Online cook books are awesome!

So, of late I've been stumped on what to cook because the pantry is beginning to get a little bare as I'm getting towards needing to go grocery shopping. As a result, I've been looking at different websites for ideas and recipes. In my head, I keep calling them online cook books. I think my favorite is Recipezaar. So many interesting ideas and recipes in one place! It's fantastic. I think I'm in love! :)

Writing & Insomnia.

Well, I just started another blog. This one is just for writing about this abuse stuff I'm dealing with. If you want the link, contact me via e-mail or say something in the comments on this post.

I'm going to go attempt to sleep. Maybe it'll work and I won't wake up two or three times tonight.

Insomnia sucks.

It's not like I'm feeling horrible. I just can't sleep. :P I don't know if I should go wash dishes or screw around with some of my craft projects right now. At least the boy stopped his 3 1/2 hour temper-tantrum. He woke up and wanted to go play. When he got put back into bed after a diaper change, that's when the screaming began.

Remind me to buy ear plugs some time.

I may need them in the near future.

Rambling thoughts.

I'm just going to put this down here and maybe I'll figure it out.

Or not... not too huge of a difference, I suppose.

I've been coming to some realizations and doing alot of thinking. It disturbed the hell out of me to realize the extent of the brutality I dealt with as a kid. I think what disturbed me even more was to realize just how the propensity for the ugly crap still remains in the people who did it and it's beginning to manifest again. It troubled me deeply to realize how many of the things I told myself about them are just plesant lies to cover up the raw, festering wounds that I have deep within my soul and damn near a lifetime of anger.

I'm not sure how directly I should mention them, because I forget if they have access to this blog. So, I belive I'm going to let some of the detaile lie where they are. I'm probably going to be writing about this a fair amount in my other blog. It is my hope that ... That in writing about this, I can make it stop haunting me so much and I can excise the inner demons tormenting me.

When I came to that realization last night... just how many lies I've told myself... When I came to the realization as to the extent that I was in denial about my past, I realized a couple other things. Like the longer I continue my interactions, the longer they'll terrorize me and I'll have to deal with those sick head games. The worst thing is, I recognize now that nothing changed over the years except for how the abuse was done. And that change of method decieved me into thinking that they had changed.

Memories are rising up to the surface like bubble of steam in a boiling kettle. And connections are being made and understanding is flashing into realization like the way a spark jumps from particle to particle in a grain explosion. I wish I could say that it was all a bad dream or some kind of strange nightmare. I wish that it was just my imagination running away from me or something else ... I wish there was something I could say or do to make it where this wasn't real. But if it wasn't real, then I wouldn't have the fears I do or the ingrained habits that sabotage me.

If it wasn't real, then I wouldn't be as concerned about their thoughts and opinions of me. If it wasn't real, I wouldn't have the nightmares or night terrors that I do. I wouldn't be as terrified of confrontation or so damn convinced that everything I do is wrong somehow and that the misery of the people around me is something I must atone for. At the same time, as I look back on all of this, I realize something that has surfaced on occasion in my mind but I didn't really believe until now.

I realize that I *am* strong, brave, and honorable. I realize that the amount of courage to refuse to participate in their sick games willingly is staggering when you look at how much power over me they had at the time. I realize the amount of courage that I had to draw on to deal with an abusive bastard at the same time as I was dealing with their shit and continue to refuse to participate in their charade is matched only by my strength. Because I now understand the enormity of what I've faced down, though I can't fully comprehend the scope, and the fact that I've done so with out becoming one of them is a testament to my strength. The fact that I didn't let them strip away those things about me which they hated and continue to hate or that I didn't let them control how I live my life today and I resisted it where I could before... It shows me that I am strong.

Honorable is entirely my interpretation here, but it was something they threw around at one point as part of their bullshit. And I *am* honorable because I have never once perpetuated that abuse. Even in the heights of anger or fustration, when my temper gets the best of me at times, I have resisted and rejected it. It is a daily fight but I am winning that war. Now, I will set to work on winning the rest of this war for my sense of self and dignity.

