its a hrd knk life

I was testing my new phone on Twitter the other night, and joked that I was going to write an entire blog post about the phone and how I came to have it.  Then, I realized that there actually might be something worth posting about in the story of the new phone.  Just as quickly, though, I was momentarily distracted and forgot my idea, leaving me with nothing more than "Hey!  I have a new phone, and I just updated my contacts, and sent a bunch of test text messages!  The end!"

I've built lengthy and pointless blog posts on far less than this, of course, but I really did have a point other than the new phone.  Most of you know that back in January, I lost a job I'd held for a long time, due to the acquisition and shutdown of the company I worked for.  I received a generous severance package, and I used it to replace the windows on my house and to spend a few months hanging around with my kids.  Everything was fine, we were paying the bills and the wolf was nowhere near the door.  He wasn't even in the neighborhood (although come to think of it, my grandmother DID look rather toothy and hairy the last time I visited.  Hmmm).  Still, as I spent the severance money, and my bank balance steadily shrank, unreplenished by new income, I became anxious about money.  Expenditures about which I would not have wasted the proverbial second thought became sources of additional anxiety.  I knew I was going to go back to work but I really felt no confidence that I'd be able to find a job when I wanted one. 

It wasn't all anxious pessimism.  My new caution about money became kind of a game, too.  I clipped coupons.  I bought store brands. I gave up my book-buying habit and rediscovered the library.  I looked for ways to avoid spending money, and was positively gleeful when I found them.  Now, I'm back at work, but I'm still hanging on to my new frugal habits.  I haven't bought any new clothes this fall, and I pack my lunch everyday.  I'm actually downright cheap.

Right after the layoff, flush with the severance money, I decided to upgrade my phone, to this one.  I text more than I talk, and texting on a 10-key phone is no fun.  It takes entirely too long, and I don't like not being able to punctuate and capitalize properly either. For example, my cousin and I exchanged frequent texts during the World Series; we were dismayed, to say the least, about Joe Buck's oh-so-obvious pro-Yankee bias. So with a 10-key phone "Asshole. (Joe Buck, not you)." would have read "asshole joe buck not you". Unacceptable.  Also, I use actual words in text messages; IDK what most of the abbreviations mean, and OMG I so do not want to know (although I think I might have invented OMG.  More on that later.)  English has worked well for me for many years, and I'm going to stick with it.

It's already far too late to make this long story short, but to condense a bit, I had one problem after another with this phone.  Not long after I had to replace it for the third time, I lost it.  Not misplaced, but lost; I looked everywhere and retraced every step, and the phone had vanished.  My plan didn't allow for a free replacement or upgrade, since I'd already had one, and I could not bring myself to pay for a new phone. Here was the perfect example of the expenditure about which I wouldn't have thought twice two years ago.  Verizon offered me a very nice messaging phone for $49.99.  It's not that I have ever been a person who would just casually throw away $50, but two years ago, I'd have thought "unfortunate but necessary expense.  Sold".  Now, "necessary" has taken on an entirely new definition. My husband has two phones; his personal phone and his business phone, and he'd wanted to get rid of one anyway, so he just reprogrammed it with my number, and I was all set.  It wasn't a QWERTY phone, but it didn't cost any money either, and this was its most compelling feature. 

I was all full of virtuous modern Depression frugality; but this, predictably, got old.  I missed being able to text properly.  My resolve started to weaken, and I started pricing phones again.  Then, my husband got an email from Verizon...he was eligible for an upgrade!  Two of the phones that were offered were free, and one was a messaging phone.  Because he's a good husband, and because his text messaging is limited to "10-4", "whats yr 20" and "on my way", he offered the phone to me.   Email me your cell phone number, and I'll send you a properly spelled and punctuated text message.  Brother, can you spare a phone?

