Condescension Breeds Disgust

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Methinks this is going to be a short one, since my brain is kind of in shut-down mode. We ended up running into town to do some errands and shopping, and came back to a cross little teether; neither are my idea of fun. 😉

Anyways, as I’ve not been around that crack known as rolling news, I’ve been musing on an article I saw before we went out this afternoon. How can I not be disgusted by the assumption that anyone is too stupid to understand or appreciate the concept of democracy. Oh sure, kudos to actually being a quasi-honest politician (if only because it benefits you to be as such right now :p), but really… this is probably just as good to all the greedy countries hoping to continue making a mint selling arms and armor. After all, this is still causing strife, and strife = ka-ching. *shakes head*

I also kind of hurt for those who are fighting for freedom right now, because I want them to get what they want. But they’re not going to get what they want as fast as they want it; life isn’t a story, and strife breed strife. And, on the other hand, what exactly does freedom mean to them, to us? Does it mean an iPhone, or being able to worship Deity as you see him/her/it? I don’t even know if I/we here in the ‘civilized’ world can understand what they want, and what we take for granted. I’ve said before that the wantiness of people confuses and troubles me, because it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to stress yourself out over. So what if you can’t afford a new car? So what if you can’t afford a new TV? Can you afford to eat and keep some sort of roof over your head? Congratulations, you’re already ahead of a lot of people. Quit your whinging and take things into perspective. *chuckles*

Oh sure, dream of and want nice things – there’s nothing wrong with that at all! I worry that people take me as being against all material possessions because I am a bit fervent in my stance. But this isn’t true – I love my computers, I wouldn’t mind having a DSi or 3DS (mmm, Game Boys are my secret lovers <3), and we keep looking at Kindles with a firm and thoughtful eye. And we’ll probably treat ourselves to them down the line; it’s still going to be an enjoyable purchase when the price goes down a bit more, and we have more cash to splash around. But for the most part, we continue to take joy in the simpler things – good food, good company, and a comfortable home. 🙂

And that’s more than enough blather for the day, so y’know… until next!

<3

Reclaiming our Home (Spring Cleaning!)

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Hola, m’dears. Today in England we have that wonderful national treasure falling from the sky – rain, and what looks like plenty of it. It’s overcast and disgusting looking out, but it’s definitely made up for by how gorgeous the grass is year round. Oh, and all the hay fever-causing pollen bastids, but that’s something altogether different.

As I sit here today luxuriating in my solidarity (my husband took the baby to ‘work’ with him today, giving me some decompression space), I chuckle at my driving need to be doing things. I’m not sure if I’d know relaxation if it bit me on the ass; it’s a bit of a hold-over from the days where I would completely pass out if I weren’t in motion (thank you, endometriosis, you fiendishly difficult to diagnosable ass). So even though I’m hilariously limping around from the damp in the air and still down an arm, I find myself scooting around the house tidying up. There’s some normality in this – on Mondays that I stay home, I’ll get the laundry caught up, do dishes, etc – anything to keep it off of my poor husband’s pretty little brain.

But there’s a bit more to the normal chores and baking today – today, I continue our efforts to reclaim our home. As some may or may not know, houses in the UK are kind of on the teensy side – new build homes are the smallest in Europe as of a few years ago. And while our place isn’t new build, I definitely feel a bit nervous that our biggest room is the same size as my bedroom before I left my parent’s house (and then they subsequently moved – d’oh!). Oh sure, I had the secondary master bedroom in that house, but even my siblings’ smaller rooms are generally bigger than the rabbit hutch tiny rooms that occupy the average British home. So when you’ve got two bedrooms, three people, and two cats, there tends to be a lot of clutter in spite of our best efforts. But for some reason, we’re winning the battle this week – we’re actually managing to make the space ours again.

Of course, this doesn’t make the house any less cluttered, per se – it just makes it better organized clutter. Moving Leah into the other room means I can take that newly created space under where we’ve put her crib to stash all her toys. All of a sudden, I have a living room again; I’m not dying attempting to dance around scattered toys. The exercise bike, as shown yesterday, was moved to where the crib was (and all those lovely clothing that I used to wear pre-baby are  finally bagged up, rather than taunting me from the floor pile). Of course, there are other displaced objects that need rehoming – the bag of clothing needs to go to my mother-in-law’s house for storage, as does the old TV (if we don’t just take it to the tip – it will be easier and cheaper to buy a small flat screen if we ever want to replace it). But at least the stuff is being moved around, and the newly created spaces make the house feel so much happier.

