HalfAsstic.com

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!

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.

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.

Last night, Kes was walking, (barefoot), through the kitchen on her way to the living room when she stepped on something.  She yelled, “Oww!”, and limped over to the couch to examine her foot.

“MOM!”

“Yes, dear.  I’m right here.”, I deep sighed… (I guess I should know where she gets it.)

“Ohmigosh Mom!  There’s a piece of glass in my foot!”  She glances up and says accusingly, “You left glass on the floor when you broke that glass cake pan the other day!”

You know how Pyrex shatters, eight million gillion pieces, give or take 6 or 7.  I am STILL finding chunks of it two rooms away as it fairly exploded when it hit the ground.  Not to mention the worst part was I was taking a batch of brownies out of the oven when I dropped it.

She plucks the offending shard out and shows it to me.  “It’s huge, Mom!”

She begins to tease now, “You left it there to stab me!  I’m bleeding Mom!  Quick get me a band aid, Neosporin, and hydrogen peroxide.  Hurry, Mom, HURRY!

I am laughing at the fuss she is making and go to the bathroom to get the stuff.  While I’m in there I hear her flip open her phone and start madly texting.  She finishes up pretty soon after I get back and doctor her toe.  I asked, so, who were you texting, and she replied, boyfriend.  What did you tell him?  She flipped her cell back open with the ubiquitous deep sigh/eye roll and read,

“I don’t think I can cook dinner for us nonight, as I am wounded.  Mom has stabbed me with a piece of the pyarrhea cake pan.”

Swear to God, she flipped the cell shut and looked me straight in the face and said “WHAT?”

I couldn’t stop laughing.  And even when I told her it was Pyrex, not pyarrhea, she still didn’t see what was so funny when she thought she was just being a litte silly.

Today at Chez Lopez we are undergoing technical difficulties.  However, not in a too terribly tragic way.  The cable is stuck.  Every cable channel is frozen.  And not in the most attractive poses for the people on said channels.  Basic channels all work fine.  But, hey, it’s Saturday and there is no sense in explaining how utterly and completely useless basic channels are on a Saturday.  OK, maybe not for someone out there.  But not me.  Henrietta is distressed, also.  No good can come of this.  I am gonna have to get dressed, walk outside, and get the damn paper to read. I need to just sue the damn cable company.  But I guess they have so much money they’d hire a very good, snooty, high powered attorney and investigate my situation and see quite clearly that my time is best spent cleaning house and not watching TV anyway.  I would lose.  They’d probably sue me for annoying them and I’d lose my house…. But, then I wouldn’t have to clean it!

I smell a lawsuit coming on…

Joan Crawford’s got nothing on me.  Just ask the wee small girl child that lives here with us.  Keelan is 17 and has some unusual ideas of good parenting.  She had a friend drop in to visit her last night about 9:30 and she and this other little girl sat in here, (the riff-raff room…where the teenagers hang out at my house) and visited and talked and giggled.  The usual.  Then at about 10:00 I came in here and talked to them.  Keelan popped up and  said that she was thinking about going camping.  Oh.  OK, with (insert friend’s name here)?  Well, yes.  With her.  “When?” I ask.  “Right now.”  After playing 20 questions like this to the tune of 136 questions I finally gathered that her friend had gone to the Texas City dike in a camper with another friend of theirs that I have never even met and said friend’s parents.  She had just left the camp site to “go home and catch a shower”.  So the thinking here is that she will swing by at 10:00pm and pick up Keelan and take her to spend the night with her and all these other people that I have never even met.  When I told Keelan that I would have to talk to them on the phone I got the response I was looking for, cause there was no way she was going.  She did all the requisite stomping, whining, and fuming, explaining that it was stupid to do that and totally embarrassing to her and “How COULD I?”  Etc. And then, per normal procedure, she said, “FINE!  I just won’t go!”  To which I said, “Fine.”, and was secretly very smug.

Now who’s a bad mom and who’s a clever mom?  OK, in the name of justice I guess I should add, who’s a bad, clever, mom?  I think I am a badass clever mom.

In other world shaking news, my dear brother of Squidspot fame has relocated an award I recieved a good while back from my good friend Trannyhead over at Law School Sucks, and so do lawyers.  It is now in the sidebar as it should be.  I really should stay on top of these things, but, alas, my housekeeping, er… “skills” are carried on over to my blogdom.  Such is life.  I am not going to complain cause hey, he got it done.  Yea, Cam!

