Plain old regular insanity

So...I may have mentioned before that I tend to have this vivid idiot morbid imagination. My tendency is to imagine things that never happen...except in horror novels, television shows narrated by Jon Walsh, COPS, Unsolved Mysteries, or Will Smith movies. More on this in a second... Here in Portland, it's Kindergarten Roundup time. For us, this entails numerous trips to all the schools we'd LIKE Milo to get into. Portland Public Schools work this way:

• You can go to the public school to which you are assigned by district boundaries.
• You can go to private school.
• You can home school.

Or

• You can put your kid's name in a lottery for up to 3 public schools of your choice, including any public school not in your neighborhood, and something called "public charters", which function like private schools and focus on art, math, environmental living, or some other specialty.

Or

• You can sign up for demi-public school lotteries for some slightly MORE specialized charter schools. Their lotteries are held separately from the public school lottery.

Confused yet? Our local school is ok. But not all that great. Their test scores are low. Their primary focus is on ESL (English as a 2nd language). We'll register there, but we're hoping to get into one of our lottery schools. So, every couple of evenings, Jamie & I find someone to watch the kids while we go to these mandatory roundup and miscellaneous get-to-know-you meetings at the lottery schools. Our kids go to an amazing preschool with a zillion teachers per classroom, fenced property with secure entrances, organic food, lots of staff vetting and reporting. Here's what I've learned: Kindergarten is not like preschool. Kindergarten is all...just like it was when I went. Big open spaces; no locks or keycards or gatekeepers; big playgrounds, big kids, big expectations; one teacher per 20+ students. It's just overwhelming and my imagination goes into crazy-lady overdrive. On each of these tours, all I can think is: "This is where someone could just stand and shoot at the kids" "This is where the kidnapper would hide and nobody would notice him" "That teacher looks SO depressed. What if she shoots herself in front of the kids?" "WHAT? They grow their own vegetables HERE in this garden where anybody could come along and inject POISON into the EGGPLANT???" Milo is ready for kindergarten. He's nervous, but looking forward to it. Me? I'm going to sit on the street outside the building all day looking for poisoning suicidal alien vegetable nappers.

Hey, Universe, you're a funny...um, entity

You know what the Universe threw at me yesterday? Free winnings! I donated to our local Public Radio station like I do...most every year. Usually. And THIS YEAR, I WON A GIVEAWAY!!! Prizes included: NEW BIKES! FLAT PANEL TV's! IPOD! TRIP TO EUROPE! MAC AIR!!! TRIP TO EUROPE!!!! (I know - twice, but it's what I so wanted) We won...free basketball tickets in a suite. You know what we don't really get into? Basketball. Like...never in the 7+ years of our relationship and never in the almost-39-years-of-my-life. HOWEVER...this year, Jamie is slated to have his surgery sometime soon (dates still unknown) after this game. So he's going to have himself a PARTAY with his Dude friends! Catered suite! VIP parking! BASKETBALL! It's funny. There are a lot of things I'd like to do for Jamie, and this isn't what would have EVER occurred to me, but...it's sort-of a cool thing I never would have imagined. So, thanks, Universe, for being WAY smarter than me I Rebekah.

Cowboy kittens sapped my will to live

Thanks to Captain Dumbass, I was reminded of something: I'm lame. Here's why:

About 3 years ago, we moved to a neighborhood on the edge of Portland's SE industrial district: "Brooklyn" - known for many years (although less so lately) as "porn town" due to the many - now defunct - porn theaters/clubs in it's business district. Porn-town was a step up for us.

Porn-town Waffle house is 100+ years old. It has "character" and also, weird decorating choices made by previous tenants. When we moved in, we had many many good intentions: First up? Rip out wallpaper! Including: Giant pansies! Beers of the world! (seriously, wallpaper comprised of international beer labels) And, my favorite, COWBOY KITTENS!
I spent long hours ripping out carpets only to find day-glo orange and turquoise painted wooden floors beneath them. I then sanded carpet glue that had been laid directly on top of the painted fir floors. We scraped yards of wallpaper and then I painted. Sealed. Paint paint paint.

In about a week, the 2 bedrooms and office were shiny and awesome. Except for...Cowboy Kittens. The bathroom. It needed a full overhaul, as not only were the walls covered in kittens AND faux burlap AND baby-poop-painted trim, but the cheap linoleum tile was coming up, the sink leaked and the shower had been put in not according to code and required some work just to make it functional.

