The Honeymooners

Last year I told you about our first date, which was 13 years ago yesterday. Nine years ago yesterday, we got the wedding over with and were flying off the next day to Newport, RI, for the most wonderful, most romantical, most magical, most fantabulous honeymoon ever.

We stayed on the top floor of the Inn at Shadow Lawn, which is supposedly haunted; the window on the left was our room and the window in the middle was our huge bathroom:



The building was gray when we stayed there; looking at their website I see that it's been repainted and is now called the Agincourt Inn. I also see that they've redecorated our room, which used to look like this:



And now it looks like this. The chandelier and the bedside lamps are the same but everything else is new.

Anyway, before we left, Bridgie packed up to go wherever she stayed that week and took every pair of shoes with her except my high heels for work and a pair of wooden-soled clogs, so I clomped around Newport for the first two days in those stupid clogs and they damn near killed me. My poor feet were swollen, lacerated and bleeding! On the third day we finally detoured to a shoe store and bought me some tennis shoes, which turned out to be only slightly more comfortable. Here's a picture of me and those friggin' clogs at Rosecliff; you'll notice they're in my hand and not on my feet:



But it didn't matter. We had a great time traipsing all over town and, when we couldn't hike any further, we'd call a cab to come and rescue us. We managed to visit all the mansions on the Preservation Society tour, plus Belcourt Castle and Astor's Beechwood. Here's Mikey at The Breakers, acting like he owned the place:



And then, on our last full day there, we somehow got the bright idea to rent bicycles. We did fine, at first, until we passed the point of no return, and then it was pure hell. Starting downtown, we pedaled to the end of Belleview Avenue and then followed the road that circled the southwest side of the island, and back to downtown to turn in our bikes. I figured it up afterward; I think it was about fourteen miles.

On the south side of the island we found a public beach, so we stopped to wade. Well, I stopped to wade; Mikey still has Jaws-phobia so he watched me wade. I got out about knee-deep and looked down to see jellyfish swirling all around my legs. I was back on the shore in a split-second, hopping around the dead jellyfish all over the sand. I dunno how I didn't get stung.

At the far southwest corner of the island was Brenton Point, where the sea hurled itself against jagged rocks and sprayed way up in the air. It was a spectacular sight but I didn't get any pictures because, by that point, I was too busy pedaling grimly along while praying for a flat tire so we could legitimately call someone to come and rescue us.

No such luck, though, so we pressed on until we reached Hammersmith Farm, Jackie O's childhood summer home, so we toured that and then we pedaled back into town and turned in our bikes and we will never, ever do that again.

In spite of the parts that didn't go quite right, there's isn't anything about that trip I would change. It was perfect in every way. Sometimes, when life gets us down, we'll look at each other, sigh and say, "Oh, God, I wish we were in Newport."

Last night, we celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary with a bottle of Louis Jadot Beaujolais-Villages and our photo album from that trip, and agreed that our tenth wedding anniversary sounded like the perfect time to go back for a second honeymoon.

If I can get Mikey on a plane, that is. You know how he is about that.

Britt Gets Bugged

I had a couple of cute videos that were too long for YouTube, so I'm trying out DropShots.

In this one, we found an empty locust shell (or cicada, if you must):


Video Hosting - Upload Video - Video Sharing

Ready For Her Close-Up

This is usually what happens when I get out the camera: Britt quits doing whatever cute thing she was doing and tries to get behind the camera so she can look at the view screen and see pictures of herself. I finally flipped the view screen around on this one so she could see herself while I was filming her:


Video Hosting - Upload Video - Video Sharing

Sarah's parents called

wanting to see Britt -- for the first time in six months -- so we went over there on Sunday. And guess what they had?

A copy of the police report.

According to the report, the call was received as a road rage incident and a patrol car was dispatched. The officer caught up with the two cars (not three) and saw the brown Cadillac swerve towards Sarah's car four times before he switched on his lights and siren.

