Dun dun da dun…here comes the Manwhore!

Well, folks, today is the big day.  Manwhore is probably tying the knot for the seventh time.  I say “probably” because I don’t know for sure.  I haven’t talked to him in many months, and hopefully never will.  I still find it amusing that they chose 12/12/12 as the date for their wedding.  I’ve never been big on believing in doing things (or not doing things) on certain dates because they are supposed to be good luck or bad.  Friday the 13th has always been just another Friday for me, and today is just another Wednesday for me.  Rest assured I have no romantic feelings left for Manwhore.  If anything, I only have feelings of pity for any woman unlucky enough to cross his path.

In other news I’m still here in Podunk Hell.  The house hasn’t sold, my boss is still a perv, and I’m still single.  Only the last one is a good thing…I think.  I did manage to take a trip down to New Orleans a few weeks ago.  It was just for one night, but it was well worth it.  I desperately needed the R & R.  The only bad thing is that now I’m anxious to go back.

As this year comes to an end I can only hope that next year will be better and not so stressful and full of uncertainty.  However, as I told a friend recently, I’m just riding the wave right now.  Where that wave will take me…no one knows.

Until next time my friends.

Happy humping holidays!

Disappointment

I had this big plan for this weekend.  Since I now have a car, I was going to take a trip down to New Orleans to visit a friend.  We planned it all out last weekend.  I was supposed to go down tomorrow, hang out, and spend the night with him.  I was all excited about seeing him and about getting out of town, and I let my excitement get the better of me.

Even though I can be incredibly selfish and narcissistic at times, deep down I am a very giving and caring person.  I had it all planned out to take him a gift.  Since he’s a musician, and I just happen to work in a music store, I thought it would be awesome if I made up a guitar care package for him as a surprise.  He’s a great musician and I adore him, and I just happened to notice once that he didn’t have a case for his guitar, so that’s what started the ball rolling in my head.  He could probably really use all of this stuff and would appreciate it.  He’s also a great guy who deserves to get a treat like this.  Not to mention that I had high hopes of seeing a big smile on his face when he opened it.

I gathered up a case, strings, pics, tuner, strap (a KISS one because even though it is a bit garish, it’s his favorite band), a wall hanger for his guitar, and some other random stuff.  I had to text him to ask what kind of strings he liked, and I tried not to sound too suspicious with my asking.  I wrapped it all nice and pretty in the music wrapping paper that we have at the store and put it in the trunk of my car.  It was all ready to go, and so was I.

Today I sent him a text just to say that I was really excited about seeing him, and that I had a surprise for him.  His response was not one of excitement, but more along the lines of ‘oh, you shouldn’t have.’  Then tonight I get a text from him saying that he’s had a family emergency and will be out of town tomorrow.  Now, I don’t know whether to believe him or not.  I don’t know if I’m being overly paranoid, or if fate just doesn’t want us to ever see each other again.  After all, this is the third or fourth time that our plans to hang out have fallen through.

Of course I don’t want to ask him if that’s really the truth, or if my mentioning that I have a surprise for him may have scared him off, or maybe he just met someone else that he would rather spend his time with.  I opted not to ask him anything.  I just said “OK, maybe some other time.”

The worst part is how crushed I felt.  Not because I had the gift that I really wanted to give him, but because I won’t get to see him.  I was really looking forward to that.  It’s been so long since I’ve seen him.  Now I feel like I may have screwed it all up.

Then more thoughts run through my head about how he probably is just a flake and I shouldn’t waste my time on him.  What if I’m wrong though?  What if he is telling me the truth?  What if I’m just letting my insecurities take over?  It all just sucks.

I sent him one last text asking when he would be back.  I haven’t received a reply.  I’m guessing that’s not a good sign.  I could be wrong though.  I usually am about most things.

Decisions, decisions. I need help.

