BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY - BIG SKY EDITION

May 18, 2013: Huntsville, AL to Atlanta, GA to Salt Lake City, UT to Bozeman, MT

It's time again for one of my great western adventures with Mr. Lee and Steve! Only this time we didn't head out to the Wild, Wild West.  Instead, we decided to visit the underground super volcano known as Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons! 

We got up early this morning and headed to the airport. I had to go through one of those full body scanners at the Huntsville airport, so I started off the trip by ruining someone's morning because they had to see me naked-ish.  Sorry, random security person!  We boarded fairy quickly and headed to Atlanta.  Blerg.  I do not like the Atlanta airport!  It's too big and too crowded.  Our layover ended up being a couple of hours long, but it wasn't too terrible. We got some breakfast and hung around until our next flight boarded. 

Our next flight was took us to Salt Lake City, UT.  The plane was completely packed, but the passengers were really calm.  Much better than our last flight out west to Las Vegas. Of course, that flight was full of gamblers and party people. For all I know this plane was full of Mormons heading home!  It got a bit bumpy at times, and I was seated right next to the wing, so I couldn't really see any scenery, but it wasn't too bad. 

THERE WAS NOTHING ON THE WING OF THE PLANE!

We landed and found our way to our next gate.  It was the smallest little airport gate I'd ever seen, which would have been fine if the strange Asian family hadn't been in such close quarters with us! That probably sounds rude, but I'm being 100% honest. The little boy ran around and around, paying no attention to his mother, who was slapping him around the whole time, and he kept running into Mr. Lee.  The grandmother kept making this disgusting sound with her face.  It was like she kept hawking a loogie without spitting. It was so gross. Steve called her The Hacker.  It seemed like forever before we finally boarded our last plane to Bozeman, Montana.

Bozeman, MT! I already see a mountain!

The plane was tiny! It was like being crammed into a tube sock.  There were two seats on each side, and I was seated across the aisle from Steve and Mr. Lee.  Since the plane was full, I knew I would be sitting with a stranger, but I wasn't bothered until I saw that The Hacker would be my seat mate! Ugh! Luckily, her grandson asked if I would mind trading seats with his grandfather so that they could sit together, and I gladly moved further back into the plane. 

I'm actually glad I did, because I wound up sitting next to two very interesting people.  The woman I shared a seat with was from Bozeman, and she was very nice. It also turned out that her daughter in law is the actress that played Juliette on Lost! Neato!  Well, at least she said she was.  Who knows really.  The guy on the other side of me was also from Bozeman, and he was so funny. We spent the whole flight making each other laugh and talking. We just talked about dumb stuff, but I enjoyed it.  I felt like I knew him from somewhere, but I know I didn't.  He just reminded me of someone, I think.  It wasn't until we got off the plane that I realized we'd talked so much that I'd forgotten to get his name! Oh, well, I just refer to him as Airplane Guy.  He was nice!  I liked him.  Of course, he could have been a serial killer for all I know.  Oh well, who cares.  I think I made Tyler Durden's fabled "Single Serving Friend."

After that, we got our rental car, and found our hotel.  We are staying in a place called Homewood Suites. It's a really nice place, with rooms more like small apartments than regular hotel rooms. The only thing I don't like is that the carpets remind me of the floors in The Shining. Eeesh. We got dinner and now we're back at the hotel. I'm so tired, but Steve and Mr. Lee want to watch some movie called Spencer's Mountain.  It has something to do with The Waltons or something.  I don't know, I'm just trying to stay awake.  Hopefully I can go to bed soon, because our adventures have just started!

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) I'm a terrible judge of character.  I think I've always kind of known this about myself, but it never really seemed to matter much until recently.  If someone is nice to me, I tend to think "Oh, this person is awesome!" and I ignore the bigger picture.  I mean, I'm not completely daft.  I think there is a part of me that can know some things about people really well, and I can see things about them that they don't realize I can see, but even then, as a whole, I don't always judge them correctly.  I'm sure I'm not the only one, of course.  I'm sure we've all known people like the friend you thought you could confide your problems to, who might listen to you talk, but turns out not to really care all that much about your actual problems. Then there is the person you think is so nice and fun to be around, but they are only that way to those they think need to see that part of them, and secretly they are kind of awful to other people.  I'm sure you can add your own experiences with people to this list ad nauseum, and you'd never get to the end of it. People are multi-faceted and honestly, we only see the parts that they let the light shine on when we're with them.  I'm sure I've badly disappointed people who thought I was better than I really am, so I shouldn't be too shocked about finding out that someone I considered a friend and all around awesome person turned out to be a black hole of absolute suckage, but I am.  I think what bothers me most is that I was so convinced that this person was great that I wasn't seeing what should have been completely obvious.

Now, before you start to wonder who has done what to me, I need to let you know that what brought on this realization has nothing at all to do with me.  This person has never been anything other than decent and helpful towards me, personally.  This is pretty much why I'm being intentionally vague.  Since it isn't my problem, I can't (with good conscience) lay it all out here for you fine folks.  Trust me, I'd love to do it, though.  Oh, and also, this person is litigious and has no scruples about suing someone over them publicly talking about what they did.  Glad I found that out before saying anything.  While I don't think they read my blog, I have certainly learned my lesson about posting certain things online.  I don't know if I've ever known anyone to be morally reprehensible before, but this person is.  It makes me kind of sad, too, though.  I actually really liked them, but after being fooled by them for so long, I couldn't ever feel the same way.   I hate when people suck.

2)  Steve got a solo for his spring/summer concert series!  Woot!  I'm very proud.  It isn't a long solo, but he's tickled, so I also have sympathy tickles.  Hopefully, I'll have a video of him playing it at some point. He's doing really great in the MCB and I'm glad he's found something that he likes to do and is a stress reliever from his work.  It's his thing, and I'm glad he's enjoying it.  If you saw the video of Butler "singing" while Steve played the trumpet, don't worry.  He really plays much better than that!



3) I wish I could find a "thing."  I haven't really enjoyed doing anything in a long time.  That sounds weird, but it's true. I feel kind of stuck.  I have dozens of hobbies, but I haven't liked doing any of them lately.  It's really strange, because it's like I'm in a holding pattern, waiting for something, but I have no idea what I'm waiting on.  I don't even have any idea what kind of thing I'd like to do.  You know how sometimes you are talking, and you get stuck while trying to think of a word?  That's how my whole life feels right now.  I hope whatever I'm waiting on is a good thing.

Is that odd?  It seems like it might be odd.  I dunno.  Maybe I'll take up tightrope walking or something.  I just wish I didn't feel so stuck. I NEED A THING!

4) Have you ever heard that smell is the sense closest tied to memory?  I find that to be very true, but it may be because I can smell things better than most people.  Honestly, have you seen my nose?  :)  Well, I bought a tube of lip gloss the other day, and the smell of it reminds me of something, but I can't remember what it is.  All I get is a feeling of uneasiness, like whatever the smell reminds me of might not be such a nice thing, but for the life of me, I have no idea what it is!  It's a very particular smelling lip gloss, and it isn't something I have used often, so you'd think it wouldn't be hard to remember what it reminds me of!  It's a mystery!  I kind of think it might remind me of a date I went on when I was 15 or so and the guy tried to kiss me and I was REALLY not wanting him to (we didn't date long, obvs), so I had to dodge him a lot, but I'm not sure that's it. 

5) I'm afraid that almost my whole blog post has seemed a bit negative. To alleviate this I present to you:

A QUICKY

I love my mother so very much!  No offense to any other amazing moms out there I might know, but in my humble opinion, my own mom is the best. :)  She's so funny.  She probably doesn't mean to be funny sometimes, but she is.  People who make me laugh are awesome. Laughing is my favorite.

Since I moved to Huntsville, trying to explain my family's accent is kind of hard, because I think people might think I'm exaggerating them a bit.  I'm really not. Huntsville isn't far removed from my hometown, of course, and plenty of rednecks live out here, but it does have more than its fair share of northern and international transplants, and the southern dialect is still a bit new for them. Since I did public speaking in high school (and because of a cute boy I knew who told me he thought southern accents didn't sound very smart), I beat my accent into submission, and because of that I've met quite a few people who don't realize I'm from the south. At least not until I've talked to them for a while.  At any rate, they seem surprised when I mimic my mother or sister's accent, because they don't understand why my own is so different.

I tell you all of that because I wanted to show you an automatic email I got from our voice-mail provider.  It sends us an email letting us know that we've gotten a voice mail so that we know to check it.  It used to just have the "You've Got Voicemail" message on it, but they've upgraded to having a computer actually transcribing the messages people leave so that you can read them without having to go through the hassle of signing in to the website to listen to them.  Usually, with the exception of some names and places, the computer transcribed messages are very accurate.  When my mom calls, her accent confuses it.  Here is the message I got:

"Hi Kayleen. Hey we made the dog-show-or(?) were sick or out on the balcony looking out at white-riley(?) hey I just thought I'd let you know I would not it okay alright(?) love you all. Bye bye."

I was all...what?  Did she have a stroke?  Then I listened to the message, and what you see above was not even close.  I'm not going to tell you what she actually said, because I want to see if any of you know your "Country" enough to decipher it.  Personally, though, you may need to get in touch with a Navajo Windtalker to see what they think. :)

DOCTOR, DOCTOR, GIVE ME THE NEWS...

