As if I didn't have enough going on this week with multiple markups, an angry bovine, an upset colon (Batman), and worrying about what to wear clubbing with my Gay Husband on Saturday so as not to embarrass him in front of his friends, a baby migraine came to visit on Tuesday. He decided to invite some friends and have a party in my right eye yesterday. Today he seems to have invited a marching band.
Because I am not one to suffer in silence, I took some Excedrin Migraine yesterday morning. Then some more in the afternoon. And some more before taking to my bed when I finally got home late last night. This morning, as I tipped the bottle and shook meds into my hand, I noted the label reads "Do not take more than two in a 24 hour period." Because it was first thing in the morning, my head/eye throbbed, and I didn't get any sleep the night before, I swallowed the pills before the meaning of the words sank in. Great, an overdose is exactly what I needed today. I'm a frickin' moron.
Hi, my name is Jill and I have a drug problem.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Do NOT anger the domesticated farm animals
In case you're wondering where I am, some Jokers made a bovine angry AND gave Batman some, ahem, gastrointestinal issues. Busy little Jokers...
Friday, April 20, 2012
Challenge Accepted
I am a horrible accessorizer. I can put an outfit together, do my hair, but I can't coordinate accessories (nor can I change up my makeup, but I'll let B address that sometime since makeup is her thing.) This week, I have challenged myself to accessorize my outfit each day.
Now that Robin isn't trying to kill himself every 30 seconds, I have an extra five or ten minutes each morning to do my hair, pull together an outfit, and add a little extra something. It really is amazing what a difference a belt and a necklace can make. Or a ring and a bracelet. Voila! It's an entirely different look.
This week was a huge success, until today. Don't get me wrong. I tried. But my skinny dark jeans, white t, and black jacket just don't look right. They sound like they should, but they don't. The accessory of the day today is a Glamour black out bar over my face.
Now that Robin isn't trying to kill himself every 30 seconds, I have an extra five or ten minutes each morning to do my hair, pull together an outfit, and add a little extra something. It really is amazing what a difference a belt and a necklace can make. Or a ring and a bracelet. Voila! It's an entirely different look.
This week was a huge success, until today. Don't get me wrong. I tried. But my skinny dark jeans, white t, and black jacket just don't look right. They sound like they should, but they don't. The accessory of the day today is a Glamour black out bar over my face.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
RIP
Blanchard, Michael "Flathead"
1944 ~ 2012
A Celebration of the life of Michael "Flathead" Blanchard will be held on April 14th, 3 pm 8160 Rosemary St, Commerce City. Weary of reading obituaries noting someone's courageous battle with death, Mike wanted it known that he died as a result of being stubborn, refusing to follow doctors' orders and raising hell for more than six decades. He enjoyed booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died.
Mike was born July 1944 in Colorado to Clyde and Ethel Blanchard. A community activist, he is noted for saving the Dr. Justina Ford house from demolition and defending those who could not defend themselves. He was a Republican delegate, life member of the NRA, founder and President of the Dead Cats MC. He loved music.
Mike was preceded in death by Clyde and Ethel Blanchard, survived by his beloved sons Mike and Chopper, former wife Jane Transue, brother Stephen Blanchard (Susan), Uncle Don and Aunt Cynthia Blanchard(his favorite); Uncle Dill and Aunt Dot, cousins and nephews, Baba Yaga can kiss his butt. So many of his childhood friends that weren't killed in Vietnam went on to become criminals, prostitutes and/or Democrats. He asks that you stop by and re-tell the stories he can no longer tell. As the Celebration will contain Adult material we respectfully ask that no children under 18 attend.
1944 ~ 2012
A Celebration of the life of Michael "Flathead" Blanchard will be held on April 14th, 3 pm 8160 Rosemary St, Commerce City. Weary of reading obituaries noting someone's courageous battle with death, Mike wanted it known that he died as a result of being stubborn, refusing to follow doctors' orders and raising hell for more than six decades. He enjoyed booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died.
