Complicated Lives.....part 3

Jimbo Snides

“Hey good ta meecha! Call me Cowboy ever body calls me Cowboy”. We tried to call him 'Cowboy' but he was wearing too tight wranglers with a Jim Beam T-shirt, not exactly cowboy…just sort of redneck. Still and all he said call him “cowboy” not redneck. It just felt wrong. I asked him if he had any cows, horses, sheep?? Anything farm related at all?? No, never had. He wasn’t even raised on a farm. We all lived in the same city. He was at least raised in a small town so that was something in his favor! He said “We’re goin to Carry-o-kee tonight, everbody calls me Cowboy when I’m there, they all ask me to sing” I wondered where exactly Carry-o-kee was and if it was in Oklahoma would we have enough gas to get there from Florida and back. Turns out Karaoke is Carry-o-kee! “I’m real well known here we might not git ta sit ta gether imma get my ol lady to hold us a table!” people start coming up to him high fives, hand shakes hugs, claps on the back all with a “hey Jimbo!” and him steadily saying “everbody calls me cowboy”…no one called him cowboy at all ever. He did have a nice singing voice however.

….meanwhile his first girlfriend left him or he left her because she refused to get pregnant out of wedlock. He took up with a second girl who wasn’t actually quite all the way divorced…we’ll call her Melinda. Melinda lost custody of her son because Jimbo decided to spank him and he and Melinda decided it was ok to leave a 4 year old at home unattended at night “as long as he was asleep” while Cowboy and his filly decided to Carry-O-Kee it up!! Melinda did manage to get pregnant by Cowboy and they had a lovely little girl. Sort of lovely she does have that hair patch on her back. They had a second child I’m not sure if was hairy or not.

Jimbo was a bit of an entrepreneur and decided to open his own siding business…the problem was, he had no experience! So Jimbo sold himself as Jimbo’s Siding and actually landed a job! He took pictures and showed us..Melinda had such glowing praise as…”that sucks” and “you need a real job” “that ain’t even straight”. It wasn’t the most professional job. It kind of looked do-it-yourself. He expected top pay and had a bit of a “fit” when they didn’t want to pay him because it looked like crap and fell apart. Tax time rolled around and somehow…though Jimbo did have a “real” job in addition to his siding business and selling stolen watermelons from the back of a truck. He wasn’t going to get much back legally. Melinda really wanted this tattoo, so Jimbo decided to get creative with numbers. He actually told us what he was going to lie on his taxes. I have no idea what he did, or how he did it, but somehow he managed to get back about $2500 in a refund when he never even paid out that much in taxes. Melinda was complaining about this and said “Jimbo’s gonna get hisself arrested…alls I wanted was my tattoo and it’s only $80. I don’t know what he’s gonna do with all the rest a that money” . About that time my 5 month old threw up strained spinach in his hairy daughter’s hand. Ah redneck afternoons!!!

We may revisit Jimbo later and learn of his exploits with the Po-leece.

Complicated Lives...part 2

Scooter

Scooter decided after his wife died to take out a reverse mortgage on the house. Scooter used the first half of the money on a girl he wanted to date on tires for her car, GPS, Lasic, Tattoo, Tattoo removal, Boob job, appliances…BEFORE the first date which never happened!!! THEN he wanted to sue her but only IF someone else did it for him because he was too busy working at a job that might or might not pay him because it was only a suggested job not an actual job with W-2’s and such. Scooter spent the rest of the money on solar panels and a land deal in the slums of Detroit…”Motown baby!!”, “Detroit’s coming back baby!!” “these fools are going to pay $200,000 for this house!!! I only paid $40,000 down and have to take out a $40,000 second reverse mortgage on this house and he already boosted the price so I could!!!! Hahahaha stupid fools baby!” 3 years later nothing has been done to the fallen down building “baby”. Also in case you are unaware of the current situation in Detroit…in that area most homes are gutted by looters for wiring and pipes they are sold for about a dollar so the city can claim property tax from the owner, if they are intact they sell for under $20,000. Now back to the solar panel investment. Solar panels aren’t actually working because he hired “some stupid idiot to put them on if I pay for him to learn how!! What a fool!!” The kicker for Scooter and his scheme was that the “stupid idiot” was not actually licensed so he never qualified for the government rebate, and the “stupid idiot” never actually connected the panels into the power box or whatever, so they don’t really power anything!!! Scooter also bought twice as many as he needed to “stick it to the power company baby!!! They’ll have to pay me for the excess!!! Stupid fools!!!” Again…these panels are not connected. The “stupid idiot” is either in jail now or cooking meth. Either way…those panels still ain’t connected “baby”!

