Ow ow ow ow ow

I never really know when something else is going to come loose or overtighten and it takes me a while to figure out what is wrong when it happens. Nowadays the thing is this horrible jaw and neck pain, muscle spasms in the back of my neck right under my skull that wrap around to my jaw. It has something to do with the TMJ that I've had for decades; my teeth slide around randomly and different configurations trigger spasms. I just got a fine big healthcare spending account starting January and am planning to use it on braces and new, smaller front crowns to see if that might help. This neck pain started the first day of the new job, sitting in the room reading the policy book and my blackberry in boredom, so it's been about two months now.  Not being able to swim this week with the pool closing for Christmas seemed to bring the RSD roaring back in my right leg, and I didn't sleep Christmas Eve with the hot bear-trap sensation combined with the muscle spasms. I actually got out of bed super early and made a hot bath, and wrapped Epsom Salts in a wet cloth to put on my neck, which helped for a while. So far in the past couple of days, I have taken Aleve, advil, ibuprofen, Exedrin, Xanaflex, magnesium, coffee, pomegranate tea, ginger, Barefoot pinot grigio, and Absolut Rasberi for pain. I am holding out on the Neurontin and Lyrica but it could happen.  Daughter forgot to go to CVS on Christmas Eve for migraine meds and woke up with one yesterday, and we had to blow off our traditional Christmas night chick flick outing. Neither one of us could justify trying to sit up and look at a screen for two hours when we couldn't get our heads to stop hurting for more than ten minutes in a row.
Fella came through for Christmas like a champ; for the second Christmas in a row, I was having to direct as much as cook and he stayed in the tiny kitchen and cleaned everything so we had a place to put things. We had a nice dinner even though the fresh turkey turned out to be a fresh turkey breast and I only like dark meat; the hazards of shopping when one is very very tired from work and the store is picked over but empty of other shoppers. I had thought it was a little funny looking in the package. Should have shown more curiosity.
We ended up with turkey breast and gravy, stuffing, coca-cola salad, homemade cranberry relish with my sister's orange in it, cranberry jelly in a can with stripes that he likes, sweet potatoes with my sister's orange in them, my child's beloved green bean casserole, rolls, chocolate pie, cherry pie, pecan tassies, and hello dollies. Festive. Southern. Excessive.
One pool out of the three in town is supposed to be open today for a short time and I am going to go try to swim and walk in it and see if my neck and leg will give me a break so I can enjoy the rest of my holiday without excessive drugs.

Yay

Child is home, in a good mood, and not making any messes so far. I have four days off in a row to not even think about how bad the job from hell makes my feet, back, and neck hurt.
The bathroom is almost finished and it really looks lovely. The fella has outdone himself.
There is a Christmas tree on the back porch that may make its way in here tomorrow and get a few ornaments on it. There is pecan tassie cream cheese crust in the fridge from some food processor magic I worked under the influence of Absolut Rasberi and o.j. a little earlier tonight.
There's even a tiny pile of presents and, thanks to a check my sister sent me, I can pay the car insurance and not be overdrawn at the bank if I don't buy anything next week until Thursday.
I know how Cindy Lou Who felt at Christmas.

Fifteen and a half years

I don't know what that is in dog years. Most Shelties, they tell me, live about twelve.
Our Sheltie has always been amazing. Amazingly bright, amazing at language and brilliant at herding both cats and people. Routines like a German schoolteacher, a built-in alarm clock that functioned to the minute.
Any time the girl or I felt sad, there has always been a sable shoulder pressed against our leg; free love, instant perspective. World's best dog, hands down. When she was younger, we walked three to five miles a day, her prance was inspiring. She hasn't been able to make the block in a while.
Whenever she has a bath or her collar gets dirty, and she has to go naked, she gets aggravated; we call her tags her jewelry, and she points her nose and harfs at them until someone gets a clue and puts them back on her neck. When she shakes them to hear them, it's like a princess preening her diamonds.
This week she hadn't felt like breakfast; last night she didn't feel like dinner. She did feel like taking a few treats. But they didn't digest, I could hear the rumbling of her stomach when she got restless in the night; and she did not recognize me. And she couldn't stand up.
The fella came first thing when I called, and carried her in a blanket to the vet. She didn't know what was going on; her first vet visit in fifteen and a half years that she wasn't terrified.
They made me a pawprint to bake, and a lock of her hair.
The fella buried her in her spot under the flowering cherry. I put her jewelry back on after the vet tech had removed it; stupid, but I couldn't bear to think of her without it around her neck.
I don't think I ever want another dog.

How Bad are Farts Supposed to Hurt?

Things you can't ask people except on the internet.

I had a minor GI bleed earlier this week; my stomach burned badly two or three days and then the telltale black sticky blood-smell diarrhea showed up. I've cleaned up hundreds of other people's GI bleeds; this one was minor by most standards. But blood and the GI tract are not very compatible and it gives you TERRIBLE gas. Like, fraternity quality death length farts. And damn, that gas is hurting in there way worse than the bleed did. I've stepped up my Citrucel and my soluble fiber; got to get that shit out! So far, it hasn't come to cropdusting people with offensive smell, hopefully it won't. I've already had one bad start at the workplace and don't need another.

Things I am looking forward to

My child is coming home next week. Yay!
My bathroom is soooo close to being remodeled. Ya'll, it's blinding white and lovely. White ceiling, white beadboard paneling floor to ceiling, white mosaic tile floor. New silver light fixture, new silver faucet, new silver towel and tp racks.
There are white sales in January and I am going to get some loud-ass color bathmats. Like, electric blue.
I have  a Leyland cypress for a Christmas tree in a pot and I've got to figure out how to decorate it. Lowe's was out of rosemary bushes but this is bigger, same price, and if it doesn't die will make a nice privacy tree on the back ditch.
I only have sixteen years to retirement. Sixteen years. You could do sixteen years in a Turkish prison, right?

Google Stats is mesmerizing

Someone on dooce told me about the stats button on here. Who knew. I knew there were a couple of my buddies besides my sister reading this but, hello Russia, hello Denmark (is that you, George?) and ya'll chime in and tell me something. Don't be shy, I'm fascinated by this.

Annoyance Proof

Sadly, the other job did not materialize. Sigh. And I paid the bills and my money is gone, and it's twenty days until I get paid again. So that does suck. Next month they will take out retirement and shit and I'll have even less to live on.  Life on the state tit is not that pretty. But! And that is a great big but!!!!
My boss cut me a huge break and after another hellish week on the most fucked-up service in the hospital, I get to change Monday to a different service. No kids to break my heart, no politics and weirdness and people who have been there thirty years and want me to do their fucking work for them and get totally fucking hostile when I just politely ask them to do the parts it's not legal for me to do. Like write prescriptions. So all the stupid stuff that happened today was just minor, and sort of funny to me. Some of it was surreal, but it was going to be SOMEONE ELSE'S PROBLEM at four-thirty so I just documented the surreality of it and went on. My cubicle mate asking me to spell myasthenia gravis and then telling me it didn't look right and looking it up and finding it was right, (dumbass, I wouldn't have told you if I didn't know) was just kind of cute in its stupidity. The spellcheck on here doesn't know it either.  So, yay for the weekend, boo for putting a little bit of Christmas on a credit card I shouldn't use, and hoo-fuckin-ray for getting on a medicine service that is just routine with minimal psycho personalities.
Plus my doctor found me some probiotics that taught my colon to make a few poo shaped poop and that although painful to the lining of said colon being grossly unused to anything in there but goop for years, was somehow cheering. It's the little things.

Groundhog Week

I broke up my week with a job interview and a doctor visit. Otherwise the days are running into each other in a haze of swollen face misery from the bad air quality in the hospital and throbbing pain in my feet from the long hikes. The medicine isn't working as well as it did, either, and I have had about three flares this week with headfog and excruciating muscle spasms and the horrible, crushing fatigue. I wonder if having a job I didn't hate would make me feel better or if it would be harder to be enthusiastic about work and be sick. If they offer me the job I interviewed for it will be something to think about. More money now, but no gravy-train state retirement later. Added bonus, of course, of not having one's soul killed by repetitive and useless phone and paperwork tasks. We'll see.

Charming as a clean baby

My fella is a cat person in several meanings of the word. Including the fact that he has more than a few toes over the line into the autism spectrum. To say he lacks empathy for people would be putting it mildly in general but he does relate well to the many cats that various women in his life have bestowed upon him. He views my smarty-pants old lady Sheltie with mild alarm but was so kind and good when she became horribly ill with gastric bleeding from eating commercial dog food to which she had developed an allergy. Then, when I got sick and was in the hospital, he actually had to make her food, which entails cooking chicken thighs to a pulp and  removing the bones by hand; a nasty, greasy business that he tackled manfully.  It weirds him out that she understands language and does what you tell her, though. I have noticed that he has started trying to talk to her in dog. She comes up to smell the eau de chat all over his sweatpants and he says to her, "Harfle harfle." She looks at him like a hostile Frenchman at a fat American parley-voooing. I think it is charming that he is trying to relate to her. She finds it charming when he obeys her nose-point signals and gets her a treat from the bag in the cabinet.

Thanksgiving

A very odd one this year; the first without my child in 23 years, but she is happy to be in NYC with her grandmother, seeing Rockefeller Center all lit up for Christmas just like we always wanted to. I will make it there one year before she finishes grad school and we will do the sights, too. I let my fella choose today's menu and it was very odd indeed; he chose homemade chicken/spinach and meat-lovers pizzas and my fancy chocolate pie. So we were not nibbling miserably at nostalgic food without my child, I suspect. When he first selected the lineup, we thought I might have just one day off and he didn't want me to spend all my time off cooking the big meal and then have to go back Friday still tired, too. So I am thankful for that consideration as well. This time last year I was too sick to stand for more than a minute or so at a time, and somehow I got our meal on the table by sitting on the kitchen stool and waving the spoon feebly at my family. Then I couldn't eat any of it because of the nausea that dogged me for the next couple of months. So I am thankful to have found a medicine to stop the horribleness that cost me my job and nearly my house. I have an appointment Wednesday with the GI doc to try to talk him into giving me an open-ended Rx for it, since whenever I go 16 hours without a dose the famous poop and the atrocious belly pain and the fainting all come back. Which I am never thankful for.