When he was arresting the two people in the Caddy (a man and a woman), they told him that the chick in the passenger seat of Sarah's car had pointed a gun at them. When he went to Sarah's car to ask about the gun, he saw a pipe on the driver's side floorboard in plain view, so he searched the car and found syringes in the glove compartment, empty packets with meth residue and $800 cash in Sarah's purse and a gun under the passenger's seat, so he arrested both of them, too.

After he got Sarah and Patty to the police station, he checked the back seat of his car and found the package containing 29.82 grams of meth stuffed down behind the seat. The two people in the Caddy had 13 grams of meth on them; the guy is reputed to have been involved in several drive-by shootings in the city and the woman had just received a suspended sentence for possession of meth the day before all this happened.

The police report further stated that the reason the man and the woman in the Caddy were chasing Sarah is because Sarah had slept with the woman's boyfriend.

Anyway, I'm done with it. I'm done with her. I will not allow her to visit Britt again unless a judge tells me I have to.

The end.

The Good-Bye Girl

Britt watches a neighbor get into her car and drive away:

Sisters Thursday

Remember our Sisters Weekends? Those annual no-husbands-no-kids-allowed estrogen fests, communing over food and jigsaw puzzles? It's been way too many years since we've had one but, you know, life gets in the way and all that.

So Debbie called Tuesday night and said that she'd rented a hotel room near me and the four of us were expected to begin converging there Wednesday for a much-needed weekend of sisterhood.

And Britt was not invited.

I was a little perturbed that I wasn't included in the planning for this because it was very short notice and I have no babysitter and no car right now and if I had been included in the planning I maybe could've made some babysitting arrangements or rescheduled the thing to a more convenient date. Also, I could've told her that the hotel she'd chosen was nowhere near me, but anyway...

I didn't make it over there Wednesday night, but Thursday morning I was up at the butt-crack of dawn to go condo shopping with them -- and, yes, Britt was invited if that's what it took to get me on board. So we scoured the northwest part of the city all morning and into the early afternoon for a condo that suited Cathy, then went to lunch, adjourned for naps, and reconvened after Mikey got home from work so he could watch Britt for me.

It was the first time the four of us had been alone together in way too many years. We went out to dinner, had a few drinks, laughed a lot, and went back to the hotel, where Debbie introduced me to Sudoku (she said I'd get hooked on it, but I already have a pointless time-wasting addiction -- my Family Tree habit). Mikey called to see when I was coming home and put Britt on the phone to lay the guilt on thick, so I stayed an hour longer than I'd intended to out of pure stubbornness.

We were supposed to go condo-shopping again Friday morning, but Cathy wasn't up to it. I was relieved to hear it, because I wasn't either. I heard nothing further until 4:00, when my sisters showed up on my doorstep without warning. They had tried to warn me, but I hadn't answered my phone, which I later found stuffed behind the sofa cushions.

It was embarrassing to be caught in my jammies at 4:00 in the afternoon -- though I usually wear jammies 24/7, I do put clothes on if I know somebody's going to be looking at me. Also, I hadn't done any chores in two days and Britt had dumped out a bag of Chex Mix on the end table while I was passed out on the couch recovering from the night before. I'd cleared the stuff off the table but I hadn't gotten around to picking up the overspill from the floor yet. So, anyway, they didn't see me or my house at our best.

They invited us out for an early dinner, because they wanted to eat and go to bed early since everybody was worn out. I had to pass, since Britt and I had just finished a late lunch due to the aforementioned passed-out-on-the-couch thing. After that I never heard another peep from them, so I guess the Sisters Weekend kind of petered out -- not from lack of interest but from lack of energy.

Gawd, what a bunch of geezers we are.

The Sarah Saga (Cont'd)

I cannot give you a coherent narrative of what happened because Sarah didn't give us one. Her story was manic, disjointed and rambling.

Mikey spent most of the visit in the front yard trimming the weeping mulberry trees because he can't stand to be around her, but when he'd come in to cool off and get a drink, I'd flee to the garage for a smoke because I can't stand to be around her either. So we each got a version of the story and, after she left, we compared notes and found that a few critical pieces of info were missing.

