The Frank Funny Farm

i'm feeling all blah and not wanting to read that book and take notes on it any more than i want to dive into reading a play. mostly because i know i won't finish it and i like to just read a play all at once if i can. the wee one is asleep, so it's just me and the cats and the dog that live here, FREEZING. it's that special time of year when it's not quite cold enough to justify turning the heat on, so it's just cold; especially so since the bossman's house (like ours) tends to be cold most of the time anyway. and i tend to be cold most of the time anyway. oh well. i can't and shan't complain (too much) though, because it's finally all fally and glorious outside. wednesday i'll just have to be smart enough to bring a sweatshirt.

maybe that's the reason i'm blah. i mean, freezing lowers your body temperature and slow down your systems and stuff, so i have settled into a state of frozen lethargy apparently. i have no real reason otherwise. i really don't have a case of the mondays. somehow i'm not tired today, even though ben and i stayed up past our bedtime last night. we churched, then went to jim and nick's with the tuckers (man, i would do things for those cheese muffins. dirty things. bad things. things requiring repentance later) where i made the (un)fortunate discovery that not only is their food great, they are masters of the pie as well. our pie-eating lead to ben punning (i can't remember why) "pie definition," which spawned a conversation to determine to what that would make the best title. becky determined that it should be a pie cookbook. i determined that i should never own a pie cookbook. anyway, after we got home we had to watch true blood and then we still weren't totally sleepy so we watched family guy, too. but still, magically not too tired. (knocking on wooden table as we speak - i have class tonight)

we did have a great weekend, though. saturday was spent moving our current batch of wine (a pinotage) from the glass carboy to the plastic bucket, cleaning the carboy so we could return the wine to it and add some stuff to give it a few extra months of tasty. that took longer than we expected, but oh well. november 1 we shall bottle it. yay! then we had an adventure to costco, always and interesting experience and to our 'main event' for the evening: we ventured to cmt to watch the premiere of the exciting new show 'hulk hogan's celebrity wrestling' with a few people from the creative dept. and yes, it was just as fantastic as it sounds,  even better perhaps since the head of creative was dressed as a luchadore. he even had a cape. anyway, after that most of them went to a haunted house but we were forced to be responsible and go home and clean our filthy, neglected, dog-hair covered house. it's much better now.

yesterday we watched some footballs, then i played in the backyard and ben took pictures of me for fun or something. and today i was productive during the morning nap and have spent the other times being entertained greatly by various baby sounds and flailings. she's so awesome. ridiculously happy all the time. i need some of that in my coffee. anyway, perhaps eventually i'll have something at least remotely interesting to say. there's always lots going on in my head, trying to make sense of it and transcribe it is the tricky part. i'm feeling very self-absorbed lately and i do not like it one bit. (oh the irony of blogging that. i'm so narcisstic, look at me, read my blog about nothing, waaah!). there's a lot going on in the general vicinity of me, and no i havent sorted out that french thing yet, though ben keeps saying "take the class, take the class" i may soon give up. that'd be one less thing to swirl about, having a tangible (or internetangible) set of lessons, the accountability, the structure. anyway, if you've made it to the end, kudos. i have no real reward unfortunately. i have this: i'm listening to the bon iver album and i really don't think i'll ever get tired of it, i'm freezing, but half an hour from heading towards coffee (then class, also freezing), i am truly, unbelievably freaking blessed, in just about every possible way (except perhaps metabolically :->), and if you're reading this, then you have access to (and probably own) a computer, electricity and in all likelihood a place to live, you too, are so much better off than so much of the world. say thank you. oh, and tomorrow a happy post, i promise.

