Dum, Dum, Dum – The Toe Bomb
For those of you who do not know what that is hang around and you’ll find out, fairly quickly.  For those of you who do know, and I believe most of you do from personal experience even if you know it by another name already know of what I speak.
These little, or sometimes big but that one is on you no matter what or who is the actual cause, explosions of pain can be almost anything.  You know the steel toe shoe that your hubby leaves in the middle of the floor which in my experience is quite often or the suitcase size nail kit that your wife left sitting next to where she was the last time she did her nails.  Come on ladies most of us have one and we do tend on occasion to leave it where we last used it.  My often worst nightmare is the occasional power tool that my hubby sometimes leaves by his chair, which I have to pass to get to the kitchen, when he has to run in and check something on his laptop and forgets to take it back out with him.  How occasional is that?  Not as occasional as you might think.  OK he’s a geek who knows how to use power tolls.  Think about that a minute and you’ll understand and if not write a comment and I’ll explain.
Nothing however is worse than the grandfather of all toe bombs.  This weapon of mass toe destruction is the bane of almost all adults everywhere all over the world.  An innocent looking little thing that to some degree makes life easier for certain individuals of our society.  These simple little contraptions look so harmless and innocent that when one is first introduced to your home you may actually be happy to see the little darling, after all you think it will be a Godsend to you as well.  Nope.
So what is this little instrument of doom that from the moment it is made takes an oath to be the destruction of the tiny little digits at the front end of your foot forever ending your ability to wear a decent shoe?  The children’s stepstool.
Let’s face it if you’re a parent you probably have at least one in either the bathroom or kitchen or both.  As parents you know that unless you want to have to run and hold your child over the bathroom sink to wash their hands or brush their teeth you must have one.  Personally over the years I’ve become a fan of the toilet being right next to the sink.  It has a lid and as long as they remember to put that down then they can crawl up on the damn thing and take care of whatever they need to do in there.  That includes the occasional flooding of the bathroom through said bathroom sink which all of them are going to do more than once and I see no reason to make that one easier.
As some of you know at my age small children are not my problem in my home and I haven’t had the need for one in many years so there hasn’t been one here for almost as long.  So why am I ranting on about this now.  Last night my hubby came home with of all things, dum, dum, dum, a toe bomb aka the step stool.  I looked at this implement of torture brought in by the man who is the reason that I already have to worry about leaving vicious obstacles that inflict pain on my tiny extremities in my path and now he has introduced the worst of all these objects.  Oh for the love of all that’s holy, why?  When I asked this, although I really knew the horrific rumor running through the family, we have growing grandchildren who visit us.  The thought that went through my head was what’s wrong with the toilet seat idea or even better, let’s not invite them back until their old enough to reach the bathroom sink standing on the floor.  I didn’t voice this out loud of course because, as a grandmother, voicing such a query could have me locked up for being insane.  After all what sane grandmother would even think such a thing little on voice it out loud.  I’ll answer that for you.  A SANE ONE.
I somehow feel that one of my daughters may be behind this.  Oh not because of her little darling who at seven still has to have one because she is quite tiny for her age but to get even with me.  I don’t know how many times while talking to her on the phone I have heard a big boom, a screechy scratching sound, and then an explosion of expletives come bursting over the phone usually ending with the MFing Toe Bomb which never fails to cause me to let loose with a gut busting laugh.  Hey I had already paid my dues with those things when our girls were growing up because of them so I feel I’ve earned the right to laugh.  Still…I think she is behind this.  So now sitting in the only bathroom in our house is one of those horrible little monsters.  Buddy, Gina if you had a hand in this, payback is hell.
Of course I have to wait to get even until after my husband’s and my anniversary because he is presently shopping for my gift and I don’t want to rock that boat.  I know what it is and I’m so looking forward to it.  Maybe I can even use it to get even.  No it isn’t a gun but still it could be a whole lot of fun.  A drone.
 

