Here's Loosey

My Cat Is A Republican

2011-11-06T07:38:00.000-08:00

Today was my favorite holiday of the year. Since I no longer work nights, I have to say Fall Back Sunday, or the end of Daylight Saving Time, is custom-made for me. I can sleep a whole hour late and no one could possibly care. Except the cat. Her reaction to my sluggishness led to a groggy epiphany.
My cat is a Republican.
I've got one living here in the house.
Proofs:
She does not believe in time change or climate change or hope and change or any change. She frowns on all matters of change.
She looks out for her own interests with fierce intensity; her food wants are paramount and must be attended to. However, when she has been nicely fed with my resources, she then turns her eye to my own meal. She obstructs my ability to feed myself by throwing herself into my legs, then once I have overcome her opposition and prepared a meal, she demands to see if mine is nicer than hers, and wants a portion.
Her behavior is generally environmentally unfriendly, as she declines to poop and pee outside where it is biodegradable. If I take the catbox away so she will go outside, she merrily proceeds to spoil my belongings to suit her preference.
She is automatically afraid of and hostile to anyone who wears anything on his or her head.
Although she brings foreign lizards into the house for her pleasure, she outsources most of the spider killing to the wild rangy outside cat.
She is, as Teddy Roosevelt put it so succinctly, a fat cat.
I don't think my TV gets Fox News but I am going to have to watch where I leave the remote.

Cheering

2011-11-05T08:39:00.000-07:00

I just completed my first week at the job I've been on for a year that entailed just doing the basic job description; no covering for other people, no teaching new people, no endless meetings for projects that never start.
It was a pretty sweet gig, actually. My fledglings call me for database type questions but I don't mind that. The other person they are designated to call, the "Educator", is completely clueless and calling her would just be frustrating to both of them.
The lady at the Credit Union said my refi went through but the assessor didn't call me this week and the CU lady didn't return my call of inquiry. I am going to keep on her, though, this house might fall in if I don't get some shit fixed. I am dreading cleaning up for window installation but it will be nice to not have actual wind blow through the house in the winter.
I have lost 14 pounds. The "saggy fat suit over muscle" look is what I am going for and I am ignoring the folds of skin sliding down my midsection. Excelsior!
I wonder if I should get one of those compression garments they have you wear after lipo and wear it. You can get anything on Amazon.

The Douchenozzle Chronicles Vol 3

2011-10-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

I stopped in the manager's office today at the gym. She was sitting at her computer looking sadly at the screen. I asked her if she had heard about the hot tub follies over the weekend. Indeed she had, and was about to handle that situation as soon as she solved the problem in front of her. Oddly, it also had to do with the ladies' locker room. She seemed mournful and without hope.
"What else could be going on in the ladies' locker room? My word!" was my inquiry.
"Nudity," she said hopelessly. "Someone was offended because the ladies in there have nudity when they are changing and it makes this person feel uncomfortable."
Wait, what?
"Hold on a minute. A woman is complaining that the women who are changing clothes in the clothes-changing area make her feel uncomfortable?"
"Yes," she sighed sadly. "And I can't think of a thing to tell her."
I pondered briefly and a helpful thought came to me.
"Tell her if she thinks those naked women are bad, just take a look in the hot tub of a Saturday and she will really get an eyeful. Those naked old ladies will look positively tame."
We both hooted like old Southern ladies love to do. Then she grew sad again.
"I can't tell her that."

The Douchenozzle Chronicles Vol 2

2011-10-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

Squick also ewwwww also WTF.
My Catholic friends used to say, "Shit Marie" when something was too bad for mere profanity and needed true blasphemy to convey their emotions.
Shit Marie.
I saw Towel Freak Woman leaving the gym today as I was coming in late. She was wearing workout gear and her hair was not wet so I thought I'd dodged a bullet and they had told her ack rite or don show up.
How wrong can one old lady be?
Very wrong.
I got out of the pool, padded into the shower room, and SHIT MARIE there she is, towel tied over boobs, kneeling over the STRONGEST nozzle in the Jacuzzi. I turned around and padded, dripping, to the front desk and complained my ass off in no uncertain terms: "I told Angela last week there was a woman masturbating in the whirlpool over a nozzle, she said she'd get Cathy on it, and the woman is in there right now doing it again, and it's disgusting on so many levels!"
The clerk's response? "Oh my god. She needs to buy a shower massage." She had seen Towel Freak woman come to the desk as if leaving, then turn around and go back in. She apologized profusely that it hadn't been stopped last week, and promised it would not happen again. Then she said, crossly, "There is a toy store right down the street, she needs to go there instead."
I know, right?
Shit Marie, what has happened to the world. I expect this kind of craziness at work; we actually seem to have a drug ring that operates out of our driveway, where the security guards are never visible. We also have somewhere that prostitutes who are patients seem to be plying their trade, and if you walk in on most of our male patients and they are not masturbating it's because they just finished.
I go to this high-end fitness club to get away from people like that!

