HalfAsstic.com

Today, while shopping for bread in the Mrs. Baird’s Thrift Store, John and I were discussing the merits of different loaves of breads.  Which kind to get?  Hmmm.  I casually remarked to him, “So, what’s the difference between 7 grain and 12 grain?”  The guy behind the counter just COULD NOT let it go by.  Slow drawl,  “That’d be ’bout 5 grains…”.

Sometimes you can escape the smartasses at home, let your guard down, and still find yourself not entirely safe.

Greetings all!  You may, (or, may not), have noticed that I have a new site in the old blog roll.  A Piece of My Mind is a site inhabited by Maria, an uber cool environmental conservationist  I “met” on Plurk a while back.  It really is inspiring to read about her own exploits in the area of trying new things and new ideas about all areas of conservation.

Have any of you ladies ever heard of a Diva Cup?  Maria discusses the use of one and the benefits of it.  Well, that little gizmo may just be the best thing since sliced bread.  Here is her first post on the “non-absorbent menstrual cup”.  The Diva Cup is also environmentally friendly because it is reusable and not disposable.  Read about it and tell me what you think.  If I had any need for it whatsoever I would have one ordered right now.  I had a thermal ablation several years ago and am done with periods.  (Yet, I still have ovaries, uterus, tubes, all my bits and pieces, and there was NO cutting.  Quite possibly the best thing ever for people who don’t want any more children and have a healthy reproductive package. It was an outpatient procedure with minimal recovery time.)   I am going to show the info on the Diva Cup to Kes and Keelan and see if either one will consider it.  They are both on Depo Provera shots due to their intense dislike of periods, but neither one wants to continue since the injection of hormones into their little bodies causes weight gain and huger than normal boobs.  I am thinking this new cup method may be the way to go.

Now, watch out for whiplash while I attempt to segue into another conservation area.  Just a very slight change in subject…

My hot water heater is at one end of my house and my dishwasher at the other.  (Still with me?)  I use it only when it is full and don’t use the “pot scrubber” cycle, just the “regular” one or the “light”.  The dishwasher repair guy said to cut down on the electric bill make sure the hot water is flowing in the kitchen sink before turning on the dishwasher so it doesn’t have to use so much electricity to heat the water to the proper temp before filling.  HOWEVER, I have to run water through my tap for a good couple of minutes to get the hot water to that end of the house.  My environmental question is this: In this case is it better to save electricity or water?

I gotta go over to Maria’s site and alert her to my concerns and see what she thinks…

Hello again.  This is Krissa, not her brother, Cam.  I have sent a hit man out looking for Cam and will update as needed.

H is home from hospital, though for how long I can’t say.  Her UTI seemed well under control when she left on Sunday and her urine was clear and light colored.  She still feels bad and is very tired and her urine is quite dark again.  They sent us home with a Rx for more antibiotics and she has been taking them as prescribed.  Oh well.  I am betting she will be going back in the next couple of days.  God, I hope not.

On the up side!!!

Kes and Keelan had their first day at college and as senior in high school on Monday.  They both really excited about the upcoming year.  So am I!

The weekend before school started Keelan was at a friends house and a… small herd of boys showed up at the front door to see her.  I was quite busy doing something or another and met them at the door before they could ring the bell and set the obnoxious dog off barking.  They asked if she was here and I said no, she was at Anna’s house.  They left and I called her later when I wasn’t so tied up doing things and told her that some boys were here and did they call her on her cell?  “No, who was it?”  Er, I didn’t know…  “What did they look like?”  Tall, skinny with stringy hair.  (Hint, all the kids she knows look like that.)  “MOM!  What color was their hair?”  I don’t know, brown?  Blondish?  “Mom! was it ____?  Or _____?”  I dunno, Keelan.  They all look pretty much the same to me and I didn’t really pay any attention cause I was in a hurry.  “Gawd, Mom!  What if one of them was my future husband?”  I dunno, what if all of them were your future husbands?  “MOM!”  KEELAN!

Later she let me know who they were and that there were two of them and not three as I thought there was.  Also that one of them had pink streaks died in his hair.  I said something like, Huh?…pink? Really?

I then promised to be sure and ask any boys that come to the door while she is out if they are her future husband.

“GAWD MOM!”

Sometimes you just can’t make people happy…

Hello everyone!  This is Cam, Krissa’s much, much younger brother.  I am INVADING Halfasstic.com to announce that I have finally gotten around to updating it to the current version of WordPress AND finally installed Akismet (a comment spam blocker).  So now Krissa should be able to manage her comments much easier than before.

