And the mod elections are being held up i'd figure i'd give my $.02
Some of you know twop, but do some of you know about twop sucks (now bitter but brilliant)? I was a huge jacob supporter and would kiss his butt all up and down the twop boards. One day a friend sent me a link to twop sucks and i saw people saying the most hateful and hurtful things about yours truly.
It was bad (real bad michael jackson) and then i got mad (real mad joe jackson) and then? I realized they had no idea who i was! Their opinion of me was based on a few statements made on a site that i basically lived at, but it was completely one dimensional. So i joined, answered some questions from the haters, and made some really cool friends that i still talk to this day.
During my time there we began to question the regime. The very things we were hating on twoppers for (oh yeah, i joined in after a while, shut up, i was young! Besides, it was mostly to hate on jacob haters, heh) we were doing ourselves. So i got an invite to twop sucks suck aka lyle lovett's needs (inorite). There, the *mod* lovers hated on the *mod* haters that hated on the *mod* lovers (don't think it can't get more meta people, cause it got even more meta but that comes later) and we talked about gasbag members who we didn't like.
Later in i'd created a *mod* fan forum (did i mention i was crazy for a while? And young? And may have been well into my 20's when this happened?) And a few splinter members from tss/lln were members. We had a hidden forum where we just talked trash about the entire situation. It's actually kind of funny how simlar all of this is, there was a southern sassy bell, a gay guy, a mommy blogger, a resplendent foreigner, and a disgruntled housewife!
We mostly just ran around being jerks in the privacy of our own forum when someone in the group happened upon some cached pages from the mod comm of twopsucks. They exposed the members as having ghostnics and sockpuppets on their own boards! They would post as their sock agreering with someone and then come in as a mod banishing everyone. Insanity, right?
I didn't think it was fair to have this info and not give it to the board and one other girl agreed with me. We wanted to release it. The rest of the group (about 5 others) didn't want to and they were vocal but not really beyond "you guys we shouldn't do this, this is bad!" what transpired next is what i see happening here and basically rattled my world.
Instead of continuing to talk about it, the splinter group decided to start a gmail thread (told you, more meta!) Where they called me everything but a child of god. During this time i had a lot of projects in the mix and they analyzed every action i took as something to out them and derail them and sell their secrets to the KGB or whatever. One of them emailed me the thread (and then later one of them accused me of hacking into their email account to get it) and when confronted only one girl decided to take the heat of my wrath (y'all, it was on my birthday y'all!). She asked me to explain my actions and i did to the very detail and she believed me. She admitted she got caught up in the crazy and i forgave her and we're still e-cool to this day. Some of them apologized and we're gravy, and some i haven't talked to since.
don't think all of that has nothing to do with this. Honestly, i get what it's like to have people talking about you, but you have got to get a thicker skin on the webs. Who cares? They don't know you and 9 times out of 10 the things they say have nothin to do with you! I had a girl say i caused her to get a reprimand at work because she was taking too much time wading through my bs! Umm... Introspection much?
Fly above the hate! Strut! Some awesome lyric from a kris song! Friday i'll be over you!
But we need to hunker down as a comm and decide what we want to be and how to get there. And we can't do that if we can't go through a single night of petty drama. Breath before taking action. Learn to look at an entire situation and not just the part that effects you. Learn how to put your personal feelings and friendships aside for the greater good when necessary. Learn how to be hated, how to lose friendships, how to make tough decisions and how to stick by them.
I love this comm too much to see it burn down. I've seen that before and it's nuts, but it is preventable. Let's prevent it.
I love you guys. Now I’m going to shower!
St Patricks Day Glitter Graphics
Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! (and Happy b-day to me)
Brenn and Mickey were helping their daddy in the back yard today. I thought I would share pictures.
My garden, Steve's new tiller, and Steve & kids with the tiller.
My birthday bench, Micky randomly and Mickey & Brenna on the birthday bench.
And looking like a walking pile of dirt. ;-)
So... every year, my daughter raises money for the Jump Rope for Heart (a jump rope-athon to raise money for the American Heart Association). They don't give us much time to raise the money... only two weeks.
This year will be the first year Brenna did not even meet her own personal goal, because I was too busy trying to help get things ready for her science fair project (due Wednesday) and forget all about pimping it out to my friends.
