You Know How Sometimes….

…..you’re minding your own business, when your dog decides to rip your arm off?

Does that just happen to me?

Fine, whatevs.

Well, she was unsuccessful in the aforementioned rippage, but only by a thread – no really, the surgeon said I’ve got a thread of tendon left.  I imagine it there, hanging on by its little tendon-nails and screaming at me every time I move my right arm that it’s doing its best, that I am not making this easier and that..

…”I’m giving it all she’s got, Captain!”…

It might be the pain medication talking, though.  I can never be sure.

So, um, yeah, I’m going to have to have THREE tendons in my rotator cuff repaired. Apparently, there are four tendons so one of the little guys escaped injury and is now trying to do the work of ALL THE TENDONS at once.  This results in moments of blinding, excruciating pain.  Followed by hours of agony.  And the whole thing starts over again.

But, it only happens when I move, sneeze, breathe, you know the stuff we rarely do.

The surgeon said words like “mess” and “extensive” when describing the damage.  I’ve torn those three tendons, the bicep tendon, and then there’s something wonky with my collarbone.  He’s going to flay my shoulder, poke around a bit, attach things where they should be attached, clean out the debris that doesn’t need to be there, stitch me up and send me on my merry way.

He also said the anesthesiologist will insert a nerve-block catheter thingy (it’s a technical medical term, I’m very learned in these things now) to keep my shoulder/arm numb and pain-free for FIVE days post-op.

When he told me that part I nearly kissed him.  However, since we’d just met I thought it’d be best if I waited until after he’d filleted me and fixed all that damage before moving to the next level of our burgeoning relationship.  I’m telling you, though, there’s going to come a time when I kiss that boy for relieving me of all this pain.

Between now and then, though, there’s months of rehab/therapy, many days/nights of pain, gallons of tears, a mind-numbing amount of medical bills that (thank God) my insurance will mostly take care of, lots of whining on my part, and I hope to come out the other side with the world’s first arm worthy of a major-league rookie pitcher (of advanced years).  You think I’m joking, but seriously kids I am setting the bar that high for me.

I have to.  It’s the way I am, I have to push myself to do more, to do better, to go a little farther each time.  It helps me focus on the task at hand, and the small victories are oh so sweet that way.

 

 

Okay, Shit’s About to Get Real

*WARNING* Language and anger ahead.  If you’re sensitive, go away now.  If you’re  a snowflake, go far, far away and don’t come back.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

No, really,

WHISKEY. TANGO. FOXTROT.

Why is everyone so upset about this Pepsi ad?

It’s an advertisement.  For a fucking soft drink.  It’s no more, and it’s no less.

Get over yourselves, snowflakes of the world, you don’t get to be the only ones outraged. Wait, yes, you do get to be the only ones outraged when your outrage is so clearly manufactured. And, if it’s not, sweet clothespin jeebus, you people need to get out more.  Or maybe just study your history.

How about four young men, staging a protest because they weren’t allowed to sit at a Woolworth’s lunch counter? 

How about separate fucking bathrooms, schools, and being force to sit in the back of the bus – all based on skin color?

You who protest a fucking Pepsi ad hide behind your keyboards, and compress your outrage in Twitter-sized posts.  You weren’t there, on the front lines, fighting for equality. You need ‘safe zones’ everywhere you go. You’d probably piss yourselves if you were ever on the receiving end of true opposition to your beliefs.

If Dr. King, Jr were here he’d slap the shit out of you and tell you to shut up or dig in and work for those people who are still facing inequality and discrimination every day. Not just people of color, but all people.

If Mother Teresa were here, she’d pray for your fragile asses and go back to ministering to the unwashed masses; quietly bringing dignity and a measure of comfort to their lives.

If Ghandi where here, he’d tell you to find your inner peace and project it on those around you.

But none of them are here, and I’ve taken great liberties with what I’m *sure* they’d say if they were.  Who knows?  Maybe they’d dismiss you out of hand for the immature children you so clearly are.

 

 

 

By Now You’ve Probably Forgotten…

…and for me it’s a slowly fading memory, but..

I didn’t leave the planet, I just moved to the country  on Halloween 2016.

You see…we moved.

Gosh, that sounds so…I don’t know, innocuous?   And most of it was not fraught with insanity-inducing happenings, but the stuff that did happen turned me (momentarily) into the hell-bitch from, well, Hell…with a capital “H”.

