brinnann’s Neighborhood

My first job was working as a make-up artist in my mom's cosmetic shop, which was located in "the dead mall" across the street from the mega-mall, where everyone respectable went to shop. The only folks who ventured into the dead mall were those with bizarre fetishes they wanted to try out in "public" without actually being too far out into the public sphere. My four hour shift was often punctuated with high school principals and construction workers in drag, trying out the new high heels they just scored at Payless; a 60 yr. old woman dressed as a naughty school girl being led around on a leash by her husband; your occasional flasher; foot fetish guy who would creepily make me show him the colors of "toenail" polish we carried and on & on...

Anyway, it appears that Vox is now the dead mall. Of course, I'm sure there are still many "respectable" folks on here...but more so, there are a lot just letting their freak flag fly. And I love it. You are my people and I'm happy to be back. But don't send me pictures of your penis. Thanks.

Like most of the country, I have sat by horrified and deeply saddened by the incident that took place at Ft. Hood last week.  I have been further saddened by how Major Hasan has been portrayed as some fundamentalist Muslim on a religious mission of some sorts and the ensuing death threats against Muslims in the Ft. Hood area.  Whatever the reasons motivating Maj. Hasan, of which I am sure there were many, none of them justify further killing or threats of any kind.  Hate begets hate.  If we all, or even a few of us, respond to this incident by targeting Muslims because one of them made a horrendous decision not in line with their faith, the chasm will grow and more horrible incidents will ensue.  As Ghandi said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

So, I am writing to propose a way to refocus those energies and to respond to the situation with love.  Show our troops some love and get yourself educated on S.1963 - the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2009.  The goal of the bill is to increase mental health services to veterans.  Our veterans are suffering tremendously and the VA, and the rest of the country for that matter, are woefully ill-equipped to manage the severity of the problem.  We are sending these people out on multiple deployments in a war zone unlike any other before.  Whatever your political take on the wars, I think we can all agree that we need to take care of our veterans.  I support this bill, but encourage everyone to do their own homework on it.

If you discover you support it, please call Senator Coburn's office and ask him to remove the hold from the bill.  He alone is preventing the bill from leaving committee and reaching the Senate floor for a vote.  The Committee on Veterans' Affairs has a statement about it here.  Senator Coburn has his rebuttal  here.  If you believe the bill should be supported, please call your senators and ask them to support it.  If you don't know how to contact your senators, go here.

I have hesitated for some time to post this because too often well-intentioned posts about how to offer support to our troops get thread-jacked by those wanting to debate the validity of the wars.  I am the daughter of a veteran who served in two wars and I am proud of my dad's service.  I am also a flaming liberal who vehemently opposes the wars.  If I can separate the soldier from the action, then you can, too, and I respectfully ask you to do so here.  If you want to say anything hateful, discriminatory, or negative, please make your own post.  I don't post publicly very often because it's easier to deal with my small community.  But, our troops are part of the larger community and we ALL need to come together to support them.  It isn't enough to put a ribbon on the back of your car and wear an American flag pin.  The heart of our country is action and I am asking you to take some positive action today to help support our troops and turn the events at Ft. Hood into a forceful, positive response from the country in support of our combat veterans.  Many thanks.

So, I've been using my Typepad account instead of VOX, and whenever I come back over this way I have shit loads of spam comments to delete. Surely, VOX, if you delete a spam account, it should automatically delete all of the spam comments they've left as well?

The terrorist attack on Fort Hood makes me realize how vulnerable we can be. It's a sad tragedy and a reality in our lives today - as united as we have always been in this time we can never become too comfortable in any situation.  

Do you believe that honesty is the best policy?

I always find that people who think to quote that, believe that honesty = mean spiritedness. Being honest means being true to what you believe and to treat everyone like an adult. However, being honest doesn't mean that you need to tell that stark white, bitchy black and white "truth".

Most of the time, that's not even the "truth," just the mean side of truth.

And I'm rambling but not making sense. It's 5 am and I'm just finishing my shift. You'll probably be hearing from me a lot during these times of the night. Expect less and less sense.

What a week this past week has been!! Here's a short recap..

Tuesday I took another PTO mom with me to Sam's Club to do shopping for our Fall Festival. PTO was providing and serving all of the concessions. We were planning on serving Nachos, Hot dogs, Popcorn, Cotton Candy and various drinks as well as having some candy on hand. Since I'm the only one on PTO that has a Sam's Club membership I had to do the bulk of the work. Of course it didn't help that the one PTO mom that offered to go with me is our Raging Alcoholic PTO mom..so I'm not sure she was entirely useful that day. We got what we thought we needed purchased and I took it all home to store it until Saturday.

