Thanks, Meg, Whoever You Are

I want to give a quick shout out to a woman named Meg. I have never met her. I have no idea what she looks like, where she lives, or what her favorite color is. All I know is the woman can't type. How do I know this? Because I've been getting her telephone calls for the last week.

After the millionth, "I'm sorry, but you have the wrong number," one of the callers finally took pity on me and told me why I'm getting so many calls from financial institutions/debt consolidations companies/debt collectors. It seems dear old Meg filled out an online form requesting a free consultation about HER debt and put MY number in the phone field.

Thanks, Meg. Really. In fact, I so appreciate the fact that you have never heard of the concept of proof-reading and have done very little to improve your typing skills during however many years you've been on this planet that I would love nothing more than to send you a big, old, gift basket full of brownies laced with my favorite special ingredient, Ex-lax. Seriously, just leave me a comment with your address, and I'll go whip up a batch just for you. I hope you enjoy them immensely while you and your mounting debt are sitting on your living room sofa, watching the last 15 minutes of your favorite TV show, while I'm sitting on my sofa, missing mine, because I'm too busy telling one more caller that you have never, ever lived with me.

Oh, and Meg, you can so kiss my behind.

It's Official: I'm a Goofy, Goober Purse Buyer

As many of my regular readers know, I have had nothing but family drama since my mom died in April. I must admit that three months of being told what to do with my life by everyone and their grandmother and of feeling like I'm the only responsible adult in the family has taken its toll. My skin is an absolute mess, and my hair is thinning in front again; hence the trip me and my leg mohawk made to Sally Beauty Supply yesterday for generic Nioxin.

Faced with stress, a girl can do one of two things. She can eat, or she can shop. After taking Chandler out to eat almost every day for two months, I'm almost sick of eating so I chose the latter when I first got back to town a few weeks ago. Now usually when a girl shops to cheer herself up, she goes for shoes. Well, I wear a 5 or a 5.5 so the selection in most shoe departments is pretty limited for me. Heck, at Payless I'm not even considered an adult. I'm considered a "growing girl." Too bad my 33-year-old wrinkles don't know that.

So what did I do? I went shopping for purses, the next best thing. My first stop was Marshall's. I had been coveting a particular Lucky brand purse there since Thanksgiving, a black and white, slouch hobo with purple piping. Back then, the purse was way out of my price range, but Marshall's had been steadily lowering the price for months. It was now on sale $49, more than I wanted to pay for a purse but far less than the original $140 price tag.

I didn't buy the purse at first. I just did what I always did: pick it up, try it out in the mirror, look at the lining and exterior fabric, check for any tears, put it back, pick it back up again, put it back, pick it up, put it back, tell myself that I didn't need it, and leave. However, when I got home, I became almost obsessed with that purse. All I did was think about it--how it would look with certain outfits, how different it was from my other purses, how much it would hold, how it would stand out from all those cow purses everyone in Atlanta seems to be carrying. I even went online and searched for the purse on ShopWiki.com. I couldn't remember the style's exact name, so I just searched for Lucky hobo purses and spent more than an hour combing through page after page of Lucky purses.

What I found out was Lucky brand purses are expensive, at least for me anyway. The cheapest one on ShopWiki was $99, while the most expensive one was $250. Every now and then if I have a gift card, I'll blow $60 on a Liz Clairborne at Belk's, but usually I spend around $20 or $30 on a purse at Target and then use it until I wear it out. Spending $250 on one bag is something I can't even fathom.

While I could fathom $49, especially in comparison to the prices I was finding online, I still didn't rush out and buy the thing. I had to basically talk myself into it. It wasn't until after my grandmother suggested that I just buy it, put it up for winter, and tell myself when I take it out that it's a Christmas present from my mom, did I finally resolve to go back to Marshall's. I told myself if the lone purse was there, I was meant to have it. If it wasn't, it was never meant to be.

As luck would have it, the Lucky purse--now there's a pun for you--was still on the rack the next morning. I took it up front and got a big eye roll from the cashier when I told her that there were two security tags that needed to be removed. I wanted to say, "Listen, lady, I'm not the one who put them there. Don't roll your eyes at me," but I didn't. I just swiped my debit card and went on my merry way.

Now here's where I turned into a real goober. When I got home, I took the purse out of the bag, went upstairs, put the purse over my shoulder, and basically struck a pose in my full length mirror. Like I said, total goober. I didn't do that once, but several times a day for a week, like I was practicing for my audition on America's Next Top Model: the Purse Addition.

Eventually, I started embarrassing myself and moved the purse to my closet. I still look at it once a day, but I don't take it out and strut it in front of my mirror anymore. Instead, I just silently count down the days until the weather begins to cool and I can carry a purse with that type of fabric. Then I tell myself, if I get this wound up over a purse, I really need to put down my laptop and get out more. Like that's ever going to happen.

Must Wear Glasses

I always knew that I had to wear glasses or contacts for some things--driving, watching TV, using power tools, touching up my roots. Now I get to add one more thing to the list--shaving my legs. I've had a really bad sinus headache for the last few days, the kind where it hurts to touch your face, your teeth feel like they're going to fall out, and your ears are so backed up the world spins every time you lean over. Needless to say, I haven't been that diligent about shaving my legs. Instead, I have just worn every pair of jeans I own, the 90-plus degree heat be damned.

Today I ran out of clean jeans so I had to reach into the bottom drawer for shorts. Truth be told, if I had planned on sitting around the house all day, I probably still wouldn't have shaved. I would have just made sure to (1) change into a dirty pair of jeans before going to the mailbox, (2) avoid touching my hairy legs as much as possible, and (3) switch my shorts for worn out pajama bottoms the minute Dr. Phil went off. However, I wasn't planning on sitting around the house. I was planning on going to Petsmart, Sally Beauty Supply, and Target. Since I didn't want to be confused for Cousin It or one of the dogs up for adoption, I had no choice but to shave before leaving the house.

Now I don't normally put my contacts in until after I shower. As gross as this may sound, I like to shower first because the steam helps get all the morning eye gook out. For those of you with perfect vision, contacts plus gook equal blurry vision. Consequently, I didn't put them in first thing this morning. I just reached for my Noxema razor and my new can of Skintimate shave gel and shaved my legs like I have done so many mornings before.

Or so I thought.

About three hours after I got back from running errands, I sat down on the sofa with my right leg tucked under me and saw what I thought was a shadow or bruise on the back of my right calf. However, after untucking my leg and inspecting the area more closely, I realized that it wasn't a shadow or a bruise at all. It was what can only be described as a leg mohawk, a strip of hair-covered skin that went all the way from my ankle to my knee. Lovely.

Now I'm not talking about a little bit of stubble here. I'm talking about out-and-out leg hair. To make matters worse, I'm not exactly the tannest person on the planet. I'm not even close. My leg hair, in contrast, is at dark as it gets. Translation: the leg mohawk had to stand out, like a caterpillar on a white tree trunk.

I'm 5'3" so my short legs aren't anything to look at anyway. Thus, I'm hoping that no one had reason to look down at my calves and that I can actually show my face and my hopefully hairless legs in those stores again. I'm just going to give it a few days or weeks before I find out. Surely, someone will do something more embarrassing in the meantime, and my leg mohawk will become a distant, albeit laughable, memory.

One thing is for sure; I have learned my lesson. (Like missing my leg with the razor and cutting two fingers on my left hand instead last week wasn't enough of a learning experience...) From now on, I'm wearing my contacts or glasses when I shave my legs.

