Super old cam pic from when I made hundreds of wax paper hearts for mobiles that I put up over our windows for Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day has always been one of my favourite holidays, even though these days I don’t do a whole lot for it. In past years, I’ve been known to do special creative projects for the holiday, such as the mobile pictured above, or I’ve sent out Valentines to my online friends, but as I’ve gotten older (and poorer and busier)  these things have fallen by the wayside. That’s okay though, because I know it won’t always be like this and I’ll be able to do more in future years. (Kind of like my attitude toward Halloween. I want to be one of those families that decorates their house and gives out awesome candy but alas, we don’t get any trick-or-treaters where we are and couldn’t afford to do it even if we did.)

Anyway, Blake & I aren’t doing anything special today, especially because he, Wes & I seem to have a particularly nasty stomach bug of some kind and our bathroom has practically had a revolving door all weekend.

Valentine’s Day means two things, however. It means that there’s only two weeks until my birthday and everyone should get me lots & lots of presents and it also means that there’s one month until Steak & Blowjob Day. Since my article on giving head is linked on the Steak & BJ Day website, it means that my site is currently getting twice the traffic it normally gets and by the time the actual holiday rolls around, my traffic will have tripled. That’s a whole lot of new people around here reading my crap! So hello new people! Welcome to Sunnyland! Glad to have ya. :o)

Another thing Valentine’s Day means, to me and some of my friends at least, is that it’s Love Your Vulva day, or V-Day for short, something that we’ve been celebrating all month over at Buttercup. Buttercup’s actually been pretty hoppin’ all month, you should pop over there and check it out. So far this month we’ve had articles on VDay.org, Katie’s sexually repressed upbringing, how chicks dig porn, Blake’s experiences growing up in a penis-centric world, an article on our featured site, Camwhores.com, an article on vulva art, phenomenal woman, Holly Hughes, who you’ve probably never heard of but probably should, and finally an article by Jade about some of the strangest vulva-centric products we’ve ever seen – with much more to come during the rest of the month! We’ve also added two new groups to the mix. S/he is a group about sexism and so far the conversations have been really interesting and enlightening and we also added a group for sports, which needs a better name than “Sports”, so if you have any ideas on that, we’d love to hear them! Along with the new groups, we’ve also redesigned the front page a little bit and we have plans to redesign it further for next month. Lots of changes thanks to the feedback we got from the Buttercup community at the end of January! Thanks readers!

So, things over at Buttercup are doing good. You should take a peek if you get the chance. :o)

I realize this month I’ve been fairly quiet as far as blog posts go and there are a million reasons for that, namely preparing for and celebrating Wes’ 7th birthday, but also I’ve been hard at work painting ACEOs for my Etsy shop since art is pretty much all I can do when I’m in the kind of pain I’ve been in for the past couple of weeks due to endometriosis issues. I plan on doing nothing but working on ACEOs until this batch is finished because so far, they’ve proven to be pretty popular items in my Etsy shop, having sold half of the first batch I put up 2 weeks ago with the other half getting plenty of views. This first batch that I put up was of gold & black and purple & gold cards and right now all that’s left is the gold ones. The ones I’m working on are more purple & gold ones, some green & gold ones and a whole bunch of red & gold ones. I’ll, of course, make a post when this batch is ready and up on Etsy. In the meantime, you should take a look at the gold & black ones I have up there currently as I think they turned out rather well and hey, these things are supposed to be collectible, so if you buy a gold & black one this month, there’s no reason you can’t buy a red & gold one next month! *cough*

As I’m reading the Etsy forums, I’m learning that ideally what you’re supposed to do is market to people outside of Etsy and bring them into your shop. For that reason, I spent yesterday afternoon designing Moo cards with my artwork on the front of them and my website addresses on the back to include a couple with Etsy orders. By including more than one, it means the buyer will probably keep one and potentially give the other one(s) to friends. I’m also working on getting the funds for another promotional item, which I’ll write more about after I have the money to order them and actually send them out to people. If all goes as planned though, they’re pretty cool – or at least I think so – plus they have sentimental value, which again, I’ll write more about when I actually have them in my possession. (I’m only 1 ACEO sale away from being able to order them!)

And I guess that’s all I really have to say at the moment. It’s been a busy month and it’s going to continue to be busy. My neighbour’s daughter, Ashley, is due to have her baby any day now, so since my neighbour (Judy) doesn’t have a camera, I’ve lent her mine and that’s why there haven’t been pictures of anything in my recent posts. Ashley was actually due like, 4 or 5 days ago, so she could literally pop any day now and I should get my camera back soon.

Okay, I hope you all have a wonderful Valentine’s Day! I’m off to watch the Olympics and work on these ACEOs.

And now for something completely different, I give you the musical stylings of my best friend, Alexandria Gillespie:

And now onto other things…

Blake & I had a pretty wicked fight last night where he called me a “bigot” due to a misunderstanding about whether or not I accepted people who identify as gender neutral as valid (I do) and we were up until about 3am talking about it. There are 2 things you never ever call me, ever: 1. A “cunt”, unless you’re being playful and 2. A bigot because I accept everyone for whoever or whatever they are or say they are. I am very much a live and let live kinda person and it killed me last night that the person in the world who knows me best and loves me the most would call me such a thing when they should know me better than to think that was true in any capacity.

But everything’s okay now and the misunderstanding has been cleared up.

Yesterday was a pretty rough day emotionally between that situation, thinking earlier in the day that Blake was mad at me and ignoring me for reasons I couldn’t fathom and because I watched the series finale of Six Feet Under which utterly destroyed me for most of the afternoon. Not to mention the fact that I’m not the most emotionally stable person these days and I’ve been “bleeding brown” for the last week & a half despite only being halfway through my last month of birth control pills. (For those not in the know, I take them for 3 months non-stop, without a period, then have a period and repeat because of my endometriosis. The last month and the period following it is always brutal and requires lots and lots of drugs.)

I think when I see my shrink on the 8th, I’m going to ask her to up my medication because clearly I’m not stable right now. The normal dose for my mood stabilizer is 4 pills a day (I forget the mg dosage) and I currently take 3. I’m thinking I should probably be at 4. I’m also going to ask her for a new anti-anxiety medication because the clonazepam doesn’t seem to be cutting it these days. I usually take 2 before I go to sleep to curb “racing thoughts” and I can take it during the day if I’m having anxiety, but lately I’ve been having to take 3 or 4 just to get to sleep and some days I need to take 2 of them, plus Ativan (lorazepam) to keep my anxiety somewhat under control. I’ve heard good things about Xanax so maybe she’ll put me on that. She’s no doubt going to ask me what I think is causing the anxiety and I honest to god have no idea. I mean, normally I’m good at pinpointing things like that, but this is just coming straight out of left field. Yeah, I’m really stressed out about Wes’ birthday party, but I’ve been at that level of stress before and I’ve never had a problem with keeping things under control with the medications available to me. So I dunno.

