Wal-Mart makes me ill

Check out this tidbit:

Wal-Mart's launch of a new kind of "wish list" Christmas site for children has drawn the ire of consumer advocates. "If you show us what you want on your list, we'll blast it off to your parents," says an animated holiday elf named Wally who guides children through a seemingly endless conveyor belt of toys on the retailer's website. Children who click a "yes" button to have a product e-mailed to their parents hear a round of applause. If they click the "no" button, the rejected toy gets boxed up and unceremoniously sent to a dump truck. The animated Wally, and his elf friend Mary, characters with quirky accents and irreverent attitudes, are also the stars of an upcoming 60-second, 3-D spot that will run in cinemas this holiday season, and they will also appear in TV spots and in a special comic book that will be sent to children who visit the website of the nation's largest toy retailer. Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood is launching a letter-writing campaign among its 7,000 members asking Wal-Mart to close down the site. "Families have a hard enough time navigating holiday commercialism without the world's largest retailer bypassing parents entirely and urging children to nag," said Susan Linn, co-founder. "For a company that purports to be family-friendly and promote family values it's very disrespectful of both parents and children."

Vomit

Is Mercury in retrograde AGAIN??

I don't know. It seems like everything that could go wrong is going wrong. Everything, it seems, is a challenge lately. Like, we still don't have drinkable water at our house, and every few days we have to rechlorinate the well, which means we can't use water AT ALL for 3 days...which means we have to shower at friends' houses and/or we smell, we have to wash dishes with water from the neighbor's garden hose, and simple things like brushing teeth are a major challenge. It's all been really difficult because Azalea is in the final stages of potty learning and she can't wash her hands with the cool Kandoo foamy pump soap afterwards (which is definitely an incentive!). You know things are bad when you are reading hygiene manuals from rural communities in developing countries (where there is no running water/indoor plumbing/etc.) to get household hints...

I digress. So then we actually get hit by a tornado. Yes, a tornado. And the one and only tree in our backyard is plucked out of the ground -- roots and all -- and slammed on top of our shed. We're talking an 80 foot tree, here. We also lost part of our siding and the tree by our mailboxes, but we actually fared WAY better than a lot of people whose homes are completely trashed. About 20 houses were condemned, and tons more had damage like trees in their living rooms, collapsed decks and porches, rooves blown off, etc. So we were really lucky. But I have to say, though, that I don't ever want to have my kids cry over weather again.

Then there are the more minor things in the "everything that can go wrong, goes wrong" category. Like I smashed the side-view mirror off of the car, scraped the side of the car in a garage and got 3 speeding tickets in 1 month. One of Craig's crowns broke off while we were 7 hours away from home at a wedding (note to self: avoid Starburst candies), which was the same weekend he lost his wallet.

And don't get me started on work. Things like technology REPEATEDLY not functioning under deadlines to the point that my boss might think I am a pathological liar or that I have some other type of creepy pathology. Or just that I'm incompetent. I don't know what's worse.

I feel bad complaining about all of this, because it's such small potatoes compared to so many other things that could be going wrong in our lives.

Shame on me.