“Agoraphobe” is not a word. I’m not really sure why but it’s not in the dictionary and I’ve never heard a mental health professional use it. Also did you know that it’s NOT pronounced a-gore-a-pho-bee-ah? It’s actually pronounced aggro-pho-bee-ah, go figure, but I’ve literally only heard my shrink and dictionary pronunciation guides say it that way. In movies and on TV they always say it THE WAY IT FUCKING MAKES SENSE TO.

Right now it’s 2:25pm. I don’t know what time it’ll be by the time you read this but right now it’s 2:25pm and I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to leave the house since about 11am. Initially the plan was to walk into town at noon to go to Alma’s Cafe and have fries and gravy for lunch. The walk would have taken me about 10 minutes. Maybe 12. Not 15. I have $22 in my bank account but I can’t use my bank card because Madison lost it so I’d have to put fries and gravy and a pop – about $6.50 with tip, I’m guessing (but I’m bad at guessing these things) – on Visa.

I’m trying to think of a good analogy for my thought process on days like today but I can’t really think of one. Maybe you can if I explain it well enough.

The idea always seems so simple.

1. Walk into town. (Issue: construction workers everywhere.)

2. Go to Alma’s where I’ve been 50 times. (Easy peasy.)

3. Order fries and gravy which I’ve had there probably half of those times. (Difficulty level depends on who’s there and who’s working.)

4. Eat. (Not an issue. Used to be an issue; I used to be scared that people were watching me eat and thinking that someone as fat as me shouldn’t be eating whatever it is I’m eating. Now there are no fucks to give. Hoes gotta eat too.[Bonus points if you get that reference.])

5. Pay. (Big issue. Who pays for fries and gravy with a credit card? It’s almost literally the cheapest thing on the menu. They’re going to think I can’t afford to eat. And the tip. What if I don’t put in enough? What if I put in too much? Less of a deal, obviously, but then what if they expect big tips all the time?)

6. Walk home. (Issue: construction workers everywhere.)

And see this right here is why Twitter is a much better medium for me sometimes because I get instant feedback. I get an instant cheering section. I get an instant influx of troubleshooting and ideas. Now that it’s 2:43pm I’ve already decided not to go but if I’d have tweeted about my issues all day instead of doing other things, I may have gone.

Now that it’s 2:44pm, I can’t go because it’ll take me 12 minutes to walk there, 5 minutes for the waitress to come to my table after I sit down, 12 minutes to get my food, 15 minutes (?) to eat, 6 minutes to pay. That’s 50 minutes which has me exiting Alma’s at 3:35pm. The kids get out of school at 3:20pm which means I’m going to be sharing the walk home with a bunch of obnoxious grade schoolers. I think Madison gets out of school at 3:35 and it would be awesome to be able to text her and tell her to walk home with me but she has a job after school walking her art teacher’s daughter from the elementary school to the high school and she often doesn’t get to leave until 4pm because the kid wants to play or be annoying or whatever.

Anyway, let’s get back to the beginning. I started my day at 4:30am. I forget what I did between 4:30am and 5am when I started work, besides check e-mail, but since today is Thursday I only had to work until 7am so as soon as my shift was done, I went back to bed. I woke up at 8:45-ish, looked at the clock, turned over and went back to sleep. At 9:20am I heard Madison in the hallway having a fit about something which was weird because Madison should have been at school but she was home sick yesterday so maybe she stayed home again today. No, she slept in. By like, an hour and a half. And she was freaking out on the phone to her father so he could call her in late since I was sleeping. What she was really freaking out over though was her french project had to be presented today and she slept through her allotted morning computer time so she couldn’t print out her story. Blake was still driving to work so he couldn’t edit her permissions so long story short, I woke up, edited her permissions so she could print out her story, which she did but she took so long STRAIGHTENING HER ALREADY STRAIGHT HAIR which is totally what you do when you’re almost 2 HOURS late for school, that she missed french class and will have to present another day. (This probably won’t affect her mark.)

So that was my morning. Madison was out of the house by 10am and walked to school in the rain.

The rain ended around 11am and that’s when I got this fries & gravy idea stuck in my head. I wish I knew where these ideas came from because they are really fucking stressful and I’ve already had a really really terrible mental health week.

