HalfAsstic.com

I have virtually nothing to post about today. Background info, anyone? H’s poop stories? I gotta tell ya’ the poop stories wear a little thin with me pretty quick, depending on what’s been going on in that department. Sometimes I feel like I am bursting at the seams with valuable information about all things BM. And, hey, deep down inside I just KNOW I must share and keep you, my dear reader informed. But, really. After a while, isn’t it just a crutch? Yes? That’s what I thought, too.

Thankfully, (for you), H is a bit constipated right now. Too much info? Oh well.

How ’bout my situation. You may or may not remember when I first started posting me mentioning that I don’t drive. The reason for this is that I’m partially blind. Actually, half blind. Literally. Now you are thinking that I am blind in one eye because that is the obvious thing to think. But I’m not. I am exactly half blind in each eye. Weird, huh? It is due to a brain injury I had when I was two weeks shy of 15 years old. I was in a car accident while a friend of my cousin’s was driving my little boyfriend and me to a nearby town to go to Sonic. At least that might be the story, as is typical with brain injuries I don’t remember anything about what was happening that night or anytime around there, before or after, for a good while. Apparently he was going very fast and neglected to turn with the road, when he ran up in someones yard and hit a tree. I was reportedly turned around backwards talking to my boyfriend who I had stuck in the backseat. I hit my head against the window, windshield… something and had neurosurgery to remove an “acute subdural hematoma” in Lafayette-stinking-Louisiana. Now, I don’t want anyone living in Louisiana to be offended because of my feelings toward it. The fact is that in the body of the state of Louisiana we lived pretty much in the armpit. Or maybe somewhere between the asshole and balls, take your pick. It was an incredibly tiny little town called Vidrine, just outside of Ville Platte. There were a few very nice people there, but the majority of the population made hillbillies look cosmopolitan.

Anyway, putting aside all my feelings for the Neanderthals that lived there….Oops. I digress. Again.

OK, back on track. I got shipped to Lafayette via ambulance and a super smart guy dressed as a neurosurgeon saved my life in short order.(Yes, brain surgeon. Think Jethro Bodine’s wannabe occupation.) There are all kinds of dramatic things to say about the whole affair. My heart stopped a few times on the way there in the ambulance. Yes, paddles, “CLEAR!”. All that . I was paralyzed on my right side for a while afterwards and had to learn to walk, feed myself, brush teeth, write, control the weird muscle spasms that seemed to be working my body for me. Oh! and control my bladder. I wet the bed a few times after I got home before I regained the use of my right side, which was a long, painstaking process.

The emotional problems that just almost go hand in hand with head trauma were particularly hard for me to handle. I’m not saying harder than they were for anyone else who’s ever had a head injury, but it was, the hardest part of my experience. Well, that and being a bald 15 year old girl was particularly hard. Ya know they shave your head when they do that crap. Not a good look when your extremely skinny anyway. Can you say, “concentration camp prisoner”? That’s what I looked like.

My memory has never fully recovered, although I am able to get by without anyone noticing too much with the aid of lists, lists, lists of the things I need to remember.

But, without a doubt, the single hardest remaining thing that hangs over my head and will never let me forget about that part of my life is my vision loss. The injury wasn’t to my eyes, it was to my optic nerves so you can’t look at me and see that I’m partially blind.

And here is where my report, thesis, docudrama, long-ass boring…post was left after Wordpress deleted at least 2/3 of it.

Now. As I was saying… AGAIN. There is an optic nerve going from the right side of both your eyes to the left side of your brain and one going from the left side of both your eyes to the right side of your brain. Well, the swelling on the right side of my brain, (where they went in and removed the hematoma), caused damage to that optic nerve. And, as we all learned in biology class, nerves don’t regenerate. So, the really bizarre outcome is that from the middle of both eyes to the left, all the way, I have no vision. So in order to see something on my left I have to look directly at it. Well, actually, I have to look at the left side of it to get the entire thing in my view. It is a very precise thing. If I focus on the head of a pin I only see half of it. There is no leeway.