So...I hurt myself.  Some of you already know this, but I'm going to talk about it anyways because it's my blog and I do what I want!

In light of full disclosure, I'm going to embarrass myself.  I hurt myself at the gym, but I didn't realize it at first. Well, let me rephrase... I knew I'd hurt myself, but it didn't seem so bad.  Maybe the endorphins had kicked in and  I wasn't feeling too much pain, or maybe I was just not paying attention, but I wasn't concerned about it until I got home, and by then my left arm had gone numb.  I'm going to assume that most of you would have thought at that point "Huh, I must've pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve."  Alas, my first thought was "OMG, I'm having a heart attack. I'm going to die here, on the floor, alone in my house."

Now, I'm not usually one to jump to that conclusion right off the bat, but to be 100% honest, I don't expect to live to be an old person.  My father died of a heart attack, my mom has heart issues, and I figure that if it isn't cancer (also rampant in our family) that takes me off, it'll be my heart doing something weird.  So there I was, in my kitchen, trying to decide if I was having a heart attack or not.  So, I Googled the symptoms.  That was not smart.  I didn't have most of them, but it "reassuringly" said that "For women, heart attack symptoms aren't always the common ones."  Well, damnit.  That pushed me over the edge and I began to have a panic attack, which in turn caused more of the symptoms that aligned with the common heart attack symptoms.  Greeaaaat.

Deep down where my common sense grows, and I do have some whether you believe it or not, I knew I wasn't having a heart attack.  Granted, I have very little useful medical knowledge, but something told me that I'd be in much worse shape than I was in if I were truly having a heart attack.  However, the rest of my brain went unto complete panic mode.  I called Steve and told him I was sure I was OK, but just in case I died unexpectedly, I was sorry.  Sorry about what, I couldn't tell you, but panic attacks are a bitch to begin with, and having one while you are convinced you are going to die are even worse and they make you a smidge irrational.  Did I head over to the hospital?  Nope.  I went on to work.  I figured that if I was going to die, why not do it at church? Cut out the middle man, right?  So I got to church, ransacked the first aid kit for some aspirin, and then sat down on the floor. Also, to cover all my bases, I took one of my anti anxiety pills. I was sitting there, in the floor of my office, all alone (everyone was late that day) wondering if I was going to die.

In case you're wondering, I didn't die.

No, I probably should have taken the anti-anxiety pill much, much sooner.  Once I calmed down, I realized that my arm was numb because I'd hurt my back.  I'd been so worried about my heart that I had ignored the fact that I'd pinched a nerve or pulled a muscle or whatever I'd done.  I was also very embarrassed that I'd gone to the edge of crazy for even a fraction of an hour.  Luckily, I hadn't gone to the hospital and insisted that I was dying.  I really, really don't want to end up being one of the people an ER nurse talks about when they are recounting stories about patients.  I mean, unless they are talking about patients who are awesome.

So that crisis averted, I managed to live with my back & neck pain for a few more days.  It was unpleasant, but I could deal with it.  It got kind of bad, but nothing I couldn't handle. At least I was able to handle it until the day I bent down to pet the cat.  Seriously, I just bent over to pet Rorschach and it was like my back said "NOPE! No more!"  It felt like I was stabbed by an icicle.  Everything locked up and I couldn't straighten up all the way.  Steve had to help me to bed and I just lay there like a slug.

As I was telling a friend of mine, I think pain is stupid.  If I'm going to hurt, I want to have to work for it.  Laying in bed or on the couch and just hurting because I'm awake annoys me.  I know pain is important because it helps you to understand your limitations and keeps you from doing things to further injure yourself, but still, it's stupid.  I didn't listen to my pain, and of course, that make it worse.  The day after I had to be put to bed like somebody's maw-maw, I decided that it wasn't so bad.  I had errands to do and I needed to get them done that day, so I hauled myself out of bed and out into the world where I pretty much walked around without bending my neck or moving too fast.  It sucked.  I wound up on the couch for the rest of the day lying on a heating pad/ ice pack, except for when I managed to construct a nifty little harness to strap a cold pack to my back so that I could get up and move around.  The pain came and went all weekend, which was no fun, but at least I didn't have to be immobile the whole time.

I went to the doctor this morning, and he didn't seem very concerned about my back.  I thought he'd at least refer me to a chiropractor, or prescribe a muscle relaxer or something, but he didn't.  So I guess this will just have to pass on its own.  If not, I'm going to have to find a chiropractor on my own.  Fun stuff.

At least I didn't die of a heart attack, though, right? Silver lining! :)

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Finally!  I keep wanting to sit down and write, but I never seem to have the time.  I had no idea I'd be so busy at work that I couldn't do this, and that stinks because I can think of a thousand things to talk about while I'm at work.  When I get home, I can't remember anything.  That is not an exaggeration.  I think I'm getting old.  :(

2) So, speaking of work, it's still going well, albeit I'm very, very busy.  I honestly didn't think I'd be doing so much stuff, but the pastor keeps finding new things for me to do.  Ditto for the youth pastor, who has apparently realized I have a hard time saying no, even when I really, really don't want to do something.  At least I've managed to convince him that I will not, under any circumstances, travel with his youth group.  If I wanted to be responsible for children, I'd give birth to some.  Plus, I would be the most terrible chaperone ever because I'm really not very mature and I have very little patience!  Don't get me wrong, I really like and respect all the men I work with at the church, but I do find myself wanting to hide from them sometimes!

One of the things I've been doing for the church is editing the videos of the Sunday morning sermons so that they can be distributed to our home-bound members on DVDs. That is one of my favorite things, because it seems to mean so much to those people who can't actually make it to church.  It gives me a warm fuzzy, so I'm glad the women's group came up with the idea!  I also edit the videos to be put on YouTube, and I'm learning that copyright laws are a bitch-kitty.  We've been hit with several infringement "cases", which have mostly been redacted, because whomever views our videos probably understands that we - as a church- aren't trying to make money or actually infringe on anything.  By all means, we should fall under "Fair Use" because the music is just a part of our services, and we also have a CCLI license that should cover our butts for almost everything, but the scouts on YouTube are hyper-vigilant about making sure we know we have music in our services that someone else wrote.  I wouldn't care a bit, but if the claims aren't redacted (which they mostly have been) our channel can be taken down.  The weirdest thing, is that most of the larger publishing houses have removed their claims, which allow us to keep the songs in our videos for free, but the smaller, Christian-based companies actually want us to pay them.  I don't think that's what Jesus would do, guys!

3)  So I went to the dentist the other day, and everything was going fine until the dental hygienist grabs this...thing.  It looked like a regular, pointy, scraper thing, but when she put it in my mouth it actually sent a bolt of vibration through my head.  It scared me to death, which made the lady start to laugh.  I have very, very sensitive teeth (and she didn't know that) so she was using a "Sonic Scaler" on my teeth.  That is not a Doctor Who joke, it is a real and terrible thing.  If you are unaware of what this is, imagine that horrible, pointy thing that dentists use to scrape on your teeth, and then add intense vibrations that shoot through your head via bone-conduction.  It sounded like a drill.  It also caused my teeth to spark so much pain that I almost fainted.  Luckily she put the danged thing away when she realized she was torturing me. 

Other than that, the only incident of note was that they found a cavity.  I have no idea how I could get a cavity because I'm super weird about making sure I brush and floss, but Dr. Knight did say my tooth had been on his "Watch List" like it was some kind of enamel terrorist.  He said I have an old filling that was coming loose and right next to that was the tooth they'd been watching, so I imagine that it had been damaged by the old silver filling, which in turn caused a cavity.  He asked me if I'd had any pain, or sensitivity (UM, HELLO!) with that tooth, and I had.  In fact, I made a special appointment with them MONTHS ago because I thought I'd cracked that same tooth because it hurt when I bit down on stuff.  They acted like I was some kind of hypochondriac because I didn't want to chance another root canal by catching any problems early.  So for all I know, they could have fixed whatever was going on back then, but they decided to wait until now to make sure my terrorist tooth went into full jihad mode.  Boo.  So now I get to go back in two weeks and get stuck with needles and have a drill in my grill.  Joy.

4) My house is still a wreck, but not for lack of trying to fix things. Well, that's not 100% accurate.  I've been too tired and busy to go on a full scale assault of the guest room to clear it out, but I have made some efforts.  Plus, we still haven't found a place for the stuff we had to move when we redid the kitchen and since we still haven't been able to find the right kind of base boards, we can't move everything in the kitchen back into it's proper place.  I am so grateful to have a home, and I love where I live, but I'd love it even more if I could move around without knocking things over or tripping over something.  I realize we sound like candidates for an episode of Hoarders, but trust me, we just have very little room to store our normal things. The closets are tiny, the attic has no floor, and our garage is not temperature controlled, so finding space to keep things out of the way is hard.  This house was probably built for nudists who didn't have furniture or any other possessions.

YUMMY CHOCOLATE OF THE DAY

I KNOW, RIGHT?! 

It's been a long time since I did a YCOTD, but to be frank, I haven't been eating as much chocolate as I'd like.  Well, actually, that's not 100% true, I'm not eating as much INTERESTING chocolate as I'd like.  Shut up, I'm supposed to be eating better.  If I tell people about the chocolate, I'd have to count it as real food!

