“Hello Sunny!

I saw your blog and wanted to drop this off to you from a client of mine, [REDACTED BECAUSE I'M NOT GIVING THIS GROSS WOMAN EVEN A LITTLE BIT OF PUBLICITY]. He is a modern-day poet who has released a few of his poems from his Jan 2012 released book poetry, [REDACTED]. I hope that you find one of the poems interesting enough for you to post on your blog for V-Day! Please review the information I have attached below.

Lastly, I saw that you like notebooks, spiral bound being a plus. I have a ton of notebooks I’ve collected throughout the years and would love to send you one from my stash! Just let me know :o)

I’m on twitter too, so check you mentions.

Regards,

Lana“

So I looked at the poems, which were a PDF, and they were pretty mediocre but one was sort of cute I guess, so I tweeted the woman back, because I was busy doing stuff and I said, “I’m gonna have to think about your e-mail and confer with Blake. I don’t really do like, endorsements, so I dunno about this.“

She replied with, “think of it as a vday gift to your readers :) even if you only post a poem…” which just SKEEVED ME RIGHT OUT. She must not be familiar with me or my blog because I don’t just promote people I’ve never even heard of or who I have no attachment to and I cannot be bought with NOTEBOOKS? What the hell!?

So I tweeted her back and just said, “Ugh. You’re sleazy. Please don’t contact me again.” And that’s just the end of that. She’s being indignant on Twitter now so I blocked her and reported her as spam haha

Just…fuck off. I don’t have time for bullshit like this.

It’s so funny to think about how little has really changed for me. Out of all 80 of us, or at least the ones who have been participating, I’m the only one who’s really still blogging the same way I did back in 2000. Every single day. I’m still on Camwhores (formerly portal 9), where I’ve been since mid-2001. I still post in the E/N style, I think. On both sites.

I dunno, I just never really thought about it before today, that things never really changed for me. Everyone else is off doing grown up things and talking about “the good ol’ days” and I feel like I’m still pretty much living them. It’s never really occurred to me until today that most of the people reading this post have no idea what the E/N scene was, let alone were they a part of it. People rarely believe me when I tell that that I started blogging, like for real, before the word “blog” even existed.

Back then, camgirls were smart as well as beautiful (not saying they aren’t now, necessarily, some are, but in a totally different way) and most of them were super geeks who coded their own websites by hand. I didn’t though, I used Dreamweaver which was notorious for writing sloppy code so even though I used it, I would have to often go into html mode and fix the code by hand, so I consider it a half & half thing for me.  This is an image of the main page of the last layout (I think) I coded and created by hand. I was so damn proud of it:

If you’ve never read my “About the Site” page and are curious about my site’s history, you should check it out. There’s a link in there to my first Angelfire site even. Remember kids, everything you do on the internet is PERMANENT! What’s so funny to me about my Angelfire site is that my version of a blog sometimes back then was to write on paper, then scan it in and post that. I should do that more often NOW haha We have a new scanner but I don’t know how to use it or I would totally do that. Also I was talking to Blake about this design just last week:

When I lived in Rob’s basement when I was in high school, on one wall I made this design, except in a circle, as a huge mural. I don’t think there are any pics of it but it was pretty cool and I was pretty proud of it. I was telling Blake about it last week but I can’t remember why, except I did say that I should draw it again in my sketchbook so it wouldn’t be lost forever and lo & behold, here it is!

I don’t like poetry. I don’t like reading it and I don’t like writing it, but after Rob and I broke up, I went through a brief poetry phase. Here’s one of them:

Piss Off

Go back to where you were.

Go back into her arms.

No one needs you here,

all you do is harm.

I hoped you were in a ditch somewhere.

I hoped for blood and gore.

I hoped that you had killed yourself and

your little whore.

I wished that you were starving,

And didn’t have a home.

I wanted you to know great pain,

I wanted you to roam.

I prayed that you had been beaten,

I prayed that you were dead.