And I haven’t been depressed, necessarily, but sad and unmotivated. Kinda numb and neutral. I have two paintings I should be working on right now, one that’s been in the works for over a year now, and while they sit on my coffee table waiting to be completed, I don’t seem to have the drive right now to work on them.

And Etsy…holy shit, Etsy. At the suggestion of my internet buddy, Ashley, whose grandmother sells aprons on Etsy and has for quite some time, I spent most of this week in the Etsy forums (and chat) talking to people and learning as much as I can and really, selling on Etsy has about as many tricks and rules as selling on eBay, which is a site I completely hate. Now, I’m not going to abandon Etsy, I still think it’s the best venue for my work at this time, but the suggestions as far as getting sales are VAST and there’s a lot more marketing involved than I’d previously anticipated. Naively, I figured I’d just list stuff and walk away, but oh ho ho, that is so not how Etsy works.

First, there’s the renewing game. With how Etsy’s search results work, which they’re actually in the process of tweaking but that’s kind of besides the point, it’s easy for your items to get buried if they haven’t been recently put up so what people do is they “renew” items, which pretty much means relisting them again so they show up at the top of the search results and stay on the main page and thus, more visible, longer. This of course costs $0.20, the same as listing an item to begin with. Most people, or at least the successful ones, renew several items per day, every single day. This week I’ve been doing that myself with mixed results, yes my hearts and views have gone up, but no sales have come from it.

Everyone on Etsy says to be patient, some people go 6 months to a year before making their first sale. That’s not exactly encouraging, but at least I know it’s not just me or what I’m selling. In fact a lot of the threads in the Etsy forums are about how sales are down for just about everyone due to the economy taking a giant shit.

But back to promotion. So Etsy gives you a couple of tools for promoting your shop. One is the “Etsy mini”, which you can see in my shop here on my site because I added it the other day. You can add this to various blogs and websites etc. but really, the only venue I have for this item is here on my site. The other tool they give you is a Facebook app that adds a tab to your profile or fan page (another reason to go the fan page route rather than a group) that basically shows your entire shop. It’s actually pretty cool and you can see it in action on my fan page. (I added it to my personal profile as well.) But that’s really the only tools Etsy gives you for promoting your shop.

Advice from other people though, well, there’s plenty. Some suggest that your personal avatar (your user icon) should be a picture of something you sell because if you post in the forums and they like the item in your avatar, they’re more likely to visit your shop. And buyers DO read the forums apparently. On the same token however, if they don’t like the item in your avatar, they may pass your shop over. That’s why I’ve chosen to stick with the picture of myself that I’ve had on Etsy since I opened my account a few years ago. Well that and Etsy won’t seem to let me change it. Using a picture of yourself, especially an interesting one, was also recommended in several threads.

Other  buts of advice were to make sure your spelling and grammar are impeccable, which I absolutely agree with, and to make your shop announcement interesting but not too long. Honestly, mine is probably too long. The other bit of advice to do with this was to make sure you fill out your shop’s policies in full and be as clear (and as entertaining) as possible. Also, filling out your personal profile is something you want to do as well because apparently people actually read those. (I haven’t really filled mine out yet, but I plan on it.) Some people suggested that in your personal profile or in the first section of your shop policies, you discuss your creative process and how each item is made. I still have to do that too, but as some people pointed out after that piece of advice popped up in the forums, you don’t want to give away too much because that can lead to copycats.

Then comes other forms of marketing that you do off-site. The main gist of most of these promotional topics was that you shouldn’t rely on Etsy’s current market to make your sales, you should concentrate on bringing outside people from your world into your Etsy shop and there are literally a million ways to do this. One suggestion, which I’d already planned on, was to register a domain name and have it point to your Etsy shop so people can find you easier and your Googlability goes up. Another suggestion was to create bookmarks or postcards or other small items with the url to your shop and give a stack of whatever those items are to your family, friends and co-workers to hand out for you. Most people can do this with whatever kind of printer they have at home. I don’t have a printer (well, not one that really works anyway) so this isn’t an option for me yet, but it’s something that I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to.

More suggestions came in the form of advertising on the internet, like with Facebook ads and advertising on blogs. That’s too rich for my blood, so I’m not going to do that, but apparently it works. One woman said that she makes postcard-sized business cards with her Etsy shop’s url on them and she goes to Barnes & Noble once a month to insert these cards into all of the craft magazines. She swears this works. (I’m skeptical, but it’s still an interesting idea.)

There is just this whole world of Etsy that I never knew existed until I started reading the forums and while a lot of it is really just good common sense marketing, there are levels to it I’d  never even considered, like advertising outside of the internet or playing the “renewing” game. My brain is pretty fried from absorbing all of this information, but I’m determined to put some of it into practice over the weekend, especially simple things like coming up with a wicked bio for my personal profile page.

Oh and more things to consider is your “relevancy”, which is part of Etsy’s new, experimental search system. LIke, for your titles, you should say what the thing is and then what it’s called. For example my titles for items were originally just what I called them, like “just like honey”, but after readong more about it, I changed them to “Original Painting – just like honey” because people search for original paintings, they don’t search for “just like honey”. And then there’s also your tags, which you have two sets of. One is categorical as far as what your item is and one is based on the materials used in the item. There’s like, a whole science to using tags, which I understand due to using tags and metatags for search engine optimization on websites, but when my mom starts selling on Etsy, I may have to help her with that.

And Etsy even has RULES on tags. For example, you can’t tag something “valentines day” because it would make a nice Valentine’s Day gift, you can only tag it with that if it’s something Valentine’s related like a heart-shaped soap or a hand-made V-Day card. There’s even a similar rule pertaining to tagging your items by colour, which admittedly I don’t fully understand but I’ll look into it more when I start selling my ACEOs by colour.

Isn’t all this shit crazy though? I mean, who knew Etsy was this complicated? I certainly didn’t. I gotta say, my inner ad geek is kinda loving it though and I can’t wait to have a little bit of capital to spend on things like advertising.

And speaking of Etsy, I still need a banner! E-mail me your 760 x 100 px submissions by February 20th and if I like yours enough to use it, I’ll PayPal you $20! Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com!

Anyway, that’s what’s been on my mind this week. Blake’s going to be here any minute with our lunch, so I better wrap this up, but chances are I’ll write more later because my brain’s been all over the place and I have shit to say!

I woke up today at 1:30pm and I was amazed when my eyes adjusted enough for me to look at the clock. I got up at 8am on Sunday, for some ungodly reason, and last night I ended up staying awake until around 3:30am because someone on a forum I go to started a thread about this A&E show called Hoarders, which I’d never heard of and it sounded interesting so I (stupidly) decided to start watching episodes on Ninja Video.