This whole fiasco happened in April of 1978. 30 years ago. That is so incredibly hard for me to believe. And after 30 years you would think that I would have stopped running into things and stumping my toes on door facings. Yeah, well you’d be wrong. God knows that I would certainly think that I should have by now. All the toes on my left foot have been broken, usually one at a time. Several of them more than once. My left shin is all dented up and has a good many scars. Yes. Dented. I mean not huge dents, but, in good light, in the summer, (when I’ve shaved), you can see little dents up and down that shin under the skin. I must have incredibility strong bones, cause I’ve never broken anything but my toes. (Knocking on wood right now…)

I had my license for years before I gave up driving. I was a fairly unsuccessful driver and that’s all I’m gonna say about that. I haven’t had it for about 20 years now and I DO miss it tremendously. Cabin fever can run high around here. There are times that I would just love to be able to get up and walk out and go somewhere. Just me. By myself. And take all the time I want and do what I want. I so took that for granted.

I think the very hardest part of all this was raising two little girls and not being able to do the regular mommy stuff with them that all moms do without getting somebody else to haul us around. I could never just pick up and take us to the park or shopping or anywhere unless we were asked to go by someone else. I have cried many, many tears about that. Wrangling rides for them to go to…things, was an occupation in itself.

It’s amazing to me that there is no peripheral vision test at the DMV. Apparently they don’t think it’s important. HA! Shows what they know.

I love shopping with John cause I just put him on my left and we hold hands. I don’t have to be super aware of my surroundings, watching out for displays and people. My friends never want to hold my hand when we go shopping. *sigh*. I gotta get a better group of friends.

I just clicked “save” and it did! It didn’t erase! It doesn’t hate me today! YES! Wordpress now validates my existence. This can’t be a good thing.

I will get back to the post I was trying to do before it was ERASED MAGICALLY WHEN I HIT THE “SAVE” BUTTON, tomorrow. But I would like to follow up on a very important subject here:

The Possum.

Wordpress will not let me type beyond this point, in other words not below this picture so I will tell you that the next picture is of the possum’s broken tail. Very sad. It has dog slobber all over it and is swollen and broken and ugly. But! Not enough to distract from that delicious cat food! And that’s what’s important. If you’re a possum, anyway.

Let me just say that I had a LONG riveting post ready to …post, when I hit “save” and roughly half of it disappeared. I wanted to cry. Mostly cause I poured my soul out in it. MY SOUL. POURED OUT. ALL OVER THE PLACE in that stupid disappearing thing. Now you will have to wait to see it until I can collect myself and do it all over again! I am so mad at Wordpress right now! It’s not enough that it’s screwing up all my pictures when I try to put in more than one. AND it won’t even let me type captions between them. It is now eating my posts and laughing at me. I KNOW IT’S LAUGHING AT ME!

I am sorry that I don’t have more than this to put up here today, I need to regroup and stab, er, did I say stab? I meant take a stab, yeah, take a stab, yeah, sure that’s what I meant….. what was I saying? Oh yeah! I’ll knock something out tomorrow. (maniacal laughter fading out…)

Last night Keelan was having trouble getting reception on her cell phone, (imagine apocalypse, cue scary music, dim lights), so she instinctively avoided the land line and fled outdoors to find a signal. Teenager.

Anyway, she is standing on the porch talking to a friend and she reaches down to pet the cat that she notices out of the corner of her eye while it is eating it’s food. Imagine her delight when she hears a hiss and she looks down to see what’s up and right before her hand touches “it”, she shrieks, hangs up and comes to get me to see this:

Yesterday there was a unanimous vote that I make my world famous deviled chicken for supper. John had finally come staggering in the door after a harry carry day at the store. His attitude is “I will do anything to be able to leave and I DO NOT WANT TO SHOP FOR ANY LAST MINUTE ITEMS OR I WILL NEVER GET OUT.” So he came home and he went in to change clothes out of his suit pants, dress shirt and tie while I got H squared away and told the teenager that we were going to be back in a min to listen for Mimi’s bell. He met up with me somewhere in the house and we finally escaped and drove the 1/2 mile to Target to pick up chicken breasts and a few other necessities. He parked and we got out of the car. I glanced over at him, obviously for the first time since he changed clothes, and noticed that he was sporting a navy blue shirt with some oil stain spots on the front, black mesh track pants and brown suede slip on shoes. I stopped dead in my tracks in the parking lot and said, “Honey? You look like shit.” To which he looked innocent and bewildered. Looking down, “What…?” I listed his offenses and he just looked incredulous and said, “Oh. You really think I care. I don’t.” And he then turned and walked into Target with me trailing about 10 feet behind. And planning on staying there.

