Being no slave to fashion, I buy clothing that’s comfortable, reasonably priced, and what (I hope) looks halfway decent rather than spending a lot of time and money hopping from one store to another in search of trendy styles.  Since I’m no longer employed outside the home, I don’t have to worry about buying work clothes (not that I ever went overboard about those, anyway!), so this time of the year, my “wardrobe” consists exclusively of shorts and t-shirts. 

I dislike shopping for clothes.  Moreover, I hate trying on clothes in stores.  I really hate it.  To circumvent this, there have been times that I’ve actually picked an armful of clothes off the racks, bought all of them, then come home and tried them on in the comfort — not to mention privacy (it’s always fun when the toddler from the next dressing room crawls under the divider when I’m right in the middle of trying on a new bra) — of my own home.  Yes, this take-no-prisoners approach does create extra work when I end up having to return three-fourths of my purchases because they don’t fit, but what the hey!

I’ve been wearing the same Hanes t-shirts and shorts for the past two or three summers, so over the weekend, it dawned on me that it was time to go look for some new duds.  I had glanced through the racks at Wal-Mart the other day and didn’t see anything promising, so yesterday, I headed for K-Mart to check out their selection.  With the price of gas being so outrageously high, I forced myself to bite the bullet and try on my selections at the store instead of bringing them home then having to drive back to K-Mart with a bunch of returns. 

I finally settled on a few pairs of shorts and several t-shirts, but one thing was crystal clear when I gazed at myself in the dressing room mirror — I simply must stick with my current 3-Apple-A-Day diet plan.  That dressing room mirror certainly did no favors to my figure.    

Peter and Caroline have been taking riding lessons for a couple of months, and both are enjoying the experience.  I’ve lately been thinking about getting a horse, even though I know I’m not quite ready to embark on a commitment of that magnitude just yet.  Horses are expensive, not to mention time-consuming, and I want to make sure the kids are really interested in riding before I seriously pursue the idea of horse ownership.  In the meantime, though, I can still dream!   

As I was surfing the Internet the other day, I inadvertently ran across some articles on horse slaughter.  I guess I’d never really thought about what happens to older horses, ones who are no longer wanted as family pets or show horses, injured racehorses, or even young, healthy horses that don’t make the cut in racing.  What I learned was truly gruesome, and I can’t believe our government isn’t doing something to stop it ASAP.     

Although the remaining three horse slaughterhouses in the United States (two in Texas, one in Illinois) are now closed, mostly due to public outrage that resulted in legislative action, thousands of horses continue to be sold to “kill buyers” at livestock auctions for outrageously low prices ($100 to $500), and they are then shipped to Mexico and Canada for slaughter under truly appalling and primitive conditions.  The horsemeat is then sold in countries like Belgium, France, and Japan, where diners pay as much as $20 per pound for what they consider a “delicacy.” 

Horse rescue organizations throughout the United States are working on shoestring budgets to outbid the kill buyers at livestock auctions and rescue as many horses as they can from this horrible fate.  Since many of the horses that wind up in slaughterhouses are ex-racehorses, my search on the Internet led me to several organizations that offer retired Thoroughbred and Standardbred racehorses for adoption.  One place, which has two locations in Ohio, is called New Vocations.  Another, located right here in West Virginia, is called Crossed Sabers. 

Now I’m thinking that if we get a horse someday, I would really like to consider a Standardbred ex-racehorse.  In the meantime, I’ve been busying myself looking at the photos and reading the profiles of horses they have available.      

I finished one of the two weekly challenges on Pogo.com last Wednesday afternoon, after the new challenges came out that same morning.  It was a Sweet Tooth challenge, and it wasn’t difficult. 

The other challenge this week was another story.  It was in Chess, a game that I know next to nothing about.   One of my brothers tried to teach me to play Chess many years ago, but I wasn’t too interested in it.  I’ve never really had any other opportunities to learn to play Chess, and it’s something that I’ve never actively wanted to learn.  Pogo has a tutorial, but since I’m under the impression that Chess can’t be learned very easily, I didn’t want to bother with it.

