And another one bites the dust.

Pumpkin down, pumpkin down!

Ewwww.

P.S.  - I meant to post this a week ago, when I took the picture. Sorry.

Ummm...

My car has sporadically started not starting. Help!

Wait, did that make sense? Started not starting...

Anyway, when the kids and I went to leave from Alex's Taekwondo class tonight, Bob (yes, we've dubbed our car Bob, it stands for Bucket of bolts) wouldn't start. Ack!

Well, Bob finally started, but now I'm freaking out.

I know the battery is good because I just put a new one in, and my neighbor helped me replace the starter motor just a few months ago. What worries me is that this is exactly what happened when the starter motor went out.

Crap.

Sorry it's been quiet...

We had a garage sale today.

Pity me.

I hate doing garage sales. You get up at the butt crack o' dawn, spend countless hours beforehand getting all the stuff ready and schlepping it down out of the attic,  and then to add insult to injury you mark your stuff down to ridiculously low prices only to have people look at you like you're crazy when they ask you how much it is, after which they proceed to try and haggle you down. 'You want one dollar for that very nice, clean, almost brand new coat? How about twenty-five cents?'

Sigh.

I made about $30 all told. Oh well, at least it was enough to cover the gap to pay the portion of my electricity bill that will keep them from shutting off our power (which was the goal anyway).

Excuse me while I go collapse.

The Great Gummy Bear Saga of 2011

If you ever get the urge to buy your kid a giant gummy bear, do yourself a favor. Don't.

Now while this might seem like common sense to most people, it apparently wasn't to me.

I was in World Market at some point during the summer and saw these huge gummy bears. I'm telling you these suckers were at least five and a half inches tall and three inches wide. Stupid me thinks, 'Oh, cool, Alex loves gummy bears. He'll totally flip when I bring home this giant one. How fun will that be?'

Bad idea.

Well, the reaction was what I wanted. He loved it, and I felt like super-mom until super-mom got the bright idea to take said giant gummy bear over to grandma's house the next day to show her. Now I have to point out that it was high summer in our neck of the woods, and at this point temperatures were reaching the mid if not the high nineties every day.

Back to the gummy bear.

Alex showed grandma, who thought it was cool (if a bit weird) and then he promptly forgot it in the car that night. Sigh.

Sometime the next afternoon we were heading back over to my mom's house and I opened the car door to a horrific sight.

Alex had left the gummy bear in its plastic case in the front seat.

The gummy bear melted in the ninety plus degree heat, oozed out of the packaging and left an enormous puddle of red, sticky goo all over the front car seat.

Words cannot express.

Have you ever tried pulling up a melted, giant, gummy bear off of your car seat? No, I bet you haven't because you are probably a sensible, sane human being that doesn't buy the stupid giant gummy bear in the first place. It was like pulling up tar, it was like pulling silly putty out of the carpet (yep, done that too), it was like trying to get gum out of hair (haven't actually had to do that one. yet). Oh. My. Gosh. 

The good news is that, with ALOT of hot water and soap, my car seat is surprisingly no worse for the wear.

I never. ever. want to have to do anything like that again. But, knowing myself, and unfortunately I know myself pretty well, I'm sure that something ridiculous like this will happen again in the near future.

I'm overdue you see, it's just how my life works.

Spider!!!

This is what I almost ran into when I went to take the trash out the other night.

I know, I know, the picture is blurry. I really wish that I had gotten a good shot of the thing, it was huge.

The dang thing had strung a web from the edge of our gutter to a tiki torch on the other side of our patio. It must have been ten feet long.

The web, not the spider.

The spider itself was nothing to shake a stick at either though. If I had to guess, I would have to say that the body was about the size of a quarter. Shudder.

I Have Been to a Custody Court Hearing, Nothing Can Scare Me Ever Again

First of all, on the absolutely highest note ever, the custody case went in my favor.

Thank God.

I don't think that I really knew how much this was scaring me and weighing on me until it was over. The thought of my kids having go all the way to California for every other holiday and three weeks during the Summer made my heart cold in ways that I can't even begin to describe, and that was what I considered to be the best possible outcome. I really thought that it was going to be worse.

It went better than I could ever possibly have hoped. Apparently having the other parent show absolutely zero interest in the court proceedings tends to tilt things in your favor.

Go figure.

So, I have sole custody and visits are to be here in North Carolina. He and I get to decide when and how long any visits would be. Which is amazing. I would love for him to come out here and visit, I think that it would be great for the kids. We'll see what happens this Summer I guess.

On an absolutely hysterical note, there were only three other people in the courtroom besides myself and another girl who happened to have the same lawyer as I did (she was in a similar situation and things went well for her in court too, I was so glad). Anyway, the court session began with role call, and the other people in the room weren't on the roster. One gentleman was there for a traffic violation that had to be handled at another courthouse, he left. The two people left (who also ended up going to another courthouse) were a man and a woman that sat on the opposite side of the room from each other. The judge asked them why they were there, and the woman stood up and said:

"Your honor, we're here on account of I tried to kick his a**, and he was gonna press charges, but we worked things out and he don't wanna press charges no more."

