Yeah I am blogging too much today and all of it is kind of blah, but I feel compelled to blog.

I itch. All over. It is like an itch from the inside, like the itch level of extremely itchy hives or a mosquito bite. But it feels like it isn't on the surface of my skin but inside. If I go to scratch it, I end up scratching so hard I bruise myself. I am covered in red marks and bruises from trying to itch my itch.

I take Benadryl but only at bed time because I am an extremely cheap date on the stuff and fall asleep like I am narcoleptic. So maybe I still itch in my sleep but I am nearly comatose so I am not sure. I wake up with bruises but how do I know if they are from the day (and finally showing) or the night?

It is driving me freaking insane.

Oh and my iPhone and blogger are neon weird so I can't make titles :(

So, we own two homes. That makes people hate me l, like I am some über rich jerk wad. But my mom owns 2.5 homes (one is a shared ownership with her mom) and my mom is a retired school teacher. Not exactly über rich.

Anyways, with that off my chest, we have home A a large (well small by a McMansion standpoint, below 2,000 sq foot) custom home in the forest at nearly 5,000 feet up. And all homes are "custom", no tract homes. Even my home-of-childhood, a very rustic ca in from 1926 is "custom built". But again I am getting wordy.

Home B is an "investment" in the Tracy home suburbs at a much lower and desert-like elevation. It is not much larger than 1,000 square feet and on a postage stamp sized lot. Seriously I could hear my husband go pee, and I was in the driveway.

We rent out home B but have crashed here for a few months to refurb it (the lawn was burnt brown desert dead) an to, well, be lazy. We move down some furnishings and have live here a few months.

I dunno where to live.

Home A has its pluses; roomy, feels like home, really pretty, better kitchen and bathroom, bigger yard, super close knit friendly community (even our meth addicts are generally very congenial), it gets all four seasons, has lots of outdoor fun activities, and has rather low crime. No gangs.

Home A sucks though. There are few amenities of civilization. We have fast food, sure, if you like Mc Donald's. we have restaurants if you like food from the grocer's freezer section. We have clothes shops if you like thrift stores. We have anything you need, if you want it used and rusty and overpriced for tourists visiting the "quaint" shops. We have a grocer if you like overpriced expired goods with a white trash style of cuisine. So basically you drove 45-60 minutes to get to stuff like Targer, Trader Joes, Home Depot, JC Penny's, Babies R Us etc. it kinda sucks.

Then add in deep fog. People common of fog and I pshaw them with "back on my day" one-upping stories. You know those yellow dashes on a road? Even been unable to see a dash ahead? The dash in front of you fading into gray?didn't think so. Add in rock slides, mud slides, and a 5,000 foot vertical drop and you almost have our roads in winter. Add in snow (and we don't salt the roads) and inexperienced drivers, 60 mph winds, and hairpin turns and voila, welcome to my commute.

You get cabin fever and if you are as blind as me, the bad weather means you do not drive. You are stuck at home. Suddenly a trip to the post office or crapy grocers is like fri king Disneyland.

Then home B has our favorite gym nearby. Seriously, I hate exercising but I actually want to at this gym. And who doesn't want to be healthy? And there is so much to do, so many places to go. Every day I go to "town" probably 3x a day. It's fun! And we do not get snow, fog, mudslides... And the roads are straight and flat. I don't get cabin fever.

But I hate the 110 degree summer heat and lack of seasons. I want to go outside but it is hot, and a teeny yard sucks. I see gang graffiti and encounter traffic jams. I have guns drawn in my front yard. I can't see the stars. The house isn't built too well, so you can hear the dog fart three rooms away. And with two large dogs, two cats, two adults, and a toddler...with one adult as a p/t SAHM and a hubby who works from home, it gets claustrophobic.

We have to spend a sh1t ton to move to house A and keep putting it off. I mean we stayed in house B for 3 months now for a reason, right? If we move to house A, we take a risk and cannot move again. Ever. No private schools or culture for my son. But yet there is nature and nice people and a nice home. If we stay in house B we have to get rid of house A in a not so kosher cool way.

I just dunno what to do. I do not want to make a mistake because it will be a life long mistake. It could be financially crappy too. But we are running out of time to decide.

Sigh.

Bracelets or gray sweats? This is why I may have taken AP French IV in high school and passed with an A-, a semester of Japanese (A) and two years of Spanish(A grades all semesters) and still cannot understand a spoken word of any damned foreign language. Including, occasionally, my mother tongue of English. Since I can't think of an example in another language, here's an example in English. Gray sweats (as in sweat pants) sounds like bracelets to me.

So in another language, (but using English here in my example) someone could have an entire conversation with me would be about a cute pair of gray sweats and I'd be thinking, wait what did you just say? Oh, bracelets. I like bracelets. Soft fuzzy ones? Bracelets aren't soft and fuzzy. And then the entire conversation about gray sweats is over and I missed the entire talk because I was baffled about gray sweats. And like five sentences of translations behind the conversation.

