Tuesday, May 19, 2015

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) I hate this time of year.  I wish I knew why, exactly, but I have no idea.  Maybe it's the weather, or bad memories, but for the past (almost) 7-8 years, this time of year just depresses the hell out of me.  I always get stressed out and anxious, and since I can't pinpoint what causes it,  I can't really do anything about it. Just got to wait it out, I guess.  Am I the only person who gets S.A.D. in the summer? 

2) Last week I had to go have a crown replaced. Lots of fun, that! Heh, no, not really.  It's something my dentist has been wanting to do for a while, but only just recently decided to follow though on. Apparently, my old crown had not been made correctly, or maybe it had degraded?  I'm not sure, but he wanted to replace it.  I'm actually embarrassed at my reaction to his suggestion that I replace it for two reasons: 1) I asked to be sedated.  Call me a giant weenie-dog all you want, but I seriously hate having people mess with my face holes, and if anyone is going to do something invasive to one of them, I don't want to be lucid. They don't sedate, but they do use nitrous, which I'd never had before. I agreed to that. 2) I said "I'll need to talk to my husband first!"  It wasn't until it came out of my mouth that I realized what that sounded like.  They looked at me really weird and said that it needed to be done, and I needed to make a decision, so they made me an appointment that I could cancel if Steve said no (or whatever.)  Let me clarify: Steve would never withhold any kind of medical/dental treatments from me.  I know this!  However, since his layoff from his last job and because he's still working as a consultant and not a full time regular employee, we have weird vision/dental insurance that we plan on changing, so I wasn't sure if that would be in place by my appointment or not.  I didn't meant to sound like a 50s housewife who needed to check with my husband to make sure my dumb ol' teeth were important enough to spend money on!  :) I did explain that to the lady at the front desk, so let's hope that trickled back to the other folks! 

Anyway, the day of my appointment came and I was worried because I didn't know how out of it I would be.  I've heard of nitrous, but I didn't know what it would do to me.  They fitted the little cup thing over my nose and left me alone for a few minutes.  I kept thinking "This isn't working! I don't feel anything!  They're going to excavate my crown and I'm going to feel everything!  AHHHH!" but then everything got very, very bright.  I didn't feel floopy or anything, but I did stop being afraid.  The dentist came over to give me a shot, but had to walk away to do something else before he could, and the hygienist came over and asked me "are you numb yet?"  I wasn't, of course, but then again, I had no idea what nitrous does to people.  Was I supposed to be numb? Is that what nitrous did to people, make them chill AND numb?  I said "Is it supposed to make me numb? Is he also going to give me a shot?"  She looked at the chart and said no, he hadn't done it yet and it was the shot would make me numb, not the gas.  Noted.  

So the dentist came in and gave me a shot, which I didn't care about in the least, and they stepped back to let that work, and they started talking to each other about watching instructional videos about dental work on YouTube. I asked if they learned things from YouTube and they were all "Oh, yeah! You can learn just about anything from videos on YouTube. If you want to know how to do it, they probably have a video about it."  I nodded and said "Yeah, that's how I learned to castrate pigs. On video, I mean. I never had to do it practically, thank goodness, but still."  That was when I knew for sure the nitrous was working on me.  See, when I've been drinking, or if a doctor has given me a sedative, or things of that nature, there is a tiny voice deep inside of me that stays sane and lucid. Think of it as the pressed dextrose tablet of Kelly at the very center of the Gobstopper that is me.  It's a tiny voice of reason that says things like "WTF did you just say that for?"  or "Wait!  Don't do that!" or "Seriously, that will probably ruin your marriage/job/life. Let's not do that."  I hear that voice. I know the voice is there.  However, I don't always listen to that voice.  While I was talking about castrating pigs, that little voice was saying "No, wait...that...why?!  Stop talking. Stop talking now."  If I'd had the capacity for shame at that point, I'd have been horribly embarrassed, but I didn't give a frak. However, I knew enough not to talk anymore and they got down to business on my tooth.  I'm sure I wasn't experiencing time at a normal rate, because it seemed like they were done in just a few minutes.  I had my temporary crown in place and they made me do a connect-the-dots puzzle to make sure I was okay to drive.  I don't think it wore off as fast as they thought it would, but they let me go anyway and I drove off still feeling kind of weird, but it passed after I got something to eat.  I'm a fan of the nitrous.  I'm wondering why more doctors don't have it!  I'm going to suggest it to my gynecologist!

3) Spiders are out to get me this year.  Last week I was in the bathroom at church, when I thought a bug or something flew by me.  It was so close that I couldn't see exactly what it was, so I stepped back, and it was a rather large spider that had done a Mission Impossible style drop from the ceiling right in front of my eyes.  I almost had a heart attack, but I managed to grab a paper towel and murder the beast.  Yesterday I was at the gym, when a spider fell from the ceiling and landed on my elliptical machine while I was in the middle of ellipticalling.  I know I screamed and flailed, but to give me credit, I didn't slow my pace.  The stupid spider crawled all over the interface and I kept trying to flick it off.  I finally managed to blow it off of the machine and someone stepped on it, but I wasn't comfortable on the thing for the rest of my workout.  Then later, as I was leaving home to go to work, a spider tried to descend onto my steering wheel while I was pulling out of my driveway.  I'm glad i was in my driveway, because I would have run off of the road.  Luckily it was small and I had a sticky note in my console that I used to smash it.  I can't take much more, y'all!  

