Warning:

WARNING: If taken in large doses, nightshade can be deadly.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

People make me sad

Today massive amounts of people ran to Chick-Fil-A to order (an admittedly delicious) chicken sandwich and show their support for a company that they think is being discriminated against or persecuted.





Chick-Fil-A has not, in any way, fashion, or form been discriminated against or persecuted against because people chose to boycott them over their CEO's son's incredibly stupid business moves.  Dan Cathy has every fucking right in the world to be the biggest bigoted homophobe bastard he wants to be.  He has every fucking right in the world to broadcast that fact on every media outlet he can find to broadcast it.  No one is denying him that right.  No one issued a warrant for his arrest, closed his very popular food chain, fined him, or infringed on his 1st Amendment rights whatsoever.  Dan Cathy has exercised his free speech.....

And those boycotting Chick-Fil-A have exercised theirs.



Whether the boy-cotter's simply didn't realize that Chick-Fil-A was a conservative Christian owned chain (really though??  They are the ONLY fast food chain that isn't open on Sunday), they didn't automatically assume that the owners were bigots simply because they were Christian (which is idealistic and sweet, please don't let these douchbags take away your rosy outlook on life), or they knew that they were conservative Christian and probably privately held bigoted beliefs but didn't realize they translated those beliefs in to the donation of huge portions of their profits into several organizations that actively (and successfully), TRULY persecute and discriminate against gay people (including the Family Research Council, which has been officially deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) doesn't matter.  Dan Cathy let his self-righteous sense of superiority override his good business sense and let the cat out of the bag.  And the people that feel strongly about marriage equality, and equal rights and just treatment for all homosexuals have decided that they don't want to continue to give money to a bigot who is just going to turn around and give that money to lobbyists that write and fund legislation that keeps homosexuals as second-class citizens.

The 1st Amendment protects your right to free speech; it does not protect you from the civil consequences of that speech.  (Just ask the Dixie Chicks.)

Chick-Fil-A's rights have not been infringed upon IN ANY FUCKING WAY.


Thursday, July 26, 2012

T-Minus 9 Days

Remember my previous blogs about the road trip I was dragging my two best friends on? 

That was a nice dream. 

But all is not lost.  I still had the money and determination to get at least myself across the country and so I pulled together a new plan and my husband and myself are leaving in 9 days for 2 fun-filled weeks on the Northwestern coast.  (A shout-out of thanks to my mom for holding down the fort for me while I'm gone.  I'm leaving you alone with three kids, five dogs, your husband and my grandma.....I'll totally spring for the tranquilizers and Valium, plus a case of whatever wine you are preferring these days)

I'll be taking tons of pictures and have lots to blog.  It will be called either "Nightshade and T-Rex's 2nd honeymoon" series or "The demise of my 11 year marriage" series.  I'll only know after it's done. 

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Conundrums

I have a very beloved uncle.  For the most part, he is made of awesome.  Unfortunately, stupidity makes up the rest of him.  I'd say he's 75% awesome, 25% stupidity.  And I've been very fortunate to only have to witness the stupidity from afar.  I've never been on the receiving end of his antics; quite the opposite, in fact, he's always been very supportive of me. 

About a year and a half ago, he gave his stupidity full reign (seriously, FULL reign) and literally destroyed his life over nothing.  He left his family, lost his job and every hope of ever entering his career field again, and landed himself in prison for 18 months.  

His wife, who is either the biggest saint ever or the dumbest chick ever (it's a toss up really.  I fucking adore her, but sticking with my uncle after his history is masochism on a level I have never seen....and I can't even begin to figure out what effect all of it will have on their children.) is sticking with him.  They have children who are around the same age as my children, and they are really struggling with everything.  My grandmother......is not helping (to put it very mildly).  

I said all that to ask this:  What the fuck am I supposed to write in a letter to him??  Seriously.  What do you write to someone in jail??  I know that he knows he fucked up on a nuclear level and is devastated by how everything is now.  I don't want to bum him out.  He's definitely paying for his actions.  My family wants me to write him....and I WANT to write him.  But I keep starting letters, realizing that they sound utterly ridiculous, and throwing them away.   I'm completely at a loss. 

