When we moved into our house a year ago, we had about triple the wall space to decorate as our last house. My husband has been slowly filling the walls with his artwork. We had a handful of his pieces at our old house, but his last job kept him so overworked, he had little time to create for the last ten years. In the fifteen months we have lived here, he has created at least a dozen pieces to hang around our house. Strangely enough, two of my favorite pieces are in bathrooms.
At some point in the last year, I decided our bathrooms needed a theme. Don’t ask me why. It’s probably because I kept calling the two bathrooms on the main floor “the front bathroom” and the “back bathroom” and they are both technically near the front of the house. The “front” bathroom then became the “gold” bathroom since it has gold fixtures, but calling the other bathroom the “black” bathroom due to it’s fixture color seemed a little racist. I had visions of my kid’s friends being in the house and me telling them to use the “black bathroom” after getting out of the pool.
The front/gold bathroom has become the “skull” bathroom when I bought a gold skull last Halloween that never left the counter. I like skulls and have a lot of artwork and decor that include them in the house. I even have skull nightlight/fragrance plug ins around the house. I was over the moon when my husband created a piece of art to hang that fit the theme perfectly. Once the skull bathroom was complete I started thinking about a theme for the back/black bathroom. I kept seeing a rug with serpents on it that I loved and decided a snake theme would be a perfect counterpart for the skull theme. I started looking for snake decor, but was not finding much that I liked, or that fit the space. Then at Christmas, my husband asked for a bunch of tools and art supplies and by the New Year he was showing me a snake he had sculpted. I came home from work one night and when I dropped my bag at the door, he told me if I had to pee I better use the back bathroom. I knew he had been working on making the sculpture into a piece to hang and had seen it during the process, but I had no idea how beautiful it was going to look hanging on the wall. My husband has some serious skills. So now I have my two themed bathrooms, and the serpent is hanging directly above the toilet, There’s no jokes to be made or make people feel creeped out, right?
*A little Tim Timebomb who also loves skulls and snakes was heard while writing this post.
The medical industry needs some work. I spent two years in pain and thousands upon thousands of dollars while doctors shrugged their shoulders and passed me off to the next doctor before a test for an unrelated issue revealed two boulders in my kidneys. I had cameras shoved in every orifice looking for the source of the pain in my side that doubled me over before a CT scan on my intestines showed giant stones in both kidneys, one of which was completely blocking the passage of fluid and shutting down functioning. No wonder I felt like shit for two straight years.
Of course once I knew the stones were there, it was all I could feel. I had visions of peeing out a slab of granite in the middle of my work day while pretending my insides weren’t turning into jelly. It took two trips to the ER, three trips to the OR and a half dozen office visits to remove one stone only to find out the other one was shrinking itself and being reabsorbed into my body. During one of the office visits, an old, white, male doctor told me I wasn’t in pain after pulling a 3″ long tube through my urethra. I thought I misheard him until he said “the stent is out, the pain is gone”. I didn’t think I would ever have to explain to an old man the concept of body kinesthesia, but apparently I did, so I did explain. I pointed at him and said “No. That is your body” then pointed to myself and slowly said “and this is my body. I am telling you that THIS body is still in pain. I understand that the pain will dissipate, but am asking what to do now, while I am still in pain”. When he tried to respond I stopped him and said “you know what, never mind. We are done here. I won’t be needing a follow up appointment with you”. I went home and slept for 5 hours straight at 11am due to the pain I was NOT in. When I woke up, I found a female Urologist to follow up with.
During the last few years while I have been navigating this situation, I have learned a few things. Emergency rooms are a waste of time unless you are attempting to score drugs or something is broken. They specialize in nothing, so do not want to perform anything other than run tests to send off to a specialist three weeks later. During my first trip to the ER, they gave me Flomax to “make it easier for the stones to pass” after being told the stones were more than double the size of passable. During the second trip, they attempted to give me the pain medication I am allergic to. They proceeded to run the same tests repeatedly just to prove they were doing something. My insurance promptly responded to the bills for these tests demanding that I explain why they were necessary.
More importantly I learned that if you do not advocate for yourself, shit is not going to get done. Doctors do not believe women are in pain. I saw multiple specialists before I was properly diagnosed for a fairly common ailment, and it was an accident that I was even diagnosed. The doctor who ordered the test blew me off once he learned that my problem was in my kidneys and not my stomach. Instead of referring me to a proper Urologist, he sent me on my way with the yellow pages. The test that found the stones was the fifth test that doctor ordered in 18 months. I literally had to jump up and down to get that test while all of my doctors shrugged their shoulders and sent me to the next one in line. My left kidney was barely functioning and all of these doctors were blaming menopause. All of these male doctors were blaming menopause.
