The Best Laid Schemes of Mice and Men

Whether you want to quote Robert Burns or John Steinbeck, either way, they were both right.

(Warning, there is a word at the bottom of this post that is not-suitable-for-children.)

My schemes (plans) today were so carefully laid out. We were taking my three-year old grandson to an Easter Egg Hunt in the morning (yes, I am atheist, but he is only three and hasn't decided what he is yet so we like to expose him to different choices) and then this afternoon, I was going to work on a scrapbook album with an online crafting class.

First, my grandson seemed very happy to be out in the park and was dancing around, seemingly very happy. His verbal communication skills are still minimal; he talks, just not in a language we understand. But then we had to sit on the bleachers while they explained "Why We Were There" aka "What Easter is All About". I'm not sure he really understood the woman who was explaining that the red M&Ms were there to symbolise Jesus's blood - but I'm sure he would have been grossed out if he did understand. It's candy, people, and these are little kids.

Side Note: Most of the other kids were mainly complaining about being cold during this part, and trying to keep warm. They didn't want to know what the red M&Ms meant either. Why did so many people dress their kids in lacy t-shirts when it's sixty degrees with a cold wind blowing? And not bring a jacket? But I digress.

Still, for whatever reason, he chose that moment to decide he wanted too leave. He started crying and got up and took my hand, so I took him back to the picnic area and tried to figure out what he wanted.

Apparently, he wanted to go home, because he kept taking my hand and leading me to the parking lot. Our car was behind another car and he couldn't see it and that's when he started crying in earnest. My husband tried to get him to calm down and hunt for candy-filled plastic eggs - the speech was apparently over and that's why we were there, after all - but he didn't want any part of it. He wanted to go home. I have some pictures - I made sure to take my camera along to get lots of glorious pictures of my grandson and the other kids enjoying the beautiful Spring day.

I got one picture of him smiling before the bleacher incident and in the rest he's crying or trying to get us to go home. After some discussion and analyzing of what he was actually doing while we were there and after we left, my husband and I think that he has an ear infection and the wind was bothering him.

The next plan for the day was a craft project gone awry, which you can read about on my craft blog here. That went only slightly better than the Easter Egg Hunt. There was no crying (yea!) but there was a mess and a migraine (boo!)

So Burns and Steinbeck were right. Never set too much store in your perfectly laid-out plans because something is bound to get fucked up somewhere along the line.

Know The Rules

Everyone has things they will or won't do. Things they like to do a certain way. (I'm not talking about anything dirty, get your mind out of the gutter!) For example, I live thirty-five minutes away from my grocery store. Also, I don't like milk that has been warm and then cooled again. So, if we put those two things together, it makes sense that, in warmer months, I won't buy milk unless I'm going directly home after grocery shopping. If I have to make a stop, my milk is going to get warm and I won't drink it even after it's been chilled in the refrigerator.

(*Do not bother to explain to me the process of homogenized milk. I know.)

I know I am like this; I acknowledge it and work around it, making sure to do all of my errands before I go to the grocery store. If it's really hot outside, I won't even buy milk at the grocery store, but stop on the way home at the little convenience store at the gas station and pay twice as much for the milk, just so it won't get warm before I get home.

It's a little thing, I know, but you get the idea. I have certain things I will do and will not do, and certain ways of doing things. That's part of who I am. When it comes to milk, those are the rules.

One thing that drives me crazy is people who don't acknowledge their own rules.  They say they'll drink the milk even if it gets warm, but then they don't, meaning that I have a gallon of milk that no one will drink, but I feel like I can't go buy more milk because I already have a gallon of milk in the fridge!

Most of the rules people have are much bigger than my milk example. I don't mind if you have rules, I have them too. But don't tell me you don't have any rules and then time after time after time, when it comes time to drink the milk, you won't do it. You're lying to yourself and more importantly, you're lying to me.

And lying to me is one rule you won't like the consequences of.

Number Four

What does it mean, exactly, to be 'sorry'? Is it just an apolgy for a behavior? Is it a way of getting out of an unpleasant situation? Is it just something to say because you think the other person wants to hear it even though you have no idea what you did wrong?


