Filed under: aaawwwww
I wrote a long and whiny post, then deleted it. Oh sure, it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, but no. Not today. Today I am ignoring the whines and making a list of stuff I am NOT whining about.
1. It’s cooler, the windows are open and there’s a breeze.
2. None of the household appliances are misbehaving. My maids are named Kenmore, KitchenAid, and Jenn-Air, and they’re all working nicely.
3. I seem to be all caught up on the ironing!
4. Crock Pot Chicken Tetrazinni is cooking.
5. um….
Filed under: home and hearth
I’m sure there’s a cheesy ’70′s pop song about rainy mondays. Maybe even some contemporary band like Chemical Romance has one…No? Well anyway, I have a rainy Monday and I love it. It’s peaceful. Laundry is churning already, chicken is on to simmer for soup tonight (tortilla soup. I had some at El Sombrero last week and totally want to knock it off for supper tonight. note to self: stop at the store and pick up an avocado)
The weekend passed comfortably. No crises beyond Terry getting calls at midnight due to mechanical issues at work. It was his weekend on, so it was expected. He is taking off Thursday and Friday this week, since upcoming is his weekend off. Huzzah! He’s going to make some sawdust! And a new cabinet for the ManCave…something sturdier than what he’s got now, with locking doors and room for a beer fridge and microwave (to keep the nachoes warm) and big enough for the flatscreen tv he’s eyeballing as his end-of-the-year reward. I’ll keep him supplied in lemonade and cheery good-wifey-ness w/apron while he’s happy in the shop, making sawdust.
The air is cool and breezy and damp. The windows are open with cats sprawled in them, suspiciously eyeballing the rain as if it’s there just to offend them. We have a generous overhang so the rain won’t blow in, but it still offends them. The dogs too. They’ll use #4′s room as a bathroom if the door isn’t closed, because going outside in the rain causes their feet to get wet and they really don’t like that At All. As long as all the doors are shut, they’ll go outside, but don’t give them any options. Nasty things.
CJ asked me to go apartment shopping with him today. He wants to live in the same complex as David (tho not the same apartment)but dislikes talking to Officials, and that’s apparently where I come in. We’ll find out what he needs to get started- deposits and all, so he’ll have a number that he knows he’ll need to save up. We’ll also start accumulating the items he will need to set up- sheets, towels, a pack of toilet paper, basic groceries. The Habitat ReStore opens on Saturday, so we’ll look for kitchen items and furniture then. Plates and glasses can be had for 10cents a piece, sometimes there’s pots and such. And boatloads to pick from. He’s wanting a small couch and a table and a TV…but they don’t generally have TVs, so he’ll need to save up for that as well. I am guessing he’ll need about $500 for the apartment and another $500 for stuff to get set up. He ought to be able to have that in 2 months, if he’s careful. School starts for him tomorrow, so he won’t have the time or energy for galavanting. Fortunately the 2 months he’ll need to save up will allow him to figure out if he is able to handle the school/work schedule. If not, he can quit work and live at home while he’s in school. I hope he can…I’d love to turn his bedroom into a reading room/library thing for Terry.
Anyway…it’s Monday, and the week is full of promise. It’s a good feeling.
What do you fear? How do you deal with it? I don’t mean the little things- like I fear cockroaches and deal with them with a great deal of hysteria and violence- I mean the big things like mortality and money and social things. Mortality I can handle for now. Barring anything unforeseen my demise is a while off. Terry’s too, hopefully, and also the kids, so it’s not even on the back burner, but on a shelf in the utility room behind the Christmas stuff. Money is kind of always there, on a 2 week cycle with the paychecks. It is not something I worry too hard about, tho, except when something like a deductible on a medical procedure is looming ($1000 on an upcoming thing…ouch!). Mainly I fear social stuff, being around people I don’t kow very well and not sure of how to act. “Oh just be yourself!” I am told, but then “myself” is a socially inept geek with precious little skill in relating. I know the rules- let them talk about themselves and they’ll love you- but then I come away from the experience dissatisfied, because all they did was talk about themselves and now I know their entire life history but they don’t know (or care) a single thing about me, and I am just selfish enough to want them to ask a few questions about *my* life. Which is why I blog..I can say all I want about ME ME ME, and if I want to know anything about YOU I’ll go read your blog…provided you link to it.
Thing is, I was raised that no one was interested in my life. “Don’t talk about yourself,” I was told, “they’re not interested.” and “Talking about yourself is self centered and boring.” Ok fine, I get that. Sometimes tho, I get around a person who asks questions, and acts like they’re interested, then I don’t know when to stop and suddenly when the conversation is over I realize the entire time was all about me and that is EMBARRASSING…”Oh Lord I hogged the whole conversation” or “I don’t know a thing about what they’re dealing with” or something like that. Diarrhea of the mouth, I has it.