Tags: blah, brain dumpin', i'm cold!, weekend

many of you are familiar with my excellent skills of indecision. i must admit, i'm quite impressive with my ability to reason myself completely into one way, then saying, but... and reasoning totally into the other way. then that 'but' reoccurs and well, it can go on for days. i mean, seriously, i have trouble figuring out what to eat most of the time. that however, is usually resolved pretty quickly as hunger and other people factor heavily. and i suppose on the big things - the really really big things - i'm pretty quick (some people might say alarmingly quick) to decide what's right for me and i say 'that's it' and that is it. those, however, i attribute more to God saying, this way, dummy and me being smart enough to say ok instead of really? but why? i thought...  it's the smaller stuff i have trouble with.

at this moment, my most troublesome batch of waffles are french. part of the requirement for my degree is to have an intermediate level knowledge of a foreign language - french for me because that's what i took in high school. there are basically two ways to do this: study yourself and then go sit in dr. paine's office for two hours and translate some passages from french to english. i did this last week just to gage how far i have to go. i didn't expect it to be easy, dr. paine doesn't play around, which is awesome. so i wasn't expecting the little prince or anything, but man. simone de beauvoir. and like three sentence snippets, so context clues are basically impossible. anyway, back to the waffling. the other way of fulfilling the requirement is to take a class:  either an undergrad 202 class or there are some classes focused exactly on french for graduate english humanities majors. there was an online class that several people used, that the head of the dept. had told me about last year. it's an at-your-own pace sort of thing, you have a year to complete it and it was around $300-400. when i went hunting for this class this summer to check it out, i couldn't find it. fine, i had my little book and was planning to resurrect what i knew and add to it over the summer and theoretically knock the translation out before the fall semester started or at least by fall break (last week). except i worked all summer and i took a class that was sometimes a good bit of work and then there was the great gallbladder revolt of '08 and then i just needed a break for a minute man. and then fall classes started and i have an internship and i'm still working two days a week and i freak out about my parents with some frequency. so as we all know, i cannot read french yet.

so here's the thing: dr. paine located another online reading french class that will work. the class would be a little less stressful i think, because of the structure. do this lesson, send it in. continue till all lessons are done. then there's a final translation which has to be done while someone babysits me. i looked at the overview thing, the first half is grammar and all that, then it goes to "writing lessons." i'm not sure what those are, but for almost all of what's listed for the first half, i'm at least familiar with if not confident in it. that might not be so bad, let me coast a bit and refresh and perhaps better synthesize some things. but (you've been waiting for that, i know) this class costs $1000. yeah. and while they send me way more in student loans than i actually need, so this money would get paid back off our credit card, it's still more debt. and that's a lot of money.

so do i just keep plugging with my book and probably another one i'll buy to augment it and get a different take on things? hope i find enough time when i remember / have the mental energy and capacity and hope i can produce a reasonable translation? but then there's the what if i can't by the end of this semester and then it's hanging over my head next semester which should be my last semester but won't be if i haven't fulfilled that blasted language requirement? ack, i say. ack.

yes, i know i'm ridiculous, but i can't hear you because i'm trying to decide if i should shower before i go to the chiropractor or just throw a hat on because it the outside remains inviting then i'll be reading out there this afternoon which will render me all stinky again.

Tags: french, i'm an idiot, school

i've been basically reading for the last 3 days pretty much, except for yesterday and saturday night. yesterday because i was working, and de bebe is basically crawling and also teething and always talkative and entertaining, so there's a lot going on when she's awake. saturday night we went to ayne wallace and cory's wedding which was great and then a few of us went to carey's house and i accidentally stayed out until 3 am because the conversation turned to religion and politics. i can't exactly resist those topics, at least with people who are in fact interested in discussion and smart enough to realize that everybody does and should have a different opinion about things, which of course those peoples do or they wouldnt be my friends anyway. so really it's all laurie and jared and ben's fault i didn't get to bed earlier and therefore woke up later than i should've and was tired and stuff. yeah. uh huh.

so anyway no time for blogging, though i'm sure i would've had much more to say if i would have had the time and brainpower. alas. anyway, now you get a lame blog cuz i've been reading since 9 this morning, other than about an hour or hour and a half to hunt down something to write about and then write my news bit for the ol' internship. i even had to be a horrible person and not go play with the kids and/or help with homework or something at the salvation army after school program where i used to work, so that made me even more grumpy. and man, i don't know if i would've liked the diary of samuel pepys any more had i not had to marathon it, i had read bits before, but dooooood. don't ever ever read that so much at once if you ever take the notion / are forced to read it. first of all, a lot of it isn't that interesting. things that could be interesting, like oh, say lots of executions and what not are literally given a sentence, which is usually along the lines of "i saw this guy drawn and quartered today." and then it's just written so blandly for the most part, it reminds me of a business ledger and there really isn't much indication as to his thoughts or feelings beyond something vexing him or angering him. bah. anyway, i'm tired and grumpy and i don't wanna go to class really. or anywhere perhaps, though i'll most likely show up at wilhagan's later. and chances are tonight's class won't be interrupted by a cute lil nun who gives us a tray of tasty tasty cookies like last night's was. she had excellent timing as well, as we were discussing the christian symbols in kafka's the metamorphosis. and her habit was all white, so she just appeared in the doorway, giant smile, sort of glowing, with cookies. you can hear the music can't you? anyway, i suppose i should go make some coffee to keep me alive through class tonight, which should be the final caffeine push that might just set me to vibrate. although i did just yawn...

