Non-political nonsense...NO ONE EVER SLEEPS THROUGH THE NIGHT!

Just a thought...a non-political thought-
Having a conversation with my husband last night- doing my usual bitching about stuff, when I realized...
NO ONE REALLY SLEEPS THROUGH THE NIGHT.
When you're a tiny kid you don't sleep through the night because you're busy peeing the bed or dreaming about crazy stuff like having your silly putty grow legs and run around your face. That wakes you up in the middle of the night.
Then you get older, and get to have slumber parties, or hide under the covers talking on the phone, until your parents see the 25 ft. of phone cord hanging out from under your comforter...after you get busted, you spend the rest of the night trying to sneak the phone back in your room- bottom line... you don't sleep through the night.
A little older, and your raging teenage hormones keep you awake.
A little beyond that, if you're lucky, you're not sleeping because you're having newly discovered crazy monkey sex  most of the night.
A few years later, you're convinced you're never going to sleep again, because the children that are a result of that crazy monkey sex are busy peeing the bed and keeping you awake.
Fast forward a few years and you're too tired to sleep through the night. Seriously. Too. Tired.
Then, you don't sleep because you're awake listening for your kids to get home, and worried about what damage their teenage hormones will cause.
Next, your own change of life hormones are raging again, and guess what- no sleep.
Next phase...you can't sleep because you're up every 5 minutes to pee.
I'm tired just thinking about this. The dog and I are taking a nap.

Calling all volunteers: Time to tell the Tea Party...GET OUT!

The more I hear the clearer it becomes...the Tea Party, and the republican whores who have allowed them to hijack the process of governing have got to go.They are the minority. They do not represent this country, any more than Fred Phelps represents a compassionate clergy. It's up to us, the American public that isn't stupid, fearful, and gullible, to get off our collective asses and take action. We have to talk to the media, our elected representatives, our neighbors, our families, essentially anyone who will listen. We have to expose them when they lie. The party of NO, the party of fiction, racism and badly spelled signage must be dismantled- and the best way to accomplish this is with the truth. We can destroy them with facts. We can wipe them out with reality. We can create a real grass roots movement, one that the media can't ignore. Big events always start out small, generally when people finally have had enough. The tea party likes to pretend that they are a grass roots movement of ordinary Americans, but we know that is pure fiction. They are funded by shills for big business, who have fanned their fears, and encouraged their racism. That is not who we are. That is not who we will allow to flourish...not one more day. Say it, the next time you hear their hate speech. NOT ONE MORE DAY! When you hear the conversations at the post office or grocery store or park, speak up. Ask them if it's OK to let your kid die because you don't have insurance. Ask them if its OK that Dad is withering away from cancer, because he can't afford treatment. Ask them why it's OK to allow the wealthiest to pay fewer taxes, while more children go to bed hungry. Ask why it's OK that their employer cuts their wages, and ships more jobs overseas, while the CEO's makes obscene bonuses. Ask them why they support candidates who kiss the asses of the corporations that deny them living wages and benefits for profit's sake.  ASK those Tea Party bastards. Make them accountable.It's time to tell the truth. These are the people who have destroyed the economy. They are not the fixers, they are the ones who broke it. Time to tell the truth. Time to stop being polite when they lie. Show your outrage! Those people in the Tea Party audiences...they deserve our outrage. They need to hear it. We've been quiet too long.  Email your congressperson, especially if they're tea party members, and ask them the same thing. Pick up the damn phone, call them and tell them you're horrified by their positions, and you will support whoever is opposing them in the next election. Then do it! Let's make the Repuplican party as scared of us as they are of a handful of crackpots! Call the news desk at every local station you get.  Tell them what you think, and that they are doing a suck job of covering what's really going on.( All major media made a big deal about President Obama's recent drop in approval ratings, but few bothered to tell the rest of the story...that the same people approved of the Tea Party even less, and trusted the President MORE than the Republicans.) If you do this, and reach 5 people a day; and tell others to do the same, eventually it will become too big to ignore. Americans who feel this way will  show that they are bigger, stronger, smarter, more powerful than those who dress up like fools and pretend to be patriots, when all along their expressed  POV is closer to the Taliban than to the ideals our country was founded on.
Another thing...it is imperative to be aware of the products we purchase. We should boycott the products produced by companies who support the Tea Party, and their candidates. (a good place to start is with the Koch Brothers...don't buy a single Georgia Pacific product and tell the retailer where you shop why)
It's easy to make small differences that will add up and send a strong message that the tide is turning, even in 'conservative' areas. If you see Faux News on in a restaurant or store, ask the management to switch the channel. If they refuse, stop shopping there. Tell them what you are doing, and write a letter to the Public Relations Dept at the corporate headquarters and tell them why they are losing revenue. Give them figures on how much you spend.
If we are complacent, then maybe we aren't any better. There is no excuse for not taking action; you see, we don't have to agree on all the points...that's the great thing about being a liberal. Unlike the lock-step right wing, we have room for different perspectives. But if we don't come together to stand united against these people who are threatening our very essence; our spirit, our identity as a people, then we might as well  become them.

Why does the tea party have such a hard-on to kill people?