Or do you actually have to be expressing remorse?


To me, the words "I'm sorry" should only be used when you are genuinely remorseful about something you've done. Not sorry that the other person got upset about it; not sorry that you got caught. We really need to find other words to use in any situation other than your own genuine remorse over your own actions.


"I'm sorry" is supposed to be an apology. Most psychologists will tell you that an apology has three parts.


1. Being remorseful about your own actions.
2. Understanding and acknowledging aloud - to the person(s) in question - that those actions have hurt someone either physically or emotionally.
3. Trying your best, if at all possible, to rectify or fix the situation - to put things back to the way they were before.


And here's where I differ from the articles I've read. There is a fourth element to being 'sorry', in my opinion.


4. Not doing it again.


And number four is the kicker. You have to have number four. Without number four, you're just spewing words that are polluting the world with their insincerity, adding to the filth that already makes our air unbreathable.


I realise that sometimes number four is hard. Damned hard. For instance, I had unconsciously learned a behaviour from my mother while I was growing up. I didn't consciously do it, my sister didn't consciously do it - we didn't even realise that we had learned to do it until someone pointed it out to me. That behaviour was to, in small, almost insignificant ways, demean men - most especially our husbands.


I know this seems like something that you couldn't possibly do without meaning to, but trust me, you can. Remarks, gestures, a roll of the eyes - there are hundreds of things we learned without knowing we were learning them.


When a friend pointed it out to me, I was flabbergasted. I remembered my mother doing it. I remembered my siblings and I commenting to each other that we wished our father would say something back (he never did). And once it was pointed out to me, I was mortified. I did not want to be that way.


I had a talk with my husband about it where I whole-heartedly apologised to him. I asked him why he had never said anything about it. He explained that he knew I had learned it from my mother, knew that I didn't do it consciously, and knew that I loved him; that he knew I didn't really mean the things I said.


There was nothing I could do to fix the sitaution at that moment, but I was determined to stop doing it.


Stopping doing something you don't know you're doing is damn near impossible. I am sarcastic by nature and that made it extra hard. Most of the things that come out of my mouth are sarcastic, but I have always tried very hard not to be demeaning. Except with my husband, apparently. The husband-filter had never been implanted in me or taken out by some means. I was determined to put it back in.


I started by trying very hard to think about every word that came out of my mouth before I said it. Being as sarcastic as I am, that was tough, but I tried. During this phase, which took literally a couple of years, I would be having a conversation with someone and if I found myself saying something that was in any way insulting to my husband, I would just stop talking, mid-word. My friends thought I was insane(r). They would ask me to finish what I was saying and I would change the subject completely, never explaining why I had stopped. I didn't want to admit, to anyone other than my husband, that I had ever done it or why. And exlaining why I had stopped talking would mean admitting the behaviour.


It took a long time. But I did it. Again, it took years to unlearn something I didn't even realised I had learned. So it can be done, if you want to badly enough.


Not that I am never sarcastic to him now, or never insult him. But now I only do it when he does something stupid - and never, ever in front of other people.


So I practice what I preach. You must include number four, or your apologies are just words that dirty up the air and add further insult to injury.


Number four. Memorise it. Learn it. Practice it. Do it.

Organisation, or the Lack Thereof

Organisation is not my strong suit. I try to be organised, but I was not one of those BOs (Born Organised people). I know things should have a place, I just don't know where that place is. And my decorating skills are random. If I can get a very clear picture in my head, I can come with room design, colour scheme, appropriate shelving and storage - the works. My kitchen, for instance. When I designed this house I had a very clear picture in my head of what I want my kitchen to look like: what goes in there, where it needs to go, etc.

I am a SHE (Sidetracked Home Executive). I tried, over the years, to get the house under control. I bought books, I subscribed to mailing lists, I made index cards and calendars and binders (the binder works pretty well, actually, and the index cards are great for children). But I still have some clutter.

It's not that I'm a hoarder, nowhere even close to it. When in doubt, throw it out is my motto. Along with the five year plan I put my husband on (he would be a hoarder if I allowed it - I don't) we do not have a lot of clutter. But what we do have, we have no place to put it.