Here’s my dilemma.  Once we lose/sell the house, my sister will move back to our hometown.  I will be left with several options.  I can either:

1. Move to our hometown with her, finding my own place of course, because I refuse to live with her and her animals ever again.  This might also give me the inspiration I need to finish my book, not to mention, the flood of memories that will undoubtedly come rushing back would be helpful.  The main con on this one, though, is that I would be entirely too close to my relatives and family for comfort.  I would have to buckle down, concentrate on the book, finish it and then get the hell out of town before I lose my mind.
2. Stay here in Podunk, MS, keep working my little job, find a crappy little apartment, and have no social life at all.
3. Move back to New Orleans, the place that I grew to really like, be with the people I miss, and find another job & an apartment there.
4. Move elsewhere in this great country of ours.  I have never lived west of the Mississippi.  Maybe it’s time for a bigger change.
5. Do nothing.  Avoid making a decision altogether, until the day comes when we are forced out of the house and I’m left with no other options other than to move with my sister and live with her again.  (This is not a valid option.  I’m just putting it on here so I will be forced to face the facts.)

Help me out here…please.  I’m begging.  I need some advice on this one.  Thanks!

Happy humping!

The Age of Enlightenment – Part 2

In all the excitement I completely forgot to tell you about my new job.  I started working there a few weeks ago.  It’s a nice little family owned business, and so far everyone there seems very friendly.  Before I went to the interview my sister warned me that the owner, OS, was a little odd, which I sort of already knew because I had heard the Preacher talk about him before.  Not talk about him in a gossipy bad way, just talk about the Preacher’s dealings with OS and his company.  OS and his family are Mennonites.  I don’t really know much about what the Mennonites believe, but I always assumed they were a little like Amish-lite.

During the interview with OS and the office manager, I got a little taste of just what type of person OS really is when he asked if I was a smoker.  I told him the truth.  There’s no point in lying about it because if he were to hire me he would find out eventually anyway.  After I made my confession he went into this story about how he had a woman working there once who was a smoker and after she left he swore he’d never hire another smoker again.  Evidently she was one of those smokers who got very snippy and cranky when she couldn’t go out to smoke at least once an hour.  Now I do like having my smoke breaks, but even I think that’s a bit excessive.  I’m good as long as I can go out at lunch and smoke, and maybe have one more in the afternoon.  So after his little story I told him that I’m a “light smoker” and he had nothing to worry about.  What I was really worried about was whether he noticed the tattoo on my wrist, because I was pretty sure that he was the anti-tattoo type too.  He never said anything about it though.

While he was asking me some other questions about the work that I had done for the Preacher, whom he knew of course, I happened to look over at the office manager.  The office manager was checking me out, staring right at my chest.  He quickly averted his eyes.  I wanted to laugh, but managed to keep my composure.  It turns out he’s a very nice, very married, goody-goody Christian man.  It’s the little things that amuse me most of the time.  Can I get an “amen?”

So far the job has been less than fulfilling, and challenging, but it pays the bills, so I guess I’ll keep it, for now.

Some other things that have gone on here at the Farm:

My sister, Fallen Angel, and my nephew, Little Bubba, have been driving me crazy with their lack of concern for keeping the house clean and tidy.  I’m not a neat/clean freak, but I do like things orderly and presentable.  There’s nothing worse to me than having someone drop by the house and it look like a tornado (aka Little Bubba) just came through.  I’m working on not nagging my sister too much about this because I know she works hard, but she needs to realize that I can’t do it all on my own.

We’ve had a couple of barbeques with the downstairs neighbors, MW & AW.  I think they are really cool people, but there is something that isn’t quite right about them.  My sister says there’s definitely a story there.  We just haven’t figured out what it is yet.  We do know that they moved here from up north to help out with her mother.  We also found out that she has had five kids, none of which she has custody of now.  One of the kids is just a little baby that she had about eight months ago.  From what we gather, either the baby is in foster care or MW’s family has her.  They are supposed to get her and bring her here, but I seriously doubt that’s going to happen.  AW doesn’t seem like she’s in a big hurry to get the baby and be a full-time mommy.  Hopefully more details will surface as time goes on.

In other news…It seems that even though the Preacher has been gone for some time now, a lot of people around here still remember him and their dislike for him has trickled down to my sister and I.  My sister had to call the local police department one day to find out about something and the receptionist who answered the phone asked who was calling.  My sister told the receptionist her first name.  That wasn’t enough; she wanted her last name too.  So even though my sister knew it probably wouldn’t go well, she told the receptionist her last name.  There was dead silence on the other end of the phone for about fifteen seconds.  Then the receptionist said in a snotty tone, “Well, he’s not in now.  You could leave a message I guess.”  Wow.  People here really do hate us (my sister and I) for no reason other than what our last name is.  LOL

Living here in this small town is definitely going to be interesting.  My sister says she just wants to live a quiet life and not stir up any trouble.  I, however, only want to stir up trouble and make these backwards rednecks squirm in their holier-than-thou pews.  But that’s just me.  It’s probably just because I’m bored to death out here in the woods.

