This was such a wonderful Christmas, I can hardly bear for it to end.  I hope all of you had a blessed day as well, filled with close friends and family and lots of love.

We did have something odd happen though, so I thought I’d mention it.  Last night, after the Christmas Even candlelight service at church, we were tracking Santa on NORAD (he’s in Argentina!  Uruguay!  Rio!  Better get in bed girls, he’ll be in the Keys before you know it!) and man, that old man was BOOKIN’ it.  He was spreading gifts to entire cities in, like, 6 minutes.  No wonder he can never stay still long enough for a picture with my little ones.

Finally, everyone was in bed and Santa came and went and then we were asleep.  And then… dun dun dun… Sawyer woke up and he was loud enough to wake his brother.  So they came in to get us.  Now, when Sawyer wakes up in the middle of the night and we know about it, one of us has to get up and watch him.  Our bed isn’t big enough, so we usually take him down stairs and he lays on one couch and we take the other one for the rest of the night.  But last night was Christmas.  And the tree was downstairs with all of the gifts around it.  And Sawyer didn’t know it was Christmas (we don’t tell him because he gets so upset.  He wants to open presents NOW and he persiverates… no, better for it to be a Surprise!  Presents under the tree!  thing.)

If Sawyer had seen the gifts under the tree, he would never have gone back to sleep.  So I went down and covered the gifts with two bed sheets.  I expected we’d be up with a tantrumming Sawyer for the rest of the night, but no.  He came downstairs, walked right past the tree with mysterious bedsheet covered bumps underneath it and went right to sleep on the couch.

THAT, my friends, is the difference between autism and the neurotypical.  My other kids, seeing the bedsheets, would have been DYING of curiosity to know what was underneath.  Even if it wasn’t Christmas, and they weren’t expecting gifts, they would have wanted to know what it was.  Sawyer?  Not so much.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Who the heck cares about some old bedsheets?

In other news, my daughter got unlimited texting for Christmas (we had texting blocked on her phone for over a year because she ran up our bill once “accidentally”.)

…It should have made the nightly news.

She texted everyone she knew this morning.  Merry Christmas!  I got texting!  And spent the entire day texting back and forth with her buddies.  At one point she was out in the yard in her pajamas texting for about 10 minutes until I told her to come in and get dressed.

It’s a wonder she remembered to eat today.

I feel like an old fogey because texting is just something I feel I am too old for.  I like most new technology, but texting just seems like more trouble than it’s worth to me.

Last year, I said I’d make a Christmas pizza today instead of spending the day in the kitchen cooking.  So that’s what I did.  Except, making the dough, rolling it out, cutting up all the vegetables and the meats, shredding the cheese, firing up the pizza stone… pretty labor intensive.  I was in the kitchen just as much as with other years, but this time with less assurance.  The pizzas came out fine, but NEXT year, we shall be ordering pies from a local establishment and tipping the poor Christmas workers well to assauge our guilt.

After all, isn’t that what payouts are all about?

Gee, what would happen if I put my Barbie’s head through the washer and the dryer?

No?  Well, apparently my daughter did, for we finished this experiment late last night.

If your hypothesis is that nothing happened or that the clothes would be ruined, you’d be wrong.  No, we had an interesting and unexpected result.

It melts the Barbie’s hair back onto itself.  We ended up with a blonde Barbie head with the best “natural” (afro, for you not into the lingo) that I’ve ever seen.  Her ‘do rivals Jan’s fake afro she wore to the dance in the first Brady movie.  It’s actually one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Why haven’t I taken a picture?  Because my husband threw her out when I wasn’t looking!  Can you imagaine?  He tossed her away and does not understand why I got so angry about it.

Imagaine.  Thinking a body-less Barbie head with a huge, melted plastic doll hair afro was TRASH.

…Crazy man.  I just might have to make another.

Oh, and Merry Christmas Eve to all of you!

Christmas of 1997 we were very short on money and had tiny children who expected Santa to come through in a big way.  We could not afford to waste our limited resources on a real Christmas tree (which usually cost about 45-60 dollars around here, which, if you shop well, translates into quite a few gifts.  Especially for young children), but we didn’t want the kids to go without a tree all together.  We decided to buy the cheapest, artificial full-sized tree that we could find, use it for that one year, and then replace it the next year with a beautiful real tree again.