So when Terry announces that there’s an upcoming Social Thing and I get to come, I get nervous. What to wear? how to act? how many gin and tonics can I have before I start acting weird? (2, usually, after that the mouth starts to run). What if all the women want to talk about theater or fashion, 2 subjects about which I know NOTHING…what to do? and the next 2 weeks leading up to the event are consumed with worry. Get me in a room with Hea Jun and we can babble on all day about genetic engineering of soybeans and the ethics therein, and be quite happy. Put me in a room with Ms. Yvonne and her latest shopping expedition to Nordstrom and I am silent and clueless. I wish I were more socially ept (you know, the oppostie of inept), but I don’t want to have to swap social eptitude for comprehending bioethics either…oh well. That’s my biggest fear, I think, looking foolish socially. What’s yours?
So, I saw Dr. S this morning, all a-worried because I had pretty much convinced myself that I would be enduring yet another hip replacement. Ha! Tis to laugh! Dr S took x-rays and proudly announced that my hip looked so good it should be in textbooks. “The Best Most Expensive Hip Ever! Fantastic!” he announced. My issues? The pain and popping sensations when I turned or bent? Bursitis, plain and simple. Who ever thought one would be cheered so mightily with a diagnoses of bursitis? “Take some Aleve, do a few of these exercises, in a couple of weeks you’ll be right as rain.”
So…NO huge surgery to wreck my hopes of being a Victoria’s Secret model. NO six weeks of relying on everyone else to do things not the way I want them done. NO using the porta-pot with the raised seat and suffering the embarrassment of having a toilet next to the bed and having to get help onto it. NO dealing with an attorney and a lawsuit and such aggravation. Just 2 weeks (maybe 3) of treating myself gently. I am fairly sure the recovery will go fine with the addition of fine chocolates and that new bottle of ginger infused vodka in the freezer. In fact, I am extremely sure.
Filed under: The Mess
*attention* this post in no way implies that Terry treats me as The Little Woman. He doesn’t.
I love my job. I get a huge kick out of keeping the house clean(ish), running #4 around to his various activities, and cooking interesting meals. I like having a bourbon and lemonade for Terry when he gets home, keeping clean sheets on the beds, and tending to the dogs. I even (kind of) like dealing with whatever varmint the cats chose to slaughter and drag in to the house…well ok maybe enjoy isn’t the right word, but it is amusing.
I have been a little worried, because I think entirely too much (right, JerseyChick?). What if my position as Household COO isn’t taken seriously by whoever it is who does these things, and when I go to dealing with DePuy Orthopedics they go “oh you’re just a housewife and don’t have any income so you don’t need any compensation for your troubles. Go away little woman.” There are all these scenarios running through my mind about it. What if they look through my medical records and go “oh lookee here, you’re bipolar, that means you’re obviously hysterical and exaggerating everything so we aren’t going to even consider you as worthy of our time.” What if the attorneys do the same? What if the attorney assigned to my case is a woman who’s jealous of housewives and decides I’m not worth the time or effort?
I was mopping the floor this morning, not easy or fun right now and even had to stop a couple of times because it actually made me nauseous (how I respond to pain, rather than going OW OW) but the floors were a mess and needed it, and whilst mopping I wondered what it would be worth. What about the laundry? how much is that worth? If we had a top loading washer it would be easier, but 5 years ago we got a front-loader and at the time is was a fantastic idea but right now the bending over to load and unload is onerous. CJ is helping, so is #4, and Terry toated it all downstairs but still…I hate asking other people to do my job.
What if…someone is out there in the woods across from my house, with a telephoto lens documenting that I could not POSSIBLY be having issues because I am mopping and doing laundry and no one with the issues I claim to be having could possibly do those things.
Don’t you ever do that- keep on doing your job when all you really want to do is lay down? Someone’s got to do it. But who? Terry, who works 14 hours a day in a nasty mill? Would that even be RIGHT, to ask him to do my job on top of his? What about CJ, who works 4 to midnight, so he’s home in the day right now, and actually *is* helping out quite a bit, but next week he starts school from 7:30am to 3:30pm, plus work, so even if he were here I totally wouldn’t ask him. #4? He can clean bathrooms, take out the trash, empty the dishwasher and feed the dogs…add a couple hours of homework to that and I think that’s enough to ask of him. No, I have my job to do and I am going to do it. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
I see the orthopedist on Wednesday. In order to fortify my psyche for the event, I am getting a haircut tomorrow. It’s been over a year since my last cut and I am looking forward to having something with a little style.
The favor I need involves recipes. I need ones that I can make ahead of time and freeze. That whole “once-a-month-cooking” thing, perhaps. If you don’t mind, hop over to Rootie’s Kitchen and leave suggestions. You don’t have to leave a full recipe, just something to tweak the imagination, because it’s not working so well at the moment and I am starting to get nervous.
