Bless her heart.

Okay, in the spirit of trying to post regularly, here I am again.  But I don't know what in the world I'm going to write about.  Let's just see what happens here, okay?

Oh.  I just thought of something!

No, that's stupid.

Are any of you doing anything fun for the holiday weekend?  I know at least one of you came to Atlanta for Dragon Con this weekend and I'm going to go out on a limb here and figure you're not reading today.  Can I just confess that I don't really get Dragon Con?  Like at all.   As in, what is it even for?  I know people dress up in costumes and then I usually forget it's Dragon Con weekend here in Atlanta and I see people who have stopped in the grocery store to pick up something wearing some crazy get up and I think to myself, "Wow.  That person has gone off the deep end for sure.  They are in the grocery store dressed up like a zombie turtle."

I had some potential plans but the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to participate.  One of my dearest friends in the world is about to have a birthday next week.  I received an invitation to a cook-out tomorrow.  Sounds harmless, right? 

A little back story.

I've been friends with this dear, sweet person since we were 15-years-old which is, well, a lot of years because I just turned 45 about 2 weeks ago and she'll be 45 next week.  We were high school friends and we were roommates for a couple of years in college and had many crazy adventures (stories for another day).  She stayed with my ex and I some when she went through a divorce.  I lived with her and her now second husband while I was going through my divorce about 9 years ago.  I adore her.  But her mom?  Well, I love her mom too but her mom is a little loopy.  Okay.  She's A LOT loopy.  She's one accordion short of a Polka band.  She's a few tomatoes short of a good thick sauce.  She doesn't have all the dots on her dice.  Her belt doesn't go through all of the loops.  The bees are buzzing, but the flower ain't in bloom.  She's nuttier than squirrel poop.  Her biscuits ain't quite done. 

Bless her heart. 

I love her to death, but she's just not quite all there most of the time.

Last fall - I would say it was in October or November - her mom called me while I was at work one day.   She said my friend (her daughter) had told her all about what's been going on in my life, about my house, about Hot Brazilian, etc. and that she is just so proud of me after watching us all grow up and how glad she is that her daughter and I are still such great friends.  And it was good to hear her mom's voice.  She then asked me for my home address and said she wanted to send me something so I gave her my address and didn't really think anything else about it because I didn't see anything come from her in the mail.

Until last month.

July.

When I got a Christmas card from her. 

She wrote a note on the back of the envelope that said, "Better late than never!  Just found this in my office!"  Um, why not just save it and send it this coming Christmas?  It wasn't dated and I never would have known.

My birthday was earlier this month and my friend called me to wish me a happy birthday and catch up.  I told her what her mom had done and she laughed for 5 minutes straight and told me how glad she was I shared the story with her because she had just had a stressful day and needed something to laugh about.

Anyway, I got my mail out of the mailbox last night and saw something from her mom.  "Oh goodness.  It must be an Easter card.  Bless her heart," I thought. 

I opened it up and it's a flyer type invitation to go to a "Grandma and Gramps" cookout for tomorrow.  I'm not entirely sure what a Grandma and Gramps cookout is. She also enclosed a little scrap piece of paper with a handwritten note to me letting me know they will be celebrating my friend's birthday which is next week and how much she would love to see me there.

At the bottom it asks everyone to please RSVP. 

But there is no phone number.

And it's supposed to rain tomorrow.

Also, they live in Villa Rica which is close to the Alabama line and I'm not sure I want to drive all that way for a grandma cookout.  

Well, now that I've just written all of this out, I have to go, right?  This has blog material written all over it!

This is also reminding me of the Christmas while I was living with my friend during my divorce when my friend opened up a gift from her mom.  It was a bunch of exercise videos called "Getting in Shape the Jesus Way" or something along those lines.  I think it was aerobics videos done to gospel music.  Um.  Okay.   Those went straight into a closet and probably remain shrink wrapped to this day unless she got rid of them when she moved a few years ago.

Mentioning "bless her heart" reminded me of this video series.....Sh%t Southern Women Say.  I've lived in Georgia my entire life and I'm pretty certain I've heard someone say 99% of this stuff.  For real.

Y'all have a great weekend!  If my kids go out and party and stay gone most of the weekend as they usually do I'll try to post again at some point. 

Posting three days in a row? What what?