Also last night, I wrote one of my articles for Buttercup, called “So This Is Xmas“, all about why I hate this particular holiday and it left me emotionally ravaged. I know I’ve told the story as to why I hate Xmas on my site before and last night I promised myself that this would be the last time I open that wound ever again because afterward, I was a complete mess. (Mom, if you’re reading this, you probably wanna skip that article. You know what it’s about and I really mean it when I say it’s the last time it’s going to be brought up.) It’s strange how something that happened so long ago can leave me a a crumpled mess on the floor wanting to throw up more than half a lifetime later.

Anyway, that’s what I did last night.

There are a couple of arty things that have been topics of discussion lately and I figure now’s as good a time as any to talk about them. The first is that some friends of mine have asked me if I’ll ever start making videos on YouTube, specifically art tutorial videos and vlogs and the answer to that is quite simply “no”. There are millions of art tutorials already on YouTube, I suck at video editing software and have no intentions of improvement in that area and I just don’t want to. Vlogs? Why? I already have a blog and write quite well, thank you, so I don’t see the point of sitting in front of a camera essentially talking to myself and saying everything I’m saying here only a hell of a lot less eloquently. No thank you. One person said that there’s no difference between recording a vlog and doing a streaming show at Camwhores and I guess that person has never been to Camwhores before or seen any of my shows. Yes, there is similarity in the fact that you’re in front of a camera, but that’s where the similarity ends. At Camwhores, there are people watching you and talking to you, it’s live and to me, that’s a lot less awkward than sitting in my office talking to myself about the weather.  Plus, there’s no editing to be done and only a select audience is going to be viewing it after it’s been recorded and put in the archives. So it’s completely different and no, I won’t be making art tutorials or vlogs for YouTube in the new year. I may do little videos of my finished paintings so people can see how they sparkle (which we’ve found impossible to photograph), but that’s about the extent of it.

The other thing I’ve been asked recently is if I’ll do a tutorial on how I do backgrounds and the answer to that one is “sure”. If people want to know how, as it appears they do, then the next time I make a painting (which should be in the new year, unless I become inspired before then) I’ll take photos of the process and whip up a tutorial on all that goes into the background. It’s actually extremely easy, as long as you’ve got the right products and I think the end result is pretty cool. So that’s something I plan on working on in the new year.

Since I have nothing to read right now, I dug out these back issues I ordered last year of a magazine called Artful Blogging. Yes, even I was amazed that such a publication existed. Basically, last year someone suggested that I write a piece about my blog for the magazine so I ordered the back issues to see what it was all about and then someone else told me to “let them come to you”, so I kind of put the idea out of my mind. Then last week when I was looking for something on one of my bookshelves that I haven’t read yet, I found them and started reading. Long story short, I don’t think I want to be in this magazine and the suggestion of me being in it is actually kind of laughable because I so wouldn’t fit in. This magazine is not for people who say “fuck” a lot, it’s for people who inspire and make friends through their blogs and network and all kinds of other flowery “uplifting” bullshit. And while yes, I’ve done all of the above with my blog (or more to the point, my Live Journal) and I’ve had mine longer than any of the people in at least the first two issues of the magazine, I’ve done so with a hell of a lot more edge than the women profiled (and they’re all women) and this magazine doesn’t appear to be the place for that. I’m going to read all of the issues I have, even though every article is practically the same, and then I’m going to forget it exists again because it’s, well, boring. Hopefully I get some new books for Xmas.

And with that, I think I’m off to my Sims Bunker since I have to write a review for the expansion next week and I still haven’t been to Egypt.

Well said, my friend.

(HugNation was raided by 4chan today, which is the context of the above video. For the full archive, click here.)

Comments on this site are now manually moderated so don’t freak out if yours doesn’t show up right away. Also I now have it set so that comments automagically close on posts older than 14 days. That is all.

Moments ago, around midnight, Blake’s mother defriended me on Facebook. But that’s okay, I mean as it turned out this “friendship” we had was pretty one-sided and as I tried to imply in last night’s post that’s not really a friendship at all, is it? Oh well, I’m not going to write another gigantic post trying to figure out what this action means as far as I’m concerned. I’m sure Blake will receive an e-mail or phone call about it eventually, unless she’s decided not to be friends with him too which is entirely possible. He was just going to bed when the defriending happened and he told me to check his Facebook account but I’m not entering his password correctly or something and can’t get in so oh well, I guess he’ll just check for himself  tomorrow.

I could go on any number of tangents from here but it’s hard to pick just one. I guess I’ll go with Blake and I’ll warn you  right now, this could get messy.

I always go to bed long after Blake does but sometimes when I’m sitting here by myself and everyone’s sleeping, I think about how lucky I am to be able to crawl into bed and sleep beside him every night. I mean, he’s my man, he’s my partner in crime, I get to be with him for the rest of our lives and constantly I think about it and think how awesome that is. It’s so lame, I know, but sometimes I sit here and fantasize about having a party for our 10th wedding anniversary so we can share our love with everyone we love and who love us back. We never really did the wedding thing and while I don’t regret that, when I think about how much we love each other and when people tell us that our marriage is one that they look up to, I just want to have a party to celebrate love. Our 10th anniversary is probably not very realistic financially for what I fantasize about but I can wait until our 20th.

People talk about marriage like it’s this huge sacrifice where ultimately you’re both going to end up miserable until you finally divorce and I just don’t get that. The way people at Blake’s work talk about their significant others just baffles both of us, how people we know talk about their marriages sometimes, I mean, we just don’t understand. I think these people maybe got married for the wrong reasons or something, I dunno. We know people who had a wedding just to have a wedding. We know people who married for financial security. We know people who married because of an accidental pregnancy and we know people who were in love when they got married but with the way things played out afterward, I’m not sure some of these people really understood what a marriage was. Blake and I? We definitely entered into this whole marriage deal with our eyes wide open and 7 years later we’re more in love than we were the day we said “I do”. It’s us against the world and guess what? We’re making it. Slowly but surely we are. And one day we’re going to have everything we want together, everything we’ve talked about, of that I’m certain because – and this is probably really cliche but fuck you I’m saying it anyway – together we can do anything and we can survive anything.

I’m unsure of a lot of things in this world, I have a lot of fears, but one thing I absolutely know for sure is that my kids are going to grow up to be amazing people and that Blake and I are never going to stop loving each other, fiercely, for as long as we live. We are the foundation, the seed, of a new family tree. We’re just waiting to put our roots in the ground which will come one day, we’re sure as hell trying.

Okay that’s enough lameness out of me. I’m not really a romantical type person and everything I just wrote kinda makes me want to throw up a little bit but I can’t help it though, I just love the shit out of him. I hope you understand.

And with that, I guess I’m out.

Ooooooh my god I’m all over the place right now. See, Blake and I have these marathon conversations about life and creativity and expression that are both brain numbing and inspiring at the same time. I love when we talk like this, but unfortunately it’s almost always late at night and by the time we’re done, we’re both exhausted. He’s gone to bed but my brain’s going a mile a minute.

