Plug it up! Part II

A while back i wrote a rant outlining several ways a gal can save money and the environment by using some alternative methods to control your flow. Oooh! here it is in case you need a refersher... Since then I've had a few inquiries about my personal chosen method (natural sea sponge tampons) and I thought I'd do a quick guide to using these things as well as some tips. To be honest, the trial and error can be a messy one, so you might as well pick up some tricks if you're considering taking the plunge, so you don't end up with uterus blood in your hair (yes it's happened to me....) Enjoy!
First off, where does one get sea sponge tampons??? As I mentioned earlier, you can easily pick some up at your local craft store. These are the exact kind I get:

This bag costs about $4.00 and will last you about 6 months to a year depending on your flow. It's got a couple of little silk sponges and one large wool sponge, but you can cut the big one into a few smaller ones so they fit comfortably in yer junk. Don't be unnerved by the "wool" or "silk" sponges. They are still natural sea sponges. Wool and silk are merely describing the texture of the sponge itself. I prefer silk sponges for tamps since they last longer (about 3 months) and are generally easier to insert and take out. The wool sponges are extremely soft, which is nice, but tend to get kind of...disintigrate-y after one flow or so. Again, they still work just as well, but you risk a greater chance of reaching into yank it out and ripping it in half by accident.
You can sew in a string if you want to, but to be honest, i always get blood all over my hands either way, so I just do it the gross way, and reach in and yank it out. And with that, on to the next step....
The convinience of tampons is supposed to be that you can take a leak with one in. I personally have never done that. I always changed mine out, because the idea of a tampon marinating in my urine inside my body for 2-4 hours disgusts me. With sponges, i wouldn't recommend peeing on it, unless you plan on throwing it out or thoughroughly cleaning it afterwards. Pee is sterile, so i'm not realy worried about infection, but it makes the sponge smell funny....and I totally hate that.
When I'm at home and i need to make a piss, I blast the hot water as soon as I get in the bathroom. Once you are on the throne, pull your sponge out, toss it right into the sink of hot water. If you are close enough, you can even squirt a little bit of soap on it. Once you're done doing your business, finish washing the sponge in the hottest water you can stand w/ soap. You will most likely have to pull out any clots and goo wads by hand.

NOTE: If you think this is too gross and are not considering it because of this step, then I have one thing to say to you: STOP BEING SUCH A PUSSY! Seriously, it's your own, and I'm not asking you to sautee it up with tonights dinner. So you have to deal with a little blood and gunk a few days per month. Life will get way grosser, I assure you.

Moving on...Keep washing and wringing it out until it is blood and clot free. Be careful when you're wringing it out at first since it will be full of blood and if squeezed too aggressivly will end up splattering all over tha place (hence the period blood in hair incident). Pop it back in and you're good to go for another 2-6 hours depending on your flow.
If you're someone who is lucky enough to work somewhere that has a one person bathroom you can do this there too. However, few of us are that lucky, and have to share a common bathroom with several co-workers. If you are in public and need to wring out your sponge, it can be both akward and gross to you bathroom-mates. I've tried giving fair warning ("watch out I'm comin out with ma sponge!!!") but people are rarley excited to watch you pick apart your blood clots right before their about to sit down and eat a nice pasta dinner. You can save yourself the trouble if you like and opt for a regular ass tampon for a night out, which is what i usualy do. But at work, I opt, again, to be gross and choose a different method of wringing out my sponge.
In a public bathroom stall, it's best to sit if you can. If this idea repulses you, you can always put down some TP or a toilet seat cover if they are available. Luckily they are always well stocked at my job. Once seated, grab a large wab of TP and set it on your leg. Yank out your sponge and toss it into the TP. Ball it up and squeeze thouroughly to get all the excess blood out and put it back in. This obviously is not the ideal situation, but a few hours without washing your sponge is not going to kill you or make you sick. Just make sure to clean your hands thouroughly, around the nailbed, and under the nails. I like to soap up my hands and then scratch my palms to get the soap under my nails. Wash it when you get home. Easy peasy.