Squick of the year

2011-10-08T14:59:00.000-07:00

I've had a wicked muscle spasm in my neck for, hmmm, forever so I haven't felt like typing once I get home. But I'm still plugging along at the horrible job, like the hamster on its eternal wheel. One good thing for the month: I now weigh eight pounds less than I did at the start of last month. I am taking the adrenal and thyroid supplements and not eating fruit, sugar, or starch. Boring but effective.
The squicky icky omg grossssss gross gross thing that happened today? Well, that is the story. At the gym there is a woman who tends to come on Saturday and hog the whirlpool. It's a big one, but she gets in it and talks so loudly on her cell or plays such loud music on her phone that I generally avoid her. She also decorates the floor in the hot tub room with, no kidding, eight or ten towels in various stages of dampness. So it's like being around someone else's badly raised teen on a good day. Anyway, last week when I got out of the pool there were two other ladies in the whirlpool and the messy teen grown damn towel freak woman was perched nearby on a shower bench. I could not help but notice that she was not wearing a suit as per the four signs that read "Whirlpool Rules: Swimsuit must be worn, and don't shave your disgusting legs for Christ's sake either" but was wearing a towel tied in front over her boobs, another twisted over her hair, and nothing else but eyeliner. Yark. She stayed out while we hottubbed. As I was leaving, I could have sworn she got back in once the pool was cleared and was leaning on her elbows facing out of it. A little buzz alarm went off in my mind: was she cozying up to the jacuzzi nozzle with her towel open in front? Gross, I decided, and went off to shower and change.
Today my neck was just a little stiff, so I wanted to whirlpool it into submission after my swim and walk in the saltwater pool. I cruised into the whirlpool room and sans music was towel freak woman, leaning on her elbows facing out of the whirlpool. She was holding a book whose pages she was not turning, and was kneeling with her legs straddled and the bubbles aimed right between them. Her superfreak towel was billowing out behind her. There was actually another woman sitting on the corner of the tub with her lower legs in the pool!
How nasty. There is not enough Clorox on the planet to clean that water. It's just a thousand gallons of douchewater, bubbling around the perverted freak who is hosing down her cooter with the jacuzzi nozzle. Ew, ew, ew. Also, fucking freak killed my chances of working on my neck.
I got dressed and skibbled out to the front desk. Sometimes the manager works on Saturdays, but she was not there today. The clerk knew exactly who I was talking about, towel freak woman comes at opening time on Saturdays and they have to ask her to leave at closing time and pick up all the towels she throws around. I used the words "unacceptable" and "disgusting" and she and I both agreed that towel freak woman needs to buy her own damn toys on the Internet and use them at home like all the other girls. She said she'd be glad to tell the manager to ask towel freak woman to just stay home for jolly time.

Time for Voodoo, Woo, and anything else with oo that is not ow

2011-09-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

So it took me about ten hours in phone calls, faxing, walking to his office to sign yet another medical records release, and driving to get my medical records to the high holy best diagnostician in town. He is a rheumatologist, and my doc wants me to go to Mayo for answers on whatever the fuck this syndrome is, but thought it would be good to see him first. He is supposed to be able to figure out any autoimmune thing in the universe.
A, he did not read any of that shit.
B, he had me come to clinic for a 1200 appointment; I saw him at 4 and got out of there at ten of five.
C, he has no fuckin idea what the hell this is. He says it's not lupus and not RA, RA eaten and removed joints notwithstanding.
He basically agrees with the endocrinologist, that I had too much iodine from all the CTs and MRIs and it made the Hashimoto's antibodies attack like crazy. Not just my thyroid but muscles, brain, and guts too. He says that's so unusual that no one knows just why it happens and how long it takes for the antibodies to get off your case. He did point out that the flares are shorter and less outrageous, so there's a decent chance I will start having them more seldom. My goiter is already gone, and the endocrinologist doesn't believe in natural thyroid and is uninterested in changing my meds now that my TSH is below 1.
So I gave up on medicine and doctors and got on the Internet. Several seriously woo articles later and some typing on Amazon, I acquired dried thyroid and adrenal cortex pills. Oddly, they do not stink as you think they might. I have been taking them ten days.
I have lost five pounds.
The horrendous neck and back pain that showed up during the four hour wait for the rheumatologist is not receding as I would wish, but having my pants fit looser almost makes up for it. The one pain relief I have seen is that the fascia on my muscles is not exquisitely tender, which is nice.
Five down, forty-five to go.

Drugged Hamster Escapes Wheel

2011-08-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

So the gold tooth on the molar way in back came off and the dentist took an xray and shook her head; the molar had broken from some extremely poorly executed prosthodontia twenty-odd years ago and was now shattered and inflamed, with severe bone loss in the underlying jaw. So an appointment with the oral surgeon it was.
Yesterday at the actual appointment does not bear a lot of reviewing; he was a very skilled guy but that tooth had disintegrated into more than seven pieces under the gum. So, yeah, I had taken 1/2 a Xanaflex before I went and could have used a bunch more pills of various types. But the surgeon was very quick and strong, it definitely could have been worse. He was very interested in my horrid immune system history, even when I assured him I'd been extensively tested and had nothing he could catch. He asked a lot of questions about the RSD and was sympathetic, which is unusual. Most docs hate anything they can't help with, and he seemed interested that all I took for it was Neurontin and Xanaflex, and that I would wean off them between flares. After the surgery, he asked what type of pain medicine I was used to and I couldn't think of any. So he said, "Lortab all right?" and I was all, "Yeah, sure."
I went to the front to get the scripts from the printer and he came and signed them, then cheerily said bye. I drove off all shellshocked to the drugstore and handed them in. When I picked them up, I almost fell out. He had given me 25 of the 7.5's. Day-um. That is a boatload of hydrocodone. Then I got a little worried; I was still numb but how bad was this going to hurt?
He must have thought I was lying about my drug history and would be calling needing more meds because I had a huge tolerance. Ha, not. I took them one at a time until bedtime and was maintaining, just a little sleepy. I took two at bedtime and regretted it in an hour; I was super groggy but the extra hydrocodone made me itch! I finally got up and took a Benadryl, which made talking to my boss when calling in super sloppy. Gained a lot of sympathy votes, though. So I have had a lovely groggy day hanging out with ginger kitty; rainbows on the floor in the kitchen from the prisms, and it's so nice to not be at that job. I haven't taken my noon dose of Lortab, and so far nothing has exploded. I'm going to take some Ibuprofen, hang on to the Lortab for other bad days, and think about going to walk in the pool all afternoon like a lady of leisure. It's better than thinking about how long it's going to take me to pay off this one disaster tooth.

