I haven't been sleeping well anyways.

Reed has learned how to climb out of his crib.

I cannot make a big enough deal about this, can't get across what a huge change this will mean for us. I'm pretty sure that he forgot almost as soon as he learned, but that means that we are that much closer to turning his bed into a big-boy-bed, that much closer to The End of Sleeping at Night for Mom. Like, POOF!- Now I lay awake at night listening for any noises that indicate that my child has padded into the bathroom and is drowning in the toilet. Or has wandered into the kitchen and is sticking his soft little hand down into the blender while pressing the "frappe" button. Or has gotten into mama's gin. MY GIN, REED. MY GIN.

Today I did something fun.

I donated a whole lot of hair to Locks of Love.



Here I am before I left this morning (with wet hair):



And here I am now (after much sweating and kid-wrangling):



Tomorrow I will style it and take more pictures.

I love the taste of phlegm in the morning.

This week I have a bronchial infection and it is very seriously sucking my will to live. Last night I coughed until I threw up. Yay, right?

The problem is that the only thing that makes me feel better is that perfect combination of Benadryl and cough syrup, which renders me nearly unconscious. I took it yesterday and felt much better, until I forced myself out of bed at 2:30 in the afternoon. This morning I'm thinking, "Okay, do I want to take the medicine and feel better and sleep all day long, or do I want to not take the medicine and feel awful but be able to be productive?" And then I'm like, "Who am I kidding? I've never been interested in being productive. I think I'll throw in a martini on top of the meds to give them that extra oomph."

So now I'm waiting for sweet, sweet unconsciousness and thinking about our money situation. It is bad, folks. There are a couple of things that may get cut off this week, plus we have to pay the child support, and we have about $250 in the bank.

I'm really trying hard to find something, anything, to bring some money into the house. I was really hopeful about this one job at Whole Foods, but they're hiring from the inside so no luck there.

It's really indescribably discouraging, this way that things are. I send out resumes all the time with cover letters explaining why I would be a perfect receptionist/office manager/executive assistant/copy editor/data entry person/ANYTHING THAT WOULD PAY ME; I am getting no phone calls.

For now I will just try to be thankful that at least I have the Benadryl.

When I first realized that I was really sick, Jason says to me, "Hey, look on the bright side: at least you don't have to call in." Small blessings.

Chris,

Good Lord, child, you are 27 years old. Happy birthday. Change your diaper.

I'm kidding. I love you dearly; I can safely say that I have never loved any of Kristi's boys as much as I love you. I think you are practically perfect in every way in that you are sweet, kind, sincere; you love Mexican food; you love my child; you can have a garbage can thrown at you and still want to be there the next day.



I have often thought lately how lucky I am to be best friends with Kristi, someone who is so like me and who I am so alike to. She and I have known each other a very long time; we have a lot of memories and good times to look back on, as well as to look forward to. I lucked out in falling in love with a man who Kristi loves and respects and likes being around. What is a surprising coincidence is that she fell in love with someone who is so oddly like my man. So it makes perfect sense that I would trust and respect you the same way Kristi trusts and respects Jason.



Chris, one of these days you will have children, and will be expected to be a role model.



Don't worry; Kane, Jude and Reed are all surprisingly normal, resilient, smart, confident, in spite of... some circumstances.



Chris, I hope you have a happy birthday. You certainly have someone wonderful to share it with. Thank you for being my friend, and for being a friend to my children. And thanks for moving closer, so that I may get drunk on your front porch at least once a week.



Love,
Buffy

Pot liquor.

Painting my toenails, doing laundry, wiping Reed's diarrhea-rear: these are the days of our lives.

Reed and I have some tiny virus that includes fever, tummy grossness, and general grumpiness, but I think it might be gone by tomorrow.

Our finances have finally reached a really awful, emergency point in which we can't afford to buy... well, anything.

Kane and Jude were here for the weekend and they both seem to be enjoying their new school. I just sincerely hope this has all been worth it, their moving back to their mom's house. I think it's probably best for them to be stable somewhere, to not change schools any more, so I hope everyone can just calm down and live life for a while.

