BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: COASTAL LIVING

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2015 – Today we set off for Port St. Joe, Florida to stay for a week with Steve’s Aunt, Uncle, cousins and their younglings.  This was a vacation that all of them had wanted to take for years, but knowing how way leads on to way, it had never happened.  Finally, Amy took the initiative to actually make a plan, and it all finally came together!  We didn’t all get to stay together like we’d hoped, though.  We rented a big house (this one if you’re interested) and are staying here with Aunt Brenda, Uncle Garry, Amy, John, and their kids Kate and Sean.  Greg and his family weren’t sure they’d be able to go until after we’d already made the reservation, but they managed to get a cottage about two or three miles away, but they are supposed to be hanging out with us most of the time that we’re here!

Today was a travel day, and it was the travelingest day I’ve had in a long time.  We started out at 6:00 this morning, and I requested that we not stop for breakfast right away.  That turned out to be a dumb thing to do, but more on that later.  Steve told me he was going to be making a couple of stops, one of which was a surprise!  I like surprises!  He just told me not to ask any questions.  We drove, and drove and drove, and drove. Once we got into Georgia, he told me not to get too excited about the surprise, because it was no big deal. In fact, he said it wasn’t really even a surprise, but he still didn’t tell me where we were going.  Were we not married, I probably might have begun to fear for my safety!  I’m not even sure where we were, but I knew we were somewhere around Atlanta, and I suddenly realized where we were going.  Steve’s grandparents had lived somewhere outside Atlanta, and since they died a long time ago, I realized he wanted to visit their grave.  I don’t know why he wouldn’t just tell me, because I was glad to go with him to do that, but maybe he thought I would try and talk him out of it.  I have no idea.

We arrived at the cemetery, and since he hadn’t been there since he was a little boy, we had to follow his memory of where the grave was.  We couldn’t find it.  We looked around for a while before we saw the funeral home on the edge of the property and we decided to go in and ask.  Unfortunately, we were there at the same time that a funeral was getting ready to start, so I rolled up into that place wearing a bright yellow shirt with a picture of Chewbacca on it and a pair of jeans.  Steve was in shorts.  I felt so gauche!  The worker there was able to find the grave and led us out to it.  We’d actually passed right by it!  So, we visited.  I introduced myself. It was nice. 

Once we left there, we had to stop and get some provisions for the trip. We were hungry by then and were going to run through a drive through on the way out, but everything was so crowded that we thought we’d just find an exit down the road and go there.  The problem was, wherever we were, there was nothing.  NOTHING.  We were getting hangry, so we just took a random exit and hoped to find something.  We did find a gas station which had a really creepy vibe to it.  It was the only thing around, and there were a bunch of people parked around it with kids running around.  That doesn’t sound creepy, but you’d have to have been there.  It felt like one of those places you’d see in a movie where travelers get stopped in a place, get chased through the woods and wind up getting eaten by the townspeople.  We were inside for just a couple of minutes before the rest of the people poured inside all at once.  We just left without buying anything.  It was weird.

We did find out that Columbus, Georgia was probably the closest place to where we would be that would have a place with a drive through, so we headed there! It took a while, but we finally found the exit.  I don’t usually eat at McDonald’s, but it was manna from heaven today. Thank you, Columbus! I’m sure you have many wonderful qualities, but today I’m most impressed by your fast food restaurants!

After that we drove some more.  It felt like we’d been on the road for 12 days.  It was only supposed to take us about 7 1/2 hours to get to our destination, but time just seemed to stretch on and on.  Our GPS told us to take an alternate route though some towns I’d never heard of.  In fact, not only had we never heard of them, but neither had my phone.  I tried to keep up with locations with the phone, but except for just a few places, location designations just stayed blank.  We went down two lane roads through cow fields, but the GPS continued to insist that we were on the fastest route.   I think we actually may have driven through Canada at some point, but we finally (FINALLY) made it to the house. We were so tired!  Thankfully, there were no plans for that night, so we just visited until it was time for bed.  The house is great, and we have a whole week to have adventures!  This should be fun! 

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Y'all, I've had a revelation.

I have finally figured out why I apologize for everything all the time. It isn't because I go out of my way to be rude to people (well, not often) and I'm pretty sure that I'm not so socially inept that I'm going to do the absolute wrong thing every single time I go somewhere.  Maybe sometimes, but not every time!  No, I figured it out and now I can't believe I didn't realize it a long time ago. (Or maybe I did know this and just forgot until recently. You know how my brain works!)

I don't know about wherever you live, but I happen to live in a place where a lot of people still consider themselves to be "genteel southerners."  Maybe not everyone feels this way, but for a lot of people I know, it was ingrained in them from the time that they were born that they needed to be respectful and sweet, even when they didn't want to be.  That's not a bad thing, really.  However, one of the aspects of being respectful and sweet is to never let on when someone has done something that hurts you or makes you mad.  I'm sure I'm generalizing a bit, but not much.  Granted, there are people who will come at you like a spider monkey, but a lot of times, people won't say a word. They just stop talking to you altogether.  It's just "Oh, well, I'm done with them now."

This has happened to me, so I'm not making it up. People just stop talking to you, and if you have no idea that you'd offended someone (which is usually the case with me since I don't mean to do it) then you just have someone who suddenly stops talking to, or in today's world, contacting you through whatever medium that you talk to them in.  You try contacting them and it's like talking into a dead phone. It's awful, passive aggressive and confusing. You're lucky if someone else finds out about what happened and tells you so that you can apologize before you never hear from the other person again.  I live in actual fear that I'm going to offend someone by accident and have them "Ghost" me without me knowing why.  I think that's why I'm always quick to apologize, just in case, because I don't want that to happen.  I'd hate it.  I'd honestly rather just have someone yell at me.  People suck.

2) I have discovered Dubsmash, and it is glorious.
I made this one for Josh, because he makes me think of Celine Dion. Can't imagine why...

I think someone knew how much I like to act silly and made this app just for me. True story!

I also made one where I sang to a cookie, but I don't have that one on hand. Sorry!

3) Last saturday, Steve and I kept hearing an irregular electronic chirping somewhere in our house.  We originally thought it was one of our smoke detectors, but we were afraid to take the battery out of it because it's tied into our home alarm system and we were afraid we'd accidentally set it off.  Steve called the alarm company and told them what was going on, but they kept telling us that they didn't show a low battery warning and there had been no issues that might have set it off.  That didn't stop the chirping, though.

It was very frustrating.  We had to leave it going on overnight because we never figured out how to make it stop. The alarm is right outside our bedroom door, so that was a lot of fun.  Finally, Steve just said screw it, and he pulled the battery out of the alarm.  That didn't stop the chirping.  Oy.  After reassembling the smoke detector, we wound up spending more than an hour walking to different parts of our house to try and figure out what the chirping sound was.  Sounds like that defy location sometimes, because no matter where you're standing, it always seems to be coming from someplace else!  We finally managed to narrow it down to our hallway, pretty much right underneath the fire alarm. But it wasn't the fire alarm!  Steve still has boxes from his old job sitting in the doorway of his office, so we figured that maybe something in one of them was losing battery power, although, for the life of him, he couldn't think of anything that would do it.  Every time we heard a chirp, we'd move one of the boxes to a different room to narrow down which one it could be so that we wouldn't have to rummage through all of them.  We moved all of the boxes and the chirping was still in the same place!

I was ready to just burn the entire place down.

I gave up and began to get ready to run some errands, and just when I stepped out of the shower, I heard Steve yell "I THINK I FOUND IT!"  He walked into the bedroom holding a box that said "Smoke Detector."  I didn't understand, because we'd already checked the smoke detectors, but he said "Come over here and listen."  So I'm wrapped in a towel, dripping all over the carpet, and we're standing in the middle of the room holding a little box between us.  It was very surreal.  We waited a long time, but the box finally chirped!  He'd found it!  We cheered!  Apparently, when he'd taken down the old fire alarm to install the new ones, he'd forgotten to take the battery out of the old one.  He'd boxed up the old one to throw it away, but got sidetracked and sat the box next to the door and forgotten about it.

