Today when I got up, it seemed like it was gonna keep raining. After me and Lilly had some breakfast (at around 2:00 PM -- yes, we've still kinda got our days & nights mixed up) we had to go to town to run by the bank and cash a check, and run by the pharmacy to pick up both mine and Lilly's 'crazy pills'. On our way to town, the sky cleared up, and it didn't rain all day, thank goodness. I was so sick of the rain. It was good to get out of the house and not get completely soaked to death in the process. I knew it would end up being a good day to finally get to mow my grass. As we were starting to head back home, however, Lilly asked to go to the park. I hadn't intended for us to go to the park, but I felt sorry for Lilly because she loves to get out and do stuff, but we hadn't been able to do much fun outside stuff lately because of the rain. I told Lilly that the playground at the park might be wet from all the rain, but she said she didn't care. So we went ahead and went to the park. Lilly hopped out of the car and started playing. There was a mom there with 5 kids (the oldest being about 7), and she would not stop yelling at them. She got on my nerves so bad. She seemed very controlling. If I had been the kind of person that wasn't shy about confronting strangers, I would have given her a piece of my mind. She was so uptight and tense, it's like she had given herself a lemon juice enema when she woke up this morning. She was horrible! I realize that she was just trying to get her kids to 'behave', but from what I could tell, they were playing just fine and not doing anything wrong. The mom kept getting pissed at the kids for not 'listening' to her, but face it, if you're around somebody that constantly yells, nags, and nitpicks, pretty soon you get sick of it and start tuning it out until you reach the point where you no longer hear them at all. That crazy lady really jangled my nerves. Me and Lilly hadn't been there very long, when all of a sudden the crazy mom snapped and yelled to her kids "THAT'S IT; since NOBODY will LISTEN to me, WE'RE LEAVING"!!! Apparently the crazy mom kept getting pissed that her kids kept disobeying her and playing in an area of the playgroung that was muddy. Well, hello, it's been raining its @$$ off for days, and you take your kids outside; what do you expect? Of course it's gonna be wet and muddy! But the playground is almost completely mulched. And it's not like the kids were rolling around on the ground like pigs and making mud pies or anything; it seemed to me like the only contact they had with any mud or dirt was while they were walking and running around the playground. One of the kids, a little boy who looked to be maybe 3, was a little hesitant to leave the playground (like almost all kids are). He wasn't hurrying fast enough for his psycho mommy, so she went over to him, and screamed at him multiple times for him to "GIVE ME YOUR HAND"!!! Seriously? Would you be happy to give a psycho who's screaming at you (and probably does all the time) your hand? Next thing I knew, I heard the psycho mom give that little boy 3 smacks on his butt with her hand. Which, yeah, sometimes it's necessary to pop your kid, but she seemed to be doing it out of anger, and I couldn't help but feel that she was satisfied to take some of her frustration out by whacking the kid. While she was spanking one kid, she was making another little girl wipe her shoes off with a paper towel. Gee, I guess she didn't want to get a few particles of playground dirt in her stupid precious SUV. The psycho mom finally got all her kids rounded up, and they began loading up in her SUV. She angrily screamed at them through gnashed teeth to "BUCKLE UP" while she made another little girl stand there with both hands on the side of the car so she could give her 3 smacks on the rear. The psycho mom was doing it angrily. By that time, all the youngest kids were wailing and crying loudly, and they all finally got loaded in the car and ready to leave. I could hear the psycho mom yelling at the kids that she was sick of them not ever listening to her, and explaining basically that if they don't obey her, then the consequenses are a punishment. Which of course, is reasonable, but the way the psycho mom was screaming at the kids, it was just awful. I felt so sorry for those poor little kiddos, and their psycho mom made me sick. She really needed to lighten up. Kids are adventurous; they're gonna get dirty, especially if they go outside on a playground after it rains. If you didn't want your kids to get dirty, you shouldn't have taken them outside in the first place. It's unfairly tempting. It would be like taking a recovering food addict to a pizza party and telling them that they're not allowed to have a bite; so later when you discover them in a darkened bathroom eating one breadstick, you slap the crap out of them and storm out of the party while fussing at them that you're sick of them not ever listening to or obeying you? How fair is that?
Crazy psycho mom. Not to mention the fact that what is she doing with 5 kids anyway? It's stressful enough just having 1 kid. I can't imagine having any more than 1, much less 5 of them!
Anyway, that lady totally sucked, and as they drove away, I saw that they were from out of town. I believe their license plate said Virginia. Sheesh. I can only hope that some brave somebody, sometime, somewhere, witnesses that lady acting so awful to her poor kids, and gives her a much needed reality check. That lady needs to chill! I mean, I could understand getting really upset and yelling and spanking all your kids if they won't stop doing something dumb and dangerous like playing in the road, or being blatantly defiant. But you've gotta pick your battles, and let your kids be kids, for crying out loud!
Sheesh!
Anyway, I let Lilly play at the playground for maybe an hour and a half, and when it got to be about 6:15, we had to go. We needed to go back home and feed our pets their suppers, eat supper ourselves, and since it hadn't rained any more today, I was excited to finally get to mow my unruly grass! I had checked the weather forecast again, and this time it was down to pretty much only 10% chances of rain for the next 5 days. So I was relieved to see that.
