What color is spite, you ask?

Well, it’s red of course. I’m still a little chicken, so it’s red highlights with blonde, and the red is only semi-permanent. It should fade nicely by the time I go on the cruise. I’ll post a picture when I’m looking good enough to take a picture. That would have been Saturday, because I was looking damned good, but I forgot the camera.

Why is it spite? Because Cowboy always requested that I not color it red. Both of his ex-wives had red hair. Piss on ‘im, now he’s got a hat trick of reheaded exes.

I?d started looking forward to Jeff’s party in spite of myself. Marci was going to drag me there whether I wanted her to or not, so I might as well have fun about it, I thought. And I did have fun.

We pulled up there in Marci’s car, and I spotted JJ right off up on the porch. I hollered at him to come help me with the cooler, but he didn’t recognize me, what with the wrong car and the wrong hair color and not seeing me for two years and all.

But when he did recognize me, his face lit up, and I threw myself into his arms and almost fell apart. It was like coming home and not being sure they would accept me, but they did, with open arms. I forgot how much I’d missed him.

The party itself was mostly full of strangers. A few close friends intermingled with some old acquaintances and a bunch of people that had come on the scene since I’d been gone, so I was the stranger to them. They were all pretty nice, if not people I’m going to want to hang out with all the time.

It didn’t hurt that Marci was my DD (wow! I’m always the DD) so I got to drink as much as I wanted, and I started early and hard. That’s good for getting over shyness, and I think I met everyone there. Can’t remember half their names, but I met them.

I did learn that chew hits one much harder when drunk and that I still know how to spit. What the hell, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone.

I slowed down later to beer, then water, and then I had an asthma attack thanks to all of the smokers and eventually zonked on the upstairs bed. Marci came and got me before midnight, but I wasn’t as drunk as everyone thought I was. I even stayed awake (and not carsick) to give her directions home before I crashed in my own bed.

I wasn’t even as hung over as I’d expected the next day, what with being a lightweight and all. I just took a lot of naps, which I’d allowed for in my busy, busy schedule, and I was fine. So, not a wasted weekend after all. And now the kids are home, John’s doing chores to make up for losing his drum, and we have grand plans that may or may not involve take-n-bake pizza. Sounds fine to me.

I was standing around bullshitting with my lineman friends yesterday when I noticed something moving awkwardly down the road. I thought it might be a mouse, so I went and looked, but no! It was a tiny toad, out in the road and the dry grass.

I caught him, got a strange look from the linemen, and drove on back to my office clutching him in my fist as he tried desperately to gross me out. Sorry, toad, a little thing like you can’t possibly pee on me enough.

He’s about the size of a spring peeper, but definitely of the toadly persuasion.

So I put him in the center of my bromeliad arrangement, which I usually keep nice and moist. He’s still there today; I brought him an offering of a nice crunchy beetle to pacify him. Toads clearly make better office pets than either lizards or snakes.

My fashion advisor Marci took me on a shopping trip today to help get me outfitted for my cruise coming up next month. I do almost all of my shopping online, and I tend to find a shirt or pants I like and buy multiples of the same thing. Consulting would be a must, if I were going to branch out into the wild and crazy world of, say, Capri pants.

And we got to take her zippy little convertible, which was fun all in itself.

On the way up, we were talking a mile a minute at each other, as we tend to do. She knew I’d been browsing the personal ads lately—sort of window shopping, as I know I’m nowhere near ready to start dating. It’s fun to look, but I confessed to her that even thinking about dating feels to me like cheating on a beloved husband. I know in my head that that’s crazy, since he left me and we weren’t married anyway, but I was certainly that attached to him. I won’t be able to date until long past the time it no longer feels like a betrayal of a relationship that I don’t have any more.

So we shopped and looked at all sorts of crazy stuff. I’m out of luck for the most part, because tank tops are hardly going to be appropriate for Spring in Alaska, but I found a couple of things and the aforementioned Capri pants. And in the second store, I found something else.

We walked up to the checkout line, and right in front of us was Aunt Judy. You remember, the woman I’ve loved as a mother-in-law for the last three years?

We gave each other big hugs and caught up a little. Lonnie’s still out cowboying, Chris is at a rodeo, and Cowboy had a high team run at a roping. Judy’s mother is going on a cruise to Alaska in late June too, and the odds are pretty good that it will be on my ship, so I promised to look out for her. I can take care of three old people, no problem.

But when it came time to say goodbye, I lost it. I was better off running into her than Cowboy, but I’m by no means prepared for either. I still love him and desperately miss both him and the life we’d built together. I think she could see that, and I hope she tells him. He needs to know, but it can’t be from me.

