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This is what i want to put on my pumpkin this year. Last year it was a No-Cats allowed sign, and last fortnight it was a regular joe-schmoe of a kin. Now i am going to put night-fowl on my hallowed fruit.

We’re still not sleeping at all. Three things happened last night.
1) I consciously pulled the covers off Andy thinking I was actually covering him better (it was hard to know in the dark) and we had a lucid conversation about it
2) I felt really stupid when I realized I laughed aloud at my daydream (the closest I get to sleep dreaming) of the tortoise and hippo friends eating our cupcakes and getting frosting around their mouths
3) we didnt sleep

 Last night we watched Jay Leno interview Ron Paul. Honestly, I don’t care for any of the candidates, neither do I want them any closer to the White House than you can get on a tour-bus route.

Ron Paul might be a better candidate than Obama, McCain, Clinton, Biden or FRED THOMPSON har har har, but considering that Economist Mitt Romney is still in the running and America’s economy is screwed…..

 Paul spent the majority of his time trying to come up with slick wisecracks at the government as if he were the people’s voice. He starts saying that the government must cut back on taxes and let the public retain and circulate the “fruits of their labor” in their communities, and how we must revive the constitution and criticise Washington for not upholding it. When questioned about IRS abolishment, Paul glibly quips “I’m all for a flat tax, but I want to make it real flat, like zero” (APPLUASE APPLAUSE).
Then he hits the issue of Iraq.  So Ron Paul, how do you feel about Iraq? He wants to pull everyone out as soon as possible (of course). But Ron Paul, don’t you think that pulling them out would cause more damage now? Being a Dr (polishes fingernails) he of course uses a Dr analogy. only it SUCKS.
“If I were to make the wrong diagnosis, I wouldn’t keep making it. We need to admit we made a mistake. Our troops are disenchanted. I don’t think we are safer at all. We are more vulnerable today looking at our current policy.”Nobody is going to touch us militarily. Our greatest threat is to that of our civil liberties at home.”

I have 2 problems with that statement. First, Iraq never came to America asking for a diagnosis or prescription so Paul can retract that pointless analogy. Secondly, “nobody is going to touch us militarily”? Excuse me? Frankly, I think America needs to realize that half the world despises them. No one has touched America because no individual country has the firepower to do so. But what is going to happen when North Korea, China and Russia decide to unite to form a superpower of the East? Then what? Still think America’s untouchable? Because it sure is going to be a target. America has angered the more totalitarian East for as long as history has been recorded and i think it foolhardy to assume America to be untouchable. Makes me angry.

I would rather see a presidential candidate who believed in what he said and sold what he advertised( even if that wasnt quite conducive to my beliefs) before I voted a people pleasing snake into office. Disgusting.

Tonight when eating gum given to me, we realized that poor people don’t eat sweets. We eat potatoes and things to make us operate, not things to make us say Yum. Gum is also not bought by poor people because technically its uneccessary. So having a piece of gum tonight was actually, quite a glorious experience.

I don’t sleep anymore. I lie in bed and get frustrated that I’m awake when my alarm goes off. That is the worst feeling next to waking up feeling like you only fell asleep 2 minutes ago – at least then you know you had SOME sleep. I lie in bed stressing about all kinds of things I can’t cure while horizontal in the dark. Things such as:
My paperwork
My working situation
Whether I’m meant to do more school
The news
Church.
As a consequence, last night I had a dream that resembled the production style of Antony Hopkin’s new movie which consists of eclectic, epileptic fit inducing scenes edited in a similar manner. I woke up several times stressed and discombobulated. Andy is also not sleeping, for the same reasons I am not which means that the two of us spend the hours between 12 and 8 wriggling around the night like a couple of bed-ridden whirly bugs. I dont really know what whirly bugs are, but I really like their name.

When I came to get Andy from school today, he had me park so I could come and see ’something’. I had to park a block away and run to where he was standing, but it was so worth it. He was standing by the duckpond where he pointed to a floating log with 4 turtles lined up on it. 3 adults and one baby. They were soaking up the sun and looked like they were going to burst into a rendition of do-re-mi. Best thing I’ve seen all week.

