HalfAsstic.com

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.

Candy has zapped me with a meme of some complexity.  This is ever so much harder for me than the other ones I’ve done.  I am sure I can think of…something.  It’s a bucket list of sorts.  I am supposed to think of 8, (EIGHT), things I want to do before I die.  I have pretty much always lamented my lack of imagination in this department.  I am very much a “live in the moment” type of person and when something good happens it’s just a happy blessing that I wasn’t expecting, for the most part.  I don’t usually day dream about things that are too terribly far outside the norm.

Well, here go’s.

1. Travel with my family to Italy to visit family and friends there.

2. Pay off this house.

3. See my children happily married to wonderful husbands.

4. See John retired and taking up something FUN with me to fill our time.

5. Learn how to lead stained glass to make a panel to hang in the window in my bathroom.

6. I would love to make a significant, positive difference in the life of another family.

7. Get my license again.

8. Lose 25 lbs… and never find it again.

Now for those poor saps lucky chosen few!

Angie over at Big Hair Envy

Karen at The Rocking Pony

(Sometimes) Serendipitious Girl

Colleen at Wineplz

Claire at Claire and me

Roger at A Screed in Time

Moo at Moo’s Moo

Mike at Speak into the Mike

Now, I’ve got to get to everyone and let them know they’ve been, trapped in my evil scheme picked!

I was reading Moo’s Moo a little bit ago and she has an interesting meme idea.  She wants to know who our girl crushes are.  Well, I’ve got a few, and they are, I am sure you will agree, luscious women.

Go on over to Moo’s and check out her list as soon as you see these!

1. Audrey Hepburn

2. Tina Fey

3. Elizabeth Hurley

4. Mary Louise Parker

5. Candice Olson

6. Keira Knightly

7. And of course no hot girls list would be complete without…

Margaret Thatcher

BAHAHAHA!

Hello intertubes!  I am back with a quick update!

Nothing too spectacular has happened since the last time I announced the goings on here at the Nut House.  How bouts a quickie update?  Too bad, here it is:

• John was off yesterday and we ran amuck.  The caregiver provider stayed here with H and we were muckyrunning aaaaall over the place.  For gasoline to be so freakin’ expensive, we were WILD!  heh heh.  We made it to Macy’s to see if there were any good deals to be had and sure enough, John’s ultra sensitive nose for economical spending steered us to a few new ties for him.  His butt cheeks made a squeaking noise as we walked over to where the tie sale rack sits.  He is always needing new neck-wear, as he isn’t that easy on his ties.  We got three $45.00 Donald Trump ties for just $5.63 a piece.  He wore one of them today, but here are the other two.

They look a little pink here.  Actually they are dark red.

Here is the proof!  With tax, $18.28 for three Donald Trump ties.

The trick at Macy’s is to find the stuff that’s on sale and take it over to the price checker thing and start scanning anything that you are remotely interested in because they are really good/bad about either mispricing or just not putting correct signage out for the sale products.  And the prices are SO good that I think they are probably just making mistakes when they are pricing, but it works out great for us almost every time we go.  My sweet little miser husband pulled out his dusty, cobweb covered wallet and paid $18.28 for all three.  Good deal!

• Hurricane Dolly made landfall sometime yesterday evening, I think, and we finally started getting some much needed rain from it.  It is still raining off and on.  Woo-Hoo!

• My brother in Italy isn’t.  In Italy, that is.  He arrived last night at my parents house in Decatur, Tx and I am hoping we will be able to meet up with all of them on Wednesday for a visit.

• Henrietta is still catheter-free and letting her hoo-hoo rest.   I asked her how it was getting on and she pulled a super serious face and replied, “Oh, it’s doing very well, thank you!”, and then burst out laughing.  Last nigh she asked me if I would close the blinds for her in her room and I said sure and was doing so and she said, “Now make sure they’re closed up tight…”.  and I said I thought they were and no one could see in that little slit, and she replied, ” I might be able to get out through there, tho…”.   I said, “You?” To which she looked sly and said, “Krissa, I don’t have any bag to hold me back, now!  You don’t know what I might do!”

• Be on the lookout for a catheter free little old lady in a nightgown.