And for the grand finale!  At the beginning of May I received a message from a young man on OK Cupid.  His profile said that he lived nearby and that he was 18 years old.  Now I know that’s a bit young for me, but I figured he’s only 6 years younger than Endymion, so what the hell.  I replied to his message.  As we kept talking he started opening up and telling me a lot about himself.  He even told me that he’s still a virgin.  Awe, ain’t that sweet?  There aren’t many of those around these days.  I guess you pretty much have to catch one early to get one that’s still a virgin.  Anyway, we moved on from that topic and kept texting and messaging one another.  He seemed like a really nice kid guy.  He goes to church, plays guitar, likes a lot of the same music & movies I do, etc., etc.  Sounds good right?  I thought so.

Then one night he added me as a friend on Facebook.  I started browsing his profile and noticed his birth date, especially the year.  Then I started calculating, which I am pretty good at, but decided to use an age calculator that I found online just to be certain.  Yep!  You guessed it!  He’s only 17.  He won’t be 18 for another couple of months.  Now at that point I had to jump-start my heart because I started remembering some of the conversations he and I had.  I don’t want to go back to jail.  So I immediately send him a message asking why he didn’t tell me that he was actually 17 and not 18 like his profile had stated.  He replied, “Oh, I’m sorry.  I was going to tell you.”  When?  After I was in cuffs?  I had to explain to him that I could get into a lot of trouble just for talking to him.  He understood.  So we agreed that all future communications would have to stay G-rated and we could even think about meeting until after he turned 18.  To be perfectly honest, I really have no desire to meet him at all now.  A couple of months difference may not seem like a lot, but now every time I think about him I think of him as a kid, and I just can’t go there.

What was even funnier was when he told me one day that he was going to graduation later that night.  I congratulated him, thinking he was the one graduating.  He said, “No, I’m not graduating.  It’s my friend who’s graduating.  I’m class of 2013.”  Oh Dear Sweet Baby Jesus in a Manager.  That was my “what the fuck am I doing?” moment.  You’ll be glad to know that my communications with the kid have ended.  I really would love to find another Endymion, but he at least needs to be able to buy beer for me.

Happy humping!

The Age of Enlightenment – Part 1

The past few weeks have been hectic, stressful, fun, and enlightening in so many ways.  I guess I should start by explaining why I put my blog on lock-down a couple of weeks ago.

It was the Saturday before Memorial Day.  My sister and I were still broke from the disastrous Crawfish Boil.  Because of that we planned on staying home, grilling some dinner for us and our tenants MW and AW, and just enjoying a day of relaxation in the humid Southern heat.

That morning I sat on the porch and wrote my post “Mending Fences with the Preacher’s Daughters.”  When I was done I posted it from my phone because I still have no internet here in the woods.  Instead of posting it using the WordPress app on my phone I decided to just pull up the website on my phone and post it that way.  When I pressed the post button it asked if I wanted to connect my blog to my Facebook account.  I had it set up before to connect to my blog’s FB account, but I guess somehow it disconnected and needed to be redone.  I clicked on the option to connect it to Facebook and didn’t think anything else of it.  I was just relieved to have finally posted something on my blog again.

A couple of hours later I was sitting on the porch with MW, AW, Fallen Angel and Little Bubba.  The grill was hot, the kabobs were cooking, and I was enjoying the first of what I had hoped would be at least a few beers.  Then my phone rang, but I had it on vibrate and missed the call.  My sister’s phone rang immediately after that.  It was Horse Whisperer.  She told my sister that I had posted a link to my latest blog post on my Facebook page…my PERSONAL Facebook page.  As soon as Fallen Angel hung up her phone, I could see the panic in her eyes.  All she said was, “You need to take your blog down…NOW!”  My heart skipped a few beats, thinking maybe the Preacher had found it or something.  She told me what Horse Whisperer said about my Facebook post and then repeated in a very stern tone that I had to take my blog down immediately.  At that moment I began to freak out.  After all the precautions I had taken to remain anonymous, to keep my family in the dark was it really one stupid mistake that was going to bring it all to a crashing halt?  I couldn’t let it end like that!