Their mom and step-dad still inspire me to pluck the eyeballs out of my head: they send rude text messages, refuse to talk to us or make eye-contact (should they actually meet us face to face)- pretty much the usual. C'est la vie.

Jude started a Flickr if you're ever interested in the photographic talent of an intense nine-year-old.

Finally, I've been making some neat things for my Etsy lately. This one's called Mary Ramey, after my grandmother:

"Don't think the sun's comin' out today; it's staying in. It's gonna find a better way."

I think we really have to be out of our house in the next couple of weeks. This whole time I've been telling myself it's not that big of a deal, at least we're all healthy (if we don't count my being an absolute crazy person), at least we're surviving, etc.

I'm suddenly realizing how sad it is. We've lived here for three years now. It's the first house Reed ever lived in, the house we brought him home to. It's the house that Kane and Jude moved into with us. It's the first house that Jason and I moved into together. It's the first yard we've ever shared, the first yard that we watched Reed play in, the first porch we've ever had to spend time with our friends on.

In this house I've watched Reed grow from a teeny baby to a little boy. It is at once terrifying and beautiful and gut-wrenching and awe-inspiring, watching this person grow and learn and change, remembering that I grew him inside me and he was once a tadpole and now he runs and plays and laughs. In this house he learned to make jokes and share with his brothers (sometimes) and pick himself up after he falls.

In this house I have watched Kane grow into an adolescent, turn from a kid who watches cartoons into a near-teenager who... watches cartoons- just different cartoons. He's growing into a young man who likes to help me around the house and likes to watch his youngest brother and likes to help him learn and grow.

In this house I have watched Jude's continued evolution into a middle child, a kid who is too young to be a grown-up and too big to be a baby. He continues to amaze me with his ability to be a complete badass, to be like hanging out with one of my friends (Brock, I'm looking at you- argumentative, difficult, challenging, entirely too smart, physically dangerous).

In this house I've watched my marriage grow into something that I know with every particle of my being that I cannot live without. I've been reminded over and over again how much I need Jason, want him, respect him. I've felt myself continue to grow into a person who will never be at the center of her own universe again, to enjoy that separation from myself, to enjoy the people who have taken the place in the center. I've hoped and strived to fill the roles that I've made for myself here with these four other people. I've hoped and strived to be able to continue playing some part in the lives of the people who don't live here with me, the people who I count on to be there when I'm scared or lost, my extended family, my very best friends who I love so much.

And now we have to move and I'm just a little heart-broken about it. We'll make new memories one day in a new place and at least we have each other and thank goodness my mom is here for us and all that, but it's still hitting me kind of hard. I'm sure I'll get over it. It just takes a few hours to get myself back out of the center again.

Summer lovin'.

Summer is almost over around here in Alabama; usually we're still baking down here, but it has been uncharacteristically cool. Today has been grey, rainy, and dare I say chilly.

We are inching up on the two-year birthday of this blog, as well as my 365th post, which really just means that pretty soon if you start reading my blog you could read one post per day and it would take you one year to read the whole thing. Of course, that will only last for one day; as soon as I make my 366th post it will take you 366 days to read it.

You can see how much time I have on my hands these days.

In other news, I have just finished cleaning a poop log out of the bath tub. This is why you have kids, folks: because without them, you don't get to clean up nearly enough poop. Unless you have Myrna Minkoff. She provides poop to clean up as well.

"buffy agan blog leeds"

So it's been a while, but I thought I'd mention that I called Mark A. Dutton on August 1st (in reference to all of this). It was a very interesting conversation: turns out that he wasn't leaving those comments. He was, shall we say, nonplussed. We had a long talk about my blog and who might want to leave such bizarre comments. Did you know that it is a CRIME to sling around legal advice when you aren't a lawyer? Did you know that what so-and-so did there- not only pretending to be a lawyer but pretending to be a PARTICULAR lawyer- could constitute identity theft, and certainly constitutes fraud?