• I just totally told off a lady who called here from Dell Computers asking me if the problem we were having last Sunday was resolved.  I told her no, we still haven’t been able to get it to recognize the disc drive.  She said something like, “Oh.”, and immediately changed the subject a bit by asking me how it was doing otherwise.  I told her, “Actually it’s running slow.  My husband and I were discussing it last night and he and I have both tried all the little tricks that used to make a difference in the past with no luck.”  (Keep in mind that it’s a year old next month.  In other words, THE WARRANTY IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE AND NO MORE “FREE” TECH SUPPORT)  She came back with, “Well, I see here you bought it with only 2GB of memory and that really isn’t enough to support Vista.”

This is where I got ticked off.

“No.  It supports Vista just fine and has for almost a year now.  It only started running slow just lately.”

She proceeded to tell me that if I ever wanted to get it to run well again I needed to purchase some RAM from her.  Now.  On the phone.  Or forever be delegated to computer hell.

“No one told me it was insufficient to support Vista when I bought it.”  She comes back with a snappy, “Oh, uh, well?”

I told her no thank you we’re not sinking any more money into it because we’re getting an Apple.

That got her off the line.  She was originally calling to sell me another warranty.

• I am taking this opportunity to apologize for the lack of substance in this post.  THAT is the state of my life, lately.  Substance free…and applesauce free.

Well, we are a perverse little lot, are we not?  I have had some strange hits since I last did a rundown of google entries that led the unsuspecting lookie-loo to my cozy corner of the intertubes.  I believe the date of the last update was….May 19.  Just a little over a month, so what could possibly be new?  Let’s see.

Krissa Lopez got another 105 hits.  As I explained before, this is a bit of a cheat as there is a fairly popular southwest artist named Krissa Lopez and try as I may I CANNOT figure out how to get in touch with her.  It’s been a while since I attempted to find an email address via the websites, but I know I never could before.

All other new searches got 1 hit each with the notable exception of “boobs” which got, (drum roll please), 2.

Here they are:

“toenail fungus”

34 year old mommy

aaaah boobs (not to be confused with “boobs”)

asian cum tube (eh, wha?  Oh yes!  the Cum Laude award!)

big ass tic

boobs and legs

boobs phone number

chapped arse  (You should know that the person looking this up was from Scotland…I don’t know why, but that puts it somewhat in perspective for me…)

confessions of a pioneer woman

dents in shin

export smoke

girls shave head

half ass teenager  (I’ve seen my share)

half assed cat food

halfasstic (Gee…ya think?)

long legs and boobs

long nails

my name is krissa

paralyzed teenager bladder control (awwww)

partially blind in one eye dmv

pioneer underwear

what happens in a cavity search  (oh dear)

www.halfantic.com

www.halfasstic.com  (really?!)

I would like to point out that my readers are a varied group of people and probably not nearly as sick and depraved as this makes it sound.  This is what I tell myself.

I am going to cheat and use the first 10 from a meme I did a little while back. No, really. You can’t stop me. It’s just the way I am.

1. I am the mother of two, (2) teenage girls, a 17 and 18 year old, and I attempt to operate them daily without a helmet.

2. I am the full time caregiver for my 86 year old mother-in-law, who is bedridden/wheelchair bound.

3. I have found that one of the worst experiences in life is dumping a bedpan of shit and pee in the potty and having the… water? splash back up and sprinkle your face in a fashion that would be somewhat refreshing under totally different circumstances.

4. I have a distinctive case of toenail fungus on the 4th toe of my left foot.

5. I LOVE to read. Favorite author of the moment is Janet Evanovitch. She is hilarious.

6. Have to be one of the WORST spellers on the face of the earth. Thank you God for spell check!

7. My husband, John, is the love of my life and a the biggest, proud-of-it, tightwad I have ever known.

8. My idea of a perfect day is to spend the whole day with my husband and two girls out of the house somewhere and have nobody argue. THE WHOLE DAY. This has never happened. But, I have faith.

9. One of my best friends resides in Italy and I miss her. (Hi Susan!)

10. My mom said to say that she is wonderful and loving and, most important, ALWAYS RIGHT. (Happy Mom?)

OK, now I get down to work…..

11. When I was very young I thought the song “Secret Agent Man” was saying “Secret Asian Man”. For a very long time.

12. My brother, Cam, thought the duo, Hall and Oates was really a group called Hauling Oats.

13. I prefer Jay Leno to David Letterman, but will watch whoever has the best guests.

14. I am very short waisted. (I have a very short body and long legs.) If my body was the right size for my legs I would actually be rather tall. I am 5′ 4 1/2″.

