Where the hell have you been?

This is a question I have been hearing a lot lately. I don’t really have one particular reason for my online and occasional real life absence. It’s been a lot of things, really. Mike is graduating in 3 weeks from high school. So you know that means lots of planning, invitations, mailings, and a lot of talking to people I don’t like, but it’s a small town and I have to be nice. Mike’s track season for him, Mel’s hand bell concert schedule (she performed with the Erie Jr Phil a few weeks ago). Melanie had a wickedly twisted break up with her first love, that took a while with lot’s o’ drama (not hers, just him pulling her chain and his family). Our giant burmese python died the Saturday before Easter. We buried him in the yard and planted a purple rhodi in his honor. Joshua has a new schedule at work that is driving him and I both a little nutty. Lindy (don’t think I’ve mentioned her before, but she is my mother’s sister, the cool one) and I have started a business. Designing and sewing clothing, handbags, wallets, baby items, jewelry, etc. This is the first week since February that I have not been at one or more of my machines on a daily basis. We are putting together an online store that will hopefully be up and running in a few weeks.

My calendar for this week is also full. An honors banquet tonight, where both M & M are getting recognized for something (I am hoping a scholarship for Mike, keep your fingers crossed), tomorrow Mike is getting his tattoo from Johnny at Karma Tattoo. Since Mike’s 18th bday was on mother’s day….we gave him his tat for his birthday and he is giving me a small one for mother’s day. Not your typical mother’s day fare, but I have never been the typical mother, either. Thursday is actually a down day which can prep me for Friday when I am chaperoning Mel’s Accelerated Bio class to the Cleveland Zoo. Saturday, the Guitar and Strings concert is being held in the Albion Boro Park. G&S is an informal music club at Northwestern. All the kids are pretty talented. Melanie and her friend, Melanie, have written a song and will be performing it in a 6-7song set. I am WILDLY excited to throw down a blanket, and listen to some awesome music. The concert starts at 1 if you want to join us. Bring a picnic and chill with the cool kids on Saturday!

I am sure I have left out a lot of detail but this is a quick and dirty version of why I have been MIA for the last few months.

Peace!

Contamination Nation, part 2

Well, it’s Tuesday and Joshua went back to work last night. He is still achy and sore, but digestively sound. Mike is also still sick but he has his college classes on Tue and Thur, so he went to school today. So it’s just me still working on laundry from the great vomit-o-thon, and mel is still home.

On a high note, the cable guy is here installing CABLE!!!!!!! We agreed when we moved in that the choice was broadband internet of cable, we all chose internet.

Have a great day!

Morning View…and then the snow came

This is a shot taken from my backdoor this morning. I got a new camera for Christmas and have been snap happy today….

This is the same view 4 hours later

I Heart Netflix

I am so loving my Netflix subscription lately.  My hubby and daughter have been picking some really great movies lately (I have a bunch on our “list” but somehow they keep getting lower and lower on the list).  I am not complaining, just wanting to give props to the pickers.  In the last few weeks, we have watched:

Idiocracy- a great Luke Wilson straight to DVD movie about an average Joe who is frozen for 500 years and when he wakes up, he’s the smartest man on the planet.  It describes the dumbing down of our society and how we would probably look in 500 years if we aren’t careful.  It also has great quotes (It has electrolytes,  it’s got what plants crave, go away…Batin’) to be used quite frequently around our house.

Charlie Bartlett- Charlie is kicked out of another private school and mom decides to send him to public school.  He still wears his private school uniform, and gets his ass kicked the first day of school.  Charlie’s family has a shrink on call and provides Charlie with a smorgasboard of drugs to treat his growing list of symptoms….all fake, since Charlie is then selling the drugs and his advice in the boy’s restroom stall.  You would think that since all this is some heavy subject matter that the story would have a bad ending, but it stays pretty light.  The kids and parents in this movie are all played by great actors (Robert Downey Jr is the alcoholic principal), and all is well in the end for Charlie and his friends.

Little Miss Sunshine- What can I say, we were a little behind on this one.  I remember all the hype about it from the Oscars and Sundance, which to be honest was the reason I skipped over it a few times, but now that I have actually seen it (and laughed and cried through it twice), I have decided all the hype was definitely deserved.  A hilarious family, with everyone having issues, travels from New Mexico to California so that the youngest, Olive, can enter the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest.  On the trip, they encounter many obsticals, but they manage to get everyone there in one piece, more or or less (can’t say any more without giving out huge plot lines).  This is a great movie to watch if you need a little reminder that YOUR life ain’t so bad.

