And one more piece of advice and then I'll shut up — if nothing else, start documenting everything. Every time she belittles you or abuses you in any way, emotional or physical or verbal. You've done that a little on this board. These kinds of posts or journals are frequently used in custody trials.

But truly, the most important thing for you to know is that this is a safe place, and we hear you.

That is crazy, Gud. It seems to me that she...looks for reasons to be upset. To put it mildly. They are your children too. Granted, you would have to say more than you want about...situations like that, but a case could be made, if you had to.

I have tears in my eyes, Gud. Honestly, when you consider the children also consider that they are learning about interpersonal relationships every day in their home, and this isn't what you want them to learn. You have a right to be respected and valued. We don't want you to feel piled on, but we don't want to see you abused either. And this is abuse.

Thanks for the support.

You're a good guy...you deserve some peace at home.

I hope you find a path through this, Gud.

I successfully bought bras today. $60 bras, but less trauma than usual. Afraid I was a little abrupt with the sales lady at first, but then made sure to make nice later (because she was just doing her job and proved really helpful, I'm just a problem child who walks into a bra shop ready to be failed.) Real shocker? Going from about to-self-destruct, now slightly-too-large cups of a 34DD to a 36C. With my rib age circumference having shrunk. Bra sizing, I don't get you. But I do know that only balconettes avoid giving me quadraboob, and they're frighteningly few options there.

And I bought a new reinforced cable for my iPad, one that hopefully Pumpkin won't chew on. I had way too much duck tape and electrical tape on the old (which she also didn't mind chewing, damnit.)

Last day of outdoor swim tomorrow! Hoping to fix my funky tan lines, not burn. And do some yard work.

Well, the day got a lot better. I thought it was the beginning of a very bad day, but it turned out not to be. I also managed to do some mowing, clean the kitchen, go to the grocery store, do a lot of cleaning in the basement, do some vacuuming, do two loads of dishes, grill a nice dinner, and return the kitchen to its relatively clean state.

I spent much of the day with family at my 3 yo nephew's birthday party. It was really nice. Did a bunch of swimming and playing.

Also, I set up an encrypted volume on my desktop computer where I can keep all my secret stuff, mostly taxes, anything with a SSN number, and the plans for my robot army. I've been concerned that I had too much easily read information on my computer if it was ever physically stolen. The NAS already has a special encrypted volume (named 'Snowden') and my laptop is encrypted. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it also isn't a lot of effort.

During my basement cleaning I'm again confronted by the two perfectly good desktop computers that aren't doing anything. I've tried to give them away a few times, but nobody seems to want desktop computers. It doesn't help that they don't have monitors or operating systems. (One had a retail version of Windows that got transferred to another computer, the other has only run a Xen Hypervisor and Linux). We're talking four core processors (Core 2 Quad and Phenom II) and 8GB of RAM in each with 1TB drives.