Oh yes…the supplies and the tender moment.

Well, let’s start with the first one: I’ve been struck by the canning bug, or more accurately, the preserving bug. With how the economy is, and with prices heading steadily upwards, I figured I’d take a page out of my grandmother’s book and do some canning. At this point I’ve confined myself to open kettle items: fruit jams. I’ve done 6 or so jars of blueberry and another dozen of raspberry. Plus three or four quarts of blueberries frozen in the freezer. I’ve got plans on peaches from the farm and pears if I can put my paws on them at a good price. When the fall strawberries come in at the farm, there will be strawberry jam, oh yes, there will be.

I’d like to do some serious canning (which involves Our Lady Of Perpetual Motion’s 1970-something vintage avocado green pressure canner) of beets, beans and carrots. I’d like to freeze corn and perhaps some other veg. And I’ll definitely be making applesauce and freezing it, as the girls can suck down applesauce like, well…they like it a lot. There have been whole meals based around applesauce. Hell, if I had the time and energy to make nothing but applesauce and yogurt, they’d be well satisfied.

Anyway, lots of food being put away. I’m not sure I feel *quite* like a squirrel (damn squirrs) or an ant yet, but I’m definitely getting that way. We’re being careful to buy stuff on sale and stock up when we can on things that will keep well through the winter. I’m thinking on having at a minimum of two weeks worth of food, but more like a month’s would make me happy. I’m not paranoid, just careful.

Now, Tattooed Dad’s already blogged about the tender moments that were interrupted by oldest child, so you’re welcome to read about his version of events. We are still not finished building out the bedroom, so our bedroom is truly a bed room. Full of beds, all off them filled with various slumbering individuals, that is not conducive to getting your freak on.

So we were fooling around in the living room, lights out, and suddenly, while Tattooed Dad was *ahem* getting ready, suddenly he says “oh, honey” (he says he said “oh fuck” but whatever). I turn my head and there is Oldest Child, and I say ‘what’s the matter, baby, you scared me to death” (which was true). She starts to cry and says she had to pee and her leg hurt (Which I think is what TD would have said if he’d had to come up with some excuse). Fortunately, there were no questions, and Oldest Child went back to bed. But that was that, because there was no recovering from it.

Next night TD and I decide to try it again, and he puts the kids to bed while I take a shower. We came out of the shower and decide to watch a, what’s the correct term?, an adult film. One interruption by smallest child, fortunately, she made a ton of noise, and we weren’t really doing anything and after that, things went according to plan aside from a loud noise, which TD assumed was a noise from the downstairs neighbors.

The next day Oldest says to me “when I came downstairs to pee last night, I saw that you and dada were watching a grown up movie”.

I swallowed my tongue and said “how did you know it was a grown up movie?”

She said “it had a lady in it”.

“Oh, is that all?”

“Yeah. Maybe when I’m grown up I can watch it with you.”

Cue grey hair.

The funny part is that the movie was absolutely (and unintentionally) hilarious. It was a “plot based” disc and there were long scenes between THE scenes that involved people in ridiculous costumes having pointless, or nearly so, conversations which allegedly advanced the story. So it’s entirely possible that she saw something fairly innocuous. At least it’s possible, right?

So I need to write about the supplies I’m putting away for winter, the first time we’ve been walked in on by a child during a ‘tender moment’ and the assorted stuff of life and what I’m *going* to write about right now is my idiot aunt.

I’ve written about her previously: this is the one who loves to send inflammatory, right wing propaganda peppered with invective and insult and then, for variety’s sake, “Christian” email forwards.

I’ve taken the time to address these emails with (usually) calm and rational debate, footnoted and end-noted and clearly spelling out that I, who am a grown woman now, am a dyed in the wool liberal who fully intends to vote for Obama this year and would have voted for Dennis if I’d had the opportunity to do so.

She responded that she didn’t vote for Bush, but that she thought Obama was “too young, too inexperienced and not good enough”. Okay. Her opinion. She said Kerry was too soft on terrorism, and look where that’s gotten us.

And then she sends another email, which was forwarded to her from my great aunt, who apparently gets all her news from the feed on Fox and has zero concept of what the hell is actually going on in the world. The email went more or less to blaming the democratic congress for the state of the nation: “the senate runs things, the president can only work with what he’s got”. Clearly she’s not heard of a signing statement, a veto and is unaware of the fact that the “democrat run congress” is not.