It will not be easy. I know there are people who are going to look at what I'm doing like I'm a mad woman. I've been through this and I recognize that the memories are going to surface. I recognize that they have been surfacing and that's ok. Those of you who know me and are close to me, I may act a little crazy at times but I will be ok. Please, be patient with me and know that I will be fine after a little while.

This is hard work I'm starting here. But it's for a good cause.

Feeling twitchy.

You know, I just let some folks know about my concerns regarding C- and I really hope that they're taken seriously. The logical part of my brain says 'yes, of course they'll be,' while another part of my brain says that there's no way they'd take me and my concerns seriously. I'm so not looking forward to the next game where I have to deal with him.

C- is a bastard and I've decided to tear him a part if he chooses to attack me. I'm not comfortable with this decision but I'm not going to let him intimidate me. If confronting him publicly for his bullshit when he persists in harassing me is what it takes, then so be it. I get so angry when he harasses and insults me. I want to smack him across the face when he does that.

I've decided not to do that. But if he raises a hand to me, I'll defend myself with prejudice. If I persist in reminding myself that I have a right to do that, when the shit hits the fan, perhaps I won't hesitate.

Ugh! Stress sucks!

You know the feeling of being stressed out? Oh, what am I asking for, *everybody* knows that feeling and hates it. It's really crappy and I just wish it'd go away for a little while.

I'm getting to the point where I just want to go run away and hide from the world for a few days. A sick baby, housework, and apartment hunting, however, demands that I stick around. Housework... gods, it's a never ending nightmare. I thought I had this place clean. Then I had to do some baking, the boy got out his toys, and I needed to work on a few projects that had been set aside. Clean house is impossible when the house is not big enough to hold everything.

I miss having a real kitchen. :( Enough space that a handful of dirty dishes doesn't turn it into an absolute bomb blast would be wonderful.

...

I could continue whining but I wont. I just feel crappy. Maybe I'll whine in my off-line journal and not subject the world to my being 'emo' right now.

more rambling.

I am sitting here feeling like crying. I feel kinda sick too, but it could be because I need to eat something. I think it's more likely to be stress. I'm terrified right now. I recognize that logic insists that I have no reason to be afraid and that we're all ok. I can't shake the terror that they're going to come over here tomorrow morning and demand that I and the boy get out while my husband is at work, leaving us literally out in the cold.

I can't stop thinking that we don't have enough money to handle the damn debt collectors and these fuckers who run the place where we're living. I've been looking all day and I can't find where I put the lease. I just want to cry. I just want to put my head down on the desk and sob, even though it does no good. I can't think of anything else to do right now.

I'm sitting here looking for new apartments and what I see... I can't stop thinking about how we can't even afford things right now as it stands. How are we going to pay the deposit and first month's rent on a new place? I look in the kitchen and I question how I'm going to make food stretch and wonder if we're going to need to let one of our other bills slip so that I can get groceries in about a week.

I hate this. I hate how sick it makes me feel. I hate the fact that I didn't sleep half as well as I should have last night. I hate how I can't even shake the fear by using the various meditation techniques that I've used over the years. I'm unable to make it go away, quiet it, or anything else.

The worst thing is, I keep thinking to myself that I should have learned more about this stupid place when I was looking for where we going to move before.

My bright spot today...

My bright spot today is my son. He's happily playing and being terribly cute right now. Thank goodness for that and the fact that it is putting a smile on my face.

Because right now, I just want to crawl under a rock or something and hide, if not cry.

I hate my landlord and the people who work for her. I hate them with a passion. We moved in here and naively expected them to be honest with us. Instead, I've spent damn near everyday since about two weeks into the lease being worried that they're going to try to throw us out. I hate these bastards.

Somedays, I hate my side of the family...

I understand, my parents are stressed. But this is beginning to really get on my nerves.

If you people don't want to help us, then don't do it! If you do want to help us, then don't bitch about it! Nobody held a gun to anyone's head and *forced* them to do shit.

