Well, speaking of memory lane… did you know Rosie that you were the first person to “talk” to me on the Dope, after I joined?
You complimented my username.
thanks!
I did? Are you sure that was me? I seem to recall “meeting” you only after you’d already wandered into the MMP that week.
You got that right! 
Well, I’ll be damned. Welcome back!
I can’t find the thread- I can’t search, but I swear it was you! The thread was titled (something) like "My husband almost killed himself today) 'cause the guy fell off the roof or something. I remember because I was a guest and I used an apostrophe correctly (for a plural possessive) and you (I think???) encouraged me to join up!
When search comes back, I will need to look for that thread from 10/05!
Getting late and I"m off to bed…
Night guys and helllooo night shift!
Oh, and Lunch- Israeli boot camp wins the thread.
I was indeed moving into a new job, and have now been here for almost three years (does that mean I haven’t posted on the MMP for that long? sob) Being a nice, polite kind’ve good lad I didn’t want to be seen as too web-happy in the first couple of months, so while I COULD post, I tried not to.
Anyways, where was I going with this pathetic excuse for disappearing on you all? um… Work was… busy, and I didn’t have much time to read the Dope, and my membership kind’ve dribbled away (basically, I didn’t have a chance to post even though I was reading and then when things balanced out and I had time to post my membership had run out and I didn’t want the wife yelling at me for spending on full membership, etc etc etc).
So, anyways, I’ve not been reading the MMPs, cos I felt bad not being able to post while you lot were having your merry MMParties, so spent more time in CS. But I have been eating cake for you all, so if you’ve been finding cake on your keyboards, that was me, caking-by-proxy.
Real-world stuff, celebrated kid#2’s second birthday in late July (did y’all even know she was on the way? Well, now she’s TWO! And terrible, but cute (can a parent declare theirv child to be terrible?)).
We were all featured in the paper recently cos of some statistic about mixed couples and kids from mixed marriages, etc. It was a slightly wierd article, but I figure if my journo friends need a trained monkey to appear in a story, then who am I to say no! (what with me being a trained monkey and all).
#1 son is in kindergarten now and has waaaaay too much homework for a five-year old, but he’s coping very well (and is amazingly fluent when swapping between the english and the mandarin - he actually reads more chinese than english!).
I’m still the same, a little hairier, a little less hairy (it seems to shift around), work is tough but amazingly fun, I also now have a lackey! (she calls herself my ‘underling’).
and and… crap, gotta work now!
Hey everyone, who moved all the furniture? 
For herbs, and gt, I am cheerfully waving goodbye to trainwreck Palin, and thank both she and Mcain for boosting Obama’s chance! Now if “Uncle Ted” would just take sonny boy Ben and slink away along with the Murkowski’s, I would be a fairly happy she-bear!
hehehe…rosie I was born in 1960, and I just got my first pair of bifocals. They suck, too, but really are great for glaring over.
So, it’s the kids second week of school, skiffman is still fishing, #1 daughter, sil and pretty li’l miss are here visiting. I still have two puppies, although they are spoken for. Summer is over and autumn is here with a vengeance, howling winds and slashing rain. Brother Brad is coming over in a week or two for a visit, he has relocated his “base of operation” to Homer, but that is just a 10-14 hour ferry ride forth and back*
The Thursday root canal went badly, very badly. :mad:The doc had a terrible time numbing me sufficiently, and he was in a hurry to catch a plane, so he kind of jerry-rigged my teeth together and said he would call me in an antibiotic and pain script in. By the time my pharmacist called to tell me the pain script (percoset) had to be brought in by hand the dental office was closed and I was s.o.l. :mad: Friday morning I was not a happy patient when I called and made arrangements for #3 daughter to pick the script up from the dentist’s office after school, and I was beyond unhappy when she came home at 4:00 with no script, saying the office was closed when she got there. :mad::mad::mad: I called again and asked wtf? Oh they were there, but they were cleaning, and had forgotten about my daughter coming by. Folks, this is Kodiak, a small settlement by the sea, not Seattle, not too difficult, one would think, to remember a root canal gone bad patient to be pissy about pain meds, which I finally got 27 hours after the procedure. He had to inject me so many times that my gum and hard palate are still bruised, and my mouth is very very sore. 
Ah, #3 daughter just brought me medicinal ice cream, what a good girl! If it weren’t for the keflex I would also be having some medicinal rum as well! (don’t scowl rigs, I am leaving the rum alone. ;P) I may be back later, who knows?
Ta!