Before I forget this, we were talking about having a Pie gathering at my house in October and I suppose we should narrow down the date so people can make plans, right?  Would Saturday the 12th or Saturday the 26th work better for those of you who are coming?  I've already got at least one person from out-of-town staying at my house and if my fake kids are still living with me then I can give up my bed, I'll sleep on the sofa or in my reading nook chair (assuming my ceiling isn't leaking water right above the chair come October) and then I could squeeze in one more but that's about it.  Unless you want to sleep on an air mattress.  So if you want to sleep on an air mattress and another person wants to fight with me over who gets the sofa and who gets the chair I can fit 2 more of you.  But I'm too fat to sleep on the air mattress - I can't get back up off the floor.  I'm starting to think this is not making any sense, so y'all just leave a comment letting me know which weekend sounds best, and if you are coming from out of town tell us if you need a free place to stay and I'm sure if I can't fit you in my house someone else around Atlanta might be able and willing to.

Speaking of people traveling to Atlanta, I always look forward to getting the heck out of here.  I just made my last car payment two weeks ago (WOOT!) so as of next month I will have an extra $400 per month.  Thank you, Lord.  The responsible thing to do would be to put that in savings to use for my next stupid house repair, but do you know what I really need?  A vacation.

So I went online recently and started looking for somewhere I could stay for a couple of days up in the mountains.  I'm much more a mountain girl than a beach girl.  I really like Blue Ridge, Ga. because it's only a couple of hours from Atlanta and it's a super cute little town with some great shopping and restaurants.  I've only been there once but I kind of fell in love with it. 

But the weekend there didn't start off so great.

My mom got married two years ago and was quitting her job (basically retiring), selling her house, getting married, and moving to Texas with her new husband all in the span of two months.  So she was a bit stressed to say the least.  I picked up the phone and said, "Mom, I want to take you somewhere for a last girls' weekend before you get married and move half-way across the country from me.  Let's go to the mountains for a long weekend."  This sounded like a great plan.

My aunt and a cousin were going to join us for one night, but Mom and I were going for 3 nights.

The first night we kind of thought we might die and no one would ever find us again.

The cabin rental place was running a special so if you rented for 2 nights you got the 3rd night free.  We decided to head up after work on Thursday so that we would have all day Friday and Saturday and we would come back home on Sunday.  Neither of us had ever been to Blue Ridge. 

I found a cabin online that looked wonderful, I sent the link to my Mom and she agreed so I rented it for us.  The listing emphasized MANY times that it was right in the middle of everything.  Right in the middle of Blue Ridge.  That many cabins claimed to be right in Blue Ridge but they were not, but that this cabin truthfully was right in the middle of town.  So we daydreamed for the few weeks until we went about how awesome our relaxing weekend in the cabin was going to be and how we would walk from our cabin to the town for coffee and breakfast each morning, shop for a while, and walk back.

Our weekend away came up and I got off work that Thursday, drove to my Mom's house north of Atlanta to pick her up, and off to Blue Ridge we went.  We had directions to the cabin rental office where we were to pick up the keys and a map to the cabin.  By the time we got to Blue Ridge, it was after 8:00 p.m.  We decided we would go to the cabin and drop off our stuff and then we would run back out to the grocery store and pick up coffee (my Mom cannot survive without it waiting for her when she wakes up) and a few snacks or something light for dinner, then we would go back to the cabin, put on our pajamas, maybe take a whirlpool bath, play games and snack.  We thought this because we thought our cabin was right in the middle of the town of Blue Ridge since that's what the online info told us. 

I was driving so my Mom was in possession of the map to the cabin and acted as the navigator.  We had no clue where downtown Blue Ridge was since we had never been there, and we certainly didn't know where it was in relation to the cabin rental office.  But we followed their directions.  And part of those directions said:  "Turn right on Aska Road and go until it ends.  Then turn right and look for County Road No. _____ on the left.  Sometimes the county road sign falls down so look for two blue reflectors on a tree."  And that's when I knew, we were going to have problems.

We made our way to Aska Road just fine and dandy and turned right. 

We drove.

And we drove.

And we drove.

And we drove.

And we drove.

And then we drove.

And then we drove some more.

And it was getting mighty dark by this point.

And then we drove and drove and drove some more.