Thursday I got a call from PTO president that apparently we hadn't purchased enough food. So off she and I went on Friday to Sam's Club again. You ever known someone that you just can't take shopping with you because they want to buy everything in the store? That would be PTO President. We went in there for more Hot Dogs and Buns and came out with Hot dogs, buns, chili, more candy, a coffee machine, and a cash register..LOL.

In all honesty the Cash register wound up being a great purchase..it's small and light and very easy to use. It also makes my job as treasurer easier since the journal feature automatically tallies all of our sales and tells us exactly how much should be in there after it's all over. It was good to have for the Fall Festival and we'll get a LOT of use out of it in the years to come.

Saturday was our Fall Festival. I arrived at the school with all of our food, every crock pot I own, and other various items at 8:30 am sharp. The festival was scheduled to begin promptly at 10 and I knew that if we were using crock pots to heat up the nacho cheese and chili that would take at least an hour.  Unfortunately NOBODY was at the school at 9am. I had to call the principal to let me in so that I could start setting up concessions. The other ladies arrived about 30 minutes later.

We had some serious electrical issues with all of our crockpots and one of the PTO ladies had brought two large electric roasters for cooking the hot dogs in. We didn't realize that you couldn't plug all of that into one surge protector. Even after splitting them into two different surge protectors we still blew breakers and melted one of the cords.. Eventually we got it all worked out and going.

Fall Festival was a success. We sold out completely on Nachos an hour before the festival was over.  Bart brought the boys and they had a blast.

After I got home from Fall Festival I collapsed into bed to take a power nap.  Bart woke me up at 5:30ish and told me that he had just gotten tickets to see Widespread Panic and The Allman Brothers Band at the Woodlands Pavilion.

 Initially I was cranky and tired and not prepared to get straight into the car, then I remembered most of the people there would be unwashed hippies so I just ran a comb through my hair, threw on some sweatpants and a tie dye and grabbed my hippie sweater. I fit right in and the show was great.

  The funniest part was that when Widespread Panic went off stage and The Allman Brothers came on the cloud of Marijuana Smoke could have been seen from space. I seriously think we all got stoned just from sitting there.

This morning I made a trip to the grocery store, and immediately went back to bed, which is where I still am now.  I am literally just wiped out today. I have slept most of the day or dozed or just laid here....Tomorrow begins yet another crazy week... At least I have all of my meals planned for the week....two days this week the Crockpot will be doing all the work. LOVE the fall!!

I'm off to make some dinner and make sure the kids clothes are ready for school tomorrow.

Hope everyone had an awesome weekend!! 

I heard about NaNoWriMo(National Novel Writing Month) about three years ago.  My initial thought was, "Who in the hell would want to write 50,000 words in a month?"  I would see all the stuff on Twitter from writer friends who were trying to make the deadline and secretly wish I was doing it too.  I have always wanted to write a book, it would be a fictional story but would include a lot of autobiographical stuff from my own life story. So I picked this year to do it.

That's right.. I actually signed up for NaNoWriMo. If you don't know what that is I'll explain a little.(or you can click the link)

You have 30 days during the month of November to write 50,000 words. It's really not about putting out a perfectly edited body of work, it's about getting 50,000 words down and editing later.

  I haven't decided yet how I'm going to go about doing this. I have no plot outline down on paper, nor do I have any of my characters dreamed up.  I think when the day comes I'll just open Word and start typing.  I think that over-planning ahead of time squashes the creative process.  Of course I may be kicking myself later on for not planning ahead a little more. 

Initially when I signed up for NaNoWriMo I was filled with a lot of emotions. I was terrified of failing to make the 50,000 word mark by the deadline, scared that I would get 10,000 words in and get writer's block, excited that I was finally going to work on this book that's been in my head for the past several years, and nervous that maybe I would get the book down on the computer and then hate it.  I think that these are all very normal reactions. 

My goal is to write 2,000 words per day. By the end of 30 days that should put me at 60,000 words. This also puts me in a position where I can take 5 of those days off out of the 30 and still meet the 50,000 word goal.  If you are also doing NaNoWriMo you should add me on the site! You can view my profile here.

Cat's NaNoWriMo Profile

Good luck and Happy Writing!!