She's raised a whopping $25 this year... and the money is due in school tomorrow morning. 
This is a huge long shot in the dark, but if any of you have some spare cash and a sympathetic heart, check it out and give her a donation?.
If not, I'll totally understand. I dropped the ball on this one big time.
ETA: She hands in the donations this morning, and thanks to a couple of very generous friends over on LJ, she managed to raise $175. Thank you so much, friends!
There is an empty lot for sale right across from the school my daughter attends. The real estate agency in charge of the sale recently placed barricades and NO PARKING signed across the entrance because teachers and parents have been using it as a parking lot (and apparently that is not conductive to keeping in the kind of shape you might actually sell it in).
Today, as I was walking my daughter to school, I noticed that one of the boards had fallen off. Not a small board, but an actually rather big, heavy board, and it had fallen into the middle of the sidewalk, blocking the path where the kids (mine included) need to walk each day to get to school. Ahead of me, I saw two kids walking, not around, but over the board. On it. Kids will do that sort of thing.
As I get closer, I can see four nails sticking out of the board, two on each end.
The farmer's daughter in my immediately noted that the mails were neither long enough nor thick enough to hold the weight of the board and -- hello, hazard waiting to happen!
The mother in me immediately remembers the two kids walking over the fallen board and envisions all the others who might have thought of it. and then I get visions of kids stepping on the nails, for -- this afternoon when they are racing home and not watching what they are doing, like they always are -- falling and taking a nail in the arm... leg... hand... eye.
Hello lawsuit waiting to happen!
I borrowed my friend's cell phone to call the agent listed on the sign and got her voice mail. Then I dutifully memorized the agency's phone number a well and called them as soon as I got home. I also called the school, to let them know because I had seen kids walking on it and because the real estate agency could simply 'forget' to have someone look into it.
My friend and I did try to move it ourselves, but it was somewhat on the heavy side and we both had kids in strollers and she had a baby in a sling on her chest, as well.
Hopefully, someone from the agency will come and take care of it and also, hopefully, the school will address it with the kids. They don't need to getting hurt.
Or, one babe in particular. *g*
We've been trying to teach Mickey (who, for those keep track, just turned 2) how to count. This was the conversation this morning before the walk to school.
Me: Mickey... one
Mickey: two
Me: three
Mickey: free
Me: four
Mickey: why
We think that 'why' is how he's saying 'five' for right now, because he's said it that way before, but it's entirely possibly that by this time, he was fed up with counting and was just asking "why?"
Also, notice that he does not say 'one' or 'four' and jumps right to the next numbers in the sequence.
(We're also attempting colors, but for now, the only color he accurately identifies is 'geen'.)
My father hates Christmas and has hated it ever since my grandfather passed away in 1997. My father had always associated the season between Thanksgiving and New Years with his father on many levels and having him no longer there to share them with has made the whole season sour for him. Already a 'surly' or 'prickly' man at the best of times, my father becomes down right unbearable and scrooge-like at Christmas time.
While discussing it with him just two days before Christmas this year, I told him that he had the power to make Christmas whatever he wanted to make it, and that, instead of turning it into a sad or bitter occasion, he should take an example from the father he loved and make it a time of love. Grandpa always made things fun for his grandchildren (my brother, sisters and myself) and that Dad could choose to do the same for his his grandchildren, too.
Or he could go on being a scrooge and making the holidays horrible for all of us.
His choice, and I told him that he should choose love.
Flash forward by two days and I am sitting on the floor between my eight year old daughter and two year old son, helping to pass out presents and taking pictures.
Brenna hands me one package, marked as 'To Debbie, From Santa.' The 'Santa' in question is my mother and the package is medium-sized, soft and squishy. I am hoping for socks, because new socks are one of the few unique joys in life that I call mine.
Also, Mom always buys me socks, so I'm really looking forward to them. It's the one present I have always been able to count on being under the tree.
When the packages are all passed out -- with the lion' share going to the kids, Steve and my mom -- I find myself sitting on the floor with … just that one present in front of me. I open in, and the hoped-for socks turn out to be a pair of fleece jammies. I don't often wear jammies because I don't like things on my legs when I sleep (they make my legs itch), and instead wear nightgowns or over-sized shirts.
