Domestic Bliss

I Feel Duped

2012-01-11T11:32:00.002-06:00

So recently I was reading something or watching something or something and this little factoid about carrots came across my awareness. Did you know that those cute little baby carrots you buy in the produce section aren’t actually carrots? Well, they’re carrots in the sense that they’re made of carrots, but they’re not real, live carrots that grow in the ground. They’re manufactured. Produced, if you will.

Apparently what happens is that larger carrots (I suspect one’s that would never sell on a produce shelf) are fed into a machine (I’m picturing woodchipper) and change-o-presto, out pops a baby carrot. Hummmppphhhh…

Makes me want to stop buying baby carrots. Of course, knowing this little fact does explain a few things. Such as why baby carrots sometimes taste bitter. I’m sure if you saw the actual carrot that made the baby carrot, you wouldn’t want to eat it as it was old and shrively.

Anyway, enough about the carrots, just know that my initial reaction was to respond in a loud voice, “I’ve been flim-flammed! Flim-Flammed!”

And with that, I’ve been eating a lot more carrots lately. It’s not your typical New Year, new diet thing. If you’ve been reading here any time at all you know I don’t really believe in the New Year’s resolution thing. It only leads to me disappointing myself and why do I need to do that to myself when there’s so much of it from other sources.

The diet is a diet though. It’s a low-carb, low-sugar thing and this time it was doctor-ordered so I kind of feel like I have to give this lifestyle change an honest-to-god, college try. Now the doctor-ordered may surprise you, but it’s not what you think. It’s not diabetes. Whew…not that I thought it was, but with the family history it’s not looking so good for me.

What is it? Exactly what I’ve been saying for years. It’s my hormones. You see, around the time I quit caring that the universe existed and that other human beings actually breathed oxygen (more commonly known as November and December), I had a visit to a new doctor. Not a gyno, I got a new one of those in October and while he tried, he just didn’t go far enough.

This doctor is what’s best described as a functional medicine doctor. I walked in with a list of complaints that went something like this: very irregular periods, mood swings, hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, weight gain, hair loss, dead libido and a painfully dry hoo-hah. Sounds positively menopausal, no? But I kept getting the finger shake from all my other doctors and a pat on the head saying I was too young for all this business.

Well, guess what? Apparently not too young as it was happening to me and my not much past forty self. So this new doc sat with me for about an hour. We talked about many things some of them things that Southern ladies and gentlemen do not talk about in a room by themselves unless they are planning on doing something lewd and lascivious.

Then his vampire took half the blood out of my body and sent it away for tests. Then someone slapped an estrogen patch on my ass and I sat in a room with a lady and had a conversation about lotions and bio-identical hormones and getting some (not bio-identical hormones). It was a very interesting conversation. Then I was ushered into a room with a lady who loaded a brown paper bag with supplements and charged me an outrageous sum of money. As I stumbled out into the waiting room, blinking in the suddenly too bright lights, someone shoved a ream of paper into my arms and told me as Yoda was wont to say, “There is no try, only do.”

The papers included instructions on how to live, essentially. These medications, those supplements, that kind of diet, sleeping and exercising, it was a whole life wellness plan with an out clause in a few weeks for them to make changes when all the blood tests came back and spelled out the underlying causes of my problems.

That out clause comes Monday. I suspect there won’t be many changes as I haven’t had a hot flash or night sweat (that I know of) in the last twenty-four hours and possibly more though it’s hard to notice with a killer vertigo attack occurring.

It will be nice to know a definitive diagnosis. I left with a preliminary diagnosis of premature ovarian failure which normally happens before forty, but since they don’t really recognize menopause in women my age because we’re by and large too young, that’s what he called it. His hope is that the hormones will help re-start my cycle. Apparently this is for the best. If not, it’s HRT for me until I get old enough to be in menopause, I guess. One thing is for sure, I can’t handle the estrogen crash and no one knows how to handle me when it happens either.

For now I just hope to keep feeling better. And I do feel somewhat better. My friends keep telling me that when I start the testosterone (next week) I will begin feeling a whole lot better. I sure hope that’s the case. Though I have enjoyed not giving a flying fuck about much of anything for the past couple of months and I intend to hold on to the finer points of that skill.

Though it has been hard being on a low-carb, low-sugar diet and not giving a fuck. You sorta have to give a fuck to change the way you feed yourself. I was doing pretty well. As of Sunday I had lost four whole pounds. Of course, the vertigo devil touched me later that day and I had gained back two of those pounds this morning. I think it may well be impossible for me not to comfort myself with food when I am sick.

For today though it’s back to the diet and I have to figure out how to get a rowboat to get me out to my car. The thunderstorms are vicious and we’re lousy with rain. The pressure changes aren’t doing anything to help my newly found vestibular stability either. If I were home, as I’ve been until today, I would take a nap and wait this barometric rollercoaster ride out, but a girl can only miss so much work before the mortgage beckons and the cupboards begin to offer up tapioca flour for dinner.

Dear 2011

2011-12-31T07:39:00.001-06:00

You sucked. Consistent and hard. Please stop talking to 2012.

Missing In My Own Head

2011-12-20T11:17:00.002-06:00

So it’s been a while. A long while it seems. Apparently I needed a break so I have essentially ignored any and all urges to blog. Those urges went something like, “I should blog,” then I would look around and do something else because really I have been majorly stuck inside my own head and even if I had opened a page nothing worth reading would have come out. Not that I’m saying this is worth reading, but you’re here reading so I may as well try.

Anyway, where was I? Feeding the wrong wolf. It’s something I’ve known for a while, but it’s really hard to feed the right wolf when the wrong one has his jaws clamped firmly around your throat and heart. Things have eased up the last few days and I’ve actually begun to catch glimpses of the good wolf again. Hopefully with the holiday and a nice long break from actual work responsibilities I’ll find the time and energy to nourish the good wolf.

The run up to the holiday has been difficult. I have struggled with that part of myself that tells me I must do and do and do. Thus I made a critical decision to do very, very little to prepare for Christmas this year. The eight underage nieces and nephews are all receiving a Christmas card with cash. I have shopped for exactly four people. My co-workers have been marked off the list of recipients of Christmas cards. I haven’t baked anything. The Christmas wrapping extravaganza consists of gift bags with tissue paper stuffed in the top.

I regret putting up the Christmas tree. I began to regret it about the time the first box was dangled over the hole leading into the attic. You might say that I’m not excited about Christmas. That would be true. More, I’m not excited about expending the energy it’s going to take to get through Christmas.

Though, somehow, my family has recently made it much easier. My mom is doing Christmas Eve and Miss A’s aunt is doing Christmas Day and all we have to do is show up with a dish. I don’t yet know how those dishes are going to get done. We may show up empty-handed and you know, after all I’ve done for everyone else through the years, I dare them to say a word because the wonderful thing about what’s going on with me is that I no longer have any compunction about telling someone exactly what I think. Hurting someone’s feelings doesn’t even really register anymore. If it’s the truth as I perceive it, then I’m not worrying about whether it hurts or not.

Anyway, I am sincerely hoping that the holiday break coupled with the appointment I have with a hormone specialist over the break is going to knock me out of this funk. It’s not like me to be so completely apathetic. If I could get away with quitting all my jobs and just lie in my bed all day long, I don’t think I would actually notice and this, my friends, is not good.

And this is why I haven’t been writing here at the blog. It’s depressing and really, why would you want to come here and read about my depressing life?

So in an effort to feed the good wolf:
1. I am thankful to be breathing
2. I am thankful that I have a job that helps to pay the mortgage and put groceries on the table and another job that I love
3. I am thankful that I have a smart phone that knows how to play Christmas carols so I can prepare for the holidays without considering anyone else’s happiness while I’m doing it

The Edition Where I Need to Floss

2011-11-21T11:32:00.002-06:00

Well, here we are mid-November and it’s forecast to be 74F today. Sigh… we’ve had what I will call whiplash weather the last couple of weeks. For a few days it will be winter, then it will be summer for a couple of days and then back to winter and so on and so forth until I think we’ll all have pneumonia.

Thanksgiving is coming. I’m alternately not looking forward to it and looking forward to getting it over with. We did the shopping for the feast Saturday and I spent most of yesterday in the kitchen prepping and cooking and getting ready. When I laid down in the bed last night I couldn’t help but feel like I’d spent the day doing something I enjoyed and at the same time was a colossal waste of time, which wouldn’t have been so bad except I didn’t enjoy it enough to waste the time.

And I’ve spent most of the weekend regretting that I didn’t take the entire Thanksgiving week off. Thus today I’ve spent trying to clear my schedule for the rest of the work week. One of these days I’ll quit being so thick and realize that for the price of three vacation days I can get ten days in a row off.

And lord knows I need it right now. I’m in PMS week. Yes, I said it, according to the calendar I’m in PMS territory. Yet, I’m not having any symptoms (other than tiredness, but that seems to be a constant state of affairs anyway) and I’m due by Friday. So either the maca is working or I’m in for another surprise. We’ll see. I just hope it holds off until after the Thanksgiving madness is over.

Speaking of madness, I hurt myself yesterday. It was all unintentional, but still, craziness. The first injury was to my left, middle back while I was pouring hot oil out of an iron skillet into a mixing bowl to finish up the cornbread. I was all, “Careful… careful… don’t spill this shit on you or anything else,” when, wham, my back spazzed out. I don’t know how I kept from dropping everything, but I managed to nurse it all back into place and get it to calm down enough that I later thought it would be okay to row.

The rowing went well. I pushed myself and rowed a bit further than I normally would. I finally found the calorie burn setting on the damn thing and that was great. So I got up off the rower and stretched a bit and then went on about my day. I had to help the dog up off the floor a little later and something hurt when I did that. The next thing I know my right arm is severely effed up. So not sure if it was the rowing or the dog or a combo, but I spent all night tossing and turning from one side to the other because everything hurt and when I’d finally get settled in a comfortable position, I’d have a massive hot flash. Sigh… the challenges… I have to be better by tomorrow because I’ve made an appointment with one of my clients who teaches Pilates on a reformer and I don’t want to be all messed up for that experience.

I haven’t lost any weight yet, but this morning was encouraging when I got on the scales. We’ve had a horrifying food weekend. Our trash can has things like doughnut boxes, chicken wing bones, and pizza crust in it. Oh and in the sink there’s ice cream bowls. Miss A drove her diet train right off the rails this weekend and I followed. With glee. Of course, I’m not really on a diet. I’m just trying to make some changes, like more activity, hence the rowing, and less sugar.

I don’t really eat doughnuts anymore they typically make my blood sugar go berserk and I feel like shit afterwards, but she bought some pumpkin spice cake doughnuts and OMG if you haven’t tried these things. Gah! And then there was pizza (now a vegetable according to Congress!) and wings as she finally gave up the no fast food fight with her mom and bought her Captain D’s on the way home from church. That put us at home all by ourselves at a meal time so we splurged on the really bad stuff. The ice cream is our yearly Spiced Pumpkin Pecan by Blue Bell. I haven’t eaten any of that yet. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it after all the other stuff I’d eaten yesterday. Tonight, maybe… But back to the scales, I haven’t gained any which is why my goal is more activity because my body is a champ at holding onto what it’s got.

Why the diet derailment? Well, Miss A retired Friday! Woo hoo! It’s been happy and sad at the same time. Today is her first day at home being retired. I left her a chore list. It said, “Don’t forget to feed the chickens!” Other than that, she’s on her own today. I envy her. I’m also a little apprehensive that I’ll never again have a moment to myself to recharge my introvert battery. But I suppose that’s a worry for another day.

If you’re wondering about her mom, there’s depression and crying jags alternating with she’s just fine. She refused to eat much of anything Saturday which is why she had Captain D’s yesterday. Pretty sure she had nothing but an Ensure and three bites of cereal Saturday. Yesterday was a better day, but Miss A and I agreed that we’re going to have to hire the service to sit with her over the lunch hour on Saturday from here on out to avert another disaster like Saturday. Either that or just move into her house with her. Sigh…

And then there’s forebodings of the paranoia that comes with dementia. Saturday her mom told her sister that we’d taken her wallet and we would have her cleaned out by the time we got back. None of it true and none of it believed, but nonetheless hurtful. We’re only seeing glimpses of the suspicion and paranoia yet. I dread when it hits full force.

Anyway, I mustache and find a piece of dental floss before this apple that has taken up residence between my front teeth kills me.

Rejoining

2011-11-16T11:41:00.002-06:00

So I haven’t written much lately even though there’s been a ton to write about. Mostly because I have not felt right for much of the last two weeks. The hormonal letdown that normally happens when my period starts never really happened and I have had no energy whatsoever.

I started taking an herb called maca around the same time I started. It’s purportedly an androgenic and supposedly can be used by your body to make the types of hormones your body is short of. So I’m not sure if this is the maca getting in there and changing things or if it’s my hormones continuing to be screwed.

What happened to the progesterone? Well, I never really could make up my mind whether I was going to start it this month or not and then I found myself in Birmingham at class this weekend and realized that even if I was going to start it this month I had missed the window so I decided to wait and see what happens with the maca.

I’m pretty sure I ovulated yesterday from the feel of things and we should be entering PMS land any day now. So keep your eyes and ears open, people.

The funny thing is today I finally feel like doing something other than putting one foot in front of the other. I did get more exercise yesterday than I have in a while, thanks to my new toy. It’s a FitBit and I got it for my birthday. It’s a souped up pedometer that is wirelessly connected to the internet where I can track my progress throughout the day. The biggest feature (in my mind) is the calorie expenditure feature on it. As long as I’m walking, running or climbing stairs it can tell me how many calories I’ve used. Hopefully this is going to finally get me on track to be able to lose a few pounds.

Of course, the energy burst (calling it a burst just seems wrong as it’s just not, perhaps a lessening of the desire to sit on the couch drooling or sleeping all day is a more accurate characterization) could be a by-product of realizing that for the first time in two weekends I’m going to be at home. Not that I didn’t love the wedding or enjoy the class I took, but I’m ready for some being at home time.

Right now I’m ignoring that Thanksgiving is upon us and plans are, as usual thanks to Miss A’s brother, still up in the air. I do know that there will be not much of a feast this year due to her mom’s salt prohibitions and my finally admitting that I can’t do it all and putting my foot down. What little plan I have is to cook a very small dinner for Miss A, myself and her mom. The rest of her family has been notified that if they intend to come, they need to bring what they’re going to eat. I know that sounds horrible, but with the amount of stress we’ve been under over the past year I think we’ve all surpassed being polite to those who continually use and take advantage.

We will be going to my family’s to see one of my nieces perform with the Moscow Ballet the day after Thanksgiving. I’m more excited about that than Thanksgiving holiday. Sad in a way consider that Thanksgiving is usually one of my favorites. This year though, I would cancel it if I could, Christmas too.

Anyway, I’m going to be “interviewing” for a teaching gig this afternoon. I say “interviewing” because it’s supposed to be more like a meet and greet than an interview. I was recommended by someone they apparently respect and since they’ve already had to cancel one class they’re somewhat desperate to get it back in the schedule. Apparently it’s a big money maker.

Of course, it’s pouring this morning, sheets and sheets of rain. I hope it lets up before I have to go try and find a strange building on a strange campus and then sit with several people I’ve never met before. I would hate to try and make a good impression while looking like a drowned rat.

So anyway, here I am, here I go, not sure when I’ll be back so just hang loose and breathe.

How I Spent (Almost) A Hundred Bucks On My Boobs

2011-11-10T11:40:00.001-06:00

So you know how I was complaining about needing a new brassiere because we were getting dangerously close to springing a strap and having an incident? Well, yesterday was the day. The strap didn’t actually turn loose, but I could feel it giving way all day long.

Fortunately, I had seen a commercial on tv the night before for an intimates company claiming to have extraordinarily comfortable brassieres. I’d never heard of the company, but as luck would have it they have a location less than a mile from my day job.

I went over to look around on my lunch break thinking to myself that according to the website they were expensive and I probably couldn’t afford it and that I was just going to look. Well, looking around turned into a nice conversation with the sales girl and then it turned into a proper measuring session with a proper bra fitting and well, I walked out of the place with two brand new bras that actually fit.

Score one for the nice sales girl who realized I really needed some help and offered it in a non-pushy way. I had never had a real bra fitting before. My grandmother put me in my first bra. She seemed to know what she was doing and every year when it was time to go shopping for school clothes she bought me a new one or two.

The fitting itself only took two measurements upon which the sales girl declared I should be wearing a 36DD. My eyes must have bugged out a bit because she asked me what size I was currently wearing (38B). She actually looked at my boobs at this point and re-did the measurements. Apparently the bra didn’t look as horrible as I thought it did, but she came up with the same thing.

After trying on three different sizes I settled on going up a cup size. And after wearing it for several hours I have to say that it’s not as comfortable as say an invisible bra, but it’s not too bad. That’s high praise for someone who would rather run about without.

Now though, after spending that much and having a $10 off coupon in my hand for another one of these contraptions, I’m worried about what happens when I lose some weight.

But that’s something to talk about tomorrow so I’ll save it. The takeaway here is that I managed to drop almost a hundred bucks on my boobs. I decided as I left the store that considering I haven’t made a purchase of new bras in somewhere on the order of 3 to 5 years and that my boobs have been through hell this last year what with all the mammograms and biopsies and poking and prodding that they are definitely worth a nice bra. Now, let’s hope these things do their job for a nice, long while.

It's Been a While

2011-11-08T11:09:00.003-06:00

Horked from Maria over at Just Eat Your Cupcake…

Take out your ipod. Put on random selection. FIRST song that appears answers the question. At the end, I will have a very special task for you.

1) Describe your childhood

Boadicea by Enya

I wish I’d had Enya as a child. Things would have been easier to manage with a bit of fairy tale, relaxation.

2) What was your first crush like?

Don’t Tell Me by Madonna

Wait, don’t tell me… I don’t remember who it was…

3) What was high school like for you?

Mama I’m Strange by Melissa Etheridge

Pretty well sums it up.

4) What was college like for you?

Shed Your Skin by Indigo Girls

Lots of growing and changing and discovering the big wide world, but not so much in the religious sense.

5) Describe your first paying job.

Ridin’ the Storm Out by REO Speedwagon

I worked in a plumbing supply house. In the office like a proper little girl. Punching a clock. It’s the only punching the clock job I’ve ever had and the clock has never moved so slowly.

6) Describe your current job.

Saving Me by Indigo Girls

I have no clue what the hell is going on half the time, but I’m here.

7) Describe your boss or closest co-worker.

Come Fly With Me by Michael Buble

Functional alcoholism, that’s all I’m going to say about that.

8) What do your siblings think about you?

Feelin’ The Same Way by Norah Jones

Maybe a couple of them, but for the rest I kind of doubt it

9) What do your friends think of you?

Occasionally by Melissa Etheridge

They see me occasionally, very occasionally.

10) What do you think of your friends?

Power of Two by Indigo Girls

Realized recently that most of our friends are childless couples

11) Describe your first kiss.

Other Side of the World by KT Tunstall

I remember wishing I was on the other side of the world when it happened

12) Describe your first sexual experience

Lay My Head Down by Indigo Girls

I was pretending to be asleep. It didn’t work.

13) Describe your first date

In Praise of Christmas by Loreena McKennitt

Hmm… I don’t think this is working… and I don’t remember my first date… this is sad…

14) What did you think the first time you met your current love?

Adia by Sarah McLachlan

This isn’t working at all… that bit about the finger is just nasty…

15) What did your partner think the first time he/she saw you?

Change by Melissa Etheridge

She has brains, that’s a change!

16) What do you think of your current love now?

Ave Maria by Hayley Westenra

Yes, she is a saint. Please don’t make her head big.

17) What does your current partner think of you now?

What’s Next by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

LOL! That is so right on! With the PMS / peri-menopause she never knows if I’m going to cry or cuss or kick something.

18) What describes your love life now?

Full Circle by Loreena McKennitt

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, we’re just hanging on until things improve again.

19) What do you look like in the morning?

Circles by Colbie Caillat

Yep, puffy eyes, mostly the dark circles don’t visit unless I spend a lot of nights in a row not sleeping.

20) How do you see your life right now?

We Are Together by Indigo Girls

Yep… that about says it all.

Now, describe yourself. What did you get?

Thursday, Blah, Blah

2011-11-03T11:44:00.001-05:00

This morning when I went out to feed the chickens I looked over at my tiny vegetable patch which was still covered with the cold frames and thought, “It’s supposed to rain today. Miss A says they need water. I think I’ll take the windows off.”

On one hand, I’m glad I did. If it’s raining at home like it’s raining here (and the radar indicates it is so) they’re getting a good drink. Unfortunately, they may be getting beat to death. It’s raining so hard and it’s moving so fast it wouldn’t surprise me if there were hail involved. It’s wicked sounding out there and I’m glad I’m in here. Poor chickens… and the neighbor’s goat who is now too big to get inside that old dog igloo we gave him. We’ll just chalk it up to getting acclimated for winter. Yeah… that’s what we’ll call it.

Anyway, it’s been a tough couple of days around our place. Miss A’s mom has been back to the doctor and again and again. Her arm had been hurting on and off through the weekend. Monday she was really complaining. Tuesday I took her to the doctor after the pain continued to worsen. The doctor’s visit was a real eye opener. It was so complicated and there were so many instructions from the doctor that I had to bust out pen and paper and take notes. Not only was there the stuff wrong that we were there for, but there were other stuffs the doc had gotten reports from plus Miss A had received a phone call from another doc about a scan that showed an aneurysm on part of her aorta.

So since Tuesday afternoon she has been to three separate doctor’s appointments and is back at it again today. Her oncologist has now gotten involved and is pissed because apparently the hospital dropped the ball last time she was admitted and he was never notified. We didn’t know to notify him and it’s just a big, friggin’ mess. We’ve got four different doctors telling us to do four different things for about six different conditions.

It’s overwhelming and stressful and I think for now I’ve passed the point of being able to get excited over much of anything. Yesterday morning she was crying she was in so much pain. She didn’t want to get out of bed and she looked horrible. It was scary, but fluids for the chronic dehydration, some appropriate pain medication, and a sit down with her favorite, handsome male doctor had her feeling better by the end of the day. I hope that continues, I don’t know how many more times we can do this nosedive thing.

Through it all, most of us have managed to keep our sense of humor. Mostly because Miss A is barreling towards retirement. Thanks to our state legislators, she will be retiring the Friday before Thanksgiving. Odd, yes. Stress-inducing for a teacher who cares about doing her job well and the students she’s being forced to abandoned, not only mid-year, but mid-term as well, oh verily much yes, but she’s handling it well and is finally getting excited about it. Thank you, senators and representatives of our great state. Our lives are about to get much easier thanks to your education-hating legislation. I suspect that’s not exactly how you planned it.

I keep asking her if she’s excited and if she has plans and until yesterday I don’t think she was very excited. What got her going? An unsolicited job offer from the community college that feeds into the junior/senior college she’s already teaching for. If it all works out, she’ll be working two days a week and bringing home possibly more than what she’s currently making. Fingers crossed, people. These are the first real smiles I’ve seen on her since her mom got sick last September.

Me, I’m just excited that my chore load in the morning is going to decrease. And that she’ll have time to do things like grocery shop and cook dinner and vacuum and let the dog out the door and let the repairman in the door and make phone calls to schedule her own hair appointments and write out the mortgage payment and… I’m probably dreaming for most of this, you do realize that, right? I suspect she has no real intentions of doing much of anything except hammering nails, mowing grass, and digging holes to put plants in until her schedule is so crammed with other things that she has no time to make a difference in the domestic situation further than what she currently manages. To say that Miss A is not especially domestic would be a huge understatement. Though she has improved of much lately by necessity of having to care and cook for her mom. And I may be surprised… we’ll see.

I think I would have to have a plan for my retirement though. I see this commercial on tv where they show pictures of the retiree on their first day with the sun rising. I might like to do that, though part of the problem with work is the alarm clock and that getting up before the sun is up thing. Otherwise, a vacation might be in order to kick off retirement. At the very least doing something fun that work has always taken precedence over.
Definitely it would have to be leisurely.

Anyway, it sounds as if the rain has let up. Hmm… the radar has stopped working… I hope everything is okay out there. I’m hungry and I don’t think a pear and a glass of water are going to cut it. I also need to hit up an office supply store for a new schedule book and a magnetic whiteboard. Perhaps that can wait until tomorrow. My car also needs an oil change so it doesn’t freak out between here and that wedding we’re going to this weekend. I don’t have to get out of my car when they change the oil. Hmm… drive through for lunch… drive through oil change… my boss just walked out of my office and told me to stop working so much… hmm…

Tufts of Grass

2011-11-01T11:11:00.003-05:00

There's nothing like sitting around trying not to start your period before you get to your gyno appointment. Sigh... yesterday, yes, yesterday I finally caved and made an appointment for this afternoon. As I hung up the phone I thought to myself, "Guaranteed I will start before I get there." Last night I started spotting. Sigh... gotta love it.

The good news is that I finally found that cool, dark well of sleep last night. Even with the herbal sleeping pills, hormones make it impossible to actually find that place. And I need that place. The PMS has been mild this time around. For that we are all very thankful. Sleep tends to help everything and I will be glad to get back to falling asleep as my head hits the pillow without assistance.

So keep your fingers crossed and I'll keep my legs crossed and hopefully I will make it to my appointment before things get ugly. I have high hopes for this new doctor and I'm taking a list. Wish me luck... I found ten bucks in my pants pocket this morning. That's lucky, right?

Kickin’ It To The Curb

2011-10-31T11:27:00.001-05:00

It’s probably a good thing I had to go to work today and couldn’t find a suitable excuse to stay home. This morning as I was trying to dress myself, I found myself down at the end of the closet pulling jackets and coats off the rack and throwing them in a pile. The ends of my closet are the dumping grounds for stuff I no longer wear. I don’t know that I consciously put much stuff there, but when clean clothes come in they go in the middle and everything that I don’t wear flushes to the outer edges.

My mood is not bad, but I think if I’d stayed home half the house would be sitting on the curb waiting for garbage pick up. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but it seems that something is cutting through all the years of sentimentality and I’m finally able to just get rid of a lot of stuff.

The jackets have been a problem for years. Several of them my grandmother gave me, others belonged to a friend who has passed and it was all I had left of her. One was a vest that someone gifted to me and it still had the tags on it.

I made myself stop with the jackets section. The pile on the floor of the closet had gotten out of control and I was afraid I’d fall in it. Since Miss A was already gone to work I’d lay there all day long waiting for her to find me. She bitches about the state of the floor of my closet all the time. This purging of clothing I no longer wear is (I hope) a first step in gaining control of the closet. I think it would be good to get rid of some of the hanging space and make a bit more shelving space in there.

Anyway, the weekend went similarly. Saturday found us cleaning out the greenhouse as the neighbor is having a tree cut. There’s a possibility the tree might fall on the greenhouse, the garage or the pool so we were trying to move as much stuff out of the way as possible. The whole while we’re cleaning out the greenhouse I’m bitching about how we don’t need to just move all the stuff, we need to go through it and get rid of some of it. Miss A was not happy by the time we finished because she wants to keep it all and I want to throw ninety percent of it in the garbage.

Yesterday I managed a vac and mop of the kitchen and dining room just before I finished stripping the wallpaper border in my bathroom and then got ready and went to a surprise 50th birthday party for a friend. That was fun, but after standing on my feet for three hours my back was about to break. Then we got home and I spent two more hours on my feet cooking dinner before we went over to Miss A’s mom’s house to feed her.