Friday, June 1, 2012

Snow White and the Huntsman

was fucking awesome. 

I have been looking forward to this movie for a while, but I was seriously doubting my ability to stay awake.  The Chinese food we had for dinner did not help at all.  But me and the hubs watched the first installment of Hatfields & McCoys on the History Channel to pass the time, and it woke me up pretty well. 

I cannot resist a Kevin Costner western.  A Kevin Costner anything, really.

 At 11pm, I hopped in our car and jammed to Florence + the Machine's "Breath of Life" from the SWATH soundtrack all the way to Columbia.  The theater smelled.  Like old people and popcorn.  It was not a pleasant "Granny's baking cookies" old people smell either. 

But then the movie started and I forgot all about the funky smell and being tired.

Visually, this movie is pretty awesome.  It is an epic fantasy with quite a bit of very well done CGI, incredible costumes, these odd and awesome obsidian soldiers, and most of the cast was very easy on the eyes.  It also stars Ian McShane as one of the dwarfs so it had a leg up on most other movies auditorily too.  Spell check is saying that I spelled auditorily wrong....but Dictionary.com says that I'm spelling it right.  Hmmm.

It also has a nice twist on the love story aspect that I appreciated, but I'm pretty sure is going to cause purists to groan.  

This is has been one of the only Snow White movies that I could appreciate at all (the other being Once Upon A Time's version on ABC).  I absolutely hated the Disney version.  This version is going to be a staple in my household.  I can't wait to watch it again. 

And can I just say, Charlize Theron is a goddess.  Seriously.  And chick knows how to bring the crazy.  


Also, for your listening pleasure:


Thursday, May 31, 2012

And the Darwin Award goes to.......

this guy:


Idiot pastor in West Virginia dies in idiotic snake-handling "test of faith".

Ironic quotes from said pastor:

Snake-handlers point to scripture as evidence that God calls them to engage in such a practice to show their faith in him. Mark 16: 17-18 reads, "And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."
Also,

 "Anybody can do it that believes it," Wolford (aka: Idiot pastor) said. "Jesus said, 'These signs shall follow them which believe.' This is a sign to show people that God has the power."

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

It's Night of the Walking Dead down there...

My husband has taken to reading the news and keeping himself generally up to date on most of the goings on of the world.  And while he is reading stuff, he's still generally apathetic about everything he reads.  So when he came home the other night excitedly asking me if I had read about the man who chewed off the other man's face, I had to see what the hell he was talking about.  

Miami police shoot, kill man eating another man's face.  He even ate the man's nose and eyeballs, y'all.  What the fuck?  

Although it is believed that the two men were on some sort of drug (called "bath salts"....really?  Way to forever fuck up a Mother's Day gift basket assholes), the jokes about zombies started almost immediately.  As they totally should have.  

But you have to feel horrible for the face-eaten victim.  Seriously, how do you come back from that?  He will always be known as the guy who survived the zombie attack in Miami.  However, if the man is so inclined, he could always segue this into a lucrative career as a zombie porn star.  Yes, that shit exists.  Google it.  Or just take my word for it, because it's rather disturbing and cannot be unseen. 


Tuesday, March 20, 2012

This two-step is getting a little tired

On my last update, Psycho had just been arrested after coming to my house with a fake gun and making the police chase him from pillar to post. 

They released him that night into his POS father's care after his father promised to take him to the hospital off-base for a full psychiatric evaluation.  The father, being the trustworthy shit-heel that he is, did not do this. 

So the next day, Psycho showed up at Billy's school, told the secretary that he was waiting for his sister, and sat in the hallway to wait for Billy.  Luckily, Billy's teacher knew that we had been having some problems with Psycho so she sent Billy to the office to wait for me there.  The problem was, I was under the impression that Billy's first day of Reading club was that day, so I was late coming to get him.  Psycho sent a little boy over to beg Billy to come with Psycho and Billy's teacher told the little boy that that was not going to happen, Billy was going to stay right where he was until I got there, so Psycho ran off. 