I finally put up the new tie rack that my pop made and Mither and Auntie-Poo brought with them when they came to visit last week. No more ties on the floor! I can’t wait until John gets home and sees! Now he owes me-big time!

Behold! The Wall O’ Ties.

Well, I didn’t post all weekend and I usually do, at least once. John is on vacation and we are trying to knock out some of these household projects. Yesterday we rented a Rug Doctor and shampooed the girls rooms, upstairs hall, stairs, living room rug and our bedroom carpet. That is every bit of carpeting and rugs in the house. Oh, and I even gave the upholstery attachment a try on the chairs in the living room. It worked great! The younger piglet daughter’s room was by far the worst. Mostly because she is guilty of sneaking her wee, small dog up there for sleepovers and not getting up in time to let her out. This particular dog has always had a tough time holding her pee and so… she doesn’t. And her owner just decided she was tired of cleaning it up and there were several pee places that just disappeared and several large soda spills AND a huge-ass milkshake (I’m guessing) of some sort spill. All gone. I feel really good about the carpeting in this house now and hey, isn’t that what it’s all about. Can I hear an “AMEN”?

John went out this morning and got two new ceiling fans and a track light for over the fireplace so H can read her paper without the lamp that should be back behind our chairs, that we need cause hey, our eyes are old and crippled too. The old track light blew up or something, and now we’ve got this shiny new one. Halleluiah! The ceiling fans are because the old ones in the L.R. and breakfast area have shorts in the light kits that we have tried over and over to fix and they just can’t be. So I guess I know what we’re going to do today. Oh, that and torture groom the hairy dog in the backyard.

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This is an actual conversation I overheard between two dust bunnies in my house. Imagine Cheech and Chong style “accents”, cause, Yes. they are that rowdy.

Hey, dude! Roll on over here and pile up with me!

Duuuude! I’m on my way!

Yeah, just a tiny bit bigger and we can make a whole new dog!

I’m pretty sure we’re smarter than these dogs.

Yeah, it won’t be long and we can take over this whole household. We’ve just gotta hide behind a piece of furniture and if that crazy-bitch looks back there she pretends she doesn’t see ya. It’s when you break free and go rolling across the floor that you get noticed.

What about that man, dude?

Naww, he’s too tired when he gets home to be picking up anything off the floor. As a matter of fact I’ve noticed that he seems in the business of leaving things on the floor. The crazy-bitch keeps doing these deep sighs and shooting him evil glares.

What about the old lady?

Dude, she’s blind as a bat. She thinks she’s living in a freakin’ palace!

Yeah, well she’s got hot and cold running crazy-bitch. They fooled her into thinking it!

Those girls though. What about them? Do they pose any kind of threat?

Are you kidding me? They live upstairs and while they are very rarely seen down here, I hear they have an entirely different breed of dust bunny upstairs. Carpet dust bunnies.

Dude, I’ve heard those are fierce!

Yeah, well, they’re breeding them big upstairs…

At this point I just stopped listening. I mean hey, I’ve heard it all before.

I have to confess that yesterday I got caught up in an unusual place to find a romance novel, well for me anyway. The Pioneer Woman has a gripping saga on line of how she and her Marlboro Man met and married. She is crafty with the words that little lady. Go on over to and see Confessions of a Pioneer Woman and get caught up on a very interesting, touching story. Or as Pioneer Woman likes to say, if you’re looking for an excuse to take a cold shower…

Anyway, I spent the majority of the time I should have been accomplishing domestic crap, reading. Gotta get high behind today. OH! Wait a minute, no I don’t! It’s Sunday and that’s all the excuse I need today! Hell, it could be hours or even DAYS till we all run out of clean underwear!

This reminds me of The Great Underwear Fiasco of 1996, as it is called by my friend, Lisa and myself. John ran completely out of clean underwear one morning when getting ready for work, which you wouldn’t think was that big of a deal. You’d be wrong.

I had recently thrown a few old raggedy pairs out and hadn’t bought any new ones yet and so the stack of skivvies was a little low anyway, but, I really just hadn’t gotten around to doing laundry…in a timely manner. John was having a really bad morning and had just plain gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and he just kinda lost it and was having a little fit at me about not having clean underwear. It was one of those things that was so blown out of proportion and over dramatized by John that as mad and irate as he was, I wanted to laugh so bad just because he was being so silly. But, that would have made things much worse. So of course as soon as he left even before he had the chance to call and apologize for being an ass and yelling at me, I called Lisa and we laughed hysterically over the whole exchange. The day went down in infamy.