Catching Up...Again

I don't seem to be very good at writing on a consistent basis. To tell you the truth, I had actually forgotten I had this blog and had to go through the password recovery process to get back in. Oh, well...it's not like anybody is reading this thing but me anyway. HA!!!


I've been married now for a little over three years. This last year has been the roughest. The honeymoon is definitely over and we are now getting down to figuring out how to really live our lives together. All I can do is to continue praying because I have no idea how this is going to turn out. He has expectations that I'm not meeting and I have expectations that he's not meeting. Somewhere there has to be a happy medium where we can both agree to let the rest go.


Kitty and Jorge are back in California. We just could not take the drama. Needless to say, after living on the streets for as long as she had, Kitty had picked up a few bad habits. Within a week of arriving back in California, Jorge left her. She called Walter a few times but the calls soon stopped when she realized he wouldn't send her any money. The whole situation is just really too sad for words. I know it hurt Walter a great deal to have to let Kitty go again especially since they will most probably never see each other again.

Robbie has moved back to Panama City and is working at Krystal's. The jury is still out on this one...and that's all I have to say about that.

Walter, Jr. is somewhere living somehow and has no contact with his father. That is another child whom Walter, Sr. considers himself a failure in having raised. It doesn't matter how much I try to tell him there was no way to make someone do what they are supposed to do. After being married to an alcoholic, I know. The only person you can control...is yourself.

Chris is doing great. He might actually turn out to do something with his life. He's in band at school and he can really play the trumpet. He much prefers to play his Xbox Live and talk to people from all over the world and learning how to mimic their accents however.

The property in Perry, Florida is looking a lot better. I finally got Walter, Sr. to realize we couldn't do all the repairs ourselves and so we've contracted out several major projects. Needless to say, once the exterior was repainted, several people stopped by and showed an interest in looking around the place. Chalk another one up to the woman is usually right. HA!!!

Been A Long Time

It has definitely been a long time since I've been able to have a bit of time to sit down and write anything. A lot has happened too so I'll do a quick summary.

Walter, Jr. - didn't get his GED, didn't turn his life around and is now back living with his mother, Betty, somewhere in Alabama.

Robbie - did graduate from high school but didn't do so well the two semesters he attended community college. He was going to join the military but then decided not to at the last minute. He is now working for Arby's in Chipley, FL and has his own apartment, car and until recently, girlfriend.

Chris - is doing very well. He chooses not to have any contact with his mother or her family and I think that is a good thing. He is in a new charter school and is finally getting the kind of help he needs to get caught up academically. He's officially a teenager and his hormones have gone into overdrive not to mention his growth spurt! I have to look up to him now and that's not fair.

Walter - moved from the farm relunctantly but is working hard to make the transition from country life to city life. I keep reminding him it's only temporary until we can get our current real estate sold so we can buy land in a more rural area close enough to where I work.

Betty - divorced the sex offender but still lives with him when he isn't in jail. She is currently living somewhere in lower Alabama and she is about the lose the title as the only member of her family who hasn't been to jail when she is finally sentenced for two counts of credit card fraud.

Chester - has an open case against him for driving without a license - habitual and is currently in jail in Alabama for supposedly not registering as a sex offender there. I'm not sure about that information as it was received from Betty and she is a notoriously unreliable source.

We also have two more characters to add to the cast.

Kitty - Walter's daughter from his first marriage. She had been homeless and living in California with her fiance, Jorge, when they were found by a Christian outreach group who contacted Walter's brother, Isaac, who brought Kitty and Jorge to Florida as a surprise right after Christmas. Boy was that ever a surprise!

Jorge - Kitty's fiance and a pretty decent guy. He and Kitty are currently living on the farm and take care of keeping the yard mowed, etc. And before you ask, he is not an illegal immigrant.

Well, that's about it for now. Hopefully, I will keep getting little snippets of time to continue to write because there is always something funky going on in my life!

