The tiny tornado who weighs 43 pounds soaking wet is now at her father’s house so I can clean mine.  I don’t want to but I have to because it would disturb most people and cause them to make judgments.  Posting photos would be embarrassing but there are toys strewn throughout four rooms that I just kick aside and keep on walking.  There are blanket forts in at least two rooms accessorized with clothes that used to be folded. There are several dozen drawings of the dog taped to the walls.  There are piles of textbooks, student files, and mail to be attended to.  There are snack bowls everywhere.  The carpets and wood floors need tending and the bathrooms need cleaning.  Getting the tornado to speech therapy and perhaps getting homework done in the few hours I spend with her at the end of each day after my long workday took precedence over house cleaning.

What really is the point if I clean and then have to do it again the next day?  I just wait a few days until she goes to her dad’s house.  My house is clean Friday through Sunday if I don’t choose to leave and do something more fun than cleaning house. My ex-husband’s house is clean Monday through Thursday.

I am writing now and not cleaning. Writing is an excellent avoidance strategy.

I know others would make judgments because 20 years ago when I was first dating my ex- we often went to his best friend’s house to watch movies.  His friend was married with three sons under five so they did not go out much.  The friend and his wife ran a computer consulting business and owned/maintained several apartment buildings.

I used to make the most awful judgments about his friend’s wife because their house was messy.  I was a single 30-year-old woman sharing a cute 1920s bungalow with a lovely sun porch near FSU with a clean roommate whose only fault was hanging her clients' art in the house.  Much of the art of was very good but she earned her living as a public defender of death row inmates. Some of the art was produced by men who had killed policemen and small children. Others might say look at our new Monet and we could say look at this Ted Bundy over here.  No she did not defend Bundy but many like him – I just can’t remember their names.

Anyway on Saturday nights we would go over to couple’s house so my ex could see his friend and there would be one room just overrun with toys.  I was appalled and wondered if this woman ever tried to clean the house.  How lazy could she be that she could not pick stuff up and put it away?  What was wrong with those kids that they could not clean up after themselves?  And could it have hurt for her to put on some makeup once in a great while?

I am thinking about the ex’s best friend this morning because that friend did a terrible thing on my birthday ten years ago.  One afternoon his wife took the kids to the movies.  They were boys and liked gory horror movies so they saw one.  The husband stayed home and went out in the backyard and blew his head off with a gun.  Every year after that my ex dutifully took me to dinner to celebrate my birthday as he mourned his friend.

The friend’s wife drove along their street after the movie with all three kids in the car. Their house was surrounded by police cars.  I was not privy to many of the details of what happened next but I don’t think they had removed the body before the kids got home.

There were many rumors about why the friend shot himself.  Finances? Criminal acts?  He had been depressed for weeks and had made alarming phone calls which his friends had reported to the suicide hotline.  Not many of the rumors that spread about my ex’s friend were true.  That did not matter.  Others believed what they wanted to believe.

The psychiatrist at Fort Hook who committed murder/suicide was heinous and should be punished to the full extent of the law.  I bolded that so my feelings are made very clear.

However, I am feeling somewhat like a conspiracy theorist by writing the following but something does not smell right. There are reports that the killer wrote blog posts praising suicide bombers that have been posted for six months and were under investigation by the FBI. This makes me suspicious. If they were really posted by this man when they were said to be posted in the past then why was he given access to large groups of military personnel?  Were there comments on those blogs at the time that can time/date stamp them through links to others blog such as what happens on OS?   This information sounds planted to me.  I think he obviously had problems that lead him to kill people. I don't know if believe he was a radical Muslim.  Maybe he was just a severely depressed Muslim.  It worries me that there are those who would seize on that reported information to focus on that aspect of the crime rather than on the suffering of those killed and wounded.  Others will believe what they want to believe without looking further for more conclusive evidence.

How lazy could she be that she could not pick stuff up and put it away?  What was wrong with those kids that they could not clean up after themselves?  And could it have hurt for her to put on some makeup once in a great while?