Next time I'm just going to send an EMP through the house.  Does that stop things with batteries?

ANOTHER QUICKIE

This past weekend, the 2015 college football season began!  Whee.

I've explained, ad nauseum, about how I have little interest in football, so I'll make this quick:  I don't hate it, but I don't love it.  It exists.  I'm ok with it.

Anyway, I knew I'd be going out on Saturday, so I made sure to pick a shirt that wasn't the color of any of the important football teams that people around here care about.  People get really weird about that sort of thing around here and I didn't want to deal with someone calling me out about it.  Smack talk is ok when I'm invested.  When I'm not, it just turns into awkward smiles and me trying to hide behind stuff.

I mentioned the shirt issue on Twitter, and a friend of mine told me I should get this shirt to fend them off:

 This would only exacerbate the problem!

But I don't hate sports.  I just don't care one way or another.  I can enjoy them, it's just not my thing. 

But, she inspired me to design this shirt instead!

Too much?   :)

 

A Quicky

Good grief.

OK, we all know how much I hate to be interrupted in the middle of a sentence.  If you didn't know before, now you do.  I have thrown ice cream onto Steve's face for doing it, and you know if I'll waste ice cream, I mean serious business.  I also hate being ignored in the middle of a conversation. I don't care if it's through email or face to face, but if I ask a question, I'd like it to be answered, even if it's to tell me to mind my own business.  Again, we all know this (or if you didn't know, now you do.)

I'm not so vain as to think that everything I say or ask might be important, but it's just good manners to at least acknowledge that a person has said something, you know?  I was at work and having, what I thought, was a nice conversation with my boss and a lady who'd dropped by.  We were talking, the subject of the conversation didn't change, but suddenly and without telling me, I apparently had been dismissed from what we were talking about. I tried to say something, and either one or the other of them would literally just talk over me as if I wasn't there.  I tried to interject three times, all three times during a lull in the conversation, and they talked over me, three times. Just to see if I had become completely invisible, I actually said, loud enough for them to hear me, "Well, fu*k it then."  Neither of them even looked my way.  I had, apparently, gone invisible, which was weird, because I wasn't aware anyone outside of the Marvel universe could do that.

I cannot abide that kind of rudeness, and it is most definitely, really damn rude.

I am so irritated.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Yesterday, I got an idea to write a story.  I used to do a lot of writing, but it's been years since I've actually sat down with the purpose of writing an actual story.  I don't know what possessed me to write this one down, but I had a very clear picture in my head and I didn't want to lose it. 

I didn't want to open a word file and write in it, because I don't let people read things I write, (not, like, story stuff. You are welcome to read this!) and people are always on my computer at work.  I never know if they are going through files or what.  So I opened an email and started writing in the body, thinking I'd just email it to myself at home so I could save it or whatever.  I left it open so I could write in between doing, you know, my job, and I'd gotten about four paragraphs into it when one of my coworkers walked over to ask me to do something.  He was behind my desk, and when I turned around to grab something, I'm positive he was standing there reading my story, which was disguised as an email. 

You know, I think I'd normally be angry, because a person who'd read an email over your shoulder is the kind of person who I'd consider a complete jerk-face.  However, because I was writing the story in the first person, and I was writing it in the body of an email, I actually think it's hilarious that he would think I was writing about myself.  Oh, I'm still ticked off that he'd be OK reading one of my emails, of course, but at least he ended up reading something that will make him wonder if I have some kind of secret life!  Had I actually been through with the story, he'd probably really be concerned.

I guess it's lucky for me and him it wasn't some kind of erotica. : )  I kind of wish it had been, now!

2)  For a long time, there has been a bad smell in my car. 

(Don't worry, there isn't a dead body in this story.)

I first thought that maybe something had fallen out of one of my shopping bags after a trip to the grocery store, slid under one of the seats and proceeded to go bad in there.  I mean, that's still gross, but not as gross as, say, a dead squirrel or something. I looked under all the seats and didn't find anything. I looked in the trunk, but didn't find anything there either.  The smell would come and go, and usually it was worse after a rain, or after damp weather.  I finally just figured that it was my car.  It's old, and the top leaks sometimes, and we'd always used it to carry the dogs around when they were alive, so maybe it was just all of that combined.  It wasn't any of those things, exactly.  Friday afternoon, after getting groceries, I opened the trunk to put everything inside and the smell was 100 times worse than it had been.  I also noticed that everything in the trunk (which amounted to some pieces of cardboard and jumper cables) were soaked.  It hadn't rained that morning, to my knowledge, but it had rained earlier in the week.  I closed the trunk to put the groceries in the car instead, and that's when I saw that the entire bottom of the back window of my car had pulled away from the convertible top.  It was wide open and I have no idea how long it had been like that.  I'm going to guess that it had been, at least partially, pulled away for a while now, and the heat and humidity finally made it let loose.  That isn't the best part, though!  I found the source of the weird smell!  When I was looking at the convertible top to see what had happened, I saw that a big, three-ring binder stuffed full of paper was in the well where the convertible top goes when you open it.  I swear, I thought I'd moved that binder into the house, but apparently I'd tossed it back there to get it out of the way and forgotten about it.  It had been catching all of the water that had been leaking into my car for God only knows how long, and had swollen up to twice it's original size.  Not only that, but it had started to mildew and rot!  I was both relieved and disgusted.  I had to put on kitchen gloves and reach through the tear to lift the book out and it had to weigh 10 pounds.  It was so gross.

I stretched a garbage bag over the back of the car just in case it rained again, and figured we'd take it to get fixed on Monday.  However, I didn't stretch it far enough, because on Saturday we had a modest deluge of rain and instead of protecting the inside of the car, the plastic collected the water and then proceeded to dump it in the window well.  There was two inches of standing water in the back of my car.

At any rate, all's well that ends well.  The car dried out and we got the window fixed!  Hopefully it will stay fixed for a while.  I hope so.

3) Speaking of Saturday, we went to a barbecue at Steve's boss's house!  It was a lovely, lovely place.  I was scared to death that I'd be weird.  I know most people don't understand that fear of mine, but you know all the stuff that happened at those Christmas parties, so you know it isn't a completely unfounded fear.  I was very careful, though.  I didn't say very much and I sat very still.  Basically, I pretended to be a completely different person than I normally am, which is boring, but at least I didn't break anything.  I did mention Chewbacca by accident once, but I don't think anyone noticed.  It was a nice party and the people he works with are very nice, too.  We even got to ride on a boat!  It was fun.  The picture Steve took of me on that boat was terrible, but I put it on Facebook anyway, mainly to prove to people that I occasionally go outside.

A QUICKY

Last night I had a particularly vivid and bizarre dream. 

(Don't worry, this isn't a verbatim recount of it. You're welcome!)

See, I have this weird tick. Since I can't really keep my hands still. If I don't have something to do while I'm sitting and talking to someone, I play with my wedding ring.  It's probably annoying and distracting to whomever I'm talking to, but I can't help it! Trust me, it's better that I play with my ring than grab your hands and rub all your fingers or something.  Trust me.  I pull off my ring and put it back on, or I slide it on a different finger, or I try it on all my fingers, or I generally just slide it up and down on my ring finger. (I realize that last one probably has some kind of Freudian implications, but that's neither here nor there.)

