Un-Greeting Cards

My mother, in fear that without use I would lose my talent for art, gave me a package of plain greeting cards back in April of this year.  She had decided that I could draw the front of a greeting card in a relatively short time, given my lack of time because of the children…and so would retain my ability to create art.  I soon came to discover that there were like 20 cards in that stupid bag…irritation soon ensued.  After I got done with about 5 to 7 of them I showed my mother…she then told me that the envelope also had to be decorated, I almost chucked the whole bag at her!

While muttering a lot in the process, I have finally finished the bag.  I told my mother this and she very happily disappeared into the other room…when she returned she was carrying like 3 more bags!  I told her NO!  The other day she gave me a bag that only had a few in them, arguing the whole time that she was “helping” me.  I took the bag and went upstairs muttering things to myself.

Before I put them up here I need to warn you that I am not an artist fit for putting on greeting cards…most of my art is anything but positive.  What I have now is a bag of cards not fit for greeting anyone…so I shall call them un-greeting cards.  Some of them have quotes in them; I heard them in various places and thought that they fit.  A great many of them come from Criminal Minds, as I watched the whole show on DVD this summer.  I will try to offer what explanation I have with each one; my art very much reflects my own life in a way, and if you know me well enough you can easily see it…if not it would appear that I am a dark and tortured soul, and in a lot of ways I am, I just hide it well.

ONWARD!  #1 “Spillage”:  I was under an extraordinary amount of stress and it had begun to spill out of me, affecting my health.

#2 “Watery Relief”:  In the midst of this spilling I sought relief in my bath tub…I do this quite often actually…everything just seems to melt away when you are in a hot tub listening to music.

#3 “Chained” inside “The creative woman is a force to be reckoned with!”:  I often feel censored and I don’t much like it.

#4 “Expectation”:  What every woman feels…torn between the expected image and the real image.

#5 “Silence”…inside “Find a place inside where there’s joy and the joy will bring out the pain” –Joseph Campbell:  That place is only found once the outside has been cut off and it’s only you and your thoughts…I do this through music.

#6 “Pain”:  I had a headache.

#7 “Robot”:  There are days when as a home-maker you feel as if you are a robot who does the same thing every day.

#8 “Numb”:  I had surgery over a year ago…not cool.  I also have very little feeling in my upper arms for some odd reason…hmmm.

#9 “Monster”:  *insert smile here*

#10 “Love”…inside “There is no safe investment, to love at all is to be vulnerable” –C. S. Lewis

#11 “Heartbreak”:  I can’t speak of this one here.

#12 “Break”…inside “Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training” –Anna Freud:  Have you ever been at that point where you are sure that you are going to start ripping your hair out of your head?

#13 “Stew”:  I would never cook my children, but sometimes they can sure drive you nuts!

#14 “Helpless”…inside “When other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.” –Hymn #166:  There are times when all you want is to feel the loving arms of your savior as you cry.

#15 “Scar”…inside “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars” –Kahlil Gibran:  We all carry scars, and sometimes they hurt bad.

#16 “Change”:  For Mickey.

#17 “Pretend”:  We all have masks, and we all use them.

#18 “Shape”:  This one is going to have a quote from a Sting song, but I haven’t gotten that far; it is called “Shape of My Heart”.

#19 “Sick”:  I got sick recently and lived on my couch with my ipod and book.

#20 “Tattoo”:  And the book I read was “Girl with a Dragon Tattoo”.

Here’s to un-greeting cards (expletive deleted), and off I go to complete the others…and NOT tell my mother!

Addiction

I think that there is the distinct possibility that I have an addiction…to casual games on my ipod.  Don’t laugh at me, this is serious!  What was Capcom…became Beeline…heaven help me I have all those games on my ipod and I have a compulsion to check on them at least 4 times a day!!  I realized how serious this was yesterday when they launched Snoopy’s Street Fair and I got all giddy and impatient as it was downloading, and today I am already half way through level 5. 

Now that it is official…Hi, my name is Cristy, and I’m addicted to casual gaming on my ipod.  And I hear the echo in my mind…”Hi Cristy”…yes, I feel slightly better now.  I have 10 casual games on my ipod and I play at least 7 of them at least once a day.  I am particularly fond of Beeline and Pocket Gems.  The games include Smurf’s Village, Monster Pet Shop, Dream Park, Snoopy’s Street Fair, Tap Pet Hotel, Tap Pet Shop, and Tap Zoo.  I have started to get angry when people won’t play too so that we can see each other’s shops, fairs, or parks…this is definitely not a good sign.

I managed to get past Pocket Frogs…which is really where this started…Angie is the one who told me to play that one.  What is really aggravating is that I played her stupid game so she could send me frogs, and when I asked her to play Smurf’s Village she never did…she is such a turd!  Anyway, I have stopped playing some…like pocket frogs and Smurf’s Grabber, I suppose there is progress there.  However I am a little sad when I have done everything I can do in them without spending real money…which is really what they want you to do.  I have a confession…I spent $4 from my itunes account for bones in Pet Hotel recently.  Now this is a horrible sign!  I felt a horrible compulsion to get the bubblegum room…in the dark of the night when everyone was asleep…I am such a bad girl.