I need bookshelves (books are the one thing I do hold on to) and filing cabinets and a desk or place to put office supplies, stamps - the kind of thing I keep buying because I can never find the one I bought last time. My beloved desk that was passed down to me by my mother-in-law is beautiful, but completely useless as a working office space. So we put it in the foyer and I am now trying to find something to replace it but where I'm going to put that when I find it, I have no idea. I have a room we euphemistically call the study in mixed company. It's empty right now and I'm probably going to turn it into a craft room... someday.

But someday never seems to come and in the meantime I have all this stuff with no place to put it.

I must work on that.

The Meaning of Life

I don't watch much television these days, but when I do...

I sound like one of those 'The Most Interesting Man in the World" commercials, don't I? Sorry.

To continue... but when I do, I watch things like Stephen Hawking's Grand Design, which tonight focused on The Meaning of Life -- dah dah dum (insert ominous music here). He spent most of the hour talking about how everyone perceives reality differently, but in the end he concluded that the meaning of life was found in your mind.

I examined this question, as I'm sure all of us have, many times in my life and here is my conclusion. There is no Meaning of Life, in the grand plan of creation meaning of the term. To me, the meaning of life is an internal, personal thing.

What is the meaning of your life? And that, to me, is a two-fold question. The meaning of one's life consists of what are you passionate about and what do you do. And I don't mean your hobbies or your job.

In my life, the two things are interwoven. I am passionate about my love for my family and that makes part of the meaning (or purpose) of my life to raise children into thoughtful, responsible, intelligent adults. It also entails helping my husband fulfill his life's dreams, even if that means learning to Bondo a 1970 Chevelle SS and knowing how positraction affects a turning radius. (I can and I do.)

I have always believed the Native American saying, "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." So I am a passionate, tree-hugging environmentalist from way back. I practice and advocate solar energy, wind power, and recycling. I used cloth diapers on all three of my children; this was in the late eighties and early nineties.

I believe in taking care of those who cannot take care of themselves, so I donate time and money to causes that help those less fortunate than myself. I am also one of the very few people happy to pay their taxes, as those taxes are providing necessary help to those who need it (at the moment, this may change after the next election).

I am so passionate about animals that my husband has made me promise never again to walk into a pet store or an animal shelter. I cannot stand to see animals in cages. When a neighbor abandoned two dogs, guess who took them in? I am passionate about child protection laws and decent healthcare for everyone. I am a member of the Human Rights Campaign and the ACLU. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

All of these things make the meaning of my life. And that's all that matters really. What does your life mean? Whose life are you changing for the better and what did you do today to make your house, your community or your world a better place? That, my friends, is the meaning of life.

Memory, or the Lack Thereof

And I'm not talking about my hard drive this time. You haven't heard from me for a few days because I am bipolar and with this condition comes occasional insomnia. You don't want to read anything I've written after not sleeping for four days, trust me on this.

But today, on the eight hour drive home from Dallas (we made a couple of stops) I had two ideas for blog posts that I liked, one of which I remember thinking was excellent. The problem is, I can't remember what either of those ideas were. I can remember thinking they were good, but not the ideas themselves. Do you want the kicker? I have a small pad and pen in my purse for just such an occasion. I also write fiction and so I always keep something nearby to write on so that if inspiration should strike, I will be able to write it down. But this time I forgot to remember to write it down.

So I want to get a tattoo that says Write it down but I don't know where one would put such a tattoo so that it would be both inconspicuous and yet somewhere I would see it so that I would remember not to forget.

It's a quandary. I'll think about it for a while.

If I don't forget.

Wasn't This Supposed To Be Fun?

My siblings and I did not play a lot of games when we were growing up. Not because we didn't have any; my parents, like many parents of the 1970s, felt it was their Christian duty to buy us the newest games every Christmas, whether we wanted them or not. But playing games, in my childhood home, was never fun. And isn't that what games are supposed to be? Or so the commercials tell us. Fun for the whole family! Hours of delightful fun for your children!

