Gallery girl, stay-at-home mom & more.

Simon was idling in bed this morning.

Today was my first day of being a Housewife/soon-to-be-stay-at-home-Mommy.  I’ve been at home for a while now dealing with the symptoms of a tough pregnancy. Up until now, I’ve been doing a project from home for my job, which I finished up on Friday. We weren’t sure when I’d be back. Even though my symptoms are abating a bit, I’m only two months away from giving birth—and after that, we would be faced with the challenges of figuring out daily for our baby.  We weighed the expense of daycare, the reduced expense of only one person commuting in the hybrid; and decided that it would be a wash.  The only additional expense is the purchase of our own health insurance. My husband is making a little more money, so we are going to wing it for a while. Until Baby J (that’s his nickname now… he’s grown far beyond the bean that he was six months ago) is older, and I can start exploring options.

Flower thinks the giant U-shaped pregnancy pillow was
purchased for her use alone.

In the meantime, I will probably focus on web-based income like my online shop and artwork while I’m home, because if I don’t find some sort of occupation, I’ll go insane. I’ll probably focus on nesting and preparing for the arrival of the wiggle-worm until he’s born.  These past weeks, I've been painting and de-cluttering. His room isn’t even begun yet. There’s so much to do and time is just ticking by.

My baby belly is growing. These past few weeks it seems to be growing double-time. Baby J’s little kicks are increasing with strength every day. Sometimes it actually hurts! But for me, after all this time of trying and failing, of worrying that something can go wrong with this completely impossible pregnancy; every squirm, every kick, ever punch is a consolation to me and has been since I’ve been able to feel him moving around from about 16 weeks. Yes it’s been a tough ride, but as a friend of mine once said, the sicker you are, the better the chances are of the baby sticking around. And stuck around, he has. From the tests so far, he is within parameters weight and size-wise, his heart is healthily beating along, no cleft palate, no heart problems—and he is very low risk for any disorders common for babies born to women of ‘advanced age’. He’s got ten fingers and ten toes. So we are hopeful for a happy, healthy little squawk-box sometime close to Thanksgiving.

The view out of the back of the Timberline Lodge, Sunday morning. We
had just enjoyed breakfast at the lodge.

I also want to give a shout out to my new OB/GYN Dr. Jill Shaw.  I cannot recommend her enough. For those of you in the Portland area, who want a real human being, who doesn't talk down to her patients, who laughs and is funny, a bit nutty in a good way, is patient, kind and nurturing, I really would like to tell you to look for Dr. Jill. She is hands-down the best OB I've ever had.

Piles of accumulated work... No more.

I miss my horse very much. He is still at my sister’s house. I wish I could go riding! My friends talk about spending time with their horses and I’m so jealous. I could use some ‘grooming therapy’.  My sister has gone up to Seattle to study to become a Yoga instructor. She’ll be there for the whole month, leaving my portly horse in the care of her husband. 

My sister has been working a lot on her art as well. She’s really growing a great deal spiritually and artistically these past months, and I’m really proud of her.  I love her artwork so much! My sister has always had an exceptional artistic eye. She is what started me drawing, and next to her I’m still such an amateur.  She could do pencil drawings that could replicate anything to detail. She has always been marvelously talented. However, I have to agree with my sister when she says that her pencil drawings, homages to detail and accuracy, seemed to lack ‘soul’.  Then my sister went to an oil painting instructor, and an oil painting workshop last year, and was introduced to producing art in broad strokes. She does most of her painting with a palette knife and wide brushes—yet even removing all that detail she is so accustomed to creating, she is producing pieces with tremendous depth and soul. It’s astonishing.

Here is her art blog; and there are links to her Daily Paintworks Gallery on her page. Check it out! I love her stuff. My other sister has also been dabbling in oils and she will also have her blog and gallery up as well. I’ve been helping them by building their blogs for them.

'A Monstrous Tea' - one of the images now at the gallery.