Easily Amused, Part 250

This is a busy busy week. I won't bore you with details.  Anyway, I needed to pick up groceries last night, and I also needed the usual household stuff that I always run out of at the same time.  There's a Target on the way home from my new job; it's one of those behemoth supercenters where you can buy shampoo and sweatpants and fresh produce all under one roof.  I hate those damn places.  But I thought "just this one time", because I'm so busy busy busy and look!  They have everything and I won't have to make two trips because I don't have time to make two trips because I'm so busy!

I needed bananas, because I always need bananas.  They didn't have any bananas.  There was the shelf, marked bananas, completely empty.  "Oh", I thought, "that is fucked up.  That is focked up!" The "focked up" was in a (silent) high-pitched sing-song. 

I really never use the expression "fucked up".  And I never sing-song. The high-pitched, sing-song "focked up" just popped into my head, just like that.  And it was funnn-eeeee.  Oh, how I laughed at my funny funny self, right there in the produce aisle at the supercenter. 

Not surprisingly, prices at the supercenter were higher than they are at my normal grocery store.  I was shocked at the price of 8yo's beloved Life cereal.  "It's how much? That is focked up!" I trilled to myself.

(Now is as good a time as any to confess that I can barely type for laughing.  I'm wiping actual tears off my face.)

(Seriously, it's fucked up.)

Barely stifling my glee, I rolled my cart into the juice aisle.  Both kids have class parties tomorrow, and for both parties, I'm supposed to send juice and cups.  I wanted to get two jugs each of apple and grape, but they had only apple and cranberry and cranberry-godforsaken-whodrinksthisshit-pomegranate.  I didn't think the kids would drink the cranberry, and I knew they wouldn't drink the antioxidant bilgewater.  "Cranberry pomegranate?", I thought. "Who is buying that shit? That is FOCKED UP!" 

By now, I was just openly disgracing myself.  No longer able to restrain the giddy hilarity, I was laughing out loud, blithely ignoring the mild what-the-hell looks on the faces of my fellow shoppers as they wondered what exactly was so funny.  Having searched in vain for bananas, frozen edamame, and spinach, I realized that I'd have to go to the grocery store after all.  And that?  FOCKED OPP!

I wish I could give in to simpleminded chuckleheadedness far more often.  Under normal circumstances,  being forced to endure Target and the grocery store in one trip would make me rather cranky.  Did I mention that it was raining, hard, when I came out of Target?  "This weather is focked up!" I sang, cracking myself up all the way to my car. 

It got better.  The rain kept steadily on as I loaded groceries into my car.  It was dark now, pouring, and traffic was horrid.  These are not generally conditions that inspire even mild amusement for me.  The joke was not getting old, though.  When I reached the very busy intersection of Randolph Road and New Hampshire Avenue and found that the traffic lights were out (awesome) I just laughed and laughed at another round of "focked up!", chorus and verse.  Sing it.

Open House

In a recent post, The Lady Who Doesn't Lunch, one of my favorite bloggers, mentioned having visited seven Presidential homes.  Those of you who have read this blog for any length of time will know that among my many quirks is a marked tendency toward Presidential history geekdom.  "Seven?"  I thought enviously.  I had only been to five, and although that's a very small percentage of existing Presidential homes, it was a record among my friends and acquaintances.  I resolved to correct this inequity immediately. 

I comment on blogs all the time, but I don't often get a chance to check back to see responses to my comments.  I commented on Lady's post last week, and didn't think about it again until a few days later, when I decided to see if she'd responded. As it turns out, she responded to my comment with a slightly revised number of Presidential home visits: having realized that Mr. Lincoln never lived in Mary Todd Lincoln's house in Lexington, KY, she removed it from her list, leaving her with six.  I responded with my list:

1. JFK's birthplace in Brookline, MA.
2. Richard Nixon's childhood home, on the grounds of the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, CA (and how is it possible that I did not know that the Nixon Library has a second location in College Park, MD? This is an oversight I'll be correcting as soon as possible).
3. Harry Truman's Little White House in Key West, Florida, a tour which I cannot recommend highly enough.
4. Dwight Eisenhower's retirement home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  Also excellent. 
5. Woodrow Wilson's post-White House home in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC.  Wilson was the only President to retire in Washington; the second Mrs. Wilson was a DC native. 