If we don’t go, she says she ate, but she doesn’t and things go from bad to worse. She is declining again. We thought she had another mini-stroke a few weeks ago as she spent about a week thinking it was April. Since then she’s gotten suspicious and surly and pissed that the girl who sits during the day time comes on Monday. She has been coming on Mondays since around April, but suddenly she thinks she doesn’t come. Miss A and I both suspect we’re about to have the ‘no, you cannot drive’ fight again.

We talked to and signed an agreement with a sitting service Thursday. I don’t know how we’re going to get them in though. She’s going to raise holy hell when we introduce them. This last week she tried telling the daytime girl not to come anymore that she was fine and didn’t need any help. Sigh…

Anyway, no clients tonight so I’m going to try and make a reusable swiffer duster pad. I saw it on Pinterest and had some scrap fleece on hand so I thought I might try it. Looks super simple and who else do you know that has a tie-dyed swiffer duster? Wheee…

Pretzel Time

2011-10-28T15:04:00.001-05:00

I'm going to begin by saying that Pinterest is a bad thing. It gives me a lot of ideas. Worse, it gives me the ability to find quickly all of the instructions on how to realize those ideas.

This, along with the knowledge that my bestie from high school was on the opposite coast doing nearly the same thing with her kids, fueled me to get myself to the grocery store and buy a bag of pretzels to get this show on the road.

I should have bought pretzel rods to do this with, but they were big and most of them were smashed up so I went with the little waffle kind that had "butter" in the name.

I already had the chocolate and white bark in the house along with a huge container of sprinkles. They were technically St. Patrick's Day sprinkles, but I just left out the shamrocks and it was fine.Next time I will buy Halloween sprinkles.

I started out by arranging a bunch of pretzels on a cookie sheet covered with wax paper and drizzling the melted bark all over them. This didn't work as I expected. The sprinkles weren't sticking and I just couldn't get enough chocolate on the pretzel without it looking like I spilled something so I started dipping each one. Very time consuming, but it worked quite well. Then I got the bright idea to dip in the chocolate and immediately go to the sprinkles.

The chocolate bark worked best. Not sure what went wrong with the white bark. It was clumpy and just wouldn't thin down. It had been frozen, perhaps that was the problem. I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't work out with the white bark as the orange sugar didn't show up well on the brown so there are only a few of the orange crusted ones.

I think I will call them my jeweled pretzels. Beautiful, almost too beautiful to eat.

An Open Letter to My High School English Teacher

2011-10-27T14:40:00.002-05:00

Dear Ms. G.,

I have recently had the awesome responsibility of helping a friend grade college “term papers”. Actually I’ve been helping her do this for years as I have special skills conferred upon me by one of those universities and a whole lot of life experience.

Anyway, every time it’s time for “term papers” I begin to think about you. I wonder how you made it through so many years of not just teaching hormone-soaked brains, but reading the ego-centric drivel, atrocious grammar and pathetic reasoning that we put on paper and handed forward.

I now have a new appreciation for why your head and neck hurt all the time. I personally long for the fortitude to stab my own eyes out with a pencil each time I take up the red pen and begin reading.

Last semester there were twenty-seven papers to read. I still have flashbacks. This semester only thirteen and I’ve been promised by my friend that she will no longer be teaching Geometry. Perhaps someday I will stop dreaming of the van Heiles and their learning levels and phases.

Regardless I just want to say thank you and I’m sorry. I hope your retirement is everything you dreamed of.

Your humble student

Plans and Coming Together

2011-10-25T20:15:00.004-05:00

So all that time ago when we remodeled the house, really before that when we built the garage and my bathroom, my bathroom never really got finished. There was trim work and a sheet rock patch that never got painted. Then I did something stupid with the vacuum trying in vain to find a way to easily clean the dust off the baseboards and was left with a line on the paint that wouldn't wash off. And most recently the wallpaper border that I added started to pull away in places and when I climbed up to inspect it I realized that all along the top of the border there was mold and mildew growing.

I've known for some time I was going to have to do a major overhaul, but I have been putting it off because one, we have too much going on and because two, I had no idea what I wanted to do to decorate it after pulling the paper down.

And then I saw some shower curtain rings that I really liked. Did I mention that about a quarter of the one's I'd been using for the last oh... sixteen years have broken and the shower curtain is majorly deficient at this point? And so since I found shower curtain rings I liked, I started looking for a shower curtain. Always hard for me and I still haven't found one, but I think I've decided that I'm either going for a solid or an elegant, simple print. The Under the Sea look has expired for me. No more fishies.

Then Sunday I got a bug up my ass while I was in the shower and climbed up on the seat and started pulling on the border to see how hard it was going to be to get down. I thought it was going to be easy, maybe not so much. We'll see. I decided before I got too far into it I probably needed clothes and a ladder. Now there's about a foot of border waving over my head in the steam every morning as I shower. Saturday though, Saturday the border will be rectified.

Once the border is down and I get the glue cleaned off. I'm thinking of doing a border of quotes. Painting them right on the wall perhaps. The problem? I have no idea what I would want to write on my bathroom walls that I will be reading over and over again every morning.

I'm open for suggestions. Know anything bathroom appropriate? I would like inspiring and comforting.

Making Do

2011-10-25T11:12:00.002-05:00

So this morning as I was running out the door I thought, “Hey, isn’t there an instant bowl of some kind of lunch thing in there? I could eat that instead of buying something.” So I ran into the pantry and grabbed this bowl of instant lunch.

Now, it wasn’t that I had a burning desire to eat said bowl of instant lunch, but it was in the pantry, taking up space that we don’t have and it had been there quite a while. Said bowl of instant lunch is not bad, but I have a sneaking suspicion I think that only because I can still taste it even though I almost burned my mouth off my face with the first bite. Most likely the entire office will be able to smell my breath for the next three days. And the sodium content, I wish I hadn’t looked.

Anyway, I’m eating it. Mainly because I’m on this mission to de-crap the house again and I was too lazy to go buy something. The de-crapping started while Miss A was still doing the 24-hour sit around with her mother. I tend to clean when I get stressed. It’s been a good thing so far. I’ve probably thrown out things we’ll need later, but ten years accumulates a lot of shit and if we need I’ll go find another one. I find that most things are just not needed.

I don’t know if it’s the heavy stress load I’ve been carrying, but it’s been easier recently to cut through the sentimentality of all these things I’ve been hanging on to and toss them into the goodwill box or the trash can. Of course, it may also be that I’ve been reading bloggers that are doing the 31 days of de-shitting your house program. That’s not what it’s actually called, but I’m unable to figure out what it’s really called right at this moment and I won’t have time later so you’ll just have to figure it out yourself or leave me a comment so I can put it on my to-do list for you.

It’s bad right now. The lack of available time to think and do and just be is really beginning to wear on us all. The to-do list is so long that I have lost the bubble and been unable to make a list and things are just falling on the floor. I think I have finally accepted that it’s not all going to get done all at once and stopped worrying about things that are left undone.

I’ve somehow managed to streamline the necessary things around the house, I haven’t recently melted down. Of course, it helps that I haven’t had a period in almost seven weeks and haven’t been forced to ride the emotional and energy rollercoaster. Miss A says I’m PMSing. I disagree though I was a bit weepy last night. Perhaps I am, but I’m not ready to accept it yet. I’m not a screaming ball of pissed off depression so it doesn’t really feel like PMS.

The laundry seems to be getting done. The floors need a mop job again, but since Blaze is gone the kittens growing in the corner and puddles of puke have greatly decreased. It’s been a month and just yesterday the floors reached the point of no return on needing the mop. I’ve discovered the amazing versatility of a dustmop and how it knows how to dust the sides of furniture, mini-blinds, and crown molding. If things continue in this vein we won’t need a cleaning lady ever again. Now if I could only teach the toilets how to clean themselves. Hmm…

Maybe I want a Roomba for my birthday. I’d been thinking Body Bugg, but hmm… If I only ran it while we are home it might be doable now. Hmm….

Anyway, Matilda gave us another egg yesterday. At least I’m assuming it was Miss Tilda. It was bigger than the first and a little lighter in color. I ate one this morning and it was yummy!

Unfortunately one of le chickens has taken to sleeping in the nest now that it’s being used and shitting all in it. I’m not happy about this as it’s one more thing that I end up having to clean. Hmm… just had an idea about the nests in the little chicken’s tractor. I wonder if their nests are big enough to stuff a box like in the big chicken’s nest? Hmm… have to test that when I get home and see. It sure would be easier cleaning out if that were the case.

Which reminds me, I need to look up the French alphabet and associated pronunciations. I’m reading a book right now with a lot of French names and special characters and I’m clueless at how to pronounce their names (and having problems following the story line because they don’t get a name if I can’t pronounce it) having only learned French from the back of shampoo bottles.

Anyway…

I Made You Something!

2011-10-23T16:33:00.004-05:00

Miss Matilda graced us with our first egg from the new flock today.

She was sitting the nest when I went out to feed them this morning and looked at me real hard when I opened the hatch. I'd been noticing some feathers in the nest, but wasn't sure who was sitting it. I had guessed Buffy our Buff Orpington hen due to the color, but I guess I was wrong. Miss Tilda had rooted a nice place out when she hopped down to have breakfast and I was hopeful that she might be ready to start laying.

My jaw almost hit the ground when I opened the hatch this afternoon to add some water and saw this. I guess she was more ready than I realized.

I suppose it makes sense. Bocephus, affectionately known as Bo, started learning to crow a couple of weeks ago. I was so shocked I almost fell off the toilet that first morning I heard him "crow". It's pretty unimpressive so far, but he tries every morning. I think he'll scare the bantam rooster half to death when he gets his full voice in. I do regret that he's patterning his call after the bantam rooster. The little one has a pathetic call. Perhaps Bo will develop his own as he matures. I can hold out hope anyway.

I Was a Bitch In My Sleep

2011-10-18T11:15:00.002-05:00

Oops… not sure how that happened, but it did. Actually I can guess how that happened. I went to bed last night an hour after my bedtime absolutely exhausted. I was so tired I couldn’t hold my eyes open and I was hurting because like an idiot I took an emergency appointment on top of a full load on top of a half hour walk during lunch. Body and mind were pooped and I was late getting in so I was late going to bed.

Anyway, I laid down in the bed and almost immediately fell to sleep. Then the cat woke me up. Then the dog woke me up. Then Miss A started coughing and woke me up. Then the dog somehow got in the closet and got stuck in there and woke me up. Then there was that running water, someone’s peeing in the floor noise that the dog makes with her mouth now (she’s old) and woke me. Then the cat decides to puke in the floor and woke me up.

By this time I’m awake and I realize the light is still on and now in addition to being awake, I’m wide fucking awake and now I’m pissed and can’t stop thinking about how I was already an hour late getting to bed and now it’s even an hour later and I might get five good hours if I can quit being pissed and go to sleep which isn’t happening now that every soul in the house has woken me up at least twice.

Apparently after I did go to sleep I groused all night long. Sigh… And they wonder why I’m a bitch in my sleep. Tonight I will be taking a pill and if I snore all night long, oh well, at least I won’t be a bitch.

I Didn’t Know It Was Possible

2011-10-17T11:25:00.002-05:00

Recently some things have changed with my day job. Actually it was last week while I was still trying to recover from being so sick. The timing, in and of itself, was bad because I didn’t have a lot of extra energy or motivation to care about it.

So anyway to get to the point, I was once again assigned an employee to assist me with the near non-existent workload I have now. It’s crazy, but they’re trying to train another individual to do what I do just in case I get hit by a bus or go nuts and decide to never make the commute again. Which is probably not a bad plan for them considering the crazy-assed driving skills I saw on the interstates this morning.

But back to it… This employee drives me a little crazy. She is older than I am by around eighteen years. She has kids, she’s nice, but she’ weak. By weak, I mean she walks around in this constant state of fear that she’s going to be fired or yelled at or something. It’s maddening to watch. I have tried to talk to her about it, but she is so negative I finally just let it go deciding it wasn’t my fight and she would fix it if she was going to.

Anyway, again she is suddenly assigned to me for at least a few hours a week and every morning she is in my office. Sigh… Before I worked with her I would walk past people’s offices and see her sitting in their office for hours and wonder what the hell it was she did. Now I know. She sits in people’s offices taking up their time. This is the way she "works".

Last week I finally had to tell her she couldn’t stay in my office, gave her a task and sent her on her way. I have yet to see her produce anything from the task I gave her.

I talked to her manager (who happens to be my manager) and he was aware of her habits. He gave me some pointers on how to handle her and get her focused. I don’t know if I’m doing it right or not. I’m giving her until Wednesday and then I’m going to start leaning on her to see some progress.

I hate managing people. It’s gotten to where I can hear her coming down the hallway. Her gait is unique and it tells in the swish of her pants at her thighs. It’s like sandpaper on my brain when I hear it and I have to brace myself and remind myself to put on a smile. Sigh… I hate managing people.

Roley Poley

2011-10-12T11:40:00.002-05:00

So I’ve been spending a lot of time lately not liking myself. It’s been painful. I don’t know if it’s a side effect of getting and being sick for so long or if it’s from being by myself too much while I was sick or just plain old being alone and inside my head too much. Whatever it is, I’m not quite sure it has left me yet. I’ve been taking B-bombs to try to get my mood back in order. It’s helping, some. Not enough.

I’ve also got halitosis. This I don’t ever recall having before. It’s rank too. I’ll just be sitting somewhere concentrating on something and suddenly I think, “What’s that smell?” And I discover it’s my breath and O.M.G. I’m reading that it’s probably caused from me being ill and going into ketosis from probably not eating enough while I was sick.

So now I’ve lost about five pounds, which is good, considering that I’d gained that much over the last month and had been struggling to take it off. I’d like to lose some more while I’m already in the zone, but this is nasty and I don’t know what to do about it. Oral care isn’t helping. It’s coming from my stomach, I guess.

I could start eating, but then I’m afraid I would never stop. I spent last evening at Miss A’s mom’s house and had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t hungry, just out of sorts and upset. I’m trying very hard to break the emotional eating habit. If I don’t I’m going to be bigger than the proverbial barn before this latest health event is over.

It doesn’t help that we’re having to give her shots. I hate needles and until just a couple of days ago I would have told you that it was physically impossible for me to stick a needle into someone. Not so anymore. I’ve given her two shots to date. Today is supposed to be her last shot. We’ll see, as of Monday her blood tests were not encouraging and I suspect there will be more to come. Sigh…

There is a direct correlation between having to give her a shot and wanting to eat a couch. It is very disturbing to me. Add in that Miss A and I have not been home together now for almost a week and the only alone time we’ve had was the three minutes we met in the parking lot of the local hardware store this morning before we both drove to work and my emotional state is continuing to degrade.

I feel myself rolling in on myself. It feels like what happens when you fold a pair of socks. Part of you goes inside out so it can hold the rest of you together. It’s a protection mechanism. Probably something I developed as a child. Unfortunately this hedge hog hibernation maneuver is not good. It takes a long time to unravel and resolve. Meanwhile I walk through my life as a zombie.

I keep thinking, “Fix this, change something, do something.” And then I think, “What would you have me do?” Every option leads to more pain.

So it’s lunchtime and I had decided I was going to the firehouse for a sandwich, but I don’t know that my stomach can handle it and I’m not sure I can tolerate all the noise there today. Something different perhaps and then I’ll go buy dog food and see if there’s anything else I can chip off the self-replenishing list of things to do while wishing fervently for a secret, silent retreat to cross my path.

Your Mattress Has Expired

2011-10-07T15:07:00.002-05:00

So if I buy one of those whiz bang $80 hypoallergenic mattress covers that keeps sweat, dead skin cells, and dust mites from getting to your mattress does my mattress still expire after 8 years? Does it still double in weight as the commercials claim?

Inquiring minds, you know.

Today, I Am Scared

2011-10-06T08:21:00.003-05:00

I'm coming up on a solid week of being sick. I'm finally getting better. No fever for about 24 hours which is good. The pain is gone, the rash is gone, I'm still on medication and while I feel better, I'm still not at a hundred percent.

I've missed a whole week of work. This is stressing me out. If the way I still feel today is any indication I will have an entire day of clients to cancel and reschedule tomorrow. This is stressing me out.

It's not the money. (Wow! Never thought I'd say that.) It's the time management aspect of all of it. How am I going to reschedule what was almost six hours of massage without killing myself? And what about the other job. Not that I missed that much work. There's really not a whole lot to do right now, there never is which is part of the problem with it, but if there's not a lot to actually do, there's a lot of face showing required. And I've missed a whole week... it worries me, why, I'm not exactly sure.

Perhaps it's that I am no longer invincible. That it's possible for me to get so sick and I have no control over getting better. It seems nothing has been effective at helping me actively get better. It's just been a wait and see kind of illness.

Now that I'm feeling some better and beginning to move around more I'm realizing that I probably should not have been alone all this time. There are things in odd places. I'm not sure if I've had a bath. All the bowls and spoons were dirty after I took a nap yesterday so I ran the dishwasher. I suppose that's the mark of a sickie in the house, the bowls and spoons thing. I tend to compress and reduce to the minimum effort.

And the nap, I've not been sleeping enough. I think yesterday was the first time I'd been able to relax enough to realize I needed to sleep. The rest of the time I was in so much pain or had so much anxiety I couldn't do it. Oh the night time, yes, but that's when we're supposed to sleep. That's when it is okay for me to allow myself to sleep. I realize this is a problem. And this time by myself, sick, lonely, and somewhat angry about being alone, sick, lonely and angry, has given me time to think a lot about everything.

Anyone reading here has probably noticed that I'm angry. I guess I've known it for a while, but not really realized how apparent it is and how deep it has gone. What am I angry about? Well, a lot of things. It's been a rough year on top of several rough years. And I've gotten stuck in it. I walk around pissed off, depressed, and stuck.

The good news is that I'm doing something about it. At least I'm trying to do something about it. Last night I gave up on waiting for Miss A to come home and started wading through the weeks worth of stuff on the DVR. I realized that I've been holding my breath, waiting for her to come home, waiting for our lives to get back to normal. That's not going to happen. At least not anytime soon so I've decided to just move on and do whatever it is I need to do to get happy.

I've decided to start writing in my paper journal again. I haven't done that in a while and I remember that it helped me through some tough times when my grandmother was dying and I was so depressed and angry. Hopefully it will let me pour all the ugliness and anger out in a safe place where no one else has to be hurt by it and I can start being less angry and shed some of this constant pain and depression.

And I'm reading probably the most painful book I've ever read right now. It's called When is Enough, Enough? And it's telling the story of my childhood. It's pointing out all these personality flaws that I see in myself and showing me where they came from and why they developed. Unfortunately I'm not getting a lot of how do I fix it out of it yet.

Though yesterday I did learn that there is something called dysthymia which is a chronic low-grade depression. I had recently wondered if there was such a thing because I thought I might have it.

Then I learned that I have a lot of tendencies towards what this author calls compulsive self-reliance. I've always called it the control freak part of me, but apparently being a control freak would be so much better than what it is I'm doing. Sigh... I always knew that my fucked up childhood made me into an individual with fucked up coping skills. I just didn't know I was still this fucked up.

And because of it I'm ruining everything good in my life right now. And I don't know how to stop. I probably shouldn't be writing this or publishing it, but what the hell, we'll write it off to medication and sickness induced insanity. That or the fact that the cable is out and I'm stuck here at the house, sick, without enough functioning brain cells to rub together to figure out how to stream something on the computer.

Polenta, Anyone?

2011-10-04T08:51:00.002-05:00

My Italian grandmother is about to roll over in her grave, but I'm going to say it anyway. I cooked polenta for the first time in my life a few days ago. I don't know why I've always avoided it. Perhaps because I didn't like my grandmother's polenta that well and I'm also not a huge grits fan. Yes, I know I may be disinherited by my Southern grandmother for that comment. I guess I'm just batting a thousand today.

Anyway, I made polenta. It was good. Too good.

Why did I make polenta? Because I wanted to make Tamale Pie. It's something I hadn't had in years, but I remembered when my mom used to make it and that I really liked it. Usually when I think back about the foods I really liked from childhood and decide to make them I'm disappointed. Something about tastes and taste buds changing between childhood and adulthood. So I wasn't holding out a lot of hope for the Tamale Pie recipe that I've had hanging around for more years than I can remember.

In fact, I think the only reason I didn't throw the recipe away is because my mother wrote it out for me on spiral notebook paper and I am just so sentimental what with the raggedy edges where she tore it out of the notebook and her handwriting. Did I mention my mother has the most beautiful handwriting I've ever seen?

Anyway, I made the Tamale Pie. I forgot to buy a green bell pepper, but since I'd just gotten back from a special trip to the grocery store, I made do without it.

As with any recipe I make I have to improve upon it because almost everything can use a little improvement. Right? Anyway, I put it in the oven and let it go and when it came out I stood looking at it. I don't know what I expected it to look like. I don't think I ever saw my mom's Tamale Pie before it was on my plate. It always looked like a sloppy mess on my plate, but what I was looking at in the casserole pan was pretty. A nice white layer on the bottom with a cheerful, chunky red on top.

I let it cool for a while then busted into it and Oh.My.God. It was better than what I remembered. Miss A tried it. I could tell before she even took a bite it wasn't going to go over well. She has texture problems with a lot of foods, but after she scraped all the polenta away she thought it was pretty good. Next time I'll make it with a rice option for her. I think it would be good that way too though I find the polenta so filling and satisfying.

So here is what I did in case you want to try it. It's not exact so you'll have to just wing it in places.

Make polenta. 1 cup cornmeal, 4 cups water, a dash of salt, a couple of tablespoons of butter. Bring the water to a boil, whisk in cornmeal and salt. Reduce to a slow bubble and go for around 15 minutes. You'll have to taste it (carefully) to make sure the corn doesn't still taste raw. Pull off the heat, stir in the butter. Spray a 9x13 casserole dish with cooking spray and pour in the polenta. I did this the day before and stored overnight in the fridge, but you could let it set up while you cook the topping.

Make the tamale topping part. 1 lb. ground meat (I used venison), 16 oz. tomato sauce, 1 chopped onion, 1 chopped bell pepper, chopped or sliced green olives, shredded cheese, cumin, and powdered oregano.

Brown the meat, onion and bell pepper. I do this all together and call it done when the meat is done. If you're using hamburger you'll probably want to drain it at this point. Pour in the tomato sauce, some crushed cumin seed, powdered oregano and green olives and heat it through. Now, I don't know how much cumin and oregano I used. I just eyeballed it. The green olives are another thing too. My mom's recipe called for 2 tablespoons. I used at least that much, probably a little more as the olives are what I remember made the dish so good.

Okay, so pour the meat mixture over the polenta, top with cheese (I used a combination of a Mexican blend and cheddar), pop it in a 350 or 375 oven for about 20 minutes.

So a little more about the olives. They make this dish what it is. I don't know if another salty item would do the trick, but if you try it, let me know how it works. Another thing that I enjoyed with this rendition, but I may do differently next time is the cheddar cheese. Because the venison is so lean there's not a lot of fat.
When the cheddar melts it imparts a bit of grease over the whole dish which is a change for the way I typically cook. I would definitely not recommend only topping with cheddar as I think the dish would just float in oil and that would be yucky!

Anyway...

You may be wondering how we actually had the time to cook and eat food at our own place at this point. That is due to Miss A's lovely cousin from Seattle being here over the weekend and me being sick. It seems that being sick and not being able to go around her mom piqued my exploratory cooking interests.

I tried a homemade chocolate pudding that turned out okay. I think I'm offended by the texture of arrowroot powder in pudding. Definitely not like the pudding texture you get with cornstarch. Someone I read described it as stretchy. That's pretty accurate though I also find it somewhat slick. It does however give the pudding a fantastic shine.

Anyway, that all happened Friday before I got so sick I couldn't really focus anymore. Then Miss A's cousin started sending food. She is a really good cook and I've had a fantastic lentil soup and spinach quiche. I hear the chicken was good, but I couldn't really get on board with that adventure.

I was at the doctor yesterday only to find out he thinks it's a virus. I've had the worst sore throat in memory, laryngitis, fever, a rash, and a lot of pain. I'm finally starting to feel better. Thank goodness. I'm still in quarantine until this afternoon if I don't run fever again today.

I won't say that it's all worked out well. Miss A had to take her mother to the ER Sunday (as I predicted), they admitted her and Miss A has not been home since. Her cousin left yesterday. Thankfully I wasn't so sick that I needed a lot of help because frankly I'm not sure what we would have done. It's been lonely though. I did see her briefly yesterday after my doctor's appointment.

The girl who sits with her mother is coming this afternoon to sit with her in the hospital so Miss A can come home, shower, and prep for her class this evening. That is if they don't get sprung from the hospital.

I'm pacing this morning. I guess I'm tired of being stuck inside. I've been trolling online looking for something interesting to cook, but every time I try to decide on something it makes me tired and I realize there's no way I can focus enough energy to complete something new. I've successfully cooked myself some tater tots this morning and I've eaten way too many of those for it not to be lunchtime.

So anyway, polenta? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Why?

A Nice, Relaxing Weekend

2011-10-02T13:06:00.003-05:00

That was the plan anyway. Turns out I woke up not feeling so hot Friday and by the time I got to the office I was considering that showing up for work was a big mistake. Fortunately I only had two clients and was home by 1pm.

The rest of the weekend went downhill from there.

Every single thing we'd planned to do this weekend has been cancelled because one or the other of us has felt so bad we couldn't leave the house. Yesterday morning we were going on a Solar Home Tour. She felt so bad we decided to cancel. I was relieved because I felt like ten tons of hell were riding me, but wasn't going to admit it because she had been so excited about this trip.

Last night we were going to go out to dinner. I felt so bad it was all I could do to call an order in. She drove and I staggered inside to pick it up. It was a sad sack situation.

After dinner I laid on the couch shivering until I finally took my temperature and watched the thermometer skyrocket up to 101.5. Sigh... Tylenol, an ice pack on my head and a couple of glasses of water later and it came back down to 100. I took that opportunity to go to bed.

The fever broke some time during the night as I woke up in a sweat. Then I went back to sleep only to wake up scratching my neck several more times. When I finally got up this morning and looked in the mirror I realized that I had a full blown rash on my neck and face. Sigh...

I got a little concerned, but then remembered that I'd been itching for a couple of days ever since I changed my facial moisturizer. Apparently, it has something in it that I really am allergic to.

Miss A sorta freaked out when she got up and looked at me so I called my sister-in-law (who is a nurse) and talked to her for a while. She agreed it was probably the facial moisturizer making the rash.

We thought we were going to get to hang out on the couch a bit before Miss A needed to run off to Huntsville for a meeting, but it was not to be. Her cousin called (the one who is sitting with her mom this weekend) and was hinting strongly that she needed to come over.

Miss A's mom woke up sick Thursday, but refuses to admit that she's sick because she has "company". So I figure they're going to be in the ER before the end of the day.

So that's what we did with our mom-free weekend. Looks like we're going to have to work on being more healthy for the next one. It's coming up in November and we have a wedding to go to so that should be fun.

A Decade Without Sleep

2011-09-27T11:15:00.002-05:00

Years ago Miss A was diagnosed with a handful of food allergies. Tomatoes, potatoes, soy, dairy, and corn were on her no-fly list. In response to this devastating news, we bought a book called, “A Year Without Food.” I remember wondering how anyone could go for a year without food.

This book theorized that if you could go for an entire year without eating anything you were allergic to (and all its relatives), then all would be well. It had explanations and recipes and it was all very interesting. I can’t say that it worked as the lists of foods she was supposed to avoid for a year included everything except for broccoli and grass. Meal preparations were a nightmare and it wasn’t long before she was eating whatever she wanted again.