Garden State is our newest pick.  We are saving it or Sunday, since we all have busywork tomorrow.  I love Zach Braff (Scrubs), and have been waiting for this movie.  I’ll let ya’ll know how it was after Sunday.

Have a great weekend!

Mom, can’t you SEE that?

Saturday I was having a good, productive day.  During the morning, I had cleaned out the washer (who knew varnish does NOT come out of clothes), and ran 6 loads of laundry.  On my last load, Melanie comes down into the basement to pass along some more dirty clothes, and she screams, “Holy shit, Mom.  What the hell is that?”  I look over behind our son’s weight bench, and there he is…..Asia our 14 foot burmese python.  What the hell was he doing in the main part of the basement?  His cage and room are supposed to be escape proof.  Since moving into this house, this is the first escape.  So I go into the snake room, and see that his cage is open about 6 inches, and there is shed everywhere.  I follow the shed into the corner beside the chimney base, and there is a hole about 3 inches tall.  Asia at his roundest is about 8 inches thick.  That damn snake crawled thru that hole and that’s how he got into the main part of the basement.  So I am a little freaked out since Asia weighs over 100 pounds and there is NO WAY I can put him back by myself (Joshua was at work and therefore useless to me in this situation).  So I call a friend who also has snakes and ask him to come over and help me.  I swear Asia heard me, because as soon as I got off the phone, he decided to “explore” more of the basement.  He was trying to get into the corner where Joshua keeps his tool boxes.  I was afraid he would stab himself on a tool or a nail or whatever, so I go back into the snake room and grab the hook.  It basically looks like and upsidedown cane and you use it to handle snakes.  So I am hooking him every 30 seconds to keep him from getting any further into the tool boxes.  This, of course pisses him off, so he starts to hiss at me.  Now, we have had Asia for over 4 years (we rescued him from an abusive home), and he has never bitten any of us.  But the way I saw it, there was a first time for everything.  So after what seemed like a half an hour (he got stuck by a train), Jim shows up and gallantly assists me in getting Asia back into his cage.  All the while, I am calling and texting Joshua about his escapee, and I am getting no response (which added to my general irritation).  So, all’s well in the Vadney reptile room.  The best we can guess is Asia used his nose to slide open the door, and in the process of freeing himself, he shed his skin.  Perfectly natural occurance (the shed, not the escape).  Now that we know the little bastard can open his cage, we put locking shims against the glass so he can’t do this again.  Just when I think I am ok about Joshua’s hobby, something like this reminds me that I have a husband who loves snakes.  Lucky me.  I was trying to upload a picture of Asia taken last year but I can’t seem to get it to work.  If anyone is interested in seeing it, I can email it to you.

Mind Power, Steve, Mind Power

Your Brain Usage Profile:

Auditory : 50%
Visual : 50%
Left : 29%
Right : 70%No matter which side of your brain is dominant,
M i n d W a r e
can strengthen your emotional brain power by helping you understand how
you feel about yourself.

Brandy, you are moderately right-hemisphere dominant and have even preferences between auditory and visual processing, traits that might make people perceive you as “slightly off balance.”You are most likely to be slightly disorganized, a “dreamer” and a person who focuses more on the end result than the immediate task at hand. You are creative and spontaneous if somewhat lacking in direction and focus. You are a learner who is generally patient and a person for whom time is an ally, not an enemy.

You are more passionate than most people with regard to life and learning and recognize your own intuitive abilities. You have sufficient goal-direction to satisfy yourself and guarantee success without being or feeling driven. You are willing to be reflective about yourself and others without getting lost in rumination.

The balance of your sensory modes allows for both learning and expressive capabilities achieved by few. You are active and “seeing” while retaining an equally strong propensity for being reflective which slows you down a little but allows for a more comprehensive perception and analysis of situations and problems. You do not spend excessive time analyzing since you mostly trust your perceptions.

In all likelihood, you have a tendency to overcommit and cannot under- stand why others get upset since you operate on a different “time table” than they do. Your organizational abilities are frequently overwhelmed by the stimulation seeking and active nature of your mind as well as by the tendency to create new categories and gloss over details, making categorization and classification almost impossible at times.

To the extent that your career path allows for creativity and abstraction as well as a bit of disorganization, you should find yourself equipped to handle any learning that is required. Your own personal adjustment to your style should come naturally although you are likely to feel frus- trated by your own limited discipline and often wonder “Why?”

The Fog is Getting Thicker….and Leon is getting Laaarrggger!