Here’s the thing: I feel like I’ve kind of been in a rut for maybe the past year. Being on proper meds and getting my bipolar disorder under control (more or less) has caused me to change some of my habits. For example, I’m not longer hypergraphic. Prior to getting my meds in order, I would go through a paper notebook usually once a month and I would literally spend like, 4 hours a day just writing writing writing. But now I don’t do that anymore. I still keep a paper journal but I only write in it maybe twice a month and each entry only ends up being a 2 page, bare bones account of what’s happening in my life at the moment rather than a sweeping saga like they were before. Likewise, my blog entries have become a lot more sanitized than they’ve ever been before and Blake & I agreed tonight that that’s somewhat of a problem because I write to process things and if I’m not writing, I’m not processing things, I’m keeping it all inside and that’s A) Not good for me, and B) Not me. At all.

The problem is that for some reason I began self-censoring myself, and rather harshly, and I don’t really know why I started doing that and now it’s gotten to the point where I’m completely frustrated by it. Blogging is like, the fucking wild wild West and there aren’t really any established rules on what you can and cannot write about or more importantly WHO you can and cannot write about. All of that is really left up to the writer and over the past year or so I’ve had trouble reconciling what’s right and what’s wrong as far as what I can write about that’s happening in my life.

Certain people – well, really only one – have asked me specifically not to write about them, not to even mention them, and I’ve honoured that…but there’s a “but” coming. The person who specifically asked me not to write about them no longer deserves that kind of respect and as it turns out, never really did in the first place. With the exception of that one person, my policy has always been that if you are a part of my life, I’m going to write about you at some point, plain & simple, because to do otherwise is self-censorship and that makes me a sad panda, it really does. The other policy I’ve always had with this whole blogging thing is that if you don’t want to be portrayed as a douche, don’t do douchey things. I mean, I think that too is also a pretty simple concept, don’t you agree?

So self-censorship…obviously there has to be some but I think I drew my line in such a way that it left me very little wiggle room and I just don’t write the way I used to and I hate that. I like being an open book, I like being a ridiculously honest person, I like that part of me and this week I realized that I’ve lost a lot of that and dammit, I want it back. My moods are stable, my meds are working, my light therapy is working, I’m making progress in so many areas as far as immersion therapy, it’s time to reclaim certain aspects of myself I put on hold for so long.

For example, a large part of the reason I left Camwhores 2 years ago was because I wasn’t stable and I didn’t really trust myself to have an outlet to instantly broadcast anything I wanted to. Near the end there, I was sad one day and I posted a picture of myself crying – for the first time in my (at the time) 7 year camming history. That was when I realized that I needed to reign myself in and get better before I could go on. I hope that makes sense.

During that time, as most of you know if you’ve been reading along, I stopped writing about certain things. For a few months there my entire Live Journal was just Loud Twitter updates because that’s all I could handle at the time. I stopped seeing the world in the unique way I normally would.

But I’m okay now, or close to it. I’m stronger. I trust myself and my own judgment and it’s time to jump on the floor and bang on the ceiling  with a broom (as my shrink puts it) and maybe shake some things up. Wake up my little readership and get them writing again themselves as so many seem to have abandoned their blogs and Live Journal for Facebook and Twitter. Have opinions. Talk to me.

I want to write about the things that are actually happening in my life again. Y’know the expression “dance like no one’s watching”? Well I’m going to write like no one’s reading. Until tonight I had so much fear and I don’t even know where it came from. I had fear about writing about Wayne & Judy in case Judy’s daughter Ashley was reading and her interpretation in telling them about it would be negative. I had fear about writing about my mother for fear of her getting pissed off at me. I had fear about writing about Blake’s mother because I know she reads and she’s the one who asked me (through Blake) specifically never to even mention her online. But in talking to Blake tonight, we sort of found the problem. When I first started writing publicly about my life, the internet was still relatively small and no one I really knew, except for Blake and some of the Scratching Post kids, was reading the things I wrote. And then my mom got online. And then Blake’s mom started reading. And now Blake’s co-workers are reading. And with all of these people reading, I kind of froze, almost like stage fright, and now I’m in this stupid rut of mine.

But Blake and I talked about it and he said to me that who is he to tell me what I can and can’t write about? And who is anyone else to tell me the same? People have to trust my judgment and if they don’t like what’s being written about them they either have to, as I said, stop doing douchey things, or start doing things to portray themselves in a better light. All I do is write what I see and feel, I simply write the truth. If I want to tell you that last night Wayne & Judy drank 28 beer and Wayne was so drunk he pissed all over the floor and toilet seat, well dammit, I’m going to because that’s what happened. If Wayne doesn’t want me writing about something like that, then don’t fucking do it. (Although honestly, I doubt Wayne would care and the incident was actually really funny. Plus they don’t even have internet and wouldn’t read a post even this long so I don’t think they’d see it or care if they did.)

So, starting today, right now, I’m going to once again be more open and honest about the happenings of my life and that includes everyone in it. People who are truly my friends and really know me will totally understand and be totally on board with this, others…well they may not be but that’s just too damn bad. I’m done censoring myself out of respect for people who don’t deserve that respect. What am I talking about? Well, keep reading, here’s where things start getting  juicy.

But where to even start? I guess the biggest thing happening in our lives right now, or at least the biggest conflict is Blake’s mother, Brooke. Right now Blake and Brooke are battling via e-mail over comments she made about me when Blake was in Michigan last month. See, when I first met Brooke – 8 years ago now – I thought she was pretty cool but that facade quickly dissipated and I found myself in a monster-in-law type of situation. I don’t even know where it all began, really, this has been an issue that long, but maybe I should start with after Blake & I got married because I don’t feel like telling the tale of our actual wedding which neither of our mothers were invited to.

After Blake and I got married and I was pregnant with Wes, Brooke would call the house constantly and if I picked up the phone it would either be something inane like what size of clothes Madison wore because she was out shopping at the time and saw something Madison might look cute in – despite the fact that we’d told her Madison’s size at least 5 times prior to that and strangely these cute things for Madison never seemed to appear. In other words, these calls were just calls to call. To this day I don’t even know what their purpose was. Other times when I’d pick up the phone, she’d give me all kinds of bad and unwanted advice and would basically tell me that I wasn’t doing enough as a wife and mother, so I stopped answering the phone.

But here’s the thing: I’ve never really been a phone person, that’s just not how I communicate, so it was a special effort to answer the phone for her in the first place so to be put down just about every time I did, didn’t really encourage me to keep taking the calls. See what I’m saying?

