HalfAsstic.com

I promised John I wouldn’t post about his… stomach virus issues, so I’m not.

HOWEVER, this does not mean Lisa is safe from my marauding posting.

Years ago, Lisa and I and her daughter Brittany, Kessa  and Keelan were on our way to, (or from… can’t remember) my parents house when they lived in Trinity, Texas.  Kessa and Brittany were both 10 years old and Keelan was 8.  It was a good three hour drive and we were on the north side of Houston…. somewhere.  Not any area we were terribly familiar with.

Lisa and I were chatting away, as usual, while she drove and the girls were doing their own thing in the back seat.  Lisa squirmed a little bit and mentioned that her stomach was feeling bad.  A few minutes later she was moving around in her seat looking pained and she said her stomach was really hurting.  Seconds later she was speculating that she was going to have diarrhea.  Momentarily there was some deep breathing and rapid panting that I swear she had done in the delivery room, combined with extreme butt clenching exercises.  She was writhing in the seat as she drove us faster and faster down the highway and we all searched frantically for a convenient place for her to go potty.

The priceless thing I will NEVER forget was when we were up to about 80 miles an hour and Lisa was bouncing up and down in the drivers seat, I glanced back at the girls in the back.  It had gone deathly quiet back there and three pairs of eye’s had grown saucer sized and were bouncing back and forth from me to Lisa on mildly terrified faces.

I wanted to laugh so hard right then!  I mean I felt SO bad for Lisa and was really a little worried myself that we weren’t going to find a bathroom in time, but you should have seen the looks on those girl’s faces!

We finally spied a Target and zoomed in the parking lot where Lisa leaped out of the car and raced in while I got out and went around to the driver’s side to get us out of the firelane.  We drove over to a parking spot and watched and one of the girls piped up and said, “… ya think she made it?”

In a few minutes she came out with a sack in her hands and headed for the car.

She had purchased a potent anti-diarrheal and a box of Tucks Medicated Wipes after she came out of the bathroom.

There were no more incidences the rest of the way home, but I glanced back several times just to see the difference in the looks on the girls faces from when we were desperatly seeking a bathroom.  I laughed every time I looked at them and the memory of the sheer terror in their eyes still makes me grin.

Yesterday, a mere eighteen days into NaBloPoMo, I forgot to post.  Actually I remembered, but by that time it was after midnight, so what the hell…

It was all John’s fault as he was off yesterday and I am always distracted by him when he’s off work.  I suppose that is as it should be… BUT IT’S STILL HIS FAULT.

We went running around and the caregiver person was here for her three hours so it was kinda nice.  I went back up to the eyeglasses place and complained bitterly about mine and they went to great lengths to explain that this is the way they are supposed to be and my eyes will get used to them.  I have 90 days and if I’m not completely satisfied, well, I get a do-over.

Do-over’s are great.  I wish do-overs came with everything I do.

Lisa called me today and when I answered the phone I said “Hello, Lopez residence, maid speaking.”

And, of course she said something to the effect of, “Where is that bitch?!”

To which I replied, “She’s out and I gotta clean this entire shithole before she gets home.”

Lisa replied, “And this is the maid?”  And then she started trying to speak Spanish to me and I got lost and I KNOW she was.  I told her, “I no speaky the English, and I no understandy you Spanish either, sista!”  Then it got so politically incorrect that the intertubes are not safe with me around anymore.

I told her,

“Oh, yeah!  You know those Lopez’s!  They are rolling in so much money they’ve even got a white woman cleaning for them!

She then commenced to tell me that she had a white woman cleaning her house too and the friend with her chimmed in and said she did too.

Now the pressure is on and I gotta get the dump cleaned, supper cooked and the laundry done cause I don’t want to be the one to make the white chicks look bad… let someone else do it!

This far into this month, what do you really expect?  Two loads of laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, swept and mopped the living room, (I did the hall and H’s room yesterday), wiped down the doors with Scott’s Liquid Gold, and a host of other mundane, boring, somewhat depressing things.  At least it seems depressing NOW!  Thanks a lot for making me THINK about it!

H had a U.P. and it was handled without incident.  It happened this morning when she woke up and was in the process of doing a poo.  I was instantly alerted to the unfolding situation.  Oh joy.  Oh Gawd!  Just let me finish this cup of coffee! “Oh sure, Henrietta, no problem!”  And in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t!