*forth and back was a manner of speech of my adopted village mom/elder, and it makes me think of her to say it, so I did!
They can even name them that here.
You definitely need a nickname. Did you have one when you posted here before?
And how come your post count doesn’t show?
Does it count if our stories are less than two weeks old? (I’m under twenty, you see…)
I worked my last night shift of the summer and packed as soon as I got home from work. At 5-ish, my uncle drove me to the airport, where I paid the fee for extra baggage (guitar) and got on a pair of red-eye flights. I slept about four hours total en route to my university, which is in a francophone city – and I don’t speak much French. When I arrived, I took a taxi to the apartment of a friend of mine to drop off some of my luggage. My friend, however, was out of town, so I had to arrange everything with her mother, who I had never met and who speaks no Enlgish. Did I mention that I don’t speak much French? She was really nice, though, so she fed me lunch. I was supposed to tour an apartment at 1pm, but it turned out to have been taken before I had arrived, so I walked about an hour across town to my hostel instead, and I checked in, tossed my remaining luggage in a locker*, and went on a little walk to orient myself in the city. Afterward, I made a few phone calls to see if anybody I knew was in town at the moment (nope –they all arrived later.) I ended up having another apartment viewing that evening, to which I had to run, before I finally could go to bed for the first time in 30+ hours. So that was the moving day.
Everything has gotten simpler since then, though. I have rented a room in a nice district of town (a bit far from school – until I can figure out how to get a student transit pass, I’m stuck walking an hour every morning to classes), and I got to do all of the Frosh activities that you need to gain friends – plus gadzoodles of my classmates from my previous school have now arrived, and we’ve had lots of get-togethers. So it’s all worked out fine. There’s still some paperwork to do, and I still need to get my luggage from my friend’s place, but hey, pas grave, ouai?
Sorry if that story is not very coherent – it’s a little late around here. Truth be told, it wasn’t very coherent when it was happening, either.
*Always take a padlock with you if you’re going to be staying in a hostel. They never tell you that you need them, yet you always do.
My, people are popping out of the woodwork! Hello, new/old peeps!
I didn’t move out to university, on account of I got a degree in momology first. I was barely seventeen and preggers–I’d already been through the disappointed parents trying to talk me into an abortion and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (yes, when I was young and foolish I fell for that nonsense) disfellowshipping my ex and me for fornication–gee, with a baby on the way, what do you figure was their first clue? His family were all JW’s so they elected to ignore us as well–that’s not mandatory, by the way, but his mother is an evil, crazy bitch and she loved the excuse it gave her for some god-sanctioned child abuse. I found out I was knocked up in February right before my seventeenth birthday and by early April we had managed to get things settled–we had had a date set for our shotgun wedding, but that got nixed by the JW’s kicking us out–no real wedding for us after all. Still, my ex had managed to find a job and get an apartment rented (the carpets were being shampooed so he couldn’t quite move in yet) and my mom had finally settled to the idea of grandmotherhood and had amassed quite the garage sale/thrift store trousseau out in our garage. In short, we were making the best of it.
A couple of days before the revised date when we were supposed to get married, one of my sisters opened my door without knocking and found my ex sleeping with me in my twin bed. He’d been sleeping there most nights, waking up early, sneaking out the bathroom window, then coming back through the front door as though he’d just ridden his bike over from his mother’s house. See, being at his mother’s house was insupportable for him because she acted as though he wasn’t even there and had instructed his brothers and sisters to do the same, on pain of being kicked out themselves. When you join the JW’s you’re pretty much forced to get rid of all your “worldly” associations so by this time we were pretty much friendless and had nobody but each other. So we spent our nights together. It was all the comfort we had, really.
So we were officially busted, sleeping together–you’d think after the whole “I’m pregnant” thing that this wouldn’t be much of a shock. My dad threw a fit. I mean, a real honest to gods “get thee from my house, disgusting tramp” type fit. He laid down the law to my mother that I had to be out of the house that day and she, as always, gave in. So I got to pack up all my belongings, and my tacky bits and pieces of gear from the garage sales and thrift stores and pack them into my parent’s van, all day long moving stuff without one. single. word. being said to me or my ex by anyone in my family. My father did not deign to assist in any way. They just dumped all my stuff onto the still damp living room carpet and left us there, alone. I was seventeen and he was twenty, and I had never lived away from home before. We both cried, hugging each other, then threw a blanket on the big old couch we’d inherited from some relative, and curled around each other and slept.