This was a curvy, hilly, mountain road and we would pass a cabin every now and then.

We finally passed a restaurant.

And we drove and drove.

And we kept saying, "this can't be right.  Should we turn around?  We're following the directions.  But shouldn't the directions say this road is really, really, really long instead of just saying turn right and go to the end like it's only going to be a few blocks?"

Then my Mom yelled for me to pull off.  We sat on the side of the road debating whether or not we should go back and find a hotel somewhere.  I finally said, "Mom, we are following the directions.  Let's just keep going a little bit further and see what happens."  She wasn't happy about it but said okay.

A couple of miles further we finally reached the end.  I would say that angels sang, but they didn't.  Because it was about to get even worse.

By now it was flat out dark.  It was almost 9:00 and we were on a mountain so there were trees everywhere and no street lights.

We turned right and looked for the county road and it was just a couple of hundred feet up on the left.  I turned on it and pretty much immediately we were on a dirt/gravel one lane path going into the woods.  The directions said to go until the road forked, take the left fork where the sign said, "Entering National Forest." 

Y'all, they were not kidding.  We were in the forest alright.

Then we got good and scared out of our minds.  My Mom started saying over and over and over, "Please turn around.  Let's get out of here."  And I kept responding over and over and over, "Mom, we can't turn around.  There's a really high bank on the left side and a cliff on the right side of the car and I can't possibly turn around." 

I could not drive more than 10 mph because it was dark, scary, bumpy, and dirt/gravel.

We finally came upon two cabins - one on the left and one on the right side of the path. 

"Hooray!" we both exclaimed.  "We've finally found our cabin!" 

Wrong.  Neither one was our cabin.

We kept driving.

Then we came to a dead end y'all.  There was a huge tree in the middle of a circular area and as we drove around the tree there was a gate with a No Trespassing sign.

"OH JUST GREAT!" my mom yelled.  "All of this for nothing?  What are we going to do?"

I replied, "Apparently we're going to turn around and go all the way back and try to find a hotel."

As I turned around, my headlights shined on an opening in the trees off to the left and I decided to go for it.

And then the angels didn't exactly sing, but they made a bit of a whimper for us.  Because our adventurous night was still not quite over.

Our cabin was in a clearing once we drove through the opening.

I'm not going to lie.....we were both terrified to get out of the car.  It was pitch black and we were two women with no flashlights and no weapons in the middle of a forest.

I shined my headlights on the front door and ran as fast as my fat self could and got the door unlocked, turned on the front porch lights, and we grabbed our bags out of the car, ran inside and locked the door.

The cabin was super nice.  The master bedroom was upstairs and there were two more bedrooms downstairs.  We went downstairs to check everything out and that's when we discovered the door leading outside in the downstairs had not been locked before our arrival.  So we held hands and walked through the entire house checking to make sure no one was in there and I'm not sure either one of us breathed the entire time.

Mom said, "we are not sleeping on separate floors no matter what you say."  So we decided to share the master bedroom.

Then we came to the realization that it was 9:15 and we were starving since we had not stopped for dinner.  I found the number of the restaurant we had passed and called them.

"We closed at 9:00," they told me.  I asked if there were any other restaurants nearby and they told me there were not.

Luckily my Mom had thrown some microwave popcorn and a bottle of red wine in her bag and that became our very gourmet dinner.

The next morning around 7:00 a.m. my Mom starts whispering, "are you awake?"

I grumbled and she said, "get up, put on your clothes, do not take a shower, I'll give you enough time to brush your teeth, but I NEED COFFEE.  NOW."

We decided to clock the miles as we found downtown Blue Ridge.  Y'all.

Our cabin was FOUR MILES into the depth of the forest on that one lane gravel/dirt path.

Then we drove FIFTEEN MILES down curvy, hilly, mountainous Aska Road. 

Our cabin was 45 minutes from downtown Blue Ridge.  And yet online they said many times they were right in the middle of everything.  Liars!

Here is a photo of the county road going into the forest where our cabin was and this is pretty close to the main road and not way deep in the woods.  Does this look like it's right in the middle of everything to y'all?  And imagine not knowing where in Sam Hill you are going and driving through this when it's pitch black at night.  I was waiting for Jason from Friday the 13th to jump out from behind every single one of those trees.