Here is the real reason you do not want a motorcycle

2011-07-30T21:58:00.000-07:00

My fella has this party in the summer that is like Groundhog Day. The same people from his festival group come every year, drink and eat the same food, play the same water volleyball in the same pool that's too small for anybody else to get in or get clobbered. One of the festival mavens is a sister of a guy I dated forever; she was bitchy to me when we dated and he blamed her and his other bitchy female relatives when I handed him his hat. So, no, she is not nice to me and I rarely have anyone to talk to at the party; they have all known each other for twenty years and it's one long inside joke. Last year I was just too sick to go, maybe the year before it too. So he has me come late in the evening and drive his drunk ass home so he doesn't get a DWI.
Tonight I went to get him and he was more lit up than usual; I can't remember if I've ever seen him stumbly drunk before, but he sure was tonight. I caught him with an odd expression and possibly leaning over the kitchen sink and quizzed him if he needed to throw up. No, no, no.
He just didn't look right to me so once in the car I rolled his window down and warned him that if he decided to blow, make sure to lean way out. Then I headed out of the subdivision and got on a bridge over the river, a dark two-lane bridge. He rolled the window back up and I put it back down and fussed. He insisted he was fine and rolled it nearly to the top. As we came off the bridge, I heard a motorcylist on a rice rocket rev up super fast and swerve around me to pass on the right, all hunched over. The cycle sounded extra loud because the window was now all the way down, and my fella was throwing up into it. But he didn't have his head quite far enough out, and I started getting drops on my arm from him spewing. Shouting for him to put his head all the way out, I pulled over to the side of the road, still in the pitch dark, and let him finish calling Ralph. I saw some vomit in the corner of the window and cleaned it off with a towel I had in the car. Then when I turned the light on, I saw it; he had leaned out far enough once and the windstream had made a huge vomit plume the shape of the Nike check all down the back window of the car....and undoubtedly to the rear where the motorcyclist following us across the bridge had gotten his share. His roar and swerve around us was a desperate move to stop being pelted with chunks of boiled shrimp soaked in beer and gastric juice.
My fella's failure to maintain or at least listen to my hard-gained knowledge regarding drunken vomiting in automotive vehicles is going to give him a long day detailing my car tomorrow in the heat.

Emerson

2011-07-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

The weight is still creeping up. About a pound or two a month, and I'm beyond frustrated. My feet hurt so much it's like the bones are screaming, and my back is a damn mess. To top it off, it's unbelievably hot here; we've had temps over 100 almost every day since the beginning of June, and that's hot even for this place. So my Biggest Bra in the Store from Victoria's Secret is failing; my boobs are getting skin problems from being squished in there. Off I went to Target, as I knew that VS sizes are smaller than other manufacturers. Damn if the D cup 38s I bought were not too small. Holy crap. So I took them back and got DD's. Now that is more like it. They are only a tiny bit too small and make my shirts look a lot better.
Back when a girl could make a decent living working for herself in the oil patch, I used to share an office with a charmingly foulmouthed handsome man from Mississippi who admired my then-modest bosom, back when it was a restrained 34 C. He would openly eye my chest, and say, " Sheee it, baby. Knock knock."
Me:"What now, Jim."
Jim: "C'mon baby, knock knock."
Me:"Sigh. Ok. Who is there."
Jim:"Emerson."
Me:"Emerson who?"
Jim:"Emerson fine big titties thar, babeh."
That actually cracked me up the first time he did it. We were friends and he didn't do that stuff in front of anyone else. After that, if he liked my blouse (read: the way my boobs looked that day), he would ask if the brand was Emerson.

Groundhog Month

2011-07-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

My efforts at health-building activity backfired pretty spectacularly, and I've been just hamster-on-a-wheel for a whole month. The soul-killing job had a bright spot with the sudden and dramatic reassignment of the Worthless one, and I went two days pretty happy with my new upgraded assignment. Then a shitload of people quit from burnout, and I am now back to doing two jobs. The HBIC canceled all vacations right when I had been planning to have enough scraped together to go and see the daughter before the snow set in, and that is pretty depressing. And my foot, leg, and shoulder pain have been downright excessive. So no news there.
Last night was fun, though: a service company bent (BROKE) the rules about this sort of thing and took a bunch of us out to a paint-and-drink party store. So there was music, Purple Haze Abita Beer (raspberry beer, you should have some at all times), and lots and lots of cackling amidst the hack painting of a fleur-de-lis. If I could get my phone camera to work I would put the picture up, it turned out okay.
The tunes that the store blasted in-between brushing tips were oddly eclectic, and included that MTV classic, "Mickey" that the not-cute girl did the cheer routine to. The youngsters next to me started singing along with it and I put my brush down and did the cheer arms and head. They roared with approval and somehow that got to my age; they were all ten or fifteen years my junior and disputed that fact. "I thought you were our age!" Ummm, gray hair, girls. And a vicious middle-aged spread. Not to speak of the creaky motion when I get up to refresh my beer, steadying myself and moving like a tree sloth.
I was thinking about that today while doing the haying out back (tractor broke two weeks ago and fella finished fixing it while I was at Cackle and Dab). I used to hate the lines between Voldemom's eyes and when I caught myself doing that in my twenties, I just made myself stop frowning. I have one line over an eyebrow from keeping it lifted all the time, and some jowliness. My cheeks got so puffy with the steroids back when that they don't have lines now, and my eyes are too big to sag. Now inside, I'm like the Picture of Dorian Gray, and the outside is still decent-ish to others.
Maybe I should scowl or wince when it hurts? Does putting it out there keep from storing it up?
The idea holds little charm, actually. I think I will put my energy into tracking down a source for a Japanese neuropathy drug called Neurotropin, it sounds excellent.

Staycation

2011-06-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

I have been running out of month before money with this job; it pays monthly and my check is double what it used to be for two weeks. The catch is, there are five weeks in what seems like most months. I know it's just two weeks salary difference, but it sure bites my budget in the butt. But every time I get stressed out by the situation with Worthless at work, I put in for some leave. It's paid, they stopped putting it on the retirement, and something really aggravating must have happened about six weeks ago because I put in for a whole week! I have a complicated dress I am sewing for the OoA#1, and the garden and house were getting away from me again. I have sewed, worked out extra at the gym, worked in the yard every day, and enjoyed making dinner when my feet aren't actively screaming with pain from the job. Part of the idea with the yard work is to get my metabolism going again by staying out in the heat. The weather has certainly obliged; I can't work past nine a.m. without starting to faint!
Today I was fighting a new, useless sprinkler head trying to keep the parch down. I gave up and put a small, new "turret" style on that will only do 1/4 of the tiny front yard at a time. Then I went and grubbed under an artemisia bush and pulled out two plugs of dallisgrass and....a dollar. Whoa. Money in bushes, what the hell. I'll take it. I looked up and the new sprinkler makes mist instead of drops, and it is showing a huge full rainbow across that half of the yard. Ha, my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is a damp dollar bill from under a bush. But it still feels auspicious, and beats a sharp stick in the eye.

