On Being Lazy

Today someone accused me of being lazy. Someone who doesn't know me outside the 24 hours a week she works with me, accused me of being lazy. Let me tell you just how NOT lazy I am. At present I work a 40 hour week. I'm not bragging or complaining. I'm just making a statement of fact. I work a 40 hour week at my paying job. Then I come home to my non-paying job; wife and mother to Sean and Katie.

This is a typical day: Somewhere between my overnight shift at Good Morning Arizona and when my kids get home from school I squeeze in a nap, usually three to four hours. Then it's homework, housework, and getting dinner on the table. My evenings are spent cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, and hanging out with the kids; taking care of last minute notes for school, making sure everyone has lunch money, clean clothes to wear the next day, etc. If I'm lucky I have a few minutes to watch TV. Then I try to squeeze in another nap, one or two hours before heading out the door to work around midnight.

My weekends consist of 15 to 20 loads of laundry. Planning meals for the upcoming week. Going to the grocery store. And special projects around the house that I don't have time for during the week. Oh, and hanging out with he kids. Maybe catch a movie, go to the mall. Sometimes we just stay home, order pizza and rent a movie. I try to get the kids and I to church on Sunday's. We usually have a nice big early afternoon lunch. Then it's off to bed for me around five o'clock for a nice long six hour snooze before starting another week of short naps when and where I can get them.

Lazy, I think not. Thanks to my parents I have a strong work ethic.

I got my first real paying job when I was 15. As a waitress. My friends mother owned the restaurant. I wanted to work there so bad I offered to work for free. For tips actually. Which I did for about two weeks. Then she decided to hire me. Three dollars an hour. That's what I made. Plus tips of course. So at 15 I went to school all day, then after school went to my job as a waitress where I worked until nine, sometimes ten o'clock at night. Then I still had to come home and do homework.

In fact, I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't work. Excluding the year after my daughter was born. But my pregnancy had been so fraught with complication it was a miracle either one of us survived it. I needed to take a year to recover and enjoy being with my daughter.

And I won't even go into what it took for me to complete my college education. Now you talk about work? That was!

And I'd be remiss not to mention the work involved in being the daughter of aging parents. My dad is 75 and my mom is turning 71 in a few days. My dad has a sleu of health problems that need constant monitoring. And my mother is dying from a degenerative brain disease.

So yes, it pains me to be told by a single-twenty-something that I'm lazy. I know when I was twenty-something I didn't have a clue about the real world. I wish I could go back and tell my twenty-something self to grow-up. But I can't. I can't even tell this twenty-something to grow-up. What I can do is wish her well on her journey and pray that God blesses her just as he has blessed me with so many things to keep me busy.... so I don't have the chance to be lazy.

On Recycling and Kitty Litter

If you read my previous post you know I'm a cat owner. We have five cats, to be exact. Now, I prefer they use the great big litter box mother nature provided (sorry Mrs. Pederson). But not wanting to start a war with any of my neighbors I do provide them a litter box. After trial and error, and error, and error, I finally settled on Petco Scoopable Cat Litter. It comes in a nifty refillable container and Petco offers a reduced price on the refill versus buying a whole new container. Great concept. I'm totally on board. I'm saving money AND helping the environment. Sign me up!
That is until recently when Petco decided to try and pull a fast one. It put the new container on sale for less than the refill. No problem. I'll play along. My bucket was getting a little warn. Plus they had come up with a new, better bucket. So I left the store that day with two buckets; the one I had brought in to refill. It was empty. And a nice new bucket of litter I got on sale.
How does the old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me! I made my weekly trip to Petco to get my refill of litter and lo and behold, the sale was still on. Well if you know anything about me, you can imagine where this is going.
Let's digress for just a minute. The point of the refillable kitty litter was to save money and help the environment. If I have to keep buying a new container to get the cheaper price, I'm not really doing all that much to save the environment. Sure I'm saving money. But this was supposed to be a win-win situation. How is the environment winning if I'm sending all of these perfectly good containers to a landfill?
So, I said, uh-uh, no way, not this time. I refilled MY refillable container and made my way to the check-out where I told the clerk I wanted her to ring it up at the "new" container price. She did what I asked and I left the store happy.
Today I made my weekly trip to Petco to refill the kitty litter. I found the "new" price was still cheaper than the "refill" price. But no worries, right. I've got it all worked out under a previous agreement made last week. I made my way to the register where the clerk asked me "is this a new container or a refill?" I said, its a refill, but you can ring it up at the "new" price. She looked at me like I'd lost my mind. She wasn't going to do it. But she could see I wasn't going to sway on my decision not to be duped into paying a higher price. She kindly informed me that she would only do it "just this once." To which I proceeded to tell her how stupid it was that Petco would offer the refill at a higher price than the new container, thus defeating the purpose of the refillable container... which is to SAVE MONEY AND THE ENVIRONMENT. GEESH, is that so hard to understand?
I walked out, refill in hand, savings in my wallet. I can't wait to see what happens next week.

