Cheaper than cheap "Anywhere Spray"

I'm always one to try to figure out the cheapest way to get quality things. One thing that I always buy is Clorox Anywhere spray. I use it constantly! Well, I have been watching my favorite BBC America show, "How Clean is Your House", and I've taken a lot of their suggestions on how to clean your home without using chemicals. One thing that I picked up from the show is that Tea Tree oil is a non toxic bug repellent and disinfectant, vinegar cuts grease, and isopropyl alcohol is a disinfectant. Add all those things together with water and Voila! you have "anywhere" spray. And it smells really clean too. I use 2 cups water, 20 drops tea tree oil, 1/4 c vinegar, and 1/4 c alcohol. If the vinegar is too potent, I'll add a little more tea tree oil. A little goes a LONG Way on that. Enjoy!

Who is this man?

Well, my grandfather died. And I felt nothing. Weird huh? Well here's some background. First off my dad disowned his father. Mr. Fales (what else do I call him?) wanted nothing to do with me and my brother, for reasons only known to himself. I had committed the crime of being born, and for that I was banished from a grandfatherly relationship. Who looks at a baby, and says to himself "wow! I want nothing to do with THAT child". Its inhuman! So my dad, wonderful man that he is, decided that if his father didn't want to have anything to do with us, then he didn't want to have anything to do with him. I tried a couple of times over the course of my life, at vulnerable times, to contact this man and get some sort of relationship going with him, but to no avail. I wrote him a letter and sent him my best picture of myself , at age 18. I got a very disconnected response, a letter and picture of him standing alone next to a car, and nothing else. I was young and naive, and life was coming at me fast, so I didn't try any contact again for a long time. He never called or wrote or came to be with us when my brother died, and that didn't really hurt as much as puzzle me. After all I didn't know him, so why would I expect anything? So fast forward 10 years, and my dad is lying in a hospital bed, precariously holding on to life, trying to recover from emergency open heart surgery, and I write to this man again, and this time I get nothing. Not a post card, not a carrier pigeon, not an email, NOTHING. Well here we are 3 years later, and my dad tells me that his dad died. He had about as much emotion over it as someone talking about a character dying on a TV show that they never watched. Apparently this man was no more popular with other people than he was with his "family", because his obituary (click the title of this blog to go there) says that no services or visitation will be held. Big surprise! There is no one TO visit! Normally my family rallies together, supporting, hugging, comforting each other during a family crisis, but there is none now. How weird is that? Another weird-y thing, my uncle's name is spelled wrong in the obit & my dad's name is wrong altogether. He dropped the name "Floyd" in favor of the initial "F." 15 or more years ago, legally. He never went by that name even as a small child. But there it is listed in the obituary, Floyd McPhalen. So as the song in the movie "A Chorus Line" says, "I dug right down to the bottom of my soul....and I felt nothing". Sad, really.

Wednesday

Its so fun to unexpectedly go out and have a blast. Yesterday afternoon my sister-in-law J. asked me if I wanted to take her husband's place at a wine tasting/benefit that they had bought tickets for. He was held up at work and wouldn't be getting home until the benefit was over, so I was like "hmmm, free wine, free food and a free night away from home? Let me think..." and INSTANTLY said yes. It was aw-some! I left C. with baby V. put on some cute jeans and a flowy tank top, some flat sandals and I was out the door! They had gourmet foods paired with the wines, and like 2-7 different choices of wine at each of the 11 tables. I was pleasantly surprised, because when I found out it was at a grocery store, I had very low expectations. I was imagining Judy Homemaker and her 4 wild hellions bumping me with their cart overfilled with soda and hotpockets, but it was nothing like that. It was held at a very fancy specialty grocery store. They had closed the store down to everyone who didnt have tickets. What a fun way to spend a Wednesday night! Me and J. had the most fun of anyone there I think, because we were also people watching. We saw "John Mayer", "Prince William", a drag queen, an anorexic "Brittany Spears" (or short haired Amy Winehouse?), a drunk woman (who was probably drunk before she got to the tasting) and the most enormous feather brooch I've ever seen! It was great!

