Shoot that poison arrow - a note to my husband, never delivered

"Shoot that poison arrow", the song goes, and I always think of it about this time of year.  I hate Valentine's day.  I've had damn few good ones, and the bad ones always put me in a blue funk for several days.  It's stupid, I tell myself, to get upset over a fake holiday.  Then again, all holidays are man-made creations, so why single this one to get so upset about?


I guess it's because it's another reminder that you just don't understand me.  I make handmade cards.  I write poetry.  I give candy.  I cook, bake, and otherwise do things I know will please you (and the kids, too).  If I get anything, it's a store-bought card picked up in the last few hours of Valentine's day, purchased, no doubt, out of guilt.  The only poetry you have ever written, to my knowledge, is "Ode to a Jalapeño".  This makes me incredibly sad.


The grand gesture, long-stemmed red American Beauty roses delivered to work, a huge heart-shaped box of chocolates, jewelry in a little powder blue box, dinner at a romantic restaurant, that is all fine and good, but what really says "I love you" to me are the simple, inexpensive things:  a handmade card with red and white heart-shaped doilies like what you might have made in second grade, a short, heart-felt verse, a massage or even just a foot rub, spending the day together watching a movie or having a picnic.  Cook me dinner, brush my hair, SOMETHING!  I want the affirmation that I am special to you, that our love is unique, and that you are moved to do something other than dash in to Wal-Mart and pick up one of the few remaining cards without giving any thought to how it will make me feel.


I guess it's stupid to bitch about getting a dumb, ugly, store-bought card.  It's more than a lot of people get, I'm sure.  But I would just as soon you didn't buy me anything than buy me a card with a fat, middle aged, balding Cupid showing his ass and saying that  it's okay with you that I love you for your body.

Inge-Sandra

If she were still alive, my sister would be turning 49 today.  At home, we called her Inge, but at school and work, she was known as Sandra, so some people called her Inge-Sandra.  Originally Inge Alexandra Cline, then Inge Alexandra Sitton after my she was adopted by my father, she changed her name to Alexandra Elizabeth Sitton when she joined the Navy.  She met and married Michael Heath, becoming Alexandra Elizabeth Heath.  I can't recall if her headstone says Alexandra Elizabeth "Inge" Heath or Alexandra Elizabeth "Inge" Sitton Heath, but whichever variation of that, "Inge" was included because that's how many people remember her.  When I was a child, if I was mad at her, I called her Inge-pinga-dinga-linga.  But most of the time, I wasn't mad at her.  Aside from my best friend from kindergarten, Inge was my best friend.

We were three years and eight months apart in age, making her my closest sister.  We used to walk down to Dairy Queen together and get a parfait.  Sometimes we would brave Jacksboro Highway and walk over to the Lone Star cafe and have lunch.  I always tried different things off the menu, but she would always get an open-face chili cheeseburger.  When I went away to college, I would come home on the weekends to wash clothes and restock my pantry, and she would sometimes take me shopping.  Our favorite thing to shop for was underwear - pretty matching bras and panties.

Perhaps it was fitting that she was born on a Friday the 13th.  She was the middle child as well, and always seemed to have trouble fitting in.  She could have been a great writer, but dropped out of school, got her GED, and joined the Navy.  As soon as her time was up, she moved back home with her new daughter.  She tried once to reconcile with her estranged husband, but it didn't stick.  So she came back, bringing her daughter, but her husband had his mother's money behind him.  Inge said she could probably afford to fight him in court once, but he was determined to have the baby, so instead of putting the child through a long, drawn out custody battle, she let Mike take Lindsay back to Virginia.

After that, Inge seemed to go through a long bout of depression, but she managed to get a job as a pharmacy tech at JPS.  She eventually got her own apartment as was doing okay, it seemed.  But after coming down with a bad case of mono, she moved back home, into my old room, as I had just moved in with my best friend.  A couple of months later, Bill Chappell broke in the house and shot her, Mommy, and Pappy.  She died at the scene.  Mommy died two days later, and Pappy died two months later.  The papers later reported that Bill was shocked to learn that he had killed Inge and not me.

