And then he drags her around in a net.....Didn't see that one coming.

Monday night, I was sitting home alone (T was working), watching television and looking like what my cousin described as "Tanya Harding's Cousin." I was an unwashed human--I had on ill-fitting pajamas, a stained tshirt, and socks I used to wear while hunting.

There was a knock at the door.

I got up to see who it was--

(I don't lock my doors, usually. I live in the middle of nowhere in a retirement community. Seriously. All the people who come to my house on a regular basis just walk in, and I'm ok with that.)

And whoever it was had covered the peep-hole so I couldn't see.

I asked, "Who is it?", and received no answer.

I started to panic. I watch crime shows all day long, and I'm thinking, 'Some insane person has figured out that I live alone and surrounded by elderly deaf people. T is at work....I'm going to be murdered."

So I sprung into action. I turned the deadbolt in the door, and was preparing to race across the house to get the gun and the phone--I was going to hurl my kitchen windows open and brandish weapons while yelling something along the lines of:

"Motherfucker, I have a gun and a phone. Get the fuck of my property before I shoot your ass and call the cops!"

However, I didn't make it that far.

As I turned the deadbolt, the person on the other side of the door took their finger off the peephole. I saw the light shine through, so I looked again.

It was T.

I freaked--Why wasn't he at work? Something horrible must have happened! (I managed to forget that he has a key to my house, and it's not like he couldn't have just walked in anyway....)

I flung the door open.

"Why aren't you at work!!!???" I said.

Then I realized that T was wearing a suit. Carrying a dozen red roses and a bottle of wine.

"What the hell are you doing?", I asked.

He stepped inside my house, handed me the flowers and put the wine down.

"These are for you!", he said.

And then, with me in all my unwashed, scuzzy toothed, pajama-ed glory, T got down on one knee (And crashed into my pantry door) in his suit and asked me to marry him.

I said, "Of course I will marry you! Why aren't you at work?"

(I rock. So romantic and eloquent in my confusion.)

T had managed to surprise me--which is a feat in and of itself. He had taken two vacation days and pretended to go to work, only to go home, change, get roses and wine and the ring and come back to my house to propose marriage.

I guess he didn't plan on me plotting his death because of it.

Black Chickens Lay Blue Eggs

Welcome, googlers.

Anyway!

My cousin came through surgery famously--restarted his heart lickity split and he was out of the ICU three days early. Still in the hospital, but should be heading home soon.

May I extend a gigantic sigh of relief? Whew.

Thank you for your assistance, kids. Really appreciate it. :)

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I learned the fact in the title yesterday. T's parents have chickens and chickens lay eggs, so they give me eggs when I need them (which totally rocks). Brown chickens lay brown eggs, white chickens white, and black, well, they lay blue green eggs. Kinda neat, actually.

This fact brought to you by the letter Q.

**************************************

Happy Mothers day (early) to all you moms and soon to be moms out there!

Assistance in any way

Hey, if I could ask a favor of all of you.....

My beloved cousin is having open heart surgery today, and, as much as I am sure he will make a full recovery, it is still very scary because, well, they stop his heart and all that.

So if any or all of you could say a little prayer, send out positive vibes or request an audience with your idea of our 'maker' on my cousins behalf, well, that would be great.

I will explain in greater detail when I know more and have more time.....

Thank you. I mean it.

Death from Within

I have spent the last four days laying on my couch and bitching at anyone who happens to wander into my frame of vision.

Namely, T. Thankfully for him, he had to work so was spared half the hours of the day.

Oh, I rallied. We went out for drinks on day two of my lamentations--but I still lamented, rum and coke or no.

I seemed to have done something to my stomach that offended it greatly. First, it felt like I really, really needed to burp, but there was nothing. Then it morphed into stronger flashes of ache--right in my stomach. Then heartburnish feelings--all in the same spot. My stomach. My real stomach--not the tummy.

It wasn't constant. I would fool myself into senses of safety and start to be productive--doing laundry or dishes, and suddenly, pain.

Rather than go to the doctor (Who has health insurance? Not me.) I played the ever-entertaining "Diagnose yourself via the Internet", which is more a game of "Emotional well-being Russian roulette", as the internet told me I could have any of these:

*Gastroenteritis
*Ulcer
*IBS
*Gallstones
*Food Allergy
*Cancer
*Liver failure
*Kidney Stones
*Diabetes

Great.

So I made a deal with myself. If I didn't feel better--Markedly so--By Tuesday, I would suck it up and go see the man about my stomach.

I ate antacids like they were candy. I ate mild, easy to digest food. I layed off the smoking, mostly. I abstained from coffee. (Seriously. Bigger deal than the smoking.) Nothing helped.

My stomach felt better if I was full, but I wasn't all that hungry. So I did something totally out of character--I drank water.

I never drink water. I know how horrible this is for me. But I don't do it--not on purpose, really, but I just, well, don't.

I started to feel better. Hours passed without pain. I kept drinking.

12 hours later (!) my body started to have some excess water--I peed. First time since the water consumption started. Still pain free.

I went back to the internet and demanded a second opinion.

It would seem that severe dehydration can cause symptoms EXACTLY LIKE MINE.

