FlipSide:Starting November 12, 2001

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A journal of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs in the life of a woman in the 21st century.

Last Updated : Friday, November 16, 2001 07:08:21 PM -0600

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Monday, November 12, 2001

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Rhiannon got to take her Godmother for show and tell today. Her school is doing a Veteran's Day Reception today and Alicia, who served in the Navy, is the wife of a former Marine, and the daughter of a career Navy Man, agreed to come. She brought pictures and a plaque commemorating the Marine Corp's birthday (which was November 10, I think). All the other veterans were grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Rhiannon was very excited and proud. Her teacher was very happy to have a female veteran. Due to this, Rhiannon is now very cool. Her stock with her classmates has gone up several notches. She will be trading off this little coup for some time.

It has been unseasonable warm around here lately. So far, I think we have only dipped into the 30s twice so far this month. Today the high, so far, is 61. We have even gone over 70 a couple of times. It's supposed to be mild through Thanksgiving. As much a I like warm weather, I hate this. This is unnatural. We are living on borrowed time. We are going to pay. Big-time. Old Man Winter can only be put off for so long, and he really REALLY hates being made to wait. We are gonna have 3 feet of snow, I just know it.

A lot has been made in some media outlets, most notably by Bill O'Reilly of the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Network, that funds are not being disbursed by the September 11 fund, established by the United Way of New York City. Well, today we had our annual United Way presentation and I can tell you that money is getting to the people that need it. So far, the September 11 Fund has given:

$27,546,000 to Safe Horizon, which provides financial assistance to victims' families.
$300,000 to each of the following United Way organizations for cash payments to displaced workers and to families of the deceased victims.
North Essex (NJ)
Greater Mercer County (NJ)
Rockland County (NY)
Bergen County (NJ)
Essex-West Hudson (NJ)
Monmouth County (NJ)
Somerset County (NJ)
Morris County (NJ)
Union County (NJ)
Orange County (NY)
Westchester and Puntam (NY)
Over $140,000 to each of the following United Way organizations for cash payments to displaced workers and to families of the deceased victims.
Passaic County (NJ)
Sussex County (NJ)
Hunterdon County (NJ)
Dutchess County
$225,000 to the NYC Fire Department

The list goes on and on. If you want to see the complete list, check out http://www.uwnyc.org/sep11/.

Bill O'Reilly has made a point of going after the celebrities that gave their time and in most cases money in the nationwide telethon for the September 11 Fund. And where were you, Bill? What have you done but criticize the efforts of the people attempting to help? Bite me, Bill. I used to occasionally tune into your show to hear the conservative side of things. No more.

(ed - Now honey, be nice. Mr. O'Reilly is on Television, which means he doesn't have to be right, accurate, or even read. He only needs to draw ratings. And since he's on Fox, he REALLY needs to draw ratings. It's a simple job. That's why morons do well in it. -- jd)

I received this email today. At first I thought it was just a rehash of the old cost of raising children today email. You know, the one that says how many thousands of dollars it takes to raise a child today. And frankly, in my experience, that $160,140 is waaay understated. I have always believed that having (or not having) children is not an economic decision. It's a lifestyle choice.

The government recently calculated the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 and came up $160,140! That doesn't even touch college tuition. (Or daycare.) For those with kids, that figure leads to wild fantasies about all the money we could have banked if not for our children. For others, that number might confirm the decision to remain childless.

But $160,140 isn't so bad if you break it down. It translates into $8,896.66 a year, $741.38 a month, or $171.08 a week. That's a mere $24.44 a day! Just over a dollar an hour.

Still, you might think the best financial advice says don't have children if you want to be "rich". It is just the opposite.

What do your get for your $160,140?

Naming rights. First, middle, and last!

Glimpses of God every day.

Giggles under the covers every night.

More love than your heart can hold.
Butterfly kisses and Velcro hugs.
Endless wonder over rocks, ants, clouds, and warm cookies.
A hand to hold usually covered with jam.
A partner for blowing bubbles, flying kites, building sandcastles, and skipping down the sidewalk in the pouring rain.

Someone to laugh yourself silly with no matter what the boss said or how your stocks performed that day.

For $160,140, you never have to grow up.

You get to finger-paint, carve pumpkins, play hide-and-seek, catch lightning bugs, and never stop believing in Santa Claus.

You have an excuse to keep: reading the Adventures of Piglet and Pooh, watching Saturday morning cartoons, going to Disney movies, and wishing on stars.

You get to frame rainbows, hearts, and flowers under refrigerator magnets and collect spray painted noodle wreaths for Christmas, hand prints set in clay for Mother's Day, and cards with backward letters for Father's Day.

For $160,140, there is no greater bang for your buck.

You get to be a hero just for retrieving a Frisbee off the garage roof, taking the training wheels off the bike, removing a splinter, filling the wading pool, coaxing a wad of gum out of bangs, and coaching a baseball team that never wins but always gets treated to ice cream regardless.

