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Well, I am pulling out all the stops.  I have, in fact, NOT been memed.  I am stealing it anyway.  Dear Ree over at Hotfessional did a meme today that I NEED to do just to have something to say.  While she did not meme me, she did not meme anybody.  She’s spreading the love anyway, cause I’m taking it.

It’s a random thoughts Meme and she got it from Marylin at A Little Space For Me.

So here goes!

• Word for the week in my head…

Emotion.  Keelan is being so emotional and, consequently, making everyone else emotional. There’s no escaping it.

• Thoughts for the week in my head…

I hope, for all our sakes, that this medication works or one of us will surely die.

• Thing for the week in my life…

Henrietta wants to wear bras now and I’ve got to go out somewhere, sometime and find her some.  32 A bras.  Not because she is worried about anything sagging, her boobs are now getting irritated by the tops of her diapers.  No.  I know what you’re thinking.  Her A cup boobs are not hanging that far.  Her spine has deteriorated so far that her torso is the length of a four year old’s.  Literally.

• Song for the week in my head… For days now Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad by Meatloaf has been in my head and I CAN NOT make it stop!

• Food for the week in my belly…

Chicken and dumplings.  Made a huge pot of it tonight and it is soooo good.  I will have to give up my recipe here soon.

• Color for the week in my life…

No idea.  What the hell does that mean?

• Smile for the week on my face…

John doesn’t have to drive to and from Pearland everyday!  Hooray!

• Blessing for the week in my heart…

That John is driving to and from work here close by and has work to drive to, period.

Free toes everybody!

Well, the SIL showed up today.  She hasn’t been here to visit H in a few weeks.  In her defense, (and it doesn’t happen often that I say anything in her defense…), she is without a car right now.  Of course that doesn’t stop her from timing her visit to coincide with my finishing up getting H off the pot and cleaned up.  Somehow she is never here in time to do the potty for HER mother.  It happens at almost the exact same time everyday, and she knows this.  Well, at least she dressed her and drug her into the wheelchair.

I am now hiding in the bedroom and giving her the opportunity to spend some time with her.

Just went in there for coffee and SIL is watching a sappy movie on Lifetime and H is reading the newspaper.  Oh well.  So much for communication.

I think I will go and fetch the broom, and mop stuff and clean the floor in my bathroom as I washed all the bathmats yesterday and I HATE putting them down on the disgusting, hairy, powdery, floor.

Did that, just waiting for the shine stuff to dry and then the rugs go down.

Gee, I can’t believe I have sunk to the point that I am offering blow by blow action on the housecleaning.

SIL left after staying about an hour and 45 minutes.  I guess that’s all she felt she was capable of today.

John is at work having MORE company and a Holiday Open House today.  So I haven’t really heard anything from him.  Oh!  He did let me know yesterday that his boss convinced the bigger boss that he can’t live without him and not to move him.  That’s great, as she would have put him in a far away store in Pearland with a unit director that runs it who has been requesting him.  Loooong commute.

And the thing that tops off everything in this gripping tale that I know you aren’t the least bit sorry you tuned into:

Today I sewed a button on my pants, (are you ready for this?), WHILE I WAS WEARING THEM.

Damn, my days are something to just try to imagine….

Had WWlll today with the 17 year old girl-child and then John came home early to… intercede?  Anyway, no one killed anyone, ( I know.  Letdown in the drama department.  BUT A PLUS ALL AROUND.)  No one’s in jail or had any kind of restraining order issued against them.  Actually the police were NOT called and our record remains intact.  For the moment.

After a loooooong time talking, (listening) to her, and I mean listening intently, I went in to take a long hot bath and, yes, more breaking NaBioPoMo news, wash my hair.  Before I got into the hot inviting water I texted my darling hubbs and said:

Would you bring me a drink?  I’m in the tub…neck-ed.

His response:

Hell yeah!

Well, today I spent the majority of my time at Lisa’s house with her three year old grandson, Bryen and her son’s girlfriend, Megan.  We worked hard and emptied out her entire kitchen, (except for the pantry), and put every single thing in any cabinet or on any counter top in her dining room on the table.  Now if those SOB’s don’t show up to put in those cabinets tomorrow I will, personally find somebody to castrate.  You just don’t take a woman’s, (or a man’s, for that matter), kitchen away from them and not follow through with your promises to give it back, only better.

