diarrhea

Self-Restraint is Not One of My Strong Skills, and Isolation is Good for Me (and Everyone Else!)

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joan

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m having a currently shitty run so far this year.  Never mind I’ve been bloody sick with the screaming snots since New Year’s Day and sleeping every moment that I possibly can manage to- when I’m either not at work or hawking up snot.  The past two weekends I’ve not bothered to move much beyond my bed.

There is no way I’m calling off for spewing snots, because everyone else (conveniently) already has.   I think the guys around here call off for hangnails, zits and even excessive vaginal sand, as wussy as they are.

As long as I can somewhat remain vertical and I’m not puking or having a hate/hate relationship with Montezuma, I will function, even if it is by being jacked up on cold medicine and Sinus Plumber spray.  It sucks.  At least I did finagle a 10 day antibiotic script, and the sinus infection part of it is starting to clear up.  The green snot is going away anyway.  The clear, and brown, and bloody snot is still stringing along though.

Sinus-Plumber--801x1024

This stuff burns like hell, but breathing is worth the burn!

Then to add a fantastic steaming hot turd to the top of this phlegmy mess is that I got rear-ended in the Target parking lot last Wednesday.  I’m sicker than hell, strung out from another stressful short-staffed day at work, it’s 3º below zero, and then some foreigner rear ends me.  I can only imagine the vision of the she-behemoth-bitch-beast that jumped out of the driver’s door on that fateful evening. The only good parts: a.) wasn’t my fault, and the other guy’s insurance (yes he had it) has to pay, and b.) the other vehicle was an SUV and has not even a mark on it.

The bad news?  I was in the Corolla and my rear bumper fascia is toast, and the left quarter panel and decklid are damaged.  It’s about $2500 worth of aggravation and God only knows how long to get it fixed.  I’m consigned to driving the truck (no, a 2010 Tacoma 4X4 is not a bad ride at all) which is not so bad except the interior smells like a dragon’s colon thanks to Jerry using it as a smoking lounge.

Jerry also has no sense of vehicle interior feng shui.  I found loser lottery tickets from 2011, various food wrappers from a variety of establishments, including Taco Bell and Waffle House, Pepsi Max cans, used Kleenex, a flannel shirt, an NRA ball cap, and assorted flotsam and detritus.  I’m sure he will love the fact that I douched the whole interior really good with lavender Febreze.

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I guess I’m just not supposed to have anything nice.

I’m sure this poor foreign guy and his wife probably thought I was some sort of snotting, rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth bitch when I got out of the car.  Even though his English skills weren’t the greatest, he was shoving that insurance card at me with the quickness.  It probably didn’t help that I refused to move the car until I at least called the police, (and apparently the word “police” is pretty high on the list of words taught in ESL classes… because the guy was really freaked when I said, “I’m calling the police,”) who conveniently won’t come out in inclement weather unless you have to call the squad.

I could have feigned injury, but then I would have been transported to the same hospital where the (hot, but clueless) male nurse in the exam room called me Mildred and asked about my diarrhea, and I would probably rather be dead than experience that particular medical facility ever again.  That, and I really don’t want to end up paying for a meaningless and aggravating trip to any ER unless I am near death or already dead, and not just suffering from the screaming snots and the fuming anger that accompanies having to deal with a trashed car.   Ironically, any other time in beautiful Central Ohio there would be cops and fire trucks and squads and sirens galore, unbidden, stopping traffic for miles for the least of fender benders, but apparently not when it’s 3º below.

ambulance-ford-E350

The moral of the story- only get rear ended if it’s a bright, sunny day!