And the war: the email bitched about money spent on illegal aliens healthcare and environmental protections and welfare, but they seem to thing that the money spent on the war is a good deal because it “makes us safer”? Are you fucking kidding? what about those poor bastards over in Iraq and Afghanistan who are DYING in an illegal and unjust war? What about the fact that the returning people are getting substandard care BECAUSE of the republicans?!? All to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars A DAY with no end in sight!

Do I continue to address them? To attempt to reach the seemingly decent people that I am related to? Or give them up as the Wall-Mart shopping, Fox news consuming, ostriches that they are?

So on my way home yesterday I stopped at a local department store chain to buy a new bra.

I have always been busty. My father, god rest him, used to say “we bought her a training bra and she broke training”. Yep, that was the kind of funny he was.

Anyway.

Busty. On a 5′9″ frame, (”I’m not fat, I’m just big boned” thank you Cartman) my bras, PK (pre kids) were 36 D cup. With the lovely biological changes wrought by being pregnant (hello expanded ribcage, not as if the barrel chest I was blessed with by my father wasn’t big enough and hello hugely swollen and unbelievably tender for several months boobs, not to mention the rest of the weight gain (of which there was really only 25 pounds or so) and magically expanded shoes and lovely zebra striped stretch marks on my fat little belly roll that I was bequeathed by my mom: hey nothing more attractive than a barrel chest paired up with a belly roll, but hey, I’m not bitter) i went up both in band size and not one, not two, not even three but FOUR cup sizes. Yes, boys and girls, when the milk came in, I was staring down the barrel of a pair of 38 G cups. My baby’s head was smaller than my tit and my nipple could have crowned a decent size cappuccino.

So here I sit nearly six years PK and still the damn things haven’t reverted to a more reasonable size.

Now bra shopping in the best situations sucks. It doesn’t matter what the tag says: until you try it on, you have NO IDEA of whether or not it will reign in the girls.

My 38 sized bras are, thankfully, going the way of the dinosaur. Either by weight loss or by (finally!) the grace of the gods, I have gone down a band size. So that makes me a 36 F or G cup, depending on the style of the bra. Go ahead, read that again.

36 F or G cup.

My old bras will be utilized by FEMA to help those poor bastards out in the midwest flood zones: they’ll make perfectly good tents for small families.

So there I am, at the lovely local department store, not sure if they even carry something as randomly sized as a 36 F (or 36 DDD, which is a marketing way to make women feel like their tits aren’t the equivalent of Everest), hating that I’ll be forced to go into some horribly lit changing room to try on these spandex and nylon contraptions.

Wonder of wonders, I found a total of 6 bras in black or white only, all plain, and marginally better than military issue, in the “correct size”. One, wonder of wonders, promises to “eliminate back roll”. The picture on the tag for this bra is a woman I could easily break over my knee and fold into origami. Her “back roll” is like my 5 year old daughters: pretty much non existent unless you happen to strap her up like a roast (bad analogy, but it’s early and I have had no coffee). Seriously, the model was even skinnier than the usual one and had maybe a soccer mom’s (tennis mom???) worth of skin smooshed under a bra that is clearly a size too small. Of course the ‘new and improved back roll eliminator bra’ shows no such indentations. As if the damned model had any to start with.

So off I go to the chamber of horrors, and under the charming glow of the florescent lights, I try on the bras, looking like an extra from a Romero film. One out of the six fit, suggesting that no, in fact, I will want a 36 G cup (36 DDDD) because of the way the damned things are designed. But wait! There’s more!

They don’t actually sell anything larger than the size I’ve got in hand. Being as that the people at this store are utterly useless and look like a pole-axed steer if you ask them any questions while holding a bra that would make an effective hat for Andre the Giant, AND that I’ve pretty much burned out whatever ability I have to be in a department store for any length of time, I pick up the one (ONE!) bra that fit and make a beeline back to the intimates department (these are not intimate bras, they are utilitarian, because, clearly a woman with tits like mine is not interested in intimacy, and where, oh where, did I put my 38 so I can ’splain to those marketing weasels what *that* does to my psyche?) to see if maybe, just maybe, I missed a blue tagged ginormo bra in something other than plain white. (As a side note, 80% of my wardrobe is BLACK.) I found one other, in white, of course, of a style I’d bought previously, and recklessly bought it without trying it on again.