Sigh.

So I'm drinking lots of water. Hopefully I still feel better tomorrow. And I am definitely having coffee if I do.

(Please, pray I feel better. This shit sucks. I promise, Lord, to drink water like it's going out of style to the best of my ability for the rest of my days. And I really don't want to go to the doctor.)

Success! Also, I brake for testosterone

T and I (As well as the youngest of T's brothers, who is 16 and therefore ripe for exploitation in the manual labor variety) spent the last few days bringing a "Campaign of Terror" to his yard. We mowed, we aerated, we fertilized, we weeded....we tore out the "garden", which was more of an extension of the lawn, removed bushes, pruned hedges and other bushes....

And we planted. Planted planted planted. T is going to have the girliest front yard when my efforts come to fruition. Over 100 bulbs went into the now reclaimed garden....it shall be glorious.

Aside: We decided to plant daisies in the window boxes. Cheerful. The daisies, combined with a small blue flower that a random woman in Home Creepo loved, would immediately brighten up the front of the house.

That is, if T and I could count. THREE trips to the nursery it took us, THREE, to determine that in 4 boxes, we would need 8 daisies. Sigh.

Anyway, the yard, it's promising.



Today was a big day for taking pictures out the drivers side window of the car. Bear with me. (Also, please ignore the hose. I did.)

Anyway--notice the "Rambo" tulips--Those things have been through the wringer and they, through no effort of anyone, have survived. I had mercy on their fighting spirits and left them there. The rhododendrons, wild daisies and snail commune were not so lucky.


*********************************************

I delivered lunch to T at work today, as he awoke this morning seven minutes after he was supposed to be on the clock and didn't have the time to pack it himself.

Before I would give him his lunch, I made him hold still so I could snap a photo, you guessed it, out the drivers side door/window of the car.




T works a manly job.

I appreciate this. Really. No, really. Yes. Like that.

If this manly job didn't require him to be covered in a nasty ass stink all the time, I might make him dress like this more often. (No, it doesn't really wash out. I have tried. Good lord, have I tried.)

Special guest apperances by:

Hello dedicated readership. I would now take this opportunity to inform you that your beloved author will NOT be scribing this post. She is, as of this moment, sitting in bed, reading a book and drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon. Take heart however, for she is not infirm and will be back to dispensing her usual wit in the near future. For now you are stuck with me, T, as a special guest blogger. I will only ask one thing of you, and that is to bear with me because I am not.a.blogger.

With that said, I would like to take you all back to a previous post about a particular trip to a particular place.

Preparations for the trip to see M's mother began some three days before we left. And I'm not talking about lists of things to bring or what chores to do beforehand. For myself my preparation started at my work place. You see my line of work requires me to do shift work. Some people would think "that' not so bad, right?" Fuck that.
I'm not talking only swing shift or even the graveyard.
Let me break it down for you real quick. I work four days every week and I work twelve hours every day and I get four days off in between. Still not bad you say?

Wrong.

Here's how the shifts really work. I show up at 5am my first day shift of twelve hours, and muddle through the day until I finally get to go home at 5pm. THEN, I get twelve hours off, after which I get to do that again. When I get off the second day I then get twenty four hours off, at which point I start work at 5P.M. and go until 5 the next morning. Then I get twelves hours off again and do that for another night. So in one "week" I work two 12hr days get 24hrs off and then work two 12hr nights!

It's a pain in my ass sometimes.

Anyway, our flight for this trip was scheduled for around noon the day after my last night shift. Our ride to get to the airport (because I insisted on getting a towncar to pick us up) was set to pick us up at 9 o'clock.... at my sisters house in our nearby metropolis.

So by now I'm sure you've all figured out this means I would 1) get off work at 5am 2) drive home to get M and our luggage 3) drive the two hours to the city (making it around 8am) and 4) hopefully not misjudge my driving time and thereby missing our only ride to the airport. (we didn't park the car there because I don't trust their security.... and I refuse to). So basically I get to be awake for the near 24 hours it will take us to reach her mom's place.


..............Fuck that.

So I did what all smart and resourceful people do when confronted with this type of situation. I faked being sick.

And I must say that I had a fair few of my co-workers convinced. So I started this ruse on my First night shift, laying the groundwork for the theatrics to come....

So I get off work go home and to bed. And when I wake up I make my move.

*ring*ring*ring*ring* " You've reached the foreman, sorry we missed your call, please leave a message...."
Uh... Hey, yeah, I'm not coming in tonight, I feel like shit. It feels like the eighteenth Russian Calvary spent the night in my head with all their horses. So, yeah.... *click*

I chuckled to myself at that point. Mission accomplished.



And so we arrive at M's mothers, and I am pleasantly refreshed from a good nights rest. She picks us up at the airport and takes us home.

Now, I'm not stupid by any means. I knew what this trip would entail, what environment I was getting myself into. M asserts that I am the hardest person to surprise. Well dear....