I recently ordered a sample collection of Chuao chocolates from Birchbox.  Birchbox is basically a very girly, makeup-beauty-lifestyle subscription service where you get a box of 4 or 5 different kinds of samples in the mail every month.  Sometimes you get awesome stuff and sometimes it's kind of meh, but I love it because I've found a lot of different products that I really like without having to buy a full size product.  Also, I love getting mystery boxes in the mail.  I can't help it.

Anyways, sometimes Birchbox sends samples of snacks in the boxes and since I loved the sample of Chuao that they sent me, I ordered the entire box, which is 7 small bars, all of different types AND they're only 50 calories each.  Not bad, really.  I'd had some of the Chuao chocolate before, and I knew I liked it, but I wanted a more complete idea of the bars they offered, so this sample box was a great thing.  Each piece is about two inches long, and about 1/3 of an ounce, so it's enough without being too much.

The first one I tried was called Spicy Maya, which is described as "seductive cinnamon, pasilla chili and warming cayenne bedded in dark chocolate." 

 

It. Was. Amazing.  No, not just amazing, it somehow actually tasted sexy.  I know that isn't going to make much sense, but that is the best word I have.  The chocolate was dark and a little bitter with a good melt (not greasy), the cinnamon and chilies added some heat, and every once in a while I'd hit a bit of chili that was a little bigger than the other pieces and it would add a pop of heat.  There was even a slight after burn in my mouth and on my lips that lingered a while after the chocolate was gone.  The little chocopod (as the small bars are called) was just the perfect size, too.  Any more of it and I think it would have been too much. 

Oh, chocolate, I've been away way too long.  *Swoon*

PS:  Sorry if this review sounds a bit porny.   I have just really, really, really missed good quality chocolate.  You have no idea.

GRRRRRR

I'd like to think that I'm generally an easygoing type of person.  I mean, I know that's not true about all things in life (just ask Steve - heyo!), but I'd like to think that in most situations, I can take the daily bits of unpleasantness and keep rolling along nicely.  I say, I'd LIKE to think that, but after yesterday I'm not so sure anymore.

I had an appointment at my doctor's office.  It wasn't with my doctor, but I had to see a nurse so that I could get a prescription refilled.  It's apparently a new rule or law or something, because it's the first time I've ever had to do that just to get a refill for this particular prescription. It's inconvenient, but I can understand that someone, somewhere feels that this is the best way to do things now.

So I went into the office first thing in the morning.  I was the first and only patient in the waiting room, and they made me fill out an insurance form (again) after saying it had been two years since it was updated (It wasn't. I'd been there three times since last January.)  I also made a faux pas by not remembering the name of the nurse I was there to see.  I had written it down, but forgotten to bring it with me and I called her two different and wrong names before they realized who I was talking about. Oops. My appointment was at 8:15, but that time came and went.  I'd always thought that not being called at your appointment time was because other patients took longer than they thought, but apparently not.  However, I really wasn't that bothered about not being called back right away.  I figured they had their reasons.

The door opened and a nurse told me to go to the scale (as every dang nurse always does) and then she directed me towards an exam room.  Something about this lady was weird.  I felt right away that she seemed...I don't know...terse or angry.  I apologized about getting her name wrong, thinking it might have insulted her, but she didn't crack a smile or even really look at me.  She walked over and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm and up close I could really tell she was angry about something.  I just kept quiet and she walked out of the room.

Have you ever been around someone who was really mad at you?  You get that weird, tingly feeling in the pit of your stomach and your face gets all warm?  That's how I felt as I was sitting there.  I began to wonder if I had inadvertently done or said something that I hadn't realized, because it felt directed at me.  She wasn't gone long, but when she came back in, she didn't even close the door to the exam room.  She just turned around and said in a rather rude way (I'm paraphrasing:)

"I can't write you a prescription, you don't qualify anymore.  These are not my rules.  I don't even know why they told you to come in."

She gave me a very, very short reason why I wasn't eligible and said when I came back to see the doctor next month, maybe I could get it then. I was genuinely puzzled, because while I could sort of understand her reason, it didn't make a whole lot of logical sense, so I got a chance to ask one question before she pretty much stalked out without saying another word.  I had been with her for less than five minutes.  I was completely nonplussed.  Honestly, I've never been treated that rudely in a doctor's office before, especially by a nurse.  I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, but she acted as if my very presence in the office was some kind of joke meant to inconvenience her in some way.  I was slightly concerned about not having the prescription refilled, but not so much that I would have made a scene or anything, so I have no idea what her problem was.  Was she ticked because of whatever this new rule was that said she had to see people specifically each time the prescription was refilled?  I don't know, but I did know that whatever her damage was, I didn't cause it.  By the time I'd gotten to my car, I was mad.  The more I thought about it, the madder I got!

It pretty much ruined my whole day.  That sounds kind of hyperbolic, but being treated so rudely first thing in the morning really set the tone for the day.  So thank you, lady, for giving me a scorching case of the Mondays, and thank the horse you rode in on, too.

SIGH

I am why we can't have nice things. :(

A couple of weeks ago, I was driving home from work when something hit the side of my car.  I think it must've been a garbage can.  Well, in retrospect I think it was a garbage can that the garbage truck might not have put back completely off of the road.  I honestly didn't see anything, so it had to have just been the corner of the thing, but still.  At the time, I was so startled that I didn't even think to look behind me to see what I'd hit and by the time I got home, I freaked out thinking that I might have sideswiped a person!  I mean, I guess I knew I didn't hit a person, mainly because I'm fairly sure it would have sounded less Rubbermade-y and more meaty, but I was scared!  I pretty much sat in my office waiting for sirens.  Not that I'd just hit a person and run or anything, not if I actually KNEW I'd hit a person.  At any rate, there were no sirens.  Let's move on.

Anyways, whatever I hit knocked the passenger's side mirror off of the car.  Not the mirror housing, but it popped the mirror off.  I hated driving without it, because the convertible top of my car creates a huge blind spot, and I just knew that I'd try and change lanes and cause an accident.  Luckily, though, Steve was able to get a slightly smaller mirror that fit the housing, so after about a week I had a new mirror!

Fast forward to this past Monday.  I'd forgotten to get the garbage can from the street when I got home from work, and again after Steve and I got back from running an errand at Target.  I remember mentioning to Steve that we needed to bring it back in, but we got sidetracked by something when we got in the house and forgot about it again.   By the time I remembered it was still out there, a storm was blowing in.  The wind was blowing very hard and it was raining a bit. Since I was wearing shoes (and let's be honest, pants) I ran out into the rainy, windy night to wheel the can back to the house. 

The rain was cold, which was very uncomfortable, so I got the can and I tried wheeling it through the yard.  It was too squishy after the rain, so I wheeled it to the driveway and started to run.  I had to maneuver it between the cars, which I always have to do, but the wheel on the can jigged and I smashed it into the passenger side window of Steve's Challenger.  Oy.  The mirror housing snapped off and just dangled there by the power cords. I threw the can into the garage and ran back out into the rain and tried to fix it, but apparently I'd broken some important piece within the mirror housing, because it just sort of wobbled on its stalk like a broken doorknob.  When I got back to the house, I told him what I did.  Then I ran and hid.

Don't misunderstand me, Steve isn't a violent type of person.  Seriously, he barely has emotions to begin with, so I didn't hide because I thought he'd yell at me or anything.  I just felt so terrible.  I'm so freaking clumsy!  I've never been one for the wanton destruction of personal property (except for that one time and I'm still finding glass underneath things) and to know I was the one who broke his CAR of all things made me feel awful.  I think I'm very much like a child in some ways, and hiding when I'm uncomfortable is one of those ways.  He was actually very nice about it.  Much nicer than he needed to be, and told me to come out from beneath the laundry pile.  He tried to see if it could be fixed, but he didn't have what he needed to make it stay.  Then we jumped into my car and rode through the, by this time, rather violent winds to Wal-Mart to get some kind of adhesive to fix it until he could have it replaced.  It was near midnight by this point, and I had forgotten how scary the Midnight People of Wal-Mart can be! Luckily, he was able to find some kind of bonding agent that has held it on very well, so hopefully it won't just fall off while he's driving!  I suppose he'll have to have it replaced one of these days, but apparently with his car you can't just get the part mailed to you.  It has to be ordered and painted to match the car, then it has to be installed by a mechanic.  I still feel bad, but not as bad as I did.  This is the second time I've damaged his car.  NO wonder he won't let me drive it!  :)

Oh, and to make the day complete, I broke an iPhone!  That one wasn't completely my fault, though.  Steve had given me a deactivated iPhone that I was using as an iPod-with-a-camera (not sure what was wrong with it, but it couldn't be used as a phone anymore.)  I had it in my purse and when I reached for it on Monday found that the cover and screen had separated from the body of the phone.  It wasn't detached, but it had lifted away from the button near the bottom, and I couldn't push it down and fit it back in the frame.  I realized a piece of plastic inside was bent outward, so I lifted the screen enough to wiggle my finger inside to try and push it back down, and the glass cracked and the whole thing fell apart!  When I showed Steve, he told me it wasn't my fault.  I was unaware of this, but apparently some iPhone batteries are faulty, and they can swell up inside the phone, causing them to--well, not explode, but it pops them apart from the inside.

