This was my weekend.
For the past month I have planned to take my best friend Neal out to dinner at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Virginia Beach for his birthday on the 26th. Finally the day comes around, Neal comes to my house to get me and where do I end up? The emergency room at Langley with a particularly vicious gallbladder attack. I apologize profusely to Neal who tells me, "Really Shannon, if you didn't want to go out all you had to do was say so. You didn't have to be so dramatic..." and I go home. WHERE do I end up at 0730 Saturday morning? Same emergency room, different bed, much better medications. I guess you had to be in the first bed to get the good stuff...you know what they say, "Location, location, location!"
While I was there I was treated really well, both times. I suppose I should have asked them if they had a card they could give me so I could punch up some frequent flyer miles. The one nice doctor I had there at the beginning of my first visit and the end of my second visit told me that he was going to call in a surgeon whose name I won't put here without his permission. I talked to the surgeon and he seemed really nice...I was however hopped up on morphine so I could have been hallucinating. I do remember him telling me that he was wanting to take out my gallbladder on Tuesday...which is today, then I'll stay overnight and come home on Wednesday, I agreed. I mean, come on what did I care? All my words were pretty much monosyllabic at that point anyway.
Yesterday I went and got myself all situated for surgery. By the way, I was right, the surgeon is really great and it wasn't just the morphine. I'll be having my surgery in a little while and I'm planning to make a bet with the surgeon that if I come through the operation and recovery without whining that I'll get to drive his car. He's got a really nice car. Just kidding...not about the car being nice, but about me driving it. Oh nevermind! UGGGHHH!
Even if I was going to make a bet it wouldn't matter because I'd lose. I have every intention of whining like a baby when this is all over. Then I'm gonna go get something to eat. I'm really hungry.
I'm cool with the surgery. I don't need that silly green bag anyway. That particular shade of green just clashes with my other organs and therefore must go.
Neal has already planned to come see me in the hospital and says that he is going to make me laugh. Neal is a dipwad. Neal forgets that in the winter he is going to have a hernia operation and that I am not above flying down here from AK just to pay him back for making me laugh after my abdominal surgery. Neal forgets these things and shall be reminded. Neal is a silly boy who will be in immense pain and I won't care because as we all know, payback is a bitch.
Wal-Mart
First and foremost I want it to be known that I hate Wal-Mart, aka Wally World.
You heard it right, I hate Wal-Mart...now don't misunderstand me, I'll shop Wal-Mart. I'll shop the shit out of it! Before I go though I have to put on body armor (and when I say body armor I'm not talking about light weight Reynolds Wrap and a "spork", I'm talking about some Knights of the Round Table Sword Pulling King Arthur type stuff), grab a flak vest, draw up a plan of escape, take between 15 and 17 Tylenol or whatever I have lying around, meditate, find my friggin' "center" or whatever it's called, take deep breaths and GO. All this just to keep me from talking myself out of it. Let one thing deter me or be interpreted by me as a "sign", like not being able to find my keys before the count of five, and the trip is off!
My intent was to go in there put dishes, bedding, towels, silverware, etc., on layaway and bolt out through the exit door like Johnny Depp was on the other side waiting for me. That was the intent. The reality was that I went in there at 4 p.m. made my exit at 9:30 and didn't really even do anything! Sure I got some of the things I wanted but not everything because the melee of shoppers coupled with the realization that there were 100,000 people in the store, 24 registers functional but only four of them in operation, I forgot most of the stuff I wanted to get.
Now I come to the point where I have all this crap to pack for the move and no boxes. Soooo, I call Wal-Mart. I see Wal-Mart the way other countries see America....hate it 'til it's needed. So I called the abyss, I mean store, and a nice lady answered. I asked her if I could get some boxes and she told me that "freight is dropped off and unloaded at 10:30 p.m. and any boxes had to be picked up by 7:30 a.m." at that point they were crushed and thrown out. I weigh my options carefully...a "carefully" that took me all of 1.2 seconds or whatever time it takes for the words "there is no flippin' way I'm getting up at 7:00 in the morning to go get boxes" to register in the brain. I look at the kids and say, "Kids?" and they look at me and say, "No, we don't want to go." I hadn't even told them anything yet but they protested, determined they weren't going and there was nothing I could do to make them.
Later on that night at Wal-Mart the kids and I started scouting out boxes. It was really pathetic if you think about it. I felt like I was stalking people (which is something I have NO previous experience in, ahem). "Hey ma'am, when are you going to empty that big box of pillows? Could you set it aside for me? Thanks." I was digging through carts full of boxes like a baglady and if I happened to see boxes being opened at the end of any given aisle I would stop and hold stock still just staring kind of like I heard Sasquatch walking through the leaves in the distance. The kids are like, "What is it mom?" I just stared in the direction of the boxes, putting up my hand ever so slightly, "Shhhhh..." It got so bad that a woman who was taking something out of a box saw me pushing my cart with my vision blocking array of boxes and yelled, "Hey ma'am! Do you want this box?" from roughly 100 yards away. I darted back and got it. I don't know if she even worked there I just took the stupid box.