Tags: cookies, nun, school, tired

we went to target this evening and well, we saw these.

"You close your eyes and hope that this is just imagination
But all the while you hear the creature creepin up behind"

so of course this happened:

"cause this is thriller, thriller night
And no ones gonna save you from the beast about strike
You know its thriller, thriller night
You're fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller tonight"

"And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller"

and, whilst searching for the lyrics to thriller just now i found one genius site that had "thriller, diller" every time it repeats thriller in the chorus. yes, this is thriller, diller night. makes perfect sense. rocket surgeons.

Tags: "fashion", thriller

so some of you are aware of my dad's current situation, so you can skip a bit i suppose. anyway, the short recap i guess is this: four weeks ago he had surgery to straighten his big toe, which was so crooked it was laying on top of the two toes next to it. since he's on his feet all day and it hurt even to put his shoes on, he really needed to have the surgery. he can't go back to work until he's 100% with a doctor's note that says so, as he can't work in the orthopedic boot thingy due to OSHA regulations (he's a corrections officer). however, his (insert expletive here) company gives them no sick days, so he had to save all his vacation days and use them. i think that was 13 days. after that his "disability" kicks in. his "disability" is supposedly half the regular pay rate. thing is, they still take out all the tax witholdings, health insurance, life insurance, and whatever other stuff they normally take out. he got his first paycheck for the two-week cycle today. $9.98. no, that decimal is not misplaced. he has a minimum of two weeks before he can go back to work, possibly as many as four. what do these bastards expect people to do? how can you have so little regard for your employees? (the company is a government contractor by the way, and they certainly aren't small).

it's so frustrating all around. partly on a universal level in that anyone is treated that way, but mostly because they're my parents. my mom is not in good physical shape, to put it mildly. she gets a little disability from the government, which thankfully pays their mortgage and their other loans, most of which is debt leftover from the farm going under 10 years ago. too bad no one was putting corn in their cars and every foodstuff known to man back then. anyway, it's just stressful and infuriating. silly things like electricity and gas for cooking and hot water heating and house heating if it gets cold enough, and lots of prescriptions are apparently not important enough for his employer to think they might need them while he's recuperating and PHYSICALLY UNABLE TO DO HIS JOB, for which the pay is crappy to begin with. at least due to my dad's endless gardening and mom's resulting canning and freezing and that southern habit of feeding people to death in the event of even the slightest infirmity, they are in no danger of starving. ever, i dont think. which means, that my parents, really are in better shape than a lot of my dad's coworkers would be in the same situation. what about the single parents, single people, people with a non-working spouse or parents or something like that? it just makes me so angry i can't even speak. good thing i can type i spose. it's even more frustrating because i can't fix it, which i know is completely absurd, but it's true nonetheless. i'm also not helped by the fact that i can't even be there to help with whatever and give my mom a break from the world's most impatient patient so she doesn't murder him and / or have a nervous breakdown. it's frustrating to see - not even see, hear - my parents who are both genuinely good and decent human beings (not without their flaws obviously) having to deal with so much more than anyone should. daddy is 64 and has spent his entire life working to take care of mama and me, mama's spent her life working to feed us and cart me around to various sporting things, lessons and whatever else i was into - which was a lot - so that i had every opportunity i could. they both are truly good and caring and giving people who've never said no to the chance to help or give to anyone and what to they get for it, what have they gotten for it for so many years? shitpiles on shitpiles with shit sandwiches to eat.

and i can't do one damn thing about any of it.

Tags: health insurance, parental units, rant