My bird just got better

It’s a banner week that ends with a giant, purple finger. While playing with Dougal early Thursday morning, I cracked my right bird finger against a board in the back of the couch, heard a snap, and knew my finger might not make it out alive. The swelling began almost instantly and has continued, creating a “sausage with a fingernail” effect that is rather sexy. The finger is so swollen, in fact, the skin is getting weird and shiny, as if it might split like a microwaved kielbasa at any moment.

But, sausage be damned, I’m not going to the doctor. The radiation I’d be exposed to getting an x-ray would surely be more damaging than a broken finger. Right? Right? The truth is I don’t want to waste a couple hours of my life waiting for a professional to truss up my finger when I could do it myself at home for free. Take that, health care system! I’m saving my deductible for the hard stuff.

The best news is that flipping the bird, which is already one of my favorite things to do, is suddenly much more exciting. There’s nothing like flashing a huge sausage-finger at the TV or radio to drive home the “you suck more than usual” message.

So, that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to this week. I’m hoping I can plead the sausage to excuse a few missed gym days and a drop-off in vacuuming. I don’t want to make it worse, after all.

What’s everyone else been up to lately?

Getting older with belly shirts and Don Williams

Just a quickie post today. Work is sapping my will to create and, in my free time, I’m desperately trying to plow through Of Human Bondage, which is not horrible, but it is 900-some pages and not exactly a cheer-fest. It’s bleak, man. Bleak. I’ve gotta get through it, though. I feel invested.

So a few random thoughts…

• There’s a young woman at my gym who tucks her t-shirt up into her sports bra, exposing an expanse of white manatee belly that undulates with the rhythm of the elliptical machine in the most horrifying, hypnotizing way. Confidence is a good thing, but there’s something to be said for healthy self-awareness…and mercifully wearing a shirt as it was intended.

• Speaking of self-awareness, I had a birthday last weekend. It was a rough one. I’ve decided not to have another one. I’m holding here. No more for me, thanks. I spent all of April dreading my birthday, feeling old and tired and panicked about the next birthday (it’s a whopper). So, I’m just going to pass from here out.

• I know I’m getting old because:

1. I suddenly love Don Williams
2. I whine about how young people dress (see above)
3. I only want to read or watch love stories about people in their 30s or beyond. If you can choose to live with someone past age 30, you’re either blind, crazy, or completely in love. Otherwise, it’s not worth making room in the closet.

I’m leaving you now with this. If you like it, you’re officially old. Welcome to the club.

It’s not a hickey

Okay, so it really looks like a hickey (which, if true, would fit the “I Should Be So Lucky” category of misfortunes), this giant red bruise on the side of my neck. But, if you look closely, you’ll notice the hickey is topped by a zit, a sort of hickey helmet, which brings me to my embarrassing story of the month.

Last night, I discovered a small-ish zit on my neck. I had to pop it (picking pimples is great stress relief), so I squeezed and squeezed, and even threw in a knuckle-squeeze, to no avail. Defeated, I blobbed zit cream on it, slapped on a dot Band Aid, and went to bed.

At the gym this morning, I was sweating like crazy, shirt drenched, uncomfortably prominent butt sweat, the whole nine. Out of the corner of my eye, in the reflection of the gym mirror, I saw the Band Aid still on my neck. Because of the sweat, the edges were lifting off (it looked like a fried egg), exposing a giant red-purple hickey. The pimple wasn’t even visible next to the dark bruise (the best pimple concealing strategy ever?). I gasped.

I am a 34-year-old woman trying to cover a self-induced hickey with a Band Aid.

If anyone asks, I have a boyfriend at another school and, no, you don’t know him because he just moved here from Santa Fe and he’s in a lot of AP classes and he’s training for the Olympics so he’s really busy. But, I totally have a boyfriend and he’s, like, 6’5” and he’s super crazy about me, even though you’re never going to meet him because his dad is in the Secret Service and you know how that goes. I can’t even have a picture of him because of, like, national security. See my hickey? It’s not like I gave this to myself. That’s pathetic. Gahh…

Four happies and a crappy

A few random happies mid-week…

• Mad Men is back. It’s been 18 months since Don Draper suddenly proposed to his too-young Canadian secretary and Joan opted to keep Roger’s child and deceive her husband; I’ve been dying to know what happens next. I’m so excited it’s back. I was giddy watching the premier last night. Megan seems crazy. Lane Pryce is right there with her. Roger and Don are suddenly the same guy. And, Peggy sure looks fantastic, though I’m curious about her boyfriend, the journalist for “some underground papers.” Very, very interesting.