Anyways, so I've been very careful not to handle or get near anything of value this week.  At this point, I'm pretty sure I could break a chunk of granite with by bare hands without meaning to! 

KELLY SMASH!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

Well, another year has gone by and I officially no longer have to scale down the age settings on the elliptical at the gym.  Excuse me while I go into a corner and sob a bit. 

*one hour later*

OK, I'm much better now!  Actually, I had a very nice birthday this year.  Well, at least there was little to no mayhem, so that's much better than some years.  I spent most of it at work, though.  Generally, I take the day off from work, but I didn't think of doing it soon enough.  I'm not kidding, this birthday sneaked up on me! (Sneaked doesn't sound right to me, but spell check says it's a real word.)

The pastor and the youth pastor took me to lunch, which was nice, but it was a little weird.   I mean, it wasn't weird in a bad way, but I'm still not used to being so causal with my preacher, so it was weird just hanging out and having lunch with them.  Shut up, I'm still getting used to it!  :)  We went to a place called Shane's Rib Shack.  The youth pastor had been telling me about the place and since I couldn't think of anywhere else I'd rather go, I picked that.  Honestly, I can never think of a place to eat when people ask me.  I'm terrible at it.  I panic, name a place, and then spend the entire meal worrying that the people I'm with don't like it!  However, this wasn't a bad choice at all.  It was actually really good! I mean, it was no Dreamland, but really, you can't expect that.  My only complaint, and it's really my fault for not knowing this already, was that I ordered a rib sandwich expecting it to be a sandwich made of rib meat.  Nope, it was two pieces of Texas toast with ribs in the middle.  Like, actual ribs on the bone in between bread slices.  It tasted good, but I had to remove the skeleton before I could eat it!

I actually had planned to leave early, but I wound up staying later to try and upload a video to Youtube, a video that refused to be uploaded.  I just got disgusted with it and left.  On my way home I stopped at the Cafe City Diner to pick up my birthday cake substitute, a couple of giant pieces tiramisu, for after dinner.  They were the size of Steve's head!

It was "Punch Someone In the Face" delicious.

When I got home, I saw where a bunch of people had posted happy birthdays on my Facebook page!  Look, I know that doesn't really mean much, and I know most of them probably didn't know it was my birthday until they saw it online, but I don't care.  I still thought it was nice.  They didn't have to take the time, so I took it as a plus!  Where else but Facebook will people you never talk to, never see, and probably don't know well enough to have a conversation with, tell you happy birthday?

Steve came home and we gave each other our Valentine's day gifts.  I'm so grateful that he knows I wouldn't like to get flowers or jewelry on Valentine's day.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's bad for people to give their wives or whatever flowers or jewelry, but it isn't something I personally like.  I got him jellybeans and he got me a t-shirt with a cartoon of the Dramatic Groundhog on it.  Tres romantic, no?

It makes me laugh. Don't judge me.

 We had to run a couple of errands, and we grabbed some 5 Guys burgers (and fries) on the way home, which I think put me over my daily allowance of meat for the next couple of days, but they were so feckin' good.  I opened my cards from my family and my birthday gift from Steve (a plotter, like the one I used at the Sprocket -pitooey- but for personal rather than industrial use. Awesome!) and we watched TV.  It was a lovely, low key birthday.  However, I didn't know it wasn't over yet!  I didn't actually get it until the next morning, probably because I had fallen into a meat coma after dinner, but I got - hands down - the best birthday video that has ever been made/ will ever be made. 

So, unless the universe is saving it up for later on in the year (which I sincerely hope it isn't, 'cause last time that happened it was really, really bad) the birthday curse was relatively mild, possibly absent this year.  Well, except maybe for what happened to Russia.  So, Прошу прощения, Russia.  My bad.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to think of me!  I'm really not worthy, but I'm glad you guys don't know that!  :)

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1)  You know, I can't believe that it's been so long since I've written anything on here.  My blog has always been a fun thing for me to do, but these days I never seem to have the time or energy!  That kind of sucks.  Anyways, I have no intention of stopping, but I hope you lovely people don't give up on me.  My life is just kind of boring right now.

2) Well, I made it through my first round of preparing taxes for the church workers!  Yippee!  Actually, make that a hesitant yippee, because I have no idea if I'm going to get a sternly worded letter from the IRS telling me that everything is wrong and I'm going to be arrested for tax fraud or something.  Since the church is a tax-free organization, all I really had to do was prepare income tax stuff (1099 & W2 forms) for the church employees, and that wasn't super hard or anything, but it was nerve wracking. I had to use a typewriter, y'all.  I might as well have been chipping the darn forms on pieces of slate. I type fast on a computer, but it took hours for me to do the forms because I didn't have spell check or any way to erase what I'd typed if I screwed anything up.  Yes, you can do all of your tax forms online, or at least with software, but the church can't afford to upgrade our Quickbooks so that we can automatically print the tax stuff.  People get very weird about their money, and rightly so, but being the one responsible for making sure it's right is awful.

I also had to make sure the church contribution letters were done, and that was another kind of pain in the ass.  If you aren't familiar with what contribution letters are, they are detailed reports of the offerings that are given to the church so that people can get tax deductions.  Some people don't bother using them, but some people are meticulous and they want every penny they give to be counted.  Of course, since I wasn't the only one working with the records this past year, and since a new program had been used (on a separate computer and the files hadn't been transferred) there were a lot of mistakes.  I had to manually, and individually, type in dozens (possibly hundreds) of new entries because our pastor didn't want anyone to get sheets from two different programs.  The work was tedious and sometimes confusing, so I have spent the last week or so correcting people's letters if they needed them corrected.  Fun stuff, you guys.

3) So I'm still trying to do the weight loss thing, and I still hate it.  Actually, I haven't been as careful as I was before because I think I've lost my mojo.  For one, I had a specific date and event to work towards back in October.  Having a goal date with a planned event made it easier to work towards losing weight.  For two... wait, is that even a thing? Secondly?  Is that better?  Secondly, the holidays happened and all of that lovely food was around and I didn't want it to go to waste. :)  For three...I don't have as much time to devote to going to the gym as I had before.  I've been trying to get back into the groove, but now that I'm working, it's more difficult to get to the gym because I either have to go really early, or after work, and I'm always too tired after work.  It's very frustrating.  I know this is a stupid thing to say, but I'd almost rather be able to focus on losing weight than working.  That is probably vain, and I'm sorry for that, but damnit, it was working!!!! 

I wasn't going to say how much I'd lost because it felt like I was jinxing myself, but at this point it doesn't matter. To date I've lost 35 pounds, and now I'm stuck.  I'd lost 37, but the last two pounds keep on coming back, going away, & coming back again.  After steadily losing weight (albeit slowly, but that works for me) for so long, being stuck is really frustrating.  Keep your fingers crossed for me, guys, because I've got a goal and I want to reach it. I just need my mojo back. Send me vibes.

BTW, 35 pounds probably sounds like a lot, but I'll be darned if I can tell where it came from.  Seriously, I see those commercials where people are all "I lost X amount of pounds by using this diet!" and they have the before and after pictures where they look so drastically different, but I don't think I look that different.  I mean, I can kind of see it, but mostly I think I must have lost it all from my head or some other useless place.  Maybe other people can tell, but I can't.

4) The other day I tried a drink that was so weird that I need everyone to go out and get it because I don't want to be the only one.  I wrote about it on my other blog, so you'll have to go there to read about it.  Mamma Chia...the slimiest drink on earth! 

I have been sick.

No, this is not a repeat of the last few entries I've written over the past few months, this is a new one!

I think that working at my church must be like working in a day care or something, because hand-to-God, I have not been sick this consistently since I was a little kid.  It doesn't help that two out of the three people I share work space with have small grandchildren (who I'm fairly certain are some type of Typhoid-Mary germ carriers that must categorically lick every surface in their homes on a regular basis.)  Add to that the fact that Steve somehow popped up with a severe upper respiratory infection that he passed on to me, and there is no wonder that I've been a veritable petri dish of assorted single-celled death harbingers.  Seriously, I'm tired of it and I want it to stop.

This last bout with...whatever it was I had was a different kind of hell, though.

It began with Steve.  Steve started coughing one day.  Just a little bit, and not enough to really alarm anyone, but it steadily got worse and worse until he practically couldn't take a breath without sounding like he was breathing underwater or trying to force his lungs out of his body.  He was scheduled to go to California on a business trip, and for once he decided to go to the doctor before I had to force him to.  He got shots and medicine (the same fun stuff I got the last time I went to the doc-in-the-box) and so it was HIS turn to trip balls and lie helpless as the steroids made their way through his system.  He missed a few days of work, which was a sure sign he was sick as he never misses work if he can help it, and slowly but surely, he started getting better.

