Dances to the beet of her own drum

I haven’t been in the best head space the past few weeks (have you noticed? lol)

I’ve had a bit on my plate with brigade stuff - mainly with not getting the support we were promised from the zone office.

I’m feeling a bit excluded from things happening with my daughter (Miss Lou will become a full time boarder next term). And then I’m under pressue to finalise plans for school holidays when I don’t yet know what my hubby’s movements will be.

I’m feeling a bit of financial pressure with my pc, mobile and car problems all needing attending to and school holidays are coming up.

And we all NEED a break from the routine of school.

Then an aquaintance that continually rubs me the wrong way got under my skin. I dunno why. It shouldn’t have happened.

It’s my fault. I should have just kept my big mouth shut and not questioned what her game was.

She wants to know why I’ve all but cut off contact with her and don’t want to meet up with her in a few weeks time. I don’t particuarly want to say “cos you drive me up the fucking wall” cos that wouldn’t be nice. True, but not nice.

Last year when we moved I didn’t pass onto her my new phone number. She would txt and ring me a few times a day with no regard to any plans that I may have mentioned, to make comments on other people’s jokes, or to rant about some dickheads posts on a forum or some such. She’d txt me from the bus stop when she was bored. She would txt or ring to make cracks about people from a time long past when we used to knock about msn groups together. People that were not friends and that I long wanted to forget. Jokes that were once funny lose their humour after the eleventy billionth time they are told. I couldn’t handle it anymore.

It was overwhelming. I admire this persons passion and loyalty to their friends but oh my god! We would have an email loop going and next thing she’d ring me instead of emailing everyone back to make a crack. Frequently those cracks were something to do with past adversaries that I would rather forget so didn’t find at all humorous.

I don’t ‘do’ msn groups anymore. I don’t care what bullshit fundamentalist christians are going on with these days or about correcting ignorance. I don’t and have never seen ‘ripping someone a new one’ as a form of stress relief and/or agression reduction.

She prefers to communicate by phone. I find her constant calls and txts way too much. Besides, when you are emailing in a loop and start replying to people individually it seems rude to me. She reckons it’s too much to expect because her typing is too slow. I find her inability to let the past rest and her complete lack of tact offputting. She says I’m blunt and intimidating. I have to be very blunt with her though cos she doesn’t get it when I try tactful.

We’ve had no meaningful conversation by either medium about what’s going on in each other lives for 12 months now.

But she still wants to get together soon.

I don’t understand why.

I’ve got nothing to say to her.

People move on. It happens. I don’t understand why it has to be a big thing. It’s not a matter of a vent and a bitch and airing anything to get it all out in the open because I don’t want to go back there.

It’s rather simple really. I don’t like how she sees me.

I think she see’s that hard outer shell that helps me deal with the difficult people in my life and senses a kindred spirit. We’ve both lived with abuse at the hands of our schizo exes. My hard outer shell though is something that I can take off at will. I don’t think she can yet. She can be so bitter and vengeful and so grudgeful and hold on to things forever. She does things that shock me at times.  And then she tells others that I’m just like her. Or she’ll tell me that I’m just like her.

And that horrifies me.

It has been such a huge, huge week for me.

A day course last Saturday, trying to get the weeks worth of washing done on Sunday, school canteen on Monday, TJ home sick on Tuesday, cadets on Wednesday, school athletics carnival yesterday, then school canteen again today followed by CJ’s speech at assembly and TJ getting two awards.

Then I got home this afternoon to discover that I’d run out of kindling so had to chop wood.

Then when I went to make tea I discovered that we’d run out of potatos.

It’s too cold to go out.

Besides.

I’m stuffed.

And I’m cold.

And did I mention I’m tired?

xdfmjkkk

And the fucking cat keeps jumping on my keyboard making my screen flash and change and leaving me with garbled gobblydedook in my text box.

I might be a little grumpy as well.

And then someone told me that my bluntness intimidates them and then went on to say that they were sure I was snorting at them saying that. I wasn’t. I know some people find me intimidating. I know some people think I have ‘attitude’. I know some people think that I’m a lot tougher than I am because I can be fiery.

But then some people take this tendancy to be blunt as being uncaring of others feelings or of not caring what they think.

Which isn’t the case at all. I just don’t see the point in mincing words in difficult situations. I don’t see the point in dancing around subjects without ever getting to the heart of them. I don’t see the point in prolonging unpleasantness in long winding conversations.

I can be tactful.

But I’d rather say my piece and be done with it.

Or wash my hands of it completely.

Life’s too short to waste on bullshit.

This apparently makes me a not very nice person.

wv `l;. and there goes the fucking cat again. *taps cat on the butt*

The reality is that I don’t have much patience for crap. I have no tolerance for drama. I have no energy for game playing. It’s not that I don’t care what other people are thinking or feeling. It’s more that I have lived through too much shit to be bothered playing along with more now.

I know I can seem harsh, but I need to protect myself.

I know I can seem hard, but if I didn’t laugh I’d cry.