Anyway, here's what we got, as best as I can tell it:

Remember Shane? Kayla's daddy? The guy Sarah was arrested with the first time, when they borrowed somebody's truck and drove it down to Mexico and sold it? The guy who kept showing up on Bob and Sarah's doorstep no matter where they moved? The guy who "kidnapped" and "raped" Sarah after she married Bob? Well, it's all his fault.

When Sarah was here in April, she'd told us that she and Shane had got back together, but he'd "beat the shit" out of her and was no longer in the picture. Which is strange because his most recent arrest record shows a domestic assault & battery charge on June 10. Anyway, she says he's pissed that she filed charges against him so he set this whole thing up as revenge. Which is strange, because she's the one who called the cops on herself.

So she and her co-arrestee, Patty, were in Sarah's car, being chased by two men (one she knew slightly; the other she didn't know at all) in separate cars and they were throwing beer bottles at her car. So she called the cops. Then she and Patty were taken to the police station in the back of a police car and after they get out, a cop reached in and found 29 grams of meth stuffed down Patty's side of the seat. Patty immediately pointed the finger at Sarah, saying, "It's hers."

Sarah and Patty were both charged with drug trafficking, and she also said something about paraphernalia charges that were dropped. The two men who were chasing them were arrested as well, but I don't know their names so I don't know what they're charged with.

And there was a third woman involved somehow, because Sarah complained that this woman had only spent one hour in jail and was released. She is apparently Shane's new hide and they are now on the run together.

Sarah, on the other hand, spent several weeks in jail and swears up and down that she kept her mouth shut, but now she's been labeled a snitch and people are trying to kill her. She can't go to her condo anymore so she's living with the old guy out at Blanchard again. But she says Shane is the one who's a snitch and she knows that "for a fact" because she's been to the DEA office with him. And now she's had a gun held to her head and somebody drove up alongside her car and pointed a gun at her (I'm not clear on whether this was two separate incidents or just one), so she's scared shitless because Shane's connected with the Mexican Mafia in south OKC.

She says the other three (Patty and the two guys who were chasing them) all go to court on the same date, but her court date is a week later, so she's convinced that they all plan to plea bargain in exchange for testimony against her. She, however, was planning to beat them to the punch by going to the DA Monday (the next day) and spilling her guts so she could disappear into the witness protection program and take her kids with her. Because she doesn't belong in prison, you see.

Umm... I think that's it. Does it make as much sense to you as it did to me? None at all? Yeah, me neither. My eyeballs are still spinning in my head.

The Sarah Saga

will have to be continued later. Maybe tomorrow.

Britt's sleep issues have kept me alternately rocking her and trying to tiptoe out of her room without waking her for the past two hours, and now I'm not in the mood to talk about Sarah, or about anything else for that matter.

Sorry to keep you in suspense, but it can't be helped.

P.S. Finally got Britt to sleep for the night at 2:52 AM.

Lord, Lord

Sarah called again wanting to see Brittany, so Mikey and I talked it over and agreed that she could visit between 3:00 and 6:00 this afternoon. She showed up almost two hours late, as usual.

I'm still so geeked out from the visit that I can hardly put a sentence together, so I'll have to tell you the whole story after I've slept on it. I did get a detailed description of her "tracks," complete with the number of blown-out veins (and I was all "yay, dogies"), but she's been clean for a WHOLE WEEK now and she's finally SEEN THE LIGHT! Woo-hoo!

I guess facing 25-to-life for drug trafficking would be quite an eye-opener.

So hard to believe our beloved Britt came out of the belly of that...THAT.

I will leave you with this teaser: The dumb shit called the police on herself.

Doggone it

We had a bad thunderstorm last weekend, so my dog spent the night in the garage. We also opened the side gate because it sits too low to the ground for water to move quickly under it, which makes the water back up and seep under the side door of the garage.

I let Pepper out of the garage the next morning. A little while later I went out back to fill her food and water bowls, but when she didn't come running like she always does, I said "Oh, shit." I walked around the corner of the house and, sure enough, the gate was standing wide open.

My dog was gone.

I paused a moment to reflect on how I felt about this. And, honestly? I hate to admit it, but it didn't bother me much. Not much at all.

