Dinner and the closing of January.

Since January is wrapping up, I whipped out the handy dandy monthly planner and set to updating it. Mostly, it was the addition of medical appointments and re-reading bill paying reminders.

This month I knock off another card into the paid in full pile. Children's Place. Mind you, all I owe is 26.00 dollars. I picked The Brat up a coat there last month and put it on the card just to keep it in use. I've only used it one other time, and it was only for like 30.00 dollars.

The Bullseye card is the one I really need to focus on now. It's not maxed out or anything, but I don't want it to be either. I came closer than I ever wanted to in December. Come the first week of February I'll be grinding away at the balance. Estimated time? Four months. That's only because I do need to keep up on my two other cards. Just over minimum payment on those though.

If I really wanted to, I could just dig into the savings and pay them all off and be in the clear, but I rather tighten the belt and pay them off month to month. It'll hopefully teach me to be even more careful.

The final breakdown? I have seven credit cards. Five of them are store cards. Bullseye. Children's Place. And the three fat stores. Two of them are just regular credit cards. One of them is secured, the other one unsecured. Out of the seven, three are paid in full, one is about to be. Not bad by my standards.

January will close out in a few days with a savings of 450.00 dollars for the month. Not quite the ideal amount, but I keep telling myself that something is better than nothing. Looking at the calendar, February is another 450.00 month.

Just under a thousand dollars in the first two months of the year doesn't sound like a bad deal does it?

March will be a six hundred dollar month. But.. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yesterday I got gung-ho about getting some walking done if I couldn't get to the gym. I wound up hurting myself pretty bad. Bad enough that today I'm off to the doctor. So... those of you who know my masochistic tendencies.. might be able to guess what I did.

I decided to wobble around on my busted knee and cook dinner and have Punky take pictures for blogging purposes. Dinner last night? Beef and broccoli with white rice.

Started out with some steak that Punky helpfully sliced thin for me.

Seasoned with some of this.

A liberal handful of this stuff.  >.>;  I so don't do measurements.

So.. we get this. Which gets manhandled into

This.

Got my olive oil handy.

Got it working in my pan.

Mm.. Yummy smells.

Generous helping of soy sauce.

Tossed in some broccoli. It wasn't as chopped as I like it. Will improve next time.

Yummy white rice.

Dinner is served.

-Angelwick

Closets of many a kind....

Umm.. does anyone know why my archive link is suddenly in Spanish? Did I do that?

So.. today I meant to blog about The Broom Closet and lost the wind in my sails. Now that they've picked up again, I figured I'd try to put my thoughts down, including ones about the many other closets I hide in.

You see, what I really wanted to do today was stay awake long enough to cook, take pictures of the process and share the recipe. Unfortunately, I just couldn't stay awake that long. My schedule is still all topsy turvy from a couple of bad nights. So now I wake up between 8 and 10 pm, and stay awake until noon.

Worst schedule ever. I feel like I miss the whole day. Case in point, I didn't get to cook. Punky did it. So of course my previously diagnosed Cleaver Syndrome kicked in. (Thank you Dr. Aine W.D.) I feel like it would have been stupid to blog about Turkeyroni. Who doesn't know how to make their own version? Psh.

Then I thought about blogging about my trials and tribulations in parenting and even about some of my wins.. but I got paranoid that I'd give away information that Satan would somehow pile up and take to court to take The Brat away from me with.  Mind you.. there isn't anything I could say that would logically lead to that.. I'm just paranoid.

These are some of the many closets I hide in. Some of them are the results of pride. Actually, most of them are in one way or another. They come about from a worry that people won't see me as I want them to see me. I'm a person like any other, I've got about a hundred sides to me.. but I want people to see the right ones first. It's about pride, and control, and a bunch of other stuff too.

So... here's me making attempt number one at coming out of some of these.

I cook stupid things like Turkeyroni. I'm aware you can get Beefaroni in a can, I just like my version better. Also the yield by price is way more awesome. It's not gourmet, or even pretty, but it's delicious. My mom used to make it for me. I taught Punky to make it, and now we both make it for our kid. The next time I make it, I vow to take pictures and show them off. NO MORE TURKEYRONI SHAME.

Ahem.

I am an awesome and righteous parent. Righteous as in I'm cool as hell, not in the AND JESUS SAID.. kind of way.

Bratexander the Great is autistic. Boy, was I not prepared for that. Is anyone ever prepared for that bomb? I mean, by the time he was officially diagnosed, we had kind of figured it out at home, but the figuring out part was the shocker. What do you do with an autistic child? How special are his special needs? How far from normal are we talking?