You get a front row seat to history to witness the first step, first word, first bra, first date, and first time behind the wheel.

You get to be immortal. You get another branch added to your family tree, and if you're lucky, a long list of limbs in your obituary called grandchildren. You get an education in psychology, nursing, criminal justice, communications, and human sexuality that no college can match.

In the eyes of a child, you rank right up there with God.

You have all the power to heal a boo-boo, scare away the monsters under the bed, patch a broken heart, police a slumber party, ground them forever, and love them without limits, so one day they will, like you, love without counting the cost.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001

Jack has discovered an interest in anatomy. More specifically, female anatomy. This conversation took place when he came out of his room last night to go potty (and put off going to bed for another few minutes).

Jack: Mom, kids have been talking a lot about bras. They have been calling them boobies. (Pointing to my chest.)
Me: You mean breasts?
Jack: Yeah, they've been calling them boobies. Does everyone get those?
Me: Only girls. (Mental note: this is not the time to discuss Ru Paul or "man-bras".)
Jack: What are they for?
Me: To feed babies. (He'll find out other uses on his own. At about 17. And not before. I hope.) But you and your sister didn't want any part of that.
Jack: Why?
Me: You tell me, dude.

Luckily, at this moment, as he was looking at me wide-eyed with the gears turning, his father shooed him back to bed. Whew. Dodged that bullet.

Then there is my daughter, who informed me last night that she now has validation that her behavior is actually beyond her control. Angels and devils are to blame.

Rhiannon: At school today we talked about listening to the angel on our shoulder. (Points to her right shoulder.)
Me: Oh?
Rhiannon: Yeah, and there is a devil on my other shoulder, but I pushed him off. He's back, now, though.

What do you say to that?! "Have another brownie, dear?" And why is it, I wonder, that good is always on the right side and evil is one the left?

To my dismay, I have come to the realization that there are only 3 paychecks between now and Christmas. Four through the end of the year. Yikes! I'm not ready for this. Fiscally, spiritually, emotionally, or organizationally. Aaaarrrgghhh. How come when you are a kid Christmas can't come fast enough and when you are an adult, they get alarmingly closer and closer together? I haven't even started thinking about Christmas cards, let alone gifts. When I was a kid the four weeks of advent were a slow torture. (Each week in Mass we watched them light one more candle on that advent wreathe and frankly, it just took forever before they got that fourth one lit. Then the week before Christmas, oh my God, how did my mother stand us?) Let's not even talk about the eternity that was the three months between Christmas and my birthday.

The fourth quarter of the year is just waaayyy to busy. We literally hemorrhage money from late September through December. School starting, October birthdays, anniversary, Halloween (which has gotten to be a very pricey pseudo-holiday, thank you very much!), Jack's birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas . . . I know I am missing things in there, but lets just say that trying to hold on to money in the fourth quarter of the year is, for our household, roughly akin to trying to bail water out of the Titanic with a sieve. And aside from money, I don't think we have had more than maybe 1 or 2 free weekends since early September through December. And my kids are in very few activities. Just wait until they are in EVERYTHING. I am not going to survive the teenage years, I am sure of it. But at least they'll have my life insurance to spend during the fourth quarter.

This from MSNBC . . . "Chelsea Clinton wrote about her angst over anti-American feelings abroad, but the former first daughter is doing more than putting her thoughts on paper. Chelsea Clinton recently attended an anti-American rally at Oxford and shouted pro-American sentiments at the protestors, according to the London Times. . . ." You go girl!

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

There has been a lot of attitude going around our house lately. In fact, the phrase most commonly uttered by the adult female in the household is "Bite Me." Not sure what has provoked it, but I am a woman on the edge. Messing with me right now is not recommended. Even Jack recognizes the turbulent waters. However, the signs have been lost on my 8 year old daughter, who has been practicing her teenage attitude on me. I tell her to do her homework, she bellows "I DID". I pull it out to check it and find that she did, at best, a half-assed job. So I tell her she is in too big of a hurry to move on to other things and go back and do it again. Sometimes she flounces off, other times she makes some sort of comment akin to "Make me". However, she knows better than to say those exact words, so she mutters words with enough ambiguity to escape parental retribution. John meanwhile, stays out of it and tries, very hard, quoth he, "To stay on your good side". Good choice, eh? So far, he has managed to sleep indoors this week.

Marcia Bilbrey got roses from a client this week. Which reminded me of the gifts I used to regularly receive from repo men while was I collecting on semi trucks at Green Tree. (I was a Bankruptcy and Litigation Specialist, so I dealt with the really seriously overdue accounts. The Senior VP knew if I was coming to talk to him it was bad news. And he believed in killing the messenger, but that is an entirely different story.) While emailing back and forth with Marcia today about this, my past dealings with these guys came up. Repo men are awfully colorful individuals. They operate in the twilight between legal and illegal and generally the unspoken rule with them was "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". That way I wasn't responsible for any fences that were or weren't there or locks that mysteriously just popped open. Two of the strangest stories are detailed below.