So once I stopped taking the calls – and again, keep in mind that I don’t take calls from pretty much anyone – that’s when she’d start calling Blake on his cell and complain that I never answered the phone. Well gee lady, I wonder why. Blake explained to her that I’m not just a phone person – for YEARS – but the complaints didn’t stop until about two years ago. Without going into huge detail (maybe I will one day, just not tonight), about two years ago Blake and Brooke had basically an e-mail war that lasted almost a year. I can’t even remember how it got resolved off the top of my head, but it did and ever since, I’ve done my best to continue being nothing but nice to this woman. I answer her e-mails, we send each other Growing Gifts and things like that on Facebook with little notes attached and while it all seems like minor communication on the surface, it’s actually huge for me and here I thought after 6 years of her flat out disliking me and flat out saying that I wasn’t good enough for her son and that Blake wasn’t living up to his full potential because of me etc. that she was finally starting to get to know me and maybe even liking me. In fact, I think it was her last visit last fall where she gave me a gift of these neat tin ladies with great quotes on them that I have hanging in my office. I thought that after all these years, we were finally starting to make progress and maybe even bond a little bit.

But then Blake’s cousin’s wife died and he had to go to Michigan for the funeral last month and on one of the nights he was there, his mom got two drinks into her and just let loose saying all kinds of negative things about me. Want a list? Here it is:

• *Everyone* has mental illness, the people she knows who are mentally ill are worse off than me and they can do things I can’t, like work. (“my whole family was mentally ill and half were institutionalized and we could all work. . .”)

• She’s scared I’m taking advantage of Blake. That I “make” him do everything. (When in reality I don’t “make” him do anything and while he does do more than I do, I don’t exactly sit at home and eat bon bons either. I mean, who did she think was looking after the kids, the house and the dogs while Blake was in Michigan?)

• She claims she doesn’t read my site or anything but she’s pissed because I apparently made a blog post where I said that because I stay home and I’m an artist I’m better than people who work. (“she said that you were basically saying how much better you are than people who get up with their kids every day and how much better you are than people who have jobs. She basically said you were saying you’re an artist and anyone who works or takes care of kids all day is a sell out and not as good as you”. This one baffles me BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS SOOOO MUCH LIKE SOMETHING I’D SAY, so I asked Blake to get more info but there was none to be had.)

• Blake said she said, “I may have neglected to tell Joyce the part about you not wanting the present because you wanted the kids treated as equals” or something like that. This is a long dead issue but Joyce is Blake’s mom’s best friend and she wanted to buy a savings bond for Blake’s “first born child” and we freaked because we want our kids treated as equals and Wes was NOT Blake’s first child. Blake’s mom hounded us forEVER about getting Wes an American SSN so they could buy bonds for him, but Joyce supposedly had no intentions of getting any for Madison, so we cut her out of our lives and said thanks but no thanks. According to Blake: “Joyce never knew we had an issue with anything, so we were just ungrateful fucks.”

• She wants to get our kids AMERICAN FUCKING PASSPORTS for Xmas. When I asked why, Blake said “she thinks that being Canadian will hold them back in life, but if they have official US docs they will magically be better off”.

For the last two years I have been nothing but nice to this woman. I’ve met her half way as much as I’m capable of. I reply to every non-fwd e-mail she sends me. I write on her Facebook wall. I send her Growing Gifts. I used to play Scrabble with her on Facebook until Blake told me she uses a program to cheat. I do way more for her than she does for me as far as meeting someone halfway and this is the shit we get? It’s obvious that she still has a deep dislike for me, the same dislike she’s had since day one, meaning that all of the stuff we’ve been doing together that I thought was progress was all meaningless and phony on her end. Here I was being genuine and trying my best to be what I thought she wanted me to be but the whole time she was reading my site and feeling negative about all the things I do. She was a troll, by my definition, she just doesn’t leave comments (to my knowledge).

Worse, she seems to think she has to “enlighten” Blake on what a horrible person I am because he’s apparently too stupid or naive to see it and that’s completely insulting to him.

Again – and I cannot stress this enough – until this very moment I have been nothing but kind and humble towards Blake’s mother. When she cornered me in her kitchen a few years ago (the last time we went to Michigan) to literally tell me that Blake is such & such a way and that I’m holding him back from his true potential, I took it in stride and never fought back or stood up for myself or anything. I just took it. (I’m not good with confrontation.) She pulled a similar move in my own kitchen a few years ago as well and it was the same thing, I just said something neutral and walked out of the room. I have never been hostile or negative or anything like that towards this woman EVER and as I said, within the past two years here I was being honest and thoughtful and trying to build a relationship and the second she gets Blake alone, she tears me down.

I think Blake was more upset about the things she said than I was. I was hurt by them, yes, because I honestly thought we were building a relationship here and her actions were genuine and when I found out they were just an act, it stung because I was making an honest effort…and it apparently got me nowhere. When Blake got home, he said that he’d let the dust settle from the funeral and when things had calmed down, he’d e-mail his mom and settle this shit once and for all. I don’t know how many e-mails have flown back and forth at this point, but the first e-mail went out last weekend and they’re still battling it out so who knows when this is going to be over or if it’s ever going to be over. I mean godammit, Blake and I have been together for 8 fucking years, we have a solid relationship and a happy marriage that works, I’m here to stay. At some point she’s going to have to accept that and accept me or we’re going to have no choice but to live our life without her – and that’s pretty much what Blake’s been saying in the e-mails from what I understand.

What he’s leaving out though, is that she also needs to accept Blake for who he is. Blake has a job he loves in a field he loves and he even acknowledges the fact that he wouldn’t be where he is right now – and be happy – without me. Blake’s mom, according to Blake, expects him to have made his first million by now and have a trophy wife who will host Superbowl parties, attend dinner meetings and have a power career of her own. While we’re happy and accept each other for who we are, we have Blake’s mom who sees both of us as nothing but a disappointment.

And did you know that when I was in the hospital in 2006 because I was having a psychotic episode Brooke’s advice to Blake was to pack up the kids, drive down to her house in Michigan and fucking LEAVE ME? I mean what reality does this woman even live in?

She says she doesn’t even know me because she’s only met me about a dozen times, but at the same time, she’s been reading my site since Blake and I got together and I’ve most definitely met her more than a dozen times and while she claims she hasn’t gotten to know me well enough to love me, she’s certainly displayed that she’s gotten to know me well enough to dislike me and feel negatively towards me.

Blake’s been saying this the whole time we’ve been married: that there is nothing I can do to please his mother because I’m simply not the woman he was supposed to marry. Right now he’s told me to stop even trying to make an effort with her because the two years I  did try obviously got me nowhere so what’s the point? He says his mother needs to examine her feelings toward me and resolve them on her own before we can move forward and until she does that, I’ll never get anywhere with her.

I don’t know how long this is going to take. I don’t know how long this e-mail war is going to last. All I know is that I’m staying the fuck out of it and leaving it between them because there’s no place for me in this discussion even though it’s pretty much about me. I don’t know what the right thing to do is anymore – I thought I was doing it! I’d rather do nothing than misstep and at this point in time I simply give up.

The other aspect of this is that Brooke and her husband Charlie want to come up and visit but until this situation is resolved somehow that simply can’t happen. How can I have someone in my home who feels so hostile toward me? Why should I have to put up with being put down in my own comfort zone? The fact is, I don’t have to and I’m not going to and Blake completely agrees.

