My life. So exciting.

I wish I had one thing interesting going on in my life to talk about.  But the truth is my life is boring.  Wait, that's not exactly true.  It's Boring (with a capital B). 

Honestly, I'm kind of glad to have some boring in my life because I feel like I have a chance to breathe.  This past week has been pretty much nothing but finishing Christmas shopping and getting my house ready for the whole family to come over and for house guests.  Because, you know, fake daughter just moved out last week so I didn't want to go too long without someone staying with me.  In the two years I've lived in my house, the longest span I've gone without someone staying with me is 5 weeks.

This weekend I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned some more.  It's amazing what having 2 teenager/young adults living in your house for 8 months will do to a place.  I didn't sit down for 2 days and I still didn't get everything done.  Now I was also trying to hook up a new tv and AT&T U-Verse box in my bedroom which didn't go so well.  I went out and bought a different kind of cable and tried again last night to hook it all up.  It still didn't go well.  So I called their customer service last night and they ran an equipment check while I was on the phone with them and immediately said my equipment is f*^&&* up and they need to send someone out and they are scheduled to come figure out what is going on this Saturday afternoon.  I was glad to know it was their equipment that is messed up and not my mad technology skillz.  I will hopefully have everything working so I can lay in bed and be lazy and watch tv for hours by Saturday evening.  Only I can't lay in bed and watch tv for hours and be lazy until the next weekend because my mom and her husband are coming from Texas and they'll be here Saturday afternoon and will be staying with me for a week. 

My mom's husband likes to do stuff around my house and be busy so I'm trying to come up with a long list of crap that needs fixed.  I should have left the task of putting together a clothes hanging rack for him.  Instead I did it myself on Sunday night.  It's from Ikea.  And Ikea stuff is a giant pain in the bedonkadonk to assemble.

The guest room they sleep in does not have any rods, shelves, etc. in the closet.  And the room and closet are lined in bead board and stained.  The closet is really long and it has 4 french doors.  That means I'm going to have to stain rods to match everything since you can see through the doors so basically what I'm saying is that I'm going to pay someone to install rods.  Someday.  (No, it's not something I would want to ask my mom's husband to do.)  And I have some alternative ideas to rods but it's stuff that will require manly tools that I don't own and don't want to buy so if I go that route I will still pay someone to do it.  They normally hang stuff in a closet in another room, but my cat has ruined that room with her IBS because the tile in that room was apparently not sealed before I bought my house so now it's stained with cat poo and I will have to have it re-tiled if I can't figure out how to clean it.  And welcome to my fun life when it comes to having house guests and cat poo issues.  My cat is still not doing very good despite expensive raw food which she suddenly refuses to eat.

Anyway, I bought a rolling clothes rack from Ikea in January, 2011 because I was going to use it to hang wet clothes on that I didn't want to put in the dryer.  In February, 2011 I did my awesome post-pedicure swan dive onto my face and broke my arm so I had never put this clothes rack together and last week I suddenly remembered it was still in the box in a closet in the room fake daughter had been living in.  I figured I could put it together to stick in the guest room closet until I can afford to have something better put in there so my guests don't have to go to another part of my house and look at cat poo stains when they want to pick out something to wear.

I haven't cursed so much in a long time as I did when I was trying to put that stupid thing together with Ikea and their stupid instructions that only have pictures and no words.  It had 7 poles and the instructions just showed poles but had no written words to tell me if I was supposed to use the long poles or the short poles or the medium poles or whatever in certain steps. 

It's supposed to roll which means it has wheels which if I read Ikea pictures correctly, are supposed to just click into place.  In all honesty, that was the only place they had words in the instructions.  They showed someone putting the wheels in and it said "click" beside it.  But they didn't click at all.  The wheels just fell back out.  So now I have a non-rolling clothes rack and if my mom's husband gets super bored he can take all of their clothes off of the rack and try to click the wheels into place.  It's also a little wobbly but that's Ikea's fault because one leg is wonky and it's not due to a lack of assembly talent on my part.  I stuck a book under that leg and it's perfect as long as you don't want it to roll and don't want to read "The Shack" while guests are staying at my house.

The only other interesting thing is that I went to the girly doctor last week and found out I have a fibroid tumor that has almost doubled in size in the past year.  It's not giving me any problems and normally they don't do anything if they don't bother you.  I've had a few of them for several years.  Apparently the doctor thinks it's bad that one of them grew so much that fast so he has referred me to an oncologist but he says he does not at all think I have cancer.  He just wants me to see a specialist and this specialist happens to be a gynecological oncologist and he said she might recommend a hysterectomy.  Oh good grief.  So I will enjoy my boring life until I go see the specialist the first week of January.  That's honestly all I know at this point so I can't tell you anything else.  Except that when I was leaving the doc's office I saw a guy in the elevator that looked very much like these gentlemen:

Another lady and I both commented to him about his unusual attire for a doctor's building and he just looked at us and offered no explanation.  He then bid us a good afternoon as he got off the elevator.

How are y'all? 

Guess what, y'all?

Guess what, y'all?

Just guess.

You're never gonna guess.

But try to guess what.

Have you made a guess yet?

Okay, do you want me to stop this stupid nonsense?

Me too.

So I'll tell y'all the big news now.

Are you sure you're ready?

Fake daughter moved out last night.

I came racing home Tuesday night (as much as you can race in horrid Atlanta holiday-shopping-after-work traffic) because I had my hairstylist coming to my house to do my hair.  She is the daughter of a friend of mine and she used to work in a salon.  Now she works at the Vortex (the crazy hamburger place I told y'all about recently) and does hair on the side so she comes to my house and I can't tell y'all how awesome it is.  We had a miscommunication of sorts and it's a stupid story and was neither of our faults really, but she ended up not getting to my house until after 8:30 and by the time she got her stuff set up, mixed up color, I covered up my floors and chair so we wouldn't get hair color all over them, etc. it was almost 9:00 p.m. before we started working on my hair.  She did overall color and was doing a 2-step highlight/toner process so she bleached out all of my highlights.  I then had to take a shower and wash all of that stuff out because it's much easier than trying to rinse my hair in the kitchen sink which is something we figured out the last time she came to my house and did my hair.  Then she had to apply toner all over it to make the highlights reddish instead of bleached out blonde.  I then took a second shower 10 minutes later to rinse all of that out so what I'm trying to tell y'all is that I was super clean by the time I went to bed Tuesday night.  I can't use a blow dryer on my hair because if I do it will look kind of like this:

Except mine would be a lot less blond.  And I would still weigh 900 pounds instead of 48 pounds like this lady.