The main reason I don't even bother with tampons even when I'm out is because honestly, I often forget to bring any! I'm so used to my sponge, that when i leave the house, I already know I've got my flow control with me. I've never had any truley gross situations arise in public with my sponge, and a little period blood never hurt anyone, so there you go. You can totally use your sponge when you're out and about, without coming out of a bathroom stall looking like Carrie on prom night.
Finally, we come to storing your sponge. Once your period is over, after doing a little jig of glee, you can wash your sponge out for the final time, and set it out someplace to air dry. Once it's dry, I usually keep in in a fabric bag or sorts to keep out dust and the like. You could probably keep it in plastic, but I would make sure it is absolutley 100% dry before you do so considering a wet sponge in a plastic bag is an ideal breeding ground for all kinds of unfriendly bacteria.
And there you have it. Yes it's gross. But often so if life. Don't act like you're never had to clean up a skid mark, some pee drops, or a nice puddle of post binge drinking barf in your life. It's your body, and sometimes it's gross. Deal with it. I assure you the benefits outweigh the yuck.

Later dicks!

Just a thought....

Why does every fucking gay "mommy blog" site have to be a bunch of Jesus loving Christ Groupies??? For serious? Is it impossible to be a good mom without believing in heinously old and outdated myth? Atheiest are not only lovely people, but are perfectly capable of raising kids without the threat of an "all mighty" etc. Why are we not included then?

To Mommy Bloggers:

I just want to read your sites for your kitchen tips, recipes, coupon clipping shennanigans, etc. I enojoy learning how to save money, and make a killer casserole.

PLEASE LEAVE THE JESUS OUT. Seriously. It's totally gay, and alienates the rest of us other faithed/non-faithed people. Stick to the meat and potatoes of why poeple love your blogs, and leave the fairy tales out.....before i puke all over myself. jerks.

What the hell am I doing?

There's a reason I haven't been around for a while. I am having a really hard time deciding what direction to take this blog in, or even if I should conintue at all. I feel like it needs to be more cohesive, and targeted at one aspect of my life. However, I'm so scattered in life as it is, it makes it even harder to make a decision what to do with this thing. In the mean time, I'll probably post more ravings of lunacy for your reading displeasure until I figure out if Iwill keep doing what I'm doing or just give up and start posting naked pictures of Rodney Dangerfield (bless his soul) or something.....

Hooray for Hallmark!

Hallmark is coming out with a new line of cards to cater to same sex marriages! Woohoo! Even though it's only really legal in 2 states, kudos to Hallmark to jumping in on a market that I'm sure is being neglected. All we need now is for the rest of the country to follow suit, and give all states the right to marry the gays!



So I'm sure you are not surprised to hear that many religious nut bags have been sending nasty letters to Hallmark, saying that it's "immoral" and "offensive". For serious? Why can't you just not buy the gay cards and call it a day? In any case, I decided I'd like to start my own letter writing campaign to let Hallmark know that I support their choice to acknowledge these occasions. Feel free to send emails and show your support.

Chairman Hall: sgronb3@hallmark.com

*STAY TUNED*

Hey dicks. It's been a while, but I'm getting back into the blogging groove with a couple of discussions I've had on my mind for some time. I'm currently researching major American corporations that like to slip religion to their customers even though their companies have nothing to do with religion. Thus far, I'm getting some really heinous stuff. So it should be extra bitchy, and probably really offensive to Christians. (Sorry guys, but you are really on my shit list this time!) I must be fueled by the eternal hellfire, since my blasphemous ideas are coming in so fast, I can barely get them recorded in time to piss anyone off.

In the meantime please take the time to read my most recent post below, "30 Days...(with Gays!). I think it's an appropriate kickoff to the religion rants that I've been working on right now.

30 Days...(with Gays)

Last night I watched an episode of 30 Days on Fox. They basically take a person and film them living with a family that has completely opposite beliefs and lifestyles for 30 days. Throughout the time there, they must abide by the house rules, and participate in activism in accordance with the cause they support. Last week it was a hunter and meat eater, living with 4 PETA activists, who have a strict vegan diet. He had to work with an animal rescue farm, attend protests, and was not allowed to eat animal products or hunt while he was there. As you can imagine, the discomfort of the guest is fun to watch, but in the end it seems like the most opinionated people come out of the situations with a little more respect for the people they accompanied. This week however, nothing was learned.

A Mormon woman lived with a gay couple and their 4 adopted children. She believed that marriage is for a man and a woman, and that children shouldn’t be exposed to gay lifestyles. Even though they were lovely people, providing an exceptional home for their children, this guest absolutely refused to even consider the idea that maybe she was wrong about these people.

