good grief.

this is my house. the motorcycle is not mine, it belongs to my husband's carpool buddy. note the Blessed Holy Oak swaying in the breeze.

our house is right at 3 years old and we got into it with a sub-prime loan. that's right, our credit was nicht so gut but my husband's income qualified us. we paid $500 and they built the house for us. we got $108 of our $500 back at closing. we felt on top of the world and oh-so-fortunate, like we had really pulled one over on someone. until after our first year when we discovered that our escrow was being calculated on the value of the land sans house and we owed our mortgage company an outrageous sum of cash. they were going to be so gracious as to let us pay off the balance over the course of a year, raising our mortgage payment to $1,700 a month! um, no thanks. so we haggled and got a solution we could deal with and all was well...

then we noticed that a lot of, shall we say...brownies were moving into the neighborhood. disheartening to say the least. in light of the mortgage crisis, apparently our builder decided to waive all sorts of legal documentation in order to keep building houses.

so, we bought our 4 bedroom, 2-1/2 bath, 2500 square foot house for $135,000 almost three years ago. last year's appraised value was $139,000. great, right?

friday i got my appraisal for 2009. my house is now worth $117,700.

(enraged silence.)

and to think we'd entertained the idea of selling and moving up around the Woodlands to get away from the less desirable neighborhood. now i'm doomed to live here and receive letters from the homeowners association about how they don't allow the raising of livestock, namely chickens, in the suburban neighborhood. letters addressing the graffiti problem. and tejano bass drops as the theme music playing in the background of my life.

don't get me wrong, i like my house and there are some decent people in the neighborhood...but being upside-down by at least $12,000 makes it hard for me to see a way out if i should desire one.

back in my renting days i thought home ownership was for suckers and chumps. i'm beginning to re-agree with myself.

rain?

in Texas, 60% chance of rain has come to mean 'partly cloudy'. i'm really starting to get a complex with the way the weather man keeps letting me down.

we are studying one of the Noble Virtues a week in school and this week is Discipline week. this is the first virtue that we've studied that needs work among the kids. the little ones have somehow equated discipline with brushing their teeth alot, so we have some really fresh mouthed little heathens around here! Daylon really needs to work on his discipline. he's a pretty good worker and he does more chores than any of his friends, but i have to tell him what to do and when to do it. every day. it's the same old thing, every damn day. he's living on the hope that mom'll get distracted and forget some of his chores. which really isn't working for him. at least he's persevering, right?

anyway, over spring break i was working on a human interest story that threatened to change the world and make my family rich. there was a woman who got a really bad infection in her lymph glands under her jaw. it made it's way into her throat and she told her husband that she needed to go to the doctor, but her husband replied, 'honey! you know business is slow right now! how will we pay our sub-prime loan if you go to the doctor? you don't even have insurance!' so the woman suffered on in hopes that her body could fight off the nasty infection. she was losing the battle and the infection spread to her sinuses, her ear, and even her eye. when her eardrum ruptured, she resigned herself to death. in her last moments she reflected on the state of the world...the recession, the mortgage crisis, uninsured citizens of America...and she realized that if she were to die, the media would grab hold of her story and her grief-stricken family's tale of the mother who died of a simple sinus infection would grab the heartstrings of America, causing all to join together in the cause of nationalization of mortgages and banks and universal healthcare...Bryan would be invited to the White House to bowl with Obama and the kids would be moved to Washington DC and enrolled in public school....

she said, 'to hel with that!' and borrowed some antibiotics from her neighbor and lived happily ever after.

ingredients for a paradigm shift

my mother's senior picture. raised in a very affluent family, a ballerina, well educated, well traveled, cultured, chic, and beautiful.



my dad was a massively intelligent band nerd. he raised his 4 brothers and sisters in poverty because my grandmother was too busy worrying with her 8 marriages (before my dad turned 18!) to have time for her kids.

i have no clue how they got together. i can't imagine they had a moment where they found something of a kindred spirit in each other and decided to marry. but they must have, and stayed together for 18 years. i guess i can see that my mom was moved by my dad's hardship, but she had no idea the strength of the personality she was dealing with. i can see that my dad was dazzled by my mom's beauty and in awe of her privileged lifestyle, but he had no idea that it was all skin deep.



they had me. i love them and thank them for giving me the tools i needed to break the paradigm.

random braggadocio

it's getting hectic around here. with the onset of soccer season plus my normal busyness i'm feeling a bit like a push-me-pull-you. luckily spring break is next week, hopefully i can regroup.


here are some random things, cause i feel random.