Anyways, Mr. Dutton was very happy that I brought it all to his attention. I have no idea if he intends to do anything about it, but I know that he can if he wants to.

In similar news, HELLO IP NUMBER 68.185.251.116! How are you out there in Pelham, Alabama? How is Charter Communications treating you? Do you enjoy using Internet Explorer on your Windows Vista system? Did you catch Lindsey's comment after all those comments that you left as Mark A. Dutton, specifically:

Every modem is assigned a unique number by their ISP. Blogger, in their infinite wisdom and foresight, God bless 'em, automatically and without fail logs each and every IP address associated with every single comment left on this or any other Blogger/Blogspot blog. Utilizing your IP address, which is freely provided to the blog owner by Blogger, the public at large is able to utilize the common knowledge reverse IP look up process in order to pinpoint just who, exactly, is leaving these comments, right down to something as minuscule and specific as their area code.

THE INTERNET IS NOT AN ANONYMOUS PLACE, PEOPLE. People seem to think they can do anything they want, such as impersonating a lawyer, and no one will ever know. People can see when you look at their web pages like you did this morning at 8:31 am right after you got the kids off to school, like you did at 10:03 pm last night right after you got the kids to bed. Does your wife know what you've been doing, or are y'all in on this together? Because you know, should we ever end up in court, this is like a freakin' GOLD MINE for our case.

To the rest of you, I love you guys and thank you for putting with up with all this crap. CRAP ON A BLOG. That's new, right?

To Pelham, enjoy searching "buffy agan blog leeds" and "buffy jason agan blog leeds" on Yahoo Search over and over again. Thank you so much for your support.

08.08.08

Stephanie,

You are one of the nicest, free-est, most sincere people I've ever known. You are a person who has actually inspired me to send a text that says, "Ooo, you're like the sun: chasing all the rain away." You have never hesitated to love me no matter what. You have never passed judgement on me. You have never made me feel like I might do something to make you love me less.

Oh, Steph, where do I start with you? When we threw bottles off of the fire escape at Watts? Skinny dipping at Green Valley? Showing our boobs for beers? Playing guitar and having sing-alongs on the beach in Pensacola? Or the billion other sing-alongs that we had a billion other places? Drinking games, hangovers, coffee, dinner, shopping, guitars, keyboards, snakes, kitties, mice?

Stephanie, getting married is a big deal; it works for some people and for others it doesn't. What I hope for you is that you've found a man who supports all of your dreams and quirkiness. I hope that he can give you the kind of life that will allow you to flourish, to really be. I hope that you cook dinner together every night with vegetables from your garden, that there is a vase of flowers from your yard on the table, and that one day there will be a crib with a tiny, wriggling little thing in it that you and James gaze lovingly at before you mix your evening cocktail.

And for the reality portion of this post: this is going to be very hard. You are going to have moments where you wonder who James is, wonder who you are, wonder where your brain was when you decided being married was a good idea. If there ever is a wriggling little thing you are going to wonder how you got that one, that one that cries and screams and says "no" and says "oh fuckin' damnit" and throws things and poops on the bathmat.

Wait, that's my life. Nevermind. Yours is going to be rosy and calm and I will be jealous forever. But if it ever should resemble mine, remember that you can call me and we can talk about it. I am imperfect as a woman, wife, friend, and mother, but I try very hard, and one thing that I can do well is listen. We can talk about the weather, or what we're making for dinner, or what makes us want to make our husbands sleep in the back yard while we quietly change the locks. Whatever you want. Because I have rain in my life, too, and you do chase all the rain away.

"Never had a care, just a livin' for the minute."

Yesterday I watched a Lifetime movie called Julie Johnson, starring Courtney Love and Lili Taylor. Lili Taylor is stupid and then she yearns and then she's gay and then she's smart and then she's lonely and then she's smart some more. AND ALSO THERE'S COURTNEY LOVE. Being gay with Lili Taylor. At one point I yelled, "They're making out!" and Jason trotted in from the other room just to take a gander.