I'm sick and tired of normal people dancing around the subject in polite company. Drag this ugly mess out in the light of day, so those among us who have more than half a brain can speak up with a resounding "HELL NO!" whenever it comes to what the idiocy-of-the-moment mouthpiece for the Koch-funded, corporate-ass-kissing-lying-cheating-pulling-the-wool-over-the-dumb-shits-out-there-AstroTurf-poor-excuse-for-a-political-movement-tea-party comes up with.
I tried to listen to the Republican debate, I really did. I thought because the media whore Sarah Palin wasn't participating, I wouldn't vomit on the floor. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Rick Perry's mere existence made me ill, and that was before he even spoke. Seriously, the only thing more repulsive than the lies and stupidity coming out of the mouths of the candidates on stage was the gaggle of knuckle-draggers in the audience cheering at the prospect of the death penalty. Cheering for the death penalty. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Did all their mommas get together and simultaneously drop them on their heads, because normal, healthy, intelligent humans DO NOT BEHAVE THIS WAY. Just in case you might be chastising yourself for being quick to judge, and think this could be a singular event, relax...you are correct in your judgement that tea party audiences are more disgusting than toilet scum- at least the asshats attending the Florida Tea Party Express Debate are. Setting a new low for a non-thinking, unfeeling, repulsive, hateful display, the crowd cheered when subject of letting the uninsured die was raised. They cheered wildly at the idea of letting sick people die.Worse yet? Not one of the candidates on the stage showed any strength of character or courage on the subject. Leadership? It is completely absent in this group of candidates,  but it is totally appropriate for the audience in attendance.
What we have to ask ourselves is whether or not this group's behavior is acceptable and representative for America and Americans. Is this who we want to become? Is this who we will allow ourselves to be? I'm thinking not so much, but unless we start coming together to voice our opposition each and every time one of these reprobates opens his or her mouths, and unless we stop letting them get by with their lies, this is exactly what we'll get.
 NIMBY!
Tell anyone who will listen about the liars and hypocrites. Tell that Rick Perry disses the Federal Government out of one side of his mouth, and asks for more Federal aid with the other. That Mitt Romney, through Bain, contributed to the vast numbers of unemployed Americans while lining corporate coffers.
That Michele Bachmann, while busy lecturing about the evils of government-funded health care has been on the receiving end of plenty of medicare dollars through her husband's practice.
Each and every candidate supported by the Tea Party needs to be held under the close scrutiny of fact check- and you need to share what you find.
Letters, people. Speeches, people. Dinner table talk. Offend your neighbors if you have to. Stop worrying about being polite- the opposition isn't. Stop apologizing for being a liberal, a thinker, someone with a brain, someone with a conscience. They're making noise...isn't it time the rest of the country heard ours?

Grasshoppers 4 ; Skippy 0

I didn't think that life in the country could get any more...rustic. I was wrong. Very very wrong. And by rustic I mean that the lack of Internet service has been oddly balanced by the increase in grasshoppers. Until today, when we had a separate satellite installed, we didn't have enough of a signal to get email, let alone play on the information highway. Hence the lack of posts, as well as total ignorance of what everyone else has been writing about. It has been lovely to spend time outside though. Except for the grasshopping bastards, who seem to be out to get me ever since I caught this guy trying to get in the bedroom window.  

The following afternoon, I was feeding Roy and Bernard, a couple of feral cats who hang out in my mother's backyard; bending over to fill a cat dish, and a grasshopper jumped down the front of my shirt and got stuck in my bra.

It was disgusting. Generally speaking, it takes a rodent to turn me into a shrieking first grader- except that's exactly what happened. I flashed the ferals in an exaggerated effort to get the nasty grasshopper away from my skin.In the flailing that followed,  I have no idea where it landed, but it must have been at least 6 feet away.  I had just recovered from the horror of the bra episode, when coming home from the Ace Hardware on Highway 133, I had another run-in. I was sailing along at 55 mph, not a care in the world, with the dog riding shotgun. We had the window down about four inches, because any more than that is simply too tempting for him, when something ( I swear it was a rock) flew through the open window and smacked me in the face, right under the eye. By the time I got home, I had a big red welt and it was starting to swell. When I opened the car door to get out, I looked down to find a huge grasshopper dead in my lap. He had apparently committed suicide on my face. Over the years, I've had some unfortunate incidences involving clumsiness on my part, but there is no way this was my fault. This was another heinous act by a grasshopping bastard. The next moring when I got up to pee the dog, a smaller grasshopping version dive bombed us, and whacked me in the back of the head.Hard. It hurt. While I was complaining, my husband told me he'd noticed way more grasshoppers than usual, but reminded me that we are in fact, living in the country, and also that I've been outside more than usual, because of the crappy internet connection, my ass isn't permanently parked in front of my laptop. I replied I didn't care and would like to visit my son in NYC, where I was sure the sidewalks were grasshopper-free. In the mean time, I planned to stay inside during peak grasshopping hours. This morning, while in the shower, I was rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, and opened my eyes to find a new grasshopper glaring at me (yes, he was!) from between the shower curtain and liner. The asshole was impervious to my swearing at him. Finally my husband heard the stream of obscenities, emerged through the steam and handled grasshopper removal. I'm sure the jackass came right back inside at the first opportunity. (I mean the grasshopper, not my husband)

So...it's a trade-off.

 Bucolic country life...lovely surroundings... relaxed environment...when you're not dodging suicidal insects. 

Maybe they're just pissed about the lousy internet signal, too.