La Eye of Pink

I think Eye of Pink sounds so much more elegant and pleasant than Pink Eye, which sounds like something a person would get after questionable interaction with a rabbit. 

Turns out there was a reason it felt like someone was kicking my eyes out from the inside. It was actually happening. I got some sort of virus apparently, that made me sick. The sick stuff then traveled into my eye, pushing it partly shut and turning it bloody red. There did not seem to be any cause for alarm (I am Mutha'!) until several days went by and my eye started to swell up, along with that half of my face. It felt like someone was holding a butane torch to it. Still, you know, I thought it would probably just go away but alas, no. It was when I realized 5 days had gone by and I was too tired and shakey even to knit, that I better go see a professional.

I went to a local walk in clinic where I was seen by Doogie Howsers younger brother, who kept asking the same questions. Do you have a cough? Are you congested? Do you have a cough? (*haaaack* no cough *haaaack*). He constantly referenced his computer where I imagine he had hidden crib notes. Step one- take temperature, over 98.5 is bad. Step two- ask if patient has a cough. Anyway, he poked at the things that looked like they would hurt and they did.

So I have La Eye of Pink, Le Virus, and sinusitits (sounds exotic enough on it's own) with a 60% blockage. Now, I'm not sure what a 60% blockage means exactly, but I'm guessing the ideal is NO blockage, so that can't be good. Plus it's more than half, if I am doing the math correctly and I know that more than half is worse than less than half. Well, I think. Going off my base assumption that 0% is the goal anyway. Also, I have gangrene in my leg. Ha ha, no just kidding. Just seems like I have everything else but that! Did I mention the total exhaustion? I am wiped out. Wrecked. I feel like I have a raging hangover but got to have exactly zero of the fun.

Okay, that's my status update. The End.

Being Sick Sucks

I'm sick. And I'm not sure who to blame for it, unless it is that O'Donnell woman who swears she is not a witch (isn't that sort of like the person who mentions the fart first and blames it on someone else, that's the person who did it? The one who says it? ). Some of this may not make any sense, because of the fact that I am disintegrating as I write.

Things are bad when your eyeballs hurt. When it hurts to move them. Eyeballs want to be free, they want to be independent and wander at their leisure. I normally let my eyes set their own pace but it feels like someone is inside my eye socket trying to kick out my eyeball with a farm boot and throwing down those snap firecrackers. Or is trying to use them as a slingshot from the inside. Never let someone use your eyes as the artillery in a slingshot. I tried to search out this symptom in order to diagnose myself with something but would you believe there is no such symptom? I actually invented a new disease! I will think that is a lot more cool when it's over with. I'm going to have to come up with a name. Accidentalopathy maybe.

I would say the girls have been pretty good during my bout with the plague, but that would bring on the blog curse so I am not going to mention it.

Last night I actually had 8 Pepto Bismols for dinner. Let me tell you something, if you need 8 of those things, your life truly sucks. I mean, you take your first 2 according to the directions, then you experience failure. You take 2 more and fail again. Fail some more just for fun. Do it twice more before you can sit somewhere other than the potty. The good news is I think I freed up a lot of time since I should have no need for a toilet for the next month or so. Also, I'm sure I weigh 3 pounds less than I did yesterday.  Rock on.

 Okay, then I have a headache and all my muscles hurt like I used them for something. My throat feels like it has road rash and I am so very very tired. Like Dorothy in the poppy field tired. blegh.

So feel free to leave your considerate and caring comments. I don't want to be pushy, but when I am sick I count my comments and make a note of who has written what. Not that you have to or anything. Just sayin'.  Because I'm sick. Really super sick.

It's possible not all of this makes sense. I hope some of it does. Going into a coma now.

You Know You Love Your Kids When.......

I've been reading "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" series lately. It's a trilogy that I started on back in August. This is not light reading, there is no fluff to be found in these books. The books are intense, they require the reader to learn quite a lot of Swedish geography, some business law, European history and so on.  Complicated reading that required my hard to find concentration, but paid off with unique story lines and startling twists. Each book is about 500 pages. However, here is the bad part: the author wrote these three fascinating novels centered around "The Girl", and then he died. So there will be no more!

Anyway, you know you love your kids when you have roughly 75 pages left in the final book of the trilogy, the last book ever, and the characters are in the middle of the trial and you are trying to interpret Swedish courtroom decorum, just about to find out what happens, the resolution of 2 months of reading 1500 pages, when you stop and put the book down because your 7 year old just reminded you that you said you would play a game with her, and it's time.

So you play.

And you lose.

Twice.