Waxxy

I went for an eyebrow wax on Saturday. Actually, since I no longer work at a salon, I went to my old OLD salon that I worked at 5 years ago, and saw an old friend that still works there, for a hair color. My roots were out to THERE and I hadn't had my hair done in about 6 weeks (about 2 weeks too long for my liking). So my friend J. was running late and I thought I'd treat myself to a brow shaping, and not just rip them out myself. The aesthetician asked me what I had in mind, and gave me a beautifully shaped arch. As she's moving on to the second brow, she calmly but tensely says "Is the temperature okay on the wax?". I assured her that it wasn't burning me, but I had a stinging feeling. She says "Well, I've never seen this before, but some of your skin came off". She hands me a mirror and sure enough a patch about the size of a watermelon seed is bleeding and gone! Now its pretty well healed, but I was completely freaked out that my SKIN came off, not just the caterpillar brow. Insane! Of course I not only paid but I tipped. What a goofball I am. I guess I didn't want to cause any waves or anything, who knows. Maybe its because I used to work there?

What if.....

This is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. I was about to choke I was laughing so hard. Let me know what you think! I'm pretty sure I was in Miss Anderson's class when she taught in Arizona, but I could be wrong.

My perfect powers of persuasion (or how I get free stuff)

I can be a bulldog when I want to. I get ahold of an idea, and I hold on to it forever. And, I'm surely feelin' good about myself right about now. Yesterday we took good advantage of the tax-free weekend, and got two big ticket things we were needing (V.'s bed) and wanting (C.'s 42 inch LCD hi-def TV). Well when it came time to check out on the TV, the guy at Best Buy told us we could save $100 by buying a new hi-def DVR at $300. Uh, what? Why in the world should we have to buy a new DVR, when every new customer gets one free just for signing up with Directv? So we declined, saying that when we got home we would just cancel our Directv and get 2 free Hi Definition DVR's from Dish Network, and free installation and no $100 upgrade charge. Yeah, even people not under contract have to pay to upgrade. So I decided to call up ol' Directv and see what they could do to keep my business. The first 2 people I talked to offered some basic things, $5 off per month for the next year, 4 months free Showtime, things along those lines. I was asking for a) a free dvr, b) no $100 upgrade charge, c) free install. By the time I had the 3rd guy on the line, thats exactly what I got. Before the cost of installation I saved us $400! I told them I wanted to stay with them as a customer, but I had no incentive to . I told them what I could get by jumping ship, then they matched it! So if you get "no" from one person, just keep moving up the ladder. It took me roughly 1 hour, but it was totally worth it.

I needed a good thing yesterday. It had been 10 years since I lost my brother Andrew. He died Aug. 3, 1997. I cant believe its been a decade already. I'm normally able to think about his passing away with nothing but hope and peace, but for some reason yesterday really hit me hard. Its honestly been YEARS since I was overly sad about losing him, because of the resurrection hope I have from reading and studying the bible. But for some reason I woke up in a funk and stayed in a funk all day. I allow myself to get sad 2 times a year. Once on the anniversary of losing him, and once on the day he would have turned older. We never celebrated birthday's but its just a day that reminds me of him. You know how it is.

I'm reading this and it seems super-crass that I'm saying that buying an expensive TV took away from losing my brother. But thats where I would hope he would be if he were the surviving sibling. I would hope that 10 years later it would just take something like that to lessen the pain. I would never want my brother (or my husband or daughter) to constantly be sad over losing me. I would want them to remember me, remember the fun times we've had, remember my smile, my laugh, my smell and be happy that I was in their lives. Especially this many years later. I would hope that every once in a while they would unburden themselves however made them feel better, be it doing something nice for someone else, buying themselves something, or just crying over the loss, and then they'd be okay. So I'm totally owning my crassiness, buying stuff did make me feel better yesterday, and I'm alright with that.

Loves!