The good news is I hit both my deductible and out of pocket max for my insurance before the end of the first quarter so I am seeing every doctor and running every test I can think of by the end of the year just to make sure there are no other parts of my body on strike or ready to fall off. Maybe I will finally find out what exactly causes me to sneeze uncontrollably every morning and why my knees sound like popcorn popping every time I squat. I am also able to see my chiropractor monthly and have preventative tests on my heart and lungs. Maybe I can also have this silver lining assessed since I seem to keep finding it.
Last month, I showed my daughter a new skirt I bought and she told me I looked like a homeless person. It wouldn’t have been so bad except she was kind of accurate. It’s an army green skirt made of nylon with draw strings. It does kind of resemble a Hefty bag. Now I feel bad about telling my dad he dresses like a hobo for the last 30 years.
I have come to the conclusion no matter how cool I think I look, my daughter sees her mom as perpetually challenged when it comes to all thing fashion related. I’m pretty sure I felt the same way about my mother when I was my kid’s age. Granted, my mom was trying to put me in pink polos and plaid skirts while I was lacing up my combat boots and shredded band shirt, but I still wear combat boots and shredded band shirts and my kid is giving me a hard time while she stands in front of me in the same outfit.
Needless to say, the first day I wore my new garbage bag, I received more compliments on an outfit than I had in months, from colleagues to clients to the receptionist at my Mom’s doctor’s office. Even my husband said I looked like I should be on a runway, although I think he meant it in an ironic way. Either way, I’ll take it, and I’ll take my kid calling my skirt a trash bag every time I put it on. She’ll be sorry the next time she asks me to wear my combat boots!
Our not-so-little furball is two years old today. We actually are not sure about his real birthday since he was a rescue, but the vet picked early August as an approximate time and he was given this day to celebrate. I bought him a new harness and longer tether so he could roam the yard. Within three minutes he had choked himself twice and wiggled out of the harness, going completely free-range. This cat is an escape artist. He can open every door in our house, including the front door where he proceeds to let himself out for a walk every now and then. It was locked last week and he somehow barged his way through the bottom of the storm door and pranced out onto the front porch. We have taken to keeping the garage closed since he can open the inside door which swings inward. My husband watched as the cat pulled the handle down with his front paws and pushed his back legs off the wall, pulling the door inward. You would think we torture him by how badly he wants to get free.
We are no strangers to quirky cats. Our last kitty, Mommy’s Little Monster was downright insane. She was the type of cat that would let you pet her for a minutes, nuzzle up like she loved you and then rip your face off. She was always getting into things like the Christmas tree, lit candles, behind the refrigerator, and the basement ceiling. She once got herself caught in a plastic shopping bag and literally scared the shit out of herself. She then proceeded to run all over the house with her entire body stuck in a giant bag of feces. I had to corner her in the basement and cut the bag off her in the washtub. I thought that cat prepared us for anything, but alas, she did not.
Brody is a totally different kind of neurotic. He has separation anxiety and meows at length when anyone leaves the house. He literally stands at the door and cries when I drive my daughter to school in the morning. He also cries when we go to bed without him, standing at the bottom of the stairs like a little orphan crying for his lost family. He has a kind-of imaginary friend to help with his attachment issues, which is a stuffed cat who we believe is a little like the Velveteen Rabbit. Brody carries this toy around the house like a security blanket and plays with it for ages while screaming loudly. He does this every single night without fail. I think he’s lonely and needs another cat to keep him company. My husband thinks he’s spoiled and thinks getting a pet for our pet sounds like something a crazy person would do. I’m wondering if he has been paying attention for the last eighteen years because that sounds exactly like something I would do. He winning this battle for now, especially since I know you can never know what to expect with an animal. I’ll just keep telling Brody the same thing I told my kid as a toddler, he’s not mature enough for a pet, and maybe next year…
My daughter started watching Stranger Things last month and has become completely obsessed with it. I can’t say I’m mad about this, as I usually get pretty stoked about her liking the same things I do. The scary part, however, is realizing that she is closer to being a teenager than I thought. When she was first introduced to the bad boy of season two she declared him her favorite character. Every time he came on screen her eyes got big and she became riveted to the TV. She giggled uncontrollably when his shirt came off at the pool. I can’t say that I didn’t have a similar reaction when I saw his car, but watching my tween drool over a teenage boy was a little unsettling. My husband, horrified by her interest in Mr. Danger had to point out that she may have a thing for bad boys like her mother. This was further reinforced when she met the dungeons and dragons freak making his third attempt at senior year in season 4. She was instantly smitten. It could have been worse, she could have named the stoner pizza boy as her number one crush, and I would have planned the intervention right then and there.