Old Scoot did some hard time (less than 30 days in jail) for driving on a suspended license. They suspended it because he failed to do the 30 hours of community service for the numerous unpaid parking tickets he had accrued..he failed to do this service so he could “work to make some money baby!” at the aforementioned non-existent job.

Complicated Lives....part 1

I am a bit blue lately so I've decided to try writing an ongoing sort of explanation of ...."where do these people come from?" I have entitled it complicated lives and will hopefully add more to it as I recall more from my life.....

Complicated Lives

Some people just lead complicated lives. Either lives are complicated by choice or happenstance. Lives complicated by happenstance generally clear up and normal out after one or two glitches. Lives complicated by choice just stay that way….and spiral into a spastic carnival of insanity.

Life complicated by happenstance

OMG!!! I love this man he is wonderful---2 months later you find out he’s your first or second cousin!!! OMG Normal people stop dating and that’s then end…

Lives complicated by choice

OMG!!! I love this man he is wonderful, fortunately he’s only my second cousin not like that time that I got pregnant by my first cousin four times. What was I thinking?? I’ll never drink moonshine from a gumboot again before I make love at the family reunion!

JillyAnne

JillyAnne lived at home taking directions from her parents until she was 35. At the spring young age of 35 she decided to light out for parts unknown with no money and a half broken Bronco. She wrote a check “to the mechanic to fix that part on the truck and I knew there wadn’t no money in that account but I figured he’d wait a while to cash it and I could call my Daddy and ask him to loan me some money to put in the bank to cover that check and the other ones I was gonna write…hey can I give you a check and you let me borrow some money I forgot to bring any money with me?!” “ I don’t understand why there ain’t no money in the bank…I asked Daddy to put some in there to cover them checks I wrote but the bank took it because I owed them money on a loan I had took out from them and still owed but they shouldn’t have took all the money they should only have just took enough for the payments I missed..they should of covered them checks because I closed that account” “this guy I moved in with that I met online in a chat room keeps chatting online with other women…I told him than one of them is gonna take him serious one day and try to move in.”

Signs of a complicated life are numerous…one of the strongest indicators is if your story for the day has more ands and becauses than a group of teenagers. Example;

Recently JillyAnne had to get new false teeth ………because Jimbo’s dog chewed my other ones up, because they was in the glass on the floor next to the mattress in the dining room because there aint no dresser in the bedroom so the clothes is on the floor and there aint no room for one, plus when his wife left him she had tooken all the furniture and just left it out by the road in the rain and it all swolt up and fell apart and she left that dog here anyway, did I tell you they weren’t never divorced and she just took everthing anyway and left him with no reason why?

next time we meet Scooter!!!

Time Warp

Not the song....jet lag!!

Boring information alert....Ok the trip was awesome, Air New Zealand rocks! I'd do it all again in a heartbeat...but my neck is killing me!!

Had my first scare in the airport, I think I overdid it on the tramping. My right leg has always been the good one. It never gave me any hassles. It's never torn anything, or done anything a leg shouldn't do. I've counted on it for years now...it isn't affected ( or didn't seem to be) but it gave out and I almost fell on a lady's head!! She was sitting on the floor and I was sitting on a footstooly thing waiting for the aged, infirmed, or under 2 to board group. The guy with the wheel chair dropped me off 2 hours earlier and I had to have beer and find a bathroom (priorities) so I got stuck sitting on a footstooly tabley thing. (it's made up words night) I have no idea what happened. I am hoping it doesn't happen again though. I did feel better in a mean sort of way because another person fell on the gangway but I remained upright. The cane really helped keep me from walking in too many circles on vacation. I can't actually look to the right without my left leg thinking something along the lines of 'hey that looks neat let's go there!' without telling the rest of me. Can be funny unless you walk into another person or in front of a car. I try to look only to the left or straight ahead.

I fed a wild chicken with my son, I am not high on pain meds! There really was a wild chicken along the side of the road to Coromandel. The Frenchman saw it too! We fed him the bread from our lovely son's Subway sandwich...yes they do have Subway in New Zealand!

We played at a hot water beach and I almost ran away at Craters of the Moon in Taupo...it was so warm and quiet....boiling mud craters don't sass or whine that they are hungry everytime they open their little boiling mouths.

i might actually post a photo or few of the trip....I can't wait to go again!!