Don't Pay the Ransom

I've escaped! No, just escaped getting arrested for murder today at work. It was a good thing the person on the other end of the phone was a quarter of a mile of hall and elevator away is all I have to say about that. And my big boss is pretty awesome, she backed me up on the one who needed killin. But still, this job, my god. I have that other interview on the 30th and I am practicing practicing practicing for it.
Also in good news, the girl who fixed my bad haircut called me back and is going to fit me in Saturday for the second repair. I may have semi-awesome hair for the interview, yay! Power hair and power panties and power prep. It's really hard not to get my hopes up too much, like I told my sis, I haven't gotten a job I really wanted in a while, I seem to get offered the ones I have grave reservations about. Maybe my new hair will help change my luck.

Fail

Plan to wander aimlessly and not stress out today? Huge, enormous, massive fail. My day was best described by the paperwork and telephone equivalent of a bear biting your ankle and dragging you around. Any attempt on your part to change the situation is essentially fruitless and just causes pain, the bear has to decide to let you go on its own.
I do have an interview for a much better job lined up on the 30th but it's with a guy who once gave me a good reference then followed it with a poor one according to the next recruiter I used. And I know he's kind of dumb and they just keep him there for his pretty face, but he actually seemed not to remember me on the phone today, with my resume' right there in front of him. With the dates on it reminding him of when we worked together.  So that lacks promise.
Waiting to see how that plays out will make this one travel job in my field go away of its own. I don't want-want to take a job across the country at Christmastime, again, for three months; California isn't really pretty in the winter. But if another one comes up after Christmas, I will make a beeline for the Golden West, crowds of fruits and nuts and all.

I am the Hamster

Work is the wheel. How do people do this. I used the excuse of five people who were playing telephone booth in my cubicle today to go down the hall and dish with an old friend who has an office the size of mine to herself. I have the third or so person who is ostensibly showing me what to do. As if. Nobody knows. The good thing is, the other one is swamped and the alert one is going out of town tomorrow so I think I will wander aimlessly around the hospital Thursday and Friday and visit with people I know and get paid for it. It's not like anyone is training me or anything anyway.
I made sour cream chicken enchiladas for dinner tonight and had a lot of extra corn tortillas so I made chips. OoA#2 was enthralled. I fried some in canola oil and oven-baked some on a cookie sheet and they were all good. He ate a ton. He barely noticed the meal with the novelty of home-made chips.

Why I am going to Hell for Today's Win and Fail

Actually, no one who survived a life like mine has a lot of belief in religious structures like Hell except here on Earth, or in God except as some enormous wry cosmic comedian.  That being said, I know I am a bad person for today but I honestly don't care, it was still funny. Besides, I've been told a lot I have a face for radio and it's brutally true so we can't all be some mother's pretty child. One thing I used to do for fun that was easy for me, probably because of my hyperflexibility weirdness, is to cross one eye, casually, in class, and look over at a classmate without warning to crack them up. It always worked, better than wiggling my ears, and less likely to get me busted than making my boobs bounce by working my pecs singly.
Anywho, I was reluctantly holding down a very uncomfortable seat in the auditorium of Day Two in Purgatory: Or, Nursing Orientation for People Who Do Not Give a Flying Fuck. They pried the Power Point clicker out of the HBIC's hands and had her run a video instead. Oh, thrilling. Entertainment.
 Now, this is a national company who was running the blurb, mind you. but the production values were resolutely local. The camera was definitely in too tight on the Caesar-haircutted talking-head host, who was explaining to us why we would cost the hospital a ton of money if we let the doctors and families throw procedure box wrappers and pizza boxes into the red Hazmat bio-bag trash bins. They entertainingly intercut his lecture with shots of longsuffering black men in Hazmat suits digging through redbags, separating soda bottles and bloody washcloths from pus-soaked sponges. The win plus fail part? The talking head guy, although moderately attractive despite his tragic haircut, had one feature that kept any of his lecture from hitting home with his audience. Every time the camera zoomed in on him and he looked into it, his left eye looked DIRECTLY AT HIS NOSE.  It was like a Monty Python skit. The girls in back of me kept snorting. The camera would zoom in, his right eye would be visible and the left one would go to white, the black guys would find something else nasty or ridiculous, and it kept happening for about ten minutes. There were credits that rolled at the end, go figure. Someone put her name on that.

Today's Win and Fail

Today's Win:
Unlike Friday, my office mate/fellow prisoner in tiny, three-person 7x9 cinderblock windowless room refrained from spraying her foul, nasty, disgusting fake aldehyde chemical "air freshener" which made my sinuses bleed all fucking weekend and caused all sorts of anerobic bacteria to grow in their swollen depths. Oh, and gave me the fun of Neti Pot Surprise all weekend. Yeah, that thing where you clean out the green snot from your head with your Himalayan ceramic neti pot and dab your nostrils nice and dry, then, hours and hours later, you casually bend over and, ta da!!!! Showers! Salty ones! Out of the nose! Onto the cat, or your foot, or anything else below you!!!
How the fuck do Indian people get anything done. Supposedly they do their Neti pot ritual daily. Do they just NEVER BEND OVER?? Shit, no, they are steadily yoga-ing away. Why doesn't the saline shower make them all bust their ass all over their yoga mat?
Oh, so anyway, the win was, no choking cloud of mace-like Dollar Store funk to send me reeling for my inhaler.
She contented herself dousing her rotund person with some horrendous flavor of "body spray". Which I feel sure she "refreshed" about three times. I considered dumping out her tote bag to see if it was "Bhopal" by Dow or "Antikurd" by Chemical Ali. Fail for my conjunctive membranes. Work-acquired pinkeye. I haz it.
Amazon is selling a desktop HEPA unit for $42 bucks with free shipping on my Amazon Prime. I get paid tomorrow. Ka-ching to Amazon.

Today's Win and Fail

Fail would be the baby girl name Trashe. No, people, no. The "e" does not save that name.
Win would be today's lack of diarrhea on my part. After ten episodes yesterday, I am allowed a small cheer.
No real migraine, either; small grumbles and a weirdly painful jaw muscle spasm on the left side. Does Botox work on jaw muscles?

Five Work Days In

The phrase "Soul-killing job" will not stop popping into my head.
The TENS unit on both ankles and lidocaine patches on both feet aren't really helping with the foot pain.
I got a headache that seemed to be a stiff neck but then decided to be a migraine; never knew there were neck migraines. Whoever invented air freshener spray should be shot. And I need a taser to use on all the idiots who spray the nasty shit around in closed spaces around a fucking hospital. And a Phantom of the Opera mask to cover the swollen eye and nose I now sport from having to use their offices.
The diarrhea is back. It doesn't hurt yet. I am hoping it's related to the migraine.
It's a good thing this job doesn't have life insurance.

First Full Week

Is it supposed to be this hard to make yourself go to work? I hate paperwork like the plague and I have landed an all-paperwork job. That I have nothing to do for days and days except hobble around on wickedly painful feet and try to look interested. This week is shaping up to be very long indeed.

New things are awesome

My poor feet are killing me. It's really got me worried; I only walked around the hospital a little bit Friday and excruciating foot pain does not begin to convey how they hurt. They have started doing the turning-purple thing again too, which they had eased up on. I'm pretty concerned that the bad sprain on the left one has triggered the reflex sympathetic dystrophy on both sides. I am going to try to rush through my orientation to see if maybe I can get established on my floor; other case managers have the whole hospital but I am going to be assigned to peds so maybe it will limit the hiking. When money starts coming in I think I will give my acupuncturist a shot at the rsd.
On a happy note, OaA#2 is currently replacing the shutoff valves for my bathroom fixtures prior to replacing the new toilet. He has tiled almost the whole bathroom floor so now I have beautiful cottage style white mosaic that replaces the former horrid Pepto pink mosaic. The toilet had to be replaced because there was a large crack in the base of the old one and we were afraid it would go through once the toilet was re-installed. Here's hoping the new one has a better flush as advertised.
Also new is my fine new skill of peeing standing up. While the toilet has been missing this weekend, I have had to pee in a ziplock freezer bag a few times. I love peeing standing up. I want a girl urinal. Do they make girl urinals? They should.

Today's win and fail

The best thing that happened today was the 500+ pound switchboard operator who had a screensaver on her monitor with her kid's name scrawled in Microsoft paint dots: Travisty. Like Travesty of justice, only spelled different.
The worst thing that happened today was, there are only two people I have ever worked with that I would never, ever, piss on if they were on fire because of epic mistreatment from them. One of them, turns out, is among my new co-workers.
Hopefully they will keep her locked in her office while I roam around the hospital.

Deep Exhale of Breath

Wow. What a year this has been. A year ago next week I had a CT scan that literally brought me to my knees. I'd been having lots of problems with colitis that was making my hair fall out, giving me arthritis and nerve pain plus muscle spasms, nevermind going to the toilet over 10 times a day. The CT contrast made this horrible burning sensation that basically didn't go away until last week.  A few days after the CT I started having trouble with nausea and fainting, and four days after that I was unable to eat more than once a day and fainting into my patient's beds with the pain. Good thing they were comatose, mostly. Going to the hospital made things worse, and I ended up at home on disability; you know the rest.
So today I took my second board certification test from the online course I took while I was sick. The one I was taking for six weeks before I got my short-term memory back part of the way. I passed it, so now I am officially Loosey, Fixer of Whut-all Needs Fixin.
Beats Empress of Famous Poop all to hell.
I got a call from my new boss, the nice lady who offered me the crummy job I desperately snatched up. She is trying to get me benefits.
My guts aren't fixed with the new medicines, but they don't make me run six times a day anymore and they fuckin finally stopped hurting. Finally made the muscle spasms stop. The arthritis and nerve pain in my feet is still pretty bad but I'll take it for a trade off; maybe I can find places to sit all around the hospital while I'm working. I'm so used to pain level 7 or 8 out of 10 I figure five to seven is doable. The head fog that started hitting me 18 months ago when the colitis started is going away now; I can complete a spoken sentence without always, always, always having to stop and try to think of the word.  Studying was no big deal, again, finally.
After I passed my test I went to buy pants and socks for this street-clothes job; on further reflection, I decided to go to the gas station and celebrate the hat trick of job, certification, and gut relief by buying two Powerball tickets.
It could happen.
But I'm still setting my alarm to go to work in the morning.