...

Gods, there is *so* much more I could add right now but just thinking about it makes my slightly nauseated stomach feel even worse.

Ever get the feeling that somebody out there is telling you something? And that if you don't get it soon they're going to be throwing a goddamn brick at your head to make you figure it out?

I'm getting the impression that I should just stop dealing with my side of the family for a little while. Time to become too busy with stuff or something. *shrugs*

I hate debt collectors.

I tell the guy that I'm having a hard time keeping the lights on. He just continues with his script.

I told him several times that it's not that I'm refusing to pay my debts but that I simply don't have the money for it. It's either throw money down that rat hole or put food in my kid's mouth.

And the guy says 'so you're refusing any hard ship payment options?'

My response was 'I don't see how I can use any of these options when I'm having a hard time buying groceries.'

I've a bad feeling that these motherfuckers are going to try to garnish my husband's wages.

As if having to deal with a jackass landlord isn't enough right now?

Remind me to go burn the world down later, somebody, will you?

Recent nightmares and thoughts.

So, there's the strange dreams that go with pregnancy. There is the strange dreams that go with the stress of dealing with idiot landlords, crazy family, and too many bills. Then there are the nightmares and strange dreams that go with being harassed by a person who had assaulted you.

Maybe it's just me but I think it'd be easier if N- was harassing me. N- wasn't quite smart enough to be the insidious bastard that C- is. Mind you C- isn't a smart man either. That said, I have been starting to have nightmares and I wasn't entirely sure why I wasn't sleeping well.

I wasn't sure, that is, until today. I woke up from a series of dreams where I was getting into a screaming argument with C- at LARP, with each dream tending closer to a physical altercation between him and I. C- may insist that his recent bullshit has been directed at my characters in the game where he and I both play in, but he's been making me uncomfortable for the past month with his attention becoming focused upon me.

I recognize part of the issue is the fact that I am pregnant with my second child and he is envious. I was briefly involved with C- about five years ago. He was my first foray into having a relationship with a man outside of my relationship with my husband. At that time, C- actively attempted to destroy my relationship with my husband and manipulated my PTSD related issues to cause me distress and get away with sexually assaulting me multiple times.

That came to an end fairly quickly when I very calmly told him to stop or I was going to break his neck when he was attempting to pin me down to have his way with me. I was dissociated but not entirely separate from myself to the extent that I was semi-catatonic. He left a few minutes later and never darkened my doorstep again. In the midst of that four month relationship, aside from the emotional and psychological havoc he created with his bullshit, he did rape me twice.

I'm not sure if C- impregnated me or if my husband did, because I didn't know I was pregnant until the miscarriage about a month after I told C- to get off of me or I'd kill him. Also, at the time that it would have happened, I was having a great deal of problems with dissociating and I can't recall fairly significant portions of time. It makes me suspect that I was raped more then twice, because only two times do I remember clearly. And the clarity of those recollections is rather startling.

Anyways, C- started with his mild efforts to antagonize me essentially right after I told friends of mine and my husband's at LARP as soon as we knew I was pregnant. I remember when I was pregnant with my son, C- was somewhat antagonizing but he didn't really show the effort that he is now. I think it is because he felt that he couldn't get away with it. Unfortunately, I've started having nightmares featuring C- again.

I'm thinking that I need to confront C- and tell him to leave me the fuck alone. I'm afraid, however, that confrontation will turn violent and C- will delibertately attempt to induce a miscarriage via hitting my abdomen. I don't know what to do, but I'm torn between a fear that he is going to try to hurt my baby and seething rage at his audacity to harass me. At least with N-, I wouldn't blink twice at the thought of tearing his throat out.

C-... Well, I don't think N- would try to batter me in a fashion to cause a miscarriage, because he wouldn't know that I'm pregnant. C-, on the other hand, knows and hates it. He desperately wants to have a child to carry on his family name. May the Gods deny him this desperate yearning and protect other women and girls from his attempt to answer it. I do, I admit, curse the day that I invited C- into my home and into my life in any type of relationship closer then a casual acquaintance.

