As the summer approaches we have started dusting off the grills and smoker in preparation of a flame enhanced good time. This year it is our goal to have more people over. While we have done a good job of having friends over in the past, i have been pregnant nearly all the time and it has really been hard for me to enjoy myself. So now we have moved on to this new phase in life and it is one where we get to know our friends again.

Living in North Carolina we have been following the success of the Carolina Hurricanes in the NHL playoffs and this has meant many many grilling opportunities. I will tell you if there is a ball or puck my husband will watch it and cheer on a team with a vengance! So hockey season is winding down, next up is baseball and then football. Ahh the never ending days of sports to come.

For all the men that come over i do quite a bit of cooking as most of them either have wives that don’t cook or are single and leftovers are always welcome. One of the hands down favorites is our patented BBQ Chicken. We mainly grill thighs because that is what we both prefer, but this sauce works on any piece of chicken.

Flowers BBQ Sauce

1 stick Butter
1 bottle Jack Daniels BBQ sauce ( we are partial to Honey and Masterpiece)
1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup mustard
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp brown sugar

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the rest of the ingredients over medium heat and allow to come to a boil. Remove from heat. Cook chicken on the grill, if doing breasts it is about 15-20 minutes per side. Brush the chicken with the sauce once cooked through and cook an additional 5 minutes per side. Brush with sauce once you turn them. I don’t recommend putting the sauce on for the whole time that the chicken is on the grill as the sauce will burn and that is just not good chicken. Also we have found that this recipe really does only taste this great with the Jack Daniels BBQ sauce none of the other brands have that distinct flavor.

That is SO not a plug for the sauce. Enjoy!

Farm Town, anyone?

Those of you that follow me on Twitter (can i say wow there are a lot of you and a lot that i don’t recognize!) know that i have a new obsession. I am in LOVE with Facebook’s application Farm Town. Wow is this game addicting. I love the mindlessness of it all and how scary it is that i could play this thing all the time. I have gotten my sister addicted to it as well. What’s not to love about a game where you send animals and trees to your neighbors, plow and harvest crops and harvest other peoples crops for coins. Sounds fascinating doesn’t it?

I enjoy it so much that i have quadrupled the size of my farm. Now it takes forever for my farm to load up. I love how the animals all do different things and how it looks like the dogs follow your avatar around. The only thing that i would change is the speed. The server gets so bogged down with the number of people playing and your avatar starts moving at the slowest possible speed. It is so frustrating. I would say that it is my connection, but i have one of the fastest connections possible and no other game runs like this. Plus there are many people that talk about the speed of the game in the forum offered. I think to it would be fun if there were more things to do in terms of your crops or maybe the chickens could lay eggs or the cows could give milk to make the game more interactive. However, for the time being the game is fun and super addictive!

Yes i know it sounds a bit lame, but trust me it is fun.

Join Farm Town today and add me as your neighbor!

I am quite possibly one of the pickiest people EVER when it comes to lotions and scents. I don’t like most perfumes because they just don’t smell right. I like my scents to match and i am the type of person who needs a couple of scents to match the many moods i go through. Now i personally love Clinque’s Happy and am fortunate that my sister works for them so i get a bang up deal on this product including lotion and body wash.

Now i am not always in a “Happy” mood and sometimes find myself needing some options. I love the smell of vanilla and pumpkin spice and cinnamon…ahh the smells of the holidays and baking, what a SURPRISE! Not really. Bath and Body Works does offer some great fragrance combinations, but if you are like me you are attracted to the scents that are special editions and will be gone forever!!! I loved Flowering Blossoms, BAM they discontinued it. I loved Spiced Pumpkin, special edition (although i bought quite a bit of it and still have some left). Since they are a little bit pricey for a girl that has four boys and an enoromous grocery bill, i had to find some other options. Well i fell in love with the Vanilla Oatmeal by Johnson & Johnson, yes the baby wash and lotion. Hey i have a baby and it is only natural for me to look at this stuff. But i was missing something citrusy, i love citrusy smells like grapefruit and oranges.

Then when shopping in the Walmart i found it, and wow it was a great smell and so different from what i have (including the hundreds of bottles lodged under my sink that are destined never to be used or thrown away). I bought it and i took it home and WOW what great coverage. I didn’t need to use half as much as the other lotions i had and it was only $5.00! You can’t beat that. My skin is so soft and i can smell the stuff hours after i put it on. It was a dream come true. Then i read the bottle one day and almost died.

It was conditioner, folks. Dove’s new energizing conditioner in Grapefruit. But you know what, i am still using it as lotion because my skin has never felt better or manageable!

Ahh the aftermath

I bet you are all wondering what pampering i received on Mother’s Day? How my day was filled with flowers and treats and that i spent it sans diaper duty and floor cleaning. Alas that fairy tale will not be told here today. I spent the day amid snot and vomit as every single child in the house had either a nasty virus or the stomach flu. Oh the joy !

It was ok really because all i really need when it comes to Mother’s Day is too spend it with my boys and i got quite a bit of that.

Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day to all of my mommy friends and family. I hope that all of you have a wonderful day with your loved ones.