Revenge of the autoimmune disorder

So, I was super happy-slappy with the absence of gut pain. We went on a long walkabout Sunday; I bought clothes for the new job at a good sale, and we spent a looong time at the Lowe's picking out things for OaA#2 to use when redoing the bathroom. My legs started hurting pretty quickly in the Lowe's and I was finding places to sit by the time we got out of there. Monday I woke up with a huge muscle spasm from butt to toes on my right side, and arthritis flares in my back and fingers and toes. The usual treatments and pills did not budge them. I went for a Chinese massage yesterday and have bruises from that today. She presses in a spot until the pain subsides and there were a couple she couldn't stop. I had let my antibiotic run out and it took a day to get the refill; I visited the doc who is greatly dubious at taking me off disability with only a three-day remission. I pointed out I'd be homeless after Christmas if I didn't start working, and she sighed and agreed. She wants me to take the antibiotics for a solid month and see if the colitis will give up. The back-pain and arthritis mean it's still hanging around, trying to wreak sneaky mayhem. I am currently covered in patches and tape, with my right leg thrumming painfully, and think we will pill up for a while.
My friend's next-door neighbor has been coming over to visit frequently. She had an ileostomy done for severe colitis years ago. She is now showing a weeping rash on her forearms that is a rare but not unheard of sequel of ulcerative colitis; so she has a belly bag, no colon, and it's still trying to get her. Autoimmune crap is the meanest.

Rip Van Winkle rides a bike

Thursday I rode my bike about half a mile. Friday, a mile. Today, two miles.
Nothing bad happened. No muscle spasms, no gut explosions.
I ate three meals today. And a snack.
I haven't had breakfast, lunch, and dinner without nausea and gut pain for eighteen months, and I quit trying to eat three meals a day a year ago this week.
So today was coffee and steel-cut oats. No problem. Leftover Chinese shrimp from last night's meal for lunch, no problem, a handful of almonds in the afternoon before dinner, no problem, pulled pork nachos and bean soup for dinner with a lot of salsa. No problem. Chocolate after lunch and dinner, too, dammit.  I thought I'd forgotten how to want food.
All I want to do is eat. That's going to be a problem.
I'm going to need to ride that bike farther.

Medicine that helps: What a concept

So it's been a tough two years. I got foot surgery that was supposed to take the horrible foot pain away by replacing the gnawed and ruined joints with clean, smooth, comfortable titanium. Instead, I got C-Diff, an atrocious form of diarrhea, from the antibiotics that are necessary when one has bone surgery, and reflex sympathetic dystrophy from having a nerve tumor removed at the same time. My feet hurt worse from the crazy painful muscle spasms and constant state of purple-black vein dysfunction, and my leg muscles actually started to waste away. Six months later, I got diarrhea after a festival meal, and things got a lot worse, with a persistent headfog and belly pain to go with the muscle spasms. I ended up in the hospital, and when my sister came to see about me, she was horrified; not only had one of my cats peed up the whole house while I was gone, I looked and acted like a dying person. I couldn't stop fainting, and couldn't eat because of the nausea and belly pain, and my normally verbose self would start a sentence and be unable to finish it; no memory, no strength. This went on for months and I lost my job. I didn't really care except for being concerned about being homeless; it wasn't like I could do the job anyway, I couldn't leave the bathroom.
The meds the GI doc got me made things much worse.
I figured out a way to replace the lost electrolytes and have lived on V-8, Pedialyte, and soda crackers for the last eight months. That helped the fainting. I never got used to or over the belly pain and muscle spasms, and I have to say, living at pain level 7 out of 10 does not improve one as a person.
I asked my family practice doc who has been great, although bewildered and frustrated for me, through all this, for some antibiotics that are not absorbed, they work only in the gut, that I found out about online. By chasing the footnotes in a wacky new age doc article in the Huffington Post of all places. I printed the original study and showed it to her and she happily wrote for the pills.
Thirty bucks for them, thirty bucks for the zinc and probiotics the study put with them, and a week later: the muscle spasms are gone, and the belly pain is only on the left side and down to about a 3. The Famous Poop my GI doc told so many hundreds of people about? Three times a day, not really diarrhea anymore.
I feel like Rip Van Winkle.
While I was sick, I left my life and it left me. I have three friends left, do not know the rector at my church, and the house looks like an old person lives here.
But today I feel like riding my bike. After I study for my final certification test, I may do just that. Thinking about that is like imagining myself as an astronaut. But a tough-ass, mean old lady astronaut.
Small-intestine bacterial overgrowth. That's what they called it, SIBO. Fucker. Thief. Die, you mean little one-celled bastards. I have things I need to do.

Woot woot also SQUEEEEE

I passed my first certification exam! I have fancy new letters after my name! Now I am HRH Loosey, Empress of Famous Poop, and Certified Fixer of Whut Needs Fixin'. I have studied like a nut the last month and that plus the online review course a kind soul sent me (value: many hundreds of American dollars I did not have) got me over the top. When I pass the Certified Fixer of Whut-all Needs Fixin Besides That, I will have enough letters to go out in the wide world and make a good salary.
Also, the medicine seems to be helping the Famous Poop and its associated Horrible Belly Pain. Now all I have to do is get the Foot Whut Is NOT Broken But Sure the Fuck Feels Busted to heal up and I will be unstoppable.
OaA#1 Squeed with me on the phone, OaA#2 is going to take me for Indian or sushi tonight.
Woot!!!!

There's a motif here

Our minds always want to find patterns, that's why people get religion in weird ways, like thinking God gives a shit if a girl cuts or covers her hair. I have this one pattern going that has me thinking. I got a job offer, full-time no benefits. I have an interview today for one at the same place that is full-time benefited and less time on my feet. The pills for my gut have cut the Famous Poop episodes down to two or three a day, and the belly pain is a lot less with half the pills to go. My foot is not broken but whatever is wrong in there still aches and throbs a lot with use, I guess it's a sprain. And I got the house like 85% cleaned up before the ugly twisted foot episode.
I hope I can get to at least an A here, 85% is less stressful than total unemployed jobless busted diarrhea fail but it comes with a different set of worries to fight off. Tomorrow I have a test that's pretty important and I hope I make 90% or better after all this work!

Spider flowers beat spiders all round

There are a few cleome plants that  came up this year from a planting one or two years back. I love the white ones, they are amazing. I shook a bunch of seeds into the flowerbed to try to get them to come back next year. I saved spiderlily bulbs from a house that was scheduled for demolition and this is their best year yet; I have spiderlilies in all kinds of places I forgot I planted them. It's been fifteen years since I put them in and they are finally multiplied to start a big fall show. A couple of  autumns ago I had this huge orb spider making a nightly web across my front walk. Now, I love orb spiders OFF TO THE SIDE. I actually walked through the web the first time she did it and kind of had a spasm imagining she was on my head. There was probably a frenzied anti-spider dance routine in there, which would only add to my reputation on the street. Now when I am coming up the walk in cooler, orb-spider weather, I do a web-check. I do not wish to be huge unwieldy prey.

Why I was doin it rong

Mister purry ginger cat was decidedly ill today, feverish and off his feed. It occurred to me that he had not eaten or played rodeo with his sister last night.  I felt the loose skin on his back and decided he might escape and go off and die of dehydration without a vet visit. The vet concurred. She was of the opinion that he had consumed too much squirrel earlier in the week and was suffering gastritis as a result; his belly xray was inflamed but not showing any visible squirrel parts. So one expensive injection and sub-q fluid bolus later, he got a cat taxi ride home and slept it off. He feels better tonight but he is staying in tonight to heal up, not that he is appreciating it.  Next time he shows up with vermin it is going into a Kroger bag and the garbage can, never mind how bad it smells it up, it beats paying a day's wage for belly medicine for a cat with bad taste in rodents.

Pictures and pills

I got my busted foot up to the doc today and she sent me off to have its picture took. Finally figured out a way around the $125 xray copay; she is a master of coding. Did you know that your xray is covered on your insurance if the doc codes "foot hurts in a few places" but you have to pay a big copay if the doc codes "dumbass fell down"?
Rachel Maddow said the other night that health insurance companies were evil whether you are covered or not and I think this is an example of that.
I made the appointment to tell her, I give up, I want morphine, I can't stand living at pain level 7 anymore.
But this weekend I stumbled on a small study about an antibiotic that is not absorbed, it just works in the gut against traveler's diarrhea and was useful to some people who had severe diarrhea-type IBS with restless leg syndrome and fibromyalgia. I don't let the docs quantify my severe, painful leg spasms as RLS or my generalized, pressure-point pain as fibromyalgia because I don't want them to think I am a nut, but the criteria do fit. I showed the study to my doc and she was elated; she remembers me coming to her after a bout of what seemed to be tourista after a meal at a festival, with diarrhea that wouldn't give up, and horrendous atypical colitis that had resulted. She had recently mentioned my case to a collegue and he had asked if I'd had too many antibiotics and perhaps had bowel overgrowth as a result. She happily wrote the antibiotic scrip, I went and got the zinc and probiotic that is part of the regimen, and I will start taking the antibiotic today. I really hope this is the magic bullet. Then the other supplements my sis sent me for my depleted adrenal function would have  a chance of working.