I pulled in about 10 minutes later than I should have, and I could already feel myself beginning to lose it.  I grabbed Billy and got in the car, and as I was pulling out of the school parking lot the police called me to let me know that Psycho was "missing" and we should be cautious and call the police if we saw him.  When I pulled onto my street....there he was; walking away from my house.  I called the police to let them know that he was at my house, but I hadn't even hung up the phone yet when a police car and Psycho's father arrived to get him.  They immediately released him to his father. 

And I completely broke down.  After two months of dealing with this situation - constant vigilance for my kids safety, sleeping like crap because I was worried about the kid coming in at night plus the nightmares that stress always gives me, and the feeling like it was never going to end - that no one cared about the fact that this boy was literally terrorizing us and they just kept releasing him back to the asshat who was more than happy to let him continue rather than actually put some effort into helping his own son; I had had all I could take.  I sent my boys to their room and sat outside on my porch and cried. 

My husband, who had also received the same warning call that I did, came home immediately.  I updated him on everything that happened and how they had just released him back into his father's custody once again and we decided that it was possible that we needed to make some arrangements to keep the boys safe since nothing was being done to help.  We decided that we were going to see what are options were as far as sending the boys to my mom's until we could get some resolution about our case.  If we couldn't do that, then I was going to ask my brother to come up and help me keep an eye on everything. 

I called my mom and let her know what we wanted to do to see if that was feasible on her end, and then I went back to the school to talk to the boys' teachers to see how we would have to arrange things if they left for a while.  They were both awesome.  They offered to help in whatever way they could, and if they think I'm probably an emotional basket case, they haven't shown any outward signs (though they'd be well within their rights, I kinda was an emotional basket case that day)  That meeting was probably the most productive meeting I've had during this entire situation.  The school's guidance counselor is amazing.  She listened quietly while I told them everything that happened, got up and started making phone calls.  She got me an appointment with the base commander for that afternoon, hooked me up with a civilian police liaison for the school, and worked with the principal to block Psycho from school grounds permanently or the county will press trespassing charges against him.  

The meeting with the base commander was a lot more of the same run around I had been getting from the investigators:  "It takes time to build a case", "Psycho's parents are really aren't lying to us about the measures they're taking to control him, it's just really difficult with him", "You're safe now, we got him back with his parents already", blah blah blah, etc, etc, etc.

Little did I know, my mother - who was extremely upset that things had progressed to the point that I was crying - was on the phone screaming at investigators and sending emails to the base commander and the White House.  Her conversations with the investigators got her about as far as they had gotten me.  She was blown off and condescended to like we were being irrational and over dramatic about the situation and there was nothing to worry about. 

Her email to the base commander was pretty effective.  He got it the next day, and immediately got on the case.  By that afternoon, my husband and his Chief were called in for a meeting where Brandon found out that Psycho's father had indeed been lying...more so than we even knew.  He had lied about taking Psycho to the hospital the night of the gun incident, he had lied about precautions he had supposedly been taking so Psycho couldn't get to Billy, and he had lied about what branch of the military his wife was in.....his wife (whom I still have never seen) was not even aware that Psycho had been in trouble.  She found out about everything that had happened about 5 minutes before the base commander informed her that he was moving her family out of the neighborhood.  

Her emails to the White House were also pretty effective.  A White House liaison called her directly, got all the details of the case, and then promised to follow-up with the commander here....and he did.  

So it took two weeks, but they finally moved them.  They moved them 2 miles away about a block from the boys' school.  *insert exasperated sigh here*  For a week after their stuff was picked up and moved from their home, they came back every day to "clean"....and every day they came back right at the time that Billy came home from school.  The following Monday after they were completely gone, Psycho was back at my door.  He approached Billy outside at a place where he goes to ride his bike, and then tried to sneak into our backyard when Billy ran home.  The police didn't even bother coming.  They just called his father to come get him.  