On Friday afternoon my aunt and cousin drove up from Atlanta to join us.  We warned them what the deal was.  And we drove them to the cabin while it was still daylight.  And they kept asking, "Are y'all sure you're going to the right way?  There can't possibly be rental cabins back in here, can there?"

Did I mention yet that there was absolutely no water pressure in the cabin and none of us could take a bath or shower all weekend?  I know.  Gross.  My cousin wanted to take a bubble bath in the whirlpool tub and we said, "okay.  Good luck with that."  She ran the water as full blast as it would go for over 30 minutes and there was maybe an inch of water in the tub and the tip of her toes could have taken a bubble bath.  Disappointed is what she was.

I emailed Mom earlier today and told her the next time she comes to Atlanta we need to take a couple of days and go to the mountains.  But I've found a place that I know is not in Friday the 13th territory.

THE END.

Look at me posting two days in a row. The earth must be coming to an end.

Okay, I'm caving to the Pie on the Face pressure and posting again.  Two days in a row.  Are y'all happy?

This is going to be mostly pictures because I am busy, busy, busy here at work.  And someone just emailed me and asked me which IT class I signed up for tomorrow and I wrote her back and asked what in the heck she's talking about because I have no idea what in the heck she's talking about.  So tomorrow probably just got a little crazier than I was expecting too.  Perhaps I should be paying closer attention to my email.  I bet it came in the day I was home with holes cut out all over my house last week.

Which leads to this plethora of pictures.  And if you're friends with me on Facebook you've seen some of these before so you will need to get over it and pretend this is all new, okay?

I want y'all to see what stresses me out before I ever get to my house which breaks every other day:

Dear Atlanta traffic:  YOU SUCK!
 

And after I sit in that crappy stuff twice a day, this is the kind of stuff that keeps happening to my house over and over for 19 months I've lived in it.

I present to you my ceiling in my reading nook.  By the way, do you know how many times in 19 months I've relaxed in my reading nook with a good book?  Zero.  The only time I've sat in the nice, comfy overstuffed chair and ottoman in my reading nook since I moved in my house was when I was in a giant cast and body brace from tripping on my flip flop and breaking my humerus in 4 places when I had to sleep in my reading nook chair for 3 months since I could not lay [lie? I always get those wrong] down.  This giant ceiling hole is repaired now, but this is what it looked like for a good part of the past 2 weeks with a bucket under it and water dripping out of it and my cat constantly drinking gross dripped water out of the bucket:

And here is the reason the ceiling downstairs in my reading nook was all molded and then cut out and gross water was dripping in a bucket so my cat could drink gross dripped water out of a bucket.  This is what the bathroom that my fake daughter and I share upstairs looked like for a bit last week:

I liked that tile a lot.

But because they had to cut out the tile and the tile couldn't be re-used and my house was a foreclosure and I had no clue where the tile had come from originally, I had to have the entire bathtub re-tiled.  I haven't take a photo of it after the grout was added, but here's the work in progress.  And the lady who owned my house previously must have gotten the best deal in the history of the universe on bead board because it is everywhere in my house.  9 closets, 2 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms (including the walls AND ceiling of the one below), the kitchen and the walls and ceiling of my garage are all lined in it.  It's a good thing I like bead board, huh?

Below is what the bedroom on the back side of the downstairs shower which was ALSO broken looked like for a bit last week.  It was the shower which had a two inch crack in the pipe and guess what?  I had the stems replaced TWICE in that shower already which was about $350 worth of unnecessary work since that wasn't going to fix a giant pipe crack and prevent water from gushing into my crawl space and under the tile in the bedroom below.  And when I posted this picture on Facebook, one of my friends asked if the contractors had painted a wiener on my wall.  No, it's not a wiener painting.  It squiggled the rest of the way up the wall under the bead board and stuff that they had to remove to cut into the wall.  My walls are wiener free.

After my cat was all disappointed that her gross dripped water bucket had been taken away (seriously, she was so sad and walked around the area meowing like her entire world had been torn apart) she decided to drink out of my toilet.  Why are animals so gross?  Two nights I have gotten up in the middle of the night and I had to physically pick her up and put her on the floor so I could use the toilet because she would not move out of the way she loves that water so much.

