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Well Mither and Pop are gone and we had a very nice visit.  They headed out this morning about 11:00 and should be home about 6:00 if the traffic cooperates.  (Not likely.)

It was great seeing them since we don’t cross paths that much anymore and I can’t ever go and see them because there’s no one to take care of Henrietta.  That really sucks,  mostly because they have all the extra room.  John and I gave them our bedroom downstairs and we kicked Keelan out of her room, upstairs, onto the couch and we slept up there.  Mither’s knees don’t work too well anymore and Pop’s breathing is quite labored, (many, many years of smoking), so the stairs aren’t really an ideal fit.  But our bed was, so that worked out well.  They were here for six days and we got a good drink of each other.

We found out that John is going to be moved soon to another store in the district.  The bad news is that it’s just barely in the district.  Pearland to be exact.  He’s got a good hour commute to and from.  More likely an hour and a half.  Not to mention it’s the new store and the largest one of this company’s in Texas.  Yes, indeed, they are having him do another &%*#$^! grand opening.  Oh joy.  (Feel the sarcasm.)  With all the grand opening stores he’s worked at before, (yes, they make a habit of abuse), he’s been expected to work 14 hour days.  (I would like to point out that he is a salaried employee and receiving nothing extra for the extra hours put in.)  Except he only had to travel a few miles to get to work.  I believe the furthest he had to go was Galveston and it’s only about 25 minutes to get on the island.  They are supposed to announce the changes on Monday and I am pissed off about it.  I told him he may as well get an apartment in Pearland and stay there and come home on his days off.  He thought for a minute and told me he wasn’t sure which would cost more, the apartment or the gas to go to and from Pearland.  Not to mention our car has over 100,000 miles on it.  We paid it off last month and I am CERTAIN it will fall apart now. *bitch, bitch, bitch*

Well, the good news is… I’m not dead.  I have just been on hiatus, hanging out with Mither and Pop.  They are down visiting and we are having a grand time.  We don’t have any big projects planned for this trip and so it has all been fairly relaxing.

While I have been relaxing a bit, it seems like I have fallen further and further behind on reading my blogs.  I am sooo sorry!  I have not forgotten you people and will get back soon!  At least I will be able to see when I begin trying to get caught up!

I have gone to the optometrist and gotten a prescription for my eyeballs.  Would you believe that my first pair of glasses is going to be bifocals?  How blind am I?  Well, I’ll tell you.  My distance is .25 and my closer up in your face is 1.75.  No.  I don’t know what that means either.  But I know I have to have bifocals.  I am getting the line-less kind, with a far, mid and close range seeing area.  I wasn’t so interested in seeing mid range as interested in NOT looking like I had on bifocals.  Did I mention that this is my FIRST PAIR OF GLASSES?  I was a little staggered.

Speaking of staggered…  I have a… family(?) situation that smacks of reality tv, like nothing else.  Think smutty, like maybe, Temptation Island meets The Girls Next Door.  Only no one is that attractive.

You may remember me referring to Auntie-poo, before.  She is Mither’s sister and my favorite person in the world, (Mither is sitting here insisting that I make it understood, except for her.).  Well, she has a son, my cousin, actually, who has a wife that is a true piece of work.  My cousin came home from work a month or so ago and his slutty wife told him she wanted him to move out that she had been communicating with a guy who is in prison and she loved him and they were going to get married.  As soon as he gets out of prison.  Come to find out this is going to have to be a June wedding, 2009.

June weddings are nice.

Anyway, getting back to my cousin, he has three children with this chick and was heartbroken enough.  She then proceeded to tell him that years ago right after their last child was born she was corresponding with another guy on the internet and they decided to meet at a Jack in the Box.  She told him that they had sex in the bathroom there.  At Jack in the Box.  When they met.  For the first time.

I can’t seem to wrap my leetle brain around this.  Maybe I’m not creative enough to think this “outside the box”. (Pardon the pun.)  But let’s consider this a minute:

1. When meeting for sex at Jack in the Box with a man that has never been met before does one just assume the restaurant facilities will be adequate?  Or does one hope the, ahem, gentleman has a van?

2.  In which restroom is the dirty deed carried out?  I mean Men’s or Women’s?  Miss Manners would definitely have something to say about this.  Or Emily Post.  If she wasn’t dead.

3.  If you are ensconced in a bathroom at Jack in the Box with your… lover, conquest, intended, slutmuffin, are you concerned with the type of paper towels offered?  I mean if it’s an upscale establishment with a roll of paper towels, that’s one thing.  You could roll those out on the floor and not have to worry about missing gaps in the coverage.