I got lucky. We got lucky. The Brat is on the low end of the spectrum. Which basically means that if anyone of you happened upon him in a park or on the street, his only tell would be his speaking difficulty. Of course, it doesn't help that he's got a retainer now and goddamnit has that thing set him back eons.

Anywho... like the average parent, I educated myself to the best of my ability. Most of it was trial and error. I learned that the television turns the boy child into a zombie. I think I've mentioned it before. His brain melts and pours out of his ears. So for the past three years he just hasn't had one. There's only one tv in the house and it comes out of the closet for Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years. We watch the parade on Thanksgiving, and the lighting of the tree. That's about it.

I will admit that we are slowly relaxing on the rule lately, and perhaps allowing a little bit of x-box time. He's coming up on his first decade of life soon. His friends all have one, or even more than one. Not to mention a whole library of games. I became torn about making him an outcast. I figure that anything I forbid is just going to be something that he runs to and loses himself in as soon as I let the reigns go. I don't want him to be a eighteen year old basement dweller obsessed with  an x-box.

He can't play Monday thru Friday unless he saves some nuns from a burning building or something. I suppose that would earn him some x-box time. He has to earn play time. Thirty minutes of reading with no fussing earns him thirty minutes of game time. Miracle of miracles... he's not a little snot about it. He's not perfect, but not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.

So what does an autistic boy with no t.v. do when he's not in school? Time to come out of the internet anonymity closet.

He takes dorky web-cam pictures with his mamas. Hello world.

He cooks. One of his favorite pass times actually.

He takes over the world like a Bratexander should.

He goes to dance class. 

He hangs out with toy soldiers.

And visits the elves.

He goes ice skating at Lasker Rink.

Tries his hand at being a mermaid display at the Museum of Natural History.

Measures up against tigers at the zoo.

Plus you know there's piano class. Aikido. Visits to Lela's house. Can you tell? This is a kid that doesn't know the meaning of sitting at home and doing nothing. He's always somewhere doing something. That right there is my greatest accomplishment as a parent.

So.. who am I? 

I'm the rockstar mom in the Kim Kardashian shades.

Basking in the sunshine.

Trying to be a tiger.

And hopping out of the broom closet to try and find my witch-y path in nature. Horrible picture of me though.

The Broom Closet Miss Aine calls it. She's brilliant. I would have never thought to give it a name. I don't know that I've ever lingered in one for long. I think my relationship with my mother is the only one in which I'd still be in there. Only because I've never said to her, Mom, I'm a witch. Lord knows that we talk about witchcraft often enough. Miss Aine thinks my mom might even be one. 

Hilarious because my mom is a hardcore talk to God about it Christian. But I see it too. My mom raised me to know that the events of a harvest could be read in spilled wine. She's got what I teasingly call Peruvian Voodoo in her. She'll even get close to admitting it some days. When and where she grew up, you didn't rely on doctors as much as you did on Shamans.

She knows how to make all matters of herbs and vegetables and fruits work for her. I wish I was half as talented, but I know that I'm not because I'm still warm. Neither Hot nor Cold, just suspended somewhere in the grey middle.

But I dream things that'll happen. I have since I was tiny. Good lord did that suck. Knowing how you were going to be bullied the next day didn't exactly inspire to get up and go to school in the morning. Of course, it's never like it is in the movies. You can't just ninja dodge whatever is coming to you just because you know it's there. At least it never worked that way for me.

These days I wake up and mutter lines from shows and movies that make no sense out of context. Weeks/months/days later, whatever I sleepily muttered to Punky plays in a trailer or something. Utterly useless to me because I didn't want to dream anymore. So I begged the God that I believe in to please make it stop.

At the time, I had a near and dear witchy friend who told me not to do it. She said it was bad news to turn away from a gift. Said it wouldn't go away anyway. To this day I can't tell if she was just being harsh on me, or if she was just plain right. Maybe both. Eventually the dreams stopped meaning anything. 

And now my son sees things. AUGH. Damnit.Curse her and her witchy ways, but not really. That wasn't the sort of blowback I was expecting. I suppose that I should have been. So, I've been stuck lately. I don't have a community of witches that I belong to. I don't even have any more witchy friends as I used to, save for my bloggy godmother's Aine and Jeanne. Lord knows I bug them enough with all my endless questions. It sure feels like I'm in a broom closet.