Today I caught myself driving down the road singing "Way Down Yonder on the Chattahoochee". Singing along and knowing all the words made me, A) wish I was down on the river on a Friday night (self, I know thee not) and, B) remember fondly my teenage years. Not that I was down on the river on Friday nights then, but I knew that song then.

People, I cannot stress this enough: I NEED A JOB. To top it all off, I think this video is hilarious. Bitches.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Finally, let's end this one with a heart-warming smile.

I'll have to remind Jason to shave...

I believe old Mark admitted defeat- he hasn't been back in a few days and things have quieted down. The human tendency towards lunacy never ceases to amaze me.

Kane and Jude's mom sheepishly accepting her first child support payment last Friday. Now we wait for the next time she decides to start threatening to sue for backed child support. Mark my words: it will happen again.

From what I understand they've been counting change over there; I do sympathize, as we've been in hard times of our own. Then again, we didn't move into an apartment we couldn't afford and buy a series of brand new cars including two sports cars and ending with a four-door Jeep that surely guzzles gas.

When the kids' step-dad called Jason at work a few weeks ago and ranted about everything under the sun, he included how much better of a provider he is for the kids, adding that Kane and Jude each have their own bedroom and their own cable tv at his house. I wonder how that's working out for him now? I'd like to add that Jason, God love 'im, immediately replied that he doesn't agree with them having televisions in their bedrooms. We limit the kids' tv-watching over here because we feel like it's better for their brains to, I don't know, play, and interact, ride bikes and ride skateboards and read- you know, all the old-fashioned, Amish-type stuff.

Anyhow, Reed still breaks my heart every day saying things like, "I miss Kane and Jude. Kane and Jude miss me. Can we go get them now?"

Lipstick has their August issue on the website now, but sadly they don't seem to include all the content from the magazine on the web. I DO have an article and some jewelry in the magazine; I can mail you a copy of you're out of Birmingham and want to take a look. Just drop me a line and let me know.

Life goes on, and I'm trying to keep up. I've been making loads of jewelry; I hope to have twenty or thirty new pieces up in the next few days. Jason and I are photographing a wedding this Friday, as well as making the groom's cake and being a bridesmaid. You can figure out which of us is doing what. Jason does look good in a dress.

I must have imagined my graduation in '97. And the subsequent college graduation in 2004.

I don't know if you've been keeping up with this, but it's really very interesting. I have a feeling that I and my ilk have inflicted so many fierce burns that he won't be back. However, you never can tell- it's my understanding that sometimes "Mark" goes off his meds, so there could be more to come. Stay tuned!

If you haven't checked out my Etsy lately, but I have lots of new things that I've just listed in the past couple of weeks. I sold something last night to someone in Tel Aviv- apparently the word is spreading far and wide.

The Lipstick Magazine with my article and my jewelry has come out and it's awfully exciting. Unfortunately they don't have the new issue on their website yet so I can't link it, but I will as soon as I can.

My good friend Lindsey has offered to help me redesign this blog, and I'm really excited about it. LINDSEY, I'M HOLDING YOU TO IT. So you might see some changes in the next few weeks.

This week brings more jewelry-making, job-hunting, and house-cleaning. I'M SO HOT ABOUT IT- especially since I have to accomplish all this without even the help of a GED. Man, I should have finished high school.

And finally, my poor deprived baby: he doesn't have his GED either.

It's okay to try again.

When I was a kid I was scared of the dark. Okay, I am still scared of the dark. But when I was a kid that meant sleeping with my parents. I slept with my parents much, much longer than is appropriate for any child; my mom would try and come and sleep with me in my room, but I would wake up in the night alone and go crawl into bed with her. They had a queen size bed and it could be a tight squeeze with my dad, my mom, and myself. I'm sure it was super for their marriage, having a huge wiggling nine-year-old desperate to sleep with them all the time. I remember at some point telling them that it sure was crowded, and when I got married they were really going to have to buy a bigger bed- true story. HA HA HA.

