Downtown Beach Party

Today Darryl and I checked out downtown Cartersville. They were having a beach party and many of the local stores has snacks and some even had giveaways. I thought I'd tell you about something funny that happened to me at one of the stores.

One store participating in the Beach Party was named Curves. I kind of thought they were talking about the women only gym. I thought I'd check that out because they had some free treats and a giveaway. When I walked into the tiny shop the owner took one look at me and said you are in the wrong store. "We don't have us no size four clothes in here. Our clothes start at size 16." I stood almost frozen. I'd never been scolded about going into a store before. That look of "OMG I'm in trouble now" must have registered on my face. The owner then said "Well I guess we have some purses you could look at." She then repeated that her clothes go from size 16 on up. For all she knew I might have been shopping for a friend, a parent, or a sister.

About two minutes went by as I pretended to look at clothes before she said something to me a third time. Trust me the third time is the charm. This time she said, "You should go to the store across the hall, they have clothes in your size." I just didn't know what to make of the whole thing. The owner was an ample sized woman but at almost fifty years of age I'm not snickering at anyone's weight. I wasn't staring at her, pointing at her, or even commenting about the size of the clothing. I wondered if I made her uncomfortable. If I did I didn't mean to. Besides I'm not a size 4 I'm a size 6 I'll have you know. I'll also have you know that there was a time in my life, however briefly that I did wear a size 16. I guess I know how it feels to have someone say something about your weight when you don't even know them.

Today was Darryl's birthday. We picked up my car and Dave gave us both our birthday gifts of $50 each. NICE.

Six slayings in two communities about 30 miles apart in Tennessee and Alabama are linked, and a suspect who was sitting on the front porch of a home where some the bodies were found was being questioned, authorities said Saturday.

Suspect identified as Jacob Lee Shaffer, who faces murder charges. Most of the victims were members of the same family. Jacob's wife, Traci Shaffer, 38, was found dead in her home on Lincoln Road, along with her 16-year-old son, Devin Brooks and his friend, Robert Berber, also 16. Just down the road, investigators found the bodies of her father, Billy Hall, 57, and her brother Chris Hall, 34. .

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation released the identities of the victims found in Lincoln County. The identity of a sixth victim, whose body was found in Huntsville, Ala., has not yet been released by Huntsville police.

I have not learned of any motive but it just seems that I'm hearing more and more about whole families being murdered. For someone to take out not just the wife and stepson but also her father and her brother, I wonder if there wasn't a divorce in the works. The father and brother probably were helping her separate and the husband didn't like that. Murders like this never make sense.

Contracts Are In

Contracts came today. When I walked into the faculty room the long sheaves of paper poked out of the teacher boxes like pale yellow jonquils in the red Georgia clay. I pulled mine from my box and stared at the Notary Stamp. It’s now official I will be back for yet another year.

Last year I was biting at the bit to leave so I could find some place closer to home. Home being Acworth, my Barbie Dreamhouse home. I had been so frustrated that I couldn’t seem to get a position in another school despite the fact that they seemed to be throwing new schools up like concert flyers on telephone poles. One school seemed larger and grander than the next and certainly they needed more teachers.

Now of course I’m lucky I didn’t get a job at one of those schools. I’ve lost that home. I would have lost my seniority. It was truly a blessing in disguise but I didn’t realize it then.

Now that Darryl’s lost his job I find a certain peace knowing that for at least this next year I have a job. It will be my eighth year at RHS, the longest I have ever stayed at one job before. When I was younger I changed jobs sometimes twice a year. I would work at this restaurant or that retail store chasing nickel an hour raises. Even when I became a secretary I might stay at a location for two years before I was ready to move on to greener pastures.

Now I’m looking at my eighth year in a single school. This means that at the end of that year I will have seen two sets of students who started out with me in the ninth grade. It’s an interesting perspective. You watch them shuffle in uncertainly that first day of their Freshman year. By the time their Senior year rolls around you’ve watched them get their license, attend their prom, and then finally you wonder if that’s really the same kid you knew for years ago as they walk across the stage to receive their diploma.

There’s another wrinkle in the phone call story from earlier this week. One of my students had walked in just as the phone was ringing and said, “I just have this feeling that phone call is for me.” Yes I’m certain he did. The student at the other end of the phone told me that another teacher was busy right that second and asked him to call me to send my student down to his classroom. Since that teacher was the swimming coach, I thought it might make sense that he might ask a student to call because he was supervising kids in the pool. I sent the young man down to the teacher’s classroom.