So I have to psych myself up for leaving the house by myself (and other times with other people, but not as often and not to the same extent) so my gameplan was to wash my hair and give myself an hour to work up the courage to first get dressed and pack my bag and then walk past all those construction workers. I wasn’t completely committed to this plan though, which is why I did not take any clonazepam/klonopin. I probably should have because that’s what it’s there for. I don’t know why I didn’t. I think I was afraid of wasting it by taking some and then not going, especially when I feel like the stuff is becoming less and less effective.

I went into the bathroom and peed and in doing so I spotted the empty box of hair dye that Madison left open on the counter. After peeing, I went to pick up the box to recycle it and that’s when I realized it wasn’t empty. Splat dye comes with bleach AND dye but Madison hated the bleaching process when we did it the first two times to lighten her hair enough to take the turquoise dye so much that she refuses to ever bleach her hair again. Since then  we’ve bought 4 boxes of Splat dye where the bleach wasn’t used. So I started looking at my roots in the mirror, made worse by the fact that I hadn’t washed my hair in a while, and decided that bleaching my hair would be a wonderful way to pass the time since I had to wash my hair either way and by not bleaching it today, I was only prolonging my awful combination of about 3/4 of an inch of ash blonde roots, then light pink that faded down the length of my hair to pure white (which actually looks really cool when the effect first starts but looks like hell after about a month) by at least 3 days.

I slapped on the bleach, set a timer and internetted while also going through the steps of leaving the house over and over in my head. I knew that once I was dressed and I was standing on the sidewalk I wouldn’t turn back, but it’s getting on the sidewalk that’s the main problem. Once I’m to the park a block from my house, my anxiety goes from 100% to a manageable 60% and that’s when I’d usually pop 2 Ativan under my tongue to bring it down further.

When my hair was ready to rinse, it was about 11:45am and I was starting to panic because my self-imposed deadline was only 15 minutes away and because my hair was wet (and I have a hair dryer, I just don’t use it for hair because my hair’s damaged enough), I wouldn’t be able to leave. But if I’m being completely honest, that was probably an excuse. The truth is that I bleached my hair to begin with to set up this situation. If I’d have just washed my hair, my hair would have been mostly dry by noon and I wouldn’t have had an excuse not to leave. I sabotage myself like this all the time and it’s like I have two people inside me, one who wants to go and one who doesn’t want to go and the asshole one is constantly being an asshole to ruin the other guy’s good time. It’s not like a CONSCIOUSLY thought “hey if I bleach my hair at 11am I won’t be able to go by noon”, this shit just happens.

So I was upset that I wouldn’t be able to leave by noon which causes more stress because now you’re a FAILURE.

I sat here and cried a little bit and then started the “it’s not too late to go” line of thinking (oh sure, NOW I take the clonazepam because writing this post is stressing me the fuck out). So I extended by deadline to 1pm. If I left by 1pm I would be home by 2:05pm, roughly. Hell, I could leave as late as 2:15pm and be well home by the time the kids even got out of school.

But that saboteur in my brain started working on me pretty hard, which you only really realize in hindsight, and I decided that my simple idea needed to be expanded upon. I decided that maybe I’d see if Brian wanted to go get fries & gravy too.

Maybe you already see why this was probably the worst thought I could have had today…

Brian is a new friend who I don’t really know all that well but I thought that since I didn’t get that sick feeling in my stomach when I was alone with him for 5 minutes, maybe I could be alone with him for 20 minutes. And get fries & gravy, which, is not without precedent. Last week Brian – who is a cartoonist – had a table set up at Jack’s On Queen, the comic book shop in town, and was drawing comics there so Blake and I went in to see how he was doing. It was the end of the day so I proposed that we go across the street to Alma’s for fries & gravy. So we did and we had a lovely time.

Anyway, I took my simple plan, best illustrated with a straight piece of string, and turned it into a cat’s cradle.