Then her allergy doctor decided she was no longer nor had she ever been allergic to any kinds of food. Again, bullshit. Her face turns beet red when she eats soy or tomatoes, she gets damn near narcoleptic when she eats white potatoes, she gets chest and lung congestion with dairy and corn.

It was never anymore apparent that she continues to have food allergies than Sunday night when she’d had enough of being sick and dealing with her mom. We went to Sonic and splurged on an Oreo blast. I knew it was a bad idea. She knew it was a bad idea, but we’re both emotional eaters so what the hell. About halfway through that ice cream she started barking up a lung.

Yesterday the doc called in antibiotics and more cough meds. She doesn’t seem to be getting any better and it’s been over a week at this point. She hasn’t been this sick in a long time. I’m tempted to say since before her non-existent food allergies were diagnosed, but I can’t be for certain. She’s been sick a lot.

And they’re spraying cotton in the south right now. I don’t know how it affects her, but it sure gets me. This morning it was foggy and the moisture in the air held the chemicals close to the ground, I suppose. Every year they spray and it takes me a couple of days to realize what that smell is that’s so sickening and immediately gives me a headache. This morning I managed to get my vents closed off before the headache set in. Nasty stuff…

And surprisingly between Miss A being so sick and the chemical headaches, I’ve been sleeping better than I have in many years. I have blamed the cats for my inability to rest for a very long time. It wasn’t unfounded accusation, one or both were scratching or licking or trouncing around the bed disturbing me.

It seems though, that I have an apology to make to Miss Dusty. Since Blaze’s untimely departure from us, I have discovered that Dusty’s sleeping style is very quiet. She plants herself next to my pillow and either doesn’t move the entire night or disappears quietly and doesn’t return. I would say I haven’t slept this well since our last vacation, but I seem to recall the beds have been horrible our last couple of vacations.

Anyway, some other things I have discovered about Miss Dusty. She is a very clean litter box user. No tracking litter out of the box where Miss Blaze would flounce out of the box and shake each of her little white princess paws off maximizing the fly range of litter bits. Dusty also does very little scratching and even less slurpy grooming. She has also gotten more aggressive in her insistence that she, like the dog, needs someone to hold the door when she wants to go out. She’s also historically been pretty quiet, but has had a lot to say this last week since she’s become Only Cat.

It’s actually been interesting watching the change in dynamics in our home concerning the animals. In talking to Miss A I asked her how come it was the animals that either were mine or adopted me that were such a pain in the ass to live with. Her response was that animals take on their owner’s personality. This did not win her any points. In fact, she lost some points over that little comment. She doesn’t know what difficult is yet.

And so I picked up Blaze’s cremains from the vet Saturday morning. We haven’t buried them yet. Perhaps this weekend… we’ll first have to clean up and prune back the mint pond to get to the site. It’s gotten a bit wild back there.

Speaking of the weekend, we will be having an unexpected and sorely needed break. Her cousin is coming in to stay the weekend and take over mom duties. We haven’t decided what we’re going to do with two whole days to ourselves yet. Perhaps we’ll be able to accomplish something we’ve been putting off because we can’t string enough uninterrupted minutes together. There are a lot of those things lying in wait.

Like the garden. Nothing is producing at this point and the weeds have taken over. I have a lot of herbs that I could harvest for drying. Maybe that will be my project this weekend, a good weeding and cleanup of the garden. Oh and did I mention I planted our cool weather experiments? Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage and some other cabbage are the victims this time around. Perhaps we will finally have some luck with the cabbage. I wonder if squash bugs like crucifers. Hmm…

Must figure out if I just spelled crucifers correctly… I’ve been having a lot of trouble lately with my spelling. And also pronunciation. I tried to read something out loud to Miss A a couple of days ago and stumbled and fumbled and tongue twisted along until I finally looked at her and asked why I was having so much trouble. She, wisely, didn’t say anything.

This has been going on for a while. My general brain function just doesn’t seem up to par anymore. Even when I’m having a good day, i.e., well-rested, happy, and relaxed, I’m ~~fpggomg[ pver~~ (see what I mean?) fogging over and having trouble controlling my brain and its many faulty instructions.

Whatever it is my brain is not working the way it used to. It’s all confused and making bizarre connections between things that used to be ordinary, every day things, like killing flies and birds falling out of the sky dead and then that dead chicken on the bridge next to an abandoned tire. And sometimes things in the shadows move if I’m not looking at them. Used to I always thought it was a mouse and sometimes it would be a cat, but now it’s just a little creepy sometimes.

And so now I realize that I’m sounding like a freak again. I guess I’ll go find something productive to do until this thing passes and I can pass for a perfectly healthy individual again.

Hard & Tired

2011-09-21T10:13:00.001-05:00

So to say the last few days have been difficult is a massive understatement. It’s been painful, though differently painful than when we had to put Miss Lacey to sleep. Perhaps it’s that Blaze’s injury/illness was so short-lived and there wasn’t months of hospice-type care required. Perhaps it’s because she was a cat and was somewhat less human-oriented than the dog. I don’t know. All I know is that it has been easier in one way and harder in a different way.

Easier because every moment wasn’t concentrated on her health and well being; harder because of the wondering what happened and whether I could have done something. And then there’s that element of, ‘did I hurt her when I picked her up that morning,’ and the inner odyssey that kicks off. Sigh… it’s hard.

Add to this Miss A’s sick as a dog with her allergies. Her quacko of an allergy doctor thought it was a good idea to take her off all her meds to test and see if the shots he’s been giving her for the last 13 years (I’m not kidding) are doing any good. I always thought the object of allergy shots was to get the patient where they had some tolerance against what they were allergic to. Obviously with our pollen counts in the high range and her being sick is all leading to THEY’RE NOT WORKING. Sigh…

And the new cleaning lady came yesterday. I’m not thrilled. The house was passable for what I paid her, but still I wonder when people quit taking pride in the job they’re doing. Also, she apparently brought her daughter with her to help. I would have been okay with this had she asked or told me that’s how she worked.

And then there’s the dog issue. Apparently, when Miss A got home from her doctor’s appointment and came downstairs after they finished cleaning, they had put the gray mats on top of Rosie girl and left. I presume she wouldn’t move out of the way for them. This is not uncommon; she has difficulty getting up off the floor which is why the mats are there. Unfortunately when you drop something on top of her when she can’t get up, she still can’t get up and was trapped. Miss A had to rescue her. The more I think about this, the more it pisses me off. Miss A said neither of them ever spoke to the dog when they arrived and now that I think about it the lady essentially ignored her when she came in the door to look at the house.

Perhaps I need to make a checklist of all the things I need to ask a prospective cleaning person. What I’m doing now just isn’t working. I always feel like I didn’t tell them half of what I needed to tell them before they’re out the door and gone. I’m going to make a checklist.

And I need a haircut. At the same time, I’m kicking around the possibility of growing it out again. I know this is a bad idea, but Pinterest and all those lovely updo’s are making me envious. When I had hair long enough and thick enough to updo I didn’t know how to updo. Isn’t that always the case? Perhaps I will open my mouth this time and have the girl cut my neckline the way I want it cut. She’s been whacking it off square for the last couple of cuts and I find that very unattractive. And lord knows, I need help in the attractive department right now. I’m tired and wrung out and I look every day of my age. Sigh…

Cue the Dirge

2011-09-19T18:36:00.008-05:00

So by the time you read this our little Blaze will have walked the rainbow bridge. I don't know if that's what you call it for cats, but I'm used to dogs so I imagine it will be the same for her. I like to think that Lacey will be waiting for her to show her the way.

Where to start? Friday she was odd before I left to meet my afternoon clients. I couldn't identify anything specific so I went to work. By the time Miss A and I got home she couldn't stand up. Her rear end just wasn't working right and she kept falling over. The vet was, as usual, fantastic and waited for us to get there even though they were technically closed.

They really couldn't figure out a specific thing that was going wrong and gave her some fluids and antibiotics for the fever she had and told us to come back in the morning if she wasn't feeling better. Saturday morning she was worse with even less function in the back legs.

We took her in and they drained her bladder because she was full and hadn't gone since they took the urine sample Friday afternoon. They did some more stuff to her and gave her a steroid shot. The vet told us that if she didn't regain some function from the shot there was not anything else they could do for her with her pre-existing kidney trouble. She's 15 years old and she used up all of her nine lives about three lives ago.

We're still not clear what happened. We had a repair guy in Friday morning working on some things and we speculate that she might have run into a door facing running from him or jumped wrong or perhaps her arthritis finally impinged on something. We just don't know.

She has been quiet and still all weekend. There's been a lot of holding and she's told many of her stories. Obviously the steroid didn't help. In fact, I think her function is even worse. She alternately has no muscle tone or is completely spastic.

The most heartbreaking part of this, aside from losing her altogether, is that she is still the same old cat. She's seemingly not in pain and when you pick her up or sit next to her she is alert and pays attention and talks to you just like she always has though at a markedly lower volume. This whole process has apparently affected something that controls volume along with an inability to go to the bathroom. So it's just a bleak outlook and we've decided it will be kinder to let her go than make her live like this.

Her appointment is at 4 this afternoon. I've taken the day off to spend with her. She really can't be left alone at this point anyway. She can scoot herself around which is heartbreaking in and of itself reminding me so much of Lacey's last days that I have to pick her up and carry her.

Miss A has spent the weekend somewhat bereft at the prospect of all of this. She alternately apologizes to the cat and then tells her that she made me cry and teases me about falling in love with a cat until I laugh.

The stupid cat literally attached herself to my ass when Lacey died and adopted me. Now she's going to gut me, I guess. She gets the final revenge. I can't seem to stop crying and she's not even gone yet. I am dreading this afternoon and at the same time I am ready.

She spent her life raising hell and doing exactly whatever it was she wanted to do. To see her unable to do anything is heartbreaking though it has kicked my mothering instinct into overdrive. It would be so easy to be selfish in this situation. But we just can't. She's given us too much.

Rest in Peace, Hellcat, Demonspawn, Devilchild, Paininmyass, etc., etc., etc., and one more. Your sweet cooing and beautiful green eyes will be sorely missed, as well as your invaluable assistance with all that laundry.

Thursday Ramblings

2011-09-15T11:31:00.003-05:00

So I was looking at the calendar and it seems that next Friday is the first day of autumn. Today feels like autumn. It is yummy and lovely and after I left home I realized I probably should have worn a shirt that covered up more of my neck. My mother has teased me for years because I spend the winter in turtlenecks. Mostly because cold air on my neck gives me a sore throat, though the older I get it seems to also give me a crick.

I could feel it coming on as I drove to work this morning so I’m going to have to be careful through this weather transition. Perhaps this is an opportunity to bust out some of my lovely scarves I’ve been knitting on for the past few years. I have a curly cue one that might be just the ticket. It was a pain in the ass to knit so I need to get some mileage out of the thing.

Anyway, while I was at the filling station this morning, delightfully shivering while my car had a good drink, I was approached by an older gentleman. He was very nice and asked about my gas mileage. I drive a hybrid and I get this a lot so no worries. Before he even spoke I pegged him as a Jehovah’s Witness and sure enough by the end of our conversation I had the literature. He was interesting and not pushy so I was good with it, that and knowing that when the car was full the conversation was over.

It was an interesting technique I’d never seen used before. Of course, it’s probably one of the few places left around here that he could get away with that. Part of the time he was talking I was thinking about different scenarios that could come of this if he weren’t a nice man. Thankfully he was nice and considerate and we were both on our way as soon as my car finished filling.

And then driving in to work I watched a state trooper try to pull someone over for speeding. Whoever it was was still driving, albeit slowly, when I finally passed them. I would hate to be that driver when they finally pulled over.

I’m sensing a change in myself this morning. I’m still tired, but there’s an inner calmness that I haven’t enjoyed in a while. I don’t know if it’s the weather finally giving us a break or the tidal hormones finally receding or that it’s Thursday and I know I don’t have to do the commute from hell tomorrow. Probably a bit of it all and I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.

Perhaps part of it too is that I’m working on getting my diet cleaned up again. I had PMS so long this time around I took to eating my way through it. Not good for numerous reasons, the main one being I feel like crap when I’m drinking co-colas and eating ho-hos for breakfast, lunch, and supper.

Speaking of feeling like crap, I’m pretty sure we’re going to be in the vets office with the dog sooner rather than later. Her nose is crusty and she won’t let me put anything on it. She’s having lots of trouble getting up. Not so much down, her legs just give out, poor thing.

We’re back to putting down the gray mats in the house. If you visited during Lacey’s last days, you know what I’m talking about. They’re so unattractive, but it’s better than watching the scramble of her trying to haul herself up off the floor.

I’m scared about the coming winter. She’s always had a hard time with her joints when the weather changes and she’s already having a lot of trouble now. I dread walking with her through this next stage of her journey. It’s going to hurt like hell and there’s no way not to do it with her. She’s such a sweet soul and given us so much. We owe her more than we’ll ever be able to give back.

And in happier news, I’ve “hired” a cleaning lady. She comes next week for the first time. I hope she’s good. I’m still not feeling the relief though. I told her no dusting. Hopefully that will force me into not relieving myself of the responsibility of actually digging into the things that really need to be done, like cleaning out drawers and cabinets and closets. The last time I swept things into the drawers and cabinets and closets when the cleaning lady was scheduled to come. Now that I have more at-home (snort) time, I should be able to start cleaning out some of those old messes.

I know I’m tired of every nook and cranny being crammed with things and stuff. Time to get busy and purge again. It really baffles me how fast we collect things that we don’t need or use. I guess I need a few boxes. Hmm…

Busy Signals

2011-09-13T11:58:00.001-05:00

I thought they’d gone by the wayside. Apparently I was wrong. What really surprises me is that it’s a business. I suppose I just expect that most all businesses will have multiple lines in-house to handle calls or at least bypass voicemail that will take care of incoming calls if the main line is in use.

So I guess I’m just going to sit with the redial button for a while until I get through. My violin should be ready today, but I don’t want to drive all the way across town if it’s not. Lord knows there are other things I could be doing with an hour.

Not that I feel like doing much of anything today. I slept well. Things have developed in the hormonal department that should have me feeling better, but I’m still sitting with the blahs and the blues. I’m so tired of it all. So tired that I’m considering taking a week off of work.

Of course I don’t know that I want to use the vacation time to do that. There are a couple of classes coming up that I want to take. Both involve some weekend time, but usually when I do that I need a day to recover and get everything back where it belongs. I don’t know. Maybe I could get in a better mood and actually feel better if I took some time off.

Anyway, I was having visions of some Zumba tonight, but I have a plumber coming to check Miss A’s water heater which isn’t doing its job properly and a lady coming to look at the house to see if she might be interested in cleaning for us every couple of weeks.

I used to actually feel a little guilty about hiring a cleaning lady. Gone are those days. I don’t have time and when I do, I’m exhausted thus we will again be making room in the budget for a cleaning professional. I would say that I’m relieved, but I think I’ll hold that thought until I actually meet her and see what she has to say. We’ve had such varied (bad) experiences with cleaning people that there’s a major undercurrent of dread surrounding the whole experience.

Okay, so they finally answered the phone and they can’t find my violin. This is not good. I’m reserving the freak out until tomorrow when I call back and talk to the guy who is actually supposed to be fixing it.

Oh, The Disappointment…

2011-09-12T11:01:00.002-05:00

So have you ever gotten up from your desk or the couch or wherever you’ve been sitting concentrating and as you walked away thought, gee, I believe I have finally lost some weight, these pants sure are feeling loose?

Well, I’ve been having that experience a lot lately. Unfortunately, it’s not weight loss doing it, it’s the pants. One pair won’t stay buttoned. I don’t know what its problem is. I button it, they’re not overly tight or overly loose, they just won’t stay buttoned anymore. Then the other pair won’t stay zipped. I don’t know if it’s because the shape of my belly is changing or what, but I’ll be walking along and feel a breeze and yep, that zipper has headed south again.

It wouldn’t be so bad except it’s my only two pairs of black dress pants, my workhorses. I wear each of them at least once a week. I don’t like shopping for dress pants. It’s depressing and frustrating. I’m shaped funny which means if it fits in the ass, it doesn’t fit in the legs and if it fits in the legs the ass is sagging like a band of gypsies moved out and if it fits in the legs and the ass it’s twisting me a new waist. Sigh…

I should learn to make my own dress pants. That would require time and effort and more frustration though. I’ve been considering going back to skirts lately. They’ve got to be easier… Of course, I hate being that exposed which is part of the reason I quit wearing them to begin with.

So it looks like I’ll be spending at least one of my lunch hours this week in a store trying on pants. Sigh… not happy about this. I avoid clothes shopping at most all costs, but it doesn’t look like these pants I have are going to last much longer. All I need is to drop trou in the middle of the hallway at work.

The weekend? Well, it went by all too quickly. I could have done without all the 9/11 memorial coverage. It still devastates me. Some day I would like to go to all three sites though. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, but seeing it might help.

Miss A’s mom gave us a very hard time this weekend. It started last Monday really. She didn’t want the sitter to come, but we wanted to spend some time together. So the sitter came and she sent her home early. She sent her home early every day last week.

Friday Miss A had to dock the girl’s pay which apparently caused a lot of fuss all around. There was also a doctor’s visit where her mother was weighed and it was discovered she’d gained several pounds. This kicked off a hellish reaction in her mother as the doctor let it out that those pills she’d been taking for a couple of weeks were to help her appetite, thus resulting in the weight gain. Her mother perceived this as a loss of control of her life. Her weight and it’s continuing to dwindle was the only “control” she perceived she had anymore.

So every time we saw her this weekend, she was an asshole to Miss A. Saturday evening she was so ugly and insistent that she was just going to get in her car and drive (asserting her independence and control over her own life) that Miss A told her that before she did it she needed to get everything out of Miss A’s name so that we didn’t lose our house when she had a wreck. That slowed her down enough that she pulled out her martyr card and declared it would have been better if she had died with the cancer as it would have made everyone’s life easier.

Sigh… I don’t know how we finally got out of there Saturday evening, I just remember that Miss A was pissed off (those last two said with great emphasis). She doesn’t get pissed off easily or often so it was an event.

Apparently the sister called to talk to mom Saturday evening and was told a bunch of shit that was only about halfway true. Of course, the halfway untrue part shed a very bad light on Miss A. With the dementia on-board so strongly there’s no way to tell if she’s intentionally trying to manipulate the situation or if she truly believes what she’s telling. Probably a little bit of both. Unfortunately, there’s really nothing to be done, but ride the wave until it’s over. Thankfully the sister called the house to find out what was going on and got the real story.

Poor Miss A, she has the patience of Job, but her mother is sorely testing it these days. This morning she looked at me and said that she suspected the dreaded menopausal mood issues had finally struck her. She was still pissed off and that is just not like her. It would be good to have a break from our responsibilities. Miss A desperately needs it, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen any time soon.

So here we are waiting and hoping that today brings her mom back around to being a lot nicer. My therapist talks about these windows of awareness that dementia patients have. I hate to say that I’m ready for this window to close, but I’m ready for this window to close. It’s hard enough trying to take care of someone when it’s disrupting so much of your own personal life without them being horrible to you in the meantime.

And watching what the manipulation and craziness does to your loved ones who are dealing with it is frustrating. I sometimes wonder if our lives will ever be normal again after this or if we’ll both be nuts for real when it’s all over.

Killin' and Cryin'

2011-09-08T11:58:00.000-05:00

Internet is running so slow today I’m ready to stab my eyes out with a pencil. Sigh… I suppose I am still suffering somewhat from irritability and mood swings. Dear god, the mood swings have been horrible. One minute I’m literally crying as I drive down the road the next minute I’m furious and crying. Sigh…

I stopped at the health food store and bought some stuff called Happy Camper yesterday. It’s to help me get back in a better mood. I took one last night about 7:30 and I’m still somewhat trippy from it. I think it is helping as I haven’t been contemplating how to eradicate half of earth’s population, two cats, and every child molester and rapist. I’ve been a lot more mellow this morning than I was yesterday so we’ll see how things progress today.

Speaking of killing and mood swings, there was a monster spider on my door last night when I went to get ready for bed. When I sprayed it with bug spray, babies scattered everywhere. She must have been carrying them on her body. I felt so bad. Then she went all kamikaze and had intentions of running up Miss A’s leg. That’s when she met her final demise. Sigh… if she’d only stayed outside… and there’s the tears…

Finally Getting it Fixed

2011-09-07T11:40:00.001-05:00

So I have this violin. A couple of years ago at Christmas time, if you’re counting this Christmas will make three years this violin has been out of commission, I was messing around and managed to snap my bridge. Since then I’ve had every intention of taking the thing to have it fixed. A year or so ago I packed it all up to take and just never got around to it.

Today though, it is with me, as in, it made it to the car and I have new directions to the music store where it will be repaired and I’m waiting for lunch time to take it.

Of course, a working violin begs the question as to when I’m going to play. I don’t know. I don’t really have time. But perhaps just knowing that it’s upstairs waiting for me will call to me. Maybe just going upstairs will prompt me to actually do something about getting rid of the steel drums that are taking up space and collecting dust. I hate to get rid of them, but I’m not going to play them anymore. They are one of those, fun while it lasted relationships.

Maybe going upstairs will help me finally break through whatever mental block I’ve got going on about actually cleaning all the excess computer crap and workout crap and sewing crap and scrapbook crap and music crap. The bamboo blinds up there have needed to be fixed for years yet they’re still hanging crooked and long with their broken and re-knotted pulls.

What I’d really like to do upstairs is to strip the room bare and start over. Unfortunately it’s upstairs and that’s a little impractical considering we’d need big, muscular help to move all the furniture. I don’t think they’d appreciate moving couches and crap out just to be told to move it all back either. Sigh… I don’t know.

And there it is, those last two and a half paragraphs, that is why I don’t enjoy myself. Because anything that vaguely resembles fun gets hijacked by all the shit that needs to be done. I can’t relax without thinking I should be doing something constructive. Sigh… we’re back to there.

I suppose even being able to think through this without crying or losing my mind points to the fact that I’m feeling better about the general state of affairs, but it might just be that my therapist recommended a new supplement that I might try to help me through this. Perhaps it’s just hope. I don’t know. Physically, nothing has changed from yesterday to today. I’m still waiting for the true letdown when the hormonal tide shifts and I truly do feel more human again.

But for now I’m going to focus on visiting a music store on my lunch break. If I’m lucky the luthier will be in and I’ll get to watch him work for a few minutes. Maybe I should learn to fix violins…

A Big Dose of I Don't Care

2011-09-06T11:21:00.002-05:00

Is it totally wrong of me to not give a rat’s ass about the secretary’s new baby that she showed up with today at work? Used to I would have stood around cooing with the rest of the girls, but I just couldn’t bring myself to it today. Bad Southern girl… maybe I need to change the name of my blog cause that seems to be a recurring theme here…

Anyway, I came here to talk about the weather and how glorious it’s been yesterday and today and no I’m not being facetious. Low 60’s, wind, rain, it’s been real good snuggling weather and an unexpected treat after the months long audition for hell.

Yesterday we took advantage of the weather, the holiday and Miss A’s sitter to go catch a movie. We saw The Help which I enjoyed very much in between cringing at the monstrosity that was our culture just a few short years ago. I do have to say that they pretty well pegged the southern, mean girl clique as I’m pretty sure I went to school with some of those women.

I do sort of wish I’d already read the book though. Some day Paperbackswap will have it for me. I’m 163rd in line currently; perhaps I need to visit the lending library. Of course, I would have to finish the three books I’m reading right now to do that.

Today it’s back to work. I wish I could have played hooky and sat at home listening to the rain fall down. That would have been a much gentler way to spend the day. But what the hell, I’m planning on having a Zumba party in my living room this evening and there’s nothing gentle about that. Might as well work into it.

I Didn't Really Want To Do That Anyway

2011-09-05T08:20:00.004-05:00

So, I've been having trouble with this blog template thing. A couple of weeks ago I discovered my Blogroll didn't work anymore. I had spent hours hacking Blogger to make it toggle and expand and then more time getting all my blogs into this online application, I think it was called Blogroller.com. It was a nifty little application that handled a lot of code generation for you and put it in your sidebar and it was free and I liked it a lot.

A while back, and by that I mean a few years, the site sorta got a little disabled in that there was still functionality, but you couldn't get in to make changes to your blogrolls. I wasn't overly concerned except that my blogrolls got a bit stale after I started using an RSS reader to keep up with all my favorites.

So anyway, I took the Blogroller script out of my template because the URL is now reporting to an open site. Sigh... I guess Blogroller is gone... sad...

That was the first thing and then a couple of days ago when I was messing around I discovered that none of my toggles are working. Sigh... so I think, maybe it's my Javascript. I recently upgraded it. Sigh... and worse, I don't know how to fix it.

I'm thinking I might just completely change my template over to the newer style. I hate to lose the flexibility, but at the same time it may just be easier altogether than continue to fight with code with time I don't really have.

Anyway... I'll fix the archives and the booklists and all that stuff as soon as I can. Just hang in there...

How My Family Does It

2011-09-04T19:25:00.003-05:00

First off, I should tell you that I've been drinking a little. Not much, but I'm feeling it already just so you know. Today has been an interesting day in my life.

Some time ago I received a 3X5 index card in the mail from my grandmother saying she was having a family reunion. I immediately dismissed it because frankly, I don't enjoy them. Okay, that's not exactly true, there are members of my family I don't enjoy being around thus I wind up having this disjointed experience wherein I thoroughly enjoy part of my family and hate having gone because of the other part. It makes dealing with family a dreaded event.

Cut to the weeks in between receiving the invitation and today, the day of the reunion, and I manage to talk myself into going to this thing because frankly I needed to see my family, take some things to them and bring some things back home.

So I checked and double checked the invitation. It said 2pm and I thought that's an odd time to have a meal, but my grandmother is old and has always been a bit controlling and headstrong so it's her party and whatever.

Miss A and I get up and it being Sunday do the mom dance (she forgot to take meds and change patches this morning so it started out nice). We got ready and headed out to the hometown arriving a few minutes after 1pm. As we drove up, I thought, 'where is everyone?' Miss A and I were the first one's there which is unusual.

We get inside and my grandmother is running in circles in her kitchen and there is shit everywhere. She's got about twelve different things going and nothing is anywhere near being ready to cook. Now, my grandmother has some dementia, but as everyone is fond of telling me, it's not that bad. Well... maybe...

So I start cleaning up and she finally gets her shit together and starts actually putting things together and cooking stuff and then she busts out the frozen solid mac and cheese. She takes it out of the box, gets distracted and walks away. I start reading the instructions on this thing and it takes 55 minutes to cook. It's now ten until 2 and still no one has shown up and I'm beginning to seriously wonder what the hell is going on.

So I'm about to shove this mac and cheese in the oven when my grandmother starts wanting to wait. I finally looked at her and said, 'it takes almost an hour to cook this'. To which she responds, 'we have plenty of time, we're not eating until six'.

Now, two things happened all at once in my brain. The first came out of my mouth, 'are you serious?' with a look of sheer incredulity. We then had an exchange about my invitation saying 2pm and she didn't really believe me and blah, blah, blah... story of my life... I'm wrong, she's right, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong... I've got it okay!

The second thing was that I flashed on the creamed corn that was still sitting in the microwave that she was heating up when we walked in the door. Why was she heating creamed corn at 1pm if she wasn't planning to eat until 6pm? I suppose this is when the, 'her dementia isn't that bad' sort of reached up and slapped me in the head.

So here I am in my grandmother's kitchen trying desperately to get everything ready because in my head there's fixing to be about 30 hungry people run through the door wanting to eat and it's nowhere near ready. Miss A and I haven't had anything to eat since about 8am and I'm entering blood sugar bitch territory.