We trekked to K-mart and found a tree for under twenty dollars that would do.  …Barely.  It said on the box it was a six foot spruce, but I think that was being generous.  It was straggly and leaned, ever so slightly, to the left.  (The leaning tower of treeza.  …You’re welcome).  It weighs about two pounds and one set of lights (ONE set!) is really too much fire power for it to handle.  I tell you, it made the Charlie Brown tree look majestic in comparison.

So, anyway, we used it and then I stored it away (just in case.  Because tossing it seemed so callous for some reason).  At that time, I had no intention of ever hauling it out again.  …Until the next year.  When our finances were still not much better and, heck, we already HAD a tree, why waste money on another one?

Fast forward to 2009 and yep, you guessed it.  Thirteen years later we are STILL reusing that same horrible tree.  Not because we can’t afford a better one, but because my family likes THIS one.  Every year I threaten to toss it after Christmas, and every year I am convinced not to.  This tree is the only tree my poor, sad, deprived little children have ever known.  They consider putting up the tree to be a cherished holiday tradition in the same way that “normal” families cherish going to the Christmas tree farm and choosing a beauty to take home.  Putting up the tree takes all of five minutes (except for the fluffing of the branches, which has somehow become MY job),  and each year it comes out looking even sadder than the year before.  For some reason, this just brings my family such joy.

…It’s like they revel in patheticness of our tree.

Every year when my husband sees the box with it’s price tag of $16.77 stamped on it, he literally chortles with glee.  “Man, we SURE got our $16.77’s worth with this, huh?” he says, rubbing his hands together in satisfaction.  “Best $16.77 we ever spent!”

Instead of a star on the top, or an angel, we have a weird little doll we call Clove Head perched atop ours.  Clove Head was made for me by a coworker about 20 years ago with no explanation.  She’s a cloth doll with cloves glued to her head like hair, and her hands glued to her mouth.  Kind of disturbing.  Way back when, we were trying to figure out the purpose of this doll (potpourri?  Voodoo?  What?!) when my husband impulsively took a rubber-band and tied her to the top of the Christmas tree.  We thought it was funny, and the next year we put her back.

She’s still here, MUCH the worse for wear.  The kids FIGHT about who’s turn it is to put Clove Head on, and my son resists each and every mention of replacing her with a nice star.  In fact, he says he wants Clove Head when he moves out so he can use it on HIS future family’s tree.

…My future daughter-in-law is going to HATE me, no question.

Our tree has been knocked over so many times over the years  (by cats and Sawyer, it’s knocked over at LEAST five times a year) that all of our nice glass ornaments are long gone.  Every year I go out after Christmas and buy a “big-bucket-0-tacky-plastic-glittery-balls” to put on next year and call it good.  Add on all of the ornaments our kids have made in school and the paper chains and… well, you get the picture.  We know how to do ‘er up right!

In fact, Martha Stewart’s coming by tomorrow and taking pictures of our treeza for her Christmas issue 2010.   We are all using psudonyms.  I’m going by Mariah.

When I’m out and about I love to look at other people’s trees.  And I’m always surprised and jealous about how beautiful they are.  It seems other people DON’T go out of their way to tacky up their trees, but instead, try and make them as beautiful as possible.  Huh.  Who knew?

My husband has PROMISED me that we can get a real tree next year, but he’s promised that before.  And if we DID get a real tree that would require nice NEW ornaments and new lights and, and… we really could use that money more wisely on gifts…

Oh man.  I see crazy people.

You know what my problem is?  I have good intentions but no follow through.  Clear Blue Water is important to me, but I have been having a difficult year and I’ve found it almost impossible to keep up with (especially the latter part of the year).  Every week I WANT to ink my cartoons and every week I manage not to find the time.  Then I feel weird about blogging when I have no new cartoons to share, so the blog stays stagnant as well…  I am sorry.  I have the most wonderful readers and I have not been a very gracious or interesting host.  I will try to do better come the new year.

