hello, monday

Sorry about the double posting of the funniest video ever made.  My YouTube account is linked to my Tumblr account.  Did not know this.  Things haven’t been going so peaches and cream over here, but every time I watch my daughter turn into the psychotic front of a punk band (WITH NO COACHING from us - she just started doing it on her own) it makes me laugh.  Heavens to Betsy, I surely do need a laugh.

For reasons that I don’t want to get into (suffice to say they are not financial or legal or any such mumbo jumbo) our search for a home will not be leading me to the cozy cute town only 20 minutes from a Target.  It will be leading us to a different town though than our current one - thank HEAVENS.  The town I live in is like a strip mall, not too much personality and that’s about it.  This other one has character.  It’s still about an hour from civilization (and thereby mostly off limits for a mom wanting to keep her baby awake so he’ll sleep at night) and not many cultural opportunities for me or my kids, so there’s not much comfort there.

Oh, they have a Walmart.  Joy.

I figured out why every neighborhood we drive through makes me feel uneasy - there’s no fences in this state.  So if one person has a perfectly kept backyard and the person next to them inevitably has a boat up on cinder blocks, it all looks pretty shabby.

And try being a mom where you can’t see a property line.  I can’t send my kid outside to play because there’s nothing holding her back from running into a neighbor’s yard or beyond.  We don’t have any fences where we live now and it’s unsettling to me.  I can’t go into my backyard and relax because I have no privacy.  And so I stay indoors, because I can’t take another awkward conversation with the nice people next to us with the yippy dogs.  I’m all for being neighborly, but it would be so nice to be able to sit in the sun without trying to politely avert your eyes while the person next door is trying to have their own personal time in their yard 6 feet away from you.

It’s grand to have problems so small and dumb in comparison to most of the world.  But dang it…