Heck, I’ve not even preened on the most important (to me) bit yet – the kitchen. I consider our kitchen mega-tiny, and the relative lack of space has been a bone of stressful contention for me. We don’t really have a lot of kit in there, but until recently, it took a lot of juggling to make what kit we do have work for us. Really, it took the introduction of our sexy sexy Christmas present to buckle down and get it done; thank goodness we have unutilised cupboard space! ‘Cause I had my beloved, but underused slow cooker to put up to make room, but that somehow made a world of difference in getting the initiative rolling. Before the husband knew it, I’d shifted most everything off the counter to make room to indulge my baking addiction, and now I’m happy coming down into the kitchen. He did his bit on the other side of the tiny tiny room, and mmm…

*wipes up drool* If you can’t tell, I really like having space to use. <__<

Anyhoos, my alone time is almost at an end, so besta get prepped to chat up the next round of cleaning/sorting with the husband – hooray! Have a nice day, what’s left of it. 😉

<3

Eviction Notice

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Until today, Leah has shared a bedroom with us since she first came into this world there. Her crib fit beautifully under the windows, and all were pretty darn happy with things. She got the hang of sleeping through the night pretty freaking early, so we managed to breeze through that first year (bar the first month or two) with no real problems.

But in the past couple of weeks, we’ve entered a period where she’s both in pain from teething, and trying to assert her own adorable and playful will. My poor husband has been pulling all-nighters trying to console her, and all for say… the cat deciding he wants to get off the bed, or one of us turns over in our sleep. It’s just not a way to live, and so, the time to boot her has come. She is now set up in the guest room, which really… we always knew that it would eventually be her bedroom, to include having plans in mind that will enable us to continue using it as a guest room. It’s also ideal, in that the cats are semi-tolerant of that door being shut; they absolutely cannot handle our bedroom door being shut, since Batman is a desperately clingy momma’s boy and will be inconsolably miserable if he can’t walk all over me all night.

Anyways, here’s some pictures… yay pictures:

She isn’t too sure about this
But it puts her closer to her ball pit, at least!
And, I think, she’s okay with that.
Now, if only Mr. Moocow were playing with her…
And I, instead, get taunted by the exercise bike.. rapture!

It’s at moments like this, when we’re making big changes in our child’s life, that I’m grateful that I never got sucked into that drama queen trap known as pregnancy/mothering boards/groups. Parenting is such a contentious thing with the ‘wisdom’ changing day to day; no matter what you do, you’re wrong. Or you’re right – the Internet makes it so easy to justify absolutely any methodology or style of parenting that you could wish to subscribe to. And even amongst pre-existing friends, one can find glaring differences in parenting styles. It doesn’t make one or another wrong – it just means that we’re all doing what we think is best. Which, really, is all we can do – they’ll all end up in counseling blaming us for something anyways. *giggles*

Take, for example, my stance against battery-powered toys. There is nothing that can convince me that someone under the age of one (or two) needs a battery-powered toy. The whole ‘makes lights and sounds!’ thing offends me to the core; I do not want my child trained into expecting instant gratification, of entertainment at the touch of a button. I want my child to put her hand skills into creating, destroying, exploring, not staring at something flashyflash. I’m also not a fan of TV, for all I love my computer-tastic idiot boxes, so it’s not just babycentric. *cough* But I also accept that my child probably has a rather long attention span for someone her age; she doesn’t need me thrusting things in her face every few seconds. No, she can quite happily go for… half an hour, I guess? Half an hour on her own, poking at books, chasing the cats, playing with her ball pit. She knows how to find entertainment, and the only non-her-but-caused-by-her-noises I have to hear are offended cats (hee!), and her attempting to play the recorder/tambourine/xylophone/etc.

Anyways, that’s enough baby-dumping for today (if not for the entire month, hahaha), so I’m going to luxuriate in this bit of baby-free eveningtime. Hope everyone is having a nice day. 🙂

Now With 500% Less Scripting!

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Greetings, world. I’m going to be keeping this short because, apparently, both my arms have decided that random shooting pains are really snazz! I’m guessing that a combination of broken sleep, bad sleep posturing, pulling a neck muscle last night and the like have probably added up to remind me, yet again, that I’m only getting older. Which reminds me… *gets to fishing out the box o’ meds*