I am usually a very private person, but I am going to break that a bit right now and share some of  the things that have gone on over the past year.  These are not excuses for my seeming laziness, per say, but they are an explanation of sorts.  I am still trying to sort through some of it in my head.  It was not a totally terrible year.  We have been blessed in so many ways, but it seems that just about everything that went on (and I mean both blessings and hardships) were life-changing events.  Not a lot of hangnails this year.  No, this was the year we did ‘er up BIG.  Can you say STRESS?

…Early in the year, a really good friend of our family died of cancer after a prolonged and courageous fight.  We were literally homeless for about a week back in the springtime.  We bought a house.  Our autistic son seems to have traded one set of problems for another (and I don’t know which set I prefer)!  I began working outside the home again for the first time in over a decade.  I suffered a personal loss.   Our ancient dog died.  And, to top off the year, I was  cold-cocked by the abrupt ending of a close friendship that I assumed would last throughout my entire life.   It’s this last thing that I’ve struggled with the most over the past few months, so it’s this last thing that I’ve chosen  to focus on today.

The friendship dissolved due to lies, misunderstandings, and unexpected viciousness, and I was devastated.  Not only was a huge part of my life just gone, but (because it ended so badly and so abruptly), I then started second-guessing our entire relationship.  I was allowing all of my memories of her to be ruined as well.

As I mourned this person (and it really feels as if she has died), God hit me with a truth that I had a hard time processing.  Our relationship had been going sour for over a year.  I had known this, I had even talked about this very thing with other friends and family members, but I had assumed that if I hung in there past the rough patch, it would eventually go back to being good again.  But the truth was, we had simply moved in two different directions and we no longer had much in common anymore.  The closeness we’d once shared was mostly gone, replaced by distance, disinterest and unease.  It seemed that she suddenly disapproved of just about everything about me, and I thought she was becoming rather insufferable.  I had been clinging to a friendship that had moved well past it’s expiration date.  Simply put, we were no longer good for each other.  The time had come.

This has been a hard thing to process.  I always thought we’d be like the Golden Girls someday (as long as I got to be Dorothy!). but, alas, that is not to be.  In some ways it’s a relief that it’s over.  Watching a once rock-solid friendship flounder and flail about was SAD.  Now we can both move on.   God brings people into our lives for a reason.  Sometimes for life and sometimes for a season.  It turns out that this friendship was just for a season, but that’s OK.  I have my memories, and now that I can allow myself to enjoy them, they bring great comfort.

Life is too short to live your life filled with anger and bitterness (even if you are justified), so I’ve made a conscious decision to let it go.  I have forgiven this person and I feel no ill will towards her anymore.  …She was a very good friend, and I wish her and her family nothing but the best.

However…  This breakup was by no means all her fault, so here is my public apology for my part in this debacle (this might or might not get back to her–I can’t be bothered to check sitemeter so I don’t know if she still checks in here or not.  So… whatever.  This really is more for me and my mental health, anyway).

Please forgive me.  I was wrong.

There!  I feel soo much better now!  Lighter and more at peace.

…Make no mistake though, I did not apologize  to try and win my friend back.  No, too much has been said (on both sides) for that.  So, why am I writing about this?  What am I hoping to gain?

I just want  to acknowledge that this chapter of my life (though important)  is over with and move on.  I guess I just want some closure, dammit!  (I did it!  I used the dreaded “c” word!  Gasp!)   We are about to celebrate Christ’s birth.  We are coming to the end of the year.  The end of the decade.  It seems a good time for some fresh perspective to blow through and clear out all the deadwood.

I’m looking forward (with some trepidation, I admit), to seeing what 2010 brings.  After all, 2009’s been QUITE a doozy!

That I am tired.  Tired of driving my kids hither and yon 24/7.  I used to enjoy my time with them much more than I do now, I think.  At least I remember enjoying it, but these days I am a taxi driver and breaker upper of fights, a walker of eggshells (with my oldest at least) an ump and a maid much more than I am a snuggler and a reader of bedtime stories, a kisser of boo boos and a dreamer of dreams.

Yes, we are firmly entrenched in the world of teens, preteens and tweens.  (Oh my!)  Siiiiggghhhh.  What this house needs is a baby!   Shhhh.  But don’t tell my husband I said that.

…Can’t we all just get along?