So of course, I have always felt a heavy burden of guilt about Inge's death.  I've had therapy, and it helped a little.  I can intellectualize the fact that Bill pulled the trigger, not me.  But I still can't seem to get over the feeling of loss and abandonment caused by the death of my closest sister (and parents, of course).  We had a very close bond.  I have two older sisters, and they seem to share something with each other similar to what Inge and I had.  But I am not as close to them as I was to her because I wasn't as close to them in childhood as I was to her.  They were always busy, out of the house, trying to get me to not tag along with them.

I have some very close friends -- closer than most people have, I've come to learn.  Friends who have been to hell and back with me.  Friends who couldn't bail me out of jail should I ever be arrested because they'd be next to me in the cell saying, "wasn't that fun??"  Be that as it may, I still have this hole in my heart that was caused by the loss of my sister.  I miss her doing things like whacking her hairbrush on the window of the car I was sitting in, kissing a boyfriend.  I miss her fixing me Hamburger Helper for Thanksgiving when our parents let us live on our own a mile away while they lived in our grandmother's house.  I miss her setting me up on blind dates with friends of her boyfriends and telling them I was a French exchange student.  I miss you singing into the curling iron to K.C. and the Sunshine Band records.

Inge always asked my opinion about everything, clothes, makeup, music, guys -- except when it came to her true love.  Inge fell in love with her Social Studies teacher, Mr. Castillo, in the 7th grade.  He finally went out with her when she was 18.  They dated for a while.  He attended her funeral, even though he was married to someone else by then.

I will always wonder what Inge could have done if she had lived.  I visualize her as going to college and becoming a writer.  Perhaps I will always feel a sadness for her untapped potential.  But I know that I'm not the only one who knows that Inge-Sandra lived up to the hope most people have of being a true, loyal friend. 

What Came To Pass

So, what all has come to pass since I last wrote in 2007?  Well, Herbie, Dave, and the kids stayed about 7 or 8 months in Argentina, but came back due to medical reasons.  Herbie had a breast cancer scare, but thank heavens it turned out to be a bad infection and not an aggressive form of cancer.  Susan and I dropped everything and picked Herbie up from the airport.  She then went to Oklahoma to be seen by a cousin of Dave's who happens to be an oncologist.  Herbie had to have several weeks of wound care every other day or so as an outpatient at Arlington Memorial.  It was a harrowing experience for everyone involved, to be sure.


But the biggest bombshell in my life was the fact the Logan proposed to me.  We were married on July 11, 2008.  He proposed while in jail, and we were married by proxy while he was in jail.  It was a spur of the moment ceremony in a friend's backyard with Logan's apprentice standing in as Logan -- kinda fitting, in a way, if there had to be a proxy.  In reading about this type of ceremony, I discovered that many royal princesses and princes in medieval times were married with someone standing in for either, or even both, parties.


Logan wound up in jail because he pulled a shotgun on a Code Enforcement officer.  They were never able to come to an agreement about what Logan could or could not have in the back yard, and in the end, of course, they won.  Render unto Caesar.  They ended up hauling all his blacksmithing tools away, along with a welder, air tanks, lumber, and metal stock.  The stuff was worth about 25K.  So naturally, this is all my fault, and of course, Logan is now without the means to do any blacksmithing.  Though physically, I don't think he's capable of banging a hammer any longer anyway, but one doesn't want ones tools and supplies swiped by paper pushers who were seen to put some items in their personal vehicles.  Of course, we can't find a lawyer willing to sue the city.  But at least while Logan was in jail, he had a light bulb moment in which he realized that "the man" could possibly kill him if he resisted them, and that that would leave me and the kids up a creek.