The base commander got involved again and gave them another last warning or he was going to move them completely off base.  

Three weeks went by, and we really thought that maybe things had ended...until Sunday.  Our doorbell rang, and Brandon opened it without checking to see who it was.  And there stood Psycho.  The police came, and so did his father.  We did our well known dance routine all over again.  And they released him to his father and left.  

This time douche nugget stayed behind to talk to us.  He wanted us to stop calling the police every time Psycho came to our house.  We explained that that was what we had been told to do by the base commander and the cops, and that it was what we were going to continue to do because past experience had taught us that he would do nothing to stop Psycho from coming to our house regardless.  He told us that we were doing nothing but causing unnecessary paperwork and keeping a spotlight on him and Psycho.  (A well-needed spotlight, IMO) He told us that Psycho was seeing several different people to help him now and was doing so much better and he wasn't violent at all, he just couldn't believe that Psycho had ever or would ever hurt Billy.  When I said that he had hurt Billy in the past and while I was sympathetic to his plight regarding Psycho's mental issues, I still had to protect my children.  He became belligerent at this point and said that really it was Billy who mean and violent and Billy had threatened to kill his entire family and that Billy was always in trouble and no one liked him.  When I told him that I didn't believe that Billy had ever been violent or threatening towards his family (I mean really.  If you knew Billy at all, you'd know that was the biggest crock of shit ever.  I'd sooner believe that I went and threatened his whole family, knowing full well that I had never been anywhere near his family, than I would believe that Billy ever had.) and that Billy had never been in trouble and has tons of friends, he said, "Well, you can see how easy it is for rumors like that to get started can't you?"

After a few minutes of me and the twat waffle standing in my front yard arguing with each other, my husband just told him that he needed to leave.  

I wish I could say that that was the end of it.  But let's be honest, this seems like it is going to be something that we are dealing with for a while.  Until one of us leaves this area.  And we still have a while to go.  

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

So much awesome!

Saturday night, we loaded up and rolled on up to B'town to see the Roller Derby!! 

I think I have found my niche y'all. 

I have a pair of skates picked out.  They have summer work-shops that they offer to get you ready to try out.  I really want to do this. 

I've also been chewing on a few names.  I have it pretty much narrowed down to three:

* Nightshade  -  it's tried and true, I've used some version of this alias since I opened my very first email account way back in the 9th grade. 
* Maleficent Seven  -  it's a play on the Magnificent Seven.  Maleficent is by far the best thing to come out of Disney ever.  And given my known adoration for the Queen of Evilness herself, my hubs suggested that I go for something that included her. 
* Malice Cooper  -  I suggested this name to someone else once, and it's stuck with me.  She didn't dig it, but I still very much do.  

I'm so stoked about this.  I can't wait to get those skates and start practicing.  Woo!


Sunday, February 5, 2012

Groundhog Day?





Y'all remember this movie, right?  Where the dude get stuck reliving the same day, over and over...until he finally learns some important lesson, or gets eaten by the groundhog, or something.  (I didn't actually finish the movie.  I'm one of the rare birds that finds Bill Murray completely unfunny.)  I feel like I'm starring in some demented remake of this movie.  

You see, Psycho came back again today.  The cops had to be called again...making this the third time they've been here in two weeks.  I won't even hazard a guess at how many times they've been over at Psycho's house, because apparently he's gone on a crime spree this week.  

He came, he threatened us with a very realistic looking cap gun (seriously, why don't they paint those things a color that screams "I'm obviously not a real gun!"??), he tried to kick in our door, he broke into our neighbor's car, he took the police on a multi-block 20 minute chase.  But today, they finally arrested his ass.  I'm sure more updates will be forthcoming.  I have a feeling that I'll be doing this dance a couple more times before it's over. 

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Now I'm crying!

Tears of laughter.  Seriously, this is by far the hardest I have ever laughed at anything Kristen Bell has ever done.  This is hilarious.






"He's coming to the party?!"  OMG, I can't breathe.