THE NAKED MAN
My repo guy had been staking out a driver's home, waiting for him to return from an over the road trip. When the driver finally got home, he waited for the driver to go inside and go to bed so he could snatch the truck back. This trucker was taking some sort of stimulant, most likely of an illegal variety, as many, but by no means all, truckers sometimes do to try to stay awake on the road. Apparently the stimulant had not quite worn off, as he was outside, lovingly polishing said truck until after 2 am. Finally, the happy pills seem to be wearing off and he heads into bed so my repo guy lumbers into action. (I would say "leap" but I don't know if you have seen many repo guys, but they tend to be rather large individuals and if they would leap it would register on the Richter scale.) As he is pulling away from the curb, the trucker comes running out of his house, sans his clothing, to attempt to keep his truck. He manages to leap onto the running board of the truck and is yelling and pounding on the window. So, lights are suddenly going on in the neighborhood as the repo guy is driving this truck down the street, in the middle of the night, with a buck naked man hanging on for dear life the side. Then his wife gets into the act. She roars out of the driveway in their car and attempts to cut off the semi, with her completely nude significant other clinging to the side, in her little compact car. I'm not real clear on what the repo guy did next to get out of the situation, (and I'm sure I don't want to know ) but I got a call the next morning, letting me know he had the truck.

THE INDIAN
We had been attempting to repo a semi from a fellow south of the Twin Cities for quite some time. The situation was getting ugly, as the state police were investigating this fellow for all sorts of bad things, including running a meth lab out of his house. (I have always wondered what he was doing with a semi if he was brewing methamphetamine in his basement. And why he couldn't make his truck payments if he was in such a lucrative business. Apparently he was just a bad business man, even in the illegal end of things.) Anyway, one day he calls my repo guy and says, "Listen, I know you have been hired to pick up my truck. How about I just turn it over to you. My wife works over at the casino, so meet me over there and I will give you the keys. So my repo guy heads over to the casino. He meets up with the guy, gets the keys and heads into the truck. Now, casinos in Minnesota are all on tribal land and, as such, the only police force on the reservations are the tribal police. Apparently Mr. Deadbeat decided to play a little trick on the repo guy. He called the tribal police and said someone was trying to steal a truck out of the parking lot. So up roars the tribal police. Now, this repo guy is not the brightest bulb on the tree. When the tribal cop asks for his papers, he doesn't have the correct papers on him, as this was supposed to be a voluntary turn over. So, he calls me on his cell. And, in front of the tribal cop, says to me, "Hey, Ann, can you tell Chief Running Bear here to lay off! I'm just repoing this #*%&#)%ing truck." Like I said, not a bright man. The tribal cop was not terribly excited being referred to in that manner. And the repo guy continues referring to him as Geronimo, slant eyes, Cochice, brave, etc. I managed to smooth it over with the cop (after I tell my repo guy in no uncertain terms to shut up and put the cop on the phone), but I was fit to shoot the guy myself. I should have let them just stuff him in jail, but I needed the truck back. It was month end, ya' know. And you just know, while all this was going on, the deadbeat was watching from inside the casino laughing his ass off.

Working in collections just doesn't build a whole lot of faith in human nature, not that I had a lot to begin with. And people wonder why I always expect the worst?

Thursday, November 15, 2001

Happy Birthday Jack!

It's been five years and my body is STILL recovering.

Friday, November 16, 2001

"They're both crying. Now I'm happy." What's that tell you about my children's behavior? This immortal line was uttered after my son, Jack the Cannibal, bit his sister on the butt. However, Miss Waterworks has alternated all evening between tears and attitude, so I'm convinced she was not completely guiltless in the exchange. What I am left with, is a 5 year old who refuses to be suitably penitent and an 8 year old with an attitude and a bite mark on her ass. I am hoping that, after a proper amount of time has passed for the contemplation of their sins, my offspring will settle down in their jammies and watch Shrek.

After he was released from solitary, I asked Jack why he bit his sister. First, he used the old tried and true, she bit me first. At my skeptical look, he put his blankey in his mouth and attempted to look pathetic (he learned the pathetic look from his dad). Again I asked him, "why did you bite your sister"? This time I get a shrug and the ever popular "I dunno." The best I can figures is that he had an overwhelming urge to taste flesh, so he went for the fleshiest part around. Sigh.

Meanwhile, I have a birthday cake to bake, a Thanksgiving shopping list to make, and bars to make for the 80's party tomorrow night. So much for a weekend to relax.

Saturday, November 17, 2001

Sunday, November 18, 2001

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