I'm Grandma, Bitch!

My kids are gone.

This morning, my parents left and took them in tow. They'll spend the next week in NY with them, much to my sister's horror and at times chagrin. Linda was spoiled rotten, she had the house to herself for a whole couple of weeks. But her la-di-dah dreamland now shuts down. By the time she gets home from work tonight, her fortress of solitude will have been invaded by my kids, and her mother.

My mom is great -- I love my mom. But with any human being, there are idiosyncratic quirks that just boggle the mind. I won't bad mouth her here, mostly for the following reasons:

1. she could be reading this,
2. she could call me on the phone and say "I'm Grandma, Bitch! Come pick up your rotten kids!" And/Or,
3. it could really hurt her feelings if I say anything negative, not that I haven't said it to her face and it would be back-bitey or anything, but because the long and the short of it is that it's not any of the rest of the universe's business. And me sharing my detailed feelings would basically betray that.



Suffice to say, I sometimes shake my head and just don't get her... but... it is what it is and she's Grandma, bitch!

And I'm very glad she's got my kids this week. Thank you grandma!

We made it through an entire weekend without doing one geocache. Our dogs are desperate to go out for a good hike. But it wasn't to be on Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday during the day we went to Newburyport with my folks, to have fun at the Yankee Homecoming they do every year. The place was packed. It was insane. Crazy insane. But we had a nice time shopping, and my mom bought deadly delicious fudge, and we had a great time hoofing around checking stuff out.

The "Life is Good" store is hiring part time help. I may have to look into that. I wonder if one gets a discount. I'd gladly work there. It'd be fun.

I think.

Doug's boss got married Saturday Night.

It was an evening wedding, civil ceremony, and they did some interesting and peculiar things that I've not seen done at weddings before. After the public ceremony, they were spirited away to do a Buddhist thing (she's Chinese American, her husband's a white boy) and so there was a huge period of time when we stood around at cocktail hour waiting... waiting...

The reception was fun, the DJ was incredibly insufferable. As DJs usually are. I went up and requested "One Week" by BNL (I figure that's the danciest thing they have) and he said he wasn't sure if he had it. So he asked me if I wanted to have him look up something else.

"How about some Metallica? You don't seem to be playing enough of that." I got a blank stare back from him.

He played all kinds of shit that no one on this holy good green earth ever EVER needs to ever EVER hear again as long as they live.

"Celebrate good times, c'mon!" Choke me with your bare hands, please.

"We are Family, I got all my sisters with me." Puh-lease.

I love how DJs play Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" song, because it's a song about hating all that kind of music. It cracks me up.

Oh, and the funniest thing in my mind was someone requested the Pina Colada song "Escape". That's great at a wedding. It's about infidelity, straying to go see if someone other than your lady is right for you... and then having a good time laughing about how you almost went off and cheated, and boy weren't you lucky it turns out that you really DO have lots of stuff in common! Yay! Happy ending!

I hate that song.

I had a great time at the wedding. And one of the reasons I married my husband, and one of the reasons why I love him to death, is because he loves to sit back and mock with me. We mock without mercy, and laugh and laugh. Good times, good times. It was nice to meet his co-workers for the first time... they were all pretty cool and we had a fun table.

Sunday morning we got up and took my parents out looking for a possible place to live. I researched some mobile home communities around the area, and found a couple on realtor.com that suited their needs. My mom isn't really ready to talk to a real estate agent, so it is hard to get her motivated and looking. We went up into New Hampshire, the seacoast area, snooped around neighborhoods, parked in driveways wherever we saw a for sale sign. Neighbors came out and talked to us, everyone seemed really friendly.

Doug started to see dollar signs in his eyes as he imagined us buying this nice triple wide with huge deck for $120k after selling our P.O.S. house for $400k (yeah, right) and paying off all our debts and putting money aside for Jessica for college.

I'm not motivated to move at all. Damn, I'm barely motivated to take laundry downstairs. I am sure we'd be living debt free for 500 bucks a month lot rental and mortgage rolled together, but I'd lose things that I like. Such as the laundry facility in my basement (I'd have to go to the laundry on the premesis) and my fire pit and dog pen for my pups. Not interested in moving, even if the place that we looked at is 1000 times nicer than the house we live in right now.

We found some cool places that my parents should really check out. I hope they pursue them. We shall see.

Our VW is back in the shop. We just bought it, and it had the "Check Engine" light on, so Doug brought it in this time two weeks ago and they said it needed a new vacuum line. So they fixed it. And two days later the stupid light came back on again.

So we dropped it off last night, and it looks like I'll be driving him to work and picking him up daily for the next couple of days, at least until they fix the damn thing. My husband has been infintely patient, but I swear to heaven itself that he's gonna snap. Pray for him, or better yet, pray for the VW dealership repair guy.

Today I spent some time looking into high speed internet.

DSL still isn't available in my area. Verizon sucks. How an area like ours is not yet covered is beyond all imagination to me. What the hell are they waiting for?

Cable is $65 a month if I don't sign up for cable TV service. Thing is, I don't want friggin' cable TV because I have the world's best service in DirectTV. No lie. I love it. But, they can install the cable line, I sign up for the basic package and cable modem and one cable TV hook up are $45 a month. I may have to do that and maybe put a TV in my room or something.

And I looked into DirectWay digital sattelite service. Meh. Too damn expensive, even though I have DirectTV. They aren't the same company, it would be $500 for the equipment and like $60 a month for the service. No. Thanks.

All I have to say is Meh.

I have a shit ton of stuff going on this week, more so than any week yet this summer. I've got projects, I just got a call from a company that wants to do training classes for one of its clients. I've got forms to fill out for graduate school, and classes to enroll in. Damn. I gotta talk to the program advisor, seeing as it's like T-minus 14 days until classes start or something like that.

I'm busy, bitch!