Maybe this is why that cat has such tummy troubles.  Because instead of drinking her nice clean water out of her water bowl, she's on a quest for the grossest water she can possibly find in my house.  Actually, her stomach problems have gotten a little bit better the past few weeks because I medicated the crap out of her with some stuff the vet prescribed for her.  But she would not eat it if I tried hiding it in cheese, chicken, etc. so I had to buy a pill shooter.  And here is a photo of fake son holding her for me while I shot meds down her throat.  You can see how thrilled she is and her love for both of us was great for about a week and a half of this.  Yes, fake son is really good looking.  Stop drooling, okay?  He's only 18 so get your mind out of the gutter.  And yes, I have stainless steel appliances and granite counter tops which June hates.  You're supposed to be paying attention to the evil slit eye my cat is giving me rather than boys and kitchen appliances.

And if sick cats, bad traffic, and holes being cut into stuff all over my house didn't stress me out enough, this happened a couple of weeks ago:

HOW THE HELL DOES A LIZARD GET INSIDE YOUR HOUSE???

I was sitting on the sofa talking to my mom on the phone and she was really upset about some stuff she's dealing with which is also adding to my stress because I love the heck out of my mom when I suddenly had to interrupt her and scream, "OMG!  Mom I need to call you back because there is a lizard in my living room!"  I'm pretty sure she wasn't expecting that.  Neither was I.  I chased this thing all over my living room with a solo cup so I could take it back outside.  Did you know these things can hop?  Did you know I can scream loud enough to wake the dead?  I finally caught it and got it outside and I hope I never see it's little green self again.

And here I am as a cartoon when I'm about to explode from the stress.

I'll do my best to post again tomorrow with something new.

 THE END.

News flash: I have craziness going on in my life

So our wonderful June is going to take a break.  I don't blame her.  But it has inspired me to really, really, really try to post more regularly.  I'm certainly not saying I'll post every single day like she does, but I am going to try to do better than once a month.  I normally have plenty of blog material, I am just limited because I am hesitant to blog at my house with the two fake kids there since I don't want them to know about this blog.  And sometimes at work I'm simply too busy.  But I promise to try even if no one is here to read my rambling. I've honestly had this post partially written and saved in my draft folder for several weeks and never had a chance to finish it.  Sad is what I am.

Well, I know y'all will be surprised, but since I last wrote more crap has happened in my life.  Seriously, will I ever have a calm week?

Here's a secret:  all of this crap that keeps happening kind of stresses me out.  Like, a lot.  Which is why I'm eating one of the world's largest chocolate and sea salt candy bars right now.  Stress and PMS.  I know you can't wait to keep reading now.

The stress made me get really cranky a few weekends ago and I said something to my fake kids in a text message on that Saturday night that was completely inappropriate and then I felt so rotten to my very core about it that I didn't sleep for three days.  Plus Aunt Flo was visiting and that just doesn't help anything.  Without going into the details, it was about an issue that I have had to talk to them about over and over and over again  that bugs the ever loving crap out of me that they have been doing and I've told them over and over and over again why it bugs me and what would happen if they kept doing it and guess what?  That thing happened on that particular Saturday night.  They were at a nightclub with some friends of theirs when I discovered what had happened to my house because of this thing they keep doing and I texted them and told them I was so angry that they should not come home.  So they didn't come home.  For two days.  I win the fake parenting award of the year for that right there.  Y'all I still feel absolutely horrid about it.  I've apologized profusely to them, I've confessed what I did to Hot Brazilian when I talked to him a couple of days later (he wasn't mad at me at all (he is mad at his kids because of what they did) but it's okay because I'm mad enough at myself for 85 people), and the kids seem okay now that we talked it all out, but I still feel just awful that I said that to them.  I've talked about it with my mom and a dear friend of mine and they said I shouldn't feel as bad as I do because of a bunch of reasons, but I still do.  I feel rotten and awful and no-good and horrible and like a giant turd in a pair of giant stinky pants.

As soon as I sent the text I regretted it and I KNOW BETTER than to react to someone out of anger like I was feeling at that moment.  I knew I should have waited until I had calmed down some.  But I didn't.  And I couldn't un-send the text.  And then my fake daughter responded about 30 minutes later and told me how sorry they were for what had happened and what they had done and then she said that she regretted ever moving to the U.S. and how awful she feels that they are still having to live in my house and she thought everything would be much easier here in America.  So that made me feel even worse.  I hate, hate, hate being as stressed as I have been lately.