They even took the time to let her speak with 2 people who grew up in foster homes, and were never adopted, to give her some perspective on how dire the situation is with abandoned children in this country. She was driven through terrible neighborhoods, and shown the bars on the windows of group homes they used to live in. She saw the empty lot where one man’s foster family used to live that was firebombed and destroyed. And despite the fact that conditions for children who have no homes and no families are so terrible, this fucking asshole lady still absolutely refused to believe that a child is better off being adopted by a gay couple than not adopted at all.

What pissed me off about her so much is not the fact that she has different beliefs than me. It was the fact that the minute she was faced with a question she couldn’t answer, or any kind of opposition to her opinions, she would cry and walk away. She felt like she was being attacked for her views. But to be honest, don’t you think that telling gay parents that what they are doing is not only “wrong” but should be illegal while being a guest in their home is an attack in itself? She claims that people were “taking it too personally” but in their position, I don’t see how else you could take it. Someone is straight up telling you “the way you live is an abomination”. That sounds pretty personal to me.

I also want to bring up the fact that the people of the local gay community were not only courteous but tolerant as well. While they did challenge her ideas, they were polite and non-aggressive. It seemed to me that this particular woman was seeing this show not as a learning experience, but more so as a test of her faith. She absolutely refused to take any other points into consideration.

This whole episode I couldn’t get one phrase out of my head. “I live how God wants me to live.” I think it is not only rude, but terribly presumptuous to assume that you know what God wants. And on the other side, what if God wanted you to jump off a bridge? Would you do it? Didn’t God supposedly give us FREE WILL? Didn’t God give us brains to think for ourselves? It’s so easy sometimes not to challenge our beliefs and deflect back to some supernatural scapegoat like “God wants me to” instead of trying to think outside of what you were raised (trained) to believe. It’s not just hard for Christians, it’s hard for everyone. We all fight a battle within ourselves between what we were raised to believe, and what we truly believe in our own hearts. Just ask sis and I. We were raised Catholic!

After all of this fuckery I’ve been spouting, I’d like to point out that there are only really 3 golden rules to being a “good person.” I think they apply to everyone, religious or not.

-Don’t steal
-Don’t kill
-Don’t be dishonest

Generally, NOT being an asshole seems like a sure path to a happy afterlife (if there even is one) to me. Treat people how you’d like to be treated. Don’t be a dick. And learn to live and let live. I honestly don’t understand how people think they are doing “God’s work” by trying to stomp on other people’s basic human rights. Let people marry the person they love, and leave gender out of it. Let good people adopt children and give them a good home regardless of who they choose to make their partner. Just because you worship the guy on the cross doesn’t make you special, right, or absolved of any flaws. You’re a person, and sometimes, YOU ARE WRONG. Deal with it. Besides, God made you that way. It’s his fucking fault.

To wrap this up, I decided to write up a little prayer of my own. Even though I don’t really believe in God per say, I am open to the idea of one, but just not entirely sure I am convinced. Just in case, I will be saying this prayer every night before I go to bed. I hear so much about the power of prayer. I decided to give it a little test drive.


God, please take special care with God fearing homophobes on this earth. Take care to teach them, to guide them, and show them that tolerance is far more Godly then elitism. And if all else fails and they refuse to see the truth that ALL PEOPLE deserve the same basic human rights, I ask you God to please make all of their children, and their children’s children homosexuals. So that maybe one day these ignorant retards will realize that gays are in fact people too.

Fitness Challenge Update

Fitness update

First off, I want to say that I apologize for being lazy in my blog entries. As I’ve mentioned before, my computer at work has no internet, and since I’ve joined the Fit Program at work, my evenings are spent at the gym. Once I’m home I’m completely wiped out, and ready to call it a night (after a shower and some sexy time with boyfriend of course!) But I just wanted to take the time to thank a few readers that migrated over here from my sister’s blog, (Secrets of a Black Heart), for leaving comments, and letting me know that people are in fact still reading this piece of caca blog, even if there are very few! That being said….on with my fitness update!

I started the Fit Challenge 2008 at my job on March 3rd. It’s been about 7 weeks, and thus far I’ve lost almost 12 pounds! I’ve done a combination of exercise, and adjusting my regular eating habits, and lucky for me, the whiskey weight is falling off pretty quickly! You may be thinking “this alkie biatch is actually doing something healthy? What is this, crazy town??!?!” Yes my friends it’s true. Even a lush like me can learn to maintain a healthier lifestyle. And let me tell you, alcohol blubber is the hardest blubber to shed! After all, I didn’t get this loveable chub from nothing. I fucking earned it!