The plan now was more like this:

1. Contact Brian and see if he’d want to go. (Anxiety 110% because I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone but my own family to do anything with me ever. I don’t have friendS, plural, I have like, A friend (hi Alex! Okay Ronny & Deanna too) and I’ve never asked her to do anything with me without Blake. Also I’ve known her for 8 years so you can’t even compare her to Brian. I haven’t had a friend who lived in the same town as me since high school. Rejection wouldn’t have bothered me, then I just go back to my simple plan. But what happens if he can’t leave for an hour or whatever and that wrecks my whole window of opportunity? I can’t really be like “hey do you want to do this thing?” and then be like, “nope, sorry, can’t. Crazy.”)

2. If he wanted to go, walk to Brian’s house. (Issue: construction workers everywhere. Possible complication: what if he’s not ready?)

3. Talk about random stuff on the way to Alma’s. (But what? Is it rude to ask someone what meds they’re on? I mean that completely seriously.)

4. Go to Alma’s. (Easy.)

5. Order. (Harder in front of a stranger.)

6. Talk about random stuff while we wait for our food. (But what?)

7. Eat. (Now an issue because now I’m not only eating in front of a stranger but I have to also keep talking to them and what happens if he finishes first because I’m a slow eater? Or what happens if I finish first?)

8. Pay. (Still a big issue for all the same reasons, amplified by the fact that now there will be TWO people watching me use the debit machine/putting fries & gravy on Visa.)

9. Walk Brian home. (And what if we run out of things to talk about?)

10. Walk to my house. (Construction workers.)

I am SO raw. I am a very very raw person. What I mean by that is that my moods and emotions are always just below the surface and they are fierce in either direction. It is SO easy to make me cry. I’m convinced most of the time that even the people who claim to like me probably really hate me. Even my body is sensitive. I wear hoodies in the summer so there’s more insulation between me and the rest of the world because certain textures will make me want to crawl out of my skin. I avoid socks like the plague because I haaaaaaaaaaaate how they feel. (Although I have THE BEST pair of knit socks an LJ friend made me a few years ago that I love in the winter.)

Anyway, I’m losing focus here because Wes just came home…I just feel like I need to take so many classes to learn how to do simple things. No one laughs when you’ve been in an accident and need physical therapy to learn how to walk again but people sure think you’re weak and pathetic if you have to go to therapy to learn how to function in society.

I basically tortured myself all day and now I feel like an absolute failure. I suppose I could try again tomorrow. And at least this time I’d be starting with clean hair. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Last post for today so before I go any further….

Blake and Madison are raising funds for the Canadian Cancer Society’s Relay For Life, along with their friend Charissa and they could sure use some donations, or, if you happen to work at Telus Barrie, they could also use some team members. The relay is on June 7th from 7pm-7am and someone from the team has to keep moving the entire time, which could be pretty difficult with only 3 team members. My mom and her friend are thinking of joining the team. ANyway, you can donate here and it would be greatly appreciated!

The rest of this post is about Madison’s pepper garden. Madison is obsessed with peppers. Like bell peppers. She thinks they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. So in March, she decided to spend some of her allowance on pepper seeds and she started some plants on the window sill. Since this last weekend was May Two-Four, when it’s traditionally safe to plant, Madison put her seedlings in the ground and I took pictures. Nothing spectacular. I did get a couple of cute pictures of Hoover though.

This big guy was hanging out in my garden on the weekend.

We learned the fastest way to get a dozen kids on your front lawn is for one of them to yell “SNAKE!”
Then they all flock.

The snake was taken across the road to the park where it was put down the twirly slide once and let go in the field.

Here’s a closer crop of its head:

Being sick changed me forever. I’m scarred. I have a bulging belly because they couldn’t fit all my guts back where they were supposed to go. It changed my face. It aged me. I can’t explain what it’s like to have to fight for your life from within your own mind because that’s what it felt like when I was in the coma. I never heard a word about the possibility of me dying. I don’t remember them asking me if I wanted to sign the “do not resuscitate” order which Blake was terrified I’d sign (I didn’t). I knew I was in big trouble though. I had a breathing tube. I remember the breathing tube. I remember the feeding tube.