On the home front it’s been almost a month on P90x.  I haven’t missed a workout and I’ve lost 12 lbs.  (I am not following the diet.  I am following a much stricter diet which is working for me.  FINALLY)!  The downside is that I havent’ missed a workout and I’m following a very strict diet, so I am exhausted AND cranky AND feeling very sorry for myself.  Gee, I guess I’ll go have an apple to make myself feel better.

Man, that was a totally depressing sentence to write!

And, after all this, I still can’t do one damn pullup unassisted.  But, you will be happy to know, my legs are looking fabulous!

Anyway, sorry for the delay with the toons.  The biggest reason they keep being so tardy is something I cannot share, so I will just end on a high note.  I have quit one of my jobs (my family really needs me to be home.  We just don’t have the kind of family where two working outside of the home parents is feasible), and this should ease some of the time crunch I have been feeling.  The toons posted are for this past week (Mon-Friday…today!)  Better late than never!

First, new toons are up.  They are for last week (10/19-10/23).  Sorry for the delay. I really am not as big a flake as it appears that I am.  Here’s the deal.  I am working part time now, and so a huge chunk of my time is gone.  I also have 5 kids with multiple needs and wants and demands, I’ve started exercising again… there’s just not enough time in the day.  I have time to write my cartoons (I have a TON written) and I have time to draw it, but I cannot seem to find the chunks of time it takes to ink it and put them into the computer.  I am trying to work it out.  Sigh… I think I just need to demand some ME time from the very demanding folks I live with.

I mean, some of the stuff I’ve written I just love!  Anyway, about these cartoons… when I reread them before I posted them I realized that I’d posted too many in a week where Manny is poking fun at Eve.  I don’t want to make him a dick, (well, not a COMPLETE one!) and so next week I’ll have to try to balance this out.  I do like them, even though he’s not being very nice.  I think they are funny and Manny and Eve do have a rather combative relationship even on a good day… my point is I am aware of it and next week we’ll maybe see Eve’s revenge.

In other news, my husband and I started P90X this week and it is HARD!  I’m actually not as sore as I anticipated being, but I am sore.  During the plyometrics tape I actually had to stop it or I would have thrown up.  Totally not used to that level of jumping around.  And they kept asking us if our heartrates were in the zone.  Um, no.  Pretty sure mine was just a wee bit too high…  So far I like it a lot.

Taking the before pictures was not so fun.  I really don’t need them hanging around.  I can’t imagine being one of those people who post their before and after pix.  Because no matter how great the after is, you are still letting the whole world in on how nasty you looked underneath it all before.  No thank you.  But I am interested in seeing if there is a change for myself.  I am following a modified version of the diet (less calories) and I am upping the cardio portion a bit since I want to lose weight and this is not billed as a weightloss program.  It’s for getting people who are at or near their goal bodies into the best shape possible.  …I just kinda skipped over the part about being at or near my goal body.  Oh well, hidey ho, maybe it’ll still work!

By the end of this thing I want to be able to do at least 5 pullups unassisted (right now I can do half of one.  Pretty pathetic).  At one point in my life I could do quite a few, but that time is not THIS time.  Then, I had both youth and fitness on my side.  Now I have middle age and sloth.  Let’s just say, it’s a different place where I find myself now.

Anyone else out there doing this workout?  Done it before?  Thoughts?

…Eve and Manny totally need to do it together.  I mean, it is RIPE for the pickins’…

I have been SO sick the last few weeks!  Sicker than I can remember being in years and years.  Just when I’d think I was getting better, I’d suddenly plunge downhill again.  I finally went to the doctor and got some antibiotics (I figured it wasn’t viral as I was the only one in the house who was sick) and man, I feel sooooo much better now!  I don’t think I’ll wait so long to go to the doctor’s again.  Thankfully, I have health insurance though.  I have a friend with none and she has to pay ridiculous amounts of money right up front to be seen.  It’s shameful.  But… that’s not what I wanted to blog about tonight.  (Another time, perhaps?)

