Blacksheep Speaks

Welcome back!

Have you ever tried to teach someone who doesn’t wanna know how to cook… how to cook? Recipes for tuna casserole and spaghetti casserole become recipes for destruction. Destruction of your taste buds, the kitchen, your cooking reputation… just think about it. Twenty years from now, this kid is going to serve a dish, to her in-laws or at a party… and it will be your recipe, her way… and she is going to modestly tell people “It’s my mother’s recipe”. When they are at the hospital having their stomachs pumped, they will, I am sure, have very loving thoughts about you. Argh.

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Okay… I DID try to warn her. But most teens don’t want to hear that something is too good to be true, and credit card companies are notorious liars. As long as they can hook you… they will, even if you are already a customer. Here’s what happened:

My eldest got her first credit card, easy to get as a first year college student. Maximum balance, one hundred and fifty dollars. So, she uses it, makes the payments on time and pays it off every time. Meaning the company is making nothing, because on balances under two hundred dollars that are paid off in thirty days there is no interest. So, for being a “good customer”, they raise her credit limit. To nine hundred dollars. She still keeps it paid on time. So, a check arrives in the mail. The letter accompanying the check tells her to deposit it in her Checking Account and use it. I TRIED to tell her that the hundred bucks was NOT a gift, that it would be charged to her balance, but she didn’t want to hear it. So, she calls the credit card company. THEY tell her it’s “just a check” and do not tell her it’s a charge to her account. So she deposits the check, thinking Mom has no clue.

Then she spends the money in the bank. AND runs her credit card charges near the limit. When the credit card company figures out that they CANNOT take it from her card and stay under her limit… they yank it out of her checking account. Checks start bouncing, MORE charges rack up… and the credit card company now wants the rest of the money… “bad” charge because of the check, you know. Great company to start college kids on, that.

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Have you ever heard of targeted marketing? That’s that thing they do where they somehow come up with your likes and dislikes, and other things about you, and send you ad gimmicks based on those. Before I turned forty, I didn’t mind so much. But for some reason, all those youngsters running the advertising agencies these days seem to think forty is a threshold number… as in, one foot on the ice bank, one foot in the grave. Seriously, last year just after my fortieth birthday, all the fun ads evaporated. I started receiving ads for estrogen stuff, “anyone can get it” health insurance, life insurance, “age erasing” skin care products, the works. Also burial plan ads. Those, I find incredibly special. And the ads for “healthy” diets. Bah. It’s like they think you start to rot at forty. Well, I have news, folks. I’m not ready for mushy food and checkers just yet. Kiss my grits.

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I am going to do my best to be clear… before you write a comment to this blog, you should know that if it contains ANY sexual reference whatsoever, you have simply wasted your time. I moderate ALL comments here. Yes, you DO have freedom of speech. Go pay for your OWN web space and use it. This is MY web space. I pay for it, I maintain it, and I moderate it. If I choose to write about recipes, fleas, Kohler faucets (which are excellent, by the way), or the pain of getting the mold off the grouting, that’s MY business. My blog. Get the connection?

I don’t care what “turned you gay”. Or lesbian. Or blue with purple polka dots. Well, I DO wanna hear about the polka dots, but that’s beside the point. You see, I feel that any person… straight, homosexual, bisexual, whatever… ANY person whose sex life so dominates their life and thoughts that they must flaunt it, proclaim it, hold it up for all the world to see is a) extremely insecure about it and hoping that the louder they talk, the fewer people will notice, and b) in serious need of a reality check. Your sex life should probably NOT be the thing at the top of your priority list when it comes to life. But, if it is… tell someone else.

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I would heavily debate the title, but apparently the teachers and administration of Highland High School in Highland Arkansas do not. My eighth grade daughter has already been forced to waste not one but TWO class periods determining whether longer thumbs make you a better thumb wrestler. And they have one more day to go. I am SO glad MY tax dollars are providing such a great education for my children! Oh, and I’m not done. That was science. In Math class… I have no idea how many class periods were wasted on this, but last year, when my current ninth grader was in the class… it was about three days. My current eighth grader just spent class time making a kite out of straws or something. These kites are to be hung from the ceiling. When I called about this last year, the teacher, a Florida import, LIED TO ME and told me it was a “study in Geometry”. My daughters, both last year and this year, confirm that there was no such lesson. The kites were, and are, decorations. This same teacher passed out a VERY invasive survey for the kids to fill out… questions like, “What are you most afraid of?” and “When was the time when you received the worst injury you ever had?”. In the same conversation where she lied about the kites, she also told me that the gathered info was for a lesson in statistics. That lesson never happened either, though she, and, incidentally, the vice principal, assured me that it would.