Anyway, the object of the Chess challenge was to win 3,000 tokens.  Unfortunately, it takes a win in Chess to really get a worthwhile number of tokens.  Pogo gives a few tokens to the loser in Chess, but the amount is almost always in the single digits.      

My friend M. won her Chess badge by playing with another person on Pogo who was offering to help anyone who needed it.  Sometimes people on Pogo will help you win your badge if you’ll help them win theirs.  Other people just want to be nice and don’t expect anything in return.  However, I didn’t want to get into in the position of accepting someone else’s help when I couldn’t reciprocate due to my ignorance about Chess.  

So, I played against a robot for awhile, just to see what would happen.  I lost every game (a bunch of them), and managed to creep up to only 100 tokens.  At that rate, it would take me days to win that badge!            

Alexander likes to rib me about my “addiction” to Pogo.com.  When I complained to him the other night that I wasn’t making much progress on my Chess badge, he offered to help me with it, despite the fact that he was working on a job that was due the following morning.  He knows how to play Chess, and he is actually pretty good at it.  I agreed to cook him a batch of fried potatoes and onions while he took a break from his job and worked on my badge.  

He played against robots, won every single game, and finished my badge in about an hour.  Yippee! 

Since my family and I don’t “do” fast food, and we only eat in restaurants a handful of times per week, I seem to do exorbitant amounts of cooking around here.  Cooking is something I just do (it’s either that or go hungry, after all), and I can’t say that I’m passionate about it.  So, the only thing I really wanted for Mother’s Day was a day off from being primarily responsible for my family’s meals.  I didn’t want to eat out (restaurants are packed on Mother’s Day), just stay at home and have a break.

Thunderstorms hit Charleston and the surrounding areas at around noon yesterday.  We have thunderstorms here all the time, especially during this time of the year, and I didn’t see anything extraordinary about the ones we had yesterday.  But, almost immediately after the storm began, our electricity went off.  I figured it would come back on in a few minutes (or maybe in an hour or two, at most), but when it wasn’t on by 2 PM, I called Appalachian Power.  They were undoubtedly being bombarded by calls from customers with no electricity, so they were playing a recorded message thatsaid they expected service to be restored to all customers in the Charleston area by midnight on May 13.  Midnight on May 13??  Um, I can’t live without hot water (not to mention an internet connection) for two whole days! 

Alexander had to return to Louisville in the late afternoon yesterday, and he suggested that the kids and I accompany him there until Tuesday to escape our power outage.  However, I didn’t want to leave our pets here alone (for one thing, the night time temperatures are supposed to go down into the 40s for the next few days), and, because I’m a worrywart,  I was concerned that when the power ultimately did come back on, there would be a power surge, a fuse would blow, and our house would catch on fire (I’m not even sure that’s actually possible) or something of the sort, and then I would feel forever guilty for ”abandoning” our pets for the sake of my own comfort.  So, I decided to stay here and ride it out.  Alexander left for Louisville, and the kids and I remained at home, feeling rather pioneer-ish.      

Just as the kids and I were preparing to go to the nearest restaurant with free Wi-Fi so that I could check my e-mail, and perhaps calm my withdrawal symptoms for pogo.com by playing a few games of Mahjong Garden at 8:30 PM, our electricity came back on.  Whew, what a relief!   I told the kids we wouldn’t make good Amish people, since going a mere 8 hours without electricity was an extreme hardship for us.

The power outages as a result of yesterday’s storms were widespread.  Peter was supposed to attend a birthday party this afternoon at a friend’s house who lives in rural Lincoln County.  The boy’s mother called this morning to say they’d canceled the party because they’d been without electricity for over 24 hours, and their service wasn’t expected to be restored until Tuesday. 

So, I got my requested break from cooking on Mother’s Day, but not quite in the manner that I’d expected.  The moral of this story is “be careful what you wish for, because it just might come true.”