I’m still a wreck; I thought it would get easier with time, but it hasn’t so far. I miss him all the time and he’s never far from my thoughts. My body got worn out with crying all the time, but if I were to see him, it would all start again. I drove home from the trip still in a daze.

It’s been more than three months. I don’t know if I’ll ever completely lose him. I don’t want to yet.

This business keeps poking me in the arm whether I want it to or not.

One of my contacts for my day job and I got to shooting the breeze a few weeks ago, so he knows I’m a water operator. He keeps thinking I’m a wastewater operator too, since that’s what he was (30 years ago.) I remind him that no, I’m not, but he forgets anyway.

So he came up with a potential job that he thinks I’d be perfect for.

In wastewater. Ew. Fortunately, it’s for post-treatment discharge, so it’s more like treating drinking water.

I don’t know diddly about wastewater, but what the hell, I’m willing to learn. And my partner does that for a living, so I told him to go ahead and pass my name on. Good thing, because he already had. I called Big Jeff and left a voice mail, because if there’s designing to be done, a rookie’s not the one to do it. But operating a plant would fit nicely in with my schedule and expand my business just that much more.

So I’m signed up for one of two correspondence courses to get this certification. I’m terrible at correspondence courses—no discipline whatsoever—but I figure I can use it to keep myself busy on the slow days of the cruise. I’ve dropped two of the three I’ve taken before, but the third one went well. I do better when I have a deadline.

And this may get me into the local good ol’ boy’s network a little more too. That’s always a good place to be, and most of the guys I’ve met around here have no problem working with a woman. They will sometimes go out of their way to give me a chance, even, which is nice.

Because come 2007, I’m going to need to be doing something. Might as well diversify all I can, and get the training in now.

I try to be the best mom I can be, but there are times I think I’m failing, at least with one kid.

I had every intention of making this trip a day of fun for all of us. I went into it planning to not be strict and not yell and not let John push my buttons, and by about two-thirds of the way into the day, all of that went to hell.

I swear, I do not know what I’m doing wrong with this kid. He seems to intentionally push my buttons, and even if I constantly remind myself that he’s ten and I’m thirty-five, eventually he gets to me.

This time it was the begging and the whining and the never taking no for an answer. You’d think he’d know by now that when I say no, I mean it. I never back down from that. And there was no reason for begging; I gave them both everything they needed to have fun. We went on all the rides we wanted to go on, we ate all the food we wanted, and they got to buy souvenirs and candy. And still, every time I turned around, John was pounding me with, “Can I have this? Can I have this? Can I have this?” And it was the same thing over and over again, and there was no reason for it. I told him no, I took him aside and explained to him that the answer would be no, I threatened him, I swatted him, and when he did it later at home some more, I spanked him. It just doesn’t sink in with that kid. He does not stop.

And he’s worse around other people. When it’s just us, he’s OK, and I can talk to him like he’s a reasonable human being. But when we’re on a train with people trying to sleep and he’s bouncing off the walls and won’t just shut up, I lose my cool.

And I recognize that a lot of his little manipulations are echoes of the things his father did to me (and his grandmother too) that made me hate them. I don’t want to hate my son and I feel an obligation to raise him to be a person that won’t inspire that kind of emotion, but he seems to be going down that path no matter what I do.

His father manipulated the hell out of me, and I still resent the hell out of him for that. His mother was even worse; I can’t believe that anyone can stand to be around her, but that just must not bother some people. I hate to see my son going down that road.

And I feel guilty too. This is the kid that’s had a mother dealing with major depression for much of his life. His first four years were in near-isolation with a mom that could hardly function. I think that if I’d had a job and been happier, he would have been more socially adapted. He would have been in daycare and would have learned to deal with other people sooner. I think I handicapped him by trying to do what I thought was best for him at the time. I didn’t know that I’m just not a person who can be a stay at home mom without outside contact.

His personality and mine just clash sometimes. I don’t really get how introverted he is. I was a pretty quiet kid myself and liked to stay inside and read all summer, but I had friends and I went outside and did stuff. He goes to Boy Scouts, but I don’t know if he has any actual close friends. I never hear him mention any names at least, except for Ben and Thomas, and he doesn’t seem to mind being a loner. That’s pretty foreign to my mind. I hate to compare them, but I relate much better to Seamus. He’s not exactly what I was at that age, but he’s much closer. He’s a likeable kid, and at some level, John is sort of an annoying kid.

And I feel guilty for thinking that about my son too. I don’t want him to be lonely or to feel isolated. But when I try to help him with the skills he’d need to get along with people, he just shrugs me off. I have a feeling that he’s that oblivious kid in every class, that isn’t liked very well, but doesn’t have to social sense to know it.

So how do I do it? How do I teach this kid to get along with other people? How do I teach him to get along with me? How do I get through to him that manipulating people pisses them off?

I just don’t know.