Except for the part where I'm not. I live in the greatest city in the world. There isn't much you can do around here that'll shock anyone. Case in point, a neighbor came by months ago on a friendly visit and noticed that Punky had put some small storage containers she gave her to good use. So.. What was in them? Shepherd's purse. Without thinking twice about it, I just said it when she asked. Even went as far as to mention that it was for some spell work. She didn't blink twice, nodded along, and we carried on conversation until it was time for her to go. 

That's my tale on the broom closet. I don't really live in one, and some days I even whip out the witch card that I may or may not be entitled to just to scare away the crazies. 

So.. as I wrap it up.. I've got a question for you, my bloggy godmother. Though.. anyone with their own two cents can feel free to chime on in.

You define a witch as someone who does the magic. I think, I might be wrong, you've mentioned that he or she do it every day. It's just a part of life.  How strict is the every day thing? Is it like cooking? I try to cook at home ninety to ninety-five percent of the time. Sometimes though, there's pizza. Or Chinese. Or bootlegg KFC. Does it make me less of a cook? 

-Angelwick.

It's Okay Tuesday, The Broom Closet, Money and Frugality and Other Pilfered Ideas

So apparently Glamour Magazine has a thing called Hey It's Okay Tuesday, which I learned about through Whispering Writer @ http://whisperingwriter.blogspot.com/

So.. Here are some things I am trying to be okay about..

It's okay that I can't just pull a car out of thin air just to get my son into a fancy dance school.

It's okay to not want to rush an appointment that'll show me my insides and all the fat they're covered in.

It's okay to miss Fish Sticks. They were delicious and great for calorie counting.

It's okay to be a little worried/scared about walking to the gym and back alone.

And finally.. It's okay to borrow ideas from other blogs until I get my own groove back.

In other news.. the end of the month feels like it's dragging horribly. The last two weeks have felt like molasses to me. I think it's because before those two weeks time felt like it had really been speeding by. I thought the trend would continue. Oh well. There's an upside.

End of the month is usually budget-planning time. Lords and Ladies know I love me some planning. These are the days when I drive Punky up a wall asking for a pen at the randomest of times, scribbling all over envelopes, notebooks, anything paper. Even some things I probably shouldn't scribble on.

Our yearly planner is still all shiny and new since it's only January, but something about seeing the pages slowly fill up with our combined annotations really makes me genuinely happy. It sort of sucks to say that there are precious few things that make me feel that way. Which isn't to say that I'm Eeyore and totally bummed all the time.. it's just that happiness is a very special and specific feeling. It's as good as it is, maybe, because it is a little rare. All the other good feelings are still good.. they're just .. something else.

Our savings are slowly chugging along. Normally January is a great savings month for us, since we tend to take care of Christmas long before it actually arrives. There isn't too much blowback or debt from the holidays. I'm the sort of person that starts picking items out in July and packing them away for Christmas. Then I just pull them out of the closet and wrap and deliver in December. It takes a lot of the stress off. There'll always be last minute things to pick up, and even the occasional surprise swerve, but it's just not so bad.

Anyway.. This January our savings are short a couple hundred dollars. I can't even point out a main reason, just a sort of combination of things. Still, though it's frustrating, I'm glad that we were able to put something away. Something, will always be better than nothing. There's still the rest of the year ahead of us, and last years savings are still snugly put away. Punky and I have put together a tiny little nest egg that we're immensely proud of. We know that every penny that we pour into it lays the foundation of the ten year dream.

Not bad for a couple of traumatized twenty-six year olds, huh?

Catching up with my previously mentioned Bloggy Godmother has rendered other bits of inspiration and thought fodder. Some of it even lines up with some of my previous thoughts up there about the end of the month and money situations.

I used to belong to a LiveJournal community that was for posting grocery shopping receipts. It was a good place for comparing prices in different places and even picking up an idea or two. Unfortunately, there weren't that many members and the place sort of quietly died. I'd really like to find an alternative for it, since it always helps to be able to do things in groups.

NYC is a great place to be frugal in. All the money you save on little things adds up and then you can do awesome things. Food shopping here isn't a hardship. That happens to be because I live outside Manhattan. Still in the city proper, just not in the priciest part of it. Food here is cheaper than in many of the supermarkets I've visited in other states. Food shopping is where I do a lot of my savings. It isn't always easy, since The Brat goes through stretches of eating like he's got a bottomless pit in his belly.

( Any advice on that last bit dearest Bloggy Godmothers? Have either of you raised hungry boys with bottomless bellies? The MiL says Ramen, but that is such a tiny solution. )

There are five big supermarkets in my neighborhood. Actually, there are probably like six or seven, but some of them are hidden on side streets that I don't really venture to. Anywho... Once a week our building gets a delivery of all their flyers/circulars. They come in about a day or two before sales kick in, which gives us time for planning.