• Easter candy is almost out of season. Between the Reese’s peanut butter eggs, Cadbury eggs, and Cadbury mini-eggs, it’s a miracle I can still zip up my pants.  Of all the holiday candy, Easter is my favorite, so I’m not going to feel guilty about it. There is only a week left and I’m going to enjoy it, but I’ll be very happy to see it go for another year.

• Sunday, I had my first t-shirt trail run, proof (beyond the puffy eyes and drippy nose) that spring is definitely on the way. The weather over the weekend was so nice. Saturday, there was sunshine for the Celtic Faire downtown, the highlight of which was the giant bag of kettle corn I took home. T-shirts, kettle corn, and sunshine runs have all combined to put me in the spring spirit. (I wonder how far I’d have to run to burn off my Easter candy. I probably don’t want to know.)

• My nightmares stopped. After weeks of waking up every night between 1:30 and 2:30 from a horrible nightmare (sometimes two in a night!), I started keeping a notepad by my bed. I wanted to remember the nightmares so I could potentially figure out what was going on in my brain. Well, almost immediately, the nightmares stopped. The notepad is still on my nightstand with only a few cryptic notes about a dream I had about moving into a really small house with a large sliding glass door. This is the only time writer’s block has been helpful.

And, the crappy…

• Barley has a strange growth on his shoulder that needs to be checked out. It’s been getting bigger and now Dougal is licking it and making it bleed. Those two vex me in pairs. I admit I’ve been dragging my heels a few weeks in making the vet appointment. I’m afraid it’s something really bad and I don’t want to face it. (This has been a banner year for crap news. I swear a new bit of awful drops on my head every month or two.) I know how stupid it is to wait; nothing ever got better by letting it fester. So, I’m making the appointment. I’ll keep you all posted. His appointment is Saturday.

Let my laziness serve as a warning

Physical therapy works, but only if you do it. Such is the lesson I’m now learning since my shoulders have organized another coup against me. Ug. The pain. You’d think I would have learned the first time around, right? Not so much. My Shoulder Impingement Syndrome (aka Broken Shoulder Disease) is back again and I have no one but myself to blame. The physical therapist warned me that if I stopped doing the therapy exercises, I’d start hurting again. Yet, I stopped doing the therapy and I’ve started hurting again.

As punishment, I’m doing my exercises and stretches on my dirty office floor. For 15 minutes, I shut my door at lunch, get down on the floor, and, using two grapefruits as weights (all I can muster in my deteriorated state, unfortunately), stretch and strain and try not to inhale the wood chips I track in on my shoes. There’s something humbling about being face down on your office floor. It puts a lot of things into perspective.

I tell you about this now to hold myself accountable (shame is a powerful motivator, second only to chocolate) and to warn you to learn from my mistakes. Do your physical therapy, even if it’s boring and lame, and forces you to be face down on the floor, trying not to permanently crease your nose. The therapy was miserable the first time around, but it’s worse now that I have the added ache of knowing it’s my own damn fault my shoulders hurt again. Remind me of this lesson when I quit again in a few months. (It’s a sign of wisdom to accept your own shortcomings.)

Beware of ghosts and crazy girls in public locker rooms

Several times over the last few weeks, I’ve walked into the locker room at the gym to find a sobbing, puffy-faced girl sprawled out across an entire bench, her clothes strewn all over the floor, her shower items still in the shower, and a trail of wet towels leading the way. When she’s not crying, she’s talking loudly on the phone about crying. Frankly, the girl is a mess and she’s making me crazy.

This morning, she hit a new low.

As I walked in, I smelled her perfume (oily vanilla, yuck) and braced myself. She was sitting on the bench and it looked like she’d just woken up.

Crazy: “I’m so glad you’re here. Now I can take a shower!”

Me: “Wha?”

Crazy: “I can’t take a shower alone because the ghosts will get me.”

Me: “Uh….ghosts?”

Crazy: “You know, the ghosts that get you in the shower.”

At this point, I figured there was no more I needed to know about this nut. I took my shower, navigating through her piles of clothes, towels, electronics, and beauty products, and kept quiet, watching for locker room ghosts. Consider yourselves warned, independent shower-takers!

A challenge update and a mad rush into politics

I think the writing challenge may have worked a little too well. I’m writing something that is turning long and interesting, and I hesitate to say it might be really good. I’m not exactly neglecting the challenge; I’ve just gotten carried away with something unexpectedly creative and impossible to wrap up succinctly. I want to sit on this egg a bit longer before I share it.