I’m sure my family is sort of pissed at me too because for the past 2 weeks I’ve felt too shitty to make the trip up there.  I also don’t want to share my mucoid maladies with anyone up there, especially Dad, who gets sinus infections and pneumonia easily enough anyway. This weekend I probably won’t either, even if I am feeling better, because I’m sure Jerry might like to use his truck for something.  I know it sounds bad because I really do miss my granddaughter, but going up north every Sunday is a bit of a pain in the ass, and usually costs me money I’d rather not have to spend.  This weekend I might just lock myself in my room and troll for new reading material and enjoy my DVR’d episodes of Brickleberry. Isolation might be healthier for me and for anyone who might surround me for awhile anyway.

cheerup

I hope so.  Because I’m rather despondent at the moment.

Granted, Jerry works at the body shop that is going to be (someday?) fixing my car.  The bad part of this is that it’s winter and there’s been ice storms, so every body shop in a 50 mile radius is booked at least 6 weeks out, and this isn’t getting done anytime soon.  Technically I can drive my car the way it is even though it looks like shit, but that could make things more complicated to fix, and I really don’t want to screw with it until the other guy’s insurance adjuster approves all the (proper) repairs.  This car is a 2014 with less than 10 K on it, and they aren’t going to get away with a half ass job.  I didn’t ask for this shit and it wasn’t my fault.  I need my car back the way it was before Julio or whatever his name was saw fit to ruin the ass end of it.

 

Victorian Ephemera, Patent Medicine and Today’s Mollycoddled Offspring

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ChildrensElastic-1975-F-208

Here’s a Victorian-era product that probably wouldn’t go over too well today.  Except maybe to NAMBLA members.

I know that knee pads are available for kids today – as well as shin guards, mouth guards and bike helmets- but these I think were designed more to preserve expensive clothing rather than to prevent injury.  One need only examine some Victorian-era playthings to understand that safety wasn’t first. Or fifth.  From the looks of some of that stuff, safety couldn’t have really been considered at all.

I can only imagine the geek factor involved for kids whose mothers required them to wear these, but then again, boys of the Victorian era typically wore those awful little man-capris with knee high socks.  Knee protectors couldn’t make that dreadful fashion too much worse.

rocks and a mace

Screw the pellet gun- let’s just give them rocks and a mace!

Granted, Steve-o had toys, ranging from the innocuous to the deadly.  He had Legos, Thomas the Tank Engine, Power Rangers, those annoying little finger skateboards, a BB gun (I’m still picking BBs out of the walls) and a Zippo (not to be confused with a flashlight.)

He had the latest video games, and a lot of other electronic toys too, but I didn’t want him to simply sit on his ass and watch as it grew huge, so I did allow skateboarding and in-line skating, which were responsible for both times he broke his right arm, once at age 6 and then again at age 11.   I should have stopped at the BMX bike, but even the BMX bike proved quasi-deadly.  Some little ass-pilot at his school decided to jam the rear wheel so the bike wouldn’t move when he went to take off on it. Unfortunately the little ass-pilot behind the engineering of that prank didn’t have much understanding of physics.  Steve-o went to take off on the BMX and as the rear wheel was jammed all 160# of his 14 year old body went over the handlebars and landed square on his mouth- blasting his two front teeth to smithereens, though by some miracle of God sparing his skull.

$3800 (that insurance didn’t cover,) three root canals, and two crowns later, Steve-o was redeemed from a lifetime of Billy-Bob mouth.  I was redeemed from $3800.  I guess the love of money is the root of all evil.  The only thing is, I’ve never been able to hang on to money long enough to fall in love with it, so I’ve not gotten to test the theory.

cat wash

Wrong on many levels, but still cute.

Patent medicines have always fascinated me.  They would have been awesome if they actually worked.  One of my favorites is the wash-the-fat-away soap.  If only one could scrub away the bingo wings and thunder thighs.

wash away fat

Wash away the lard- and eliminate the ravages of time.  What’s in this shit?  Acid?  Flesh eating worms?

Even better are the adjectives used in patent medicine ads to describe overweight people- “corpulent,” “stout,” “too much flesh,” and just plain “fat. “

fat people

Hey!  You!  Lard Ass!  Try this shizzle.  It’ll CURE your fatness!  Or should I say “corpulency” and “stoutness?”