About halfway through his illness, I started coughing.  I was determined not to get sick this time, but nothing I did could prevent it.  I knew I was in trouble when I woke up one morning sounding like a 5 pack a day smoker.  Ugh.  I was worried about Steve and having to take care of him while I was at home, which didn't allow me very much rest time, and I was still going to work everyday because I was trying to figure out tax stuff.  Needless to say, I was not doing myself any favors.  I didn't want to take the time to go to the doctor, because I was fairly certain I'd just get the exact same medicine I got last time I was there and I couldn't deal with the steroids again...I just couldn't.  Luckily (and weirdly) my GP had given me a refill on my last bottle of antibiotics and I still had an almost full bottle of some kind of cough syrup called Zutripro, cough syrup I'd barely used because I wasn't actually coughing at the time.   I waited until I saw the signs of a respiratory infection (and I won't elaborate because ick) and then I started taking the antibiotics and cough syrup.  I think I made the right call about the medicine, because after a day or so, the antibiotics started clearing up the ick, and the cough syrup kept me from coughing, but stuff started happening to me.  Stuff I wasn't expecting.

At first I got, well, grumpy.  Everything was getting on my nerves.  I couldn't figure out why, because most of the stuff that was bothering me wasn't important, or even anything I usually care one way or another about.  Next I began thinking about...things.  Awful, past-few-years-things.  Things that, if I could somehow erase them from my memory, would drastically improve my emotional well being as a whole.  They'd pop into my head at odd moments, and I couldn't get them to go away.  Sometimes this happens to me in my low moments, but I can usually fight them back.  I couldn't fight them back this time.  Then I started feeling kind of panicky and clingy.  I try very hard not to be a clingy person, because it annoys and embarrasses me to feel like that.  I still felt awful physically, but now I had this nagging feeling that I was all alone and Steve was only trying to get better so that he could take this business trip to get away from me.  I'm not kidding.  I kept asking him if he was mad at me for some reason, and he kept saying he wasn't, but I didn't believe him.  As I well know, he's very reserved even when feeling 100% well, but when he's sick, he's even more quiet and withdrawn. It didn't matter that I knew that, all I could think of was that he was angry at me and just wanted to get away from me.  It made me feel even worse.  I wasn't sleeping well, either, which also didn't help.  It wasn't just Butler being weird, I literally couldn't fall asleep.  I'd stare at the ceiling, thinking awful night-thoughts, trying to read until I could fall asleep, but only managing to get an hour or two of sleep as a whole.  I'd be wide awake in the morning, but the lack of sleep was wearing on me, I could tell.  I figured that if I could just stay on my normal schedule, I'd feel better, but I ended up having to go home early from work on Monday because I felt so terrible.  I called in sick on Tuesday, thinking that after I took Steve to work (a friend was going to take him to the airport later that day) I could just rest and hopefully start feeling myself again.  It was dark and rainy, which wasn't helping my mood, and so I came home, put on a crock pot of beef stew, so I could at least have a good dinner of comfort food, took my cough syrup and I fell asleep for a while.  I woke up later, my hands shaking like crazy,  to still more rain and an even darker mood, taking only enough time to eat some bread before throwing myself back onto the couch and being depressed and panicky in my nest of snuggies.  To make things even more fun, I got food poisoning from the beef stew and was even more sick than I had been earlier that day.  I will not be eating beef stew again for a while (if ever) and it was my own stupid fault for trying to make soup out of leftovers that I'd apparently kept too long.  So that was lots of fun.  I've never realized how miserable it is to be sick and alone.  There wasn't even anyone to whine to!

Then things got weird.  I was still not sleeping, I was depressed and angry, and I felt alone and abandoned.  I found myself lying on the floor, holding Butler's paw because it was the closest thing to human contact I had. When I could finally eat again, all I wanted was carbs - bread, cereal, chips, crackers...and I ate a lot of them.  I found myself getting very weirded out every time a specific commercial would come on TV.  Something about one man's face on that commercial unnerved me, and I swear it was like they would play that commercial as much as possible because they knew it was scaring me.  I got weepy looking at pictures of dogs online.  They weren't even Sara-McLaughlin-Sad-Dog-ASPCA pictures or anything like that.  It was just pictures of dogs!  I was upset that none of my friends were emailing me.  Not just that they weren't emailing me, but that they were not reading my mind about how bad I was feeling and emailing me to make me feel better. How dare they?!  I'd somehow know if they were sick and I'd email them, right?  I felt like every bad, awful thing that had ever happened in my life was returning and crowding around me.  It was really quite scary and awful.

That's when I did what I should have done days before, and I looked online at the side effects of the cough medicine I'd been taken.  I usually always check things like that, just in case, but I'd left it a little late since I'd only taken one dose when the medicine was originally prescribed.  Apparently, this particular medicine can play merry hell with your mind and body.  According to the website:

"The most common adverse reactions of Zutripro® Oral Solution include: Sedation, somnolence, mental clouding, lethargy, impairment of mental and physical performance, anxiety, fear, dysphoria, dizziness, psychic dependence, mood changes, nervousness, or sleeplessness; blurred, double, or other visual disturbances; confusion, headache, euphoria, facial dyskinesia, feeling faint, lightheadedness, agitation, restlessness, insomnia, irritability, tremor."

So yeah...this awesome cough syrup that I'd been taking with great regularity was doing all kinds of insane things to me. Those aren't even the "Call Your Doctor Immediately If These Things Occur" side effects...they were the most common.  That doesn't even include all of the physical yuck that it can cause, but gosh darnit, it kept me from coughing!  Why the hell would a doctor prescribe something like that to a person?  So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of and I threw the rest of the bottle away, coughing be damned.  Luckily I was not coughing as badly by then, and I had some over the counter stuff if I needed it.  I'd almost refilled that stuff y'all!  I could have jumped off of the roof out of sheer hopelessness if I hadn't stopped taking it.

I am still getting rid of the side effects, but I'm much better since I stopped taking the medicine.  At least I no longer feel like I am going crazy or being abandoned or anything.  If your ears were burning over the past few days, it was probably because I was saying bad things about you to the dog.  You know...cause you didn't somehow psychically know I was sick and needed company.  I'm also sorry if I sounded unpleasant or angry on any online stuff I might have posted. 

Don't do drugs, folks. 

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Christmas went wonderfully for all of us, thanks for asking!  We had a low key dinner with Mr. Lee for Steve's birthday, another one with him for Christmas Eve, and we spent the afternoon with my loud family on Christmas day.  We had a lot of fun!  There were a couple of disappointments, of course.  Instead of show, it rained like we'd angered God somehow.  I missed having brunch with a long lost friend because of his "family obligations" (whatever, man) and I still didn't get that Red Ryder Bolt Action BB Gun with a compass in the stock and the thing that tells time, but other than that, Christmas was very, very nice!  I ate too much, though.  It was glorious!

2) Ugh, so it's the new year already?  Yikes.  I wasn't prepared for this!  Time went by insanely fast this past year, owing, I'm sure, to the fact that I suddenly became kinda, gainfully employed.  This time last year, I was on my way home from an awesome mini vacation with some friends and wondering what I'd be in store for in the upcoming year.  Lots of wonderful things happened, and some pretty bad stuff as well, but all in all I know I'm very blessed.  Hopefully, this year will be just as good, if not better, for all of us!  No biking accidents, surgeries, having to unexpectedly have a dog euthanized, or emergency house repairs that cost more than you can afford!  Also, fingers crossed, I might just try to finally get the house reorganized at some point so that we don't look like a case study on an episode of Hoarders anymore, but I don't want to get crazy. 

3) Speaking of the New Year... Tuesday I tried my hand at cooking pig face (or hog jowl if one must be pedantic about it), for the first time.  It was always the men-folks in my family who cooked it when I was growing up, and I never really knew why until yesterday.  It's dangerous and messy!  I knew that it got smoky and very splattery, but I wasn't expecting the oily carnage that ensued.  OK, maybe that's a wee bit exaggerated, but not by much.  I kept the door to the garage open because I knew the smell of frying pork would fill up the house, and I was hoping not to saturate everything with it, but it only helped a little.  If you are unfamiliar with hog jowl, it's like bacon on steroids (maybe literally, the way livestock is raised in this day and age) and as messy as it is to fry bacon on the stove, multiply that by 7.  By the time I was done, the entire house smelled like grease, my kitchen was covered in a very thin film of oil, and I had multiple, minor splatter burns on my hand, arms and face.  The pork was delicious, luckily, but I don't think it will be something I attempt again.  Not only is it probably the absolute worst kind of food a person can eat, I can't get the smell out of the house and it's making me nauseated.  Also, I forgot to move the clothes drying on the sweater rack in the hallway, and now I have to rewash them because they stink.  I don't like anything that makes me have to rewash already clean laundry, so my first foray into salt pork will very probably be my last.

4) Last night was the first time I've slept in my own bed in weeks.  No, Steve didn't kick me out or anything.  We can blame this on our spoiled dog.  Sometime after Thanksgiving but before the Christmas holidays, we felt it was finally time to remove Bear's kennel (sniff) from the living room.  We'd left it up well beyond a reasonable amount of time, be we really needed the space since our house is still so crowded with out-of-place stuff.  I thought that Butler would have trouble with the change, but he seemed to take it OK.  Well, at least at first.  A few nights later, I remember hearing him batting at his kennel door, but because he's done that on and off since Bear died, we ignored it.  Later that day, I noticed that the carpet was wet under the door of the kennel.  It wasn't pee, thank goodness, but it had to be drool, and Butler doesn't normally drool very much.  The next morning, I got up to let him outside, and before I walked into the living room, I saw that he was standing up in his kennel and panting.  Not only that, I saw that the entire front of his kennel was wet, and so was the floor outside of the kennel.  Yuck!  The only explanation I had was that he'd stood there at the door all night and panted and drooled.  That meant he wasn't even sleeping a little bit at night anymore.  Geez.  So we started sleeping in the living room with him again, just like we did after Bear died, only this time he refused to stay in his kennel.  Since then, I've slept on the couch in the same room as the dog so that he won't freak out about being alone at night.  Steve slept in one of the chairs for a while, but he wound up hurting his back and has to sleep stretched out in the bed until he gets better.  We even tried making Butler sleep in our room, but he stands at the door and scratches at it like we're keeping him hostage.  Sigh.