How do you feel when you get up in the morning?

2011-05-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

My fella has started calling me in the morning because I'm having so much trouble not sleep-clicking my alarm to snooze. He doesn't get it; he wakes up and apparently gets up, pees, stretches, does crunches, cleans the fishpond filter, feeds the cats, and still gets to work on time.
What. The. Hell.
I have a fine CPAP machine that I thought was going to make me sleep better, hence magical rested mornings would ensue. Not fucking even. I thought the gasping, choking, and waking every six minutes was the cause of my fatigue. A year later, I'm guessing I was wrong. When I wake up, I'm stiff, my shoulder hurts from lying on it, my hip is showing off a big old charleyhorse apparently from bladder pressure, my feet still do the screamy don't-put-your-weight-on-us-no-No-NOOO thing that gives me my trademark lurch to grab the wall on the way to the bathroom. And my arms are cold. Under the blanket, cold arms. Also, I am often so groggy that I put the coffee back into some random place instead of the freezer. And if I left laundry in the wash overnight that does not contain essential uniform ingredients, the chances I will forget it wet until it begins to stink are 9 to 1.
The cats take varying measures to get me up now that alarm clock lady dog has gone to heaven. Fat girl tends to ball up by my feet and stare at me, assessing my food value if I delay past her to-be-determined deadline. Wild man pops into the house and leaps onto the bed, purring like a tiger with his mouth open, prrrrr-WAAA-prrrrr-WAAA. Then he gets on my stomach and makes purr biscuits with his unclipped claws, which gets my attention fairly well. The cats know to scatter when they do get me up, as I will be unable to miss them with my feet during the inital lurch down the hall.
I tried not taking my neurontin at bedtime (by running out of it like a damn genius) and the result was not pretty; I have work-related nightmares all night when I do not take it and fierce nerve pain and fatigue the next day from waking up every three minutes to go, Aieeeee. Oh. Nightmare. Stop sweating, go back to sleep. Go on, now. Sleep now. Ok, now.
Trying to recall back in the faroff haze of youth, I don't ever remember waking up clean and refreshed. I had a firm mattress and I would wake up hurting, convinced I had not turned once in the night. I used to put telltales on my covers to try to test the theory but would always forget them. Sleeping; I am doin it rong.

Weasels and fuckers and Groundhog Day

2011-05-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

Weasels personally dealt with this week: 6.
Fuckers personally dealt with this week: 9.
Times I woke up clutching my alarm, having popped the snooze button for more than twenty minutes unawares:2.
Times I called that lady about that job and didn't get a return call: 1.
Scale of the eyeburning, chest-tightening funk odious cheap whore cologne the idiots I share an office with wore: Mississippian. Like the river. Rolling waves of eyeburning pain.
Times I slipped up and said Damn in front of the house supervisor at the front desk: 1.
FML.

It's not going awaaayyyyy....

2011-05-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

You know how giving up something you crave supposedly makes you stop craving it after two weeks?
This time, not so much.
I've given up starch before, and actually lost 20 pounds without ever being hungry. Even cheated with chocolate. That was in California, where I could get a Jamba Juice for lunch, El Pollo Loco chicken for dinner and throw away the tortilllas, and get perfectly wonderful Thai takeout full of shrimp and veg.
This time, no starch, sugar, nada, for months and I haven't shaken the cravings; they actually make me depressed some days. Worse still, I'm still gaining a small amount of weight.Less than eighteen hundred calories a day, and I've increased my exercise to 40 minutes daily from 30, and HOW THE FUCK IS THIS POSSIBLE.
The only good thing about it is the expression on the faces of the many black women I work with when they see what I eat. None of them can believe anyone eats avocado with a spoon. The nicest thing they can say after they stop asking me, no, really, where is your real lunch, because that right there is fruit and that's not lunch, is that I sure do eat healthy. Then they heat up their porkchop in the office microwave and have a real lunch. With french fries, like God intended.
My new thyroid medicine has been in use for a little over a month; no energy burst, no magical stoppage of the heinous bone and muscle pain, nothing but a huge increase in the sweats and a painful pounding sensation in my chest. Bogus.
I think I need to save my pennies and go to Mexico for some lovely Mexican Adderall. Hey, laser-sharp focus and weight loss all in one cute little pill.

Believing in Miracles

2011-04-17T07:36:00.000-07:00

My fella got talked into a bodywork class at the gym. He hated it, except for the part at the end where they lay on Miracle Balls. I looked them up on Amazon and was intrigued, and hey, Amazon Prime free shipping plus two whole dollars off. I like the kit, it's like a Klutz press gift book with toy for the crippled. Yes, I am crippled so I get to call myself that. I don't call anyone who is not family that, so relax. I do wish the tiny adorable book were a little larger or easier to keep open, it's an adorable four inches square with big print and you have to flip, like, ten pages, to do one move. But the balls under my back and hips do seem to relieve some pain at the moment right after use. Perhaps with more use the effect will last. Meanwhile it is very entertaining to the fluffy cat, she sits on the shelf under the coffee table and watches me closely to see if I am dying and need to be eaten.

He Who Plans Makes the Gods Laugh

2011-04-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

How is this for WTF: a girl who I used to work with fb messaged me yesterday asking if I was interested in a job in the field I'd studied so hard and spent so much money certifying in, only to not find a job it was practical to take. Ummm.
Yes, I am interested in knowing more.
Boom, her boss called me an hour later.
She says she wants me to come talk to her about it in person when the HR gnomes post the opening.
We will see about this. I'm reluctant to give up the state retirement but it's hard to overstate how much my job sucks.