Maybe the fat reducing ideas of the Victorian era were more effective than the potions and fads we try today, but then I would wager there were fewer fat people back then because everything one ate or drank had a good probability of giving one Montezuma’s revenge.  You got to crap your way thin whether you wanted to or not.

constipation wretched

Then again…

Perhaps if you lived on salt pork and corn cobs, constipation may just be an issue.  I have to say that using a bird (presumably that’s a crow) to hawk (pun intended) a constipation remedy is brilliant.  None of nature’s creatures craps more often or in more quantity for its size than birds.  The subliminal is right here: Take these pills and you’ll shit like a bird!

My Old Friend Montezuma Stopped By, and He Brought His Cousin, Ralph

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happy superfriends birthdayThis year’s birthday really, really sucked ass.  Then again, I should refrain from any toilet-related verbage for awhile, probably.
I appreciate the birthday wishes everyone sent me Tuesday even though I didn’t reply to anyone on Facebook or anywhere else.  I wasn’t being rude intentionally.  I was home in bed and quite miserable- and not because I wanted to be.
Monday, when I’d already arranged (of course) to take the day off for Sophia’s birthday and then to take Tuesday off for my own, I got to spend both days in the company of Montezuma and his cousin Ralph.  They are not nice houseguests.
diarrhea tsunamiNot my idea of a good time.  Ever.
Steve-o and I left early Monday morning with Sophie to go to Easton so she could do Build-a-Bear for her birthday.  We got through the Build-a-Bear (she picked the Hello Kitty- and her clothes) and then I got deathly ill.
I’m just glad I knew where the ladies’ was at Easton, and that I could trot fast enough to get there in time to avoid a most embarrassing and aesthetically unpleasant scene.  Not too many people are “down with the fountain of brown.” Steve-o had to take me home and I spent the rest of the day Monday and most of the day Tuesday between bed and…well, you know where.
overflowI had better aim than that, thankfully, but yeah, it was about that bad.
It was my typical bad luck to schedule days off only to be sick, but then I thought at least, 1. I had taken vacation time already anyway, and 2. getting sick while on vacation saved me the dreaded necessity of calling off, which I won’t do, unless, of course, I am physically unable to remain vertical.
Tuesday night, once I did manage to keep down some saltine crackers and Diet 7UP, I felt a little bit up to reading the pages on fasting in our Lenten study book from church.  I know my sort of imposed fasting of late isn’t exactly what I’d call a spiritual discipline, at least not when the cause for one’s fast is: Don’t eat – unless you want to visit Cousin Ralph.  Even so, I did not fail to see the irony in reading about fasting when all I’d had to eat in the past 24 hours was a few saltine crackers.  Being hungry sucks.  It sucks even worse when you know that anything you think you’re going to put down is going to come right back up.
throw_upNot one of my favorite activities.  It’s right down there with standing in line at the BMV.
I know as a diabetic, fasting from food, in the traditional sense of a fast, is Not a Good Idea, especially when my blood sugar was 60 Tuesday morning (don’t worry, it was 110 yesterday morning and 118 this morning, which is acceptable, so today at least, I’m staying vertical.) For the past few days, though, in spite of being somewhat vertical yesterday and today, I’ve felt like a freeze-dried dog turd.