The end of the week report

I was sitting on the couch with Genea, she loves to sit right up close with me and hold my hand while I put my arm around her. Usually we just talk, sometimes she even falls asleep. It sure wasn't always this way, it was about a year and a half before I could even touch her. We worked on it a lot, and now she does so much better with it. Sometimes she plays with my rings as she did on this day, and we had a chat about one of them.

Genea- is this your married ring?
Me- yes.
Genea- no fair, I want one too!  (everything is no fair these days).
Me- you have to get married to get one.
Genea- NO, I don't want to.
Me- well you have to if you want a married ring. Are there any boys you like?
Genea- NOOOOOOOOO!
Me- (*ahem good!*) Hmmm, I don't think this is going to work for you.
Genea- I'll marry Daddy and he'll give me a ring.
Me- that would be a good idea except Daddy is already married.
Genea- that's okay, I'll just wait until you are dead.
Me- ummm, okay then, that should work.


There is a house at the end of the block that puts on a really cool Halloween display, and this year they have really outdone themselves. Teena and Genea and I were getting ready to walk down to the house to see it at night, with the spooky lights on and all the blow- up figures going. We were standing in the foyer putting on shoes and coats and I had opened the door in overly optimistic hope that we could get out of the house in a reasonable amount of time. But really, that never happens.

Anyway, Teena was standing at the screen door looking out as Genea struggled with her shoes and I nagged at them both to get moving. Suddenly Teena exclaims----

Look Mama, there's a new jackass across the street and this one has a different color truck!

Aha, for sure she was right. There appears to be a new jackass "visiting" across the street. He looks perfect, now we just need to lull him into the tangle of the Skankenho's web.


Things That Suck

My coffee pot broke this week. I had to practically milk it like a cow to produce a pot the day it happened. Tragic!

My dryer seems to have also broken this week. It just says mmmmmmmmm mmmmmm when I turn it on. No spinning and no heat. Sigh. Double sigh.
(Updated.... I wonder if I can turn this into an excuse to buy a bunch of new, presumably clean clothes?)

Cleaning Triage

There comes a time in every person's life when they are going to have to clean the house. No one, with the possible exception of my Polish grandmother, no one likes to do it. In my case I really super hate it. It wastes my valuable time to be washing a floor that A. I just washed six months ago and B. I'm going to have to wash again in six more months. There is so much I could be doing with that time instead such as cooking and spending great quality time with my family. I could even be solving the Navier- Stokes equations for a million dollars, but instead I am stuck chipping crusted cereal off the legs of the dining table. The final nail in the coffin however, is that I am stuck cleaning for guests that are not even mine. People with perfectly good homes of their own far far away, relatives of the other half of this parenting team. It's the kids I tell you, kids. No one cared about The Husband and I when we were a little "dink" family and for sure no one cared about visiting us, and we were fine with that.

So, tick tick tick, time goes by and all of us in this house know that these guests are on their way. For months in advance we know. Certain of us start to poke and prod others of us that a massive cleaning needs to be underway. Others of us are well know to complain they are too sick or too tired after working all day to clean or are reading something fascinating about an obscure religion from a billion years ago and cannot possibly get up off his butt to scrape bug guts off the walls.

(A side note. My preferred method of dealing with insects in the house is to spray them mercilessly with toxic chemicals from a very safe distance until they fall off the wall and convulse into death. The Husband does not care for carcinogens being sprayed all over his air (fussy man) and so the compromise is that I will slap the bugs with a super long fly swatter (I love to slap stuff) and he has to clean the guts up off the wall. That's the deal.)

The result is "we" wind up waiting until the expected guests are practically on their airplanes before we start to clean up. Suddenly, we have to winnow down a very long list to only the highest priorities. Take for example the blinds. With the dust and hair provided by 3 girls and 2 cats our window blinds usually have an extra layer of protection on them. Don't judge, it can look pretty in the right light. Kind of fuzzy and soft. It is assumed that cleaning blinds sucks. I have discovered though that with just the right precise tilt, they look fine without being cleaned. And if you do it right, the fact that the windows are not clean either will be obscured. Good enough.

See? Pretty!

Beware the tilt stick! How come the dust and stuff lands so evenly over the span of the blind louvers?  Why wouldn't it collect in some spots and be invisible in others? Mysterious. This is what we are obscuring.

Then I take into account who my guests really are. On this non-occasion, they are a 65 year old woman and an almost- 90 year old woman, neither with great eyesight. Plan to pull all the curtains and put on no lights at all. The dimness hides a lot, even the streaks of spilled coffee on my kitchen cabinets! Even the stove hair collection is difficult to see with no lights on (why does so much hair and furry stuff get stuck on the stove? Anyone?). Forget it that I can't see either, I know where stuff is, I'm the one who hid it there.

