So we are in the trash, keep, donate, sell phase of moving. The next step is figuring out the best way to get our stuff up to our new location. Do we get a truck and load it ourselves? Do we get a truck and pay someone to load it? Do we pay a service that has a truck to load it? And then what do they DO with the stuff? Should we have it stored here in Florida and then pay to have it shipped up once we have a permanent address? Or do we go ahead and move it up north and just store it somewhere semi random?

Of course if money was no option or a company was relocating us this would be insanely simple, but when every dollar needs to be accounted for things can get stressful and scary.

Case in point- I thought this one company would be totally awesome. I won’t say the name as you can infer on your own, but basically this company would deliver a large pod-like unit to your driveway and you could load it at your leisure and then they would store it and ship it out when you are ready. And based on the on-line quotes it seemed ideal. Maybe even perfect. But then a bit of time digging and searching on consumer affairs and BBB and this place does not seem on the up and up.

So then I started researching local moving companies. And wouldn’t you know almost all of the companies had reviews available to be read via google. And wow! Some of the companies just seem so awesome and fair. But then I noticed that the rest of the reviews were kind of robotic and unhuman. And then I noticed that other people had noticed this and wrote their actual reviews. You know the kind that lets us know that the companies in question broke things, stole things, gave quotes and then did not honor them.

I found one company that was local that I even spoke to on the phone. The woman on the phone was a great salesperson and I felt safe and protected and excited that it was a good deal. She proposed that we box up our own stuff (we already planned on that) and then pay her team an hourly rate to load up one of their trucks. Then they would store the stuff here in town and when we had an address they would move the stuff up for us. AND we could save costs by “piggy-backing” with someone else moving up north.

The price sounded fair. The plan sounded easy.

And then I checked the BBB and this company has a D+. Sigh…

We are just nervous as we are totally ripe for ripping off: broke, desperate, gals. Blah.

Anyone done an out-of-state move on their own with little funds/man power? Got advice or warnings? Bring it. (please)

The holiday catalogues are arriving at an alarming rate. It’s totally time, I get it. (I won’t, however, accept that it is time for my local grocery store to have holiday decorations on display in their parking lots. I’m looking at you, Publix.) And while 98% of the catalogues end up in my recycling bin without so much as a backward glance, some of them do end up being casually flipped through. And since I like to pretend that I have oodles of money to splurge on my son on things like monogrammed luggage or Santa hats, the reality is that usually I am just window shopping. And I am cool with that.

Because W doesn’t really have a need for luggage just yet. He has plenty of baggage just having me as a Mama. bwha ha ha. What? Too self-deprecating? Ok. How about he doesn’t need luggage because he is 7 months old. As of today, by the way. (insert totally silly moment where I sort of sadly wave farewell to his infanthood)

But back to Pottery Barn, because, in case you didn’t already guess, that is where I am going with this post.

So the first (of what I am sure will be many) thick catalogues arrived from the PB yesterday. And color me red and green- it’s the holiday edition! And I get all giddy thinking about how this is going to be W’s first Christmas EVAH and dive in to get my fix of pretty decorations and toys.

And I’m turning and turning the pages (oh & if you have this catalogue at home you can read along with me!) and I get to page 20 and the sadness begins. Like on a totally weird, what is this emotion I am feeling??, level. Dolls. Lots and lots of dolls.

And before you think I am having some sort of, “I wish W had girl parts” moment I swear it isn’t. Instead I had a, “But why can’t W be in the marketing blitz when it comes to dolls? moment” Why does the language have to be so exclusive?

“Surprise her with a sweet, new friend to bring everywhere she goes, from tea parties to sleepovers.”

I get it- girls play with dolls. But I bet there are some boys out there that would like a new friend. I know that girls play and are encouraged to play with dolls in a way that makes them emulate parenting. It fosters nurturing behavior and creating play. But I have to wonder why we aren’t encouraging boys to play in the same way.