She did the usual thing about talking it to death just because it worries her so much for anything unexpected to happen to her body.  I assured her that everybody poops and she will do it when she has food that is ready to come out the other end.  It’s natural and not a bad thing and yadda, yadda, yadda, we’ve been through this a million times.

On the up side the paranoid little freak is taking it much better than she used to!  No tears or headache pills were needed.  The day progressed as usual and she even got out of bed as usual.

The younger offspring is probably going to suffer an untimely death tomorrow and that will give me something to write about then.  She is about to drive me nuts.  She was fine with me all day and as soon as John gets home she turns on me like a devil child.  And neither one of us can understand why.  It’s not like she’s even pitting us against one another.  John doesn’t put up with her acting like that anymore than I do.  I hope the doctor gave it her best guess cause, I swear, if this medication doesn’t work, she may not live long enough to try any other kind.

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.

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.

OK, I am so glad to be back and will go immediately to read everyone as soon as I throw this miserable excuse for a post up!  You might want to wear a neck brace while reading… it jumps around a bit.

First of all I would like to thank my brother, Cam for updating everyone during my absence.  I really hope he only chokes a little on the vino he’s going to be drinking in beautiful Italy this weekend.  heh heh heh

Love ya Cam!

Today is September 27 and we just got internet up and working as of yesterday.  Two weeks after the stupid storm!  I started transcribing a post from a pile of scraps of paper onto Word Friday of last week, (when we got electricity back), and am keeping my fingers crossed that I will be able to successfully copy and paste it to the Wordpress thingy which acts strangely at best due to the fact that I am cursed with Vista.

Here goes nothing!

Hello there, interwebs! I am back, finally, and I missed you all! I am starting this on Friday, September 19, 2008 and am a bit flummoxed at the thought of trying to get caught up. Luckily, I jotted down notes here and there during the last few days. Following this paragraph is a fairly random collection of them starting Friday afternoon, Sept. 12, the day hurricane Ike laid us out. We just got electricity back at about 12:30 in the afternoon, yesterday. Six days after it went out. And while I know we have so very much to be grateful for and are truly blessed to have survived virtually unscathed, I can’t help but point out that living in this humidity and heat, without floor to ceiling windows on all the exterior walls, is a gruesome ordeal that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Well, OK, maybe that would be the perfect kinda conditions for my worst enemy, but my point remains that I can’t imagine hating anyone with that much intensity…you get my drift?

6:00pm Friday evening- the power company cuts the electricity. Winds are starting to pick up just a bit and we all know the big ones are coming. The preemptive electric outage is to keep people from injury, (and certain death), when the lines fall.

The following night is harrowing. H is given an Adivan and sleeps through the entire thing. (Thank you God, for Adivan.)

Apparently I will take anyone or anything in to shelter through a hurricane including, but not limited to, stray dogs and a 6 ½ foot red tailed boa.

The poor dog was left here when his crumby owners evacuated. They left the gate open and left. Just like that. The other neighbors and I were talking about it and the fact that one sweet lady down the street had taken him in. This was Friday afternoon and Ike was due to show up that night. She was saying that her chocolate Labrador was trying to tear down the door to the room where she had the dog, so I offered to take him off her hands until after the whole dealy-o blew over. He really was sweet and well behaved, just scared to death of everybody AS IF HE HAD BEEN ABUSED. The deal was that the house next to us on the corner with the trio of sweet little girls was going to take him in when it was over. Of course the next day my daughter’s boyfriend left the gate open and the dog went in the backyard via the doggy door and promptly left. So, in the rain, John and I drove around the neighborhood until we found him and I got out IN THE RAIN AND CHASED AND BEGGED AND PLEADED AND CONJOLED, and yes, cursed, that dog into letting me catch him and haul him into the car, (where anybody would want a wet dog).

I then took him to the little girls and dumped him on them. They were delighted and I still haven’t gotten any evil looks from their mother so, here’s hoping…

Keelan has a friend of some standing…with her at least. Anyway, this kid has a large family with three cars between them and other pets involved and he claimed that there wasn’t room for the tank that accommodates the huge ass snake and, of course, not the snake either. Am I easy or what? NO. Don’t answer that!

Saturday AM- It is rapidly becoming evident that I will be requiring a shower every 15 to 20 minutes. The temperature is hovering in the low 90’s with 110% humidity. From our front yard the neighborhood looks like….Bosnia. A total war zone. I turned to John and said, “Honey, I don’t think you’ll make it into work today…”

Big Mess! Hot, so very hot. The power lines are all underground in our neighborhood, but the one next to us has huge trees snapped off halfway up and just flipped up with gigantic root balls sticking up in the air. They are all laid over on the power lines. We can’t get into it for all the debris so we just drive by looking in from the road betweenus.