Anyway, my friend/stylist was dying (no pun intended) to see my hair after it dried to see how the color turned out so she cut about 3 inches off of it and then we sat around and talked until it dried.  And then we kept talking because at that point she had slurped down over half a pot of coffee while she was doing my hair and so she didn't leave my house until a few minutes before 2:00 a.m.

But the point is, when I raced home earlier that evening and I pulled in my garage I noticed that all of fake daughter's stuff that she had been storing in there was gone.  She had to stay at the home of the family she works for that night (she is a nanny and the parents were out of town) and I texted her the next morning and asked if she was moving out.  She told me she would probably be completely out by the end of this week.  The family she works for owns some rental properties and apparently some of their renters needed another roommate in their house so fake daughter said she would move in with them.

She got home really late Wednesday night and because I had not gone to bed until almost 3:00 a.m. the night before because of my friend/stylist being at my house and then getting up at 6:30, I was already in bed asleep when she got there so I didn't see her.

When I got home from work last night, she had left me a bouquet of flowers and a very sweet note telling me thank you for everything I've done for her and helped her with but she was excited about starting a new phase in her life. 

So I didn't even get to tell her goodbye really.  Yes, I am excited to have my house back (although I have family coming in a week to stay for the holidays so I won't really have it completely to myself until after Christmas), but I feel awful that I didn't even see her before she left.  I'll definitely see her again but it still feels weird that I didn't hug her bye.

This weekend I have nothing scheduled which makes me absolutely giddy with happiness.  I'm super close to being done with my Christmas shopping but I would rather run finish it after work one night next week than have to put on a bra and leave my house this weekend.  Because I have my house to myself!!!  I plan to clean it from one end to the other since it's supposed to be raining a good part of the weekend here in Atlanta so I can get it back to the way it was before two fake kids invaded my life 8 months ago and turned everything upside down.  I'm also going to attempt to set up a new tv and cable box on my own so that should be interesting. 

So yes.  I am old - I'm excited about spending an entire weekend cleaning my house.  And wrapping a buttload of gifts.....okay, I'm not excited about the wrapping part.

Camels. Elvis Presley. Nose pickers.

Okay, so last time I had time to write an actual post, I told y'all about going to a Cypriot Christmas party on Mount Olympus with some drunk Scots and getting engaged while I was drunk and half dressed.  And I told y'all about Israel. 

Today I'll tell y'all about Egypt and New Year's Eve in Cyprus.  Again, this was a lot of years ago so my memories are limited on details, but I'll hit the big things.

Again, remember I had to take what were already crappy and blurry photos (that I had taken with a disposable camera because this was in the age of dinosaurs (or 1995) when there were no digital cameras that I could afford or iPhones) out of my photo album, put them flat on my bed and then I took pictures of the photos on my phone and downloaded them.  So they suck.

Oh!  Before I forget, I meant to tell y'all a funny story about something that happened in Israel.  We were on big tour buses from our ship to go to the different stops.  When we left the Old City of Jerusalem, we were heading to a diamond manufacturer (sadly my ex didn't bring extra money or credit cards with him because we would have gotten an awesome deal on an engagement ring).  On the way the tour guide told us they were stopping for a potty/snack break.  The bus suddenly pulled off the road and went into a clearing behind some trees.

Where I saw the largest statue of Elvis Presley I've ever seen in my life.  It must have been 75 feet tall.

They had an Elvis convenience store.  An Elvis ice cream shop.  An Elvis inn.  It was Elvis Presley central.  The people sitting around us on the bus who knew we were from the U.S. all started looking at my ex and I and chuckling because they saw the dumbfounded looks we had on our faces and then heard us cracking up.  And then we each ate an ice cream cone as big as our heads.

Before I left Atlanta and went to Cyprus, my ex had planned the cruise to Israel and Egypt but the only thing he would tell me is that he had a big surprise planned.  He refused to tell me what it was.  Because it was Christmas, I packed sweaters and other clothes for cold weather.

So here I am standing in a desert in a sweatshirt which said "Snow Valley" in huge letters across my boobs while sweating my ass off and looking like an idiot:

You know when you see pictures of the Sphinx and all you can see behind it is pyramids and desert?  Let me show you what I mean:

It makes you think the Sphinx is way out in the middle of nowhere, right?  Let's look at that first picture again and see where it really is.  It's right near downtown!!  If you look a little to the left of my head you can see a round thing.  That's the back of the Spinx's head.  Look how close it is to a large city:

From our cruise we had gone to Israel the first day and then we went to Egypt the second day.  The Israeli authorities had to stamp a slip of paper and put it in our passports because if they stamped directly into our passports and the Egyptian authorities saw we had been to Israel, they would not let us in their country.

We had to have police escorts for our buses in Egypt because bad guys will hijack tour buses and rob everyone on them.

Egypt was filthy dirty.  We saw grown men walking down the street picking their noses like it was cool. 

I'm glad to be able to say I've been there, but I never want to go back again.  One day was plenty and I was ready to leave.  I've talked to two other people who have visited Egypt and they also said they never care to go back there again.

Anyway, as we were approaching the pyramids, our tour guide told us if we wanted to ride a camel they would take us to a spot to ride them.  But if anyone approached us as we were walking around, we were warned not to get on a camel because the handler would then charge you whatever he felt like charging you in order to let you back off.  OMG.  We decided we didn't want to ride a camel.  Unfortunately, they only gave us about 30 minutes to walk around the pyramids before the buses left.  THIRTY MINUTES!  It's the pyramids and I traveled halfway across the globe to get there and you only give me 30 minutes?  So we didn't get to go in them because we had no time.

We just walked around and took photos and then got back on the bus.  My ex got really mad at me when a camel handler asked if we wanted to ride his camel and after I told him no, he offered to let us take photos with his camel.  He then charged us $10.  It was only $10 and he got all mad at me.  He acted like we could take photos for cheaper with a camel near the pyramids here in the U.S. or something.  This was a once in a lifetime chance for me and I thought $10 was a bargain.

If you think he was looking pissy with his hand on his hip in this picture, you are correct:

Anyway, I think it was a well spent 10 bucks.

