For Me, By Me

so...as anyone that reads these blogs knows my marriage is not a normal one. it's full of love and caring and support but at the same time i share it with 2 other people and all 3 of us (yes i said 3) are allowed certain freedoms, including flirting with other people (of the same or opposite sex) and this 'flirting' can include kissing, making out, and go to whatever extent is agreed upon by the 3 of us.
( read on if you like... )

and so much has/hasn't happened. i'm just days shy of my 28th birthday and though it's not a great milestone, birthdays do tend to cause people to pause & reflect about where they are in their lives; not to mention, my 10-year high school reunion is this august (the jury's still out on whether i'll be attending that function)...

( exceptionally long retelling of my last 10 years )

Now that I have just completely and utterly rambled on for way too long, I feel a slight catharsis, a somewhat purged feeling…if you’ve read this all, bravo!, if you haven’t, I take no offense. :)

Hey All,
My friend Liz is looking for a part-time job. She's looking for 5pm - 9pm M-F & whatever - 9pm on the weekends. Let us know if you hear of anyone hiring for these kinds of hours. She's got a ton of customer service experience, about 2 years of managerial experience and she's also a licensed manicurist. Thanks! :)

Describe me with...

...just one single word. Leave it in my comments section. Be anonymous if you choose, it won't be screened. Then post this original message on your journal and see how many strange and interesting things people say about you.

Rules of the Game:
Once you have been tagged, you must write a blog containing 10 weird, random things, (facts, habits or goals) about yourself. At the end, select 10 people to be tagged, listing their names and the reason you chose them. Send them a message ("You're It") and instruct them to read your blog. You can't tag the person who tagged you. Since you can't tag me back, let me know when you've posted your blog so I can see your answers. Thanks for playing and have fun!


1. I'm now working for the company that owns KSON (97.3FM), Jazz 98.1FM & 94.9FM in San Diego, CA...it's sooooo much fun!

2. I'm desperately afraid i'll never be able to have children. i'm just hoping that the last few years have only been my body's way of resetting itself.

3. i love the arts! reading, writing, singing, opera, paintings, sculptures, etc! they all can move me.

4. i have a husband AND a wife and they're the 2 most important people in my life and i love them both dearly and passionately.

5. i'm hoping that by the end of 2008 that our debt will be gone or manageable and that we'll actually have money in our savings account.

6. i would like to be back down to my high school weight within the next year to 2 years...that would require a loss of about 55lbs...

7. i want a cat...but am lazy so will probably have to bribe my hubby to keep the litter box...not to mention i still have to come up with the $500 pet deposit AND convince myself that a cat is truly worth it.

8. i want a house of our own. just ours. no one else living in it but us 3. with the money to decorate as we please.

9. i hate my hair. it never does what i want it to.

10. i love my lips. i think my lips are model worthy, especially in red, glossy lipstick.


Play along if you like! :)

This image is from reddragondesigns.net

for those of you that may bet on such morbid things, it only took me around 39 hours to post my thoughts on mortality.

( cut for details )

