mamadrama

Yep! There are some genes that make certain medications difficult for your body to process properly. My pain management doctor had me tested. For my body weight and height (95 pounds and 4'10"), I have a crazy-high tolerance to opioids. There are some medications that I have trouble processing at all-it's like I haven't even taken them.

Thank you! I can only pop in here for a few minutes at a time. I mostly look for the highlights.

When I first heard that they'd named their baby "North", I thought it was a joke. I thought for sure the person who announced it was reading an Onion article.

Stubby update! She's grown. At 5 weeks she's about the size of a 3-week-old kitten. She is also being tested for kitty down syndrome. (Cats can't actually have DS as we know it but they can have chromosomal abnormalities that look a lot like it.) She's as cute as she can be.

Am I weird for not even thinking that's cute? #Iveheardbetter

It's just like Whitney Thore. Her whole no bullying/no body shame crap REALLY means that if you're referencing HER weight then you're being mean but SHE can bully or shame anyone she wants.

Hey, if I can post one about the special needs kitten you can totally share yours! Hang in there, dude.

Is it wrong that, when the inevitable fallout occurs, I'm kind of interested in watching? As someone who got a taste of these women's attitudes, I don't want to be anywhere near it. As a spectator, however... Re-publishing is a pain in the ass. It involves re-doing everything, from the formatting to the cover design (since our names are on the cover). Some of it is even outside of my skillset. Yeah, it's a pain. I am going back in to check our contracts. I don't think she *can* pull out unless there's a glitch with Amazon and exclusivity.

Hey y'all doing? (Courtesy of Dr. Now.) Can I get your all's advice? I need a neutral third party to tell me that I am in the right here. (So even if I am not, I need you to say it, ha ha.) There is ALWAYS drama in the indie author world. I've inadvertently caught myself up in the latest, though, and I am not sure I handled it the right way. So there is this author/promoter. We'll call her Author A. I don't know her, have never had any dealings with her, and am not social media friends with her. Thousands of people know her, though, and she's kind of "up there" in the ranks of indie authors. She's also a polarizing figure-people either seem to love her or hate her. In the past few months she's been involved in some deals that some are saying are unethical at least, and against some Amazon TOS at worst. Another author filed a lawsuit against her, someone else created a Go Fund me to help the prosecution's lawsuit, lines have been drawn, the gossip mill has run awry. Like I said, I am neutral in this-I don't know her, nor do I know any of the key players in this. So how did I get involved? Another author, call her Author B, is a huge defendant of Author A. She's constantly singing her praises and is loyal to a fault to her. I say "to a fault" because, from the way she talks about Author A, it comes across obsessive. I am friends with Author B. I've met her in person, we've hung out, and we've had a few business transactions. I like her. She has absolutely lost her shit over all this drama, though. Rather than post things that are book related, she's spent the last few weeks bemoaning Author A's woes and lashing out at anyone who might not share the love. (She's actually posted more than Author A, and Author B has no dog in the fight. It's kind of weird.) So last week Author B got on FB and posted a big list of names that belong to fellow writers. These were apparently all people who had somehow "wronged" Author A and are a part of that particular drama. At the end of this list, Author B challenged us to choose her or them. That if we continue to be FB friends with them, that we would need to unfriend her. There was a lot of cursing involved. It didn't really affect me because I didn't know any of those people. I still chose them. Look, we are all in our 30s and 40s here. It's too old for that "if you're going to be her friend then I'm not going to be your friend" nonsense, right? The idea of someone giving me an ultimatum, of telling me to CHOOSE between people? It royally pissed me off. In the indie author world, most of us are connected through social media for business purposes. Threatening people's friendships just because someone wants to continue holding on to a networking link is stupid. I like Author B. If I'd seen or heard anyone saying something bad about her then I would have quietly cut them off and gone about my day. I am loyal to my friends, too. But this isn't even her fight and that list of other authors aren't even any of the key players. This is all dumb, right? Now they've set their minions loose on Amazon, encouraging people to give bad reviews to the books of authors that they are angry at. Yes, that happens in our "world" and it's stupid, too. I wrote Author B a polite note. I told her that I liked her as a person, respected her as a writer, and thought a lot of her but that I didn't like being issued ultimatums, that I didn'tknow any of these people and, for professional purposes, wanted to stay out of any fights that didn't involve me. She promptly wrote back and asked me to reissue the anthology that we'd been a part of-this time without her story. Yes, this happens. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I agree! I know she's kind of polarizing but, to me, Priscilla Presley is a badass boss. She went from being teenage Lolita, essentially locked up in Graceland without any hobbies or friends of her own, to running Elvis Presley Enterprises and being one of the richest (and most powerful) women in the country. What she has now she's earned on her own-all she had was the name in which to build upon. There are people who say that she's just capitalizing on Elvis' death, and maybe she is, but without her Graceland would no longer be standing, we wouldn't have access to his awesome catalouge of songs, and there would be no curation of the things he left behind. "Badass" is a value judgement that must be bestowed by someone else; it's not a moniker that one can give themselves. If you have to call yourself a badass bitch boss, and you're the only one calling yourself that, then you're probably not.

No wonder these wackos are so full of themselves: Dude makes senseless IG post, leg humpers fall all over themselves.

Ha ha, mine too. My 6 year old still thinks she's 35. Last night she paused the TV on an image of Freddy Kruegar's face and said, "Isn't that beautiful work? It's almost all makeup work with hardly any prosthetics or CGI!" (We watch a lot of FACE OFF.)