And then I threw some jeans on, grabbed the leash and a picture of Pepper, parked Britt on my hip and headed out to look for her. The neighbors across the street were having a garage sale, so I started there. Yes, they had seen her; she was in my next-door neighbor's backyard, so I went and fetched her and took her home.

So I still have a dog. Dammit.

Seriously, y'all, I have tried. I've tried and tried and I'm still trying, but I just don't feel the love with this dog. I pet her and scratch her and talk to her every time I go outside, and I brush her just about every day, but I'm just not bonding with her. This is not the dog I wanted.

I first started wanting a dog when Kitty was still alive and before Britt was born. My kids had left home and my arms were empty and Kitty wasn't much of a cuddler. So I spent hours and hours looking at pictures of dogs at local shelters, but they were always too big. I wanted a little dog, an armful of love, like the miniature dachshund I grew up with.

Mikey nixed the dachshund idea. Also chihuahuas, anything with bulging eyes or a pug face and any dog from a shelter. He told me to decide on my top three picks and he'd see what he could do. So I did. I studied on it and finally told him that I wanted a silky terrier, a Westie, or a cairn terrier.

We tried for a silky, but they're pretty rare around here and every time we tried to get one they were already sold out. That Christmas, we were over at his parents' house for the family gift exchange when his brother came through the door with a tiny Bichon puppy. I said, "Oh, is that for me?" and everybody laughed. No, it was for my brother-in-law's kids. Later, I cried. Mikey said, "Oh, did you want a puppy?"

He finally told me that if I really wanted a dog, then I should just go get me one, but I could tell he wasn't on board with it and adopting a pet is such a huge commitment that I couldn't bring myself to do it without his support.

And then Britt came and my arms were no longer empty, so the whole issue went on the back burner until this winter, when Britt became mobile and we thought it would be nice for her to have another living being to interact with. Plus, I still really wanted a dog. A little dog.

So I started looking at the shelters again but, still, the dogs there were always bigger than what I wanted, plus they didn't want to adopt dogs out to families with very small children. So I looked at breed rescue sites. Same thing. No families with toddlers allowed.

So I studied the breeds available in the classifieds and circled likely candidates. And showed them to Mikey. And nothing happened, except that he started talking to his customers about dogs and then coming home with reasons why I couldn't have this one or that one. Finally, he told me that I couldn't have any kind of terrier at all because somebody told him they were "nippy" and if a dog ever bit Britt he'd probably hurt it.

By this point, I wanted to scream and claw my face. Instead, I found a website that rated breeds according to their compatability with children, cross-referenced it against what was available in the classifieds, and that's how we got our keeshond. I told myself this was a compromise dog but now I realize that this was a desperation dog. It was a dog and I could have it.

But it isn't the dog I wanted.

She is a beautiful dog and it's true that she has never snapped or growled at Britt, but sometimes she gets too excited and knocks her down or scratches her. She has completely destroyed my beautiful garden and she chews on every damn thing she can get her teeth on, including me. I can't hardly pet her without her latching onto my hand or my arm, and she has nipped the tender inner part of my thigh while trying to chew on my pants and also my boob when she tried to chew on my shirt. And she bit a button off a brand-new pair of capri pants, and ate it.

I read and printed lots of stuff about how to train her but, you know what? Training a dog takes lots of time and diligence, and all my time and diligence is devoted to Britt right now. She is a smart dog and I think she would be a great pet for someone who knew how to handle her, but that someone is not me.

Mikey, of course, has had almost nothing to do with her; he never goes in the backyard. He did today, though, and when he came in he told me that the condition of our yard and patio made him feel very depressed. He's ready to put her up for sale.

I think I am, too.

Busted II

I e-mailed Britt's guardian ad-litem the other day, asking if she could find out what was going on and get back with me.

She said it was indeed "our" Sarah who got busted, and that old guy she was living with in Blanchard last year was the one who bailed her out of jail. That's all she told me, though, which was annoying. I want details, dammit!

UPDATE 4:40pm: I just checked the messages on my phone, like I do once a month or so, and found out that Sarah called on June 13 wanting to see Britt.