4.  Do you bring your own paper towels?  Oh dear.  Would this seem presumptuous?  Now, we wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression.

5. If left with only the folded paper towels that pull out of the dispenser one at a time, what do you do?  Move the party to the counter?  Sink?  Standing?

6.  Is there a lock on the interior of the door in the Jack in the Box restrooms?

7.  How long to you do “it”?  Too long and there will be people making racket outside the door and that will put a real damper on things.  Too short and your partner will be very unimpressed.

8.  What’s the rule about how old or big you can be to use a changing table?

9.  When it says “Family” on the door of a restroom, does it mean just relatives?

10. When it says “No shirt, no shoes.  No service” does it mean panties are optional.

11.  John wants to know, “Do you get fries with that?”

You know Witchypoo over at Psychicgeek has an advise column that I’ve been toying with different questions for here for a good while, now…  How do you think she’d answer,…..?  Hummmm.

Good news, well, for me, anyway!  Mither and Pop are coming to visit for a few days!  They are coming tomorrow and I really should be cleaning house right now.  I am going to have to get high behind here shortly.

Plus!  Nana will help me come to a firm decision about what color to paint the front door.  Here are more picture’s of paint swatches just to further confuse everybody.

I have been picking up more colors every time I run out with Lisa, (the friend who’s having remodeling work done and is spending a substantial amount of time at home improvement and paint stores).  We had lunch today while the caregiver provider was here with H and stopped at Sherwin Williams on the way home.  I’ll say one thing for the expensive paint people… they have bigger paint chips.  Home Depot’s are smaller and Walmart’s are even smaller.

Here are the ones on the other side of the door.

It’s beginning to look a little mosaicish on there.  Hummm,  Maybe I just need to tile the whole thing in different colors…

Things were moving right along today.  Everything going smoothly just like, proverbial, clockwork.  I should have been watching for the other shoe to drop.  I should have made everyone go freakin’ barefoot.

I went in and fed Henrietta breakfast and removed the tray and put her on the bedpan and she pooed and I cleaned her up and diapered her and took off her nightgown and put on her shirt and had her pants all ready, just had to empty her catheter bag that was rather full from overnight.  AS PER NORMAL PROCEDURE.

The home health care nurses that visit and leave me with the equipment that I need to own and operate an H. on a daily basis have consistently been inconsistent with the type of bag for the urine to collect in.  For several months I will have the kind I like with the plastic clip that pinches the flexible tube off.  Then you just tuck the end of the tube into a little hard plastic hollow bump attached to the side of the bag.  This is the kind I prefer.

So today I am in there working with the one I don’t like.  It has a green hard plastic tip on the end of the flexible tube that “clips” into a receptacle on the outside of the bag and a sharp edged metal clip on the flexible tube to pinch off the  flow of pee.

My reasons for not liking this particular kind of bag are varied, but, I do believe the most compelling is the fact that if, for some reason, the bag becomes unhooked from under the wheelchair and falls on the floor, (This has happened many times.), H will, inevitably, run over the bag and the metal clip punches a hole in the soft, pliable plastic bag.  Occasionally, this only creates a very small puncture and I don’t notice the leakage when she is taken into bed.  Then in the morning I am greeted with a very small puddle of, “Oh, what’s this?  Did she spill her juice?  There’s not much of it and it is right underneath where she was sitting…. OH SHIT.”  I then go in and look under her bed and there is small lake of urine.  A pond, if you will.

Getting back to my original enthralling story of urine mishaps, I happily toiled away at getting her dressed, pooped, peed and out of bed.  I was about to put on her pants and needed to empty the bag o’ pee.  I grasped the green plastic clip gizmo between my thumb and index finger, just as I had a million times before and pulled.  Nothing.  I pulled again, a bit harder.  Nothing.  Well, what is the matter with this stupid thing anyway? I pinched the two little things together harder that you have to do to get the damn contraption to work and finally the clip released.  It also, somehow, released the metal clip that holds back the flow of urine.  I sprayed pee all over the damn room.  It hit the bedside table and all over the floor.  Somehow I missed her bed skirt.  I don’t really know how that happened, it’s white for heaven’s sake.  Seems like, whatever demonic little twit it was that organized this assault on my day, would have managed to have the bed linens sprayed as well.  Turns out the devil was not that thorough in this particular war campaign against moi.

I know there will be a rallying of the troops and another assault.  I am waiting and watching.  I am a feared.  As far as WMD’s go this was just the urine.  Can poop be far behind?  No pun intended.