Anyway, in my dream, I was visiting a friend's house for the first time when I found her and her husband's wedding/engagement rings lying on a counter.  They were just sitting there unattended, so I put them on my finger and started sliding them around while we were talking.  I didn't think "Hey, I shouldn't wear their rings! That's weird!" I just took them and started wearing them, but my friend didn't notice. When we finished talking, I left the house without taking them off.  I didn't mean to take them, I just forgot that I was wearing them.  The rings probably wouldn't have ever popped back into my dream if someone hadn't said: "Why are you wearing their rings?"  I looked down and saw that I was still wearing them, and I immediately panicked.  I knew I'd have to go and give them back, but I was afraid to do it because I had no reason for even putting them on, much less taking them with me. For the rest of that dream, the rings kept trying to slide off my finger. I knew if I lost them, my friends would be so angry, and I was scared to go back to their house and return them because I knew they'd be angry that I had them at all.  I was also fighting to keep them on my hand the whole time, because I didn't want to lose them, and they kept trying to slide off!  I have no idea how that dream would have ended, because at one point, I felt the rings slide off and when I reached for them, I woke up clutching my left hand.  To make matters worse, I wear my grandmother's wedding ring and I always keep it on, even when I'm in bed, so when I woke up clutching my hand, I could feel a ring on that finger. I panicked even more because I thought that I'd actually pulled the ring out of the dream with me and I was going to have to tell my friend I inadvertently stole her and her husband's wedding rings! I couldn't go back to sleep after that, and I've been particularly aware of my own ring, which has made the tick I have even worse.

If any of you woke up this morning and couldn't find your rings.  It was me.  I'm sorry.

Anyone want to decode that dream for me?

For the past couple of weeks, I just haven't felt well.  Mentally, I was tense, obsessive over silly things, quick tempered and spacey. Physically, I could go from feeling fine to feeling like garbage.  Mostly I just felt really strange all the way around. You know that feeling you get right before you cry?  I felt like that a lot, only I never cried. In turn, I'd get super hyper, which was strange.  I'd also wake up feeling panicky, I was itchy and my skin felt like it was fizzing. My feelings never really seemed to match my emotions. At times, I literally thought I could be losing my mind. It was scary. I kept trying to tell Steve I thought something was wrong, but I couldn't explain it well enough for him to understand. I probably sounded crazy!

It wasn't until last night that I got an inkling as to what could be the matter.  I have to take a prescription medication to correct a thyroid imbalance. (eff you, HIPAA, this is my blog!)  It isn't even a very serious one, to be honest, but it's just off enough for me to need to take the medicine. I've been on it for a while and I've never had any problems, which is why I didn't put two and two together. I'd finally gotten into a consistent pattern with taking it, because it has specific sort of guidelines.  You can't take it with anything else, you have to take it on an empty stomach and blah, blah, blah.

I'm not sure what triggered it, but apparently I became hyper-sensitive to it and I had no idea, so I just kept taking it!  I was taking medication that screws with all kinds of mental and physical things, and I never once thought that it could be the cause of why I was feeling so weird all the time!  The only thing that finally tipped me off was that I forgot to take it one day and I started feeling a little better. Since I wasn't sure I was right about it, and I didn't want to NOT take medicine I'm supposed to need, I took half of one and within an hour, I started feeling the panicky, fixated, itchy, fizzy feelings I'd had before.  I looked up side effects online, and I had so many of them that I was convinced it had to be that.  I even called the doctor's office (and I never do that with things like this) to make sure I didn't need to eat charcoal, or say a prayer to the moon goddess Diana to keep from dying or something. Luckily, I didn't!  I just have to stop taking it and keep an eye on myself!

I think the worst part of the whole thing, to me anyway, is my behavior while all of this was going on. I was mean to people. I said and did very odd things.  It wasn't constant, of course. I was able to be relatively normal for the most part, but I keep thinking about all of the little strange things I said and did to people and I am embarrassed. I try so hard to be kind and funny and good to people, and I haven't been as successful at that as I would have liked. It bothered me so much I just sat in the back of the church and cried.  Maybe it isn't as bad as I think it was, but maybe it was!  Of course, I'm going to remember the worst parts of it all!

I've been told that I apologize too much, and for weird things, but I am really, really sorry if I did or said anything too weird or hurtful to anyone of you over the past couple of weeks. I hope you guys can still like me a little. I'm actually already feeling better than I was, so maybe I can get back to being myself again soon! I hope so!

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING - RATHER MUNDANE EDITION

1) When I was getting ready this morning, I just wanted to be comfortable, so I pulled out a sort of big, flowy tunic that I had bought so that I'd be thematically appropriate for VBS (and mainly so I didn't have to wear the t-shirt to work everyday.)  When I went to the mirror to make sure I had it on front-ways, (and also to make sure that I was wearing pants, a situation I was almost in yesterday but realized before I went outside) I realized that I looked exactly like my mother had in a picture my dad took of her years ago while she was pregnant with me. She was wearing a very similar shirt to what I had on, and our hair is cut very similarly, and because my shirt is so big, it kind of poofed out in the front. I'd post that picture of her on here, but she wouldn't forgive me for that. I got a good laugh out of it until I realized that I was dressed like a housewife from the late 70's who was about 14 months pregnant. Then I felt bad and wanted to go back to bed. I didn't change, though.

2) There is a wonderful, lovely British woman who goes to my church.  Well, she's an American citizen, but she was born in England. I love talking to her. She always says something funny. Today she came in to lead our Women's Prayer Group, and while she was in the office making copies, we started talking about how she came to American when she was 21. I asked her why she came to America, and she told me it was because she married an American man.  She told me "He was the only American man I dated. Good girls didn't date Americans. I didn't even want to date this one, he just kept coming around!"  She is a delight.

3) A couple of days ago I sprayed some cleaner on the bottom of the tub so that I could scrub it, and then promptly forgot about it, like I sometimes do. It wasn't until the next day, when I was about to get back in the shower, that I remembered that I had sprayed the stuff in there. I figured that if I let the water run for a bit, it would just wash the cleaner off and I would just put more in there later.  That is apparently not how it worked. After I thought plenty of time had passed, I stepped in the shower.  As I was in there, washing my hair, I realized that I was slowly sliding towards the drain.  I probably wouldn't have noticed, but I almost slid out from under the spray of the shower head.  I stepped back and then started sliding again.  You know how bathtubs are slightly angled so that all the water runs out? Well, that, and the fact that the running water had somehow reconstituted the cleaner instead of washing it down the drain, was causing me to slowly slide as I was trying to take a shower.  When I tried to adjust my feet, I started sliding more.  I suppose I'm lucky I didn't fall and hurt myself (oh, the horrors of being found naked and unconscious) but I managed to hang on and finish my shower.  It was funny, so I was laughing while I was in the shower. I'm so glad there is no one there to hear me when things like that happen.  People who laugh while they are alone in bathrooms are usually not normal.

4) Last Saturday Steve and I went to Lowe Mill!  It was so much fun!  Lowe Mill is a kind of artist collective, I guess you'd call it.  It's like of like a flea market for people who sell cool-ass stuff that they've made.  I'd wanted to visit it for a long time, but never took the time.  I'd never been to the artsy side of the place.  The only time I'd ever been there was when I'd applied for a graphics job for a company that used to be housed in one half of the old textile mill. Some of you might remember that it was the place I had to escape from because I felt like I was going to be murdered right in the middle of the interview?  You don't?  (OK, you can read about that here.) Anyway, it's an amazing old building filled with really talented people.  We looked around a bit, and I found a couple of classes I'd like to take someday!  It also houses Piper and Leaf, a local tea shop that usually has stands set up at farmer's markets (good stuff), and be still my heart, Pizzelles Confections, a real, live, local, fancy chocolate shop!  I'd never tried their stuff before, so I just got one of everything in the case!  Don't you judge me.  I don't know if their chocolate will be as good as the last fancy chocolate I had, but if it is, I might not survive. Neither will anyone else. ; )  We had a fun day!  I already want to go back soon!

HELLO FRESH!

