Okay, I will try to keep it as rage-free as I can.

Kate recently asked about how things are going here in Italy.

My reply:

Let’s just say it’s not remotely as fun or interesting as it looked on paper.

The idea was pretty neat: Lazy B. gets stationed in Italy, and our little family comes here, we travel on the weekends and see the sights, we get to take trains through the rest of Europe, and basically have a great time, experience some European culture, eat great food, blah blah blah.

How it worked out so far:
Stationed here… Lazy gets the shaft from new unit.
Little family gains another member, which is good, but house stays the same size, which is crowded.
Weekend travel? Gas prices skyrocket- if gas was costing you eight bucks a gallon, would you go for a Sunday drive?
See Europe? We still are waiting on the baby’s passport. Paperwork involved with having a baby outside the U.S. is horrendous.
Culture? The damn Italians protest us. Never mind that we can’t do anything about being here, and that their own elected government is who they should complain to if they don’t like the U.S. base. They make it uncomfortable for the families of folks who are only here doing their damn jobs. Thanks, jerks.
Food? Italian restaurants don’t have a lot of space for big strollers, and I have yet to see a high chair anywhere. With all our babies and so forth, it’s a huge production just getting in the door.

So yeah, I am really disappointed with the whole experience so far. We weren’t accurately informed of what to expect here, for sure…

…yet I sometimes think to myself that if Lazy were to get stationed in Japan, I would love to go. Meh. Probably not though.

Propagandist/professional douchebag Michael Moore is at it again.

He illegally used Michael Yon’s photo (we know the photo, now, don’t we?) on his “let’s all give Obama a handjob and the Oval Office” website. I won’t link to it. But here is the story at Michael Yon’s site. I mean, we know that Moore has no shame, but he apparently has no regard for the law, either.

This is my outrage for the week.

Oh, it was alright, I guess. I had enough to eat, the kids were not atrocious little monsters, and I didn’t lose any cookware or accessories.

Said hi to my Battle Buddy and marveled that it was five years ago that we were slogging through mud together in training, laughing at our awful PT-uniform tans, and getting caught by the drill sergeant folding our laundry in my bunk after lights out (it was also a minor gigglefest, and the D.S. even thought we were a bit amusing). Five whole years. Now I am a hermit, some unknown crazy woman who is married to some soldier and who never leaves the house- and my battle is a first lieutenant in the company my husband is in. She’s pretty kickass. I’m proud of her!

As for myself, it became horrifyingly apparent that I really have got to make an effort at our next post to be more involved in stuff. Of course here, I spent months not getting any information at all from the family group, and my husband spent a year tasked outside the company, so it wasn’t simple to make contacts with the other spouses.

It’s not that I’m really that mean. I do have an awful temper but I am highly skilled at behaving myself around acquaintances. I only feel comfortable raging and burning in front of close friends and family, like any civilized fire-monster. I just don’t like making friends anymore. It’s complicated, awkward, and alien to me. Folks try to be really nice when you move to a new post, with all their “Hey just call if you need anything,” line. I feel like I should just tell them straight out:

“I’m not going to call you. It’s not because you’re not a very nice, pleasant person. It’s because I don’t like asking people for anything, I don’t like calling people in general (ask my mother how often I call her!) and I feel that after 30+ years of life, I should be able to handle my own difficulties. Of course I can’t always, and there are days when I probably really DO need help from some nice person that I really don’t know, but the fact is- I am not going to call you. It’s not you, though. It’s me.”

But that sounds like some kind of breakup. Maybe I should get business cards that just say:

Opponents vow to fight CA gay marriage ruling.

These gays want to marry the person they love. OMG! That’s HORRIBLE!

Quick stop them before they become HAPPY!

This is why people say conservatives are “evil”. What kind of group goes around trying to crush other people’s attempts at happiness!? Wanting to deprive people of happiness is way, WAY worse in my eyes than wanting to have sex with someone who happens to be of the same gender.

I hope all the queers in Cali get hitched before the ruling gets overturned. Good for them. Just because they’re gay doesn’t mean they don’t deserve love and joy.

House to boost GI Bill.

Meh, did I ever tell you about why I don’t even GET my GI Bill?

Maybe I shouldn’t, though, it just angries up my blood- and I have enough stuff causing that lately. To be totally honest with you, I have had even less control over my temper ever since I got home from Iraq, and I realized this just recently. I was not such a raging bitch before. Promise.

Oh and a couple of items I forgot about in the last post-

Second Life: my creative outlet (visual not verbal) is now just a reminder that I really and truly am untalented. Fuck the fact that my blog sucks- I can cope with that. The fact that I make pretty things and no one appreciates it is really what upsets me, because it’s a genuine effort to not be a goddamn angry fire-monster all the time. I am feeling overlooked and bitter about stuff. People photoshop their work (digital images from virtual reality, like photographs but NOT) and get rewarded for their portrayals of Second Life? Not that the images aren’t nice, it’s just that if you photoshop the hell out of it, it’s not a picture from that virtual space anymore, it’s just a pretty picture. I added no effects whatsoever to the two images I submitted to a recent “contest” for displaying the lovely new atmospheric rendering in SL (”windlight”- it makes the virtual world that much more real and SURreal all at once) and was totally overlooked. I take the guidelines seriously and get shrugged off. It’s gotta be a total lack of talent.

Then there’s the worst thing of all.