Don't talk with your mouth full

It cooled off a lot last night and I left the back door open this morning for the air. The critters have been enjoying strolling in and out, even lazy old lady dog. I was answering a friend's email when I heard ginger boy cat enter by the open door, meowing almost continuously, unusual for him. He usually just calls once and purrs. I got up to see what had him so excited. Oh, dude.
  Not again.
Well, it was really a squirrel this time, and it was all dead. Ginger cat usually does not allow himself to be carried but I was steadily fussing and he was concentrating on not dropping his big ole dead squirrel so out the two of them went the way they came. Slam went the door behind the pair of them.
So much for relaxing enjoyment of the three days of fall weather we get here. I do have one window that is not painted shut, that will have to do. Until a dead possum dragged by a cat comes in it or something.

All-Important Nose and Tail Security

I like how my orange guy loves to sleep with his nose and tail all tucked up safely. He can purr super-loud even with his nose buried like that. Seems like it would tickle. If I am too noisy he wraps his paws over his eyes, like I am giving him a headache and he is trying to hold his head on. 

Watch what you ask for

I strapped the broken foot together with tape, literally, and somehow got into an office for an interview without the manager being able to see me limp in or out. Magic, really. I had worked really hard on that new state application and made myself super resentful in the process. It took about half an hour of Work for me to tease myself back into a human state of mind after finishing it, I was just so annoyed by the ten pages of paperwork. So the job is not a great one by any standards; it's in a really gritty hospital, pays fairly poorly, and offers no benefits besides the paycheck. But it's a foot in the door, if I pass my boards I would have a good shot at any good openings that came up, and it's eight-hour shifts and no lifting. Plus, hey, they offered it to me. Seriously. Only five months out of work, and I finally got a job offer here in town. I'm trying not to worry about being too sick to pull off a whole day of walking and working; I'm telling myself it will help my stress to not worry about money and have the opportunity to get a better job in the system.  Now: heal foot, pass boards, buy street clothes that will accommodate big swollen belly as none presently do, and set off to work in a month if my background check comes back okay. It should, I just passed two of them for other hospitals. My belly's huge, unexpected, and unpleasant response to the good news of the job offer made me really glad I had turned down that New Orleans gig. I can't really cope with the stress of a change here in town without a lot of deep breathing and belly pain, so trying to move house and start that new career would have meant a very bad end indeed. I'm so overdue for a remission on this colitis. The docs looking pained and hopeless do not make me feel better when I ask them when I will get some relief.
In really good news, OoA#1 got a meeting with the professor she wants to do research with and it looks like she will no longer be wandering in the wilderness, but is now invited to lab meetings and will be given access and be welcome in the group. They were super nice to her this summer, then the academic protocols of the grad school dictated they keep their distance; another prof tried to poach her but she only wants to do research with this group and it's been a lonely two months for her until now. I feel better and have less stress already knowing that she will have a group to join since the campus in general has been such a bust in terms of potential friends.

Countdown Begins!

I finally got confirmation of my registration for my tests that I sent in, um, six or seven weeks ago. Maybe eight, who's counting. Anyway, they straightened it out, and I am taking one of them on Oct 5 and one Oct 19th. The only problem is the test is hard-scheduled for 1145 which is not so great for my belly. The old group had times throughout the day you could choose for the two-hour test. But noon is better than nine so the studying continues!

Bargain Healthcare

My leg is not broken, so I've got that going for me. The Kinesio tape has pulled most of the bad bruise out of the  shin area and it's stopped hurting now that the bruise is superficial. The foot is another matter. I ran into my acupuncture doctor at the Sam's Club and she pointed at the wreckage in dismay. I told her the story; luckily in her view, OoA#2 can do no wrong, and she was not mad at him for dragging me off. Even though she's pretty sure he broke my foot. "Immobilize it" is her decree. Because there's no visible bruising and I can take some weight on it, she's pretty sure it's stress fracture type breaks from the foot getting twisted, and I will need to keep it taped up for about four weeks at least. Going to the pool is pretty great though, by the time I walk down the lane and back the foot stops hurting. I'm glad I have the daily water to move around in.
We bartered OaA#2's fixit skills for some extensive dental work that had to be done on his fat ginger cat. The poor thing had some type of very strong thin string lodged high on one of his canines, and it gave him a terrible abcess. The tooth had to be removed and surgery done. Luckily his vet is awesome; she is a cat specialist and knows we are both job deficient, and had failed gutters on her house. So the fella has two weekends of gutter repair, the cat has many hundreds of dollars of oral surgery and medicine, and the vet has a home with lovely pristine eyebrows. It was her idea to barter and such a huge relief. I am hoping it is a sign our luck is turning. I have been working very hard on re-doing my state hospital application form, and such a nightmare of typing you can't imagine, all for a job that is full-time no benefits bad hours but dammit a job. If I could just get one of these bum feet in a door somewhere.
I was elated this morning to find the ginger avenger in the back yard. The man next door had an aggressive calico who regularly came over just to beat up my two smaller cats. They started moving their territory farther away, which has been really distressing to me; I have this wonderful yard and I want them to stay home! The people who have been living there recently moved out and the calico is gone. It's taken a week for my cats to realize they can be in their own yard. I hope they stake it out. Old lady dog spends less than ten minutes a day in the yard doing her business, so she is no help with menacing strays. The cat vet says I should get traps from the shelter and box up the mean ones for the pound, and give car rides home to the ones with tags so they will be traumatized by coming to my yard and stay out. I feel like a BB gun on one pump would be more effective and make me look less crazy. Do they still make pump-style BB guns? I bet not. Paintballs are too hard, I know that.

I miss skinned knees and mosquito bites

I had this big plan, marry a great guy, have four kids, be happy. Well, the great guy turned out to be a weasel, the four kids soon devolved into all my eggs into one beautiful little basket, and my plan has had bandaids on it pretty much ever since, mostly financial. We had a lot of fun when she was smaller and there was less economic pressure; even though she's kind of a handful with her tendency to panic, she was really balanced out when she was dancing a lot. It seemed harder to me once I sent her off to college and she started having problems I couldn't help with, like the mono that kept coming back and flooring her, followed by the catastrophic migraines. There wasn't any outlet at college for dance for her, and I had high hopes for grad school, they promoted their dance programs a lot.
Grad school so far has been brutal. She's been there five weeks and has yet to make a single girlfriend; she's never been anywhere twenty minutes without a new lifelong buddy.
She got heat rash so bad she developed a sensitivity to her own skin and got hives on top of heat rash. She hates taking medicine and is now having to keep up with a migraine and allergy regimen to avoid being put on steroids.
She was elated to sign up for jazz, tap and ballet classes. She loved the teachers and happily fell on her butt after four years out of class. Then the school changed her class schedule and she can't go to tap or jazz. She went from nearly five hours happy a week to a sad little ninety minutes.
Her car died dramatically yesterday and had to be towed, just as she was trying to go to the one fun thing of her week, the farmer's market. It had been sputtering but she had been saving up and planning to take it in to the garage after the next paycheck to keep the budget from being busted. So much for that.
The weather there has already begun to turn cold and gray, and it will be cold and gray for seven months. I need to Amazon Prime her a light box and pray it keeps her from becoming suicidal in the dark, she would get a little mopey in November here in the South for crying out loud.
I think I wouldn't worry so much if I had a job, really; just knowing I had enough money coming in would make me feel more capable of making her feel better. No, I couldn't buy her friends, but I could fly her home for a break from not having any and make her some manicotti.
 I thought this mom stuff got easier when they got older.

Seven to Twenty-three

Of all the ailments of error my sorry excuse for a Christian-Science raised youngun self has experienced in my lifetime, I can honestly say I miss hyperthyroidism the most. Gawd, yes. In my teens  I slept a few hours an afternoon in the newspaper room up at school, a few hours at home, and ate at least four thousand calories a day while maintaining the figure of a praying mantis. That actually continued until college, when a bout with some unlimited Jersey milk brought on an extra fifteen pounds and the most enjoyed bout of anorexia any girl ever exercised her way into. I have a picture of myself at that time, thinking how fat I looked, and the wind blowing my hair was more substantial. Until my foot surgery two years ago, there's never really been a time that I couldn't just limit my portions and exercise off any extra weight, usually as an adjunct to the celebration surrounding the release of yet another significant other into the wild. Last summer changed that pretty dramatically. I'd been going to pain management, trying to keep plugging along at work, and the Lyrica she gave me for my horrendous foot pain gave me a sudden extra ten pounds on top of the eight I'd gained lying around with both feet in the air all winter and the ten I'd put on with feeding the boyfriend some fine-ass vittles. All of a sudden I was hugely fat, like at the pre-eclampsia delivery weight but without a baby, and then, boom. Colitis to cut me off at the knees.
Here is the thing. Diarrhea does not make you lose weight. Your metabolism changes and you store fat around the middle. Even at its worst, when I was unable to eat more than six hundred calories a day, I didn't lose much: I got down to 165, still ten or fifteen pounds too heavy for my frame, and the steroids put it all back on in two weeks.
Right before the trip to New York, I had another flare. The trip was, okay, horrible physically. I got back and showed my docs my bloated belly and how my hair came off in my hand; they shook their heads, again, and said, well, at least this time it wasn't caused by a CT. I had gained another 5 pounds right before the trip all in my belly and that is the most I have ever weighed. I could feel how the inflammation was making the guts all big in there, but I was not even going back on the steroids. Just back in the pool.
Right  around the time after I got back from New York, the weight started coming back off. My belly still hurts, the famous poop is still presenting itself at its usual intervals, but the weight is finally coming back off. Today it was seven pounds down. Now I have 23 to go; maybe if I can get the pressure off my guts they will stop punishing me all day, every day. My GI doc doesn't think so, he's never seen somebody get colitis from being fat, but he hasn't come up with anything better so far. Come on size 10 jeans size eight dresses, mama wants to not poop all morning and hurt all day long.