I'm not a very good cook.  I used to think I was, but that dream unraveled on me a few years ago after the fires.  If I cook in tandem with someone who knows what their doing I'm fine, but on my own, I am kind of a disaster.  I mean, I can do a few things just fine, like mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs, and if it comes out of a box and involves a pound of hamburger meat, I can do that too!  I can also bake things, as long as it doesn't require yeast.  However, when I cook (I don't very much anymore, poor Steve) my meals don't have very much variation. St. Martha Stewart (genuflect) would definitely be horrified.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, the lovely and wonderful Sara Watson gave me a code so that I could receive a week of free meals from an outfit she is a member of called HelloFresh!  It's a kind of food subscription service that sends you the stuff to make three meals a week.  I thought it was worth a try, because free, and so I put in my order!

I scheduled the deliveries to be made on Fridays, since that is my day off, and it's lucky that I kept looking out of the window, because the stinking delivery person didn't knock or anything.  He just left a (squashed) box on my stoop, in the sun I might add, which is bad because the box had meat in it!  I'm glad I was at home!  When I opened it, there were three smaller boxes inside (with their corresponding meats) that held what I'd need for each meal. I thought there was a mistake, because it didn't have what I would have thought you'd need to make a meal in it.  It just had...ingredients.  Like, whole vegetables and leaves and stuff.  Also, it didn't look like enough for two people.  I don't know what that says about the amount I normally cook, but all I could think of was "What will Steve eat?"

That night I set about making my first meal, which was something called "Honey Dijon Pork Chops." The box had this in it: Pork Chops, Potatoes, Corn, a Tomato, a Yellow Squash, Lima Beans, Scallions, Garlic, Dijon Mustard, Stock Concentrate, Honey, and Lime.  Just FYI, on a regular day, I wouldn't eat at least three of those things at all, but since it was all in the box, I was going to give it a try. I had to cut up all this stuff and it took FOREVER! Cooking with real food-things is a process!  I also didn't really have a pan big enough to cook this in (I forgot I had a wok at the time) but I used the biggest one I had and just kept having to put things back into it that fell out as I stirred.  The recipe also said that it would take about 40 minutes to make. LIIIIIIIES!!!!  I think it took me that long to cut up the vegetables! At any rate, I finally got the vegetable "hash" finished, and I made the pork chops and, surprisingly, it made a ton of food! It was also really good, even if it had squash and tomato pieces in it.  I think I cooked the vegetables a bit longer than I was supposed to, but I couldn't stand the thought of eating crunchy vegetables and I needed them to get soft before I could eat them.

At any rate, the food was good and it was cooked correctly!  I was excited! Of course, the food boxes come with a recipe card with step-by-step instructions on them.  When I say step-by-step, I mean it.  It tells you when to cut up stuff and when to start cooking certain things before you do other things.  I realize regular recipes tell you some of this stuff, but it helps to know that you need to have an onion cut up before you've got everything else in the pan cooking, so you don't leave the stuff on the stove cooking too long while you're cutting up the onion.  Oh, and I've gotten to use my prep bowls for their actual purpose for the first time ever!  Nice!  I've learned to make marinara sauce, which technically isn't hard, but I didn't know how to do it before!  I even went out and got a proper sized pan and a garlic smashy-thing!  We haven't wasted near as much food as we used to, because it makes just enough for two people, and that makes me feel better because I hate throwing away food. They also have all kinds of recipes, which means I'm making and eating a much larger variety of food and it all seems to be relatively healthy stuff because it keeps the processed food at a bare (if it's used at all) minimum. As for disasters, I did manage to burn some kind of mutant broccoli they sent for one of our meals, but I am going to put that down to our oven being hotter than the dial says it is, so technically it's not my fault! I even made paella and didn't ruin it!  Yay!

As much as I like it, though, I'm not sure we'll keep up the subscription.  It's about $70 dollars a week, which isn't terrible, but it seems a lot for only three meals for 2 people a week. However, if you go out and eat at a regular sit down restaurant 3 times a week, you'd probably pay that much, so I have no idea.  Also, it makes me nervous to have food with meat delivered to our door, because even though it's packed well (as long as the box stays intact) it's so hot outside right now that I'm afraid something will spoil if I'm not home to bring it in as soon as it's delivered.  Not that I have a very active life on my day off, but I might get a hobby or a friend. YOU DON'T KNOW MY LIFE! (ahem)  We're still on the fence about it, and I have the subscription on pause while we decide.  

So I thought I'd let you know about this fun thing we've been doing.  I have a code if you want to try it for free for a week, just let me know, but remember to cancel in time if you don't want to be charged and shipped a new box of food. That's how we ended up with two weeks worth of food!  :)  I've actually enjoyed cooking everything we've had, so if nothing else, it's been worth it for that and the knowledge that I am actually capable of making something that didn't come out of a box and that I don't always set fires when I'm cooking!

A QUICKY

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  I need to find a thing.  Something to get involved in!

I know people think I have a million hobbies, and I guess I kind of do, but lately nothing I have has been interesting me. I've literally had times where I've been sitting at home trying to think of something to do and all I get is internal white noise! It's frustrating and it makes me restless.  I've been looking for classes to take or groups to get involved in, but I haven't found anything that blows my skirt up.

Steve has his band, I've got friends who train for and do triathlons, some of my friends camp or hike, and all I'm doing is sitting at home listening to the voices in my head tell me how lame I am!  :)

Seriously, I hope I find something soon. The only thing I've done lately is make questionable decisions!

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Last week my sister and her family went down to Florida, so Steve and I got to keep their dog for them!  Beau Thomas is an 8 month old Red Heeler dog that Logan, one of my nephews, got just around last Christmas.  He's adorable, but he's a hand full.  Red Heelers are (I think) a breed of Australian cattle herding dogs and they have a LOT of energy.  He's much smaller than either Butler or Bear, which meant he could get into a lot of places that they couldn't.  He has a nubby little tail, giant ears and very expressive eyes, which meant he could pretty much do anything he wanted and I couldn't get mad at him. He also has a vertical jump of about 4 feet, so he had to be watched closely to make sure he didn't get on top of things.  I wasn't expecting the amount of energy that dog had.  By the time Butler and Bear had gone to live on a farm, they were both old and slow, but Beau acted like he'd just eaten gunpowder and someone was trying to light his tail!  He was after me all the time to play. If I didn't sit down in the floor and volunteer to throw a ball or play tug, he'd bring the toys to me while I was sitting in my chair and put them in my lap. I likened the whole situation to finding some parents who have raised their kids and sent them off to college, only to have someone hand them a hyper 4 year old and tell them "Good Luck" as they run out the door!  It was fun, though.  We basically had a 7 day long game of fetch.

He was very hard on the toys, though.  I swear, he destroyed everything he played with.   When they brought him to our house, they brought two toys, a rope toy and a thick rubber ball with a smaller ball trapped in side it. He'd mangled the rope before the first day was out.  Then he found the basket of dog toys that had belonged to Bear (Yes, we still have them. Shut up.) and he pulled them all apart. We didn't mind that, but it was hard to keep up with which toy he was playing with because he was determined to eat the squeaker out of something, but with 10 disemboweled toys in the floor, you never knew which one he was rooting around in.  He managed to also eat his rubber ball and part of a Beanie Baby.  In fact, for most of the time he was here, I was constantly having to yell "OMG, what did you just eat? Did you just eat something? Spit it out! SPIT IT OUT!" I fished more stuff out of that dog than I want to talk about.  I even had to go buy more toys so that he wouldn't get bored and start eating the furniture.  He destroyed two of the three things I bought for him within a couple of hours.  He is a very sweet dog, though. I'm glad we got to have him for a week!

I've decided that if we ever get another dog, it'll have to be a big, slow one. I don't know if I could handle a hyper dog all the time.