It Was YouTube's Fault

I have spent hours today and yesterday trying to figure out what happened to my blog design. Yesterday, the three columns suddenly stopped repeating all the way to the bottom in three out of five browsers. I created a solid header and moved the background image to the outer wrapper (the yellow and white faux columns) until I could figure out what was going on with the content wrapper. I removed the Blog Catalog, MyBlogLog, and Google Friend Connect widgets. I both moved and removed the CommentLuv plugin. I tried various types of CSS on the content-wrapper, none of which worked, including just a solid color. I opened up the templates of sites that I have done with a repeating content-wrapper image and compared them line by line to this template. I even emailed JS-Kit. For the life of me, I could not figure it out.

Then I started to look at my posts. I know the columns loaded correctly when I took those screenshots I sent to CommentLuv and posted here. They stopped working after I post the So You Think You Can Dance video from YouTube. Could it possibly be that?

A few minutes ago, I deleted the video. Viola, my site started working again when I moved the image back to the content-wrapper part of my template. It was that simple. Just try telling that to the bags under my eyes.

Regardless, the site is back to normal with my normal header, knock on wood. If you want to see the video, you'll just have to go to YouTube and search for it instead. (I'll see if I can link to it later, but right now the only thing I'm going to do is take a hefty dose of Tylenol.)

Sorry for the Mess Again

If you're visiting tonight and things look wierd, sorry. Now something is causing my design not to go all the way to the bottom in Firefox, Opera, and Safari. I moved CommentLuv yesterday. That may be it. It may be Google Friends. I'm going to delete a few things and put them back on to try to figure it out.

UPDATE: Removing CommentLuv didn't phase the columns. Neither did removing Google Friend Connect. My best guess is that JS-Kit was causing my problem because I had the 3 columns set up the same way on my other sites, and they're working fine for now. The only difference between this site and those sites is that this site has JS-Kit while those have standard Blogger comments. Quite frankly I don't want to mess with uninstalling JS-Kit, but I want the even columns so I changed the header. I don't like it as much as my old transparent one, and I'll probably do some more tweaking tomorrow, but it'll do for tonight.

I Can't Believe I'm Saying This...

But I'm actually feeling sorry for my sister right now. My mom's house is being sold at auction next month so Tina has decided to move into the apartment off the back of my grandmother's house that I was going to move into before my mom died. She hasn't even moved in yet, and my grandmother is already treating her the way I suspected she was going to treat me and would have treated my mother if she had gone through with her own plan to move in last year.

First let me paint a picture of that apartment. It's a 1970's cave. Every wall is covered in dark, dark paneling. The floors are covered in a combination of just as dark, forest green, shag carpet and linoleum that is older than I am. Half of the apartment is sinking in due to, in everyone's opinion but my grandmother's, a water leak somewhere. My grandmother, however, won't fix the floor or the leak because she says there's nothing wrong with the floor. According to her, it's perfectly normal for one side of a house to be a good six inches lower than the other side and for the toilet to lean at a 45 degree angle. The apartment's rooms, meanwhile, are set up as a shrine to the con artist that stole most of my grandmother's money a couple of years ago. Even though she'll admit to everyone but us that the man was no good and was just using her, she refuses to get rid of his stuff and expects my sister to live around it.

My sister wants to do what I wanted to do to it--paint the walls and replace the carpet--but my grandmother is already putting her foot down. It has to stay the way it is, the 1970's Sammy shrine. She is also trying to stick my sister with all of her bills--not her half of the electricity, her share of the groceries, etc.--but the whole darn thing, even though, as I have already mentioned, she hasn't even stepped foot in the place yet. (Yes, it's technically my grandmother's house, but she didn't pay for that part of it; her mother and father did after they sold their farm and moved in with her and my grandfather.)

I wish my mother was here so I could say, "I told you so." For those of you who are new to this blog, check out this post I wrote last year: Don't Live with Nana: More Dysfunction on the Homefront. In it, I wrote about how I spent an entire weekend talking my mother out of moving in with my grandmother. The reasons that I listed are all coming true, only now they're happening to Tina, not my mother. I wish I could say, "I told you that's how she would behave. I told you that's what she would expect, " but I can't. Instead, all I can do is tell Tina the same.

I will be surprised if Tina lasts a month. I know I couldn't take the constant, "Pay this for me. Go get me this. Bring me that. Do, do, do for me," without getting anything in return. Heck, the entire reason I'm back in Atlanta now, or one of the reasons anyway, is that my mother's body was barely cold before my grandmother was telling me how I was going to spend my half of the insurance money to fix her house. No kidding, people. She was telling me that, as soon as I got the check, I was going to pay to have her 40 year old carpet ripped up, to redo her kitchen cabinets, and to fence in her backyard (her's, not the apartment's). In the words of Alicia Silverstone, "As if."

What makes me and my sister mad is that my grandmother would have money to do those things herself had she not shacked up with a con artist after my grandfather died and disowned anyone who told her that he was only after her money. For all we know, she still has the money now if the two new con artists she has circling around her haven't already taken it. They've taken her beach house--I use that term loosely to describe a trailer that Con Artist #1 had her buy a couple of miles from the beach in the Redneck Riviera--so why not everything else? I'm sure Tina's moving in has really thrown a wrench in their plan.

Just the same, it's not like my grandmother is destitute. She's just spoiled. My grandfather spent their entire marriage buying her whatever she wanted so he didn't have to listen to her. When, due to emphysema, he could no longer go to the store and buy her her every heart's desire himself, he had my mother do it. Consequently, my grandmother has never had to do anything for herself. She's never had to the grocery store. She's never had to pay bills. Sometimes I wonder if she's ever even had to wipe her own butt. Now that my mother is gone, she still won't step up, become an independent woman, and learn to do those things. She just continues to expect someone else to do them for her.

Like I said, I doubt Tina will last a month before she's out apartment hunting. Let's just hope she doesn't show up on my doorstep. As much as I feel sorry for her, I won't be opening the door. Ditto when Con Artists #2 and 3 sweep in in my sister's absence and take what little my grandmother has left. Maybe that makes me incredibly selfish, but sometimes you just have to be to survive, especially in my family.

So You Think You Can Dance: In Case You Didn't See It

Just to prove that I can do something other than vent, here is a clip from YouTube of Melissa and Ade's second performance tonight (last night technically now) on So You Think You Can Dance: This Woman's Work Dance. It's performances and choreography like this that makes me wish I had continued dance lessons through college and beyond.

It's missing the lead in and the judges' reactions (they all cried) so here's a quick setup for those of you who don't get it. Melissa's character has breast cancer, and Ade is the partner/husband who is trying to be strong for her. The words to This Woman's Work and the dance explain the rest.

FYI: I prefer the Kate Bush version of the song, but given the piece is supposed to be about Ade supporting Melissa, I guess the male version from Maxwell fits better. I also used to have the video up on this post, but it made my template go crazy.

Not Feeling the Love with CommentLuv at the Moment

Forgive me, but I need to vent for a minute. Yeah, I know. What else is new? But, hey, this really is a new vent. Since I've been home, I have noticed that CommentLuv has stopped working for a lot of you. Either your comments fail to return any kind of post at all or they end with a "recent undefined" error. I put in a ticket on the 18th on CommentLuv's web site, which, as luck would have it, turned out to be the same time that the developer redid his site. Since his redo included his support ticket system, I had to put in another one yesterday.

The essence of the ticket was this. My feed does not show up on many Wordpress blogs that contain CommentLuv. For instance, my feed is not picking up on JunkDrawerBlog.com. It used to, but now all I get is my Gravatar. I don't get any kind of link to my latest post, let alone the ability to choose from my last 10 posts like you're supposed to. Meanwhile, some people's feeds do not show up on my CommentLuv-enabled Blogger blog.

I also noted in my ticket that I had discovered, in an attempt to solve the problem myself, that when you visit my blog for the first time in Chrome or Safari, CommentLuv does not load. You have to hit reload to get it to show up on the JS-Kit form. I clarified that by first time I meant after you have cleaned out your cache, cookies, browsing history, etc. or for the first real visit.

