Movin’ On

    I met with an attorney  yesterday. I feel like  I’m cheating. My soon-to-be-ex ( from here on to be referred to as STBE) doesn’t know I am seeing a lawyer about our divorce. He keeps expressing the phrase “we don’t need lawyers taking all our hard earned money over this. We can iron it out ourselves“. (hear his Brooklyn accent)

   The thing is,  he gave me this ludicrous financial proposal that basically says he gets to keep everything of value except the house, which I then cannot afford to keep because it’s horrificly expensive to maintain, and then if I sell it he gets 10% of the sale price!! Which would pretty much reimburse him for any monies he may have to pay in alimony.

  I always thought alimony was for bullshit,  slug-ass , money grubbing gold-diggers but I have a whole new appreciation  for women who get it.

   For thirty years I seriously supported my STBE in every business venture his cackamamie-ness could come up with. He wanted to be a dairy-freakin’-farmer? I learned how to milk cows and do artificial insemination. He wanted to move the  cutlery rental business to town?  I renovated the new  building for him and put in 50 hours a week to get it off the ground while he did deliveries.  He wanted to drive to Minneapolis with his 1934 classic car to a fancy car show? I ran things and took care of the kids while he took home trophies for owning an expensive automobile. I also did all the housework and 90% of the yard work. Occasionally, if he wasn’t too busy with his antique car clubs he would sit on the lawn tractor and mow something. I cooked every meal, washed every dish and every bit of laundry , and made sure his daughters got into college without getting pregnant along the way.

  I sound bitter. I try not to do that. I was doing pretty well until  recently.

  I got tired. He got tired. He moved out. He moved in with his girlfriend. They  bought a house together.

  I want my half. I don’t want to wonder when I am 70-years-old whether I have enough food for the week. I don’t want to have to move in with my daughter to make it through the winter without freezing to death. I want half. No more, no less.

  He wants to “give ” me what  amounts to a pittance.

   My  attorney took one look at the financial proposal  my STBE handed me and he LAUGHED!  I think I love this guy.

  It’s so great to have an advocate to say the things I dont have the ovaries to say to said STBE!

February Has 87 Days

 My head hurts like some dumb-ass teenager has cranked up the bass too loud and the speakers are thumping so hard my temples are ready to blow. My nose is pouring out so much snot that I need to have one hand constantly holding a tissue to my nostrils. I sneezed so much today my eyes feel like they’re ready to fall out.

I have a cold.

I walked out to the burn barrel carrying so much paper garbage I needed two hands to hold it all. Before I got there the wind blew a rope of snot out over the side of my face !

I wanted to work on cleaning out the attic but that’s not gonna happen.

I feel drained, physically and emotionally. My boyfriend didn’t get the job he interviewed for last week. He was so hopeful and really thought this time he had it but today he found out that they went with another applicant. He’s getting seriously depressed and I feel terrible knowing there’s nothing I can do to help (other than a BJ and since I’m here and not there, that cannot happen right now.)

 I hate February.

Ice Cold Memories

  

      This old house of mine… ah, we have a love/hate relationship.  She’s OLD!  Built around 1845 old!   Right now I am hating her because she’s a cold and drafty bitch.  I know the spots where she’s  warmer though, like in the corner of the kitchen where the heating vent sends warm air near the floor by my feet first thing in the morning.   At least there’s that!

  My daughter’s old room in the upstairs northeasterly corner is the probably the coldest.   But for some truly cold space head to the attic.  I’ve been  trying to empty out the boxes and bags up there.  Every time I pull that ladder down and climb that rickety thing I prepare  myself for that  icey blast of cold.  I grab the nearest bag I come to (it’s only a crawl space) and fling it down the stairs to land with a thud on the hallway floor below.  Then I scurry back down and close the pull-down ladder.

     I don’t want to be doing this job.  I shouldn’t have to but it looks like the girls will never get around to it and if I end up having to put the house on the market  I want to be ready.  That attic is a mess!  The girls used to clean the crap from their rooms and shove things they wanted to keep-but-not-look-at into garbage bags and boxes.  This went on for years, including the college years.  The problem is that whenever they wanted something they had stored up there they didn’t know in which bag to look.  So they would rip open bags at random until they found what they were looking for.  Nothing was ever returned to the ripped open bags.  Mice found a cozy, safe home in many of them judging by the copious amounts of  little mousey turds up there.

    I found a whole box of Barbie dolls, a stack of their favorite read-aloud books from when they were small children, some FisherPrice toys (they never die!) and photos!!  OMG, the photos!   I hate that!  That means I have to go through them all, sort them out and make sure they’re handed out to the family member who might want them.   AAGH!