OHMYGOSH!!!  I am spending real money on non-existent objects to spend to get a non-existent room!!!!  I just had to have the bubblegum room with the cute little bubblegum machine that I love so very much, it was only 12 bones, that isn’t much…not even $2!!  OHMYCRAP!!!!  I am such a TARD!

So there it is; my addiction.  Here’s to the addictions that we all have in life…may they not take up all our time, and may we enjoy them while they last.  Now off I go to collect from my street fair, village, and hotel!

Candy Fruit

I have very much enjoyed the new version of the Thundercats that is now playing on the Cartoon Network on Friday nights.  We have them all recorded on our Tivo and watch them religiously.  One of the latest episodes did a whole revamp of the Berbils, for those of you who weren’t fans they are the robot bears that are hard to understand.  Anyway, the Thundercats were presented with their food or fuel of choice, candy fruit.  WilyKit and WilyKat were most pleased with this…and it didn’t take them long to become super-hyper with wide eyes, talking fast, and running around out of control.

I write about this because I have noticed a similarity to my son and Starburst.  We gave out Starburst for Halloween to the trick-or-treaters this year…and as we had such a demanding year last year my husband bought a box of them.  Needless to say we have some left…in a stuffed pumpkin with a hollowed out middle that we forgot about.  The little boy must have found them and kept bringing them to people in the house to unwrap for him…there are a lot of people in my house, so by the time we all realized what was going on he was running in circles and shaking his head back and forth laughing the whole time. 

He then brought some to his dad when he got home from work a few hours later, and his high had worn off…Ryane had given him about 4 before I got to him and told him to stop giving those to him.  He asked me why and all I had to say to him was “candy fruit”…he turned around to see him running in circles again.  *facepalm*

Now I am well aware of the studies that say that sugar does not make children hyper…but Starburst is candy fruit to my son, and he gets that same crazed look in his eyes!  He starts running and yelling and throwing stuff about.  And his level of mischief making quadruples!  I am pretty sure that the Great Cornholio is going to rear his ugly head and my son will have his shirt over his head running about the house asking if we are "threatening him".  But on the up side, we have discovered that this does bring about instant happiness, to be used to our advantage as much as we can stand it.  Here's to candy fruit, in whatever form it takes for you; may we use it to our advantage during our quest for sanity!

Casey Bug turns Big 5

 After a not so good month of October, including boils and smoke alarms going off in the middle of the night…we have moved on into November, which is only just begun and is not stress free.

 

 On Halloween Casey and I went early in the morning to have the vampires take her blood, which as always was followed by a reward of powdered donuts!  She was a little late to school, but I told her that because it was Halloween she could tell everyone that she was attacked by vampires.  We ended up that evening going Trick or Treating with some friends from the ward, Little Ryan only lasted about 40 min before falling asleep, but overall a grand time was had by all!

 My Casey-Bug turned 5 years old on the 2^nd of November, and after having a good morning with her and laying Ryan down to sleep, I laid down myself to sleep a little before having to pick up Casey from school.  My phone rang…the pediatrician’s office…Casey’s blood work came back with an abnormality…there goes that nap!  They told me that they would get ahold of her specialist in Loma Linda to get instructions and then call me back.  We had a great birthday party for her; she requested a strawberry cake with Mario on it, and strawberry ice cream.  She got her requested “laptop”, which turned out to be made by Vtech, thank heavens!!  Uncle Matt came and gave her a chocolate bar as big as her head, and he is supposed to be a doctor!  She went to sleep in her new Spiderman PJ’s with her Lightning McQueen laptop, a happy girl. 

 I didn’t sleep, as is normal for me when something is not right with my Casey; I fear that after seeing her in the hospital with tubes coming out of her I will always worry more about her than I ever will about Ryan.  The next morning I called her Endocrinologist in Loma Linda, told them what I had been told, and by the end of the day there was a new prescription waiting at the pharmacy and paperwork in the mail for a new blood test in 3 weeks.  I love Dr Mace and am so grateful for his promptness and care of my baby girl.

 On a side note I have discovered that I am tired, not just physically tired that comes with being a mom, overall tired; tired of stress, tired of difficulty, and generally tired of life.  I am tired of having “life” ruin my days, weeks, months, and this whole freaking year!  I am looking forward to so many things, but because life has been so hard on us this year I am afraid to speak them for fear that Satan will just use them to beat me down some more.  Yes I know, fear comes from Satan…but right now I just can’t take anymore.  I have an overwhelming desire to lock the doors and windows of the house and just hide in my bed until the storm subsides.  The hailstones are beating me so bad that I am starting to bleed and the headache no longer goes away.  My daughter is off school the week of Thanksgiving, I think I will hide then, as there will be no need to leave the house at that point.