All we could hear was the constant chainsaw and generator noise backed by the incessant drone of emergency vehicle sirens and low flying news choppers with the occasional med-a-vac , Army and Coast Guard helicopter thrown in for good measure. All the windows are open and there is hardly a breath of air moving through this house. It is stifling.

Last night we had hurricane and, of course all the windows were closed tight and most were boarded up.I set the thermostat extremely low in the house during the day so it would be a cool as possible when we lost the lights. The cool air lasted partially through the night.

Well, when Henrietta said she was ready to go to bed I rolled her in there and got her ready and she said, “Oh, close the window, Krissa.” I said, no, we really would have to leave them open because it was too hot in the house with it closed. “Oh Noooo! I’m fine! Really! I’ll be all right. Just close the window. “ No, Henrietta. You’re room is directly across from ours and in order for us to have any kind of ventilation at all we need your window open. Then, (very pointedly ignoring what I have explained and attempting to act as if it is beyond her comprehension), “Oh no, Krissa. I CANNOT HAVE THE WINDOW OPEN. No, no… I never have and I don’t want it open.” By this time John showed up and backed me with the whole argument. She see’s that she’s not going to get her way….at least not easily, so she turns on the tears. We both stand firm and she shuts them off. I swear it’s like flipping a damn switch. I left the tacky venetian blinds she insists on having drawn at all times down and closed and had to sneak back in and open them when she was asleep.

I am told by my mother on my cell phone that we are supposed to be boiling our drinking water for 1 minute. So I am boiling huge pots of water on the stove to pour in the sink and wash dishes in. Thank God, we have a gas stove.

The entire house gets significantly hotter when you are boiling huge pots of water on the stove with no A/C.

You really can make coffee by pouring boiling water into a carafe with coffee and letting it sit for a bit and then pouring this disgusting looking sludge through a filter into a cup. I found that using a paper towel worked even better than a filter because it would conform to the shape of the cup better.

I would kill for an old fashioned board game of some kind. As of two garage sales ago, we got rid of all of ours.

By the time there was enough trees moved for us to make it off of our block, (a day later) we decided to try to make it to our friends house a few neighborhoods over. They had evacuated and had asked us if we could check on their house the first chance we got.

Our neighborhood has all the electrical and phone lines underground, but the one next to ours has even more mature trees and it’s all above ground. At least every other house had a huge tree either broken in two and lying on the lines and/or house or the trees were just lying over with a gigantic root ball pulled up and sticking in the air. It was crazy. We weren’t able to make it by our friend’s house that day or the next as there was no way to get there. The streets were impassable immediately around it. John finally got by a few days later on his way to work. Thankfully, they had no flooding and no trees on their house.

ALMOST OUT OF COFFEE.

You CAN read trashy novels by candlelight. NO, it doesn’t make sweating your body weight romantic.

My neighbors really are wonderful people and we all pull together really well when there is an emergency.

One really bizarre, other worldly experience was realizing that even three days after it was all over, there were still no birds/bird sounds or flying bugs. Saturday afternoon I went with John up to the grocery store he manages to see how bad it was or wasn’t and as we were driving through the parking lot I saw a baby egret sitting on one of those big metal grid storm drains. It just sat there as we passed by it and had one leg down in the hole and the other one clutching the grate. I thought it was stuck and had John stop and I got out and went over to it, picked it up and the poor thing just looked at me. It was clearly in shock. I believe it was thinking something to the tune of, “What the hell. Of course the human lady will pick me up. After the night I’ve had, what else could I expect? This is nothing”. I carried it over and put it in some bushes and it immediately scrambled under them better.

What is it with me and strange baby birds? Owls, Egrets, what next?

Sunday – John goes back to work and it’s a hell hole. Everything was wiped out, pretty much before he left on Thursday. The benevolent souls at the top of the corporate ladder, (or whoever), decided to actually close the store on the Friday of the storm. I must say that this surprised me somewhat as the storm was due to show up fairly late that evening. Believe me when I say that if Walmart or Target had stayed open, they would have, also. The thought was that they wouldn’t let the managers go in time for them to evacuate their families, so they would give them a few hours head start on getting their houses boarded up before the wind got there. And that, my friends, is as much as can ever be expected of these people. John had worked 12 hour day’s everyday that week in preparation for the storm, as had the other managers at all the stores on the gulf coast in the chain. When they got back to work on Sunday, they spent the greatest part of the day throwing out every last parcel of meat, frozen and refrigerated food. I came to find out the generator only runs a few lights and the registers if the power goes out and that’s all it did. They reopened with virtually empty shelves and zero meat, dairy and frozen foods.