2) I have been waking up around 2:00 am, on and off, for a while now. No matter when I go to sleep, I'll just pop awake for no reason.  I hate it.  Most of the time it's only slightly annoying since I keep my iPad nearby, and I'll just pick it up and read until I get sleepy again.  However, there are times when it gets downright awful because of what I've come to think of as "Night Brain."  Night Brain hates me. 

I know I'm not the only one this happens to, because I've talked to other people who have the same issue.  If you're unfamiliar with it, basically what happens is that I wake up in the middle of the night and because of whatever is going on in my head, every bad thought that could possibly intrude on me comes rushing in.  It's relentless.  I can only assume that a well rested brain is a much more rational brain, and/or there is some kind of buffer that your brain usually enables as you wake up that keeps things in perspective. Night Brain, however, is mean.  For instance:

NB: Hey!  You're up!  Now we can talk!  Oh, remember that thing that happened a few weeks ago? You know, that thing you swore you'd do again the first chance you got?
ME: Yes!
NB: Well, actually, that was a terrible thing to do and here are all the reasons why it will not only ruin your life, but the lives of countless others!
ME: Wait, what? It wasn't that big of a de...
NB: It actually was, and you are awful and now you'll die alone and unloved.
MS: But...
NB: Well, let me rephrase, it was a big deal to you, but everyone else is laughing at you. They think you're a sad, silly person.
ME: That doesn't even make sense!
NB: Of course it does!  You'd know that too if you were smart.  Oh, and that friend you like so much? Yeah, they are bored of you, leave them alone.
ME: No they aren't!
NB: Yes, they are! When they get messages from you, they roll their eyes and ignore them, and they only respond after a while because they don't want to be rude. They make jokes about you to their other friends.
ME: Really? Well, I guess you could be right, but...
NB: By the way, it's been a while since you thought about your dogs that died! How about that? Or, hey, do you remember when your dad died? That sucked, didn't it?  Plus, you got fired and will probably never work in your field again! Oh, and you're fat!
ME: Hey, not cool!
NB: No, forget all that! I've got something even better!  Let's relive 2008!

So, yeah, I hate that.  It's worse when I start believing it, but at 2:00 in the morning, with no chance to protect myself from those thoughts, it's hard to be rational.  I'm just glad it doesn't happen every night.

3) I finally got my hair cut again!  I didn't want to do it, but I'd accidentally run my hand through my hair while I was holding an open pair of scissors, which snagged one side of my hair, so I had to do it.  I went back to the mall, because I never learn, and fortunately/unfortunately the place I usually go was completely full of people. I'd forgotten it was the week before school started, so everyone was getting their hair did.  I actually had to bounce between two different salons before I could find someone with a bit of time to cut my hair.  The girl who cut it was very nice and talkative, and she cut my hair just like I asked her to!  Nice!  Of course, then she styled it and I looked a little like Flo from the Progressive Insurance commercials, but it was OK since I was going home.  After several days of trying to figure out how to fix my new haircut, I decided that maybe she didn't cut it exactly like I asked.  I have a cross between The Rachael and a mullet. That sounds kind of dire, but it doesn't look terrible.  Now it just sticks out in weird ways if I'm not careful, and when I wake up in the morning, I look like the Bride of Frankenstein a bit. Eh, it'll do.  I've come to terms that I'll never have a good haircut. 

4) I had to have another CAT scan for my lungs, but the doctor didn't find anything new!  Yay!  He said I still have the nodules in my lungs, but they haven't changed.  I wonder why they aren't going away?  Well, he wasn't worried, so neither am I.  I do have to have another CAT scan in three months, so hopefully they will have shrunk down a little by then!

5) We almost have the church's media computer back online!  We weren't able to use the piece of hardware we had before, but Steve dug around and found a different kind of equipment that would do the same thing.  There are a few bugs that have to be worked out, but mainly it's just stuff that we have to learn about the new thing. (That sounds very technical, no?)  It's really supposed to be used for gaming, so I hope that it'll still work well enough for what we are using it for!

I'm so glad we are getting it fixed!  I did do something fairly rude, though.  I had an open ticket with tech support from the company that made the old piece of equipment, and I told them that we had to trash their hardware and go with a different brand!  I could have been nicer, but I think that by the third email with them I should have gotten further than "Is your cable working?"  Cable working, my ass. 

OPERATION EDUCATION

My talk with the kids for Operation Education went very well!  At least, that's what I was told, and I choose to believe it! 

Up until the day I actually spoke, I only had the vaguest of ideas about what I was going to say.  I'd been given some really good advice about what to do from a teacher friend, and I'd searched the internet for a way to talk to kids about graphic design, but it wasn't until a couple of hours before I actually did it that I got sort of an outline of what I was going to do. I'd be a terrible teacher.  Well, I might be a good teacher, but I'd be a very under prepared one!

There were a lot of little kids down in the basement that night.  Like, a LOT.  So many, in fact, that I got a little panicky thinking of how they could probably keep me hostage in some way if they chose to do so.  The children's group leaders feed the kids dinner every Wednesday night during the summer, so they were all scattered among different tables when I started my talk, but the minute I brought out my first visual aid, they all rushed forward with chairs and surrounded me so they could see.  You'll be very proud to know that I didn't run screaming!

A world without graphic artists would make cereal boxes very dull.

I won't give you a verbatim account about what I told them, but basically I told them that graphic designers make everything look awesome.  We do, by the way.  The kids actually seemed very interested (although a couple of them talked through the whole thing, but at least they were talking about what I was talking about) and they reacted well to the stuff I talked about.  I told them about understanding colors (knowing which colors go where and why) I told them about fonts (appropriate fonts for certain kinds of things) and context of images (which I realize is very subjective, even as I was telling them it wasn't!)  They were very impressed when I told them that I'd worked for the SpRocket (ptooey) but I left out the soul sucking, vindictive, hose-beast of a boss that fired me. Let the children learn those lessons on their own! :)

I only had two moments where I went a little off the rails. First, there is one little girl in that group who is apparently super-smart and a grade above her age level.  She understood more about color theory than the other kids, and one of her questions prompted me to say something along the lines of "using colors as psychological manipulation in certain kinds of marketing." I got a lot of blank stares with that one.  Second, when one of the kids asked me how old you had to be to do the job, I told them how old I had been when I graduated college, which I realize is much older than most people are when they graduate with a BA. I explained that I'd gotten married and had to work while going to school, which made everything take a lot longer and somehow that got tangled up with whether or not you should get married before or after going to college.  (After. Always after.  Except for graduate degrees. You can get married before you do that.)

At any rate, they all seemed to enjoy my talk, and one kid (the one that had talked through the whole thing and the one I was sure hadn't heard a word I said) came up to me afterward and thanked me for coming in to talk, because he wanted to design video games one day and he said I'd helped him understand a lot of things he'd need to know to do that.  I waited until he was gone to melt in a puddle of warm goo from that. 

Is it wrong that I get irritated when people pigeonhole me?

I know not everyone can know everything about another person, but it really bothers me when people assume I only have one facet of my personality and that's all they will talk about with me. 

I know that shouldn't bother me so much, because some people may legitimately not know anything about me other than the fact that I like Doctor Who, or that I work at a church, or that I once auditioned for American Idol.  For those people, it's ok, I guess.  I can't expect more than that.

But people who have known me for any length of time and refuse to see me as anything other than the one thing they've pegged me as? Or that they designate me as "The Person Who Does This One Thing and That Is All I Care About."  It bothers me.

I'm an effing, shiny diamond, y'all!  I mean, sure, I'm a little chipped and dusty in places, but I can still sparkle if you look at me from a different angle! Grrrr.

This is why I'm extra grateful for the people who've taken time to get know me better over the years.

That was an weird little rant, wasn't it?