I was reading about the hunger strike that’s happening at Guantanamo Bay (which you should read about too because it’s pretty crazy) where they’re force feeding the striking prisoners by strapping them to a chair 2 or 3 times a day and forcing a feeding tube up their nose and down into their stomach and they’re force feeding them. I ripped out my feeding tube at least twice that I remember. The first time was when I first woke up from the coma and was freaking out because I didn’t know where I was or what was happening and I accidentally pulled the tube out. And it really fucking hurt. Burned. Made my eyes water. And then they had to put it back in and that hurt even more and it made me gag and cry and even pray (I’m an atheist so I don’t understand that one either). The second time they had me on so many drugs that I was hallucinating and I hallucinated a monkey came and pulled out the feeding tube and then bit my nose. And they had to put the tube back through my nose, down my throat and into my stomach and I cried some more. When my mom and Blake came to visit that day I had the feeding tube taped into my nose with a band aid and they asked me what happened so I told them a monkey bit it. A Telus monkey. Y’know, to be precise.

When they feed you through a feeding tube, they literally stand on a stool with a funnel and pour liquid and what sounded/felt like crushed up pills and it’s cold. Then the crushed up pills or whatever would get stuck on the tube so they’d be squeezing it to try and make the clog smaller and feeding me was this awful half hour production 3+ times a day that I hated and really frustrated the nurses.

Lately stuff like that is coming back to me. I’d forgotten most of it. My shrink says my mind would only let me remember if I could handle it and I am handling it but it’s difficult.

So that’s pretty much constantly on my mind.

I can’t paint because there’s no room in here to make anything new and Blake wants to put most of my stuff in storage so we have a better shot at selling our house (my entire office is pretty much clutter to the naked eye, but to the trained eye, it is perfectly organized). Putting my stuff in storage is really fucking with me. Part of the reason I don’t leave the house is because I can’t take all my stuff with me. I carry a huge bag full of all kinds of essentials whenever I leave the house because you never know what you might need. But like, putting my art stuff in storage….what if I get inspired to paint? I guess I won’t put my sketchbook in storage. At least then I won’t lose the ideas completely, just the motivation.

I’m terrified of moving. I just got used to living here and now we have to go somewhere else. Well, we don’t “have” to but our house is too small for the 7 of us, if you include the pets. I need a room alone just for my books that are on shelves everywhere, piled two or three books deep.

The school system in this county is abysmal. I bet half the graduates of Elmvale’s high school don’t even know what that word means and I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m saying that to be truthful. I know I talked about this “somewhere” but I forget if it was on Facebook or Live Journal or Camwhores but Wes is in grade 4 and he’s never been asked to read a book. He’s never done a book report. They don’t read in class. Honestly I don’t even know what they do. Madison’s in grade 9. Just this year she was asked to read To Kill a Mockingbird (which she loved) and to choose a book for her independent study unit. She chose The Bloggess’ book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (which she also loved but was horrified when I said she should e-mail Jenny and tell her). So in 11 years of schooling, Madison’s been assigned to read 2 books. Don’t you think that’s a little fucked up? They ask them to do all kinds of creative writing but how can you write WELL if you don’t also read? There’s more, but basically the two schools in this town work in tandem to create McEmployees and we want better for our kids. The high school they’d be going to where we want to move is pretty good.

I’m nervous about living in the same town as my mom. I love my mom and my mom loves me but she doesn’t understand me or my life. She doesn’t understand that I don’t answer the phone most of the time even when I know who it is. She doesn’t understand that sometimes, because of the chemicals in my brain, I go for weeks without seeing anyone but my immediate family. I hate surprises. I don’t answer the door unless I know who it is in advance so surprises are not a good thing. I can just see my mom trying to “fix” me and then getting mad at me when her efforts fail, like it’s something I can control. She sort of understands that I have a disease but she doesn’t understand the disease or in my case, the cluster of disease and disorder.

I’m just learning how to leave the house by myself. I’m just learning how to drive again. Moving means starting all over. I’m also scared about losing my shrink. I really love my shrink. We’ll be moving outside of her area so I’ll have to find another one and I’m scared I won’t be able to find one as brilliant as her. I don’t think there’s a fancy mental health centre near where we’re moving. Not like the one near us now. The next biggest town I can think of in that area is bigger than Midland so their mental health centre won’t be as small and personal with all the resources I have now. Of course this is all assumption but my mental health centre is the gold standard and I am absolutely terrified of having to start over. This could literally set me back years. The good news is that I can probably go back to my old family doctor, the bad news is that he’ll probably be retiring soon.