Turn Around...We Hope

It's now several months later and Walter, Jr. is doing better - both with his attitude and his more realistic expectations. I wish I could say the same for his mother, Betty, but that is another story for another time. Walter, Sr. and I still don't fully trust him but we are all working on those issues and Walter, Jr. understands that it will take time and he has to be patient.

Walter, Jr.'s final court hearing was last week. He completed both essays, the letter of apology and his community service hours. Of course, he waited until the last absolute minute, but that was to be expected...he's a teenager after all. The night before his hearing, his father took him to buy a new suit. This was Walter, Jr.'s idea. He recalled how the other offenders and their parents had looked at his previous hearing. Most were extremely casually dressed to put it politely. He wanted to stand out and show he was a different person from the one that had appeared before the judge previously. And Walter, Jr. looked good...black jacket, pants and tie with a deep red shirt. He was so handsome and proud of everything he had accomplished. Our time before the judge was short and sweet - all the charges were dismissed and they wouldn't appear on his record.

As we were driving back home, there was an atmosphere of relief and celebration in the car. When we got back home, Walter, Jr. went in his room and changed out of his suit and hung it back up. He had wanted to wear it to school, but complied with our wishes that he not. Not that he didn't try to talk us into letting him wear it, but he didn't get the usual attitude when we wouldn't relent.

My biggest fear was that after the court case had been settled, things would return to the way they had been before with Walter, Jr. going to his girlfriends every night and us having no real idea if he was really there or not. I'm happy to say that - so far - it hasn't been that way. There has been an equality about where they spend their time that has been very refreshing. I also get the feeling that Walter, Jr. enjoys spending time at home now and doesn't see going to his girlfriend's as the escape it was before.

All is not roses and sweetpeas and I know Walter, Jr. still has quite a bit of maturing left to do. I also know he is going to make a few more mistakes. And then again, he could just be a lot more cunning and manipulative than we give him credit for and all of this could be a ruse...a game he is playing until he turns 18-years-old and his time is up. That is where our hope comes in...the hope that he is beginning to see what he came from and what he could be moving towards.

Teenage Runaway...NOT!

Now fast forward a month from the timeframe of the last episode and we are a week before Walter, Jr.'s court date on the shoplifting charge where he will find out if he goes to Juvenile Detention or gets his hand slapped with a little probation. He hasn't quit smoking and his girlfriend is providing him with the cigarettes because, of course, she's gainfully employed while her loser boyfriend, a.k.a. Walter, Jr., can't seem to get a job. I've already told him he was going to quit because I was tired of him hawking up phlegm during the night and spitting it on the walls of his bedroom.

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you - you just read that the boy spit on his bedroom walls. In fact, he spit so much that it ran down the walls and dried phlegm accumulated on the baseboards to such an extent that the baseboards were brown. The walls were streaked with brown. The two walls next to the head and to the side of his bed were the absolute worst. It was extremely disgusting. What I really couldn't understand was that this boy would sleep next to and probably touch something so utterly disgusting but he wouldn't use a towel more than once because as he said, "I don't want to dry my face with something that's touched my balls." This is also the boy who wouldn't eat the bit of french fry he had touched with his fingers. He ate down to the part that he was holding and put the little bits of leftover fries in a pile on his plate.

Back to the story...that Walter, Jr. disagreed with my assessment of the situation would be putting it mildly. He was adament that he wasn't quitting his nicotine habit until he was good and ready to do it. I was adament that he was and told him that his girlfriend wasn't coming over until he was more compliant with my wishes. In my mind, no girlfriend equaled no cigarette supply equaled COLD TURKEY. Oh, and he could hand over his cellphone as punishment for his attitude and language.

With my proclamation made, Walter, Jr. had a proclamation of his own and that was that he was leaving - packing his stuff and moving out. And by 10:00 PM, he was out but not quite where he had thought he was going to be. He was relocated from his girlfriend's house by police escort to the local teen runaway shelter where they took his phone and his cigarettes. Sometimes kharma is a cruel mistress but you've got to love the irony of it.