We walk in the front door and I am literally STRUCK by the powerful smell of stale cigarettes and cats. This smell was so intense that I was immediately thrust back to my childhood and the memory of one of MY mothers close girlfriends.... who smelled overwhelmingly of stale cigarettes and cats.
This sensation thankfully passed rather quickly as I became more accustomed to it (probably owing to the fact that I am now a smoker too), and I was able to pass the rest of the trip in relative olfactory ease. I did however, have to become a pill popper because as luck would have it, I'm allergic to cats. Thankfully the claretin worked and all I suffered was getting licked and having cat hair on everything I brought with me.

So, with M having gotten as much a dose of her mother as she could stand, we come home. Thank. God. I didn't say anything, but I was going stir crazy having to spend SO much time there.

Within hours of our arrival home we began to get an idea of exactly how bad we really smelled. Having been confined in that RV with three smokers and two cats for four days, my once black fleece pullover had become white and the two of us smelled like ashtrays that have never been cleaned. *sigh*

Well needless to say we avoided as much contact with the public until we were able to make it home...... At which point EVERYTHING got thrown in the washing machine.

I still have cat hair on my pullover.

So on and So forth

I said that about 198 times on the phone with F the other day. It would seem that talking about the myriad of ways my mother has ruined my life will cause me to use redundancies. (It does seem a little fitting, as my mom is running quickly out of new ideas and repeats herself quite often.)

I am more than ready for my fucking chronic neck and shoulder pain that spirals into a migraine to break up with me. It's one of those relationships that has been dead for a long time, you know, where one party is more in love than the other, but the un-loving partner stays due to not wanting to hurt feelings and so on and just does ass-hatty things in hopes of pissing off the other party enough that they will end it and absolve the un-lover from any wrong-doing? Yeah. I'm trapped in a loveless marriage with my neck.


I am totally at a loss of something to blog about. Perhaps I should let loose a yarn about the white-trash-Mecca (Welcome, googlers!) I used to live in.

Hrmmmmm....there are so many to choose from. The dude that pulled all his own teeth? His brother, who cut his face in half with a chainsaw and walked out of the woods and then drove himself to the hospital for stitches and came immediately back to work logging? My ex's brother, the taxidermist, who had his ceiling 'raised' (Cut a hole in the trailer's ceiling insulation) to make room for the rack from his prize bull elk? (And yes, he used it as a gun rack.) How he and his wife were caught having sex in their 'garden' (Wife posted fake flowers in the dirt rather than plant real ones) by their son's friend at three in the afternoon? The 60 year old woman with no teeth who, for $50, sold her dirty panties to a stranger at the local bar?

Oh, I know.

Clown Faced Jimmy, aka 'Sparky'.

Clown faced Jimmy was an electrician of sorts. He wasn't licensed, to my knowledge, which never stopped anyone in that neck of the woods from doing anything. He was also famous for shitty work and being an alcoholic, which I believe is where his nickname came from.

Sparky, that is.

We called him Clown Faced Jimmy because, well....He looked like a clown.

Let me explain.

Jimmy was Canadian (I don't know how this applies, but my step father teased him about it a lot.). He was slender, about 5'9". He had insane black hair that stood up around his Stihl baseball cap at odd angles. He also had a very wide and pale face, and electric blue eyes. Like, not pretty blue, scary, 'there's-something-very-wrong-inside-this-man blue. And one tooth.

One. One of his front top teeth--that was it. The rest were small, worn, black nubs. They looked like he had fallen into warm road asphalt, come up with a mouthful and called it good.

Now, I know you are all wondering where the 'clown' part comes in. I guess I can't really do it justice by putting it in writing.....trust me. (I'm freaked out by clowns. Not because of Jimmy, but that fear may have something to do with the nickname.)

Anyway, other than questionable electricians work, I have no idea where Jimmy received any income. I know that he had a lady friend for a time who supported him, but I don't know where he lived, what he did with himself during the day or anything else.

Jimmy drank cheap ass beer and smoked cheap ass cigarettes. He laughed a lot, (Showing his road warrior teeth) and was generally a nice person. He was friends with a man who was quietly said to have a marijuana farm, but no one said for certain.

One day, in the middle of the summer, I was working at my parents store with my step father. I was about 17 or so. The store was busy-ish, it being the summer months. Our store was RIGHT ON THE HIGHWAY--not the busiest highway, by any means, but a major thoroughfare just the same. This is important.

So my step dad and I are working away, when we hear a rumbling 'Bang!' of a backfiring vehicle. We turn to look out the window and see just who it may be....

It's Jimmy. And his friend, the pot farmer. They have pulled into the store parking lot, next to the gas pumps, to reattach a tarp that was supposed to be covering the bed of the truck before they head to the nearest town.

They needed a tarp to cover the bed of the truck because the bed of the truck is piled, literally piled, with pot.

Now, take a minute and imagine this. Really.

My step dad and I just stood there, watching them use rope and tie-downs to cover this mountain of pot and make it road ready. The saw us, smiled, waved, and left.

In what reality is this even remotely possible? Plausible?

The best part? They didn't get caught. They drove through a town at 25 mph with a literal truck load of cannabis, cars all over the place, and no one thought twice about it.

I don't know whether to laugh or....be confused. I vacillate, really. At least we know how Jimmy supported himself.