I thought that you were staying there,

and you’d stop messing with my head.

But now you’re here and I hate you more,

Than I ever thought I would.

I thought that you had finally left,

finally gone for good.

I wished that you would disapear,

Or shrivel up and die.

But you’re still here living happily,

and I still wonder why.

Why couldn’t you have been a good boy,

And slit your fucking throat?

Nothing I would love better than to

watch your dead body bloat.

Can’t win them all I guess,

But I can always hope.

If you ever want to kill yourself,

I have lots of rope.

Hahahahaha!!! Isn’t that hilarious? I also think it’s funny that on my Angelfire site, I had a “PMS page“, which was basically the original version of my “Shit I Hate” page. I’m also still really proud of this troll story I wrote. If you knew the guy it was based on, you would find it hysterically funny too! :oD

More poetry; I wrote this one for Madison when she was first born:

Too funny!

But yeah, it amazes me how much and how little has really changed since then. Especially the latter for me since I feel like I’m still in the same place, doing the same thing as I was 11 or 12 years ago or however long it’s been (I started my first site in 1997, so how long ago was that?).  On the FB group, we were talking about “what if…” and wondering why none of us ever really made it “big” in the blog world and I still don’t have an answer. It kills me that people like Dooce get all this recognition for the same thing myself and several others have been doing better and longer. What makes her so special? What makes her more marketable than us? Why did she get a book deal? I don’t get it. She’s not the only one, I’ve written about the Mormon mommy bloggers before and that whole thing STILL baffles me.

Anyway, the trip down memory lane was a welcome change from the usual. Do you remember the E/N scene? What/who do you miss the most? Spill! I miss being pretty and having nice hair. Oh yeah, I still maintain a small webcam archive, which can be found here.

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~

PS. Another thing I just remembered is that a few years ago on Facebook, someone referred to me as an “internet celebrity*” and Madison saw it and was like “wtf does that mean?” so I had to show her my site and some of my Camwhores archive and explain the whole shebang to her. She actually thought it was really cool but now that she’s aware of the fact that there’s a relatively big audience, she won’t let me post everything about her anymore, which sucks, but I respect that. Wes knows about everything but my activity on Camwhores and he thinks it’s the coolest thing ever and constantly tell me what I should tell you guys about. “Tell them I did this!” he says all the time, like when I’m filing him or taking his picture. A total ham.

Okay, nurse Cheryl (ugh) is going to be here in 2 hours. I’d better get a bit more sleep.

(* It’s easy to be an “internet celebrity” when there are only 50 people on the whole entire internet haha)

Edit: Apparently Steph formerly of Delightz.net made the FB group, not Artfag and Steph wrote a really nice post about it which you can find here.

Edit #2: Here’s Artfag’s post about the whole thing.

Around 9am, Cheryl, one of my nurses, was scheduled to come do my dressing, which the night before I was really pissy about because I didn’t want to get up early but I was glad for it when I saw the sunrise. God I love sunrise.

As I was looking out the window at bliss, the phone rang and it was my mom. She said that I should check my e-mail very carefully because she got her Squam registration e-mail. I checked and checked and checked but I didn’t get one yet. My mom said hers said that I was her roommate and that we were staying in the Longhouse, which I know is a 13+ person cabin. Let the games begin! I cannot even imagine the fights to use the bathrooms haha I will most definitely be bringing my Lush “No Drought” dry shampoo! Since my mom’s e-mail said I was her roommate, I’m assuming my e-mail will be coming shortly. So excited!

After I got off the phone with my mom, Cheryl came and that was pretty uneventful. Cheryl is a smoker and she tries to cover up the smell of the cigarettes with perfume, which just makes it worse. When she leans over me to change my dressing, it smells and I can’t stand it. Also, she comes early and I hate that, whereas Janice and Siske come in the afternoon (and they don’t smoke). BUT since I had such a great day yesterday, I’m thinking getting up early isn’t a totally horrible thing to do on “office days” (days where I stay in my office the whole day making art, as opposed to the living room/computer).