Then a lot of things happened. People started trickling in the door and it seems Miss A and my invitation was one of two that indicated lunch at 2pm. Sigh...

So we puttered around and food came out of the oven and finally around 3:30pm Miss A and I ate and then got ready to leave because hey, we wouldn't have come if we knew the thing wasn't really going to start until 6pm. Not to mention we left her mom at home alone so we could run down for this thing and get back home before dinner time.

Miss A and I had already had a go around Saturday night about how I wasn't going to be in any mood to deal with her mom when we got back from the hometown. I had no idea just how not in the mood I was going to be. I suppose it wouldn't have been quite so bad if I had been expecting to have to do the dementia dance and if I had, had the whole story about what was going on to begin with.

Anyway, for a long time I've been agonizing on why I get so pissed off, tore up and upset about Miss A's mom and the amount of time we spend caring for her. One is the effect she has on Miss A. Her mom is like an addiction to her; it's all she thinks about morning, noon, and night and it's not healthy.

But today I found something in my family that shed a bit of light on why it bothers me so terribly much and it had nothing to do with the effect her mother's illness is having on her. It has to do with the way my grandmother has been and has treated me all these many years. You see, she's a bossy, controlling, old bitch. The family likes to pretend she's not until she does or says something so terrible she has to be dealt with, but there it is and I, I have been a whipping post for her for many, many years because of something that happened to me that she blamed me for.

And Miss A's mom, she's a bossy, controlling old lady. I won't call her a bitch because by and large she's not, though she does have her moments. I've known this for a long time. There was this trip to Texas many years ago which upon our arrival back home to Alabama I declared that I would never, ever take a road trip with her again. But it never occurred to me why her bossy, controlling ways pissed me off so badly.

I guess I just thought it was because I like having my way and I don't enjoy anyone trying to manipulate or control me. Shame on me, bad little Southern girl I forgot I was supposed to smile and swallow when that shit hits the back of your throat. Apparently, not so much... there's something deeper here and today it came full circle.

I'm thinking I won't be volunteering to go to another family function for a long, long time.

So anyway, we get home, Miss A repackages the leftovers to go to her mother and as she's walking out the door tells me to be in a better mood when she gets home. Thus, the alcohol... I'm trying, I really am even though most days it doesn't look like it...

Dear Blogger,

2011-09-03T06:52:00.000-05:00

Please stop fucking with the way my template works. You're giving me a panic attack.

Thank you.

I Can Feel It

2011-09-01T11:21:00.002-05:00

Something has changed. This morning I stood under the shower shivering turning the water ever hotter trying to warm myself. I think it might be fall coming. Maybe it’s just in my head as it’s definitely not cooling off here yet. Muggy and mid-90’s again today.

I will not lie and tell you that haven’t been dreaming about waking to temps in the 50’s and going outside to enjoy the goosebumps. I have. Every morning when I feed the chickens and slap at mosquitoes I dream about having to put on a coat to go out and converse with the cluckers.

They all seem to be doing well. The new chickens are growing and are bigger now than when Miss A brought them home. I still try to pick each of them up and hold them for a bit every day. Recently that’s been happening in the morning and they really like my pink crock shoes when they’re hungry. They like them so well, in fact, that someone got overly excited and pecked me on the top of my foot this morning. They just missed drawing blood and left a blood blister.

I’m still amazed at how far I’ve come about being pecked by chicken and not freaking out. Now I just stand there shuffling my feet and saying, stop pecking me on the foot while they look at me wondering what the heck I’m going to do.

Of course, after playing around in the pen with the big chickens I went to feed the little chickens and asshole rooster tried to flog me again. He did it yesterday and is making a habit of trying to get me when I pour their food in the feeder. One of the side effects of being around the big chickens is that I’m no longer very scared of him. So we had a Mexican standoff over the feeder. He’d try to flog me and I’d push the feeder and bump his chest. This went on for three or four iterations until he got pissed and started pecking the girls on the back of the head. I think it’s safe to say, I hate that rooster. Not just because he’s an asshole, but because he’s also a bully to the girls.

Anyway, we’ve been talking a lot about winter coming and how we’re going to keep the birds warm. I still don’t know what we’re going to do. We’re no closer to combining the little birds and the big birds. I know we need to get rid of asshole rooster, but I just haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. Perhaps I should list him on Craig’s List as a free bird to good home. Hmm…

So I’m hoping my body is right and is trying to tell me that fall is coming sooner rather than later. I’m hoping the break in this hellish weather will lift the mood around our place. It’s somewhat bipolar currently. Momentarily it may be happy and the next sad. And dealing with the constant repetition is taxing to say the least. Even when we’re not with her mother, it weighs.

Funny anecdote about her mom… during her chemo she lost a couple of teeth. Those two teeth were anchors for a bridge. Recently she got a permanent replacement bridge for the one’s she lost. For months she’s been telling us how big this bridge is going to be and we keep reminding her that it’s going to be smaller than what she thinks. Tuesday evening when I cooked dinner for her and Miss A was still at school we sat at the dinner table while she counted with her finger jammed up in her mouth all the teeth that were involved in the bridge. Her total came up to six. In actuality it is three plus the two anchors. I just smiled, agreed, and kept eating.

I don’t guess it’s going to hurt anything for her to believe she has a six tooth bridge. It seems to make her happy that she has this amazing thing in her mouth. She seems to be eating better too, but that may be because of the mystery medication she’s taking that she doesn’t know what it’s for. She hasn’t asked and we haven’t told, but every time she takes the pills she asks how much longer she has to take them. Hopefully for a while to get some weight back on. I don’t know if she’s gained anything, but I do know that even though she will tell you she’s not hungry when the food hits her plate she forgets to say grace she’s so busy shoveling it in. And that is not a bad thing when you’re watching someone who had been wasting for the last several months.

Anyway, no clients tonight and I’m looking forward to relaxing a bit. Last night there was a beer served at our place. Maybe tonight there can be another. Or maybe not I just remembered that no clients doesn’t mean relax, it means cook then go spend an hour or so at her mom’s and then come home exhausted and clean up and finally collapse on the couch fifteen minutes before bedtime. Damnit…

Knocked Off the Tracks Again

2011-08-30T19:28:00.000-05:00

So it’s been a few days since I wrote anything. Mainly because, once again, I got sideswiped by life.

It started last week with a double homicide just down the street from my massage office. It was at a fast food restaurant that I don’t eat at and I didn’t know anyone who worked there, but still, it was shocking and it has made me sad.

There’s been other stuff as is wont to happen with life. It just keeps marching on as you roll around in the gutter, mewling and trying to get up.

I am struggling again. Against what is a good question. Nothing seems right, but then nothing seems any more wrong than it’s already been. I’m sad and I’m happy all at the same time. Most days I just feel like I’m going to go ahead and lose it altogether.

I would say I need to see my therapist, but we’re what, two years in and nothing seems to be changing on the grand scheme of things. Every month it’s the same ebb and flow around my hormones. When I’m not PMSing, I’m finer than fine. When I am PMSing I’m angry and lonely and lost. It’s frightening and frustrating and I’m really, really tired of just wanting to run away from myself for half the month.

Add to all the inner turmoil and I look around casa de domestic bliss and it’s a falling down, filthy wreck. I’ve been looking for a cleaning lady, but the only lead I’ve gotten is a Guatemalan illegal who is purportedly very nice and conscientious, but I can’t risk getting busted by our new state laws that are currently in flux and so here’s looking at me some more.

And my business is sucking wind this month. I thought it was related to school starting back, but then I learn that Alabama is entering into another recession. Great…

I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping up with the bills. They just seem to get put aside and I think, ‘I’ll do that tomorrow’ and then I don’t and well, let’s just say that I got a piece of mail yesterday that reminded me I hadn’t paid my credit card bill in two months and they really wanted me to pay it. Sigh… this never happens, yet, the mortgage was late this month and my credit card was late. Sigh… thank goodness for the internet and those nifty money transferring programs.

Speaking of the mortgage, I did get inordinately excited as I drove to work this morning and realized that we’ve chipped it down to 6.5 years of payments left. Yay us!

Anyway, the kitchen is waiting for me. I don’t think it prudent to let that pan I cooked the fish in tonight linger. Maybe I can find a bottle of wine while I'm in there cleaning.

Hold On To the Seat of Your Pants

2011-08-23T11:07:00.004-05:00

It may be a bumpy post today…

So you know how the world is small and weird? Well, yesterday it got sorta small for Miss A and definitely weird. Perhaps you remember from a few years ago when I had my own personal stalker. Well, last night Miss A was over in Huntsville for a board meeting on a board that she serves on and they had their meeting, strangely enough at a grocery store.

Anyway, follows is the text exchange we enjoyed while she was at her meeting:

Miss A: Do you know an Addi? This guy at Publix just hit June up for an engineering job.
DB: Addi Carriesapurssi? (name changed to protect me from being found) My stalker?
Miss A: Short, dark curly hair w/ grey alittle bald spot
DB: Pakistani. Extraordinarily hairy. Not much taller than me. Glasses
Miss A: That is him checker at Publix

This guy used to be an engineer, but had some trouble controlling himself and did stupid shit like throw documents at customers when they asked him to do his job.

Several minutes later another exchange
Miss A: Weirdness shows!
DB: Yep. It’s like I always say if there’s a weirdo, freak or nutcase in three states they’re drawn to me. Which is why I’m surprised that JL isn’t madly in love with me yet…

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Perhaps an overly developed sense of giving the odd duck a chance? I need to be meaner apparently.

***

Bok bok! The chicken feeder in the new coop is broken. Again. The babies seem to get overly excited about their food and do this circling thing around the feeder which unscrews the wing nut and eventually the whole thing falls apart.

It’s easy to fix. It’s just that I forget it’s broken until I’m dumping food into it. Which is in the morning and usually I’m already dressed for work and should have left fifteen minutes ago and I just don’t have five more minutes to fix it.

They’re hysterical to watch eat. Now that the feeder is on the ground they still circle around it, but the little roo keeps trying to put his foot in it. He’s been doing that from the first day he got here. Put a piece of watermelon out there and he runs over and puts his foot on it like it’s going to run away while he eats it. Anyway, this feeder doesn’t allow him to do that, but it hasn’t yet deterred him from trying. I think this behavior is part of why it’s constantly falling apart.

Did I tell you that we’ve named all but one of the “big chickens”? Yep, we have a Buffy, a Bo (short for Bocephus), Lucy or Lucille (as in Ball, you should see this crazy ass bird), and a Matilda. The only one not yet named is the one we thought was a Rhode Island Red, but turns out she’s actually a New Hampshire Red. I haven’t come up with a suitable moniker yet. Suggestions are welcome.

***

Have you ever woken up and remembered a conversation you had except you don’t know who you had it with or when except you know it was a recent conversation and it was interesting and you remember facts so you’re pretty sure it’s not a dream, but not convinced it wasn’t a dream after all? That happens to me a lot.

I recently acquired a small piece of information about gin and tonic and how it came to be. Apparently on the sailing ships of old rickets were a dreaded affliction. Tonic was apparently one method employed to combat rickets, but the sailors didn’t like the taste of it and refused it so gin was added to make it more palatable. Thus rickets were prevented and gin and tonic was invented. Hee hee…

Anyway, I woke up thinking about this little story and started trying to remember where it came from. I decided it was a dream then after about half an hour of trying to do other things I finally sifted far enough down in the brain pan to find the conversation. It happened Friday afternoon. Sigh… sad that it only takes a few days to damn near erase anything that’s not traumatic.

***

I think I’ve finally identified my tapeworm. It’s the new “vitamins” I’ve been taking. That in combination with running out of my regular multi-vitamin and taking a substitute has screwed up my metabolism. The new “vitamins” is a powder that makes your water “fizzy” and allows “superior absorption” of a bunch of stuff that I wasn’t actually looking for, but allowed myself to be talked into.

What I was looking for was a simple magnesium supplement. It makes sense though. I’ve been without my mag for a little over a week now and I haven’t felt right in about a week now. So… I’ll be going back and getting a true magnesium pill that I can take twice a day like I used to and start feeling like myself again.

***

I finally slept last night and boy do I feel a lot better. I attribute it to once again having to take a pill and that the cats took my threat to heart and left me the fuck alone while I was trying to sleep.

Is it wrong that I very much want our very pregnant secretary at work to hurry up and go out on maternity leave? I don’t know why. Well, I sorta do know why. She’s adorable. Or at least she was before she swelled to three times her pre-pregnancy size and it just friggin’ hurts to look at her now. She’s still cute as a button, but dayum, how long can someone stay that swollen without permanent side effects.

Kinda feels like we just drove sideways over a plowed field, huh?

Well...

2011-08-22T20:36:00.002-05:00

Inflected in my best Southern Belle voice. I just discovered that my blogroll was hopelessly broken. The website for the application doesn't even exist anymore so... I have completely lost my blogroll.

I may try to do something permanent later, but for now I'm just ready to go see my pillow for a while.

That’s Me

2011-08-22T11:17:00.003-05:00

So recently I went to a meditation class. I figured I could use a little meditation. I had learned a little about meditation from yoga all those years ago and it was something I’ve always wondered about and been somewhat interested in so when the opportunity arose and I didn’t have clients beating down my door, I went.

It was interesting. Not what I expected, but then I didn’t really know what to expect. The part that was unexpected I think was the intuitive part of it. The ~~leader, instructor, teacher, guide,~~ the person in charge of the class was somewhat intuitive. She spent a few minutes with me and started telling me things about myself that I didn’t realize were so obvious. The first was that I was practical and lived my life very pragmatically. Yep… there’s me, nothing but practical. It’s a curse sometimes.

Then we did some breathing and being quiet and concentrating on nothing for a little while. I did pretty well after about the first 14 minutes during which my nose itched, my foot cramped, my back started hurting, and my right leg decided it did not like sitting on the floor at all. The exercise lasted 15 minutes and I was just getting into it when she called time. Sigh…

Then the instructor did an exercise with me after which she and one of the other ladies in class who was my Reiki instructor declared that I am a “child of light”. I don’t know what that means exactly. Perhaps Google can help? Because it sounds good, but dayum, I don’t feel very good.

In fact, I feel like I have a tapeworm or something. I’ve been hungry for days. And angry. I don’t know if I’m angry because I’m hungry or hungry because I’m angry or what the hey is going on.

Yesterday I spent the day cooking. I was scared to eat too much of it though because it had cream cheese and sour cream and sigh… it was way too good. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I ended up making an extra recipe and freezing it so life will be easier some time in the future when we don’t have anything for dinner.

It’s a new plan we’re trying to put in place. I’ve been threatening the investment cooking thing for a long time, but have never done it formally. My plan is that whatever gets cooked that is freezable gets doubled and half of it is frozen in appropriate sized containers. This way we stop struggling with food for Miss A’s mom.

We’ve recently run into a new roadblock with the food issues. As if her refusing to eat enough to keep an ant alive weren’t enough she now doesn’t like leftovers. Last week Miss A stopped at a place on the way home and picked up a Chicken Tetrazzini casserole that they make. It’s excellent and easy. You just pop that sucker in the oven and half an hour later dinner is served.

Well, it’s way too much for one meal for three people. So I cut it in half before she put it in the oven and froze the other half of it for later. She cooked it and we took it and her mom decided that she just didn’t want anymore of that; she’d already had it enough times. It was brand new, but since I took half of it out straightaway she assumed it was leftover. Sigh…anything not to have to eat. So we continue to struggle over the food issues and I have stopped worrying about the fluid issues as she’s having to have IV fluids on average once a week anyway because she stays dehydrated.

Anyway, back to the child of light stuff. I am planning on going back to the next class. I am really in serious like with the instructor’s puffy, bean bag chair thingy that’s not really a chair but more like a ball full of buckwheat or something that molds to your body and let’s you sit on the floor, but not really. Hard to explain, but I want one for everywhere I haunt. My ass hurts from sitting on it all the time and it would be great to get in a more ergo friendly position for sitting around.

Stop sitting, I know you just thought it. Yes, it’s just that easy, I suppose, but then I suppose it would be easier if I weren’t stuck. Stuck at work, stuck at home, stuck in the car, stuck, stuck, stuck… waiting… sigh… I’m hoping the change of season that is surely coming will help unstick me. I started working on an old knitting project last night. That’s something. I haven’t worked on the knitting for a long time. I’m almost halfway done with the cardigan I started hoping to have done before summer was over.

Anyway…

Try It Before You Buy It

2011-08-19T11:19:00.004-05:00

I recently had a conversation with a work friend. She is very different from me, married, two kids, big house, the whole bit. At the same time she is somewhat similar. Lots of responsibilities, somewhat psychotic over the state of her house, too many jobs, etc.

Anyway, we were talking and in the course of conversation she said, “That was back when Hubs and I were looking for a place to live in sin.” I just shook my head because really, no big deal. Then she said, “We don’t talk about that in front of the kids, but that’s what it was.” And again I just shook my head because really, no big deal.

But then that little snippet of the conversation kept coming back to me and niggling away. Something isn’t right here, over and over and over again until I was just sitting there thinking about nothing and something and suddenly it became clear why it was still bothering me.

It’s the ‘we don’t talk about that in front of the kids’ part. Why do people do that? I’m baffled as to why they hide things from their kids that obviously worked and are still working for their relationship.

No it’s not standard fare in these parts. Yes, they go to church and yes, the church would frown on it even now that they’ve been married close to twenty years and have a successful marriage and family. But really, you want to send your kids out into this big, mean world without all the tools available to them?

I’ve always been a try it before you buy it kind of girl. Test drives are good things. Practice makes perfect and all. And even with my philosophy I’ve had several dismal failures of relationships. Most were my fault. If I’d had the backbone to stand up early on and say, “I’m not putting up with this shit! Either reform or get the fuck out,” we’d all have been much happier.

I know there’s a contingent out there that just shakes their head and thinks (says) that if I’d gotten married before living together, fornicating and whatever else it is we do that is against the grain, my relationships would have worked out. I’m calling bullshit on that.

Relationships work because the participants have the tools and emotional skills to make them work. This littering of the way and withholding is stupid. It’s hard enough to be happy in this world. It’s hard enough to find someone to love that will love you back and be good to you. Why do you want to make it harder by pretending that there’s only one way to do it?

Bitch, Bitch, Bitch…

2011-08-17T11:43:00.002-05:00

It’s turned out to be a week filled with conferences and seminars and I’m really tired of it all. Of course, if it weren’t for all the activity I’d just be sitting somewhere waiting on someone to give me something to do. Sigh… never satisfied. Nope, not me. Of course, if it were massage-related I’d be flying, but no… it’s suits and ties and people overly impressed with themselves.

I’ve not been sleeping well so that just makes it all worse, I suppose. The reason I’ve not been sleeping well is my own damn fault too which makes it, oh so much worse. You see, Sunday evening I got down in the floor to do some stretches. Well… one thing led to another and I started goofing around trying to do some things that one should not be doing at forty and only half way in shape.

I decided to do some leg raises. You know, where you lay on the floor and lift both your legs perpendicular to the floor a few times just to make sure you still have some abs under all that flab? I did five. I counted them and decided to stop there because it had been a really long time since I’d done any core work intentionally. Plus my muscles were cussing at me already. Anyway, got up Monday and things weren’t so good in the lower back region. The longer the day went on the worse it got until I was sitting at my desk with pain shooting down my left leg and my back spazzing out intermittently. Hmm…

So Monday night was not comfortable between the continuing shoulder pain and the now freaking out lower back. Tuesday dawned with less severe leg pain, but a still very unhappy low back and a crick in my neck! I wore an IcyHot patch to work yesterday. Do you know how bad those things stink? I didn’t care after tossing and turning all night long and still hurting like a mother.

Last night I was feeling better enough to do some stretching and compression work to try to get things to settle down. The shoulder, I am happy to report, is responding well to the rotator cuff exercises I’ve been making it do. Maybe by tonight I will be able to sleep without it waking me up. The lower back is still pissy, but much better than it was. Maybe by tonight I will be able to sleep without it waking me up. The crick in my neck is gone as far as I can tell. Whew!

So if all goes well today, I may actually get to sleep tonight. Except there’s still the cat problem. Did I mention that we have a stray cat who is valiantly trying to adopt itself into our family? It gets up on the porch and meows and howls and cries and is just a pitiful thing. Thus, our house cats get all, “What is that?” and wide-eyed and terrified and come bedtime they try to crawl under you to sleep. Sigh…

I feel sorry for the thing, but we’re not having anymore cats inside the house. If it wants to live out there and make its own way, it’s welcome as long as it doesn’t tear anything up or hurt anyone.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on today. Seems like I should be writing of things of more import here, but here I am doing the best I can. I feel as if I’m being consumed by something I have no control over and I’m doing the very best I can.

Writing a little every now and then seems to be all I’m managing. Scrapbooking has gone out the window. I haven’t taken a picture in so long I can’t remember. I knit a few rows when I think about it, but usually I don’t think about it until it’s too late. I try to stroll through Pinterest every couple of days. That seems to be scratching my creative itch somewhat right now. Though, fall is coming and it’s starting to cool off a little (if you can believe that can happen in Alabama during August) and I want to do some stuff for the house, but I don’t know where the time or the energy is going to come from to do it.

I will be glad when I get my life back. Unfortunately, some very painful decisions are either going to have to be made to have that or Miss A’s mom is going to have to take her final step in this earthly journey. I don’t see either happening anytime soon though. Her mom is not well, but also not at the end. And so we wait…

Scattered to the Wind

2011-08-15T10:56:00.001-05:00

You ever have one of those days where no matter what you do you can’t seem to get the tractor cranked and headed in the right direction? I’m having one of those kinds of days today.

I’m up. I’m awake. I even have a list, but I just can’t seem to get anything done. I’m not overly excited about anything. So I don’t know what’s going on. I do know I have to get my shit together before 12:30 though. There’s this meeting where someone is going to try to skewer me and I need to be prepared. Sigh… love my job.

Speaking of loving a job, I had to fire one of my massage clients last week. I don’t know what else to call it. He is an 80+ year old man who sincerely thought that massage therapists were prostitutes. He was astonished when I informed him I didn’t do that and told him to get up and put his clothes on. To make it official, I wrote him a letter and sent it to his address of record. It was an uncomfortable experience and I’m seriously re-thinking accepting any more elderly men as clients.

And now not talking about my jobs, I went to a party Saturday night where we surprised a good friend and I experienced Patron for the first time. The party was nice, lots of police stories floating around. I like cops and hanging out with them. Some are interesting personalities. Perhaps it is because most of them are men, I don’t know. I just know that I enjoy hanging with Miss A’s popo friends.

I always learn something. Like the game W0rds With Friends. Who knew that existed? I may already be addicted. And also that Patron can cure an aching shoulder. Perhaps it’s just that I had just enough for my brain to turn off the pain signal from the shoulder. I don’t know what it was, but I paid for it yesterday apparently.

My shoulder hurt like a mother all day long. I finally capitulated and did the heavy duty research, drug out the rotator cuff manual and started doing the exercises. I also took my first ibuprofen in almost a week yesterday. That bout of vertigo last Tuesday scared me off of it for a while. It was rough too considering ibuprofen is the only thing that touches cramps and I went through a whole week of menses without it because I didn’t want to fall out of the bed in the middle of the night from the spins.

Anyway, the shoulder is feeling somewhat better today. I brought Miss A’s big, green rubber bandy thing to work with me though so I could do my exercises during lunch. I’m tired of hurting. Of course, it’s also a learning opportunity. It’s good for me to experience some of these aches and pains my clients are experiencing. I think it makes me a better therapist when I know where to go to get to their pain. And it also allows me to give them tips on stretches and exercises. I just wish I could figure out what I did to hurt it so I could avoid doing that again.

And did I mention that our weather finally broke overnight? Yesterday it was “cooler with less humidity”. Funny thing was I still sweating like a mother. This morning it was below 70 when I went out to feed the chickens. The pool was steaming and it was so cool. It was heaven. I can’t wait for fall to finally get here. Summer has been way, way too long this year.

What Happened?

2011-08-14T06:56:00.003-05:00

Ten days since my last post... I'm not exactly sure what happened. I've written a dozen posts for here in my head, they just never seem to make it to electrons.

Last weekend I spent in a conference room learning some new whiz bang massage stuff. Then Monday I took the day off to catch up on some stuff around the house. Then Tuesday I woke with vertigo and spent the whole day sick as a dog. Thank goodness I didn't have clients scheduled.

The rest of the week was a whirlwind between work, clients, functions and parties. I don't know what the hey is going on today, but I plan to spend it piddling about the house. Maybe spend a little time outside if it doesn't rain. I keep hearing we are going to get a break from the hellish weather. Maybe it will be today.

Tomorrow starts another week. Currently I'm not looking forward to it. Maybe there will be more time to blog. Maybe my brain will be in blog mode.

Hello PMS

2011-08-04T11:56:00.001-05:00

Hello PMS. I won’t say it’s nice to see you. Last month was so nice when you didn’t show and I had hoped that you wouldn’t show again this month. I am disappointed.

Your pissy moods are really bringing me down. I was well on my way to being able to ignore the laundry piled in the laundry room floor, the peach peels and pits stinking up the kitchen sink, and the floors in desperate need of the vacuum’s attention. I was really enjoying the fact that I hadn’t mentally skewered anyone in quite a while as well. That gets exhausting, you know, reliving all those slights that I try to forget. Thanks for bringing all that shit up again. I fail to see how it improves my character. It sure as hell does nothing for the peaceful, stress-free attitude I’ve been cultivating lately.

Anyway, I hope you choke on your own damn hormones. Have a great day!

Sleeping Weirdness

2011-08-03T11:43:00.001-05:00

So last night in the middle of the night one of the cats woke me up. She was next to my head, slurping, which always pisses me off, but even more so when she wakes me up doing it.

As soon as I woke up I realized I had to pee, of course, and my brain started racing. So up I get and shuffle to the bathroom to take care of business. Then I lay back down and wonder why my brain isn’t sleeping? And why does this happen every single night when the cat wakes me up?

I laid there long enough that I had a whole blog post composed in my head with a really cool title all the while telling my brain to shut the hell up and go back to sleep. This morning the really cool blog post and title is gone. Poof! Sigh…

Then I dreamed one of the new chickens got out of the coop last night and I had to chase it around the garage. Yes, the garage. They are still in the garage. Miss A worked all day yesterday in between heat strokes to get the permanent walls on and still we lack an access door for the nests and the feeder and two narrow panels to finish the back wall and roof.

Sigh… the back wall and roof would have been finished yesterday except the tin snips just wouldn’t cut the tin in the longitudinal direction. We have a neighbor who is a ductwork professional and he says he has a tool that will do it. I’m thinking it’s time to just go ahead and invest in a recip saw. Maybe someone will need a birthday or Christmas present soon… hmm…

Anyway, Miss A had a sleep study done last night. It was flight of the bumblebee at our place trying to get her mom dinner and her packed and out the door to make it to the hospital on time. She texted me a picture of herself about 9:30 last night and they still weren’t done hooking up all her electrodes. She had already been assimilated and I sure was glad I wasn’t there to see it. Stuff of nightmares… I don’t know how anyone actually sleeps with all that crap on them.

She told me that periodically through the night a voice would come over a loudspeaker and tell her to turn over. I would be out of there. I know what my sleep issues are. Their names are Dusty, Blaze, and Miss A. One slurps, one tries to lay on my head, and one has hot flashes. They all snore occasionally.

Miss A says she’s tired of sleeping away from home. I can’t blame her, but I have enjoyed the sleep of the dead while she’s been away. Sort of anyway, if you don’t count the cat.