You always hear how big the stones are.  THEY ARE ENORMOUS.  I am about 5'4" (AND A HALF thank you).  In this photo, I am standing on top of a rock that came up almost to my waist and my head still barely reaches the top of the first row of stones.  And I did it while sweating in my stupid sweatshirt:

Anyway, they gave us 30 minutes at the pyramids and then we went to the Egyptian Museum.  Neither my ex nor I are big fans of museums.  So naturally they gave us FOUR HOURS in there.  We were not allowed to take any photos inside.  They had a King Tut exhibit, but you had to pay somewhere around $50 or $60 per person extra to go in that section if I remember correctly.  We were in our 20s and very poor and didn't have an extra $100 or more to go in there.  So we walked through the museum rather quickly and then we went outside and sat next to a fountain and watched Egyptians pick their noses and scowl at us.  When we grew tired of having hundreds of people give us mean and dirty looks, we went and sat back on the bus with the driver.

This is the museum:

Eventually that long 4 hours was up and we were taken back to the ship and then we returned to Cyprus the next day.

For New Year's Eve, we went to the apartment of his friends.  Remember when I told y'all my ex was training someone to take over his job when he returned to the U.S. and that person was a friend of the cruise director?  That friend is who we spent NYE with.  We ate dinner with his family and eventually went to downtown Nicosia for fireworks and to ring in 1996.

There was possibly a lot of drinking going on.  I mean, maybe y'all can't tell by these photos, but I'm telling you there was some alcohol consumed that night.


Whoa.  Who wouldn't want to snatch up and marry a guy who can do all of this to impress a table full of people?

Bill Cosby called and wants his sweater back:

Yes, balloons, paper crowns and stickers on their grown-up heads.  Lots of alcohol.

He could be sweet sometimes.  And no, I wasn't drinking.  Nope.  Not one drop.  What do you mean my eyes look heavy?

The day I was flying out to come back home was also my mom's birthday.  My ex decided we should call my parents to pretend that we were making sure they knew my flight information and he wanted to act like he had done the proper thing and ask my dad for my hand in marriage.  So we pretended that he was asking them permission and then proposing to me while we were on the phone with my parents.  And I acted all surprised even though we had actually been engaged for almost two weeks at that point after our drunken night on top of Mount Olympus.

What we didn't know is that my older brother had proposed to his girlfriend the night before.

My parents, my brother and his by-then fiancee and some other family met for brunch for my mom's birthday and my mom and dad went on and on and gushed about ex and I getting engaged on the phone that morning so my brother and his fiancee said nothing about getting engaged the night before because they didn't want to steal our thunder. 

It is now almost 18 years later.  My ex and I have been divorced for 9 years.  My brother and his wife are now separated.  Oh how time changes things......

$##@%%^$

Dang it all, y'all!

I have a post started but I got about 1/3 of it written before all-you-know-what broke loose this afternoon.

TOMORROW!  Tomorrow I will finish the *#@%*$ post.

Right now I'm going to go home and go to bed early because I had a hairstylist at my house coloring and cutting my hair until 2:00 a.m. this morning.  Yes, really.  Okay, possibly we were just talking for part of the time.  But I am tired.

Crazy busy

We have been busy, busy, busy here at work this week. It's the mad rush to get bills out and try to get our clients to pay us by the end of the year.

I am hoping I have time to write tomorrow.  I'll finish talking about my trip to Cyprus, Egypt and Israel.  At some point I'll write about the Dutch Christmas Festival I went to over the weekend.  And

I'm getting my hair cut and colored tonight.  It's been a year since I've colored it so it's about time, right?  When people have been asking me if the gray streaks down each side of my head are on purpose, it's time.  Actually, I've had 3 people tell me I should leave it because it's gorgeous.  Um, no.

How are y'all?

Cyprus and Israel. Finally.

B-O-R-I-N-G.

That describes my life the past couple of days.  I truly have nothing worth blogging about.  So I will finally talk about my trip to Cyprus, Egypt and Israel which I told y'all I was going to blog about approximately a gazillion years ago.

This is going to be photo heavy mainly because this trip took place back at Christmas/New Year's of 1995/1996 and if my math is correct that was a lot of years ago and I'm old now and my memory ain't that great.  But I do remember I went to those countries.  I'm not THAT old.

I should tell you that this was way before digital photos so what I did was this:  I took photos out of my photo album and took photos of them on my iPhone and then downloaded them.  So what these photos are is high quality, y'all.  And I wish I could say photos a few more times.  Photos.  Photos.  Photos.

You will also get to see photos of my ex-husband.  I don't think he'll ever see them on here because I have no reason to believe he is stalking me online and that there is any chance he's found out I have a blog after being divorced for 9 years (except I did see that he had looked at my Linked In profile a few months ago).  I don't even understand how to use Linked In so I'm not sure why I'm on there. 

Anyway, he worked for a company that I will keep secret and they sent him to Nicosia, Cyprus for a little over a year.  He left in August of '95 and asked me to come over for a couple of weeks for the holidays.  It was the first time I wasn't with my family for Christmas and it was kind of weird.

I left Atlanta on a Friday night, had a layover in Switzerland for a while and arrived in Nicosia on Saturday afternoon which was the day before Christmas Eve.  I didn't know this so maybe some of y'all don't know this either, but Cyprus is not part of Greece even though a lot of people seem to think it is.  It is actually near Turkey and Syria.  It was at one point a Greek colony, but it went through being a part of several different empires, it was ruled by Italy for a while, Turkey for a while, and it was British for a while.  In 1960 they declared themselves independent.  Then in 1974, Turkey launched a military invasion and took part of the country from them and then stopped because they had shown they could do it.  So now part of the island is Cypriot and part of it is Turkish.  Apparently the Turkish side is the prettiest part but I never made it to that side.  They have a green line which is basically piles of sandbags where the military for each country just hang out.  My ex and I walked to the green line one afternoon and that's all it is.

While I was there, we went to a Christmas Eve party at a hotel up in the Troodos Mountains.  It was kind of foggy up in the mountains:

 We went to the party that night and this is my ex and I:

 We met a very nice Scottish couple at the party and I tried really hard to understand them when they spoke.  They had heavy Scottish accents and they were drunk so it was a bit of a challenge:

 After the party was over, my ex and I went up to our room and I took my shoes off.  And then I reached up under my dress and whipped off my uncomfortable as heck pantyhose.  And he had taken off his shirt and tie.  And I may have been a little bit drunk and I looked at him and said, "So, are you ever going to propose to me?" because we had dated way back in the 80s in high school and this go 'round we had been dating for almost 3 years and I was kind of wondering and apparently when we were drunk, half-dressed, and sitting in a hotel room on top of Mount Olympus on the island of Cyprus in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea it seemed like that was a perfect time to ask.

He looked at me and said, "Okay.  Will you marry me?"

I responded, "Yes."

And then we just kind of sat there.  So I said, "Is that it?  Just like that we're engaged now?" because it was just about the least exciting moment of my life.

