This was on my brother’s FaceBook after our phone call today. Why, WHY can he not simply understand that once you become a parent your children MUST be a priority, and if not that, at least give them food a shelter and LOVE.

My Brother has a five month old baby girl. She is WAY behind on her developments. WAY. She is more like a 2 month old in actions. Their three year old is out of control and he thinks its FUNNY that she swears a blue streak and physically attacks adults around her.

The worst of it though, is that he doesn’t care if they are safe. I spent five years listening to his GF bitch and complain about her mom, about the drugs her mom  used, the neglect she went through, the beatings. For five years we have all listened to J talk about this stuff, about how HORRIBLE it was growing up around this woman, the men she brought home and the lack of love.

Guess where those two innocent babies are right now? If you guessed at J’s mom’s house, you would be SPOT ON! I swear to GOD, those two need to take some Lipovox to get some of the fat out of their heads so they can think straight!

A few nights ago my brother went to the bar. 3am that morning his five month old baby cries, ‘cus ya’know, that’s what babies DO, he screamed at her to shut the Eff up. At a five month old BABY. For CRYING.

My Brother tells me he is getting rid of J and taking the girls, trying for sole custody, and we as a family backed him 100%, J is pretty unstable herself, but my brother is flat broke and apparently, living in a crack Whore’s den is preferable to getting a job. He is NOT leaving J, that’s obvious to me, as he has been staying nights with her at her mother’s house and having relations with her – and yes – he told me that.

I’ve removed my Brother from my FaceBook. It might seem like a passive aggressive move, but to me, it feels right. He will not let us help them, he will not let us care about them, and I cannot continue to torture myself over this. I just can’t!

There is nothing I like more than to sit my middle son down and have him post for pictures. he has the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen.

Don’t hate me cus he’s beautiful!

It’s near the end of January, meaning February is right around the corner. And of course, February means we will be getting all of our tax stuff ready and filing our returns. My husband always gets a nice refund becuase we cheat  a little bit.

Oh don’t get too worried!

What we do is every January, the company hubs works for resets all of the tax information. At that point, all the employees go in and state their family situation. Every year, My husband leaves everything blank and does not claim me or the boys as dependents. That means that during the year, more taxes are taken off his paycheck, but come February when we file our taxes, we get that all back!

It’s one of the ways we save up for things. In the past, our tax returns have paid for the basement renovations, the new fence and the landscaping int he back yard. This year our returns are going towards both a new laptop for Hubs and a family vacation to Calgary. I’m not sure which I am looking forward too more, Not having to share my laptop anymore, or spending quality time with the family on vacation.

Because the time is drawing close, I have been watching very close for Buy.com to have a sale on laptops, So far, I haven’t seen one, but I have seen some AWESOME sales on other items like this D-Link DIR-615 Wireless N Router.

Our router is a piece of crap. It loses its signal about, and this is no exaggeration, 20-40 times  a day. It’s lost it right now, but by the time I finish this post, it will be back up. Hopefully. We are desperate for a new router, but the ones we have seen in stores around here are priced from 89-129 dollars! the Buy.com one is on sale RIGHT NOW for $39! Even their regular price for this router is cheaper than what I have been seeing in stores!

The only thing stopping me from buying it right now is the letter “N” in it’s name. I’m not sure, exactly, what the letters stand for, but I know that we need one that will be compatible with all of our wireless gadgets, and there are a lot of them! (The LapTop, the PS3, the Wii, The iTouch, The boys’ Nintendo DS.) I will be pointing Hubs to Buy.Com as soon as he gets home, that’s for sure!

Between now and the time the refund check clears our bank, I will be keeping an eagle eye on the sales Buy.Com has every week, Cross your fingers I see a laptop!

(I was hoping that my router would have found it’s signal by now, I’ve unplugged it and will have to wait a few minutes to reset it. This sucks! I need a new router NOW)

This afternoon Hubs and the boys sat down to make RockBand characters. Hubs had made his the day he opened his Birthday Gift, but the boys had just been using any random player as they played.

Parker went first, first you have to choose the face style, the length of the nose, the shape of the chin, that type of thing. Then you have to choose a hair style – all three boys chose different variety of punk rock hair – next up was dying the hair. All three boys wisely chose to keep their character clean shaven LOL.

The funny part was the last step in creating your Rock Band Character. You got to play with the height and weight. Now, the last time I played a game where the player got to create a character like that was when we made our Wii Me’s. The weight function of the height and weight actually made you fatter or skinnier.

In RockBand, the height made you taller or smaller, but the weight, LOL, the weight made you a 98lb weakling, or a contender for the IronMan competitions! Hubs upped the weight bar to the extreme end, and the guy just turned into the incredible hulk – minus turning green of course.

I guess that Rockband expects the players to be hooked on cocaine and crack to lose weight, becuase real rock stars would never need to use alli or any other weight loss drug for that matter!

As an adult, I can see the humor in this, that the weight doesn’t actually add weight (well technically, muscle weighs more than fat, but STILL) and I doubt that kids my son’s age would ever pick up on the difference. i wonder if it was done on purpose becuase its very rare to see an out of shape rocker, or if the game creators just wanted to only have “good Looking” rock stars in it’s game?

Last week at this time I was snuggling with my brand new nephew. While I was with him I had taken a few pictures of him and promised his parents and my step mother to get the pics onto a DVD for them.

Guess who forgot she was supposed to have that done until this exact minute?

My Step mom and dad are heading here sometime tonight, and I think I better get off my butt and get the Pics burned. I would have used cds a few days ago when I was playing with them, I’m sure that just handling the CD’s would have reminded me I had a task to do, but Hubs had me convinced that the best bet was to load all the pictures onto a DVD and send those out.

