I have not used this in forever, but I am going to use it to play kink bingo. Fun!

Street Cat Rescue is now on the list of Charities for the Dell Direct Giving Program! If you or anyone you know works for Dell, please spread the word! Dell will match your donation up to $5,000 per year, either through payroll deductions or one time donations - this which will really add up for Street Cat Rescue!

I issue a standing offer that if you make a donation of any amount to Street Cat Rescue that I will make you a present and send it to you. It could be a shiny bracelet, a necklace, a box of brownies, some homemade marshmallows - I have a lot of beads, a Kitchen Aid mixer and I like to make a lot of different things. Donate to the kitties and message me with some confirmation and we'll talk about what I can send you in thanks.

It would mean a lot to me.

Mike brought home flowers yesterday, big red lilies and a bunch that look like daisies and thistles. I like flowers. They seem sort of careless and whimsical. The mail also brought some cards, the cool planet beads from Elise and my copy of Alabaster.

There was much delicious sushi for dinner. I ate salmon, scallops, yellow tail, sea bass, salmon roe, baby octopus and eel. We also ordered a plate of beef bulgogi that came sizzling hot and fragrant. I love eating all the small bowls of various bits that come along with the bulgogi, like the briny crisp salad and the sweet red beans. It was so good. Plus there was the hilarity of a couple sitting behind us who obviously had a Very Serious Discussion occurring during their dinner. At one point the girl began shouting about how the boy gave her the wrong house key and of she didn't trust him, etc, etc. It was a little hard to keep from laughing.

Too stuffed for ice cream, we just got coffee and came home to play Carcassonne. It's my new favorite game and I need to get all the expansions now. Then I played some Viva Pinata before bed. I almost didn't buy Viva, because I waffled on spending $40 on a video game that was just going to be mindless entertainment. But when I took it to the register, it rang up as $8. Apparently they had some promotion going on, but the store clerks admitted they had been too lazy to sticker the games. Score! So I also bought Crazy Taxi, as Mike has never played it. Poking through the clearance shelves, I found a copy of The Black Dahlia by Ellroy. At last I have discovered my early summer reading for lounging about outside.

From a review of 300:

"over all a great movie, if you havent seen it buy it, its worth it for action fans who love the mid-evil type era."

I had to pause for a moment to allow my brain to recover before I continued working.

NY Times article on how major food companies like ConAgra have no idea if their ingredients are safe

There are 25 ingredients in a Banquet pot pie, and they couldn't figure out which one was tainted with salmonella. So the company decided the solution was to tell the consumer the pot pie must be heated to 165 degrees as measured by a food thermometer. When confronted that cooking instructions may not be sufficient, the company says your microwave probably lies about the wattage.

Amazing whiskey tango foxtrot there.

It is strange to think about the incredible process of food supply. You think "Of of course they must have safety standards and inspections and what not." But the people sending out pot pies think that about the chicken supplier, the flour supplier, the vegetable supplier, who thinks that about the farmers and ranchers who assume that the suppliers and manufacturers are doing it. Then how many people at home actually use a food thermometer and know what temperature to cook things to? (I admit my failure there.)

For the record, I hate frozen pot pies. Ick.

In other news I went to the dentist today. I did not cry, which was a bit of a personal triumph. While I've stopped actually crying in the office I often burst into tears when I get back to my car. Not even when I paid the four figure deposit on the large amount of dental work I will be doing next Wednesday. No new cavities were found, though they are sending me to a periodontist to look at my malcontent gums. So the two old cavities will finally get filled, and the two back teeth will get crowns at long last. They are also replacing one of my upper crowns because I've chipped it somehow. It's a problem crown, that one, and they have reset it at least twice already.

The hygienist Candace has excellent skills. She's able to clean my teeth without making it feel so scary, and words her comments and directions so that I am not made to feel like a worthless creature for my dental afflictions. (Despite mitigating factors of health and medication issues, I know a good deal of this comes down to my bad habits and failure to keep up a good routine.) Even with some insurance, this is still expensive and dreadful. But I probably wouldn't be able to make myself actually do it anywhere else. Having access to a dental facility that caters to phobic, terrible patients is a good thing. It's probably a good way to earn money as well, if you can stand looking into mouths all day.

We also need a cat therapist. Jasmine is the most codependent cat I've ever seen. She meows loudly and pitifully for Mike's attention all the time. This morning she woke me up at 6am, for no reason I could discern except that she wanted attention.

It's been a year, almost to the day. Mother's Day was on the 11th last year. It's peculiar to think about how different things are now. The scars on my arms are fading. I live in a different place. I haven't spoken to my mother in eleven months. Two months ago my sister was found guilty of assaulting me and given a sentence of three days in jail and a fine. I haven't spoken to a single family member in the past six months except my father.

This is so fraught and strange. I know friends and strangers will often say there is so little time, anger isn't worth it, etc, etc, infinite. Even Buckley seems forgiving of his vitriolic mother in his new memoir. That's fine. That's a choice. It isn't flippant and I don't wish to downplay the genuine feelings behind those sentiments. But it is a choice and it is not my choice.

I am choosing to no longer be the person who picks up all the pieces and puts the family back together. I have parented my family for more than a decade, through situations in which I desperately needed the assistance of a functioning adult and was left alone. I cared for my parents as their marriage unraveled and my sister became a psychotic meth addict, I called the police when my sister attacked my mother and when she threatened suicide. I drove my sister to the ER when she lied and said she was raped to cover up a weekend of runaway partying. I propped everyone up, long after I was out of the home. I've come to understand in the past year that my mother is deeply mentally troubled, and that my sister's amazing capacity for self delusional and denial is not a mystery but a direct and learned behavior from both my parents. While my father drinks to color the past in his own interpretation, my mother simply blocks and colors it to her liking. She denies I ever told her I was raped and that she refused to help me. She told people my sister never hit me, that there was no blood running down my arms.

I'm not going to be the person who tries to make it all better any more. I'm tired, and I'm done. I will make no effort to bridge this gap on my own. If my mother chooses to make some effort, she can do that and I will approach it cautiously. But there will be no more automatic forgiveness from me, and I won't do the hard work of carrying everyone's problems on my shoulders. I have my own life to worry about, and I'm both too old and too young to parent this family anymore.

Yesterday in the grocery store I was nervous, skirting around the displays of flowers and cookies and cakes. I was afraid the cashier would ask me about Mother's Day and I would blurt out something like "She's dead" to avoid the complex and tangled story of the truth. In the car I mulled it over, wondering why death was the first answer that came to my lips. The hollow ache of this past year has been the true and final death of my childhood, and something like the death of my mother for me. It's gone completely. That day was irrevocable - from the moment my mother told me I was a terrible person to driving home crying and bleeding to filing the police report in a little substation in the park.

An introduction to Maru

I could watch Maru ALL DAY. He likes boxes. He's so round!

I keep waking up in the same position I laid down to sleep. That's strange for me. I only wake up because my or arm is tingling from being so still. I hate it. Either I can't sleep, or my sleep is deep and horrible. Last night's dreams involved being shot several times, moving to Prague and everything going wrong, someone shooting cats with some kind of stun gun and a hundred other terrible things. It's all left me off kilter, confused and feeling unable to do anything I meant to do today.