Blog O’ Obscurity

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers.

Today is a day to reflect on all the joys of motherhood and to let your children tell you how special you are.

As a nod to Hallmark, the creator of this holiday, I added a little ‘THANK YOU’ money to their coffers by buying a card for my mom.  After all, without them (Hallmark, not moms) this day wouldn’t be possible.  It almost makes me want to send them a ‘THANK YOU’ card.

Of course in about a month I’m going to want to send them a ‘GO TO #@$!’ card since it’ll be Father’s Day and I’ll have no idea what to get my husband.  I mean, I don’t know what THE KIDS will get my husband.   After which comes our anniversary.  Then my mom’s, sister’s and daughter’s birthdays.  Good thing July gives us an extra payday.

There are so many times when I really must give a gift, it leaves few days during the year when I can give a gift for no reason.  Not enough time passes between the days when gifts should be given for giving a ‘no reason’ gift to feel like anything but extravagance.  It seems more like a gift you bought for the previous occasion that you forgot about and found in the back of the closet.

Uh, but yeah, happy mother’s day.  That was my point all along.

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In my family we have a rule - no holding a grudge for more than 10 years.  You’d think that it would be easy to just get over it (whatever ‘it’ was) in less than 10 years but in my family, we can hold a grudge like nobody’s business.  When you realize someone is holding something against you from before you can even remember stuff, it’s time to make a rule like this for your family.

Every one deserves the opportunity to nurse a grudge for a while.  Especially if that grudge is for something really bad (like bringing tofu into the house, cutting you with their toe or making you wear braces) but eventually it’s just healthier for the grudge holder to let it go.  I mean we’re all getting on in years and this stuff could be bad for our blood pressure.

So this year, I’m going to let go the ‘decided to not honor birthdays and mine was the first’ grudge and the ‘didn’t show up for my wedding’ grudge.  I think I’m even doing it a little early on that one but I was more upset by the extenuating circumstances than the act itself.  I’m getting rid of the ‘bad mouthed me in the blog before I knew what a blog was’ grudge and the ‘wouldn’t share her blanket with me’ grudge (that one is WELL overdue but it’s been awhile since I cleaned ‘grudge house’ so to speak).

I’m please to say that, though I still hold my ‘day before my daughter’s birth’ grudge, I’ve made great strides towards letting that one go.  That’s an ugly, ugly one that eats at me in the worst way and I really WANT to be rid of it as soon as possible.

The thing about grudges is that you aren’t doing it right unless the person you’re holding it against doesn’t know about it.  I like to do mine right, so the grudges mentioned here are mostly unknown to the object of the grudge.  Except they might recognize themselves here since I haven’t been particularly vague with my grudge names.  But since I no longer hold the grudge, how can the possibly be offended?

I better make a new rule now: “No holding a grudge for someone holding a grudge.”

There, that should cover me.

Let me just add, “If you break the preceding rule and hold a grudge for someone holding a grudge, your grudge may only have a half life of the duration allowed for the grudge upon which you base your grudge.”

There.  Ironclad.

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So I’ve taken my own advice and created my own commercial to be entered into the Dockers contest. This contest is searching for commercials of original content about Dockers pants to be placed online and possibly to be featured in an ad on television. Now I’m not looking for my big break into Hollywood or the world of advertising, but it would be cool to have a commercial that I created this afternoon aired for the whole country to see. Really cool or really embarrassing. Maybe both. More towards really cool if I get a lifetime supply of Dockers. It’s not listed in the contest as far as I know, but here’s hoping.

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Last April my husband received a job offer for a position he really wanted. The pay was about the same per hour as the job he had then but since he had been getting overtime and a shift differential, the result was that when he took the new position, we had to deal with a 30% pay cut. He began the job last June and since then, we’ve been really working on roping in our spending. Sometimes we’re successful (like when the car burned to the ground and he started taking the bus) and sometimes we’re not so successful (like when he bought me a brand new bike for my birthday).

At first I felt it was his problem to deal with. I’m happy he has a job that is a career instead of just a position. I’m glad he has advancement opportunities and I know that in the long run this job is the best financial decision we’ve made since we got married and for all of us (four kids along with we two) financial security is important. But I still felt it was his problem to solve since he was the one who took the pay cut.

So he solved it. A friend told him about the many possibilities that blogging holds for supplementing your income and he began this blog. One day he asked if I could help him out with a post. I said I hate blogs and would have nothing to do with it. A few days later he asked again. He had hit a writing wall and really needed an idea. I jumped in to save the day and wrote a post about a movie I had seen (National Treasure: Book of Secrets) and raved about the Disney short that opened it. Is it too ridiculous to write here that I got hooked? Too late, I already did.

I gradually took over the blogging. Well, not that gradually - I started the next day getting opps and writing posts. If an idea struk me for a blog post, I would write it down. I had an endless supply of ideas - and I went through every single one. The blogging has been a great boon for us. Realistically, we would not have made out as well financially if this chance had not been presented to us. Realistically we would not have made it this long without someone in the family getting a second job and realistically (due to scheduling and a decided lack of paying employment on my part) that someone would have been me. (I hate being realistic. Can’t I live in the world of naive optimism?)

So now I’m a stay at home mom and a stay at home blogger. I get to contribute financially to the household (which I’ve always felt a need to do but not in a ‘May I take your order’ kind of way) and I get to see my husband more than if either of us had gotten a job outside the house.