Before I go, however, I’d like to leave you with a few gems I came across when I was recently back at our mom and dad’s.  Call it revenge for the pictures Krissa posted of me back in July for my birthday.

Enjoy, and please comment!

(to view in their full-sized glory, click on them!)

Hello boys and girls.  I have been spending time doing things other than reading my blog sites and I am so sorry!  I need to get caught up, but I need to do laundry worse.  I haven’t been here much in the past few days as Henrietta got herself in hospital.  OK, really, the ambulance got her there, but still…

About 3:30 Thursday morning she rang the bell and I went in and she was shaking really, really hard.  I felt of her and she had no fever so I thought she was surely having a really bad anxiety attack.  She has before, so I got her an ativan and gave it to her and told her not to worry she’d feel better soon and she did and fell asleep within about 10 to 15 minutes.  I left her bedside table lamp on and went back to bed.  Next morning I went in and looked at her and turned off the lamp and tiptoed out.  The anxiety attacks really take it out of her, though she doesn’t have them often, so I wasn’t surprised when she slept in late.  I went by her room about 11:30 and she was sleeping but the lamp was on.  Strange.  So she had been up, but why had she turned the lamp on, it’s daylight and there was plenty of light in the room.  I walked over and looked at her and fliped off the lamp and opened the blinds a bit and she opened her eyes and looked at me and started trying to talk.  It was like something out of a nightmare.  I couldn’t make out what she was saying at first, her words were slurred and she couldn’t talk loud enough at all either.  I got down and listened and asked her questions and she said things that made no sense at all.  So I started calling people and ended with 911.  They came and got her and while they were here assessing her, the hot, young cutie that was doing most of the talking said that yes, she could be having a stroke, but the fact that I was treating her for yet another UTI, (urinary tract infection), told him that she could possibly be septic and the symptoms mimic those of a stroke very closely.  I, personally, thought it wasn’t possible, just because her previous UTI had gotten much worse than this one.  With this one she didn’t even  have any symptoms.  I would have never known she had one without the urinalysis they did as a follow up from the previous UTI.  In hind site I can see that it was all the same one and the antibiotics from the first one didn’t completely get rid of it.

So H gets hauled off to the hospital and I went with her.  My friend, Lisa followed in her car.  This was about noon and she went straight to an ER room and stayed there for a few hours and was put in a room by about 9:30.  They have, by now run every test under the sun and determined that:

A) She freaks out when in the MRI machine.

B) She did not have a stroke.

C) “She’s a pistol.”

D) When she misses her dose of Miralax she can’t poo.

E) When she gets two doses of Miralax too close together she has diarrhea.

F) When I find out they are running all kinds of stupid tests that don’t make a hill of beans difference, just stress her out,  I get pissed off.

G) When I call and have them leave a note on her chart for the Dr. to call me, I mean it and will call and chew out everybody else in the nurse’s station if he doesn’t.  (He makes rounds at 6:00AM.)

The night before she had these problems at home, when I changed her diaper and put her to bed, I noticed she had a strange line of diaper rash kinda down on her thigh a little bit.  I was telling Lisa about it in the hospital after we got her in a room.  I looked down at H and asked her if she’d mind if I showed Lisa her diaper rash. (At this point I should point out that Lisa’s mom died of multiplemyloma and Lisa took care of her up until her death, so she knows at least some, and usually a lot, about every aspect of care giving.)  Immediately after I asked her if she’d mind me showing Lisa her rash, without pausing, she looked at Lisa, pulled a deadpan face, and said, “It’ll cost you $20.00.”  Lightning fast wit, that one.  The nurse came in and she looked at her and said “It’ll cost you 20, too!”  She died laughing and we were all giggling uncontrollably.   She also told us to tell the EMT that she’s single.  My gawd, I’ve got to watch her like a hawk!

H) She charges for a peek at her hooch.

Hi all!