This week has been the week from HELL where PTO is concerned. We just finished a VERY BIG fundraiser and I had to tally, total, and collect money and orders for 600+ students. Imagine with me for a moment how many checks that is that I have to keep track of which checks came from which kid and who's class they are in and what grade. It's been MADDENING. (More on that below)

I don't know if I've told you this or not but we have the SMALLEST PTO EVER in history. There are 4 of us. There's me, Denise, Tammy and Lisa.(names have been changed to protect the innocent)

  Lisa is SUPPOSED to be our Secretary. We elected her at the end of the year last year because the teacher that was on PTO as our Secretary was moving out of state and we had to find someone to fill the job. Little did we know that Lisa is a MAJOR alcoholic. She does not own a computer or typewriter, nor can she spell. She has been pretty useless to us ALL YEAR because she's either too hungover or doesn't know how to DO the stuff she is supposed to be doing. So her job as Secretary has been absorbed into my job as Treasurer. (Can you sense that I have a little bit of anger over this?? WHY ON EARTH would you nominate yourself for a position on the PTO that you KNOW you can't do?)

Tammy is the Vice President. She hasn't been useful to us all year due to extenuating circumstances with her health so her job as Vice President has been absorbed into Denise's job as President.

Denise and I don't WANT to be the only two moms on PTO but we have no choice. We tried to hold new elections and nobody even showed up let alone nominated themselves for a position.  It's sad really, but not surprising. The area we live in is pretty rural and parents just don't get involved. Last year we actually had parents drop their kids off at music programs and leave them and not even stay to watch the program. It really makes me sad.

So the two of us are doing the work that normally 20 or more moms would do.

I spend more time at the school than I do at home. The upshot to that is that I am always able to see the boys at school.

I don't mind helping out, really I don't. I bitch all the time to Bart about all the stuff I have to do but deep down inside I kinda love it. I love being involved with the kids school. I think MORE parents should be more involved. I know people that NEVER set foot inside their kids schools except to register them. That's just sad. 

Here's all the stuff that TWO PTO moms are doing this year:

*Organizing and running any fundraisers we have during the school year. (we are doing 4 this year) The fundraiser I just finished lasted 3 weeks. Two weeks for sales and one to collect the orders. Today I submitted all of the orders to the fundraiser company and now I have the daunting task of counting and tallying and entering checks, cash, and change into spreadsheets to prepare a deposit. I have over 600 checks and I have no idea how much cash and change to count and tally. You should see my bed right now. It looks like a bank threw up on it. I asked Bart today.. "Do you think it would be wrong of me to dump all the cash in a pile and roll around on it before I count it?" He just laughed... I'm still undecided on whether I'll do it or not, I'm thinking it would be "frowned" on by the principal, not that she would have to know..

*Putting together and submitting the Yearbook..  Let's just say here I have NEVER put together a Yearbook before. Our treasurer last year handled that and I have NO idea what I'm doing...I just hope I don't screw it up.

*Organizing and planning the annual Fall Festival that is coming up on October 17th.  Booths, Concessions, and advertising. I got this one! I LOVE festivals and I LOVE food! We're doing hot dogs, nachos, and snow cones. There will be a cake walk, a booth where people can pay to throw whipped cream pies at the teachers and a dunking booth for the principal. Moonwalks, face painting and all sorts of stuff.  We've been planning this since the beginning of the year so it's really not as stressful as it sounds. 

Organizing, arranging for donations, and putting together themed baskets for annual Silent Auction.  Did this one last year so it's not a big deal either. Basically I go to local businesses and ask them to donate a service or item to the school. I give them a list of the themed baskets we're doing and they always have something to offer us. Last year we did 24 baskets. They cost us basically NOTHING and we made almost 7 grand for the school. It was pretty awesome.

Organizing and planning the annual Kids Christmas Shoppe. Yep did this one too last year.  Denise and I go to the dollar store and snatch up all the "gift" items we can find that we think will sell well. Bring them back to the school and the kids can come and "shop" for their parents. We buy items for a dollar tax exempt. Then turn around and sell them for 2.00 each and make a profit for the school. Last year we spent 800.00 and only had about 20 items left. Which means we sold 780 items for 1560.00. It was pretty easy and made a good bit of cash for the school.

Putting together a weekly, monthly and quarterly as well as annual Treasurer's report and Financial Statement. I can balance a checkbook and I have last years reports to go off of as to how to format them so I think I'm good on this one too.
 

I'm also the school Photographer for the yearbook. I'll be taking all of the photos that aren't actual "school" pictures. I took a LOT of the pics for the yearbook last year so this isn't a big deal either..I also take Grandparent's Day Pictures and sell them for 5.00 each on Grandparent's day when the kids are having lunch with the Grandparents. We set up a cutesy bench with a fall type setting around it and I take photos. Then have them printed and return them to the students by the end of the week. It's been a HUGE hit. I donate my time to the school, and the photo editing. Print them off at walmart and we make at least a 4.00 profit on each photo. Last year I think we took about 300 pictures.