I ran, literally ran, to the table and grabbed my phone.  I went to the Facebook app on my phone and tried to delete the link/post, but I couldn’t find the option to delete it.  I was in full on panic mode.  MW and AW didn’t understand what was going on, but my sister sort of explained it and they were very sympathetic to my predicament.  After repeatedly trying to delete the post on Facebook, then trying to log into WordPress on my phone and put my blog on lock-down, I couldn’t get anything to work.

I went to open the front door and go inside to get my laptop.  As soon as I got to the door it opened.  My sister was standing there with a steak knife in her hand pointing it at me saying, “Take the blog down now!  Get your laptop, go to McDonald’s, and take it all down, now!”  I know better than to mess with my sister when she’s wielding weapons so I did what she said.  I was going to do it anyway because I was panicking even more than she was, worried that someone we knew may have already seen the link and could be reading it at that very moment.  Picturing our friends, or God forbid, the Preacher, reading my blog with wide-eyes and jaws gaped open was just too much for either of us to handle.

AW offered to go with me to McDonald’s to try to get online and take everything down.  With laptop firmly tucked under my arm, we ran to the truck and sped off.  That five minute drive to town was the longest drive of my life.  The whole way there I couldn’t stop thinking what an idiot I was for making such a stupid, easily avoidable, mistake.

We got there, sat in the truck with the laptop on and I connected to their Wi-Fi.  I managed to get the Facebook post deleted, but just after I did, my battery died.  I then went inside to find an outlet to plug into, but they didn’t have any!  Not a single freaking outlet in the seating area.  How do they expect to offer free Wi-Fi and not have outlets for people to use??  Even the crappy little local burger joint in the Podunk town we used to live in had outlets in the dining room for people to use.  What else could possibly go wrong?

We ran back to the truck and I started brainstorming.  It was a holiday weekend.  Not much was open.  Hotels!  The hotels are open and there is one on the main road that offers free Wi-Fi!  Praise the Lord!  I drove across the highway to the hotel and parked right out front.  AW and I got out and headed into the lobby.  I was a woman on a mission.  I didn’t even turn to look at the person at the front desk when I walked in.  Normally I would be too timid and too worried about getting caught, seeing as how I wasn’t actually a hotel guest, but this time I didn’t give a shit.  I walked past the front desk, past the sitting area, and straight down the hallway until I saw an outlet.

I stopped right there in the hallway, plugged in my laptop, and got connected.  It took all of a minute to find the right place on my WordPress dashboard that gives the option to make a blog private.  I wasted no time in doing so either.  Even after locking it down I had to go back to Facebook to make sure that the post was actually deleted, and also that I didn’t have any messages from irate or shocked friends and/or family.  Thankfully there were no messages.  I also checked my Histats page to see if I had any hits and where they were located.  There weren’t any hits in cities that I recognized so I hoped I had caught it in time.

I kept my blog locked down for a week.  It about drove me crazy.  I have spent the past two years writing on this damn thing and to have it all go to hell in a matter of minutes was very depressing.  It’s my passion, my creative outlet, my therapist, my pride and joy, and it was all but dead and buried.

To keep myself from going completely into a state of depression and to keep my readers from thinking I had personally been wiped off the face of the planet, I sent invitations to a few of my readers who I had email addresses for and who I thought would still want access.  To those of you who did accept my private invitation, I can’t thank you enough for sticking with me during that week of hell.  You will not be forgotten.

I’m also telling you all of this because there may be other “anonymous” bloggers like myself who I want to warn about the pitfalls of connecting your blog to Facebook.  Make sure you are logged into the correct Facebook account before you hit that button!  My phone was logged into my personal FB account and it just assumed that was the account I wanted to connect to.  So consider yourselves warned.

There’s a lot more that’s been going on here on the farm lately, but I’m going to have to save it for part two.  Trust me.  You won’t be disappointed.

Whew! Crisis averted…now back to our usually scheduled “Happy humping!”