It cracks me up that OldMatt went from his "we earned it" uppah class house and probably-fake eBay memorabilia to married to a waitress and getting kicked out of a cheap apartment (not necessarily in that order). All in, what, like a year? God I love this show!

I attended Catholic school in elementary school. Our uniforms were awful-green plaid skirts and big, red vests that hung down our waists. We looked like Christmas trees. :-) Here's a Stubby picture for the day.

Mine was almost 4 before we were able to leave the house without accidents. Now she's 6 and nobody cares when she was potty trained. You can't tell the difference between her and someone who did it at 2. It all comes out in the wash eventually. :-)

Hell, when Britney was at her worst she was STILL able to go out and shave her head, bash a pap's car with an umbrella, and march across town to give her mother a letter from her lawyer. #takethatCate

I know, right!? I am clearly going about this the wrong way.

I think you're right. His attitude screamed withdrawal flu to me, from his glazed eyes to his trouble with the temperature and saying that he "hurt."

Re: Nova's pitiful little "Mommy will pick me up" from daycare... Our youngest son died unexpectedly in 2010. One week after HIS funeral, my mother-in-law died. (Cancer, and she'd been in Hospice, so even though she was only 50 it wasn't an unexpected death.) My husband is from England and his whole family is over there. They're also super weird, unlikable, and general pains in the asses. Basically his father told him that they only wanted HIM to come for the funeral, that our surviving son and I could just stay at home because we weren't "real" family. Although I was paying for our travel arrangements and we were going to stay in a hotel so they didn't even have to see us if they didn't want to (I just wanted to be there for my husband), they put up such a fuss that we didn't go. So there was my husband, having just buried his youngest 2 weeks earlier, getting ready to get on a plane to leave me and his other child to fly across the ocean. Some of you all know me in "real" life and, if you do, you know what a freakishly close relationship my husband and I have with each other. Even my kids say, "Daddy wouldn't even know how to breathe without Mommy around" but it kind of goes both ways. I am sure we need therapy for it but, oh well, one thing at a time. Now I wasn't there so I don't know exactly what happened but my mother says that she went out to start the car to take him to the airport and that my husband kind of hesitated in the doorway. At that point our 3-year-old went up to him and said, "Daddy, do you promise you'll be back?" She says that my husband broke down into tears and she was like, "You want me to get your suitcase back out of the car for you?" And she did. He missed his mom's funeral because he could not stand to leave us; he could NOT be away from his kid or from me-not at that time. We've been paying for that with his family ever since. (Seriously. After a bunch of name calling and other shenanigans, including a bill for $10,000 that my father-in-law sent my husband for not being "the son he wanted", we had to cut them off completely. Haven't spoken in almost 8 years.) I totally understood why my husband didn't go and I fully supported him. If it had been switched, I would've done the same. In Cate's shoes, Nova would've broken my heart. No way could I have left after that scene in the car. No way. Hell, I sometimes have trouble telling my kids goodbye when they leave for school in the morning. I've lost a child and I have a bit of separation anxiety with my others. I'm a little surprised that Cate, who has unresolved issues or giving up Carly, doesn't have at least a little of the same. I think it just goes to show how emotionally unattached she can be to Nova.

I am still having trouble processing the fact that she was there over Christmas. When my son was 3, I was hospitalized for hyperemesis. I'd been in the hospital for 3 weeks and it was getting close to Christmas. I finally talked them out of releasing me for a week. I was having panic attacks at the thought of not being there for my family. They installed a Picc line and set me up with a home health nurse so that I could go home for a week to spend Christmas and New Years' with the family. Had they not done that, I probably would've just checked myself out anyway. As someone who is frequently hospitalized, I'd trade places with just about anyone if it meant that I didn't have to be away from my husband and kids so much. When an organ ruptures and has to be removed, I don't have much of a choice. Cate and her nonchalant attitude about how Nova will "manage" and her hightailing her ass back to the spa rehab without even discussing it with her husband first can kiss my toe.

I have no words of wisdom to add to anything anyone is going through. I can barely take care of my kids and my kitten these days. I'm very good at listening and commiserating, however. And I can share more Stubby videos. Here's one from yesterday.

When I was on Fentanyl, I took the lollipop form.

Her BMI is more than my actual weight...

Isn't it funny how often people claim to be getting harassed like this, but it always seems to be through private messages? In the indie author world we had some drama a couple of weeks ago with a cover designer having a breakdown. Apparently, "more than 80 people" (her words, not mine) harassed her and sent her nasty messages over a particular issue. 80 people harassed her through PMs yet not a single person wrote on her wall, commented anything negative, etc? I mean, I get nasty messages pretty frequently but I also get a fair amount of nasty comments, too. Statistically, some of that shit needs to be spread around. Anyhoo...

That's one of my biggest complaints about these "voice" shows. A good majority of the women have so-called "powerful" voices which, to me, just sound like shouting. I have a nice voice; I even moved to Nashville and sought a career in country music many years ago and I still sing regionally. There is NO way I could compete with the women who try out for these shows, though. I definitely do NOT have that Jessica Simpson/Kelly Clarkson/Carrie Underwood/Christina Aguilera sound. I would love to see more variety, especially in the women. Norah Jones, Emmylou Harris, Patsy Cline...hell, even Madonna (I know, not known for being a great vocalist but still...). These women didn't have to rely on "power" and runs to get their music across. That was one of the reasons why I liked the "You Were Always on My Mind" cowboy boots girl. She had a much weaker voice but at least it didn't sound like all the others.