15. I feel like everything in my house revolves around whether or not the kitchen is clean.

16. I am a Discovery Channel junkie.

17. I love to learn things but at the same time I hate it because I know I won’t be able to remember it, no matter how hard I try.

18. I am horrible about starting projects, (major ones), and not finishing them.

19. My favorite tv show is Boston Legal.

20. I can’t stand raw onions, but like them cooked.

21. I love animals, and am a “dog person”.

22. I wish I knew more about computers. (Who doesn’t?)

23. I spent a good deal of my childhood growing up in Louisiana and have never gone back.

24. The funnest job I ever had was being a mannequin model at Casual Corner wearing wedding dresses outside the store in the mall hallway. I was so surprised at the amount of people who never figured out that I was a real person and not a mannequin.

25. I wish very much I had lots of friends that would come over and visit me a lot.

26. I second guess myself about everything, and almost always end up wishing I had done or said something different.

27. When I make iced tea at home I sweeten it and when I order it in restaurants I never add sweetener, just lemon. I don’t know why, just easier, I suppose?

28. To this day the smell of aerosol hairspray reminds me of summertime when I was a little girl. I’m guessing my mom’s Aqua Net.

29. On the one hand I want to be able to get out and “experience life” very badly, but on the other hand I am kind of afraid to and the thought of being afraid to leave the house is even more terrifying to me. Can “forced captivity” lead to agoraphobia? I’ll let ya know.

30. This list is harder than I thought and I have obviously given up on trying for only interesting things.

31. I am allergic, big time, to poison oak, as is my mom. But I could play in it when I was a child and it had no effect on me.

32. I can’t stand hearing people say “Where you at?” or even “Where are you at?” I always want to correct them. ” WHERE ARE YOU? PERIOD! NO ‘AT’!” Am I a snob or what?

33. I give up on things I am trying to do way too easily when they become challenging.

34. I am ALWAYS the winner in a “sarcasm contest”.

35. I am a very sweet person in general, but go for the throat if irritated.

36. I love Honey Nut Cheerios.

37. I rarely make my bed.

38. Van Gogh is one of my favorite classic artists.

39. My pet name for my husband is D.B. which stands for Doll Babe.

40. Sometimes D. B. stands for Dumb Butt.

41. D. B. is also his pet name for me.

42. We call each other this ALL THE TIME.

43. We hardly ever argue.

44. When we do our children are completely flummoxed.

45. I can’t wait until my husband retires.

46. We have been married for 20 years.

47. I like croutons, but not bacon bits.

48. Sometimes when we are driving through our neighborhood we like to look at stranger’s houses and wonder aloud what they are doing inside right then and what is going on in their lives. Then we make up strange stories for them and laugh while we both “one up” each other on bizarre little details about their lives.

49. When I was a child I could eat my weight in fresh apricots from my grandmother’s trees.

50. When I was a little girl I had a huge crush on Davy Jones of The Monkees. But hey, who didn’t?

51. I actually know how to stop global warming, but, no one has asked me….

52. I tend to toe out a little bit.

53. It is alarming how fast this went when I first started and how fast that well of inspiration dried up.

53. I’ve always thought it would be so funny if people had a little light that went on over their heads when they are flatulent. No more secrets there! BAHAHAHAHA

54. My dad was a pilot before he retired and when I was little he used to land in the pasture at our house in a helicopter and take my friends and me for rides, on my birthdays.

55. I wish I had learned to play an instrument.

56. I had a head injury, in a car accident when I was almost 15 years old.

57. I can’t remember the majority of my childhood.

58. I am a night owl.

59. I HATE math.

60. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone would purchase or read a tabloid newspaper.

61. When I was growing up I had a subscription to Mad Magazine, Tiger Beat, and got all my cousins old Highlights. Was I well read or what? Oh, Oh! and National Geographic! See. I wasn’t that devoid of content.

62. I grew up with The Houston Post newspaper and I still miss it. Now there is only The Houston Chronicle. Or as John calls it, The Houston Comical.

63. I keep hitting “save” every few entries, but I fully expect WordPress to eat at least part of this before I am done.

64. I love roller coasters.

65. I never scream. Ever.

66. I hate my wardrobe. Well, not all of it. But, a lot of it.

67. I have a weak chin and the fatter I get the weaker it gets.

68. If I could change anything about my face it would be my chin.

69. My mom used to tease me about my “idea” of opening a business where I tell people “what they should do or do differently, for money. I think these are called “Consultants”, now, but there was no such thing when we were joking around about it.