So it came to pass.  I now have full VA dependent benefits - medical, a monthly stipend of a couple hundred dollars, and access to any base.  The kids and I took full advantage of swimming on base this past summer and visiting the base library.  And Logan has discovered a benefit to himself:  since I can go on base, he doesn't have to go grocery shopping if he doesn't want to.

Out With The Old

Around the first week or so of a new year, I usually get around to deleting old emails.  I had forgotten, though, that I had set up subfolders of my main email account.  I went through them today, and deleted most of what had accumulated, but when I came across a particular one (which I had forgotten I had saved), it brought to mind the fact that I haven't written in many moons.  The email in question was a screenshot of an anonymous post someone made on this blog a couple of years ago.  The post, I immediately deleted because it was sheer vitriol.  So why did I keep an email to myself of the screenshot?  I am clueless.

Of course, I don't know who made the post.  Someone more tech savvy than me could probably figure out how to find the IP address and track down the person who made the digital equivalent of writing on the wall of a bathroom stall.  But should I even care if the person wasn't brave enough to confront me?  From the language of the post, I think I know who did it, but at this late date, should I really care?  And why did I let it paralyze me?  I asked a mutual friend of the suspect, and was advised to "Just delete everything. Anything that hasn't served any purpose other than to make you happy, bring you great fortune, or to at least make your day go a bit more smoothly has absolutely no redeeming value...unless it is your motivation for something greater. In which case, frame it and read it every day."

It certainly hasn't been a motivation for me, so I agree that I need to delete it.  And I will.  And this advice is like a swift kick up the backside.  I need to jettison everything that is holding me back.  Projects that have gone years unfinished are going to be donated to Goodwill.  Books I haven't finished reading will be returned to their owners, even if I don't finish them.  And I'm going to make it my mission to get my frigging house clean, if it takes me until this time next year.

Hoarding, clutter, and disarray are just symptoms of a mind in chaos.  The only way to overcome mental stagnation is to forcefully remove it.

Surprises, Disappointments, and Irritations -- Oh, My!

I haven't written in around six weeks. I seem to go in cycles of when I feel like writing and when I don't. Let's see, what's happened in all that time?

Susan, Heather, and I drove down to San Antonio (in my car) and attended an SCA event, a fiber arts college which consisted of a whole day of classes related to fiber arts, spinning, weaving, identifying fabric, various types of embroidery (I would go blind if I actually attempted blackwork.), and nalbinding, a type of fingerknitting. We agreed that we were old since in our youth, a road trip would end up with us blued, screwed, and tattooed, drunk off our asses in Tiajuana, or at the very least, in jail somewhere for some sort of socially unacceptable behavior.

Herbie had the gang all over to dinner one night to drop her bomb -- she, Dave, and kids are selling everything and moving to Argentina for a year. Because they want to. Dave said it's more socially acceptable there to be a slacker, and all he wants to do is read a paper, drink coffee in a café, and hit the beach. Their house has been on the market for almost a month now, and their tickets are for August 22nd. Susan and I are already taking bets on how long this venture will actually last. Neither of us see it actually lasting a full year.

Logan really pulled a boner. He pissed me off earlier this month by changing his plans from going camping for a couple of days (I grant him there was no where in Texas to camp that wasn't soggy or actually underwater due to some far-reaching flooding.) and instead, hopping a C-130 to Hawaii, which meant that I ended up having to use vacation days I hadn't planned on using to watch the kids and keep them from killing each other over who gets to be on the computer. Logan stayed in Hawaii a couple of days and discovered that he couldn't get back. It turns out that disabled vets aren't supposed to have "space available" flight benefits. NOW you tell me! So he had to wait for a couple of days more to get a commercial flight back which he could actually afford. Luckily, it was only $27 a night to stay on the base near Waikiki.