I used to try and menu plan with them, but that only worked out halfway for us. I can't get too specific ahead of time, as it guarantees that the family will revolt and not want to eat whatever is planned for Tuesday, because they want the Thursday meal instead. Thursday rolls around and they want take out. Kaboom. The plan blows up. Instead, I stock up on very versatile ingredients that lend themselves to a variety of meals.

Ground Beef/Turkey is a great example. It lends itself to everything from meatballs to chilli to tacos and burgers. So, at night I take a portion down from the freezer to defrost and take votes on the meal later.

If nothing else turns up, I might just take a crack at blogging my cheapness. Any other frugaholics out there?

I was going to blog about The Broom Closet .. but all the wind has gone out of my sails. Maybe next time?

-Angelwick

Rainy Day Pondering...

To go out or not to go out... that is the question. All my talk of making the sun come out scared it away I suppose. I had been hoping to get back into the gym routine this morning.

Tramadol.. the wonder drug I wrote about some months ago.. helped my various pains so much that I was able to start going to the local World Healthyness. I started out not being able to do too much for very long at all, and slowly each day I could do a little more. Now it's been about two weeks since I've been. I miss it. I don't want to stay off the bandwagon just because I've fallen off of it.

The sucky part about the rain is that I'll have to wear a coat. Normally, I just shuffle out of the house in my work-out clothes and catch the bus to the gym. It drops me off practically at the door of the place, so I don't usually need a jacket or anything. Just my trusty mp3 player. However, recent ambition to save up crazy amounts of money for the next six months means that I've chosen to go without my monthly buss pass.

Okay.. backtracking a little.. The wonder drug? It lets me walk to Bullseye. The Bullseye that's always stealing my money? Yeah.. it's just under two miles away from my house, and I haven't been able to walk that sort of distance in years. The gym is even closer than that, so walking is an option, I just don't know if walking in the rain with no coat is an option.

Ideally, I'd want to get out of here soon-ish. Today is a sort of busy day. Not with actual doings, but with telephone calls. I have three referrals from my primary care physician and appointment making over the phone sucks. It can be hours of bad music and stupid questions sometimes. And that's just one appointment. I also have to schedule an ultrasound of my liver. Recent blood tests show that my liver enzymes are really high.

The liver thing scared me for a bit because my doctor threw around the Hepatitis B/C card. I can happily say I'm much calmer about it now that I've done some reading up on it though. It's not the HIV /  Herpes doom-bomb I thought it was. I may not even have it. He also said it could just be fatty liver disease.

All disease is bad disease, but in this case, and in the case of the arthritis I supposedly have, I'm not frantic. My doctors blase and oft repeated cure is to lose the weight. Well, I'm working on it. I've dropped about ten plus pounds, and I'm managing to keep it off. It's not just going to all fall off in the blink of an eye though. I gained weight over many many years of not being able to walk. It'll probably be years before I'm down to my goal size 14.

I so want to go to the gym. I think I'm going to.

In other news. Bratexander has a dance performance thing tonight. His semester of Hip Hop is over. So far it's the only activity we've stuck him in that he didn't love. I kind of mourn the three hundred plus dollars that went whoosh.. but I'm all about making him try new things. He loves music and he has joyful seizures that pretend to be dance moves whenever he is around a radio. I thought dance class would help and I even resisted the urge to stick him in ballet. Unfortunately, he wound up being the only boy in his class and he felt unnerved being surrounded by nothing but girls. I guess until now his interactions with other children had always been more balanced.

Then there was the bit about not remembering anything he'd learned in class once he got home. Talking to his teacher revealed something that was already a familiar pattern to us. He's great in class. So says every teacher we expose him to. School. Piano. Dance. Now martial arts. ( Mind you, we the parental units wouldn't know, as he hates all things we try to work on or teach him at home. Reading. Math. Piano practice. It's like pulling teeth. He gets to class, and he's some kind of idiot savant.) The Hip Hop teacher couldn't help figure out why he wasn't remembering choreography at home, so we just sort of sucked it up and rode it out.

Punky and I continue to half jokingly discuss sticking him in Irish Stepdance, since he had a little taste of that last year at the IAC. My mother would like to see him in ballet, for one to see the family tradition continue, and for another, because she thinks ballet is the road to life. It helps with flexibility and balance. Things that will come in handy when we try and make an Olympian out of him.