After Cheryl left, I made waffles with the REAL maple syrup my mom got me for Christmas, which is one of my favourite things in the world (if you’ve never had real maple syrup, I truly feel sorry for you because it is one of the Earth’s most wonderful treasures) and I brought them into my office and started flipping around to see what was on TV. I watched Wife Swap, the UK version, which was nice and trashy but as always, one of the moms had a revelation that her life sucked and they all became friends and it was heartwarming.

After that, I took my plate into the kitchen, filled up my drink and came back to my office to make some ~*SERIOUS ART*~ (not really) while I watched…something. I honestly don’t remember what. Something that was an hour long and was probably a talk show. Whatever it was, I worked on Argent’s painting as I watched (or more to the point, listened). Argent’s painting is turning out to be a royal pain in my ass and I can’t wait until it’s finished and out of my house! EVERYTHING I’ve tried to do with it has failed miserably and I’ve had to make corrections like crazy. It’s making me mental! But it’s almost finished and I think he’ll be happy with it and that’s all that matters.

Once Argent’s painting was in a state of “no touchies”, I started working on my girl who will be on my last page of the Sketchbook Project sketchbook.

I think I watched Ellen while I was doing this and Colin Firth and the little dog from the movie The Artist were on it. Colin was very animated and talking about Gary Oldman being “hung like a water buffalo” and the little dog was very charming. Truthfully though, I can’t see myself seeing either of their movies. Just not interested.

After that, was The View. I like this show a lot, I’ve always been a Whoopi fan, but I don’t normally watch it because when I was working, I didn’t watch TV at the same time, and after I got sick and now that I’m home all day with my thumb up my ass, I spend most of my time in front of the computer which is something I’m hoping to change and yesterday was the first step.

(Paper peony)

On The View, the women did their hot topics but they weren’t all that interesting or I’d be able to tell you what they talked about. I know there was a story where Sheri was on a plane and Courtney Love was there with a short skirt and no underbums and she caused quite a ruckus. Their guest was an old guy from that Tom Hanks/911 movie I have no interest in. I just listened and worked on my girl.

Then it was Dr. Phil and boy, what a show. o_O They had on there a guy who was into infantilism. He liked to act like an 18 month old, sleep in a crib, play with baby toys, act like a baby, eat in a high chair and wear diapers. He had a regular job at a “big box store” working nights, but when he got home in the morning, he’d put on his onesie, hop in the high chair and his poor girlfriend would feed him and change his shitty diaper. I felt so bad for her. She was doing everything for him and he never did anything for her, like nothing, and Dr. Phil was like, “are you having a relationship with an 18 month old or a 24 year old?” and the answer was an 18 month old. And she said she wanted to marry this guy and have kids with him one day, but only if he could “tone things down”, which Dr. Phil said would not happen no matter what the guy said. And it wasn’t even a sexual thing, the guy didn’t get OFF on being a baby, that’s just how he felt naturally. Which I think is weird, but fine, it’s not hurting anyone EXCEPT your significant other who you’re lying to about it and basically using. He needs to find someone whose thing in life is wanting to take care of an adult baby and that girl needs to run away as fast as she can in the opposite direction because he will never change and things will only get worse as he takes it farther and farther.

Normally I don’t watch Dr. Phil because I think it’s pretty trashy and only a few degrees away from being Jerry Springer, but if there’s nothing else on or if the topic is interesting, I’ll watch. Yesterday’s was interesting.

By then it was 4pm and the kids came burting through the door just as a Roseanne rerun came on. They asked me what the show was about and I said it was about a family a lot like ours. They decided to watch it with me and they wanted to know who in the show was like who of us in real life. I said that I was Roseanne, Blake was Dan (obviously), Becky was Madison and Wes was DJ. I also told them that it was probably the best sitcom to ever grace the airwaves. Wes was really into it (it was the episode where it was Dan and Roseanne’s 20th wedding anniversary and he took a part-time job to pay for her present) and Madison not so much. Right after the first episode there was another episode so we watched that one too and in that one, Darlene and David break up because Molly kissed David and Madison got more into it because David is on Big Bang Theory and apparently so is Darlene. This, along with Mayim Bialik, makes me think I should give that show a second chance because when I first watched it, I just wasn’t into it but everyone I know loves it and the various clips I’ve seen online of it, I really liked.