As I sit here trying to think of something to say, the only thought that comes to mind is something that I probably read at Tales of an Unlikely Mother. I’m pretty sure I saw her post something a few months back on the subject of teething, and how it’s a horrible, wonderful thing to blame all baby problems upon. But it is the likely cause of most of our sleepless woes – the pain of a slowpoke canine trying to jab through. It’ll catch her and wake her up for a moment, causing her to yell and toss about… and then she’ll zonk back out. Because of medication I’m on, I tend to be a clumsy zombie at worst, and completely oblivious at best, so it’s not my sleep that suffers as much – it’s my husband who takes the brunt of it. But these, these are things I don’t go on about, though I couldn’t tell you why. I guess it’s ’cause I accept it as a normal part of parenting, so try not to let me sabotage myself by bigging it up. That, and I have that totally twisted thing where I find sympathy to be hugely insulting and insinuating that I’m incapable of doing things… mmm, twisted mental states. <3

*glare at arm* Why do you hurt so, little limb? I’m starting to question the nature of its malaise; I bet I caught myself on a stupid door handle and forgot. That’s definitely one thing I do not like in this country – I’ll take door knobs over levers any day. The former have never conspired to cause me permanent harm, while the latter seems to do its damnedest to see me captured, stabbed, or hung by some body part or another.

Yeah.. gonna leave it there and short, ’cause I’m definitely not with it today. Hope your day is better! 😀

Adventures in History: Me Versus the Snake

The Scarlet B Posted on by

At one point in my life, my family and I lived in backwoods Mississippi. It was outside of Tupelo, in fact – yes, that revered birthplace of The King. I rather loved it there – we had several acres to call our own, a goodly sized house, and about 1.5 neighbors. There was one family that lived on our route, and they had other relatives that lived a footpath away. So yes, nice and isolated in an excellent school district that treated me good, and y’know… was just able to be a kid and have fun.

Some of the amenities of our lot was the lovely trash-burning pile (yee-haw!), isolated road, sandy stream, and treehouse. Okay, it was like.. three planks nailed to a tree; Dad had all of a single day a week off from his fancy job as a McDuffs manager, so didn’t have a lot of time to do things like build treehouses. But between all of these goodies, I had an enviable playhouse set up under my treehouse, complete with patch of carpeting and discarded lounge chairs. I had a large Lego bucket that I kept full of mud from the sandpatch at the end of the drive, and would use the cat food cans that didn’t burn up as little dishes to serve my ‘food’ to friends and siblings.

It was all in all snazz, and I’m totally neglecting to mention the other 3/4 of the space surrounding the house. But then, they’re not so relevant to this story, especially since I hadn’t mastered riding a bike yet. Perhaps it’s because I’m short, or because I’m a lefty and thereby naturally off balance to the rest of the world, I just couldn’t manage to get on a bike and stay on one. Because of this, I’d trundle around on the tricycle with little to no shame; I wanted to roll, so I was gonna roll, yo. And it was on one of those gorgeously perfect summer days that seem to fill childhood retrospectively that I was going up and down the drive (at least, the first eighth of a mile of it), and having a generally good time. I spotted my mom and sister coming down the drive, or perhaps Dad was coming home and getting ready to park up, because I veered off the drive and down to my treehouse. Suddenly, Mom started yelling at me for some reason, though I couldn’t make out why. I slowed as she came running up to me, yelling and pointing at something. After she calmed down a bit, she managed to finally point out the snake that, apparently, I’d run over.

On a tricycle… whups.

Honestly, I don’t think I ever knew what sort of snake it was. It probably wasn’t a rattler, and it probably wasn’t poisonous, considering that it was the same sort of tawny-to-tan colour of the drive rocks. And as my parents never moved it, it was always there, almost out of sight, as a testament to the might of my six year old ass rolling around on a tricycle. I presume that it’s long since decayed now, seeing how that was… eesh… 20+ years ago. But there you go – trike beats snake.

And y’know… happy weekend, if that’s your thing.

<3

It’s an Exies Day!

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Well, it was a Sponge day earlier, but a particular Exies song (which happens to also be my husband’s ringtone – yay!) seems to suit my mood better. It amazes me how quickly time can fly by doing the same thing day in day out, and it leaves me wondering what I could do differently. Taking on new hobbies would just be adding new things to the rut, and outside of randomly jumping up and yelling silly things, I don’t consider myself a particularly spontaneous person. Even in my school days, spontaneity came at the behest of my friends during our routine hanging out/sleepover times; I was never the one proposing midnight drives to dance with gnomes.

I would have to say that, in some ways, I desperately cling on to routine for the sake of sanity. Knowing that the day is going to go a certain way allows me to autopilot and let my mind wander… or zone out. It’s usually zoning out, to be fair; I probably tune out a lot more than is healthy. Add in the fact that I’m incredibly easy to stress out, it’s vital that I keep my routine low-key because I never know when I’m going to have a complete meltdown, it makes it hard to find the drive to go do Things™ for the sake of it. And yet, I do, insomuch that I like to keep myself busy to feel like I’m not totally wasting my time staring into space; it’s as if doing random crap means that I’m not off in my own world… even if I totally am.