Well, wouldn't you know that the essence of the developer's response was that he couldn't help me because it was all working hunky dory for him? (Not his exact words, but you get the picture.) He also mentioned how well it was working in Firefox.

Uh, did I ever say it wasn't working in Firefox? I said I thought the error may lie with Chrome and Safari, the two browsers based on WebKit, not with Firefox, which is based on an entirely different platform. Not to be deterred, I replied to his response with screenshots of what was happening and by further explaining myself.

Here are those screenshots:



Safari is on top. Chrome is on the bottom. I know that it's hard to see them period without zooming in, but do you see that telltale black box and red heart at the bottom of the comment form, right above the smileys? No? Me either, so either we're all delusional or I'm really not making this up. Like I don't have better things to do than make up problems and fill out tickets on blog-related web sites all day long.

Again I got much of the same in the second response, only this time I was told Opera worked just fine. Duh, I know Opera works fine. If I thought Opera was the problem, I would have said so in the ticket. Did I say Opera? No, I said Chrome and Safari.

I was also told that he could no longer help me since he could not duplicate the problem. Well, gee, thanks. On the one hand, I understand where he's coming from. It's probably hard to fix a problem you can't see. On the other hand, it's frustrating because he seems to have the same mentality that's so popular at Entrecard these days. If you don't or can't see something happening, then it's not happening. (That seems to be the mods opinion on the forums. If unapproved paid ads aren't showing up on their own blogs, then they must not be showing up on other people's. Well we all know how true that statement is, but that's a topic for another post.)

You know how you can have the worst stomach ache of your life, but when you go to the doctor it finally stops hurting? And of course the doctor can't help you because you can't tell him where it hurts, and then five minutes down the road the pain returns? I'm starting to think CommentLuv is my stomach ache.

So instead of returning to the doctor--obviously it wouldn't do any good--I'm going to grab some virtual Milk of Magnesia and try to soothe my aches myself. That is, I'm going to try to move the CommentLuv plugin to the sidebar at a higher position than Google Friend Connect and see if that changes anything. The widget was screwing up things for this blog overall on Internet Explorer 8. Maybe now it's screwing up CommentLuv on Opera and Chrome.

I'll give it a few days, and if I'm still finding that people's feeds aren't showing up, I'm going to reach for virtual Pepto-Bismol instead. That is, I'm going to go into JS-Kit and either see if can change the label on the URL line, so it says something like URL (hit reload if you don't see CL), or add in the JS-Kit URL line. If I do the latter, there will be two URL lines, which I know will be confusing for everyone, but, assuming I can change the labels so you'll be able to tell that one is for JS-Kit and one is for CommentLuv, at least you'd have the option of choosing which kind of linkback you want (main page of blog or to your last post). That is, at least you'd have a better chance of some kind of link showing up.

Blame the Sleep Deprivation

I'm sorry I haven't posted anything in a few days, but I'm rather sleep deprived at the moment. I think my sleep deficiency is due in part to my body's clock being thrown off by those two months I spent at my mother's. If any of you read my family ventfest post, you know that my sister would come in every night around two or three. The minute she would put her key in the door, all six dogs--yes, I said six--would run to the door and bark like they were on death row at the pound. Then my sister would spend the next hour "cooking" or, as I like to call it, slamming cabinet doors and rattling pans in the kitchen. Guess where I was sleeping? That's right. In the bedroom right next to the kitchen.

If I was lucky, I'd fall back to sleep by 3:30 a.m. or 4 a.m. If I wasn't, I would toss and turn while my sister blared the TV in the living room until it was time to take the dogs out at 8 a.m. I swear the woman has to be half-deaf the way she blares a TV.

The other reason that I'm sleep deprived is my next door neighbors, not the ones that I not-so-affectionately call the Devil's Spawn or the kids from the Village of the Damned, not the even the ones I've nicknamed Boxer Boy and Booty Shorts Girl. No, these are the ones who bought the foreclosed house next door about a year ago and who have in the last few weeks turned it into Party Central, the ones with two kids and I thought a job. Well, the job must now be with Anheuser Busch because partying is all they ever do, day and night (sound familiar?), and it's only gotten worse now that they can add two more cars and four more people to the mix. (How they fit eight people into 1300 square feet, I'll never know, but they have.)

When I go to bed at night, I get woken up around 2 or 3 a.m. when the party moves from the backyard to the front. (My bedroom is in the front of my house.) When I try to nap during the day, I get woken up by someone vacuuming their car with their stereo on full blast or by my dogs barking at the people preparing for the night's party in the backyard. In other words, I'm not allowed to sleep. Neither is anyone within a five mile distance of the neighbor's house.

I'd call the police, but knowing these neighbors, they'd just return the favor the first time my dogs barked at them. After all, these are the same neighbors who waited until I was out of town to build a privacy fence across the property line and attach it to mine, just so they wouldn't have to buy fence for the right side of their yard. Who cares that they completely blocked off my access to the very back part of my yard, at least from the back of my house, that they broke several property laws by crossing property lines, or that they damaged the structural integrity of my fence by bolting their fence into the middle of my panel? Not them, that's for sure. They do what they want, and the rest of the street be damned. At least the HOA was on my side for once and made them move the fence. I'm sure they're still pissed about that fact and just looking for payback.

Add to that the fact that I've been taking Benadryl, Claritin D, and Tylenol right and left for this ever-present sinus headache, and you can see why I have been too exhausted to blog about anything other than my dog's teeth. For those of you who care, Bailey is doing better, by the way. Up until today, he was eating both hard and soft dog food, but I think the amoxicillin they have him on is finally catching up to him because he puked it all back up before dinner. Hey, at least he's not bleeding anymore.

Anyway, hopefully I'll get some quality sleep soon and be able to write about something a little more interesting.

Charter is Giving Away a HP Laptop a Day

During those two months that I spent in my hometown after my mom's funeral, I made two resolutions. The first one was that I would never complain about Kroger again. (If any of you have ever had the misfortune of shopping at a Harvey's, a grocery store that is overly priced but short on services and products, you know exactly what I mean.) The second was that I would never complain about my Charter services again. Why? Well, let's just say that I learned how the other half lives.

You see my mom had cable and Internet through the city. The Internet was fast, and the cable had a lot of channels, but that was about the only good thing that could be said about them. As for the negative things, I could go on and on. For example, if you were to hit "info" on a show, it would say that the show was brand new, even if that particular episode was five years old. Only one of the two cable boxes worked via remote, but the city refused to let us trade in the defunct one at their office. They said we had to schedule an on-site service call. The only problem with that is that it would take one to two weeks to get someone out there, not the next day like with Charter. If the cable went out in the middle of the night, you couldn't call anyone. Unlike Charter, customer service with city cable only worked nine to five. Whose cable ever goes out between nine to five? I think that it's an unwritten rule somewhere that your cable only goes out five minutes before your favorite primetime show, not during daylight hours, and don't even get me started on the lack of On Demand. I swear that I was going through On Demand withdrawal by the time those two months were up.

So when my cable, Internet, and VOIP phone went out a couple of weeks ago, I didn't complain. I wasn't happy, but waiting a day to get it fixed was better than waiting two weeks. I just used the opportunity to read and play video games.

Now Charter is offering something else I can't complain about--its Back to School Laptop-a-Day Sweepstakes. Every day between July 15 and September 15, Charter is giving away a Hewlett Packard 550 notebook, which features a 160 GB hard drive, a 15.4 inch screen, a wireless card, and Windows Vista Basic, as well as a NeoTec Compu Backpack to carry it in to one lucky winner. Charter is also giving away gift cards to customers who sign up for its services online. The gift cards cover the gambit from Macy's and Pier One to Dunkin Donuts and the Olive Garden.