I know I will get a HUGE backlash if I don’t post actual photos of the catheter bag…  Fascinating, huh?  Aren’t you glad you stuck through the icky post to get to see this?

Here is the stupid clip thingy undone from the damn bag.  The metal clip thing on the tube had slid down and gotten caught between the stupid green pinching things.  Whatever.  I’m still mad…

See how sharp the sides of the metal clip are?  I mean, what could the reason for this possible be?  I suppose to use it to slit your own throat when the damn bag fails and you have to clean up an ocean of pee?  Yes.  I am certain that is what the manufacturer was thinking…

Yes.  Me memed.  But, it’s been a while so I will lovingly embrace this, er, cough, cough, opportunity.  To be honest, I had no idea what kind of blog fodder I was going to yank out of my ass dig up for today anyway, so this was quite opportune.  Let’s see… I went in to the doc for my well woman exam yesterday… I know we ALL want to relive that!

Right.  Moving right along, then.

My dear friend, Angie, over at Big Hair Envy tagged me and I’m really glad she did.  There are rules and things to do, and of course, my favorite part, people to tag, so I’ll get to it.

First of all, THE RULES!

1. Link to the person who tagged you and post the rules on your blog.

2. Share 7 random or, (in my case), weird facts about yourself.

3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and link to their blog.

4. Let each person know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

There.  So far so good.  Now here are seven trivial bits of crap priceless bits of information that are juicy nuggets of knowledge sure to help you win at that next game of Trivial Pursuit.

Ahem.

1.  I detest rudeness.  And yet, I am always worried that someone will perceive me as being rude.

2.  I had a tiny toy poodle when I was a little girl named Blossom.

3.  I am very short-waisted.

4.  I tend to be a grammar snob.  I silently correct everything in my leeetle head…and then look down my nose at the offender.

5.  I am a horrible speller.  A spelling snob should attack me!

6. I get around to dusting immediately when I notice someone has started writing in it.

7.  I think some of the cattier messages written in the dust on my furniture are a clear sign that the author HAS TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS AND NEEDS TO PICK UP A FEW EXTRA CHORES, LIKE, OHHH I DUNNO, DUSTING!

OK, step number 3!  And the poor saps winners are:

Roger at A Screed in Time

SSG (not to be confused with MSG) at (Sometimes) Serendipitous Girl

Ree at My life as a Hotfessional

Tink over at Pickled Beef

Karen at The Rocking Pony

Tranny Head over at Law School Sucks (and So Do Lawyers)

Colleen at Wine Please

Now I’ve got to get around to contacting you guys!

OK, bear with me people!  This is not as painful as you might originally expect.  This brings us to step number 4 where I alert everyone to the awful truth that they have been memed and the good news is… envision drum roll… It’s not jury duty!  So buck up, and pass along the pain joy to your other good friends!  It’s the American way!

After my doctor’s appointment yesterday I spent the rest of my time away from the home with a girlfriend of mine helping her get her house ready for some guys to come and do some demolition.  Tearing out paneling, carpet and walls.  I am excited for her and also a little bit fearful.  I am worried that there’s going to be big trouble because she has nothing in writing saying when the re-construction will be over with, or even begun.  She trusts these people because her sister uses them and vouches for them, but contractors are FAMOUS for doing a super quick tear out for half the agreed upon amount and not ever returning to finish the job.  Or putting you off for months while you live in a shell of a house.

We will see.  I will pray.  Baby will grin.

We took Baby to have her groomed the other day and I must say that I still find myself breaking out into a snorting laugh when I look at her.

Let me preface this photo by saying that when you cross a peek-a-poo, (pekingese and poodle mixture), with a Pomeranian you get a… noteworthy dog.  I am going to be very careful with my adjectives here.  She really is quite cute in person, just because she is so gregarious and smart… maybe not so much because of looks.  The truly hysterical thing was losing all that body hair, and there was a LOT of it, made her ears even huger, if that’s possible.

Ears up with her trademark smile.

Ears down and caught with mouth open while reciting a line of poetry...mid-sentence.

Is it just me or does that first pic of her look a lot like the little critters in the movie, Gremlins?

Hello there peoples!  Peoples?  There is more than one of you… right?

Whatever.

As the common expression in my family goes, “Do you want the good news or the bad news”? Well, the good news is, there is no bad news.

John is still on vacation and we are, in general, having a really fairly good time of it.  We have now added to the list of things accomplished to include:

*Called Verizon to get them to set us up with land line service.