The guardian ad-litem said it's up to me whether or not we let Sarah visit Britt, which I'm hesitant to do under the circumstances. Since she's a drug trafficker and all, you know.

On the other hand, I could get her over here and pump her for info.

Hmmm...

When Britt's pigtails fall out

she looks like a papillon:

Busted

Bridgie called to tell me she'd found something interesting on the OSCN website: Sarah was arrested last month for trafficking in illegal drugs. I pulled it up myself and looked at it; the birthdate is correct, so I'm sure it's her. Click on the link and you'll know as much about it as I do.

I called Bob; he thought it was pretty funny.

Mikey's been worried that Sarah would finally manage to clean herself up and try to regain custody of Brittany. I didn't have that much faith in her, but it's still a relief to know that she won't be taking Britt away any time soon.

I wonder if I could go downtown and get a copy of the arrest report? I am the legal guardian of her child, so I think I have a right to know what's going on. I'd hate to make the trip for nothing, though. Do you think they'd give me a copy?

A quick update

Britt's been having sleeping issues this past week or so. I finally got her to sleep at midnight-something tonight, which seriously cuts into my free time. Since I don't have a lot of free time on a good day, I haven't been blogging much lately.

I guess y'all heard that Roy's in the hospital with kidney failure. Cathy's been stuck up there without a car, so I went and took her out to lunch today. She's doing fine and Roy seems to be doing better.

I do have some exciting news to report -- Britt's hair is finally long enough to put in pigtails. Behold the cuteness:

Sleeping Beauty II

This time I caught her before she rolled off the bed:

School's out

and so one of my favorite new-to-me blogs is slowing down for the summer, dang it. And I was just about to add it to my blogroll, too.

It's the oddly fascinating Vegan Lunch Box, wherein a mom posts a daily photo, description and rating of the lunches she packs for her son each school day:



I'm not a vegan, but I would totally eat this stuff. Well, I would -- as long as somebody else did the shopping and the cooking for me.

Damn

I thought my meno was pausing.

I guess not.

Damn.

Greg's Wedding

Made the trip home to Tahlequah this weekend to see my youngest nephew get hitched. Here he is, enjoying his last few moments of freedom:



Amber was a lovely bride:



The kiss:



And it's a done deal:



We went over to Debbie's afterward, where Britt got to swim in the pool. She even got to ride in a kayak with Kelly Beth and Emily, with Eddie catapulting it from one end of the pool and Bob catching at the other:



And she went hot-tubbing with her Daddy; by this point her super-absorbent diaper was bigger than Bob's head:



Don't ask me what's up with Bob's facial hair. Could be he's Amish now, I dunno.

Missy is a lesbian

I forgot to tell Bridgie today when she finally came to get her dog that Missy has been humping my dog. Also, my leg.

Oh, yeah, Bridge -- remember when you came over for dinner Thursday and I couldn't find my little stainless steel saucepan? And I looked in all the cabinets, and I looked in the dishwasher two or three times and I even looked in the refrigerator and the freezer? And then I sat on the floor and looked through the pots & pans cabinet again? And it was nowhere to be found?

I hunted for it a few more times over the weekend, thinking it might magically reappear somewhere.

It did.

I finally unloaded the dishwasher on Tuesday and there it was.

Last night

I was in the garage smoking when Mikey popped his head out and told me he was going to mail the mail. Then he left.

A few minutes later, I was ready to go back in the house and -- guess what?

Yep. The door was locked.

I was locked in the garage with the baby monitor and an extremely tedious book and Brittany was asleep in her room -- alone.

I don't like being locked out of my house. I tend to freak out, just a little.

So Mikey came home and found me sitting here in front of the computer.

You locked me out.

What?

You locked me out.

How'd I do that?

Well, I guess you turned that little thingy on the knob when you shut the door.

How'd you get in?

I got in.

How?

I got in. You need to fix the door jamb.

Oh, great.

Oh, great? Oh, great? Like I'm the one who caused the problem?

I couldn't stay mad for long, though. He brought me a Blue Bell Texas Size Double Fudge Bar. Only 240 calories and 11 grams of fat. Diet, schmiet -- it's heaven on a stick.