I couldn’t sleep this morning, so I came downstairs and popped in a DVD.  Airplane. I love this movie.  It’s ridiculous in so many ways, but it’s also side splitting comedy at it’s best.  Leslie Nielsen is hilarious and my brother and I can quote this movie line for line.  Thinking about movies…maybe I’ll update our queue at Netflix and request some comedy.  Have a good Monday.

The Rainbow After the Storm, and other things I am waiting for.

A friend told me long ago that there is always a storm before the rainbow.  I have been thinking about that a lot lately, wondering when my storm will be over and I can enjoy the rainbow.  My depression is back in a serious way, and any coping reserves I had are kaput.  I am sleeping too much, my temper is on a one inch string, I am crying when there is no reason.  Joshua took me to the docs yesterday and they both decided that I do not need another trip to the hospital.  It was weird seeing the two of them deciding what I needed.  It was kind of offensive to me, but I was too upset to bother raising the issue.  This sucks.  It’s summer, I should be happy.  The sun is mostly out, I have a garden that is going to produce lots of tomatoes and pumpkins and zucchini.  The kids are both healthy and happy.  Even with my bullshit, I think Joshua still loves me.  He’s pretty pissed at me right now because I fucked up our expenses again.  I can understand his frustration.  He’s working his ass off, and if you look at it from the outside, I am the one sabotaging our climb out of this debt hole we’ve managed to fall into.

Our tenant at the trailer hasn’t paid rent since May, we are in the process of evicting her.  The kids and I had to go over there Wednesday and mow the lawn and pull weeds.  Her van was in the driveway, but she never came out.  Mike didn’t want to mow because he knew she worked nights and was probably asleep.  As politely as I could muster, I explained to him that she was 2 months behind on her rent and I didn’t give a shit if we woke her up.  The grass was 6 inches high and there were weeds almost as tall as me in the flowerbeds.  That really upset me because in the 8 years we lived in that huge trailer, I took immaculate care of the yard and the beds.  There is probably $500 in bushes, bulbs, and perennials.  And just like the  rent, my pretty yard was missing, too.  What a bitch, we gave her a chance, and she is totally fucking us over.  I did manage to transplant some mint, oregano, and some hyacinths.  The funniest part of our visit to the trailer was that I told Mike to mow down one section of the herbal bed I had.  Well, he mowed it down, and all of a sudden we get this HUGE whiff of what smelled like a pickle pizza.  I had Oregano, basil, chives, and some dill I had forgotten about.  Due to the wind blowing a little bit, you could smell our culinary combination down the street.

And to top the week of with a great FU to Brandy, the company that carries my long term disability coverage didn’t bother to cut me a check for July.  We don’t know where it came from, but they had a return to work date in June for me.  My doc never gave them that, and now I have to wait anywhere from one week to 30 days for them to review my case AGAIN….so as if we weren’t fucked enough financially, no check for Brandy for a while.

So these are a few things I am waiting for…..sanity, no depression, rent, and an LTD check.  This should be an interesting July.

That was then, now I am Desperately Seeking Sanity

Who’s Your 80s Movie Icon Alter-Ego?

 

 

 

 

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Sick and Tired, Sick and Tired

Back in March, I was seen in the ER for upper right abdominal pain on a Sunday evening.  Bing bang boom, 3 tests later they give me a shot of dilaudid, and sent me home with instructions to find a surgeon to remove my gall bladder.  I found a highly recommended surgeon and it just so happened that she had an opening on Tuesday.   We go, I am poked and prodded.  She finally says, “I do all my scheduled surgeries on Thursday, and I have availability.  The nurse will call you tomorrow to tell you when to be at the hospital”.  Wow, 48 hours to prepare myself mentally.  It was hard, but I managed.

    After the surgery, I have several complications.  The most severe (gross part here people) side effect/complication was that I have diarrhea several times a day.  It matters not what I eat (i ate 3 bananas and NOTHING).  It’s been 10 weeks, now and I am almost back to a normal eating regimen.

    Saturday evening, I started to get a sharp pain in the VERY lower part of my left side.  The pan also felt like it was inside my vajayjay.  I took all I could until Joshua took me to the ER Sunday afternoon.  A cat scan, IV fluids, blood in my urine, and a few dilaudid shots, the doc tells me I had passed a kidney stone.  WTF?

    Trying to get back to me old self mentally has made very little progress since all I can muster energy for is recovery.  I feel like my body is revolting against the healthy foods I have been forcing her to eat.  Any thoughts?