Karma

Karma (Sanskrit: कर्म , “act, action, performance; Pali: kamma) is the concept of “action” or “deed” in Indian religions understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect (i.e., the cycle called saṃsāra) originating in ancient India and treated in Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Buddhist philosophies.

The philosophical explanation of karma can differ slightly between traditions, but the general concept is basically the same. Through the law of karma, the effects of all deeds actively create past, present, and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one’s own life, and the pain and joy it brings to him/her and others. The results or ‘fruits’ of actions are called . In religions that incorporate reincarnation, karma extends through one’s present life and all past and future lives as well.

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I am a big believer in karma. I am a believer in doing good for others brings joy into your life. I think that there is nothing wrong in believing that you play a hand in your destiny through your actions towards other people. I don’t define my life by karma, but due to recent events maybe i should. I know that i have spent a lot of time looking inside my own head and i have not liked a lot of what i am finding there. I realize as a parent now, i influence the way that they look at things and their reactions in situations.

When they play I can hear them using the same words i use in disciplining them when they aren’t behaving the way they should. I am by no means a perfect parent and my faults by far out weigh the good. I am short on sleep and often times on patience. I could blame it on the fact i get very little sleep or that i want 5 seconds, just 5 seconds to myself to do something. Truth be told, i chose to have kids and i am very blessed with 4 beautiful boys and i am grateful for every single day with them. I need to be more patient and understanding and realize that it is my job to teach them and guide them. I don’t want them to be quick with their tempers and i can already see that happening. So i need to calm myself and remember that for every action there is a reaction and is that the reaction that i want them to have.

Well i am sure that after yesterday’s post full of fun and laughter that you are simply excited to come back and read another post. Not to worry, i am not at the brink of divorce just yet. Sometimes i have to let it all out and when the only person that feel like you can discuss this with is the source of it, that just doesn’t always work. It is important that if we do work things out that the people we hang out with and are around alot don’t judge him and treat him differently. It is important to me, right now, that people don’t look down on him. I am not angry, maybe i haven’t reached that stage yet. I am just hurt and sad. It is all encompassing right now and sometimes sends me into a weird place, i am fortunate that i am not suffering Postpartum Depression on top of this. I really struggle daily with this and really feel like there aren’t a lot of places i can turn to talk about this. So i needed to let some of this off on the internet, trust me i would never want to burden anyone with this. Right now my main concern would be the boys and their life. I will deal with me later or not at all. I mean after all that is how i was raised, put it in a box and store it. Emotions are for wimps!

It is times like this that i miss riding and my horses with a physical ache that nothing can take the place of. Anything major that happened in my life before, i always took to the barn and my horses. The people there and just the amount of work needing to be done always helped me. The barn has since moved and changed, the kids are long gone and grown leaving a new set of rich and less hard-working ones and my horses have died and i just have been out for 5 years and don’t have a feel for any of the ones there. It helps center me though and bring peace to my mind.

7th Anniversary is what?

Yup that’s it, today is M and I’s 7th anniversary and if you asked me before this year i would of said that I saw us being together for a long time. However, this year, i can’t see what the future holds. It is true I am unwilling to say a lot about things on the internet, you know real people and all, but let’s just say we are struggling to keep it together. The schedule we have and the kids (love them dearly, but they are a big source of stress) and just M’s complete disregard for my existence have put a black pall over the relationship and its future.

I struggle daily with whether i want to remain married to someone who has such a complete lack of emotion towards me and who is so self centered that we only talk about things he wants to talk about. There is also the trust issue and right now, there is none on my part. How do you continue to be married to someone who would break a fundamental bond for a solid relationship? I don’t know that you can.

I say that it is for the boys that i continue to remain in a relationship that i would of long ago abandoned. It is true, i don’t want my boys growing up in a “broken” home even though i know that is not the correct term. I have spent a lot of time reflecting and working on myself here lately. I have turned into such a negative person and a lot of it is a result of being in a relationship with someone who doesn’t care that i am here. I am not blameless in this, i thought so at first, but i am not. So much about who i used to be has changed, it has had to in terms of having kids and becoming a mother. I have had to step it up, responsibility wise and become an adult, who would of thought that day would come? I am not the person that he married, but neither is he, far from it. While i am not blameless, i can say that i have never broken a vow to M and he can’t say the same, whether i drove him to it or not. I would of preferred that he left us. At least then i wouldn’t of had/have to deal with everything all at once soon after coming home with #4. I feel like he wasn’t very fair and right now i don’t like him much at all. He really isn’t that person i married, the one that i thought would NEVER do this to someone. Just goes to show that I really can’t trust myself in finding someone to be with.

It could be that he is going through a mid-life crisis, but you know what? I don’t care because the hurt he has caused me can’t be reversed and i am not sure it can be overcome. He continues to act like a bachelor and treat me as if i don’t matter and we aren’t in a relationship. These things don’t endear me to him. The boys need their father and they love him. He loves his kids, but he continues to say that he never wanted this many (he was certainly there for the conception) and it is all getting to him. He continues to refuse to listen to me on any level and constantly throws in my face that everything is a double standard and the outcome is to my advantage and flat out refuses to listen to me at all. It isn’t and he is a real prick lately conversationally. You can only have your heart truly broken once and after that it is never the same.