I love my new endocrinologist

2011-04-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

She is tiny and lovely, and asks very good questions. And has patience with my bad memory. She seems rawther smart as well, and is of the opinion that my big health disaster of 09 was caused by the iodine in all the CTs setting off my Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Something about all that iodine triggering my immune system to attack my already feeble thyroid with renewed ferocity. That's the first time a doctor has told me I had Hashimoto's instead of garden variety hypothyroidism. Supposedly the lab work I did the other day showed it. She is changing my thyroid medicine up and giving me more of it, and has scheduled me for more labs and a remote followup. There was some harrumphing on her part about my TSH being at the high end of normal, she doesn't think the lab normal is right and wants to bring it right down. So we will see. She does think the weight gain is post starvation syndrome and that the no-starch plan is a good one but wants me to supplement with mega doses of Vitamin D and B12. A girl after my sister's chiropractor's heart.

Today's Win and Fail

2011-04-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

The win, I guess, was that I found this to be funny: Worthless supposed co-worker listens in on a phone conversation. I tell the person on the other line how his goal would be achieved, what I can do to help, where I am putting the paperwork, and the caveats on whether or not it is possible. I take his number and promise to let him know what I find out after he leaves me the paperwork.
I hang up, reach for my portfolio to take his paperwork out and start to fill it out.
Worthless supposed co-worker, whose job this actually is but whom I have stopped asking because she won't do ANYTHING, says, "Oh, I have three things to do upstairs so I will let you handle that."
Hahahahaha hilarious. Hilarious because her job description is basically to handle six to eight things a day, not three for fuck's sake, I have three besides my job description. Also hilarious because, how the fuck is she letting me handle anything when I was ALREADY DOING IT ALL.
Win because I let my face say it all and refrained from any speech, gesture, nod, or eye contact. She just finally walked off.
Today's fail was walking outside and seeing a lady in a pink housecoat smoking twenty feet from the front door. Yeah, that's against the rules, so what, the security guards come out like twice a day and run off the foul Newport addicts. The fail part is that she was sitting on a wall and had something sitting next to her. Actually, it was sitting by her, all green and shiny, with a tube going to her nose. Yep, she was smoking, outside the hospital doors, on oxygen. Our oxygen. We are a gazillion million dollars in the hole and some goofy nurse hooked this idiot up with a nasal cannula, a twenty-pound oxygen cylinder, and a rolling cart to go outside and play demolition grandma. Good thing it was windy today.

Snake oil and woo

2011-04-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty skeptical about all medicine and most herbals. I've tried just about everything in the literature for my arthritis; because of my sulfa allergy, I'm not allowed Celebrex. Vioxx worked for two weeks and stopped, about four times from different MDs. Plus it tends to make people's hearts stop and they don't quite know why, not a good quality to me. The docs have given me SSRIs, SNRIs, big huge Cox-2 inhibitors, Elavil, and about seven other things. The effects are, flat don't help, make my head fog worse, screw up my insides, and make me feel groggy and crippled simultaneously.
So a couple of weeks ago I decided once again to suspend disbelief because I was just hurting so freaking bad, with a wicked RSD flare that was starting to affect my guts again with the pain in my SI joint spreading to my belly. I plopped some money into Amazon for some 400mg Italian Sam-e and some cheapo Swanson Magnesium oil.
I got some relief, not like turning off a switch, but gradual. The mag oil is tricky though, if I don't rub it in very well, it starts burning like a motherfucker about five minutes after application. I was able to pilot my nused lawn tractor bought secondhand from a neighbor around the huge expanse of backyard, though, with minimal (five joints) pain consequences.
We will see if it keeps working. My legs still start the horrible pain screaming and purple coloration when I try to stand around or walk the whole distance of the Lowes.

Time for a vacation

2011-03-31T21:05:00.000-07:00

A woman who works down the hall from me got run over in the street today by a car. Right in front of the entrance doors.
I thought, "I'm glad she wasn't killed," and "Mmmm, need to rethink my constant jaywalking."
Then I was mildly envious of her for getting out of work today.
I said the first two things out loud but I kept the last bit to myself.

Chemo hair? Radiation hair? Colitis malnutrition hair?

2011-03-17T21:09:00.000-07:00

So, about a year and some months ago, I had a CT, then another, then another, and most of my hair fell out in the next six weeks. It had two more spells during colitis flares where it would start raining down again. I'd have hair on my clothes, in the food, covering the sink, all over the floor, and big old wads in my butt crack that I never figured out how they got there. Seriously, how does a pile of hair the size of a toy mouse get past an untucked shirt and down your pants? Twice a day?
I lost almost all my eyelashes, about half my brows, and a sizeable but unmeasurable portion of my nose hair. I can't really describe the process when your nose hair decides to let go and blow out of your nose. It doesn't look like eyelashes on your face, either. And the carpet still matched the drapes but boy did it get threadbare.
I started with a shitload of dark mouse brown, slightly gray, very bone-straight fine hair. By the time a year had gone by, I was down to less than half the ponytail I'd had in width, it was very flat and straight indeed, and my hairline had reshaped while receding. There were a few weak looking grays coming back but not much else. I didn't need a haircut for months last winter, it actually stopped growing for a while, and my hair usually grows nearly eight inches a year; "My hair is eating my face" is how I describe my need for a bimonthly haircut as a rule. I only got it cut once last year in eight months, and only then because it was so raggedly and broken.
In September, I got hold of some meds which started holding the colitis back somewhat. About a month later, my head began to itch like crazy. When I got some privacy to scratch it, my scalp felt decidedly prickly. I started seeing this kind of crew-cut growing in around my remaining hair. So, now about four or five months later, I have two distinct heads of hair. If it's dry or static-y at all, I have a whole new set of hair about three inches long, most of it stripes of gray, a lot of it wavy, that sticks off my head like a momfro. Or the strangest mullet ever. There are curly elflocks growing in front of my ears. Curls, on me, the flat and lifeless hair queen of the world. Frizz, even. Bizarre doesn't begin to cover it. It's pretty cool to have hair texture, though. I've always heard that your hair grows back different after chemo; I wasn't on chemo that I knew of but I did get convinced that the first CT was an overdose. So, maybe radiation hair.
My abundant chin hair, which had stopped growing altogether last winter for six weeks and then was a little feeble and hesitant, is no longer pussyfooting around. I'm back to the daily hunt and pluck of three of the little bastards at the least. Good thing about that is most of them turned white as well, so they aren't as aggravating as when they were all black. It's weird what cheers me up sometimes.