I'm sitting typing this and trying to put into words the emotions that were running through me yesterday while I was helping Mom clean up the wrapping paper and empty boxes. I don't intend to sound selfish or childish or anything like that, and that is what makes it hard to say this. I got one present, and it wasn't even one I necessarily will find joy in for more than 2 wearings (before I wash them and start making my legs itch, that would be).
It's not really that fact that I only got present. It's not even really the fact that it wasn't the socks I was hoping for (and largely expecting).
It's the simply fact that the only present I got this year was from my mother and that there was nothing under the tree for me from my husband.
Further, Christmas Day came and went without him saying thing about it. No 'Merry Christmas' or even a Christmas card with an IOU taped to the inside.
People, this is the same man who bought me a glass globe of the earth for our anniversary to symbolize him giving me the world. He is not generally without resources, creativity or imagination.
He could have done something and simply put, did not.
And for my part, most of the way through Christmas Day, my kept going back to that conversation I had with my father about making Christmas be about love and not 'just things' so I sucked it up and nothing even though there were times when I wanted to just crawl off somewhere and cry because the man I'd put months of energy and planning to finding the perfect gift for had not even gotten me a lousy Christmas card. Because the kids were happy and we were getting ready to have my brother and his new fiancée over for Christmas dinner and it would not do to be glum on Christmas, right?
Right, so I don't say anything, until later that day, after dinner when Mom and I are doing dishes and she notices that I am not necessarily happy. She asks what's wrong, so I tell and… get told that "he tried but couldn't find the gift he had wanted to get for me' so I should not be mad at him.
(The gift in question… he had been trying to find me two movies I had asked for three weeks ago, which had been on sale at Walmart down home in VA at the time… and in stock aplenty. He did not buy them there and no store up here in PA had them… so not buying able to find them anywhere, he gave and bought me… nothing. And further compounded it by saying nothing or offering up an alternative and basically leaving me to feel like I had been forgotten or worse, an after thought. But I am supposed to forgive that right? Because he tried, or so mom says. )
Today, he's hunting with father in The Big Woods (it's flint lock season, yay!) and I'm at my parent's house with the kids, typing this when I should be cleaning the house before Mom gets home and still feeling pretty much like a selfish shit because getting gifts is not what the season should be about and I know it. There are people in the world who are so much more worse off than I am who do not have the things and blessings that I have.
This holiday season, I have been blessed with two healthy, happy children, my husband home safely from Afghanistan, and have been surrounded by family (my parents, brother and sisters, nieces and nephews).
We are not homeless, jobless or poor, even though the economic crisis has pinched us, too.
All in all, my family has a lot to be thankful for this year and I should be happy with that instead on dwelling on some … stuff… I did not get.
Well, it's the day after Thanksgiving and I have so much to say and so much to be thankful for.
On Tuesday, November 25th, my husband returned home from an overseas deployment in Some Places Where There is War. We got to meet him in the airport terminal and Brenna & Mickey hugged on him and would not let go. We have special spaghetti dinner with garlic bread and home made coffee cake.
Wednesday, we packed up the car to drive home to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. During the nine hour drive from Norfolk to the farm, I polished off the last 2,700+ words to get over 50,000 words on my NaNowriMo novel. This is the first year in all years I have done NaNoWriMo, that I have actually won.
My family keeps asking me "what did you win?" and I think they expected the prize to something substantial like money or having novel published when it was finished. They seem really disappointed when I tell them "nothing" or "the satisfaction of knowing I did it."
Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I got to meet my brother's new woman, Robin. I am not sure how I really feel about her. It seems weird to have a strange woman calling my parents 'mom' and 'dad' (and she seriously sucks up to my dad, so that is even more weird).
Tonight, Steve and I are leaving the kids with Mom and Dad so we can have an "adult night" all to ourselves. We almost ever do anything like this, but I think that after this past 11 months, we more than deserve one. We are going out to dinner and maybe a movie and then spending the night in a hotel.
Hope every one had a great Thanksgiving!
When I was a little girl, my mother used to sing me this song and I never knew where it came from, but I taught it to my daughter too.
Today, very randomly, she asked me where I got it from and when I told her, from my mom, she said, "let's call gramma and find to where she got it from." So we called mom and she said Gramma Gee sang it to her when she was a kid, and then added that it was a popular song from the 1940's.
So, I went to Google, and found this.
