In case you can’t remember what this title means, I’m going through 10+ years of unfinished draft blog posts that have accumulated, and releasing them unfinished into the wild. It’s, like, spring cleaning for blogs.

NaNoWriMo
Last Modified: 11/3/11

I am attempting NaNoWriMo again.

The Squid has learned to crawl. Boo for mobility.

I’m doing pretty good on my wordcount.

The DragonMonkey poured an entire box of Rice Krispies down the bathroom sink right about the time I hit word 1500.

I made it to 1700 words last night.

The DragonMonkey learned how to eat the little paper pieces from his Elefun game. He just came to stand in front of me, standing eerily still and quiet.

“DM?”

Eyes wide, he gave one of those creepy, deep, weird gag of a burps that preceed vomiting. The papery piece flew into my lap, strangely dry. He picked it up, smiled broadly, and went back into the living room.

I made a little headway today. The book’s not taking the direction I had originally planned, but it seems to be going nonetheless.

In other news, the Squid has decided to go from two teeth to six, simultaneously. Sleep has not been abundance in in this household. And if he doesn’t learn how to OPEN HIS FRIGGIN MOUTH BEFORE HE DECIDES TO TWIST HIS HEAD AROUND TO LOOK AT SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE OF A NURSING SESSION, I’m not going to have anything left to nurse him with.

Club Dirt:
Last Modified: 1/6/12

He was exceptionally calm in the arena.

Three years old, 15.3 hands, and probably 1150 pounds, Willie was anything but small. His name was “WillieBeACutter”, and the answer turned out to be a resounding “no”. Cutting horses need to be agile, quick, and graceful.

Willie was strong, sturdy, a little slow on his turns, and, well, kind of clumsy. Well, to be honest, it was less clumsy and more awkward. He was growing fast, and when you rode him it felt like riding piggyback on a junior high boy – he was strong enough, but he just wasn’t all that coordinated.

I hopped on him

I’ve Got Mom Butt
Last Modified: 2/14/12

The title says it all.

Squidgelet is now officially a year old. According to all the manuals, all the chub you have left on you when your baby hits a year is YOUR fat, not baby fat.

Well, crap.

I mean, there are some good things about being fat.

I never get cold any more.

When I go see a movie, I don’t have to worry about the seat cushion being too hard – I’ve brought my own squishy seat cushion with me.

When I’m out for a walk I don’t have to worry about anybody whistling at me like they used to.

I float great in water. Between that and the never getting cold, I imagine I could be a pretty serious competitor at long-distance cold water swimming.

I do know I’d kick some serious heiny at a game of “Who Can Survive the Longest Without Food on a Desert Island”. Anyone want to play with me? Winner gets to eat all the losers! Anyone? You there, in the back— is that a hand? No?

I never used to have to worry about what I ate, or working out. I’m active by nature, and horses gave me all the exercise I needed. Maybe I didn’t look like a supermodel, but I was healthy.

Surprisingly, sitting at a computer for 10 hours a day, followed by going home to do laundry isn’t quit as effective at keeping a person in fighting trim shape.

Up On My Soapbox
Last Modified: 7/14/2012

Seriously people… spay and neuter your pets. Also, and this may not make me a lot of friends, but here you go nonetheless:

There is nothing wrong with putting a pet to sleep if it’s not adoptable. Sick, old, too shy to cope…. there are a lot of healthy, happy, young pets dying in shelters right now. Don’t foist the job off on someone else.

Death, when done humanely, isn’t a bad thing. There are a lot worse ways to go than euthanasia, and those ways usually take a lot longer, and involve quite a bit of suffering. If you can’t afford a vet, an animal shelter will generally do it for a small donation (although you won’t be allowed in the room with your pet.) I’m not one of those ONE OWNER FOR LIFE!!!!! activists. I’m not saying we don’t have a responsibility to the pets we take on, but bad things happen to good people, and in this economy, you just never know. There is no shortage of pets in this world – there is a HUGE shortage of people doing the right thing.

Fat Cat was one day away from being dropped at the pound. Coyote was the kitten of a starving, stray pregnant cat that a kind hearted lady started feeding. Xerox you just read about. Even Comet (The Bean’s cat who finally got fed up and ran away after I brought home Coyote) was a stray – a starving, mangy, completely feral kitten that The Bean lured out of an engine block with the balogna from his sandwich.

