Sunday May 9, 2010 – 10:40am – 4:36pm = 5 hours and 56 minutes. It’s been a year since my last alone time…my how time flies when you’re having fun. Spent the majority of the time sleeping in my chair. Will i ever remember how to enjoy?

I have a feeling that this will be my last alone time.

So we had some more police action here in my wonderful neighborhood last week. Apparently just 3 doors down from me they had the police out and it was officially filed as “Criminal Damage/Malicious Mischief” and “Motor Vehicle Theft”. Lovely. So far we’ve had tons of vandalism, several cars broken into, a car tipped over, gang grafitti everywhere, gun runners and now this. This hellhole is getting better and better everyday! It’s sooooooo fun when you have to be scared even in your own home. I’m telling you things had better pick up economy-wise soon so I can sell this house and move back to where I belong. I swear I never saw this much police action when I lived between New York CIty and Newark, NJ. I felt safer there than I do here. Ah well, I guess we get what we deserve, right? I must have done something really horrible in a past life and now am paying the price. I need to put a stop to it is all. Someday…right?

I know this is a week or so early but I thought I would take a look back on the past year. To be honest, most of 2008 is NOT something I want to remember. It was the year that I finally accepted some hard truths about my family and myself.

But there were a few goods parts too. Yeah, I’m as amazed as anyone about that. In the beginning of the year I started a new pastime that I really think I could enjoy especially if family wasn’t interfering (yep, there’s that bad stuff again!). I’ll explain. I started creating stained glass stuff. I could really get into this as it’s an incredible feeling to watch something come to life and know that it’s because *I* made it happen. Now for the bad part…Mom insisted that I pursue this hobby out in the garage. I would have setup my workstation in the house like a real person would but having to listen to Mom go on and on about it was too much to deal with, so I setup in the garage. It’s not that that is a totally bad place to do something like this but it means that here in the boiling pit of hell that I live in I can’t work on anything in the summer months (which out here is about 6 months long)…it’s just too fucking hot. And there is also the thing about Mom starting her usual panic rant about money anytime I say I want to buy more glass. So yeah, that shit does take some of the passion out of things. But in the short time that I was able to work on stained glass I created something that I am really proud of (see image on right). This is something I hope to continue with.

The second good thing came out of having to take a break from the the first good thing – the stained glass stuff. Since I couldn’t work on the stained glass during the summer months, in August I started creating themes for WordPress to be distributed publicly thru my new site The Cloisters. Much to my pleasure and surprise, my themes are fairly successful. And it really is a great feeling when someone likes something that I had an incredible amount of fun creating. It’s awesome! So check out the site and maybe download one of my themes – I offer pretty decent support too!

The third good thing was getting to go back east for a week in June. I swear the minute the plane landed back there I felt I was home. That’s a feeling I haven’t had since I came out here to this desert wasteland. I do have some pictures that I took and will eventually get up on this site. And since I already wrote about the trip in the post Back Home Again, I won’t repeat things here.

I think maybe I’ll stop here and try, for once, to keep things light and end this hellish year on a positive note. So Happy Holidays to everyone and here’s hoping 2009 will bring some good changes.

So I woke up this morning, looking forward to a peaceful and lazy Sunday. I get myself a cup of coffee and then go out to get the paper and there on the front page was the “punch in the gut”. Big headline talking about how houses have gone down in value and my being the masochist that I am I just had to read the story. Apparently in my area of town the percentage of homes that now have negative equity is about 33%. That means that if I tried to sell my house right now I most likely would end up having to pay because I couldn’t sell it for enough to cover what I owe. Now I know what you’re thinking, that I bought above my means like so many others (those who I believe are a contributing factor in this mess) but when I bought my house it cost a bit over 100 grand. Way on the low end of houses here…and within my budget.

In the same article there were what I think were supposed to be “oh pity me” sob stories but I have zero sympathy for these people, in fact I feel rage since they are examples of the problem. The first story was about a 26 year old woman who bought a 750 sq ft house for $132,000.00 with only $2,000.00 down with a sub prime loan. She’s paying 13% interest! Someone like her should NOT have bought a house nor should any bank have given her a loan. She now will most likely lose her house.

The second situation was an older woman who bought a house with no money down for a monthly mortgage of $1,400.00 a month. The stupid fucking cow only made $2,000.00 a month from 2 jobs, one she has since lost. Another foreclosure in the making.

I think we should take all the banks that gave people like these women loans and string them up. It’s criminal.

Yeah. If that doesn’t suck big time I don’t know what does.

**LONG INCOHERENT RAMBLING AHEAD**

So I spent my Easter redoing my sister’s computer. Totally wiping 3 years worth of crap out and putting it all back again. Of course there were glitches and bumps in the road as they do insist on still using Windows, but I got it done. One of the glitches was that there was no drivers disc and I had to go searching the internet for them all. Now what gets me is if you ask me to do this for you then have some fucking faith that I know what I’m doing. When the internet didn’t immediately work my brother-in-law went into a panic because he couldn’t get his email and my sister was freaking about something with the firefox and their internet provider (still not sure what). EITHER YOU HAVE THE FAITH IN ME OR DON’T FUCKING ASK ME TO DO THIS!!!!!

To further the fun on this my sister apparently mentioned her issue to my mother who, mentioned it to me. I explained as best I could considering I didn’t even know what the problem was and mom, in wanting to help, called my sister back to tell her what I said. A fight of sorts ensued and we’re back in the shit. I can’t stand this anymore. My sister said to me that she doesn’t understand why mom always has to be in the middle of everything. Well that’s the way it’s always been and always will be. And since mom is MY responsibility she and I are a package deal. Now I really don’t like this but since it seems to be up to me to do everything for and concerning mom or taking her where she needs to go, then that’s how it is. For example because I couldn’t (because of financial and my job issues) take mom back east for the funerals of her 2 sisters and her brother, she didn’t get to go. Now if mom was a shared thing between my sister and I (as it SHOULD be), then my sister could have taken her back for at least 1 funeral. But since my sister didn’t think she had to and didn’t want to then she also believes mom is my sole responsibility as if she were my child instead of my mother.

If you read this, thank you.