People were understanding and patient, helpful to each other about information and standing in line.

Over the next few days things really went downhill fast. Trucks arrived as often as they could possibly get there and it became harder and harder to explain why WHEN EVERYONE RUNS OUT OF THEIR REFRIGERATED ITEMS AT THE SAME TIME IT IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO SUPPLY THE DEMAND. Not to mention the bread everyone was going through, along with chips and snack items, etc.

Sunday night- Henrietta apparently has given some thought to the window situation and feels she did not put on her best performance last night. Tonight, she pulls out all the stops. She announces that she can’t sleep like that and she woke up afraid over and over last night. Bullshit. Not a chance. She NEVER wakes up when she’s taken an Adivan and she would have rung her bell if she was the least bit afraid. She argues with us both about it and continues to insist the window has to be down. She apparently has absolutely no regard for how anyone else might feel or how much sleep her own son may or may not get before he trudges off to work like a dog for 12 to 14 hours. Finally she tells us that we are abusing her by leaving her window open and I have had it. I got in her face and John looked l at her like he was going to explode. I unloaded a bit and she started to dry up some. There really is no end to her selfishness when it comes to her own little wants and paranoia’s. Needless to say her window stayed open. She told me to “Pleeeeease keep me blinds down, Krissa!” I certainly will. Until you are asleep…

Monday- There is not a word from her about the window or the blinds or anything else at bedtime. Halleluiah!

And the rest of the time until the lights are back on, (Friday), she doesn’t say another word about it.

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

I will post the rest of the… story tomorrow and add the missing pictures.  Come to find out they are riding around in John’s pocket on his jump drive and he is at work, (where else).  I’ll get them when he gets home.  Things are still very disorganized around here and I’m having a hard time getting back in the normal groove.  Sorry.

The more I look at the pictures of the little owl fellow that flew around in our garage, the more I think it’s a baby.  And not just because it’s small, either.  No, I have found pictures of breeds that are much smaller.  See below.

Pygmy Owl

No, I think it’s a baby just because it’s so ruffled looking.  It doesn’t have the smoothness the adult owls have in the pictures I am finding online.  But then again, it was in MY garage.  I get ruffled every time I go out there too and that obnoxious little dog barking like that…  I bet he was thinking, “If ONLY I were bigger and I could just eat that damned thing to shut it up!”  I don’t know for sure, but since I am having trouble finding a picture that looks like it, I think that it’s a youngster.

Now here’s my story about the last time I had to deal with an owl.  I mean before this.

I was 18 years old and my brother, Cam was 10.  Our dad was in hospital having some heart bypasses, so we were staying at home by ourselves while our mother was at the hospital with him.  We lived in a big ol’ two story house and he and I had never stayed by ourselves before.  (I mean, OF COURSE, right?)  I had been hearing a strange little scratching noise in the wall of my bedroom at night and had decided we must have mice and made a mental note to tell Mither about it as soon as everything calmed down and got back to a more normal routine.  The chimney to the living room fireplace shared my bedroom wall and it never occurred to me that there could be anything in there.  This went on for three nights.  Then, one evening, I was sitting on the couch in the living room reading and all of the sudden there was this gigantic WHOOSH of ashes that flew up in the fireplace.  I couldn’t see anything and then this huge white face with two enormous eyes turned around and looked at me and blinked.  It was a gigantic barn owl.  IT WAS HUGE, PEOPLE.  It just stood there in the fireplace and looked around and at me.  I just sat on the couch without moving like a scared little kitten.  I wasn’t really scared even, I just had no idea what to do.  My brother was asleep and besides that… he was 10.  I called Mom and told her and by this time I watched the owl hop up on top of the damper and sit there.  I stuck my head in the fireplace and could see two great big talons wrapped around the metal edge of it.  I counted myself lucky that I hadn’t received any owl shit in the face, wondered briefly if it really was slick, (My pop was always saying one thing or another was “slicker than owl shit”.), and pulled my head back out.  Mom had said she didn’t know what to do either and she’d be home the next day.  So we agreed that it needed water and food, as it had been there for at least three days, (that’s what I’d been hearing in the wall, actually the chimney).  So I got a little bowl of water and some lunch meat and put it in the fireplace.  I then closed the heavy metal chain link screen…and went to bed.