Mike was born July 1944 in Colorado to Clyde and Ethel Blanchard. A community activist, he is noted for saving the Dr. Justina Ford house from demolition and defending those who could not defend themselves. He was a Republican delegate, life member of the NRA, founder and President of the Dead Cats MC. He loved music.
Mike was preceded in death by Clyde and Ethel Blanchard, survived by his beloved sons Mike and Chopper, former wife Jane Transue, brother Stephen Blanchard (Susan), Uncle Don and Aunt Cynthia Blanchard(his favorite); Uncle Dill and Aunt Dot, cousins and nephews, Baba Yaga can kiss his butt. So many of his childhood friends that weren't killed in Vietnam went on to become criminals, prostitutes and/or Democrats. He asks that you stop by and re-tell the stories he can no longer tell. As the Celebration will contain Adult material we respectfully ask that no children under 18 attend.
Published in Denver Post on April 12, 2012
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/denverpost/obituary.aspx?n=michael-blanchard-flathead&pid=156944598
No relation, but I would love for my obituary to read like this someday.
No relation, but I would love for my obituary to read like this someday.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
NYT Op-Ed
Phony Mommy Wars
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 17, 2012
Ann Romney is a good mom.
She’s also a good pol.
And though her people skills are far superior to Mitt’s, it turns out that Ann is just as capable as her husband of turning an advantage into a disadvantage.
After the liberal strategist Hilary Rosen clumsily mocked Mitt Romney for relying on Ann to tell him what issues women care about when “his wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” Ann smashed that lob back.
Blasting out her first tweet, she said: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.”
Shaken Democrats dived for cover and threw Rosen under the campaign bus. The media, worried about being perceived as favoring President Obama, jumped in on the side of the maligned Ann.
She pressed her advantage, scolding Rosen on Fox News. “She should have come to my house when those five boys were causing so much trouble,” Ann said. She alluded to her brave battles against breast cancer and multiple sclerosis: “Look, I know what it’s like to struggle.”
But at a fund-raiser at a private home in Palm Beach, Fla., on Sunday, the night before her 63rd birthday, Ann made it clear that she wasn’t really aggrieved. She was feigning aggrievement to milk the moment.
“It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it,” a gleeful Ann told the backyard full of Florida fat cats, sounding “like a political tactician,” as Garrett Haake, the NBC reporter on the scene, put it.
It’s important when you act the martyr not to overplay your hand. If you admit out loud to a bunch of people — including Haake, who was on the sidewalk enterprisingly eavesdropping — that you’re just pretending to be offended, you risk looking phony, like your husband. (It also doesn’t fly to tell Diane Sawyer that your dog “loved” 12 hours in a crate on top of the car or that it’s “our turn” to be in the White House.)
The candidate, meanwhile, continued to look phony by presenting a completely different side of himself to the wealthy Palm Beach donors who came in fancy cars to eat snapper and hear a snappier Mitt.
Rather than making bland pronouncements or parsing patriotic songs, as he usually does, Mitt gave a more specific vision of a Romney White House, including the possible elimination of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which his dad once led, and vivisecting the Department of Education. He also talked about ways he might close tax loopholes for the affluent — another matter he hasn’t been too detailed about — to pay for his cuts in tax rates.
Mitt offered a different view of the value of working parents in January when he talked about how he changed welfare rules as governor of Massachusetts:
“I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, well, that’s heartless. And I said, no, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It will cost the state more providing that day care, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.”
So the dignity of work only applies to poor moms?
This latest kerfuffle is piffle, but it is another instance of Republicans dragging women back to the past to re-litigate issues they thought were long settled.
Just as women had assumed their contraception rights were safe, they had considered the tiresome debate about working moms versus stay-at-home moms over. My mom stayed home to raise five kids, and she is my feminist role model.
For the most part, nobody’s casting aspersions on anybody else’s choices, which are often driven by economics. Women have so many choices that they’re overwhelmed by the stress of so many choices.
The real issue is whether Mitt, a tycoon who has been swathed in an old-fashioned cocoon, understands the plight of working mothers and the rights of 21st-century women.
When the Romneys got married and moved to Boston in 1971 so Mitt could attend Harvard, they set up house in a suburb, befriended other young Mormon couples and kept to their cloistered, conservative, privileged, traditional, white, heterosexual circle.