There’s something that could also probably be said about still waters running deep and all kinds of crazy undercurrent stuff, since I’m supposedly like… a monolith or something. *laughs* I’ve also got that old saw about each year passing being a smaller fragment of your life, and therefore, that’s why it seems like the days run by faster… but as I sit here clock-watching, I wonder how these last few minutes of the work day can tick by so slowly when I flew through the rest of the day…

Otherwise, just sort of bemusedly watching the world as it goes through the current batch of growing pains. The protests continue to expand across Africa and the Middle East, the world wonders if the US is in decline, or if it’s going to continue to optimism itself into greatness, and we continue to grind ourselves to dust for no good reason. Too bad we have the wrong idea of what is going to make us happy to boot, eh? 😉 Number four on that Cracked list is especially apt to me, and reminds me with some amusement of a comment one of my good friends made in the past week about advertisers trying to convince you that you need their product to be happy. But myself, I’m in the school of thought that happiness as we’re sold doesn’t exist; I always will aim for contentedness and the comfort of the middle ground. Mmm Rutville, you are the true way. <3

Anyhoos, I pack up and flee for the day. I hope everyone is having a lovely Thursday, and all of that razzamajazz.

Motivation, Marriage, etc

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Afternoon dears, and all of that jazz. I’m actually feeling a severe lack of motivation, and am thereby grateful for the fact there’s a song by that name (lyrics) that I rather enjoy, AND find to be most relevant. I’m just sort of listlessly dragging through the days this week, and I find that I can’t bring myself to care one way or the other. 🙂

The last day or two, I’ve been thinking on the whole institute of marriage thing. I, myself, am married, and don’t feel like I had to do it to fit some social or religious norm. I did have to do it to enable myself to stay in this country, but that only is relevant in that it caused us to get it done and over with in short order. This was fine by both of us – the fanciest I could’ve envisioned would have been something incredibly basic outdoors with no pavilion and probably pizza at best. What we got was a lovely little ceremony at the local registry office (which is definitely a step nicer than the JoP jobby in the States!), and down to the pub to chat with our friends for an evening. It was basic, it was simple, and it didn’t mean that we started our joint life up to our ears in debt.

However, I know that I have a lot of friends who do feel that the institute of marriage is some sort of shackle set, that it’s somehow agreeing to do what Deity says, that it’s not fair if gays can’t have it just the same (the government is working on that here, but I think that it’s kind of perilous to try and force churches to change even if some people think that’s what needs doing :P), and so forth. I guess it’s hard for me to understand why people let themselves work under the false premise that they have to have a ceremony (you don’t), that it’s necessarily religious (you don’t have to do that either), and the one that I get the least – people thinking that it’s some magical portal and that somehow your relationship is going to be fundamentally different. Honestly, I just think people get these crazy ideas about what life ‘should’ be like from watching too many movies and TV shows, and don’t realize that it’s normal and healthy to fight, to argue, to not always get along. Or, the one that gets me, that it’s somehow weird spending time with your spouse? My husband is one of my best friends, and we’re always glad to be in each other’s company. And while we’re still new to it all in all (it’ll be our fourth anniversary in July), I am fairly confident that we have the skills needed to keep going for a long time, the skills in question being communication and huggles. *nodnods*

But really, what I think the rambling is trying to say is thus – I think people are so scared to fail that they just don’t want to even try. I’m a ditherer, so I have some mild sympathy for this sort of mindset. But as I sit here watching my daughter chew on a tambourine (gotta love teething!), I smile, and pat myself on the back for being willing to take risks and put my heart on the line. There was a lot of hurt along the way, but all in… it was worth it. Especially since my husband didn’t have to pay a dowry of two cows to get me, hee hee – hooray for not being chattel in modern-day marriages! xD

Anyhoose, enough nonsense for today. Have a good day, if that’s your thing!

Birthday Brat

The Scarlet B Posted on by

In my family as I was growing up, we had but a few small traditions. Most of them revolved around birthdays – Dad would take us out on a date (dinner or a movie or both), we’d be excused from chores (hooray!), and we were allowed to pretty much expect everyone else in the family to dote on us, hence the being the Birthday Brat. We were all fairly respectful on our day, minus my youngest sister – she tended to take the brat too far, bless her.