Yum, Zoom, Splash

I got two big evenings out on the jetski this weekend and had a big old time. Sunday some of our vegetarian friends came and brought their cousin, and we had grilled leeks with romesco sauce, grilled eggplant stuffed with seasoned ricotta and covered with marinara and parmesan, crostini with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil, a pasta and white bean salad with pesto, and tiramisu. They brought the tiramisu from Target and it was yum, I made the rest. Yesterday we went by ourselves and had some ribs and homemade potato salad. The jetskiing was mixed both days; the friends were enthusiastic but timid, so we did quite a bit of shepherding them around while they drove verrry slowly, encouraging them to go faster so it would plane a little and not be such a rough ride. But they seemed to like their first ever jetski driving. Yesterday started a little alarmingly; a squall came up and I thought it would follow a previous cloud so I went across the lake. It followed me and basically washed my hair and kicked my butt; I've never had waves go over the whole craft before, and that part was not fun.  By the time I fought back across the lake, it had died down and I spun around a little so I would have some fun before I got off, I didn't want the horse to throw me. It smoothed out, both of us got on to scoot around, and he spotted a big green lawn chair the squall had blown into the water. He didn't want anybody to get hurt hitting it, so he tried to scoop it up; when he fell off in the effort, he dragged me off and my left leg got involved with the steering column. It's some interesting colors today, and the foot is making distinct "I am broken" grumbles. I think it's just ligaments and hyperextension, it was not very painful when I went to the pool today. We now have one good foot between the two of us, his right one. But the rest of the scooting was awesome, super smooth and fast, under a Maxfield Parrish blue and gold sunset. And we did get the damn lawn chair up on a pier.  Tonight I am making some crawfish etouffee as soon as this thunderstorm lets up so I can drive over there.  The writing is on the wall for his job, maybe this week, maybe next, but soon; meanwhile, we will eat well and party small.

What I did and didn't say

You would think that more people on this earth would realize that they enter it helpless and exit it the same way and are damn lucky if they don't spend a good portion of the intervening years nearly so. But as I limp and faint around, I find that there is a pissant attitude of superiority among the temporarily able-bodied that does make me need to bitchslap them occasionally. I managed not to hit anyone who acted alarmed for themselves when I would commence to faint and sit down suddenly last winter, probably because I was too weak to lift my hand to them. But wearing my Kinesio tape on my feet and legs has been a mixed blessing at best. The good thing is, it is remarkable how it can turn off some of the muscle spasms in my right foot and lower leg; think of having a charley-horse for two years and putting some stretchy tape on there, waiting twenty minutes, and realizing it has stopped. Ahhhhhh. I was really excited and also made extremely aware of just how goddamn painful the big spasm that stretches from the top of my sciatic nerve to my ankle is, so I taped that one, too. It helps some but it's not the light-switch fix, I guess because that muscle is so large and deep. Still, I'm not limping when I start to walk for the first time in almost two years.
Point of this is, two people at the health club have been rudely curious this week about my tape and I have been holding back....some. First there was this pet pomeranian junyaleegah pipsqueak woman in the dressing room. Her inquiries were at first polite, and I answered them, then she started hinting how disfiguring the blue tape was on my leg. I glared down at her puffy styled blonde hair and stated firmly, "I think it looks better than the limp." She cackled off with her feathers a little ruffled; junyahleegahs would rather die than have their legs taped apparently.
The next day, I was giving my lane in the pool to this guy who was, honestly, square. Really. He was about five two and about five feet wide; his neck-fat was wider than his chin. His moobs were as big as my boobs. His arms didn't go down, but out, because his fat distribution was all the way around him, not just in front. Now, I'm 25 pounds overweight, but he is carrying around enough stored calories to nourish Darfur for the whole dry season. What does this champion specimen say to me? "Hey, does that racing stripe on your leg make you swim faster?"
What.
I heard him fine but I smiled and made him repeat it.
Twice.
I kept smiling and nodding.
Here is what I did not say:
"Yeah, motherfucker, it makes me swim like Michael Phillips. Does that flotation device you are wearing make you the Guardian like Kevin Costner?"
Here is what I did say:
"Oh, yeah. Faster. Ummm-hmmm."
Honestly. What is wrong with people.

Bellyache and Pondering

Stressing that phone call on Wednesday was like taking a gut punch. My insides went, well, crazy. I started wondering yesterday and woke up considering today if I was going to be having surgery to remove part of them on the left or if that spot was going to refrain from exploding. This problem is something my GI doc and I have discussed without resolution before: how do you know when your insides explode, when they often hurt enough to make it hard to breathe? When do you go to the ER?
He doesn't know either.
I had a good two days after the stressful call, too, got to visit with three friends, made some great food, got some great exercise, got an encouraging call from a recruiter who may have a lead on a local job in the next six weeks. You would think good stuff would cancel out bad.
Apparently not when it comes to guts with a mean streak.
I have, however, gotten ahead of a lot of this damn house. But it keeps trying to catch up with me.  There was an article in the NYT yesterday about floor-cleaning robots. I think they are on the wrong track. We need Jetson-style serious kitchen and laundry robots. Dishes in cabinets, clothes in drawers. That little Roomba shit will not get it. Hell, we need errand robots; give them your debit card and a list and send them to the damn Kroger. Let them send you pictures of stuff they have questions about. Men engineers think small. We need more female engineers.
I need to go drink some Pedialyte to mediate this new belly disaster and try to rally for some errands in the heat. Three stops feels like Everest some days.

Divining the Alignment of the Stars

I took many, many deep breaths yesterday and tried to turn down the job in New Orleans. Then I got the email from the nice guy who would have been my boss. The relocation money wasn't a joke, exactly, but it wouldn't have covered the moving expenses and the terms they wanted to pay it on would have given me some serious crunch in the finances. So I sat down this morning and wrote down all his numbers, left messages on all his voice mails, and answered his first prompt callback of this whole process. He was very nice and asked me to refer anybody who was already down there that I found out about and I told him I was going to a meeting next week and would definitely ask around.
Wow.
I coulda been a contender.
A contender who had to self-move to a place as humid as Panama, fix up a house, rent a house long-distance, comfort a chronically anxious senile dog, two wild cats, mend the fences at a small hospital that's mad because two of their friends got fired to hire her, establish a new practice, pass her boards, and make the cut on a 90-day probationary period with no one to even go to the grocery for her, in a place with very few grocery stores five years after Katrina.
I am hoping that I did the right thing. Right now I'm sure I did; I still get weak and sick after just a few errands and an hour of house work, and I still have to study for and pass my boards. I can make my money last until March, and with my certification, surely I will get something. It does bother me that I am sending out three to five resumes a week with no answer and most of the jobs I'm applying for fit my experience level really well. But I'm gaining control of the house for the first time in three years, and feng shui has got to help. My nerves, at least.
At ten nightly old lady dog and I go outside for her to pee. I peer up at the sky. So far, the stars aren't telling me much.

Dinner is served

My fella has been wistfully requesting chocolate pudding pie since I've known him. I tried the Jello pudding he remembered from his childhood and it was a dismal failure, several times. Southern Living was a gift from my child last Christmas and I've actually been feeling too poorly to make many of its recipes so far; but this month's issue had this beauty and I've never had a SL recipe fail. Kroger failed me in the search for the chocolate wafers to make a homemade crust, but one Keebler chocolate crust and the rest of the recipe later and, voila. Homemade Chocolate pudding pie that is firm and gorgeous. It's made with eight ounces of Ghirardelli 60% Cacao and sixteen ounces of whipping cream; hard to go wrong with that. It called for rum but not having any I used Jack Daniels and it was stellar. Oh, there was taco soup, too, but after he yummed down two bowls of that the fella yummed down two pieces of this and bemoaned keeping it in his fridge, as he feels it is not safe around him. I'm just relieved to have found a nice, simple, perfect recipe for this favorite thing of his.

Do Not Want

My cats before these two half-wild things were content to go outside, pee in a flowerbed, turn around, and come back in the house. The present two feral rescues my boyfriend has talked me into have kept things around here, to put it mildly, lively. The orange one with the loud purr ate a hole in the floor of the house and escaped out of it as a kitten to thwart my well-intentioned plan to convert him to gracious home living. The calico has to be checked on her every entry during the day to prevent the daily murder of an anole lizard under the dining room table. The kitty rodeo they put on every day and night at ten sharp leaves every rug and piece of furniture askew and the dog looking a mite nervous. And the dead squirrel who appeared twice under the dining room table, once intact and next regurgitated after I had flung his corpse into the ditch, is best forgotten.
Orange badman is the one I love best because he does love to curl up next to me and purr hugely. Tonight he did not come when I called him and I was concerned, as he had a scrape on his tail and I wanted to check on it. A few hours later, Rachel Maddow was on the DVR and I heard some scratching at the front door. I opened to check to see if it was him, and greeted him happily....um. What is that. No, really. Why is your head down, and what is gray, exactly.
Discretion being the better part of valor, he went under the coffee table, and I went for the broom and a small plastic trash can, visions of the previous squirrel violation dancing in my head. I poked the ginger avenger with the broomstick and he waved me off: nothing to see here, nothing in my mouth.  I peered more closely; sure enough. Nothing in his mouth. But in my only pair of shoes that I wear? My Keens that I wear all day, every day?
There is a black button nose, twitch-wise, and a pair of beady eyes. Smallish roundish gray ear, also. Yeah, way cute, whatever. Vermin in my Keen. Fucking cat has verminated my Keen. There is a squirrel in my Keen. I hook the shoe into the trashcan with the broomstick and look closer; guess what. No cute furry squirrel tail even. Cat has totally ratted my Keen, not even squirrelated it, rattleated vermilated violated now my shoe has bubonic plague and hantavirus dammit. There is a rat in my shoe in my house. Rat.
Boy their tails are ugly.
I take the trash can to the front porch, dump the shoe out, rat runs off, calico takes off after it, I lock the door after the both of them. Keen goes into the washer.
I definitely should have held out for the Abyssinian I wanted in the first damn place.