I can’t seem to beat any of this into M’s head and i feel like i am hanging on by a single strand and barely at that. I wait for the slightest indication that i might matter to him anymore and that anything that i want is important, but i am just kidding myself. Of course, right now i am riding the hormone train too and sometimes i see things that aren’t there. I am not mistaken in the way he treats me though, others see it. I AM NOT YOUR DAMN ROOMMATE M, NOR AM I A CONVENIENT LAY. Don’t think i won’t out your “thing” on this very public forum and to your family.

I am not that type of person though. After all the pain he has caused me, i would never want to alienate him from his friends, but i know that if “we” don’t work out then it will come out. I refuse to have people think that we are separated because we don’t get along, that just isn’t the only reason. He will blame me and everyone else will because i am difficult, you just don’t know. Maybe this is why i am destined to be alone. I don’t know, i am full of “I don’t know’s” lately. I am just so sad that we are going through this and I feel like i am the only hurting and that he is glossing over this. He was so defensive of the issue and so angry with me that it made me feel so very small and insignificant.

I hesitate to post this because i do know so many people in real life that read this, but i also know that i am not the only person to go through this. And maybe just maybe someone will have some insight as to where my life took a wrong turn.

Not at all what you expected out of an anniversary post, huh? Life over here is real people, and right now real plain sucks.

When i started blogging i thought it would be a great way to share crafts i do, discuss things in the world and keep the ability to write in complete sentences. My original blog, Pharlap Wonders, was created and is still something that i update, although not as much as i should. At this point, blogging was really taking off in the crafting community as well as the mommy community. The people that read my blog really weren’t into all the family stuff and so this blog was created. I never imagined that the people that read this blog would be real people (ok i KNOW you are real, but you know)that i actually in real life know. I don’t know why it should surprise me, there are just so many people out there that communicate through their blogs with so many. For the most part this is why i don’t share some of the issues that i deal with on a personal level. I think M would be less than thrilled to have one of our friends to ask how our problem with such and such was that we read on your blog. I think i would be banned from typing.

M doesn’t read my blog, at least not to my knowledge. He isn’t big on blogs and not too much on reading what is going on in my life. It may seem callous to say that, but it is the honest truth. We are both very independent people that happen to be married. Most people think that this would change when you get married, but when you live a certain way for so long, it is hard to change. In some cases you don’t want to change. My blog is a way for me to talk about most of the things that M could care less about. In addition to this blog, i twitter. While M says that the people i talk to via tweeting and blogging aren’t real friends, i disagree. When you read things about a person’s life and e-mail/tweet this person they do become real friends. It doesn’t matter that you have never met this person face to face, they are still real. Anyway i disagree with him, but that is how it is most of the time lately.

Blogging for me is a great way to just get out a lot of the jumble that occupies my head. Whether it makes sense or not, doesn’t matter. It is my blog and i can confuse you if i want to.

On the other hand

I did not miss a while slew of things about work. I love my job and while i would rather be at home sleeping in the middle of the night rather than screwing up my body’s natural rhythm or playing with glitter or doing something else really, work is really just that work. It is a job in which a corporation expects you to uphold a certain standard and perhaps perform the job that you were hired to do, which was vaguely outlined in a contract in which you only saw the last page of. Of course now you have to take umpteen thousand training videos to certify that you are capable of saving you co-workers from a terrorist attack (people this company is in the top ten of places a terrorist would attack, something NOT included in the application), or that you will not even under torture give your login out to anyone (by god the powers that be will smite you for this), and things you have to swear that you will never do even though every week someone does it and then we have to go through this damn process again. How many times people, just how MANY times do we have to do this before just a glimmer of intelligence will leak in and say “hey maybe what we are about to do IS NOT A GOOD IDEA?”. Apparently many many many mind numbing times. Anyways i didn’t miss any of these things:

* the sounds of my co-workers sleeping beside me while i am on the phone trying to convince the people i am working with that “No that is not snoring you hear. WAKE UP YOU LAZY FREAK!” (plus if i wanted to hear loud annoying snoring i would be at home with my own personal snoring machine)

* management belittling my intelligence despite the years of experience and that i am RIGHT

* the same problems all the time without fail

* constant fear of layoffs

* not getting to sleep at night and being oh so tired all the time

* damn see through chairs that they got as a bargain used when they moved us all into this cube farm

* nancy grace all the time because CNN is one of the channels that is on all the time (you know to warn us of said terrorist attack)

* having to risk life and limb to come in regardless of the weather because i signed up for this and it is in my contract that i will live in this building if i cannot make it back in

* ketchup packet wars (because that shit doesn’t come out of suede)

* training classes that should of been updated years ago because seriously backing up a system onto a floppy???

* hot cold hot cold, i am going to find the moron who controls the temperature in this building and lock him in a freezer, i am never dressed for the weather inside this building