This all plays back through my mind today because, of course, there is a birthday here in my home. My husband is… well… older; I’ll stick to being the one that rubs the number into his face. But being mindful of this bit of tradition that I brought across the ocean with me, I’m doing my best to be a loving little wifey-servant. I’ve tried to pick up even more of the house slack, I’m gonna go make us some lunch in a moment, and I do my best to see if he wants anything anytime I get up to putter around the house. And then I realize… I do most of this day to day, at least, when it comes to the basic courtesy of offering to fix him a coffee or the like when I’m downstairs. *chuckles*

Actually, this sort of minds me of something that we saw on TV this morning – a debate on whether or not relationships should be ‘easy’. I find, after three and a half years of marriage, that my relationship with my husband is strong and pretty much trouble-free. Oh sure, we don’t agree on everything, I’m insane, overemotional, and lost in my own head, and he lives behind a mask of professional blankness, but we still manage to read each other and take care of each other fairly well. Would most people find it easy? Probably not – there’s a lot of fine-tuning to keep our love machine running. But does it seem like it’s a difficult thing? Absolutely not – we value each other beyond what we can imagine the other values us for, and so the little things that lube our lives… they just get done. They get done, ’cause it’s worth it, and that’s about that, methinks.

And as my train of thought is being fragmented to bits by lots of stop-starting (I’m getting some chores done before we ditch the kiddo with her grandparents for the evening), I’m going to wrap it up and scootch. Happy birthday, my darling husband – you’re the bestest and all that jazz, etc. 😉

<3

Just So

The Scarlet B Posted on by

Happy Monday, all and sundry. And y’know.. happy bilk ’em for chocolates and flowers day, too – I actually got some flowers this year, and a full dozen at that! They’re sitting on my desk at home, and I think my husband can now process just how much getting them means to me. *laughs* Of course, I only got them ’cause I gave up ever expecting to receive any (tomorrow is his birthday, so he gets off the hook for most of the Valentines Day crap), but hey – can’t complain at the wafting lovely odor of roses.

Even more exciting than getting flowers after years of pouting is that I can report that my PC is now functioning again – hooray! The new graphics card was waiting for us here at the office once we got in, so I installed and road tested it after we returned from taking the tiny one for her final round of immunizations this year. In addition, I’m stealing my husband’s monitor here ’cause I’ve decided it like it better than the one I have at home, so more hooray-ness. At the very least, it might help me have slightly less headaches brought on from all the backlitness that are monitors… which, of course, I make worse for myself by dint of the fact I am in constant use of two computers for sanity and load-bearing’s sake.

That reminds me of some musing I was doing earlier on the nature of being an introvert and socialization. In my head, I was likening it to a plate of cookies, ’cause everyone likes and understands cookies. I idly imagine that my ability to give attention to other people is the equivalent of 100 cookies. Say the recommended dosage of my attention is 2 cookies; this means I can talk to about 50 people in a day. Now, I know that we all really like cookies, so y’know… some people filch an extra one, since it can’t hurt. Well, if everyone did that, then that’s 33.3333 people in a day that can be chatted to/associated with/assisted/etc – congratulations, greedy children, you’ve just robbed lots of people of attention. *chuckles*

Of course, there are several things that don’t hold up with the metaphor as that stands, or need further explanation. Firstly, in my head, it’s kind of self-explanatory that it requires people coming and taking the cookies//attention; I’m not going to run screaming after people trying to give them cookies. That’s not an introvert thing – we don’t generally attention seek. By that token, I can sort of understand that, even if I’m offering tasty cookies, an extrovert isn’t going to understand someone needing people to come to them rather than the other way around; I/we don’t operate in broadcast mode (says the girl with two Twitters, ha ha)! I can even understand why not being in constant broadcast mode makes people think that my kind are stuck-up, overly formal, etc – between the children coming up now having been told that everyone should worship the ground their winning feet deigns to tread upon (ha!) and me being a reticent person until I get to know someone a bit better, well…

Also, totally lost my train of thought – that’s what I get for using cookies as a metaphor, especially when I have a plate of ’em I baked up last night… what a tease! Anyhoos, more tomorrow, hopefully with a teensy more sense to it. 😉

Not Much to Say

The Scarlet B Posted on by

I find that after the oh-so-long week that just went past, I really don’t have any desire to go find things to write about… I think I said that yesterday, and then totally betrayed myself. *chuckles* But then, my left arm is really sore for some inexplicable reason, so I cannot see myself typing at length. That, and I’m just feeling really apatheticly zoned out in general – I am quite content to be doing absolutely nothing, and will continue doing as much of that as humanly possible today. After all, we all need our Sabbath, and not enough people really take it. So y’know… I hope people are having a nice, relaxed day of doing nothing, or whatever version of nothing brings you calm and recentring.

<3