My creative muse has been coming back. It’s so weird. I hope I’ll be drawing again soon.  There is a book store and art gallery (Wy’east Book Shoppe and Art Gallery)  up here where I live. I showed the owner some of my drawings. She asked that I frame a few ands he’d take some to sell in her gallery. So I went to IKEA and got some inexpensive frames, and framed pretty much one of each of my prints, and brought them to her. She took them all. I was very excited. She said the pieces were different than anything else she carried, and she also wants some bookplates as well. This makes me so happy. :-)

"Oh girls!" One of my future prints and an old 'Office Special' 

Anyhow, this is my update for today. Hopefully I’ll have some ‘non-office-specials’ to offer soon. Maybe they won’t be so hastily made now that I’m no longer in my office.

"Pests" - Another old Office Special and one of my
personal favourites

"Town & Country"
Old Office Special

Another old Office Special I quite like. :)

A wordy update and a diatribe....



Because every post, regardless of its subject should be preceeded
by images of Alan Rickman in all his sexy hawtness (and I didn't draw anything today).

I’ve plateaued at 12 pounds so far, damnit! I’m apparently not drinking enough water daily, so I’ve decided to discipline myself more about that. My husband hit 29.4 lbs in weight loss this week. I’m so proud of him it hurts! I want that 30lb mark too! Jealous! Damned men and their fast weight loss.

These past couple of weeks, my emotional craziness has tempered itself a bit, but the hot flashes have arrived and seem to be here to stay. Holy hell. I went to the fabric store with some friends on Monday, and I had this horrible hot flash that not only made me feel as if I was radiating heat like a nuclear fuel rod at Fukushima, but also, my entire thought process sort of short-circuited and it was impossible to focus on even making basic conversation. At the check through, I was fanning myself and sweating like a hog and the lady asked me if I was alright. I told her about the Lupron treatment, and she said: “Oh, my... how wonderful, you get to experience menopause TWICE, what a privilege,” she laughed. I didn’t think that was really funny at the time, but since my brain was in short-circuit mode, I just stood there fanning myself and staring at her blankly until I realized she was asking me for money.

I got my second Lupron shot yesterday. Month 2. Yay. Bring on the hot-flashes. ::urgh::

Last weekend hubby and I went into home impro-mode. We had bought some flooring material sometime back, and we decided it was time to install it in the bedroom and I thought, hell, if we’re taking everything out of the room, why not slap up a coat of paint too? So Saturday I rolled out a layer of really awesome coating paint (BAER Premium; that stuff ROCKS. I may sound like a cheesy commercial but as an experienced room-painter I declare its quality now!) while the rug was still in. I did not feel any remorse when I tracked paint on the floor and dripped it here and there. It was all going in the trash anyway.

Simon managed to get a blue dot of paint on his forehead and to also step on the lid of the paint can and make blue footprints into the kitchen. Once I got the majority of the painting done (everything but the cutting-in), we proceeded to tear up the carpet in our bedroom and O...... M...... G....... Carpet is GROSS. I ... for as long as I live, VOW never to install wall-to-wall carpeting anywhere ever again. It’s no wonder we woke up every morning congested and sniffly. It probably didn’t help that the previous owner left the old padding underneath the new carpet, and it was SO GROSS! It looked like someone had died on it and lay there for a few weeks before discovery. And the smell... ::gag:: It probably didn’t help that my mom’s dog saturated a corner of it with pee, which my dog Simon decided would be a wonderful tradition to continue. Luckily it and our subsequent scrubbing with Nature’s Little Miracle didn’t soak into the sub-flooring (thank GOD). The whole thing was just all out icky. I washed my hands like I had OCD for the rest of the day, and had to scrub the dust from it from my face and hair. We pulled it up, cut it into strips, rolled them into little tubes and crammed them into garbage bags. The padding ::gag:: we also tore up and garbage-bagged for the dump. N.E.V.E.R...A.G.A.I.N.