Pro and Con list

The guys in New Orleans are being weaselly about coughing up relocation money upfront. Ninety days after I got there isn't much help; as I told the bossman, I have one set of money, and it's enough to get me there or fix up this house so renting it would pay the mortgage, but not enough to do both. I can't carry two places to live for three months on what they are willing to pay, I'd go through all my renovation money. He was going to look into getting the payment upfront and call me back. He hasn't. But, honestly, that is good.
I was going to take the job out of panic. Violating my own Rule #1, Don't Panic.
 Yeah, it's in my new field and was a good salary offer. But I won't run out of money here for several months and I think on further reflection that hauling an old sick anxious dog and two half-wild cats to a strange place, starting a new job, and studying for boards that I have to pass to keep that new job is no way to stay healthy. I ate some fried food this weekend and incapacitated myself for a day and a half. Plain stupid but it did remind me how hard life would be with absolutely no one to help when I can't just wish away the symptoms of the chronic illness that's had me by the tail for more than a year now. I yowled  at my sister and spoiled her lunch hour with my angst over this; I honestly have been unable to get a job interview here in town and it's scary to let a sure thing go, even a sure thing that would pile some killer stress on. Then I yowled at one of my friends on the phone, and was finally calm enough to discuss it with my fella. He doesn't want me to go, and thinks it will be too hard altogether, but wasn't going to say so because he was being supportive of having a job, any job. I'm still determined to clean the house like I'm leaving it, but I really think if that guy calls me back I am going to have to take a deep breath and tell him the month it's taken them to get back to me has let something else come up. I'm not going to let on that the something is studying for boards and praying, praying, for a job here in town.

No One Else Will Think This Is Funny

But when we were driving through Pennsylvania, it almost made us die. The roads in Pennsylvania were pretty terrible, all washboardy, so we had been pounded in that truck for hours and were punchy. Plus, the horrendous stench of the cowshit of the Lehigh valley is like nothing you can imagine, unless your car has broken down outside Bakersfield, California, by the feedlots. So, we are looking for our exit to the hotel, in vain, and sooo tired and beat-up. There is a sign! We will read it!
It says, Shartlesville, 16 Miles.
I say, Shartlesville sounds like a place where everyone looks all surprised all the time because they made a mess in their pants when they thought they were just going to fart.
My daughter started laughing so hard I thought she was going to drive the truck off the road. She does this thing when I crack her up that she loses her breath and starts hitting her leg while tears run down her face. Her eyes started to squinch up and she was trying to say, sharting, startling, startled shartled.  I was making bug-eyed ooops my pants are full of poo faces. The truck started to swerve around and I saw the little blue car appear briefly in the rear view mirror.
Wait, wait, don't kill us, not that funny....hold on...
She wiped her eyes with one hand and did some gasping and we had to drop the subject for a while.
It took us about another two or three hours weaving through the bumpy, crappy road-work Pennsyvania highway night to find our exit past Allentown.
We got to our hotel and it was a shithole. It was two stories and lacked an elevator. Horrible tattooed middle-aged women were staggering into a disco on the first floor. We dragged our suitcases upstairs, shooed some guidos away from our door to enter it, glared at the grimy bathroom ceiling and 80's striped wallpaper, and said to each other,
Not Allentown, Shartlesville.

Filters and a Rapid Descent into Madness

Last night we were lying around like slugs, I on the computer and he watching some trainwreck on TV. Oh, it was a tattoo show; he is horrified by tattoos and watches it by switching it off and on like there are snakes on it. When Kat comes on he lets out a stifled, "Ugh". There was a particularly unusual setup and I "heard" him consider something very un-p.c. in his thoughts. So I peered around the computer and repeated it. He allowed as that wasn't nice to say. I allowed as how I hadn't thought of it, just repeating it. He grunted in assent and laughed at himself for being so rude, even inside his head. The thing I like about it is, it didn't weird him out at all. The tattoos did.
I enjoyed the hard work of setting up my kid's apartment even though it involved constant cleaning; it all seemed to make something good happen. I have been working on my house since I got home and every day it gets harder. The front rooms looked better, at first.  Now they are starting to fill up with crap for the yard sale I have promised myself. I  have worked on the bedrooms for days and they still don't look much better unless you check closely for dust. Every day I attack another closet, bookcase, box of abandoned stuff my kid wanted to keep but not sort, or desk drawer. My eyes and lips burn but thanks to the big allergy workup, I now know that it's a form of angioedema that won't kill me so I can just suffer and power through it. But it's really upsetting me in a cumulative way; I spend a couple of hours every day searching vainly or applying vainly for local jobs. I am waiting for my drug-screen to come back so I can get a start date from the guys down South. When that happens, I will have to negotiate a relocation allowance just to get down there, and then the real madness will start. When I got sick it crept up on me; my feet filled up with bone spurs while I worked 270-hour months, half of them on the road, and never sorted the chemicals and baskets in the laundry room, the clothes I got too fat for, the junk that filled the drawers. Once I was felled and couldn't stand or bend over without fainting, the place turned into a bonafide Hoarders site; if it got in here, I had to get someone else to remove it or it didn't leave. It's truly scary what three years of that will do to your home after fifteen years of having someone keep it tidy for you.  I found a lot of unorganized photos and sorted them out of the sleeves, and the ones of the house just killed me, it used to look so much nicer. I got this huge, wistful, sad nostalgia for my housekeeper, my health, my ability to bounce between jobs, my stamina to keep the yard up, and it slams me every time my nose starts to itch while cleaning out a cabinet. Cleaning gives me the blues on a good day but cleaning without visible progress while on hold for my life is sending me around the bend.

Knowing, Not Knowing, and Friday the 13th

So, here is something else I don't usually tell people. I know stuff other people don't know by ways they don't know it, and I'm not sure how I get the information. It's not much of a blessing, the information is often negative.
I have had many, many boyfriends who were convinced I was psychic. Actually, all of them that were paying any attention at all.  I really could just sit next to them and "hear" their thoughts in my heads and would often respond to what they were mulling over. When I was young and had no filter at all it caused a shitload of discord, to put it mildly. I really never understood why it freaked them out so badly. One of the nicest things about my Asperger's boyfriend is that he does not care when I respond to what he is thinking. Apparently it fits the worldview of a mild aut to have one's girlfriend hear one's thoughts.
Women are generally somewhat better at hiding their thoughts but many are startlingly loud thinkers as well and probably the reason I don't have many women friends.
It's only really pleasant with my child; she was electively mute for the first several-several-several years of her life, and we developed an elaborate means of thinking back and forth across the car or room which defies explanation; we could decide on meals, choose something fun, and even tell jokes. A lot of it went away when she got older, but we can still do the jokes, and I am forbidden to look at her in church for that reason. One of the hardest things about the trip we just took is during the drive when I started really being in lots of pain, remarkably quickly, and was doing everything in my power not to let her know, she was not in the least deceived; and when she got so tense on that bad stretch of road in Alabama, I got a muscle spasm in my neck. Neither one of us can hide distress or pain from each other and we are reflexive liars about both.
A good case could be made for me just being a good pattern-reader, if I wasn't so myopic, really. My child's primary, outstanding "giftedness" is in pattern recognition ability according to the school psychologists, and I have color memory and distance memory and some other odd pattern abilities.
Every now and then something just hits me in the middle of the chest like a random negative energy particle and I get this horrible premonition. It goes all over me. It's rarely wrong as far as, something really pretty bad will happen in the next day once that worry bomb goes off. Sometimes I'm awake, sometimes I'm asleep, but they are usually about twelve to 24 hours ahead of the disaster. I just hate the fuck out of them because they are like someone yelling "look out!" at you when you are driving....hell, you are looking out, dammit, you are driving!
I got one yesterday afternoon on a day when nothing was out of the ordinary at all. I just realized that the new job hadn't called me back about the pre-employment physical, and I went cold all the way to my toenails, and my chest started hurting. I have enough money to live on until March, there wasn't a reason for the doom reaction, and I've been shaky ever since.
When the pets got me up this morning, one of them had disgraced themself with a very unhygenic act in the kitchen, and the refrigerator had died, again. Not really Friday the 13 type stuff except for the cost of replacing a fridge. I sucked up my courage and called the new boss, and he called me back four hours later with a contact number to go have a drug screen done next week. Drug screen, pssht. Piece of cake.
So it does look like I'm moving to the Gulf Coast, which is enough to dread, I guess. Maybe that was the premonition, not the dead fridge and the large pile of cat turds. How's the hurricane forecast for this season shaping up, anyway?

Deep Intake of Breath

I finally have a job offer. It's six hours away. In New Orleans, home of hurricanes and rampant crime, and where neither my cats nor my ancient dog would be anything but continually restless. It has a good salary and benefits, a possibility of a sign-on bonus I could use for relocation, did I mention an actual salary instead of hourly work for the first time in twelve years, and it's in my new field that I trained for while I was sick. My boyfriend, who has Asperger's and hates to travel, is not going to be buying it. So there goes that if I pass the pre-employment physical. Yep. Pre-employment physical. For someone who's been on disability for, oh, um, hey...nine or ten months. Fuck.
Not worrying so much about the whole relocation thing, really; not a good liar. No need to relocate if they withdraw their offer because, fuck this, you are a CRIP!!!! How close can you trim the truth on a pre-employment physical form? Damn, I can't remember what-all they asked before but I can't imagine how I can pass one. I can put my daily meds only, the pain stuff is not daily, mostly. Leave out the TENS unit if they don't ask directly, and I don't remember a form asking about one directly. Crap, I don't know how I will finesse this one but the local job that was going to call me today, sure thing, aces....crickets.  Nothing.
I am definitely blackballed here in town. And since MegaFormerEmployer cut me off from getting unemployment by LYING about firing me for being unable to work 12 hour shifts, I've got to get a job before I run through the pittance that is long-term disability. So when they call me to go take that pre-employment physical, I'm going to take a deep breath, hold it, and answer each question as narrowly as possible without actually telling a story. Because employed and crazy is better than homeless and crazy.