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) I screwed up the church's editing computer and I feel really, very terrible about it.  If you follow me on any of the other social networking sites, you've probably heard me reference the struggles I've been having with the damned piece of technology, but I don't think I've been able to adequately express my hatred/shame over this computer's issues.

Two years ago, the church bought a massive iMac that we use to edit our Sunday sermons. I can't be certain, but I'm fairly sure I'm the only person in this church who knows how to use a Macintosh computer for more than just browsing the internet.  Because of this, it usually falls to me to update programs or do any kind of maintenance that it needs.  I'm decent first tier tech support, but just barely, and we've been lucky so far that we haven't had many problems at all with the Mac. A while ago, while I was editing the sermon, I noticed that the OS needed to be upgraded to the newest version, but I just didn't have the time to babysit it while it did the updating, so I kept putting it off.  About a month ago, I decided to just bite the bullet and update the thing.

The very next time the programs we use to record and edit were opened, we noticed that one piece of our equipment wasn't being detected.  We have this thing called a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle Pro, and I don't know what it is exactly, but it allowed the composite A/V from our cameras to be transferred to the iMac for editing.  It's literally the beating heart of our ability to use the data the cameras collected, and according to the software we usually use, it didn't exist anymore.  The computer hardware knew the shuttle was there, but none of the software could see it.  I did everything I could think of to make it work and nothing happened.  I contacted the company, and the tech support line I got was very little help.  I looked up the problem online, and apparently a lot of people who bought the shuttle have the exact same problem that I'm having, but nothing the company's tech support told them to do worked either.  So I got Steve involved, and as brilliant as he is with computers, I still know more about Macs than he does, so we tried working on it together and still couldn't figure it out.  He did everything he could think of, including learning how to wipe and reload the entire brain of the computer, just to see if we could reload the original software for the shuttle.  Nothing worked.

I can't tell you how frustrated I get when working on computers.  I don't see how computer people don't throw things out of windows more often, but I can tell you I had to walk away from it more than once because I got the temptation to punch my fist through it.  I finally just got so frustrated that I packed the whole massive thing up and took it home so we could work on it there.  We still haven't figured out the problem, even after doing everything (and more) that the tech support told us to do.  We finally had to resort to ordering a completely different piece of equipment to see if we could use that instead of the shuttle, so keep your fingers crossed.

The thing I feel most badly about is that I've basically interrupted an entire ministry.  I'm sure I've mentioned that there are people who can't physically come to church, and they rely on the videos we sent out and upload online to be able to participate in our worship services. So, for those people at least, I've basically done the technological equivalent of putting our pastor in a coma and locking the church doors. I've also hobbled the group of women who visited our shut-ins and took the DVDs to them.  I'm the devil.  : (

All I did was update our software!

2) I learned this weekend that, no matter how much you enjoy doing something, don't tell anyone! There are people in this world that will make sure you never get to do that thing again!

3) I don't usually comment on politics, but I will say this: Donald Trump is a clown shoe. I think he got into the presidential race as a kind of publicity stunt, and somehow he got much further into the process than he realized he could.  Now he's saying insane things to try and get out of this mess, because he knows he's not qualified to run our country.  If he gets elected, this country deserves whatever it gets. 

4) I've been incredibly restless lately! I just want to go out and do silly, irresponsible things.  I don't know why.  It's very weird.

I CRINGE

Perhaps you don't need to know why.

Just know I feel very dumb, a little disappointed, and a bit confused.

Having said that...I'd probably do it again!

But, I still cringe.

QUICKY

I think I had a mini stroke or something, because I've volunteered to to a talk to some of the church kids next week about Graphic Design as a part of "Operation Education."

Operation Education is something that the children's teachers put together so that adults from our church could teach skills to the younger kids.  I think that they were thinking more about practical skills, though, but so few people volunteered to do anything, they're taking what they can get. They'd actually originally asked if I could teach the kids crochet, but A) I'm horrible at teaching people to do stuff, and B) crochet is not something I could get those kids to understand in half an hour. I felt bad because I knew that they needed people to come and talk to the kids, but I couldn't think of one thing I could teach them that would be useful.  My only idea was to tell them about art/graphic design.  So...either I'll get some kids interested in it or I'll bore them to death.

I don't know how to talk to kids.

What have I done?

SIGH

Last month a lady came by our church and she was distraught. Like...screaming and crying distraught.  She had just found out that her mother had passed away, and she was taking it very hard.

I don't know this lady, except that I see her at church when she's here, but apparently she doesn't have very much in life, and she needed some clothes to wear to her mother's funeral.  The pastor asked if I had any clothes of a certain size that she could borrow, and because I like clothes and have been many sizes in my day, I did. 

I went home and grabbed as many of the things I had in that size that would be appropriate for a funeral, thinking that she'd pick something and I'd take the rest home. However, in the 20  minutes I was gone, the lady apparently had a complete come apart and ran out of the building and went home.  OK, then.  So the pastor loads me (and the clothes) up in his truck and takes me to the lady's house.  Instead of finding something that would fit her, she took it all. 

I wasn't mad, because the lady was obviously upset, and I just figured that I'd never see any of that stuff again.  I have a lot of clothes, so I didn't think it would be a big deal if she kept what I'd given her. I pretty much wrote it all off.  No biggie.

When I finally saw the lady again a few weeks later, she told me she had worn one of the dresses and would have it cleaned and bring everything back as soon as she could.  I told her to take her time, and I didn't see her for a couple of weeks.  I finally just decided to tell her to keep everything, if she wanted it.  I didn't want her to worry about having everything cleaned or worried that I'd be mad if she didn't bring it back.  However, the next time I saw her, she'd actually brought everything back and left it in my office.  I offered to let her keep everything, but she declined, so I went to take the stuff home and discovered that yes, she had the one dress dry-cleaned, which was awesome!  She had then stuffed it in a bag with the rest of the clothes, which had been sitting in her cigarette smoky house for over a month. I now have to take a load of reeking clothes back into my house. I hate cigarette smoke.  I wish she's kept the clothes.

Also, and I feel kind of bad about this, one of the dresses I gave her I had retrofitted into a Halloween costume. It wasn't gaudy or flashy, but it happened to be in with the clothes I got out of the closet.  That was the one she chose to wear to her mother's funeral. I cringe.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Our church directories are FINALLY in.  Hallelujah.  We got the proof back during the first week of June and I had to make revisions (which was a lot of revisions.) Honestly, I was so done with the whole thing by the time the deadline to return it came around that I mentally gave it the middle finger and just told the printing company that they could print it without sending it back for a second revision. Luckily, we must have caught the most glaring errors, because no one has complained about them yet!  I have never known a bunch of adults to be so impatient about anything in my life.  Granted, I know the directories are important to them, mainly so they can remember the names of the people they sit next to in services, but good grief. I swore that if one more little old lady asked me when the books would get here, I was going to start launching people through the stained glass windows like lawn darts.

2) I had a fun holiday weekend, and I hope you did too! I got to spend some of Friday with one of my oldest and dearest friends, who I don't get to see nearly often enough. It rained a lot, so our visit was a little damp (we met at a park because I didn't look at the weather when we were making plans) but I still had fun.  I really wish those visits could happen more often! Since I never know when one is going to happen, I'll just enjoy each visit like it's the last one! Live every week like it's Shark Week!

Saturday,  Steve and I didn't have any concrete plans, so we decided to pick up some food to grill and hang out at home and just relax. I would have loved to have seen some fireworks, but it was raining on and off all evening and I didn't really think anyone would be doing their firework shows.  I was wrong, of course, and we could hear a big firework show going on somewhere in town, but when I stepped outside to see if I could see any of them, it was raining really hard. Eh, well, even without fireworks it was still a good day!

Sunday was church, of course, but that night we'd been invited over by a couple of friends to play a game called Cards Against Humanity with some of their other friends. I'd never played it before, but we had so much fun!  I tied second place with our hostess, and Steve actually won the game.  I'm not sure it's something to be proud of, but we were both disturbingly good at the game!