I paid for my purchases and got a bag big enough to hold a suit in, and dashed through the torrential rain to the car, soaking my shoes and jeans and making my shirt indecent (yay!)

I get home and show Tattooed Dad my purchases: I’m drawing breath to bitch about the lack of selection and oldest child says “wow, mama, those are pretty. And big.”

So here I sit in my recklessly purchased, “the old one fit” bra, knowing full well that I need a G cup and not really caring.

I’ll be buying online from now on: I wonder where porn stars get their bras?

I know, I’ve been a-miss.

Neglectful, even.

I have an excuse, truly.

I’ve been reading a blog.

To the exclusion of pretty much everything else (besides, chirren, cats, the dog, and some, but definitely not all, of the housework, and the job. The godforsaken job.)

The blog is by a remarkable woman named Crystal, who makes me laugh out loud, makes me think, and quite frankly gave me something to hang onto for the last couple of bad, lousy, no-good, awful weeks.

I’ve literally read the whole thing, start to finish, and I’m absolutely grateful for her honesty and her humor, not to mention that she looks like she could have been my sister in the 80’s, ubiquitous hat and all.

At the risk of sounding stalker-ish, I’d say this is one woman who gets it, damn it, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel so wrong and broken about how I am.

My hurts and anxieties and whatnot are mine and aren’t comparable to hers, but I’m inspired by how good of a person she is, despite all she’s been through and I’m all kids of impressed by her writing, her intelligence and her humor.

Go, quickly, and read.

My recommendation? Start from the beginning. You’ll be glad you did.

“It’s like a salty lollipop!”

yeah, um…it’s a PRETZEL.

I was going to wedge these into my last post, as they sum of the many of the distractions of the weekend, but felt like Dennis’s work deserved a post of its own.

I’ve started reading the oh-so-interesting Home Grown Evolution blog and am inspired to go all Victory Garden on my yard, especially since I’ve now got a wildly sunny space to work in (with the trees down and all).

On Saturday, the Lovely Maria and her lovely man and his lovely daughter accompanied the kids and I to Garden in the Woods for an afternoon of plant, insect and animal watching as well as a lovely hike about the grounds. For a reasonable admittance fee, it’s a great afternoon.

On Sunday morning we popped over to
our local Pick Your Own farmstand. Goats, sheep and pick your own strawberries. Four quarts for $9.50, and I’m looking for my strawberry jam recipe…

Hope you’re all well…

well, you know…we all want to change the world.

So why aren’t we? That’s not to say that there aren’t LOTS of people working for change, because there are.

We were chatting with friends last night over burgers and beer while the kidlets lolled about on the carpet watching classic Disney films, and one of them said “so where are the torches and pitchforks? Why aren’t people in open revolt?”

Tattooed Dad said that it’s because we’ve been pacified by the ridiculous amount of stuff we have, the shiny gadgets, the television, the distractions. We have food when we want it, we don’t *really* have to cut down on things, aren’t “suffering” like people in other countries.

I suppose that’s true, on an inordinately awful level. I am distracted, myself, on many levels…the kids, the job, the housework, the marriage, the pets, etc. I don’t spend oodles of time considering the state of the world (because it makes me want to vomit) and with the war grinding endlessly on, it barely makes headlines. I worry about our bills, our finances, our kids, our lives.

Dennis Kucinich has brought articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney (which are lingering in committee) and now against W. Dennis Kucinich is the bravest man in Washington, and could very well be one of the bravest in the country. He promises to be an agent of change for sure.

We went off to the vermont woods,literally, for the wedding of Ms. Moonspun and her Running Professor.

We arrived at their house on Friday, and I spent a good hour being absorbed by their gorgeous garden…lupine, lady’s mantle, dianthus, roses, iris, Jacob’s ladder…it was gorgeous.

We got to play in their brook, the dog was off leash for the first time ever, which made her wildly happy, the kids were running wild through the yard, it was great.

