Random ramblings. Pretty much. Yeah.

This post really doesn't have much of a point. I just felt like blogging, because sometimes I just need to let stuff out and I guess blogging is the easiest way to do it. I can just kind of open up and let loose all the random stuff I'm tired of keeping inside my head all the time. Not that it'll make much sense, especially given how hard it is for me to keep my thoughts straight when I get interrupted often (one of the hazards of having kids ;) but it's about their bedtime anyway, and I figured I'd give it a shot while I have a couple minutes to myself. The baby will be waking up soon, and she's quite taken with the keyboard, which makes it extremely hard to type anything coherent - given she'll lunge forward and start hitting the spacebar and all kinds of other keys while I'm trying to do anything. Try to edit photos sometime while entertaining a 7.5mo at the same time. RGB levels start going all over the place. ;)

So the latest DVD to send me down memory lane lately was one I found at Wal-Mart last night. It was a 4-DVD set of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show. Weird huh? Totally unexpected to find that there. It's so funny how many things from my childhood are making an appearance on store shelves. Some things haven't come back that I wish would (Glo-Bugs for one... I *loved* Glo-Bugs and I know my kids would too) but it's amazing now that DVDs are the standard viewing device, how many old shows you can find. Netflix has a ton of them - my kids have seen Thundercats (something we won't be doing again - I totally forgot about that wicked evil scary skeleton-demon bad guy - oops) and Gummi Bears (that old Disney cartoon where they drink Gummi Berry juice and go bouncing around while the bumbling gargoyles do their nefarious deeds for that poor bad guy that you almost had to pity, he was so pathetic) and now Mario Bros. Oh wait - we also have Duck Tales, TaleSpin, and Darkwing Duck. :)

My favorite show from when I was a kid though, or at least it ranks right up there at the top, has to be The Tick. And for those of you who are thinking the live-action one (I didn't even *know* there was a live-action one till I searched for the animated one) that's not it. What is it about the Tick that is so appealing? I think it's a combination of his innocent child-like naïvete and his wildly random and weird humorous musings. (I think I know when I've been on flickr too long, when I start spelling "humor," "humour". Anywayz...) Wow, it's getting hard to type. The heater has been a bit finicky lately and when the blower turns off, it gets cold fast. Plus I think I'm starting to come down with something... Probably the same thing my 2yo has been coughing in my face the last couple days. Hm. You know how some people call themselves existentialists? I'm a tangentalist.

Back to the Tick. I am so glad they finally came out with it on DVD. When I first started looking for it, all I could find was some ripped-off-TV version on ebay. I didn't know how bad it was until I ordered it though. Half the episodes didn't work (I tried contacting the seller but he was completely unresponsive to my emails - jerk) and the other half had the TV network's logo in the bottom corner the entire time. Plus the quality was laughably horrible. But, it kept me company on many long lonely nights while I was home by myself (well, with the kids of course) while the husband was out to sea. I used to sit there and watch them while eating hot wings (Foster Farms makes killer ones) and ice cream, and then fall asleep on the couch. Even now whenever I watch the Tick I get cravings for hot wings. ;) One of my all-time favorite episodes is the Tick vs. Santa. I don't know what tickles my funny bone about it so much - but I especially love the end when the Tick swims up the river of Santa clones - and later when they're disposing of the santa clones with static electricity. They go grab a santa, start rubbing, and say some silly typical Christmas phrase, then "pop!" santa disappears. And always at the end, Tick has some profound knowledge to share that he gained during his adventure...

One of my other favorites is The Tick vs. Science. Can you get any funnier than a bunch of superheroes, supervillains, and innocent bystanders (including "Tongue-Tongue", a disgusting huge slobbery walking tongue) getting their minds switched around into random other characters' bodies? At one point, Arthur and Tongue-tongue switch places, which makes for some pretty hilarious dialogue. Tongue-tongue (in Arthur's body) cries forlornly with his tongue hanging out of his face, while Dr. MungMung laments "He weeps for he has but one small tongue with which to taste the whole world." while Arthur (in Tongue-Tongue's body) is freaking out because, "I can taste the floor! I can taste everything!"

Classic. :)

Well I guess I should end the ramblings for now. The kids are all ready for bed, and the girls are playing a little too rambunctiously in their room. I look forward to when we can separate the 2yo from her older sisters again. *sigh*

Disorder

Like, omygosh! 2 posts in one day, how can that be?!?

Ever have one of those days where everything seems to spin out of control? When it seems like the harder you try to hold it all together, the more it flies apart? One where as soon as you get done cleaning something up, you turn around to find an even bigger mess somewhere else. And you have so much that needs to be done, that you can't do, because you're doing so much just to try to catch up to what you needed to do before.

I'm having one of those days.

Toilets Hate Me

Kind of an odd title, I know. I thought about getting a photo of one to illustrate this post, but first I thought that would be kind of crude; and then the thought of what might come up in my search for a cc-licensed photo to post with this scared me. So, no pic. Just a bunch of words that hopefully make sense in my pre-coffee ramblings.

I'm not kidding though; I think they have it out for me. Since moving out and getting married, I've only lived in one place that had a properly-functioning toilet. We lived there for about a year-ish; and it had these industrial-type toilets with a push-button rather than a lever - that could've sucked a small child down into its vortex, it was so powerful. It was odd too, the shape of the seat and bowl. All elongated and narrow. Really weird. But I digress.