Two days later I ran into the coach. “How long did you keep G because he never returned to class?” “What? I didn’t send for him.” The teacher replied. “REALLY?”

The trap slammed shut. I wrote the student up but the difficult question was, who was the student who called? Wouldn’t you know his classmates had heard I had figured out the deception and asked me if I had written up P also. P is not my student. I didn’t even know that P had called me. “Yes. Of course I wrote him up. That was crazy that he would call and think I wouldn’t check on it.” Two of my students laughed and said “Yeah that really was stupid that P would do that.” SCORE!!!!!!!!!!! So I wrote him up also delivering the referral to the Assistant principal personally. I’m certain P feels that his friend G snitched. I don't think I will go out of my way to correct this perception.

Today is also candy day. Every week until the end of September, Mars is giving away a candy bar. I won one last week. I hope I win one again this week. I posted it on ThriftyMaven but I wonder how much traffic it will get.

Here are the blog contests I entered today:

Prize: $50 Red Lobster gift card.

Prize: Pair of eyeglasses from EyeBuyDirect.com [excludes designer frames and sunglasses].

Prize: $25 Build-a-Bear Workshop Bear Bucks gift card.

Prize: HomeFree Treats Organic Cookies sampler pack.

Prize: One-year supply of all small & mighty detergent, The Apprentice Complete Season 1 DVD, autographed photograph of Donald Trump and You're Fired! promotional items (ARV $160).

Prize: 8-day/7-night trip for two to a JetBlue Getaways destination city of winner's choice (ARV $3,296).

Prize: Flip Ultra Series II Camcorder (ARV $149.99).

The Economy Sends Us a Sucker Punch

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!! Darryl's company just recently sent him to Mexico. He was gone for several days and I missed him. When he came home he went on and on about what a great sign this was for him. After all his boss normally would have gone on such a trip but they were sending him. We imagined that he would be promoted and sent to Dallas, Texas. I hated to think about that but on the other hand it looked like we'd be moving in the right direction. We figured I'd have another three years here and then I would be vested in my pension plan. We figured even if he got called in before I finished my time here we'd travel back and forth and then I'd move down. I love this house but I wanted Darryl to move forward with his career.

The planets seemed to finally be aligning in all the right places. The auto insurance was going to pay us almost all of what I needed for my new car after the accident. We were finally going to rent out the house in Cartersville. I was beginning to have little dreams of being more like some upper middle class woman. You know the kind that stays at home, gets her hair done every six weeks and goes out to dinner with the girls. We just got an invite from the neighbor women to go to an ornament exchange and I was trying to figure out how to make the pennies really squeeze.

Darryl was wondering about us taking a trip to see my family for the holidays and about seeing Gene get married. We talked about visiting my son Michael before he shipped off for Iraq. As a matter of fact Darryl just emailed me about a cross country trip he'd like to take this summer. We were finally going to stop wondering when the next shoe was going to drop.

Well the shoe dropped. Just a few weeks ago I asked Darryl, what would happen if he got laid off. I fretted over it a little but Darryl assured me his company was having record profits. At the time they were getting ready to send him to Mexico. He assured me that the nation needed coal and he didn't for see any reason to worry. He'd actually been told that engineering probably wouldn't be hurt by all this. He was being trained to take his boss' place. I believed him and I believe Darryl believed this too.

I came home from work planning to work on Dan's resume. Honestly I felt pretty good. I was finally through with being sick. I would have time to work on Dan's stuff and keep up with my sweeps. Yippee. No sense of impending doom.

I was home, maybe an hour and I was fixing dinner. Big dog as moving back and forth, he wanted to go out. I saw Darryl outside. What was that about? He was supposed to be at work. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he took the day off. "Look big dog. Daddy's home."

Darryl looked up. "I didn't want you to see this. I wanted to wait until I got in." he said. He was taking his boots out of the car. His small fridge was in the trunk. "What's wrong?" I asked. He asked me to wait until he got in.

I wondered if he was going to tell me we got broken into again. I'd just had enough I was just sick and tired of it. I waited and stood in front of the stove. What could it be. What did he know. I hadn't seen his Dad was something wrong and he wanted to tell me when he was inside.

Then it clicked. He got laid off. He WHAT? No no that can't be true. That's a crazy thought.

Darryl came in. He got laid off. They called him in today around 3:00 and told him that they were laying him off. This is so unexpected. We were so blindsided by this. We are going to have to give this house, my dream house back to the bank. I'm moving back to Cartersville. I've been here before.