Poltergeist

2011-03-16T21:14:00.000-07:00

Two nights ago, I came home at ten, lugging groceries. As I staggered into the kitchen, the oddest noise got my attention, and I couldn't find it at first. Then I realized, the old fridge magnet that is a minature slot machine was making a tinny, creepy, running-down battery noise. Its bandit arm was pulled forward just a little, and it was sort of whining.
I touched the handle, and it clicked off. Then I went cold all over; that crappy thing doesn't have a decent magnet on the back, and falls off when tapped. So the cats couldn't have set it off. One of them was in the house, and not acting weird, so I looked around, and the back door was unlocked. I have gotten in the habit, since the dog died, of closing it by the deadbolt and locking it in one motion. The cat started acting strange, sniffing under all the furniture. Yikes yikes yikes.
I got the creeps, bad, and called my fella and whimpered, and he came over and shone his flashlight all around, including the attic, and flushed out no evildoers. I still had trouble going to sleep.
Last night I got home and there was a light on I didn't remember turning on that morning. Sure enough, I got too creepy to go in and had to go back and get him, and his flashlight, again.
This morning I was all, "I am TURNING THESE TWO LIGHTS ON AND REMEMBERING IT" out loud like a crazy lady.
Fella surmised one of them would burn out before I got home and he'd get summoned again. Ha, third time was the charm. No cats inside but nothing that creeped me out, either.

Adding to my legend

2011-03-12T14:26:00.000-08:00

Looking like me, and walking like me, makes me automatically eccentric in a town dominated by small-nosed petite makeup obsessed women. I have lived on the same dead-end street for decades and my neighbors are either friends or frightened of me.
Two weeks ago I planted some new lovely flowers in my front flowerbed. I ripped up handfuls of wild onion at the time, and dug out every plant of it I could find. This week I was dismayed to see they had all come back and more. The internet was not much help; I've tried every remedy and product for them listed except: steam.
I have a steamer, kind of a big 'un.
I got my chair, my ice water, my phone playing Avalon channel on Pandora, and my extension cord. I fired up that steamer and steamed those weeds flat. They turned bright green and fell down, smelling like dinner with that special wild onion funk.
The postman and the neighbors all had to stop to see why I was vacuuming the flowerbed. The explanation did nothing but add to my legend on the block. If I'd done it in my bathrobe it would have been a little more fun but it's too warm today for that.

How to Slow Down Time

2011-03-05T13:09:00.000-08:00

As you get older, time seems to speed up. Days and weeks seem shorter and shorter. Then, poof, there goes another month, another year. I have discovered how to stop this process cold in its tracks.
Give up eating starch.
No, seriously. I was gaining weight in a scientifically unlikely amount and writing down every bite I ate; the calorie count could not even begin to account for the four pounds a week the scale kept inexorably showing.
Then I decided: okay, if your guts think you are still starving, make them work to get the calories out of the food. So: eggs, fish, meat, veg, fruit. No sugar, wheat, potatoes, corn, or rice.
Holy shit.
A day lasts forever on this regimen. There is nothing to look forward to, and eating is not fun. The last week at work doing this was about a month long, and that's with going home one afternoon with a stomach bug.
I lost about four and a half pounds in ten days, also highly unlikely, and am not the least pleased. For this amount of suffering I should have acquired Adriana Lima's body.

What I did and didn't say

2011-02-24T05:30:00.000-08:00

What I did say: "Oh, so you don't have time to do this assignment?"
What I didn't say: "Bitch, you don't have anything else to do, I know this for a fact, and you were supposed to come aboard and do these specific tasks. If you don't feel like helping, get out of my face and quit the fuck paging me when you know what phone I'm sitting next to, and we'll take it up with the boss."
Being a grownup is hard. Drawing the short straw on a co-worker is hard. Keeping my face neutral is impossible.

What I have given up lately

2011-02-23T05:34:00.000-08:00

Besides my dignity what there was of it, telling this stuff. But this week I stopped eating the one spoonful of sugar I put in my coffee, wheat, and corn.
What I have not given up: swearing. The scale hasn't gone up in three days but I swear at it anyway, and I am quietly cursing most everything else. I say FUCK under my breath a lot.

The Biggest Bra in the Store

2011-02-20T20:12:00.000-08:00

So, yeah. I had this one bra that is a neutral color and it's the one I generally wore to work. It was big.
But the doc I went to this week to complain to about my hellish 14 pound weight gain in the last three and a half weeks and the atrocious new bone and muscle pain had little to offer. She just thinks that my insides and my metabolism were convinced I was starving to death during the Bad Year of Famous Poop, and neither one has yet gotten the message, NOT STARVING QUIT HOARDING CALORIES. And oh, that pain is refeeding myalgia, so cut back on the exercise, and we'll get you in to the endocrinologist asap.
Meanwhile, the beleaguered bra in question just gave up in exhaustion. So off I go to the bra and underwear store. Because that's where you buy bras. Except the cheery petite salesgirl measured me, thought I'd go one size up from the 36D I was sporting, and those weren't even close to big enough. I got the 38DD next, thinking this will be HUGE. And it is. Only not as far as capacity cup-wise. I could easily have worn an E. But they don't go that high in that store. I wore E's back when I was nursing and I thought the weight of my boobs would crush me if I lay down. Now I'm back in them except they don't sell them there and it was bad enough to have to buy the Biggest Bra in the Store, I was not about to hobble down the mall and look for a bra with cups big enough for my oversized head.
I am eating this primal diet thing and Saturday is the first day in nearly a month that the scale did not go up. Primal diet and endocrinologist need to handle up, I can't waddle around at nearly two hundred pounds for long without breaking a bone in my foot.