70. I have the voice of a Munchkin doing hits of helium. It’s a thousand wonders my children ever considered me the boss.

71. I am a born navigator. I have an absolutely uncanny ability to determine north, south, east and west from anywhere. When I was a child I could fall asleep in the car and wake up in someplace that I’d never been before and know which way north, south, east and west were. To this day I can remember the places I have lived since I was about 5 and can tell you which direction they were facing. Weird. And WHY?

72. I have brittle fingernails and they split, horizontally quite easily.

73. My Dad constantly surprised me as I was growing up by offering a different perspective than my mom or I could ever come up with.

74. My brother is my savior of sorts as he built my webpage for me to blog on.

75. I am mechanically minded and instinctively understand the mechanics of things that are really quite complicated.

76. I wish I could sew like my mom.

77. One of my biggest fears is my children will grow up and not respect me.

78. I prefer baths to showers and…

79. chocolate cake with white icing

80. I really hate fighting, but I am passionate about it. I always win.

81. I am “Scotch/Irish on my maternal grandfathers side of the family and English on the grandmothers side.

82. Samuel Clements is a distant relative on my grandmothers side.

83. My father’s side appears to be all German.

84. Both my natural father and adoptive father are of German ancestry.

85. I once worked with a woman named Marjorie Sterling and I still think that is the prettiest name…

86. I love to do artsy stuff.

87. I wish I had more energy. (Who doesn’t?)

88. I like to try new foods, but was the world’s pickiest eater as a child.

89. I wish I could grow all my nails long AT THE SAME TIME.

90. I pray every night and have since I was a teenager.

91. I am always worried that God is bored to tears with my prayers.

92. But, really, what do you want to say to God that would seem more interesting?

93. Even the sins I confess are pretty boring.

94. It finally rained and I am so glad I don’t have to water the plants outside today.

95. I very rarely remember my dreams.

96. I CANNOT BELIEVE I AM ALMOST FINISHED.

97. I am finding it hard to resist the urge to cheat.

98. Now I am wondering HOW I would cheat…

99. Followed closely by feeling of deflation upon realizing there is no shortcut and I have to come up with one more….make it good, Krissa…OH! I know!

100. People pick their noses when they are in the car with me because if they are driving and I am in the passenger seat they are on my blind side and I can’t see them. YES YOU DO! I KNOW YOU DO!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my. What a strange little group we are. I was reading Tranny Head’s post over at Law School Sucks and she was discussing her reader’s search terms. There are some rather unusual ones for her site. So I thought I’d check mine. Here’s a rundown.

“Krissa Lopez” came in first with 155 hits. This is a cheat for me, as there is a fairly popular Southwestern artist in New Mexico named Krissa Lopez. Yup. That right there is weird enough.

“Electronic shipping received” got 2 hits. Huh?

“4 permanent teeth pulled” got 1 Ewwww.

“Export smoke” got 1. I can only assume someone wanted to ship cigars out of Cuba.

“half ass award” got 1. Not gonna touch that…

“halfasstic” got 1. Gee, ya’ think? What I don’t understand is it says 138 under “pages/visit” Don’t know what that means as I have no where near 138 pages. Anyone?

“horse gestation 350 days” I had checked that at the time and I was like at the very bottom of the 5th page of google hits. Why click me?

“pre jowl implants” scored 1 hit. Really?

“purse fetish” got 1. I really don’t want to even know.

“semper donates” got 1. Some other parent wondering “Huh?, You got nominated for what?” I can relate.

So there you have it. Over all I am sorry for the person who got only a “half ass award”.

Hot Mama over at Law School Sucks and so do lawyers, has a post today that I sooo relate to that I feel the need to expound upon it.

We have lived in this house for three and a half years and the list of things to do have grown and grown. And, of course, none of them are cheap.

I like to think that we are pretty easy on our domiciles, but the fact remains that none of these things were wrong when we moved in. This house might as well have been brand new. It was in pristine condition. Fresh paint inside and out, new carpet upstairs and down, everything worked perfectly and nothing was broken. Oh. Well, there is one ceramic tile in the kitchen that has a hairline crack in it that you can barely see. That is the only thing that is preexisting. I do think that the lights on the ceiling fans that we are having trouble with are nothing that we did. The wiring is just shitty and both of them, living room and breakfast room, have shorts and flicker on and off.