(Apropos of nothing: 5yo, fresh from his bath, just ran through the house in his underpants, brandishing a Nerf gun, screaming "ENEMY UNDERWEAR"!  He's done this several times in the last week or so.  Apparently, the underwear is a patient and deadly foe, and there is no rest for 5yo.   La guerre, c'est l'enfer.)

As I was leaving my comment for Lady, I thought to myself  "I won't count the Kennedy house on N Street, because I've only walked by it, I've never been inside".  (Well, I also thought a little bit about why I was leaving a 300-word comment on a week-old blog post, and why I'm throwing down the Presidential house tour gauntlet to a woman whom I've never actually met, but these are existential questions to be considered at a later time).  I also don't count the Kennedy Library in Boston, since it's not a Presidential house.   I could, however, count George Washington's HQ at Valley Forge, a place I visited many times as a child, since Washington did live there.  So that made us even, at six each.

Even, that is, until I remembered just one more. I've taken the White House tour THREE TIMES.  This means that I have visited at least one residence of 43 Presidents (I'm counting Washington's HQ, not the White House, for George Washington, since he never lived in the White House.  I'm counting Grover Cleveland as one President, although he served two non-consecutive terms).  43, my friend, 43.  I'm the winner of a truly ridiculous contest, against an opponent who didn't know she was competing.  Small victories.

Thank you...

...to my 12-year-old nephew and his friends, for teaching my five year old to say "Good afternoon.  How are your buttocks?"  The English accent was a nice touch, and he's perfected it in the 300 times that he's said "Good ah-fternoon.  How ah your but-tocks?" since last night. 

CDP: Today's WORST BLOGGER IN THE WORLD! (Part Deux)

I've been busy for the past week and a half.  I think I've finally adjusted to working every day, since it's not quite a full day.  But my sister-in-law got married on Saturday, so the week leading up to the wedding was filled with errands, and retrieving Koreans from various and sundry airports, and socializing with said Koreans, and attending the rehearsal dinner and the ceremony.  Add to this children's swim practices, homework (8yo's, not mine.  More on this later.  Later in this post, actually.  Meanwhile, 8yo's vocabulary list includes the word "genre", a rather strange word choice for a third-grader), normal routine household responsibilities and a visit to the dentist and the Social Security Administration and it was a busy busy busy week. 

Notice something missing from the "I'm-busier-than-you" list?  This, right here.  I actually had several ideas for posts (and in an emotional moment following one of my periodic clashes with my mother-in-law, I wrote and discarded a seething screed in which I cursed her and all her works and pomps.  We're OK now.), but I've had no time to sit and write.  Some of the ideas I've forgotten, and some, like the preceding example, have been determined to be of the "seemed like a good idea at the time" variety.  So that leaves me right here, writing about my sorry excuses for lack of blogging production.  Maybe I'll try the every day method again.  Or maybe I won't.

Without school, I'm temporarily lacking a blogging focus, and I'm thinking of starting a new blog, with a theme and everything (maybe more on that later.  This time, "later" means in another post).  I didn't graduate, and I'm not quitting, but I did have to take this semester off.   I wasn't sure if I'd find a job, so I didn't want to spend $900 on tuition.  More importantly, I didn't really know if I could manage a class and a job again.  Long-time readers might remember that at my last job, due to a planned closure which took 18 months, I had long stretches of time during which I had nothing to do.  I did schoolwork with the full knowledge of management.  I suspect that this would be frowned on in my new job.   I'll be back in school next semester, hopefully to regale you with outrage over conflicting citation style requirements, disdain for poetry, and criticism of criticism.  Don't say I never give you anything to look forward to.