Here’s Lisa, Megan and Bryen hard at work while I walk around aimlessly snapping pictures…as it should be.

Good Gawd.  That was a lot of shit to move into the other room.

These pictures, I offer as proof of how badly she needed this redo.  I have known Lisa for 13 or 14 years now and she has wanted to do something with this house for a very, very long time.  Well she is doing it up right!

Her walls are sheet rocked and painted really beautiful earthy colors.  It as so much fun picking out the paint chips!  We even had professional help!  (Lisa keeps telling me I need professional help… wonder if that’s what she meant…)

Living room with the couch sitting in the middle with the cushions upended.  The cat and dogs are not welcome.  Yet.  The furniture isn’t coming back in yet.  Still some touching up the painters have to do and SOMETHING has to get done about that fireplace wall.  We have plans for it.

I love the paprikaish colored wall thrown in just for good measure!  Lisa’s idea and she was on fire.  It is a short little wall around the corner and is just one side of the foyer.

I wish I had pics of before it was painted!  It was bad and dark, and paneled in the living room and the LR and hall, along with the kitchen, breakfast area and utility room all had tragic flooring.  The living room was an unfortunate carpeting choice that she made years ago, (with me there assisting) and it was a horrible, stinky, stained mess.  (Lisa and husband, Roger have two large outside dogs that tend to smell.  A lot.  And even with the giving of a bath, this is not rectified.  Stinky. Dogs.  They are supposed to stay outside, but someone I will not name, (starts with Rog and ends with er), tends to let the stinky dogs in when Lisa isn’t at home.  I think he’s scared to stay by himself.  I am sure he would dispute this.

This is in the breakfast room.  Can you tell we had only just gotten started bringing stuff in here at this point?

They also have two small inside dogs and a cat.  Housebreaking the dogs and having the cat puke hairballs all over the place for ages has just worn the sanitary out of the carpet.

The kitchen, breakfast area and utility room all had terrible old sheet vinyl that was original to the house, built in the 60’s.  Now it is this awesome large Italian porcelain tile.

Strange side note:  Every time Lisa takes pictures in her house with her camera she gets all those weird little circles and light spots on the pictures.  You can see them above and I think in all these shots.  I never have that problem so I brought my camera.  These pictures are with my camera and there are still all the weird little spots.  What’s up with that?  Are they haints?  If so there certainly are a lot of them and they better not smurf up the new paint job.

Oh!  That’s the little antique oak table I am SO GENEROUSLY GIVING UP OUT OF THE GOODNESS OF MY HEART.  (I’ll kill her if she tries to put that thing back in my garage.)

Ok.  It pains me to say this but there is some bad news in the way of our friendship.  I am afraid I am going to have to report Lisa to the SPCA.  I even have photographic proof.  Before I show you these disturbing pictures I will explain what has, obviously, been going on.

Lisa has been contributing to the obesity, (I mean incredibly obese), of these poor, over indulged squirrels.  These poor guys don’t stand a chance if the cat ever gets out.  I watched one of them attempting to… scamper(?) up a tree and let me tell you, there was no scamper about it.  Poor squirrel looked like he was hauling a load of bricks up a ladder.  He may as well have been.

She buy bags of mixed seed and seduces lures attracts these little critters from the surrounding yards with her own brand of crack.  These guys can barely move.

There’s even a little one.  A baby, that she is trying to get hooked at the moment.

I think this little guy is doomed.  Here he is, so transfixed in his stupor he doesn’t even notice me.

Passed out Sacked out in a tree trying to recuperate.

Please remember these guys in your prayers…  I don’t think there is a Jenny Craig program for squirrels…

Well… not really.  But he could have!  And the important thing is… that that’s the story I’m going with!

It was, after all, John who caught the cabinets on fire.  He did!  NO!  REALLY!

A couple of months ago he decided he was going to make himself a tostada with some left over taco meat we hand and he popped a couple of tostada shells in the little toaster oven we have on the counter top.  I guess he set it to “Incinerate” and walked off.  Well, pretty much immediately the fire was pouring out of the toaster oven and the varnish on the cabinets was aflame.

