Great Sickie Event of 2011

I wrote this on my "other" blog the last time I had a lingering illness. It seems appropriate, since I am going on day 7 of this crap.....


Ode to Phlegm
At first it was a little tickle,
and then it was a cough.
Then sniffles chasing sneezes,
but that was not enough.
My eyes gooped in the morning,
dried snot upon my face.
Rush to the bathroom hacking,
lift the toilet seat, just in case.
Kleenex by the truckloads,
and NyQuil by the keg,
My lungs have just exploded
something gross upon my leg.
Green and yellow carnage,slimy, icky goo.
Okay, okay you're right dear
I guess I have the flu.

Saturday, September 5, 2009
~D

Beautimus

Okay, so that is technically not a word, but that is what the day was like today. It is sunny and 68 degrees outside as we speak. The trees are starting to bud, and Jonquils are already popping up all over the place.

I took Ms. Carol to Tuscaloosa again today--we joked that the car should know its way by now so we could just put the seats back and nap on the ride. She had her stitches taken out, but had another section that the surgeon decided needed to be stitched up. She has become a human pin cushion. Needless to say, that means another trip back to T-town to get those stitches out.

We saw lots of baby farm animals on the drive as well: lambs, kids, calves and foals. So darned cute when they are that size.

The one thing that was not beautimus is all the litter on the sides of the roads. I have noted that in the South, they just chuck stuff out the car window, or dump unwanted stuff on the side of the road or down in a gully. It sure is an eyesore. While Ms. Carol slept on the way home, I was composing the anti-litter campaign slogan for Alabama: "Give a damn, Alabam'!"

I have watched the most genteel of ladies throw a used tissue out the car window. What is up with that? I am baffled at the attitude. Do they not see how ugly the trash looks on the side of the road? Do they not know how beautiful this state could be? It breaks my heart to see such apathy. I have spoke to a few Alabamians who were born and raised here, and it is almost like they are proud of how trashy Alabama looks. One even said it keeps the Yankees out...Wow.

I love Alabama. I really do. I just wish that those who lived here were proud enough of their state to keep it picked up...

Okay, off my soapbox. I need to run to Millport and get Mr. Mike his antibiotics.

Keepin' it real!

Aliens, revisited

As I said in an earlier post, I am convinced that I get frequent visits from aliens, and that they are having oh-so-much fun doing experiments on me. For the record, I am NOT having oh-so-much fun. I am a mostly sane person, but I am perfectly certain that those little fuckers are messing with me.

1) I sprouted two bumps on my head about 5 years ago, literally overnight. They are on top of my head, like sick little horns trying to grow. I think they are actually some kind of transmitter so the suckers can keep better track of everything I do.

2) I have three moles on my leg that form a perfect isosceles triangle. Each mole is the same size and color. They just appeared one day.

3) Bilateral "ow-ies"--I have had several instances that I will get a boo-boo on the same spot on each hand, or each arm, or each knee, etc, etc, etc. Thing is, I never remember doing anything to get the ouchies in the first place--they are just "there".

4) Crazy-ass, unexplainable dreams. I have these ALL. THE. TIME. Case in point: the recent dream that I will recount for you now...

I dreamed that my father, Bud, and a few other friends and I were going to pick up a very eccentric old lady friend of ours to take out to eat. She lived in a huge mansion with lots of turrets and skylights. She loved birds, and had many wild birds nesting in her home.

We rang the bell, and another friend answered the door. He told us that a stranger had burst in, and then ran out of the house running. Since the stranger had been there, the old woman had disappeared.

We hunted all over for her. While hunting, I noted that there was a next of baby birds up in the rafters that appeared to be orphans. My dad brought a ladder and helped me rescue the birds. While I was rescuing the birds, I heard a thump and turned to see that a huge section of pipe had fallen off of the antique wrought iron stove. We soon realized that the stranger had stuffed the poor old woman into the pipe. It was horrible.

It was at that point in my dream that the birds were now tomatoes, but in my dream, I did not take notice. My father told me to take very good care of them, as they were orphans. Evidently, in the world of my crazy ass dream, tomatoes are where people came from. At some point, all tomatoes morphed into babies. There had even been a documented case where one tomato did not morph until it was 21 years old!

For some reason, we still wanted to take the now dead and pipe-filling old lady with us out to eat, so my dad was having some of the men tie the pipe, with the little old lady still inside, to the side of our bus (our group was so big, we had to ride around in a bus). I, for reasons unknown, had cut open one of the tomatoes and was scooping out the slime and seeds as though I was going to stuff it. A piece fell off into the sink, and I thought, "uh oh, I wonder if the baby will be deformed?" (good grief, I thought about this AFTER I had sliced it wide open???)