While he was still over there, we spoke on the phone a couple of times, and once, before we knew he doesn't really have space A benefits, I asked him if he was prepared to pay for me to fly commercial anytime he takes the kids somewhere. [You see, he never claimed me when he filed for his disabled veteran benefits. He claimed the kids, but not me. That means he and the kids get insurance, can go on base to the BX, the movies ($3 each), the pool ($1 each), and soon, the commisary, plus he can rent a cabin or tent space or marina slip at any of the bases, whether they are Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines, anywhere in the country and some places overseas. But I can't. If he would claim me as a common-law spouse, then I could.] He said, "we'll have to see what we can do about that", which gave me cause to hope that he would finally claim me to the VA.

Monday, when I got to work, there was an email reminding me that it was Summer Enrollment time, meaning it was time to make my insurance and other benefit decisions for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts September 1st. So I called Logan to discuss the issue with him, and reminded him about what he had said. He got very testy on the issue, and told me he didn't see what good it would do me for him to claim me.

I explained that besides all the obvious benefits, one of the added benefits of having ChampVA insurance is that it would cover all my co-pays since I have BCBS of TX, plus -- I would be able to have lap-band surgery. This is my main goal.

Logan asked how it would benefit him. I guess he's just too dumb to realize that it would save me money (no co-pays), I'd get a small monthly stipend, and being able to have the surgery could possibly add years to my life. He argued and fought with me over this. He thinks I have some ulterior motive, like taking the house away from him and putting him out on the street. His paranoia really kicks in hard from time to time, and because he's twice-divorced and the divorces both came from out of the blue, blind-siding him, he is unreasonable about this issue.

So I started researching the issue, printing out things to back up my assertions as to what benefits I'd get, and in doing so, I discovered that I can file a claim myself, above his objections.

So that's what I'm going to do. After 16 years of letting Logan call the shots in our relationship, I've decided to make some decisions on my own, without consulting him. There are two of us in this relationship, I am tired of not having a vote. We're supposed to be a partnership, not a monarchy. And if I don't get a vote, I'm staging a coup.

At least you know you're alive....

It's slow today at work, and I'm suffering from ennui despite the fact that I had a fun weekend (party with friends Saturday) and I had a health scare yesterday. I may have a hernia, and I awoke with searing, burning pain just below my ribs, right in the center of my... chest? abdomen? kinda where my diaphram is (solar plexus?). The pain was such that it woke me from a deep sleep, but not sufficiently enough that I could even call for Logan's help. In my mind, I kept thinking I needed to go to the ER, but I couldn't move to call or even say a word if I had managed to get the phone. I was scared, but eventually resigned myself that maybe I was dying and it would be okay. I fell back asleep, and was pleasantly surprised to wake up, and with no pain.

I've Got You Under My Skin

The universe has been getting on my last nerve lately. From witless drivers who rudely push their way into the space I thought of as a safe driving buffer zone distance to telemarketers who don't even bother to have actual humans call and interrupt dinner but instead resort to using computers to tell me they have an important message to clueless, undereducated sales clerks that must have failed third grade math because they stare blankly at me when I hand them $21.05 when my bill is $15.55 (My change should be $5.50, a nice round sum, rather than $4.45 if I had paid with just the $20.00.). I've had it with people.

Movin' On Up

Here's the email I sent to kith and kin this morning:

I received word late yesterday afternoon that I got the promotion I applied for here at work. I will still be in accounting, but will be one pay grade higher, with a 3% raise -- not a lot, but I will be learning some new stuff, which is really what I was looking for since what I'm now doing has become fairly rote. What's really neat is that I will have an actual office, not a cubicle in a large room, so it will be quieter, I will be nearer to a window (though won't actually have one, but can see out the window across the hall -- where I am now, there are NO windows at all), and I will have my name on a sign next to the door! I will have to take a picture of it.

I'm not sure when I'm moving across the hall because the new boss is out on medical leave (She should return on Wednesday.), and I will have to train my replacement once someone is hired. I'll keep you posted.

Out like a lion

I've been out of the habit of writing because I switched to the Google version of this blog, and forgot my username and password, and never got around to recovering them until today. Last month was not a very happy month, anyway, so I suppose I was avoiding writing about it.