No. Because in our house, my mother - for whatever reason - felt the need to sit next to us as we were playing a game and tell us what we were doing wrong. Not that we were breaking the rules, but we weren't making the move that she would have made. Whether it was Monopoly or solitaire, it didn't matter. She could never sit idly by and watch us play or, even better, go in another room and read a book or something. She had to not only watch at close quarters, but play the game for us.

Believe me, any fun to be had disappears very quickly and you stop playing games all together.

Some people have said this is a control issue; that some people feel the need to control their environment. I can understand controlling your environment to a certain extent - it brings calm to your world if there are no surprises. But when you need to control it to the point where you're telling the people around you how to play solitaire, you need counseling. Which my mother would never have considered. "Normal" people didn't go in for psychiatry back in the 1970's. And, while my mother wasn't normal - in ways I cannot even begin to go into here - she liked to think she was and living in a suburban neighborhood would have meant that the neighbors would talk and we couldn't have that, now could we?

My mother's peccadilloes no longer effect me; she died in 2003. But the reason I bring it up is because almost every night before I go to sleep, I play a game on my computer called Bejeweled Twist.  It's not in the least bit difficult, there is no way to play it wrong - and the game never even ends. It saves after every move, you stop whenever you want to and you just play on and on forever and ever. I think my score is in the 75 millions right now. It is relaxing and somewhat mind-numbing so that you can forget all the crap that happened during the day (or will happen tomorrow) and let yourself drift into a peaceful world where you can sleep. Side note: my body is not fond of sleep. It rebels against it in horrible ways and so I go to great lengths, almost every night, to get myself to a state where I can sleep.

Back to the point. I cannot play this game if my husband is around. Because... you guessed it. He will tell me what moves I should make or should have made. Let me repeat - THERE IS NO WAY TO PLAY THIS GAME WRONG. You don't die. You don't lose a turn. You don't have to start over. You are not penalized in any way if you don't make a match. So why oh why does he feel the need to do this?

My husband is not a control freak. (Except during construction or car mechanics, but since he's the only one who understands these things, we want him to tell us what to do anyway.) But the rest of the time, there is not a controlling bone in his body. And he knows about my mother and knows how I felt about her telling us how to play games. But he forgets when he's sitting next to me and he sees a move he thinks I should make. Because something inside of him just needs that move to be made.

I think there should be a law against this kind of behaviour, but I can't think of a punishment strong enough. Do any of you have any ideas?

Does Your Backup Have A Backup?

It's official. My external hard drive has died. One of the pins inside the drive where the cord connects has broken and I no longer have access to over 500 GB of information. Luckily, I keep all of my important things on my computer and I have a Mediafire account where I keep some of my ebooks and music stored. You can bet I'll be expanding that selection pretty quickly.

I wasn't really in favour of the concept of "cloud" storage before, but I'm warming to the idea. Google has the new Google Drive, where it will create a folder on your computer and anything you put in the folder will automatically sync with your Google account. You get 5 GB for free, I guess you have to pay for more than that. But I have 4 Google accounts (don't ask) and my MIL and my husband won't be using their storage on their accounts, so I'm pretty sure I can get most of my essential programs and documents uploaded without having to pay. I also have a website where I can store anything that Google or Mediafire might consider "questionable" should SOPA or a version of it ever pass. But the thing about paid accounts is - if you miss a payment, there goes your information. I'm not planning on my husband losing his job - he's an engineer and there are no lack of jobs for engineers - but you never know.

But still, I was a programmer BC (Before Children) and I know how essential backups are. And I know that you always have backups of your backups. So why didn't I? I don't know. But you can bet I won't be making that mistake again. I will buy another external hard drive. I don't always have internet access, the instability of my satellite internet at home guarantees that if we have a hard downpour, my internet will go out. So it will be nice having a hard backup in case of lack of internet. But getting things stored somewhere reliable where I can  get to them again, even if I have to go to the library to do it, will be a very good thing.