Underneath was a very plain wooden plank floor that was painted brown, with knotholes that were covered up with flattened tin cans secured to the floor by nails hammered in all around the edges. The bay window was floored in cheap particle-wood sheeting. So we scraped up the staples and other debris (apparently the carpeters didn’t mind just spitting out their gum onto the floor, leaving their cutting blades and didn’t bother to sweep up all manner of dust and dirt) and swept it all up. It took a long time to clear off that floor. I wiped it down with a bleach/water solution and we put down the thick plastic moisture barrier first before we laid down the foam base on which the floating laminate floor would sit. Before laying the plastic, I quickly, with hubby’s help, cracked out the cutting in on the high-areas of the painting, and we plastered holes and such.

Hubby spent most of Sunday on the floor locking together pieces of laminate flooring. I helped in whatever capacity I could, but in about four hours he had the bedroom floor pretty much done. We haven’t put in the new baseboards yet (or bought them at this point either), but who cares. We put the bed back in there and our dressers. We’re waiting to install some cabinets we also bought to provide much-needed storage in our teeny house. We’re missing some components and are waiting on IKEA to get their sh*t together and get the parts into inventory. Once that’s done, our room could be magazine cute—except the existing closet which still lacks doors, but that will happen someday. I even found some lovely dark fabric (for privacy) that has the same dark brown of the floor and a similar tone of blue to match the walls. I have some IKEA track system stuff to hang up so I can have a background of sheers and then the heavy drapes in front of those to close when we don’t want our pot-head-alcoholic idiot neighbour looking in our window (we were woken up last night to screaming and laughing from next door as his drunken, high friends stumbled out of his house and into their remarkably loud ramshackle pickup trucks and trundled off to wherever they crawled out of. My levels of dislike for this neighbour have been escalating for a while now, but when he cut down half of a cluster of maples straddling our property on Sunday, my feelings graduated to something akin to hate... MORON!), Ugh...

Anyway... It’s so nice to walk into the bedroom now. It’s so much more... sanitary-feeling. The problem is, however, now the rest of the floors in the house look even crappier than they already are and I am now wishing we could do the whole freaking house in the laminate (except the bathroom which I’d like to tile in ceramic and take out the tub and install a nice roomy standup shower instead). But finances are finances and even if the flooring is reasonably priced, it’s still requiring money we just don’t have... so I will have to content myself with the kyute bedroom for now. ::grumble::. I’d rather not go the stupid route most other people would and get ourselves neck-deep in credit card debt; it’s the sort of stupidity that put this economy in the state that it’s in. So responsible=shitty floors for now and no closet doors.

And onto more serious things...

So Bin Laden is finally partying it up with his great harem of virgins in the sky. I confess, as welcome as this news was to me, I was kind of a bit sickened I have to say, after Obama made his speech and the cameras turned onto the crowds of people waving flags and having a good ol’ time in the streets and landmarks. The image of it brought right back to the morning of September 11, when I stood before my TV frozen in horror and the international news broadcast images of people in the Middle East waving flags and having a good ol’ time in the streets celebrating the act of terrorism and deaths of what turned out to be 3,000 people. It was horrifying then, and I was horrified now. What REALLY astounds me is that the age of those people dancing and cheering at our landmarks are kids in their twenties. They were just rug rats when the whole thing went down... So I imagine they didn’t see how awful it really was. Either way, it was just so... unclassy. I guess is the way to describe it.