I have to say that except for the initial whooshing landing in the fireplace I was never really scared of it.  I felt very sorry for it and was worried it was going to die of dehydration, but I just never got the feeling it was threatening.

It never touched the food or water at all, that I could tell.  Perhaps it wanted mayo and wheat bread with pickles.  Perhaps it was a mustard kind of owl.  I don’t know why it turned up it’s…beak to my dinner selection, I only know it did.

So, that next night my dear, brave mither came home and we set about getting the owl out of the house.  It had jumped back down in the fireplace.  Mither was terrified out of her mind awed by it.   I opened the screen and we waited for it to decide to come out.  It was probably a little shy and wondered why we kept peeking around the corner at it.   Finally, it did and we ran in to try to shoo it…somewhere, and it flew straight into the sliding glass door.  No, we had not thought to open it first.  It was freakin cold outside and that’s my excuse.  Whatever.  Anyway, it smacked it’s beak pretty hard and was dazed and confused.  It was like it was competing with us… still think we won the dazed and confused contest…

The poor thing flew around the living room for a short bit and landed on things you wouldn’t think it would choose to land on and then flew through the breakfast area, kitchen, utility room and into the game room, completely avoiding the sliding glass door that stood open.  We followed.  Finally we had it somewhere we thought we could get it out easily.  There was a pair of French doors that one of us opened all the way.  I kept trying to shoo it toward the doors and it seemed oblivious.  It flew all over and finally when I was wondering if we were keeping it and could it please live in my brother’s room, it looked straight at the doors and I almost heard it say, “Ah ha!”  I saw the little light bulb go on over it’s head and it took off.  With both full size doors open it had to tilt diagonally to fit through the opening.  The doors were six feet across.  I don’t even know what the diagonal measurement was.  A lot.  Freakin’ huge-ass owl.

I have to point out that my dear mither was a squealing mess, cowering against whatever wall she could back up against and standing in doorways ready to flee, whilst making small squeaking noises.  Pretty much useless for herding owls.  Luckily, she has proven invaluable for a large multitude of other things… and we all love her dearly.

If you head on over to Psychicgeek, Witchypoo has written a very moving post about Ivy, a two year old little girl that is desperatly ill and is having a life saving treatment withheld from her.  It’s all a bunch of bureaucracy and her mother is trying to do everything possible to help her.  This is an online company that does petitions and I want you to go there and sign up.  Ivy needs all the help she can get.

9:45 Saturday evening.

Greetings, intertubes.  I am sitting here watching The Weather Channel and trying to out-predict the weather man.  This should not prove difficult, as he looks like he graduated from high school last year, or maybe the year before that.  God knows I have lived through many, many more hurricanes than he can remember.

It is going to Louisiana… poor bastards.

10:29 Sunday morning

It’s been a long time since I lived in Louisiana, but I swear I don’t remember them having presidents of parishes.  I couldn’t believe some guy on the news was referring to this guy as “Mr. President”.  Then there was a crawler across the bottom that said he was the president of the parish.  For those of you who don’t live in Louisiana, a parish is the same thing as a county.  Except, apparently, they have presidents.  Weird.

The stinking mold is back.  Except, really it doesn’t stink.  And it looks different.  Instead of a white powder it’s…fluffy.  No.  I have not been smoking anything or eating anything that lived down there with the mold.  There was no indication that we had any at all and I would have never known if I hadn’t just reached under there and wiped my hand to check for it.  John thinks that if we hadn’t found it maybe it would change into the powdery kind like we had before.  I don’t really know what to think.  AND I don’t know why it’s here.  STILL.

I have an awesome post waiting in my camera to be unleashed.  But, sadly, the camera card wasn’t in my camera when I took the awesome pictures and they are committed to internal memory so I have to have a cord to download to the pooter.  Guess what I can’t find?  I know.  Enough excuses already!  I will look for one on Tuesday when John is off and the sitter is here to take care of H.

12:35 pm Sunday  SIL just left.  She showed up and visited for about an hour with her mother and helped me change one diarrhea diaper.  I suppose she thinks she has contributed as much as necessary until next week.  She brought her 11 year old grandson with her and she just walked in where I was and said “I guess I’ll go.  He’s already ready!”  No shit?  An 11 year old boy isn’t having fun at my house with absolutely nothing to do except watch tv?  Shocking.  Wonder what she’ll do to break outa here in no time next week…

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.