Hopefully it will be every bit as dynamite as the cell service.  It was awesome during the hurricane.  They never even lost a tower, I guess.  All the circuits were busy a few times, but we always had service.  They are supposed to call us back… sometime.  My guess is that they were inundated with calls for service after Ike, from Comcast customers that lost service before the hurricane ever got anywhere near us and didn’t get it back until at least 2 weeks later.  Oh hell, some still don’t have it.  One month later.

* I caulked the edge of the shingles on the back of the house and the garage Thursday.  I did the front of the house yesterday evening.  I rock.

Here you can see how the shingles don’t stick out far enough past the flashing in places and this is where we are having signs of water…well, not yet damage, but the paint is beginning to bubble so rot is not far way, under the eaves.  And this is happening only where we were “short shingled”.  Coincidence?  I think not!  I went ahead and caulked the entire house and garage anyway, just to make sure we got it all.

Now here’s my dilemma:

I want to paint our front door.   It is an oak door and it weighs a gazillion pounds.  Yeah, yeah, I know!  Every guy out there is going to try to die at the thought of painting it, but it needs refinishing or painting really badly and if I am going to go to that much trouble I want it to be a pretty color.

Ideally I would like red, HOWEVER, the damn neighbors across the street, (really very sweet people), beat me to it and their door is so pretty! Especially when her geraniums are in bloom.

See their pictures below?  Don’t they have a beautiful yard?  Even with the recycle bin still out?

So, I was wondering about, maybe, green?  I would really like to know what everyone thinks of this.  My house needs some color as it is shades of beige and brown with pasty white brick.

Oh, please note the attractive piece of cardboard in the lower right side of the window in the door.  Yeah, gotta get that fixed, too. And I don’t usually have a ladder in the front yard but I was doing the caulking when I stopped and took these pictures. Also, the shutter that is standing on the ground by the post with the house numbers has been replaced on the right side of the window.  It blew off during Ike and I ran out during the eye and retrieved before it blew away.

See how dark it is in the itty bitty porch?  I am thinking a sagey (this may not be an actual word, yet you know what I mean…), green.  So what do YOU think?

As I said in the last post, John is on vacation this week.  We have managed to get a few things knocked off the list of “Stuffs to Do”.

*Make a new Financial Plan.

That, right there, just makes me want to giggle when I consider how misleading the whole statement looks.  But, yeah.  It’s done.

*Track down and attack the person in charge of getting H a new wheelchair.

Done.  It’s all shiny new and she’s got her bony ass in it right now.  I was somewhat disappointed, but there was no bloodshed.  The lady seemed fully cooperative and got on the ball as I indicated she needed to.  The wheelchair was delivered within 24 hours of hanging up the phone with her.  If only everything were that easy…

In addition to these things there were some others that never got put on the list that we did and I wish we had put them on there just so they could be crossed off.  We:

*Cleaned the garage

We threw away a butt-load of old crap that was, mostly…OK, entirely Henrietta’s.  She was safely ensconced inside or none of it would have gone to the curb and actually, the boxes o’crap would have spontaneously reproduced themselves and made more to clean up.  This is a phenomenon particular only to H as far as I can tell.  She cannot be turned loose with any amount of stuff to “Go through it and throw away the trash, Henrietta.”.  The pile o’shit will grow and grow and I swear she has a wicked kind of black magic that she uses and produces more old greeting cards, plastic plants, (complete with plastic flowers), broken jewelry boxes and picture frames, (with and without torn pictures that don’t fit the frame), glued together coffee cups, moth eaten clothes that she hasn’t worn since 1958, thousands of ancient books on Catholicism, (I mean we’re talking copyrighted in the 50’s and 60’s), and an assortment of shit that defies description.

*Got John a new bluetooth that will work with his new phone.

Tomorrow we compare insurance rates and caulk the shingles.  Or, rather, I should say, I will caulk the shingles.  While John’s not scared of heights, it just goes without saying that any work being done on a ladder is going to be done by me.  I don’t know why this is, it just is.  DO NOT FEEL SORRY FOR ME.  Any grocery shopping that gets done, is done by him.  Well, almost all.  I feel like this is a fair trade, and what I think is what’s important.

We had fajita papas tonight, (beef fajita meat with cheese, salsa, chives, sour cream, etc. piled into a baked potato),  and the SIL and her guy friend were here and they stayed and ate.  They were very good and I highly recommend that everyone show up at our house the next time we have them and partake.  I guess I really should give a heads up when we are about to do them again.  I will.

OH!  Tomorrow I hope to have the garage finished, also!