On Friday, I popped over to Alltel and had his phone service switched to an older phone I kept as a backup and boy was I in for a surprise. I was absolutely amazed at the number of text messages he was receiving from different girls and each one thought she was his one and only girlfriend. I later found out that he had been able to convince at least one girl from Mississippi to send him money! People hear me now - the economy isn't our nation's number one national crisis - stupidity is!

That evening, Walter, Sr. and I paid Walter, Jr. a little visit to see if there had been any improvement in his attitude. He was crying and begging us to let him come home. It seems he had encountered some kids who had really had it rough and weren't just pretending to be tough. I'll admit it - he touched my heart strings and I talked his father into letting him come home that night. Sometimes, I can be so gullible!

The next day, Walter, Jr. was right back to his same old tricks - attitude and saying he wanted to go back to live with his mother. As far as I was concerned, I was fine with him leaving to go live with his mother. Don't let the door hit you on the butt on the way out was my attitude but Walter, Sr. didn't see it that way. He wasn't ready to give up on his child yet and I could sort of understand that but then he wasn't physically there dealing with it every day and I was tired of having to deal with everything on my own while he went back to Perry, FL to his childless home full of peace and quiet. I couldn't understand what was taking so long about getting the renovations at his place done so we could put his house on the market so that was getting on my nerves too. He had been at it for eight months. An entire house can be built from scratch in that amount of time. However, we'll cover that storyline in another episode.

The Five Finger Discount

I'm going to have to stray a bit from the storyline that I started back in December 2008. There have been several events that I need to bring to your attention and I'll start with this next one.

Having spent his bi-weekly allowance on cigarettes, Walter, Jr. didn't have the necessary funds to purchase a set of headphones from the local Kmart. For Walter, Jr. this lack of funds wasn't a problem because he knew that with his five finger discount a new set of headphones would be super cheap...free even. So Walter, Jr. selects the pair of headphones he wants, stuffs them down his pants and proceeds to the bathroom because every good five finger discount requires a trip to the bathroom - the discount is notorious for it's laxative effect. As he is standing in the stall marveling over the attributes of his recent acquisition, he hears somebody else come into the bathroom. He realizes that he doesn't have his Five Finger Discount Card with him and, therefore, what he has done is actually wrong. Before he can zip his pants, however, it is too late and Walter, Jr. has been caught by store security and the police are on their way.

This having occurred on a Friday night and the fact that I don't really have a social life, I was over at a friend's house helping her help her daughter with a school project when the call from the police came. I just sighed after getting off the phone because I knew a call like this had been a forgone conclusion from the moment Wayne, Jr. came to live with us. I was actually disappointed that it wasn't something more serious. I mean...who wants to be known for lifting a set of headphones from Kmart?! How badass is that? On a gangstawannabe scale of 1 to 10, this had to rate somewhere in the negative category.

Where it all began...on the Internet

Dating as a fat woman was incredibly hard. Now throw in the fact that I'm 6'0" and you can see my dilemma was only compounded. There are only a certain percentage of the population of men that like some fat on a woman. Of these, there was only a miniscule number who met my standards. It's not like I had incredibly high standards either. The following is the actual list of standards that I wrote down in my prayer journal.

1. Christian.


2. Steady income.


3. Good dental hygiene.


4. Ok with my child but didn't want to have any children. Could also have children of his own.


5. As tall or taller than myself.


6. Intelligent.


7. Funny.

I was even willing to fudge a bit on #5. My first husband was only 5'8" so it wasn't a deal breaker but all the others had to be there.

I started looking for a man on the internet way back in 1994. Well, to be technical I started looking on what were called BBSs. Before the internet became popular outside geekdom, there were computer bulletin boards that you had to dial into. Sort of like the dial up ISPs of today. I eventually graduated to the internet and soon had my profile up on every BBW personals website there ever was on the internet. After I became a Christian in 1997, I even put it up on some Christian personals sites. I found out Christian men can be very judgemental.