And it got even better: when we got to the event site, which is run by the absolutely wonderful Burr family, we got a neat cabin, with power (including a coffee maker!) and a very comfy bed. The site itself is absolutely gorgeous: acres of land to play on, a pool, stream, tree house, labyrinth, fields of flowers, pollywogs, frogs, dragonflies, butterflies, you name it (and mosquitoes, but hey, it was a small price to pay). It was glorious.

The wedding went off with only minor behind the scenes bobbles, and with only one stumble (mine) during the ceremony. It was the first wedding I’ve cried at in years: the love between Moonspun and RP is so clearly visible, and their commitment to one another is so honest and pure, the emotion was overwhelming.

We had wonderful food, great company, the beautiful outdoors: it was a perfect weekend. Even the rain kept itself to appropriate times. The girls had a great time playing with the other kids, and Luna ran herself ragged in the fields.

As they say, a fine time was had by all. It was tough to come back to the city!

When Tattooed Dad and I fight it’s over either sex or money…the lack of either.

Money is a huge issue around our house. We’ve worked hard, and we’ve invested a lot of that into the house. It seems like any time we get under control things go wonky. In this case, it was both cars having fits, one right after the other.

Tattooed Dad’s shift linkage broke, and the first replacement part failed. The second one worked with only a small hack (since we bought the “generic” part and not the saturn part that was three times as expensive). Ultimately, it seems like we’ll need to cough up the money for the big ticket item.

My car, as you might know, is possessed. It appears, though, that we’re on the right track for a fix. After the first round of repairs and a rental car and a second trip to the shop because the first one didn’t solve the “I’m wet so I will not run” issue. The second trip included the mechanics drowning the car to recreate the circumstances that gave me the problem in the first place and MIRACLE! it worked. As near as they can tell, the MAP sensor, which controls the flow of air/fuel in the injectors. Hopefully, this *will* solve the problem.

So TD wrote a post about all of this as well and also about the ultra generous gift from his friend Alx.

Now my thought was that the money should be used to pay for the damn bills (or be socked away as a cushion). And yes, I know, it’s “found money” (or rather a whopping gift) and that maybe it should be used elsewhere. For me, at least, not having to freak out about getting the damn bills paid is HUGELY more important than pretty much any cool item that I might like to have.

TD, however, had a very different opinion. He went, without even mentioning he was thinking of doing it (and I’d asked, mind you), and bought a camera. This is not the super whoop-de-do camera that he’d like (or that I’d like for that matter) it’s a newer version of the one we have. I’m sure it was around $200.

That’s not, as you might imagine, my issue. It was buying something that we don’t “need” instead of dealing with the huge stack of crap we need to deal with.

So we fought, because TD sprung this on me right after we got back from getting the car from the shop for trial number two, and because I’m sure that we’re looking at yet another huge bill for the second repair. He said *I* didn’t need the camera.

When I said that I thought TD was disconnected from our situation (i.e. we’re financially tight and don’t have room for much outside of our budget) and he responded that he knew *exactly* what it was. He said it was a check from his friend given to him for use for “fun stuff”. I said fun for me was not worrying about the groceries, or the bills. I mentioned the money we owe for the cars, the tree work that has to be done, to various friends and family etc. He got heated, and so did I. He went on to say that “as long as we’re together, I’ll *never* buy anything for us again”. I told him he was being a drama queen and to drag in the drama llama for a show. He said he wasn’t being dramatic.

It got ugly.

He said that I “couldn’t see anybody’s point of view but my own” and that he couldn’t talk to me. He stomped out of the house and drove away.

It hurts me that he thinks that, even for a moment in the middle of an argument. I try very hard to see other POVs…I make a living seeing other people’s points of view. I hate that I’m forced to be the practical one, the banker, the accountant, the babysitter, the mommy, the care giver. I’m sure that I’ll get the fact that I spent $30 at the fiber festival tossed back at me, or that because I elected to rent a car for four days while mine was being fixed (rather than shuffle all of us around, or use his car and leave him stranded) and thereby racked up more bills will also be of note.

I’m so fucked. And not in a good way this time.

*me, to Oldest* “hey, don’t put your feet in your mouth, they’re dirty”

the irony is that she’s a Sagittarius.