So last week, the phone company unceremoniously disconnected our phone. No, it wasn’t past due, and they couldn’t explain why they did it. It wasn’t fixed before I had to leave on my trip, so I didn’t have a chance to post about the whole lot of nothing I had going on. Really. Nothing’s happening. Except this:

Tomorrow is Ringo’s first day of preschool. I think it’s going to be great for him, but a little panicky voice is screaming in my head about how little he is, and will he behave, and how good is this alleged bus driver, and what if he burns down the school, etc… I am sure it will be fine. *tapes little voice’s little mouth shut*

Lazybones is on leave and we’re just being lazy together.

I miss Crash.

George is just so cute I can’t stand it, with her little tiny voice and her little tiny face and her little tiny toes, and I am constantly having to tickle and squeeze her and kiss her.

But really that’s it. Hope everyone else is doing well…

I figure a little personal update is in order. Mostly because I am sitting home, waiting to hear from my beloved lazy sack of bones. He squeezed (yes, he has put on almost 15 lbs of squidge since we wed) into his Class A pickle-suit this morning and sauntered off to the promotion board- only three years late! It’s a long and bitter story, and I think I have touched on it previously. Let’s just say that the Army has plenty of jerks who are more interested in chasing their own personal gain than in helping their soldiers. My lazybones is quiet, but he’s a damn fine troop and the most decent guy I’ve EVER known. He doesn’t tend to fuss even when someone does him wrong, which is a shame. I get more fired up over this stuff than he does, by far! But anyway, I am waiting here for him to text or call and tell me how it went. Since I know he’s prepared and squared away, I am sure things went great.

I’m a little under the weather. The actual weather has been excellent all week. I feel like shit, however. The kids caught colds at daycare when I was in Toronto in the middle of the month, and I have been wiping snot noses for going on two weeks now- I was bound to get it. So three days of head goo came and (mostly) went, and now the crud has settled into my chest. The kids are coughing too, and I can do NOTHING for them but hug them, pat their backs and kiss their snotty faces. Stupid pharmaceutical companies and their lousy child-endangering cough remedies! My mother pumped me full of Vicks Formula 44, Actifed, and anything else she could convince me to ingest as a kid- and I turned out just fine.

Oh, stop laughing, I am really quite healthy when I am not the leading producer of lung butter in the European Union. And any mental problems I’ve got are the result of other weird childhood crap, a string of shitty relationships and a deployment to Iraq.

So anyway, we have been unable to take advantage of the lovely weather due to our nasty phlegm making party, and I fully expect the thunderstorms to come back just as soon as the gunk clears our bronchial tubes and such.

We’ve been struggling through random power and water outages here as well. They apparently decided that letting us know about the outages would be giving us an unfair advantage, allowing us to stock up on bottled water and all. Jackasses.

Also, a whole bunch of troops just got home. Good for them, yeah. But it means that most of them are acting like fucking morons, and the MPs are busy as hell, and that every store and/or office on post is clogged with a bunch of hooah-hooah motherfuckers, who all think that they’re hot shit. Yeah, okay, good job and all that but I was downrange when some of these clowns were just getting their driver’s licenses, or skateboarding to middle school. I feel old.

I gotta go hack up some goo now.

American food.

I made some (modified) buffalo wing sauce and slathered it on a pile of chicken breast strips that I had fried. Sure, if I inhale as I am bringing a bite to my mouth, it burns the lungs a little. But it is SO good. Greasy, spicy, hot tender goodness. Hell yeah.

Lazybones has been at work since early this afternoon and he won’t be home until early morning. This means that the kids and I won’t get to go watch fireworks, and since Lazy is working TOMORROW too, we aren’t going to take them to the carnival. Kinda sucks. They hate fireworks (scared them to death last year) but they would love playing.

Happy 4th of July, everyone. Freedom’s a lovely thing.

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:

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.

No surprise to me.

At Ft. Campbell, we lived in buildings fill of mold, asbestos, roaches and worse. Exposed pipes? What, aren’t those normal?

I don’t recall the sewer backing up like they show on the story there. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

And yes, our buildings would have been condemned if they’d been anywhere other than an Army post, too.

At Campbell, though, the infantry had brand new nice barracks. We didn’t. So no one gave a shit.

I’m still here, despite my complete lack of interesting shit to post.

So here’s a brief update about what I have been up to lately:
Nothing.

Seriously!

It seems I go days and days without accomplishing anything except changing diapers and shoveling food into the hungry mouths of my babies. Imagine a nest of gaping-mouthed baby chicks, peeping incessantly.

I got a new vacuum cleaner, and it sucks. I’m so happy I could cry. I might actually make it through April without sneezing myself into a coma.

Lazybones should be finally getting his long-overdue promotion around the time I have my birthday. By “long-overdue”, I mean the promotion he was supposed to get around the time we got married. The trouble is, if you’re unobtrusive and just do your job, sometimes they forget you’re there. Y’all may not believe me, but the best way to get promoted in the Army is to get a DUI, or get busted for adultery. I’ve also heard that sexual harassment and domestic violence can help too. Since my handsome life-partner only drinks at home, fears castration, is polite and never punches me unless I request it, he’s been quietly getting screwed by the Army for the past 3 1/2 years. Not that I’m bitter or anything. He sure as fuck doesn’t seem bothered by it, which only makes me more enraged. I threaten to go back on active duty just to get promoted over him sometimes. Maybe then he’d listen.

Bah, anyway.

I am increasingly annoyed by the news, and ignore it as best I can. If I sat here and started posting about all the shit I think is wrong with the nation/world/people in general, my fingers would be bleeding stumps before I got halfway done.

Anyway, this post is ending now, because it really was just a way for me to pass a few minutes while I drank my coffee and took a break from cleaning. Now I need to text my boy-toy and make sure he remembers to bring home a huge vat of laundry detergent when he gets off shift. And flower seeds, and a pizza, and beer. I feel like getting wasted tonight.

I love you, best buddy! No one makes me puke like you do.

The only thing I look forward to every fourth year is the 29th of February.

I hate the stupid Summer Olympics. I really hate the whole election circus. But I think that the 29th is great.

I don’t know why, really, I’ve never had a great February 29th that I remember specifically, and today was a shitty day, to be perfectly honest- but I still think it’s a great day. Just because it is rare.

If I had had any patience or planning skills, I would have waited until today to get married.

Or planned one of the kids to arrive today.

Instead, though, I plan to put my kids to bed, wait for Lazybones to get off shift, and get silly drunk with him.