I guess I’m just thinking about this because I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with Xerox. If I had the balls (ovaries?) I would wait for her to have her kittens, if she is pregnant, then take her in to get spayed and quietly euthanize them. It’s horrible to say out loud, but this town is crawling with stray cats, there are “free kittens!” signs everywhere, and I don’t have the funds to spay/neuter all the kittens before find them homes.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I know I don’t have it in me. Besides, when

No Title
Last Modified: 7/11/12

The DragonMonkey wanted to go to “Portwand”. The last time we went to Portland we met up with Jamethiel and her Squidgelet, and he had an awesome time in the park with them. He’s been begging to go back ever since.

When The Bean and I told him we were taking a trip, and then informed him it was not “Portwand”, much crying, and drama, and temper-tantrums immediately ensued.

He wanted to go to Portwand.

Portwand is where he wanted to go.

Why weren’t we going to Portwand?

“Portwand! Portwand! PORTWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND!” he moaned at full-volume, writhing on the ground, flinging his hands about in desperation. All he needed was a loincloth and a volleyball floating away from him, and he could have been reenacting the “Wilsoooooon!” scene from CastAway.

I really needed to discipline him.

But it was only twenty minutes to his bedtime, and I was exhausted. Parenting is not for the faint of heart.

As I stood there, contemplating which corner I should send him to, the Squidgelet wandered up beside me. He stood there, looking down at his purple-faced brother quietly for a moment, then looked back at me with a strangely adult, amused look. If he knew how to roll his eyes, he would have. Instead, he settled for leaving the silliness behind him and wandered off to go play with a toy train.

Laid-back babies are really fun. Sometimes they have really good ideas, too.

Leaving the DragonMonkey to howl on his own, I followed Squidgelet over to the toy pile and started playing with him.

The DragonMonkey flopped about for a few moments, but it’s just not as fulfilling without an audience, so he dragged himself over to us, flopped down on the ground, and began his fit again.

“Pooooortwaaaaaaand….”

In desperation, I snapped out, “Well, fine. We’ll go to Portland, but then you won’t get to see the chickens.”

Nineteen more minutes to bedtime. Nineteen more minutes to bedtime. Nineteen more minutes…

He’d already been in time out several times that morning, and

I gotta admit, this draft dump has been a lot of fun. I can’t wait until the day I log in and the only drafts in my inbox are current drafts I’m actively working on.

Also, if we’re admitting things, while it’s nice to have the lights back on here on the blog, the timing of getting them turned off was kind of fortuitous.

I could say I spent the entire time fretting over all the blogs I never got to write….

But the truth is I spent the last month nursing my busy lifestyle and a broken arm.

On April 14th my stepdad and I were unloading a corral panel from a trailer, when I realized how slippery the trailer ramp was. Maybe it was a combo of the light misting rain, maybe it was the slippery soles of my tennis shoes, but whatever it was, I realized that the trailer ramp was slick as snot.

I turned around to tell him, “Be careful! Don’t slip!” when both my legs shot out from underneath me.

My arms reached back to brace myself, and I had just enough time to think, “That’s not how you fall, Becky, not if you want to avoid breaking bones. For heaven’s sakes, unlock your elbows,” before my locked arms caught all of my weight. I think I hit even harder than normal because my arms were higher up on the ramp than my lower half, so it was a very jarring, sudden shock.

At first they thought I’d broken my right wrist and my left elbow, but it turned outo just be a radial head comminuted fracture. PHEW.

I’ve gotta tell you, I am NOT a fan of slowly typing one letter at a time with one hand. I was almost I was almost glad the blog was down, because it provided me a respite from feeling like I had to type.

Having a broken arm, and a husband working till crazy late each night at work, and two horses, and four baby goats and a full time job and four human kids and and and….

And I probably would have had a nervous breakdown, but it was one of those moments in life where people just….. It was like they rose up from hiding places in the bushes, all around me, just to help me.

People who had never been to my house before were dropping off dinners. Good friends came over and straightened the house and did ALL OF MY FRIGGIN LAUNDRY. People helped with the goats, and helped with the kids, and just…

It was almost too much helping. I felt guilty accepting it, knowing I couldn’t pay everyone back. It was humbling, even though I needed it desperately. My mom is in Mexico at the moment with sick family members, and the Bean’s busy season has extended well beyond its normal time period, and we also had the stomach flu rip through here, and the goats got into poisonous stuff and tried to kill themselves… and, and, and, and…

Nothing was bad in and of itself, but when it all added up, I was definitely overwhelmed.

People are so good, for the most part. It’s just that the bad stories are so much juicier to tell.