A Home For Wayward Chickens

2011-08-02T11:05:00.002-05:00

Perhaps the title is a bit unfair. The new chickens didn’t do anything to, “get themselves in trouble,” as my grandmother would have put it. Nonetheless we now have five new chickens and the Taj Mahal of chicken tractors. Or at least it will be the Taj Mahal of chicken tractors if we ever get it finished and I’m having serious doubts that it’s going to be a tractor in the sense that it may just be too freaking heavy to move. Of course, considering it’s in the garage currently, it’s going to have to move some time so Miss A can have her parking space back and uh… we can clean up all the chicken shit and food that’s scattered everywhere.

Anyway, on to the chickens… Of the new flock, we have two Buff Orpingtons, one Barred Rock, one Rhode Island Red, and one Red Sex-Link bantam. They are all two to three months old so no one is laying just yet and the roo is just beginning to chase the girls around though I’m not sure he could do anything about it if he caught them.

It’s been an interesting few days around our place. Friday night at 8pm we started building this new coop. At midnight we had it framed in and went to bed. The next morning Miss A drove away to meet her sister in Monroe, LA to do the chicken exchange and I started stapling chicken wire to the thing.

Have I mentioned lately that it’s not just hot in Alabama right now, but more like hell dropped into an erupting volcano? So I spent most of Saturday and Sunday stripped down to underwear and sometimes less out in the garage stapling away. I finally figured out I could only go for about ten minutes at a time or risk giving myself a heat stroke. So in between stapling sessions I watched a couple of movies and three episodes of TrueBlood from season three. It was not how I had planned to spend my weekend, but it worked out.

Miss A arrived home Sunday around noon. We spent a couple of hours cleaning up the chickens and getting ready to go to a memorial service for a friend who recently passed from ALS. Sad…

Anyway, Sunday night we worked more on the coop. Last night we worked more on the coop. The chickens love it even though they’re still in the garage. I’m pretty sure they’ve been in a much smaller pen up until this point as there was a lot of sparring and flying over each other and bumping chests going on the first evening we threw them in the coop.

This morning before I left we had to take them out of the coop and put them back in the dog boxes for safe keeping while she finished the walled in section of the coop. I called a few minutes ago and she was very discouraged and frustrated as the building of the nesting boxes wasn’t going well. Apparently she got one almost finished and it broke before she could get it completed.

Hopefully by the time I get home this evening it will be done and we can move it out into the yard. Not sure how it’s going to go with them sleeping outside. These chickens are used to air conditioning and people picking them up and holding them. This morning everyone had to get petted as they went into the boxes. So funny… I’m concerned about the heat too with them going from A/C to the garage which is a good 20 degrees cooler than outside to fully outside in the over 100 heat indexes. The last thing I need to do is explain to Miss A’s sister that we killed her chickens.

Anyway… that’s how my life is progressing right now. How’s yours?

Flowers Floating in a Random Sea

2011-07-28T11:21:00.002-05:00

As you probably already know from experience or reading here there’s always something going on at our place. Right now it’s a handful of things that have either just finished or are about to start.

I’m nursing a shoulder injury. I say injury although I don’t really know what the heck happened to it. One day it started to hurt and got worse and got worse and got even worse until I adopted BioFreeze as my best friend and it is finally getting better. If you haven’t tried BioFreeze roll-on, I highly recommend it.

Miss A woke up yesterday with a big toe issue. Today it is worse and hot and red and streaking and I’m somewhat scared about it. It doesn’t help that she’s in training all week for some green energy stuff that she’s really geeked about. I’m hoping it improves on its own without medical intervention, but we may be going to the doc in the box tonight if it’s not any better.

Saturday promises to be an exciting day. She’s leaving for somewhere in Louisiana where she’s meeting her sister to do a chicken exchange. I have a massage scheduled for Saturday afternoon. After my massage I plan on watching True Blood and Beastly. I hope this new guy doesn’t hurt me.

Some time between now and when she gets home Sunday we have to come up with a chicken coop for the new chickens we’re getting. She’s been drawing on a piece of paper for weeks now trying to figure out what to build. I’ve just been staying out of it.

I am somewhat concerned at this point though that we’re going to have two roos on site and it’s going to get ugly. Perhaps time to do as I’ve been threatening and get rid of our mean little banty roo.

It’s almost time for school to start. Miss A has had virtually no summer. The reasons are varied, but they center mostly around caring for her mom. I think we’d all be crazy if it weren’t for the sitter and we’re about to have to alter her hours so she comes five days a week instead of four. That should be an interesting adjustment for everyone concerned.

There are job changes on the horizon again. I can’t really share it here until something is decided, but I feel sure there is going to be at least one massive career change in our household before the end of the year.

Speaking of job-related stuff, I think I may have gotten one of my boys back at my work. He came to me yesterday with glad tidings and cautious optimism. It lifted something in my heart that I hadn’t realized was so heavy. I hope it all works out. It would be lovely to have him back in my life every day.

I have birthday cards that need to be mailed. I’m late on them, again. Poor kids… I hope they don’t depend on me to make their birthday special. This year it’s going to be money and I have a feeling it’s going to be money from now on. They’re all getting to the age where they need to learn to use money anyway and frankly, I don’t have time to stand in the toy aisle and remember who got what last time. I’m giving myself permission to stop the toy-buying insanity.

We found out yesterday Miss A is going to have to have a sleep study. This morning as we trudged back up from the mailbox where we’d spent time in our pajamas cleaning up strewn garbage (did I tell you about the new neighbors? and their dog?) she told me she didn’t want to do it. Apparently the CPAP is not for her and she doesn’t want to have surgery either. But first things first, I’m going to have to convince her it’s ok just to have the information.

I sort of feel like all these different things are like those flower floats that people put on the water with a candle and send out to sea to honor someone. I wish it were that easy to release all of it. I’ve been practicing with releasing a lot of stress lately. It seems to be working. I seem to be less stressed overall.

The only real meltdown I’ve had lately was last week when the sister-in-law and kids were here and I tried to cook burgers on the egg. That was stress. It seems every time they’re here I try to cook on that damn thing and it either doesn’t get hot or gets too hot.

Anyway, back to the stress part, I’ve worried that this practice of letting go would result in an absence from actually living a life. The jury is still out on that part though it has been nice to disconnect from the crazy for a while and just go with the flow. I suppose I still fear living a wasted life. Though it’s hard to know one way or another what is waste and what is the actual living part.

I have a couple of books on the wing that talk more about this low stress, acceptance stuff that I’m working towards. Maybe they will help me with the lowering expectations to manage stress part of it all.

For now though I’m just going to chill and wait for this infernal summer weather to break.

Picking My Nails...

2011-07-19T11:27:00.003-05:00

Just sitting here picking my fingernails trying to figure out what to write about today…

I guess I’m just waiting for lunch and then waiting for time to go home. I don’t have any massages scheduled for tonight. I try to leave Tuesdays open so I can go to Zumba, but I don’t know if I’ll make it tonight or not. I have to cook dinner and with the kids coming tomorrow there’s just a lot to get done.

The girls always use my bathroom and it is seriously nasty right now. So bad that I was embarrassed when the plumber came out and fixed my toilet on short notice. Usually I like to at least dump the trash can and pick up the magazines and books scattered about.

Right now though, mold and mildew are the big issue. My bathroom doesn’t have good ventilation and the fan sounds like a 747 trying to take off on your head so historically I’ve not used it, especially in the mornings when I have low tolerance for any kind of bullshit. Unfortunately, mornings are when I shower, pumping the largest amount of moisture into the room. I’m reluctant to leave the fan running during the day when I’m not there. Somewhere in my pea brain I equate it with leaving a hair drying running and expect the house to burn down from it or something.

Anyway, as soon as I find the time there’s going to be a redo of my bathroom. I’ve had the same décor since we built it and before that I had the same décor in a different bathroom at my house. So I’m a little tired of it and need a change.

The issue of time came to a head this morning when Miss A went in my closet to get yoga mats out. Her back is killing her and we use the mats for her to lay on while I walk on her hamstrings and glutes. Not ideal, but it works in a pinch. Anyway, she came back with the mats and very diplomatically said, “What can I do to help you get your closet organized?”

You may remember the last time she helped me organize something it was the horrendous mess that is my scrapbook area. Still love it, but I don’t think it turned out exactly as she planned.

Anyway, my response to her question was another question asking if she could give me some extra time. To which she responded, “That closet is the biggest shit hole in the entire house.” I was somewhat shocked by her harsh judgment and criticism of my closet, but mostly by the language, I think. Shit hole or shit heap are usually my words to describe something that has grown out of control and needs to be cleaned.

Perhaps it also shocked me that she would notice what a wreck it all was. I am guilty of internal dialog that swears to me she sees and notices nothing if it is something that needs to be cleaned. It has recently been pointed out to me, repeatedly, that this is not true so I am trying to change the internal dialog. This exchange also doesn’t hurt when it comes to the re-training efforts.

Patchouli Dreams

2011-07-18T11:04:00.002-05:00

I’m back! Still stinking of patchouli and wondering where all the weirdos came from and subsequently dispersed to, but back nonetheless. And when I say weirdos, I affectionately include myself among their ranks.

There were all sorts of people at this massage conference. Mostly I hung out in the vendor hall helping at the booth which gave us all a front row seat to some of the hi-jinks being passed off as massage-related these days. There was lots of spa-related weight-loss stuff, lots of the “newest” whiz-bang massage appliances, lots of creams and oils and aromatherapy gadgets and gizmos, and there was even an honest to god psychic reader doing readings all weekend long.

I would have liked more time to mingle and check out the other vendors’ wares and techniques, but our booth ended up with only three people to staff it the entire weekend and we were booked solid. Saturday I did six massages… and there were at least that many or more done by the other two therapists with me.

I met a lot of interesting people and surprised myself at how easy it was to talk to people about our massage and why they really wanted to pay money, take time off work, and come learn with us. I even got a massage Saturday afternoon which made the whole weekend worth it!

Of course, there was the dorm experience. My roommate was a hoot. If you’re familiar with the Lion-Camel-Turtle-Monkey personality typing paradigm you will understand when I say she is a Monkey. I am a Camel. It could have been disastrous, but I was feeling mellow and knew we were only destined to live together for two nights and three days. She was very nice overall and we will probably keep in touch through our mutual business contacts.

The bed though, I hope to never sleep on a dormitory mattress again. It was a slab of concrete disguised by some slick, blue, polyester, waterproof covering. And it didn’t move except for the one place where the last student had sat on the edge of the bed in the same spot over and over and over again until it broke. Thus, my entire first night I spent trying not to get tossed out of the bed as I rolled into the broken down butt print. Of course, I was freezing to death as well that night so all the exercise I got hauling myself back up onto the mattress proper kept me from accidentally expiring.

The next night I put my head at the other end of the mattress and it went better except for the concrete slab portion of the experience. I cannot stress enough the importance of a good mattress to sleep on. I don’t know how these college kids do it. Perhaps their ~~jones and boints~~ bones and joints being younger than mine don’t wake up in protest?

Anyway, the drive to Western Carolina University was beautiful although terrifying. Chattanooga, one of the worst places to drive through with speeding semi’s through mountain passes, then Cherokee National Forest with speeding semi’s through more mountain passes, then Nantahala National Forest with speeding semi’s through more mountain passes, and finally a college town. Woo hoo! I’m surprised I actually made it there and back without getting mashed. Getting to watch the white water rafters zoom down the river as I was driving was pretty cool though. Maybe someday I will try the white water rafting thing. It looks sorta fun.

So when I got home yesterday afternoon I went in and lay down on my bed and thanked god for it. Somewhere in my sleep-deprived and exhausted mind I had gotten confused and thought I would never get to sleep again. Last night though, I slept the sleep of the dead and woke on time for work with no alarm clock. That rarely happens.

I’m actually looking forward to this week quite a bit. The sister-in-law is coming Wednesday with the kids and I’m only commuting Monday and Tuesday. I still have massages scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, but we’ll make it work. I’m hoping to convince the sister-in-law to lie on my table while she’s here.

Anyway… I guess that’s about it for now. This post has developed into something I didn’t see coming. I had all these other things I was going to talk about. Oh well…

Busting the Roadblocks

2011-07-13T11:33:00.002-05:00

So you know how sometimes you get to thinking about something and the next thing you know you’ve convinced yourself it’s a brilliant idea and then you think about it some more and get excited about doing it (whatever it is) and then you get ready to do it and then you do it and then you’re all like, this is dumb? I’m there.

So instead of doing what I was going to do today I’m going to do something else. Please be patient and kind while I try valiantly to snap myself out of these long streaks of blog silence.

So here it goes… I’ve been eating tomatoes for my morning snack lately. And as I was slicing my tomatoes this morning I realized that the small tomatoes I brought are about the size of one of the wedges off the one I brought yesterday. Yesterday’s tomato was a German Pink. I wish I had a picture. It was almost as big as both my fists put together and it tasted awesome. Today’s tomatoes? Who knows what they were, but they weren’t nearly as large. The taste was also not as good.

I think it’s safe to say that this year’s German Pinks and Cherokee Purples are the showstoppers in the garden so far. We should be getting bell peppers soon and I’m holding my breath to see if we get any squash. Miss A planted it late to try and short-circuit the squash bug issues we’ve been having. So far the plants are huge and my mouth waters every time I look at them.

Of course, the compost pile is growing the most impressive squash plant either of us has ever seen. Not sure what kind of squash it is, but hopefully it will fruit. Did I mention Miss A started using the lasagna garden method this year? She also nabbed an organic fertilizer recipe that had me running all over the city and ordering stinky mushroom crap off the internet trying to amass all the ingredients. It was worth it though. We have the first successful garden in over ten years of attempts.

Anyway, so far we’ve gotten potatoes, tomatoes, and strawberries out of the garden. There’s still sweet potatoes, squash, and bell peppers to come. The okra wasn’t doing well last time I looked so I’m not hopeful. Everything else was ornamental, herbs or a test. I think for the first time ever I’m thankful and excited that we have a garden. Normal garden years I look out upon the dirt and weeds with disgust and disappointment.

Speaking of disappointment, I was talking to the fig tree this morning. We have gobs medium-sized green knots growing on the fig tree. It’s done this before. Put on tons of fruit only to sit there and stay green. I’m going to be pissed if once again I get no figs after watching them grow all season. Of course, I may be complaining about not being able to give enough away in a few weeks. Who knows?

So there’s a page… Yay, me! Tomorrow? Don’t bet on it. I’m driving to Western Carolina University all by myself and I’m apt to be tired and who knows what the computer/internet situation is going to look like. I’ve been burned by promises of “free wi-fi” the last two vacations we’ve been on.

Catching Up For Now

2011-07-12T17:45:00.003-05:00

So a lot of water has passed under the bridge since I last put pencil to paper here. I've been blocked again. I seem to stay that way on a permanent basis these days.

Sometimes I think, "I should get out my paper journal and give it a go," and then I don't. I think, "I should knit," and then I don't. I think, "I should work on my scrapbook," and then I don't.

I seem to be spending way too much time on pinterest looking at beautiful things and recipes and crafts I'd love to do and then not actually doing anything. It's depressing and I don't know how to get out of the rut. The actual getting up and doing something part is just too much effort. Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's just the crushing load of stress we've all been under, I don't know.

Life seems to consist of putting one foot in front of the other still. Hopefully that will change soon.

My job, although the news seems to be improving, is still causing much stress. I have prepared mentally to be unemployed. As of this morning perhaps that's not going to happen. In a way I am disappointed.

It looks as if Miss A will be retiring before the end of the year. Another unexpected employment fiasco there what with the state screwing around and changing the laws making it impossible for her to stay until the end of the school year. It's either retire or plan on teaching 13 more years. Not exactly what she had in mind.

On a more positive note, Miss A's cousin was here last weekend allowing us to get away for three whole days. It was glorious. We went to Callaway Gardens and Roosevelt's Little White House over in Warm Springs, Georgia, and if you don't count the heat, we had a fantastic time. I can see us visiting there again when it's not July.

And speaking of heat, I don't know how it is where you are, but Alabama is auditioning for a part as Hell. I am just hanging on until fall gets here. Rosie is suffering from the high humidity with the accompanying high temps. The chickens spend their days panting. We have a mouse living in the house. I can't blame it for taking its chances.

There's a good chance we're about to take on five more chickens. Miss A's sister is having to unload some birds so Miss A will be driving to TX later this month to pick them up.

And speaking of traveling, there seems to be a lot of that on the schedule for the next few weeks. I leave Thursday for North Carolina to spend the weekend demonstrating at a conference. I'm excited about it and wish I didn't have to go alone. Unfortunately, with no one around to watch Miss A's mom I have to go by myself. Same deal with her going to TX to pick up chickens. Someone has to stay.

Fortunately we will both be home when my sister-in-law and the kids come up. That's something I'm looking forward to already!

Oh, what else... insulation... we had more insulation blown into the attic today. It's been a long time coming and hopefully we'll start to see some difference in the cost of our utilities. They've always been high, but the heat so far this summer has pushed it well over previous utility bill records. We're still talking to the appropriate people exploring the geothermal heat pump option. Hopefully that will come through soon.

I'm sure there's more, but as usual, I can't remember... that seems to be happening more and more lately...

Lost and Found

2011-06-30T11:53:00.002-05:00

So a while back, right after the tornadoes hit in fact, we lost our party fridge. I’m not sure if I talked about it here. So much happened during that period of time that I don’t really remember what I wrote about and what I didn’t. Nonetheless, we lost our party fridge. No it didn’t get struck by lightning or just poop out altogether after the power outage. We lost it voluntarily.

It was the second (possibly third) such voluntarily lost “appliance” in our household. The first being our gas logs which went to live in Miss A’s mom’s fireplace. I still have a sticky place in my craw over those. The agreement was that she would find new one’s and we would get ours back. That was two or three years ago and she’s burned them so much that I don’t want them back now. Some time last winter, I think, we agreed she would purchase us a new set of fire logs for our fireplace. That hasn’t happened.

The other possible appliance was my lawnmower. It got sold / traded for Miss A’s mom’s lawnmower. I still have a sticky place in my craw over that as I just didn’t see the need in the trade or the money we had to lay out. I’m pretty sure we got screwed on the deal even though it was her mom we were paying. Seeing a pattern here?

Cut to today and the party fridge. When the tornadoes hit the power went out and we spent days without power making it necessary to clean out fridges and freezers. While we had everything empty, Miss A decided that her mom’s crap ass refrigerator with a broken ice maker needed to go and we would take our party fridge with a working ice maker and put it in its place.

So she called her mom, they agreed, and we moved the fridge. No small feat though we did have two small, strong men do all the heavy lifting. Her mom came home from her shelter in the storm and promptly got pissed because, wait for it, she forgot that she agreed to the refrigerator swap.

Ever since then her mom has had a hate on for our party fridge. Then a couple of weeks ago the ice maker started leaking water. I don’t know how that happens, but it did and it made those nice little ice cubes into a block of fused ice cubes. Yesterday the repair guy came out and declared the ice maker unfixable. Actually what he said was he wouldn’t do what it would take to repair it for fifty cents, but rather he would charge $150 to replace it.

Anyway, her mom was furious and when Miss A finally talked her down they agreed to pull her old crap ass fridge with a broken ice maker back into the kitchen and we would take our much beloved party fridge with a now broken ice maker back to our house.

I cannot tell you how relieved I am to have the party fridge back. It looks a little odd as I’d gotten used to the hole where it had lived, and there’s no decorations on it, but I’m relieved. Maybe tonight I can put the beer back in the party fridge and make some room in the kitchen fridge. Having a place to put food in the fridge will actually be a huge relief. Especially since we’ve got to cook for a party we’re going to Sunday.

And so for the first time in a very long time I almost feel like the world righted itself just a little bit. I don’t know why a refrigerator would have anything to do with it. Perhaps it’s that I look around the house and see a lot of things that need to be fixed or refreshed and the follow-on thought always entails something to do with how there’s no time to do anything except work and take care of her mom and then sit and stare at a wall while trying to find where my brains went. Perhaps it’s because by dumb luck or perhaps a swift kick our party fridge found its way home and all it cost us was fifty bucks. It may also be that Miss A and I had the big talk about how we’re not solving anymore of her mom’s problems by taking our things to replace hers.

Lost and Wandering

2011-06-27T11:10:00.002-05:00

I think my rope must have broke or the knot gave way or something because I find myself lost and wandering. Not knowing which way to go so just picking a way and going with it.

It was a difficult weekend. We spent Saturday in the hospital with Miss A’s uncle giving her aunt a break. Her uncle is improving slowly, but he seems to have bought the corner on complications from open heart surgery. Sunday we spent with her mother and step-niece which went ok until it was time for them to go home and all hell broke loose.

Her mother decided she was just going to drive home and then come back for dinner. Which would have been okay except her mother hasn’t been able to drive since her surgery in November and between the medication making her dizzy and her dementia causing her to startle and panic or clean forget, it’s just not safe. So Miss A had to tell her no and that’s when things got ugly.

I think I feel most sorry for the niece. She’s in the middle of a family situation that is by marriage and she gets to spend time with us about once a year. She and I huddled in the kitchen together last night when “the fight” started. I have become accustomed to the constant tug-of-war between Miss A and her mom. The niece not so much and while she handles the mom well, I would not be pleased with having to deal with this crap while I’m on “vacation”.

The struggle to keep Miss A’s mom safe is becoming more and more difficult. She just thinks we’re trying to usurp her independence. I know it’s a common thread among those of us caring for elderly and dementia patients in particular, but it’s difficult. It has absorbed us and our lives and there are days I resent it more than others.

And in the middle of all this drama and trauma, we’ve had another friend die. Miss A’s pastor, who I actually liked and respected and have spent more time with than any other member of the clergy to the point of counting him as a friend, passed Saturday around mid-day. It was unexpected and shocking and I think it’s pushed me over the edge.

I had begun to wonder what was going on, but now I’m convinced that something terrible is happening. I think it has to do with the tornado and the physical and emotional stress it caused on our area along with this brutal and relentless summer heat so early in the season. One of my clients has a sister who is in nursing and they are reporting significant upticks in the number of stroke and aneurysm cases they’re taking in. Something is happening. Too many people are dying. And not by their own hands which is way too common after these massive tragedies.

And so I wander and wonder when things are going to get better. I think we’re at the bottom now. I need for us to be at the bottom now.

Addiction - Not Always A Bad Thing

2011-06-24T10:54:00.003-05:00

So I've recently become addicted to Pinterest. Let's just say I'm having to set time limits on myself. I used to wonder how people could just sit around surfing the net for interesting things. This tool let's you find all kinds of stuff you may never have even considered before. And it's beautiful and you I can customize it and save all your favorite things so you can get back to them. I like that it's visual rather than list-based. I'll actually use this thing to go find the places on the web I'm interested in.

Anyway... go try it. It's free... just know it's a massive time suck.

Fair to Middlin’

2011-06-23T08:40:00.002-05:00

Things seem to have improved somewhat on the mood front. Of course, I’ve been slamming calcium and magnesium twice a day for the last three days. The magnesium I’ve been on, but the calcium is a new addition post some more research I did online about PMS and supplementation. I don’t know how the rest of the world is perceiving it, but I sure don’t feel like my typical raging, PMS bitch.

Of course, some of that may be that Miss A and I had a very pointed discussion yesterday morning before I left for work and she left to take her mother to the doctor. The therapist says I have to share and not hold it all in so I’m starting to share and not hold it all in. You’ll have to ask Miss A how that’s working out. I seem to feel better, but I’m not sure how she’s feeling. You see, I haven’t seen her since I left the house yesterday morning.

She took her mom to radiation, came home and packed a bag and sped off to Birmingham. Her uncle had triple by-pass surgery Monday and things were not going well. She should be home some time tonight if all goes well today. He seems to have improved somewhat overnight.

Work is not going well. This morning I hit some kind of wall. Probably because I have competitors calling again wanting resumes and applications and such and it all just makes me so tired. Then I have people calling from the new (old) contract I’m supposed to move to wanting to meet and talk and for me to decide and it makes me so tired. Then I have people sitting in my office whining about their job or their family or their dog and it just makes me so tired.

And the boss, he did the worst thing he could possibly do to me right now by telling me not to take time off. So I have no respite. I can’t take a mental health day to get it all screwed back on right. There’s no telling what might happen before it’s all over and done with.

I made reservations for the massage conference I’m going to next month. I’ll be staying in a college dormitory and somehow I’m really excited about it. My last college dorm experience was not successful. What with a Marlboro Red-smoking, Patrick Swayze-worshipping Amazon who refused to open a window or share her tv and sorta scared me in a way I didn’t fully understand. I spent as much time outside that dorm room as possible thus I don’t even remember her name. Kinda sad… Very sad actually… I ended up with no friends from college. Let’s just say that what time wasn’t spent studying was spent with the ex-hubs.

I’m hoping I get a nice roommate this time and that the food is good. I’m most excited about meeting other therapists that do the same kind of massage I do and meeting the founder. Working the booth is going to be fun and I can’t wait to troll the vendors. Imagine that, me wanting to talk to people (aka, strangers). It’s probably the first professional convention I’ve ever been excited about. The others I’ve always felt like I didn’t belong there or fit in.

I know that’s a big, blinking neon sign telling me that I’m probably in the wrong line of work, but you know it’s important to prostitute yourself for money. And that, I do well.

Anyway, free lunch today. I’m very excited about that. I have reason to believe that banana pudding is going to be involved. And I wonder why the new bathroom scales are not cooperating with my weight loss program.

I thought this morning I was making some headway when my dress pants were feeling very loosey goosey around my waist. Until I sat down at my desk and something felt a bit odd and I realized that I’d only zipped up halfway and hadn’t buttoned it up. Sigh…

You see what I mean now when I say I need some time off. My Camel is in high gear, but my Turtle is driving. I can’t wait to see the HR director’s face when my pants hit the floor as I walk by his office…maybe they’ll give me some time off then…

What's That Smell?

2011-06-21T11:57:00.001-05:00

The rotting maw of depression is yawning once again. And with it here comes the PMS. I'm so tired of this cycle. I'm tired of trying to make things better only to be cut down again and again. I don't know what to do anymore and I'm tired of hearing the gyno and GPs tell me that nothing is wrong. Sigh...

A Domestic Tale

2011-06-18T10:53:00.002-05:00

Have you ever had a rug that got dirty? You know in the garage or outside the back door. And it got dirty and you would look at it and think, "I'm going to wash that thing."

And then some time would go by and it got dirtier and you would look at it and think, "Man that thing is dirty, I should wash that thing."

And then some more time would go by and all the while the poor rug is getting dirtier and dirtier and then one day after many, many moons have passed you walk by and look at the rug and think, "I don't even remember what color that rug was, I should wash that thing."

And you pick the rug up, beat it off a bit, and throw it in the washing machine. And while you're at it you remember there's another brown rug that needs washing so you go get it and throw it in too.

At first you set the machine on regular wash then you think about how muddy the water is getting in there so you set the machine on a long, hot wash and walk away to do other things.

When you come back you open the machine expecting to see bright and shiny new-like rugs and you realize that all those years of dirt were the only thing holding them together and they've sort of disintegrated into a few bits of fabric and rubber backing and lots and lots of sandy dirt.

Sigh...

We’ve Come Off The Rails

2011-06-14T11:00:00.002-05:00

Today has been what can only be described as either a train wreck or a clusterfuck. You pick, makes no difference to me.