my thoughts on mortality, it's more fragile then we think. as i sat with bated breath watching the fires begin to rage across san diego, my brother, my nearly middle-aged brother, was dying. with the loss of my mother only a year and 2 months ago this was an extreme blow to our family. never did we think we'd lose another so soon. especially when all of us thought that our parents were too young to die. our father was only 53 when he passed away in 1998, 9 days shy of his 54th birthday. our mother was only 60 when she passed away last august, 4 months shy of her 61st birthday. and now the oldest of us kids, rainie, at i believe 45 or 46 years old, only 2 months after his last birthday. what a shame and a scary thought because the reality of the situation is that rainie was my biological father. the people i called mother & father, were his parents, my paternal grandparents. they adopted me when i was only 3 days old and raised me to know rainie as my oldest brother and his brother's, buckey & jr, my biological uncles, as just 2 more brothers. i didn't even know until i was 12 years old that rainie was anything more to me then just one of my big brothers, but by then it was too late for me to see him as anything differently. he'd been absent most of my life, only to begin reappearing, sporadically, when i was in kindergarten. my biological mother is in hawaii. i didn't even get to meet her in person until i was a freshman in high school. she's a great lady, but still not someone i can call mom. why scary you ask? because i'd really like to know what caused his heart attack or what not as i don't know any of his or my biological mother's medical histories. i need to know if what caused this was mere environment or a fluke of genetics. rainie i'm sure didn't know the scope of his family's medical history either as he was technically another man's son adopted by our 'dad' when our 'mom' married him. and as for some sort of family medical history from my biological mother's side, think again. she only found out just a few years back, maybe as many as 5 years back, that she too was adopted, so she has no idea about any of her family's medical history either. as for me, i'm worried it's a fluke of genetics cause just this past may i found out that my triglycerides were quite high and that i needed to bring them down by changing my diet. if what actually cuased rainie's cardiac0whatever was a fluke of genetics rather then the end consequence of his years of extra-curricular drug use, then i need to know. not that i haven't started to change my diet, but because it may be something i can't control with only a simple change in diet, and that's something i'd like to know sooner rather than later.
well, now that i've rambled on long enough about that i guess i'll wrap it up. if you're reading this, i'm sorry it's long...i just felt it needed to be told in its entirety.

this is a x-post, so if you've read it already, i'm sorry...

we did leave our house in lakeside for a brief time yesterday as we lost power and had no way of getting any information, however, we did come back last night (as we were never asked to leave) and have been watching the fires. the one of most concern to us is the one that's burning in the barona area that's shut down willows road. willows road is only a mile and a half from our place so we're watching that one very closely. *Update: channel 7 news just announced (10/23/07 @ Noon) that the lakeside fire department has deemed that lakeside is currently not threatened by any fires.

aside...on a more personal note...i had insult added to injury yesterday morning (monday october 22nd) when the youngest of my 3 older brothers told me i needed to get to grossmont hospital as my oldest brother had been rushed from our family house in el cajon via ambulance with a stopped heart. barely a minute after i made it to the hospital to join my oldest brother's girlfriend and my second-oldest brother were we told that my oldest brother had not made it. the ambulance team was never able to restart his heart. apparent cause of death was a massive heart attack. so another loss for my family.

so it's been about 3 1/2 weeks since my last entry and there really wasn't much info in that one except about my new tattoo (which, BTW, is doing great! i never really scabbed or anything!) anywho...so...about a month or so ago kev and i traded cars one day cause he was off and was helping my step dad move stuff out from his storage unit to his new condo. so kev and his dad stopped at a local taco bell to have lunch and as they're sitting inside eating some guys walk in asking who owns the grey mazda outside and kev's asks 'the mazda truck?' and they're like, yeah. so kev's like 'i do, why?' and that's when the guys tell him that someone just backed into the truck and left. so kev goes out to look and sure enough so guy had backed into the passenger side taillight area of my truck, the same place i'd been rear-ended in a week or so before my mom died. that accident was never reported, instead we took cash from the person that hit me in that case cause the body shop (caliber collision) told us it was all purely cosmetic damage. well, this time around the guy that backed in to the truck apparently came back, talked to kev, said he didn't have his insurance card on him at the time, and gave kev his name, number and address and said to get the estimate and call him with it and he'll pay us outright. well...the number never worked so we ended up reporting it to our insurance as a hit & run. our insurance decided to total out my truck cause the repairs would cost more then half the current value of my mazda. so they ended up offering us like $4300 for my truck if we didn't get the truck back with a salvage certificate. being's as my truck was a '98 with 150,000+ miles on it already, we decided to let them have my truck and to look for something newer and bigger. after much searching and disappointment we finally physically pulled my step dad into the mix seeing as how out of both our families he's the only one that even remotely offered to help us get a new/used car. he'd actually offered us his '04 sport trac by taking over payments and such, but we ended getting an '03 F150 super crew (it looks like we put miracle grow on my mazda cause it's the exact same color!) but he signed as my co-buyer and put the $3000 in cash he'd brought with him to give us as part of our monies as the down payment on the truck from el cajon ford and voila! i have a new/used truck! my cream machine! :) so...back to the $4300 the insurance company offered us...out of the $4300 the insurance company gets $500 off the top for our deductible and then about $1890 goes to our bank cause my mazda was the collateral on a loan so they have to pay that off to get the title and we get what's left! yay! so...yeah...there's an update!