But, that doesn’t mean I have nothing to say here. I have a few things floating around my brain. I’ve been writing since 4:30 this morning (a Saturday even) and there’s still a bit of juice left.

Have you ever worked really hard to make everything different and you suddenly wake up to realize everything is different? Well, that’s how it’s been the last few weeks. Everything feels different in a good way. Maybe it’s the vitamins or the accumulated effects of beets, but, after months of trying and feeling only glacial progress, things do feel different. It’s cliched to say I feel that weights have been lifted, but cliches only become cliches because they are true on some level. I feel lighter.

Well, I feel lighter until I hear Rush Limbaugh calling everyone a slut. How a man who forced his housekeeper to score his pills can complain about anyone else’s LEGAL behavior is beyond my comprehension. He makes me sick. The whole Republican primary makes me sick. But instead of wallowing in the sick, I’ll savor my birth control pills, not because they allow me to be a prostitute, but because they regulate my moods and keep me from falling apart two weeks a month. In spite of what Rush and his ilk believe, there’s nothing slutty about that. In fact, not everything is about sex. I challenge him to have monthly cramps, migraines, and mood swings, and then tell me how it is women should behave.

I suspect these old white men are threatened by a recession that has hit men harder than women and a series of culture changes that have them feeling superior to no one anymore. Without racial minorities and gays to kick around, they are suddenly equal to everyone else, and equal doesn’t suit the arrogant blowhards very well, it seems. So, they attack women, minorities, and gays, trying to bring back the imbalances from which they’ve profited for decades. I feel sorry for them.

I know I shouldn’t talk politics here, but I did anyway. It’s probably because of all the wild, crazy sex the government is paying me to have. I’ve gone off the rails. (I love that expression.)

Have a great Saturday!

A proposed writing challenge

As you may have noticed, I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while. I haven’t been writing as much as I should and, what I have been writing is entirely work related and not very interesting. In fact, my creativity is being sucked out of my butt. Seeing that, I got on the google machine and found this writing challenge. I don’t think I could do it every day; my goal would be three times a week. My only concern is that no one would really enjoy reading these kinds of posts. So, I’m asking for feedback. Does this look like something any of you would want to read? Could you handle a detour into fiction writing? Let me know what you think. Thanks! — A

30 DAY WRITING CHALLENGE

Day 1 —Select a book at random in the room.  Find a novel or short story, copy down the last sentence and use this line as the first line of your new story.

Day 2 —Tell about a character who lost something important to him/her.

Day 3 —Write about the worst time you’ve ever put your foot in your mouth.

Day 4 —Write a story/excerpt to include the line, “Sorry, we can’t insure you for a journey like that.”

Day 5 —Pick a letter of the alphabet.  Now imagine two aisles of your local supermarket.  List everything found in those two aisles that begin with that letter of the alphabet.

Day 6 —Write about a person who would buy all of those items in Day 5.

Day 7 —What sets you apart from the crowd?

Day 8 —Tell your life story from someone else’s point of view.

Day 9 —What was your favorite childhood toy?

Day 10 —What do you want to be remembered for?

Day 12 —What is your favorite day of the week?

Day 13 —Write about a random picture you would find in an envelope of finished prints at Costco.

Day 14 —Elvis still gets 100 Valentines each year.  Tell about one of the people who sent one.

Day 15 — Create a character who is falsely accused of a crime.

Day 16 —If we assume ghosts are real, what type of ghost would you like to see?

Day 17 — Write a short scenario set in the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant.

Day 18 —Take a reader behind the wheel with the worst driver you’ve ever known.

Day 19 —Write a list of 25 (or just 5!) things you want to do in your life.

Day 20 —If you could go on only one more vacation in your lifetime, where would you go and why?

Day 21 —Find a job ad in the paper.  Write about your life if you had that job.

Day 22 —You wake up with a key gripped tightly in your hand.  How did you get this key?  What does it lock or unlock?

Day 23 —Pretend you’re a cartoon character.  What type of a character would you be?  What would a day in your life be like?

Day 24 —Write about the longest amount of time you’ve ever gone without sleeping.

Day 26 —Write about your worst habit.

Day 27 —Make up a near-death experience (unless you have a real one).

Day 28 —You read about yourself in your brother/sister, girlfriend/boyfriend’s diary.  What did you read?

Day 29 —You are at a cemetery reading gravestones.  Write about one of the people you find.

Day 30 —Write a short entry that ends with the line, “The silver dust of moonlight settled coldly on the night.”