To expand upon that topic, according to Blake, Brooke and Charlie don’t like coming up here because they get bored. Well if you’re so bored and your grandchildren aren’t entertaining enough, then don’t fucking come up! In a recent phone conversation with his mom, which sort of turned into a fight – while he was at WORK – she said that Charlie would like to do home improvement projects with us and got all offended when Blake said that if we needed to work on the house at all, we’d probably enlist the help of Phil (my dad) because he’s only an hour & a half away and he does this shit for a living, every single day and has a truck if we need lumber or drywall and a million other reasons. Well Brooke took great offense to this for some reason and started a fight about it, saying how Charlie (her husband, if that wasn’t clear) put in someone’s window in something like, an hour or whatever and Blake was just like “where the fuck is this even coming from?” I mean the fact of the matter is, we don’t really DO home improvement projects and we’re certainly not going to call on Charlie to drive 5 hours up here to like, paint our living room ceiling or tile our shower. We’re not going to start a home improvement project when we have company coming (them) and we don’t have the money to just start a home improvement project when they want to come up just so Charlie will be entertained. It just doesn’t make any sense.

But where did this all come from? Well I talked to Blake shortly after his mom had called and he told me about it and I told him exactly where it was coming from: that day or the day before I’d made a post about us moving on Live Journal and how we’d need to fix up our house a bit to sell it and that Wayne had offered to help. THAT is where it all came from, I’m fairly certain. But the thing Blake and I both wonder is: does Charlie even know she’s saying all of this stuff on his behalf? We kind of doubt it. Charlie, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell and Blake agrees, is a pretty laid back, go with the flow, sit & chat kinda guy. It was certainly news to both of us that he suddenly wanted to help us drywall our bathroom because he’s bored out of his skull when he comes up otherwise.

The other issue with them coming up, according to these phone calls Blake gets from his mother while he’s at work, is that it’s too expensive. See, they can’t stay at our house because 1) Our house is very small and our futon isn’t very comfortable, 2) Charlie’s apparently allergic to our dogs and 3) I don’t really want to be alone in the house with them when Blake & the kids go to school and work because his mom corners me, talks down to me and puts me down, so that means they have to stay at a hotel or do what they did last time they came up (for a week) and get a time share somewhere. And this is apparently where the boredom sets in. While the kids are at school and Blake’s at work, they’re left to their own devices and they get bored. I don’t really know what I can do about that. If it were me, I’d do some Googling to see what was around and find something to do, but by the sounds of it, that thought’s never crossed Brooke’s mind. She’d rather complain that they’re bored.

So if it’s boring and too expensive, then I say don’t fucking come up! Plain & simple. If it’s such a chore, such a bother for you to come up to spend money only to not have a good time, then why bother? I mean I don’t have a solution to either problem and neither does Blake. I’m sorry my house isn’t bigger? I’m sorry Charlie’s allergic to my dogs? I’m sorry our kids aren’t entertaining enough for you? I mean what are we supposed to say to that?

What comes to mind is what my mother used to say to me when I was a kid and complained of boredom. She said, rather nastily I might add, “I’m not your entertainer!” and dammit I’m not. If you can’t keep yourself occupied, that isn’t my problem. Complaining about it to us isn’t going to solve your issue, you have to be proactive and go see what’s out there or I dunno, stay home!

I don’t know how to move forward from here. Everything is so convoluted at this point that I worry there’s no turning back. The harder Blake pushes the subject, I think the more his mother is going to resent me, but at the same time, I think he has no other choice than to bring this all up to the surface and address it rather than smile while staring daggers, know what I mean?

And of course Brooke is going to read this post and probably flip out but at this point I don’t even care. Blake doesn’t either. He told me tonight to write whatever I felt I needed to write and I think that’s what I’ve done here, as far as his mother is concerned. Until this whole thing blows over or runs its course or does whatever it’s going to do, I’m just gonna lay low, observe and, for the most part, keep my damn mouth shut on the subject. I wish I had a crystal ball so I knew how this was going to play out, but I don’t and I hate not knowing what to expect, I hate not knowing what to do. Is this post going to make anything better? Definitely not, but I’m sick and tired of pretending this aspect of my life doesn’t exist when it’s been a problem for the entire 8 years Blake and I have been together. It’s a constant drain on both of us and a huge source of anxiety for me. Every time I even think of Blake getting another e-mail from his mom, I have to pop an Ativan because my stomach knots up.

But enough about THAT drama I’ve said what I need to say right now and that’s just what is going on and yeah, Brooke will be making an appearance in my writings again at some point, but that’s enough for now. In the meantime, wanna know what else is going on in my life? Well my friend Jesse has pretty much abandoned me. I’ve sent him e-mails, I’ve written on his Facebook wall several times, I’ve sent him messages on Yahoo, I’ve tried to add him to Last.fm but he won’t add me back….I haven’t seen him since like, the winter and I don’t even know why this is happening. Blake’s talked to him and Jesse claims he’s not mad at Blake or myself, he’s just been “busy” and “doesn’t get online very often anymore”.

Blake went over to Jesse’s house on Saturday to retrieve the CDs he’d borrowed from us because I’m so convinced he’s distancing himself from us on purpose I wanted to get them back before he moved or something and he was apparently all sunshine and lollipops. He said he’d get online and e-mail me, but so far that hasn’t happened and I don’t expect it will.

I don’t like thinking bad things about my friends, but the only reason I can think of for Jesse blowing us off like this is the fact that I don’t smoke pot anymore, so I can’t be his stoner buddy and there’s no smoking in our house anymore so we can’t sit around smoking and talking like we used to. He used to come over at least twice a week, I’d talk to him usually every day on Yahoo, what happened?

The last time I talked to him was on Yahoo at the end of June because I asked him to come to the Hypercube event with us and he said he’d ask for that day off and we haven’t spoken since despite my attempts. Something’s going on there and I don’t know what and while it used to bother me, I’m at the point where I guess Jesse’s been moved into the “acquaintance” category and out of the “friend” category for the time being and that’s why I wanted all my CDs back. It was a “closure” kinda deal for me. Now Jesse can fuck off and do his own thing and I’m not even going to worry about it anymore. If I see him in the grocery store, I’ll talk to him, but I’m not gonna chase him down anymore or make myself crazy wondering what I did wrong. I’m just going to take him at his word that I didn’t do anything wrong and leave it at that.

In other news, Alex and I had our first fight last week. Here’s what happened: Blip.fm posted on Twitter excessively drives me nuts and Ronny is the worst offender on my list. But I love him so I just put up with it and grumble to myself when he’s on a Blip marathon and scroll past them or ignore Twitter until he’s gone to bed. But one day last week, I checked my Facebook live feed and there, from Ronny were a bunch of Blips. Now here’s the other thing about Ronny and I, for some reason Ronny tends to bring out the snark in me, so I commented on one of the Blips on Facebook and said something like “Are you seriously going to make me put up with these here too?” thinking he was posting tweets to Facebook and not realizing it was a Blip application that I could block. I thought in order to not see them, I would have to block Ronny altogether and I didn’t want to have to do that.