The packing ladies arrived at the house a couple of days prior to our move, looked around, and proudly proclaimed this an “easy job, 4-5 hours tops” …and then proceeded to pack for 10 hours with one short break.   I had known we had a lot of stuff, but to hear professionals mumbling about “all this stuff…” when they didn’t think we were listening was an eye-opener.

An aside – we’d already spent weeks cleaning/purging/packing prior to this.  There was a lot of stuff…just…so….much.

Anyway, at the point where these two lovely workers were glassy-eyed and looked about ready to collapse from exhaustion, they finished.  We paid them, twice what we’d budgeted, and tipped them generously to boot.

We knew the move would be expensive – though I don’t think either of us thought to double our original estimate, but we’d sold the house and knew that we’d be getting a chunk of change once we closed on it.  So, out came the credit card.  We’re so cute when we’re being all optimistic and totally naïve.

Two days later the moving trucks and six young men came to move our stuff from the big city town (40K population) to the country town (3K population).  They, too, proclaimed this an “easy job” and how it wouldn’t “take long”.  TWELVE hours later, with daylight fading, they were still pretty upbeat but it was not longer an easy job that wouldn’t take long.

It was an epic journey, and everyone was so tired we giggled insanely at every little thing.

Well, almost everything.

The one thing we did not laugh about was the one thing we desperately needed once the packed trucks and our packed vehicles arrived at the new farm in 90-degree weather.

Electricity.  That was the one thing we needed.  It was so important that I’d arranged for it to be turned on three days prior to the move. I’d arranged this, over a series of phone calls, a month in advance.  The last phone call, to confirm, had been the day before the service was turned on to the house.

Guess what we didn’t have?  No, really, guess.

You’re so smart.

I proceeded to call the electric company we’d chosen, and in the country calling someone on a cell phone is an exercise in frustration…and sometimes futility.  I finally found a good signal in a spot about 50 yards in front of the house and within two minutes the helpful young man at the other end of the phone told me his company didn’t service our home. We had to use a co-op.

I proceeded to scream at the top of my lungs at the poor kid, the gist of my screaming was that I wanted to know why someone hadn’t informed me of that sooner.

I scared the absolute shit out of the kid on the phone, and my movers. Every. single. one.

My husband had to tell them I wasn’t normally a maniacal hell-bitch, but no electricity when I had been so careful to make sure we had electricity, that was the proverbial straw.

I’d been working at my job, coming home and packing, cleaning, packing, sleeping little, and so on for weeks.  To say I was at the end of my rope is too cliche.  I was at the end of every rope, ever.

We finished unpacking the trucks, in the dark, and since it was Halloween and we were in the boonies and it was dark, the sounds of the forest scared the shit out of the young movers.  They whispered about curses and witches and ghosts to one another.  I did nothing to alleviate their fears when I said, straight-faced, that the house was built on an “old Indian burial ground” and rumored to be haunted.  One of them asked me if I was afraid of ghosts, and I told him that since I was a witch I had power over the ghostly realm. I honestly think he believed me. Poor kid.

We collapsed into bed that first night, too tired to even care that it was sticky and warm.  All the windows in the house were open, but if any ghosts visited we were too tired to care about them either.

We got the electricity turned on the next morning, but only because I threatened to sit down in the middle of the co-op’s office and cry until they did.  I was desperate, exhausted, in need of a shower, and the nice lady in the office had just told me it would be 1-3 business days before they could get the power on at the house.  Instead, she took pity on me and by the time we drove back out to the house we had lights and air conditioning and a working washer and dryer.

Too bad we couldn’t locate a lot of our clothes.  Somehow, in the move, everything seemed to get separated.  We spent four days unpacking and we wore the same clothes all four days. I’d wash them every night, and we’d put them on every morning.  We finally found all our clothes, so with that and electricity things were looking up.

Then, our real estate agent called..the old house may not have sold after all. Maybe, perhaps.  We need to re-negotiate here. With ginormous credit card bills looming, we listened and we compromised and we got the old house and some land we owned sold.

We spent the rest of the week unpacking everything, and in the end were really only missing a couple of small items and only found a couple more broken.

It’s been a few months now, and we are loving our new home.  It’s magical, it’s beautiful, and it’s where I intend to spend the rest of my life.  I told my hubby that if he ever got the notion to move again I’d go straight for his throat.  After seeing me react to the whole electricity debacle I’m pretty sure he believes it.