My point was, this was not the flu.  No fever or body aches, just a persistant, awful, miserable cold.  Why did this hit me so hard?  I am in fairly decent shape, I’m not old (well, to some I am, but I say to those babies, go put your pacifiers back in your mouth and hush)!  Why couldn’t I shake this cold?  And then it hit me.  In the three weeks I was sick I suffered two significant losses.  Our dog was the first and though I know plenty of people who don’t mourn for their pets and who would think I am crazy for doing so, I really am grieving for Luna.  The other was a loss of a different kind, but it left me no less grief-stricken.  I think that I got and stayed so sick because I was ill AND sad and this is a very bad combination.

And then, just when my antibiotic engorged cells were making me feel better physically, something really neat happened that seems to have snapped me out of my mental funk as well.  Honestly, right now I am feeling perfectly marvelous and that is a very nice change after a very difficult few weeks.  This really neat thing that happened concerns my oldest daughter (I’ll call her Clementine as  I am not comfortable sharing her real name.  Suffice it to say, it ain’t Clementine)!

Anyway, Clementine is very musically gifted.  She plays 3 instruments, reads music fluently, and writes her own songs.  She also likes to sing, but I have never paid that much attention to her voice.  I knew she could pretty much sing on key, but she was always shy about singing in front of me, so I mostly heard her singing in the shower and in her room through her closed door.  As far as I could tell, she had an okay voice.  Not great but she didn’t suck either.  Just… average.  In fact, she told us this year that she wanted to try out for American Idol and we talked her out of it.  We were very blunt with her and told her that they were looking for the next Christina Aguilera, and that wasn’t her.  That if she had a bad audition, it could be broadcast for sport to a national audience.  So she didn’t try out.  She knows a girl that did though and she didn’t even make it in to see the judges, and she’s got a pretty good voice.  Definitely good enough to see the judges at least, I’d think!  (Though she isn’t a freak, so there is that…)

Anyway, then last  year Clem tried out for some play or something and she sang Summertime and apparently she was fantastic.  All her friends kept telling me what a marvelous voice she had but she would never sing it for me.  I even tried to bribe her, to no avail.  I put it down to the hyperbole of friendship and thought nothing else of it.  Then this year Clem decided to try out for the talent show.  She played three songs for me and asked me to pick one for her to sing.  I wasn’t familiar with any of the songs (one was a John Mayer one, I remember that) so I picked the one I thought was the prettiest.  I had no idea if she could do it justice or not.

Clem made the talent show and then steadfastly refused to sing her song for me.  I have no idea why she is so nervous about singing in front of me and not in front of the entire school!  To make a long story only a little bit shorter, the talent show was this past weekend.  I was SO nervous for her.  When she walked out on stage I literally hunched over in my seat and squeezed my eyes shut and prayed “Please don’t suck!  Please don’t suck!  Please don’t SUCK!”

And she opened her mouth and…  blew the fricking roof off the place!  My baby can SANG!!!!  It was one of the neatest things I have ever witnessed.  I had completely underestimated my daughter and I thoroughly enjoyed being proven wrong.  It was all I could do not to twirl my panythose over my head and scream “Go Clem, go!!!” and stomp and whistle repeatedly  before running a couple or three laps around the auditorium pumping my fists and hyperventilating…  perhaps I’ll save that for her graduation from college…

Anyway, so I taped it.  Our camera has been thrown about a bit by my kids and is still functional, but the video portion is kind of broken.  Suffice it to say, I got an audio tape of her performance, but you couldn’t see anything on the video.  I got home and told my husband how good she was and he didn’t believe me.  Kind of rolled his eyes and smirked.  Suuurrre she is.  Uh huh.  Sure.  So I played him the tape.  After 30 seconds he got this big ol’ grin on his face and said in an awed voice, “WHEN did she get good?!”  Followed by, “Are you sure that’s OUR Clem?”

I tell you, it was like… it’s like finding out your child has secretly been going to medical school or something, and you find out about it  by happening upon them performing complicated  surgery out of the blue (well, maybe it’s not EXACTLY like that but I’m sure it’s close…)

So, the next night Sawyer’s aide offered to watch him so we could go to the show as a family and this was marvelous.  Clem sang it even better the second night.  Then we found out that this local music guru was also blown away by my baby and he has asked her to sing backup vocals on some record!  She will get paid good money for this.  My baby’s first gig!  I am so proud I am about to break out in hives!

