This is a really good Blog Tag

The rules are as follows:1. Each player answers the questions about themselves: five items per answer! 2. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves a comment letting them know they've been tagged and to ask them to play along and to read your blog.

10 years ago:
I lived in Maryland.
I had a dog I am still missing a lot - Tucker.
I was married.
I was not yet 40, darn that felt good.
My grandfather was still alive - I miss him too.

Today's to-do list: (there really was not one, thankfully, as it was one of those days I had to roll with the punches)
At their request, wake up 3 teenagers at 7:30 am
Clean up sleepover wreckage
Take Leanne and some friends to a 4H Bake Sale
Pick said teenagers up
Take care of myself, emotionally

Snacks I enjoy:

Cheese and Crackers
Popcorn
Poptarts
Really good ice cream
Any kind of pie

If I were a billionaire I would:

Have cozy little bungalows all over the world, for me and of course to be shared with my friends
Fund a home for the elderly that truly takes good care of them...and John and Jane and Mary and Skeet would live there
Travel, travel, travel
Have a huge farm (that might be where the old folks live)
Give a ton of money to certain medical research causes

My Bad Habits:
I am only spontaneous and carefree when it comes to spending money
I tear the crap out of my fingernails when I stress - at least I no longer bite them, they look like crap still though
I neglect my docs appointments - things like mammograms
When I stress I don't eat well
I tend to be a packrat - throwing things away is not easy for me

Places I have lived:
Columbus, GA
College Park, MD
Hyattsville, MD
Richmond Hill, GA
Ruckersville, VA

Jobs I have had:
Mother, always and forever it feels like :) (the pay is actually the best of all...but I won't count it in my 5)
Kennel manager
Various retail and administrative clerk jobs of no worthy mention
Team and government institutional sporting good sales
Office manager/business operator of a carpet cleaning company, currently
The best job ever had no title - there were too many hats to give it one - working for the Fisher family totally rocked - Jim changed my life and so many others, and I think anyone who ever worked for him would agree. That is why 26 years after his untimely death, his picture is still in my house where I can see it every day.

I need to figure out how to tag Christine...darn.

The Why of "The Shovel's in the trunk" as my title

Those words, "the shovel's in the trunk", were uttered to me by my daughter when she was 12 years old. I had just bought this piece of land, my one acre on the lake. The house was under construction. I was back and forth between College Park and Ruckersville watching over and taking care of making this place HOME. One thing I had to have was a mailbox, that had to be put into the ground on the opposite side of the road, at a certain height so the mail person can do their thing. There was much shopping to be done. I think we spent 2 hours at Lowes. One of the things we bought was a shovel. And we bought it because we thought it a good thing to have around the house. (I left 4-5 good shovels at 9500 Narragansett Parkway, darn it, the shed with a tree sticking out of it at the moment, but that is another blog topic.) We shopped and got every thing we could possibly imagine that we needed in this new home.

Later that afternoon we decided to do the last necessary task, put the US Postal Service specified type of post and box into the ground (so the bills could be delivered, mostly). It was stinking hot and humid. We were tired and cranky. Assembling the mail box was a pain in the butt enough. And then attaching it to the post. Then it comes time to put the post into the ground and my ex and I are suddenly clueless. How are we going to get that post into the concrete they call soil here? We were sniping at each other. It was as ugly as we have ever been with each other.
Leanne had been standing there watching us struggle, only because there was no place else for her to be. She was unusually patient and quiet. She stood back and watched us stress out, flip out and treat each other badly. (She was likely afraid to speak, I might have ripped her head off at that point for no reason at all.)

Finally she quietly said "the shovel's in the trunk". We were so caught up in our frustration and exhaustion and being nasty to each other for no good reason that we overlooked the most obvious of all. We had spent a bit more time than was likely necessary picking out that stupid shovel, and then totally forgot that we bought it in the first place and it was right there, the one tool we needed, in the trunk of the car, with all the other crap we bought.

To me it resonates not so much because of what she said, but how she just let us be idiots, how patient she was. Maybe she was laughing at us inside (I hope so). He and I ended up sitting there laughing at ourselves and thanking her for being smarter and kinder than us.

"The shovel's in the trunk" is now what Leanne and I say to each other when once of us gets mindless, thoughtless or misses the obvious.

Lesson learned.