OK, I just returned from the ladies room, and I believe I went into the wrong facility. For whatever reason, despite the knitted scarf, earrings, long skirt and obvious bosoms, today, I look like a man in drag. I just applied some lipstick, which I’m sure is cementing the Drag Queen Within look for the rest of the afternoon. I need to go back to bed so I can wake up a woman, dammit!

Special Orders DO Upset Us.
I think my senior years are going to be spent as a shut-in. Mostly as a defense mechanism to avoid being thrown in JAIL. I went through the drive-thru at Sonic at lunch, and ordered a double burger. No fries, or tots, none of that stuff, I just wanted one big ol’ hamburger for lunch. And I had a coupon. I might as well have garrotted myself with some piano wire and saved everyone the trouble. See, the coupon was for a FREE BURGER, because we drove in a few weeks ago and they were closed, and they handed out free burger coupons as a “woops! We sorry!” sort of gesture. And it clearly states that it’s for one free single burger, anything else is extra. You’d think, what with this being a four-color process coupon and all, not someone’s ghetto publishing extravaganza, that it’d be pretty easy to deduct the cost of a single burger. Here’s some math to indicate how it was going:
That’ll be eleven…….. (my eyebrows are hitting my hairline, waiting for the other shoe to drop)
That’ll be seven (something). I got a Sweetheart Shake, too. Which, by the way, is pretty darn tasty, and yet my life would be so much better if they came in a SMALL. I threw half of it away.
I told him about my coupon, and I could see the entire axis of the store’s foundation start to spin. He tried to add another burger to my order. No. More silence. Finally, I drove up to the window. A manager got involved. I finally said, fine, just give me the regular burger. OK, $2.50. Manager reappears. He took my coupon and tore it up. (?) I just wanted to LEAVE and didn’t enquire about his Sinead O’Connor act. Then he came back and said they’d make it work. $4.49. OK. Finally, the Burger of Discontent is done. Oh, it’ll be a few minutes on that shake. It had been 10 minutes at this point, I didn’t even ask what sort of paralysis I had caused, I just took my meal and left. And concluded that in the interest of gravitational rotation and staying out of the pokey, I should stop trying to do anything different from the Great Menu of Life. Yeah, right.

So, I am just hoping that this day picks up. Or that DAMN I start to feel like a woman….. ba ba da da daaadeeeyaaaaah

That was the subject line from some spam I got today; I thought it had a nice ring to it. Of course, I didn’t open it, because we don’t smoke & I haven’t found much of a need for ashtrays, burly or otherwise.

Today’s somewhat better on the health front, probably due largely to the nap I squeezed in yesterday. My coughing didn’t stop last night, and this morning, it finally dawned on me why my back hurts: the coughing! My entire ribcage area feels like I’ve been treated to a visit from a loan shark or something. I’m hoping that a couple more days of the meds will start kicking this bug out of my system & life will get back to normal – a term that’s always relative.

I’m blue (da bo dee da bo dah), because I had to sign the papers that say my dad’s will & all that stuff is Final. Since he left nearly all of his estate to his wife, that also brings up some issues that I keep stuffing into a footlocker and piling books on. It reminds me of the bright hot Springtime afternoon that I had a blowout fight with him over his decision to leave everything to her, and how he finally got angry with me, and stopped trying to protect me and said, “Jennifer, I wake up in the morning and wonder if this is the day I’m going to die.” He hid the severity of his illness from all of us, but I think in that moment, it helped set the stage for what would come later – which still came far too soon. I remember feeling panic and regret for a few days after that conversation, but I don’t anymore. I’m glad we talked about it and scrappled through it like we did with anything else we didn’t see eye-to-eye on. I wish things were different, so many things, and no amount of money or stuff will ever take from me the relationship he and I had. Sometimes with blended families, it’s hard to dissect the semantics and definitions of words – both my dad & his wife viewed their partners’ children as their children as well. Call me selfish – and I know my dad WAS a dad to her kids – but I was his kid for 31 years before he even knew them. And it sounds petty and yet, with everything I could get wrapped up in and off-track focusing on, that is the one thing that makes me feel a little better when my Panic Gnomes try to get me swirling over what’s fair and 100 other things I can’t control. The other part of my blue is that I’m going to have to go home & go through a whole bunch of stuff, things I’m dreading seeing and remembering and the tidal wave of emotions that will come with it. Part of it is my hatred of who I was when I was a teen, and all the reminders I’ll have of my fractured, broken relationship with my mother. The regrets of knowing now what I didn’t know then, and the mistakes I made. I prefer to live in a candy-colored bubble of avoidance.
It’s so much nicer than a burly ashtray.