I stay off of Facebook a lot, nowadays. It has become such a… shouty place. I have friends from all the way on the left side of the equation to all the way on the right…. and I even have them in that same spectrum from other countries.

One of my favorite FB “friends” I picked up is some dude from Russia who posts pictures of cool dogs and angry political rant memes that I don’t understand a word of. I also have someone from the middle east who posts a lot of political rants.

I mean, I’m pretty sure they’re political rants take, just because they look exactly like the kind of rants and memes that fill my FB feed, only in a different language. I could be wrong. Maybe they’re really impassioned cookie recipes?

Anyways, I like to see the political memes in English sandwiched between one in Russian and one in Arabic, because it helps keep me from taking anything too seriously. I still keep trying to use social media for the human connection, as I have for the past decade.

Unfortunately, lately every time I log in, I start to feel a little bit like this fence:

Of course, I don’t know why I’m complaining. There’s a very simple cure, and it works every time (although I always seem to come creeping back): I delete the app of my cell phone and just start interacting with people around me.

I gave a ride to some skinny kid toting a bunch of big ol’ bags the other day. I didn’t have any kids in the car, and I was driving the “flip” car (The Bean likes to fix vehicles up and flip them, one at a time), so I felt safe… or at the very least, safeish.

Intellectually I thought it was a horrible idea, but that still, small voice inside me told me to do it, so I did.

I can’t say why I did it, except that the three times I’ve picked someone up on the side of the road, it’s been because I was pretty sure God told me to, so I did.

The kid was thankful, not that I needed gratitude. It just felt… nice. It was nice to connect with a total stranger, to reach out and give an warm ride in the cold. He said it was nice on his end, too, just to be seen. So many cars drove past him without stopping to see if he was okay.

And that was it.

We chatted about recent rains, and a couple of other things, and then he was out of my car and I doubt I’ll ever see him again. We didn’t have any giant, Chicken Soup for the Soul moment. It wasn’t this grand gesture that changed his life – he had actually just gotten out of rehab, and while I hope he is able to successfully turn his life around, it’s not really any of my business. It was just a five minute car ride to make his day easier, because I could.

I find that the more I am off of shouty Facebook, and the more I have these small interactions with people all around me, the better I am on the inside. I feel hope, and that hope fills me up and allows me to pour out more into others.

The angrier I get, the more I find myself outraged by whatever travesty is going on nationally…. the more I get mired in the muck of obsessing about how I feel about things, the less I am able to do for humanity.

Maybe I am part of the problem, as so many people seem to say, by not standing beside them and shouting my anger into the wind and raising awareness.

Maybe I am complicit. Maybe I am the problem.

Maybe it’s the coward’s way out, beneath a cloak of privilege, but I just. Don’t. Want. To. Be. Angry. All. The. Time.

I don’t feel like I *can* be angry all the time, not and stay healthy, and there just doesn’t seem to be a space to take a calming breath between waves of fury on social media. Everything seems to flow from one inflammatory topic to the next, on all sides of the political spectrum, and, well,

So I work during the day, and play with my kids on the evenings and weekends.

I raise my goats, and cut the grass, stare in my backyard at the horses and feel grateful.

I read good books and bad books and berate myself for not getting up early enough to go jogging.

I fight with The Bean, and then we make up, and we lay beside each other on the couch after the kids go to bed, shoulders touching as I read my book and he watches videos about motorcycle engines.

It’s quiet, and good, and it gives me enough peace on the inside that I feel like I can at least help out others, in small ways.

I want to do more, but there are literally only so many hours in the day. So I give rides when I can, and I finally got my computer situation fixed so I can start back working on social media support for foster kids when I can, and I serve on the library board, and offer to babysit other people’s kids when my nerves aren’t too frayed from chasing after my own.

It’s not much, not in the grand scheme of things, but I think that’s okay. I think it’s okay not to be a world leader, or a political money and shaker, but just to help out in small ways where you can, when you can.

Man, this post ended up a lot more maudlin than I was intending, and I’m sure that if I looked at a calendar and added up days I would see why (would it even be a Becky post if there wasn’t a moment of TMI?), and honest-to-goodness this is not the tone I was hoping for in this blog post. I was hoping to pass along more of a “Hey, this is what has been making me feel better when I get depressed after going on social media- feel free to try it, if you’re feeling down by all the shouting, too.”

Anyways, to awkwardly change the subject from the soapboxy, slightly depressed writing hole I just dug myself into….

Can you believe Reverie is already a year old?!

I think I’ll end this post, and maybe start work on a new one that’s a belated happy birthday post to her.