I know I can be fiery, but if I wasn’t passionate I’d have lost everything.

And perhaps before people judge me, they should take a walk in my shoes.

yes, it’s that time of the week again where we offer up hot hunks to the lustful Irish wench Widdle Shamrock for her pant wetting perusal.

For this weeks offering I have decided on a movie old favourite………….

Drink up, me ‘earties, yo ho.

So the fella came to talk to us about our cadet programme today and from the get go was accepting that blame to be had for any stuff ups was not to be laid at our end *hehe*

Problem sorted. It’s a pity that it takes a problem to develop to clear up the miscommunications though. I did tell him that it would have helped had they set out exactly what they wanted from the get go. For our part we are simplyfying the admistrative component for ourselves next time we run the programme which could be very very soon.

Like next term soon.

A few of the kids have asked us if they can come back next term. We are seriously considering the idea.

One of the things that I told the coordinator today was that the standard programme was too involved. That there was no possible way for us to cover all the suggested material in the time frame that we had so we had been just picking out 3 main points from each session to concentrate on.

Extending the programme by another term will certainly give us time to delve deeper into some concepts and will also allow us to expand the material that we expose the students to. We’ll be able to add in aviation firefighting, more about village firefighting, MVA’s, fire behaviour and rescue scenerios.

Today went really well. All the students had a turn at putting out a small stove top fire (under controlled conditions) using a fire blanket. We showed them how to hold the blanket to protect their face and hands while attempting to smother the fire. They then all had a turn at using a fire extinguisher. We then exposed an assortment of common household materials to fire to see how they reacted. The results were interesting and the practical demonstration was most effective in helping the students to understand how different types of materials react to fire.

Even if none of these kids ever join a brigade, if just one of them ever needs to do this and is able to because they remember what we showed them today and saves their home, the programme will have been worth every second that we put into it and every headache that the happened over the paperwork fiasco.

Hubby left for work this morning after telling me he wouldn’t be long. That was 3 hours ago……………… I think he must be lost in the fog lol

TJ put his jumper on when he left for school without arguement. brrrrrr

I can still looking out my window now, see remnants of this morning’s frost and fog.

Sox, my cat, isn’t happy. He wanted to go outside, took one peek and decided against the idea. Too much moisture in the air perhaps lol

This is the second big frost and fog this week.

We may have a ‘true’ winter this year…………. I’d better find some more blankets for the spare bed for when Widdle Shamrock comes to visit next month so she doesn’t freeze her butt off!

No witty introduction today. No sparkling preamble.

I’m ticked. I’m damn annoyed.

We’ve been running a Cadet brigade of highschoolers through introductory fire fighting training for the past 8 weeks and now one of the bosses decides that we aren’t doing things correctly because of some paperwork not returned to them that THEY didn’t send out to us in the first place! He wants to come talk to us on Wednesday. He told me that we can’t do most of the stuff we had planned  over the next two weeks as a result of this missing paperwork. Meh. We think he just wants our programme to fall on it’s face.

We’ve gotten no - as is zero, zip, nadda, nil - support from this bloke in running our programme. He showed up a couple of days before we were due to start, threw a folder at us with the standard programme in it and has left us to it ever since.

The programme has gone really well. We’ve discarded a lot of what was in the standard programme - just picked out the guts of it to concentrate on instead. We’ve had other local emergency services involved. We’ve kept our training sessions as hands-on practical as we can and it’s worked really well. The kids are happy, they are engaged, they are enthusiastic and the trainers are all very happy with them.

The only kink in the whole thing has been being hassled for paperwork that we weren’t given in the first place which really isn’t our screw up! We’ve got him this time though. A phone call to our zone manager later and this guy is going to get a rude shock surprise when he shows up on Wednesday to tell us how we are screwing things up. We’ve got a folder full of paperwork to shove up his arse dump on him before we run off to play with our cadets. We also have an afternoon jam packed full of fire extinguishers, fire blankets and experiments with how different types of household furnishings will burn for the kids.

So, have you screwed up this week? Have you munted anything? Have your loved ones ballsed up? Is someone elses flubb up causing you some grief?

We want to hear them all. Leave me a comment and I’ll add you a link

Leechbabe

Widdle Shamrock

Anja

I have many, many moons ago I did a workshop on making my own soaps. Over the course of the workshop we made solid bar soaps, bath bombs and liquid soaps. I had recipes for all sorts of natural based beauty products, but along came more kids and away went my time and motivation………… Until reading Naomi’s blog post the other week on dandruff & shampoo. So last week I gathered some basic supplies so that I could experiment a little.

CJ and I made 3 things. First a bi-carb wash to remove any residual product from our hair, then a Chamomile Shampoo and lastly a lemon rinse for added shine. It was really easy peasy and we had really good results.

The bi-carb wash was simply 1 tsp of bi-carb in 1 cup of water. We poured this on and massaged it in then rinsed it out.