One would think that having some resolution to the recent job distress, however temporary bordering on hellish it may be, would be cause for if not outright celebration then an ease in the constant tension. But no…

It started with a cat and a rooster this morning, some time before it was actually time to get up. They have apparently made a pact that they’re in charge of when I wake up. The rooster doing his best to crow me up and the cat doing her best to either bury my nose in her asshole or choke me to death with cat hair or both. I don’t think she was being particular this morning, she just wanted me up. So it wasn’t a pleasant wake up experience as you may imagine.

Then I got up and got ready and got out the door and got all the way to the airport (20+ miles from home) when I discovered I didn’t have my cellphone. This didn’t make me happy and I only realized that it was impossible to call someone to bring it to me as I was about to start digging in my purse to get a phone to call someone. Sigh…

This after Miss A informed me as I came from the shower that her mother’s sitter had bailed today because her kid is sick. Aaaghhh… Then the cat got sick. Well, not sick, she had one of her constipation episodes. This is where she pukes all over the house and then eventually dumps a load more the size of what comes out of a 65 lb. dog.

So after numerous and many phone calls back and forth, Miss A has successfully cleaned up the cat’s mess and acted as my business secretary and I have successfully served as hers after she was unable to complete a task from her mom’s computer. She took her mother to radiation, delivered her home, fed her lunch all after and while taking care of my business and the mess at the house and then, then she went to work. Sigh…

My cellphone is now at her mother’s house, waiting. I hope to hell Miss A turned it off else it will be smashed to bits by the old lady trying to get it to stop beeping and bleeping. Not to mention, the last person I want to try to deal with after the day I’ve had so far and going into a full complement of massages this evening is her mom. She will decide it’s time for one of her world famous meltdowns the moment I walk in the door.

Miss A is teaching this afternoon so she’ll be out of pocket for a while. Hopefully nothing else will go wrong today. I’m not sure either of us can handle it.

We’ve got to find a backup for her daily sitter. Her mom is getting worse and can no longer get through her morning routine without constant management. We’re already managing her evening routines and the sitter takes care of most of the daytime stuff. I don’t know what we’re going to do and home health seems to be creating more problems than they are solving currently.

I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time sitting around trying to figure out which of our souls are going to expire first. It’s depressing and morbid yet strangely fascinating. Perhaps it’s that we’re experiencing so much loss right now. Miss A has lost two long-time friends in the last week with another hospitalized for what they think is a stroke. Attrition rates of her police family are not being handled well currently.

She missed a funeral yesterday because she had to take her mom to the doc and they both separately told me that they watched the funeral procession as it made its way down the main thoroughfare. Miss A apparently got out of the car, stood on the roadside, and saluted her friend as the hearse carried him by. The picture of that in my mind breaks my heart.

Not sure how much more we can take. Something has got to give somewhere. And the sooner, the better.

Quick and Dirty, Hopefully...

2011-06-12T06:57:00.003-05:00

Okay, so here's the deal, Thursday morning I arrived at work to find that the contract I've been working for the last ten years or so had been lost to a new conglomerate who underbid all the competition by double-digit millions. The powers-that-be decided for that kind of money it was okay to wipe out their experienced workforce and knowledge-base.

So the day just went to hell in a large way with me sitting at my desk wondering where it all leaves me. Eventually, read that as six hours later, a manager came by and told me not to ignore any offers coming in from the winning camp. Fantastic, a job change...

Then the phone calls start from the competitor. And after a few I have a job interview Monday.

Then more phone calls and it seems my current company has found coverage for me. Until July 15 and hopefully we'll win the next contract. Sigh...

So, as it stands, I have a job interview tomorrow morning with a company I do not want to work for and who will most certainly cut my pay and whose benefits are not nearly as attractive as where I work now (six weeks of vacation is what more than fifteen years of service buys you). Or I have the option of staying put and working on a contract that I detest and would rather pull my own teeth out with a pair of pliers in the garage, retain my benefits and vacations, and hope like hell they win the contract for the follow-on work and then hope like hell we can pull something else in for me to do that will unchain me from the horrifying contract. Sigh...

I'm a little stressed out. Strangely, my first reaction was not panic. I have a nest egg I've been working on for several years. It will hold us for about a year supplemented by my massage business. I don't want to have to spend it if we can help it. On the other hand I don't want to be forced into taking a job with a company where I know I won't be happy.

The closer tomorrow gets the more I'm dreading it. I hope it's going to be one of those, 'Well that wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be' situations, but I'm not holding out much hope. I'm sick of the tug-o-war over DB thing and I'm sick of having to make decisions that end up with me agonizing over leaving someone in a lurch.

And on top of all the financial woes I'm absolutely freaking out about the personal change part of all this. I don't know how much I really talk about it here, but I don't have a lot of friends. I've developed relationships with some of the people I work with. Mostly it's the guys. A select few. Over the last few years I've lost several of them. New jobs, new cities, new friends. Add to that the group I work with has essentially dissolved and I've watched other co-workers, not necessarily close, but people I've worked with every day move on to new things.

It all adds up to a lot of loss. And I don't do loss well. My customer I currently support is someone I would consider a friend. And most of the people in her office I consider friends and friendly faces and will miss if that's the way this all ends up going. Sigh... not good...

So there it is. Not too quick, but plenty dirty. My life sucks right now and somehow unemployment ain't looking too bad. At least then I'd have time to clean the floors.

Oh, Thursday, How I’ve Longed For You…

2011-06-09T11:16:00.003-05:00

It’s not that it’s been a bad week. It’s just that it’s been a bad week. The day job has been frustratingly slow. We’re on the famine side of the curve. I can see feast coming. It will arrive two days before the contract expires and they (the supers) will expect us to continue showing up past contract expiration date to handle it. Other problems deal with trying to calm the nerves of co-workers who are in a state of panic over the non-existent follow-on contract and very real possibility that we may all be taking a substantial amount of vacation while the company tries to figure out what to do with all of us. We may be losing people again. I may be one of those people.

So… in celebration of a work week that has made me feel as if my function is useless I am planning a very laid back Friday. The morning will see me renewing my CPR certificate and the afternoon will see me performing some type of goofing off. No massages scheduled. I probably could call some people and get an appointment or two set up, but I just don’t want to. I want to float in the pool and drink mojitos until my brain is rum-soaked. Sigh…

What I really want to do is run away to a white, sandy beach where it’s not too hot, sit under an umbrella and listen to the waves crash. Eye candy is optional depending on my mood when I get there.

Sigh…

*** And after I wrote all that my day went to hell in a major way that I will talk about perhaps tomorrow

When People Talk Out Their Ass

2011-06-07T11:42:00.001-05:00

Usually I get pissed. Which happened today…

This is how it went; I spent most of the morning with people in my office consulting on their personal problems. I still haven’t figured out how to get that stopped without being rude. I think I’m going to put up a sign with a big arrow pointing next door to the HR director’s office.

Then I had to go to an insurance meeting and while there take an ethics training which resulted in a ten-question quiz.

Question number six went something like this:
You wake up with the flu and 108 fever. What do you do?
a. Not the right answer
b. Call your boss and ask if you can work from home
c. Go back to sleep, your boss will understand why you didn’t call
d. Sneak in to work and hide in your office until time to go home hoping no one will notice you’re sick.

I picked C because, well, frankly at 108 the brain no longer functions in adults and I probably didn’t wake up at all opting instead to become a vegetable or simply die. After a co-worker gave me shit about it, I revised my answer by writing below all the options, “None of these are good options.”

When I turned my paper in I told the HR rep that six was a bad question and that they really needed a better option and she said, “Oh, that was the sarcasm coming through.” To which I thought WTF, but walked away without saying anything.

Then same co-worker that gave me shit about my answer had her paper graded and of course, I got it wrong and she gave me more shit and as we left the conference room I said quite loudly that I wouldn’t be calling anyone or asking to work from home if I had 108 temperature. The look on the HR rep’s face was priceless.

My super came to visit me a little while later and when he walked in the office I told him not to expect a call from me if I had 108 fever, but I would have someone invite him to the funeral. He just smiled and turned around and left.

Yippee!!!

And Then I Returned

2011-06-06T11:14:00.002-05:00

It appears as if I have finally crawled out of the PMS hole I’ve been in for the last two and a half weeks (at least). Though I still feel somewhat emotionally fragile, as if the smallest thing could push me over some unseen edge, overall things are somewhat better. I no longer wish every needing thing a swift and final end.

The weekend was good. Friday I spent a day doing massages and a couple of voice overs. It was a hard work day, but it was good. Friday night we celebrated with friends over their recent wedding and marriage.

The party was held at a house on Pill Hill in Huntsville. I could move everyone I know in and there would still be room for some more. Wow! Who knew people actually lived like that?

Anyway, Saturday we drove to the hometown to go watch the nieces dance in their spring ballet recital. It was all about the Secret Garden this year and it was lovely. They did a wonderful job and I got to spend a lot of time with my nephew. He’s 4 and all boy. We leg wrestled and even though he was cheating with his Spiderman underwear (which he tried to hide that he was wearing) I still won once and we came out with a draw once. My younger niece also got in on the action and she whooped me though I don’t think she noticed as she lost interest. I guess I’m not enough of a challenge or something. I should be better at that leg wrestling stuff, but it’s hard and I assumed my heavyweight status and height would give me a bigger advantage. Apparently not.

Anyway, some time in between arriving at my brother’s and getting ready to go to the recital I began to feel the black fog thinning and trying to lift. It also helped that Miss A was with me and I finally began to see her personality peeking through. We’ve been so busy with graduation, final grades and closing down her classroom, my jobs, taking her mom to various and sundry doctor’s appointments, meeting with home health care, and just taking care of her mom in general on top of my horrifying PMS I hadn’t really seen her (even though she was at the other end of the couch every night) in what seems like a month.

So it was nice to watch her relax and to finally relax myself and to see her again. The ride home was filled with conversation and ironing out some hurt feelings and misunderstandings, but it was good to finally have time to talk and reconnect. We got home yesterday afternoon and piddled about the house with laundry and bills (which was super stressful considering I’d hosed the checkbook up by several thousand dollars, gulp). At least it was that I forgot to write a deposit and not a withdrawal… whew…

Anyway, the evening lazed along and there are probably things that should have been done, but it was easier to just let it all go and relax and enjoy being home again.

It’s All Weird

2011-05-31T11:26:00.003-05:00

My life. It’s weird. Not so much the outward part, at least not like you think. It’s nowhere near “normal”, but I wouldn’t put it at weird. Inside though, the inner stuff right now is in a weird place.

I seem to be changing and even saying that is not really accurate. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just weird. I don’t know what to do with it or how to fix it or if I should even try. Maybe just wait and see what happens? I don’t know.

I do know that a lot of shit has gone down recently. I should be happy, but mostly I’m not. I’m stressed and overwhelmed and confused.

Starting around when the tornadoes happened my stomach went berserkers. I thought I had gotten it under control last week until I got to work this morning and here we are again gagging and choking on the acid reflux business. Makes me wonder how much of this is my job. I’ve been researching food combining diets as it seems some lady has put together a program that guarantees to stop your digestive ailments in its tracks. Any, uh, advice or words of wisdom here are welcome.

We’ve been on a whirlwind of weddings and high school graduations lately. I think we have one more weekend of wedding commitments and ballet recitals to get through before the summer starts to slow down a bit. I’m looking forward to the weekend although it’s going to take us away from home again. During one of my more lucid moments yesterday I had the idea that I should probably start a sack of things to take home with me. Of course, that got sidelined when I couldn’t figure out exactly what needed to go in the sack. Something… I know there was something… books, yes, books, that’s it.

The up side is Miss A will be out of school this week and guarantees me that she’s going to start wrestling with some of the mess that this last weekend grabbed me around the throat and made me absolutely into a stark, raving, card-carrying, psychotic bitch.

I need a haircut. Fortunately that’s supposed to happen this afternoon. Perhaps she will chop off some of the weirdness that’s going on and I can leave it in her floor. It would be nice if that were the case. Then I’d just shave my head and be done with it.

Anyway, in between all the strangeness I’ve been seriously blocked writing-wise and again considering shutting the blog down altogether. Perhaps I need to break out the old pen and paper journal and start stabbing away at it again. Who knows… therapy doesn’t seem to be helping anymore. I’m thinking of quitting that too. Seems all we talk about is dementia and how to handle it and where Miss A’s mom is in her disease process. And that gets expensive when I’m (still) a fucking nut and her mother is the one with the disease.

Occasionally I tell myself that all this is because of all the loss we’ve experienced lately on top of losing several friends to job changes and moving across the country. Then that leads me down the you-don’t-have-any-friends path and I see that is mostly true and it scares me. Then we spend a month socializing at graduations, weddings, parties, etc and I see I do have friends, I just don’t have time for them in my life and I start to get depressed because this massage thing was supposed to take some of the time burden away, but apparently that has fallen victim to nature abhors a vacuum and how is this for a stream of consciousness sentence?

Anyway… weirdness I tell you. At least I’m sleeping, mostly. None of the animals are sick, at least when I left this morning everyone seemed healthy, especially Blaze who over exerted herself chasing a chipmunk and then got overly excited and yakked all over the floor. Stupid ass cat…

I didn’t want to leave home again this morning. That seems to be a persistent thing lately, just wanting to be at home. The problem is when I’m there I don’t know what to do with myself and I end up sitting on the couch and staring at repeats of shows I don’t even enjoy anymore. Miss A and I have been talking about doing some kind of couch to 5K thing that I heard about but haven’t done enough research on. We’re planning on experiencing a Zumba class next Monday evening. I hope that works out because we’ve got to do something.

Miss A discovered that our current set of scales are grossly out of whack and not weighing properly which means we’ve both gained even more weight and that is so terribly fucking depressing, especially when I am still actually losing girth. I’ve got to figure out how to get okay with weighing 150 lbs., but being in a size 8. I don’t know how it’s possible, but that seems to be the way it’s going. Perhaps they are making the sizes bigger again. I know they’ve done that in the past.

Anyway… just a glimpse into the bizarre and frightening. Aren’t you glad you’re not me?

Sigh...

2011-05-28T07:17:00.002-05:00

PMS is here. I'll be the one walking around with tears shimmering and threatening to spill over.

I'm not sure how I got through the graduation ceremonies last night without bawling. Watching the news this morning and every other story has me on the edge. Sigh... Going to be a fun weekend.

Hot Diggity Dog...

2011-05-25T21:02:00.002-05:00

Last night Miss A and I thought it would be a good idea to go to S0nic and get a hot dog. I got the chili cheese coney dog and she got the new york dog. They were both good. At the time. Except my stomach has killed me all day long. I'm blaming the sauerkraut on the new york dog.

I'll be glad when this is over. It is no fun...

Why I Hate Roadtrips

2011-05-23T07:48:00.001-05:00

DB: I need to go to church.
Miss A: Why? Because you want to choke my mama?
DB: Uh huh...
Miss A: You know it's not like AA, right?

Sent from my iPhone

Just So You Know

2011-05-22T06:18:00.001-05:00

Being forty and barefooted and dancing like a fool at a friend's wedding might be a whole lot of fun while it's actually happening, but the next morning, my friend, is something close to torture. Where's the ibuprofen?

My Friday Post

2011-05-19T11:15:00.002-05:00

Yes, it’s Thursday, but today is my Friday so it’s a special day and I’m celebrating it. How? Well, that’s a good question. I paid off all my bills this morning. I love the internet and how it will let you move money around without having to write checks and lick stamps.

When I say I paid off all my bills specifically I paid off my car and my credit card. The credit card gets paid off every month. I don’t use it that much, but the car, that’s the biggie. I’ve been working on paying it off for quite some time and now instead of paying the bank, I get to pay myself instead. Woo hoo!!!

I can’t wait until next month when I plop that big old car payment directly into my savings account. And the month after that and the month after that… Pretty soon I’ll be investing in money market accounts and such. Sigh…

Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that no one is going to run over me on the way home today. My poor brother paid his truck off the day before the tornados hit and his truck was totaled in the storm. Something about it being found upside down on top of another truck in the parking lot it had been parked in.

Our luck runs along the same lines sometimes, hopefully not this time. Though the past has proven that when I pay a car off is about the time someone decides they need to wreck their uninsured piece of crap into me.

Anyway, I guess all I can do is keep busy and try not to worry too much about it.

There are more important things to worry about today. Like buying a pair of sandals to wear with my new outfit to the wedding we’re going to Saturday.

And what I’m going to wear to Miss A’s nephew’s graduation Monday. And whoever heard of having graduation on a Monday evening? Don’t they know some people travel over long distances to see their people graduate? Sigh… so inconsiderate…

And then there’s Rosie’s breath to worry about. That dog, I swear, has the worst breath of any dog I’ve ever been around. It wasn’t so bad until she took a liking to chicken poop. It’s gross and we try to keep her from eating it, but you know how dogs are. Anyway, she’s also developed a penchant for laying in the floor and licking the hardwoods.

We’ve had this horrendous smell in the house lately. I’ve been doing sniff tests and guerilla cleaning and laundry, but I can’t find it. It seems to come and go. Well, I think last night we finally figured out it’s the dog’s breath combined with her licking the floor.

So today it’s off to the pet store to find some gut enzymes for her. Hopefully that will dial back the breath problem to manageable levels. Seriously, it’s so bad I gag when I pet her because she smells so bad. Poor thing…

And then to yet another shoe store to try and find the elusive sandal I need. Sigh…

Welcome to Bedlam

2011-05-17T14:55:00.001-05:00

Thank god I have a therapy appointment tomorrow. Though, I’m not sure it will help. My life is in an uproar right now. Perhaps it’s just the perception that it’s in an uproar right now. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’d like to just go home, crawl under my bed, and hide from all of it for a while. Usually sleep serves the purpose, but unfortunately that hasn’t been working very well lately. So it’s under the bed for me if I can find the time.

I don’t really know where to begin because I can’t identify exactly what it is that I need to cut away to offer some relief from this madhouse confusion that is constantly rushing at me.

I suppose I started feeling this particular way last week when my niece was still here in the hospital and I was trying to go up every day to visit her during my lunch break. I started getting overwhelmed what with that and work and massage clients and home and cooking for Miss A’s mom and worrying over my brother and him getting his feet back under him. And then my stomach started.

For over a week now it’s been bothering me and getting progressively worse, day by day. I am to the probiotics and antacid stage, but the lump in my throat continues to grow bigger and bigger when I’m not shoving something down my craw. If I don’t get this under control I’m going to be three hundred pounds. I don’t really want to go back to the doctor about this mess, but it’s coming if something doesn’t give.

Then Friday morning I hurt my back. I did it while engaging in the most strenuous task of opening a drawer. It wasn’t a very big drawer, small on the grand scale of things. Actually it’s one of the smallest drawers in the house. And thus commenced a couple of days of excruciating pain wherein I had to explain to my mom why I wasn’t coming to see her on her birthday and then proceeded to cry half the day. The back is still not great, but at least I’m not in constant pain and spasm anymore. Perhaps tonight I will finally completely rest and it will resolve itself. Sigh…

Nonetheless I plan on either drinking alcohol tonight or taking my “herbal sleeping remedy”. It works better than alcohol at knocking me out anyway.

The cat has been sick again. Allergies we suspect as there was lots of coughing and sneezing wherein I called the vet and told them I couldn’t afford to bring another animal in for the sniffles and they prescribed OTC Benadryl. The cat hasn’t sneezed since, but I think she’s jonesing for more Benadryl. She literally got high off the stuff.

The chickens have the worms. They’ve been treated and every day we throw perfectly good looking eggs away in order not to ingest the poison we had to feed them to get the worms out. Sigh…

Miss A’s mom has started radiation therapy. She cries because it hurts her shoulder to lie in the position she must be in to receive the therapy. Sigh…Five more weeks plus three days. I hope it gets less difficult.

I’ve been trying for two days to get an actual person on the phone to find out about an indigent program that my niece may qualify for. She has no insurance and needs physical therapy that Medicaid won’t pay for.

When I was driving between offices earlier today I realized I didn’t even know what day it was. It took me a while to figure out it’s Tuesday. That’s because Monday was difficult and this morning was such hell that it well should have been Monday again.

It started with a school task that Miss A puts off every year until the veritable morning of its delivery to get it completed. Completing entails me sitting with the computer and printing crap off. This would have been done last night except she didn’t finish her part of it until after 10pm and I had gone to bed due to exhaustion and could no longer function.

So when I got that done after 35 or so minutes of fighting with the computer and printer I went downstairs to deliver the product and the power started blinking on and off. Then the cable box went out. So I took a shower and tried not to worry about it. Then when I got out of the shower Miss A asks if I will call and report it because apparently I have some unique qualification for dialing a phone number and sitting on hold. So I put it on speaker phone and let her listen to the whole exchange. By the time I’m off the phone with the cable company I’m pissed, she’s pissed, and I really want to rip the cable box out of the entertainment center and throw it out the front door.

By this point in time I’m still half naked, haven’t eaten breakfast and haven’t gotten ready for my two massage appointments this evening. Oh, and I was already late for work. I wasn’t happy, but I managed to get everything done and as I’m walking out the door I realize the chickens haven’t been fed (unless Miss A did it). So I call her and nope, I had to feed the chickens before I could leave.

The only thing that would have made my morning more perfect is if my gas tank had been empty and I’d had a flat tire. I have no idea if I turned off the iron or if the dog got her treat before I left. I do have on underwear which is, in and of itself, a miracle.

I will say that if tomorrow starts out this exciting, I will no longer be working a job in Huntsville. I’ve decided it’s low-hanging fruit and will be eliminated if I’m required to deal with so much personal shit before 6am in the future.

This Just In: Chicken Worms

2011-05-10T11:24:00.002-05:00

Did you know chickens can get worms? I sure didn’t. I knew they could dig up worms and eat worms and generally just go nuts over worms, but I did not know they could actually get worms. The parasite kind, if I’m not being clear.

I went out yesterday morning to feed, water and remove the ramps off the nests. Everything was going smashingly until I pulled out the first ramp and was walking toward the compost pile with it. That’s when I noticed something odd about the deposits the chickens had left on it overnight.

Something odd looked sort of like a sea anemone. Except why is there a sea anemone in the chicken poop? Upon closer inspection and a very panicked Google and backyard chickens search, I discovered our chickens have roundworms.

Who knew? So this morning I went by the co-op and picked up some stuff to go in their water. It’s supposed to kill the roundworms. It also kills our egg machine for a couple of weeks. Sigh…

It’s either that or dead chickens, I guess. I saw pictures of horrible things that worms do to chickens. Roundworms apparently block their intestinal tract. This is no good, especially for the chicken. Perhaps this is why they’re suddenly eating so much more food than they were when we first got them? Hmm…

Tomorrow starts the treatment so hopefully we’ll have three good eggs this afternoon when we get home. That will give us a full dozen to work with before we have to buy.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Poor chickens…

The Tornado: The Part Where We Camped Out On the Front Porch

2011-05-09T11:16:00.003-05:00

So before the last round of storms hit last Wednesday, the power went out. I was cooking supper when it flickered, flickered, and then was gone. Thank goodness I was mostly through with it and the pasta had already been going for about five minutes. I put the lid on it, left it on the eye and just left it alone for about half an hour. When I took the lid off we had the best Mexican Skillet Pasta I’d ever made. It was a new recipe and from here on out it will be called Mexican Tornado Pasta. Follows is the recipe:

1 lb. of ground meat
8 oz. tomato sauce
16 oz. salsa
1.5 cups H2O
2 cups pasta

Brown the meat, rinse and drain if you like. Add the liquids and bring to a boil. Pour in the pasta and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and let cook 15 minutes or until pasta is done. Stir as needed to keep pasta from sticking.

Sharon’s Recipe Hacks – I used venison, obviously. And Pace Picante Sauce in Medium heat made it just hot enough. I found with the power going out that you really only have to have the heat on the eye for about five minutes after the pasta is in and boiling. I tested this out the second time I made it and it worked so if you’re trying to conserve some energy there’s ten minutes of not running an eye.

Anyway, for the first Wednesday after the tornadoes, I made the Mexican Tornado Pasta again. It was an homage of sorts to all the people who lost so much and are mourning and suffering as well as a celebration of life.

But this is all talking about when we actually had power. We spent several days without power. I’ve already told you about the first night and how scary it was and how we packed up Miss A’s mom and sent her to Birmingham with a cousin where there was power so we wouldn’t be in the ER with a broken hip from her stumbling through the dark trying to find the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Her cousin was also good enough to bring ice, gasoline, propane fuel cans, onions, and coolers which Miss A crammed full of all of our venison meat and replaced with bags of ice. They were then sent to freezers in Birmingham and saved. Whew!

So the next few days were spent checking on neighbors and cooking (on the camp stove) what we were pulling from the freezers and fridges that hadn’t yet spoiled. We had a couple of very interesting meals. One I remember vividly because it was so bad included hot dogs and turnip greens. Yuck!

One good thing was that we got to spend a lot of time outdoors. Thankfully the weather was cool and not blisteringly hot. In fact Thursday dawned with some of the most beautiful skies the south has ever seen. I guess the tornadoes took all the humidity with them. They were almost those beautiful, blue Pacific skies you get on the west coast. Of course, by Friday we were watching the clouds skid through and melt diluting us back to that hazy, crummy blue that passes for sky.

The power finally came back on Saturday afternoon / evening. We had been to my brother’s that day and by the time I got home I didn’t even feel like dealing with actually cleaning out the two fridges and the stand up freezer. So we spent the evening on the couch watching news and tornado recovery coverage. It was depressing, but comforting in a way to have things, “back to normal.”

Sunday I started cleaning out the refrigerators. Fortunately the government has a good site on what we store in the fridge that is and is not spoilable. Some things were obvious, mayo, lunch meats, cooked foods, etc. Others not so obvious mustard, jellies, and, surprisingly, eggs do not spoil when put through the conditions we experienced.

During one of my breaks I planted myself on the couch in front of the tv to watch some more coverage. That’s when it sounded as if a bomb went off outside. Our power went down and then came back up and everyone in the neighborhood ran outside cussing and yelling and trying to figure out what happened.

It took a few minutes but the across the street neighbor finally found a smoking squirrel next to his power pole. Seems the little guy had been frolicking on the transformer while the power was out and came back to play some more. Poor thing. He scared the crap out of all of us.

Several hours later we discovered that the little booger had not only kamikazed himself, but he also took down the cable transformer for the entire neighborhood. Sigh…

I’m not sure, but I think having the cable out was harder than having the power out. We did however finally figure out how to project our favorite tv shows from the computer onto the tv screen. The commercials were brutal though.

Anyway, if this experience has taught us anything it has taught us that we need an emergency preparedness plan. We didn’t have one (still don’t, it’s in the works) and we were lucky that we just had everything (except batteries) that we needed on-hand. It has convinced us that as foolish as the risk to cost ratio looks, we are investing in an underground storm shelter. It has shown us that we’re not the kind of people who do well without a party fridge. We gave our party fridge to Miss A’s mom to replace a horrifyingly bad fridge she bought on the cheap and now we’re both crazy from trying to live in one fridge. The whole cable experience has made me realize that we need to do something very different with our entertainment center. I love it and spent a lot of money on it, but it’s impractical and I’m stupid to keep hanging on to it when it’s so wrong for the space.

So some serious stuff and some somewhat frivolous stuff, isn’t that how life is supposed to be? A bit of each to lend balance. I have a tendency to lose perspective on balance and only focus on the work, work, work part of it. This became very apparent to me when I started seeing toy drives happening. My first reaction was an internal conversation about how frivolous and wasteful and you don’t need a toy to live, you need food and water and blah, blah, blah, but then someone explained how they were making care packages out of a toy, underwear, socks, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and several other necessaries and how they hoped it would bring some normalcy back to a child’s life. And I felt horrible. Some days I don’t understand how I got to be the way I am and I hate it. I’m sure this crushing practicality has some uses, but it’s so ugly and hard and keeps me from being able to relax and enjoy life so much. Some days I just wish for an empty brain that no longer cares about what’s practical and necessary and spends the day watching ants crawl through the grass with no worries as to where dinner is going to come from.