So anyway, I got busy talking to Blake or doing something, I can’t remember, and when I opened up TweetDeck, here were these bitchy, passive-aggressive Blips from Alex that were most definitely directed at me. So me, always one to make matters better because I’m talented like that, I posted a Blip of my own…of the Bloodhound Gang’s “I Hope You Die” and mimicked one of Alex’s passive-aggressive Blips in my message to which Alex replied “……..” and then “You’re a real bitch sometimes,” or something to that effect. I replied with “At least I’m honest,” and then a few second later I said something about how I’d rather be a bitch upfront than a passive-aggressive one and that’s when Alex announced that she was too “tired and cranky for this bull” and that was the last I heard from her on Twitter.

So after that I checked my e-mail and there were Facebook notifications where Ronny and Alex had commented on my original Facebook Blip comment saying that it was an app and I could block it and that no one was “forcing” me to do anything. I commented back, even though both of them had gone to bed, that I hadn’t realized it was an app, that I thought I’d have to block Ronny altogether and I apologized for the misunderstanding. Then, later that night I got thinking about it and while yes, Alex was a bitch too, I started it, so I decided to be the first to apologize so we could forget this ever happened. So, I texted Alex with “I’m sorry. I love you.” at like, 1am so she’d get it in the morning and when I woke up the next day, there was a text on my phone from Alex saying the same thing. Everything’s cool now and I think we just caught each other on bad days, but it was just a weird situation because Alex and I had never fought before and I’m glad we have the kind of relationship where we can just apologize to each other and let bygones be bygones. I was proud of us that day. So many women love to let drama like that play out for as long as possible and make it snowball and I really dig that neither she nor I are that type of woman. Or maybe we are a little bit, but at least we both value our friendship enough to just step back and be cool about things. I love Alex.

Saturday night, which those who follow me on Twitter already know, Blake & I went over to Wayne & Judy’s to play euchre and drink a little bit…or in their case, drink a lot. Apparently they started drinking at around 6pm, we showed up at 9pm. Blake & I don’t really drink that much or that often, so he had a 6-pack of beer and I had two 4-packs of Mike’s Hard lemonade. Wayne’s one of these guys who thinks men are superior to women so he always wants it to be men against women and…Judy & I beat them 5 games-0. Wayne knows the game now and at least 3 times renegged and once he decided to go alone on a hand that had NO trump whatsoever. He said “Blake, ya gotta trust me, this hand is ours,” and Blake was like “Wayne, if you don’t have the best hand ever and win this, I’m gonna punch you,”…and then it turned out he had NO trump while Blake had a hand that was almost entirely trump. Since Blake couldn’t really punch Wayne, I did. Later that night, as Wayne got more and more drunk, he wobbled upstairs and when he came down he started bitching at Judy that they need to change the plate cover on the light switch in the bathroom because when he’s drunk he can never find the switch to turn it on. (Their light switch cover is bumpy and has frogs on it and it makes the switch a bit recessed.) And then he tells us that as he was peeing in the dark, all of a sudden he started peeing on the seat. So we were all like, “why didn’t you have the seat up?” and he slurred “oh I never do that, I don’t have to” and I was like, “well if you’re pissing on the seat then apparently you do!” None of us were sure if he was serious or not about peeing on the seat, so all 4 of us went up there to investigate and lo & behold there was piss all over the seat and a huge puddle all over the floor. I don’t think he actually got ANY in the bowl. From that point on, especially because they have a cracked, squishy toilet seat, I went over to my house to pee. But it didn’t really matter because by that point Wayne was so drunk he was practically passing out at the kitchen table, so shortly after the bathroom incident, Blake and I left to go back to our house and while I tried to drink the rest of my Mike’s Hard and actually get drunk like everyone else, I just wasn’t into it so I dumped mine. We tried to play a game of Monopoly but I was just too tired and not really feeling well so we packed it up and I went to bed instead.

Sunday I was hung over which I think is totally unfair since I didn’t even get drunk the night before. Because I felt like crap, I basically just slept most of the day and rested up for the Mad Men finale (which was excellent).

And then of course, after Mad Men was over, Blake and I started our marathon conversation on blogging, creativity and life in general which brings us back full circle. The fact of the matter is, I’m not painting right now because I’m discouraged but that doesn’t mean I can’t be creative in other ways. I’ve got a short story bordering on a novella sitting here that I could be working on. I don’t know if anything will ever come of it, but it’s here waiting for me to write it. I have a million stories from my past left to tell and a new audience to tell some of the ones I’ve told before to. There’s no reason for me to remain in this rut and to become stagnant, waiting around for something to happen.

Another thing my mom used to say about boredom was that only boring people get bored, and the thing is, I’m not boring, I have this wicked imagination to keep me entertained so I might as well use it.

And I think that’s all I have to say.

PS. This entry is 6300 words long.

PPS. This entry was supposed to be posted at about 3:30am but our ISP had an internet outage so that’s why it’s being posted this morning.

Yesterday I had a Pepsi for the first time in probably 15 years and it immediately made me remember my grampa.

When I was a kid, my mom would let me play hooky from school so I could go up to Alliston with my grampa, which was about an hour and a half away and also happened to be where I was born. This was where his carpet store was and a few times a week he’d drive up there in his big blue van to make sure things were running smoothly and to do “measure ups”, which meant that he was going to someone’s house to measure their rooms for new carpet.

On the way up to Alliston, my grampa would give me a Pepsi from a mini-fridge that plugged into the van’s cigarette lighter and being a Coke fanatic, this was the only time ever that I’d drink Pepsi.

When we got to Alliston, my grampa would leave me with Flo and Bonnie, his two employees, and he’d give me some money to go to the Stedman’s store down the street and buy clothes or toys. I would do that of course, but I’d never spend all of the money. Instead, I would go to the pet store behind my grampa’s store and more often than not I would buy a small animal that my mother would kill me for bringing home. My grampa would always come back from his measure ups and pretend to get mad at me for buying the animal and he’d tell me to take it back and I’d cry and get my own way and then we’d go two stores down to have Chinese food for lunch where I’d get an extra fortune cookie because Bing, the owner, liked my smile.

When we went to Alliston, I’d bring books and toys with me and I’d hide behind the rolls of carpet , which were stacked vertically against wood scaffolding and read or play my Game Boy, drinking my grampa’s Pepsi from a styrofoam cup the whole time.

After work, we’d go to a restaurant, the name of which is completely escaping me but it was the same one every time, with Flo (who was actually my grampa’s girlfriend, although I probably wasn’t supposed to know that considering he was still married to my grama) and I would order LIVER. Yes, a child who likes liver, who grew into an adult who likes liver.

When we were done with dinner, we’d drive Flo home and then head home ourselves, drinking Pepsi along the way. One time my grampa pulled over because one flukey night we could see the Northern Lights just outside of Alliston, something I’d never seen before nor since.