That is two classes out of seven. There are similar stories for almost EVERY subject. If my insurance agent knew how much this was making my blood pressure rise, my life insurance rates would skyrocket. I’m that angry. Talking to the school administration does NO good. It’s absolutely pathetic. You know, I attended this same school. Back then, it was the best school in the region, with the best teachers. Now, I am incredibly ashamed to admit that I graduated from that institution.

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As a kid of the seventies and eighties, I remember well what it was to live in a time without home video. Back then, if you didn’t catch it at the theater, you had to wait a year at least to find out if one of the networks would be airing a truncated version of the thing. And even when VHS beat out betamax in the marketing of things, you still had a very limited selection because, well, please… who could afford it? Back then, each movie cost between fifty and seventy bucks, and rental places were requiring a fifty dollar deposit PER MOVIE. I can’t remember what the deposit on the players was. To put it in perspective, a movie ticket cost three bucks. And the experience! Surround sound, previews that were usually actually interesting… popcorn with bugs in it that you couldn’t see in the dark… mammoth sodas that were more ice than soda… theater seating that made you cramp and cry, not to mention that, with your hands full of soda and popcorn, it was nearly impossible to get those pop up seats to stay in place… then, that lovely view of the couple making out in front of you… Hmm. Yeah. The good old days. I’ll just stick with my DVDs, thanks.

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I live in one of the states where gasoline prices went through the roof when Hurricane Ike went by. The pumps were jumping every hour or so for a while here. It amazes me that these stations are selling gas that changes price so often… since they only BUY it once every week or so. We aren’t exactly a booming metropolis. They don’t sell THAT much gas. And when the prices DROP, it’s every few days, not every hour. Our governor is actually prosecuting the stations that did that. But it still happens anyway. We had an interesting thing happen today. With one inside dog and four outside dogs (plus a stray we can’t get to leave) we go through a lot of dog supplies. But, by the time you add in the gas to town, plus the price hike the stores put on ALL products to pay for the transport cost TO the store…. it now costs us more to go GET the supplies than the supplies themselves.

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I love my husband, really I do, and he is a loving, caring father as well. But there are just some thing about which he has no clue. None. He means well, of course. But… well, when a thirteen year old girl gets her first zit, she sees it as a traumatic event. I have long aged past the time when I really understood WHY that is so, but it is definitely so. My husband knows this, having already been through this three times. So, he sat down to patiently calm our daughter by telling her that he himself had quite a time with acne as a teen. He was doing great, right up to the point where he explained that his was so bad it left scars. When she asked what kind of acne scars cream he used… well… his answer? “Oh, that stuff. Nah, I just grew a beard.”

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After I wrote that last post, Hurricane Ike made it’s way to my house. I feel lucky to still HAVE a house, actually. Here in the Ozarks, we are not used to hurricanes. They usually don’t attack the middle areas of the country. But this one made it’s way straight from Texas to us, and it was BAD. Not so much rain, but the winds… whew. I thought we were going to lose the roof. Some people did. And so, I log on the internet and find out that CNN pretty much stopped paying attention when Ike left Texas. In my email, the Phentermine ads keep coming, on television, the ads for Cialis and that idiot commercial that infers smokers can’t remember how to do ANYTHING without a cigarette in their hand keeps playing… it’s like nothing even happened here. One person DIED a couple counties over. Thankfully, it’s over here, now, and we made it. Barely.

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It’s a little after three in the morning here in my sleepless world. About a half hour ago, news reports started filtering in about Hurricane Ike hitting land. One guy is dead in Corpus Christi. Over a million homes are without power in that neck of the woods. I just checked the CNN site and was greeted by a picture of some guy hanging onto a phone pole or something for dear life while his body was being held straight out sideways by the winds. And at the front of every news report I watch is the proud little statement, “closed captioned for the hearing impaired”. For some reason, that kind of gets me. I mean, a guy is DEAD, but it’s okay, we have closed captioning. And why don’t these people LEAVE, anyway? Report after report said it would be death to stay. Me? I’d be SO out of there. I wouldn’t CARE if they were wrong and I left for nothing… it COULD have been something.

Here in the Ozarks they are predicting that we will get the later fallout from Ike. I hope not. The last hurricane spent three days stalling over us. We’re pretty soggy already.

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