I am happy to see that her taste has improved since last year. On more than one occasion she told me that she only liked bald guys with hair growing out of their ears. I was a little concerned that she had a very specific type, one that might lock her in his basement or a box in the woods, and then I realized she was talking about her grandpa. I often forget that every man is measured against him. This either sets the bar really high or really low, depending on how you look at it. He is kind of a superman in some respects but he also ate a piece of plastic off the floor last week because he thought it was cheese. So my daughter is going to hold off on dating until she finds a guy who will let her paint his face and nails and eat floor cheese. Great!
Luckily my kid still felt awkward watching any of the affection between the teenage characters during the first few seasons. Even more lucky that I remembered where these scenes were so I could fast forward through the parts that made us both squirm. Somehow in our house watching a demon dog rip a man’s intestines out makes us less squeamish than a couple of fourteen year olds making out with the door cracked three inches. I had already been traumatized during the first season when my kid asked what a douchebag was after hearing it 100 times in the first three episodes. I told her it was a feminine hygiene product and was the equivalent of calling someone a tampon. I’m happy to say she accepted that explanation with no further questions.
She also didn’t ask me what it meant anytime someone said “bang”, “nail” or “screw” and when the creepy middle-aged man asked the teenage boy how the pull-out was, she didn’t question if he meant the couch or something else. I have recognized that she is at an age that I can no longer make sex jokes with her Dad and get away without a look, but when they fly out in the middle of a movie, I am usually caught speechless, which is an unusual place for me. I did get to explain to my kid how valuable both a bike and a walkman were to a kid in the 80s and spent what felt like an eternity in a second hand music store digging through cassette tapes so she could have the full experience. Apparently my generation’s version of walking uphill both ways to and from school in a blizzard is having to rewind a cassette tape to get to right part. Who knew we had it so good.
**Feeing a little 80s so I listened to my favorite band in the 80s. The Clash of course!
Apparently I have not been out of the house in too long and life has changed quite a bit while I was taking this self-isolation thing to a whole new level. My daughter dragged me to not one, but two malls in 48 hours and I have discovered many new and horrifying things.
First, there are vending machines that sell false eyelashes. I shit you not. Vending machines stocked full of spidery looking little beasts in plastic cases. The first thing my daughter asked was “where is the glue?” I thought she meant what people must be sniffing to make them shove a credit card into a machine and wait for it to spit out some eyelashes at them. My first question was who is walking through the mall thinking “you know what would make this experience better…. giant fake eyelashes!” I mean, are that many people experiencing the loss of lashes while shopping that they need vending machines? I would have thought this was a joke but there were multiple machines at this mall containing thousands of eyelashes. If they are going to be dispensing beauty supplies in the same fashion teenagers buy chips and soda, I would prefer it be something useful like a nail file. I broke two nails carting around my kids’ bags and couldn’t find a file to save my life. You would think I was in a prison, not a mall. Although the similarities of the experiences are strikingly similar.
The second thing I learned is that there are no actual stores at the mall. All I wanted was a new pair of Chucks and the Converse store is apparently only open half the week. Most of the clothing stores I was planning on shopping at had signs on their closed gates stating their limited open times. Strangely, the store that sells wedding and prom dresses straight from the 80s was booming. I guess big lashes and big dresses are all the rage. The pretzel place that smells like barf was closed which was the only saving grace. The stores that were open were only about half stocked. We went into at least three stores that had nothing in my daughter’s size and about half of the selection that I saw online the week before.
Somehow, in the last two days of putting in 20,000 steps at the mall I managed to schlep home a carload of bags full of landfill and sugar. My kid now has enough fidget toys to keep her hands busy for the next 10 years and I am going to have to walk around the planet to burn the calories packed into the multiple bags of candy we picked up. No wonder all of the stores are closed. They are busy widening all of the waistbands after we sit on our fat asses eating truffles and playing with stress balls.