All day I have been reading and hearing about folks pigging out at bar-b-que’s so I got to thinking about it and realized that there is an unwritten LAW stating that any red blooded, God fearing, American, (and the atheists too), MUST, under penalty of death people feeling sorry for you, eat a hot dog or hamburger on this auspicious day. It is just expected. And then I began thinking of the lonely package of hot dogs in the fridge that John brought home the other day and I knew I had to pay them a visit.

People. These are the best turkey dogs you will ever taste. EVEN John likes them. I know you probably can’t tell cause this is still my old shitty camera, but, look on the upper right hand corner of the package and see the little yellow square? It says 0 grams of fat. ZERO. AND THEIR BUN LENGTH. I will only eat bun length hot dogs from now on. I have set the bar high. Bun length high.

Have a happy Memorial Day and remember what it’s all about.

When I was young and cute and skinny and had mile long legs and perky boobs, (aaaah yes, I remember…), I waitressed in a swanky cocktail bar for loads of cash. For those were the days when the economy was booming in Houston and business men threw around cash like politicians do blame. I came across many an amorous man who would ask me for my phone number. I began to see the correlation between my tips and the giving of the phone number to those that would ask. A lot of my friends that worked there would give a fake number just made up on the spot, but I thought that was a bit rude and besides, return customers always tipped best anyway. So one day when I noticed an add in the phone directory for a place that sounded perfect, I memorized the number and gave it out at work as mine from then on.

I like to think that in addition to letting a guy down gently I also, in my own little way, contributed to Christianity when these unsuspecting, drunk dialing, slobs reached Dial-A-Prayer in the wee hours of the morning and there was no way in hell I was answering the phone anyway.

When we, (my whole family), were putting our collective heads together to come up with a name for this blog, I wanted “halfass” and I thought it wasn’t taken just because when you entered it in the address area it had no takers. My brother straightened me out and had me doing domain name searches the proper way. But on our way to the half ass tic website you are now reading we came up with a lot of different names. I wish I still had that piece of paper. The top contender in my mind, (until my brother came up with HalfAsstic), was www.VoraciousVerbage.com. I still think it would be a really neat name for a blog and I hope somebody else does, too and takes it. I realize spell check doesn’t recognize “verbage” as a word, But! when I checked on Dictionary.com, this is what I found:

verbage spelling, jargon
/ver’b*j/ A deliberate misspelling and mispronunciation of verbiage that assimilates it to the word “garbage”. Compare content-free. More pejorative than “verbiage”.

Now, I thought that the spelling of verbage assimilating to the word garbage was particularly telling. And pretty much told the same story the name “HalfAsstic” did. Not that it’s the story that everyone, (or even anyone else), would want to tell. But! I do think it’s a cool name.

I glanced out the window and noticed that the rotary club has come by and put out the flags in everyones yard so I went in and told H I wanted to show her something. I sat her up on the side of the bed so she could see out of the window and she started blubbering, “OOOOOH, it’s so BEAUTIFUL!”. She is SO emotional. I mean she could only see our flag from where she was sitting, so tomorrow I will wheel her, (a bit unwillingly, probably), outside and let her see the whole street lined with 10′ high flagpoles all proudly waving large, brand new, American flags and stand back, cause the waterworks will be on!

So far today, John has gone to work and he has a “close” shift, which is ironic because his store is open 24 hours. To “close” just means work the late shift. He goes in at 1:00 and will get off about 11:00 or midnight.

Gil, who is Kes’ boyfriend is upstairs with her and they are watching some creepy movie. I will never understand their fascination with horror flicks. But, hey, if they enjoy it…

H is, (true to life), on the shitter. So I am in a holding pattern until I hear the cowbell ring and then I am off to ahem, clean up her nether regions and get her dressed if she wants to get up by then. It is currently almost 3:00pm so, she may not want to get up today. She’s been obsessing all day about all the coughing she did last night. I have tried over and over to tell her that it’s just her allergies and her sinuses are draining. This tickles her throat and she coughs. No. She is having none of it. She announced that “I have a fever in my stomach because I keep drinking water.” Well, if ever there has been a good reason to invent some mysterious, abeit impossible malady I say drinking water should be it. I have an ingrown hair on my leg and I’m sure that that’s why I’m thirsty right now. Hey, at least an ingrown hair is possible. Fever in her stomach? What kind of old Mexican wives tale is that? Better yet, how on earth do they justify it? Someone swallow a thermometer and barf it back up after 3 minutes to prove it?

Ya just gotta wonder where this stuff comes from and why anyone would buy it.