Poltergeist

I honestly did vacuum and mop before I left for a week but you sure could not tell on my arrival home. So I got out the tools today to attack the whole haunted-house vibe from the rolls of cobwebby fur in every corner. It wasn't just the fur, either: it looked like a poltergeist had been at the place with receipts, pens, pill bottles, magazines, and letters in every possible spot on the floor. Apparently not only does nature abhor a vacuum, my cats abhor a clean floor and attempt to fill it with as much plastic and paper as they can lay their kitty paws on in my absence. I got quite a bit done, though. The place can sure use it, since I've been laid up one way or another for more than a year and a half. But if I can hit one bookcase or corner a day, eventually it will look more like my house again and less like a half-finished episode of Hoarders.
I talk to OoA#1 about four times a day and she is keeping busy and it's cooler there, at least. She seems pretty resigned to having a sucky birthday tomorrow and I am resigned to not telling her I told her so. I spend quite some time playing on the Southwest Airlines website researching fares for her to come home at Christmas. She will be going to NYC at the end of the week to stay with friends so that will cheer her up. Which will cheer me up.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

We drove, day before yesterday, around the neighborhood a little in the atrocious heat. There was artisan mozzarella and guaranteed sweet corn at the tiny Italian farmer's market, so we got some. We gaped and oohed at the gorgeous Victorian and Grecian homes in her new neighborhood at fifteen miles an hour with no one behind us to honk, and found where a waterfall came out of the side of the hill to crash into the canal that goes into the Hudson. Then we went down the street to Wynantskill and got antipasto salad and the best cannoli you ever saw, at least a million calories apiece she said, filled with mascarpone and whipped cream and chocolate chips and drizzled with chocolate syrup.
We had gotten everything put together the day before, right before the worst of the heat set in. No air-conditioning in a third-floor walkup on a ninety-degree day is no joke, and the two fans we had pointed at us didn't keep the sweat dried off. We had to wait until after dark to put up the curtain rods because it was more than a hundred degrees by the ceiling. Fabulous, eleven-foot, white-molding ceilings, but hot bastards nonetheless.
Here is what everything was: She put together the six-drawer Ikea Hemnes dresser while I was at the stores all day Wednesday getting stuff to finish out the apartment and taking a conference call. She and I fought a huge pitched battle with her enormous Ikea padded headboard frame; it came with six vital screw-holes in very awkward places not predrilled. If an Indonesian Ikea worker ever hears the words, "My name is Loosey Ricardo. You did not drill the leg-holder holes for my daughter's bed. Prepare to die", he should not be surprised.  The nightstand was a piece of cake. The dining room table was enormously heavy and the pegs were a huge bitch to pound in; we did ruin a cake of Dial soap her aunt had randomly given her by rubbing it on the pegs and that helped some but our latissimus dorsi will probably never be the same anyway. Three of the four dining chairs were no big deal, the fourth had mis-drilled holes, easily corrected once the Home Depot trip to obtain drill bits was completed. The six-foot bookshelf was completed in the time it took Steel Magnolias to run; Shelby lay dying, refusing to open her eyes, as I pounded the nails into its back.  The lamps just screwed together; Ikea had fooled us with displaying the wrong bulbs for them, but Home Depot to the rescue again, and a couple of white-wire shelf units for the kitchen and office nook later, all we need is....a microwave stand. Her grandfather got her a microwave that looked small on the box and out of the box was HUGE, wouldn't fit on the counter, and had to squat on the floor in the corner in the dining room to prepare our guaranteed sweet corn that it was just too fuckin hot to boil water for. Incidentally: if you wash it and leave the inside leaves on, microwaving about two and a half minutes an ear makes mightyfine sweet corn without heating up the house. Damn, it was good.
The drive to New York was a nightmare of pain; she was a trouper but it was fourteen hours of bad road the first day and twelve hours of better road the next. Alabama I am talking to you, Interstate 59 is not supposed to be two lanes with a sand shoulder. Pulling a car on a dolly down that, in the dark, is best described as a growth experience. One that firmly establishes the belief that Alabama's chief traffic engineer should have to do that task nightly. Tennessee and Virginia know how to pave a highway, but Pennsyvania, for godsakes, all those picturesque buggies on the side roads do not make up for the overwhelming smell of cowshit in the entire Lehigh valley and the washboard interstate interspersed with roadwork crashwalls with no outside lane stripe. The four and a half hours of getting to New Jersey, getting covered with bruises fighting the Ikea boxes into the Penske truck, and driving to the apartment were minor in comparison. And her building manager came through like a champ; he got his brother to come for the weekend, who was formerly a mover, and the two of them moved everything up two impossibly narrow and steep flights of stairs cheerfully. After the first day at the apartment, I had to throw away my TENS unit electrodes; they are meant to last for months but I had sweated off the gel in the drive and during the New Jersey Ikea leg. But they came through when needed and I just subbed in a bunch of Lidocaine patches; I had been wearing both to make it on the trip.
I filled up her fridge and cabinets with food and organized her kitchen and utility closet. Her apartment is beautiful, a jewel-box of peach and yellow with blue and brown accents. She is doing what she does best: worrying. About passing her intro tests, about finding friends, about being homesick. I had tried to talk her into moving a few weeks later, closer to the beginning of school, but she wanted to be settled; now she is anxious about loneliness. She drove me to the airport yesterday and couldn't talk when we hugged goodbye; she did the death-grip like when she hung onto me at college and begged me not to go off and leave her there, after she had begged me to let her go off that far. So I did what I have always done when she panics. Fight my own panic down, back into the corner where it needs to die. Forget that I wanted her to stay two more weeks, hell, that I wanted her to pursue that offer from New Orleans for Christ's sake, not godforsaken New York fucking snowbound State.  Straighten out my face, my voice, my neck. Look all happy, all calm, all reassuring, all cheerful. Say something completely rude to make her laugh. And once I get the laugh, kiss her up and remind her that we've been here before, that she felt this way at Trinity and ended up loving it and missing it and having to go see it this October; and that we are Steel Magnolias who can drive a big orange truck towing a cute blue car and put together furniture and say fuck doing it and bake awesome cookies to thank the nice guys for moving and make it all look easy. And in four years we will be laughing about this now, and she will be homesick for Troy on her way to somewhere else, because she will have done great here and had a great time and now she's just got to go back and start on that. Right? Right.

BAT=Big-Ass Truck

So OaA#1 and I arrive at the Penske rental place today and the only thing they have to carry a car is hooked up to this one enormous truck, like a two-story truck. It was seriously like 45 feet long. We clutched each other in horror, eyes bulging, and squeaked, "Is that our truck? Holy shit!"
It wasn't our truck. Our truck was big-ass enough, and the car thingie we ordered didn't come in, we are going back tomorrow to see if we can get it. We had BAT driving practice today and while not fun, it wasn't as bad as we were afraid. So, there were two miracles today.
One, her father, whom we have seen, um, four times in the past ten years, showed up, early, and loaded, cheerfully, everything. EVERYTHING. Furniture, boxes, clothes, go to the storage room and give her his sofabed, everything.
Two, the insurance guy I have been pestering about my disability claim called, saying it was approved and he was going to be sending me two checks so that my payments would start from when I got fired. If that money comes through, it will be a couple of months grace period to keep working on finding a job without being homeless in the process. Not worrying so much about money made me feel like a different person. Now, starting tomorrow, I am a BAT out of hell cross-country driver!

Multiple Choice Madness

The cats are playing rodeo and hide-and-seek in the two empty boxes in the living room. All the other boxes are full, getting ready to go to New York to be my adorable child's beautiful apartment furnishings. The pressure and pain in my chest isn't cardiac, so it's either the RSD moving to my chest muscles, costochondritis, or just old-fashioned anxiety. The long-term disability insurance is delayed on medical review after I submitted two pounds of medical records, the on-call job I was counting on dried up abruptly in June and has been asking me for this piece of paperwork and that continuously since then, but not offering any work or paying for my time to answer all their questions, and the only interview I have been able to get in town was for a job I was wildly unqualified for and would pay about half what I used to make; no callback after a cordial and chatty hour and ten minutes out of my life.
I have a job interview six hours away tomorrow and it's sketchy. I have, honestly, no idea how I would physically manage a move if I got the damn thing. The only reason I'm going is that it's in the field I'm trying to break into and if I could manage it, even for a year or so, I could leverage it into a much better job. That's predicating, of course, that my upcoming crazed cross-country Penske racing team adventure is survivable. Oh, I didn't mention that I was loading my muscle spasms and my child's migraines into a moving van, hitching her Volkswagen to the rear of it, and driving it through the Appalachians to the other side of the country, with no one lined up to help us put the stuff in the third-floor unairconditioned apartment at the end of the trip? It's incidental that neither of us has ever driven a trailer in reverse, of course, and she has never driven a truck.
Thinking it over, it's quite possible that the nerve damage is not restricted to my limbs and trunk but has quite possibly extended above my neck.

Loonmagnet activated

I have long been known to have an awesome magnet for attracting loons. It has the strength of an electromagnet powered by the Hoover Dam turbines. Of course, it went into red-zone level today; I spent the morning slogging through the unemployment claim form online, only to discover I have to go in to the skeevy unemployment office in person ANYWAY. So after that little dose of crazy, I scooted off to the health club pool that doesn't have a broken heater today, since I haven't gotten my daily swim in since Friday at my regular one. Yay, an open lane, right? Right?

On my left are: a preternaturally fit and talented young lady is burning up the far lane with a splashy butterfly stroke, and a gentleman ten years my senior is freestyling a blue streak in the near lane. On my right, a smallish lady about my age and about half my height was bobbing around all smiley. I replied to her intial pleasantry about the pleasantness of the pleasant water. Pleasant, right? Magnet activated! Now, I am trying to first march up and down the pool, then swim up and down it, five minutes apiece. I zone out and really enjoy not focusing on anything, it really helps with the pain....usually. Up the pool? Lady speaks to me. The pool is great.Down the pool? Speaks to me again. If she had a pool at home, she'd never get out.  Up? Yup. Down? Dammit, I'm exercising here! So I give up walking and start to swim. Nobody talks to a stranger while she is swimming, right? Wrong. Finally I am reduced to avoiding her eyes, smiling and nodding, and keeping on, as if I don't have breath to talk. She gets bored about ten minutes in and announces her next destination: the hot tub. Blessed be Poseidon. I finally get a few minutes to swim and walk in peace, dreading having to walk past the hot tub on the way back into the dressing room. What a relief, she's not in it anymore, so I shower off, go spin my suit dry, and grab my clothes for the changing cubicle. I barely have my underpants on when I hear Water Loon state with satisfaction, "THAT feels better." Followed by a loud flush. I tuck my toes back in horror, and listen as she bangs the toilet door open, passes the sinks without handwashing, and blessedly goes to dress on the other side of the lockers. I got out of there like my hair was on fire. Upon getting on the highway to go home, I found that not only was only one lane open for miles but this was the car I was stuck behind the whole way:

You have to admire six years worth of that type lunacy.

