No More Excuses!

I hate excuses. Now don't get me wrong, I do my fair share. But an old boss of mine once gave me a bit of advice that I try to live by: Excuses are like assholes. Everyone has one and they all stink. And unless you take a shower, it's still going to stink. In other words, you can explain your way out of screwing up but unless you fix it so it doesn't happen again, no one is going to care what you have to say. That being said, I must tell you about my Mom.

I love my Mom dearly. She's had to sacrifice a lot to give us a decent life and I know I can go to her for anything. But lately I've turned into the Mom and she's become the child. I know she gets mad because Jason's parents get to come down and visit a few times a year. And I get to hear from her about how she and my stepdad would like to be able to do that also. But she's quick to mention that they don't have the money. Well maybe if they quit dropping all their extra money in slot machines a few times a week they would be able to come and visit. But what really burned me is the conversation we had earlier.

When the kids get pictures done for their birthdays, we go to JCPenneys and get their SmilesByWire (it's free for the military!) and the pictures are good for 3 months. The pictures get emailed to me and I forward it off to our mothers. Every time I send it to my Mom, I call her and let her know. And every time she says that she never got it so I send it again. By about the 5th time I send it she realized that the email went directly to her spam folder. So you would think that now that she knows what happened to it, she would fix it. WRONG! Now she's all upset because she went to order his pictures and the session had expired--A MONTH AGO!! So now she wants me to call JCPenneys and see if I can still get pictures. So she procrastinated (she had 3 months to buy them!) and I had to hear the same excuse about her stupid spam folder. What really makes me angry about it is that if the roles were reversed, and I was the one with the constant excuses, she would rip me a new one. I'm half tempted to just tell her that I can't get the pictures. It's about time that she "took a shower" because I'm tired of the stink.