i got my first, AND ONLY, tattoo. it's gorgeous. not what i'd orignially envisioned, but it's perfect. just an explanation...the rose is for my mom (1945 - 2007) because her middle name, halelokelani, means 'house of roses' in hawaiian; and the butterfly is for my dad (1944 - 1998) because the song 'butterfly kisses' by tom carlisle had just come out right before he died.

i did it. i applied for an auto loan through my bank with my lizard as my co-signer. i found a really nice looking 2000 F150 on autotrader.com. hopefully, i can use the truck as a tax write off next year for kev's business, because unfortunately, right now, neither one of our cars is in any condition to carry food for a catered event. to use it for the business i'm going to put a tonnaeu cover on it so that it can seal stuff in when i need it to. it's also a 4-door truck, so i could easily just put it in the back and front seats. we'll see.

it's almost over done...of moving that is! we're like within an hour of being done moving. the last load of crap is staged in the living room of the old apartment and the old apartment's almost done being cleaned. another hour and we'll be done with the old place and only have to worry about setting up the new place. not like we actually moved that far, we moved from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom in the same apartment complex, unfortunately, because they wanted a whole new deposit is why we weren't able to make estrella this year, again. we'll get at least half the old apartment's deposit back, but that won't be for at least another couple of weeks. we already got our state return, and spent most of it on paying a couple credit cards down and trying to buy a big screen t.v. we tried for a 50" we found on craigslist for $200 and got shafted. we now have a $200 50" 230+lb paperweight in our living room. fortunately, our federal's due in by valentine's day and a friend of ours that's been around for a few years now is going to be kind of enough to spot us half the cost of a brand new 42" plasma t.v. so by next weekend we'll be viewing t.v. in HD and at least 10" bigger then we currently are. our old t.v. is going to be donated to some friends of ours that are currently existing on a 12" t.v. for their living room. the 50", well, our friend (and roommate) that just moved out here from kansas in december wants to gut it and make an entertainment center for his bedroom. more power to him, but it needs to leave the living room ASAP. so, once we buy the 42" we'll be indebted to our friends for a total of $950. we'll owe our friend that's sporting us the half of the t.v. $600 and another friend of ours popped up about a month ago with a brand new computer for us that cost $350 (the parts were on sale and would've cost double if they weren't on sale). so, gotta love our friends. we owe them money but they're not stressing on it. our friend for the t.v. just wants at least $100 a month. the one that bought us the computer, said we can give him money when we can, so we're going to give him $200 out of our federal return, that'll only leave $150. our friend for the t.v.'s actually going to buy it all up front on his own and then we'll give him $600 from our federal, and unless we absolutely need the money from our old apartments deposit refund, we're going to give him that, too, that should be at least another $200. so, yeah. good friends, good times.

( Cut for TMI )

( Long time comin )
so, that's what's been goin' on...