And enough of that… To wrap this up, we have power and cable back, but we’re far from full power. The utilities are operating at about one-third of their normal rate as there are only two temporary transmission lines coming across the river. We used to have six permanent ones. So we’re trying to conserve. Which for those of us conscious about these things (not all folks are, unfortunately) means no air conditioning and conserving as much electricity and water as possible for the foreseeable future. It’s forecast to get to 90 this week. I’m dreading it. At work they’re running the air full blast already, but at home, no air. It’s going to be miserable.

Anyway, I guess that’s about all I’m going to write about the tornado experience directly. If you have questions, feel free. I like questions.

Stay tuned for a chicken update. They left me a lovely present this morning that is both disturbing and a mystery.

The Tornado: The Part About My Brother

2011-05-07T06:27:00.005-05:00

I suppose titling this 'the tornado' is a bit misleading. I think at last count they were saying 24 actual tornado touchdowns in the state that day. There were hundreds of tornado warnings and the map of the tracks across the state is dismaying.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about my brother and his family and what happened to them. He lives in a very small town east of Birmingham. You may have heard about what happened in Tuscaloosa. In fact, I think the whole country heard about what happened in Tuscaloosa. It was so bad there the president visited. Unfortunately, Tuscaloosa is one of many, many places that got decimated. It's not really that special except that everyone recognizes the name because of the football connection.

Anyway, the tornado that hit Tuscaloosa and Birmingham kept coming ripping through St. Clair County, crossing the river into Ohatchee, then on over to Wellington, then Pleasant Valley, and Piedmont and on into Georgia. It was massive. They're saying 1.25 miles wide.

My brother lives in a trailer. So because they're not dumb they went to a shelter. The one they normally go to. It's a church basement. Ordinarily this would be one of the safest places in the world to be. Unfortunately there were two problems with this basement on the night in question. One, it was a walkout basement. You know the kind where one wall is construction and isn't protected by earth with the other three at least partially buried in the earth. Two, the tornado hit dead on the walkout wall.

There were eleven people sheltering in that church when the tornado hit it. My brother, his wife, his mother-in-law, my niece, her two year old son, and her fiance along with others from the community. Nine of them walked away with various injuries. My niece suffered a crushed pelvis and was taken directly to the hospital. Her fiance didn't make it out alive.

Last Saturday Miss A and I traveled home to see if there was anything we could do to help and to let me put my eyes on my brothers, their families and my parents to make sure they were all okay. Because once again J1 came this close to death and escaped. The second time in a little over a year. And it scares me that he keeps having these close calls. I don't think I could handle it.

Anyway, J2 took us to the site of the church. We had to hike in as the damage was still so bad they had the roads closed. And when I say site, I'm not kidding. There's nothing left there but a pile of sticks and bricks intermingled with unidentifiable stuff. That picture above is the basement that collapsed on top of my family. We walked around and around and around that place and I still can't figure out where there was room for any living thing to fit without being crushed flat.

This was the worst of it for my brother's family, at least in my mind. I don't know how they feel about it as they suffered property damage as well. But property is something that can be rebuilt. A life was snuffed feet from them. Someone they knew and loved. Property seems somewhat insignificant.

It's not, I know it's not and they're going to have a rough time recovering. Fortunately their home was spared all but a few pieces of underpinning which were replaced by the time I got there. My brother's shop building was removed courtesy of the tornado, wadded into a ball and deposited roughly 150 yards away up on some railroad tracks at the back of his property. The equipment inside the building including boxes of bolts and screws stood where he left them. Papers blown away, but the toilet paper in the bathroom not even wet. It was surreal.

The damage to his business isn't really known yet as they've got to assess each machine to see if it will still work. He doesn't know if he'll restart his business or not. There are a lot of things up in the air.

My niece is still in the hospital and will be in a facility for a long time. She had to wait almost a week to be transported to a hospital to have surgery. That happened Tuesday and she seems to be doing well. She should be moved to a rehab facility this weekend or Monday if nothing changes. The doctors are saying she won't walk for at least six weeks post her surgery. I can't even imagine how difficult this recovery is going to be. I would lose my mind.

Anyway, that's what happened to my brother. Stay tuned for the next part where I talk about the power being out for days and the recovery stuff.

The Tornado: The Part Where It Happened

2011-05-05T11:54:00.004-05:00

The forecast was scary. So scary I stayed home from work. It’s not often that those folks out in Oklahoma put a big red bull’s eye on the map with us in it. At 3am the weather radio started squawking and didn’t stop until time to get up for the day. Our local prognosticators couldn’t pin down when the next wave of storms would hit. Early afternoon or late morning was the best they could do and they said when it hit, it would be a doozy. So I stayed home and Miss A ran off to work her required half day.

The second wave of storms hit before lunchtime. I can no longer keep track of which part of the state and which town got hit when because there were reports coming from everywhere and the weather radio wouldn’t stop screaming and all I knew is that we were okay so far.

Miss A finally got out of school and went and picked up her stubborn head mom whose caretaker had left to get home in between storms. Unfortunately, that put me on the road in the middle of a tornado warning trying to pick her up. Of course she refused saying she needed to be at home if anything happened. Uh huh… I wanted to hurt her at that point, but Miss A collected her and brought her safely to us eventually.

The third wave of storms hit and we were still okay. Little did I know that my oldest brother and his whole family were not.

Before the fourth wave of storms came we lost power. Now I know it’s because a tornado had taken out the transmission lines from the nuclear plant that cross the river. I heard that we came about thirty minutes from being another Japan as there were difficulties getting backup power up and running. Scary shit…I need to look into nuclear meltdown safety when we get back up from all this.

We listened to the weather radio screech for what seemed like hours waiting to see if a tornado would come get us. Fortunately it didn’t as we were relying on the outdoor sirens to come on if it came near enough. They never came on. We found out days later that was because they don’t work when there’s no power. This seems stupid to me and that is an understatement. I feel as if someone should be reprimanded for that massive short-sighted move.

Some time after dark we all went to bed. It was a rough night what with Miss A’s mom stumbling around in the dark trying to find the bathroom. Over and over and over again and forgetting her flashlight every single time. Then the panicked phone call from my nephew waking us up telling us about my brother and his family. Then being up for what seems like hours trying to get someone on the phone that knew what was going on. Then trying to go to sleep while worried silly about my brother and his family. It was a horrible night and it lasted forever and I was scared.

Weighed Down

2011-05-04T12:56:00.004-05:00

I know if you're here you're wondering what's going on. We're fine. My family is ok and limping along as injuries heal.

There's a lot to relate, but I'm battling encroaching depression. There's been so much death and destruction and I'm having a hard time re-entering the daily grind.

It doesn't help that our main source of information at the house hasn't yet been restored so even when we're home we are still disconnected and figuratively "in the dark".

I'll write soon about what happened and is happening. For now just send prayers, supplies, money...whatever it is you do when you encounter people in need. There are so many people in need here.

Tornado Alley

2011-04-28T20:05:00.000-05:00

We're still here. No power, but everyone is okay.

Pray for my brother's family. Several injuries and my niece's fiancé was killed in the storm. His house is still there, his business is possibly mortally wounded.

Power is estimated to be back on in no less than three days. More likely it's going to be close to a week.

We're roughing it. Thank goodness for Miss A's camping gear obsession.

Cell coverage is spotty at best so call the house if you want to chat.

We'll be back online asap.

Love you. Take care of yourself.

Sent from my iPhone

Adding To My Resume

2011-04-26T11:33:00.003-05:00

The first thing we should add is chicken trainer. Because all the chickens in the tractor aren’t as stupid as some of the rest of them look.

The whole time I’ve been trying to get this chicken nipple watering thing working there’s been one little hen who has been very friendly and curious. I thought she was going to get it yesterday, pecking at the nipple, but I was never sure that she actually hit it so I had to take it out. This morning though I took the new waterer out and hung it up.

The rooster didn’t like that I was anywhere around and attacked it while I was trying to hang it. Dumbass… He’s taken to flying up and bashing himself against the chicken wire trying to get to me when I walk up to the tractor. He has a serious case of testosterone poisoning and hates me now that I’ve made friends with his hens.

Anyway, I poured a bit of extra water on the outside of the container to make it all drippy at the nipple part where they peck to get the water out. Then I sat down on the block and waited. My curious hen kept getting under the container and looking and looking and pecking around at the hanging water drops. Have you ever watched a chicken look at something? They’re hysterical turning their head from side to side and tilting trying to get their eyeball in the right position. Anyway, the mosquitoes were starting to chew on me so I headed in the house and took a shower.

When I went back out and plopped down on the block after my shower my curious hen marched right over to the waterer and started pecking the chicken nipple showing me that she knew how to do it. I was so proud. Of course, the rest of the chickens just looked at her like she’d grown an extra head or two.

The instructions with the nipple system said that once one figures it out, the rest will follow. I’m counting on that being true. Of course it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if the rooster was somewhat dehydrated and lethargic when I get home this evening. It will just make it easier for me to haul him out of the tractor. He’s headed for the stewpot. Miss A and I had a discussion about him yesterday. Now to find someone to do the deed as I’m just not sure butchering chickens is ever going to be on my barnyard resume. Bleeee…

And something else I won’t be adding to my resume any time soon… I got a phone call yesterday with a job offer. It is intriguing and something I never even dreamed of. In fact, it’s so far out of the realm of where I envisioned my path leading that I had to talk myself down off a ledge and then I got a migraine.

The offer was to write, produce, and host a new travel show on a local access television station. When the call came in I had a knee jerk absolutely not, no, uh, uh reaction. Then I had to talk to myself about not being stupid. It could be a few weeks work up front for not a lot of commitment down the road and a regular commission. Unfortunately the time commitment is more than I can handle right now. Part-time, but the weekly hosting thing is what really got me. That and the contract that they would want me to sign. Nope… no contracts… Plus I had no control over format. It just doesn’t fit into my path right now. If I were retired already though… that would be something else.

I still have to call and break the news, but I think I’m going to offer to him that I will be willing to do voiceovers and perhaps some of the writing if they need it.

In the meanwhile I’ve got a friend who is ready to re-vamp her website and I need to call her back to see what kind of job that’s going to be.

And somewhere in the back of my head an alarm bell keeps going off reminding me that I don’t have to do so much. So far though, I’m ignoring it because I know about that laundry that’s still not been folded.

It’s Official!

2011-04-25T11:26:00.004-05:00

We have stupid chickens. Yes, yes, indeed, we have stupid chickens. I had suspected they were a bit on the dumb side since about the time they were delivered to us, but this morning cemented it.

We bought a chicken nipple. It’s a gravity-fed automatic watering device that is actually pretty nifty. You install the thing in the bottom of a container, fill the container with water, put it in the pen with the chickens and they peck at it to release water and drink. At least that last part is the theory.

The instructions say to take out their old waterer overnight and put in the new one. If they don’t get it, poke the nipple so it releases water. This apparently is supposed to bring them running because they’re thirsty. I got out to the tractor this morning and everyone was very upset. Lots of clucking and burbling from the girls. The rooster was stalking around doing his typical asshole routine and pecking the girls on the head.

The girls were very upset and kept hopping up on the block where the old waterer stayed. I spent probably half an hour out there poking the nipple. Then I went in and read through the troubleshooting instructions for when your birds don’t get it. And then I took more water out and poured it over the top so there was water dripping from the thing and they all ran over and started drinking the water off the ground. Sigh…

One of the girls pecked at the nipple once, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t actually hit it.

I finally gave up and put their old waterer back in the pen underneath where I had the new waterer hanging. Everyone rushed it and started drinking immediately. We’ll try again tonight and tomorrow morning. Maybe putting the old waterer under where the new one will hang will help. Sigh…

Saturday night I dreamed we let the girls out of the tractor to run around the yard a bit. The rooster was nowhere so I assume we finally got rid of him. I continue to waffle about what to do with him. He’s a nuisance and scares both of us. Even when he’s supposed to be asleep he’s giving me the stink eye.

One of the things we did yesterday was install a proper roosting bar in the tractor. They have been sleeping in the nesting boxes because the old roosting bars were too low. So Miss A figured out how to get one in there higher and when we went out to check on them they were all piled up in the nesting boxes still. So I took one hen out and put her on the bar. The rooster (who was supposed to be asleep) started pecking her. Poor thing. I hate to get that started up. Of course he never did get on the roosting bar with her. None of them did.

Anyway, I keep reading the rooster keeps the predators away. I don’t want anything to eat my girls, but at the same time he’s so mean and we can’t seem to do anything with the hens because we’re both so scared he’s going to attack us.

There’s a local chicken farm close to us and I think I’m going to call and see if they will either take him or butcher him for us. I don’t think I’d have any problem cooking and eating him. Of course, I don’t even know if roosters are ok to eat. Probably should check that out first.

Bitch Session

2011-04-21T11:17:00.003-05:00

Lately I’ve been seeing these commercials for breakfast pastries. They are very common among the toddler and pre-pubescent set. The name starts with a pop and ends with a tart.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the commercial I’m talking about, but it is a cartoon and it shows a mom and three kids dancing around and all happy fixing and eating their flying breakfast pastries. The part that really gets me though is the part where they do their tag line, “Made F0r Fun”.

Food that’s made f0r fun. Hmm… so I thought I would look at the label. Nowhere on the label does it say fun unless maybe you count the dye they put in it. The blueberry one’s have four different food colorings, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup and artificial blueberry flavoring. Because apparently blueberries don’t taste blueberry enough and need a little help. Anyway, maybe the fun part is when your kids start running in circles from eating all the sugar and crap in it. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m not going to be bringing them into the house anymore.

And is anyone else freaked out about this Mom Prom thing? Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of doing a father/daughter or mom/son function gives me the serious willies. I’m sure it’s just my background with my family and not having any kids of my own. But still, it makes me shudder.

Speaking of shuddering, I’ve been seeing these huge billboards with pink ribbons and large lettering proclaiming that the local breast inspection center now has digital mammograms. This is such a fallacy, people. Why are we as victims of the mammogram excited about going digital?

I know, I know in my heart, because I was one of the ones who sparked suddenly with excitement at the prospect of never again having my boobs smashed between two rigid pieces of plastic. Not so…they still smash your boobs. Flat as a flitter, let me tell you and then they take a picture of it. A digital picture. The whole process is no different from the film picture except that the technicians and radiologists who read the mammograms now get to look at a computer instead of a film. Sigh… nothing to get excited about really.

And I still don’t understand why my dentist has software that can identify that I have a cavity developing between two teeth without any pain involved and they still can’t image a critical body part without maiming it in the process.

And while I’m at it, I might as well address this one again. Don’t send me a catalog in the mail that features “designs for women with real curves” and then hire models that are a size zero. Those aren’t real women*. They also don’t have real curves. I’ll invite you over to my place and I’ll show you what a real curve is if you’re confused. Oh, and one more thing, I’m not going to buy a pair of pants that cost a hundred and twenty bucks. I’m cheap and cotton pants with elastic and a drawstring are not worth that much money. I could go buy the same fabric, modify a pattern, pay for gas and my time and could make them on my antique sewing machine for less than half what you’re asking.

* In the sense that they do not represent the majority of the population of American females.

Stormy Weather

2011-04-20T11:11:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I had a nice appointment with my therapist. One of the things we talked about was how usually when you go on vacation you come home and sort of ease back into the old ~~ruts~~ routines. Obviously that’s not been the case with our recent visit to Shangri-La and it’s been, shall we say, stressful.

As if the constant, “Are you here yet?” phone calls Saturday while we were traveling and the health issues from Monday which finally put us in bed some time after 11 weren’t enough last night became another hellish experience.

My client yesterday afternoon stood me up. We had arranged for Miss A’s mom to have a breakfast drink just before the sitter left and I would go by to check on her after my massage. So I went over and did the milk switcheroo and she had already eaten some leftovers. I checked her meds and went through her evening routine and came home.

She felt great, looked great, and was in a great mood. I was encouraged. Until Miss A texted me around 9pm. She had stopped in at her mother’s house (first mistake) to check on her and her mother had a full blown screaming and crying nuclear-style meltdown.

I still don’t know what the problem was and she was so upset Miss A couldn’t really figure out what the problem was either. These meltdowns seem to be coming more and more regularly. This time it took roughly an hour to get her calmed down enough that Miss A could come home.

Again it was after 11 before sleep began happening. Sigh…

Somewhere around 3 am the weather radio started screeching and only shut up long enough to let me get back to sleep before it scared me awake again. Miss A’s alarm (which is also her phone ringing) went off and my first thought was that it was her mother. Sigh…

I figure I’ve had about four hours of uninterrupted sleep with maybe fifteen minutes more of constantly interrupted sleep overnight. Night before wasn’t much better.

This afternoon I have two clients scheduled. I’ll get home around 8:30pm. Miss A’s already been put on notice that I’m going to bed at 9 and going to sleep. Which means I plan on turning off all the lights and the tv set. Either that or I’m moving upstairs to the futon. I can’t keep a smile plastered on my face without sleep. And we all know how ugly it gets when I don’t have a smile.

Deceptions

2011-04-19T19:08:00.002-05:00

Take a deep breath. I'm gonna need it.

Miss A's mom is sick. You knew that. Yesterday's trip to the doctor for labs went badly. She was dehydrated and malnourished among other more painful things. Fluids were administered and the doctor very seriously prescribed Carnation Instant Breakfast three times per day with whole milk in addition to meals.

She cried. She cried because there's fat in whole milk.

Sigh...

So in order to try to get some weight back on her (she's lost a lot and is proud of it) I went to the store and bought a half gallon of 1% milk and a half gallon of whole milk. And as you may have guessed by now, I mixed those bad boys half and half and filled the 1% jug up with the mix.

I dropped it off a while ago and I probably should feel bad about the deception, but I really, really don't. In fact, I'm somewhat geeked by it. I am curious to see if she notices and I am more than looking forward to finding out if it helps put some weight back on her.

Of course, she'll actually have to drink the shakes for that to happen. Apparently today she poured one out when the girl who stays with her went to the bathroom. When J confronted her, she admitted what she'd done, but they were at the doctor's office so there was no way to re-make the shake. We've seen this behavior with her before pouring her water out so she wouldn't have to drink it and feeding food to the dog so she wouldn't have to eat it.

That poor dog. He's so fat the vet finally told her she was going to kill him if she didn't stop feeding him table food.

Anyway, currently in my fridge there's a half gallon of 2.5% milk. Not sure what I'm going to do with it as Miss A's allergic and I'm mostly lactose intolerant.

Hmmm... guess I'll be sneaking it over a cup or so at a time and pouring it in her jug until it's all gone!

Sneaky, sneaky!

Beach Vacation Redux

2011-04-18T10:02:00.003-05:00

It went something like this:

Beach – It was a nice way to start trying to relax.
Eat – Err… you don’t want to know
Shop – Hmm… I’m sure it was something we needed
Visit with family – Miss A’s elderly aunt and cousin who cares for her full-time. We feel their pain.
Watch some bird people band a bunch of birds – We got to see a painted bunting!
Fort Morgan – Wherein I got sunburned after losing my 30 SPF and we missed the ferry to Dauphin Island changing the plans of our entire day!
Eat – Even worse…
Beach – Ahh… I think I might actually be getting the hang of this relaxing thing.
Eat – Bahama Bob’s on the beach in Gulf Shores. Yum!
Dauphin Island – Wherein we bicycled, walked through the Audubon Park, toured the Sea Lab, and briefly visited Fort Gaines where we accidentally located two tidal benchmarks!
Eat – Gag…
Massages – OMG! One of the best massages I’ve ever had. If you’re going to Gulf Shores, I will give you her name and number if you contact me here.
Eat – Lulu’s at Homeport Marina! L.A. Caviar yum, yum, yummity yum! I have to figure out how to make it!
More Shopping
More Visiting with Family
Eat – Les Roux a Cajun/Creole place wherein I almost made myself sick it was so good.
Pensacola Naval Air Museum – Admittedly I’m a nerd and I have naval history, but this was one of the best museums I’ve ever been to. Loved it!
Eat – Back to Lulu’s as our German friends finally arrived and we needed a good place to take them.
Walk on the Pier – It was cold! Brrr…
Meet with the Mayor and Chief of Popo’s in Gulf Shores
Dauphin Island - To the Coast Guard Station wherein we got to go on patrol on an honest to god USCG boat. Unfortunately the waters were very rough due to a storm coming in so we puttered mostly around a natural gas rig that had been abandoned and then couldn’t find any leisure crafts to board and inspect.
Eat – Oh, dear god, don’t these people know how to separate shellfish from not shellfish?
Scrapbook store!
Nap – Finally…
Beach – Sigh… the storm coming made it mostly unbearable to sit on the beach and enjoy. It was a true red flag kind of day.
Eat – Jake’s Steakhouse in Orange Beach. My advice, go for the steak, skip the ribs, but whatever you do don’t miss out on the banana pudding.
Ride the bicycles through the state park – Woo hoo! Look ma, no hands!
More Visiting with Family
Eat – Gelato Joe’s in Foley(?) Sigh, why can’t we have good places like this closer to home?

Go home kicking and screaming and falling into a deeper and deeper depression the further we drove northward. It’s not that the drive was bad; it was just the feeling of being sucked back into the vortex of caretaking and worry over Miss A’s mom. It didn’t help that Miss A’s mom was alone (the stepsister departed early Saturday morning) and having a difficult day. There were several phone calls back and forth each one ending with, “when are you going to be here?” Sigh…

We picked up food on our way into town and went straight to her house with it. She didn’t want to eat even though we could tell she hadn’t eaten much at all during the day.

Some time after dark we finally arrived home and got to see our babies. Rosie was so sweet and even though I truly didn’t want to come home from vacation I had to admit I was ready to see her big nose and thumpy tail. The cats graced us with loud protests and acted like they hadn’t been fed in a week. The chickens were sleeping already, but we went out and shined a flashlight in and counted everyone.

It’s good to be home. Now if we can just figure out when we can get back to the beach…

We've Been Away

2011-04-17T20:00:00.003-05:00

We've been on vacation for the last week and have spent the day trying to catch up. There's a lot to say and a lot to tell. We had a great time and both agree we wish we could have stayed longer. A lot longer...

Regular posting to resume soon...

The Weekend In Which We Became Chicken Farmers

2011-04-04T11:33:00.004-05:00

It was a big weekend, huge actually. Friday afternoon we went and looked at chickens and Saturday around noon chickens were delivered to our house. It was easy, probably too easy, but so far, so good.

By two, we already had two eggs. I wasn’t overly surprised because I figured there’s no stopping an egg once it’s in the chute, but I wasn’t expecting anymore eggs for at least a week after the move and subsequently meeting the dog. Let’s just say that everyone got very excited when they spotted each other.

But to my utter surprise and apparently very shocked look, we got another egg yesterday. We also finally met the super long snake that’s been living around our place for a few years. He was all of six foot long, slithering through the yard making his way toward the chickens. Miss A gently encouraged him to go visit the neighbors and now every time I open the nesting box I do so with great care. The last thing I need is to come nose to nose with that sucker.

The guy we bought them from told us straight up the rooster was mean. We didn’t see a lot of that until this morning when I practically had to crawl into the pen to reach the watering apparatus and he tried to flog me. Things went downhill from there as I went back out with the cut off end of a closet dowel and held him back while I retrieved the waterer. I felt sort of like a knight jousting an opponent*. I’m sure it was a hysterical sight with me in my pajamas fighting with a chicken over a watering tower. Sigh…

Anyway, we have four hens and the rooster. They are (according to the seller) silver penciled barred rock bantams. I’m not sure what all that means, but the take away is that they are a black and white mottled color, small, standing no more than a foot tall, and lay eggs that are half the size of a large grocery store egg.

There is a possibility the rooster won’t last. He came with the package and that is the only reason we have him. Unless he proves good at keeping the snakes away from the hens and eggs he’s really just a nuisance so he didn’t do himself any favors by attacking me this morning.

Anyway, I haven’t yet told the house sitter that we bought chickens. I’m a little afraid of her reaction. I guess I should probably do that soon in case she backs out we’ll have time to find someone to take care of things for us.

As for the rest of the weekend, it was filled with fun things like setting up and taking down the camper, making boxes for the garden, making raised beds in the boxes, planting tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and basil. Essentially we spent the entire weekend outside working in the yard and garden.

Since we’re leaving on vacation soon though that has caused a bit of stress in figuring out when we’re going to clean house. I guess it’s going to have to be in the evenings after work. Yikes!

* No chickens were harmed in the creation of this blog post.

Oh Boy...

2011-03-31T17:59:00.003-05:00

This video made me bawl...

Short And I'm Not Talking About My Height

2011-03-31T11:21:00.001-05:00

This story really starts last night when I saw a new client. I liked her. She was friendly and personable and we had a nice conversation as I worked and we got to know each other. And while I don’t think she’s going to be a very regular client, I’m sure she’ll be back.

Fast forward to this morning when I went to organize the cash and checks I collected last night in my purse. She paid me in cash. I remember because she was the only one. When I unfolded the cash it was short. I dug around and no more cash.

At first I was just shocked. How could someone do that? Why would someone do that? I really started to wonder if I had read her wrong. Then I rationalized she must have misunderstood me.

Then on my drive in to work I started getting mad and fumed the entire drive in and even called my mentor and left a message to get her to call me. I was in a serious quandary. Do I call her on it? Or do I wait and see if she tries to reschedule?

So I get to work this morning still not sure what, if anything, I should do and I have a voicemail. It’s from the new client. Some time last night she realized she shorted me and was mortified, embarrassed, and frantic.

Sigh… so now she’s mailing me the balance and I’m relieved, but still trying to figure out how to solve this problem. What if it happens again? I guess I’m going to have to start counting the cash when folks hand it over. I’ve always found that a bit rude though, to stand and count cash when there’s no cash register involved. Hmm…

In fact, I’ve always had a little trouble with money. Especially when someone is short or late with it. When we were asked about fees in school and how we were going to handle them it was a very uncomfortable discussion for me especially when we got to the part where someone refused to pay or we had to specifically ask for payment. I've gotten better about confidently declaring my fees. In fact, I only cringed once at the beginning of the year when I raised my fees.

I suppose it's because my history taught me that when money is involved there’s going to be some kind of confrontation that ends in possibly yelling and hitting, but most definitely hard feelings. I like to avoid those kinds of situations so I tend to get paralyzed when there are money issues.

Hmm… what to do, what to do?

Grasshopper Needs a Break

2011-03-30T11:42:00.001-05:00

Well, I don’t even know where to start. I think we’re all just so emotionally exhausted that we’ve tied the knot and are swinging.

Vacation happens in ten days. It can’t get here soon enough. I am so ready to show all the responsibilities and projects tail lights that I would seriously consider bartering off the next ten days just to get to vacation sooner.

And just as I finished writing this I realized that some time between now and then I have to give the house a good scrubbing so I won’t be embarrassed when the house sitter shows up. Sigh…

Notwithstanding the continuing cancer care clinic we run, things are going pretty well overall. After the electrical mishap and the phone mishap and the incident Monday where both cats went to the vet after Miss A’s mom had to have fluids for dehydration and I got stood up, we’ve had a couple of days where nothing has gone wrong. Yes, I’m knocking on wood currently.