I remember 9/11 with an astonishing clarity. I was already in a depressed rut and when my home co-owner phoned me that morning to tell me to turn on my TV. I switched it on just in time to see the second plane hit and I was immediately and completely drawn into the spiral of misery that the whole thing became—my rut became a chasm I could not climb out of. I did not leave the television for days, I am not exaggerating. I lay on the sofa bawling as they broadcast images of people wandering around the devastation holding pictures of their loved ones, begging for someone to tell them they’d seen them alive somewhere. I was morbidly riveted to the dog searches, the eye-witness stories and could not look away from the footage of people jumping out of windows in desperation to escape the heat of the fires. It was a dreadfulness that took forever to get over and I didn’t even lose anyone in the tragedy. I cannot imagine the horror of the families affected by this tragedy. That event is what spiraled me down into one of the darkest moments of my life; a moment I almost did not survive. If it weren’t for my dog Eddie giving me a reason to get up every day and the intervention of a boyfriend who was bewildered by my utter depression and frightened for my safety, I don’t know where I’d be today. I began therapy then (was nearly committed) and began the job of learning to cope with what seemed to me, a pointless and hopeless existence.

It was impossible for me to quantify the reasons why anyone would do that. I couldn’t bear to live in a world where there were people who would be willing to harm so many others for ideological reasons alone. It was too bleak for me to cope with. Seeing other people celebrating the event like it was a wonderful accomplishment drove me further into depression. There was nothing redeemable about humanity to me. I was sick by it. I sometimes still feel that way. Cruelty can sometimes send me into periods of despair now and again. Survival for me is a matter of just forcing myself to face the world and its daily brutalities in hopes of finding some of the positive things in between.

Surviving depression at that level is not an easy task. Those who’ve never been through it cannot really understand how completely powerless a person can be against the wash of chemicals your brain is guided by, and a lack of dopamine can manifest itself into some pretty terrible things. I can say I’ve been dealing with it sans medication and on my own with some measure of healthiness for about six years. But it doesn’t take much to pull me right back to memories of that fugue; and seeing those kids wooing and yaying, waving little flags, dancing around in exuberance at the death of a mass-murderer, giving his expiration WAY more attention that the man deserves, I felt it for a second... that horrid darkness. I felt like humanity would not ever be capable of bettering itself and rising above the animalistic behaviours that seem to define us. Those kids seemed just as awful as the people in the Middle East celebrating the events of 9/11. I’m sorry, but that’s what I felt. 1 mass-murdering terrorist vs 3,000 innocents; none of those deaths should evoke joy on anyone’s part. The fact that it does makes me so very, very sad.

Anyway, that’s my view on it. /diatribe.

Stop! Thief!

Yesterday, I stopped to receive my requisite raping from OPEC and my debit card was declined. I'm confused, but I have enough to get gas on another card, and I drive home in puzzlement. I get home, and my husband is there. He asks me:

"Did you buy anything from Royal Farms in Baltimore, Maryland?"

I'm thinking: Oh, sure, I shop on the east coast every day. "No," I reply, my brow arched in further confusion. "I haven't shopped online in forever."

"What's Royal Farms?"

"I dunno. Google it."

It turns out Royal Farms is a convenience store/gas station from that area. He shows me our online banking statement and there are two payments for $100 made there, one the day before yesterday, one yesterday.

We call the bank's 800 number and shut off our cards. This morning, another payment of $100 was taken out, despite *my* being declined for fuel the night before; that I don't understand.

Husband took the day off to meet with a utility person (because our utilities are so flexible you have to take a whole day off so you can accomodate their unpredictable schedule. I think utilities should reimburse you for lost work-time... it's ridiculous). Anyway... he's going to deal with the bank today too. He'll let me know what our bank says. $300 loss is HUGE for us. I'll update when I know.

God only knows how our bank info was stolen. Be careful people... in this economy it can spell disaster.

Today's Pearls seems extremely appropriate: ::urgh::

More Shameless Begging;

Dear Mr. George Soros and other drippingly rich entrepreneurs and philanthropists who give all your money to huge bureaucracy-foundations:

Our septic is filling up. I wonder if you ever have to worry if you’ll be able to use your own washroom at home. We do. That’s $300 we don’t have. It’s part of the bigger problem that the septic tank is too small and not to code; and we don’t have the money to have a proper system installed.

