Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Another three years…

Friday, July 27th, 2018

Times flies when you’re having fun… and also when you’ve been having cancer.

I’ve been through chemo, radiation, and fairly radical surgery to deal with Stage-3 breast cancer. I’m doing well now, but it’s amazing how time-consuming cancer has been, and how much energy I don’t have these days. But I’m taking things slow, and plugging along nicely!

My sister has moved in with me, which is awesome! Our wonderful next-door neighbor passed, which was very sad. On balance, though, life is good, and I’m gonna try to get back into recording things, blessings and “warts” alike.

Praising the Lord at Hooters?

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

After my ex dropped off “all” of my stuff (ha, ha), he made a big deal of saying, “I just wanted to say that I’m very sorry for everything that happened in the past.”

Had he brought a check to pay any of his tens of thousands of dollars in past-due child support? Had he brought any of the paperwork he was required (by court order) to provide months ago? Did he give any evidence of meaning anything he’d said? No, of course not.

But before I could say anything in response, his whited-sepulcher of a wife chipped in with a cheery “Praise the Lord!” I replied, “Show me your faith by your works“, referencing writings from her religion that tell people, in effect, to “put up or shut up”. She had the gall to say that she totally agreed, and that she was “working on it!”

The ex just recently started going to Hooters. I wonder if she goes with him.

I’ve been feeling unmotivated

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been feeling singularly unmotivated. I don’t know why. I could come up with some excuses, but that’s all they’d be; they wouldn’t really be “reasons”, and they certainly wouldn’t be justifications.

Maybe sometimes I just need to be unmotivated or frustrated, keep plugging along minimally (enough to keep food in the house, right?), and then get back to business. I don’t have to hate myself for not always being optimally “useful” or “efficient”.

How much bigger can he get?

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

My son is now wearing men’s size-14 shoes. I told him that Noah could have used his shoes as pontoons on the Ark.

Thank Heaven the store had one pair of sneakers in the size he needed. His “nice” shoes still fit him, he says, and he’s worn his riding boots (size 13) frequently enough that I think they’ve kind of “grown” with him. But what on earth am I going to do when he needs to replace them?

The boy already outweighs me, he can lift me, and he likes to tell people that he’s “five foot twelve”. Just how much bigger can he get?

First time ever

Friday, January 11th, 2013

This past holiday season was unusual for me, in that it was enjoyable. I had a lovely time with family and friends, and my boyfriend surprised me with a beautiful sparkly necklace.

Nobody ever gave me jewelry before.

Sometimes “new” can be very, very nice.

This isn’t that…

Friday, January 4th, 2013

I just did a Google search (how dated will that term be in ten or twenty years?) and discovered that there is another “braden bryce”.

Wow, is this “braden bryce” not that one! Sorry, but if you’re looking for graphic non-hetero, um, “activities”, you’re in the wrong place! *blush*

Just for the record, “Braden” is my grandmother’s maiden name, and “Bryce” is my son’s middle name. I’d read it somewhere, and had liked it. When we had trouble coming up with a name for our pre-born baby, I remembered the name.

“Braden Bryce” was originally going to be a web-publishing company. Back fifteen to twenty years ago, making websites was still a big deal, and I figured I’d have lots of free time on my hands, because “how hard can it be” to raise a child, right? Ha! Anyway, I had the domain name, and now it’s been re-purposed.

Just not re-purposed that way for that subject.

Learning the wrong lesson

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012

Last night, while driving home in the dark, my son twice had near misses. He’s still learning how to drive, but he’d been warned against his “technique” in each instance.

His conclusion seems to have been that he’ll “never” drive after dark. I’m hoping, once he’s calmed down a bit, that he re-thinks that, and concludes instead that maybe he just needs to start listening to his old mom a little better. Sure, my eyesight is poor and I don’t have depth perception, but I’ve been driving without any at-fault accidents for years. (My last the-other-guy-was-at-fault accident was more than twenty years ago.)

It’s just possible that I have something positive to contribute to his learning experiences.

He’s driving!

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

My son started school (eleventh grade) on August twenty-third, a Thursday. On Friday, he brought home paperwork for the DMV (“Department of Motor Vehicles”) related to his drivers-education course. So I took him to the DMV to get the paperwork completed.

Next thing I knew, he was sitting for his written test. Obviously, he hadn’t studied for it. But the little snot got a perfect score! Worse still, he remembered that, five and a half years earlier, I’d reversed two of the road signs on the mix-n-match section of the test, so I’d gotten two questions wrong when I’d tested. He can’t remember to clean his room, but that he remembered. The whole way from the testing area to the cashier, he was dancing next to me, poking fingers at me, and singing, “I did better’n you did! I did better’n you did!” He’d gotten his beginner’s driving permit!

But he didn’t want to drive my car, because it has no brake on the passenger side that would enable me to stop him before he hurt himself. Last Thursday, though, I insisted. He was quite certain that we’d die, but I explained to him that the only “hard” part of the drive was getting out of our apartment complex, where he’d have to turn left across traffic. But there’s a left-turn lane in the middle, and he’d seen me many times pull into that, so he knew he’d only “have” to cross half of the road at once.

I was concerned that he might misjudge his position and not pull completely out of the way of traffic, but the informal driving he’d done with me over the last few years, plus the two drivers-ed classes he’d had, combined to allow him to pull neatly into the center left-turn lane. Granted, he took forever waiting until the gap in traffic was big enough for him to brave the turn, but he finally did it.

After that, all he had to do was wait for another gap, pull into traffic going his way, and stay in that lane until he reached his turn for his martial-arts class, where the intersection had a turn arrow. And he did great!

This week, he drove from his school to his therapist, which involved two lane changes and two left-turn arrows, and he did just fine for that, too. I’m so proud of him!

They lied again

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

Well, I hadn’t meant to misrepresent the situation, but I hadn’t known that my ex-husband and his current partner had lied again. Rather than getting married on her brother’s birthday, they’re saying now that they’d gotten married nearly three weeks earlier.

Why do they lie about everything? I didn’t even care, other than that he was getting married (because her income helps my case in court). What kind of mind-set reflexively lies, even when there is absolutely no point?

Supervising my love-life

Sunday, July 15th, 2012

From time to time during the course of the divorce, my (now ex-) husband would make weird references to my “sharing [my time] with somebody special”. But during his deposition of me, he made clear that he planned to attack me during the trial for being some kind of child-abusing slut for having started dating somebody more than three years after he locked me out of the house.

He’s getting married in two weeks.