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However, even in my non-voluntary fast, I learned a few important things.  One is the ever present lesson that my physical body and stamina are quite limited.  Lately I had been burning the candle at both ends as well as in the middle, and it caught up with me.  Sometimes these annoying (though thankfully, usually brief and not deadly in the long term) ailments give one just enough time to stop and rest and realize that there’s too much noise and too much running around and various crud going on.  Saturday I was between Columbus and Marion.  Sunday I was between Columbus and Lancaster and then back to Marion. Monday I’d gone back from Marion to Columbus after staying in my parents’ guest room, being kept up all night by the spooky sounds of the trains.
train2
It’s a backwater, but even in Marion the trains are diesel-electrics, not like the cool steam engine pictured above.
If you live there, you get used to the trains, but when you don’t live there, the incessant noise of the trains is creepy, probably like the airport would be for people who don’t live less than a mile from Port Columbus.
diesel-electricThis is a diesel-electric locomotive engine- the ones that are in use today- constantly hauling thousands of coal cars back and forth across central Ohio.
The bottom line was I was running too much, and trying to cram 10# of fertilizer into a 5# bag.  That’s sort of normal for me, only the older I get I have less and less tolerance for it.  If my body and mind don’t get the rest and recharging they think they need, sometimes they take it by force. Sometimes they hire Monte and Ralph to do the job.
I was forced to step back and realize that no, I wasn’t going to be able to get all the laundry done.  I was going to have to ask Jerry to go get catfood (and hope and pray that the catfood bags still have pictures of cats on the front so he doesn’t come home with hog feed or something.) I wasn’t going to get to spend a day traipsing about Easton with my son and granddaughter.  I was more than aware that if I wasn’t able to get myself vertical and drag myself out the door that calling off Wednesday would have been a distinct possibility (and maybe should have been…)
catfood
Jerry: no, it’s not cat meat in the bag, it’s what you feed the cats.  Just so I’m clear.
It’s hard to take a hiatus from our own demands, (even if we try to plan for it) but it’s even harder to take a hiatus from the demands of others.
I think I understand what John Lennon meant about sitting and watching the wheels go ’round and ’round.  I’d like to get off the merry-go-round from time to time, but it seems the only time I get that opportunity is when my grip on the merry-go-round gets overwhelmed by the centrifugal force of the world spinning.  I let go, and I fall off of it.  Unlike John Lennon, I don’t have the luxury of staying off the bloody thing for too long, but I need to do it more often, and before I have to be pried off of it by illness, weakness and sometimes, even, my own pride.
There is an even more profound lesson to be found in all of this.  All of our provision comes from God.  Apart from Him I am not able to do anything.  It’s not my strength we’re talking about, but His. Sometimes I need times like this to be reminded that it’s not about my plans or what I’ve set out to do.   Sometimes God simply says: “Sit down and shut up and rest for once. You have no power at all save for Me.”  It’s a necessary and humbling reminder.
Monte and Ralph have beaten me up pretty good over the past couple of days.  I will need to change the cat boxes tonight though, because Jerry will NOT do that.  I took him way out of his comfort zone by asking him to unload the dryer and hang up his clothes. 🙂
 Explosive-DiarrheaThen again, maybe not.

