My Single Mom Life

In blogging and site news, I have had to shut down comments on all previous entries, including the last two that I just wrote a single day ago, due to being flooded by some nasty and evil spammers.
All comments get moderated anyway, nothing gets published unless I say it does, but I am getting pounded by spammers!
Every hour, I get approximately 20-30 spam comments from the same exact spammer(s) all posting the same exact list of spam URLs, to the exact same nasty websites.
They think they are oh so clever though, they say things like the following at the beginning of their huge lists of URLs in the hopes that I will mistake it as a real comment and not mark it as spam and block their IP address;

"Congrats on your new home!" (what?)
"I hope that I can have one someday too!" (er?)
"Sorry for my silence these past days, my computer was broken." (I hope you get the blue-screen of death, for reals!)
"In related news, the Wayans brothers want to cast Tiger woods in their next movie but they can't decide if the title should be White Chicks 11 or 12 ?" (ha-ha! OK, that IS kinda funny, but it's still spam!)
"Oh man, I'm so not your friend anymore!" (Good! Now go away and leave my blog alone!!)
"Deeply entrenched lurker here ;)" (Great, thanks for letting me know, IP is now blocked!)
And oh so many more stupid and off topic comments like them.
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Sebastian and I took a walk to the corner store a bit ago, and when we go for walks, he always tells me about his day or a story from his life from another day.
Tonight he told me about one of the times that he went to the horse farm with my sister Jo to ride the horses and help out around the farm for a day.
The horse farm they go to lets you ride a horse for awhile for free if you help out around the farm first.
Muck out the stalls, feed the chickens, geese, horses, and pigs, all of that kind of stuff, and then you can pick a horse that you like to ride, and go out riding the beautiful trails for a couple of hours.

One Saturday when they went, one of the people who works at the farm asked him to go to the stalls and get the horse tack, that's all that she said to him, so he started to walk off toward the stalls and then stopped.
He walked over to Aunt Jo, and asked her, "Aunt Jo, what is horse tack?"
She told him to go and just grab everything that you need to ride the horse.
He went to the stalls and grabbed a bridle, bits, a harness, a saddle, saddle pads, stirrups, reins, crops, and a martingale.
He carried it all back out to the area where they were getting the horses ready for a day of riding, and brought it to the woman who had told him to go get it.
He started helping her put it all on the horse he was going to be riding that day, Maximilian, and he just had to know exactly what it was, so he asked her, "Which one of these things that I brought, is the horse tack?"
She laughed a little bit, and then she said to him, "It's all horse tack. We call all of the stuff that you use for riding a horse, 'tack'. It's so much simpler to say 'get the tack', then it is to say 'get the bridle, bits, a harness, a saddle, saddle pads, stirrups, reins, crops, and a martingale', isn't it?"
He agreed and said yes, and he also felt a little bit embarrassed by asking, but he really didn't know.

And neither did I until he told me the story tonight.
When we came home from the store, I wanted to see if he was pulling my leg, so I typed into Google, what is horse tack, and this is the definition that I found;
"Tack is a term used to describe any of the various equipment and accessories worn by horses in the course of their use as domesticated animals. Saddles, stirrups, bridles, halters, reins, bits, harnesses, martingales, and breastplates are all forms of horse tack. Equipping a horse is often referred to as tacking up."

I learned something new on my walk tonight.
I like learning new things.
I also like having those walks with my sons, whichever one decides to walk to the corner store and back with me, because it gives me a chance to have some one-on-one alone time with them.
I get to talk with just them, no one else around to interrupt or make them uncomfortable, they open up and tell me things when it's just the two of us.
The boys and I have always had a pretty good open communication line between us, but I would say that the older they got, the harder it was to talk with them about some things.
Both of them are going through some things, some of those things I won't be discussing on my blogs, but I do talk about them with my counselor when I go and see her (once a month) because those things have a lot to do with the current situations in my house and with my family.
Earlier tonight, all three of us sat down and talked about the family issues that have had me really upset for several days now, some that I did blog about.
There were a lot of questions, a lot of denial, a lot of yelling, a lot of crying, a lot of confusion, and a lot more of me learning what people think and say about me.
There's a very deep hatred for me because I packed up my sons and moved here to Florida in 1997, instead of just staying in Maine.
But I will have to talk more about that stuff in another post because this one is now well over 1,000 words, and I know, super long posts like this don't get read all of the way through, people skim long posts, or just don't even bother reading long posts at all.
And that's OK.
I blog it because I need to, because I need to talk it out, get it out, so it doesn't build up in me and cause an emotional explosion.
So that's all for now, more to follow, most definitely.

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