It's not so bad, really.  It's strange sleeping alone, of course.  Our couch isn't uncomfortable.  However, the occasional, unexpected press of a wet dog nose on the side of my face in the middle of the night is somewhat disconcerting.

I really, really hope the dog gets back to normal soon.

PARTY DOWN! I REPEAT, THE PARTY IS DOWN!

Do you remember last year when one of Steve's more influential co-workers threw a Christmas party and I had a small, but powerful come-apart about being worried that I'd been strange and awkward the whole time?  No?  Well, you should follow that link and read about it. Geez.

Anyways, the man had another Christmas party this year, and believe it or not, I wasn't the least bit nervous about going.  Part of it was that I knew what a lovely couple the host and hostess were, and I guess the other part was that, at the time, I was still on medication for whatever mystery illness I was being treated for and it made me feel too terrible to think about all the things I could do wrong.  Who knew feeling like death was good for the self esteem?  The only thing that had been worrying me about this party was the fact that I wasn't sure if I'd done the right thing for a host/hostess gift.  See, I know I could have gone to that party empty handed and it would have been OK.  Had they been good friends of ours, I wouldn't have felt it necessary to give a gift, but it just seemed like good manners to take something to this party. 

Well, everything started off better than I could have expected.  I was feeling a bit better by the time we got there, and our gift was a huge hit.  Seriously, they weren't just being polite.  I mean, they seemed genuinely thrilled about the towels I'd embroidered the name of their farm on.  (Yeah, they live in a place with a frickin' name! Awesome, huh?)  So I relaxed and figured that the rest of the party would be a piece of cake!

That's when God punished me for my hubris.

The host gathered us all together, prayed over the food, and we filled our plates with various little nibbles. Steve and I found out of the way seats where he could tell me who everyone was without them hearing us talking about them.  Things were going well, and we were laughing and talking, when someone came over to tell us goodbye.  We were sitting and the man was standing in front of Steve.  He shook Steve's hand, and I leaned forward - plate in hand -  to say goodbye.  I didn't realize how close to Steve I'd apparently leaned, but when the man released Steve's hand, Steve's elbow went into my plate.  Hard.  It was like a wrestling move.  Almost in slow motion, a jumbo shrimp, covered in sauce, sailed across the room.  The rest of the sauce, which had puddled on my plate, immediately fell onto Steve's lap. Crumbs fell, napkins fluttered, Steve froze in place and the crunch of my plastic dinnerware hitting the floor echoed around the room.  Now, of course, it probably wasn't really like that. It all happened so fast, but it felt like time had slowed to a crawl.  Steve's face had a look of panic on it that I rarely see, and of course, I lost it.  I started laughing so hard all I could do was sit there as Steve retrieved the shrimp and started piling the trash into my plate.  The man who had been shaking Steve's hand made a "yikes" face and fled, and I still sat there laughing like a lunatic.  Apparently the medicine I was on made me not care how loud I was laughing either.  Poor Steve was so embarrassed, and he couldn't even stand up because of all the sauce on his pants!  One of the caterers (the one I hugged last year was back, and I'm fairly certain he recognized me) quickly walked over and took the plate from me.  I sat and snort-giggled until Steve was able to get up and find a bathroom to clean himself up in.

When he finally got back, I was calm enough to go back to the food and get some dessert.  Now, what they were serving were these tiny little chocolate shells filled with various and sundry flavors of whipped cream, or something like that.  I got two, and walked back to the seats.  I sat down, picked up my first little dessert thingie, when my plate - which was sitting on my knee - tilted sideways.  I managed to catch the plate before my food went into the floor, but not before almost crushing my chocolate thing.  It startled me into saying "SON OF A WHORE!" a little bit louder than I meant to.  Of course, that set me laughing again.  Then Steve started laughing, and we were like two little kids in church trying not to laugh too loudly.  Once again, the caterer was at my elbow, taking away the plate.  It was then that I knew they had noted the frequency of my messes and had targeted me so that they could keep everything around me clean!

At that point I felt that Steve and I should walk around and talk to some people, so that we wouldn't have to hold plates anymore.  While we were doing this, I started feeling very ill indeed, so I walked outside on the deck to get some air and there were the dogs!  Of course, I immediately started petting them and talking to them.  When I started feeling better, I was getting ready to go inside when I noticed the sweet dog faces looking at me.  I could tell that they really wanted to go inside, and dummy me thought I remembered that they were trained only to go as far as the screened in porch, so when they followed me back into that porch I didn't think anything of it. I walked back into the house, and the dogs followed me!!  I don't think this would have been a problem, had they been small dogs, but the 110 pound lab decided that not only should it visit as many people as possible, probably to see if they had food, she was also just the right height to pretty much stick her face into the chafing dishes.  Luckily, very luckily, I managed to stop her before she did that.  The woman caterer walked over to me and said "I don't think they're supposed to be in here!" and she chased out the smaller of the two dogs.  It took longer, but the man caterer managed to shoo the giant lab.  By that point, I was fairly sure the catering staff was very tired of me!

After getting the dog out, I somehow managed to lose Steve.  Now, this house is big, but not so big that I could lose my husband in, but I swear he just disappeared!  I stood in the middle of the room kind of non-plussed, looking towards all the different groups of people and not seeing him. I finally had to start asking people if they'd seen him.  Of course, no one knew where he was, and I had a very bad moment of wondering if I'd embarrassed him to the point of just leaving me at this party to find my own way home!  After some searching, and more than a few more moments of panic, I discovered him, wedged into a hidden corner of the living room (seriously, I hadn't found him that whole time because of a stupid bend in the room) talking to some of his coworkers.  Yeesh.  As I made my way over, I stopped at the bar to get a cup of apple cider.  It was in one of those silver, heated coffee dispensers that you have to press a black flipper thing on the spout on its front.  Since I'd pretty much spilled everything I'd had in my hands that night, I only planned to fill my cup half-way, and as I was doing that, the fricking catering lady jumped over to my elbow to make sure I was doing it right.  Seriously.  I was starting to feel stalked.  I got away and made it over to Steve without spilling it, so IN YOUR FACE, CATERING STAFF!

After sitting there for a while, the yuck feeling came back fairly badly.  I had to surreptitiously tug on Steve's sweater and let him know I was feeling bad again and wanted to leave.  Although I'm sure he would have liked to have stayed longer, he was gracious enough to realize I honestly didn't feel well, so we got up and made our goodbyes to the host.  I'd like to say that we managed to get away without any further embarrassment, but no.   Because of where we parked, and because people had pulled in behind us, we couldn't get out of the driveway without some fancy maneuvering.  In fact, in our attempt to figure out how to get out, we had to drive up and reverse pass a giant picture window that looked directly into the party about 37 times.  We had to drive past and reverse so many times that it got stupid and we started laughing again.  Big Ben...Parliament.   I had to get out and direct Steve in what was probably a 42 point turn, one in which he drove a tiny way into the flower garden and almost hit one the dogs.  We finally managed to get turned around and we left the party, our dignity in tatters and flaps, but everything else luckily all in one piece.

I think there's a part of me that would love to think that my antics (for want of a better word, I guess) were adorable and that possibly I could pull off being seen as sort of a poor man's (or in my case a very poor, homeless, and possibly meth addled) man's Zoe Deschanel: a precious, elfin creature that can't help but be awkward and freakishly cute while knocking things over and spilling everything, but I don't think that's the case. Instead, I'm fairly certain I'm more like that kid your mother made you invite to things and they were always the one to spill the red punch on the couch and break your new birthday toys. 

I wonder if we'll be invited back next year?

UGH

I feel kind of icky about something I did the other day.  It was actually about 3 weeks ago and I'm still uncomfortable with myself for it.  It wasn't anything bad, per se, but still, I did something I can't stand when other people do and it made me not like myself very much.

There is a store nearby that sells artisan jewelry.  You can tell it's artisan because some of it is gorgeous, some of it is frightfully ugly, and it's all way overpriced.  That being said, Sara and I were perusing the shelves one day a while back and the sales girl was doing her salesperson thing hardcore.  Instead of letting us look on our own, she basically followed us around the entire store and told us about the stuff we were looking at.  Sometimes that can be a good thing, but when you're really just looking, it can get old fast.  Still, she was just doing her job, and she was annoying me.

I'd stopped at one of the cases to look at something and she launched into a spiel about how the designer is "so talented" and had won an Emmy award for costume design by designing jewelry for the Showtime/HBO show, The Tudors.  She went on to tell me "She had to design each piece separately. You couldn't just go an get stuff like that, you had to make it individually!"