Anyway…after Roseanne, it was Golden Girls, which I knew the kids wouldn’t be so much into (although I was into Golden Girls when I was their age) but they watched it with me anyway. The two episodes we watched weren’t very good ones (one where they were remodeling the garage and Rose is dating Mr. Terrific and the other was where Rose’s boyfriend retires and wants to sail around the world) but I explained to Madison, who’s very interested in gay issues and equality, that the Golden Girls was an extremely progressive show for its time because Blanche’s son was gay and they had some episodes dealing with that, but also the show itself was about women at a time in their lives that you just didn’t – and still don’t, really – see on TV. This made her more interested in the show, but only snippets found on YouTube, not the actual episodes. I’d still really like to get the whole series on DVD or Blu-Ray. It was probably my 2nd favourite sitcom of all time.

By the time the Golden Girls was over, I’d finished my girl and stuck her in the sketchbook and today I’ll give her arms, sew the trim on her dress and give her a quote. Then all I have to do on the sketchbook is a girl for the cover and then I’m finished! YAY!

The only difference between this pic and the one above is that I inked her hair and legs/feet.
She’s just so damn pretty, I wanted to post her twice!

After Golden Girls, Wes went into the living room to watch Pokemon, which he’s obsessed with (by the way, his birthday is in 3 weeks if anyone was planning on getting him anything – e-mail me if you need our address), and I flipped around channels to see what I could find. Blake and Madison were going to the high school for like, a parent/teacher transition night type of thing  so I took that opportunity to watch something Blake would never in a million years watch with me: Toddlers & Tiaras.

I can’t help it. I love this show. I never know when it’s on, so I don’t watch it all the time or anything but every episode I’ve seen I’ve really liked. I think that show falls into 3 categories: ones where the kids are total brats to their parents on camera and therefore the episode is funny because it makes their parents look like losers, ones where the kids are really into the whole pageant and they’re just cute as hell and ones where their parents look like monsters and you feel sorry for the kids. Yesterday I saw 2 of the above.

The first one I watched was where the theme for the pageant was Groovy Girls. Or maybe that was the pageant’s name, I’m not sure. Either way, there were 3 categories in the pageant: beauty, costume of choice and one other one I forget the name of and the pageant was “full glitz”, which means that the girls had acrylic nails, spray tans and “flippers” which are like fake teeth. In this episode, all of the girls were actually really into the pageants and they were old enough to choose that this is what they wanted to do. The mothers weren’t overbearing at all, they were just supportive and this was just what they chose to do with their daughter, like any other family would do hockey or soccer. I *DO NOT* like the spray tanning and acrylic nails and fake teeth, I think that’s dumb, but it’s part of the competition, just like shin guards and helmets and sticks and shoes, so as long as the kid’s okay with it, and all these ones were, I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with the makeup either, a lot of little girls like to play with and wear makeup. And as long as the kids are GOOD winners and losers, I don’t have a problem with it. In this show, two of the girls who apparently compete a lot and win and lose to each other all the time, are actually friends. I liked that.

Anyway, seeing the girls in their little bell bottoms and vests and sunglasses and go go boots and stuff like that was sooooooo cute. I especially liked seeing like, the 18 month – 2 year olds all dressed up in their little costumes, they were just adorable. And really,  thinking these kids were cute in their costumes is no different than Halloween. The whole show was just cute little girls being cute little girls and I enjoyed the show immensely, enough to watch a new episode that aired at 10pm.