Darryl's got to get a job within three weeks or we lose the house. I told him that we'll just give this house back. There's just no way he can get another job so quickly. Not in this economy. Just no way. I sit here in the loft typing on my computer. I had a dream about how I wanted this loft to look. I loved looking out my window as the sun rose in the morning. I imagined how we would entertain in my beautiful kitchen. I loved my bedroom. I loved my living room. It's a beautiful house.

It's all over. I need to start bringing boxes home soon. We really have to leave. I can't say my life is over. I've faced much worse in my life. What I can say is that this is a sucker punch I wasn't expecting.

Say a prayer for us.

Free Groceries From GC Still Going On

We are still staying in the Cartersville house sleeping on the air mattress. Not really the best place to be. We have one working toilet still and that is downstairs. All the other toilets have been removed from the floor. Let’s see I have my decorative living room toilet, which I often threaten to fill with potting soil and day lilies, and my master bedroom closet toilet. Since that one is only visible when one walks past the hole in the floor where it should be and stare into the closet I tend not to think about this one much.

In order to take a shower you have to use the upstairs shower stall which is missing one of the handles. Thank goodness it is the cold handle because I would freeze to death. Since the hot water never seems to get too hot when it comes on full trickle, I’m OK with the hot water working.

I’m still using the free Kroger Gift Cards that I won. Even though my bill came out to be $107.10 my groceries never cost me a cent.

So what did I buy with my Kroger card this week? Again this all goes back to the fact that I’m living in Cartersville. I am limited by the fact that I can only cook things in the microwave. No fancy meals or cooking, my only option is frozen dinners. TV dinners as we used to call them when I was growing up but I guess they aren’t just for TV anymore. Dinner is served on our fancy card table which is also used as a computer desk when I have internet access.

This week Lean Cuisine wasn’t on sale for $1.50 a piece. They were all regularly priced. I still needed them so I bought seven, enough for one week. The most expensive ones were $2.46 and most of the rest were $2.07. I was able to save a little because I had two 50 cents off coupons which of course doubled and brought them down to about that price. I had a hankering for Mac and cheese. Since I don’t have an oven at the Cartersville, not one that works anyway, I bought the Lean Cuisine Mac and Cheese and it was nothing like what I had a hungering for what a disappointment.

I take back the comment about the oven. I do have one and it might work if it wasn’t sitting in the middle of the dinning room acting as counter space for Darryl’s junk.

Darryl on the other hand required Hungry Man frozen meals because he says Lean Cuisine doesn’t fill him up. One of these Hungry man dinners actually cost $4.79. I blanched but what could I do. The rest of his meals were $2.97.

Darryl also needed some cold cuts. Thank goodness Land of Frost had one pound turkey and one pound ham packs for $2.99 instead of $4.79. It also helped that I had a $1 off coupon for each of those so I really only paid $1.99 for each of them. Sandwiches need bread and I scored on those too. Sara Lee has new bread and the introductory price was $1.99. They also had coupons out for the bread and I had two of them. The coupons were each for a free loaf of the new bread.

The dog’s food choices are also dictated by our living quarters. When we used to live here I began having a problem with rats in the cold winter months. I say rats because I actually saw one and it was the size of a kitten. I used to feed the dogs downstairs and the rodents would find their way in through the crawl space. It scared the heck out of me. If you set food out for the dogs and they didn’t eat it all right away then the mice would come out and eat it. So for now the dogs are loving life because they are eating canned Alpo dog food. They slurp that stuff right up so there is nothing left for mice or rats.

I had two coupons that gave you a free can if you bought five cans. Since a can is 61 cents a piece it was like getting a dime off each can making them 51 cents a piece. Gosh I can still remember when I first got the dogs and Alpo sold for 45 or 50 cents a can. Usually canned food is a special treat for them.

I decided to buy three insulated shopping bags. They really are nice and it would be a great way to transport food without having to worry if it will defrost on the way home from the store or on the drive from the house in Acworth to the house in Cartersville. The bags were $2.99 a piece and I bought three.

I had $19.61 in coupons bringing the original amount down from $126.71 to $107.10. According to my receipt I saved $43.41 which means without any sales or coupons I would have spent $150.51. So I saved about 29% on my groceries.

If I had the time and energy I might be more like these women who buy $300 worth of groceries for $2. Still all things considered that’s pretty good. I’m still coming back to Acworth on the weekends to do the laundry and then on Sunday I do my shopping. After shopping, I go back to the house in Acworth, pack up and drive back to Cartersville with the dogs. I will be glad when I can stay in my Acworth house. I’m so tired of people breaking into the Cartersville home.