I can’t figure out how I can possibly afford to fly out and get my oldest daughter when her summer vacation starts. I sit here searching fares, desperately attempting to wrangle dates and destinations so that I can make it to her dance recital and not spend thousands of dollars that I just DO NOT have- and all I get for the effort is a headache and a horrible, heartbroken feeling that I will have to tell her that I just can’t make it there to see her dance. I’ve never seen her dance or play piano at a recital. I’ve seen one video of her performing in a school christmas pageant. I feel like a real shitbag mommy right now.

So now that I’ve unloaded almost all of my angry here, I will apply myself to finishing the dishes so that I can make that food I mentioned before. Already have put a list in lazy’s hands- he came home at lunch, took out that garbage, and looked generally terrible- his face may be purple by the end of the day. Poor lazy fucker.

This whole week has been one annoying fucking thing after another.

Monday, my darling husband came home bruised and scratched. Seriously. This week he’s in an instructor’s course where they are all kicking each other’s asses in order to better subdue unpleasant people. They are holding nothing back during training, except for actual weapons I guess. At least he hasn’t come home stabbed or shot yet.

On Tuesday night, I griped at that lazy fucker of a husband, told him to start bringing the large mountain of laundry he’d been collecting on top of the dryer. Beaten down or not, he still is responsible for the occasional light household chore or two. Being, as I said, a lazy fucker, he thought it best to wad up the mountain of laundry and try to squeeze it all through the laundry room door at once. He couldn’t see over or around it, of course- and upon exiting the laundry room he promptly knocked over an old lava lamp that I’d been telling him to take out to the dumpster for the past month or so. Do you know what’s in a lava lamp? I don’t- but whatever it is, it is oily, doesn’t smell nice, and is a real bitch to clean off a tile floor. There’s still an oily residue.

At some point on Monday or Tuesday, lazybones mentioned that the company party on Friday is mandatory. I think that was when the top of my head blew off. I am still hunting for it.

Yesterday, I took the kids out to play-group and they were fairly delightful. However, one of the other kids had a snot nose going, so I expect my own precious rugrats will be sick by the weekend.

I was going to hit the shopette for some milk (which lazy was supposed to bring home after formation, and “forgot”), but they didn’t open until much later, so I had to bring the kids right home. Upon my return, I decided I was tired of tripping over hubby’s 40 pound ruck and his patrol bag, so I proceeded to open up the front closet where his Army-stuff is supposed to be stowed. Ohhh. No wonder the ruck and the patrol bag were out! He can’t possibly put them inside when he’s stashed a bunch of boxes in there- boxes which I told him needed to be disposed of. One box that my pink boots came in. The pink boots I bought around the time little George was born. Over a year ago. He was hoarding trash- boxes of boxes, because he doesn’t want to take them to the next block to dump them in the cardboard box dumpster.

At this point, the remnants of my head exploded in a barrage of swearing (that my boy did not repeat, luckily). I dragged out several boxes, a broken clothes-drying rack (I told him to dispose of that about six months ago, I’d guess), numerous bits of paper and broken rubber bands, a plastic AAFES bag with a honey bun in it (at least it wasn’t opened- he doesn’t collect stinky garbage, just kindling), mud-crusted boots, assorted leaves and twigs, another ruck, and some spare PT shoes that haven’t seen daylight in a few months.

I cleaned the whole fucking closet and finished assembling the wire racks that were laying in pieces on the floor. I sorted his Army-stuff some, shoved his 600-lb duffel bag against the improperly-repackaged christmas tree to keep it from falling all over, and miraculously fit all the crap that had been sitting by my door back into the closet where it belongs. Even got the spare stroller in there.

All the crap that he refused to dispose of got thrown into the downstairs bathroom, because that is the place where he gets ready for work in the morning. Inconvenience me? I’ll inconvenience you!!!

He did fax my paperwork to the IRR people during his lunch break.

Today I tried to email my contact there last night to make sure they got the fax. Out of office all week. Emailed the guy he’d told me to CC in the event he wasn’t in. Out of office all week. Emailed the guy his auto-response indicated. Hope he shows up for work today.

Lazy didn’t take out any of the crap last night, by the way. He said he was going to get it once it got dark (and cool) outside, but he played video games instead.

It’s all my fault, though. I am sure it is.

I have to go figure out what dish I will be bringing to this stupid party bullshit tomorrow. I do have one friend in the company, at least, so maybe I can chit chat with her a bit. Or maybe I can find the people who have been kicking the crap out of my husband all week long and thank them.

I wanted to change to a really pretty pink and grey and black flowery lookin theme for the blog. Not gonna happen.

I hate Yahoo. It’s pissing me off with its unfriendly file uploads, and its refusal to accept that I want to check all my mailboxes without having to get stuck in a password-prompt screen until I restart the browser. It bastardizes WordPress to the point that shit just DOES NOT WORK how WordPress says it should.

I am having a really grouchy day, and this shit is not helping.

Not really, but instead of re-writing my post, I want to direct the readership of this blog to my Second Life blog.

Oh boy.

Okay, here’s the deal.

I got mobilized.

But they had a bad address for me, so I never got my orders.

I got a horrifying email with many unpleasant words like “failure to follow a lawful order during a time of war” and I went into “arrrrrrrrrrgggghhh” mode. Made a call, sent an email, stewed in my gastric juices all weekend- and heard back today.

Occasionally the Army is understanding.

So I have now got piles of paperwork and such to cope with, but at least the scariest part is solved.

I’d rather get a tan again than to be involuntarily, undesirably let out of my remaining contract.

It’s fairly unlikely, given my situation, that I will have to do that- but I will keep you, my three readers, posted.

Hey look- KOOKS!

I’m linking it because AP spelled the name of the town in Idaho where these folks moved from WRONG.

It’s Sandpoint. One word.

And right now I am wondering if I know any of these kooks.