3) I think I'm getting paranoid.  Sunday afternoon while we were walking into a restaurant for lunch, I hear something go "POW!" I nearly hit the concrete before I realized that it was just a bottle rocket.  Oy.  I think my current sense of self preservation would make sense if I were a combat veteran, but I have no idea why I'm this jumpy in my current situation.

4) This morning has started out magnificently. I woke up about 6:30 or whenever Steve got up.  I was awake, but I didn't get out of bed, because lazy.  Anyway, since I don't have to be at work until 9, I thought I'd just doze off for a few minutes before getting up to get ready, but I'd forgotten that I'd already turned off my alarm clock. I'm fairly certain that I was dreaming that I was lying there, awake, waiting for the alarm to go off, because when I actually did wake up and look at the clock, it was time for me to be actually leaving the house. So I was an hour late for work today.  Yay for me!

I AM TIRED

I'm having a blue day.

Nothing specific has happened, per se, but it feels like the world has just gone to boogers and lately it feels like just existing in it is a chore.

Don't worry, I'm not about to off myself or anything, but seriously, if I had a real opportunity to just unplug from everything and hide for a while, I think I'd take it.  The big problem with that is I'd eventually have to come back to it all.  You can't really hide from it. 

I know a lot of this stems from the fact that I had a very sheltered life for a very long time.  When you are safe in your own home, with people who care about you, you don't have to think about it. It's easy to forget/ignore the homeless, the mentally ill, the poverty, the neediness, the lonely, the sick, the children who's parents don't care about them or that abuse them, the racism, the sexism, the dishonest, the violated and the violence. Technically, I still live a very sheltered life, since I'm (thank God) not actually experiencing these things first hand.  I see it at work a lot these days, though, and it scares me. It's constant. People come to the church all the time with their hands out, sometimes they are legit and other times they are scamming us, but all of them have sad, pitiful stories. I don't believe most of them anymore, because I'm getting so cynical, but that doesn't mean I'm immune to them.  There are enough of them that are true.  There are days when I feel like I'm trapped under a big, heavy blanket and it's smothering me. The really bad part  is that I'm not even dealing with the biggest part of things, I'm just in the wings.

You can do things to try and help, but it doesn't feel like it makes much of a difference.  Sometimes it feels like the ugliness is winning. 

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) At the end of last month, I had to go to my doctor's office to get a prescription refilled.  I was literally only in the office for about 10 minutes (which was way less than I thought I'd be in there) and I was so glad, because I wanted to get breakfast before I had to go to work and I didn't want to be late.  However, when I got down to my car, the battery had died. I was going to be late after all.  Boo.   I had to call AAA to come and deal with it.  Well, I called Steve first so that he could come and rescue me, but he reminded me that we are members of AAA and we kind of pay for them to come and do this kind of thing, so I called them.  Whatever.

Anyway,  when they got there, it turned out that my battery wasn't just dead, it was really-most-sincerely-dead.  It had apparently had enough of a charge to turn on my radio earlier, but not enough to hold a charge and keep it, if all they did was jump it off.  So I agreed to let them put a new battery in my car.  It wasn't cheap, but I figured that it would be worth the money if my car didn't die while I was at work and trap me in the ghetto with no one to help me!  I was so pissed off at my stupid car!  It's been giving me trouble for years.  Not bad enough trouble to get a new car, but there were strange electronic hiccups and bits falling off of it all the time.  I was ready to drop-kick the entire car into the ocean, but before I could do that, I'd need a battery to drive it there. When they pulled out the old battery, it actually turned out that my POS car wasn't as much of a POS as I thought.  Although I'd been having issues with my car always doing something strange, it wasn't the car, it was the battery.  The battery hadn't been changed since 2006, when we'd bought the car.  All those alarms going off, indicator lights flashing, and the car turning itself off at red lights had been my battery slowly dying.  I credit my car for somehow managing to work, albeit with the problems it had, but all the while doing it with a battery that was flickering in and out of consciousness.  That battery had worked longer than any the AAA guy had ever seen.  So, I'd like to publicly apologize to Lois, my car, who I verbally abused for reasons that were not her fault. Sorry, Lois.

2) Have I mentioned that I hate this part of the year?  It's like the whole world goes crazy.  Not zombie apocalypse crazy, but just crazy enough to unsettle me until July or so. Maybe I just hate June. Bad things sometimes happen in June. I'm ready for June to be over.

3) I finally got my permanent crown!  Yay!  It's actually much better than my old crown, which felt like it was a size bigger than any of my other teeth.  I didn't have to be sedated to have the new one put in, thank goodness, but it was still unpleasant.  They accidentally cemented my new crown to the tooth next to it, and then spent 15 painful minutes trying to break the cement with dental floss.  They kept pushing down hard and snapping the floss, and when they finally broke through it, I think that they damaged the tooth it was cemented to because it's been almost 10 days and it still hurts to chew on that side. You guys know how much I like to eat, so chewing is important.  At any rate, I have the new crown, and it looks nice!  It'll also make it that much easier to identify my body in case I'm murdered and discovered months later in a shallow grave!  Silver linings!

4) Well, I managed to look wildly racist this morning, so that was fun.  We have a rule that, because of the neighborhood the church is in, I am not allowed to let people inside the church while I'm here alone unless I know them.  That probably seems like common sense, but that rule hasn't always been in place.  We have people that often come here asking for help.  I used to let them in to hear them out, but after some people at a church across town were killed doing the exact same thing, the rule was created. So this morning our doorbell rang and it was three black men asking for help.  I told them, through the speaker, that someone would be with them in a second, but then remembered that I was here all alone. I'd forgotten the pastor was dropping someone off somewhere, so I went to the door myself and they asked if anyone could give them a ride.  I knew our pastor would do it (he's cool like that) but I knew I couldn't let them in.  I had to tell them that I couldn't let them in, which made me feel about in inch tall, but they seemed understanding about it. They all stayed outside. While they were outside waiting, one of our church members - a white lady- rang the doorbell and I didn't think twice about letting her in.  It wasn't until I was unlocking the door that I realized how it looked.  So, you know, now I'm probably the racist lady who works at the church.  Great.

5) Sorry if I sound glum.  I've had a really weird week.  It has made me tired. 

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!  

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. 

VISITING ALL THE DOCTORS!

I'm so tired of going to the doctor.  I mean, I'm glad that there are doctors out there that can basically digitally peel you apart and see what is going on inside of you, and I'm glad that I have access to those doctors, but I feel like I've had more than my fair share of them this year.

I told you about my visit to the Doc-In-the-Box in January because I thought my heart was glitching, and about that visit leading me to the hours long stress test that I had to take to "ease my mind."  Well, just the other day I had a regular visit with my GP.  Just routine stuff, but I had to have blood work and a chest X-Ray beforehand as part of it.  Two days before my appointment, the doctor's office told me they saw some shadowing on my X-Ray and that I needed to go and have a CT scan of my chest.  This probably would have scared me if they'd told me they found a spot, or a lesion, or a ferret on it, but shadows can be caused by almost anything, including leaning too close to the machine-thing.  So I go to have the CT scan, which was a lesson in patience, because you have to wait SO FREAKING LONG before you get to go back there.  I was given an IV (which thankfully didn't squirt my blood across the room this time) and injected with what felt like hot coffee, but what was (I was assured) contrast dye.  That part was really weird because they told me the dye would feel hot in my veins, and then make me feel like I'd just wet my pants.  They were NOT lying about that.  It also made my liver feel like I'd swallowed some lit birthday candles.  Then I was passed in and out of a scanning doughnut, which spoke to me in a creepy robotic voice "Breathe In. Hold Your Breath. Exhale."  I kid you not, it was like the weirdest Disney ride you could ever imagine.