I don’t think it makes a boy effeminate or emasculate to play with dolls. I actually don’t feel like there should be any sort of gender bias when it comes to parenting. There are some pretty amazing fathers out there that are doing it on their own. Might there be more of them if doll play was more encouraged with little boys?

By the time I get to page 24 in the PB catalogue we are in more pink pages of independent play toys: doll houses, ironing boards, tea sets and retro kitchens. There is a slight change in the language of the items for sale. Instead of saying “she” the copy now says “kids”, but a picture is worth a thousand words and all of the “kids” demonstrating play in the photos are girls.

And then I turn the page and find myself in the boy section. How do I know it is the boy section? Well obviously because the colors have changed from sea foam green and pink to primary red and blue. And the items for sale are all geared towards sport play sets-  totally non gender specific stuff. But you wouldn’t know it based on the photos because, once again, they only feature one gender- this time it’s boys.

I know that ultimately I decide what W plays with. And if I have dolls and kitchen sets for him then he might decide to play with them. I guess I am just bummed out over the totally in your face gender labeling. I am also bummed that there are more pink pages than primary colored pages (which wouldn’t bother me so much if pink didn’t = girl and primary didn’t = boy).  Options, people. Give us options. Because I promise you that Mothers are buying dolls and kitchen sets for their sons and basketball sets for their daughters. It would just be lovely to see that reflected in the ads.

And now I promise to bite my tongue in regards to the toy airplane for sale with only a male pilot and female flight attendant as options. And more tongue biting over the generic families available for purchase for doll house play…sigh.

Outdated stereotypes…smells like the holidays are coming!

(by the way, check out the totally awesome new art in my header. Made by a reader in France who has not yet let me know if I may say her name, but holy amazing. Nothing like opening your e-mail inbox to that!)

Oh lawdy. I watched the 2 hour launch of SYTYCD and I have all kinds of issues. Which I will vent in the comments. Have your own issues? Let’s talk!

A post will be coming soon in honor of GM’s birthday, but a couple of you have asked WTF I meant about the hacking. I am not entirely sure I was hacked in the worst way. I think the developer of the template I was previously using decided to turn on a link or something. It ONLY happens with that one template and only started happening two days ago. And none of my content was messed with.

Phew.

And now that I have done a scan for random links and have a new template installed I can (hopefully) move forward.

The thing is that coding themes and templates is crazy hard. I do tweaking of themes and even that can take me hours and hours. The themes I use usually have a credit link down at the bottom and I leave that alone. Some person spent a lot of time putting together the foundation of something for me to jump creatively off of and I appreciate that. What annoys me is when the designer goes bananas with random secret links. I am SO cool with linking back to the designer’s web page or even like one or two links that might generate some ad revenue for the designer.

But seriously. Turning on a link, without my consent, to a penis enhancer drug? Lame. And annoying. And I am bummed because I dug my previous theme. I am not sure how I feel about this one yet. hmmmmm…

And for those that wanted to see what it looked like, here you go:

Last night I discovered that the template I was using here had been hacked. My apologies for those of you that noticed the generic viagra ad. It would be funny if it wasn’t annoying. I am now tinkering with a new template so things may get wonky as I make changes around nap time.

Lately I kind of seize up when I think about blogging. I feel like I am in the rut where the ONLY things I have to write about fall under the following categories: visits with GM, Mother’s job search, and flaunting Captain Adorable. Of course these are pretty huge themes to write within, but there are other things going on that I just feel like I can’t or shouldn’t write about.

Well, look, if I am going to be entirely honest there are emotions and anxieties and stress that I would love to vent and purge here, but I worry that to do so would really hurt my Mother’s feelings.

Not that I feel the need to attack her or say anything here that I don’t already say to her face, but some days I wish I could whine and moan and rage against the insanity of situations and know that it was safe to do so and that it wouldn’t upset her.

I think it is safe to say that things have been a bit tense at home. That is what happens when you toss two adults and an infant into a hot Florida environment with crazy variables like no income and differentiating view points on random things. How come MTV doesn’t want to film our real world? (by the way- even though I SWORE I wouldn’t- I totally started watching the new RW season. It will never be as amazing as those first few seasons…but I can’t not watch it.)