As I mentioned in my previous post on Charter, you can now follow Charter on Twitter and thereby stay up-to-date on its most current promotions, including the notebook giveaway, and, assuming your Internet service isn't down, request technical support. For those of you on Facebook--no, I still haven't jumped on that bandwagon yet--you can also connect with Charter on Facebook.

As for the sweepstakes, you can register on Charter's web site or mail in your entry. While no purchase is necessary to enter the sweepstakes, you do have to live in an area serviced by Charter to enter. For more information on the sweepstakes, including additional details on how to enter and a list of current winners, just click on the Support My Sponsor link below.

My Poor Baby

My two dogs got their teeth cleaned today. Poor Bailey had to have three of his front teeth pulled. Here are two pictures of him drugged up and somewhat toothless:




For new readers, here is what Bailey looks like when he's not drugged up and when he had all his teeth:

I want to cry just looking at him now because he looks like he's in so much pain. I'm going to have to call the vet in the morning to see if they were supposed to give me some Metacam for him on top of the Clavamox. They kept telling me Bella had them pulled, not Bailey, which might explain why they didn't send me home with the pain killer. Bella is allergic to it. However, once I got to the car, realized Bailey was the one missing teeth and bleeding, and took them back in, they should have offered the pain meds then.

Before any pet advocates jump on my case over the teeth, Bailey had bad teeth when I got him from the pound, not to mention the worst doggy breath ever. I have tried everything to clean his teeth. I've bought a three-sided toothbrush, a regular doggy toothbrush, and a toothbrush that slips over your finger. I've also bought dental wipes, Greenies, dental biscuits, dental chews, dental bones, basically everything teeth related except that stuff you put in their water and sprinkle on their food that theoretically keeps away plaque. None of it has helped. His teeth are still bad, and their crooked nature and the pronounced underbite don't help any.

As for Bella, her teeth look amazing post-cleaning. They're whiter than mine. Is it wrong to be jealous of a dog's teeth?

When It Rains, It Pours, Internet Style

Today is just not my day. Now my comments aren't showing at all in Internet Explorer 8. In Firefox, old comments are showing, but new ones are disappearing into the wild, blue yonder. They will initially show on the blog, but if you come back to the blog, they are nowhere to be found. They're not even showing in my JS-Kit Moderation Dashboard. I have no idea where they are going. If you leave a comment today and you come back tomorrow and your comment is gone, please know that I didn't delete it. I have put in a ticket to JS-Kit. Hopefully, the issue will be worked out soon.

UPDATE 9:24 PM: It seems to be working again. Comment away.

First Entrecard, Now Internet Explorer 8

Earlier today, I wrote a post about how the low price of my blog on Entrecard was making me question the blog's worth. A couple of people commented on the post, but for some reason JS-Kit and CommentLuv didn't pick up the commenters' RSS feeds. Scared that the fault for that lay on my end, I decided to open Internet Explorer 8 and attempt to leave a comment using the URL of one of my other sites. I never got to the comment part, however, because I got the dreaded "operation aborted" error message every time I tried to open my home page.

I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach as I thought, "Oh, great. Here we go again." How many times have I tweaked something on this web site, only to find out it works great in all browsers but Internet Explorer? Too many to count. The thing is this time I hadn't tweaked anything, which is what had me worried.

After sometime reading up on the problem on Firefox--by all means, the superior browser of the two--I discovered that Internet Explorer can't read certain scripts correctly. In particular, it has issues reading the scripts that are involved with Google Friend Connect or what used to be known as the Blogger Followers widget. According to the Blogger Known Issues site, Blogger has known about this since May and still hasn't come up with a solution. Lovely. The people in the Google forums suggest moving the widget further down your sidebar, removing it all together, or just using Firefox.

I'm not ready to remove the widget just yet. I'll be darned if I have to redesign this blog yet again for yet another Microsoft quirk. Instead I'm going to try moving the widget underneath the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog widgets. If that doesn't work, all I can do for my readers is suggest using Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or Safari. They're better browsers anyway.

UPDATE 7/17/09: I have moved the widget down, and now the blog is loading fine for me in Internet Explorer 8. I have also tested it in Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome, and, at least on my computer, it seems to be working fine. If any of you are still having problems, can you please leave a comment--assuming you can get the page to load long enough to do so--or send me an email at justbloggled@yahoo.com? Thanks. I'll scrap the widget if I have to, but I'm hoping the move was enough.

Last Two Days to Enter It's a Blu World Contest

Several months ago I received two free samples of BluFrog Energy Drink in the mail. Now I have to admit something here. I had never drunk an energy drink before those two cans arrived on my doorstep, not unless Gatorade counts. Hey, don't laugh. I had not. To me Red Bull was nothing more than something Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears were photographed drinking; it wasn't something that I would actually go out and buy, and BluFrog? Well, let's just say that I had never even heard of it.

I have to admit something else. I'm one of those people who love freebies. I once got a sample of Dove shampoo in the mail, and I was practically skipping back from the mailbox. Thus, despite the fact that I had never had an energy drink, I couldn't wait to try it. I put one can in the freezer so it would get cold faster and the second can in the fridge. About an hour or so later, I shook the can from the freezer as directed, popped the top, and took a sip.

I was surprised by the taste. I think that I expected it to taste like a really strong Coke or a Pepsi, but it didn't. It was fruity, like punch with a kick. I can't say that I was particularly energized by it--I drink several Cokes throughout the day so it takes quite a bit of caffeine to phase me--but it definitely didn't put me to sleep. Plus, I liked it enough I drank the other can, albeit a few days later.

I was also surprised by the ingredients. BluFrog has actual vitamins and antioxidants, something my favorite red can does not. It has no artificial flavors or colors and contains only 68 calories per serving. In comparison, Red Bull has 110 calories, while Coke has 140. Not bad.

I haven't bought any can since--my hometown is rather short on the grocery store front and I keep forgetting to go down that aisle in Kroger now that I'm back at my house--but I have checked out BluFrog's web site. The company is hosting a contest called It's a Blue World Contest that ends tomorrow night at 11:59 p.m. EST. If you enter the BluFrog contest by then, you could win one of five great prizes--an Xbox 360 gaming package, a New Year's Eve trip to New York City, a trip to Chicago for Lollapalooza, the Richard Petty Racing Experience, or a trip to Aspen for the Winter X games. All you have to do is leave a comment on the contest web site saying why you want one of the prizes, tweet about the contest on Twitter, or write a blog post about it with a link back to the site. It's pretty simple. Just don't forget that tomorrow is the last day to enter.

For more information about the contest, check out this video from BluFrog:

Good luck to whoever enters. I have one question though. If you win one of the trips, will you take me with you? I could so use a vacation.

I Love Being So (Un)Popular

Some days in the blogging world I feel like Heather Chandler at the top of blogging food chain. Some days I feel like Veronica Sawyer, not the queen bee but well liked just the same. Other days, however, I feel like Martha Dumptruck. Yesterday was definitely a Martha Dumptruck kind of day, courtesy of that Graham guy that owns Entrecard. He didn't do anything personally to me, but his site was a serious ego killer. I logged in yesterday to find that it only cost two credits to advertise on Just Bloggled. Two. That's it. In Entrecard world, two is the same as zero credits. It's the bottom of the heap. It's never getting asked to dance at school dances. It's being the last person picked at P.E. Two credits just plain sucks.

Which made me think so do I. I suck. This blog sucks. The whole world sucks. Yeah, I was on a total pity parade. I took that parade to Twitter and announced my worth to the tweeting world. I got a couple of advertisers out of that tweet. By the time I went to bed my blog's net value had gone up to eight credits. Eight. It's better than two, but not a whole lot. If two is being the last person picked at P.E., eight is being the next to the last person and knowing you're not last because the guy next to you picks his scabs and eats his boogers, not necessarily in that order.