**While driving from mall to mall, this is the album my kid wanted to hear over and over and over…
When we moved into our house a year ago, we had about triple the wall space to decorate as our last house. My husband has been slowly filling the walls with his artwork. We had a handful of his pieces at our old house, but his last job kept him so overworked, he had little time to create for the last ten years. In the fifteen months we have lived here, he has created at least a dozen pieces to hang around our house. Strangely enough, two of my favorite pieces are in bathrooms. 
The front/gold bathroom has become the “skull” bathroom when I bought a gold skull last Halloween that never left the counter. I like skulls and have a lot of artwork and decor that include them in the house. I even have skull nightlight/fragrance plug ins around the house. I was over the moon when my husband created a piece of art to hang that fit the theme perfectly. Once the skull bathroom was complete I started thinking about a theme for the back/black bathroom. I kept seeing a rug with serpents on it that I loved and decided a snake theme would be a perfect counterpart for the skull theme. I started looking for snake decor, but was not finding much that I liked, or that fit the space. Then at Christmas, my husband asked for a bunch of tools and art supplies and by the New Year he was showing me a snake he had sculpted. I came home from work one night and when I dropped my bag at the door, he told me if I had to pee I better use the back bathroom. I knew he had been working on making the sculpture into a piece to hang and had seen it during the process, but I had no idea how beautiful it was going to look hanging on the wall. My husband has some serious skills. So now I have my two themed bathrooms, and the serpent is hanging directly above the toilet, There’s no jokes to be made or make people feel creeped out, right? 
The medical industry needs some work. I spent two years in pain and thousands upon thousands of dollars while doctors shrugged their shoulders and passed me off to the next doctor before a test for an unrelated issue revealed two boulders in my kidneys. I had cameras shoved in every orifice looking for the source of the pain in my side that doubled me over before a CT scan on my intestines showed giant stones in both kidneys, one of which was completely blocking the passage of fluid and shutting down functioning. No wonder I felt like shit for two straight years.
Last month, I showed my daughter a new skirt I bought and she told me I looked like a homeless person. It wouldn’t have been so bad except she was kind of accurate. It’s an army green skirt made of nylon with draw strings. It does kind of resemble a Hefty bag. Now I feel bad about telling my dad he dresses like a hobo for the last 30 years. 
Our not-so-little furball is two years old today. We actually are not sure about his real birthday since he was a rescue, but the vet picked early August as an approximate time and he was given this day to celebrate. I bought him a new harness and longer tether so he could roam the yard. Within three minutes he had choked himself twice and wiggled out of the harness, going completely free-range. This cat is an escape artist. He can open every door in our house, including the front door where he proceeds to let himself out for a walk every now and then. It was locked last week and he somehow barged his way through the bottom of the storm door and pranced out onto the front porch. We have taken to keeping the garage closed since he can open the inside door which swings inward. My husband watched as the cat pulled the handle down with his front paws and pushed his back legs off the wall, pulling the door inward. You would think we torture him by how badly he wants to get free.
My daughter started watching Stranger Things last month and has become completely obsessed with it. I can’t say I’m mad about this, as I usually get pretty stoked about her liking the same things I do. The scary part, however, is realizing that she is closer to being a teenager than I thought. When she was first introduced to the bad boy of season two she declared him her favorite character. Every time he came on screen her eyes got big and she became riveted to the TV. She giggled uncontrollably when his shirt came off at the pool. I can’t say that I didn’t have a similar reaction when I saw his car, but watching my tween drool over a teenage boy was a little unsettling. My husband, horrified by her interest in Mr. Danger had to point out that she may have a thing for bad boys like her mother. This was further reinforced when she met the dungeons and dragons freak making his third attempt at senior year in season 4. She was instantly smitten. It could have been worse, she could have named the stoner pizza boy as her number one crush, and I would have planned the intervention right then and there.
Luckily my kid still felt awkward watching any of the affection between the teenage characters during the first few seasons. Even more lucky that I remembered where these scenes were so I could fast forward through the parts that made us both squirm. Somehow in our house watching a demon dog rip a man’s intestines out makes us less squeamish than a couple of fourteen year olds making out with the door cracked three inches. I had already been traumatized during the first season when my kid asked what a douchebag was after hearing it 100 times in the first three episodes. I told her it was a feminine hygiene product and was the equivalent of calling someone a tampon. I’m happy to say she accepted that explanation with no further questions.
Apparently I have not been out of the house in too long and life has changed quite a bit while I was taking this self-isolation thing to a whole new level. My daughter dragged me to not one, but two malls in 48 hours and I have discovered many new and horrifying things.
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