even the smallest thing that we often take for granted can be a blessing.
*note: both men and women can be abusive… linked text is written from the majority viewpoint of the male partner being the abuser
I spent the first part of my day off work cleaning out horse stalls. A dreadful job any day of the week, but particularly foul when it is cold and wet, and stalls are flooded, and the scraping of the shovel against the rubber floor mats creates this brown sludge that cannot be defined. To make it even more pleasant, the stalls had not been fully stripped and cleaned in weeks, as we haven’t shut the horses in the barn due to the unseasonably warm weather. That is, until Ma Nature dumped a few inches of rain on the existing deep mud, and topped it off with a solid half inch or better of ice.