The front door is getting weathered and is peeling, needs refinishing.

The leaded glass in it has some broken places.-(thanks to one of Keelan’s dumb-ass friends)

The sprinkler system has a broken valve thingy.

The hot tub has two broken jets.

The carpet in the master bedroom needs cleaning. (The upstairs isn’t getting done until the pigs girls move out. I know when to cut my losses.)

At this point the liquor cabinet is depleted.

The hood vent in the kitchen is kaput. That means no one can burn anything cause we are limited in our ability to export smoke. So, like, there is no cooking going on cause, hey, we burn things on a regular basis.

When we have hurricane force winds, (remember I live down here by Houston, deep up in the armpit of Texas), there is a leak around the atrium window.

We desperately need sand in the backyard, and some in the front. The ground is uneven and holds water that I would really rather run off to my neighbors’ yards. (I AM TOO A GOOD NEIGHBOR!)

The liquor cabinet needs….redecorating.

Speaking of liquor cabinet… The sink in the wet bar is very slow to drain.

My closet would look much better if I had a new wardrobe.

Come to think of it, the floors wouldn’t look that bad or even need sweeping if I had freshly pedicured feet to look at on them. I mean, really, who would even notice the floors if my feet looked fab?

The light track over the fireplace, and more importantly over where H sits in her wheelchair while reading the paper, just stopped working. For no apparent reason at all. We got a new wall switch and swapped it out and changed the bulbs and everything else you can think of that was cheap. No. Must have new light track.

That is all I can think of right now. There is a more extensive list, (if you can believe that), living on John’s Palm.

And isn’t that half the battle. Well, around here it is.

I have very exciting news on several issues. Starting with just generally pleased and working our way up to titillating, we have:

• The yard got done this morning and, as my husband said, it no longer looks like a pack of Mexicans live here. (I am allowed to say this as my husband and mother-in-law are Lopez’s. Well, I am too, actually, but you get where I’m going, here.) And just in case you were worried, it HAS been mowed since the last time I commented on how jungle-like the yard was. Cause as fast as that St. Augustine grows in south Texas, the homeowners association would have hung us by now. Well, they can just back off cause we are mowed, blowed and weed-ate. Yes siree, that’s the way to be.

• The other day some folks from the Dickinson Rotary Club showed up at my door, (I was actually dressed and not in my nightgown. Yea me!), and wanted to know if I wanted to become a member of a flag…thing. I can’t remember what it was called, but, basically, for fifty dollars annually, four times a year someone shows up and shoves an American flag in my yard, by the walk and leaves it there for the three days preceding the whatever holiday and then removes it. Sounds like a neat deal, and it was to benefit the rotary club so I said “Sure, why not.” Only probably with less enthusiasm than you are picturing. Anyway I pulled out a checkbook and cut them a check. Yesterday, John was sifting through the mail and said “Who wrote a fifty dollar check on the Texas First account?” My first thought was, NOBODY! THERE IS NO MONEY IN THAT ACCOUNT! Followed closely by, what do you mean “Who”? Only you and me here, babe… Then came the realization that I wasn’t paying attention to which checkbook I pulled out of the desk. My purse was soooo far away, (in another room), it was going to be too trying to go and get it, so I dove in the desk for the nearest handy checkbook. Working my way to: Voila! Hot check! The GOOD news is that the bank, for some reason, chose to pay it. I have no idea why. I have never flashed these people. Or, I suppose I should say threatened to flash them if they don’t pay our one and only hot check. Whatever. There is that ubiquitous $27.50 charge by the bank, but that is nothing compared to the humiliation of having the snobs at the Dickinson Rotary Club point and laugh. ANYTHING BUT THAT!
• And saving the best for last! I am happy to report that I have received my first Blog Award! This is a red letter day for me. Lonely housewife/caregiver/mom person who has only recently found this outlet, (Thanks again to my brother, Cam!), and is having a hellofalota fun. My new terrific friend, Law Student Hot Mama over at Law School Sucks-and so do lawyers, has awarded me with the prestigious Smokin’ Hot Blog Award. And I COULD NOT BE MORE THRILLED! I will be passing this on to…somebody awesome shortly. Gotta think. Gotta concentrate. Gotta run, H is ringing the bell…

Thanks, Hot Mama!