The one I watched at 10pm was vastly different than the one I watched earlier. The one at 10 had horrible parents pushong their kids to do this when they really didn’t want to do it. The one little girl was SICK and feeling like crap but her mom made her compete anyway because the grand prize was $10,000. This mom made the poor little girl not wear her glasses when she was on stage and then belittled her when the little girl didn’t do her routine – which she’d only learned 2 DAYS prior – because the girl couldn’t see the judges or her mother in the audience telling her what to do. Then another mother, who was a hardcore Russian immigrant, was just a monster. He would withhold her daughter’s favourite stuffed bear, “Micha”, and only give it to her when she had to do pageants because apparently when the little girl held and played with Micha, her thumb would go in her mouth and this is how they stopped it. The little girl, Mia, would only get to play with Micha at pageants and seeing the reaction of the girl, who was only 4, when she got to see Micha, it was just heartbreaking. I almost cried. She was just so happy to see her friend again. Then in one of the cutaways, Mia said to the camera, “I want to do good at the pageant because that’s how I know my mommy loves me” or something like that and I *DID* cry, it was just so horrible. And worse? When Mia was on stage doing her beauty routine, she wasn’t listening to the emcee who was kinda like telling her to get off the stage but nicely and Mia’s mom flipped out and started screaming in their hotel room that the emcee hated Mia and that they had to “forget about it” (winning) and that they should just go home. In the end, Mia won a high title and $500 and the FIRST THING she wanted to do when she won was to show her mother and her mother PUSHED HER AWAY. OMG my poor heart. :o( That woman was just a horrible person and she was so blessed to have such an adorable, loving little girl and she didn’t even appreciate her in the slightest. If I can find a clip, I will show you this awful woman so you can wretch with me.

In between episodes of Toddlers & Tiaras, I actually watched a show called “I Cloned My Pet” which was the most pathetic hour of television I have ever watched in my whole entire life. These people were all fucked in the head. There was literally nothing else on except a rerun of the same Wife Swap I’d watched in the morning and that’s the only reason I watched this extremely stupid show.  EXTREMELY stupid.

After that my choices were a show about hoarding or American Idol and because hoarding shows just piss me off because the world just does not need that much excess, I chose American Idol because as much as that show bugs me, I have to admit, the auditions at the beginning of each season are always entertaining.

As I watched American Idol, I started working on an art journal page that uses vellum as bubbles which is a technique I’ve used before and I’ve always really liked, but the only vellum I had on hand was green, yellow, orange and red so my bubbles actually look a lot more like polkadots (hmmm, polkadots are also apparently two words OR one word and they have their own Wikipedia entry). It’s not finished yet and it was night by the time I started working on it which meant that the light in my office was garbage so I figured I’d work on it again today and take pictures of it tomorrow when it was finished. I have absolutely no idea what to write on the page, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnd that was my (mostly) internet-free day yesterday in support of the SOPA protest! I will say one thing though: I didn’t tweet yesterday because Twitter was supposed to be part of the black out but I had TweetDeck up just out of habit and I was really disappointed by some people who I *know* knew about the blackout and who tweeted inane bullshit anyway. Some people retweeted SOPA-related things instead of posting which was better than what other people were posting, I guess, but posting at all is the opposite of the concept of a “blackout”. I really, truly thought my Twitter feed would have been completely dark yesterday but it wasn’t and it’s making me evaluate who’s on my feed and why. There are some folks I have on there who I’ve kept just to be nice, but they’re not nice to me back or they don’t interact with me so I wonder why I bother. Soooooooo, I think over the next few days, there are definitely going to be some cuts. Hopefully people won’t make a big issue about it.