I was out from work for a week from Feb. 12th through Feb. 16th with the flu and bronchitis on strict orders from the doctor to stay in bed -- not even sitting up to play on the computer -- because the bronchitis was threatening to turn into pneumonia. I'm better now, but still coughing up crud. At least it's mostly clear now, and not the putrid shade of green it was during the height of my illness. I finished a course of Tamiflu, which I'm not sure did anything at all, and took Mucinex DM for several days until my sense of taste returned and I couldn't get the things down, they taste so bad. The smell isn't lovely, either. I'm still sucking on an Albuterol inhaler 4 - 6 times a day, which is supposed to keep me from wheezing, but I think all it does is make me dizzy, then cause me to hack up a huge loogie. I went through FOUR boxes of Kleenex while I was sick, and went through another one my first week back at work. Gah, I hate being sick.

On the 19th, Weyland's kitten, "Wac" ("wild-assed cat", named by Logan), got hit by a car and killed. Weyland wouldn't eat dinner that night, and had trouble falling asleep. He has been having such trouble anyway, trying to get his schoolwork done. I don't know what his problem is or how to help him, but he's taken a distinct disliking of school, and won't finish his work in class or do his homework. I think he's terribly bored, and doesn't see the point of doing what he calls "baby" work, despite being in the gifted/talented program, such as it is in the EISD.

In other news, now it isn't likely that Beth will be sent to Germany. I'm kinda bummed about the whole thing because 1) She's not getting to go on an adventure to which she was looking forward, 2) I'm not getting to go on an adventure to which I was looking forward, which would have included, perhaps, meeting a couple of my penpals AND spending some time with one of my FAVORITE COUSINS and her husband, and 3) It was probably going to be my best chance at getting to go overseas.

I've only flown in a plane twice. The first time was in a little four seat airplane out in West Texas while visiting two of my other cousins out in Snyder. It was very hot, and the pilot thought it was funny to make wild maneuvers so that we girls squealed. Between the heat and the sudden drops, I got queasy and decided I didn't like flying. My second time in an airplane was flying into Love Field from Lubbock the year my parents died. Aunt Patsy and Uncle Buck had me come spend Christmas with them because I was pretty much adrift and alone that year. I remember feeling very grateful for the invitation since my sisters didn't say a word to me that year about any sort of doings. I suppose they were dealing with the loss of our parents and a sister in their own ways, but at least they both had husbands to help them with their grief. I had no one, and not hearing from them hurt. Hell, it still smarts, as I sit here at lunch, glad that no one has noticed that I have tears welling up in my eyes.

I discovered I like flying in big airplanes better than in small ones, but the take off rather unnerved me. I had to laugh at my own naivete. When I finally unclenched my hands from the armrests and relaxed enough to take in the view, when I looked down, I thought to myself, "since when does Texas have snow covered mountains?" Then the clouds cleared, and I was agog at how high in the air we were.

What is ironic is that I would love nothing better than to be a travel writer, but I have been damn few places beyond my hometown. I've been as far west as Carlsbad Caverns, NM, as far south as Galveston, TX, as far east as Fort Knox, KY, and as far north as Sallisaw, OK. But alas, no one has ever offered me the dream job, and I haven't studied much on how to get it for myself.

In the meanwhile, I do seem set to change positions here at work. I was the only person interviewed for a job which opened when a woman resigned and went back to her previous job. If hired, I will reconcile entries in the general ledger, reconcile bank entries, and serve as backup for the woman who approves all the data entry and corrections. It's not a lot more money, but it is one pay grade higher, I'd have my own office instead of a cubicle, and I'd actually end up with a lot of free time. The supervisor told me the job is feast and famine, and asked "could I amuse myself when there was nothing to do"?!? Sounds like I'll have time to write the Great American Novel (if such a thing even exists any more), all the while getting paid a whopping two tanks of gas and a lunch a week more. I won't find out until probably next week if I got the job since the supervisor is out on elective surgery, but I like my chances.