OK, first off...the history of Tudor England is kind of my jam.  It's one of the only historical time frames that I've purposefully researched on my own, without having to do it for a class or anything.  I enjoy the whole sordid mess and I'm fairly knowledgeable about it, especially the reign of Henry VIII.  Second off, as someone who studied art history, I've done a LOT of looking at portraits of the time, and I've studied them as closely as I can without being able to actually stand near them with my nose pressed against the frames. Third off (thirdly?) I love jewelry. Not just wearing it and making it, but I love knowing about it, especially historical pieces of significance, and the dynastic portraits of the Tudor line have a lot of wonderful, beautiful pieces included.   I guess what I'm saying is that I'm quite familiar with what she was talking about.

I don't know why what she said rubbed me the wrong way, and I don't know what possessed me to do it, but I went into smug mode and proceeded to pretentiously tell her that of course each costume piece had to be specifically made, because the real pieces would have been made specifically for the people and blah blah, Holbein, blah blah...smug.  She was kind of taken aback, I think.  I used my education to be a know it all bitch, and I am really uncomfortable with that!  I hate when other people use what they know to try and sound smarter-than-thou, especially when they're talking to someone who would have no reason to know the things they're talking about.  The only thing that accomplishes is making them sound like a pretentious ass, and I don't want to be like that.

So, I'm publicly calling myself out for being an art-snobby, know-it-all beastie.  I'm sorry the universe had to see me like that!

ROCKIN' PNEUMONIA AND THE BOOGIE WOOGIE MYSTERY ILLNESS

Well, it actually isn't pneumonia, either the walking or running kind, this time.  What is it?  I dunno.  Neither the doctor or her PA was very specific.

I suspect I've got the black lung, Pop. (koff koff)

Oh, wait...let me start at the beginning.

*flashback waves and harp sounds*

I'm fairly sure whatever I had got it's humble beginnings while we were in New Orleans.  If you read my story from the night after Sara's wedding, when we went down Bourbon Street and wound up with the funk of the ages all over us, you might remember that my eyes had apparently taken the brunt of whatever was in the air that night.  I'm certain that there is some kind of mold in the air down there that comes from an old-ass city constantly being flooded and dried out again.  Whatever it is, it really, really tried to blind me.

Ever since then, my eyes have been painful, itchy, burning, and crusty.  I know that's disgusting, but I don't care because I'm being CLINICAL here, you guys!  Anyway, I thought it might be pink-eye, but it wasn't the same as the last time I had pink-eye, and that is certainly something I'd remember *shudder.*  I'd mostly be fine, but my eyes would get cloudy and I'd constantly have to rub them, and then they'd get watery, and then I'd wake up the next morning and my eyes would be welded shut with...whatever the crusty stuff was.  It was unpleasant.  I had some antibacterial drops that I'd put in, but they didn't do anything except make the inside of my eyelids peel off.  (CLINICAL, y'all!)

Anyways, not long after that, I started feeling bad almost every night.  I'd be OK during the day, but every night around the same time I'd start running a low grade fever, had chills, and had to lay down and wrap up in a blanket until I felt better.  Every night.  It was weird.  I probably should have gone to the doctor then, but I didn't want to take the time to do it because it seemed like a dumb idea when I was feeling fine.  Pretty soon after that I was sure I had some kind of weird sinus thing going on.  It wasn't an infection, but maybe some kind of allergy to something.  It made my head and face hurt, my nose stop up, my neck and shoulders hurt, and face and head misery in general.  Basically I just felt so awful all the time that it started to seem normal.  Once again, I should have gone to the doctor, but I kept putting it off for one reason or another.

All this was going on until a week ago when I began to get sharp pains in my chest.  They weren't heart related or anything, it just hurt when I breathed.  It wasn't all the time, and since the pains went all the way through me from my chest to my back, I thought maybe I'd just pulled a muscle or something, and every so often I'd tweak it just the right way to make it hurt.  Then I noticed my back would hurt on the left, then on the right, and then my chest would hurt again, and it wasn't until I started having trouble breathing that I realized it wasn't my back after all, it was my lungs...and it felt exactly like two years ago when I got walking pneumonia.  Seriously, it took me a month and change to get rid of walking pneumonia, and I didn't have a job back then so I could take the awful medicine that made me trip balls and hear the neighbor's thoughts. I couldn't deal with it now.

Anyway...so after two days of huffing an expired inhaler, and suspecting that I had somehow grown sea sponges in my lungs, and feeling exponentially worse, I finally sucked it up and went to the doc-in-the-box.

I decided to go after work Monday, and it was packed in there.  By then I was feeling really terrible, my voice was almost completely gone (a new development since that morning) and the walk-in clinic had apparently just updated their database, which meant I needed to fill out new forms! Joy!  I was wheezing and glassy eyed, but why not?  When I went back to turn in my form, it turned out that I'd left my driver's license at home in the pocket of the jacket I wear to the gym.  She was nice enough to try and find the scans of my ID that they had on file, but since scanning it had obliterated my picture, she wouldn't accept my new form.  I completely understand the bull-crap bureaucracy of the whole thing, but by that point I was feeling so terrible that I almost cried when she told me I'd need to go home and get it.  Well, the crying feeling actually was secondary to wanting to reach across the counter and rip her arms out of their sockets, but THEN I felt like crying.  I didn't though.  Luckily, I don't live that far away, so it only took me about 30 minutes to go home, change out of my work clothes, grab my license and get back.  Of course I had to sign in, again, because "We can't hold spaces, ma'am."

I almost punched her.

I shoved my license and insurance card to her and pointed to the form that was still out on the counter (I didn't have a voice, remember) and she told me to go sit down until they called me.  It took a long time before they even called me to come up and pay the co-pay so I could get my license back.  By then, I'd gotten over wanting to kill them all because I realized that the whole day must've been hectic and busy, and they weren't just being evil.  They were just tired and ready to go home.  Since I've worked customer service, I have a soft spot for others in that position, so instead of bodily harm, I just made a few jokes and waited until they called me back to a room. Friggin' finally.

I told the nurse what was going on and she took my vitals.  Then the doctor came in and I told HER what was going on.  She listened to my lungs and asked me if I smoked.  Nice.  She said "Yes, it sounds pretty pitiful" and then she pulled out the bed extender and told me I could lie down if I wanted.  She also informed me I'd need some blood tests and a chest x-ray.  A new person, I'm guessing a tech of some kind, came in and took about 9 pints of blood from me and then took me in for a chest x-ray.  Again, I had to make the bra-less walk of shame from the exam room to the x-ray room, but luckily it didn't take long.

When I got back to the exam room, I sat for ages, waiting on my results.  I had a book, but I mostly just sat there staring at the walls.  At least the room I was in didn't have one of those "The Various Ways a Body Part Can Be Diseased" posters on the walls.  They are both disgusting and fascinating all at once.

Finally, the doctor came in and said "Well, you tested negative for everything."  I was all...OK...thinking she'd at least tell me what I was being tested for.  She did not.  So I asked her "So, I'm not contagious?"  She said, in her musical Indian accent "Oh, yes, you're contagious. You will be until you stop coughing."  I'm over there thinking WTF?  I haven't been coughing!  What does she mean?  What do I have?  She asked me how I felt about getting some shots, which I agreed to only because I wanted to get better much faster. I started to ask her what I was sick with, but she left before I could get my wits about me to ask.  Then the PA came in and had to calm me down when I saw the needles, but I took the shots to the *ahem* hips like a champ. When she was done I said "So, what...I have some kind of crud?"  Instead of clarifying, she just said "Yes" and left.  Ok, then! Fine!  I don't need to know what I have!  I'll just hope it isn't monkey pox or anything!  After that I was given my prescriptions and I left.

I had to stop by church, and by then the injection sites on my hips were sore and my kidneys were on fire.  Like, I could actually feel my individual kidneys sitting there, burning.  It was a weird sensation, and it scared me because I thought I was having a bad reaction to it, but that part didn't get any worse.  I stopped by McDonald's on my way home to pick up a quick dinner, and then I went home.  That's where things got fun!

Almost the second I'd finished eating, I started tripping hard core.  I hadn't put two and two together when the PA told me I was getting a shot of steroids, but that is the medicine that puts me into a complete loop.  I felt exactly as if I was drunk, albeit I didn't get the urge to email anyone.  I was stumbling around and babbling and everything seemed like it would be fun to touch.  I finally had to just lie down before I fell over and that is when my day ended!

I've had time to think on all of this, and I'm fairly certain that I had various kinds of illnesses going on in my body for a while.  After I got the shots, I felt hot and tingly all over, plus I felt like...well, have you ever seen the movie "Transformers" when two of the big robots start fighting and you can't tell who is who, and it's just a big, confusing tumble on the screen? I felt like that on the inside.  I also had high pitched sounds in my ears, like a bell that was almost out of hearing range, but just audible enough to nearly drive you crazy.  The various prescriptions I'm on are the same ones I was on when I had walking pneumonia, and one of them is a cortico-steroid (I think), which is the medicine that whacks me out.  I've been at work since yesterday dizzy and doped up, and I had to work A/V duty for a funeral while I was under the influence.  Fun, right?   The ringing in my ears is still there, and I'm still on antibiotics and steroids, but at least I'm not contagious anymore.