So, I’ve been fighting this sporadic, unpredictable cough now for about three weeks. I swear, it rattled the windows and floorboards & reminded me of my first apartment in Minneapolis, which was under one particular flight pattern that shook our building several times a week. The worst was how it woke me up in the middle of the night, and I’d bury my face in my pillow, coughing – but never getting anything OUT. It’s been kind of a personal hell.

Last night was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I hadn’t been in bed half an hour when I woke myself up, coughing. Then, much later, I woke myself up again – sorry for the graphic nature here – with bile & acid in the back of my throat & in my mouth, gagging, coughing and like you right now, grimacing. So I finally realized that it was not going away, and I was tired, tired from not getting complete nights of sleep, tired from the coughing. Fortunately, my doctor’s office usually can get you in pretty quickly, and I popped in mid-morning. I know before, I bitched about the customer service and whatnot, and even started thinking about switching, and I TAKE IT ALL BACK.

My main contact there is a physician’s assistant; my primary care physician is this tiny short Vietnamese woman. The last time I was in, she and I had an animated discussion about Vietnamese food. Since the PA was out, I saw my doctor, and I was sitting there knitting on a pair of socks when she entered the room. It set the tone for the entire visit. She went crazy, because she’d just learned how to knit, and proceeded to tell me she’d had a disaster, dropping a stitch, and she panicked and ripped the whole thing out. I proceeded to show her how to fix a dropped stitch, dropping one of my sock stitches & then zipping it right back up. I went further & explained the difference between picking up a dropped purl vs. knit stitch. After about five minutes of good knit chat, she listened to my lungs, and said that I did have some stuff in them, but it wasn’t bad yet, and good thing I didn’t wait until it turned into bronchitis. She sent me off with a bag of samples, two antibiotics a day and two cough suppressants a day; those pills are the size of a Civic. I felt like maybe I should have gotten my copay back for the free knitting instruction, but I didn’t push it. (After all, the samples saved me a trip to the drugstore.)

I came home and slept for a solid two hours, bookended by chipping ice on the driveway. It’s an unseasonable 50+ degrees today & I had to take advantage of the melting temps to get some of that stuff up. I always think I’m going to get so much done if I’m home during the workweek, and it never works out that way. The sleep was a good thing, though. The sunlight poured in and I didn’t even care that it was so bright, I just curled up like a dog in a patch of sunshine and slept – finally, without the interruption of coughing. And I’m going to be completely confused for the rest of the week as to what day it is!

W:”So, it’s Groundhog Day. The groundhog DIDN’T see his shadow.”
J:”Woohoo! Spring’s on the way! Good ol’ Petawny Chuck.”
W: (shakes head)
J: “What? What’s his name.”
W: “Punxsutawney PHIL. His name is PUNXSUTAWNEY PHIL.”
J: “Oh. Yeah. Well, I was close.”

Snapped today at McCoy’s :

Indeed, some folk believe Cream of Mushroom Soup is actually SOUP.

Anyone north of I-80 knows it’s merely an ingredient.

In part, because I am not this dog:

Those people at Lion Brand have access to some VERY very good drugs.

I haven’t gotten this angry at work, about work, and not involving my OWN neuroses, which I have filed in a floss bobbin box, neatly labeled and arranged by size, since… well, I don’t know when. A sales rep screwed up, and boy howdy, in a royal gigantic way. With all the trimmings. Plus dessert.

Ordinarily, I get wound up and mad and Rawr Rawr Rawr and then I’m level-headed in my interaction and give the benefit of the doubt and try to find the solution. I even first responded to the situation with that attitude, and then one conversation with my client erased any shadows of doubt that the wrong thing had been done.

It’s rare for me to be passionately angry and equally logical, and while I’m still pissed to the nines about what happened? I loved it on another level. My boss did, too, not only because he agreed with me, but as we laughingly observed, because it meant I wasn’t on his ass about the things he’s screwing up & needs to do, too.

Good thing we’re like family ’round here. Family of ROMANS. Let’s just not implement a toga policy.