Christmas-Birthday

I hate that my birthday is so close to Christmas. I'm not referring to those people that whine and moan about a birthday so close to Christmas, you know, on December 3rd or January 14th. They don't get my sympathy.

See, I celebrate my birthday when, in other parts of the world it's Christmas. That is too close to Christmas my friends.

Ever opened your birthday gifts under the Christmas tree? Ever had them wrapped in Christmas paper? Ever been told to open them on Christmas to appease family? Ever not had a birthday party cause no one can come?

For a few years as a child, my mom mom gave me a birthday party in June. She called them half birthdays. This gave me the childhood right of passage, a bonafide party with games, streamers, cake, friends, gifts without pine needles and Santa paper.

As an adult I have come to accept my crappy birth date but yeah... I am still a bit bitter, my childhood left a bad taste for birthdays in my mouth.

The day my life changed

Today I make a life altering decision. Okay the decision has been made in my head but must be made in life, acted upon. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. I will be persecuted and ostracized by many. But I am doing what I feel is right, correcting a mistake.

I will let you, my readers, know how it goes and what "it" is. I hate posts where you're like WTF is she talking about, just tell us! But there is a valid reason why I'm keeping you in the dark.

Just know this...family comes first.


(And yippee week two of the nablopomo challenge begins! A post a day!)

The votes are in

I didn't really care about politics until my mid twenties. Before that, I'd vote for who my friends liked or for what hot issue was the topic of conversation on campus. I would never really put thought into it.

2004 came about and, well, I still didn't really care about politics. I had started my first job , a teacher in an inner city school, and I was busy. Who cares about politics when you have three hours of work after the kids leave?

I remember election night well. I had dispassionately sent in my absentee ballot and flopped on the couch to relax. On a school break that had just started, I wanted to just sit there like a bowl of jello and do nothing. No housework, no intellectual stimulation, no politics or anything. Just me and my ice cold beer.

My husband had different thought and was glued to CNN. I tried to find a distraction and came up short. I slowly peeled the label off mybbeer, too lazy to do anything more exciting. I tried to let the tv turn into white noise as I melted into the suede and tried to craft beer-label paper airplanes.

Suddenly, my plane was half made and I was sitting upright. Numbers flashed on the screen, maps turned red, and the real excitement began. It looked like a winner would be announced. In all the hoopla and excitement, I got intrigued. Or maybe i like sparkly things, cheers and jeers, and info graphics complete with musak. Or maybe I had too much beer. Either way, I was drawn in. Who would win? Who did Delaware, a state I knew nothing about, vote for? What is proposition- whatever about and why is everyone cheering? Wait, if he wins, what does that mean? Why didn't I pay attention before, dammit! This moment would determine my future. My future was at stake!

My husband and I watched the results on the screen as the President accepted a second term. We lifted our beers and toasted to the future.

We toasted to OUR future, symbolized by Election Day. Sure we had the same president again (for better or for wprse) but to us, we had new beginnings. We celebrated not a second term, but a second night together as a married couple. On that honeymoon, I really grew up. I became a wife and an adult who cared about politics. I had our future at stake.

Insomnia

It is almost midnight and I am wide awake. As in, I could go run on the treadmill kind of awake. As in why can't I be this alert in the daytime kind of awake.

When I usually encounter this I take a Benadryl and crash out. We are our I'f Benadryl. I'm screwed.

At least I know the nature of the beast tonight.

We were going to move but now, probably not. We are doing a load mod, or trying to, which is stressful. I just found a great daycare but its where we were going to move and it opens when I'm scheduled to begin work. An hour away. And my overly sensitive son will not do well there, I just know it. And I worry he needs speech therapy because he is about at the level of your average one year old (meaning just turned one) as he is stomaching his second year of life. And my hubby is snoring and I can not and never have been able to sleep if someone's snoring. And I am likely quitting my job. After gas and day care I come out negative so why work? It's stressing my son out. Hubby's job has been threatened- he can no longer miss work to watch or pick up my son early. I feel the grading policy and school culture fosters apathy and cheating, and the kids just refuse to do work and instead disrupt me and throw paper wads cause they can. Nothing can be done to change that. So why work? Add in the elections and ugh. My pick was 3rd party so of course a loss but the winner? Don't like him one bit. You can love him, each to their own and most of my friends love h. That's okay, I just think differently. But four more years depresses me. I got through the 8 Bush years, ugh, but was in my carefree 20s and didn't really care. And I lost an election I ran for; I ran locally and knew I'd lose but it still sucks. Oh and my moms visiting; I love her but she stresses me out more than any other person on Earth.

So yeah. I can't sleep. It's now past midnight, my stomach in knots, a sub called for my class tomorrow ( stress is making me feel crappy) and to boot I am worried they won't get a sub. Gr. stop worrying and start sleeping.

And so ends my stream of consciousness, off to find some website to lull me to sleep. I hope.