Alright I’ve been pissed since this latest shooting which has only intensified with each new one but somehow someone has managed to take that to a whole new level.  Are they frigging kidding me?
Armored backpacks!  No this company isn’t praying on the fears of parents, not at all.  “Hey folks a bunch of kids just got killed so here buy this expensive backpack in hopes it will protect your child at the next school shooting.’  They’ll make a butt load of money off parents thinking this is the answer to their prayers.  It isn’t.
Hey, here’s a novel idea.  What don’t we stop the fucking shootings.  Now I’m not going to claim I have a pat answer for that resolution but I’ve been lead to believe there are smarter people than me out there and I would think they could come up with an idea for this one.
My husband made the statement after seeing a news report on these backpack, “Yeah, and why don’t we just completely outfit our kids in bulletproof armor like we do our soldiers for combat?”
Well maybe what we should be doing is just go to an all military training academy setups and go ahead and train them for live combat.  After all, it seems that is what they take a chance on every day of their young lives.
Back to those backpacks.  How many children carry those things all day every day in school?  I know it’s been a while since I went to school and back then just about the only ones who carried backpacks back then were the nerds.  Now it hasn’t been that long since my daughter went to school and by then most all kids were using those things that my generation turned its nose up to.  What do I remember about when my daughters were in school?  OK, I admit even that has been a while but I doubt that this one thing has changed a whole lot but I could be wrong.  My girls didn’t carry those heavy things all day long in school.  They generally put them in their lockers and carried only what was needed to any given class.  So unless kids are wanting to lug around those heavy, cumbersome things to every class or not may have changed but somehow I doubt it.  After all, that still isn’t a cool look when you’re trying to show off something about yourself.
Even if they did carry them you’ve got a small area of protection to their backs against handguns but a high powered rifle, not so much.  You still have all their unprotected areas and it’s a lot more than that backpack can cover.  I’m not about to go into gruesome points here because, well I don’t think it would be right is all.
So let’s get back to what could really make a difference to our children.  Stop the shootings.  Here’s something for all you politicians to consider.  These kids may not be able to vote right now but guess what you idiots, those that manage to survive their school years one day will be.  Most are going to remember those of you still in office then and they will have a chance to call you on the carpet.  Here’s the real kicker.  If you have children you’re grooming to follow in your footsteps, what do you want to bet this will follow them as well?  You’re sons and or daughter’s political career gets sideline right out of the box.
Of course I’d be willing to bet that your little darlings are safely tucked away in some high price school with major security keeping an eye on them.  Children in public schools do not.
So keep it up and keep playing Russian roulette with the lives of our youth.  I see some are already finding their voice and to them I say.  Good for you.  Don’t let them shut you up.  Don’t back down.  You have the right to expect protection from your parents, your schools, and every branch of our government and our society as a whole.

We go through life sticking our foots in our mouths.  I mean we could start out with the ones women often make like where did you get that dress and how much did you pay for that sweater.  Most of us know that asking the what someone paid for something is rude but a lot don’t know that asking where they got that item is just as wrong.
How old are you is another one that both women and men tend to do with women.  Nothing makes me madder than for someone to ask me that.  Now if I’ve got myself together and looking good, well as good as a woman my age can look I guess, I get a bit of a kick telling them because it is usually followed with a look of surprise because they don’t believe me.  They tend to end up sputtering and looking like idiots so there is a reward in that.
Are you pregnant?  Now that one is a bomb waiting to go off in your face with chances of serious bodily harm to you if the woman isn’t.  Another good one is asking a woman if that is her grandchild.  Women are having children a little later in life these days so that whole ‘is this your grandchild’ can really get you hurt.  You’ve not only insulted this woman ability to procreate but along with that you have insulted her age, her appearance, and the worst of all you have brought into question the most highly prized title that most women care more about than any other, Momma.  Now that one very well could get you killed.
Now most of these are directed at women but it can be just as bad asking certain things of men.  I’ve actually heard women ask what size shoe do you wear or can I see your hand.  Really ladies.  You can’t just look down and get an idea.  How far you look is up to you but you get what I’m talking about.  Guys if you’re not being asked either of those questions there’s only one of two reason for it.  Either something on you is a dead giveaway or something else about you just turns ladies off.  Figure out which it is and try to fix it if you can.  There are others I’m sure but since I’m not a guy it wouldn’t be fair for me to try and go beyond that.  Actually I think with men it may be more of making certain statements to them.  No is a good one when it comes to certain men.  They really hate that.  It doesn’t matter what it relates to they just hate that word.  “Honey can you hand me another beer?”  “No.  Get up and get it yourself.”
Now what brought up this little rant?  Well, I was watching something on TV regarding a gentleman in a wheelchair.  This lady was going out on a blind date with this gentleman and was told to wear flats by someone.  What went through my head was ask the guy how tall he is and go from there.  My thinking was that if he was of a taller stature then the type of shoes the lady wore should be governed by what the man’s actual height was if he could stand and then it dawned on me that there would be no way you could possibly ask that question without sounding like an asshole. 
 