Since the store didn’t close until 9pm and it was an hour and a half home AFTER dinner, I would get home late enough that my mom was too tired to give me or my grampa shit about the new pet I’d acquired so I’d just get my pajamas on and go to bed.

And that’s all I have to say about my adventures in Alliston. For now, anyway. It’s just so weird how a taste or a smell can trigger such strong memories, especially when you haven’t experienced them in a long time.

In other news…on Monday I spent the whole day with my neighbour, Wayne, because it was his day off and he wanted me to rip CDs onto his computer.

A few weeks ago, Wayne was drunk and somehow we got started on the topic of religion, which in my experience is usually a bad idea. Wayne is technically a Catholic, although I guess you’d call him non-practicing as I’ve known the guy for 4 years and I’ve never seen him go to church, he definitely doesn’t eat fish on Fridays and while he believes in God, I seem to know more about Catholicism than he does.

Wayne’s known for quite some time that I don’t believe in God, so that day he asked me what I did believe in, what did I think happened after we died and stuff like that and that’s how we got on the topic of karma, a word he’d heard before but a concept of which he’d never really considered. So I explained to him the various thoughts on karma and my own personal ones and ever since, we’ve both been obsessed with it. Me with getting him to understand the concept and him with saying that I’m “funny” because I now constantly remind him to think about karma.

I lent him season one of My Name Is Earl, which he liked (I would have lent him the rest but I don’t have them) and ever since he’s kinda been turned on to the whole idea of karma, while still not totally grasping it. he says things like “Judy and I sacrifice so much and karma doesn’t reward us,” and I’ll say “but what have you done for someone other than yourselves?” and he’ll say “well we sacrifice so Courtney can have the things she has” (Courtney’s their daughter) and I say something like, “well you don’t get a reward for parenting, for doing something you’re supposed to be doing anyway,” and he’ll sit and think about it for a bit and then change the subject.

Well, the other day I thought of a good way to explain it to him so I think he’d understand. So on Monday I said to him that I was going to explain karma and I asked him what he does when he sees a stray dog in his driveway. He replied with “I try and chase it off,” to which I replied with “and what would Blake or I do? Or even Madison?” and he said, “well, you’d probably try and trap it” and I finished his sentence with “and we’d all go through great lengths to find its owner and, failing that, we’d call animal control, do you see the difference?” And he DID. He explained back to me that doing a good deed would give you good karma and I said yes, that’s exactly it, but remember, it has to be something completely unselfish and outside yourself. And he said to me “but if you call animal control, you’re kind of doing a bad deed because then the owners will have to pay money to get their dog back”, to which I replied, “that’s not my problem, the bottom line is that I saved that dog’s life, it didn’t get hit on the road, it didn’t die of dehydration or starvation and it didn’t get attacked by coyotes. The owners having to pay to get their dog back, that’s their own karma”.

After that Wayne was quiet for a little while, which is weird for Wayne, and I could tell that he was finally starting to “get it”.

And it’s not like I’m trying to preach or convert anyone or anything, he brought the whole thing up weeks ago, it’s just that Wayne & Judy, as much as I love them, they don’t do a whole lot for other people and they don’t really think outside of themselves or their own family (we’re included in that), but now I’ve got them, or at least Wayne, beyond their normal limits and honestly, I’m kind of proud of the fact that I did that.

With my belief system, which is karma-based, all of the bad things that are constantly happening to them – which I won’t go into because it’s not my place but let’s just say some REALLY bad shit – is a result of living a selfish existence. And maybe “selfish” isn’t even the right word, I don’t know what to call it. But like, they’ll utilize the food bank, but they’ve never contributed to it. A woman at Wayne’s work raised funds so Wayne could adopt a dog for Courtney for her birthday and we’re talking $300 here, and they took that, but they’d never in a million years do the same kind of thing for anyone else. I’m not saying they’re bad people at all, quite the opposite actually, they’re nothing but good to us, me in particular, and I really do love them dearly, it’s just that they don’t seem to see beyond the borders of their own existence and I truly believe that if they did, their luck would change and their lives would be better.

God, do I sound like an Evangelical or what? Please let me stress again that Wayne’s constantly been asking me about karma since it came up a few weeks ago, I’m seriously not pushing an agenda here, it’s just that he’s interested and I think opening him up to it would be of great benefit, so I patiently answer all of his questions and explain things the best I can.

Anyway, as time goes by and as I think of more examples, he seems to be getting it and I think that’s a good thing. I even told him, you can believe in God and karma at the same time, just think of it as God giving out karma, think of it as living by the Golden Rule.

So that’s Mondays with Wayne, constant talk of karma while I’m over there doing nice things for him.

Tomorrow night Blake’s going to be updating my badly outdated WordPress install, which I’m very excited about. It’s possible that when he does that, it might fix some of the annoying things I hate about WordPress, like the fact that I can’t wrap text around images. (It works when I’m typing the entry but when I publish it the formatting goes to shit.)

This update has made me think about my site a little more, specifically about its layout and some of the things that bug me. For example, I belong to a number of Ning groups and I’d like to place their badges either in the sidebars or even on my Exits page, but for some reason when I paste in the code, they don’t show up properly and I’m not sure if that’s a WordPress issue or if it’s the theme I’m using. When I designed this site originally, I wanted a fairly bare-bones layout because most of what I do is text anyway, but as I post more and more pictures and do more and more art, I want it to be more reflective of what the site’s all about and who I am. I don’t know if I have the graphics skills required for the kind of site I have in my head, but I think Blake and I should sit down and try to work something new out in the very near future.

And thinking about layout has led me to thinking about the site itself. The thing is, most blog sites, which really I guess mine is, have titles. Yes, people use their names as their site’s title and domain, but most arty blog sites have titles, for example, The Hermitage or Ruling At Life or Broken Toyland. I’ve been SunnyCrittenden.com for a very long time now and suddenly I’m thinking that it’s time for a title. SunnyCrittenden.com will still point to this site, but I’m thinking it’s time for my name to take a backseat to something bigger – I just don’t know what that is yet.

A long time ago I wanted my site to be called “A Pocket Full of Posies”, but the domain was taken. :o/

I dunno, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about tonight.

Okay I think it’s time to retire to my Sims Bunker while I still can. I’ve got a couple of days off from Buttercup, so to speak, before we all head into the craziness of October, so I’d better take advantage of it.

Goodnight!

Buttercup is an independent e-zine for persons seeking a female-focused atmosphere that celebrates diversity, individuality and creativity.
We launched September 1st!
Come join the party!

You’re attitude about the things going on in your life is disgusting. The beauty behind the concept of the blog is that you have every right to say what you feel, and I respect that. I’m not telling you to be any different, or to stop writing. I’m simply expressing how completely ridiculous I find you to be.

- Comment by Jeni — August 6, 2009 @ 3:14 am