HalfAsstic.com

Hello gang!

I would like to report that on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, my SIL called me and said that she had gotten the ham she had agreed to bring and it was a nice big spiral cut.  She made a point of saying that it was already cooked and mentioned it a couple of times.  Ok, great.  I’ve gotten spiral cut hams before and yes, that’s the way they come.  Cooked.

I guess I wasn’t too worried since I was doing a huge turkey and I was sure there was going to be enough for everyone.

The following morning, Thanksgiving Day, she called to say that she was going to bring it over to my house to heat up.  OK, fine.  She then told me that she was going over to her ex-husbands house for a meal at noon with her kids since we were going to eat in the evening when John got home.  I told her to be sure and bring a pan to heat the ham in since all my sheet cake pans were being used for cakes and casseroles and what not.  She said she’d buy one and I told her not to bother, I’d wash it, just use a pan from her house.  She told me that she doesn’t own a sheet cake pan, or any other pan other than a skillet and pot.

She is 55 years old.  How can this be?

It gets better.  I asked her what time she was coming over and she indicated not until shortly before we were going to eat.  I told her the ham would have to heat for longer than that and asked her to read the directions on it.  She insisted that the ham only needed about 20 minutes to heat and went over to it and told me it was 10 lbs, would only require about 20 minutes to heat.

I said “Millie, read the directions to me.”

Millie: deep sigh, “Heat for 15 minutes per pound…  hum…”

“That’s two and a half hours, Millie.”

She said she’d take care of it and I assumed she was going to heat it at her ex-husband’s house, at least partially.  No.  She showed up with a cold ham and we hacked off a bunch of slices, put them in the microwave with a little bit of water and heated them up.  It worked out fine, but, man! how could anyone grow to be 55 years old and know so little about something so simple?

And the question of the day is, what made her so sure it only took 20 minutes to heat the ten pound ham?

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

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

So here goes!

• Word for the week in my head…

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

• Thoughts for the week in my head…

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

• Thing for the week in my life…

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

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

• Food for the week in my belly…

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

• Color for the week in my life…

No idea.  What the hell does that mean?

• Smile for the week on my face…

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

• Blessing for the week in my heart…

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

Free toes everybody!

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

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

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

His response:

Hell yeah!

Today’s the day I get my glasses!  John is off work, so I have a way to get there and we just have to wait until one of the girls is here to stay with Henrietta.  It’s going to be wonderful to have a pair to wear all the time, because I can’t tell you how tired I am of not having the readers where I am trying to read at the moment, they’re always in another room.  Or maybe it’s me that’s always in the other room, after all I am the one that’s given to roaming around the house, not them.

OK, it’s now 10:55 PM and I am home with the new glasses on.  They aren’t that confusing, but I am not sure they were…”done” right.  When something is right straight in front of me it is very clear, but when I have to look slightly off to one side, either way, it is blurry.  I don’t mean very far either.  It seems to be this way with the far away vision, the mid range and the reading, all.  If I am reading a magazine and there are three columns of print, while having my head positioned looking straight at the first column the one on the far right is so blurry I can’t read it well at all.  I have to move my head or the magazine.  Is this asking too much of a pair of glasses.  I’ve never noticed anyone reading a book having to move their head in order to read across the page.

I think they didn’t “do” the prescription all the way across.

Well, God knows I have debated about this, but here’s a damn picture:

Somehow, at this point in my life, the “smart chick” look doesn’t bother me at all.  Not sure I can pull it off once I open my mouth, but up until then, I think the glasses I picked out help with the illusion.

They told me to wear them for a week and see what I think.  I think I’m going to call them tomorrow and ask why I have to be laser-sighted on target and physically aimed at anything I want to see clearly.

Now, I have to find someone to do something about those chipmunk cheeks.

OH!  Before I end this, I have a confession!  No!  Nothing juicy!  No, what I did today was make it over to Lisa’s AGAIN two days in a row now and I was going to take pictures of her gutted kitchen.  We went and visited and left and I forgot to take the pictures.  Got my glasses and went home and then remembered I needed to take them so John and I went back over to Lisa’s house AGAIN.  Got over there and looked in my purse for my trusty(?) camera and I had left it at home.

I really do think God didn’t want me to take any pictures today, cause he obviously made me very forgetful for some reason.

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

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

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

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

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

June weddings are nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?