When my daughter was small talking to her wasn’t that confusing.  As she got older things changed.  I don’t mean that we became distant, or argumentative, although she can be at times, or that we began to speak different languages.  This is much more than that and doesn’t even have anything with our speaking but our hearing evidently.
Now I admit that my hearing may not be what it once was but that doesn’t explain this either.  I’m talking about two people sitting no more than two feet apart carrying on two separate lines of conversation that somehow mesh while it is going on and we only find out later that one or the other or both of us were hearing something different coming out of the mouth of the other and we don’t realize it.
This happens for more often than either of us realize probably and the scary part is we have no way of even knowing how often it does happen so my sweet baby girl could have told me at some time that she is a mass murderer and I heard she was free this weekend for a girls day out.  The flip side of that is she may have heard something I said as I ain’t your momma which would explain why she stormed out of my house one day when what I might have said was would you like a tasty beverage.  Don’t believe me?  I’m going to end this with a little example of what I’m talking about from my side but not yet.
Now I know where part of this is coming from.  I don’t know about fathers and sons but I know this probably applies to a lot of mothers and daughters.  Gina and I started at some point to be able to finish each other’s sentences.  We still can but somewhere along the line I think that finishing each other’s sentences may have morphed into something a bit crazy and now we get a jumble of crazy conversations.  I think most of the time we do catch on at some point because we do spend a lot of time laughing at what the other said, or what we thought the other said.
Of course we often deny that we said anything like what is being repeated to us and most of the time it only causes us to laugh all that much harder.  The bad thing is on occasion it can also result in one or the other or both of us pissed as hell and we won’t speak for a day or two and for Gina and me going longer than twenty four hours not talking is unusual.  The average length of silence between us is between twelve to sixteen hours.  Yes we talk often.  It may be nothing more than hey how’s things going but we do talk regularly.
So what is all this rambling I’ve been doing about?  We had a conversation yesterday that stepped over into the weird and absolutely gruesome.  I can only recount what I was hearing and not her.  I can say that she claims that what you are about to read wasn’t what was being said.  If you think what I thought was going on in some way is odd it isn’t as strange as what she claims she was actually saying.  At least to me.  Right now I’m not sure if I can be sure of anything anymore so who knows what the actual conversation really was on either part.
Here is the conversation as I thought it went.
What I thought was a look of pure horror passed across her face.  “Oh my God.  Was that a body back there?”
We had just passed, what I thought was an unusual scene involving some road workers, which struck me as odd.
Me,  “Gina I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a body.”
Her,  “Are you sure?”
Me,  “Sweetie I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a body.”
Her,  “Good.”
Me,  “Are you OK?”
Her,  “Yeah.  We passed that thing and I suddenly smelled barbecue and I thought how good that smelled and I remember somewhere that someone said people taste like pig.”
Me with the thought going through my head, what not chicken,  “Baby you weren’t smelling a burnt body.”
Her,  “I’m sure you’re right but then I remembered there’s a crematorium just down the street so was that what I was smelling?”
Me,  “Baby girl we just passed a barbecue place on the other side of the street where those people were.”
Her,  “Oh.”
The only thing I am reasonably sure that was mentioned in that conversation yesterday was something about a crematorium, barbecue, and maybe something about a burnt or burning body.  Oh and she never saw the three people standing in the street.

Losing My Marbles Over Marbles
Seriously I am.  Look I got so tired of these things a few months ago that I just put them back in their box and walked away for a while.  Now that took me about a month that time.  I pulled them out again today and I’m already considering putting them back in box.
Trying to sort them out and figure out who made them, is it an Akro or is it a Christenson maybe it is a Peltier or a number of other manufactures.  You go to the ‘experts and no two of them are going to tell you the same damn thing.  Now I’m not saying they don’t know their stuff but when all they are seeing are pictures it’s hard to really tell about a lot of them.
I had one guy tell me that he could go through a thousand of these things in a couple of hours in a day or two.  He’s a dealer so yes I have no doubt that he could but I don’t he had a thousand of these little round balls dumped on him at one time when he first started.  He has learned over time and time is something I don’t have to put into them.  Yes there are some beautiful marbles in this bunch but I simply don’t have the time to invest in another project that is beginning to sound like it could take years to complete.
If anyone out there want to weigh in or offer advice I’m open to hearing it so give me a shout out in the comment section.
 

