Wednesday Night and All Is Well

 The stray orange cat is outside on my doormat right now chowing down on a bowl of food I just gave him. He wants to come in so badly but my cats aren't quite so welcoming. (And after I wrote that, he finished the food and then sauntered away, Maybe I'm just a restaurant for him.)

I woke up this morning (Wednesdays are my weekday off) and had a list of things to do but no get-up-and-go to get-up-and-be-gone. So Murder vomited all over my comforter and left me no options.

I didn't get everything done but I did my donation at Goodwill, went to the vet and got flea meds, took all my blankets to the laundry and got some groceries.

I have donated/rid myself of a lot of things. Some were gifts which made me feel guilty and some were things I really like but don't use and if it's sitting there unused for a year or more, it doesn't need to remain in my space. 

Tomorrow I get a new cat tree and the one in the front window will go into my bedroom. So I'll have 2 cat trees in my bedroom and one in the living room with about four assorted beds. 

I said I'm not buying anything for myself but the cats are babies and they need things!

It's funny but in the last week or two of starting to clean out closets and under the bed and all that, my apartment is just so much nicer. 

I'm such a cleaning whore. I can't even deny it.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of These

 I had a very disorienting dream last night where Mollie was taken away from me and being given a new mother. I had no means to contact her and the worry was astronomical. Then I was lost in a gigantic mall and trying to find the office but it was too big and confusing.

Issues. 

I'm a vivid dreamer and from childhood was aware that I processed emotionally through my dreams. I've had joyful dreams of freedom and love and admiration. I've had horrible dreams of loss and abuse.

Losing Mollie has always been a dream since the first blush of being her mother. And this morning I woke from that dream and realized that the feeling of loss is inevitable and how I process it and live with it will be defining for the last part of my life. (I'm in old age. I've had my childhood, my teenage years, maidenhood and middle age. I'm 65. I might live to 100, I might die tomorrow. This is, no matter how many years it encompasses, the last part of my life.)

And I am dealing with loss.

Not just the loss of motherhood. I raised my daughter to be true to herself and without realizing, I raised her to be independent. She is happy and free. She is never coming back to America and my adult brain is joyful that she found her place so easily and so young. But I am not moving to Japan since I found my place and that is Hawaii. I feel safer here than anywhere else I've ever been. 

Also I'm distancing myself from my family. They make me feel diminished. I've had a lifetime of it. I'm not giving the last part of my life to anyone who doesn't think I'm amazing. 

I miss my mother. She's been gone 18 years and she was a problematic person but I miss her so much. And I'm sad knowing that she died without ever having found a real sense of peace. She was not speaking to my siblings when she died. 

My mother loved drama. She loved having "situations" with her kids. She was proud to make us cry. She would give the silent treatment to us when we were young and that is w one of my biggest triggers. The manipulation of doing that to someone you love is unforgivable.

Anyway, the dreams last night gave me an unsettled morning. It's now afternoon and I'm starting to feel almost normal again. 

My sleep exhausted me. Oh well...

Love y'all. Stay safe. There are monsters out there.

Whatta Day

And it's not even noon yet.

Yesterday ended up being a really productive day. It was good and tiring but one of the first days in a long while that I crossed off everything on my to-do list.

Today is pretty productive also. But it's already had a few twists and turns. There's a stray orange cat at the apartment (I'm assuming the cat lived here but his people moved away and left him). I always see him stalking Murder when Murder goes out and recently he's been hanging out a lot at our door. 

So I started feeding him. And this morning he's made a couple of attempts to come in but Wednesday is not having it. It isn't my plan to have more cats than the 2 I have but if the Cat Distribution Network has decided I'm getting a third: then I'm getting a third. 

I've cleaned off my desk. All my work is caught up. Amazing.

My neighbor is moving in February. She's so awful. She has a baby and a pre-school son and she yells at her son all day. That poor child is always being ragged on by his mother. As far as I know there's no physical abuse (I'd hear it if she hit him, I'm sure) so I can't call CPS. I mean she's traumatizing the poor boy but in an acceptable way. It makes me sick. I've even offered to watch the kid but no go.

I'll be so glad when she's gone. (She's yelling right now.)

I haven't had much energy lately but today I have some. I'm going to take advantage while I can.

By the way: I'm calling the orange cat George. Weasley. I wanted to go for Homocide but orange cats are too jolly to fit in the killer categories.

Love y'all. Stay safe. 

Good Book, Good Music

 My reading is spotty at best nowadays but when the right book crosses my path, I love it like a chocolate pudding. (I love homemade chocolate pudding.)