"That's it.  We're engaged," he replied.  He then said he was planning to ask me before I went back home but he really hadn't planned on it being at that exact moment so he didn't have a ring but would get me one before I left.  And he did.

Then we both went to sleep.  Honest to goodness, that is my exciting marriage proposal story.

I had jet lag still and was awake for pretty much every single sunrise the entire two weeks I was over there.  So while he slept one morning, I went out on the balcony and took pictures of the sunrise in the fog:

 And then I took some more pictures later after the fog had lifted:

 On Christmas Day, we went back down the mountain and a friend of his had invited us to their home for the holiday.  They had some weird food (their "dressing" was rice with cranberries and tiny pieces of liver in it.  Gag.).  Unfortunately, they also had a couple of inside dogs and I'm deathly allergic so my ex and I spent a lot of time walking up and down their street so that I could breathe and not die.

Then we drove back up the mountain to spend Christmas night in the hotel again.  The entire country is about the size of Rhode Island so this wasn't a long drive.

A couple of days later, the ex surprised me and told me we were going on a cruise to Egypt and Israel!  We were poor and he booked the cruise kind of last minute so we had a room way down deep in the belly of the ship.  And it was kind of tiny.  And we had to use a community bathroom down the hall.  Seriously, here is a photo of me with my arms spread from one side of the cabin to the bunk bed which was as far as I could spread my arms:

My EMPTY hanging bag would not fit in the "closet" so we put all of our stuff on the top bunk and squeezed ourselves into the bottom bunk each night.

But you know what?  We had a blast.  We didn't spend much time in our cabin anyway.

We were too busy getting picked out of the audience in the lounge to play musical hats.  Ex lost to a guy named Wally from England who was celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary.

 The cruise director heard ex say he was from the U.S. (honest to goodness a gasp was heard from the crowd when he said it) and came to our table after musical hats to talk to us.  He told us we were the only Americans on the entire ship and that it was rare for Americans to go on Cypriot cruises.  It turns out the cruise director had a very good friend who my ex was training to take over for him when he came back to the U.S.  What a small world!  He gave us free champagne, told us the best souvenirs to get on our stops, etc.  He kind of took us under his wing.

The first stop was Israel.  The PLO had just taken over the week before.

 We went to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.  And if you ever go, I would suggest not going TWO DAYS AFTER CHRISTMAS because it's kind of crowded and annoying (it's also decorated a bit gaudy if you ask me):

The site of the manger:

 We went to the Wailing Wall as well and I wish my ex would have liked wearing his jeans a little tighter:

 There is an Australian guy (I think that's where they said he's from) and he stands near the Wailing Wall and preaches and sing and plays a harp type of thing:

 Here are some gardens where Jesus hung out a lot:

  Then we got back on our tour buses and drove to the Old City of Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified.  It was kind of crowded there too:

Supposedly, this hole is where the cross was:

It's up under this altar where Meryl Streep was hanging out.  Seriously, doesn't she kind of look like Meryl?  Anyway, you had to climb up under this altar to take the picture above of the hole where the cross was:

Crowded, I tell you.  There was some incredible artwork:

This was the stone they laid his body on after the crucifixion:

 

We had purchased some crucifixes and they said we could put them on the stone to have them blessed.  Apparently my ridiculous ex thought he needed his sunglasses blessed as well:

We then got to see where the tomb was.  It's inside of this:

Once you enter that "room," you had to kneel down and this was where the tomb was:

Unfortunately, this is all I have time to write today.  I will blog about Egypt and the crazy New Year's Eve we had next week.

Y'all have a great weekend!

Not much today.....

Okay, y'all.  I'm not buying a new car.  I just paid my current car off in August and the past 3 months is the first time I haven't had a car payment since 1996.  I normally go from one car to the next because I've only been able to afford crappy cars so they start breaking down constantly, someone hits me and totals my car, I get divorced and have to buy a new car to split up assets, etc. I'm enjoying not having a car payment and my car only has 85,000 miles on it so I'm not buying a new car.

Deb-in-Denver:  Thank you!!!  I ordered some of the stuff you recommended for my cat.  I told my friend here at work who got me on this expensive raw food diet because she has a cat with the same issues.  I told her I will let her know how it works on Bailey and she may order some too.

Unfortunately, this is all I have time for this afternoon because my boss has me helping him on a deal that he's closing today.

So watch this because for some reason it had me howling with laughter earlier (be sure to watch it through to the end):

Or watch my favorite ridiculous pageant answer in the history of ever which I'm sure most of y'all have seen:

Dinero. Bankroll. Dough. Moolah.

I started Monday morning by stepping in a puddle of cat vomit first thing in the morning.  She left it right in the middle of the doorway into my kitchen.

I started off Tuesday morning by stepping in a pile of cat poop first thing in the morning.  She left it right where my foot landed as I came off the last step from upstairs.  I came thisclose to slipping and breaking my ass.  Can y'all imagine if I had to add to my list of broken bones:  (a) broke my humerus in 4 places in a horrid post-pedicure flip flop accident complete with ambulance ride to the hospital and a body brace; (65) broke my wrist falling down the stairs after being startled by my geriatric cat; and (MMIIV) broke my ass slipping on a pile of cat shit.

Remind me again why I'm willing to spend a fortune on a raw food diet for this cat and her IBS?

Oh, that's right.  It's because she gives me the stink eye at least once a day:

There is a super long and not very interesting story about why my house payment went way up last year and then I appealed some stuff but I had to wait until the end of this year for them to refund me a bunch of money I had over payed into my escrow account, but I got the check and guess what?  I'm now trying to save the American economy all by myself.  It feels like it's free money somebody gave me but really I paid all of it last year and it just sat in an account and they probably earned a lot of interest on it and then they gave it back to me.

I'm now going to be spending $110 every 13 weeks for raw chicken parts to feed my cat.  Oh yes.  I told y'all it's flipping expensive.  (But that does include the THIRTY EFFIN' DOLLARS they charge for shipping because it has to be shipped frozen from the complete other side of the country.)

I told y'all I went last week to buy paper plates and came home with a new table instead.

I paid off my two credit cards last week.  Granted neither of them were huge balances, but still.

Yesterday I did Christmas shopping and when I went to check out on one site it said if I spent 73 more cents I would be buying enough to get free shipping.  So I decided I needed a gift and I ordered myself a new food processor for Christmas.  Remember I don't even really cook.  But I just had to have a new food processor.  (I have two of the mini ones and they are both broken.  They're still sitting in my cabinet taking up space and they don't even work because what I do is make a whole buttload of sense.)  The shipping would have been about 8 bucks but instead I spent another $50 on something I don't even need so I could save $8 on shipping.