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) So, in case you are interested, I went to the pulmonary doctor and he wasn't worried about what he saw on the CT scan.  He told me I have a 12mm nodule in the upper, right lobe of my lung (about the size of a marble) and a bunch of granulomas (basically, little swollen spots) scattered throughout.  That sounds much scarier than it really is, though, because it mainly just means I'm still having issues due to the pneumonia I had earlier in the year.  I must have had a worse case of pneumonia than I thought!  At any rate, he wasn't worried and I wasn't worried and now I have to go back for a routine 3 month CT scan just to make sure the stuff is going away.  Also, he wasn't that much of a bastard at all.  He was dry and straight forward, but he wasn't mean.  Due to what people had told me about him, I was more scared of meeting this doctor than I was about finding out the results of my scan.

I also got lost leaving the doctor.  I was less than three miles from my house, but I got turned around.  SIGH. I'm horrible at finding my way places.  If it wasn't for my talking GPS, I'd probably be in Guam.

2) A couple of Sundays ago, I was walking to the back of the church when one leg of my pantyhose exploded.  OK, before you make fun of me, yes I still wear pantyhose with dresses.  SHUT UP!  I have pale legs!  Anyway, you might think I'm kidding when I say that they exploded, but I'm not.  I was walking to the sound booth and my left leg started to feel weird. I can't really explain why it felt weird, but I knew there had been a disturbance in the force, if you will.  Since I couldn't pull up my dress in the middle of the sanctuary, I walked back into one of our storage rooms to see what was going on.  I can only assume that I'd bought a defective pair of hose because this is what happened:


Just in case you've never worn hose, I assure you, that is not normal.  So I was standing in a storage room with my dress gathered up to my waist, and one leg of my hose hanging on by a thread.  I was going to try and tough it out, but all I could think of was that thread letting go and the leg of my hose sliding down like a stretched out sock.  Nope.  So I had to take them off.  My legs practically glow in the dark already, so I was not happy with the turn of events.  I also never really thought about how covered up I feel when I'm wearing the hose, so after taking them off, I felt mostly naked.  It was an uncomfortable rest of the morning.
Sometimes being a woman sucks.

3) We think lightning hit the church a couple of weeks ago, and it blew out a whole section of our electronics.  We've had to replace several things, including part of our AV system, an internet switch and wireless router, but one thing we haven't gotten around to is replacing our "Doorbell Camera."  I don't know what the proper name for the thing is, but when people ring the doorbell, a camera turns on a monitor at my desk and I can talk to them through a speaker.  If I want to let them in, I hit another button and it remotely unlocks the door.  That probably sounds like overkill at a church, but trust me, our neighborhood is rough, so it's a necessity.  We've been trying to get people in to look at it and fix it, but we've had the run around like you wouldn't believe. Our security company swore they didn't sell it to us (they did) and the pastor tracked down the original salesman (who no longer works for the afore mentioned security company) and had him come and look at it.  He said he couldn't do anything, but he'd send someone to look at it. However,  because we didn't have a contract with his new company, he had no idea when they could come. Then our current security company called back and said "Oh, yeah, we can totally fix that!"  So they sent a salesman out to look at it, but since he's a salesman and not a technician, all he could do was sell us a new system.   The pastor was not pleased and sent the guy away.  We bought a new power supply, but that's not making it work, so we have no idea when the security camera doorbell will be fixed.  I hope it's soon.  I don't like going to the door.  We have legit crazy people who come here all the time, and I don't like not having the option to screen them out, especially if I'm alone.

One funny thing to come from it, though was on Monday morning, when the representative of our church's security company come by to take a look at the monitor for the camera.  He had to crawl under my desk, which is a horror show of cables and stuff. I'm also worried that food had fallen under there and I haven't found it, so just in case, I apologized for any thing he might find under there.  I said "Sorry if there's crumbs or anything under there, but I eat like a Klingon."  He laughed and said "No problem!  Oh, and may the 4th be with you!"  Now, I wasn't expecting him to say that, and honestly, I haven't figured out the proper response, so I kind of stuttered and said "Oh, and you too!"  He looked at me and said "You know, the 4th be with you? It's a thing people say today. Sorry, maybe I'm just weird."  Bless him, he thought I didn't understand what he was talking about.  He had NO idea.  Anyway, he was embarrassed after that and I didn't know how to tell him "Don't worry, I'm one of you!" so I made some comment about Star Trek that, in retrospect, didn't make much sense and then we retired back to our respective, awkward corners. 

Geeks in the wild, ladies and gentlemen.