( my xmas stocking )

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okay, so, per CIKevin, this is my loveletter...the letter "W"

1. Women...love'em, hold'em, kiss'em, rub'em...yup, they're all good for one or more of those

2. Warm blankets...can we say burrito-fy?

3. War...any War...May/September Potrero, Great West and coming soon to a state near you, Estrella!

4. Water...i love to swim (when i don't look like shamu in a swimsuit) and i love to just be at the beach

5. Wineglasses...i don't drink much wine, but i think the glasses are beautiful, they've got some nice ones out there

6. Watch...i feel totally lost without mine right now, verging on naked, even when fully clothed

7. Watermelon...i could eat a whole one a day! granted i'd be paying for it later, but i still could

8. Waist-length hair...on any sex, especially if it's well-kept and i'm allowed to play with it

9. Walking...at a slow, leisurely pace, anywhere, with friends just chatting, so much so you forget where you are and where you're going

10. Watching...i enjoy people watching immensely! theme parks and the like are such great places to people watch!

so, there's my 10, if you'd like your own, please comment and i'll throw you a vowel, or a consonant, or something...yeah, definitely something...

so, kev quit sycuan sometime around the 1st week of october and had been putting in resumes everywhere. well, he got a job at this place called smencils. i was really rather leery of the place because the guy was doing some serious background checking. i mean, he checked kev's credit history, and then questioned him on it, called every single one of his previous employers until he could talk to someone that'd worked with kev. called all his references, including his extra. and then finally, after 2 weeks of background checking him and making phone calls to discuss tidbits of info he'd gleaned from his searching with kev, he hired him, BUT, with the stipulation that kev's 1st 2 weeks will be off the books and under the table. now the position was originally posted with a $15/hour salary, however, because kev wasn't "exactly" what he'd been looking for, he offered kev $13/hour, not too shabby. well, kev's 1st week was last week, this is his 2nd week and today as kev was getting off, the owner/boss, pulls kev into his office, tells him that after the last 2 weeks he realizes that he's actually going to need 2 people to do the job that kev's been doing by himself for the last 2 weeks so that it'd be up to his standards and that he just couldn't live with himself to keep kev on and pay him only minimum wage after paying him $13/hour for the last 2 weeks. that's right folks, he gave kev the boot. this is after kev has been busting his hump for the past 2 weeks endeavoring to help this guy and his 3 other employees (not counting kev) get out of a hole they were in of being behind by 175 orders coming into their christmas season rush. they finished playing catch up today. kev kept asking him what he did wrong, how could he have done anything differently, why couldn't he just stay on at minimum wage? and the guy just kept telling him that he didn't do anything wrong, he wouldn't change anything kev did in the last 2 weeks cause it couldn't have been done any better and that he just couldn't live with himself to take kev down to minimum wage and keep him on. so, yet again, kevin is without a job. luckily i started my new job with viejas tribal government last week monday and will be getting my first paycheck next thursday (a full 2 weeks) and liz is still steadily working. between hers and i's income we can make our necessities with enough leftover that if we're very frugal, we can walk that thin line between surviving and living until kev can pick up another job. what i don't get is why kevin can't keep a job. i know he quit sycuan because the hours were driving him insane, literally and physically making him sick, but he can't hold a job. if liz weren't with us, i'd be in hysterics right now trying to figure out how we'd be making our rent and bills on my income alone, again. kev's only had 3 jobs that have lasted longer than 6 months in the 8, almost 9, years we've been together. it's been for a mixture of reasons, he left the job, or the job left him. if anyone out there knows of a place he can work where it would take an act of god to get him out of the company once he's hired on, that won't require him to work graveyard or night shift, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, let me know. all of his background is in customer service, retail and wholesale. he could sell ice to an eskimo. he's a big boy, but physical labor does not daunt him. he may need to wear a bandana or something to keep the sweat out of his eyes, but he can do the work. PLEASE, somebody help me find my husband a job that won't go away in 3-6 months, that won't find someway to get rid of him, that won't make him find someway to get rid of it. those 3 jobs that lasted longer then 6 months; radio shack (he was an assistant manager when they let him go while he was recovering from gastric bypass surgery), working as a bus aide for the cajon valley union school district (he left there because they were cutting his hours and trying to say he owed them $400 because they screwed up and overpaid him on a paycheck) and richard's chem-dry, a carpet cleaning place (he left there because he hurt his elbow and shoulder trying to catch the biggest piece of equipment he used, the floor cleaning device, as it tried to take a leap out of the back of his work van and the owner/boss didn't believe him that he couldn't lift the cleaner (even though he was still going out and working) even after going to the doctor for the injury). i don't know what to do with him. i'm almost tempted to ask liz if she and i should take on 2nd jobs a piece and just tell kevin to stay at home, keep house, and make sure a good hot meal is on the table for breakfast and dinner 7 days a week. but if we did that, liz and i would be dead and we'd never get anytime with each other. cause liz's only days off are wednesday and thursday. she's currently working 11am - 8pm or 12pm - 9pm, friday's - tuesday's. i work 8am - 5pm, monday - friday. i could try to pick something up that was on the weekends only, but it's doubtful i'd be able to keep it after the holidays. liz is a licensed manicurist, she just doesn't have any clientele of her own, except a couple of friends. she's been trying to find a salon that would allow her to work there, without requiring her to bring her own list of clientele and has a steady flow of walk-in customers. she doesn't mind the space rent, and she can get her supplies on her own, it's the clientele she lacks. she got into a nice salon after she finished school, but it was off the beaten path and had practically no walk-in clientele. she could work that on wednesdays and thursdays and mornings on the days she chose.
so, i go on begging. PLEASE, if anyone can help me, help kev, find a job, i'd be eternally greatful. if anyone could help liz find a salon with the above qualifications, i'd be eternally greatful. i'd be eternally greatful for any help i could get right now with either of those needs. hell, if anyone could help me, help liz, find an entry-level office job making at least $9+/hour, we'd be even better then we are right now.
thanks for listening (or rather reading) my bitching, whining and begging.