The other day, Monday in fact, John and I spent the better part of the day on a not so fun project.  For a while now every time I opened the flatware drawer there seemed to be a fine coating of flour or powdered sugar or Bisquick, something of that nature, on the utensils.  I just thought one of the girls spilled some in there and not much more of it.  After several times, though, I became suspicious.  I reached inside the drawer and wiped my fingers along the underside of the counter top.  Upon the removal of my hand I promptly threw up.   No, not really, but I wanted to.  White, powdery mold.  I grabbed a flashlight and looked in at the backs of the cabinets.  Nothing.  No water stains or mold or even cobwebs.  Very clean.  HOWEVER, when I shined my light up at the underside of the Formica it was all covered in the white mold.  So when John got home and after a little inter net research we went out and got some bleach a spray bottle and some sponges.  We removed the drawers and all of the contents of the cabinets before I spent about 5 minutes on my hands and knees with my head stuck in the cabinets spraying that bleach all over the underneath of the counter top.  Man!  That stuff burns the eyes!  We waited a while and repeated the process.  Or, I should say I repeated the process!  John has “bad knees” that bother him every time there is the need to crawl around on the tile floor.  Whatever.

The neat thing is that the mold had disappeared immediately after I sprayed the first time.  I mean not a trace of it anywhere.  Poof!  Disappeared in a cloud of… well, not mold.  Has anything like this happened to anyone else.  There was no moisture under there and never had been, and it was only on that side of the sink, not the other side.  Weird.

Hello, people.  Greetings to all!  I have had company today and they FINALLY left, not a moment too soon!  My SIL came and brought her son, his…girlfriend and their two children to see Henrietta.  Every time she brings these people they break something big.  The last time they were here the…girlfriend-in-law climbed up on the trampoline with her little boy when she was EIGHT MONTHS PREGNANT, and the rusted out frame gave way and it is a thousand wonders little miss dumb ass didn’t give birth right there.  I was inside and didn’t witness the dumb ass wonders taking place in the backyard, otherwise she would have never gotten up there.  You just kinda of assume that not only is she old enough to watch her own children she can make responsible decisions for herself.  Or, at least I did.  Never again, though.

This time the 3 year old hellion that was on the trampoline with his mom last time was running all over the house and being an Unholy Terror.  He went outside with his dad to get something out of the car and ran back to the door ahead of his dad and struck the leaded glass panel with his hands and broke a good sized hole out of the bottom of it.

PLUS, I found out some things about their finances while they were here that really chapped me arse.  I know, I know, what business is it of mine?  Plenty, it turns out.  SIL is forever going on about how poor ____ and _______ are so broke and need money so bad and they need groceries and can we spare some money to help them out?  So I usually fork over a check for $35.00 or $40.00.  Well, SIL said something about how you can get online on her son’s TV set.  I looked at him and said, “Oh?  How do you do that?  Special kind of TV?”  No, it’s with his PlayStation 3.  “Oh, I didn’t know PlayStation 3’s could get online…”  No, not all of them, just a special kind.  “Oh, wow.  How much are they?”  Five hundred dollars.

The little shit can afford to buy the most expensive games out there, yet, apparently, has some difficultly providing for his ever increasing family.  No longer my worry.  The well has dried completely up.  Next time SIL tells me they are near death and starvation, I will tell her to suggest to them hocking the PS3.

Mark My Words inter-tubes, no more free rides for these jokers and I may even cut off my family…er, no, before I could finish this sentence Keelan called and wants to borrow $10.00 to go to the movie.  But, ya know what?  She’ll pay me back,  Without me having to ask for it!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In…more upbeat news, I have a new blog award!  My brother, Cam, bestowed it on me and while the cute little hiney on the award doesn’t look anything like H’s little shriveled up butt, I appreciate it, none the less.  Actually, I appreciate the fact that it doesn’t look like her at all.  He pinched the pic from this post of Big Hair Envy’s.

In appreciation of this cute little hiney, and because of the many diapers changed while dealing with all other manner of shit, I would like for Angie to have the first Loaded Diaper Award.  Congratulations, Angie!

Would you believe me if I said that I’ve been cooking, baking, and cleaning non-stop for the past few days?  No?  Well, that makes you a smart little cookie, doesn’t it?  If I had a gun to my head and some yo-yo telling me he’d shoot if I didn’t account for my time, I’d be a dead, domestic failure…rather than just a domestic failure.  I guess I’m saying things could always be worse.

I did manage to get a few things done today.  Sweeping the kitchen, breakfast area and utility room and doing my version of mopping to all of those freshly swept areas.  This entails walking around with a spray bottle of one sort of cleaner or another and a handy wipe, bending over spots, squirting, wiping, and moving on to the next spot.  Hey, don’t laugh.  My floor is clean…er.  I put things away left and right that have been slowly piling up for ages and cleaned the kitchen, and did several loads of laundry.

Got H on the bedpan not once, but two times for a grand total of two poos.  This normally throws her into a tailspin.  As I have discussed here before an unscheduled poo, or U. P. is a force of nature to contend with in this house.  She was reciting some panicky sounding prayers the second time I put her on, but other than that she handled it well.