A couple of days later my family showed up to take us to the Justice of the Peace to get hitched. We’d had to reschedule the date a bit because our original date/time didn’t work with the ex’s new job, so my mom found a JP who was willing to stay in the office after five to marry us. I put on my ivory Gunne Sax dress and we all drove to Galt, CA and got married in what looked for all the world like a Greyhound bus station. The JP was drunk, slurring his words and mispronouncing our names. The whole place smelled of cigarettes and urine. It was special and magical. Then my parents took us to dinner at a Japanese restaurant around the corner from our new apartment. The conversation was… awkward. My dad had lots of false bonhomie about how happy he was that we were all legally married and shit–I guess that the drunk’s words had made it okay for us to have had sex or something.
I never really forgave my family for that. He never forgave his family for their treatment of us, either. We had our two children, we loved each other as best as we could, but eventually his escalating bipolar disorder forced us to the point where I felt I had to decide whether I would be a wife or a mother–I didn’t feel strong enough to do both, so I chose my children and we separated.
I have moved house many times before that time, and many times since, but that was absolutely the worst move I’ve ever had. The recent hooraw with Governor Palin of Alaska and her poor, knocked up daughter with her too-big “engagement” ring on her finger and her boyfriend being called out by name on national TV and all the attendant nastiness has resonated too much with me these past few days–I think I know how that young woman feels right now and I detest her shitty ass mother for putting her on the spot like this. Rot in hell, there, Sarah–you deserve it.
Well, I’m a barrel of laughs this evening–sorry 'bout that…
Nickname was/is 'gene (which is funny, cos that’s my name!), although some of the guys commented on my often frenetic posting style (which isn’t so frenetic right now cos I just had a massive lunch and the rice and dumplings and rice dumplings have all settled and I’m now fit to sleep a week! zzzzzzzzzz (#1 son woke me at 4am and said, ‘dad, could you stop snoring, dammit!’, which might also explain the post-lunch sleepiness).
I’m guessing my post-count isn’t showing cos I’m posting for free, and the free-post option limits all sorts of crap (but I haven’t read the details cos I’m not so good with reading details, you know how it is, all those words and stuff), which doesn’t explain why i’m still ‘charter membering’ it (but don’t say that too loud, cos it looks cool and I’d hate to lose it even if I’m not entitled to it anymore anyhow).
I need some icecream (they only had mango pudding with sago).
My goodness, but I’m up.
I fell asleep around 3:30… so I’m really tired!
It’s the kidlets first day of school- my son is in 8th grade and my daughter is in 5th!
Gotta hop in the shower and get them ready for school after a lazy, fun summer!
Cool. Thanks for the update gene! I’m pretty sure kid #2 wasn’t around (or even expected) when you last posted.
I’m up and need to get the heck out of here…
GT
Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffienatin’ here. Purtified for work too. I’m goin’ in for a little while but expect to be home with a workpile by late mornin’. This is after all one of my work from da cave days. However, since I have not been in the office this week, I gotta go find out what needs doin’.
It’s gene!!! Howdy!!! Are we now goin’ to get regularly scheduled caffiene induced posts again? YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!! Plus somebody else to flirt with.
How you doin’?
I’m enjoyin’ everyone’s move in stories. Keep ‘em comin’!
kai sorry about the rotten root canal. Hope you’re feelin’ better.
SmartiePants, yikes! I think you win.
Ok, gotta get movin’ here.
Later Y’all!
I’m gonna be in Beantown all next week. Anyone in Boston wanna find out what a dull jerk I am?
**Soapy **is awfully young you know…cute too!!
But she’s working on no sleep trying to get our kids off to school. Not feeling so cute (or young) right now… yawn.
Smartie wins the thread by a mile. Dontcha think dear old Dad was just waiting for a chance? What a bastard. Sorry, but he was.
I feel sorry for Bristol–having read some of Levi’s MySpace stuff, you KNOW she’s going to be left holding the baby, literally.
I went running this morning; it felt good (but hard-I am terribly out of shape). I drove out a 1.2 mile route. I need to get a digital watch WITH LARGE NUMBERS FOR THESE OLD EYES TO SEE BECAUSE I’M NOT ABOUT TO WEAR MY GLASSES WHILE RUNNING. And then I’m set. It feels good. I’m sure to become sanctimonious and smug about the whole thing.
Bad night of sleep last night. Grumpy now. Work soon. Trying to decide if I want to pull some $$ out of my sickly bank account for vaguely chai-flavored milk.
swampy is a temperamental picnic guest