I wake up most mornings hoping I will get some work that week so we can subsist on something other than fresh air, and be able to put the heating on when its freezing cold. I have a couple days a week up at Kay & Margarets doing their stuff, and Magaret wants me to work at her office sometime which will be good work, but its not enough (even combined with Loralee’s). It’s hard to find things that pay cash in hand though. I mean take that catering thing for example? I worked for 4 hours for him and he refused to pay me. And what can I do about it other than argue aggressively? absolutely nothing. I got screwed over by that comic guy too.

Anyway. I found another cleaning job i thought might work. Sure its $8.25 an hour but, better that than nothing.
Maybe.
I pull up at a big house, with 7 cars ( 2 are SUV’s). I am greeted by a woman with fake, black hair and boobs pushed up to her collar bones who claims that she’s an overachieving ‘mom’ who expects me to follow her around and do as she says, because she has A Very Serious Regime. Nazi.
So I do, I follow her around for 2 hours. She’s overachieving in that she purifies all drinking water to make the pH more alkali (because humans are “just so acidic and they don’t need to be”) and has all her drawers labelled (yeah, labelled but full of the wrong stuff i.e. I found tea towels and sachets of Lime and Lemon Herbal Drink in the Pots & Pan’s cupboard). Her house was a total disaster, but she insisted she was totally ridiculously organized and faked having this amazing laundry routine that totally got every bit of dirty clothing through the wash at least twice a week (whaaaaaaa?). She used approximately 12 laundry baskets to emphasize how efficient she was with her 6 kids laundry. May I point out that the laundry/dining/bedrooms/lounge room were heaped with clothes that had not navigated successfully towards theses oh-so-effective laundry baskets. Weird.
>After dragging me from the kitchen (where she instructed me to stick a singular bowling badge to her Amazingly Talented Son’s Scout Shirt) to the Laundry room (where I was told that under no circumstances was I to do red loads, and that I needed to hang up all 10 year old Vashti’s Hollister T-shirts – she’s really trendy (yeah, I noticed when I saw your 10 year old sporting a pair of 7’s)) before being yanked off upstairs to put some new dance shoes on Vashti’s dolphin bed (she’s just such a fantastic dancer, ballroom y’know, she dances like 30 hours a week) I was told off for not finishing on her son’s shirt or completing laundry.
What?
I told her I wasn’t interested in doing that full time by any means thanks very much. She persisted even called me back this morning when I was showering to tell me she wants to reconfigure a wage etc ebcause she “thought our personalities clicked so well”
Wow. I must be better at acting than I thought.

I am disappointed. Wish I’d known my paperwork would have been screwed. I would have applied for the MSW program here and gotten licensed just as Andy graduated.

  We will move to a small village in France where we will take trips after work to get bread from the bakery, apples from the green grocers and jam from Monoprix. We will take our own bags to collect the food and return home to construct dinner, read a good book, paint a picture and prepare for an evening walk. I expect this will alleviate our stress.

This is what Andy’s High School English teacher said about Andy’s CD…on his blog! hip!
“I recently picked up a cd by FHS grad Andy Martin, and it’s pretty good stuff. Andy’s tunes present a nice blend of folk and rock and pop (the cd reminded me most immediately of the Three Bens, particularly Kweller).
There’s a lot here about love and travel and on repeated listenings the cd suggests a young man wrestling with finding his place and making mistakes coming to terms with the woman who may or may not be of his dreams. The closing piece, “Piano Song,” finds him singing “take me where you go,” broken and healed, settled into the business of loving enough to give up complete control of his life. Nice that it’s the track that includes a violin contribution by the woman who is now his wife.
It’s a pretty mature album for such a young guy, which is not to suggest that it suffers from the Deadly Earnestness that often afflicts folky music. There’s a lot of fun here, and a nice range from the Dylanesque pieces (“Falling Off”) to solid rockers (“The Valley Waits”). His vocal styling is loose and relaxed; not always vocally precise, but always personal. The production on the cd matches that—solid, but not overly slick. Overall it’s a nice contrast to the plastic over-produced slickness of top 40 without requiring the listener to endure amateurish experiments in odd noisemaking.
I have listened to this cd over and over and would be happy to own it if I had never met Andy in my life. You can get yourself a copy by websurfing your way to www.andybobmartin.com”
you can read the original here!