Thanks to hours of dropping last night, my number is slightly more respectable this morning. Nevertheless, I'm starting to realize that, not only is Entrecard a big time consumer, it's a major ego deflator if you're not one of those blogs that cost 1000 plus credits. I'm also starting to wonder if I should continue taking part in the system. I used to say I needed the traffic, but these days I'm only getting three to six visitors from the site a day. Granted, that may have a lot to do with my two month blogging break, but I thought that by posting regularly these last two weeks surely that number would go up to at least ten. It hasn't. Even if it had, hours of dropping for ten visitors--it doesn't seem like a fair trade.

I'll give Entrecard a few more weeks of my time, but given the new changes Graham plans on implementing like forced comments and X amount of minutes you must stay on each blog, it may be time for me to go back to finding good blogs through Blog Catalog, My BlogLog, and comments on blogs that I already read regularly. Those methods seem to be a lot less stressful.

That being said, I checked my dashboard for top droppers. The way the statistics section is set up, you can only see the top droppers for the last 30 days. It won't show me the top droppers for the months that I was away. I will have to go through my inbox manually later and do the math on my own. To my top droppers, I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

More Sisterly Love...or Not

Monday I made the mistake of eating the chicken club combo from Wendy's. Today, three days later, I'm still paying the price. My right kidney, the one that likes to shoot out kidney stones every time I eat too much salt, is killing me. Despite that fact, I told my nephew that I would go to Target and see if they had the Fusion Fall game cards, like the Fusion Fall web site contends. As it turns out, the game isn't free after you pass Level Four. You have to pay for unlimited access thereafter. As usual, my sister refuses to buy her son anything that might entertain him so he tried to get me to pay the monthly fee. I'm willing to pay one month of $5.95--hence, the hunt for the game card--but not a year's worth. I've bought him enough in the last two months.

I went to Target, Best Buy, and Walmart, gritting my teeth against the kidney pain the entire time. While some Target stores may carry the cards, mine did not. All they had was the game, which gives you four months of unlimited access for free but costs $19.99. Even if I was willing to pay the $19.99, I wouldn't do so without doing some research. I've found the hard way that some games will work on Vista if you buy the download version but not the disc version. (Cough--Polar Bowler--cough.)

Anyway, I came back home and called my nephew on Skype to tell him what I had found out. What do I get in return? My oh-so-loving sister in the background chewing me out because I dare let our father make a copy of my key. It seems dear old dad, who's not the brightest bulb, has been using it to let himself in whenever he wants, which is usually when my sister, who, as I've mentioned before, sleeps to 3 p.m. or so every day, won't wake up to answer the door. He wasn't supposed to use it for that. He was supposed to use it for emergencies.

Which is what I told her. I didn't tell her the rest of it, which is that everyone in and outside the family is scared that she's going to go out one night and leave Chandler alone, drink so much that she ends up with alcohol poisoning, or mix one too many Valiums with one too many bottles of beer and can't, as opposed to won't, wake up the next day. I didn't tell her that I gave him the key to copy, so if those things or worse were to happen, someone could get in the house. I just left it at he wanted a copy for emergencies.

What's that saying about no good deed going unpunished? Well, obviously that axiom applies whenever that good deed involves my family. The next time that I think of doing a good deed for anyone who shares my DNA, someone please remind me to think again.

Nothing Like a Little Noon Time Paranoia

Sometimes I really am my mother's daughter. I used to make fun her all the time for how paranoid she would get when a cop car would get behind her. Even if she wasn't doing anything wrong, she was convinced that the cop was going to stop her. It's a miracle that she didn't commit ten different traffic violations thereafter just from sheer nervousness.

Well, today at lunch I exhibited a bit of her blue light paranoia. I was coming back from Kroger and saw a sheriff's car sitting in the front of my subdivision. I figured that the deputy was there to catch speeders, since people use the street outside of my subdivision as a speed-happy cut-through all the time, or was about to serve someone with papers. As I wasn't speeding and, to my knowledge, no one is about to sue me, I put on my left turn signal and turned into my subdivision worry-free.

Then the sheriff pulled in behind me, and I started to worry. Had my turn signal bulb gone out again? Did the lens on my rear tail light fall off? Is it now against the law to have peeling paint on your car? What did I do?

When I turned onto my street, I began to worry more, as the deputy continued to follow me. Was I being sued? Did I forget to pay a credit card? Had Chase magically applied my house payments to someone else's account? Was my sister coming after me for that electricity bill? Were my mom's creditors coming after me because they found out she had nothing to probate? Did the cashier in the self-checkout lane at Kroger think I stole something? Why on earth was he following me?

When the deputy stopped in front of my house, my worry was about to turn into full-fledge panic. Had my ex-boss, Judge Combover, somehow found my blog and decided to sue me for slander? After all, he's now up for the Supreme Court of Georgia. I'm sure he doesn't want anything negative out there about him, even if said negativity is true. Was he having me arrested for contempt of court? Granted, I haven't been in court in some time, and I never wrote the blog in court, but he wouldn't let that stop him. He once tried to get the deputies to arrest a civil clerk for contempt of court for something she did or refused to do for him outside of court. The deputies, however, were her friends and refused to do so. Was the Solicitor General finally making good on his promise to "make me his mission"? If so, what were the trumped up charges? Had I missed jury duty? I haven't received a notice for jury duty, but it wouldn't be the first time that the mail carrier has misdelivered my mail.

I tried to act all calm, cool, and collected as I got out of the car, but, considering the fact that the deputy then got on his radio, it's a miracle I didn't spill my three bags of groceries all over the driveway. I somehow made it to the front door without hyperventilating or being handcuffed. As I put my key in the door, I heard the deputy start the engine of his car. I turned around and saw him do a u-turn in front of my house and leave. Then my worry turned to anger.

Let me guess. The Redneck Mobile matched a BOLO (be on the lookout) call yet again. I had been stopped once before because the car matched a BOLO. Now it looks like I was being followed for the same thing.

I have so got to get a new car.

Ha Ha, Hee Hee, Amy

No vent today. Just something that made me laugh. A few weeks ago in South Georgia, the radio stations started to play Britney Spear's "If You Seek Amy." They played the song with no edits, at least so far as the title of the song and the chorus were concerned. I don't know if the DJ's and the radio stations don't quite get that the song has nothing to do with some chic named Amy or if they just ran the song by the FCC and the FCC gave them a thumb's up. Either way, I was surprised that the song, which I find funny in itself--it reminds of this poem that this guy in high school got the clueless English department to publish in the school's literary magazine that spelled out a similar sentiment when you read the first letter of every line--got any airplay in that part of the state at all.

Now here I am today, driving along in my car, in the suburbs of Atlanta, a town that I'm sure considers itself much more progressive and liberal than any town in South Georgia, and I hear the same song, only it went something like this:

"But all the girls and all the boys are begging to ha ha, hee hee."

Luckily my fountain drink from the QT was too watered down to drink. Otherwise, I might have had Cherry Coke in my mouth and spewed it all over the Redneck Mobile's windshield. Yes, all the girls and all the boys who were begging to ha ha and hee hee had me ha ha and hee heeing as well, at least for a few seconds anyway. Then I turned the station.

Seriously, Atlanta, loosen up. Better yet, give Amy a call. She might be able to help you in that department.

Rewriting History, Idiot Father Style

Did you know that I used to be anorexic or that I was hospitalized for it in the 12th grade? No? Me neither, but apparently that's the story that my father has been telling everyone lately. Nice, huh? Add this post to the category of Things I Didn't Bite My Tongue About a.k.a. Things I Chewed Someone Out About in the Middle of an IHOP Restaurant.