My brain.  It's a super fun place to be.

Today I bought two new televisions.  And someone needs to slap me upside the head if I say I'm buying anything else for myself. 

But but but.....let me tell y'all what a deal I got before you slap me upside the head.  You know, maybe one of you wants to buy two televisions today so I don't feel so bad about doing it myself.

I only have one tv in my house and it's an old school one that has the huge back to it and weighs approximately eleventy gazillion pounds and it's going on 15 or 20 years old.  The picture is not very clear.  It's a piece of crap y'all.  It has one foot in the grave.  It wants the new tvs to get off its lawn.  It is aged like fine wine except it's more like Two Buck Chuck.  Every night is the Golden Age of television at my house. 

I searched online and found a 32" HDTV which was originally $350 but it was on sale for $179.  (And it was free shipping.  Apparently that's super important to me.)  I decided to buy one for my living room to replace the old dinosaur I have, and figured for $358 which is barely over the regular price of one tv,I could buy TWO tv's and have one in my bedroom for the very first time in my entire life.  Seriously y'all, I'm 45-years-old and have never had a tv in my bedroom and I sat there about to place my order and felt like I didn't deserve to buy them.  Why do we do that sometimes?  I have worked hard my entire life.  I've worked 2 jobs for a huge part of my life.  And I don't deserve to spend $179 to have a tv in my bedroom?

OMG!!!!!!!  Guess what, y'all?  Right in the middle of typing up a post about how much money I've been spending as though I think I have a money tree in my backyard (and since my milkshake doesn't bring all the boys to my yard maybe my money tree will) I got called by HR to go down for my annual review.

I just got a raise!

Imma go by myself a new car now......

Just kidding.

Drama. Laziness. Gross food.

Happy Monday!

Did all of you have a great Thanksgiving?  Did you get trampled at the Walmarts at some point over the weekend?

I don't understand any of you people who think Black Friday is fun.  I don't like shopping on a normal day so I really don't want to go out in the middle of the night and stand in a long line for a bargain.  I'd rather pay full price than do anything related to Black Friday.  I did take advantage of Cyber Monday this morning and got a big part of my Christmas shopping done.

On Thanksgiving Day my brother came over and he, fake daughter and I went to my neighbors' house.  We had two turkeys, a ham, and all the sides and pies along with a Dutch vegetarian, 5 American vegans, 4 kids, fake daughter experiencing her first Thanksgiving, family drama due to a family death (neighbors' family, not mine), an annoying guy who is always there and no one likes him, someone got scared at some point the annoying guy was going to steal their car, a dead car battery that ended up not being dead after all, the Dutch vegetarian had to leave and go to another house and there was so much drama at the other house he decided to come back to hang out with us, the annoying guy drank all of my Fresca I had brought so I ended up drinking 3 glasses of wine and got a massive headache but talked everyone's ear off.  In other words, it was crazy but awesome in every way.

When we got home I had to ask my brother to help me move a table from my garage into my house.  I went to a store last weekend to get some Christmas paper plates and napkins but came home with a new side table/console for my dining room.  Spontaneous shopper?  Who, me?  I struggled to get it out of my SUV by myself so I knew I couldn't get it in my house.  My brother loves coming to my house - he gets to move furniture, change light bulbs in my high ceilings, etc.

On Friday I had nowhere to be and nothing I absolutely had to do so I stayed in my pj's all day long, lounged around on the sofa with a blanket and a cat on top of me and watched TV and slept all day.

It was so awesome that I did the same thing again on Saturday.  Seriously.  I think this is what heaven is going to be like.  Or maybe retirement.

By Sunday I was kind of bored after lounging around for two days.  But I still stayed in my pj's.  I do not put on a bra to hang around by myself at home all day.  I managed to do two loads of laundry, cooked my lunches and dinners for the week, and put up all of my Christmas decorations and my tree.  I'm pretty sure this is the earliest I've ever done that in my life, however, I went through an 8 year period of hating the holidays because of a whole big drama filled situation with my ex-mother-in-law who was pure evil dressed up in a pair of pants.  Seriously, that woman was horrid.  So for 8 years I put up no decorations so perhaps if I had put up decorations in those years I would have done them earlier at some point.  I highly doubt it though.  Two years ago I had to go buy all new decorations because I had given all of mine away.  I still hate New Year's Eve.

I did start Bailey on her ground up raw chicken organ diet and it is quite possibly the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in person to watch her eat it.  It looks like slimy raw ground beef.  Yuck.  Thankfully I can't smell it.  It's all I can do to look at it when I feed her.  You know those nature shows where a lion catches something and the first thing they eat is the bloody organs?  Yeah.

The first morning I started her on it, the food had not thawed completely so I was running the package under some water with a disgusted and grossed out look on my face (I admittedly have an overly sensitive stomach - I once threw up because my trash smelled kind of bad).  She stood at my feet sniffing and crying because, "OMG, I'm deprived and I need that food right this very second or I might die."  It was still frozen and she could smell it.  Let us give thanks our noses can't smell like a cat.  She loves the stuff.  What she doesn't love is the fact that you give them a portion and it has to be eaten fairly quickly (which is no problem since she inhales it and then cries for more) so she only gets food twice per day as opposed to having a self feeder like she's had for 14 years where she can eat anytime she feels like it.  We may end up homeless trying to pay for this new stuff, but hopefully this will cure her problems and she won't be pooping all over our cardboard box we end up sharing one day.

And we'll end it on that pleasant note.

A plethora of stuff.

This is one of those posts that are going to cover eleventy gazillion topics which have nothing to do with one another.  Some of it is to answer questions or comments y'all have made.  Some of it is my normal rambling.

First of all, I think the stomach thing finally went away Monday night.  THANK GOODNESS!  I met two friends for dinner that night at Sweet Tomatoes and had a gigantic plate of salad because that's kind of their thing at Sweet Tomatoes and I figured it might kill me dead later with all of the roughage and fiber.  I also had a bowl of soup.  Shockingly, I felt fine afterwards.  I ate normally yesterday and my stomach has not hurt at all.  So I think I can safely say that it was 9 days of awfulness but it seems to be over now. 

Second, a couple of y'all have asked if my plantar fasciitis socks have been working.