I honestly don't know what it is. We can't seem to find a place that doesn't have something wrong with its piping. The very first place I lived after I moved out and got married was this pathetic apartment in Silverdale, WA. First of all, it wasn't the apartment we were supposed to have. The one we were going to rent, the tenant changed her mind and decided not to move out. So we got a different one, sight-unseen (as many Military wives will attest, most places you end up moving into are sight-unseen. And that is reeeealllllly unfortunate, given the condition of some of the places you end up. I can regale you with stories of the places we lived growing up, when my dad was in the Navy... especially Virginia. *shudder*) Turns out this place was infested with black mold. The entire bathroom wall was covered in it. In fact by the time we moved out several months later, the mold had come through the wall to the bedroom that was on the other side. I truly believe I'm lucky to have survived living there... though I didn't know why, my asthma was so horrendous that I literally was gasping for breath almost all the time. I had to suck on my inhaler after climbing up the flight of stairs to the main level where our car was parked, just to keep from passing out. I was also pregnant at the time, and my blood pressure was sky-high (I normally have very low blood pressure - think 90 over 55) and I was always exhausted. My poor son who was only 3 1/2 also had to deal with it. I am so glad we didn't live there any longer than we did. You wouldn't believe how many of our possessions had mold on them after living there.

But I've completely gone off on a tangent. Heh. :) The toilet. Yes, the toilet. (Sorry, my kids are watching "Flushed Away" for the first time, and it's just kind of ironic; here I am getting distracted again.) Again, as many Military wives will attest, everything goes ka-boom when husband leaves. The first day he left with the sub for a week and a half for some exercises, my poor child went to flush and *WHOOOSH* the toilet overflowed. 'Kay, not just a little bit. It *flooded* the bathroom. I had never had a toilet overflow before, and I panicked. My brain finally kicked in and I shut off the water, but not before there was at least an inch of standing water in the bathroom. (I'm sure that helped the mold problem, right?) I soaked it up with a bunch of towels, which I then put in the bathtub, and decided to go to my mom's house. And of course, on the way, got pulled over by a cop with an attitude for having a headlight out. Just what I needed, right? :)

The next place we lived had the super-suction toilets, so I didn't have to deal with any plumbing problems at all. No, just having some unknown person looking in my window at night when I was home all alone with my new baby and my son. That was exciting. Thankfully, I had good friends for neighbors who were very aware (they were the ones who noticed the guy looking in), and the husband came over and gave me some dowels to put in the window frames. Talk about a completely freaky feeling. Our back window looked into the woods after about 10 yards of grass, so it's not like someone couldn't just hide out there and sneak up whenever he wanted. I was on edge for pretty much the rest of the time we lived there. In fact one day, it was all bright and sunny, and I was walking past my window and noticed someone out of the corner of my eye. I gasped and froze, and then realized it was just a landscaper. But it nearly gave me a heart attack.

After we moved from there, we lived in another place on base... and at the moment I can't think of a whole lot of problems with the plumbing. No, wait. The kids' bathroom. We had 3 bathrooms in that place (3!!! I think my entire growing-up life we never had more than one) and for some reason, the kids' toilet never seemed to work right. It never overflowed, but it would never flush right either. I spent more time plunging that thing... It got to where the kids just weren't allowed to use it. Period.

Fast-forward to a whole bunch of stuff happening to where we got transferred across the Sound to the Everett area (north of Seattle). I don't know what the deal was at Carroll's Creek Landing... but lemme tell you, they must think that because they have a "captive" population, they don't have to keep the place up to standard. They're part of the public-private venture the Navy decided to undertake in regards to housing, and IMO it's failed miserably. Anyway - I don't think one toilet worked right in that house. As soon as we'd get one working again, another would stop. We couldn't use the bathtub in the kids' upstairs bathroom either. Whomever lived there before had somehow allowed so much water to accumulate on the floor that it had soaked in to the linoleum and caused it to start peeling up around the edges. When we first moved in, I said something about water damage on the ceiling of the living room. We weren't able to be there when the maintenance people showed up (I had to finish cleaning the other place we were moving out of) so I couldn't point it out and demand something be done about it. When we came back, the maintenance sheet said it was a "bad patch job" and had something to do with a sliding door. (In the middle of the living room?!?) I never pursued it, but I wish I had. Because all it took was one time for my son to splash enough water out of the tub by accident to cause water to suddenly start dripping from the ceiling. You know in the Secret of Nimh where the animal's house is being submerged in mud, and it's starting to drip in? (At least that's how I remember the scene... something that has given me a life-long morbid phobia of mudslides and being buried alive) Well, it was reminiscent of that, though on a much smaller scale. I know it sounds almost humorous to compare the two, but you didn't see my oldest daughter's reaction. She was *freaking* out. She thought the house was going to be flooded and the ceiling was going to cave in. Finally, the water damage on the ceiling made sense. When I investigated further, I found the entire edge of the floor in the bathroom was actually sunken, and there was a crack running up the wall in the hallway that matched up with the edge of the bathroom wall. Just so happened, that this part of the floor was right above the living room, and the cracked wall looked over our stairwell.

Though I again said something to the management, they didn't do anything about it, and we even got charged after we moved out to replace the damaged linoleum. I sincerely hope whomever is living there now doesn't get a bathtub in their living room one day.

Have you figured out yet I have a hard time sticking to one subject? ;) Ok back to the glorious main subject. ;P Would you care to guess how many times the toilet (the single only toilet in our one bathroom we have now) here has overflowed? Just the other night, when the idea to rant about it in my blog first hit me, I spent a good half-hour trying to fix the stupid thing. We don't know where our nice heavy-duty plunger (that we got so much use out of at our last place) is at the mo., so we've had to use the old fashioned, wooden-handled plunger the last residents so generously left behind. I can tell you, by the time I got that stupid thing working again, my arms were sore and my hands were nearly raw.

Besides a big kitchen, a dishwasher, and lots of windows... if we ever buy a house, my major prerequisite is that it have working toilets.

Chem/Bio-warfare, or Blown-up Jellies?

Freaky stuff.

And people say there's nothing nefarious happening in our skies?

Heh.