Also my doctor here, the hospital here, the pharmacy here; they all know me. They know why (usually) I’m at the hospital. The pharmacy talks to my doctors more than I do. Getting a pharmacy to request a new rx of hydromorph contin via FAX to a doctor who’s only met me maybe 10 times but my chart’s pretty thorough because I *say* I’m having a pancreatic attack (which I was and do, but I could just as easily be a drug seeker) is next to unheard of. That’s MORPHINE! So I dunno what I’m going to have to do to get all our ducks in a row for the care and maintenance of me. And I’m scared.

I’m also scared our dogs will get out of a strange yard they don’t know and we don’t know and get hit by a car or lost because they don’t know where they live. I’m not so much worried about Lucky in this respect because of that time….ugh I’ll just tell the story again for any new people. My shrink when I first met her, suggested I get a “support animal” to help me get out of the house more. A dog I could walk and I could train to sense when I was about to have a panic attack etc etc etc mental health support animals are a real thing. So I sell a painting for $250 which was exactly enough, almost to the penny, to get Lucky from the SPCA with all of his shots up to date and neutered. The only issue with him was that he had/has anxiety separation but since I’m home all day, that shouldn’t be so much of a problem.

So we got him on a Saturday and that Monday I walked him to the grocery store, tied him up outside on the cart corral and went inside to buy him Milkbones. So I did. And when I came out he was gone, he’d slipped his collar. So I freak out completely, call Blake, Blake says he’s on his way home. I’m having an absolute meltdown but what choice did I have so I started walking home and calling Lucky the whole way. I get to just before our driveway and something catches my eye. I see Lucky looking at me from BEHIND our gate to the backyard. Not only did he run home, but he got into the yard and to this day we still don’t know how he did that.

So I’m not so much worried about Lucky getting lost if they don’t go very far, I’m worried about them getting separated because they’re both very curious and Lucky will follow Hoover but not the other way around so then both of might get lost without even each other. :o(

And as much as I loathe the school system here, it really makes me sad that we’ll be splitting Wes up from the girl he’s claimed since Junior Kindergarten that he was going to marry.

I really really don’t want to move, I don’t want the hassle, the disruption, the chaos, the bullshit, but we really really really have to.

So that’s what’s on my mind. Being sick. The ramifications of being sick and practically kissing death. Moving. I see my shrink tomorrow I think.

PS. At the beginning of this month I passed the 2 year milestone of being a non-smoker.

PPS. I kinda hit another milestone at the beginning of this month. It was a nice evening and Brian said it was good for sitting on porches and playing guitars. So Blake and I went to Brian’s house and Brian said to Blake, “where’s your guitar?” and Blake, not thinking he was serious, didn’t bring his. So I stayed and sat on Brian’s porch while Blake went home to get him guitar. This is a milestone in that I have not been alone with another person who I’m not related to in a VERY long time. I have a fear of one-on-one interaction with just about everyone who’s never been to my house. And there’s still certain people who have been to my house who I wouldn’t want to be alone with. I won’t even be alone with my own support worker or shrink. But Brian is just so non-threatening that it was pretty much a non-issue. I don’t think I could like, go out for lunch with Brian by myself at this point but I was alone with him for about 10 minutes and nothing bad happened so that was good. Here’s a video from that night. Sorry about the vertical video, that’s just how my phone does it:

So we did Madison’s hair that royal blue (or as she calls it “Spiderman blue”) like maybe a little over a month ago? Maybe 6 weeks ago? She hated it and it faded into a light violet colour with streaks of light blue, which I personally liked but Madison didn’t, so for her birthday, she got 2 bottles of pink dye and here are the before and after pictures:

And now the after…

I forget why she was pouting.

She turned 15 last Thursday.
This was her ice cream cake:

She and her friends made sushi for dinner.

Wes hung streamers all over the house like a maze and he made Madison birthday breakfast.

So that’s it for this round of pictures. I have two more picture posts to do today and then maybe I’ll do a real post. We’ll see.