~~~~~FREEBIE~~~~~
Now in my fourth bedroom I have a bazillion boxes. The thing is, when I needed boxes I couldn't find any but now that I HAVE those boxes every body on the planet can suddenly get boxes for me. My buddy Mark left boxes in front of my garage, my friend Robin can get me boxes, etc, etc, etc.
Thanks Wal-Mart for cluttering up my rooms with huge boxes. Nothing turns a upstanding citizen into a cart-digger faster than an ill-planned move and free boxes.
Never thought of it quite like this....
This makes much more sense than it probably should.
So I'm looking through the internet the other day and I happened upon this link to these dolls called Krypt Kiddies. Dear sweet Lord has anyone else seen these things? I clicked one of the pictures to enlarge, because I'm smart like that, and spit a mouthful of water on the monitor. I immediately turned on the light in the computer room because I certainly didn't want to be in the dark alone with a picture of that thing.
Lemme give you some background here. I hate dolls. I played with trucks and such when I was a child...I'm sure my parents thought I was going to be different, but whatever. The thing that made me scared of dolls was the this movie made up of three different stories called "Trilogy of Terror" made back in 1975. The segment that did me in was about a woman, played by Karen Black, who has this tribal doll that comes to life and tries to kill her. I am aware that this is a pretty benign plot by todays standards but when you're six, well, it's a real clencher! What's even worse than the doll is the way the main character totally lost it and ended up being scarier than the doll. At any moment you expect the doll to stop, take one look at her and say "Okay lady, you win". That movie scarred me for life and if you think I am the only one just look at the IMDB message board for that movie and you'll see what I'm talking about. Oh, and when people find out about the doll thing, well, you can just imagine. I told my friend Juli about my fear and she taped a knife in a dolls hand and stood it up on the stairs that led up to the second floor of her house. Juli is a funny girl. I like her.
In light of my new "Krypt Kiddies" discovery the dolls I was afraid of then seem like little angels on a Hallmark card compared to these demon spawn. Wanna make matters worse? They have one that's just as grotesque...and it's a CLOWN. Believe me, the clown story is a post all it's own.
The fun doesn't end there my friends, not by a long shot. Years later I got married had children, a boy and a girl. Well Evan, she loved her some monster trucks and cars, etc. until one day we were whippin' through the store in some sort of frenzy and I mistakenly turned down the "PINK AISLE". If any of you have girls then you know what I am talking about, don't deny it. I started backing out of that aisle like a dog when it realizes it's about to run off a cliff but it was too late. Much, much too late. Now she has Barbie, and dolls my dad sent her (who's side are you on anyway?), and dolls my husband got her (because his sense of humor is just out of control), and coupons for dolls, and dreams of new dolls. My sister-in-law even collects those porcelain faced dolls and was nice enough to tell me that if anything ever happens to her my daughter gets the dolls. I go to great lengths to make sure nothing happens to her.
Thank you Krypt Kiddies! Thanks a friggin' lot.
Step aerobics = Death
Soooooo, today I turned the air conditioner down to somewhere around 14 degrees, got a ginormic glass of water, and readied myself to step up and down for 45 minutes. Up and down, up and down, up and down, check pulse, up and down, up and down, up and down, get water, up and down, up and down, up and down, tell children you love them and call coroner. All that upping and downing and the scenery never changes...kind of like the Daytona 500 - if I'm driving that many miles I'd better cross the finish line in another state.
Anyhoo, I am doing my thing on my trusty aerobic step and I do everything that Kathy Smith is doing yet she is still able to connect words together and form complete sentences that I can understand. I mean, not that I could hear her over the sound of my own gasping. Darth Vader would have offered me an inhaler. I get around minute infinity and over in the corner is none other than the Grim Reaper himself. Checking his watch. He's so pushy.
I got through my 45 minutes of self-torture, Grim left saying something about "next time", and I went to take a shower because I smelled like a barn. A crowded barn. An OVER-crowded barn.
I would have typed this blog before my shower but I was scared all of the sweat would short out my keyboard. Now I'm Zestfully clean! And deodorized.
Now I get to do it all again tomorrow.
Trying to archive...and move to AK.
Anyone know how to archive these things? Me either.
HOLY CRAP I THINK I GOT IT!!!! Man I'll tell ya, I accomplish more things by accident than most people set goals for.
So, my time is drawing closer for my move to AK. I have to get boxes, call people, change the brakes on my truck, yadda, yadda, yadda. We leave October 1st or 14th, depending on when the house in AK is ready. It's a really nice house too, i.e. not base housing. It has a garage with rooms over it, a fireplace, a big master bedroom, a big porch on the front and a deck on the back. Our landlord said that he will give us the money to put in a jacuzzi if we'd like. Well, let me think. Yeah, I guess.
I have to get John's car ready for storage at a friends house since John's dad decided to be a jerk (HUGE jerk) and screw him over on storing the car. Sell it you say? I just spent money to paint it AND it is one of 281 made out of a total of 26,000 '75 T/A's made that year. No, not selling. My 13 year-old furniture is falling apart but the car is painted.
Well, I have to go for now. I'm taking the kids to lunch and then to swimming (30 minutes should elapse between the two :)).
Be back soon! Probably sooner than you'd like.