So how did I find out my father decided to rewrite history and make me into the poor, underfed heroine in an after school special? I started paying attention to Step Skank's snarky comments. Usually I tune the woman out or just ignore her altogether, but after the hundredth time I heard her say, "Well, if Chandler doesn't start eating, he's going to end up in the hospital just like you," I decided to do something about it.

Before any of you get too concerned, Chandler isn't anorexic either. He is just a picky eater. He likes what he likes, and doesn't like what he doesn't like. It's that simple. However, Step Skank seems to think that, if what Chandler eats doesn't come from a cow or pig or isn't deep fried, it isn't really food. In other words, if he eats chicken, fruit, and yogurt, then he has to be anorexic. If he eats red meat, then he's a growing boy. Some logic, huh?

As for me, I have never had an eating disorder. What I did have--the thing that landed me in the hospital in the 12th grade--was pseudomembranous or antibiotic-associated colitis. To put the condition in the simplest of terms, pseudomembranous colitis occurs when you take an antibiotic, usually of the broad-spectrum variety, and the antibiotic, instead of killing off the bad bacteria in your body like it's supposed to, kills off the good bacteria instead. The bad bacteria then takes over and eats away at your colon, bit by bit. If the doctors catch it in time, they can treat the condition with vancomycin. If they don't, then it's goodbye colon, and you spend the rest of your life crapping into what amounts to a Ziploc bag on your side.

Luckily for me, the doctors went the vancomycin route and left my colon right where it should be. Nevertheless, I spent six long weeks in the hospital for that condition and that condition alone. Did I loose weight while I was there? Well, yeah. The only way the colon can heal itself is to shed its damaged lining, and the only way it can shed its damaged lining is to send said lining down the remainder of the digestive tract in the form of--you can all cringe now--diarrhea. Who wouldn't lose weight after six weeks of the runs?

Did I have a feeding tube at one point? Again yeah. After all, it's a little hard to eat solid food when you have a tube in your throat breathing for you for four of those six weeks. I had to get nutrients somehow.

But was I anorexic? No, no, and no. But I guess anorexia makes a better story than your daughter crapped herself for six weeks so that's what my father is telling everyone 15 years later. Like I don't have enough to deal with right now.

Anyway, once I finally figured out that anorexia was what Step Skank had been implying, I let her and my father have it. I didn't care if we were in public. I was tired of the two insinuating that my mother didn't feed me or I didn't feed myself. Heck, if my father had ever bothered to take an active part in my life back then, he might have realized that I ate all the time; I just had a high enough metabolism that I didn't gain 500 pounds from it. As for my mother not feeding me--in trying to defend himself, he claims my official diagnosis was malnourishment, as if--what a joke. She was the only one who did, and without any help from him or his rarely paid child support, I might add.

Well, poor little Step Mommy couldn't take it and left the restaurant. My father, meanwhile, kept insisting that my hospitalization had nothing to do with an antibiotic and everything to do with my eating habits or lack thereof. He swears right and left that Dr. Wolfe, my gastroenterologist, told him that was what was wrong with me. Seriously, a gastroenterologist told him that? Why would a gastroenterologist even be involved with an eating disorder case? And why would said gastroenterologist prescribe vancomycin for that eating disorder? Or do two different colonoscopies? I wouldn't think any of those things were the norm in the treatment of anorexia.

But try telling my father that. Try telling him anything logical period. I think he lacks the brain cells needed for logic to compute because he didn't hear me. He just continued to insist that he was right and I--the one person who should know better than anyone else what happened to me--was wrong. I can just imagine his conversation with Step Skank on the ride home. "Oh, the poor thing. She's still in denial 15 years later. We're going to have to stage an intervention. After all, recognizing that you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery."

Yeah, I recognize that I have a problem all right. My problem is that I have the world's most-screwed up family. There. I said it, but how do you recover from that? Now that Sarah Palin has resigned as governor of Alaska, I guess I could recover by moving there and buying me a nice little igloo to hide in.

Wait. I forgot that I don't like the cold. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to settle for beating my head against the wall while my father, my grandmother, my sister, or someone else rewrites even more of my history. Good times.

It's My Life, Right?

A couple of posts ago I said that I had spent the last two months biting my tongue, so much so that if I didn't stop biting it soon, I would bite it off. I wasn't just talking about sister drama; I had other drama as well. Chalk this vent...um, I mean post...up to other people telling me how to live my life.

The day after my mother died, I got a call from her friend at work, the one from the previous post that was supposed to be her partner-in-crime on the Coyote Ugly outing. She said that my mom's boss wanted to talk to me and asked if I could come by the office early the next morning. I said that I would. What was I going to say, no? I just assumed that he wanted to talk to me about her life insurance, pall bearers, cleaning out her desk, or the like.

Well, you know what they say about assuming... As it turns out, he didn't want to talk to me about any of those things. Instead, he and her friend wanted to tell me what I had to do next. I had to call DFACS and have them see how messy my mother's house was. I had to tell them that the mess was all my sister's fault (which it was, but I digress). I had to hire a lawyer and file for custody of my nephew. I had to take whatever job the boss found me, get an apartment, and pay off my mother's car so I could have "reliable transportation." Basically, I had to change my entire life because he said so.

I just sat there stunned and didn't know what to say, other than, "Uh, okay." I felt like I had been called to the principal's office, only to find out that Tony Soprano was now the principal. By the time that I left his office, I had an appointment scheduled for the following Monday with an attorney and my whole life laid out in front of me, whether I liked that version of my life or not.

When I got back to my grandmother's house, I spent the rest of the weekend silently stressing over what I had been told to do, plus being barraged by a stream of old ladies and nosy, distant relatives who all told me that, now that my grandmother no longer had my mother at her beck and call, I was expected to move in with her and wait on her hand and foot. (Not their exact words, but that was the essence.)

I don't know if I have ever mentioned it in this blog before, but every night for the last few years my mother had to run errands for my grandmother the moment she got off of work. My mom worked 12 hour days so that meant she had to run these errands at 8 p.m. at night. Most of the time she was lucky if she got home and ate dinner by 9 p.m. Then she had to deal with Tina, Chandler, and four dogs. Basically, she never had five minutes to herself.

I used to tell her that she didn't have to do those things for my grandmother and that she needed to train her the way you would train a dog. In other words, she needed to tell my grandmother that she would only go to the store once a week and if she ran out of anything other than insulin during that week, she would just have to wait until the next week to get it. After all, the woman could live without cigarettes and Diet Rite. She might not me a very nice person to be around, but she could live just the same. Of course, my mom never did that. She just dutifully went to the store day after day after day.

I didn't want that to be my life. I didn't want to give up my goals and my dreams to spend the rest of eternity waiting on everyone else, putting everyone else's needs and wants in front of my own. In a way, I feel like that's all I have ever done anyway for the last 33 years. For instance, I didn't want to go to Rollins for undergrad. I wanted to go to USC. It was my first choice. I got in to USC. I even got a small scholarship, but I didn't go, primarily because all anyone did my senior year of high school was tell me not to move to big, bad L.A. In all honesty, I never really wanted to be a lawyer either. I just wanted to write a script about one on TV. However, all I was ever told was how I needed to be a doctor or a lawyer or some other "somebody" and how film school was just a pipe dream. Obviously I listened because here I am now with a useless law degree, not able to get a job in a law firm if my life depended on it.

I'm also right back to people telling me what to do. Forget the customary "I'm sorry for your loss" or "If there's anything I can do, let me know." Instead, all I got in the days immediately proceeding my mother's death was, "What are you going to do for everyone else?" or "This is what you're going to do."

Those of you who have read "Let the Family Ventfest Begin" probably think I should have kept the appointment with the lawyer, and maybe I should have. However, by the time Monday rolled around I was so angry over everyone telling me in one way, shape, or form to give up my life that I didn't go.