As you may or may not remember Mother was going to go out of town (out of state, really) to get a giant amount of hours for CLE. It was a great deal in a lovely location and it seemed like a smart thing to do. Only as the week loomed near I started to feel more and more like I shouldn’t go. And I really shouldn’t go with W.

Things like the super long drive in the car, the expense of a larger hotel room, not to mention expense of food and whatnots…it just seemed like it would be smarter for me to stay home. That way Mother could focus on the classes and maybe get out and network and mingle without the pull of offspring at the hotel. If I was Mother I would have been fine going solo, might even have embraced the adventure…but when I said that I no longer felt it was smart for me to go she no longer wanted to go.

And I felt like a giant asshole and other complicated shit that I won’t blog about…

Other stuff I am not ready to blog about yet:

1) How if the job luck doesn’t find us by the end of August we will need to move

2) How I have NO idea how we can find a place to rent when we don’t have jobs

3) How sad I am that the first months of W’s life have been filled with one giant lump of anxiety

4) How I feel like I should go out and try to find a job except that I am not ready to relinquish the care of W to anyone else

5) How I just want to get rid of everything we own and run away…

There was also a post I wanted to write about this new Lifetime show Drop Dead Diva and how seriously bummed out I was that I didn’t like it. Because (SPOILER ALERT) why did they have to kill the fat girl’s soul? My one liner take? It is fluff for the fluffy. It is also an epic waste of Margaret Cho.

I’m also seriously stressed that Kayla may be getting voted out tonight because, let’s be real, her solo was kind of tame.

And seriously- is Ed going to propose?

And how come no one ever tags me for a fucking blog meme anymore??

And is anyone else feeling like the BlogHer convention is summer camp for the cool kids? I hate myself for how bummed out I am that I am not going and I feel like all of my blog friends will meet up and braid each others hair and trade be-fri charms and then never come visit me in my whiny blog again.

I am so dull, dull, dull…

I am also spending my time being in awe over the power of the sun. I am addicted to sunning W’s cloth diapers. There you have it- the only reason I can think of today why it is good to live in Florida.

Yes. I sometimes sit and look out the window and watch his diapers bleach.

I think I might also be a blossoming agoraphobic.

So there is a bit of a continuing saga regarding the air conditioner in my room. To explain (as I am not sure I really have before), my bedroom suite is upstairs. Above the garage. It is a room that is sometimes referred to as a “bonus” room, and in some southern states a FROG (full room over garage). I live in Florida. It is hot here. This hotness necessitates that a separate A/C unit be employed for the upstairs living quarters.

And when that unit dies (where was the CNN coverage on that, Anderson Cooper?!) things get beyond just hot. They get funky and steamy and you can pretty much see the hot air sizzling in front of you.

In other words it is unfit for sleeping & W and I have been sleeping on a twin mattress on the floor of GM’s room since last week. Let me rephrase that, W has been sleeping. I have not. And at this point I am just cranky as hell.

I have been calling the A/C repair place* every day since the repair man left things a hot mess last friday. He actually left things worse as before he futzed with things at least I could get the fan to work. So I call and check on the status of things. And because I am nice and was raised well I call with a sort of apologetic tone to my voice. You know that, “I’m so sorry to have to call again, but…” girl? She is me.

Until today. Until I called and was placed on hold and bounced around from one clueless tech to the other until I finally got on the horn with some lady that is Queen of Parts. Turns out that they haven’t even ORDERED the part that my unit needs. Someone wrote a number down wrong and they had to track down the technician or some such excuse and it all boiled down to a giant delay.

And I might have just hung up and pouted a bit more, might have felt a bit more pathetic and lame for being the girl in a heat wave with no cool air above her bed. But then the lady says that she is walking out the door and will have to order the part on monday. Making giant delay a SUPER SIZED delay.

Excuuuuuuuuse me? Um. No. You are calling now.