Okay, going to go to my office now…WAIT, one more thing! Apparently my posts aren’t always showing up on peoples’ LJ friends lists for some reason and I don’t know if it’s my x-poster or if it’s Live Journal but I’ll x-post an entry and it’ll go through fine, but when I go to edit a post via WordPress and click “update” it’ll tell me that my password for LJ is wrong (it’s not!) and it’ll only update the version on my site. So I dunno what’s up with that. Also when I go to a Live Journal entry and manually edit a post’s userpic and mood, which I do with everything I post, I’ll come back a few hours later and the post will be back to my default userpic. The mood will still be set to what I changed it to, but the userpic will be default. So I dunno WHAT the hell is going on but if you guys on LJ don’t hear from me for a few  days, either check my actual LJ or my site. I *think* the error is with LJ because they were having a lot of problems over the weekend so I’m just waiting for them to fix their shit before I investigate further.

NOW I’m going to my office! Happy Thursday!

~*Please donate!*~

Not that it makes a lick of difference, but my site will “go dark” tomorrow in solidarity with the other sites that are protesting this bill. That means I won’t be updating. I also won’t be tweeting or doing anything considered as providing content because that’s exactly what’ll happen if this passes, sites you care about will go dark. The bottom line is that this will affect the internet as we all know it. Like I said, read the above link for a breakdown on it and see for yourself and do me a favour? Really click the link and read it. Because if this breakdown is all true, and I have every reason to believe it is, then we could all be in very deep shit if SOPA passes. I can’t do a damn thing from my little bunker in Canada but you? You reading this? I bet YOU can. So do it.

In other news, today is Wild Rumpus Day!
Will you be rumpusing?
Be sure to take pics!

But first, the backstory…

When Madison was still in my uterus, I started collecting Beanie Babies, thinking that they’d :be worth money someday”. In my back shed, I literally have $900 worth of the things in boxes. Or at least the collection was worth $900 the last time I looked them all up, after doing a bit of research last month I’ve come to realize that most Beanie Babies have actually gone so far down in price that most of them are cheaper to buy now than they were originally at retail price. This is actually good news for me because whether they’re worth money of not, I really loved/love the little guys, particularly the bears, and now that I have a job and I have my own money, I fully intend to buy all the Beanie bears I could never afford when they were going for collectible prices.

So that brings me to my favourite Beanie Baby, behold, Sunny the e-Beanie:

She was special in that you had to sign up for some online Beanie Baby club Ty created in order to buy her, which I had to do considering her name and the fact that she was specifically an “e-Beanie”, as in “e-mail”, as in “the internet” and that, of course, has been my internet handle since the very beginning of time. In fact Sunny the e-Beanie’s birthday is only a couple of weeks before mine:

It was just this huge coincidence and out of all the Beanies I have, she is the most special to me and she sits in a protective case on top of my desk, but as I said, she often gets stuff piled on top of her.

All my Beanies have protective coverings over their hang tags so they stay in pristine condition:

Here you can see the special “e-Beanie” emblem on her chest:

I think there was a blue e-beanie after her, but Sunny was the first one and as I said, she’s one of my most prized possessions. That may sound lame to you since she’s just a stupid stuffed bear, a mass produced one at that who will probably never be worth anything, but even if she was, she’s special and I wouldn’t sell her for all the money in the world.

That is all.
Happy Wednesday!

Hi Sunny,

My hat is off to you on your beliefs & philosophies. Why……well let’s just say it’s like when you eat a good home cooked meal……ya know it’s going to be easy to digest. No Tums needed :-)

Many belief systems are hard for the brain to digest because it revolves around a belief in some God figure. I like what you wrote “I am not without spirituality”. It can’t be put in much simpler terms than that.

Another great point you made is “Because energy, they say, cannot be created nor destroyed and can only  change form, I believe that this energy survives and disperses after  death”.

This is oh so true because every living thing has to have energy in order for it to exist. As to what defines “living” is yet to be determined. I think we have yet to fully understand and or  define it. As far as we know the universe(s) could be a living entity. I personally feel it is but don’t think we humans are quite ready to fully understand and grasp this yet.

I bookmarked your page and look forward to do pass it on to others whom are opened minded enough to embrace your belief & philosophies.

All the best, Mike – Fla.