How to fix life-altering colitis

2011-02-12T09:16:00.000-08:00

I can't really even believe I did this, much less that it worked.
My doctor gave me the long Rx for those antibiotics that helped. We talked about what would happen if they stopped helping. He mentioned a few of his patients that have not gotten any medical relief and that he was reading up on stool transplants. I had the expected reaction. He told me a story which was not off-topic about how his teachers in medschool all completely rejected the H.Pylori hypothesis for ulcer formation as voodoo talk. Then, fifteen years later, someone devised a way to really test it and boom, almost all ulcers are curable with antibiotics. All those esteemed professors were wrong. He mildly mentioned some current researchers who attribute Crohn's to low-level TB exposure from cow's milk and UC to enterotoxic bacterial overgrowth following a viral infection. How those guys are getting hooted at now but he thinks in ten years they will be heroes. He looked at me meaningfully with that small discussion.
The antibiotics stopped working in six weeks.
The headfog was brutal, my hair started falling out again in handfuls, the belly pain was coming back, the diarrhea went from three times a day to five then eight. The arthritis called Ankylosing Spondilitis which is even meaner than it sounds, revved up so I could barely get out of my car or hold my keys. My nails started breaking to the quick either from clumsiness or poor circulation, and the muscle spasms came back in my legs and feet. I went back to pain level seven all day, every day. My face swelled up and my ears were ringing. Then the fainting started again. When your gut becomes porous, your whole body goes wrong.
It was kind of a bad two weeks.
Understatement. My last chance had failed, and I got really, really sad. Then I got desperate.
I did a stool transplant.
I haven't had diarrhea in almost two weeks. It stopped when I got the stool enema. Yes, it was as gross as it sounds.
My headfog has cleared quite a bit. My belly has almost stopped hurting. My hair stopped falling out. The musculoskeletal mess is very slowly improving, and I don't get headspin or ringing ears.
It didn't make it all the way to the ileum, which is the source of the worst pain, so that's been gradual; I may have to repeat it.
But still; kind of like a miracle. I'm so ready to have a life. I hope this gives me one back.

What I did and didn't say

2011-02-02T21:14:00.000-08:00

"Um, they won't give that away for free, you can talk to them about it but they make a lot of money charging for that, no I am not going to ask them to give it away."

(If I were a fucking fairy godmother, I would sure as shit not be ugly, old and fat; everyone knows them wish-granting wenches fix themselves first. Am I beautiful, slender, ageless, and winged? No? Then, motherfucker, I am not your fairy godmother.)

What I did and didn't say

2011-01-28T21:49:00.000-08:00

So here is this client. She wants me to write, let's call it a work excuse. For her relative in the hospital this week, and she wants me to state he can't make it next week, the week after that, and into March. I told her, politely, ten times, I could write and fax the excuse from the time to admission until the day she wants it written but no one gives excuses out for the future. Hoo boy. She bitched and wailed and waved what was left of the tips on her nails and yelled about me getting him in trouble until the nurses at the station almost lost their heads from craning their necks while rolling their eyes at her stupidity.
What I was dying to say but waited until I got back to my office and verbalized it to my cubicle co-slave: "Bitch, if I could predict the future your sorry ass wouldn't know what I looked like, because I'd have my lottery winnings and be locked behind a big gate with a mean, bald Israeli security force."

The Well-trained Cat Owner

2011-01-25T20:11:00.000-08:00

My half-wild ginger man purred at a lady three streets over and she read his collar and called me. My fella went over and fetched him home, screaming dismally in the truck. He promptly ate half a pound of kibble, purred around charmingly, and took the plumbing panel off the closet in the night and went back outside. Heated the subdivision on my dime. He opened the panel to come both in and out several times over the next few days; a cute trick but costly on the heating bill. I got my fella to put a catflap in the panel and nail the panel itself more securely. Ginger man and his pudgy calico sister wasted no time poking their heads through it. He's gone out through it twice in two days, but he's still coming in through the people door. I thought little dim chubby calico sister was too timid to go out through it, but I came home just now and she was waiting in the driveway after I had left her in the house. I was proud of her initiative initially, but then I opened the door and decided that the evident reason she felt compelled to leave was the stench of the heinous shit she had taken in the catpot before going OUTSIDE where other cats are smart enough to go to take a dump. So now I have cat egress which is not being used until after the home is befouled. Not hard to see who the dim one is here.

One month later

2011-01-22T14:34:00.000-08:00

It's really pretty out today, finally some sunshine. I got a candy-striped crinum lily, some asian lilies in pink and white, a white amaryllis, and some white peruvian daffodils. I planted them on my Lily dog's grave while the cat hovered around watching anxiously. I'd like to have something bloom there all year, and wish I'd ever had success with lily-of-the valley for winter/spring. I've got some paperwhites out back and daylilies and spider lilies out front. That should have something like a lily blooming there most of the year. I still can't talk about her, and I honestly don't feel better even with this done, but maybe when something blooms I will.

