Many Years of Poems

Well, here in a little bit I need to go get myself together so we can go look at the apartment complex. Cliff thinks we won't need to move. I hope we don't have to either. Moving is a pain in the ass, and we have so much shit. It's amazing how much crap you can accumulate in three decades or so of living.

We have an appointment to go look at an apartment that will be about $50 less a month than this place is. Every little bit helps, I guess. The appointment is on Saturday at 1pm.

That's the best I can do, to find a place that is decent, accepts pets, and has washer/dryer connections.

I wish I could find something nice for cheaper but it just doesn't look like it's going to happen.

I'm craving a cig so bad right now I could tear my skin off. I hate that I couldn't buy smokes. This sucks.

I think I'm going to go see if a certain neighbor is home from work and will let me bum one.

I bitched to a friend about the whole Cliff work situation. I feel a little better for having bitched.

Cliff says it's his fault. I say it's his bosses' fault for not moving him out of hell (aka Shands Hospital station) when he begged them to after two years there. Nobody else had to stay there for that length of time. And other people have done much more egregious things than he did by taking two calls at once, and they haven't lost their shifts. They're just assholes up there and he doesn't kiss ass so they don't like him. That's what I've decided.

The weather is nasty here. It stormed like all hell a while ago and now it's just kind of rainy and blah. The dog had an absolute fit. The cats didn't give a shit. They never do. The weather is something that happens outside and their world is inside.

Well, Nancy is finally home. What we finally had to do was borrow gas money and drive up there and get her ourselves. We had two Waycross police officers escort us to the house just in case the pissant motherfuckers decided to pull any additional bullshit or try to make good on their previous threats.

So I spent three hours in my car taking care of this, and Nancy has been made aware of exactly why I'm never doing that again. She is not to visit them ever again, at least while she lives under this roof. She is also clear on why I turned her phone off; I have turned it back on so she can talk to her friends and reschedule her job interview with HellMart.

So the drama finally comes to a close. Whew! I was so sick of that bullshit it's not even funny.

Please, universe, gods, whatever, no more drama. We've had our share for a year or so.

Nancy was supposed to come home today. She now says she'll be home tomorrow.

Supposedly she got sick this morning, throwing up and having diarrhea and that's the reason she didn't come home today. What-the-fuck-ever. It's all such bullshit that I've gotten to where I don't believe a word she says. She keeps lying to us and/or not doing what she says she's going to do that she's destroying whatever trust any of us ever had in her.

I'm in a better mood than I was yesterday. The urges to cut have subsided, and I just generally feel better, so that's good.

I'm a little bored though.

I slept for a really long time. I went to bed just to lie down, not to sleep, around 6:30 last night and fell asleep and stayed that way until Cliff woke me up when he came to bed and made me take my night meds. I got up and smoked a cig but went back to bed and stayed there until around 10 this morning.

I had a weird dream about helping break the hold of a bullshitting preacher on an unsuspecting church. I haven't been to church in years; why I would dream about it is unfathomable. Unless of course, Nancy's bullshitting friends are the preacher and Nancy is the church.

I have a nasty infected bug bite on my right middle finger. It hurts. I shouldn't have scratched it open and let it get infected though, so it's my own fault.

In other news, Mike and Charlie are going to get themselves a doggie friend. I've been pinging on Mike for a while about getting a pet because he's prone to depression and anxiety like I am, and pets can be such a wonderful comfort when you're feeling down. They seem to know when you feel bad and hang out with you and want you to pet them. Plus the responsibility of taking care of a pet can get you up in the morning when you feel so bad you want to stay in bed. I'm trying to persuade them to get a shelter dog; it will be less expensive than a pedigree dog and probably a better pet. And most shelters these days make sure the pets are inoculated and spayed or neutered as applicable, so you don't have to worry about that. They've just now gone out to lunch and to the pet store to look at dog supplies.

We have two cats and a dog; the cats are just ordinary domestic shorthair tabby cats. One is a ginger tabby named Tessa and the other is a brown tabby named Sweetie Pie. The dog is a Labrador/American Staffordshire Terrier mix named CC. He looks like a smallish blond Lab.

Anyway, I just wanted to let people know that no, I didn't cut myself yesterday as much as I wanted to, and no, I didn't check myself into the hospital for wanting to cut myself so badly.

Nancy STILL isn't home. Now I'm not sure why they won't bring her home. They went out to the movies yesterday so they can leave the unlocked house unattended for three hours to go to the movies but they can't leave it unattended for about the same length of time to drive her home.

She needs to come home because we need to have a family sit-down with her. I don't guess I really count as family yet since Cliff and I are not yet married but I live here too and all this bullshit is affecting me as well as Cliff and Dixie.

Cliff was torn up at the prospect of cutting her out of the family; he knew he was upsetting his mom which he doesn't like to do, and he was so upset he couldn't eat and was throwing up, but if she chooses "friends" who will threaten her family over her family then we don't want to deal with her.

Also, if she comes home, I'll turn her phone back on so she can reschedule her interview with HellMart and generally use her phone again. But until she comes back home, it stays off. She also conned Dixie into doing her chores for her while she's gone, and Dixie's health is not fantastic and she's tired of having to do Nancy's work, when Nancy could get her little ass down here and do her own work. Walking the dog is especially hard on Dixie's breathing because of the growing heat and humidity. It's easier for Dixie to breathe freely inside in the air conditioning.

I think Leslie (the bitch friend) just wants her to stay so she won't be without friends in Waycross. I don't know what possessed them to move to Waycross in the first place since Duncan's mom's job is here in Jacksonville and all their friends are here in Jacksonville, but hell, it's not my problem.