It was exciting!

The strange thing is that the only emotion I can come up with is relief that it was him and not me who did it.

I wasn’t around when it happened, but he told me that he threw water on it.  INSIDE THE TOASTER OVEN.  I indicated that it wasn’t the brightest thing he had ever done as he could have electrocuted himself…but, then again he did torch some innocent tostadas…

I explained the theory of using baking soda to extinguish flames from an electrical source. (Assuming he didn’t want to go and get the FIRE EXTINGUISHER from the utility room.)  He informed me that he doesn’t know where in our kitchen the baking soda lives.  I showed him.  I am CERTAIN, within an inch of my life, that he will never need to know the whereabouts of the baking soda.

Unless there’s another fire.

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.

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?

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!

I almost forgot that I was going to announce the winner of the “What’s wrong with this shirt?” contest on the Friday of Ike.  I was …busy.  Sorry.

There were 6 contestants with the right answer:

Madam Queen-Leandra

A Screed In Time-Roger

Silly Me-Sebrina

Susan Crosby

Karilyn Hernandez

Speak Into the Mike-Mike

Here is a pic of Keelan selecting the winning name from the bowl! 

And the winner is……. Susan Crosby!  I will be getting an email to Susan ASAP and shipping her lovely prize of foot care products in the very near future.  NO.  REALLY.  There won’t be a hurricane this time. (knocking on wood, frantically…)

Thank you all for playing.  You’re all winners in my book.  Better luck next time…yada, yada, yada…

OK!  See, I finally got the long promised pictures up!  Woo-hoo!

This is Rich’s house, across the street, before the hurricane.  Take a moment and note the very last tree on the right…kind of in the background.  It is very vertical, huh?  You might even say exactly perpendicular to the ground…

Here is the corner of Rich’s house with a now somewhat diagonal pine tree looking to head toward Gene and Elsie’s house.  This is on Saturday, the next day after Ike.  It is being appraised by The Hunky Tree Guys.  Some of you out there, (ladies), may want to click and enlarge this particular shot.

As you can imagine, tree guys, hunky or no, were in great demand and raking in the cash hand over fist in the following days.  Here’s the kind of fantastic neighbor’s I have:  Gene and Elsie are gone, evacuated.  Rich paid The Hunky Tree Guys $1100.00 to do nothing but cut down the tree and just leave all these great big sections in his yard.

The Hunky Tree Guys are price gouging, big time.

Normally, the fee for this kind of job would be about $250.00 and that would include stump grinding and debris removal.  This is how busy they were.  All of this was done without Gene and Elsie’s knowledge so that the tree wouldn’t go crashing into their house the next time it rained, (later that night).  Of course they cut Rich a check for half the cost as soon as they got home and he told them what had happened.

Here is the front of our house before the storm and afterward it looked pretty much the same except for missing screens and one of the window shutters along with a buttload of branches and tree debris in the yard that we spent a long time cleaning up.

Back of our house all boarded up and cleaned off except for all the larger plants I shoved over in the corner.

Looking down the road going to my friends house…  needless to say, we didn’t go, not that day anyway.

From the car driving down the road close to our house.  Those are NOT bushes, it is manicured lawns full of tree limbs.  (Pardon the windshield wiper.)

A bit blurry, but you can see the huge root ball of the tree that just pulled up in the wind.  It’s laying over on the house.

The fuel center at John’s store.  Those are soda and newspaper machines that were tossed around like nothing.

Storm grate where I found the baby egret with it’s butt kind of down in one of those holes… I thought it was stuck there.

The baby egret, after I picked it up and carried it over to some bushes.  It was pretty small, that’s my hand there to the right of it.  I guess I could never be a professional photographer, (even if I was the least bit skilled at snapping pictures), because my first reaction upon seeing this bird was, “Stop the car!  That bird is stuck!”, and I jumped out and got it and moved it before it occurred to me to take a picture.  I could never just remove myself from the situation and photograph things.

Here is my love-bug sitting out back resting after we got through hurricane proofing the house.  We were just hanging out waiting for it to start up and noticing how weird and silent it was.