The shampoo was pretty easy too. We used -

1 1/2 cup(s) water
4 chamomile tea bags
4 tsp. soap flakes
1 1/2 tsp. liquid glycerin

We simply boiled the kettle, let the tea bags stew for 10 minutes, added the soap flakes, waited till they had softened, added the glycerin and mixed well before pouring into a pump bottle. 

lastly was a lemon rinse. Very simple to make with squeezing half a lemon into a cup of rain water.

The shampoo didn’t lather up much, but gave us a good ’squeaky’ clean. All in all we got a good result. CJ was commenting all day yesterday about how soft her hair felt and she got compliments on how nice and shiny it looked. I’ve noticed that my hair feels nice, but not dry which is great.

Hubby reckons I must have been bored or something to be fiddling around with this stuff, but he also reckons his dandruff isn’t quite as bad after using it, but I’m going to make another batch using mint for him to try - it’s meant to be good for dandruff.

The shampoo needs to be kept in the fridge because of course it doesn’t have all the chemicals and preservatives in it, but on the other hand it doesn’t have all the chemicals and preservatives in it and that’s got to be better for us.

I’ve been tagged for a swagload of meme’s this week, saved em up and will do them now all in one glorious, magnificent meme hit!

First up was Widdle Shamrock tagging me with this meme, she had been tagged by Jane etc and so forth.

Ten years ago: I dunno. Oh yeah, that’s right. I was planning my wedding to the PSLS. ooops.

Five things in todays ‘to do list’:
1. get some sleep

2. sit through a course on safe food handling

3. Rescue my mother from my son

4. bum around for the afternoon while PSLS cuts down some trees

5. Reward PSLS for his tree cutting prowess

Snacks I enjoy: Cheese and biscuits is my usual

Things I would do if I was a millionaire:

Hide from our families. If any of our drug/alcohol fucked siblings even get a sniff of money they’ll be camped out on our doorsteps faster than they could score a hit!

Places I have lived:

my home town, Queenbeyan, Caboolture (QLD)

Ok. Next up was another Widdle Shamrock tag with the Very Personal Opinion Meme. Anja tagged her. She was tagged by Naughty but Noice Naomi. Nomes is it’s author and originator.

Naomi asks for my very personal opinion on the following:

Body piercings:

I have my ears pierced twice. Does that count?

Genital piercings:

I gotta say that after being stitched up ‘down there’ twice after giving birth, I’m not particuarly interested in having people fiddle with my bits and pieces. I don’t care how much extra value it’s meant to add to the decor

Tattooing:

Did I mention that I’m scared of needles?

Best place for a tattoo:

Somewhere it can be covered up if need be.

Body modification:

What ever floats your boat, but I think it’s pretty bizzare.

Flavoured condoms:

Wrong, so very very wrong. Blech!

Skinny jeans:

Not for me.

G-strings/thongs (not the footwear):

For them. But not if they are hanging out the tops of people’s pants/jeans.

High heels:

Can’t wear them. Can wear a moderate heel, but not for long.  I have shocking balance and I’d fall (and have fallen) arse over tit in them.

Sex with Socks on:

Meh. It happens.

Bert Newton:

A cheeky bastard but not really my cup of tea

What’s next………… I know someone else tagged for me for something a little while back, but I can’t remember who or what oooops! *blushes* 

Lastly the fabulous Anja tagged me for this little beauty!

• Write a six-word memoir.
• Post it to your blog including a visual illustration if you would like.
• Link to the person who tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogsphere .
• Tag 5 more blogs with links (or however many people you feel like annoying)
• Don’t forget to leave a comment in the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

I know exactly what to put here.

Shit Happens. But usually to me.

Yeah I know the pic ain’t quite right, but you will just have to deal with it ok? K.

As for tagging people………….. if you haven’t done one of these and they tickle your fancy, by all means meme away. Go on. You know you want to

I am absolutely freakin gobsmacked at how many people I have had visit my blog after searching for David Boreanaz. I mean, I know he’s hot and whatnot but I don’t have that many pics of him up around here. (Yet).

My “Happy David Day” post has become my top post attracting around 40 hits a day, seconded by my original “Hot Hunk Thursday” post which featured David in the bath. All this David mania has attracted around 35 search engine hits a day in the past 5 days.

That’s a lot of wet pantied women looking for their drool fix!

And seeing that it is still Thursday and I haven’t done my hot hunk offering this week, and people want David, then who am I to deny the masses?

ooooo I can just imagine taking a spin on a washing machine with him!

And our latest addition to the bathtime series of David pics. Got your snorkel ready Scrappy and Anja?

My blog visitor stats have doubled the past few days.

I can only presume that ya’ll are checking to see if I’m online or not.

No you can’t have a comment luv fest.

But in case I’m wrong and I have had an influx of new visitors…….. Hi!

Welcome to my little corner of the bloggy world.

You can learn a little more about me on my about page.

If you are here after the David Boreanaz pictures you can find them HERE. Happy drooling. (I’m sure those 50 odd search hits the past two days aren’t Scrappydo alone lol)

If you leave a comment, I shall come visit your corner of the bloggy world.

I shall come in peace……….. but also perhaps with a little mayhem