Campuses were roiling with change — feminism, civil rights, antiwar demonstrations — but the Romneys were not part of that. They were throwbacks.
“The parental roles were clear,” Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write in “The Real Romney.” “Mitt would have the career, and Ann would run the house.”
We will see if these affluent, soon-to-be owners of a car elevator in La Jolla and members of the horsey set can relate to the economic problems of regular people.
Given how secretive and shape-shifting Mitt Romney is, we’ll probably have to keep eavesdropping to find out.
I feel very strongly about the Mommy Wars, but even more so about how that plays out in politics. I'm a mom and work full time. I have the luxury of saying that's my choice but I think the majority of working women don't have the same luxury. Working mothers worry about quality affordable daycare (a must), keeping the boss happy, whether a traffic accident will keep them from picking up the children before closing time, what to have for dinner, whether laundry will get done, how the bills will get paid (both literally and figuratively, because the checks don't write themselves), and a million other things. At home moms also worry about some of these things, but not others.
I don't deny that Ann Romney worked hard when she was home raising her five boys (FIVE! I have two and I have no idea how she kept her sanity!) but I can say that Ann has no inkling of my life. She cannot relate to being a middle class working mother.
I have serious concerns about the future of women in this country. Employer sponsored health insurance gives me access to birth control which, in turn, has allowed The Spouse and I to decide how/when/what size of family we would like to have. This has allowed me the freedom to work outside the home (I couldn't afford daycare for more children). If it weren't for our health insurance, I would have to turn to a clinic such as Planned Parenthood. Attacks on Planned Parenthood are not just promoting a right to life agenda, it's an attack on working/poor/lower class women who don't have other means of birth control. Sure, some of those whores and sluts shouldn't be fornicating outside of the marital bed (nod to you Catholics and Evangelicals), but a good portion of them are married women without other options.
Preventing women from taking control of their reproduction prevents women from financial self sufficiency and keeps them tied to the home. Perhaps in the eyes of Ann Romney, an upper class woman and a Mormon - a church that celebrates large families - that's a good thing. In the eyes of this working mother it's not.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
What I Did Today
I saw Space Shuttle Discovery fly over the National Mall today. I was just outside the White House, on the lawn. Yes, my job has some perks. The commute is terrible, but the perks are worth it. Most days.
Monday, April 16, 2012
While I've Been Away
My friends Brad and Angie got engaged. Blah. Whatever. I'm so over them. Frankly, I can't stand them and the only reason we are friends is because we joined the same online mommy support group during our second pregnancies and now our kids are all besties, except that Batman and Robin keep pestering me to let them ride on Mad's dad's motorcycle and buy them Nerf guns and stuff. Sheesh, I can't get a break. But Robin and Knox are inseparable and Zahara lets me play with her kitchen (girlfriend has got some bad hair). I have to perfect my skills before I bring home my Haitian baby (shh, let's keep that on the down low so that bitch Angie doesn't get my daughter before I do.)
Also, the boy wonder who stole my job was promoted to Dear Leader of North Korea had a pretty major embarrassment big joke played on the world press. He invited everyone over to watch a long range rocket launch, then exploded it just to show that he could. Rumor has it, the rocket isn't the only thing that Kim Jong Un has that prematurely explodes, if you get my gist. (Yes, I started that rumor right here, but I'm still bitter I was passed over for the dictator position.)
I'm wearing a fancy new ring and bracelet today. Not as fancy as Angie's, but who's competing (besides her)?
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Fear not, fans, I have returned from the great heartland of America, escaped unscathed from the clutches of the Bible Belt, and scored points with the Spouse. Yes, I survived five days in Kansas with my in-laws!* I have stories to tell and pictures to post, but the Jokers are keeping me busy catching up at work. Back later with updates.
Your Dear Leader,
Jill
*Ok, I kinda won the lottery when it comes to in-laws, but it's un-American not to complain about the inlaws.
Your Dear Leader,
Jill
*Ok, I kinda won the lottery when it comes to in-laws, but it's un-American not to complain about the inlaws.
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