The sad thing is, the difference of $300 a month can determine if we get by or not. It’s pretty precarious. We have to put some bills off to pay others. We’re also past our grace-period for our mortgage; and so we have to pay a late fee of $50 we could have used for something else, just because we simply didn’t have enough to pay it the first half of the month.

The groceries that usually cost us about $150 cost us $200 last week. We’re not sure why, we don’t get anything expensive or new.

There’s this little blue house about twenty minutes from where I live. It’s right in the center of town, and it’s small and quaint, and has gingerbread trim. It’s empty. I don’t know where the prior business went that was there (I think it was a yarn-shop), and I don’t see a for rent or for sale sign. I'm hoping it will stay vacant until a miracle windfall comes raining down into my lap.

It’s the perfect building, the perfect location, for my dream business. It’s almost painful to see it and feel that sense of ‘What If…?’

Once again, I’m writing this big whining letter to all of you with the power to help ‘middle class’ Americans achieve their dreams and improve their lives. Probably for less than it would cost for one of your trips to Cabo.

Give me money! I’ll make it grow with skills that are being wasted at a workaday job, and it will improve our lives greatly to be investing our energy in a business that will help the local economy, and provide specialty services. Why not?

C’mon. Give me money you rich, spoiled creatures with always-working toilets! Share the wealth, even a little bit. I'll make myself accountable for it, no wasting, no blatantly irresponsible choices like buying a brand-new 2008 Jeep Wrangler 4-door Rubicon ~ or an em.. err... Prius or Smart car.. ahem, ::coff coff:: :D

Middle Class ~ My Ass

Normally, one would be glad that you moved up into a higher income bracket. A little more money is always good. However with increasing fuel costs, and higher food prices, and our mortgage and other payments that are due each month, we’re feeling the pain—not the expected relief more money would provide.

We had significant tax deductions thanks to the major interest we’re paying for our mortgage and such, and we confidently went to our tax preparer in hopes of getting that little windfall that would allow us to breathe easy for a month or two, and to do some projects we’ve been waiting to do, or fix a car.

Unfortunately, we’d made too much money last year.

We went up a tax-bracket; by very little, just about a thousand dollars. But that alone was enough to give us a whopping tax refund of $200; which should just about cover our tax preparer’s bill. Our family members say in that patronizing tone: "Oh it could be worse... at least you don't owe anything." True to some degree, but STFU; it doesn't make our situation any better because we don't owe the IRS. We will eventually, the way things are going.

We are a childless couple. Of course, that means we don’t get any extra deductions, and we have a heavier tax burden.

Meanwhile, we have a couple of bills doubled-up… and we have to pick and choose who we can afford to pay monthly. We’ve turned off our cell-phones, gone down to basic cable, gone off 'green energy' with the electric company because it's too expensive. Even with vehicles that are fully paid off and a reasonable mortgage, we are still barely scraping by, robbing Peter to pay Paul.

We’re in our mid-thirties and we have nothing saved up, it is impossible to do so; something always comes along to gobble up anything we have. We can’t even find money to make home improvements, and we had to take out a credit line of $1,000 to make ends meet last month.

Hubby had to borrow against his 401K recently, and I’m thinking about shutting all my own benefits down so my paycheck is more substantial. How is this an acceptable fate for ‘middle class’ people? This is ridiculous. It’s not as if we’re living out of our means or living irresponsibly on credit alone like some of our younger relatives… We just can’t keep up with the $600 a month in fuel costs (which is always growing), not to mention the added expenses and inflating cost of basic goods; all along suffering with what are essentially, stagnant incomes (the yearly 2% raise we both get isn’t going to put filet-mignon on the table, that’s for sure—not when living expenses are going up, up and away). We have a 800 square foot home, and we pay $300 a month in winter for propane heating. There's something completely wrong with that.

We can’t even afford the down payment to get a new, more fuel efficient vehicle. Our option would be to get gouge-you-up-the-butt financing and another monthly bill we can’t afford!

