Counting Down

45- there are 45 minutes left on the dryer cycle. That gives me less than an hour to not be pissed off at the world because laundry sucks so bad.

5- Five hours until the kids get off of school. On a good day I have a 50/50 shot of them not coming through the door bitching and griping at each other. My golden afternoon is kicked off with the two of them defending themselves separately in stereo as to why he said this or she did that, and why the other is wrong; this is of course complete with pointing fingers and screaming contradictions of the story one is telling by the other. The quiet and peace in the house is shattered so suddenly, it is often a shock to my system- like jumping into an ice cold lake.

50- I have 50 days left of having the house to myself, to run my own daily schedule, and get my shit done during the day. The kid's last day of school is June 14th. My son has already started his sing-song of "We get to spend AAAAALLLLL Summer together, Mom." He does with that rub it in voice.... and then giggles his bony ass off. That's fucking stellar; a whole 3 months of "I'm bored." "It's too hot to go out to play." "I'm hungry." "HE/SHE started it!" Don't get me wrong, I love them dearly, and spending time with them is great- but last summer was spent with them all up in my grill from 7 am until 9 pm.
They were told to go out and play, but it didn't seem to last too long when they did. Once or twice a week, we would go out, have lunch, and run errands... Which usually prompted the monkey shit fight or grab ass games in the commissary, BX, or back seat. We would do projects and such, but having the collective attention span of my cat on ritalin, I was unable to hold them captive for long. Seriously, they would rather fight.

56- I have 56 days to get birthday presents bought and figure out what kind of party/event I can plan to placate my daughter. Despite the success of last years big bowling bash- I am not wanting to spend $200 plus for her and her classmates to get down for 2 or so hours at the local kid trap. The theme here is finding the lowest necessary effort and cash to get the maximum happy. I have already started seeding a thought in her head of a nice quiet family thing. "Just the four of us", so long as I stipulate to yet another Disney Princess cake.

2- I have two months to sit and stew in my own thoughts about what the next step in our life will be... Until we find out wether we get to stay here or have to figure out another plan. Being in this limbo is driving me shit house loon crazy. Do we stay here? Do we go back to the states? Do we take a random shithole assignment, or volunteer for a shithole, with the security that we get to stay in said shithole for at least 5 years? There are other various options too, but all hinge on this extension thing, and I hate sitting here jobbing myself in the ass with twiddling thumbs waiting to find out.

5- This is the number of months I have get the costumes I am going to peddle for Halloween made. Shouldn't be too difficult, once I find the patterns I want, and once I manage to pull the 500 pounds of lead out of my ass and get going on said projects. Thus far the plan is to put up about 15 simple kids costumes on Sleaze-bay, and do 2 or 3 adult costumes that I can hock for the bigger bucks. This is more difficult than it sounds, as the only fabric choices I have here are over priced and exchange rate suffering shit downtown, or trying to eyeball match colors and fabrics online.

6- Months until October. That's 12 paychecks to rathole about 2 grand for our fall trip to Disney. This trip is tentatively scheduled to be taken with my mom. That is another one of those lunatic up in the air situations. She doesn't know what is going on in her life, I don't know what is going on with ours... but IF everything works out on her end, and IF we get our extension, and IF I can get good reservations, and IF she can rat hole the cash to come over and pay their side of the Disney trip... It's a shitload of IF. In the back of my mind is stewing a back up plan...

Maybe it goes like this... IF it nothing works out with these plans of mine... I will check into a quiet place with pretty with padded rooms, and nice young men in clean white coats who carry syringes of happy in their pockets...