On The Naming of Cats

Cats the musical is one of my favorites. I've seen it seven times. I saw it twice in the same run. The first time I saw Cats was in 1989. It was another 12 years before I became a cat owner. In 2001 when my daughter was one we adopted our first cat. And naming her was easy. We named her Jennyanydots, after one of the cats in the musical. We called her Dot for short, because she had a white dot in the middle of her back.

Getting Dot home was itself an adventure. She was wild. It took three or four people to catch her. When my husband handed her to me she started squirming and scratching. I dropped her. She took off and the chase was on, again.

On the ride home my daughter threw-up in the car.

Dot didn't want anything to do with us for weeks. She mostly hid under my bed. Then, finally, a break through.

I had to have oral surgery, to have my wisdom teeth removed. I was home recuperating, laying in the bed, doped up on pain killers, sandwiched between two heating pads, when all of a sudden Dot's little face peered in. She was checking on me. I thought how sweet of her to do that.

And that was the beginning of a long, and wonderful relationship.

Dot may have been my daughter's cat, but I was clearly her favorite human. She slept with me. Watched TV with me. Read books with me. Got ready for work with me. On a cold night I could whisper her name and she would come lay on my chest and keep me warm. In fact, on a hot night she would come lay on my chest and keep me warm.

The downside to the love between Dot and I is that a couple of nights ago as I was heading out the door for work she naturally followed. It was cold out and apparently after I left she took refuge in the engine of the neighbors car. Well, I don't have to tell you what happened next. Dot was badly injured and we had to put her down. The worst part was that I had to do it without giving my kids the chance to say goodbye. Dot acted so brave. She wasn't crying at all. In fact she was alert, even purring at times. We had a nice visit while I waited for my husband to get to the hospital. I asked him to come be with her during the procedure. We had to have our dog, Snowball, put down a few months back, and I just couldn't go through that again but didn't want Dot to be alone. So he graciously relieved me of my post. It was strange. Almost as soon as he got there Dot got very relaxed and laid down, as if to say, "I'm ready now." We had our final goodbye and I left her in the capable hands of my husband and the veterinarian.

God Bless You Dot.

Thank you for bringing us so many years of joy.

On New Year's Resolutions

Ah, the beginning of a new year. And the question I'm being asked a lot these days, "What's your new years resolution?" I'll be honest, I'm not very good at keeping a new years resolution. Giving up something for 40 days during Lent? Now that's a commitment I can sink my teeth into. Probably because during Lent you get to fudge once a week. I mean really, who can't commit to something six days at a time? So come this February 25th through April 11th, you can expect me to meet my yearly Lenten obligation of giving up soda, except of course on days that begin with "SUN."
Until then, I needed to come up with a new years resolution that I knew I could keep. Because let's face it, failure is just depressing. So, without further ado, my new years resolution for 2009, is to write in my blog at least once a week.
I'm a writer, it's what I do, I was born to write. When I was a little girl, and by that I mean from about fifth grade until I was a senior in high school, I absolutely couldn't go to sleep at night until I wrote in my diary. I wrote in teeny-tiny letters, and came up with abbreviations for peoples names and certain words, so I could fit more stuff on one page. But if one page wasn't long enough I would get out a piece of notebook paper and write some more and then tuck it inside the pages of my diary. Lord knows how many hours I spent writing in my diaries. I still have them and every now and then I drag them out for a good laugh, or cry! You remember what it was like to be a teenager.
Then when I went back to school I started an unsuccesful blog, "Confessions of a thirty-something college student." I mean, did I really think I was going to have time to carry a full load of classes, commute two hours, do homework, take care of my husband and two kids, AND KEEP UP A BLOG! Please!
Okay, school's but a fond memory, and about a year ago I started another blog called Observations. I managed to create a profile and make one blog entry during the whole of 2008. Mind you, I had a lot of great ideas for my blog, and I wrote dozens of blog entries in my head. I just never found the time to put finger to keyboard and get my observations down in print.
So with that being said, as God and you as my witness, I'm making the commitment right now to write in my blog at least 52 times in 2009. If you have the desire and the time I hope you'll return and check out my Observations.