IBS. Not being able to eat or drink more than water, because your digestive system is being a punk.  This sucks.

Army housing, which is insulated and air conditioned (or not) depending on what the normal climate for the area is. Alaska housing was well insulated, and warm with the thermostat set to 68 even at -50F. Unfortunately, it wasn’t air conditioned, because it doesn’t get that hot there. Normally. Our first summer there? It hit 90-100 for over a month, AND it was the worst fire season in history (at that point) so we couldn’t have our windows open due to the smoke and ash density. Now we’re in WA, No AC, and we had a freak heat wave this summer, over 100 for about a month. Last winter…freak blizzard, this winter…deep freeze. We haven’t been above freezing in days. Last nights low broke a record set in 1919. I have my thermostat at 72, and it’s still cold to me in this house.

There is no normal climate anymore, so Dear Housing: Please just put max insulation and AC standard everywhere ok? Trust me, I know all about freak weather. Married in the Blizzard of 93 (Northeasterners remember that sucker), first daughter born in record setting heat in PA, second…Blizzard again. We are freak weather magnets. It sucks.

Dog Of Epic Evil. Sucks. Yes, he keeps me warm at night. From the knees down. For about 10 minutes. He’s still on the sucks list. See THIS entry if you have any doubt.

Boredom!!!! (Sucks)

This is a given, but DEPLOYMENT SUCKS!

Any day I don’t get to talk to Hunny sucks. Sometimes this is one day out of 7 that sucks, other times is 14 days straight that suck, there have even been thirty of these sucky days strung together like Christmas lights. When this first started, there were about 90 straight sucktastic days!

The Steelers. Yeah I said it!

Things that don’t Suck:

MY perfectly angelic Dog.

Teddy Bears.

Any day I DO get to talk to Hunny.

A new CSI episode.

Soldiers with Puppies.

Cute animals singing Nomnomnom

Just a lyrics post today. Anyone that knows me, knows this is so completely me

Sometimes I cry for no good reason
Sometimes I fight when I ain’t mad
Sometimes it hurts and I ain’t bleeding
Sometimes I laugh when things go bad
Chorus:
But I’ll always be the girl I am
And when Life comes falling down on me I do the best I can
And I never make apologies cause I don’t give a damn
I’ll guess I’ll always be the girl I am
Sometimes I know there’s something missing
Sometimes I want to start again
Sometimes I scream and no one listens
Sometimes I feel like giving in
Repeat Chorus:
But I’ll always be the girl I am
And when Life comes falling down on me I do the best I can
And I never make make apologies cause I don’t give a damn
I guess I’ll always be the girl I am
And I never make apologies cause I don’t give a damn
Yeah I guess I’ll always be the girl I am

-Gretchen Wilson from the album One of The Boys

Not easy at all. Which I’ll admit, surprises me. When I finally had the oppurtunity to be a stay at home wife and mom, after ten years of working, I was thrilled. It’s all I ever wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I had a few jobs I really enjoyed. I just couldn’t keep up with working, keeping a house together and cooking all at the same time. I felt like a failure pretty often actually. For those women that can do it, I applaud you. It’s just not me. I need to focus on ONE thing, it’s just the way I’m wired.

When the Man enlisted in the army, that brought with it my chance to not work anymore.  My chance to be June Cleaver! She made it look so easy didn’t she? Yeah, well it was all lies. First off, a husband and kids leave stuff  EVERYWHERE.  If said husband is a soldier, your home quickly gets randomly decorated with camo and combat boots and a bunch of stuff you can’t find anywhere to put! But that’s not the real point here. So let me find it. There are certain advantages to working vs staying at home.

1. You have a boss.

Noone tells me what to do, when to do it or when I need to have it done by. Now, on one hand that is awesome. But I’m not a great motivator. In fact, I lean towards lazy procrastinator 90% of the time. Which means when I don’t feel like cleaning x part of the house. I probably won’t. And noone is here to kick my ass for it. Except me.

2. No year end reviews.

Noone is going to take me aside and show me where I’m excelling, and where I could use some extra work on something. I’m responsible for recognizing my own success and shortcomings, and dealing with them appropriately. Again with the self discipline.

3. The Social Aspect

I work alone. I don’t have the coworkers to chat with to make the day go by faster. I don’t have anything even remotely resembling socializing going on here unless you count talking to the dogs.  And this is where I go off on a tangent.

I live on an army post. There are always fuctions out there to meet and greet other spouses. Alot of them, like me, stay at home moms. You’d think we’d have things in common right? Not so much. What I usually run into are either wives that are 15 years younger than me, with very young children, who are way closer to June Cleaver than I’ll ever be. They bake, and craft, and have playgroups, etc. Or I meet wives 15 years younger than me that have no kids yet but are into the party scene.

My hobbies just get me blank stares and fake smiles most of the time. I play WoW, I enjoy photography. I blog. I would love to be able to actually have an enjoyable conversation with another spouse about those things but…have yet to meet one. I’m not saying it’s a requirement. Lord knows my closest friends in AK  I could talk about everything under the sun. But the difference is they didn’t look at me like I was a freak because I wasn’t crafty, and green, and girly, even with my missing June Cleaver gene. We were all experiencing the same thing together, and accepted each other for what we were.

