Mama Bear Wants to Claw Someone.....

Sweet Girl hates it when I refer to her as my "cub" or refer to myself as a "mama bear." She'll understand the concept when she has kids of her own.

I'll probably mess up part of this story, since it is Sweet Girl's and not mine to tell, but I'll risk it anyway.

My daughter loves to cook. I don't know where she got that gene, because it certainly didn't come from me. Not only does she love to cook, she's pretty darn good at it. She experiments, she tries new recipes, she uses exotic spices and flavorings.

Me? If it has more than 5 ingredients and there's a single thing I can't pronounce or don't know what section it's in, I move on to the next recipe.

(I almost posted on Facebook the other night: "Food just tastes better with a new can opener" but I was afraid no one would get it. Or rather, I was afraid it was dumb.)

Sweet Girl decided NOT to come home for Thanksgiving this year. She's technically unemployed (but almost finished with school, praise all that's holy for that!), and we all know gas isn't cheap these days. Instead she decided to stay home and cook a meal for one of her married friends and her small family.

I don't know the entire menu, but I know she cooked a turkey, baked a pecan pie (I have never been that brave myself), made deviled eggs, and a host of other goodies. She cleaned her townhouse and sent me a picture of how sparkling it looked. She got up early on Thanksgiving Day and put the finishing touches on some things, whipped up a few things that can only be made the day of the meal itself, watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and relaxed while she waited for her friends.

Only they didn't come. Canceled (by text message, I think) at the last minute. After not returning her calls the day before.

Man, have I been doing a slow burn ever since yesterday. I want to track this little girl down (and her husband and child too, I'm not picky) and kick. her. ass.

How could she DO that?

My sister-in-law were talking about it today, and we pondered whether it was generational. I couldn't think of doing that to any of MY friends, not now and not when I was 28. Not ever. If you say you're going to be somewhere, you go. If you don't think you can make it, you don't say you will be there. And especially an occasion like Thanksgiving, where the girl had to know how much trouble went into the preparation. Not to mention cost. For an unemployed veteran who just wanted to have someone to share the holiday with her.

The Mama Bear in me wants to find that little b****'s number on Sweet Girl's phone and give her a piece of my mind. But that would embarrass my child, and I need to reserve those moments for really special occasions. Like riding the grocery cart through the parking lot.

IS it generational? Is it just young people in their late 20's to early 30's (older? younger?) who are so ME, ME, ME, ME oriented that they can ignore the feelings of other people and cheerfully go about their business? Or is this an isolated case of one young person/family? Please, please, please tell me it's the latter, or I may just crawl under my comforter and suck my thumb until the world comes to an end next month.

I know I should give the girl the benefit of the doubt, particularly since I don't know the WHOLE story. She has a young child, so there could have been any number of reasons that she had to cancel at the last minute. But she didn't offer ANYTHING in the way of explanation. I believe the phrase she used was, "We can't make it." Even if she had to make up a LIE, it would have been better than not offering an excuse at all. (I think Sweet Girl would disagree with me on that last one, because she's inherently way more honest than I am. I mean, when backed into a corner. Yeah, that's what I meant.)

Ugh.

This parenting thing just never stops hurting.

Marsh House Not to Be.....

I realize I just wrote about this topic in last night's random thoughts.

I try to take the attitude that things happen for a reason. What's meant to be will be. Not completely - I don't think it's meant to be that babies die or crazies shoot up movie theaters.

I got an official email from my banker this morning that my loan for the marsh house cannot be approved with the foreclosure of my ex-husband's house on my credit report. I had been planning to ride my bike this morning, and after I got the email I was so bummed out I almost didn't go. Then I decided it would be good for me, and I rode a little over 26 miles.

The more I rode, the more relieved I felt. I guess that in itself is a sign that while I wanted the marsh house badly, my heart wasn't really in the idea of going into debt for something I wasn't even going to live in.

When I contacted the realtor to let her know, she said she didn't think I could back out at this point.

Excuse me?

What are they going to do, squeeze the money out of me? If I can't get financing, how do they propose to force the deal to go through? (I actually asked her those questions.)

She said I might have to forfeit the earnest money, and while that will suck, I guess  there's nothing I can do about it.

Really, I'm ignorant of this whole process. What CAN they do? Can they sue me for breach of contract? How likely is that to happen? Ugh...I wish I'd never started this process.

I hate feeling powerless, and this whole ordeal has made me feel powerless. When my ex and I built that house, we had to pay a whopping 10% interest rate. (That was a combination of youthful blights on my credit rating and the fact that he didn't have a real job.) After the divorce, when he remarried and had a good job and interest rates fell to about a third of what he was paying (or not paying, as the problem turned out to be), he refused to refinance the house. And it was out of spite. He knew that if he refinanced, it would release me from the burden of the mortgage, and it was his one last way of saying, "Screw you for divorcing me."

Sigh.

Further proof that we should be allowed to delete them when we're through with them, just like old computer files.

And now, having talked to the realtor, I'm grumpy. I was fine with this whole thing, mourning the loss of the house (that I never had) but feeling better about not having a mortgage. Feeling like I was being all grown-up and handling my disappointment with panache and maturity, and now I feel like someone has slapped me on the hand for misbehavior.

Hubby, while not really the world's perfect man that I portray him as being, always seems to know the right thing to say. When I texted him the news this morning, his first response was, "I'll help you if you really want to do it." (I'd already had the conversation with him about if the loan didn't go through, it was a sign it wasn't meant to be.) It was tempting, but I stuck by my word and told him no, let's just be done with it. Then he texted me a message that said, "Think of all the trips we can take." See why I call him the world's last perfect man?

Enough of my problems. It will work out the way it's supposed to work out, and I'll be wiser for having gone through it. I may also be broker, but perhaps not as much as I would have been had the deal gone through.

Perhaps.

I hope.

The Only Way to Go is Up......,

I guess it's the danger of booking online.......

This campground is a disappointment, to say the least. Rather than being "on the beach," it is actually across the road from the beach. And once you cross the road the beach is still a long way away. We walked over there this afternoon, but we couldn't go onto the beach because they don't allow dogs. Bunch of communists. We're going to ride the bikes over there tomorrow.

The camping area itself is on something they call a creek, but it looks a lot like a swamp. Lots of screaming kids around. And when we got here at about noon today, they told us check-in wasn't until 3:00 and we could "wander around" for a while. Wander around in a motorhome that gets approximately 8 miles per gallon? He checked and discovered that the people in site #35 had checked out early, though, so he relented and let us go ahead and check in.

We think we know why the folks in #35 checked out early.

Pictures tomorrow. Maybe I won't be in such a negative mood.

FANatic.......

I really wish I could care a little less about sports competitions.

Tonight our gymnastics team lost their third meet in a row. And I'm taking it a little personally. The loss tonight was to a team to whom We. Had. Never. Lost. Before. In. 65. Meetings.

For the second week running, we had a score that began with an 8. That's E-I-G-H-T. I didn't know the judges even HAD a card with an 8 on it.

The 8.7 tonight was from a senior. Our anchor. Our rock. An All-American. National beam champion two years ago. Has scored perfect 10's on both balance beam and uneven bars. Eight point seven.

I will confess that I know NOTHING about coaching college gymnastics. Or any level gymnastics. Or anything else.

But I'm guessing this is NOT the path to another national championship.

If there is a bright side, and I'm struggling to find one, it's that all week I planned to make the 3-hour drive over to our neighboring state to the west so I could see this debacle in person.

Thank all that is holy for bad weather tonight.

Considering professional therapy,

Bragger