We have to commute nearly seventy miles *each* on a daily basis to work, because jobs that are well-paid are scarce in our immediate vicinity. So here we are, scrabbling to keep our telephone paid up enough so we actually have one, and the IRS comes bumbling along and gobbles up something like 30% of our income. How is that okay? Meanwhile, people making incomes in the millions (usually our employers) have less of a tax burden than I do proportionately? What the hell? And to add insult to injury; all that money we're paying into social security now may not be matched for us when we get old and we have hardly any savings. I won't even touch on the money being spent on the war...

And Dubya’s solution to our reduced spending due to the rising cost of living? Send us a check that is in all essence a loan against the following year’s tax refund. In our cse... what refund? We will have to save up money just to pay back the ‘recession relief money’ that our government thinks will fix this shitty economy, and we can't even save money for ourselves! Does this mean we’re going to owe taxes for 2009? This just doesn’t make sense!

I’m sick of this! We’re supposed to be doing *better* than our parents. What’s gone wrong here? Someone please explain. Please.

Running on the Hamster Wheel.

I’m a strange person. I’m not happy unless I’m creating something. If I’m not writing, I’m drawing, if I’m not drawing, I’m sewing, or doing some other new project I’ve decided I’m going to try, or I’m imagining a new business venture; the building it would occupy, the sign that would hang above the door. I’m also prone to depression, so I can always tell when I’m depressed because that bug inside that is always working, always dreaming, always conjuring and creating is quiet.

I’m in a weird state these past few months. It’s like I’m part depressed part in hyper-creation mode. I want to be doing creative things, I want to have the freedom to build something grand, to create the art that I want, to write more books; but sometimes the ability is there, sometimes it’s not. There’re days when all I want to do is write, write, write, or days when sewing occupies my mind, and other days when all I want to do is sleep.

Then there’s my job; which is like a black hole—sucking away my creativity like the real thing would suck away light and matter. And it’s never ending. I get up, I get ready, I drive an hour, I do the same tasks I’m supposed to do, day after day, then I go home, we figure out dinner, spend an hour or two watching TV, then we go to bed, lather-rinse-repeat.

I fill my life with all these activities and groups; which are the fuel that keep me going, even though my physical ability to keep up with it all is taking its toll.

The other day I was driving and I just sort of broke. I had to pull over because I started blubbering and weeping. It’s like a hamster wheel. I’m running and running and running and getting nowhere. In my head, I have all these dreams and ideas and creative forces that are really without a proper outlet. I'm getting old, maybe I'm starting to see the futility of trying anymore. There are all these reasons why I shouldn’t take the risks I need to take. Mortgage, fuel costs, bills, responsibility; but where does it end. How do I get off this damned wheel, and allow my creative beast to just take off? Will I ever be able to just step off and walk past the stupid wheel at all?

What can I do? I think I’m going insane (if I’m not already there).

A pushy letter to George Soros.

Dear George Soros,

I've decided it would be best to post this on my blog, because it has about as much chance of meeting your eyes as an email to your foundation would. You see, this is a blog-post/badly disguised begging session.

George, I'm aware of your multi-million dollar bank account. Such riches are shared liberally with lots of foundations for this, and foundations for that; big honking non-profits that rake in the dollars every day. And I understand you donate all these dollars to these great lumbering juggernauts in order to better this world and this country.

You have shown a tremendous desire to change our politics, change our economy and change our world. Well I have a simple solution. Instead of giving your money to mega-bureaucracies; give it to people like me.

Mind you, I'm not asking for just a win fall of cash to come raining down on my head. I'm asking that you find people like me who have massive dreams and negative cash. I have an idea to create a business that will shape my future; but I cannot start it. A drop in the bucket for you could mean securing someone's future directly, erecting a business that will help the local economy.

Be an Angel investor (and start with me!). Find people whose businesses are floundering, or people who need cash for startups and give them the money. That is a way to fix the economy, in a small way. Start with us, the peons, with no money and enormous dreams. Please! Be my Angel investor.

Signed;
The Hungarican Girl.