God's honest truth.

At the very least it made for a good ice breaker.

Just To Let You Know

I've survived the bus route so far.

I'll put up a more in-depth post later because I'm just picking Sarah up from my mom's right now. I just wanted to let you all know that I was still alive, and yes, the kids are still intact.

(And so is the bus)

(And so is all the public and private property that I drove by)

Watch Out World!

I'm driving a schoolbus.

The school informed me that I needed to get my CDL license and that I would probably be given a route. No, you don't have a choice, and if you don't take a route you won't have a job either. Thank you sir, may I have another.

Yikes.

I was told in the beginning of the year that I wouldn't have to drive a bus because I was working in a special ed classroom and I had 30 hours a week. Full-time staff isn't required to drive a bus. Well, apparently that provision is flexible depending on the needs of the school. In other words, if we need you to drive, your gonna drive. Great.

So, starting today, little ol' me will be driving a schoolbus. A schoolbus! I was afraid to start driving a normal car! I didn't want to drive so much that I postponed getting my license until I was 18.

Lord help me.

To make matters worse, I rode the route with the old driver and the new afternoon driver (I'll be driving mornings) on Friday. Our bus, is a fossil. This was the bus in the bus lot that the trainer took us on for five minutes, just to show us. He walked us on saying the words, and I  qutoe: "Oh, you'll never have to drive one of these, but I want you to get a look at one just in case."

Thanks Bo.

To top off the fact that we're driving this wreck, we also found out that there is a really bad turnaround on the route. The road we have to turn around on is unfortunately very accurately named Point's End.

It's one lane.

With a lawn on one side and trees, shrubs and mud on the other.

You have to execute a five-point turn in a bus. A school bus, for those of you who are curious, weighs in at 32,000 lbs, is 8 feet tall, and 40 feet long.

40 feet.

And I have to do a five-point turn in it. AHHHHHHHH!

Hang on a second while I stop hyperventilating.

Ok, I think I'm alright now. The only saving grace is that I'm driving so early (6:15) that there won't be anyone on the roads, and I'll be able to do my turnaround before any kids are on the bus. The last thing I need is a bunch of Highschoolers witnessing my humiliation and my destruction of private and public property...

Wish me luck, and if I don't write for a while you'll know that I'm out looking for work.

~ Jen

I'm Sorry, We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties...

So I was working at The Grocery Store Friday night, and it was about 11:30. At this point in the night, it's just me, the overnight manager, and the stockers. A young man walked in and handed me some coupons for two free packs of cigarettes, and I didn't think anything of it. I rang him up, and my register required an override from a manager because the free product went above a certain amount. No big deal, right? Right. I paged my manager, he came up to the front, and did the override.

His password didn't work.

He tried it again. His password still didn't work.

Yikes.

You see, when the register requires an override, there's no way to continue ringing anything else up until you resolve the override. Sigh.

Now we normally don't have anyone (and I'm not exaggerating here, I really mean that the store is empty) in the store at this time of night, but tonight (of course) we had five other people in line. Twenty minutes, two phone calls, one grumpy woken up manager, and five pissed off customers later, we finally got another drawer open and I was able to check out the rest of the folks in line.

I'm surprised they didn't riot.

Gosh, I love working at The Grocery Store.

Don't Try This at Home

I'm car-less, which is a sad state to be in.

Well, I suppose that I'm technically not car-less because I'm currently borrowing my Grandmother's car.

The Grey Ghost.

It's a '95 Ford Taurus that's a wing and a prayer away from falling apart. The air-conditioning is broken, the windshield wipers are on the verge of giving out, and the parking brake light is always on. All this doesn't bother me one little bit, (except when it's raining and I can't defog the windows because the air-conditioner's broken) I'm just grateful to have a car that will get me to and from work.

Thursday, however, was a different story.

I had just pulled into the parking lot at school, and I was putting lipstick on before going into work. I turned the rearview mirror so that I could see... and it came off in my hand. No, I'm not kidding. It took me a second to comprehend that the rearview mirror had just detached from the windshield.

So, for the last two days, I've been driving around with no rearview mirror. It's been fun. And nerve-wracking, and dangerous. Oh, and did I mention nerve-wracking?

My first priority tomorrow is to go down to Auto Zone and get epoxy so I can stick the damn thing back on...

Ouch

I have the upper cartilage in my ear pierced. This,

is what my earring used to look like.

This,

is what it looks like now. This damage was done while it was
In. My. Ear.

I was at work, bending over to undo the drain on a sink, and when I stood up, my earring caught on the edge of the sink. I honestly thought that I had ripped it out of my ear.

Yeah.

Ouch.