Here is the continuation of the whole Ike debacle.

Oh, I never did get the photos from John and he still has them on his jump drive.  In his pocket.  I am just not working out!  I will really try hard to remember to get them tonight, I promise!

Tuesday, September 16- Today I saw two hummingbirds and a housefly. Please God, don’t let anyone tell the mosquitoes how to get back…

There is candle wax ALL OVER MY HOUSE.

SO. FREAKING. BORED.

I can’t believe how awfully bad my carpet needs vacuuming.

I have decided I am not going to boil another pot of water for dishwashing. I have been inconvenienced enough already and if some sort of plague gets its start here, in my house… well, I’m sorry.

We are probably all going to die of dysentery. My next door neighbor said she never did boil the water for washing the dishes. I don’t feel I know her well enough to ask about her bowels…

Keelan went to meet the vet out at the barn as our horse and pony show now necessitates a visit. Dandy, (her mare), has a bad cut on the back of one of her ankles from… barbed wire(?). She got there and discovered, yet, another snake in her tack room. A couple of her friends were there with her, DJ and Victor and they, being boys, quickly and joyfully beat said snake to death with shovels. Eww.

Wednesday Morning, September 17- We got last Friday’s newspaper delivered to us. The first bit of outside news since last Thursday. The editor had a notation on the front page saying they are going to try to get the past issues caught up in the near future.

Our good friend, Roger, brought us over a generator and I hooked up the washer and dryer to it after I ran the fridge for about 6 hours. I then proceeded to do rapid fire laundry. Frantically.

As I was slowly rolling the refrigerator forward to reach behind it and unplug it from the useless hole in the wall, my grandmother’s 70 year old Kitchen Aid mixer fell off of the top of the fridge and landed squarely on top of my head. Dead center. I cried. That sucker must weigh 15 pounds and has a motor that could run a riding lawnmower. Keelan was frantic and I ended up feeling sorrier for her than me. It really did scare her to death.

Crap. I am watching a mosquito, (among the first of many to return), searching on the outside of the window. It’s the one window that is just cracked open a tiny bit because that particular screen was never found after the wind died down. Plus, the little dog keeps making her escape through that window every time she see’s someone walking their dog, so it isn’t open very much. I’m going to have to shut it because the mosquito is being persistent and will get in eventually.

OK, I’m back.

When I was done with the laundry I unplugged the washer and dryer and left the fridge hooked up while I plugged the TV and DVD player into the generator, also. (The cable was out well before they cut the power…probably as soon as the sun was behind a little white cloud. By way of explanation I say to you this one word…Comcast.) So we watched movies and sat and wondered what was happening on the news. What the surrounding areas looked like, death toll, what the evacuation looked like, etc.

The cicada’s are back… it’s gonna be a scorcher.

Thursday, September 18- No paper today.

Friday, September 19- THE ELECTRICITY CAME BACK ON!

Today is Monday, September 22, and they STILL don’t have everything completely full at the stores. At least they have opened the major highways back up leading into Houston. John’s store is getting as many trucks as they can spare to send him. He has worked 14 hour days EVERY day since the hurricane, and he is running out of steam.

My friends, a few neighborhoods away from us still don’t have electricity. Lisa is out of town, evacuated, and Roger is practically living at work. He is bringing over his clothes, which I wash and I’m cooking for him. Poor guy, I hope and pray they get their power back on soon.

Needless to say the Comcast services still aren’t working and I am betting another week at least. We will see. It would be fun to take bets.

We were really stupid when we signed up with them because we got a bundled service thing where our cable TV, internet, and digital phone, (whatever that is) are provided by them. Or not, whatever. So we have been without a landline this entire time and my cell bill is going to be exorbitant. My smart neighbors across the street never lost their phone service because THEY DON’T USE COMCAST.

Have I mentioned my loathing for Comcast?

Thursday, September 25- My friend, Lisa, was on her way home yesterday from evacuating to San Antonio and John was off work during the early part of the day. As we drove by her house on the way home I saw that her porch light was on! I called her immediately and told her that her electricity was back! What timing! Lucky dog never went without it the entire time.