Eventually my parents divorced, and it was much more comfortable in that bed with just my mom and me in it. Now with the foreclosure and all of our financial problems we are moving into my mom's house, that same house that I grew up in. As it turns out, my mom is going to take a different bedroom and Jason and I are moving into the master bedroom. It just feels funny that I will be once again sleeping in that same room, the room where I felt safest for all those childhood years. I sure hope that I feel as safe there now.

Yesterday we met with our lawyer and then had a celebratory, take-a-deep-breath-and-stop-worrying lunch at the local Mexican restaurant. We are still trying to get things straightened out with Kane and Jude's mom. Jason made the decision that the kids could move back in with her and we'd go back to the original custody agreement, which is what she asked for. She rewarded us by threatening to sue for backed child support for the years when the kids lived with us, the years when we were doing homework and sending lunch money and field trip money and attending parent-teacher conferences. The saddest part is that I predicted this years ago, and here it is. Thanks for being predictable. It will be so satisfying for me to revel in my rightness while living in my cardboard box.

I still don't know what's happening with the house- if the foreclosure if definite or if there are options. There has been so much going on over the past few weeks that I haven't been very good at staying on top of things, at following through. So I just don't know.

Reed is just amazing. He woke up this morning and told me that he dreamed about going to the beach, going to the ocean. He wakes up smiling almost every day, and even though the day goes on to present fits and fights and disagreements and floor-writhing, that moment when I first peer into his crib and he looks up at me and smiles is magic. He told me yesterday in the car, "I love Kane and Jude. Jude always talks to me. But they at they mommy's house." I almost cried.

These days have been marathons, racing to get to the end of the day without bursting into tears. Some days I win, and some days I lose. I have been listening to this song a lot, because it makes me feel better.

Hot potato, hot potato.

Man, oh man. I don't think my fingers could even manage to type all the stuff that has been going on today. Let's just say, Courtroom, here we come. We're being harassed now via text message by Jason's ex-wife, and she's slinging around transparent threats and expecting us to start giving her tons of money for absolutely no reason. I can't really think of much to say besides something I said here about two weeks ago: When you figure out how to squeeze blood from a turnip, please let me in on your technique. I'm nearly certain that she reads this- everyone wave hi!

Job-hunting, jewelry-making, photography-planning, blog-writing, child-rearing. That about sums it up. I'm going to try very hard to have some interesting things to say here; right now I'm absolutely void of anything to type besides bad words.

The scariest thing I've ever seen:

From this Mental Floss article. You really should read it and check out the videos. I'm going to go hide in the closet with a bottle of gin and a shovel.

Thanks, Lindsey.

To do:

- Deposit our stimulus check which was as slow as Christmas getting here, but will probably be gone by the end of the week.

- Laundry, housework, etc.

- Decide what to wear for an interview tomorrow for a job that is literally about four minutes away from where I live.

- Start picking out my scooter for when I have said job and can drive a scooter to work. Also choose matching helmet.

- Start brainstorming a good gang name for when Jason and I both have scooters and ride them around. Shop for leather jackets to have gang name embroidered on.

I wave my arms, and swing my baton.

This last week, these last seven days, have been the hardest of my life. I do not exaggerate; I have never persevered so much rage, doubt, humiliation, self-hatred, sadness, impotence, and fear emanating from my own body in the entire 29 years of my existence as in this past week.

Now that this week is behind me I am ready to move on. Jason and I have all kinds of exciting ideas about vacations and jobs and loving each other. We are enjoying each other in ways that we have neglected for a long time (get your minds out of the gutter, kids), and I think if we can just focus on how important we are to each other, all the other bad stuff in our lives will seem less important by comparison.

My jewelry is officially for sale at Soca in downtown Homewood, and I'm working with Happi and hope to have my things for sale there as well. We're barreling towards August, when my jewelry will be featured in Lipstick Magazine, along with a nice article that I wrote about the fourth annual Birmingham Chicks Rockfest. Good things are happening, people.