YES!  They have been working wonderfully!  I did try to wear some cuter shoes one day.  And I tried taking the Walk Fit inserts out of my ugly ass shoes another day.  On those days my feet hurt a decent amount.  Apparently it is the combination of the ugly ass shoes, the inserts and the sleeves that work for me.  When I wear all 3 I only have foot pain on very rare occasions in the morning when I get out of bed and even then it is nowhere near the severity it was before.  Not that I wear them all to bed.  That's just when I notice any pain.  I still can't walk barefoot without pain, but maybe we'll work up to that eventually if I keep wearing all of this stuff on my feet regularly.

So yes, my stomach and feet don't hurt anymore so I have much to give thanks for tomorrow on Thanksgiving.

I mentioned that I went to dinner with some friends on Monday night.  One of the friends is someone I've known since we were 5.  And Oh Em Gee that means I've known her for 40 years because girlfriends, I am old.  The other friend is someone I met through her at a Pampered Chef party.  For whatever reason, everyone canceled and I was the only guest who showed up at my friend's house so we had kind of a private party and then guess what happened?  The PC lady convinced me to have a party.  And then guess what happened?  She convinced me to start selling Pampered Chef.  Me.  Who hates cooking.  And hates selling crap.  It was a rather short-lived career but I'm still friends with the PC lady.  I remember when I was doing one show and the homeowner's fireplace screen fell on top of me right in the middle of my presentation.  It was an awesome job for me - cooking, washing lots of dishes, selling and getting hurt. 

One Saturday she reserved a booth at a small town festival and asked me and some other people if we wanted to work it with her to try and get new parties/shows booked so I volunteered.  And I stupidly volunteered to be there for the early shift of the day.  What that meant was that I had to meet my friend there at 7:00 a.m. so we could unload all of the Pampered Chef products, set up a tent, and set up the booth.  The best part?  It was in Loganville which is about an hour from my house so I had to leave at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning to get there which meant I had to get up at 5:00 a.m.  I was still not completely awake when I got there.  A cop had the road blocked where the festival was with his car and one of those barricades that looks like a sawhorse with a sign on it.  I politely asked him if I could get through to unload my car and he said I could and then told me where to park after I unloaded, etc.  He moved his car and I proceeded to drive right into his barricade thing with my car. 

Do you know what I would not advise?  Driving into a police barricade with your car right in front of a cop.

He laughed at me as I sat there with a completely mortified look on my face because that's the kind of look you get on your face when you plow your car into a police barricade. 

We both got out of our vehicles and that's when I saw the huge and horrible scratch on my bumper and the giant crack in his police barricade.  He told me not to worry about his barricade and I rambled on and on and said a whole bunch of stuff that made me very surprised he didn't give me a field sobriety test on the spot and then I went on my way.  I unloaded at our booth spot and then went and parked my car in a lot.  The PC friend got there and for the life of us we could not get the tent up so some man had mercy on us and came and helped, we ran the booth until the afternoon crew showed up, and then she and I walked to our cars.

I got to my car and there was a note on a scratch piece of paper stuck under my wiper blade that said, "Call me about your car" and had a phone number.  I told PC friend about hitting the police barricade that morning and she said I should probably call in case it was the police officer.  I thought he might have something more official looking to leave me a note written on than a piece of ripped off paper, but agreed with her that I should probably call.  But I was exhausted after getting up at 5:00 a.m., driving an hour, hitting a police barricade, unloading a car full of stuff, trying to set up a tent, and working a booth at a festival most of the day AND I was meeting the friend I've known since we were 5 for dinner before I went home.  So I decided to wait and call the next day.

I was hosting a cookout at my house the next day because I like to torture myself when I'm already exhausted, and Hot Brazilian was coming over for it.  When he got there I told him about my Saturday and showed him the note.  He showed me how to call on my cell phone while hiding my number and I dialed the number on the piece of paper.  A guy answered and I told him I was calling because of the piece of paper he left on my car the day before at the Loganville festival and he said he had no idea what I was talking about.  And that right there is the very anti-climatic end of that story.

Completely unrelated story coming up now......

My mom and her husband live in Texas and they decided to go to Illinois for Thanksgiving to see some of her husband's family and some of my mom's family.  My mom is kind of over flying anywhere.  She hates having to pack for flying, security checks, waiting and waiting, being crammed into tiny seats, etc.  So she decided they should take a train.

Oh.  My.

I told her my ex and I took a train during a leg of our honeymoon trip because I thought it would be very romantic like in the movies but in reality it was more like riding a Greyhound bus and seeing some of the grossest towns I've ever seen in my entire life.  But our train trip was not an overnight one so we had no sleeper car and I told her that her trip might be way better.  She was excited about the dining car and I told her on my trip it was more like a concession stand with hot dogs and vending machine quality sandwiches.  But that hers would probably be better.  At least she won't arrive in Penn Station in NYC in the middle of rush hour wearing overalls and carrying a week's worth of luggage and then have to get on the subway and get off at Grand Central Station still with a week's worth of luggage and wearing overalls.  Because I will tell you that native New Yorker's don't like that shit and they get a bit irritated with you.

My mom and her husband left Texas last night so I texted her around 11:00 this morning and this is how the conversation went:

Me:  So....how is the hobo train life?  Love you!

Mom:  Oh my goodness.  Ready?  Cause you're not going to believe this adventure!!  Left Longview 1 hour late.  Dinner on train.  Tried to use upper bunk - too small!!  Then......at 2:00 a.m., stopped in Little Rock.  Rail issues there, soooooo, got everyone (several cars full) off, onto buses.  Rode 2 hours to Walnut Ridge.  Got back on a train.  Now heading to Bloomington - only 8 hours behind schedule!  But we are still laughing - meeting nice people and truly having an adventure.  Love you!

Me:  Oh wow.  Sounds like glorious fun there, Mom.  Glad y'all are still laughing!

Mom:  The Griswalds have nothing on us.

So see, y'all.  My whole family has craziness happen.  It's not just me.

Another unrelated story coming up now......

I think I mentioned in a recent post that my cat is about to be eating a more expensive and healthier diet than I eat.

I've told y'all she has tummy issues.  What she has is irritable bowel syndrome and it makes her poop all over my damn house.  I am tired of cleaning up cat diarrhea up to 6 times per day.  She whines a lot sounding like she's in pain when she poops.  Her fur looks awful.  Medicine has not helped.  Prescription canned cat food did nothing.  She's lost a ton of weight.  She's not healthy and it's driving me to the edge having to clean up after her.  There is an entire room in my house that will have to be re-tiled because apparently the tile was not sealed and her poop stains it.  OMG.