Need to dust and vacuum everything? No time. Dust the side that shows and vacuum the part people will see. I went to jam a bunch of random junk under my bed when I discovered to my horror that it was full under there from the last three guest visits. Close the door. Clean. As for the bathroom, well, it doesn't have to be clean, it just has to look clean. I think it counts if I run a rag over the toothpaste hills in the sink. The hill is clean right? The things my children can do to a single innocent towel are vile. Turn all towels around to the other side. Clean.

I don't have time to pull out dishes from my open shelves in the kitchen to clean out the cabinets. My guests are short- both of them. I squatted myself down several inches and realized I only needed to wipe down the first visible shelf. Neither of them would be able to see the other shelves without a step stool, and I certainly would not be providing one. HA! Clean.

Way- hay- hay too high for anyone to see. Ignore dust bunnies and dust giraffes. Clean-ish.

Now here is something I don't mind cleaning- my antique Fiesta collection! It is fun to play in these dishes and move them around. Sadly the collection has not been added to since the first child put in her appearance. See how shiny and happy they are? Clean!

I used to be a  person who felt like, if you have nice stuff you should use it! What a waste it is to have wonderful things you love only to have them hidden safely away, unseen for years. How terrible! So what if you have kids- whatever happened to teaching your kids not to touch? Teach your children NO. If they don't get it- slap their hands a few times, they'll get it. Sigh.  *pain, I am getting a pain* Seems that somehow while I only have 2 children, they have been blessed with eight arms and legs apiece and they do not coordinate. 

This teapot is the Marlon filler. I just use it to heat water for Marlon Jackson the Hot Water Bottle. What is that gunk on it? I have no idea. All I know is that it does not respond to chemicals that promise to strip paint and clean the oil spill off your driveway. There is no hope here. Hide this teapot when guests come over.

Okay, so what do you do to "tidy up" when company is coming? Share your tips and tricks with me!

PS this is somewhat in sarcasm (but not totally *ahem*) but my house is safe if you were considering coming for a visit or letting your kids come to play!

Where Did I Go Wrong?

It's a serious question.

I've raised my children the good old fashioned American way. On processed foods and chemically preserved food-stuff. That they eat in front of the TV. Which is babysitting them.

(insert heavy sarcasm font above)

I offered my children a popular brand of canned spaghetti where the noodles are produced in cute little circles with a discolored glue probably intended to be the sauce. Where the can label lists things like toxicobenzene, red sludge,  rubberizedwhiteifiedflour, and 435 separate preservatives. The sort of thing that is quite possibly keeping Joan Rivers' face from falling off. The sort of thing I loved as a kid. That all kids should love. They have commercials! They have an adorable character! They have cute noodles!

They declined. Declined!!!

Why? They wanted me to make MY spaghetti. With MY sauce that I make from tomatoes and spices with straight noodles and stuff. Bah. They wanted me to cook. Cook!!! Food!!!

Where do they get these awful idea's? Where did I go wrong?

Bullets

Nightmare of nightmares, our internet indeed took a fall and could not get back up. So for the past week we have had super slow, spotty access and it has been horrible! Also, there has been a lot of other shit going on in my world so I'm going to bullet point a few things just to make it snappy.

• My in-laws and my period arrived at the same time. The universe hates me.
• Genea and Teena have both been sick
• Now I am sick!
• Skankenho passed out in her house with her kids locked out after school. They wound up at my house and after an hour and a half I had to report it to the police. The police were able to wake her and the kids went home. 
• I don't like sentence-finishers. Especially when the finisher is prone to finishing my sentences in the most negative way possible. 
• I have a guppy I need to have verified by the Guiness Book of World Records. It will not die. It also appears to be a cannibal as no other guppy has survived his companionship.
• The Husband cleaned the toilet with bleach. Then he used a scrubbie to get all the "oogedy" stuff off. The scrubbie appears to have reacted with the bleach cleanser and turned our toilet bowl a pale blue color. With scrubbie marks everywhere. And splotches. The scrubbie was a coppery looking thing from Dollar Tree. Don't dis my Dollar Tree if you have a theory to explore on the cause of this oddity.
• Oprah has not contacted me. I have written her 3 times and applied for the audience of 12 shows, including one of her "last minute reservation" shows. Yes, you have to fill out an application to be in the audience. And that's okay! But, I really need a makeover. My hair is too long, straight and straggly and I am waiting for an Oprah Makeover. Anyway, I never heard back on the shows I wrote in for but definitely got a NO THANKS LADY on my audience reservation requests.
• I got the book "The Boy who was Raised as a Dog" by Bruce Perry and as recommended by Annie and kate and some others. I devoured it. It should be required reading for pre- adoptive families!
• Where did everybody go? I used to read like, 60 blogs a day. Now I have about 15 to read on a good day. If you seem to notice you are gone, please make a note of it.

So, that's all for now!