Subject: I’m not a lurker

From: “Deanna G” <blahblahblah@gmail.com>

Date: Tue, February 15, 2011 11:57 pm

To: Sunny@sunnycrittenden.com

————————————————————————–

Not even slightly. But I’m emailing you anyway because emails are fun. So I

found your blog this one time I was going through all the people listed

under the LJ “Port Perry High School” page (even though you deleted it from

your profile you still showed up there…btw you STILL show up on the page)

and you were one of the only people who actually still updated and wasn’t

already my friend (I think like 50% of the people on the PPHS LJ page are

people I convinced to join LJ, I could be totally wrong but every time I

look at it I’m like “you got livejournal cause I told you to and you got

livejournal cause I told you to” blah blah blah). Um, where was I going with

this? Anyway your ideas were intriguing to me and I wished to subscribe to

your newsletter. Hahahahahahahahaha. Um anyway from there we started a

beautiful friendship going on I’m thinking about 3 years at this point…

Wow. Cool :) Uhhhh, okay, what did other people say in these

emails…hmm…Well my name is Deanna and I’m 19 and I see so many

similarities between us quite often that it’s uncanny. Have I ever mentioned

that? Probably. But I’ll read something you post and I’ll be like “oh hey

did I write that”. OH and I should mention that I love reading your old

entries because it is super weird to think that we lived in Uxbridge at the

same time for a while and knowing the town, we had probably seen each other

at the grocery store or something before. And the fact that I used to live

about a minute walk away from someplace else you used to live. And then when

you combine in the fact that I often think to myself that I was born a

decade later than I should have been, reading about your life is kind of

like “hmmmmm, I wonder what it would have been like if my life was the same

except born 10 years earlier”.

Also you and Blake are my favourite couple in the whole wide world and I

love you two so much and you guys make me so friggin happy. SO. friggin.

happy. Also honestly I just get so much hope from you, you have been through

stuff I don’t think I would ever be able to cope with and you just, you’re

here and even though sometimes it’s bad I can see that it’s getting better

and sometimes (a lot of the time) it’s GOOD and this just makes me so happy

and so hopeful, like if you can do it, if you can keep on livin in this

fucked up world, then maybe I can too. Did that make sense? probably not.

I’m running excessively on caffeine and nicotine at this point. Um.

<3

PS whether or not you post this email I don’t really care but I enjoyed

writing it, emails are fun, and I’m sorry if this was totally incoherent. I

suspect it may have periods of coherence. Why did I say period. ugh. fuck

periods.

I’d been wanting a cone incense holder for a long time and was really surprised when I actually got one because it’s not something I’ve mentioned a whole lot, so it was kind of an obscure item. He came with vanilla and rose incense. I’ve been burning mostly the vanilla because traditionally I don’t like rose, but this stuff’s okay. I’m not burning it during the day though because it makes me sleepy. Wal*Mart doesn’t have cone incense so I’m not sure where I’ll replenish yet but at least I have it to enjoy now! I’m actually thinking of starting an incense burner collection because I’m told there’s a lot of really cool ones out there and that if I was impressed with this one then I ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Someone described to me Chinese dragon incense holders where the smoke comes out their nostrils and I’m very interested in seeing one of those.

So that’s what Madison got me for my birthday and as I said, I love it. And I guess he’s not exactly a “laughing” Buddha, he’s more like a smiling Buddha, but that’s okay. I’m not picky about my Buddhas.

This morning I got an automated call from Visa saying that they needed to go over some charges with me because they thought they might be fraud. I pulled up our Visa statement online and double checked everything, I even called Blake because one I didn’t recognize but it was for his parking so it was okay. We both assumed they were checking up on all of the charges we made when we were in the US since we put pretty much everything on Visa since our bank cards wouldn’t work down there. So I call Visa up and it’s this automated thing that starts telling me someone tried to put a $1500 charge on my card for Google Adwords. Wtf? So I made it give me a real person and he explained that it was a charge from the UK and that this is a pretty common scam where they set up a website that will say something like “you have a virus on your computer and if you don’t give us money right now to fix it, your computer is going to blow up” so people pay them money because of this when in fact, the site does nothing and they use Adwords so the fraudulent site will come up when people search certain keywords pertaining to whatever the site’s about.