Domestic Insanity and Drunk-n-Stupid Meet Passive-Aggressive Revenge

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I know better.  I really do.

I’ve been somewhat ambivalent about taking Mom and Dad down to NC this Saturday.  I really doubt if Dad should be travelling this far this soon after open heart surgery, and I am freaky about taking him down in places where medical assistance is either not available or, if it is, it is, shall we say, primitive.  My sister lives in the middle of nowhere, and you have to drive through 12 hours of mostly nowhere to get there.  On the positive side Dad goes to his Dr. again tomorrow, and I will know for sure then if he will be OK to go, at least on a medical evaluation.

Another thing about this potential road trip that kind of freaks me is that I’m still having exactly the same issues I ended up in the ER for back in June.  Still have the heart palpitations and chest pain and all that mess, but according to the Dr.s I’ve seen including my family Dr., it’s nothing that’s going to kill me.  Yet.  I am still a wee bit apprehensive about driving continuously for 12 hours- Dad is allowed to drive, and probably will at least part of the way down, (Mom won’t be driving at all because she can’t drive manual shift,) but I’m coming back by myself since they’re staying all week. My sister or my nephew will be bringing them back.

I can’t die yet, because I don’t want to vote Democrat.  Ever.

Maybe I’m already on Obama’s death list and I just don’t know it yet.  Maybe there’s a little note in my medical records that says, “let this one die, so we can have more money to buy more pecker pumps for geezers and pay for birth control for people who should be keeping their legs together to begin with.”  I don’t think having heart palpitations constantly and up to the point of barely being able to catch one’s breath is “normal.”  But what the hell do I know?

Or maybe not?  Who knows?

I do know that I don’t want to go back to the same hospital where they called me Mildred and asked about my (non-existent) diarrhea,  put me in the same room with a howler monkey, and then told me that the reason why I have heart palpitations is because I don’t get enough sleep.  Then I go for the sleep study, get told I have sleep apnea, but not to the point where I need to be on a machine…I’m frustrated on that point.  I still don’t sleep for shit, haven’t for years.  I have to sleep at about a 45° angle to keep from drowning on the snot that drains down the back of my throat.   I don’t think I’ve had a really good night’s sleep since before I was pregnant with Steve-o- and he’s 21.  It doesn’t help that I have Tipsy McNumbNuts, who smokes like a chimney, screams like a banchee after a 12 pack or so, and has a taste for bad country music in the middle of the night, conspiring against my nightly repose.

Drunks should come with warning labels.

Jerry was on a roll last night even for a Monday.  I hope the boys at the shop are enjoying Tuesday Hangover Jerry today, ’cause it’s going to be a good one.  I hope they’re at least as loud and obnoxious as he was last night.

His TV, cable box, DVD player and stereo have been carefully configured (by me, he can’t figure out electronic anything) to be very simple to operate.  There is one button on the remote that turns the TV and cable box on and off.  It’s very simple.  Push the power button, TV and cable box turn on simultaneously.  Push the power button again and the TV and cable box turn off.  It’s not rocket science.  It is, however awkward at best to plug all this stuff in so that it works correctly.  I know what plugs in where, but I’m not particularly fond of the gymnastic feats I have to attempt to get the right things plugged into the right places.

It’s too hard for some people.

For some reason only known to God and maybe another drunk, finding the power button on the remote was too difficult for Jerry last night.  He wanted the TV off. So he unplugged everything- even unscrewed the freaking coax off the back of the TV and unplugged the AV leads from the DVD player for some bizarre reason.  Hey, kids, alcohol kills brain cells, just so you know!

Then to make it all the more entertaining, after prattling on all night last night on various rants and assorted nonsense, he’s sitting in the bed whining this morning that “the TV won’t turn on.”  Well, no shit, Sherlock, you unplugged every single wire you could unplug from every single AV device you have…

“Well, I need to watch the news,” he pouts, (insert Eric Cartman voice here) “and if I can’t watch it in here I’ll just use your TV.”

Oh, no you won’t.

Suffice to say as Jerry is a smoker with essential tremor, the world is Jerry’s ashtray.  To top that off, not only do I not want my bed to be full of stale beer farts and cigarette ashes, he doesn’t know how to operate my TV either, and I don’t need that screwed up too.  If he wants his little hole to be a fetid filth den, fine by me, but I like clean, fresh-smelling, burn-hole free sheets and a TV that works.

So at 6:30 this morning I’m back in the filth hole smoking lounge that is his room, behind the dresser, untangling wiring, plugging everything back in and moving the various electronics back to their proper places.  20 minutes later he was watching the stinking news on his own TV.  I could have wrung his neck.  Maybe it wasn’t nice of me to keep on muttering “dumb ass,” but it’s not as if Jerry being a dumb ass is a secret or anything.

I call ’em as I see ’em.  Then again, I’m fully aware he was raised by wolves.

I know he’s pissed at me for volunteering to take Mom and Dad to NC this weekend instead of frying my patoot off at the campground (I like going down there, but not when it’s supposed to be 95° and hotter all weekend.)  He’s pissed because he will have to remain sober so he can go back home Saturday night to take care of the dogs.  So all week long it will be passive-aggressive revenge (and as much drunk-n-stupid hijinks as he can stand to perpetrate) just so I know how much he will be “suffering” in his weekend sobriety.