Plight of Pens

I use pens for all kinds of writing - from bills to addressing envelopes all the way down to writing notes in magazines just for the heck of it. I am not the only person who lives in this house...I have six other humans who also use pens that live in this house with me.

Every time a little person asks me to use one of my pens I say "Yes, but only if you promise to bring it back!"

Every time the little person says "I promise I will bring it back!!"

And then I never see the pen again.

This past year when school started I bought a staggering EIGHT bags of ball-point pens and distributed five of them to school children. That left me three bags of around 8 pens each all for my very own to use as I pleased. However, as children kept borrowing them and never returning them, now, five months later, I find myself with no pens whatsoever.

I tried to fight the urge to buy more pens. This is winter in my fair town of Illinois, and winter means cold and cold means I stay in the house all day every day (I do force myself outdoors occasionally to truly appreciate how warm it is inside my house) and this is usually the time of year I start my "Spring Cleaning."

However THIS year I am finding it extremely difficult to motivate myself into doing the kind of week-long-move-everything-clean-every-last-corner kind of work that it takes to really clean this house sooooo after three weeks of the new year of NOT cleaning I finally broke down and bought two more packages of pens.

However you just KNOW that I will clean this house and find a CRAPLOAD of pens! One of these days I will do my Spring Cleaning and I will have more pens than the Bic factory. Thanks a lot, kids LOL.

Here is a picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/agacobra/5366033132/in/photostream/
Enjoy!

Homesickness

I missed blogging so I thought I'd try this again. I like to write every day. As a matter of fact, when I stopped blogging here I started writing a memoire of sorts for my children and stepchildren for after I leave this planet. Let's face it I'm not going to live forever, and all these memories that are so important to me I'd like to pass on to my children. I would like them to have something of me after I'm gone. Right now they are busy living their own lives and my husband doesn't want to hear any of it. So assuming it doesn't get deleted or accidentally thrown away I was writing in it every day. Then I took a break from it while I dealt with other things...mainly Autumn and December. Autumn is just the worst time for me. I don't know if it's because of the shortened daylight hours or if it's because my mother died in October but I just go through an awful time and a mini-depression. Usually on the anniversary of my mother's death I go somewhere and cry for about four hours. I feel I'm kind of pathetic not being over her death in 24 years but I'm really not. I have certain people in my life that have a special connection with me. I care about these people in a way I can't describe-but their souls are inexplicably intertwined with mine. My mother was one of them, and I still feel her death in ways my husband thinks I should seek therapy for LOL. My siblings have been fine living without her and they don't seem to think about it all that much. She died, that's life, we've moved on. Even my mother's siblings seem to do just fine without her.
I'm not saying I'm not doing just great without her, but sometimes the pain of knowing she never met my husband and will never meet any of my kids in this life just kills me. Then again I feel things more than normal people in my opinion.
The other day I felt such horrible homesickness I seriously felt like vomiting. I love my tiny little town but it's still not home. No place in this state has ever been home. I think it was brought on by my finding one of those souls I was talking about. She moved back to Lemon Grove, which was a suburb of where I used to live. I can still see that silly giant lemon statue from that area in my mind. I was so happy I found her that I cried for over an hour. I was just so thrilled to know she was alive and happy. When I realized she had moved back "home" I started thinking about how different my life was now that I live in Illinois. Over half of my being I developed just from being out here. But I still miss CA.
Everyone knows how obsessively I read now. Other than "The Clan of the Cave Bear" I never read anything out there because I was always busy doing stuff. It was only after I moved to that God-awful town in Illinois that I suddenly had no friends and you had to DRIVE HALF AN HOUR TO GET ANYWHERE that I started reading anything. Then I started on the "Goosebump" series and then moved on to "Fear Street," then checked out the book that changed my whole life...."Pet Semetary" by Stephen King. Then Stephen King wasn't enough - I started reading EVERYTHING. I wouldn't be this blogger right now if it weren't for moving out here.
Still, every once and a while I remember walking the half-mile to school and observing the bush that had the birds in it that would let me carry them, and the hill that was a 45 degree angle to level ground, the part of the sidewalk that was covered in some kind of succulent, every friend's house, every house that had a dog and the sky....no where near as beautiful as here in Illinois but I was obsessed with that sky and I still remember how the clouds looked and the thin brown line of smog...and I just miss it.
I wonder if my kids will ever miss Illinois like I miss southern California. I wonder if they'll ever miss the sound of the wind going through the corn fields as I miss the smell and sound of the ocean. I look at the sunsets here as I looked at the sunsets there. So different, yet the same. I'll never know for sure. People who grow up here tend to stay here. It is a really nice place, but I'm still a California Girl. I couldn't change if I wanted to.
Depressed yet? LOL I was supposed to write about "Julie & Julia" which is a really fantastic movie and got me thinking about blogging again. Not because anybody reads this....because I seriously doubt anyone does. But because I NEED to write. I just have to.