After I got finished mowing the grass, I decided to walk down to check on that cute little bird nest, since I hadn't been able to for days. When I got down there to it, I could see immediately that something was wrong. The nest was a lot smaller, and little pieces of it were blown down. I'm guessing that all the storms we've had over the past few days may have damaged it. I looked around to see if I could see any eggs, eggshells, or dead birds, but there wasn't anything like that around. Finally, I figured that the nest was probably abandoned now for whatever reason, so I took a stick and began gently tapping and scraping to get the remnants of it down so I could investigate. There wasn't much left of the nest at all. But there were no eggs, shells, or skeletal remains in what was left of the nest. So I'm hoping for the best; that the eggs hatched, the nestlings fledged, and then the nest just wasn't needed anymore. I sure do hope that the storms (or some weird predator) didn't somehow mess the nest up and kill all the baby birds. Oh, well, whaddaya do? That's nature!
Jamie starts his drive home from Illinois today, and expects to be back home around 6:00 PM this evening. He said he took some pictures, so if he has any good ones, I'll post them. Jamie will still be off work on vacation the rest of this week (his workplace actually closes the week of July 4th every year, and gives all their employees a temporary layoff so they can basically all have a paid vacation). So that's good.
And next week, Lilly will be gone to summer camp from Monday through Friday! It's 4-H camp down at 'Rock Eagle', and she's been super-ultra-excited about getting to go for months now! I know she's gonna have a blast. It should be really fun and good for her. It will be really weird not having Lilly around the house for 5 days straight (it'll be the longest she's ever been away from home, and the first time she's ever stayed out of town), but I must admit that I'm secretly looking forward to getting a break. Maybe I'll finally be able to get a lot of stuff done around the house that needs doing (and also get to do some things that I would like to do for a change, instead of having to entertain Lilly and do what she wants to do all the time)! ;)
I've been using my Nook to blog with, and it works ok. Lilly's been using the laptop with the messed up 'Shift', 'A', and '1/!' keys to watch funny videos on YouTube with. Using the Nook to blog is about as big of a pain in the @$$ as the messed-up laptop is, but at least it's better than nothing. Oh well!
I was excited today to see that I got another small paycheck for the week and few days that we worked that was after the payroll cutoff for that month. I thought that I should probably be getting another little paycheck, and they pay us on the last day of every month, so when I saw that bit of money had been deposited this morning, it was a nice surprise, especially since Jamie has taken that trip to Illinois and has used some money doing that. I would never tell him that he couldn't go, though, (unless we happened to be flat broke) because he probably hasn't been back up there to Illinois since he was a kid, and he never gets to see any of his relatives on his mom's side, since they all live so far away.
Jamie did go to the flea market a couple of weekends in a row to sell a bunch of stuff to make some money for his trip, so that was cool. One of the things he does at work is manufactures all different kinds of bags. I don't really know how to explain it. Laundry bags, mainly, of all different sizes. They even make body bags for dead bodies. Anyway, the boss at Jamie's work has been making a whole bunch of small laundry-style bags for Jamie to sell at the flea market, and they split the profit (Jamie gets most of the money, though). So that's been nice, and I think Jamie's probably gonna continue to sell stuff at the flea market for a while to come. And we've been able to get rid of some of the stuff we've had laying around the house that we don't have any use for that's just been collecting dust and taking up room that is too good to throw away, but that we just don't want to mess with donating it to a thrift store. Like Lilly's two bicycles that she outgrew years ago, and stuff that Jamie had drug out of the dumpsters when he used to drive the garbage truck. And Jamie's old music speakers for vehicles that have just been taking up room under the crawlspace of our house.
Even I got in on the act. Last year when I didn't really know what to do with myself, I got the notion that maybe I could make some money by making and selling bead jewelry. I made tons of stuff, but was too shy and not confident enough in my skills or quality of what I had made. I liked what I made, but I just had these visions of trying to sell my stuff, and people looking at it, wrinkling up their noses, saying that the price was too high, or trying on a piece of jewelry, only to have it come loose and spill beads everywhere or something awful like that. But since Jamie was going to the flea market anyway, I decided to just send my jewelry with him to lay out there and see what people's reactions were. I wouldn't be there, so if anything went wrong, I wouldn't have to witness it and be mortified! LOL! I didn't really know what to price my stuff, so Jamie, who has years of prior flea market experience, helped me. I only had a couple of things that were $5; the rest were 25¢, $2, $3, and $4. Well, I ended up selling $31 worth of jewelry that I had made in just that one trip to the flea market. So that made me feel really good, and gave my confidence a huge boost. I offered to give Jamie some of the money since he had to sit there and sell it for me, but he wouldn't take any money. So that was sweet.
Jamie said that another guy had set up next to him with a table full of Made In China jewelry, but people passed it up and went for my handmade stuff instead. One lady in particular bought a whole bunch of my stuff; probably $20 worth. And another lady bought a bracelet for her 86-year-old mother that I had made, which made it all worthwhile to me. Hearing that really made my day!
So I think whenever Jamie goes back to the flea market to sell more stuff, I'll just keep sending more of my handmade jewelry with him to sell. It's just turned out to be kind of a fun thing to do. And it's nice when he brings me home a little wad of cash and tells me how everyone exclaimed that my jewelry was some of the most beautiful they've seen! :D
Yay me! :)
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