Finally, after 10 years of sifting through dirt bag after dirt bag, Walter sent me an email. That was in June 2004. We met for the first time on August 8, 2004. He was still married but he said he was separated. I had been through the whole lying-married-guy-said-he-was-separated fiasco before so I wasn't taking any chances with this one - if you're reading this Tom, I hope your wife is STILL making you pay - so I decided to do a background check. My previous internet dating experiences indicated that if men lied about their marital status, it was a good probability they had lied about other things. For instance, if they said they owned their home but there was no record of this, then chances were good, he had lied about his name or where he was located. The number one reason most men lie is because they're married. Nothing makes me more angry than to find out a man who is professing his erstwhile devotion to me is married.

So I did two background checks on Walter before I agreed to meet him. The preliminary check consisted of what I could find out about him on the internet. Let me just say, "I LOVE public records!" You would be absolutely amazed at what is out there on the internet...property records, tickets, military discharge records, marriage licenses, divorces...I could go on but I think you get the picture. I could usually eliminate 99% of men with this check before I went on to the criminal background check that I had to pay for. Walter passed the preliminary check and then he passed the secondary check. My love life was looking up at this point!

After we dated for two years, I helped Walter file for his divorce. Betty and Walter had been separated for a little over two years so there really wasn't that much for them to decide on except the house and the children. Betty couldn't afford the mortgage so that pretty much took care of that. The oldest child wanted to live with her and the youngest wanted to live with Walter so custody wasn't an issue either. The divorce became final in December 2006. All in all, it was a pretty easy divorce. I say that tongue-in-cheek because there is no such thing as an easy divorce. Divorce hurts. Period.

It took almost another two years before Walter was ready to get married again. In May 2008, he got down on his knees in front of me and proposed. Of course, he had a caveat to the proposal. He said he knew he wanted to marry me but he didn't know when he would be ready to get married again. In other words, I needed to be prepared for a long engagement! I figured I had waited for him for as long as I had so what was a bit more time? The next day when I came to work and showed a co-worker my engagement ring and told her what Walter had said about a long engagement. I made a comment to her that I would probably be married by the end of June or July at the latest and we both laughed.

In early June, he asked me what the requirements were for a marriage license in Florida. I told him there was a 3-day waiting period between when the marriage license was issued until we could get married unless we attended premarital counseling. Out of curiosity, I checked what the requirements were for Georgia and Alabama since we are close to the border with either state. When I told him there were no waiting periods for either state and that the marriage license was actually cheapest in Alabama, I think that clinched it for him. Walter is nothing else if not a penny pincher. He'll drive five miles further down the road if the gas is a penny cheaper. One of his favorite sayings is, "If you had a $1,000,000 and took away one penny, you wouldn't be a millionaire anymore." Everytime he says that, I always think to myself, "Only if you keep your $1,000,000 stuffed in the mattress. It would earn interest if you put it in the bank."

So we eloped...sort of. I had to go to Alabama for two-week training class for my job. While I was there, I happened to mention to Walter on Tuesday that I got out of class at 12:00 pm on Friday. He asked me if I would like to get married and I said, "Of course!" He drove up on Thursday and after I got out of class on Friday, we drove to the courthouse, parked in 30-minute parking, got married and then went back to the hotel. He was so nervous and stressed out about being married again that he had to lay down and take a nap! All I wanted to do was...well, you KNOW what I wanted to do...and the man I wanted to do it with was laying on the bed snoring!

So while my new husband snored, I sent text messages to everybody in my phone. My best friend, Lynn - not her real name - was horribly upset with me. When I told Walter about how upset she was when he got up from his nap, he suggested we drive to her house in Mississippi to see her and make it up to her...on our honeymoon weekend. I knew she would get over it and all I wanted to do was stay in the hotel for the weekend with the exception of short foraging trips in between love making sessions but Walter was insistent. So I spent my honeymoon weekend driving from Huntsville, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi and vice versa. I enjoyed spending time with Lynn but I would have much rather spent the time with my new husband - ALONE.