A friend I work with has a cat with the same issue.  She has spent a buttload of money on different things and taken her cat to 6 different vets and no one can give her any treatment that works.  She found a company online out in Washington state that makes raw pet food with no grains, chemicals or preservatives.  It comes frozen in pouches and you thaw it out and give them a small amount twice per day.  She started feeding it to her cat a couple of months ago and said while he's not 100% better, she can actually walk in her house at night and not almost vomit from the smell.  He makes it to the litter box most of the time now.  She can stand to have him sit next to her because he doesn't smell awful anymore.  He has more energy.  His fur looks way better.

This food is Bailey's last hope.  If it doesn't work on her I may have to consider having her put down because I can tell she doesn't feel good and nothing else has worked.  But my word is this stuff expensive.  The shipping alone is $30 because it has to be shipped frozen.  My friend lives on a farm and has tons of cats and dogs.  She said most of her cats eat it now.  A few of them don't like it but the majority of them gobble it up.  She said even the healthy cats look and seem even healthier now.

So yes, my cat is about to eat raw chicken organs from chickens that are free-range and hormone free with kelp, salmon oil and catnip mixed in.  Yum.  Tasty, huh?  It just got delivered to my desk and I will start her on it tomorrow morning.  This should be interesting.

Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.  I will be hanging out with my brother, fake daughter (at least I assume - she told me she wants to join us but she hasn't stayed at my house in a week so we'll see if she shows up) and my awesome neighbors.  We will have one vegetarian and two vegans there and I looked for vegan recipes to make my two casseroles which are sweet potato and green bean.  And I decided they just won't be able to eat my stuff because I had no desire to go through everything required to make vegan cream of mushroom soup.  Soaking nuts, expensive almond milk, etc.  No thank you.  

What will all of you be doing?

OMG! I met OFM! And I picked up a turkey from a police officer at Starbucks.

I still don't feel all that good y'all and it's been 9 nine days with this crap.  I feel a lot better than I did the first 3 days of it, but I still don't feel like myself.  I hope none of you get this.  It's awful.

To answer some of your questions from the comments on my last post, no it was definitely not food poisoning.  I've had food poisoning twice and this was totally different.

No, neither of my friends who came to my house to paint got sick.  Neither has fake daughter.  I've tried to stay in my bedroom a lot and not spread my cooties all over the house.

All I know is, I still can't eat much.  I haven't gotten sick or anything, I just can't eat much before I feel disgusting.  I ate a sandwich for lunch Friday which was the first "real" meal I had eaten in 6 days and I felt gross the rest of the day.  On Saturday, I had a piece of toast around 8:00 a.m. and then I had a normal dinner and I felt gross all day yesterday.  In fact, I went to bed at 6:00 last night and slept until 4:00 a.m. which is not like me at all.  Hello, insomniac here!  I had half a piece of chicken and some rice for lunch today and I feel kind of horrible now.  There are no other symptoms though - no fever, no vomiting or the other stuff.  I just feel really gross and disgusting after I eat.  Maybe my stomach just shrunk a ton from not eating for 5 or 6 days so now I can't eat as much.  I'm going to be disappointed if I can't eat much for Thanksgiving though.

And hey, my pants are getting looser!

Let's talk about something besides being sick.  Because on Saturday I went and did something kind of awesome:

 

That's right, hookers!  I met One Fabulous Mama!  If y'all are not following her on Facebook yet, you need to really consider doing so.  (She also has a blog, Sadie who isn't on Facebook.)

She just published a book and is doing a little road trip for book signings.  I happened to be on Facebook right before I was going to bed on Wednesday night and saw one of my childhood friends write on her page that she was going to her book signing on Saturday.  So I popped on there and asked if she wanted some company since my friend and I had not seen each other in at least a couple of years and OMG, I WANTED TO MEET OFM!  My friend was thrilled so we made our reservation at the quaint little Italian restaurant where the book signing was being held and I drove out to Covington, GA which is about 45 minutes from Atlanta.

For those of you who have no idea what on earth OFM is about, she is a light in the oftentimes dark world, she is a rock star superhero goddess, she is amazeballs, and she is all about loving yourself no matter what anyone else thinks about you.  In fact, a huge part of her message is that it's none of your damn business what other people think about you.  She also is spreading love and peace and all that is good after coming back from the brink of wanting to kill herself a year ago.

After meeting her, I can tell you that she is even more amazing in person.  She is so warm and accepting, humble, she is honored that people share their broken pieces with her, and she is truly amazed that she is making a difference in people's lives.  She took time and wrote meaningful messages in each book she signed.

She is also not nearly as pasty white as I am.  Good grief.

There were 3 different reservation times and my friend and I went for the last one.  Do you know what that means?  That means we also got to meet one of her Littles and her Mister because they came to help her load books, OFM wine, t-shirts, etc. up in their van when the day was over.  We met the college-aged Little.  We also got to meet Pam who is one of the admins on her Facebook page.  They were all just so nice, y'all!  Very down to earth.

After I left the book signing, I went to Starbucks in Conyers, GA to pick up a turkey from a police officer.

As one does.

My brother, fake daughter and I are going to my neighbors' house for Thanksgiving.  They have a good number of people over each year (we went there last year too) and they fry two turkeys.  My brother had told them he would get one of the turkeys, and I'm bringing a couple of casseroles and a couple of desserts.  He told me last week to remind them he was getting a turkey to bring so I was texting with the wife about some stuff and I mentioned to her that my brother would bring a turkey.

She told me her husband said it couldn't be more than 13 pounds to fit in the fryer and then she said her husband needed the turkey at least 40 hours ahead of time to prepare it.  I guess he injects them and brines them - I'm not really sure what all he does to them.  She seemed to be a little stressed about making absolutely certain he was really bringing a turkey so they would have enough food.  So I told her the guys needed to talk and leave us out of the turkey situation.  I texted my brother and told him to contact the husband so they could discuss The Great Turkey Situation of 2013.  I never heard back from him.

On Friday night I texted my neighbor and she said her husband had not heard anything from my brother.  I called him and he said he had been really busy, blah blah blah but he was definitely bringing a turkey.  I told him the neighbors would need the turkey by Monday night and he said, "Okay, I guess I'm driving a turkey to Atlanta on Monday" which would be about an hour or more round trip.

Then I told him I was going to be in Covington on Saturday night with our mutual childhood friend meeting a rock star super hero goddess who sells books and peach wine and ninjas and is covered up in awesome tattoos and I could meet him after that and pick up the turkey since Covington is very close to where he lives and works.

My friend had not seen my brother in probably 30 years so when I told her I was going to meet him to pick up a turkey she asked if she could join us because apparently picking up a turkey on a Saturday night is our idea of a wild time out on the town.