This was such a good book. It was soft. Friendly. This is about people finding their home, their place. It's a slow burn book. No surprises, just a lovely soft story about a adult woman rediscovering her sense of purpose. 

This book has a lovely tone. It's paced well, the romance is slow and lovely and it just felt good.

**

I'm obsessed with Demi Lovato's album Dancing With the Devil. It's from 2021 and all about addiction. She has a well documented history with drug and alcohol addiction and it's all out there. 

The song are so well written and there's so much to relate to. It's just a brilliant album.

**

Life is, at this moment, pretty good. We'll see what work has in store this week.

Love y'all. Stay safe.

I'm a Terrible, Horrific, Nightmare of a Mother

 Mollie is having some stress currently. Job issues, Visa needs to be renewed, other things... I'm 100% committed to being there for her. I know she can get through all this and it's just a lot of stuff. She needs to learn to take one step at a time and ultimately everything gets done.

I remind myself of this all the time. One step after another and then you've passed the finish line.

So Mollie needs to learn how to handle all the crazy and she will. It's a great skill. And I love her and want to give her anything she needs.

But... well, I've mentioned that she can always come home. We can get a 2 bedroom apartment. We can have too many cats and I'll have someone to cook for and be with and I'd be so happy. 

So I've mentioned it. I'm not banging on it but it's there. And it's especially in my head right now. I want her to come back to Hawaii. 

So this mother is admitting that for the first time since my daughter left home, I'm trying to get her back. I'm not pushing because honestly, Japan is cool and she's happy there. But if she ever chose to come home I'd be over the moon.

Over the fucking moon.

Granola

 1/2 cup oil of your choice

1/2 cup honey

1/2 t salt

1/2 t cinnamon

3 cups oats

*I added sunflower seeds, flax seeds and chia seeds. I also chopped up craisins which I added before cooking and then saw it was supposed to be added when it came out of the oven. Didn't matter because it was fine.*

Sheet pan with parchment paper. Flatten it and bake at 300 for 10 minutes. Then spatula it over. Another 10 to 15 minutes. Take out of the oven and cool.

This was my first time making granola and it didn't dry as completely as store bought. But it's even more delicious. 

I always eat breakfast and my favorite is yogurt and granola. So I wanted to try homemade.

Oh yum.

The Customer is Always...

Her Hands My Hands 

Aztec Lady has a blog post up about reader demands (well, more than just that, but go read it to get the entire story) and it got me thinking about the culture of entitlement, Karen's and the grandest of expressions: the customer is always right.

I spent my first decade plus of working in retail. My first job was in Jack in the Box. I've sold books, t-shirts and sundries. It was always a horrible job. Bosses almost never created schedules that were fair (I remember one boss Bob who did, in fact, create a store schedule that was fair, sensible and solid. You could plan ahead for months because Bob's schedule was just that good. Obviously they transferred him and the next manager tossed that schedule and created a terrible one.)

Anyway, I have no horrible stories to tell, really. I was insulted to my face a few times but I have been in medical offices also. I did have a homeless man throw cupcakes at me but it wasn't for a reason. But there were more than a few people who walked in with demands or  expectations that were just grandiose. 

Anyway, there are always those bosses who say deal with it. For the most part of it, that's because they don't have to deal with it. But the entitlement of 30 years ago and the entitlement today has blown out of proportion. I would love to read a sociological view of why that is. Where did the imaginary crowns all sprout from? 

I have a sad, sick enjoyment of watching Karen videos on the internet. Watching people freak out in stores and public areas in the most loud, obnoxious ways. Sometimes it's cringe and I can't watch. But many times there's a crazy aggressiveness that people (so many white women) have where they start to demand information or resolution that they are not at all entitled to.

Obviously there's a lot of racism involved. The number of white women trying to insist that people of color don't live in the apartment buildings that they live in. All the "I've never seen you." The prove to me that you live here, that you belong here, that your black skin is allowed to reside where my white skin calls home.

Similar vibe is the "viral" crowd. The people who haunt spaces demanding that they are influencers or important or just that 10,000 votes short of being president. Oops. That's a different story.

Anyway, that old adage "The customer is always right" is obviously wrong and should be a death sentence if uttered. Attitudes like that just feed into class, racism and white supremacy. The Karen entitlement (which I have been guilty of in the past and now causes me cringe to think of it) is so class based. My Mom was one of those people who saw slight in every situation and caused endless misery to waiters, salespeople and any service worker out there. 

I could really go on and on about this. I think it's so engrained in us that we deserve to be treated like celebrities (we're all one tweet away from fame, after all) that we're destroying our little society with each scream fest, private outrage made public and lack of empathy.

Anyway, love y'all. Stay safe.