We all have them.  Something or someone in our past leaves such a mark on our souls that they haunt us throughout our lives.  An ex hurts us so bad that the scars leave us without the ability to move forward with a rewarding and meaningful relationship with another, an event so traumatic that it drills holes into your mind so deep it seems impossible that no matter how many new memories you make not only are they overshadowed by the past that any new memories you make are never enough to fill the holes, or your life growing up wasn’t the most perfect and it left you unable or unwilling to form attachments with people and have a safe stable family of your own.
Hey, I’ve had the same problem.  As a matter of fact I’ve experienced all the about to some degree or another.  It sucks.  I was lucky enough to get past them and have a wonderful husband, three beautiful daughters, and four, if not always perfect, fabulously entertaining and lovely grandchildren that I love dearly.  Oh the three daughters aren’t perfect either but their pretty damn close and yes I love all of them too.  I admit it can be to varying degrees depending on whether or not I’m pissed off at one or all three but I always love them.
Still there were those old ghost that would rare up from out of the past and haunt not only my nightmares but my waking hours as well.  Then I found something that helped me let them go.  I started writing.  I found a way to pull all that pain out of my soul and release it to the dark underworld where it truly belongs.  There are things I can never tell outright but I can put it into a story and finally get the satisfaction of some sort of vindication and justice in the worlds I create where there might not be any in the world I actually live in.  Don’t try to figure them out because they might not be as obvious as you might think.
The point is, find a way to exorcise those haunting spirits from your past.  Whether it is writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, or just building something with your hands, just do it.  Don’t think building something could do it?  Every time you pound the head of a nail with a hammer think of it as the person who hurt you.  Every time you twist a piece of wire imagine your hands around that person’s throat.  Look I’m talking about doing this in artwork not on a real person because that is a great big no-no.  That could land you in jail for a while at the very least up to lying on a gurney with a needle in your arm at the very worst.  Not to mention that would just be wrong no matter what that other person did.  Once you write, paint, draw, sculpt, or build those ghost into whatever you create then you can put them in a coffin of your own minds making and bury it deep in the earth of whatever world you want and then jump up and down on it until your heart’s content to pack it down as far as you can.
Life is too short to let the ghost of the past haunt your future.

Men Are Such Divas
Ladies we are told all the time we are the irrational ones.  We’re told we are flighty.  We forever hear that we are too sensitive.  No we’re not.  Yes we can get our panties in a bunch but let’s face it, when it comes to totally irrational behavior men take the cake.  Especially if you step on their toes when it comes to something they are totally wrapped up in.
Does your man have an old car or cars that he works on and protects like it’s his first born child?  How about his tools.  Maybe it’s his favorite sports team or teams.  How about a hobby he spends too much time with.  With my husband it’s old Greyhound buses, oh my word his tools, and yes he has a couple of old cars.  You do anything that brings that love, loyalty, and most important, his knowledge of the objects of his affection into question and damn you would think you ripped their family jewels from their puffed up bodies and handed them to the guy on a platter along with a death certificate of his first born.  You have called into question his intelligence, and jerked the twenty million dollar lottery check he just got out of his hand.  And this isn’t just your mate but any man you viciously attack with your arrogance.
They become the kind of diva that would put even RuPaul to shame.  At least when RuPaul does it he looks good at it.  The average Joe starts to turn red, his eyes bulge out, steam comes pouring out of his ears, and he starts to sputter.  My stars I’m always scared they are going to have a flipping heart attack.  I managed to step on some poor guy’s toes today and Heavens above the response I got was mind boggling.  I didn’t question his knowledge but simply told him the history of something and he treated me like I was basically a dim witted moron who didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.  Well after I presented him with some evidence of what I was saying he turned into super sweet guy and is now wanting to help me with a project.  God love him.
Oh does my husband get that way about anything?  About all of the things I attributed to him earlier to varying degrees but for the love of all that’s holy do not step on his toes when it comes to his Greyhound buses.  Yes he own buses, four of them and no they are not toys.  That’s OK though, I love them almost as much as he does and when we sent the fifth one he had off on its final journey I cried like a baby.

What have I done?  I disappeared.  Now for those of you who have been following me website you know I do this on occasion, OK I do it fairly often.  Hey guys I do have a real life.  OK that life means I have three grown daughters, four grandchildren and a husband.  That means they all have lives and I am relegated to being support staff.  Think I’m kidding.  Ask any mom, if she is honest with herself and others, and will tell you the same thing.
I have to say at this point that I do have one daughter who often willing to be support staff in mine and her dad’s.  OK, to be honest, she does bitch at times.  If you had me as a mother you would understand why.  No I’m not that difficult per say but I am a bit unusual, strange, weird, and spacy.  This often means I may take the long way around to get someplace, be it a physical place or subjects of conversation, but there is usually a reason.  I have an extremely dry sense of humor, don’t believe me try to tell a joke in front of me.  I personally tell extremely bad jokes and I do do this deliberately.  For those of you who think do-do is bad grammar check it out on something other than spellcheck.  For those of you who went to the toilet on that flush while your head is in there.
Oh crap!  I just remember I have something I have to finish quite soon and get posted.  Today is my youngest brother’s birthday and I need to finish a video for that momentous occasion.  I’ll get right on that after I finish this, and after my phone rings and I spend an hour on the phone with someone, and I get distracted by something else I forgot, and the phone rings again, Oh look a chicken.
Anyway the reason for this, which I totally got off topic of, was to apologize for falling down on the job.  So sorry about that and even though I will tell you I will try to do better in the future, don’t bet on it.
Wishing you all lots of love and happiness, oh there’s another idea for a future little piece of silliness.  Oh crap there goes my phone.