    I plan on burning a good large number of photos of ME because I was so FAT!  I look older in some of those shots than I do now!  No way am I letting those babies into fall into the wrong hands (by which I mean anyone’s!)  Lordy, did I actually wear those horrible glasses and how could I have gotten that awful spiral perm back in the late 70s?

     I figure at the rate I’m going I will be done by spring. 

   Meanwhile I have to get up at 3:30 tomorrow morning so I can be ready to go when my daughter picks me up at 4:00.  That’s A.M.!  I’m going along with her to Geisinger Hospital to be there when my almost-2-year-old grandson gets the tube removed from his tear duct.  It was put in place 6 months ago because his tear duct was clogged since birth.  It’s the one that drains the tears away so he always had this goopy, red eye until the tube was put in.  Hopefully it’s now dilated enough that when the tube is removed it will continue to drain properly.  The scary part is only that they have to put him under general anesthesia, always a little dangerous at this age but he came through the last time with no problems.

    I hope the snow holds off till we return.  The prediction is for afternoon snow accumulating 3-4 inches. Greeeaat…

It’s a Bad Day

    I got up as usual this morning, made coffee, took a good piss, brushed my teeth. I took my coffee upstairs to my computer, as usual, and IM-ed  my sweet bear D. We poke each other first on IM and then he calls me so we start off the morning hearing each other’s voice. It’s sweet.

     I don’t know why but last night and this morning he is just , well,  making me crazy.

     I feel like he isn’t listening to anything I say. He can just chat away and I am attentive as hell, regardless of the subject matter. Often he goes off on a monologue about political issues of which I know very little and I ask questions and interject approving comments at appropriate times so as to remain in the mostly one-sided conversation. But if I make a lengthy  comment I am met with a long silence. Then he changes the subject. What the heck is that all about?

      Last night he kept me on the phone while he downloaded stuff, played with the feeds, randomly commented on things that popped up on his screen, as if I wasn’t sitting there on the phone in silence waiting for him to remember I was there.

     This morning he directed me to a fetish link he knew I would like. When I went there I found a picture of a little girl and a bear that I knew he’d get a kick out of so I told him I was sending it to him in an email. He said “don’t send it to me. Just send me the link.”

     Fuck it. I closed it down. He said “what? I’m waiting.” I told him to forget it. He said “so now you’re mad.” I said “no, I’m not mad.” and I wasn’t. I was a little hurt and annoyed but not mad. Maybe I should have been.

     Later, he was making a remark about the Primary elections in Washington and I said something about I thought Obama took Washington. He said, sarcastically as hell ” there is a Republican Primary and then there is a Democratic Primary. I was referring to the Republican one.”

     Well, fucking excuse me.

     Now I am depressed. I haven’t seen him in two weeks. (We live three hours apart.) I am stuck here alone in this big house while the damned snow howls outside. The roads are covered in snow and I don’t feel like driving  the 16-mile round trip to get into town to get my Sunday NY Times and groceries like I planned. I feel like crying.

    Maybe I really am just depressed. My ex is giving me a hard time. Now D. is being weird.   Somedays  he’s UP and some days he’s down and I never know which it will be. I’ve portrayed myself to him as this paragon of strength and sane stability. Maybe I was wrong.  I felt he needed me to be solid and stable, probably because I know how unstable his ex was.  I didn’t think it was me playing a part. It’s who I like to believe I really am.

     Today I don’t know.

If I Don’t Wanna Get Screwed I Better Get an Attorney, I Guess

    

      Ok, I can’t sleep ’cause all I see when I close my eyes is my damn he-better-soon-be-an-ex-husband standing in my kitchen with this smarmy look on his face as he hands me his “proposal”.  The one where he gets to keep, like 7/8th of everything and he pretends like he’s giving it to me when, in every rightful sense of the word, IT IS HALF MINE!

 I was hoping (duh, I was stupid) that this wouldn’t go this way but fat-ass has always been secretive about his finances. In 30-odd years of marriage I never really knew how much money he made . Seriously.   He, no, WE own a service business and he’s run so much cash he probably doesn’t know either! I felt like I was in the movie “Married to the Mob” when Michelle Pfeiffer asked her mob-hubby for some spending money. He said ‘How much do you need, Baby?” and she held up her hand with her thumb and fingers about 2 inches apart and said “This much”. 

I’m not greedy. I worked just as hard as he did to make us successful.  I only want half. Is that so bad?

Damn.

Out of My League (temporarily)

Please bear with me. I know virtually nothing about using WordPress but I am a quick study (usually…if I haven’t been hitting the wine too hard) so I hope to have something up and running shortly.