Free toes, everyone!

Hello again, people.

A few days ago Keelan was sitting in living room on the couch reading her book  I was talking to Henrietta about something and I forget what we were discussing but it became necessary for me to use the word Fritos.  Well, let me preface this by explaining that the only thing worse than H’s hearing is her comprehension.  Her little mind races and she… tries too hard(?) and over thinks what you are saying and totally gets the words screwed up.  It’s like playing Password with a hyper, narcissistic, mental patient.

Anyway, as I was saying, I don’t remember what we were talking about but I used the word “Fritos”.   Only when I said it to H it was broken into two distinct syllables and enunciated very clearly.  FREE TOES! (Imagine me shouting into her ear…)   Well, Keelan tried to die.  First I heard her snort and then she said, “Did I just hear you say ‘free toes’?”  and she was gone.  Dissolved into a fit of giggles that wouldn’t stop.

Did not matter how hard I tried to explain to her why I had said it that way, she would. not. stop. laughing.

I finally just said “OK!  I’m from Texas AND SO ARE YOU!  Is it really so hard to figure out why I went “there” with the word?”

Now every time I want to make her smile, I just say “Free toes”.  And sometimes I text her, “Free toes”.

John is going to be on vacation next week, starting tomorrow and we have a list of things to do.  (oh yea)  He is going to need some time to recuperate from the hurricane schedule they have had to adhere to at work and truly I feel for him about this because I know he is truly tired.

But here’s the list anyway:

*Caulk the shingles

*Change phone companies

*Compare insurance rates, USAA and Allstate

*Make a new financial plan

*Track down and attack the person in charge of getting Medicare to give H a new wheelchair.

And this is just the beginning.

Thursday “they” came by and picked up all the brush piled on our curb since the hurricane.  Things are beginning to look a bit more normal around here.  At least our street is.  Except for all the sawed off trees and huge holes in the ground where they just pulled up, root ball and all.

I called Housecall Doctors today and asked them to tell me how the x-ray came out that they did on H on Thursday.  The Dr on call called me back and told me that, (surprise, surprise), she has a dislocated hip.  I said I already knew that and explained the problem to him and told him her history and what I was worried about.

He told me to take her to see a orthopedist.

This lady is an orthopedist’s wet dream.  I wonder where he’ll start?  I figure that’s one of the things that will go on John’s vacation list after I talk to Darnell, her PA.

Well, I really need to toss this post up and see what happens.  Will the pooter spit it back out?  It should.

Free Toes, everybody!

Hello!  Today, boys and girls, I have been busy talking to Henrietta’s P. A. (physician’s assistant), home health care nurse, and the x-ray technician who came out to snap some glamor shots of her.

She’s got a totally bizarre and perplexing problem residing in her… (are you ready for this… go ahead and take a wild guess…) ass.

To make a long story short, (Yes.  I am aware nobody thinks I can do this. *sigh* Now I am going to have to prove myself…) She broke her hip a couple of years ago and while she was still in the hospital recovering from the hip surgery, they called me and said it was dislocated.  Doc said her muscles “contracted” and pulled her leg out of socket.  She would need surgery again to fix it cause it would just pull out again if he manipulated it back in.  Strangely enough, the old woman that makes the princess and the pea gal look insensitive wasn’t in any pain so she elected not to have the surgery.  I believe it was one of her cuter moments, she looked at me when I explained her options and said, “I don’t want to have surgery again, Krissa.  I’m old, already!”.  She was 84 and I didn’t argue with her.  So all this time she’s had a dislocated hip.  Or, actually, I don’t know why it’s called that because really her femur is dislocated from her hip.  Well, all of the sudden her leg bone has started… migrating around in her, butt.  Her hip is all wonky crooked seeming and the head of the femur is poking out in the thickest part of her gluteus maximus.  This makes it very painful to sit on for any length of time.  Her butt is bruised from the inside.

At this point I would like to point out that this was promised to be a short story not a normal one.

Anyway, the P.A. and I sat there by her bed poking around and talking about what’s up with her bones and placing bets on what the x-ray will show and what we think the different odd bits poking out here and there are going to turn out to be.

I do know one thing.  I see an operation in her future.  Before long that bone is going to start a bedsore that I won’t be able to cure because anytime she is sitting or lying on her back she is pressing against it.  Constant pressure.

John called while I was in there talking to the P.A. and asked what I was doing.  I said, “Looking at your mom’s ass with Darnell.  Do you want me to tell you about it?”  “No!  I gotta go, they’re paging me.”

The pansy-ass.