I don't know why she likes Leslie so much; from all I can tell, Leslie is an attention whore and a general bitch. But that's also not my problem. As I said in an earlier entry, she just has generally shitty taste in friends, but she's a pain in the ass herself so maybe it's just birds of a fucking feather.

I'm just tired of it. She needs to come home so we can talk to her without that loudmouth bitch Leslie jumping in on the conversation or that self-important pissant Duncan inserting himself into what is really our household business and none of his.

It's all such bullshit, and I'm so sick of it I could puke if I had anything on my stomach.

Nancy still isn't home.

She said on Friday that she was going to move in with her friends in Waycross; Cliff told her that if she does that, she's cut off from the family. Her phone will not be turned back on (I temporarily suspended her cell phone line which is on my cell phone account after her pissant friends used it to call me and threaten to beat my ass), her mother's phone number will be changed (her mother's phone is also on my account), Cliff and I will not accept calls from her, we will not visit her or bring her mother to visit her or allow her mother to borrow the car and go visit her, she will not be welcome in our house, she will be out of the handfasting ceremony (right now she's my third attendant because she's Cliff's only sibling), she is CUT THE FUCK OFF from her family.

So after everybody crying and pitching a fit, she's supposed to come home tomorrow and stay for a week and see if we can work something out with her staying here and not living in Waycross.

The drama on Friday almost caused me to miss my daughter's school showcase. (My daughter is in a film and TV production program at a magnet school for the arts.) I made it to the showcase, but just barely. I would have killed Nancy if I'd missed it; I missed the fall one because nobody told me about it (my parents don't seem to think to email me or call me when school stuff is going on, and my daughter herself just recently got it in her head to call me and tell me about stuff like the showcase). My daughter didn't have a chance of having any of her work in the fall showcase anyway; too early in the program, and fall term is when her epilepsy started so she missed a lot of school and didn't get to work on too many of the fall productions. But there was a chance of some of her work being in the spring showcase, although as it turned out other productions were selected, and she was not a happy camper. She said at least two of the productions she worked on were good enough or could have been made good enough in time for the showcase, and they were passed over for productions done by upperclassmen. I tend to agree with her that the showcase should reflect the work of all the students in the department, not just the upperclassmen. The showcase was really good though; the school has very nice, nearly top-of-the-line equipment for the kids to work with, and they select really creative and bright kids to be in the program. One of the featured prodcutions was a documentary about people with muscular dystrophy, and it was very well done, co-directed by a student with MD. My daughter has decided that next year, she's doing an independent documentary (encouraged by the faculty) on epilepsy, since she is epileptic. I bet that makes it into one of the showcases. I hope it does, anyway.

Anyway, back to my house. Nancy is supposed to come home tomorrow to stay for at least a week. Her friends think that Cliff and I will be gone at an SCA event, which we were going to do but we decided against due to gas prices and my not trusting Nancy's friends not to pull some stupid shit at our house while we're not here. Supposedly only the boyfriend's mother (who for some crazy reason is living in Waycross, GA, but still working in Jacksonville, FL, over an hour's drive) is driving Nancy down and dropping her and her stuff off; we shall see what happens, I guess. Cliff thinks something is up because Dixie (their mother) was on the phone with Nancy and confirmed with Cliff that we would be gone, so Cliff and I have been lying to Dixie all day about planning to day-trip the SCA event when we've already decided not to go. I don't like lying to Dixie but I don't trust her not to share with Nancy, and I REALLY don't trust Nancy's friends in Waycross. I don't much trust the boyfriend's mother either, if her son is any indication of what she might be like. I'll just tell Dixie tomorrow that I spent too much on groceries for us to be able to afford to go.

Nancy seems to have really shitty taste in friends. The only one of her friends I can stand is Jon, who lives here in the neighborhood and the only thing he does to even mildly annoy me is that he eats supper with us an awful lot. It makes me think nobody cooks at his house or something. But I usually cook enough for six or so, because I like to have leftovers for Cliff's work lunches, so there's usually enough for company. And that's only mildly irritating. Other than that, he's intelligent and polite and cleans up after himself and is generally a good guest. Rebecca is as annoying as Nancy; neither of them know how to shut the fuck up. I swear they both talk from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep. And Rebecca's younger cousin who lives with her and her grandmother has in the past transmitted lice to Nancy, who then transmitted them to me, so that REALLY pissed me off. (I have ass-length thick reddish brown hair that I'm rather vain of, and it pissed me off to have to lice-treat it with harsh chemicals when I generally baby it.) Christy brought lice into the house as well, although nobody in our house caught them but I still had to lice-spray my couch as a precaution and nitpick everybody's heads to make sure we hadn't caught lice. Josh is Nancy's ex-boyfriend, and he's all right but has an annoying voice and tends to interrupt people. And Leslie is the pissant little bitch in Waycross who used to live out toward the beach. She's disrespectful and arrogant and every time Nancy visits her (even when they lived here in town, just out toward the beach on the other side of town), there's always a bunch of bullshit about Nancy coming back home when she's expected home. When Duncan (Leslie's boyfriend) threatened Cliff and then Leslie threatened me, that was just the last straw with them.

I'm very tired of all this bullshit drama. It's so high school. I think my daughter would say it's even too immature for high school.

I will say this much. If the car bearing Nancy pulls into the drive tomorrow with more than an older lady and Nancy in it, I'm calling the cops before they even get out of the car. I will call 911 and say that I made a report of a threatening phone call on Thursday and that the people who made the call just pulled up in my driveway and would they please send out an officer. I am through playing games with these pissant motherfuckers.

I'm still pissed at Nancy. She's supposed to come home today, and I'm going to tell her that if something like yesterday's bullshit ever happens again, I'll take her phone and run over it with my car.

I've calmed down enough that I'm not going to slap the shit out of her unless she mouths off to me. If she mouths off, it's on.