Far Away Places

Far Away Places......With strange sounding names…are calling, calling me.....

I hadn’t thought of that song in 25 years or more, until it came haunting me during this trip. Whenever it came on The Lawrence Welk show, my Grandma cried. Once after Mom came to visit then left again she left the room…she couldn’t listen to it, but she left it on so I could. It reminded her of the fact my Mom was over the seas. It reminded her of all the places she wanted to see but never got the chance. It reminded her of her sons in the service. That song carried so much weight for her. For me…it was a mission.

I think we must have some rambling blood in our family. Most of us seem to like to travel. Maybe it’s because our earliest ancestors sailed to America. Maybe it’s because she grew up in rural Kentucky but knew so much more of the world existed. She always ALWAYS saved postcards from the road trips she and my Grand Dad took. We also had sacred mini bars of camay from hotels in the 60’s. Cups from Florida before we lived there, spoon sets from Iowa, so much stuff with so many stories! I still have many of the things and may memories of the stories. I was told I peed on President Nixon, every time I drank from one of the sacred flag cups on the iron holder.

I sit here now in Wellington New Zealand after having visited…Auckland, Rotorua, Hamilton, Cambridge Napier, Hawke’s Bay, Norsewood, Dannevirk, (and many small towns along the way, we almost made it to Whangarei and Dargaville) and planning Whanganui, Taupo, Waitomo, Coromandel…etc and many small towns along the way.

My Grandma and I listened to the song Rio by Duran Duran, she pulled out a book and showed me the Rio Grande. When Land Down Under came out we looked at the globe. I’ve waded in the Rio Grande and sung Rio whilst doing it, I’ve been to Canada several times and now I’m sitting at the tip of the North Island staring at my husband and son. I’ve played them the song that has been in my head this entire trip…it’s almost like my Grandparents came along and finally got to see some of those far away places with strange sounding names.

I am now sharing the link with you

Far Away Places- Teresa Brewer

Our Adventure so far

Flat whites are rocking my a$$ off!! I seriously am loving these things!

Upon landing the first thing we did in Auckland was to promptly get lost at 6am and have my husband learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. Getting lost was on purpose. We stopped at the nearest convenience store somewhere in Ponsonby and purchased…no lie…at about 6am….

• 1- Hot fish pie
• 2- Hot meat pie
• 3- 2 flat whites (our first and we need interventions)
• 4- 4 bottles of All Blacks powerade (gotta help the team!)
• 5- 3 packs of Chocolate Fish
• 6- 1 bag of bluebird crisps Kiwi As Kaitalia fire and sour cream flavor
• 7- Blackberry taffy

My husband and I sucked down the Flat Whites in about 10 minutes, split the fish pie and got possibly one bite of the meat pie from our son. I think he bit my finger when sampling the fish pie. The calories come in Kilojoules so we have no idea what we are consuming but possibly vast quantities…at least our clothes still fit.

We stopped at a grocery in Auckland and wandered the aisles staggering like common tourists…eeking over the kumara and wanting to bring sacks of them home. Wondering if the lamb pack ($44 NZ!!) for a good deal of it, would carry on the trip home or if we could bring back bags of golden kiwi? We bought Panadol ( we no longer have it in the states) and immediately began taking it. Paracetamol is still awesome. Then we got more flat whites. So far we have tried, Flat whites, pies, whitebait fritters, flat whites, paua patties, flat whites, fish chowder, marmite, flat whites, vegemite, kumara chips, flat whites, Burger fuel, L&P, flat whites, Hell Pizza, Speights, lots of other beer, and NZ wine. There is so much we have tried and or plan to try.

As yet, we’ve not made too horrible of an impression on anyone. They have told us of the common custom to snicker and run away. We have been assured us that such behavior is the normal way to welcome distinguished guests. They especially find sassy preteen boys distinguished and run away much faster!

I did however ALMOST totally embarrass America (and my son) last night at cocktail hour in the hotel. A beautiful little girl about 4 was sitting at a table with an older man in a sweater and a younger man with wet hair in what appeared to be a khaki jacket. The little girl got up to do something only 4 year olds can understand and the khaki man got up to chase her. He was about 7 feet tall and the khaki jacket was a buttoned trench to his ankles!!!! I put my hand over my mouth lest the champagne come out my nose. The whole room watched but no one was gyrating and purple aside from me. They finished cocktails and left…I hadn’t seen them in the club before, so maybe tonight!!! (hoping) or this afternoon for tea. Really it looked like Austin Powers standing on mini-me’s shoulders…it really was that bad! I swear he looked…..well you know what it looked like…OK I’ll behave. I’m already on alert from my son. I embarrassed him at tea by laughing too loudly.