But whatever, I am wasting time here online, I need to go and find the DVD’s and get burning!

XO

Although my SIL knew that the time was coming really fast, she was still caught a little by surprise when her Eldest son and his long time girl announced that he had proposed (he took her out very early in the morning, they went for a walk along the beach and as the sun rose out of the water, he got down on one knee and proposed – can I get an “AWWWW”)

While my SIL is happy for her son, and is confidant that he has made a good match, she is pretty worried about the upcoming months. You see, her eldest daughter announced HER engagement during Christmas Week. The kids will be married with only a months separating the dates, and for each wedding the sibling are involved with the others. My SIL has four children.

That means tuxedos and dresses for two wedding to pay for (the tux’s will be rentals) plus all the incidental charges associated with putting on a wedding, one of the weddings is actually 8 hours from their home, in the US so she will be arranging to get the kids passports in time, trying to find flights and everything.

Her only spot of hopefulness in teh whole thing is that she will be too busy getting everything ready to be sad about the fact her children have grown up and are vacating the nest!

Every morning when I get up I check the current weather temps. I have a weather thingy on my desktop so I can always see at a glance what the temperatures are like, but I need to go in and see what the feels like temp is. For example, this morning it was -32 with feels like temperature of -46. It was a definite drive the boys to school morning!

While I was on the site I use for temperatures I clicked over to see what big news items had happened over night in the city nearest to us. (it’s only ten minutes away). Just like last year and the year before and the year before ( I could continue, but I’m sure you can see where I am going with this) there were people Bitching about the city’s lack of snow removal plans. I know that when we lived in the city we had a hell of a time during winter becuase residential roads are just not priority for the grader crews – with the exception of their own streets – that always pissed me off.

Anyway, the bonus. When we decided to move here, to this “small town” outside the city, we chose becuase the homes were newer and cheaper and property taxes were about half that in the city, plus, we like the small town atmosphere. Five years alter, we are big enough to be classed as a city, yet the small town atmosphere and low taxes remain.

And the bonus? In our town, it’s not just hte main drags that get plowed, but all the residential streets AND the back alleys. We got 20cm of snow just during the afternoon yesterday, by five PM the main drags were plowed and by this morning when I awoke, the residential streets were done. Right now the bob cat is in our street clearing out the sidewalks for us.

last year when we had a huge blizzard and had a five foot deep, twenty foot long drift in our driveway, the Bob cat driver went around clearing Driveways as well as the sidewalks – for the whole town.

Nice, huh?

I had clicked over to Facebook, its 2Pm and my pull tabs are in (lol, yeah, its an addiction) I was distracted by a video that had been posted on my home page by someone in my friend list – apparently if you pour coke over raw pork and wait, worms will appear. I watched several of the videos and think that it’s all BS, but whatever, I’m not going to waste three bucks of pop and five bucks of meat to test it myself.

When you watch a video on Youtube, in the sidebar you can see links to other “related” videos. Most of the videos were also about the Coke/Pork myth, but one was called beware the worms or something – this dude had freaking WORMS coming out of his skin!

ZMG my skin is crawling just thinking about it, so I wont. lets talk about something else. ANYTHING else!

Like….

I need to go into the basement and locate a pair of Ski Pants that will fit me so that i can go into the backyard, trudge through four feet of snow and find the shovel. We have other shovels int eh garage, but the only shovel with a metal blade is in the back yard, precisely where it can do the LEAST amount of good.

I also need to *ugG* scoop some of the poo the dear pups leave behind them when they romp around outside. I seriously need to potty train those two!

The back yard should be navigateable, other than the snow, i had picked up all the out door toys in the fall and stacked them in the kids wagons, but with my luck, I will trip on a randomly placed snowflake or a sunbeam that crosses the yard at the wrong minute, fall into the snow and be lost out there forever.

ARRRG! This isn’t working! I can still see the worms crawling out of his face! OMG

I’m suddenly feeling the need for a shower.

My husbands Birthday is this up coming Tuesday, January 13th. He is turning thirty and I have had a wonderful time teasing him about the onset of his old age. I’m planning a cake in the same vein of my taunting, though I still need to pick up some cake rounds.

As for gifts, my husband usually gets shafted on his birthday. It falls right after Christmas and we usually ignore bills during December and concentrate on the fun stuff. The past few years we have paid bills and done up Christmas, and we did that this year. As such, hubs has picked out the gift he wants – a forty dollar keyboard thingy for his PS3 controller and expects that thats all he will get.

Now, he knows I have more blogs than just Bluepaintred. he even knows the names of my blogs AND links to all of my blogs are on my google tool bar, so there is no excuse for him to not read my blogs. However, the only blog he does read, is Bluepaintred, so HAHA to him, becuase I’m going to tell you right now, that the keyboard thingy for his controller is NOT going to be his only gift.

See, Hubs makes a big production out of my birthday ( in July) every year. i either get cash or he and the boys pick me out some nice gifts. Notice the plural on gifts. it makes me sad that we can never afford to do the same for hubs, except this year, this year I have squirreled away money fo rhim, and on his birthday he will get more than what he is expecting.

While he could use some practical things, like new dress pants or a suit jacket from this century, or even one of those nice Luminox watches, I’ve decided to go the fun route and get him Socom 3? 4? I’m actually not sure what version, all I know is he REALLY wants the Socom game for the PS3, the one that comes with the blue tooth headset, and so that’s what he is getting. That or rock band!

My only issue with getting him rock band is that It is available for so many different systems, and there are already so many different versions of it out there! I wouldn’t have a clue which one to get for him!