There were other reasons I didn't keep the appointment as well. First my mom's boss failed to write down the appointment time and the name of the lawyer that the appointment was with so I had no idea where or when to go. Second, I spent that afternoon running Chandler from store to store trying to find him a bathing suit so he could go swimming with his friend down the street and at least for an hour think about something other than death. Third, the closet optimist in me wanted to give my sister the benefit of the doubt. I had hoped that, once she got over the initial grieving period, she would get her stuff together. Finally, I was scared that the courts wouldn't place Chandler with me or with his father and would instead stick him in foster care. Chandler had just lost my mother. I didn't want him to lose the rest of his family and his dogs as well.

I thought that, once I missed the appointment, people would get the point and leave me alone. They didn't. Instead, my mother's coworkers told me that I needed to give up my dogs and get an apartment with my sister. Say it with me now, everyone--WTF??????? Give up my dogs? I'm not giving up my dogs. As corny as it may sound, those dogs are my babies. I'm not about to trade them in for a two-legged dog with a bad dye job.

And get an apartment with Tina? Why? I have a house. The offer I had on it fell through the week after my mom died because the guy lied to his loan officer about all the child support he owed. I took it as a sign that I don't need to sell it right now and that I need to stay put. So why should I give my house up? Why should I get rid of everything that I own and everything that I have worked for and give up on the hope that one day I may have a career that I actually enjoy, get married, and maybe even start my own family just so I can take over as chief enabler for my sister and grandmother? I mean this is 2009, folks. Women can take care of themselves now. They don't need a man or someone else to do it for them, and it's about time that my sister, my grandmother, and every busybody around them realized it.

I've got a raging case of heartburn right now just typing this because I know that I'm probably being badmouthed right and left in my hometown for not doing what everyone else thinks I should do, but like I said in the title of this post, it's my life, right? It's not theirs. They shouldn't get a say as to how I live it or get to tell me that I have to give it up just because my mother died. Why don't they just tell my grandmother and my sister to grow up instead? Why does it all have to fall on me?

I'm going to go take a couple of Tums now, not because some busybody wants me to or because that's what you're expected to do when you get heartburn, but because I want to. My life. My heartburn, and despite what many back home may think, the former is not up for sale.

Today's Smoky Soapbox in Honor of My Mother's 55th Birthday

Hmm...Looks like I scared some people off with my rant about my sister. Sorry, but I had to let all that venom out somehow. Well, for the few who are still left, hopefully you won't be too offended by today's post.

Today would have been my mother's 55th birthday. Her New Year's goal was to lose 55 pounds by her 55th birthday and then go with her best friend to the Coyote Ugly in Panama City and act like she was 25. Obviously, she's not going to get to do that now. You can blame it on asthma. You can blame it on the flu, or you could blame it what I blame it on--smoking.

My mother wasn't born with asthma. She didn't have asthma as a child or young adult; she only developed it within the last few years. She wasn't genetically predisposed to it; that is, asthma doesn't run in our family. She also was never exposed to asbestos, toxic mold, or any other asthma-inducing environmental factors except one--second-hand smoke.

For 54 years, my mother--a woman who had never even picked up a cigarette except to throw it away--had second-hand smoke blown in face on almost a daily basis. My father smoked the entire time they were married. My grandfather smoked until he developed emphysema. Even then, he continued to light up until the doctor put him on an oxygen tank. My great grandfather--my mother's mother's father--smoked until he attempted to throw a cigarette out of his car window and ended up setting the backseat on fire. My grandmother smokes at least a pack a day. My sister smokes that much as well. Basically, the only people in my family who don't smoke are me and the dogs.

A few years ago my mother had her lungs x-rayed. The x-rays showed that she only had half the lung capacity of an adult her age. Half. That's it. She asked the doctor if second-hand smoke could be to blame. He told her that it very well could be.

Now I know what a lot of you smokers are thinking. Very well could be isn't the same thing as definitely is, and you're right. It's not. Putting my lawyer hat on for a moment, I know that very could well be would never stand up in court. It would never prove that second-hand smoke nuked my mother's lungs and ultimately caused her death.

However, in taking off the lawyer hat and putting on my daughter one, I know that it did. I believe that, had my mother's parents, grandparents, ex-husband, and daughter quit their habit early on or at least aimed their smoke elsewhere, she'd be sitting in the passenger seat of her best friend's convertible right now, getting ready to dance on a bar top, down some shots, and do other things that would make me want to disown her. Because seriously, folks, who dies of the flu or asthma these days? Seriously, who?

So if any of you are looking for an incentive to quit or a reason not to start, there is one. It doesn't matter which side of the cigarette butt that you are on; smoking kills.

Okay, I'm stepping off my soap box now. I missed the first half of the Michael Jackson memorial, and I want to see if I can find any clips of Brooke Shield's speech online.

Let the Family Ventfest Begin

So I thought with my sister out of town for the week--she took my nephew and all of her friends to the beach for a week and, surprise, surprise, didn't invite me--I would have a peaceful week at home, hundreds of miles away. Yeah, right. My father just called to inform me that, while feeding my sisters' dogs last night, he found a half-addressed and sealed envelope from her to me in the living room. He said that he couldn't tell what was in it, and he was scared to steam it open, in case he couldn't get it to seal back, but he thought that I would want to know.

Great... Now before any of you start to think the envelope contained a hand-written letter all full of sentimental what-nots, thanking me for taking care of her son and her dogs for the last two months or apologizing for threatening me with arrest--a topic I'll get to later--let me tell you a little about my sister. She's not a nice person. She's not even close. The day someone confuses her with Marcia Brady, Mother Teresa, or Little Suzy Sunshine is the day hell freezes over, unthaws, and freezes over again...twice. She's also not the type of person that I would ever associate myself with in real life. In fact, if we weren't related, our paths would probably never cross, except for maybe in lockup, where I would be handing her my business card, offering to represent her in court. Then again, maybe not. Even a lawyer has standards, especially this lawyer.

Why can't I stand her? Oh, where do I begin? Here's the quick version. She's 28 years old, but she acts like she's about 8, and that's probably giving her too much credit. She's never had a real job in her life, unless you count the few weeks she worked for her best friend one summer wiping down tanning beds. She's also not looking for one any time soon. After all, it's hard to look for work when you sleep to 3 p.m. every day. Ditto on the degree. Even night school is too early for her.

Sleeping, by the way, is pretty much all she knows how to do, except for tanning, partying, smoking, and cussing. Too bad colleges don't have degrees in those fields. If they did, Tina would be well on her way to a Ph.D. by now. But seriously, that's all she does, day in and day out. She sleeps to 3 p.m. every day, gets up, goes to the tanning bed, comes home, changes into whatever the newest fad is in skankwear--remember my post from a few months ago about the cut-off black slacks--leaves again to go drink the night away at parts unknown, has someone drop her off at my mother's house around 3 a.m., throws up all over the front porch, and then passes out on the couch. That's her life.

I thought that my mother's death would be a wake up call for her, a big, fat reminder that she needs to grow up, join the land of the living, and start taking responsibility for her life and for her son's. It wasn't. In fact, if anything, my mother's death has just given her an excuse to continue on her path to nothingness. Now if anyone asks, she can just claim that she's sleeping late and drinking all night because she's depressed. Uh-huh.

In case you think I'm exaggerating, here are a couple of pics that prove my point, pics that I stole off of her MySpace page. They were all taken AFTER my mother died, just last week in fact. Here is drunk Tina:

She's the one on the right with the four beers in front of her and her head in the pitcher, and yes, I'm pretty sure that they're her beers, not the girl's next to her. I know this because I went to bed one night with no drinks being by the pool and woke up the next morning to find seven empty bottles of beer next to it. Unless there's a drunk ghost in the house, they all belonged to her.