-i've lost 30 pounds! i'm really into the detox and health aspect of this thing now. normally i diet until i'm not disgusted with myself (which is where i am now) but this time is different. this time is for fitness. i'm aiming for optimal health of body and mind. Sunday i received quite the heady compliment...'you look so much younger!'...which i daresay has stoked my fires.

-Daylon is becoming kinda cool. i can't believe i said it, and don't tell him, but there it is. for example, the other night my neighbor (see previous entry, pardon me while i burst into flames) had a drunk husband arrive home from work. she is trying to stop drinking and in a jealous rage, provoked her husband until he was hollering and being a general ass. she got scared and ran out of her house with the baby screaming for help (eye roll extraordinaire) and brought all the drama to my house. after the situation had calmed down and she went home, Daylon said, 'man, i think they need to watch Fireproof again!' among other things, it gave me hope that i'm rubbing off on him in positive ways. ;}

-soccer season is on! Asher scored 5 goals this weekend (which he was disappointed with, he really wanted 6). there was an Irish grandmother on the other team and after she determined Asher was mine, she said in a thick Irish brogue, 'Ach! he's a little bruiser!' which just tickled me. Daylon played even though he had the flu...and managed to score! my dad gave me crap about letting him play sick, but i assured him that we value a warrior mentality over coddled sickbed crap. ha! i was really proud of Daylon's team, they were down 4-0 at the half and came back top win it 6-4! there are some really good kids on his team which is pretty surprising to me out here in the land of plenty.

-i'm getting Galilee off soymilk thanks to the fear mongering on the OR board ;} and i tricked her in to drinking goatsmilk this morning...she liked it!

-we went to Washington on the Brazos this Sunday for Bryan's birthday. Texas is so damn awesome. the bluebonnets were getting started and it was just really lovely. i always fantasize about moving to somewhere beautiful like Utah, but when it comes down to it i just regret that the economy of Houston ties us to this place. i couldn't live anywhere else. i think i'll give up on Utah and the Faroe Islands and set my sights on the Texas Hill Country. everyone knows the cows think Brenham is heaven, and i'm inclined to agree.

useless, but not for long

i'm not one to subject people to my political persuasion, but something has stuck in my craw lately and i'm trying to either purge or reconcile it here. however, i doubt it will be so simple.

the Declaration of Independence states:

"...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government"

i'm not an anarchist. i think the founding fathers were some admirable thinkers, and quite wise. while they were addressing their current situation with England, they were foretelling our situation today and highlighting the struggle of mankind to govern itself.

the Nine Charges of Odinism state:

To suffer no evil to go unremedied and to fight against the enemies of Faith, Folk and Family: my foes I will fight in the field, nor will I stay to be burnt in my house.

these quotes have become parallel in my mind.

there is something bad wrong in this country and the world. i do not think that sitting idly by and waiting for the storm to pass is going to yield a bright clear day, i think the agendas at hand are sinister where the common man is concerned.

i do not want to be burnt in my house, yet that's what we're all doing. of course, we don't know what to do, and we can barely conceive of the conditions that could be right around the corner. we are the generation of fat american privilege, after all.

if what's going on in washington isn't 'unremedied evil', i don't know what is.

we have the right to make this right, but we lack the courage and the vision. if there were a march on washington with pitchforks and torches tomorrow, i'd be there...however, i'm unlikely to start one myself. ugh.

i don't know how to go about it, but i do know what i'd like to see happen. i want to march up to the capitol and fire every lousy fucker in the place. they could be replaced by people who truly want to serve the people...if you have the conviction to govern the people of this country you need to put your money where your mouth is. all of the members of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government should take a (verifiable) oath of poverty for the length of their term. i'm talking sackcloth and ashes.