More Nibbles

I am getting my hair cut Monday for a job interview on  Tuesday. It's with my former employer, and basically seems to entail reading charts to look for more things to bill insurance companies. It pays a fraction of my former wage, but would keep the house going for a while, and give me a chance to pass my boards in the new specialty; I might have better luck finding work in that after October at that point. The other nibble is yet another possible travel job; it's across the country in the wrong direction from my kid, is for two months only, but the pay is pretty good; I'd be home by late September and it would pay enough to give me a cushion through October to pass my boards and try to get a real job.
Either one of these jobs will make me feel like my cat when he catches a live cicada; sure there is an accomplishment here but very vague on what it is.

Hot in the old town

I had a close call with a sick refrigerator. Thank goodness for the Internets, I was able to look up the symptoms and the schematics; OoA #2 got the part locally, and fixed that devil up once I pointed it out from the schematic; I was crouched on the camp fridge, trying to be all Miss Spatial Ability. He installed it brilliantly and the thing purrs like a kitten. Score.
There was a tragic death in the household; the compressor on the central air unit started tripping the breaker with a loud bang. The tech came and pronounced its death. Then the race was on for his equipment guy to source me a freon unit because the recommended, green-type crunchy fine modern unit requires new coils, which is an ADDITIONAL three thousand dollars. He did find me the last one in town; OoA paid $1900 for his three-ton Trane unit six weeks ago, mine was a no-brand three-ton unit at $2300. Plus a new drip pan and float switch, and I'm magically out $2600 for the privilege of breathing.
Nothing like being unemployed to make your appliances collectively clutch their throats.

A Terrific Day

I shook off the yucky week I had and went to sushi with an old friend today. We talked and ate and had a great time. I had put some ribs on to cook before I went, with the Dixie Dust rub my sis brought me. I put some great cole slaw together when I got back from lunch and OoA#2 had handled up on getting the jetski working again after last week's epic fail. We scooted on out to the lake, drove the jetski around, and ate the ribs and slaw inside with some super cold beer. After eating, we both went around the lake fast, and I took the last turn while he went to put the truck in the ramp. The water gets really glassy right before sundown, and going over 40 mph across the water is about as happy as I can get; blue sky, pink and gold sunset, warm wind and cool spray. I start grinning until my teeth dry out and I am all Cheshire Cat across the water like a truly strange purple and red bat out of hell. It makes everything stop hurting. I wish I could live on the water and jetski every day at sunset.

Summer awesomeness

It's officially too hot to breathe here, so that means summer. We crept out to the Farmer's Market and got local peaches; made jam out of some of them and cobbler out of the rest. Heavenly. There was a special on strawberries so I got a big box of those and we committed some strawberry jam/preserves as well. Omigosh. Homemade jam is amazing. The peach was beautiful, the strawberry had some pink foam, but both make you happy you need a sandwich. Homemade strawberry jam with Nutella on bread is good enough to make you need to eat it privately because of the humming noises you will make while chewing.

Fishing Expeditions

I've been out of work for almost two months now. At first I was concentrating on getting my course requirements done, but now I am applying for at least one job every day. It's grueling, somehow; I hate paperwork and forms beyond reason and have to deal with several every day. I have had two nibbles from travel companies and no local nibbles yet.  One of the travel companies had me waste about five hours doing various computer tests and forms; I sure felt cheated when that job didn't materialize.  I've told myself I will break down and take a job I don't want but can barely do, like in home health, in the next two weeks if nothing better comes along. My school didn't process my grad paperwork in a timely fashion and I missed my cert exam deadline by a week, so now I have to wait until October to take the tests. I just have to decide if I want to keep trying to get a job in my new field, until my money runs completely out, or get something to stop the worrying and try to study anyway. No four-leaf clovers have turned up in the backyard so far.

Big Gay Sam, come in please

So I got on here and started yacking when I met a great guy on the Dooce Community who called himself Big Gay Sam. He encouraged me...hell, told me how to set it up. I loved talking to him through the community and loved his blog. A kinder, funnier person I've never seen online. Anyway, some members of the DC got their collective heads up their butts the other day and posted a huge, unpleasant list of hatefulness. He got fed up and quit and now we can't even see his hilarious and sweet blog.  The two-hundred-fifty-plus of us who followed him on there are totally sad. We all hope he will come on one of our blogs and let us know how to keep in contact with him; maybe send us a link to his new blog if he starts one.
Sam...I was so miserable all fall and talking to you all night on the DC, when I hurt too much to sleep, was such a lifesaver for me. Maurina, Mihow, and firecat and I all wish and hope to hear from you again.

More Stories about Airports and Hotels

It's Groundhog Day again, back to disguising my contempt for TSA agents and wishing the guy in the seat next to mine had better manners or thinner thighs. Work is walking through hospitals, giving the same inservice over and over, rattling it off with the same jokes in the same place every time. My perfectly beautiful new room in the Residence Inn was riddled with formaldehyde; to stay in it the first night I had to drive to Wal-Mart and buy candles to burn up all the fumes. Now that my eyelids are not swollen to bulging, it is very nice to look at, and is nearly the size of my house. Super spiffy stainless fridge and granite countertops. Muuuuch fancier than my house. But I won't miss it when I go back to my shabby house, not one bit. And I got canceled for next week so I will be hard at work trying to get a job that will let me keep the shabby house. Here's hoping.

Long Marching

There was a lot of "weaselly fucker" mumbling in Atlanta when Delta canceled my connecting flight, offered me a  substitute flight out the next night, and wouldn't try to get me my suitcase. So a few hours in the Renaissance Hotel and a 7 am flight out the next day on a different airline didn't really help. And the first day walking around the hospital, teaching, was brutal with the foot pain. But yesterday I pulled out a big bag of pain control tricks; a huge increase in my night medicine, some anti-inflammatory gel I haven't used lately, and my TENS unit stuck to all the nerve pathways in the bad right leg. The big hospital I had to do was actually super nice and very manageable, and my feet never started the horrible screaming, crushed sensation. I'm going for another pool swim and hope today goes as well too; this is a big job in terms of daily hours over six days, but I really needed the money. Two down, four to go, c'mon pain relief strategies. I am thinking of getting hypnotized when I get home to help with the RSD pain; since the neuropathy has no cause, maybe I can block it.

Weasels and fuckers

Traveling to work these days is like having a weasel in your pocket; you can slap the pain down but it never really gives up. I got roped in to a hospital that "credentials" you through a horrible organization called RepTrax; basically they charge you $200 to tell you the minimum of information, then e-mail you back when the credentials you submit do not meet some esoteric standard; one you have no way of foreknowing. I gave them their damn money, then they start telling me, "Now send this. Now we will put off finishing these credentials, not in the two days you paid for, but two more days." Weaselly fuckers. Now after four phone calls, three sets of faxes, and a whole shitload of money for nothing; basically I just faxed them the crap I carry to the hospitals myself, they finally said they will have my account updated and ready for me to work Sunday. Fuckers better be right.
So then I traipse through the heartbreakingly stupid security theater that passes for TSA screening, get my shoes on for godsake; at least they let us wear our underpants still. Get locked back on the gates and the Shreveport airport has gone Coca-Cola free. As in, they only have Pepsi products in the machines and the one pitiful cooler. Fuckers keep you from have a damned Coke zero. How can they justify trapping people back here and not even having a Coke in a machine? Fuck Pepsi and its exclusive agreements. I'm already pissed and I haven't started my 68-hour workweek. I usually wait for the hell that is Atlanta Hartsfield airport before I start mumbling, "Weaselly fuckers." I'm already there. Weaselly fuckers.

Holy Mother

So I managed to start off this weekend's college graduation festivities by slicing an enormous hole into my left hand. It was a very sharp can pull-top that I grazed my left thumb with while assembling specialty food for the stuck-poop kitty we were leaving in charge of a catsitter. I had opened the skin more than half an inch wide and nearly as deep. It needed about three stitches.
I glued it shut with some skin glue a rep had demo'ed to us earlier in the week. Pretty cool stuff; made all the blood stop rolling down my arm. The next day, driving through Texas, I saw it had flaked off and the wound was trying to reopen; glued it again. Did that about three times and now it looks like it's healing: after hauling huge amounts of daughter's belongings down three flights of stairs. OoA#2 did most of that hauling.
Her grandparents showed up late to the graduation, where saving seats was not allowed. So one of them sat with me and my SO. Who knows where the others went. Her father was wearing a polo shirt, and her grandmother had evidently left her hearing aids at home. During the procession, we could not figure out why we couldn't see her marching with her class; I spotted her friends but could not find her anywhere. But she turned up walking across the stage. Turns out she fainted in the assembly line and was revived by campus security and then sneaked into her seat so she wouldn't faint again waiting until her turn to process, since she was fifteenth to last of  about 500 graduates. Damn alphabetical order. Then the grandparents wanted to take three pictures and leave instead of coming to lunch. Her grandfather, who had said he would use his big old huge auto to help her move, wanted to change and leave town and pay for her couch and boxes to be shipped home. As if we could have gotten them somewhere to ship them out; plus the nonsense of paying more for shipping than the worth of the items. He did deign to come back that afternoon and get them in a rush and set off for home.
And her grandmother made a huge point of giving her a necklace with a "family" diamond in it. She had told her it was pear-shaped, and it was round; no big deal, very pretty. But on the ride home, it was apparent in bright light that the diamond has a flaw in its center so large it appears cracked.
Outlaws. Texas is full of them.