so it's 11:49pm, 10/29/06, and i start my new job in the morning, at 8:30am. i've been working part-time since we got back to california in january and i start full-time again tomorrow. the job's a wonderful opportunity. i'll be making, on my own, on a yearly basis, only about $2-$3,000 less a year then kevin and i have ever made combined since we started filing jointly. i was floored at the income potential. with kevin just starting a new job tomorrow as well (he quit sycuan) our income potential's kind of in the air. however, between my new income and liz's income, survival is guaranteed, living on the other hand, will be limited with only hers and i's income. adding in kev's new potential income (potential because he's on a 2 week trial) we'd be absolutely set. we could live and save! it'd be wonderful. with the start of my new job i hope to start a new phase in my life. after seeing pictures of myself from this past weekend, the ones i'm especially not too thrilled with are publicly accessible to a vast majority of my friends, i've decided that excercise is in much need. i know my metabolism will do what i want it to do if i simply start working out. so i've decreed that i will begin going to our apartments rec room after work tuesdays, wednesdays and thursdays, to use our stair climber/elliptical machine. i'll start with a 15 - 20 minute stride on it and work my way up from there. i've seen how rapidly my body can start doing what i want it to do, but i think it's the plateau i hit soon after starting exercise that bums me out. i'll notice changes within 2 weeks of starting an exercise regime, but after about 4 - 6 weeks, i stop noticing differences, and that irks me. here's to hoping that with exercise i can regulate my body naturally and get it back on track. for my health, my self-esteem and the hopes of starting a family before i'm 30.

The first five people to respond to this post, will get some form of art, by me. It will be about or tailored to those five lucky individuals.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations.
_I make no guarantees that you will agree with what I perceive as art and/or quality.
_What I create will be just for you, though it may include some "found objects," or experience related art.
_I am giving myself no deadline on completing this - however, the longer I take, the cooler I'll try to make it.

The only catch for this is, if you comment to receive something, you have to repost this and do so for others too. Come on, we all love snail mail and who wouldn't want a token like this?

Ready. Go!