I still hope she stays away from American Idol (that show can chew you up and spit you out) but I have learned my lesson.  I will never again underestimate my kids or try to talk them out of something they want to do.  Sink or swim, they should always be encouraged to try.  I thought I was protecting her, but by doing that I was actually holding her back.  I don’t know if God wants her to pursue singing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if He does.  Clem has always wanted to be a Vet, but lately she’s been talking of double majoring (pre-med and music).  The desire is there, the talent is there, the luck and the looks (you KNOW it’s a factor!) are there… who knows?

To sum up, finding out my baby is a sublime singer has both knocked my socks off AND knocked me out of my funk, and I am so very grateful for it.

Highly recommended…

(Toon to be posted tomorrow.  Sorry for the delay again).

Sorry about the glitch. Last night we had some minor computer problems. But now, the strips that were due last week are up.

Again, sorry for the delay. New toon due on Monday now.

A few weeks ago I went to pick up something I needed from a friend’s house. At the time, she was very sick with the flu and when I got there it was like a plague house from the middle ages. She opened the front door as I came up the steps and waved me off. She threw me her keys and told me to get what I needed from the garage and then leave her keys down there. Don’t come up, you DON’T want to catch this!

Let me tell you, it freaked me right on out. I went home and scrubbed my hands and hoped I didn’t catch anything.

Well, I didn’t catch the flu but I have come down with a horrible cold. And it’s just lingering on and on and on. I feel sicker now than I did last week. I sound like crap as I have almost completely lost my voice, and my cough sounds like a wet death rattle (now THERE’S a vivid image)!

And the thing is, I never get sick. The last cold I had was years ago. The other thing is that I’m the only one in my house that’s sick! How unfair is that? And where the hell did I pick up this bug?! (Being as I’m fanatical about hand-washing). And the thing is, I don’t even get to enjoy being sick. To get a nice break and lie down while people bring me hot soup and sandwiches. No, apparently life is determined to just keep marching on no matter HOW I happen to feel. …I HATE that.

Which is why it has taken me so long to post my cartoons (I am about to post the missing one’s for this week. Tuesday through Friday. Which means that yes, this week I only manged to do Sunday and Monday. I suck). Anyway, remember, I take Saturday’s and Sunday’s off, so my next cartoon will be on Monday. I should be better by then. No, REALLY. At least I HOPE I am.

On the bright side, at least I’m losing weight!

Today we picked up the ashes of our dog Luna from the vet’s office. It was a very sad thing to get back this small, heavy little canister and realize that it was all that was left of our good friend. In the spring, we are going to plant a tree and bury her ashes underneath it, along with the ashes of our cat Butterscotch who died 2 years ago. Let me tell you, I’m glad our cats are just kittens right now and will hopefully live good long lives because I am not emotionally ready for another death.

That being said, we have started discussing what kind of dog we’d eventually like to get. Luna was black lab mix. We got her from the pound, so I don’t know what her other mix was. I always suspected it was a doberman because she had a very deep bark and she was a very protective of us, and she had a doberman’s small, fine head. She was a good mix. The joy and friendliness of the lab mixed with the dobie’s protective nature. What a great dog.

All we do know is that we don’t want a really small dog (they can’t get out of the way like kittens can and someone would trample it in this house!), nor do we want a huge dog. No terriers because they dig too much and we don’t want a dog that barks constantly either. I’d take another lab in a heartbeat but Luna’s hips were bad and they were bad from the time she was quite young, and they got progressively worse. Add arthritis to the mix and she was a hobbled dog in pain. It was horrible to watch her decline and I don’t want to do it again. So no breeds with bad hips either. And they have to be good with children.

I was leaning strongly towards a border collie because they are so beautiful, but then I started wondering how barky they were. They’re herding dogs… probably QUITE barky. Hmmmm…..

So, being in need of some fresh ideas and perspective, I thought I’d ask this here. What kind of dog should we get? What are your favorite breeds and why? We will most likely get this dog from the pound too, but the pounds here are SO full of dogs all the time that we really will be able to decide on a breed and just go save one. …Probably.

We will not be getting a dog until next year some time, but I want to get this decision finalized.

I’ll keep you posted on what we decide.