So that's my story!  It was too long, probably, but I'm currently taking my steroids and I'm feeling chatty.  Also, they make me not care at all about anything, so if it was too long...eh.  :)

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) I'll be honest, I thought I'd have more time to blog since I'd be, once again, sitting behind a computer for most of the day.  Silly me.  You know, I feel like a complete dork when I say that my job is demanding.  Honestly, I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm JUST a church secretary.  I don't have to save lives, or negotiate with terrorists.  I don't even have to go to meetings or teach anyone anything.  As far as jobs go, it isn't very important in the scheme of things, but daggum if I don't come home from work everyday feeling like I've had to run a military obstacle course while someone fires tennis balls at me from an air cannon. 

I could actually go on and on about why the job is currently frustrating, but it would take a long time.  It isn't even anything really huge, just a lot of little things that have suddenly come to light that nobody noticed before. I can't finish one project without someone coming by and finding something else that needs to be done RIGHT NOW, and it all gets tangled up and the daily stuff can barely get finished. I'm hoping that eventually we can get everything caught up and fixed so that I won't dread going to work everyday. 'Cause right now, I do.

Office work aside, I've realized it's hard to work for a church in other ways.  There are so many people who call or come by asking for help.  Some people need food, which we can provide as long as our benevolence pantry has been stocked.  Most people need money, which we can't provide because we just don't have the funds.  So many people call asking if we help with rent, utilities, and things like that, and there's nothing we can do for them.  It's depressing as hell. Then we have the people who call with hard luck stories and come by with their hands out, but they're scammers.  They want the church to give them money, or pay bills, or give them food and what it all comes down to is that they want something for nothing.  We've even had someone call asking if we'd pay their cable bill!  We've had people come by crying because they don't have money for this or that, and when offered a short time job to earn the money, because that kind of pay can be worked out, they never come back.  That's depressing in a whole other way.  It also makes me angry, because I can't tell the difference between those who truly need help and the ones who just go from church to church asking for handouts. I'll be almost in tears thinking about the sick, little old lady who comes by asking to just pray with the pastor, only to find out that she comes by every so often to scam for money and the whole "Just want to pray with the pastor" thing is her way to get a foot in the door. 

I love my church, and I love the people I'm working with, but I'm swiftly losing faith in humanity by working there.

2) Thanksgiving was great, thanks for asking!  Once again we traveled to Georgia to spend the holiday with our Puckett and McGee family, minus a couple of them due to a wedding up north.  Our food was awesome, seriously, the turkey was the best we've ever made in my humble opinion, and except for an unfortunate canned sweet potato incident and the fact that I accidentally booby-trapped the coleslaw (I answered the age old question of how much cayenne pepper is really too much), everything was wonderful.  When we weren't eating, we were hanging out, playing games, and watching silly TV shows together.  The only difference is that we didn't do Christmas together that week.  Since Greg's wife and daughter were at the wedding, we've decided to put it off until another time when everyone can be there! 

3) Ha!  I was such an idiot the other day!  I had to go to Target to do some grocery shopping, and there were just TONS of people in there.  It was a cold day, so most of them were drinking cups of whatever from the Starbucks at the front of the store. (That's important, I promise.) As I was walking down an aisle, my foot slipped in some brown liquid.  I was wearing my Fuggs (Fake Uggs, if you don't already know) and the soles of them have very little traction. Anytime I walk on something wet or slick, I slide around.  Luckily I didn't fall down, but I thought that someone must've spilled their coffee and no one had come by to clean it up.  How rude, right?  Well, I walked a little further, and I slipped again.  Again, it was some brown liquid, and I thought that maybe someone had a hole in their cup and didn't realize it.  As I walked, my feet kept slipping in dribbles of this brown stuff.  I slipped and slid so much that it got stupid and I started laughing.  I couldn't figure out how in the world I was managing to walk in the exact path of the person with the leaky coffee cup!  I even started weaving the basket, just to see if I could get out of the path of it.  It wasn't till I stopped in the meat section for a second and AGAIN slipped in a big puddle of stuff that I realized one of the Coke Zero bottles in my cart had a leak, and I'd been bobbing and weaving all over the store trying to get away from the "coffee" on the floor, only to be spreading it all over the place myself!  I felt like such an idiot, and I'm glad no one else slipped and fell because of me.  At least I helped clean it up!  That's got to count for something, right?

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Well, it's official, I'm the new Church Lady (TM)!  I've been training twice a week since sometime in late July, I think, and I don't feel much more prepared to take over than I did that first week, but there you go.  The time has come and I'm going to do the best I can.  :)

My first official act as church secretary was to be a complete dorkfish.  See, the woman who just left the job has a similar name as my own.  Well, similar in the sense that her name is Katie and my name is Kelly, and if you are hard of hearing or not paying attention, you might mistake one for the other.  Since pretty much my first week, when I'd answer the phone, saying my name and everything, whomever was on the other end seemed to think I was Katie.  At first I'd try to correct whomever was on the other end of the line, but it happened so often that I gave up and just let whomever had called think they were speaking to Katie.

Right when I was in the middle of trying to complete a task I was completely unfamiliar with (this was after Katie was gone) I got a call from a lady who was upset about something.  Our pastor usually provides counseling, or at least a listening ear, to people who have problems both real and imagined.  One thing I've been specifically instructed NOT to do is try to fix people's problems, which I'm OK with because how in the world would I know what to tell them?  Unfortunately, when this lady called, she called me Katie, and I just went with it because she sounded upset and it would have been more trouble than it was worth to correct her.  When I told her the preacher was unavailable because he was out on a visit, she immediately launched into telling me her issue.  I didn't know what to do, but I calmed her down the best way I knew how (don't worry, it wasn't life or death stuff) and thought that would be the end of it.  Alas...she started asking me some questions about "my pregnancy" and "my doctor" and I kind of panicked.  I honestly didn't know what to do, because in not correcting her when she first assumed I was Katie, it would have seemed very weird to tell her who I was at that point.  Oy.  Luckily, I knew the answers to most of what she asked, and I just pretended I was Katie until she hung up.  On Sunday, the pastor told me that he'd actually talked to the lady later on that night, and she'd told him how sweet and helpful Katie was and how she was sure that the "New Girl" would be fine, but she was sorry to hear Katie was leaving.

*shakes head*

2) So there was an election yesterday.  I personally didn't vote.

Oh, wipe that look off of your face.  I had my reasons. 

I didn't feel I was informed enough to make a good decision about anything on the ballot, and believe it or not, I'm uncomfortable making uninformed decisions about important things.  As you well know, if you're a long time reader (or if you personally know me at all), you know that anytime I make a decision about anything without thinking about it first, things go awry:  things get set on fire,  I get fired from a job, or I end up getting caught up in things I don't want to be involved in!  I wish I had known more about the amendments and local candidates that were on the ballots, because I'd have liked to be able to vote on them, but I didn't understand a lot of what they were trying to accomplish.  I really, really hate politics.  It turns perfectly nice people into complete and total know-it-all, narrow minded jerks.

I prayed that the right candidates be chosen, so I'm hoping that prayer was answered.  My main hope is that the government doesn't cut the military and defense budgets too severely.  Steve's job, as well as most of the people's jobs in this town, rely on those contracts to exist.  I like my town too much to see it destroyed.

I was happy to see that some states have finally passed marriage equality laws!  Josh and Jeoff can't get married yet, though, but hopefully they can soon.  :) 

3) So, my weight loss has completely stalled.  Granted, I haven't been as hard at work as I was before we left for New Orleans, and I'd set that weekend as my goal date.  I didn't quite hit my goal, but I came close.  Now I need to start a whole new program with a new goal, but it's so, so, so hard.  I'm still seeing the dieticin I need to get my head back in the game and my body back in the gym.  It's harder now that I have a job, because that means I have to get up early to go and I'm too used to sleeping in to make myself do it.  I'd go after work, but at this point I'm still so stressed about learning everything that I'm exhausted by the time I get home and all I want to do is eat cupcakes and chips.  I wish I wasn't a stress-eater.  I didn't think being a church secretary would be stressful, but until I learn what I need to know and get more comfortable, my nerves will be pulled tight - and so will my pants.

4) I think my veterinarian is trying to emotionally destroy me.  A few weeks ago, we took Butler to be boarded while we were in Louisiana.  When I got there, the girl behind the counter called Butler "Bear."  Now, I can't blame them for that, because they only really see us a few times a year and it's on record that we had a dog named Bear, so the mistake is bound to happen.  The girl apologized and I said that it was fine...yadda, yadda.  Then she took the PA mic, and called "Bear Pratt is here for boarding."  She looked mortified, and she kept apologizing over and over.  I told her it was OK, but she looked like she'd kicked the dog, not just called him by the wrong name.  Several days after we got back from our trip, we got a card in the mail from the vet.  It had a big tree on the front, and on the inside it said that a tree had been planted in Bear's name in one of the national forests.  I'd been OK when she called Butler Bear, but that just sent me over the edge and I had another pitiful, snotty crying session on the floor of my kitchen over the fact that they got him a tree.  Does it ever end?

I kind of wonder if they usually do that for pets when they have to be put down, and maybe it just takes a few months before they get the card sent to them, or if they felt bad for calling Butler by Bear's name so many times that day and they did it to make up for that?  I don't know.  Maybe my wailing the day we had to put him down traumatized them and they're afraid that I'm so emotionally fragile that if they remind me of him I'll jump off the roof.  At any rate, Bear has a tree. :)  That was sweet of them.