Love is not a sin or a thing you can legislate.

I am sure that some of you who know me are going to expect a rant about how someone is throwing around the anti-homosexual marriage garbage again. Actually, this is about a situation involving the Salvation Army. I kinda respected those guys until I saw this:

Capt. Harsh led the Oshkosh Salvation Army for more than three years before he was suspended for not following orders. He is a widower. His wife, who was also a Salvation Army officer, died suddenly last summer.

"I asked God to bring me a woman who was pretty on the outside and the inside. That's what God did," said Captain Johnny Harsh, suspended officer.

Capt. Harsh now plans to marry Cia, who is not an officer.

I have a real problem with this situation. It's highly unreasonable, in my opinion, to take this stance. The Salvation Army apparently has this policy that officers can only marry other officers. I wasn't aware of this until today. I am finding myself inclined to boycott the Salvation Army because of the misery they're sowing with this stance.

I know, I know... I'm a heathen and I really shouldn't be concerned with how people of other religions operate their religion. This, however, is not a matter strictly of religious philosophy. In my opinion, this is a human rights matter. Just like the question of gay marriage is a human rights issue.

We have the right to love whom we will, it's simply a part of who and what we are. This can't be legislated or dictated from on high. It's something that moves our hearts and is a blessing. I truly and honestly believe that it is morally wrong to condemn someone for who they love. That said, I think there is a distinction between love and sex.

I'll put limits on sex, but those limits are not going to stop someone from feeling love. If an adult loves a child in a romantic fashion, if they *truly* love that child, then the adult will be willing to wait until the child is of legal majority to consummate the relationship physically. People have done this and I don't object to it. But the rest of this crap, is wrong.

I'm *so* stumped!

I have decided to completely re-do my web-page on Keen and the one that I've got set up on Tripod. I figure part of my problem getting business is because those pages are too ... well... They're just not any good.

I'm just at a loss for how to correct them. As such, I'm off to do some research and scope out web pages for other psychics and figure out why pages suck. :P

~*Update*~

Well, I've surfed a bit on the interwebz and found this image that I love and want to use as a background. It's free and it's goregous!

Well...

I found out what I've suspected for a few weeks now. I'm pregnant. I'm pretty sure that my Mom's going to go bat shit rather then be happy for my family here. I mean, the boy is getting a sibling, a person to play with and he won't have to go out of the house to play with them. The boy's going to be delighted once he realizes this is a good thing.

It'll make money interesting. Right now it rather sucks, but it was going to suck anyways because life is just a pain in the ass like that right now. Not having alot of money and having things like your student loans come due is a huge pain in the ass. Mom, however... I have this terrible feeling that the first words out are going to be a diatribe about how we can't afford the baby followed by a demand that the pregnancy be terminated.

Yeah, I had a few nightmares last night... can you tell?

I am livid.

I want to kill a motherfucker. I really do.

And I fucking can't.

Why is it that my widowed Aunt has found herself in the position of being stalked and sexually harassed by a dipshit who is just fucking like N- is beyond my comprehension. I do know, however, that I am so filled with rage at his behavior that I can't calm down enough to sleep. I just want to beat the fucker until he's lying in a pool of his own blood and drowning to death in it while in excruciating pain from his injuries.

Worries.

I can't stop thinking about money and worrying about it. My stomach is in knots and I feel like I'm on the verge of crying half the time when I'm not numb right now.

And when I'm not caught up in that, I'm fretting about stupid bullshit with my mother.

Or of turning into her.


It has not been a good day for me today.

Stream of consciousness rant/rambling

I suppose that did sound a little awkward for a title to this post. Ah, well. I'm not going to trouble myself over it very much. Right now, my son is sleeping and so is my husband. As such, I either have the liberty to use the internet as I wish or do some chores uninterrupted. As you can tell, I've chosen to play in the interwebz. It's been challenging over the last several days. I'm not sure where the biggest challenge comes from right now.