John worked a “close” today and will be home about 11:00 or midnight.  He is enjoying his new boss and things are going smoothly so far.

Yesterday I asked him if he had chased any shoplifters through the parking lot lately and he replied, “No, I’m too fat and old for that.”  To which I immediately responded, “Your not fat.”  He groaned at me.  Seriously though, he’s getting older everyday, but he has lost a lot of weight lately.  He says he’s getting down to his “fighting weight”.  heh, heh, heh.

Pop is going into the hospital next Tuesday to have a defibrillator implanted just under the skin in his chest.  It is a battery operated thing that has two little wires that will be attached to his heart and if it stops beating or falters it will shock it into rhythm.  I don’t know much more than that about it.  Mom will ask more questions, I am sure.  I am wondering how long the batteries last and what changing them entails.

I guess that is all I’ve got to report at the moment.  I haven’t been doing much of anything or feeling like doing anything.  Very blah.  I haven’t even been Plurking.  I have also been neglecting reading the blogs!  And that is very bad of me, for shame and all that stuff!

I’m gonna try to get my shit together and get back here sooner!  Promise.  And I’ll try to have something to say.

Can you remember a time in your life when the Exact Correct Thing flipped out of your mouth exactly when you needed it.  You know, a time when later you would normally look back and think, “Man!  I wish I had said, (fill in the blank).”  But, not YOU!  You were dead on with your reply, timing, attitude, etc.  I have saved up a few of those perfect moments in my memories and was reminiscing about one recently.  I don’t even know what made me think of it.

I was a cocktail waitress for a short time in my younger, svelter days.  I was working during a fairly slow time of the evening, yet things were due to pick up in the next hour.  Happy hour?  Quite possibly.  I’ve forgotten.  I digress.

There was a guy and a young girl sitting at a table that each had a drink in front of them.  These two and their  drinks were there when I came to work.   They were getting a bit low so I slid on over and asked if I could get them anything else.  The guy, immediately, without asking the girl said, “No.”  So I just went my happy way.  They sat there like that, talking a bit, but mostly just looking around for a little while.  I asked them maybe once more if they wanted anything and was told they were fine.  After I had been there for about 30 minutes they disappeared.  Like I said, it was slow at the time and so I just left their drinks on the table because it was a very big place and I didn’t know where they had gone.  Eventually, when things got really rolling and the table was needed, I  picked up the two, virtually empty glasses.  TWO HOURS AFTER THEY HAD LEFT THE TABLE.  Almost immediately the guy and his mousy little girlfriend showed up and he wanted to know where his drinks were.  I told him that they were empty and I had bussed the table.  He said they were not empty and he wanted his drink back.  I was pure professionalism.

Hot Young Waitress: No.  Your drink is really gone…. Oh, hers too.

Jerk: Well you need to buy us another round cause you had no right to throw away our drinks. At this point he is noticeably raising his voice high enough above the music for little miss young-and-easily-impressed to hear.  It is clearly going to be one of those things where he wants to save face with the eye roller.

HYW: Er, no.  Don’t think so.

At this point Jerk pulls out a wallet and flips it open Miami Vice style, to show me a two part center fold of a drivers license and a police badge of some sort or another.  I glanced at what he was trying to impress me with, shot a quick glance at the girlfriend that could only be read as, “Are you serious?  This is the best you could do?”, and said:

HYW: SO? They check your ID at the door here.  I know your old enough to drink or you wouldn’t have made it in.

Jerk: Obviously distressed that I wasn’t impressed with the badge he was flashing at me, You stole our drinks and now you need to replace them!

HYW: Loud enough for girlfriend to be sure and hear.  Look, I noticed you have a badge and I know you people don’t get paid very much, but, really…I am here to make money not buy drinks for people that can’t afford it .

Jerk and girlfriend got themselves up and located a manager who, soothed them and bought them drinks, as any good manager would.  But.  He told me that if he had been in my shoes he would have done the same thing.  I bet he wouldn’t have known what to say, though.

Greetings all.  I am up early this morning with many things on my mind and I am quite sure that it will be this evening before I can make sense of it all enough to get it down in a post.  Then I will re-read it and think, “So why was that so hard to say and why did I think I had so much to say?”  I suppose just because it’s been a while since I was good about keeping up here.  I’m not apologizing, cause shit’s been happening.  And I don’t even meant he bedpan variety.  No.  Real, documented and undocumented, shizzle.