My husband is also a CBCP (Certified Business Continuity Professional), where basically they train you to think like a terrorist and examine all the ways a disaster can strike. I think my husband taught them more than they taught him, but I digress. Between the two of us, you'd think we would have had a better plan in place so that we didn't loose all of our important data. But we didn't.

Although, the one most important thing I learned in my college programming classes? KEEP YOUR PAPER DOCUMENTS. All of this nonsense about a paperless business world is crap. If you have a piece of paper documenting your information, it trumps whatever the computer says every time. Walk into any bank with your deposit receipt and even if that deposit isn't in their computer, you'll get your money.

So consider what you have on your computer and what you absolutely have to have, or what would be very expensive to replace. And then backup your backups. Keep your paper documents. Store whatever you can in reliable online storage - XYZ.com Computer Backup Company does NOT count as reliable.

Learn from my mistakes, people. Because even someone trained to avoid this can lose their files. And it's going to cost me a lot of time, effort, and money to replace what I lost.

Feeling Good About Yourself

I am a writer. Not a for-pay writer, but a writer nonetheless. I write fiction and give it away for free on the internet; I even have my own website. Many may scoff at this as a "hobby" but I can honestly say that I have touched people and changed lives with my writing. Not many for-pay writers can say that. And I have the good fortune to have made some amazing friends through my writing. Not superficial "internet friends", but real, in the flesh friends who have made a difference in my life and helped me through.

The last year or so, I haven't been able to write. Life changes, physical changes, dilemmas and laziness have all contributed to my lack of writing. And I have felt horrible. I am a writer - it isn't what I do, it's who I am. And not writing, to me, means that I am not anything.

But today, I wrote for the first time in over a year. I worked on a story that I had begun more than a year ago, but had not touched since. I edited, I researched and I wrote. And I feel good about myself. For the first time in a really long time.

There's something to be said for that.

Housework? Not So Much...

I'm good at making lists. I'm good at making plans. I'm good at setting things up. But the day-to-day doing of things? I suck at that now. Oh, I'm great in a crisis. If you have to go to court or show your house or need five thousand cupcakes in two hours, you want me on your side.

But the dog hair that needs to be swept up every single day? Nope, that's gonna pile up. I know what should be done. I can make you list upon list of what needs to be done and how to do it. I can give you diagrams and websites and references. But actually getting up and going and doing it when I know it's just going to need to be done again tomorrow? Not so much anymore. I hate doing things that have no visible and lasting results. So being a homemaker was really the last job I should have taken. The ultimate no-respect, no-visible-results job.

You can spend eight hours cleaning your house, polishing the  silver, picking flowers and creating a table arrangement, bathing the muddy dog and then mopping up his muddy pawprints, buying your husband new underwear, ironing the tablecloth, and cooking a balanced, nutritious, tasty meal for your family and what does your husband say when he comes home? "What did you do today?" And before you can answer he will say, "My day was horrible; you're so lucky you get to stay home and do nothing all day."

My husband once actually said to a group of people that women had it easier than men because they could "find someone to take care of them and do nothing for the rest of their lives". (He means well, but he's clueless.)

Wouldn't you know it, but that was the day I stopped doing everything without him. If I had to grocery shop, he had to go with me. I stopped cooking dinner and he had to learn how to cook. When errands needed to be done, I could suddenly only do it when he was home to go with me and see all the "nothing" I did.

That isn't to say I did nothing when he was at work. I homeschooled my three children and that can take up plenty of time. I would be up at six to get some time to myself and prepare for school and then I would teach my kids, do the laundry, pay the bills, answer calls for my husband's work, make his work appointments, answer questions about the company computer system because no one at my husband's work seemed to understand it (he works as an engineer for a big insurance company), and then the main housework and errands would be done by the whole family when my husband got home. My husband used to complain that I would be asleep by ten at night and there never seemed to be any time to be romantic. It was all that nothing I was doing that was wearing me out.

And yes, even then, he still wondered what it was I did all day. Look in your drawers, honey. If there are clothes there, then I've been busy.

Alas, the children have grown and gone and it's just he and I. No one to do for anymore. So when he comes home and asks what I've been doing all day, I can honestly - and happily - say, "Nothing."