And honestly? Bratexader the Great will probably wind up doing it all. Maybe not all at the same time, so as not to overwhelm him, but still getting a taste of it all. Over the years as he grows up, whenever I've butted heads with my mother as to his upbringing there's been a certain phrase I keep going back to.

To me, Bratexander the Great is a New Child. I tell my mother often that he's not a child of the past like I was, instead he belongs to the future. He's a world child. He's got just about every corner of the world in his blood, and the corners that aren't in the blood are in the house or around him elsewhere and helping in his raising. I may not mention the rest of the village often, but they are there, and he is being raised by all of them.

I've got Martin Luther King Jr. type dreams for my son. I want nothing to be foreign to him. I want him to see the world, and know about it. I want him to know the music of it, and its dances. I want him to eat all its foods and see all its colors.

The Brat and I share a birthday. He was the only present I got the night of my eighteenth birthday. Which means, that when he is eighteen, I will only be thirty six. Okay, so most of the time I amongst the female population that feels like thirty should stay away forever. I won't lie. But.. in truth, thirty six is pretty young. Lots of people are only just starting to figure it all out at that age. I've at least got a good steady solid plan. That's what I do, I'm a planner. When I'm thirty six, I'll still be young. Hopefully, I'll be strong. I'm trying to shape up my health now, so it'll be there when I need it then.

When I am thirty six Satan will no longer have a hold on me. If on a whim I want to put us all on a plane to Japan, I'll be able to do that and no one could stop me.

Anywho.. I need more parental friends that I can talk to. Parenting has started to feel a little lonely, and I know it affects the boy too. Me not having parent-y friends means no play dates. My neighborly Raven has sort of fallen off the map and The Brat hasn't exactly made friends at his lessons. I have such a hard time making friends though. I'm closed off, defensive, and.. just .. me. I'm a lone lion?

Oh well. No closer to figuring out if I should risk the rain and go to the gym.  Help?

-Angelwick

Inspiration and the imprecision of language....

EDIT : Credit for the questions goes to Miss Aine of The Deepest Well @ http://deepestwell.blogspot.com/ 

Since having an anxiety attack has prompted me into blogging again, I've been trying to catch up on the blogs I follow. I started with a lady I consider a Bloggy Godmother, and even though I've barely scratched the surface of all I've missed on her blog, I came across a bit that sort of stuck out and hit home.

Are you a Witch or Wiccan?
Do you belong to a group/coven or are you solitary?
Do you abide by The Rede or oany other Rule in your practice?
Does your belief system include a deity or deities? If so, explain who they are, your relationship with them.
Does your path include magical practices?
Do you/how do you celebrate seasonal changes/Sabbats/Wheel of the Year
Do you agree with the statement "All Wiccans are Witches, but not all Witches are Wiccan" ?
Do you believe that Witchcraft is a religion?

I'd like to answer some of those questions, or at least take a crack at them, but I'm frustrated by the words that I do not have. I find myself going around in circles around words that don't explain much. Suddenly an aversion to labels renders me mute. How can you identify something without words that label it? But how can you label something too grand to put in a jar?

Am I a witch? I don't know. Who decides if I am? Do I? What is a witch? If I come from a people that can make the sun come out and answer to them, am I a witch? And if my son can make the rain fall down, does that make me a witch? And if I can dream the future?

When does the strawberry become jam? Is it in the pot or in the jar? Does the secret lie in the mashing, or is it only jam when it has finished? Is a human being ever finished? I don't think so. I think death is our end as humans. I'm not done growing and learning and transforming until then. Then I have become the jam, I suppose.

Am I solitary? More solitary than most can know. So alone it isn't funny, but I belong to a people if I am not with them. I belong to them, even if they do not embrace me like I long to embrace them.

Maybe, like Aine, my winter has just become too long. I'm ready for life again, for picnics in the park and running the soccer fields with Bratexander the Great. I'm reaching for a life that I feel people are trying to tie up and take away. I don't do well in cages. I'm not an animal meant for them, if there are even any that are.

No, to the Rede. As for rules.. I think all things work by them. I must as well, even if I do not know them.

As for the rest.. I want to answer, I may even come back to them.. but I just don't have answers in me right now. It all comes back to language. What is magic? If my mother can scare disease from your eye is that magic? What is a deity? When my orphan child of a mother looked out on the mountains covered in flowers that no one had planted she knew that something bigger than herself was at work and calling to her, but she didn't call that thing God. At least not right away. Sometimes it seems like God is just a word. A name. It is a thing, like I am a thing, like all things are things.


-Angelwick