I carefully pulled all the wedges back together into the semblance of a tomato, sans one wedge. I carried the tomatoes with me onto the bus.

When we got to our destination, one of my former bosses, BS, appeared, and offered a $1000 prize to the first person who could correctly guess what is the most common start and end time of a shift for the average employee based on a study by the (blah blah blah) personnel group. I had the correct times, but I didn't get the prize, because BS stated that I also had to note that each time correlated to a famous mountain/volcano, one being Vesuvius and the other I don't remember now. Anyhow, I didn't win...

It was then I realized that I had either lost one of the tomatoes, or it had morphed and I just didn't know it....

End of that particular dream.

Are you now thoroughly convinced that aliens are controlling my dreams and trying to drive me insane????

I sometimes dread going to sleep, afraid of what I will dream next. Damn aliens!

Please Let this be the last...

These are pictures from just three days ago. The last of it just melted. Hell, we came to Alabama to get AWAY from this shit! Instead, Alabama is getting more snow than they have in ages. We lived here for 10 years, and we didn't have any snow that actually lasted more than a day during that entire time period, and it was never more than an inch deep; this year, we have had three snows that have stuck around for two days or more. UGH!


We had just returned from taking Ms. Carol to her umpteenth appointment in T-town Wednesday when the skies opened and it began to snow like there was no tomorrow.
Well, there was a tomorrow, and this is what it looked like on Thursday morning:



Sorry for not rotating the last image, but I wanted to include it to show that there was over 4 inches of snow on the ground. Geez!

Carol and I went and got our hair cut in Columbus on Thursday afternoon. She treated as a thank you for all our help. I had the stylist lop off about 4 inches. Sure felt good to have those old dead ends off! My hair is now shoulder length again. I colored it today, so it is like a whole new head of hair!

The boys went off today. I have a ton of reading to do, and Ms. Carol didn't want to go if I wasn't going. I hope they are having fun. I know Mr. Mike can kind of be a demanding pain in the butt, but I think it is good for both of them to have some time away from their "old ladies".

Felt like taking a much needed break before my brain explodes from my statistics chapter on finding margin of error in a sample population. Do I know what that even means?

I made a yummy supper of purple hulls, cornbread, and turnip greens. Mmmmmmmmm. Also made two round white cakes: one plain for Bud, and the other I am going to fancy up with cherry pie filling and whipped cream.

Looking forward to the 70 degrees that is predicted for Thursday. Now THAT is what I am talking about!

Seriously....

I soooooo want to just spend a day in bed. But as soon as 8am rolls around, I start feeling guilty, because I know I have two laid-up adults in the living room waiting for me to change bandages, drain drainage bottles, get their urine-soaked butts out of bed and onto a commode while I change them...pretty much my daily morning routine.

It is 9:30am, and they are both still asleep. I don't dare go back to bed, as they are sure to wake up if I do. Instead, I am sitting here in the frigid kitchen (only room with heat is the living room where Mr. Mike and Ms. Carol sleep) typing a brief update.

We had to drive Ms. Carol to Tuscaloosa during the worst of the freezing rain and sleet--fun times. Her wound just did not look good, so I called the visiting nurse to give it a look-see. The visiting nurse said it was infected; later, the doctor told us it was not. It ended up being a good thing after all, as we were supposed to have her to T-town by 8am this morning to have this procedure done. That meant we would have had to get up at 5am to have her fed and ready to go, and we would have been driving on ice covered roads in the dark. Instead, she had the procedure yesterday, and we were home before it was dark. Not that the roads were a joy, but it could have been worse.

It is still raining this morning, and because the surfaces are so cold and the temp is only 34 degrees, it is freezing as soon as it hits the ground. Due to this fact, the dogs will not go out to pee. Dixie, a feisty Lhasa Apso, took a dump in the kitchen rather than be subjected to the ice cold rain bullets. Can't blame her...

I am turning into a real southern bumpkin. I made jalapeno corn bread last night to go with a pot of chili, and I am making fried chicken livers for supper tonight. Who'd a thunk it? And these people are actually EATING it...go figure. They did pick out the jalapenos from the cornbread, stating it made it too hot. Wimps!

I am heading to Columbus once it warms up to put in a job application with Marriott Hotels International. They just built a Fairfeild Inn, and they are breaking ground for a Courtyard by Marriott. Wish me luck!

Crazy ass dreams last night. Involved petting an android cat until it had kittens, and competing in a dance off on a pre-teen kid's show. My brothers and I were like the Partridge Family or something (yes, I am an old fart who watched the Partridge Family).

Sigh. Carol is up, must get my hiney in caregiver mode.