Maybe you think that blogging isn’t for you. I would say that blogging is what you make of it.

Maybe you think that this is pie in the sky money that you’ll never see. I would chime in with my salesperson pitch and say I felt just the same way when I started. Except I’m not a salesperson (as evidenced by my lack of a mint green satin jacket and greased back hair) and I really did feel suspicious of the idea when we began. Turns out the internet is not old enough to be as jaded as I am and I get to pay the bills with the new income.

If you have a blog already going, you can probably start right away by just signing up with some different sites like the up and coming SocialSpark.

If you haven’t started you blog yet, get one going where you rave about your genius children. (My 1st grader can use rectum in a sentence.) There’s no WAY you’ll run low on ideas. Then sign up and see where your blog takes you.

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It’s official - my kids are klutzes.  I assume it has something to do with the fact that their bodies are growing and they don’t realize how much space they take up.  My younger son has been terribly afflicted by this problem.  This week alone he got a huge scrape on his arm when he fell and hit a wall, fell backwards off a swing cutting the back of his head, cut his knee when he tripped and (this is my favorite) gave himself a black eye when he bent over to pick something up.  On the way down he hit his face on a shelf on the entertainment center.  He also likes to tell people about how he fell getting out of the shower but there’s only anecdotal evidence of this.

He’s not alone, though.  My youngest split her lip yesterday; my oldest fell at school and scraped up his arm (he blamed it on the fact that I wouldn’t let him wear a winter coat that day even though it was 85 degrees); and my oldest daughter just ran in crying…..

I’ve spoken to her and apparently she’s not hurt, but her brother DID just touched her. Let me through out a hasty ‘Keep your hands to yourself”……

Should I admit to being nervous about taking them out in public lest someone think I am the reason for these problems?  At least some of them can talk and tell them otherwise.

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Spring break is coming up and I’m SOOOO looking forward to sleeping in. I’ve spent too many days getting up before the crack of dawn to get things done. Of course a vacation doesn’t just mean sleeping in - it means spending some time in the sun. Whether you want to improve your tan or enjoy the sun while blocking the rays, opotion.com has the sun care skin products you need.

They have spray on sunblock, lotion bronzer or any combination you can think of. They have products to protect your even your hair from the sun. If it’s your kids who are on spring break and you plan on spending some time with them at the beach, you can still get protection for their delicate skin. With Ocean Potion you can get that bronze look faster without spending as much time in the sun. It has an SPF of 4.

Once you’ve figured out what you need for your skin, try putting a little money in your pocket for your time away from home by entering their Spring Break Contest, the XTREME Spring Break Challenge. Make a video promoting their products and you could win $5000 or an XTREME Dream Vacation which includes airfare to and a stay in a hotel in Vegas (for two), fighter pilot training, a dune buggy excursion and more.

GOOD LUCK

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There’s an artist in Australia who  has a unique way of painting.  Or rather a unique thing to paint with.

What exactly do you think was going through the guys head when he decided that he should use his, um, his, um, well YOU KNOW WHAT as a paint brush.  Did he think, “Shoot, I just wrecked my last brush.  What can I use now?  Eureka!”  Being drunk or high is just too obvious.  Maybe he was just trying to find a way to cover up for his bad painting and can now blame it on the instrument (so to speak).

Woodpecker is a much funnier word, now that I think about it.

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The weather is wonderful! I don’t have to run the heater; I don’t have to run the air conditioner.  Too bad this will only last for a couple days.  Then again, I could be in International Falls, MN where it’s -40.  That’s the actual temperature, not some weird ‘wind chill’ temperature.

Here’s something I found out when I lived in Michigan for a year - hair freezes in cold weather.   Just a little tidbit for those of out there who don’t understand the cold like we people who’ve really lived through it (actually, I heard it was a mild year that year).

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Funny story…

I was recycling my cans at this big machine in a random parking lot (cuz that’s how I roll). I’ve done it at least a dozen times before and some of you may be familiar with the beastly type of thing. You shove all your cans into a hole and somewhere in the bowels of the metal box they get weighed and quarters are dispensed. You can get more if you go somewhere and deal with a real person, but I like the anonymity of recycling with a machine.

Anyway, as I’m dumping the cans in (mine and those of another lady who gave me hers instead of hang out - thank you lady!), I heard a noise coming from around the corner of the machine. I assumed it was just the noise of things rattling around inside but when I looked there was a huge pile of cans that I didn’t remember being there before.

Turns out my cans gave the machine gas because it was burping them out the side, into the parking lot!

Now here’s the moral dilemma (and I won’t tell you what I did because the only two things I could come up with could be wrong but feel free to tell me what you THINK I did).

Should I have picked up the cans and run them back through double dipping on the money but not leaving a huge pile of litter (kinda the whole point of recycling)?

OR

Should I have left the cans by the machine knowing that they had been bought and paid for but that there would be a pile of trash that most likely would not get picked up?

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My older daughter has reached a new milestone.  I like to call it the ‘Don’t Call Me Anything But My Name’ phase.  An alternative name for this phase is ‘Explain Idioms to Children’ phrase.  You can’t say ‘Sorry, Charlie’ to kids during this time because they take offense to being called Charlie.

When I called her a little lady the other day, she protested.  When I called her sweetheart, she protested.  Each time she protests, it’s with a little more impatience as if she’s tired of having to tell me the same thing over and over again.  I can really relate to that.

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