Here is the sucking part: I suck at finishing projects. Seriously. Suck. Just ask my backsplash tiling project, my red-barrel project, my doll-making project. They'll tell you: SUCK!

Jamie sucks too, in this way, so together we're just one, loving, sucking couple. Fine...except? Cowboy Kittens (and the yard, and the garage, and the basement...) To date? One wall is wallpaper-free, and the other walls are covered in the results of haphazard, occasional picking at the ends of wallpaper while the picker is in the bathroom.

Some day, as Wizard is my witness, we will defeat those kittens...

Who's your daddy?

A brief history of bad hair...

In the spirit of it being Monday, and me having had a full day of GAH! (in the form of a HUGE bounced payment check from this stupid 2nd job I shouldn't have taken - seriously evil karma for them, but also seriously painful for me to wait for them to just effing PAY ME! and then the boy believing that although halloween-is-over-chocolate-is-forever-so-give-me-chocolate-CHOCOLATE-NOW-NOW-NOW), well, I'm just all...not writing a blog post or including cute clogging kittens with pitchforks today. I'm all the other way today. Instead of that post? Inspired by Steenky Bee, but omitting her deep love of all things Sarah Connor, a history of hair: HS senior photo, juxtaposed with me a year ago. Oh, so beautiful 80's...

Clearly, HAIR CONTROL has always been a problem...

Is there a dog on that child's head? Dear lord, no. It's just HAIR! And then came the bangs... And the posing...oh.

The hell?

Note the so-beautiful PAISLEY JEANS in those last 2 photos. I think I was overfond of them... Hair control. I just don't have the gift. Or the posing thing. That too.

Identity

(aka fun with my crappy Photshop skillz) You always wonder where you might have ended up, don't you? Don't you? Do you? Well...I do. Because, as I've already established, I live in the past, I often think about all the paths I took but reverted. Or messed up. Or just barely went one way instead of another. Let's just see what that might have looked like, had I not changed majors and divorced and then divorced and changed majors...and then moved to Oregon: Here's one: Mormon mom. How do you know she's Mormon? White shirts. Because? Are you kidding? Who puts kids in white?...There's a whole life averted in this picture.
Or this is totally cute: OK, frankly, I've never quite been here. A couple of protests that could have gone awry, but...mainly no. I did date a couple of future felons though. And made some poor roommate choices in college which could have gotten me here.

[Note: when your parents offer to pay for religious college, which you acquiesce to under duress and out of poverty, because you drank too much didn't study hard enough to keep your full-ride scholarship at the state school; and then your religious-college roommate says she's "bucking the system" at said college by "dealing a little", DON'T try to "be cool" by letting it slide. Get out!]

Fortunately, she never got caught (while you lived with her). Unfortunately, you live in your car for a while because you get freaked out by the company she keeps (and she totally steals all your clothes while you are doing this). During a Utah winter. Before you FINALLY realize you will pay for your own college, drop out of BYU and go live with non-drug-dealers-not-in-your-car, thank you.]

Anyway, I never got arrested.

All right. I was also never a mermaid, nor going to be a mermaid. But I did used to have cartoonishly perky boobs.
Singer! My first college major: opera! But primarily I did an enormous amount of bad or mediocre community theater. Right before I married the Evil Mad Scientist, I gave it all up and have (almost) never looked back.
Smoker!.Well...passively. I lived with an active smoker and sometimes held ciggarettes (is that how you spell that) just to fit in:
Kashmiri bride: I may not have mentioned that the Evil Mad Scientist was of Pakistani descent, but he was, and once upon a time, I really truly did this, so I guess it's a path actually taken, but reverted. We stayed married for about .2 minutes after this, but at least I'll always have Pakistan...
Nomadic Hiker: Husband #1 was this sort-of restless, gypsy-ish nomad guy. My life could have looked like this, but mainly it looked like being alone, since he was usually off doing his own thing.

Alterna-babe: Even though I am a product of my generation, I have no tattoos. A couple of nose rings, yes. It's the path I didn't take, but I'm right next door... I'm an alt-dot-neighbor!
My birth father is an ex-Hell's Angel. Can't you see it? It's in my bloooood!
And finally, of course, this. I was SO close to becoming her. But chose instead to use my powers to remove dangling participles armed with nothing but a keyboard. (I kept my lasso, though).

Rewards for good behavior? Not so much...

Some days, in an inspecific burnt-toast-traffic-meetings-missed-clothes-stained kind of way, make me feel insignificant. Some days, those same events can feel a bit more personal. And then there are Thursdays...