There’s not much of that here. If I would go out and get a job, sure I’d probably meet new people, even ones I have things in common with. Because while work is work, it’s also a social setting. As a stay at home mom, it’s MY responsibility to seek people out, and form relationships. That isn’t easy. Not easy at all. However I’d be right back to where I started, good at one job, slacking at home. Which might be ok for me, but not so much for the family.

So June Cleaver lied. She made it look too easy. With this deployment coming up, it’s kind of scary not having my old support system here. Maybe I’ll find one, maybe I won’t. But I’ll always have my blog. And the dogs are pretty good listeners.

I don’t have a well thought out blog post today so you get all the random crap that’s gone through my head over the last week.

• Preparing for a deployment never gets an easier. Hurry up and wait. I’m all zen with it. Probably makes me look like a heartless bitch, but this is what he does, and what I do. He deploys, I wait. I’m a pro at it. Just call me Scarlet. Fiddle dee dee I’ll think about it tomorrow.

• If the media would get their heads out of their asses family members wouldn’t freak out when these guys deploy. “Violence in a specific part of *countrysoldierdeploystoistanraq” seems to translate into “The whole country is besieged by EVIL AND CHAOS!!!” This is why I don’t WATCH the news before, during, or after a deployment. IE: almost never.

• My teen daughter takes offense that her friend doesn’t want her constantly texting her boyfriend when they hang out. I agree with the friend. It’s just rude.  The discussion ended when her ride came. It was a huff. She left in it.

• Why does the clear sunny day never happen on the weekend when Hunny is off work? Weekends are all we have left to get any exploring done before he leaves since we used his last leave until R&R to go home to visit. Rain during the week and Sun, shine on the weeekends geez!

• I want a horse.

• Whole grain Barilla pasta is full of win. It doesn’t get sticky. I am never buying anything else again.

• Cook in the pan lasagna noodles…genius.

• Finally, my peace has ended, teen daughter just came in from school, and apparently her ride was a Huff too.

We’ve returned from our trip, but I’ll still be pretty much offline for another week as my Mother in Law is arriving tonight. Shortly in fact. Hope everyone has a gret week, I’ll be twittering I’m sure. you can find me there at http://twitter.com/TheLadyJess

Hello short and funky red hair (sorry, hard to take a pic of yourself with a big camera. Annnnnnnd I just remembered I have a smaller camera, so I’ll post a better one later. For now, you get…(good camera picture…yay)

I totally fucked up. That’s right, I used the F word, that should tell you something. Yes, I know I use it alot but not usually in my blog. Anyhow, enough of the review of my bad manners. I cannot be trusted with technology. See up there?? That’s my new cell phone. It is awesome. It flips open o reveal a keyboard. [Random: on local news, the headline spoken was "Get ready to pay more for your porn". /boggle] Anyhooooo. Hubby’s cell was the last number I had dialed from said phone before he left for his training. Sunday night he calls, and says “did you call me this morning?”. Hmm…no, no I’m sure I didn’t. His phone started ringing, at a time when cell phones are strictly forbidden to be used. Yes we discussed the fact that his should have been turned off. So after we hang up. I check my call history. There it was. 8:43am, I somehow called my husband. I assume I slid the phone into my hoodie pocket, and bumped the send button when I leaned across a counter or something.

Did I stop there? Noooooo. Yesterday it snowed here. So I used my in phone camera to take a picture. I wrote a message with it, and intended to save it as a draft to send later. Did I? Nope, I jumped right onboard the failboat, and it sent. Now, I haven’t heard from him since Monday night. With my luck, I probably got his damned phone confiscated.

/sigh.

In other news, American Idol is slow starting this season. I’m actually happy that Nick/Norman got through to the top 36. BUT dear God WHY is Tatiana omg I am so annoying still in it?? And her male counterpart the drama king that cries over frigging Every. Little. Thing.

/boggle

And I got at least one decent shot out of it, but I still need ALOT of practice before I’ll be happy again.

ME: What if I suck?? What if it’s not like falling off a bike?? Oh I meant riding a bike…whatever!!

HIM: *chuckle* I don’t think you ever fell off the bike hun, I think you just quit riding it.

ME: *thinking he’s talking about the bike in the carport* OH! you didn’t mean that literally did you??

HIM: *laughing and shaking his head*

Suddenly my husband has gone all metaphorical on me. Hmmph. Anyhow, I finally calmed down enough to breathe, and got to work on not only my photo site, but this blog as well. I have a shiney new theme. It started off looking like this. But after some screaming and cursing (mostly due to my own impatience and rush to make it mine) it looks like this. I’m shocked I didn’t go pink really. I’m rather proud of it. I’ve never worked with a theme as fully featured as this, and found myself intimidated at first look. But when I finally calmed my ass down, I figured it out quickly. I also set up http://photoflections.net again, with it’s new theme. Just waiting for pictures now. COME ON UPS!! Ok, yelling won’t help, it’s not due to be delivered til the 3rd.

Love this video…(if you can’t see it here, it’s on http://atouchoftude.com)