I called my brother and he suggested meeting at Starbucks so we met him there and he was on duty (he's a police officer).  He's a supervisor so he gets to drive around in a super fancy police SUV so we stood out in the parking lot and got the turkey out of the police SUV and put it in my boring and plain SUV and then I stood there while he ran down the bank and through some bushes to yell at some guys sitting at a red light who had their stereo turned up so loud we were all vibrating.  And then I went in and treated my friend and the turkey toting uniformed police offer to coffee.

I have never typed the word turkey so many times in my life.

At some point, my brother had to leave to go out on a call and my friend and I sat and talked for so long that he eventually came back so he could talk to us for a few more minutes.  Then he had to leave for another call and my friend and I left to go home.

My friend is going through some stuff so we talked about it quite a bit.  Later that night as I was getting ready for bed she sent me a text and said she was so thankful for my friendship and that I had saved her life Saturday night.  I told her I didn't know about all of that, but that I'm always here for her and that I love her tons and hope she's okay.  She wrote back and said, "No.  Seriously.  You don't know what you did for me tonight.  You saved me."  It's amazing when you can just listen to a person and help them that much, isn't it?

Blech

Um.  Hi.  I'm back.

I didn't mean to be gone for a week but here we are and I've been gone for a week.  I was gone to the land of sick people.  In fact, lunch today was the first real meal I've had since last Saturday.  Oh yes people.  It was a stomach sickness which I have not had in years and years and years other than when I got food poisoning ON MY BIRTHDAY in 2011.  Happy birthday to me from some lasagna.  But this was a bug or virus or something.  Which means it wasn't gone in a short 24 hours. No.  That would have been heavenly to have only been sick for a short 24 hours.

But I was not sick last Saturday which is where I will start. 

A friend of mine contacted me a month or so ago and asked if I was still teaching painting classes at the studio I used to work at part-time.  When I told her I wasn't, she asked if I would consider teaching a class in my home studio to her and a friend for their birthdays which are a few weeks apart and I told her I would.  Then we discussed possibly going to lunch before painting and the last thing she sent to me via a Facebook message was that we would all go to lunch and she wondered if sometime between 1:30 and 2:00 sounded okay.  I told her that was great.  The last time she had come to my house she arrived almost an hour and a half late so I was planning on closer to 2:00.

I got up Saturday morning and did some laundry, cleaned and straightened up the house, and then went upstairs to rearrange stuff in the studio to fit three of us in there, etc.  About 12:15 I headed back downstairs and happened to pick up my phone to see what time it was and thought I was doing great because everything was ready and I still had over an hour to shower and get dressed.

Then I saw she had sent me a Facebook message 10 minutes earlier saying, "Hey!  We're on our way and we'll pick you up at your house for lunch!"  She lives quite a long way from my house so I didn't really panic.  But I immediately wrote a message back and said, "What time will you be here?  I'm jumping in the shower now" because for whatever reason, I didn't have her phone number to call her.  I waited a few minutes and she didn't respond. 

I had to take a couple of bags of trash out.  As I was walking back up onto my front porch they pulled in the driveway.  OMG.  Y'all.  I had not showered.  I had not even brushed my teeth.  I had no bra on.  I had on capri yoga pants, a t-shirt, my hair up in a scrunchie on top of my head, no make-up, and I was sweaty from cleaning house and moving stuff around in my studio.

I screamed at her when she got out of the car:  "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?  IT'S ONLY 12:30!!!!  YOU TOLD ME 1:30 OR 2:00!!"

"Well, I meant to paint at that time.  But we're going to lunch first, right?"

Oh, I could have killed her. 

The friend that came with her grew up in our old neighborhood when we were all wee kids but I didn't remember her and she didn't remember me.  I told her to wait until I was showered to pass judgment on what I normally look like because what I looked like right then was not good.  She said our mutual friend had no concept of time and she is always late or early showing up for everything they ever do together and that I should not feel bad.

So they sat in my living room while I stampeded up the stairs (no seriously, there was actual stampeding) and took a shower, put on make-up, brushed my teeth and got dressed in 18 minutes which I should win some sort of award for if you know me.

We then went to The Vortex in L5P to eat hamburgers the size of our heads.  This is the entrance of The Vortex for those of you not in Atlanta.  It's a cool place with great burgers and incredible people watching.

After we stuffed ourselves, we went back to my house and then they each decided they wanted to paint different things. So I taught two different classes within one.  I'm so talented, y'all.  It's really not that big of a deal.  You just have to be able to paint two paintings in the time it takes other people to paint one.

They left my house around 8:30 or 9:00, I ate half a bowl of cereal and went to bed a little later feeling totally fine and planning to be very productive around my house the next day.  I was going to do more laundry, blow the gazillion leaves in my yard and driveway, cut back dead plants in my yard, etc.

At 3:00 a.m. I awoke and felt like I was about to die.  I had the worst nausea I have ever had in my life.  TWELVE HOURS LATER it had not let up for even a second and yet I had not actually gotten sick.  At 3:30 p.m. I finally threw up but guess what?  It didn't phase the nausea even a little bit.  I was still doubled over in pain.  Little did I know that was only the very beginning because I went on to feel the most extreme nausea of my entire life for FORTY-ONE STRAIGHT HOURS.  It never eased up for one second.  I stayed out of work on Monday.  The nausea finally went away after 11:00 p.m.  That's when something else started and I can't even explain it exactly because it was a weird feeling I've never felt before.  It wasn't quite cramping.  It wasn't quite like sore stomach muscles.  It wasn't nausea, but it was very unpleasant.  When I breathed in even a little deeply it sent horrible pain all through my stomach and around through my back.  And that all went on non-stop for three and a half days until it finally went away in the night last night.  I could not keep anything down other than broth, hot peppermint tea, ginger ale, Sprite and I ate about 10 crackers over the course of 5 days.  I finally ate a sandwich at lunch today and things seem to be mostly okay now.  But that's why I haven't written here.  I've been moving rather slowly as it is and we've been swamped at work and when I got home at 7:00 or 7:30 I honestly would eat a little broth and I've been in bed by 8:00 every single night.

One good thing to come from it all?  I think it broke me of my caffeine addiction so I am going to try to stay off of coffee, Diet Cokes, regular iced tea, etc.

Anyway, that catches you up on my really boring week of sickness.  How are all of you?

Tomorrow afternoon I have something fun planned so hopefully I will have something better to talk about next week instead of throwing up and nausea.  And I'll tell y'all how my cat is about to be eating more expensive food than me.....