They canceled the transaction and are sending me new cards in the mail, which will take about 10 days, but good on them for catching it and alerting me. I have no idea how they would have gotten my credit card number because I don’t even use that card, Blake does, and he doesn’t generally buy things online. He DID buy something from a seller on Amazon last month though, which is a possible suspect but I think Amazon’s pretty good about vetting those people, right? I mean, they’re legit businesses, right?

*I* buy a lot of stuff online, obviously a lot on Etsy and Lush but I use a different Visa from a different bank than the one Blake uses so it’s weird that the one Blake uses had this happen to it.

Speaking of Etsy, I bought THIS last week and I cannot wait until it arrives because I’m absolutely in love with it:

She uses the same paper I use for my girls’ dresses except I use the flat version and she uses the textured versions. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this or not but I’ve been buying a lot of art from Etsy in preparation for my new office if and when we ever move. There’s nowhere to put art in the office I have now because the biggest wall is covered in vinyl siding, but one day I’ll have an office with nice, flat walls and I’ll be able to hang all kinds of stuff. I’ll have a whole house with walls I can hang stuff on! I fully intend to have pictures of my family all over the place, as I told my step-mom on Facebook yesterday. The best part of their birthday gift to me was the card with a photo of my step-mom, Phil and my little sisters which I fully intend to frame, but in this house, there’s nowhere to put framed photos. Our house is so dark that putting things on walls is pointless and we have a distinct lack of non-functional surfaces. But when we have our new house, I plan on having tables and stuff like, in my living room or wherever, that are just for pictures. Pictures of my Muskoka family, my mom and John and Chris, my cousin Haylie, Brooke and Charlie, the Albanians, my kids of course, Ronny and Alex and maybe even my brother if he stops being such a shithead.

Ever since Michigan, family has become a lot more important to me than it was before and I’ve found myself getting kinda bummed out that my brother is such a turd. I downloaded the song “Pretty Fly For a White Guy” by the Offspring, which reminds me of my brother because that’s him to a “T”, the kid in the video even looks like him and I put it on the playlist I’ve been listening to since Monday and I’ve been thinking about him a lot. Here’s the video for my mom, who’s probably never seen it:

You would think that as he got older (he’ll be 26 in July) he’d smarten up and quit being a shit, but he’s still living with his father (who got fired from the job he’d had for like, 15 years) and is more or less unemployed most of the time for no real reason other than, I can only assume, he has a problem dealing with authority (runs in the family) and he doesn’t like waking up with an alarm (runs in the family?). Also, last I checked, he was smoking a fucking ounce of weed every few days. Honestly, I don’t even know, I haven’t talked to the guy since 2005, I only hear snippets from my mom once in a blue moon. When he left my house that day in December, he promised he’d be back and he went on and on about how much Wes and Madison meant to him, but that must have been all horse shit because where is he then? Not even an e-mail? Not even an add on Facebook? I never did a damn thing to him so I don’t know what his deal is.

I mean, it’s not as if we’ve ever been close to begin with, there’s a pretty big age gap between us and we were raised in completely different ways by two completely different people in two different houses. I’m an only child with 3 siblings. But it’s just the fact that he PROMISED that he’d be back and he went on and on and on about how much my kids meant to him that eats at me. Why would he say that shit if he didn’t mean it? And how can he mean it if he’s not here?

I dunno. Most of the time I barely even think about him, it’s just that song that has him on my mind lately. I’m sure it’ll pass and like I said, we’re not close so it doesn’t even really matter. It’s sad that it doesn’t, I suppose, but that’s the hard truth of it. Honestly, we barely even know each other. Not as kids, not as adults.

So that’s where my head’s been the last little while. I need to get back to work.