She then tells me that she was supposed to leave at 4pm today and it is a holiday weekend and she needs to GO. Well, dear internets, you would have been proud. I went off. Monday would not do. Not at ALL. NO. You will call now. I even sufficiently raised my voice at her when her response to my reminding her that I have a 12 week old baby (yes. I milked it.) was that I “could just have him in a pamper to keep cool.”

I get that I am lucky enough to have cool air downstairs, but my sleep is all janked up because I can not sleep in my bed and it has been an epic wait and parts haven’t been ordered and rather than just put me on hold and make the fricken call you are going to get snippy with me?I’m trying to get snippy with YOU. Don’t infringe on my snippy with yours. Uncool. (literally)

Of course I bet as soon as she got off the phone with me she peed all over my file and lit it on fire and sang God Bless America.

*reminder that we are renters and at the mercy of our property managers as to where we can get repairs done.

That moment yesterday? The one where I got my laptop to finally churn ON and break through the grey screen? It only happened once. I was able to save all of my photos onto my new external hard drive. I was able to make a zip file of the photos and also save that to external hard drive. I was in the process of moving the zip file to a burn folder to make a back up cd of the photos when the computer gave up. Frozen status bar- for nearly 5 hours. I wish that I had moved things to flickr first. I wish I had gone through and really made sure I had all my documents backed up.

But all subsequent attempts at reviving the laptop have failed. I think she is a goner. And damn does that suck. Granted I have the ability to step back and thank the universe for the chance to go back the one time and save the photos- that is really all I care about to be honest.

But now I am in a full on pout. Now this means that until I get a new computer (ha ha ha) I can’t upload any photos and I can’t access any photos of mine that aren’t already on-line. My 11 year old imac does not have iphoto nor does it have the memory to upload photos from my camera.

It is sort of paralyzing to not have photo freedom. But, like I kep reminding myself, I saved the photos I had. Now I just have to take less photos (how?!!) and hope that the memory on my digital camera can hold up.

And ready for the full on whine? This just feels like another tip on the scale of awful in my life right now. It just seems like once I got the very thing I had hoped and prayed and begged the Universe for everything else went away. Lost cat, lost job, lost security, lost closeness with GM and now lost ability to have creative outlet. I know, I know- I must sound so obnoxious- but I am really fucking bummed.

It is a new month and I just hope that it is better than May. May can suck it.

My alarm went off at 6:30 this morning. I went back to bed. I woke up in a panic at 7:00am on the dot. Turned on the television to make sure the world had not blown up in the middle of the night. The tv happened to be on NBC so I listened as I made my bed and washed my face. And then I heard the voice. Heard the tone. Heard the statements. And my stomach groaned and my brain flickered.

Ann Coulter.

Oh my fucking GAWD. The things that come out of this woman’s mouth. I mean. HOLY SHIT. I mean it is beyond me that she comes up with this stuff and then even MORE beyond me that people buy into it.

COULTER: Yes, it’s very sensitive. Well, and it’s something that needs to be said. What I’m saying is there is no better example of victimizers who are treated like victims, and single mothers. This was not an accident that the illegitimacy rate has gone up 300 percent since 1970. This was a plan by liberals. Liberals claim…

COULTER: Seventy percent of the inmates in prisons right now come from single-parent families. Seventy percent of teenage runaways. Seventy percent of teenage delinquents, 70 percent of drug abuse. All of this is a problem, not just of illegitimacy, of single motherhood. And single motherhood is…

(above from here)

And also, according to Coulter, Single mother’s raise strippers.

She goes on and has plenty to say about Obama- especially in terms of race.

So let me just save you, my friends, change the channel if you see her. I still can’t get the taste of her hurtful and careless words out of my mind.

It is a very dangerous and unhelpful line of thought that equates crime with single Mothers. And to say that liberals and the media are helping establish a victimization of single motherhood is just nuts.

Three goods, three bads, I’m sad. Long post ahead.