Putting together the Grade Level slideshows from said photos that will be shown at awards ceremonies at the end of the year, THEN submitting them to the company that makes the DVD's that we will sell after awards ceremonies. Easy. These are just done in Powerpoint and set to music. They're a big hit.

Video taping the music programs and editing and preparing them for the company that makes the DVD's that we will sell after the music programs. Also easy. I use Adobe Premiere to edit the videos and add effects then send it off to the company for burning to DVDs.

Also PTO is in charge of all of the Field Day stuff. We set up our Snow Cone and Popcorn Machine outside the Gym during field days and sell Snow Cones and Popcorn. I am officially the Queen of running the Popcorn Machine. That Snow Cone machine kinda scares me. I'd rather burn the hell out of myself than have my hand chewed off in that thing any day..

This will be my LAST year on PTO for this particular school.(I turned in my resignation to the Principal already this year just to be sure she understood that she would need to fill my position with someone new for next year) Next year two of my boys will be in Middle School and I'll just have one in Elementary, so it only seems fair that I spend more time at the school where the majority of my kids are. Besides I'll get to go and be Band mom next year. Being as how I was the biggest Band Geek you will ever know this excites me more than you will ever understand. When I was in Junior High and High School I played the Flute, Clarinet and Bass Clarinet in the Marching Band. I LOVED football games, and after school practices. I'll get to live vicariously all over again through Austin. It's going to SO ROCK.

Anyways, just wanted to write a short update so you wouldn't all think I had abandoned my blog again, I've just been buried in fundraiser crap. I'm going to get all this money and checks tallied over the weekend so I can get it all in the bank where it belongs. Then I'll have a few days to relax before we start running like crazy women again prepping for Fall Festival.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!!

Now that Austin and I are both over the Oink Flu I have a myriad of tasks to catch up on that didn't get done over the past month while I was healing up from breaking my arm and being sick.  This weekend is getting dubbed as Operation Sanitize The Clickarosa.  It's been far too long since ALL of the laundry was done and put away, the kitchen floor got mopped, and the shower in the master bath didn't look like you would get ill just from showering in it...

I spent the day yesterday making Gumbo. It took 5 hours if you count the trip to the store for supplies and my 24 quart stock pot was 3/4 full when I was finished.  Poor Bart, I thought he would starve to death before it was done...he was so funny...circling the pot all day while it cooked looking like a sad puppy waiting for his kibble.  As usual it turned out WONDERFUL. It was just what I needed to finally get over my sickness....Cat's Gumbo is truly medicinal.

In a few moments I will make waffles for the kids and start the crazy woman cleaning fest.

On the list for this weekend:

Household Tasks:

Strip all of the beds and wash the linens.
Sweep and scrub kitchen floor.
Dust and vacuum living room.
Windex all the glass tables in the living room.
Wash, dry, fold and put away ALL of the laundry. (there is currently a Mountain at the end of the hall I lovingly refer to as Mount Washmore.)
Clean the master bathroom.
Clean the kids bathroom.
Straighten, dust, and vacuum kids gameroom.
Work some in my office getting rid of papers that don't need to be there and generally straightening it up, also dusting and vacuuming in the office.

Tech/Geek Tasks:

Figure out why Sony Vaio desktop system crashes in mid boot and restarts. More than likely will have to wipe system and reinstall windows.
Do monthly backup on laptop to external and DVDs.

PTO Duties that need to be done before Monday:

Reconcile PTO Bank Statement and prepare Treasurer's Report for September.
Finish logging all new PTO members into membership roster.
Prepare membership dues deposit and tally sheet for Treasurers Book.
Go to Bank and deposit all membership dues.
Make database on computer to tally all Fundraiser Orders as they start coming in on Monday.
Type minutes from last general meeting and print out to give to President on Monday.
Pay our signmaker for the awesome signs he made for the front of the school.

Outdoor Tasks:

Trim all dead leaves off plants on porch.
Fertilize all patio plants and water.
Refill bird feeders with fresh seeds.
Clean and refill hummingbird feeders.

Gosh it makes me tired just reading all of that....but it's been far too long since all of this was done and it NEEDS to be done..so off to work I go!  I hope everyone has a FABULOUS weekend!!

I've been down with the Flu for a day and a half now. My oldest son went to the doctor yesterday and they said it was Swine Flu that he had....Within about 5 hours I had started to show symptoms as well. Let's just hope Bart and the other two boys don't get it...

Anyways, that's not the purpose of this post. I wanted to share two AWESOME songs I have gotten my hands on in the past few days that I just can't stop listening to...

The first song is by a great band called Muse.