I don’t read other people’s blogs, for the most part. I don’t really understand why people read blogs, honestly. I skim my Live Journal friends list every few days when I’m bored but those are my friends for the most part and even then, the list has become cumbersome so I can never get through the whole thing in one sitting. People sometimes e-mail me and say that they’ve been reading for over 10 years etc. and I keep thinking “why?” Sometimes I ask them but they don’t ever really seem to know either.

I know why I write this thing though. I have this weird tic, this weird idiosyncrasy, where I have to document everything around me. Andre, my last photography teacher, asked me why I shoot and it took me awhile but it’s so I can document a moment. I can freeze time. Those flowers my grama told me to buy myself? They’re pretty much dead now but they live on in these pictures:

As they decay, they turn purple.

When I started taking my photography class in the fall, a friend told me I could freeze raindrops so that’s what I tried to use yesterday…unsuccessfully. The pictures are pretty unspectacular but I’ll show them to you anyway…

ISO 200, f/2.8, 1/50th of a second
Not very impressive.

This one looks better on my big screen but it’s still pretty blah.
f/1.4, ISO 100, 1/249 sec

f/1.4, ISO 100, 1/249

f/1.4, ISO 100, 1/499 sec
You can see the rain hitting the pavement but I still don’t see individual drops.

Same settings.

f/1.4, ISO 100, 1/999 sec

So I showed Blake and he told me that I should have raised my ISO to make my shutter speed faster. It’s supposed to rain again all day today so I’ll try again. Sucks that I couldn’t do it by myself yesterday when we were having crazy storms. I should know how to do this by now.

I’m sorry I just don’t have it in me to write anything else. I’m not doing okay these days.

So the other day in the car I started telling Blake about my friend Brett, Canadian, who recently moved to NYC, who also recently realized that or rather it was pointed out to him that Canadians and Americans say things differently depending on where you’re from. And so on Facebook, we had this discussion about it where I attempted to explain these differences phonetically which is funny because I suuuuuck at that and so that was a few weeks ago. But I was just telling Blake about that and this went through my head…

….save the draw-ma for your maw-ma – holy shit it rhymes! That is so funny! I’d only ever seen it in writing! And so I burst out laughing and Blake’s like “dude, wtf?” so between fits of laughter I tried to explain all of the above to him about Brett in NYC and that because we say “drama” so it rhymes with “grama” or “gamma” and that I FINALLY UNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING (no, a joke from like what, you guys, 1999? I know it’s an American joke. I know it’s old. Yes I can read and yes it’s quite possible that I am mentally retarded).

So yeah. That happened and it was funny and I hope it translated even a little bit to text.

~*———————————————LATER————————————————-*~

See this is my problem in life, one of my many flaws; I am prone to laughing out loud at inappropriate times having absolutely nothing to do with my surroundings. One of the many reasons I have a trouble being out in public.  :o/

So I’m pretty sure I’m not going to do the studio tour. Especially because I don’t even have a studio and if we want to sell this house, we’re going to have to put a lot of my art supplies into boxes and into storage so I won’t be able to paint and I think it’ll be really awkward sharing space with another artist I don’t know. Or barely know. So yeah, I’m going to maybe talk to Brian about how last year was before I make my final decision, but I don’t think I’m there yet mentally. I’ll still promote the tour when I’m set up at the township office in August though but I won’t be going to SGAA meetings anymore either because there’s really no point if I’m not in the tour.

That’s that.

Today Blake is mowing the lawn or rather doing the first mowing. It’s pretty high so he did it once with the blade higher and then Madison will go over it later in the week with a lower blade. He feels all manly because he gave the lawnmower a tune up all by himself (with maybe the help of the internet). And now he’s inside having completed his task.

I have a thousand pictures to go through so I should probably go do that.

I don’t know if I can do the studio tour in the fall.

For starters, I don’t want to take a vacation day off of work to do more, MUCH less profitable, MUCH more stressful work.

Next is the fact that it costs $75 and if I do it I’ll have to have new business cards made up. So we’re up to $110 + I’ve lost a day’s pay…

Then there’s the fact that I’m like mentally not sure I can do this. I think it’s going to be really boring and fake. I’m not a salesperson.

My grama’s dying and I just don’t feel like painting right now.