Goods:

1) GM is 100% cancer free. Her mohs surgery went very well and she has 9 stitches on her right forearm that already seem to be healing nicely. We are to leave the bandages on until her followup on Wednesday with the surgical oncologist. In order to keep the bandages in place I have put a cut up tube sock on her right arm and she really gets a kick out of that. This morning, as I helped her make her 3rd trip to the bathroom in under 2 hours, she asked me if she would soon start wearing a shoe on that hand. heh.

2) We are home. We were released late yesterday after a HORRIBLE hospital experience. But if I am focusing in the the good right now- I am just going to celebrate that we are HOME.

3) In an entirely separate issue, but equally perceived as good, I finally relayed news about Snork to some people that I worried about- in terms of their reaction. The news was met by one with complete happiness and joy, and by another with stunned confusion, but seemingly pleasant. Next up is GM’s 87 year old cousin.

BADS:

1) The hospital stay was awful. Usually we have amazing nurses that are fantastically helpful and kind. If we ever encounter an issue with a nurse it is in getting them to understand that GM cannot speak for herself and that Mother & I must speak for her.  This hospital stay was beyond that. I can’t even get into all the ways that things went wrong. Nurses being snide with Mother, having to BEG, cry, demand medications, GM having not one, not two, but THREE psychotic breaks because her medication was not given to her in time. I’m talking it was 3-6 hours late in every instance.

All of GM’s Alzheimer’s symptoms are pretty much mental at this point. Agitation, depression, aggression, loss of reality. She is on a very powerful, but very effective and fine tuned cocktail of meds that have taken us three years to perfect. If she misses a dose- just one- we lose her. And by lose I mean she has no idea who she is, we are, where she is, how to speak and she begins to bite, scratch, kick, hit…you name it.

So imagine that hell is happening when a nurse finally comes in. The nurse not only gives the meds to Mother to give GM she actually LAUGHS when she sees GM trying to bite Mother’s fingers. She laughed and replied, “oh! She is mad at you!” ha ha. It was just bad and before we were checked out (after I raised the most GIANT scene you can imagine) we were sent some nurse liaison lady to try and smooth things over. Didn’t work. Now I will say that we did have two nurses that were amazing, kind, and loving towards GM. But the night nurses get no praise.

2) Diagnosis for GM: Primary biliary cirrhosis. FUCK. Basically it is an autoimmune disease that is causing her liver to attack itself. GM had an ultrasound and a CT scan and both showed not only a very, very bad liver, but also a very damaged spleen. Dr. Liver is going to take on GM’s case. Based on GM’s age and the advancement of the disease there is not much that can be done. She is on a new medication that will help prevent a massive bleed-out and that is all we can do. Thankfully she doesn’t currently have any of the symptoms associated with this disease- she just has the horrible blood work and horrible liver.

I’m sure I could go on about how shitty and fucked up this is, but I know you guys get it. I mean having the Alzheimer’s is horrible, then having to deal with the cancer was pretty crap, but now this? What the hell, Universe. Leave my Grandmother alone!

3) Guess who also has wonky blood in regards to liver function? Mother. There are some studies that show that this particular kind of cirrhosis is hereditary. Dr. Liver is also going to be doing a full workup on Mother and IF there is something going on we will hopefully have caught it in time. It freaks me out to no end to think that Mother could have this going on as well. She already has the autoimmune issues with her MS, having something else would suck infinity.  (I don’t seem to have any liver issues, thank goodness. When I went through the horrible hepatitis C scare last year Dr. Liver did a massive blood workup on me and my levels are all fine.)

So right now I am sad. I am tired, I feel defeated, I feel crapped on.

GM was chatty every time she needed to get up and already she has forgotten that she was in the hospital. That is a VERY good thing. I am hoping that by going directly back to her normal routine she will be, well her version of normal.

Wednesday we have the followup on GM’s arm and then the next week both GM & Mother have appointments with Dr. Liver. I will probably hunker down for a few days and be quiet on the internets. I can’t even find the words to explain how upset I am about all of this.