Here is pissed off, I'm-such-a-bad-ass Tina:

She's the one in the middle with the three chins. Yes, I know that description is mean , but after the two months I've had, I've earned the right to be that mean.

And finally here is the Tina that the rest of the family gets to see on a regular basis:

Okay, that one didn't exactly come off of MySpace, but it's still an accurate depiction of Little Sister Dearest.

Now guess where her 9-year-old son was when all of these were taken. That's right, with me, the only adult left in the family. While she was out partying every night, I was taking care of her child. I was making sure he got fed, bathed, and went to bed at a halfway reasonable hour. I was the one taking his mind off the fact that he found my mother's dead body. I was the one making sure he was okay now that the only stable influence in his life is gone. Me, not her. In other words, I was doing what my mother did for the last nine years, being the mother my sister refuses to grow up and become.

I didn't just watch him at night. I watched him all day long as well. With the exception of the one week that I spent in Atlanta last month, bringing back a truckload of my mom's things, Chandler spent nearly every waking hour with me. If he ate, it was because I took him to a restaurant to feed him or bought and cooked him groceries. If he got dressed, brushed his teeth, or bathed, it was because I told him to. If he picked up his report card or went to the library to get books to read, it was because I drove him there. Once again, me, not her.

Do I get a single thank you for that? Not even close. What I get is my sister throwing a temper tantrum because she thinks I'm responsible for half of her utility bills until the sheriff shows up and kicks her out of my mother's house.

Do I owe her money? Um, let's see. In May, I paid half of the utility bill for April's electricity, even though I didn't live there. I then had to turn around and pay all of MY utilities as well. Subsequently, I used all of my blogging money to either buy supplies to clean the house she trashed or put food in her child's and dogs' stomaches. When that money ran out, I used my half of the measly $200 we were able to get out of my mom's account before the bank froze it to, once again, feed her child and drive him around, which included driving him to the last day of school because she was too hung over to do it herself. Wait, let me rephrase that. I used my fourth of the money. The other $50 magically disappeared out of my mother's wallet one day, about the same time that my sister supposedly went to Steak-n-Shake one night in Valdosta and only bought a milkshake. Yeah, I've seen the MySpace photos of the night in question. She bought a hell of a lot more than milkshakes, and it wasn't just at Steak-n-Shake, if you catch my drift. Meanwhile, we only had $5 left to eat on for the next week. Oh, and since we got the check from the insurance company, I've probably spent close to $2000 on her child, buying him the computer that I knew my mother wanted to get him for Christmas and that I knew my sister never would (hasn't stopped her from using it on a daily basis, however); the printer, wireless router, and software to go with it; food (both groceries and restaurant food); clothes (all of his clothes were either stained, too small, long-sleeved, or ill-fitting hand-me-downs and I knew, for a fact, that my mother, the person who usually bought his clothes, never wanted him to look like a throwaway); gas; toys; toiletries; dog, rabbit, and newt food; supplies for camp; and general household items. If it wasn't for me, my sister wouldn't even have had toilet paper to wipe her butt with because I have bought every last roll in that house since April 29.

What has she bought with her half of the inheritance? Beer. A bag of dog food that caused my mom's 15-year-old Cockapoo to bloat up three sizes before I threw it away. A bag of cotton candy for Chandler, and a week at Mexico Beach. That's about it.

So do I owe her money? No. If anything, she owes me, but try telling her that, which brings me to that little topic of a threatened arrest that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Right before I drove back to Atlanta, my sister and I had a huge fight over a storage unit. After my mom died, I rented a unit to put her things in. The deal at the time was that we were supposed to half the unit, but as usual, my sister couldn't bother to get up during daylight hours to go with me to the storage place. Consequently, the only name on the contract was mine, and I was legally responsible for the entire bill.

Back in June, after another sisterly blowup, I rented a Ryder truck, emptied out my half of the unit, and had my father drive that half up here and put it in my garage. When I drove back down, I had every intention of helping my sister finish emptying my mom's house and paying for half of the storage bill, even though I no longer had anything in the unit. Well, those intentions went out the window after about the hundredth time Tina pitched a fit about the electricity bill. I got so sick and tired of hearing how much I owed her and how much electricity I used up--who cares that she did the same to Mama for years or that I only used that electricity in the course of caring for HER son--I finally said screw it. I told her that she had to either put the unit in her name or tell me where she wanted her stuff dumped, because I wasn't paying to store it. Her free ride--the one that our mother gave her for the last 28 years--was officially over. I couldn't pay my bills and hers, too, not unless I wanted to lose everything I owned in the process. I don't.

As you can imagine, that went over well. After two days of battling it out, she finally agreed to go by the storage place and put the contract in her name. The caveat? She refused to do so until I gave her the keys to the unit.

Well, if it's one thing that I know, it's how malicious my sister can be. Hence, the Godzilla pic above. I wasn't handing over those keys until she showed me proof that the unit was now hers. Otherwise, I knew what would happen. She would take the keys and refuse to transfer the contract, and I would be stuck paying the $115/month rental fee on the unit until I had a locksmith come out and cut the lock off. She would assume that it was her due right, given that I owed her on electricity.

After a few hours of Chandler going back and forth on the phone and from the driveway as our intermediary, Tina finally went and put the building in her name. Five minutes later she came by my grandmother's and had Chandler inform me that, if I didn't turn over the keys right then and there, she was calling the police. I told Chandler to tell her, fine, I would give her the keys, but first she was going to show me a signed contract. I didn't and still don't trust her as far as I can throw her. Trust me when I say that's not very far. Once Chandler was out of earshot, I also said, "Let her call the police. I'm sure they and DFACS would be real interested to know about the kind of mother she's been for the last nine years. If that's the kind of game she wants to play, let's play it."

She gave Chandler the contract. I gave Chandler the keys. We haven't spoken since. So do I think that envelope my father found is full of heartfelt goodness? Not even close. At the least, it's a letter in which my sister, in her sloppy, drunken penmanship, cusses me out and tells me that I'm dead to her. At the most, it's a temporary restraining order or a demand letter informing me of her intent to sue, should I not turn over the $200 plus dollars for the electricity bill every month. Either way, that envelope is about as far away from a Hallmark store as you can get.

I know that my mother is just SO proud right now (cue the big eye roll), but you know what? She created that monster. She was the one who enabled my sister's behavior for decades. Now Chandler and I are the ones who have to live with it. If my sister wants to go down some legal path, like to sue me over an electricity bill or to lie to a judge and tell him that I'm a danger Chandler in order to get a TRO, when I'm the only parent the kid has had for the last two months (even my wicked stepmother said he might as well be mine), then I say this. Bring it on, little sister. Bring it on. Only one of us went to law school, and it was so not you.

Thanks for the Condolences

I'm finally back in town, hopefully for good this time, which means this blog should be up and running again soon. I want to thank everyone who continued to stop by while I was gone and who left your condolences on my previous post. I plan on visiting each and every one of your blogs in the upcoming days, as well as the blogs of those Entrecarders who visited but didn't leave a comment. Considering I have two months worth to catch on, it may take me a week or two, but I promise I'll get to your blogs eventually. For those of you who follow this blog because of my fan fic, I'm starting on update as soon as I finish posting this post and folding a ridiculous amount of clothes. (There's nothing like rewashing "clean" clothes because they smell like your sister and grandmother's cigarettes.) Check FanFiction.net or my other site for the update in a few days.

A quick head's up. I may spend the next few posts venting about my dysfunctional family. I've spent the last two months biting my tongue, especially in regards to my sister, and if I bite it any harder I may very well bite it off. This blog is the only place I can let my frustrations loose and save my tongue. Maybe some of you can relate.

Again thanks for your concern and for continuing to stop by. Your support meant a lot. I hope you all have a great Fourth of July weekend!