Why is it that a man spends every waking moment divising schemes to get into your pants but when you're willing to let him have as much as he wants, he doesn't want it anymore?!?!?! Men...I will NEVER understand them!

Introduction to the Cast

As the Tractor Wheel Turns is the title I've given to my relationship with my - now - husband, and his family...especially his ex-wife and children. You see my husband - I love him dearly - is a country boy. He grew up the oldest of 8 children - all boys - in Defuniak Springs, FL. Oh, and lest I be scolded for not portraying his life accurately, he grew up dirt poor. He likes to say that all they had to eat were beans and rice and when they got tired of that his Momma made rice and beans. I am - mostly - a city girl. I grew up as a military brat and moved every couple of years. After my dad retired from the Navy when I was about 10-years-old, we settled down in NC. I spent about 13 years growing up in and around rural Burlington, NC and even spent the first few years of my stint in NC on 21 acres out in the middle of nowhere. A 45-minute ride in the back of the truck into town on Saturday was considered a treat. This was before the days when people considered children riding in the back of truck a crime. My husband doesn't consider this time as having been sufficient enough to qualify me to speak on "all things country."

Walter - not his real name - and I met through the internet in 2004. It seems funny to write that now after reading the above paragraph but it's true - Walter is somewhat computer literate. That's much further along than most of his family except for his brother, Isaac, who is much more computer savy and actually does a bit of stock trading, etc. on the computer. After four years of long distance dating - a 3-hour drive - we finally got married this year. After six months of marriage, he is still doing the drive but that is an explanation you will have to wait to hear about later.

During the four years Walter and I dated, I regaled my girlfriends with tale after tale until one of them started coming to my office for the next installment of As The Tractor Wheel Turns, as she took to calling my relationship. She said our infrequent lunches just weren't long enough for me to tell about everything properly. So I have to give credit to her for coming up with the title. She has insisted I should write a book but I'm too lazy to write a whole book. I do like to write short snippets to amuse myself - and hopefully others - so I decided to start a blog. I mean blogging is the hip thing to do nowadays and I want desperately to be hip and on trend for once in my life.

So let me describe the main characters. I'm going to change the names here not to protect the innocent but to prevent large scale embarrassment at some of the things I'm about to write.

Robbin:
I'm using my real first name because I don't embarrass easily. I lost any shred of dignity I had remaining after giving birth when I was shown by a male nurse how to breastfeed. I'm a fat woman - fat is not a dirty word in my personal dictionary - and have correspondingly large breasts. Pregnancy made my breasts GIANORMOUS. So here is this male nurse at the hospital trying to show me how to breastfeed and having to literally pick up my boob with two hands to position it so my child - who was about the same size as said breast - could latch on. I would also like to mention that this male nurse also looked a great deal like Mel Gibson - the hot Mel Gibson before Mel became a crazy drunk. Besides that, I'm the writer and I will definitly be putting a skew on my version of events that most probably will not be as embarassing for me.

Walter:
I waited 10 years for Walter to come into my life. He doesn't have that much formal education - he did graduate from high school and even did a year of community college - but he is very intelligent. He can't solve a calculus problem but he can kick my butt playing chess. He is attentive and expresses his love for me in more than words - he shows me he loves me - but all is not a bed of roses so you can stop gagging over the trash can. Walter does irritate me as I'm sure I irritate him. He is very rarely on time - for anything. He also has the annoying habit of wanting to take a nap just when I think he should press on with whatever honey-do-job I have him working on. What's really annoying about it is that if I'm not around, he will actually go lay down and take a nap. Walter has also inherited a talking gene from his parents. For the most part, this is fine. He talks and I sort of listen while I continue to do other things. The talking gene has a mutation however that makes it impossible for him to remember everything he has said and therefore Walter has a tendency to repeat himself. I have heard some of the same stories several times now yet he never remembers having told them to me at all.