Every day is a new adventure and sadly my camera just won’t capture it well.

The roads are really winding none of the mountains have been cleaved to clear a path for a motorway so the few main roads area long and breathtaking.

http://www.burgerfuel.com/nz/

http://hellpizza.com/nz/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_white

you'll miss me when i'm gone

For those of you brave enough to read this and actually care what goes on in my little mind...I will be away from my wonderfully witty and scintillating blog for a few weeks.

Have no fear...I will be back and boring you all to tears in no time! I might even get a wild hair and blog while I am away...who knows!

Until I return to bother you all......

Adios, Au Revior, Aufweidersehn- Lawrence Welk

sorry guys my clicky links thing isn't working so I am using links until i get off my lazy butt and figure it out

I swear I thought that's what they said!!

Never Tear us Apart

Don't ask me what you know is true

Don't have to tell you I love your precious heart

I, I was standing you were there

to wear the niiiight out and they could never tear us apart!!!

Major Tom

4-3-2-1 Earth beams no one

drifting falling

your team wages

falling calling hoooome

Land Down Under

Do you come from the land down under

where women grow amid plunders

Purple Rain

I never meant to cause you any sorrow

I never meant to cause you any shame

I only wanted to see some kind of loving

I only want milk of magnesia in the purple rain

Mr. Roboto

Double my tomato (not tomato...lol) Mr. Roboto

Double Double

Crocodile Rock

Crah rockin the sound is rockin and the beat just can't keep still

never knew it a thousand times and I guess I never will

Crah rockin Friday nights

and suzy was dressed up tight

Crah rockin is outta sight la la la la la la

Me and Bobby Mcgee

busted flat in baton rouge

waitin for a train

feelin you was faded as my jeans

bobby thumbed a diesel down in the pourin rain

rode us all the way to new orleans

i pulled my heart through my dirty red bandanna

fading soft while bobby sang the blues

windshield wipers turpentine holding bobby's hand in mine

Beat it

Pick totem don't you ever come around here

don't wanna see my face you better disappear

the fire's in their eyes and their words are really clear

so beat it just beat it

beat it beat it beat it

no one wants to be defeated

show em it's not funky

show em it's just fright

it doesn't matter whose wrong or right just beat it

Those are but a few of my many many many misheard and loudly sung lyrics. The 1980's were an odd time for many. Unless the tape you purchased had the lyrics included or the album had the lyrics on the cover, you were out of luck for learning lyrics. I remember laboriously listening to the line of a song, stopping the tape, writing the lyrics, starting the tape, stopping the tape, writing the lyrics...you get the idea. Learning the real words was hard work! Of course you had to do it or look stupid. I looked stupid for the songs I didn't have tapes to transcribe the lyrics from. We had an underground for lyrics, we'd pass them around along with the copied tapes...(yes there was a world pre-bootleg) We'd whisper who had what tapes, or who had lent out tapes and lost them. Once I committed the ultimate sin and lent a friend's tape to another friend. The friend never returned the tape and my friend got mad at me so I had to go buy another tape, but not that same tape because it really belonged to someone else entirely and she was a real jerk so I had to buy another tape my friend wanted...wow that was a mouthful!!

I thank the internet gods and goddesses for lyrics websites and also for making me aware of all the misheard lyrics I've sung...there are so many more!! My son is now proudly carrying on the traditon

Dragula

Dj Dj Joe

Little woodchips that slam

in the back of my dracula

Sadly there might never be anymore misheard lyrics from him aside from Move Chemical (smooth criminal). Poor deprived child has the internet to look up lyrics and the sound quality is much better on cd's. That is until they get scratched 5 minutes after you purchase them. Tapes in the 80's were somehow indestructible. They could be left in players for days, left in the sun, get moldy, get crimped, get tossed out car windows in a fit of lover's rage...but still the soldered on playing for us such magical melodies as Kiss me, Kiss me, Kiss me. Vacation. She Bop, Karma Chameleon......ah I miss the 80's

I'm a lover in your eyes all the way

when i see your wicked world i want to say

i'm a man with out attention

i'm a man who doesn't know

how to play the competition

they string along they string along

comma comma comma chameleon

you come and go

you come and go

lovers would be easy

if your covers were like my dreams

red cold and green red cold and green

ah that music really rocked!!