I sat fake daughter down later and I told her that it is not the U.S. that is difficult.  I explained to her that being an adult is what is difficult and that being an adult kind of sucks about 75% of the time.  I tried to make her see that this is all hard because she's never done it before.  She's never lived away from home.  She's never had to try and rent an apartment.  Or register her own car.  Or get her own car insurance.  Her own cell phone.  Her own utilities.  Pay for her own food, etc.  I told her she'd be learning all of this stuff and having to do all of this stuff whether she lives here, whether she had stayed in Brazil and moved into her own place, or whether she had moved to China.  I told her when I moved from my apartment to my house I had to do every single thing she's having to do, whether it was establishing new services or moving existing ones and changing addresses with companies.  Yes it sucks giant sweaty donkey balls, I told her.  And she finally said she got it.

One week later, my fake son told me he's planning to move to a country in Europe which I'm not going to disclose right now so that he can play semi-pro soccer.  Which means he won't finish high school.  I got all over him in the nicest way possible and told him as nicely as I could that he's making a huge mistake that he will regret a lot when he gets older.  And he told me in the nicest way possible that he doesn't want to discuss it with me.  Have I told you the situation with him?  He went to another European country last year (taking a year off school and let me tell you his father was completely against it and it was a horrible situation) and played semi-pro soccer and then he planned to come here with his sister and finish school this year.  Only a couple of weeks ago he said that is now not his plan.

Then last week his sister took him to see yet another high school here and he liked it and started saying he wouldn't mind going there if they could find an affordable apartment in that school district. My guess is that his dad has possibly had something to do with him reconsidering. And for the past few days he hasn't wanted to talk about what he's doing so I'm completely in the dark but I honestly think he's kind of in the dark and undecided too.


And why not throw some more MAJOR house repairs into the middle of things.  My contractor gave me an estimate a few weeks ago of almost $4,000 and at the time I had $9 in my checking account.  I cried when we hung up.  I honestly just felt like I was completely defeated by everything going on in my life.  But then he called me again and told me my homeowners insurance would probably cover it and he would fix a couple of other things he knew were messed up in my house that I needed to have done but could not afford for whatever the insurance company would give me.  Yes, I have a super awesome contractor. 

An insurance adjuster came out to my house a couple of weeks ago and he took pictures and he measured rooms and measured showers and measured the exterior of my entire house and he climbed around in the attic and he oohed and aahed over all of the wonderful character my almost-100-year-old house has and I told him he should buy it from me because maybe he could afford to fix all of the crap that keeps breaking in it better than I can.

That is how it came to be that last week I had 4 guys in my house for 3 full days (I told you it was major) working non-stop.  They had to cut a huge hole in my dining room ceiling because of mold, repair the hole, completely re-tile an upstairs shower after they cut into the wall and repaired a leak, he repainted that bathroom, he had to remove bead board and cut a hole in another wall to fix a downstairs bathroom that was gushing water into my crawl space and up under the tile in the room next door (because it turns out there was an approximate 2 inch long crack in the pipe), get rid of all of the mold in that wall, he replaced all of the plumbing fixtures in the downstairs shower, he repaired my kitchen faucet, put some bolts in my stair railing that was becoming very loose and wobbly (the stairs I've fallen down twice and broken my arm on), and he repainted another small bathroom downstairs at no charge.

Poor Hot Brazilian.  When I told him I was dealing with two really bad shower leaks his immediate reaction was to ask, "darling, did my kids do this?  Because if they did......"  I assured him it has a lot more to do with my house being almost 100 years old than his kids doing anything.

But y'all, if one more major thing breaks in my house I honestly don't know what I'm going to do.  I'm already giving some consideration to selling because I cannot deal with this.  And if I do I'm going to buy the tiniest house I can find so no one will want to live with me ever again.  Except for Hot Brazilian when he gets back here of course.  If I could figure out a way to make a living, I'd move my ass right up to the North Georgia mountains and live in a cabin in the woods far away from civilization.  

I hope my next post is full of funny and happiness. 

Oh, I did see a girl's bare ass on Saturday walking down the sidewalk.   Super short skirts, going commando, and a nice breezy morning are not the three best things to combine.