Betty:
Walter's ex-wife and the mother of his two children. Betty also grew up in Defuniak Springs, FL but came from a much more dysfunctional family. She was the only one of her family not to have been in trouble with the law until recently. She's now on probation for filing a false police report against her former landlord for theft. Betty did this in order to get revenge for the landlord pressing charges against Betty's husband for beating the landlord during a drinking binge. However, Betty still holds title to being the only one of her family not to have served actual time in jail - county or state. She proudly calls herself a "Redneck" and truly means it. She spent two years at a vocational school getting a certificate of completion for learning Microsoft Office and another certificate for Medical Transcription. She calls these certificates her degrees - and she's serious when she says this.

Chester:
Betty's current husband. Chester is a registered sex offender and an alcoholic. In answer to your question - because I asked the same one - yes, Betty knew he was a registered sex offender BEFORE she married him. She also knew Chester had an extensive history with law enforcement and that he had served time at the state level for various crimes. Chester is currently incarcerated for violation of his probation and battery on the landlord. He claims to be a mechanic but never seemed to have a decent running vehicle - not a good reference source when applying for a job as an actual mechanic. Betty says she is going to divorce Chester but is waiting for his mother to die to see if he will inherit anything worth taking in a divorce. Besides, where would Betty be able to park the travel trailer she lives in for free if it weren't for Chester's mother?

Walter Jr.:
Walter Jr. is Walter's oldest son. Having been born in the country, Walter Jr. has a nickname...Cooter. Cooter acquired the nickname from his behavior as a baby. He preferred to scoot on his butt instead of crawling. The word scoot morphed into coot when Cooter's younger brother couldn't pronounce the "s" in scoot. When Walter and Betty divorced, Cooter chose to live with his mother. When he was 15-years-old, he got his 17-year-old girlfriend pregnant. In Cooter's defense, however, I will have to say this girl MEANT to get pregnant. To her, pregnancy meant marriage and she was very focused on getting married to Cooter because that was how the women in her family got married. Thankfully, Betty wouldn't sign off on the marriage or Cooter would be living his own reality version of Deliverance right now. When he turned 16-years-old, Betty encouraged him to drop out of school because it's very important that a teenage father have absolutely no ability to support his offspring. The only time she ever went to the school he was zoned for was to sign the paperwork so he could quit. She had never actually registered him after they had moved for the upteenth time in a year. After two years of living with his mother, Cooter is now living with us. In January, he will begin attending a GED program and hopefully have his GED by the time he is 18-years-old.

Chris:
Chris is Walter's youngest son. Chris also has a nickname...Tank. He acquired his nickname from Cooter because Cooter said Chris's diaper stank. Cooter couldn't say the "s" in stank so it was shortened to tank. Tank is a "Daddy's boy" and is very protective of his father. Walter is also very protective of Tank. I think overly protective but that is my opinion. Chris is still quite young and I have hopes that I will be able to overcome some of the ignorance instilled in him by his mother. I call him Chris while everybody else calls him Tank. Having changed enough diapers raising my own son, I prefer not to be reminded of them when talking to my stepson.

Robbie:
Robbie is my son from my first marriage. He and Cooter are only 3 months apart in age with Robbie being the oldest. Robbie is my mother's revenge on me. Unfortunately, he acts just as badly as I did when I was his age. Fortunately, I already did everything he could ever think of doing and therefore catch him. He is a VERY bad liar. He had to have inherited this trait from his father because I could always tells when his father was lying. On the other hand when I was a teenager, I was a VERY good liar. I once got my mother to believe my eyes were red after coming home from a date because I had been crying over an argument I had with my date and not because I was actually stoned from smoking pot.

These are the immediate cast of characters. There are a myriad supporting cast but there are just so darn many of them so I will introduce them as I fill you in chaper by chapter on the soap opera that is my life. Cue voiceover - So stay tuned for the next episode of As The Tractor Wheel Turns...