The reality that we have three elderly animals and an elderly mom with cancer is really hitting home right now. There’s been a lot of crying lately.

Poor Miss A has lost three pairs of shoes in the last couple of weeks to Blaze (aka demon cat, devil’s spawn, hellcat, dumbass cat) who has taken to pissing in her shoes if they are left on the floor. The vets now think that in addition to the failing kidneys she is developing Alzheimer’s.

I’ve tried to clean the shoes with the Nature’s Miracle stuff. It’s not working. Next step is to run them through the washer and then treat again. I’m pretty sure they’re toast though.

Anyway, we do have a few lights at the end of the tunnel. Vacation, obviously, in which we miss the last actual chemo treatment and the ensuing hell week where her mom goes from manic to barely able to get out of bed. Thank goodness for step-sisters.

The last chemo treatment, obviously, upon which we all begin fervently praying that enough cognitive ability returns where we do not have to physically manage her every single day and we will once again be able to cook a meal without having to pack it up and transport it before it can be consumed.

Oh, and then there’s the chickens. At least in my head there are chickens. We’re going Friday afternoon to look at a chicken tractor and some bantam silver penciled barred rock chickens. Miss A and I can not seem to agree on a design for actually building a coop. I haven’t figured out if it’s because we can’t agree or because I’m ready to make a decision and get started and she’s just ready to turtle. All I know is that the last time we tried to figure out what kind of coop we wanted I ended up aggravated because she wouldn’t quit changing her mind and let me finalize a design.

So we’re going to go look at one for purchase. I’m at the point where if it’s even close to being acceptable I’ll buy it just to get us started. Of course, I haven’t discussed this with the house sitter yet. I wonder if she’ll mind adding chickens to her resume.

And speaking of emotional exhaustion, here’s yet another example. My mom just called to tell me that my brother’s wife got a good job cleaning at the college. A regular paycheck, insurance, and retirement benefits is something I’m not sure they have any experience with. In the next breath she tells me that he’s being hauled into court for his first child on some sort of custody issue (he’s never paid child support) and if he doesn’t show he’ll lose all parental rights. He’s not planning on going. Sigh…

This doesn’t surprise me and you know, I’ve been trying so long to stay in touch with my niece (to very little avail) that I don’t even care anymore. She’s 11 or 12 and her mother stands in between her and our family even with those of us who just want to love her. Some day she’ll come around when she wants or needs something. Or she won’t. I don’t have enough left to worry about it anymore. And that’s a horrible, horrible way to feel about a blood relation.

Acceptance, Grasshopper…

I Should Be Ecstatic

2011-03-24T18:02:00.002-05:00

I got the laptop back this afternoon. I should be ecstatic as the computer whiz I take our broken down computers to recovered almost everything off the dying hard drive. But I'm not.

What I am is nervous. Nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs comes to mind. Nervous as a duck in a room full of alligators. Nervous, nervous, nervous...

I'm sure tomorrow when I take the laptop back to him with a very specific list of paths for him to check for our email archives, address books, and internet history he will be able to find it and transfer it to the new hard drive. But right now, all is definitely not alright.

This goes far beyond the addiction of the computer in my lap and having Google at my fingertips. I am completely panicked at the thought of having lost all of our addresses and phone numbers and histories. Again...

This happened a long time ago and I managed to scrape together some old data and import it and we made do until we recovered. Now... I wouldn't even know where to start looking.

I know you're wondering why haven't I backed this stuff up. I'm wondering the same thing myself. I thought I did, but I can't find it anywhere on the backup drive. And if this experience has taught me anything it's to figure out how to properly use the Windows backup utility and actually use it.

Sigh... I'll be glad when Miss A gets home. She has a massage scheduled this afternoon. After that I'll be having a hot toddy and taking my nervous ass to bed.

Five Thousand and One

2011-03-22T10:35:00.000-05:00

So this morning the laptop puked on itself and decided it no longer knew how to boot up Windows. It's at the repair shop now, but we may be light online this week as we're going to be running on our phones unless I can find a workaround.

I think I'm already in withdrawals what between the stomachache and the headache. Poor, pitiful me.

Sent from my iPhone

Five Thousand Other Things

2011-03-21T09:26:00.002-05:00

We woke this morning to half the kitchen and dining room being without electricity. The overhead lights and the fan were mysteriously not working. So we did the whole breaker box routine to no avail. I'm currently waiting on the electrician to arrive.

Friday we had the phone company out because even though they fixed the no phones at all problem week before last, we still didn't have working jacks in the older part of the house. Turns out the line that had the trouble was the one the technician unhooked. We didn't know until later it control all the jacks on the old part of the house.

The news Friday about the phone situation was not good. The Frickerizer apparently created a problem when he put the junction box on the ground under the porch and left it there. It's in about an eight inch crawl space so they can't get to it without tearing deck boards up and oh, by the way, our insurance we've been paying for years doesn't apply because The Frickerizer left the box laying on the ground.

The recommendation, re-wire all the phones on the old system. When the electricians get here I'll be asking if they do phones as well.

Sigh...

Nest Check

2011-03-19T09:09:00.003-05:00

Have I mentioned we keep bluebird nests? I'm not very good at it, but this morning I noticed a couple checking out one of our nests closest to the house. So I went out to see if they had built there yet. It was empty.

Then I remembered one of the nests further down the driveway had crap running out the hole and decided to go check it. Apparently someone has built nest on top of nest on top of nest in that one and laid three eggs.

They're bluebird eggs. Unfortunately two of them are broken open and the whole box is full of ants. I don't know what to do about it and Miss A has gone off to a meeting with the rowing club.

I don't want to sprinkle ant killer because I don't know if it will harm the adult birds. I can't tell if the remaining egg is viable or if I should just chuck the lot and let them start over after killing the ants. Sigh...

I should have gone to the rowing meeting with Miss A. I don't have a good excuse as to why I didn't other than I'm not feeling especially social today.

This morning's task list wasn't extensive and I've already completed the stinkiest one of all, fishing yet another drowned squirrel out of the swimming pool. Perhaps I'll pull the couch and insulate behind it.

Anyway, if you know anything about bluebirds and how I should be stewarding their nests, suggestions are welcome.

Is It Rude or Am I Overreacting?

2011-03-17T19:00:00.001-05:00

So we have a couple of secretaries where I work. One is quite long in the tooth, should have already retired, bitches a lot, but otherwise a nice lady. The other is very young. Early twenties, pretty, opinionated, pregnant with her first child. She is somewhat immature at times, but who isn’t at her age.

They don’t like each other and guess who finds herself stuck in the middle?

Today found one accusing the other of hijacking a conference room and deleting outlook appointments from the other. Then one got snarky with the other at the lunch meeting about a piece of pizza.

Now, I think it was rude for the pizza filcher to come in and take pizza. It wasn’t her meeting nor was she even invited to it, but who are we if we refuse food to a hungry, pregnant woman? But I find it to be beyond rude for the other to have actually said something to her about it.

Maybe I’m just sensitive right now. Maybe it’s because I have these beliefs about food and how no one should ever, ever go hungry. I nurture with food, I can’t help it. I think it’s the Italian part of my heritage, “Mangia! Mangia!”

Anyway, what do you think? Is it rude? Which? Both?

Conspicuous Silence

2011-03-15T11:46:00.003-05:00

There’s a lot going on. It’s not all bad, it’s about normal, but I’m feeling a little blocked or overwhelmed or something so what I have to say is typically terse. Not meant to hurt, I just don’t know how to get it all out.

I am spending too much time watching the news about Japan. This morning I stood and cried as they showed children in shelters holding up a sign, “Please, Help Us”. As someone who helps by touching, I feel utterly useless.

Did Anybody Get The Tag on that Steamroller?

2011-03-13T07:19:00.004-05:00

Wow! And I mean, wow! This week sort of just accelerated and ran me down. I've been going non-stop since Wednesday. I think it's fair to say that I had a significant event occur for my business Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It involved a video camera and some new people, a couple of promises for new clients and a contract with the local, community tv station to sponsor them for free advertising. Anyway you can read more on my business site, you know how to do it. If you don't just scroll down to the link section and take a wander through there.

Other than that, I'm way behind with everything domestic. I did manage to make the Irish soda bread muffins. They turned out good. There's one left and hopefully some time today I will have enough energy to make another batch. They were that good. And I gave most of them away so I would really like to have one or two more before St. Patty's is over.

Yesterday was a strange day here. I felt awful. What between the different physical exertion Friday afternoon and forgetting to take my allergy meds two nights in a row because I was so overly tired it was all I could do to make it to the bed. So... we drove out to a home and garden show in the next county over, then we drove to Huntsville and went to a couple of sporting goods stores to pick out Miss A's birthday present from her mom. We ended up being out all day long and it was a beautiful day.

This morning I lost an hour when I stepped out of bed and I'm just going to try to ignore and enjoy and not obsess or get bent about it. Unless I get to feeling better there may be no project work done this weekend at all. I have laundry to do again and last week's still hasn't quite finished folding itself and jumping into a drawer. So...

Oh, did I tell you about the phone. They came out and "fixed" it Monday. Turns out he unplugged the extra line thinking it was something not in use. That fixed the new side phones, but we don't have any jacks that work in the old side of the house now. Not a huge biggie, but it would be nice to have a working phone in the bedroom. Sigh...

Anyway... I'm sure there's lot more I wanted to write about but right now I don't remember. Time for a cuppa tea.

Still Cringe-Worthy After All These Years

2011-03-08T11:28:00.002-06:00

So several years ago, on the order of ten, Miss A and I went to a party. I think it was a New Year’s party, but I can’t be one hundred percent sure. I seem to recall that it was the second party of the evening we hit and they were both a bust and this is why I think it was New Year’s. We had a really bad couple of years there as far as parties go.

Anyway, back to the reason I started writing this… shiny object, shiny object, shiny object… pretty…sigh…I swear it’s got to be hormonal. Anyway… we went to this party. We were invited by friends, but didn’t actually know the host. We were supposed to meet the friends there and were given directions. So off we go and find the house and arrive a few minutes past the appointed time. We were assured that we need not bring anything and that we would meet inside. All of this up front made me very nervous. I’m a little shy and a lot skittish in strange circumstances and well, our friends we were meeting weren’t known for being the most prompt.

Anyway, we get there late hoping the friends had shown up, find a parking place, and make our way inside. "Inside" was a very dark “sidewalk” down the side of the house where we ended up hanging on to each other for dear life trying not to fall down. As we approached the fence the smell of marijuana hit us full force and I looked at Miss A in the dark and said something like, “Maybe this isn’t such a great idea.” She agreed, but we decided to go in and find our friends and see if the grass was recreational or hosted.

So we get inside, no friends to be found. I knew no one at this party. So we walked around the whole place looking for the host and ended up in the kitchen with some lady (not the host) pushing food at us. To be polite we both took a plate and put a little bit on them and shuffled our feet for a while. Then this really, really and I mean really drunk lady came up to us and started asking us strange questions. I don’t remember what they were as I could barely understand her. I do remember she shook my hand vigorously. Miss A talked to her for a minute. About what, I’m not really sure then the drunk stumbled off.

Miss A and I stood looking at each other. I’m sure I was in fearful mode and she was in WTF mode. And finally it dawned on me that the drunk was the host. We decided to leave pretty soon after that as we were getting very strange looks from the guests and no one was talking to us and I just felt like a bug under glass. Add to that our friends never showed up.

Months later we learned that our friends showed up hours after we left and it was all figured out that we had indeed come by for a while and we were the weird chics who came in, ate, and then left. Just how I want to be remembered!

Anyway, just writing this whole event down makes me cringe. Miss A and I talk about it occasionally and every single time it makes me cringe. I was so uncomfortable and that discomfort has persisted all these years. I don’t know if it’s because I feel like we should have done something differently, though I don’t know what that would have been as we tried making conversation with people. If we shouldn’t have gone at all, at this point I would have been more comfortable with that. If we should not have eaten anything since we didn’t show up with something? I don’t know, I recall there being so much food anything we would have offered would have amounted to noise and we barely ate anything anyway.

But the whole deal with the host being so drunk she could barely stand up and forget about enunciation. Perhaps that’s what gets me the worst. As a host isn’t it your job to make sure your guests (invited or not) are welcomed? And if you’re planning as the host to get trashed make sure someone is there to play the role for you? I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but open house party doesn’t excuse bad manners.

And then there’s this thought that a whole party full of people think we’re weird party-crashers. That really makes me cringe and may be the crux of the problem.

I will say that I have since seen some of the people who were at that party out in public and I can assure you that not one of them was sober when we ran into them so maybe it doesn’t matter.

I don’t know…

The Project Files – A Bust Really

2011-03-07T11:27:00.002-06:00

Going into the weekend, my list looked like this:
- Fix the hole in the floor behind the couch
- Tap the rain barrels
- Clean off the bookshelf in the bedroom and give all the scrapbooks a place to live
- Clean off the kitchen table and decorate for St. Patty’s Day

Friday dawned, I sprang out of bed with a million things on my mind and the list suddenly went from four items to about two hundred. If my body only had as much energy as my mind…

So,
- The hole didn’t get fixed. Somehow I never made it to the gettin’ place to get what I needed to do it.
- The rain barrels didn’t get tapped as Miss A and I had a serious discussion on design in the car on the way home and we realized that my idea of our rain barrel system and her idea of our rain barrel system differed fundamentally. Mine involves putting taps and overflow valves and, okay, sigh, a daisy chain system. Simple. Hers involves digging trenches and gutter installations and modifications plus everything mine involves with a little extra confusion thrown in. Oh, and don’t forget we need to move that huge water tank by the side of the house before we can even start… sigh… Not to mention I never made it to the gettin’ place to get a couple of things I still needed to do it.
- The bookshelf is partially done. The scrapbooking dilemma has been fixed for a little while anyway. In the process of fixing the scrapbook problem I sorted out about twenty books that need to be listed on paperbackswap. They’re currently piled in my bedroom floor waiting to be listed and then find a box to live in while they wait to go to their new homes. Then there’s the shelf and a half that didn’t get organized this weekend. Maybe next weekend. We’ll see…
- And if you read Friday’s entry you’ll see that I did get the decorating done for St. Patty’s Day. At least part of it. I understand that one of my favorite craft stores is running 30% off all St. Patty’s Day stuff this week. The table got cleaned off and we’ve managed to keep it cleaned off for about two days now. Of course, the buffet has become the new shit pile in the kitchen, but at least I don’t have to look at it when I walk in the door.

Lots more may have gotten done if we hadn’t up and run off to Huntsville Saturday for a gardening seminar at the Botanical Gardens and then on the civic center for the annual Home & Garden Show. We then intended on heading back across the river, dropping some dinner at her mom’s and then out to see an old friend play at the coffee shop, but alas, it wasn’t to happen. We hung out at the civic center for way longer than we intended and didn’t get back to Hartselle until around 8pm. Her mom wanted cheeseburgers for dinner so we had a very nutritious and cholesterol conscious meal of cheeseburgers with fries. So as you can see, Saturday was shot for accomplishing my list of things to do, but we had fun anyway and came home with a steamer mop.

So yesterday I gave the new steamer mop a workout. The jury is still out on the thing, but I am very excited about the fact that I can bust it out at any time and clean up the floor after the cat pukes on it without having to make a whole bucket of mopwater and fighting with a mop. In fact, if I get home early enough this evening I noticed there are already two places that need to be touched up. I’m sure she (Miss Puke-a-palooza cat) will have made me some more by the time I get home.

Then I put two huge holes in the garage wall and hung up the hammock for storage. That led to a partial cleanout of garage type crap and a good sweeping. I don’t think it had been swept since before I let the previous cleaning lady go.

Some time mid-day yesterday we realized the home phone was out which was odd because the DSL is still working. My mom called and said she’d been trying to call it since Saturday evening. Our very gracious and accommodating phone company tells us it might be fixed by Tuesday so I am happy about that. Though, we probably would have noticed a lot faster something was wrong if the DSL went out. It’s a shame we don’t have better cell reception there. I like the idea of ridding our home of telephones, less crap sitting around on surfaces and all.

Overall it was a somewhat frenzied weekend between activities and projects and cooking. Yes, I did cook. I managed a pizza, spaghetti, spaghetti bake with ground venison, roasted fennel, onion and mushrooms, and a venison meatloaf. All done yesterday. Now I’ve made myself hungry…

I don’t really know what has gotten into me lately. Where this tear came from and why now, but my eyes fly open on Friday morning and I feel like there’s just not enough time to get it all done. And there is a sense of urgency in cleaning out all the crap and getting things arranged.

I thought about this a lot Friday as I was running in six different directions at once. Where is the energy coming from? Where is the creativity coming from? I suspect it’s that one extra day a week I get to not run out of the house in the morning. I can focus my morning energy on cleaning up the things that trouble me and drain my emotional and mental energies and being alone means I can make as much noise as I need to while doing it and at the same time recharge my introverted batteries. Then I get to go do some massage and get a good workout in the process. I think it’s just a healthier lifestyle than my other life where I sit at a desk and stay stressed out all the time. Of course, we’d probably starve to death if I had to support myself on just massage. It’s been slow since the New Year, though I have picked up several new clients recently.

Also, it’s the caffeine. I have become a caffeine-user. It’s terrible. I can be in total slug mode, drink some coffee and I’m bouncing off the walls. I wouldn’t say I’m addicted as I’m limiting it to weekends mostly. I did drink a cup of coffee this morning because my tractor would not crank even after I drug myself out of bed and sat in a stupor on the couch. But overall, I’m trying to use it judiciously as I don’t want the heartflop problem to start again and I’ve overdone it a few times as I’ve been experimenting with it the last couple of months.

So post the coffee this morning I managed two more loads of laundry before I left for work which is good, but then I sat at my desk bouncing for hours, which is definitely bad. I once had a boss who said when I had something to do I was hell on wheels. When I had nothing to do I was hell to deal with. He hit the nail on the head then even though I didn’t realize I was such a pain in the ass to other people. I thought it was all in my head.

I also managed to find a recipe I want to try for soda bread. It’s getting that time of year though I don’t know if I have any caraway seeds in the house nor do I know if I actually have plain, non-self rising flour. Sigh… why is it that when things really start getting good I have to get up and leave the house for work?

Anyway, I guess I’m going to go study for my cholesterol test. It’s Wednesday and I’m sure the pizza and cheeseburgers that I studied this weekend were not on the test. Sigh… I was doing so good too.

Festoonish Friday

2011-03-04T13:15:00.004-06:00

So I've spent a lot of today cleaning house and doing some other things that needed to be done. One of which was dumping the pumpkin and gourds that were still serving as decorations from Thanksgiving-ish. Eek! I'm nothing if not slow in getting around to getting things done.

Along those same lines, I finally finished last weekend's laundry this morning.

While I was folding clothes and watching the news I found a holiday I can really get on board with. What is it? National Pound Cake Day! Apparently it's today. If someone had told me earlier I would have made the effort to go buy or even try to make a pound cake, but alas, I have a couple of massages scheduled for this afternoon and well, there's just no time.

Anyway, I'm sure there are a few more things that I can get done before I have to stop and get dressed for work. Hee hee, get dressed for work... that means I put on my massaging clothes... makes me so happy that I've had much time to spend today fixing up around the house and now I get to go make some money to justify not working a full time job.

Dirty Little (Scrapbooking) Secrets

2011-03-03T11:17:00.002-06:00

So a while back we had a big re-arrange of all the bookshelves in the house. Or maybe I should say the bookshelves that are obvious to visitors. What happened is we attempted to make them all pretty and took out a bunch of stuff that was crapping them all up. Part of what got foisted was my scrapbooks. Not because they’re crappy looking, but because they didn’t fit on the shelf. So…they went to live in the bedroom bookshelf. Now, that bedroom bookshelf is a crap catchall.

Papers I don’t know what to do with, but need to keep for some reason or another (mostly I don’t feel like going through them before the cleaning lady shows up), greeting cards people have sent me (I’m sentimental and have a hard time throwing them out), books waiting to be read, puzzle books, knitting books, CDs, odd or off-season decorating pieces, picture frames, unused electronic gadgets all get crammed into the bedroom bookshelf. Occasionally I will find a cat on the bottom shelf making herself at home among the detritus and contributing as much cat hair and dander as the space will allow.

When the scrapbooks first came to live in the bedroom, I cleaned off a shelf and neatly ordered them by year, 1998 to whatever the present was then. The next day I arrived home from work to find all of my scrapbooks piled in the floor and a very upset cat. The shelf supports had broken and I presume the cat was either in the bookshelf or very near when it gave.

Miss A and I fixed the shelf and I cleaned off a second and the scrapbooks got distributed between two shelves. Sigh… Fast forward a couple of years and two or three new scrapbooks have magically appeared and guess what? There’s no more room. One is living on top of my knitting basket another is standing on the seat of the chair wedged behind another box of yarn. Every day I look at them, look at the shelves and try to figure out where the hell I’m going to put them permanently.

I’m afraid it’s time to clean off another shelf and dedicate it to the scrapping habit. Sigh… I don’t want to. Mostly because I have no idea where I’m going to put all the crap that’s currently living on the shelf that will have to be cleaned off.

We have too much crap. I have too much crap. I dream of walking into my home and it is warm and inviting and everything is in its place and then I dream that it magically stays that way. But it’s just a dream. Apparently I don’t have enough energy, wherewithal or discipline to keep up with it and truthfully I’d really rather be scrapping or knitting or doing anything else other than cleaning.

I read an article a few days ago about slobs and how seemingly intelligent people tend to become slobs not because they don’t have time to clean their digs, but because they have too much stuff.

We’re not what I would define as slobs. We’re messy and don’t clean up our messes promptly, but we definitely still have too much stuff despite years of paring it down. I feel another weekend project in the works. The master bedroom has been needing an overhaul for a while. I think the bookshelf is going to be the first casualty.

Domesticity - The Windows and Insulation Version

2011-03-01T11:27:00.001-06:00

Well… the windows are finally insulated, the replacement windows anyway. I’m waiting for the next cold snap to see about the new installation windows. I have a feeling I’ll eventually wind up having to do those too, but for the time being I need to forget the frustration the very last window caused me. It wasn’t as bad as last weekend’s debacle with the warped board, but it was frustrating.

Anyway, I’ve a handyman coming out this afternoon to check out the gap problem we’re having in the living room at the floor level with the wall where the fireplace used to live. I spent part of Sunday crawling on my belly under the house and porch trying to fix it, but short of squirting some insulating foam along an eighteen inch join, I was largely ineffective.

So… I’m moving on with the projects. If the weather will tolerate it, I think I’m going to try to put taps in the olive barrels Miss A bought for making rain barrels. This will all depend on whether I can enlist her help while I crawl into the things to install the taps. I shouldn’t be nervous about this, but I am. I mean, really, I crawled under the house Sunday with a bunch of spiders and snakeskins and these really funky bean-looking things that were stuck all over the place. What’s the harm in a plastic barrel?

Perhaps it brings back bad childhood memories… my father once threw me in a garbage can head first. I don’t remember it, but they still laugh about it so I know that it’s true and I’ve never liked much of anything headfirst. So, perhaps… Perhaps it’s the possibility that the thing could roll away with me inside. Who knows?

All the crawling about has made me sore; sore knees, sore deltoids which I don’t really get, but especially a very, very sore internal rotator of the hip. I haven’t figured out exactly what that muscle is, but it’s going and soon because it is seriously ouch when I stand up or rotate the leg.

So what else is going on? I don’t know. Yesterday was a Mack Truck Monday. It pretty well flattened me between all the folks at work wanting my attention and having errands to run and a late massage scheduled last night. Sigh… it was just rough.

The laundry didn’t get done over the weekend so I’m still working at that. Four more loads to go and about four currently waiting to be folded and stowed. I have a foyer full of cardboard boxes that need to go somewhere. Somehow I’ve managed to have a lot of stuff shipped in for my business in the last couple of weeks and all the packaging has made itself at home in the foyer. Hopefully by Friday I will have been able to haul it all off to the recycler.

Did I mention that I let our cleaning lady go? So along with all the other things that have to be done around our place I’m back to cleaning floors.

And I’m feeling a bit discombobulated lately. I’ve been taking my herbal sleeping pills the last couple of nights. That may be it. I’ve been having a lot of trouble going to sleep and spent most of last week completely exhausted so I gave up and broke out the bottle. They work so well I don’t want to overdo it and develop immunity to them (not to mention they’re kinda expensive) so I’m going to go it alone tonight. We’ll see how that goes. Perhaps I’ll supplement with one very yummy pecan beer this evening as I don’t have a massage scheduled and my only commitment is dinner with Miss A’s mom.

Speaking of, she had chemo treatment number four yesterday, only two more to go after this one. I know she will be glad when it’s over. I know we will all be glad when this is over. Sunday we didn’t go over at all she was doing so well and I found myself not knowing how to act when it came time for supper and I didn’t have to cook and then pack it all up and transport it. It made me really look forward to a time when we have our evenings back to ourselves.

Anyway…

Knitting Dreams

2011-02-26T22:25:00.004-06:00

I want to make one of these sweaters. I've had it on my Rav wish list for a long time. I don't know why I haven't done it, I just haven't, but now I'm dreaming about it. The problem is I don't have enough of any kind of yarn in my stash to do it with.

So... I need to go look at yarn. I dread this. Mostly because I don't care for our local yarn store. They have weird hours and depending on who is working when I hit it I will either be completely ignored, snottily dealt with or watched like I'm going to stuff a cabinet full of silk into my purse. Maybe I'll call my mom and get her to go shop at her local yarn store.

Of course, there's no telling what she'd send me. Not to mention the money issue. My money issue, I'm still freaking out about funds even though right now it's not an issue. I have this fear that it's going to become an issue so I've gone into obsessive mode over everything I'm spending.

Anyway, I think I'm going to have to put a wish list in the sidebar of this blog. In the last week I've found two really cool toys that I want. This is in addition to the last really cool toy I wanted.

So what are they? Well, they are in no particular order of how badly I want them a spinning wheel and a b0dyr0lling ball.

The spinning wheel is mostly made of PVC pipe which I find interesting and I like the price point being significantly lower than one made of say, wood. Of course, it's not as attractive as some I've seen, but then where else can you go all steampunk with a wheel?

The b0dyr0lling ball is something I've been investigating after reading an article somewhere. I think I might even be able to write it off as it is related to massage.

Anyway... I just punched myself in the teat. How does this happen? I'm going to slink off and cry now.

Let's Try Something New

2011-02-25T11:03:00.003-06:00

Every now and then Miss A and I find ourselves in a grocery store aisle staring at something we've either got a coupon for or have been seeing intriguing ads for.

The last incident was a couple of weeks ago and it involved a commercial for either almond milk or coconut milk. I don't remember exactly. Anyway, we found ourselves in the grocery store and picked up a small box of the almond milk to try. Then yesterday Miss A comes home with a half gallon of coconut milk that she got for $1.50 on a manager's special.

The girl is charmed at finding deals.

Anyway, I'm liking the almond milk. Nice mouth feel, nice taste. A little too much sugar (for me) to be practical, but I can see it being nice as a dessert or in a dessert occasionally.

The coconut milk took me by complete surprise. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I got. It's light and wet and cold. The coconut is mild and not cloying like you get with something that is flavored coconut. Not a lot of sugar, which is good for me, but I wanted a little more. I can't figure out what I'm going to do with it yet, but it definitely deserves a spin in the rotation. Seems like I saw a recipe that called for coconut milk a while back...

Anyway, it's nice to have a choice. We've been doing soymilk for a long time and I don't really drink milk anymore. I've unfortunately allowed myself to develop a coke a week habit. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it tears me up. So... it's nice to have options while I kick the habit, again.