I am torn between pointing at the anger I feel towards my mother for her recent bullshit and the general feeling of malaise that's been left in the wake of her... bad behavior, bitchy words... what is the correct way to describe it? I honestly don't know. I've ranted about this elsewhere. I've had about a half hour long conversation with my husband's girlfriend about it (who is wonderfully supportive and is strongly exhorting me to say 'fuck you' to my mother and cut her off from my life just as she has done with the people who've hurt her in her family). In some ways, I feel purged of the angst that I sat down with initially to write out and expunge from my soul.

At the same time, I'm... feeling like I need to lance some kind of emotional boil and drain the festering abscess within my soul of rage, anguish, pain, and profound disappointment. It's funny, I fell asleep last night and dreamed of assisting people will illness and a theme that came up was healing infections. It wasn't an exactly cathartic dream but it wasn't one of the nightmares that I've been having on a regular basis either. It was kinda nice to wake up and not have my left arm bruised because I smacked it against the nightstand as I was having some form of night terrors as I slept.

Night terrors... Oh, gods, do I hate those things. I can not begin to detail the worst of them. Actually, I could but even in the supposedly reassuring light of day, I still find myself uneasy with *that* one particular one. Not terribly surprising, it does feature physical violence and torture. It seems like the worst of my nightmares are usually along those lines. It kinda makes me wonder just how bad some of the things I don't remember were. It also makes me think that my interest in medieval torture really didn't serve me very well for helping me sleep.

Fascination with medieval warfare and torture just doesn't mix well with a restful sleep when you have an active imagination and way too much stress inside. It does make for some very... well, fucked up dreams at times. Throw in my amusement/love of zombie and other horror movies and it can get really disturbed inside my head sometimes. So, I believe I'm going to write about something else. I've decided to write about something happier.

I have made alot of progress in my efforts in preparation for the holidays. I think it will be a good year to be a child around in this neck of the woods. I still need to pick up a few things because I realized that I'm missing some of the materials I need to make a couple of items, but it's not as bad as I thought it would be. My plan to make a rag book for my youngest neice and a rag book for my son this year is coming into a good stage. It've gotten my ducks in a row and I'm ready to start cutting and peicing it together.

I'm also working on finishing up a couple of sweaters and a few other nice things for the kids in the family. On one hand, I've got to admit, it is kinda easy. When you have nothing but neices to get gifts for, it is terribly easy because they're all pretty much interested in the same things right now. The eldest of all the girls is a bit more sophisticated but even she's at about the same point right now. So I don't have any real worries about what to give her. I just need to get my sewing machine in order. Which I think I've got fixed.

Wow, my capacity for paying attention is just completely shot right now. I should work on something else aside from writing right now. Fortunately, this is not in preparation for anything like serious publication.

Brief Update.

I've got some stuff to rant about and such. I'll do so in a few minutes. This, however, is a quick plug to let the world know that I'm still alive. Aside from that, I'm severely pissed off with my mother. Don't worry, I'll rant about that in a minute.

I'm also contemplating changing the layout of my blog again. I'm getting bored with this one.

Images that match characters.

I'm taking a brain break and this is what I found.

Marie Clair (daughter of Marie Olberight):









Marie Olberight:



Richard Dawson:











Janine Davis:



All pictures belong to the owners which the images come from.

Insomnia.

I'm sitting here with a minor bout of insomnia. I'm going to attempt to do some writing upon my NaNoWriMo project and I can't help but feel that odd sense of peace that comes late at night. A part of me is contemplating just staying up incredibly late tonight for the sake of that feeling. I don't really know why.

I also feel an odd mix of sorrow, liberty, and longing right now.

Stormcrow, you make me wistful at moments for the oddest reasons. I think that smile the last time I saw you is what did it this time.

And Stargazer, I wish you were here right now. I was brave today, so very brave and I think you'd have been proud of me for it.

Getting comfortable in your own skin is so very hard sometimes.