Loving them state holidays

2011-01-16T08:26:00.000-08:00

I had a better week at work even though the crazies were barking loudly. My new plan, to not call the seconds in command, just get advice from people who do this job and let the big boss know what the bad crazy potentials were, made things a lot smoother. We are supposed to get some help soon that should get the crazies out of my hair and onto another set of burdened backs. Can. Not. Wait. It will let me just sleepwalk through the soul-killing parts of the job and just focus on the fact that I have one and it has state benefits. Best of all are the nearly monthly three-day weekends. Just as my jaw and neck and leg pain get the worst, along comes some Monday off or another. December's were pretty great. Some other things work better, like the HSA; I filed my first, big hit from the year's deductibles for my stunningly expensive medicine and the HSA put the money back in my checking account in less than a week. My former HSA took two or three weeks to send me a check, so that was nice. It gives me the money to eat on until the end of the month.
Working with people who don't have jobs or health insurance really brings it home that in our country, you either have or have not. If you don't have a job with insurance and you get sick, there's no real safety net; one good illness and you can find yourself living under a bridge. I do not care for algae in general so under-bridge life appeals to me much less than a soul-killing job. There is a remote possibility that holding onto the soul-killing job for a year could bring me a less awful one in this big organization, so I spend a small part of each day drinking a cup of tea and rationalizing going back out to the Faustian bargain that pays my heating bill and my blessed swim club membership. Water therapy is the only thing that really keeps the RSD from being total misery, and hitting that pool every day makes everything seem like it will be okay. Tomorrow I will be doing it as a holiday, which is brilliant.

How to Have a Happy Birthday

2011-01-05T16:13:00.000-08:00

Have your kid bring you one of your favorite sandwiches from a restaurant you went to back when times were easier. Introduce her to your co-workers and listen to them croon at her loveliness. Introduce her to a few of your docs and impress them with her grad school. Yay. A fun day. The crazies did not bother me today, and they were out in full force. Bring it.

Plotting and Planning

2011-01-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

I had a horrible week at work; seven days of training instead of the ten or fifteen usual ones granted most other new hires didn't give me a lot of depth and I ran into a lot of crazy stuff. Every time I called the bosses for advice, they'd grab the situation away from me and things would get wild fast. My big boss, the nice but either ditzy or memory-impaired one, was out all week. So I came up with a new strategy; not ask those heifers anything. Call the few coworkers who have been nice to me for advice, run stuff by the big boss if she's available (ha, as if). I've got to hang on to this dreadful job. There's nothing else out there right now.
A super bright spot is that my child's too-short visit got extended through next weekend so we will have two more free days together before she has to go back. Plus she's home at night when I get here. So awesome. I get to smell her head; it never gets old.

Ow ow ow ow ow

2010-12-26T07:51:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-23T20:47:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-18T08:07:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-12-17T05:15:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-15T18:02:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-11T07:23:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-10T15:46:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-04T21:50:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-25T21:53:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-23T20:41:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-16T18:39:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-10T19:09:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-27T15:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-25T05:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-20T19:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-19T18:13:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-05T12:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-04T06:59:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-30T20:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-28T10:04:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-09-16T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-14T07:29:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-09T18:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-07T15:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-03T07:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-31T21:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-10T18:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-08T20:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-28T20:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-27T20:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-19T19:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Long Marching

2010-05-24T07:52:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Slam

2010-05-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

So I went up and cleaned out my locker at my former job today. Spoke to a few people who were sad I couldn't stay on.
Last night I was all relaxed, not stressing, walking to my car, and got a strong premonition that the job I wanted to get here in town wasn't going to happen after all. Really strong. I fought it off the best I could, since the lady I interviewed with seemed to really want me and said she'd call Friday and tell me if she could work it out.
So it's time for her to leave work now, and....no call. Not yes or no, but limbo. Which is not promising. Now I have to do clinicals and jobhunt. With a high probability of having to travel or relocate.
I'm going to swim now and let myself be sad; I've already made two calls on other jobs and will just have to be an emailing fool for a few weeks. Still, it sucks.

The Sound of a Door Closing

2010-05-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

I was denied accomodation at my place of employment. They told me I was on my own to get another job in the company that would let me work 8-hr days instead of the twelves I just can't do any more. I got one of the two interviews I requested; the lady just gave me a courtesy call to let me know she had a better match for the job, someone with specific experience to that office. So I'll be terminated at my present job on Friday.
Yesterday, I interviewed with a different company, and the boss was very nice and seemed anxious to solve the two internal problems to my hire, as I would be able to work without training and take over her supervisory role at another facility. I sure hope that is my window opening. She said she would let me know Friday.
There aren't any more openings in town for the specialty that I want, and chances are the place I just interviewed with would not hire a certified person over me, that they would go with a lower-cost person, so I couldn't go get the job a certified person left. I am going to have to travel or relocate if I don't get this job.
I feel oddly calm about all this. Somehow, I'm sure it's the right decision, and I will somehow get a job I can physically do and enjoy.
Here's hoping for the sound of a large window opening.

Kitty Butt Pirate

2010-05-01T12:34:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of cats in my life. I have the two wild crazies, they rodeo all over my house and night and abuse the throw rugs. I've been helping house-sit a friend's neurotic tiny cat with the horriblest voice evah, she has a sweet nature but she sounds like the Wicked Witch of the West and she's super talky, plus has a tendency to chew off her fur. Object of Affection #2 has three cats that spend the night at his house plus a fourth that comes for meals. One of his housecats has small head syndrome; he has eaten so much that his body makes him look microcephalic. A couple of weeks ago he was making room-clearing farts. They matched his personality so we didn't think much of it until this week when he stopped eating. The vet found that he was literally full of shit; he ate so many mice and fibery things like them that his poop got too big for his pelvic girdle and his colon was impacted its entire length. She sedated him and removed as much as she could reach, and the stench made her clinic air bad enough to burn out all your nose hair.
I had to take him back in today because his new diet wasn't helping him pass the remaining impaction. I helped her hold him and manipulate his belly while she bravely dug and enemaed and flushed and dug some ridiculously large and hard poop out of him. The sedation didn't put him all the way out, and he started growling faintly, so they had to give him anesthesia gas. After it was all done, and he only had 1/3 of the original blockage left, too high to reach, the tech and I were cleaning him up. She asked the kitty a rhetorical question and I did a voice like I was him and said, "I went to PRISON...I don't know what I did but I went to PRISON." Another client had brought her sick kitty back and the vet and tech and I burst out laughing; the client was obviously shocked that I was so heartless, making fun of kitty butt reaming. My humor is not for everyone.