So that was over, and I was fine with it.  Certainly it would ease the doctor's mind about any lung shadows he may see.  I'd had pneumonia after all, so I was sure that's all that it was.  The same thing happened to Steve a year or two ago, and they'd had him convinced it was inoperable lung cancer, but thankfully it was just because he'd had scars from an earlier bout with pneumonia (which he'd never been treated for because he's stubborn and likes coughing a whole lot.)  So, at my actual appointment I was told everything was fine. Blood work was fine and my CT scan just said I had a nodule (just like Steve) from my case of pneumonia.  He even showed me the report that said it was a lung nodule with a very low chance of being anything scary.  I'm paraphrasing, of course.  All he said was that I have to lose weight, of course, but when do I not?  The only other complaint I had was that my side had been hurting quite a lot. I thought it was my gallbladder, and so did my doctor.  So the next monday he sent me to have an ultrasound on my abdomen.  Fun stuff, that ultrasound.  Imagine getting covered with jelly while someone rolls a Tonka truck all over your stomach. It was weird.  Later that day (and way sooner than I'd imagined) they called me to tell me that my ultrasound was fine, although that doesn't explain the pain, but for all I know there really is a ferret in my spleen.  She also told me that the doctor went back to look at my CT scan and wants me to see a pulmonary specialist after all.  The same one as Steve went to, actually, and he says that doctor is a bit of a bastard, so that should be fun.  Now I have to go see yet another doctor who will probably have me scanned or jellied or some crazy thing.

Somewhere in there I also had a dentist appointment where they told me I need to have my crown replaced in early May and I have yet another, unrelated to anything else thus far, doctor's appointment I have to go to in either May or June (depending on when there is an opening.)

Seriously, I'm very, very grateful that I have access to so many doctors and insurance to help pay for these visits, but this is an embarrassment of riches. Getting old sucks.

TESTING

I'm testing something out, here. We're fine.  We're all fine here, now. Thank you.  How are you?

OMG! LET'S CANDY!

You guys, I have a problem.

OK, it isn't a real problem. Not like a "I need a kidney" problem or a "I've Been Locked In a Closet for Two Days and Need To Use the Bathroom" problem.  Nonetheless, it's a sort of problem.

I like candy.  I like it a lot.  It used to just be chocolate that I'd hoard and eat whenever no one was looking (although I don't really consider chocolate candy, per se. It's too important for that,) but now it's all kinds of candy.  I blame Steve.  I'm not sure why. 

Anyways, you can look at me and tell that I like candy, but my fondness for it has mutated recently. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been buying Japanese niche candy. I've bought that kind of candy before and I've even talked about it on this very blog.  But now I have a whole lot of it. More of it than a grown up, child-free woman should own all at once.  I'm not sure why, either.  It's like a compulsion! I think it has to do with the Japanese videos that I watch. So, in a fit of what I can only assume is some kind of fever, I Amazoned myself a whole lot of strange Japanese candy.  Some of it is straightforward, pull-it-out-of-the-box-and-eat-it kind of stuff and some of it is way more complicated.  No, seriously, you have to mix things and put things in the microwave.  Also, to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what some of it actually is.  It's all written in Japanese, so I can't even Google it.  I'm just going to have to do my best.

Of course, I'm bringing you all with me!  I can't help it.  I feel less guilty about buying candy when I can talk about it on here, so you will get to see it all, if not taste it all.  Yay!  So stay tuned for what I've dubbed:

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) If you follow me on Twitter, I'm sure that there are times that it looks like I'm having a one sided argument that consists of nothing more than me berating someone.  I'm sorry.  Actually, that's sort of what it is. There are times when I am in a situation where I'm hearing things that aggravate me so badly, but I have no business chiming in to say what I'm thinking out loud.  Could I just not say anything at all?  Probably, but I'm kind of mentally wired to express myself, and if I don't, I might explode. True story. I usually do this with my Twitter account because not many people who annoy me enough to be the subject of one of my random tweets knows I've got an account.

Ugh. It doesn't make me feel very nice, but it's better than saying mean things to people who don't know I can hear them, right? RIGHT?

2) We had such a fun visit with our Georgia family!  Steve and I drove over to Waleska to spend the weekend with the Pucketts and McGees!  Amy's birthday was on the 28th, so we combined a birthday visit with a "fix Aunt Brenda's computer" visit!  We had a really great time!  We got there Friday evening, and had dinner and birthday cake with everyone.  I brought a special candle for Amy's cake that sounded really dangerous, but also fun.  It was one of these:

These are very cool, but because I'd never used one, I didn't know what it would do exactly.  The instructions said it would spin, play music, and there is a sparkler in the middle that lights all the candles on the petals.  It says to keep everyone about 3 feet away from it when you light it, so I was expecting a small explosion to happen when it was lit!  Alas, it was a little less spectacular than the video I saw, but still a cool candle.  Also, it didn't set anything on fire, which is always a plus!  I'm also extremely jealous that my niece, Katie, has such pretty purple hair and I can't dye my own to match! :)

Saturday we visited and had dinner with almost everyone for Amy's actual birthday-day dinner, and visited some more when we got back.  Sunday we got to visit with everyone else again until we left.  It was very chill and a lot of fun to see everyone who could be there.  I also got to meet/play with Beau, Aunt Brenda and Uncle Garry's giant black lab, who is the size of an elephant, but still only a puppy, really.  He's so sweet!  We played tug-of-war, chase, and sticks, and we brought him chew-sticks, so he was our friend immediately.  It made me miss Butler and Bear a lot, but I guess if I can see Beau occasionally, I'll be ok!

Steve and I left around lunchtime and drove into Atlanta to eat at Big Chow, which is one of his favorite restaurants.  From there, we went to IKEA, which was both terrifying and fun.  It's terrifying because the place is huge and maze-like, and I always have a sneaking suspicion that you can get lost in one and never be seen again.  It's fun, because they sell a lot of neato stuff, and now I want to buy a lot of furniture that would look terrible in my house.  The line to pay was it's own special brand of hell, though.  You think it's bad when Wal-Mart has 230 checkout lanes and only 3 cashiers?  Imagine that in a place with eight times as many people who are buying furniture. We stood in line for a solid half-hour. Boo!

After that, we finally got on the road and headed home.  We got stopped for about an hour by a huge traffic jam just outside of the city because of road construction, but once we got past that, it was gravy.  Good times.

3) I still don't like my hair.

4) I swear, I think my co-worker just barked.  The pastor barks all the time (well, howls like a beagle, but that's his thing.) My other co-worker never barks.  I'm scared.

5) I'm bummed.  I may have mentioned this a while back, years back even, but one of our former pastors went missing several years ago.  He was the pastor at my church when I first joined, and while he didn't marry Steve and me, he did say a blessing over us at our wedding.  He was a very sweet man and I liked him a lot. However, his wife was a horrible person.  I mean that.  She was not good a being a person.  They'd been at the church for a year or so when she told him she was going to visit family, and then surprised him with a divorce.  He literally had no idea it was coming.  It rocked him, obviously. So much so that he was placed on leave so that he could get himself together.  It wasn't a mean or malicious thing the church did by placing him on leave, I swear. It was really in his best interest, because he wasn't handling anything very well.  During that time he just up and left. He didn't tell anyone, including his own mother, where he was going and no one had known where he was for about 11 years.  He was a legit missing person, with the police involved and everything.  We found out yesterday that he had gone to Mexico to became an English teacher, which was a relief, because we had imagined all kinds of horrible things.  However, as glad as we were to know where he'd been, the reason we had been contacted was because he had died last September.  They didn't tell us how, other than he'd been sick.  I just hope that he was happy when he was in Mexico.  I hope he found some kind of relief and joy and I hope that whatever sickness he had didn't make him suffer. He deserved better than he got, I think.

I hope his ex-wife has nightmares.