Crazy Mother Trucker

Last Friday a snowflake fell on Dallas and the entire world went batshit crazy.

In all fairness, a few pellets of sleet joined the snowflake so there’s that.

Now, my normal commute these days is about an hour.  On Friday, it took me THREE AND A HALF hours to make it from work to home.

I think a Kardashian or two got pregnant, gave birth, and started a search for the baby daddy all in the time it took me to get from Point A to Point B.

I saw TWELVE accidents in a 20-mile stretch of highway.  All of them single-car, none of them looked like anyone was hurt, and every one of them avoidable if people would just pay attention.

But that’s not the worst of it.

Stuck, sitting on the highway with no exit in sight, I had to pee so badly I created a makeshift bedpan for my car’s front seat and prayed that a. I wouldn’t have to use it, but if I did then b. I’d positioned it properly.  (fyi, I didn’t have to test my MacGyver-ish work but I’m seriously considering carrying an actual bedpan for future disasters it was that close)

But that’s not the worst of it.

Then there was the part where I was watching big rigs get stuck on bridges with slight inclines because the bridges were solid sheets of ice, and praying that fishtailing trailer didn’t slam me as I crept past them.

But that’s not the worst of it.

You wanna know what the worst thing was?  Other than having to hear my hubby on the phone telling me how pretty the snow looked from in front of the fireplace at home while I struggled to maintain some control over my bladder?

It was the mother trucker from hell in front of me. She appointed herself shoulder police, and since we were in the far right lane and no one was really moving, she had ample opportunities to block drivers who tried to take advantage of the unused shoulder of the highway to move up in the world. She’d pull off to the shoulder every time someone broke from the pack and tried to maneuver their way around.  Once an SUV came up alongside me, and I guess she saw them at the last second and pulled hard to the right forcing the SUV off onto the embankment and down in some slick/frozen grassy area. I thought for sure he was going to roll it, but he managed to maintain control and got around her.  She wasn’t happy, so she decided to stay on the shoulder because no one, by God, was going to do that to her – the SHOULDER POLICE – again.  Since she seemed content to now be the person using the shoulder to move along, I inched my car up until I was about halfway down the length of her trailer.  It was at that point she rolled down her window and started gesturing wildly and screaming at me.  I rolled down my window, utterly perplexed as I had not tried to use the shoulder to pass her but was, in fact, passing her in the lane. You know, the right of way, the part you’re supposed to drive on.

The conversation went…

CrazyMotherTrucker:  Do you want to get run over, bitch??!!

Me: What?

CMT: DO YOU WANT TO GET RUN OVER??

Me: But, you’re the one on the shoulder and I’m nearly passed you now so why don’t you just let me get in front of you and….

CMT: I’M COMING OVER NOWWWWW!!! RIGHT NOW!!

Me: (realizing at this point she had about 40,000 lbs. on me) Uhhh….

And she did…she just kept coming, and I had nowhere to go because right next to me was another truck and he had nowhere to go and so on.

So I stopped.

And I prayed.

And I held my breath and my bladder…the last one just barely.

And she juuust missed me by an inch or two as she did just what she screamed she would.

Crazy. Mother. Trucker.

 

 

Random Shit – Just So You’ll Know I’m Not Dead…Yet

So, a few weeks ago we bought a farm.

Sweet clothespin jeebus, what were we thinking?  Not only did we double the square footage of house we will now occupy, but we like bazillioned the amount of outdoor space we will now occupy. Thankfully, most of the outdoors looks like a forest and that’s exactly how it will remain.

Oh, and hubby doubled, yes fecking doubled, his commute.  Mine will remain about the same, because traffic.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. are we doing???

We’ve also listed some other property we own for sale, put my mother’s property on the market – and it sold in three days, but now we wait for probate and try to figure out the drunken monkeys who wrote the damned mortgage on the property’s thought patterns – and hope/pray/cry/scream in frustration over the whole fecking mess which boils down to will I really be able to sell it at all or must I back out of these deals because when I do sell the property the mortgage company will come after me for the entire mortgage when I’m only responsible for half?  Jeebus, I hyperventilate just thinking about it all.

Then, this past weekend we spent 745 hours cleaning, packing, and de-feckifying the current house so the listing agent can come take pictures of it tonight and put it on the market.  Let me just say it’s been a while since I dusted anything properly. Apparently. Trust me on this.