Thanks!,
Rootietoot
Terry’s fiddling with the TV right now. It has a plethora of cords, and.. I despise seeing a tangle of them…and he says right out of the blue “the case of the one-eyed killer stud horse” and I’m like “whut?” and he goes “look” and holds up a Hank the Cowdog book. “alrighty then!” and returns to the tv cord apocalypse. Ok perhaps I exagerrate (exxagerate? exaggerate? there’s double letters in there somewhere)but it is quite the snarl. He told Arthur the Cable Guy he’d take care of it. It’s not just as simple as the cable box connecta-to-da-TV neither. Long gone are the days of “plug the tv in, have a cord from the tv to the rabbit ears”. Oh no…There’s the surround sound system, there’s the DVD player which is also a Netflix reception thing and it’s Blu-Ray so there’s fancy cords for that and it’s all HD so there’s extry cords for that and I hate a mess of tangled cords, so there he is, fighting with Medusa’s Head early on a Sunday morning, all because of my delicate sensibilities. This is why I love the man. Slayer of Dragons, my own personal Perseus.
Filed under: Uncategorized
These are things I’ve never seen, want to see, and take a picture of…ok some of them I have seen but didn’t take a picture of…whatever.
1. A tornado
2. lightning
3. the Aurora borealis
4. That crazy platter cloud that happens over Mt. Fuji sometimes
5.a volcano eruption
6. a geyser
There’s something about weather and geological phenomena, you know they aren’t staged, but can be so beautiful!
Filed under: The Mess
The cause of all this anxiety
Attention: I am not wanting or needing sympathy for the hip issue. I do appreciate it. However, even tho it will become a regular feature here, if you’ve said “oh poor baby!” once, you don’t need to repeat it. Right now it is the elephant in my living room and I don’t intend to ignore it, but it is not a bid for sympathy. /end statement
Way back when, I reckon around 2005 when the old hip really starting giving me fits, I developed habits that allowed things to get done while still accomodating orthopedic shortcomings. I am glad I did that, because now I know what to do with the current issues. I don’t get all hand-flappy and call Terry in a panic when stuff starts to misbehave or make it’s unwelcome presence known. I just go back to what worked before.
The hip feels pretty good first thing in the day, after I’ve been off of it for 10 hours, so that’s when things get done. I will work like a banshee from the time I get up at 6am until 11-12, when body parts begin to go “ummm, better call it quits, Hoss…”. Fortunately most things can get done in 6 hours. Then I’ll sit quietly down with a basket of hand-work, turn the music on if nothing interesting is on the TV, and make something ornamental. 3 hours later it will be time to go to the school and spend 30 minutes walking up and down the school driveway, taking names and keeping children from getting run over, and by then the hip calls it quits. Actually it quits about 10 minutes before the job is done, but I’ll be double(profanity deleted) before I let DePuy orthopedics make me quit something that I’ve committed to. Tylenol and another hour off of it when we get home makes it possible to stand long enough to cook dinner.
Some days are better than others. Sometimes the issue is just an awareness that something is off-kilter down there, and not particularly painful. Other days it’s kinda bad…like…well, like it was 3 years ago, a month before the initial hip replacement when I had trouble walking to the mailbox and up the stairs. Today is not like that. Today, so far (it’s almost 11:30), has been quite good, with the ability to get on my knees and pull weeds, and carry a 5 gallon bucket of soapy water to the mailbox to give it a much needed scrub. However, on the way back after cleaning the mailbox, the hip said “ok honey, thats enough for today” and that was that. So now, the hip and I are sitting in a chair, listening to some quiet music.
I am trying to be thankful for all this. Romans 8:28 says “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” and I firmly believe that includes the stuff we don’t really like. Peaches said to me “Be a good Calvinist, and remember that God has a purpose for everything, and eventually this will work into something amazing. He is a God of surprises, so sit back and trust that He’ll do what He will.”
So at this point, I have no idea what’s in store for the future. I don’t know if Dr S will want to put in a new hip, or just keep an eye on this one. I don’t know if he does decide to replace it, what will happen there. Last time wasn’t as easy as it shoulda been, so the possibilities for the future worry me, no matter what Paul and Peaches say. Oh, I have no doubt it will eventually all work out somehow. Past experiences tell me that God is quite capable of taking a really rotten (to me) circumstance and turning it into something quite wonderful, so I trust *that*…it’s just…kinda scary, y’know, to not know what the process is going to involve, and I do NOT wait well. The appointment to see Dr. S, get evaluated, and find out just wot’s wot, is on Wednesday at 9:30. Until then I am going to worry and make up Worst Case Scenarios.