And finally, we hopefully won’t even be living here by then.

So how do I extract myself from this situation?

So the leafs lost last night, which sucks. This guy who went missing here (“here” being within my bubble of safety) after going on a test drive of his truck with two guys who answered his ad. Well they found his body. It’s just terrible. I mean, when I was a kid, you bought used cars from Autotrader, which was this magazine of people selling their cars that was free at coffee shops, and you either fantasized about the car you could buy in it or you (or more likely your dad) which one was going to be the next in your driveway. And all you did was show up and be nice to these people because they want to buy your truck…and then you made the sale, usually cash, sometimes certified cheque or money order.

You are not supposed to die during this transaction. That’s fucked. UP.

And I dunno if Tim Bosma had ads on the internet or just local ones, but either way, this is why I would never meet someone alone, from the internet, in a non-public venue. It’s also shit like this that literally makes me scared to leave my house.

(Whoa. The prime minister just tweeted “My thoughts and prayers go out to Tim Bosma’s family during this difficult time.” Harper has a heart. Who knew?)

It’s just so crazy to hear of this happening when I’ve seen tons of these interactions since I was a child. And now you can’t trust that anymore.

Terrible.

Madison has banned me from taking pictures of her twice now in like, 3 days. The first was while she was watching hockey and she was playing the same game on her phone as Blake was playing on the iPad and their expressions were identical but Madison saw me reach for the camera and said “NO.” :o( The second time was about an hour ago because she said she “looks like crap” and she did only have 10 minutes to get ready to go back to school so I said “maybe later?” and she said “maybe…” but she really wants her hair to be mixed with pink right now for her birthday, which is on Thursday, but she sucked at budgeting her allowance and while Wes has a bigger cashflow than Madison because he doesn’t spend his money stupidly, we’ve told him that he’s only allowed to buy her ONE bottle of hair dye when we need TWO to do her head properly.

But I think her hair looks cool now, especially since she got a trim on the weekend. Hopefully she’ll let me take pics of her when she gets home.

Wes got a haircut too so he’s not all shaggy. He sang me a special song on Mother’s Day for his YouTube channel, which you can see here:

Right now I’m listening to The Bastard Fairies doing “Brand New Key” with ukuleles because it’s what came on my iTunes and if you haven’t seen that, you probably should:

Anyway, what else?

I want to see the Gatsby movie but can’t until it’s been in theatres for the first few weeks so we can use our passes. We went to see that stupid wedding movie with Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon and Deniro and they were like, over 15 minutes late starting the movie so Blake went out to tell them and even though there were only 4 of us in the whole theatre they played the movie and gave us these free passes for another. But they can’t be used during the first few weeks of a movie’s release. (Which sucks, but free is free, man. And that was decent of them.)

Belinda showed me how to use Reddit so now that’s basically all I do now. I *HAD* been working on something that’s shaping up to be a musical but it started feeling like work so I thought I should let it percolate for a little while. Reddit’s a good distraction.

Angelina Jolie cut her boobs off. Not sure what else I can really say about that. Not sure what I’d do in the same situation. Thinking about it.

This is the best thing I may have ever seen in my whole life:

There was a shooting at a parade on Mother’s Day in New Orleans and I thought, “really America? You can’t even keep it together on Mother’s Day?” It’s sad and it’s tragic and it’s scary but on way different levels than Boston or Sandy Hook or 911 or whatever. This is a new thing.

Right now my friends and I on Twitter are talking about which is better, BSG or LOST (BSG, FTW, BTW) and then Leora comes out with “I know a former cylon!”

Interesting.

It’s so weird waking – no, re-waking up in the morning and Madison being home so you automatically think Blake should be home too for some reason and you ask Madison where he is and she’s like, “uhhhhh at work? He’s working at work today.” So weird.

Not sure why I thought he’d be at home this morning or how I forgot him leaving this morning. (Until Madison reminded me.) I must have still been partially asleep still.

I haven’t fed myself yet today and it’s 1:41pm so I should probably do that soon. Really I was just posting because I hadn’t in a while.

Oh! The sweetheart roses my grama bought me are doing the craziest thing right now. Their centers are turning purple as they decay. If I can get pics of them, I will.

Peace oot.