Welcome to the new entry with the new, you know, stuff around it.
I'm just experimenting, trying to see what I might like. I actually put in a request for a free estimate with a designer, just to see what it would cost for someone else to take care of my graphics. I have no talent for this stuff, and I can't find a pre-fab set that I love yet. I like this one well enough, but I don't, you know, love it.
I'm hoping "Return to Me" is good. I so want David to be successful in a movie where he isn't Mulder. Although from the previews, he looks like he has pretty bad hair.
Not sure what that has to do with whether or not the movie is good. But there you have it.
I had a fight with my father tonight. Not really a fight, more like a tiff, and I admit that it's completely my fault, in that I have to figure out some way to not care what he thinks about what I do.
See, I have a friend whose parents are moving from Iowa to Memphis this summer, and we had talked about road-tripping to Graceland after I take the bar exam. My father, of course, expects me to start working right away, while I was envisioning taking at least a week, if not two, to relax and recuperate, something that I don't think is completely unreasonable, given what the bar exam does to most people.
So I tell him about the Graceland plan, and I get the Disappointed Tone. "Uh-huh." And it annoys me to no end that my parents never just say "Oh, that sounds like fun, dear" and leave it at that. So I have to press him about it, and he has to tell me that it's not his problem how I react to what he thinks, and I have to hang up in a huff.
And then I have to call back (because God knows they wouldn't), and when he answers I have to say "Can I talk to my mother" in a really bitchy voice, and he has to get in a huff, and then I have to bitch to my mother about what he said, and she has to tell me that he didn't really mean it, and then he has to get back on the phone and I have to make him say that he thinks two weeks off is too much and I have to cry a little about how it does too matter what he thinks of me and then we make up.
Don't think I don't know that it's totally ridiculous. This is why (a) I can't wait to move and (b) I can't wait to be financially free of them. If I weren't dependent on them for money, I wouldn't care what they thought about how much time I take off after the bar, and they probably wouldn't care. I just can't stand the Disappointed Tone, and as much as they want to deny that it's there, I hear it, dammit, and it makes me mad.
So the last time I went home, there was this dead mouse lying by the front doorstep.
He'd have been very cute, if he wasn't dead, and a mouse. A little thing, maybe three inches across, with little white and gray fur. He hadn't been maimed in any way that I could see, so I figured he must have frozen to death in the snow last month, because the last time I was home there was still snow all over the walkway.
This was actually the second instance of dead animals appearing on my parents' walkway. Back in February, I came home and found two dead birds. (Again, not maimed at all, but I'm not sure exactly how two birds would freeze to death not three feet from each other.) But I found them the same day I had the gas guy come out to check a suspected leak, and he offered to "take care" of them for me. (I still have no idea what he did. I never did find them anywhere.)
Anyway, I made the unfortunate mistake of telling my mother that the mouse was out there, at which point she pleaded with me to go do something about it. And she wouldn't let me just slide it into the landscaping in the walkway. She wanted me to pitch it down the hillside in our backyard. (My parents' house has about six feet of backyard, then a row of bushes, then it drops almost straight down, nothing but brush for a few hundred yards, to a road at the bottom.)
I insisted that removal of dead rodents, just like dead birds, was nowhere to be found in the duties required of girls, but I said that I would try. And I did. I was going to try to get it into a shovel, which I could then carry around back.
But the damn thing wouldn't get on the shovel. I ended up just pushing him around a little, and when I considered trying to wedge him up against the doorstep, I shuddered and quit trying.
So now the shovel rests against the front door, shading the little guy, waiting for my parents' arrival tomorrow.
Yes, I'm a wimpy girl, but I can't help it. I'm okay with most bugs, but rodents and birds, forget it. Way out of my league.
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