It hasn’t been easy, but it’s not nearly as grueling and unenjoyable as I had first anticipated. An active lifestyle seems to agree with me. I’m already feeling the benefits of what a few hours a week of cardio can do. As far as food goes, well…I love to eat. I can’t help it. When I was a kid I could put down a foot long rack of ribs, lick the bones, and finish your leftovers and still have room for dessert. They called me the SHARK. Ask sis. She’ll verify my bottomless pit of a stomach is in fact real. She’s seen it in action. If you don’t believe me, Jesus will punch you in the neck for being so foolish! Any hoo… I needs me plenty of eatins or else I whine and piss and bitch and moan like a baby. But I found that little changes here and there made all the difference. Switching to whole grains, tea instead of coffee, leaner meats, and limiting my dairy intake seemed to do the trick. I’m still eating enough to be satisfied, and enjoying it too!

My exercise routine is really fun and I’m enjoying it a lot! My work has it’s own gym and fitness instructor so I go to classes 2 times a week, and do cardio on machines another 2 days. Every so often I like to use my lunch break to take a lighter class like yoga or stretching if I can fit it in. I vary my workouts so my body doesn’t get used to it. I do a combination of cardio, weight training, and yoga every week. Here’s a rough rundown of my schedule:

Monday
20 min on the elliptical machine, Calorie Burning Program
20 min on Treadmill, on an incline (better for my bad knee)
Or
20 min on the stationary bike, again Calorie Burning Program



Tuesday
Two 30min classes. They vary week to week but it’s usually any combination of the following:

Butts & Guts
Body Sculpting
Pilates
Interval Training
Step

Wednesday

Day off …woohoo!

Thursday

1 hour of a yoga class that combines regular yoga and pilates

Friday

See Monday schedule


Unfortunately, I never thought I’d do this well, so I didn’t take any before/after pictures to post and give you some perspective on how my body’s been changing. So if you’re interested, here are some stats to give you an idea of how I’ve been doing.

MARCH 3rd
1st day of the Challenge

Height: 5ft 6
Weight: 190lbs
Pants Size: 12
Shirt Size: XL, 12

I carry it all in my torso, so I have quite the large gut, larger arms, and some face chub. My legs and butt never seemed to have changed much since high school. I’m generally weak and out of shape, and have very low endurance for aerobic activity.

APRIL 2nd
First weigh in of the challenge

Weight: 186 lbs
Lost 4 lbs

My belly and arms seem to have thinned out a bit, but I’m still the same size in clothes. My legs are much more muscular, and my arms are starting to thin out and show some muscle definition.

APRIL 17th
About 6weeks into the challenge

Weight: 180lbs
Lost 6 lbs
Lost 10 lbs total

I definitely see a difference in my belly. I have an actual waist forming, and since I’ve got big boobies I’ve got an hourglass shape forming. Still the same pants size, but they feel significantly looser. My arms are really shaping up nicely, and I definitely feel much stronger and more energized throughout the day.

April 24th
7 weeks in

Weight: 178.5 lbs
Lost 1.5 lbs
Lost almost 12 lbs total

I’m averaging losing about a pound and a half a week. People are actually starting to notice that I’ve lost weight, and it’s become visible through clothes. My face is definitely a little thinner, the gut is going down slowly but surely, and my calf muscles are like rocks, even on the leg that was weak because I fucked it up acting like a jackass at a Murphy’s Law show! I am still the same pants size, BUT now I can fit into a couple more pairs of pants that were 12’s but too snug to wear when I bought them.

There you go! I hope this may be inspiring to someone, since I was a cynic about this fitness business for as long as I can remember, but now I’m a believer. I honestly feel so much better, and I’m not anywhere near done yet. I know my sis mentioned she’s had it as far as her weight goes as well. Although she’s not nearly as bountifully blessed with blubber as me, she knows her own body, and knows when it’s time to make a change. I think we’d be awesome workout buddies, but noooo she had to go and get knocked up twice! Phhhhh! People and their children. Kidding kidding….Big props to you mama’s out there trying the shed that baby weight, while running your home, and taking care of business all around. That shit is harder to lose that alcohol chubbz. I would say “God bless you” but I’m an atheist, and it is my personal belief that George Carlin is the closest thing to God I know…so with that

George Carlin Bless you!