Little Miss Ladybug and a Saturday tribute song

As expected as it is to mourn the loss of something or someone important, there’s a secondary mourning that happens years after the original loss. It’s the sadness that comes from not being as sad anymore because so much time has passed. It’s probably guilt about moving on and not taking the time to remember, combined with the sadness of knowing that life has gone on and everything will eventually be lost. So it is with Molly.

Molly died in 2006. It’s sad that she’s gone, and sadder still that she’s been gone so many years that I don’t think about her every day anymore. So much time is moving far too quickly. But, it’s good to think about her and remember how special she was.

Here are a few of my best Molly memories:

Barley and Molly. She had the best ears.

• She pooped on my dad. When my ex and I would go to Duck football games, my dad (who lived about a mile and a half from me at the time) would come by to let Molly and Barley outside to go to the bathroom. Molly was extremely skittish, so I told my dad that if she didn’t want to go out, he shouldn’t worry about it. He could just let her stay inside and I’d take care of it when I got home. However, he didn’t listen. Determined to let her out, he cornered her and picked her up, at which time she started crapping. I don’t think he ever tried to make her go outside again, however.

• She was perfectly chubby. One of my favorite things to do with Molly was roll her on her back and roll her back and forth by rubbing her tummy. I called it Rolling the Dough and we had a song to go along with it. I’d roll, roll, roll the dough and she would kick her legs and let her tongue hang out. If I tried to stop before she was ready, she’d blow dog snot on my hand and insist we roll more dough. It was adorable. She was old and dying of cancer, but she loved to roll the dough.

• She was a princess. Barley and I have always done a lot of hiking, but Molly was old and not accustomed to a lot of exercise. Still, she always wanted to go. When she’d get tired on the trail, she’d look at me with her big eyes and I’d carry her for a while (as long as my arms would hold out, see the point made above). Then, she’d get down and walk a little more, and I’d carry her a little more, taking turns until we got back to the car. She loved to be carried. She’d put her paws and her head on my shoulder and look behind me like a baby. A lumpy, hairy baby. The best kind.

I only had Molly for about a year, though I knew her for much longer. I took her into my home, put her on a diet and exercise program, and loved her very much. I had expected to have several years with her, but by the time the vet found the cancer, it had already spread through her bladder, abdomen, and lungs; there was nothing anyone could do. So, I had to let her go. It was very hard, but I love thinking about her and remembering how special she was. It’s funny, but I never actually called her Molly very often. I called her Lady, Ladybug, The Miss, Missy, and all kinds of nicknames. In spite of everything, she was always so funny and full of affection. She loved to roll in the grass and sleep in the sunshine. I miss her.

To honor two of my favorite ladies, Miss Molly, who’s been gone a long time, and Miss Etta James, who died this week, here’s one of my all-time favorite songs.

A snow-tastic few days off for almost everyone

We’re having the worst winter storm I’ve ever seen. Record-breaking snow, ice, wind, you name it. It’s been a wild few days. Thankfully, I haven’t had to drive to work and I’ve avoided the worst of it. I was even able to get outside yesterday for a lovely walk in some very deep snow in my neighborhood. Today, however, is a mess. There’s ice everywhere and it’s impossible to walk around, let alone drive. Dougal won’t pee because he can’t get sure enough footing to make it happen. Poor kid. I’m just trying not to fall on my ass or, worse yet, take out another knee.

My snow dogs

That said, I love snow and snow days. I’m a natural hermit. I love doing my yoga videos in the living room, playing cards, watching court shows, and being a bum. Here are a few things I’ve learned during my two days of unscheduled time off:

• The oven timer is a dieter’s friend. I’ve discovered that setting the oven timer is a great way to keep me from snacking on my days off. I set the timer for three hours and don’t eat anything until the alarm goes off. That way, instead of focusing on eating well for an entire day at a time, I really only have to make it through the next three hours. It’s working so far. It’s getting me through these unstructured days without stuffing my bored face.

• TV news is out of control. Because of this storm, the TV news stations have been ridiculous. They’re reporting around the clock with almost nothing new to report. The worst thing is that I actually found myself transfixed for a couple hours last night. Suddenly, I wondered why I needed to see 10 videos of 10 cars sliding, when one proved the point very well. We all get it. The weather is bad. Can you stop preempting People’s Court now?

• Dougal finds snowmen terrifying. There was an incident yesterday with a snowman down the street. Dougal tried to attack him, but, since he was scared at the same time, he lunged and screamed, and lunged and screamed. (If you’ve ever heard Dougal scream, you know how ear-splitting it is. Horrible, horrible noise.) It sounded like he was being murdered. I know I shouldn’t have been laughing, but it was really, really funny.

I guess that’s about it for today. What did everyone else do with their snow days?