Geez, am I ever gonna be caught up catching up? Apparently, this week was mostly about me. Three of the five pictures are of myself. It’s kind of interesting that the better I feel emotionally, the more often I am willing to take pictures of myself. Not surprising, but lots of things that one understands on a knowledge level are interesting when applied on a personal level. Let’s hope that all these self portraits don’t leave me wishing I had purchased the extended service plan for my crackberry.

April 26 Silly Me I just love this picture. I snapped it to make That One smile, because he was having a rough day. Those of you who are friends on facebook will recognize it. And by the way, I decided last night that I am totally buying this hat, if it’s still at the store. And also another one, which I haven’t shown you yet. Time to live some dreams, people!

April 27 Crafty Me I finished another hat. I was sure this one would be too small for him, but knitting stretches. Apparently, it stretches a lot.

April 28 Amish Cockscomb I think I spelled this right. Correct me if I am wrong, please. My Grandmother used to grow this in her flowerbeds, always red. This year, for the very first time, I saw it in other colors: this light pink, and also in cream. I wonder if the other colors have always existed, or if they have engineered them through selective breeding. Err, selective cross-pollination. Err, screwing with nature.

April 29 Working Me Yes, this is what I look like out in the garden shop. It’s not quite fashionable, I know. But so far, my crow’s feet aren’t any deeper, my face is still white, and my hair in undamaged. I’ll take it.

April 30 Leeeeezard! Yet another lizard. Hey, I shoot what I see, k? K.

And, yay, a post without drama!

April 21 Dead This, my friends is the pile of dead plants that I pulled out of the garden shop when I returned from my two weeks out of their. Clearly, someone needed to check into life insurance rates for them while I was gone. They expired from a lack of water. I continued to pull plants for about a week. At one point, I set up an intensive care nursery for the ones I thought I could save, but my manager said we didn’t have time for that, and the plants I was nurturing were thrown away. Her call, store’s loss.

April 22 DaBaby visits On the 22nd, Mama was in town and brought DaBaby by to visit me. It was lots of fun getting some midday hugs and kisses. I miss my kids a lot when I am at work.

April 23 Lizard! If you look closely in the middle of this picture, you will see a wee reptile. I see them quite often at work, but they rarely remain still long enough to take a good shot. Today, I won.

April 24 Fire the Third Hmm, they still didn’t believe me. This was the day I cleaned the living room. It still looks pretty good.

This was also the night of catharsis. I continued to cry up until this night, and most of the way through it. I cried for a lot of reasons this night. For loss and betrayal and the grown up me and the little girl me and for my children and it just went on and on and on. But when I woke up on Sunday I was a different woman. Actually, I was my old woman again. The depression that had plagued me for a very long time (years) had lifted somewhat, and that laughing, fun loving girl I used to be was clawing her way to the top. Somewhere in that night, I faced the ugly truth that a lot of really bad crap had happened to me in my life, and I grieved for it, and I tried to let it go. That’s not to say I’ve been completely perky since that point, but when I get down, it’s for a couple of hours, not….for the forseeable future. I can deal with that!

April 25 Hello Old Me You may not be able to see it in my face, but I sure can!

So, I did some more things.

April 1 Looks like I went to Taco Bell for lunch on the 1st. Well, actually, my coworker went, and we ate in the breakroom, but whatever.

April 2 On the second, I went to the hospital right after work to see Granny, and realized I hadn’t eaten all day. A tasteless chicken sandwich and tasteless strawberry shortcake was dinner. I usually like the shortcake from here, but…….yeah, no. Sigh. Not this night.

April 3 I went to ACMoore on my lunch to look for yarn for That One’s mom and sister. They want hats. HA! I didn’t find what they wanted, but I scored several balls of each of these for myself at just $1.99 each. Yay me! And I still get to go to another yarn store looking for their stuff. Yay me again.

April 4 No picture. Early morning “you need to come to the hospital” call instead. So I did.

April 5 Picture I took in the bathroom of work to replace the one I had taken outside that That One declared “too frowny”. You can tell by the white shirt that I was in the pharmacy instead of using my box cutter to open garden shop freight.

This is a picture I took on the 25th, when I was extremely frustrated. Unfortunately for me, my frustration level continued to rise pretty much right up until I posted this entry. Which, also unfortunately was not auto published, but real time published at almost 4am, as That One snored in my bed and DaBaby snored on my couch and I snored nowhere because there was no freaking place left in my house to freaking snore. Good thing I am a natural insomniac.

On the bright side, at least I am awake in my house since it didn’t burn down after all. But Dear Lord, can I please have a day without some sort of parenting/financial/automotive/household disaster? PLEASE? I’m beginning to feel a bit like one of those old dishes. You know the ones with the stress marks they call crazing? It comes from age and use and it makes old dishware quite attractive and special. I think it just makes middle aged women look old and tired and bitter.

Having successfully washed my dishes for 21 days, I have decided to work on a new habit. I noticed last Wednesday, as I had That One in my ear and Sprint tech support on chat that his voice was so soothing and calm, almost like a caress. It was quite pleasant. And yet I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was way stressed: surrounded by darn yankees, no cell phone for over 24 hours, pay phones getting harder and harder to find, and he has to stay in touch with his company to know where he is going and what he is doing. And that soft quiet voice that demands you calm right down too and focus right now on getting a job done. I liked it, and I am trying it. Really trying it for real. I’m nowhere near as good at it as he is, but he’s had years of practice. I will say, though, that at times today, my voice was so soft I could hardly hear it myself. But then there was that other time that didn’t quite work out that way. Oh well, it’s a work in progress, this life of mine.

Hey, only 300 more days to go!!

I took this shot as I was forcing myself to clean the house a bit before I watched The Time Traveler’s Wife. As you probably know, I consider this to be possibly the best book ever. I was surprised by the fact that I liked the movie, because I usually don’t if I liked the book. For a two hour movie, they followed the book fairly closely. I smiled and cried in the same places, so….yeah, they did a good job. You may watch it without fear if you’ve been holding out.

Oh, I added “glow” with Picasa to this picture, which mostly effected the already bright sunlight behind me. I like this one, because it looks like I finally feel: at home in my own skin. I’m past the age of prenatal vitamins, not yet ready for geritol, and pretty darned pleased with life.

So what have you up to this week?

Good Morning, Folks! Enjoying your coffee today?

I’ve got big plans today: church, laundry, dishes, knitting, movie. What about you?

Sorry this is delayed. I tried to post it via utterli, but it utterly failed.

Last night was the military ball, which I attended with That One. We were the second most good-looking couple there, second only to Country and her date. I had an absolutely wonderful time. Absolutely wonderful. It’s quite an awesome feeling to be dipped so low that your shoulder length hair brushes the floor.

Also, must learn to salsa, samba and shag (the dance, duh). When the man goes to a dance, he actually expects to dance. Who knew?