We told the kids, they got weepy, the grandkids cried, and everyone decided we had to have a farewell potluck in the old house in a couple of weeks before we actually move – which will happen on Halloween, as you do…or at least as we have done the last two moves.

So, I’m a wee bit distracted and a wee bit exhausted, and a wee-wee-wee all the way home aching from head to foot.

Oh, and this morning my tire alarm went off in the car so I stopped to put air in the tire and was harassed by a homeless guy on a bicycle.

Good times.

Did I Tell You About The Time…

….my mother died and then I had a head-on collision a couple of days later?

Yeah, so that happened.

I think y’all have heard me gripe about our frat boy neighbors across the street a time or two, amiright?

Well, one of them got up close and personal with me the day we were traveling to my mother’s funeral a couple of weeks ago.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.  He hit me, head on, on our street as I was taking the critters in for boarding.  They are fine, by the way. Me, not so much, but I digress.

He was turning onto our street at a “T” intersection, and I was coming up to the intersection to turn off the street.  When he turned, he cut the corner really sharp and accelerated – as you do, when you’re 19 and too cool for school – when he looked up, and remembered this isn’t England a millisecond before his Beemer hit my Impala smack in the nose.  One inch to the right and my airbags would have deployed, likely totaling my car, but the gods of mechanical shit were with me and instead of totaled, the car sustained about $5K in damage.  He bent the frame when his little car went under mine or else it wouldn’t have been so much.

Amazing what an impact at 20 mph will do to a car and the bodies inside.

So, after he hits me I just sat there staring at him through the windshield and after a minute this big boy, covered in tattoos, gets out of his car..and he’s crying.

Crying.  There’s no crying in car crashes. But there he was, crying like a baby about having just had a crash “and it’s my fault” he kept saying.

Damn right it was, and I was pissed…and this is what happened next as I sat in the driver seat dialing 9-1-1 as he approached me.

ME: What the fuck? HOW did YOU  not see ME??

CRYBABY: I don’t know. I just….*sobs*

ME: Stop being a pussy, will you?  Are you hurt?

CRYBABY: *hic* No.

ME: Well, I am..my chest hurts and I’ve got the cops and fire department coming.

CRYBABY: *wails*

ME: Geez…you live across the street from me, right?

CRYBABY: *sniffle* Yes

ME: First, why the fuck do you think I want to hear your music all hours of the day and night?? TURN THAT SHIT DOWN!!

CRYBABY: *sniff* Okay.

ME: And that has nothing to do with this. I just saw an opportunity. Now, the police are coming, everyone’s fine, you just stay where you are.

*an aside, I’ve had dipshits try to run on me before – this is accident #7 and twice that’s happened*

CRYBABY: I’m not fucking going anywhere.

ME: Don’t you talk to me that way, young man!

CRYBABY: (stares at the profane old lady in the car)

So, the police and hunky firemen came (seriously, why are all firemen so damned cute?) and checked me out.  My chest was bruised, and I had a goose egg on my knee from hitting the dash.

I rode to my mother’s house with an ice pack strapped to my knee.  And every breath hurt.

I thought I was fine.

I’m cute when I’m in denial.

Last weekend, two weeks after this incident, I noticed a GIANT lump in my chest.  Looks like I’m growing a third tit, and it hurts a whole helluva lot.

What. The. Fuck.

My doctor took x-rays and said I fractured the xiphoid bone, and have a large hematoma (third tit) in my chest.

No worries, none of that is as bad as it sounds. It’ll heal on its own and the hematoma isn’t in a vein or anything.  It’s on the bone and surrounding cartilage.  It’ll just take time. Time and ice.  Really, ice seems to help a lot. But, I can’t go around with an ice pack in my bra at work.  Stupid social rules and shit like “propriety” get in the way.

Since the day of the crash, I’ve been trying to get Crybaby’s insurance to accept liability.  First, they had no copy of the police report.  Then, no copy of the report AND Crybaby was not responding to calls or letters. Then Crybaby said it was MY fault, and they were investigating.

THEN, this morning I went all bitcharoni on their asses in a pain-induced fit of rage. Lo and behold, they have their reports, they got his statement, and they are 100% sure they are accepting liability.

Hallelujah, holy shit, where’s the Tylenol?