Where to start….?

Pop is in the hospital and, actually, is scheduled to get out today.  He told me on the phone yesterday that they told him he could leave this morning so he said he was going to get up at about 3:00am and go.  I told my mom he said that and she laughed and said she hoped he had a ride cause she wasn’t going to get him at 3:00am. He is such a character.

He has emphysema and COPD problems that got a bit of fluid in his lung.  “Pneumonia”, I thought.  “No”, the doctors said, “just some fluid in his lung”.  Huh?  Oh well, my understanding is not pivotal to his outcome, anyway, thank you God.

John got a new boss to work with and it is a vast improvement over the last one.  Oops, he isn’t supposed to be there until Monday, so I suppose that’s jumping the gun.  No it isn’t, cause anything would be an improvement.  Plus he’s worked with this guy before and he’s a pretty good one.  So that’s all good.

Henrietta is getting a new caregiver provider and she starts Tuesday.  They called and asked me if we would mind someone who mostly speaks Spanish and I said no, I didn’t mind and so did H so that’s a go.  As far as I know the hand gestures for indicating you have to poo are a fairly universal thing.  Well, that and H throws in some really good facial expressions leaving no doubt as to the amount of urgency/amount of poo ratio.

Got the first semester bill for older child’s college tuition and that was a nasty little shock.  It was something like $2400.  OK.  Well that sucks.  And that is after her scholarship was deducted.  Shit.  Then a day or two later we got an email saying that there had been an error and everyone had been charged $345. for a…something, can’t remember what they called it, but anyway that was an error and they were going to remove it.  So, OK great.  We looked at her bill and they had deducted the $345. for each of her 4 classes  so that just about halved her bill.  Yea.  Can you say “good news”?  We are college tuition bill virgins, (in this millennium) and had no idea what to expect so we were really anticipating having to spend about two and a half thou on it twice a year.  Next, text books.

And then there is the discussion of the younger daughter moving to Decatur, Texas to live with Nana and Pop for her last year in high school.  Strangely, she wants to do this.  She is disillusioned with her friends right now and hates her job and is worried about Pop and Nana both, mostly because they just plain need help.  Young, limber, strong backed help.  Family help.  Adorable, beloved, grandchild help.  The only thing keeping her from jumping at the first chance of going?  New school.  I really can’t say that I blame her.  I was always adamant that she and her sister never have to change schools if there was anyway we could help it and they never did.  K-12, same school.  I guess I wanted this so badly for them because I have attended 6 different schools in my life.  I didn’t know I was crippling them with an inability to flex and change.   No, I can’t blame her for not wanting to do it.  Very scary stuff, walking into a new school for the first time and trying to find your way around feeling like everyone is staring at you.  The New Kid.

Of course one of the friends she is disillusioned with is out with her right now and they are getting spray tans, eyebrow waxing and manicures.  How really bad could it possible be?

Besides, I am pretty sure she would miss me too much to stay gone for months at a time from me.  Yeah.  That’s the way I am hoping thinking it would go down.

We’re trying to die in this heat.  And not because it’s hot, but because we refuse to be and our light bill is run up to a whopping $600 last month.  NOW we’re being hot because that thermostat is turned way up.  This house is like an oven in the rooms Henrietta is in without the ceiling fans on.  When we are all in the living room and we are getting hot I stand up and turn it on and she looks a bit frantic for a second, (she’s convinced the, “wind will make me sick”), but she doesn’t say anything cause I am fanning my shirt and saying how hot it is.  If I get her a light throw or something to wrap up in she says no, it’s too hot for that, so I know she’s not cold.  Just weird and full of old wives tales.  What can I say, she’s an old wife.

I haven’t been to a movie in years and then about a month or so ago John and I saw the Indiana Jones movie.  Really neat.  Then again, when he was on vacation last week we went to see the new Batman.  Well, Wednesday a good friend of mine came over and we watched The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants #1 on DVD, and made plans to go and see #2 at theater yesterday.  We really enjoyed it, also.  So I have seen three movies in the past couple of months and before that I bet I hadn’t been in 4 or 5 years.  How weird is that?

While John was on vacation, my brother was home from Italy to visit and finalize the adoption of my brand spanking new nephew.  Older child had to work and could not attend the family reunion, as it were, but younger girl, John and I met up with Nana, Pop and Cam in in a park in the small town of Buffalo, Texas.  We hung out and ate at a near by resturant.  It was good to see him and I never know how long it will be until I can see him again.

Here he is with Keelan.