Finally, an addendum to my prayer that I posted here a few weeks ago:

Please God, help me to be tactful, graceful, to remember who I am. Help me to hear Gordy Ramey saying it when I get lost. Help me to refrain from choking any bitches to within an inch of their lives. Help me to remember why it would be a bad idea to go to them with pictures of my children and ask them how much they enjoy toying with their happiness. Help me to be a lady, a sane lady, something with which I have absolutely no experience. Help me to take an awful situation and find and make the best use of all the good things that can come from it. Please God, help me to let it go like so much water off a duck's back. Help me to be sure, to stop questioning, to move forward hard and fast. Help me to start writing again at a time when all I can think to write about are things that I refuse to write about.

And God, please help my husband to remember that I am a crazy person, have always been a crazy person, was a crazy person when he met me. Help him to remember that I've never stopped loving him, even when I am at my most intolerable. What I'm saying is YOU'VE BOUGHT THE COW. NOW YOU HAVE TO LIE DOWN WITH IT IN YOUR MADE BED. What? Yes, that's what I mean.

Making your way in the world today takes everything you got.

This birthday was about half great and half shitty, with great being against all odds. My attitude and emotional status have been all over the place lately, from grief, shame, humiliation, and regret to optimism, happiness, and hope to rage and spitefulness.

We got our letter of foreclosure Saturday morning. I worried about it all day, and then went out for birthday dinner with several friends, and then headed back to Kristi and Chris' new place to drink birthday beer. It was nice to spend time with everybody; most of my favorite people were there.

I think living at my mom's house isn't the end of the world. It is one of those things that will work eventually, but will start out kind of stressful and uncomfortable.

I've been talking with the mortgage company today, and I think we have some options, some possibility of avoiding the foreclosure, which I am taking steps to move towards. I do feel like we can't possibly pay for the house, and whether the bank forecloses or we get out of the woods and then hand them the keys, we are going to have to get out. I wrote a long letter of hardship to send the mortgage company and realized we aren't irresponsible, we aren't bad people, this isn't all our faults. These past two years have been really, awfully hard; it's been one bad thing after another, including insurance disasters, plumbing disasters, employment disasters, custody and ex-wife disasters. The end result has been that the amount of money Jason and I bring in to the house has dwindled lower and lower, and the amount of money we need to be sending out has risen higher and higher. Unfortunately we just can't reconcile the two. Add to that the fact that Jason and I are both totally, absolutely stressed out 24 hours a day, and you got the recipe for a hot mess.

Things with Kane and Jude's mom is pretty much at a standstill. Jason occasionally gets text messages from her asking for money. I would like for her to know that as soon as she figures out how to squeeze blood from a turnip, she should give me a call. Or a text. Whatever.

Yesterday was my 29th birthday, and guess what I got? Foreclosure.

It's been a damn long time since we've been able to pay the mortgage, so it's not like it's a complete surprise. It's just that every payday, the money is gone before we get it, paying the daycare and the power and the loans etc. So here we are.

This weekend we start moving stuff into my mom's house.

On children's programming.

So Bunnytown is one of Reed's new favorite shows, and I think it's okay. We have been inundated with the Wiggles for the last several months, which I resisted for along time because of this atrocity right here.



I first saw this when I worked at a daycare in 2001. I was all "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS TRIPE THAT THESE KIDS ARE BEGGING TO WATCH? OH MY GOD. WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE I WAS WATCHING THE WALTONS AND YELLOW SUBMARINE." After a couple hundred days of watching the Wiggles, I now don't find them atrocious at all. I actually walk around singing several of their songs, and I occasionally look forward to watching them with Reed. I know that's all against God's plan and all, my wanting to watch stuff WITH him instead of utilizing random children's television to babysit him while I have my gin and a cigarette, but I've always gone against the grain. I tried to find one of my favorite songs they sing, the bricklayer song, but I found this beauty right here.



I am new to the Bunnytown stuff, so when I searched and found the following video I decided to post it because it is so similar to a certain someone's bedtime around here. We go through this almost every night of the week.