Tag: Elz

Ghostly

The whitest thing I’ve ever witnessed was Elizabeth’s face seconds before she administered her first insulin shot. But then, with the help of her big girl panties, she jabbed that sucker in and pushed the plunger with nary a problem.

Very proud of her. On the other hand, she won’t share the spider ring she got from the treasure chest on the way out the door. So selfish sometimes!

For Elizabeth

Q: How do you get four elephants into a Mini?

A: Two in front and two in back

Q: What game do four elephants in a Mini play?

A: Squash

Q: How do you get an elephant into the fridge?

A: Open the door, insert the elephant, close the door

Q: How do you get a giraffe into the fridge?

A: Open the door, take out the elephant, insert the giraffe, close the door

Q: The lion decided to have a party. All of the other animals showed up except for one. Which animal did not show up?

A: The giraffe because he was stuck in the fridge

Q: How do you know if there are two elephants in the fridge?

A: The door won’t close

Q: How do you know if there are three elephants in the fridge?

A: There will be one elephant waiting in the Mini

I freakin’ love elephant jokes!

Some Words Revisited

So one week ago today Elz calls me (!!) and asks if I want to hear the good or bad news first. The way things had been going for her at the hospital I asked for the bad news first. The bad new: she didn’t have a ride home. Which, of course, means that the good news was they were releasing her.

Can’t say as it wasn’t a surprise. She was still on some pretty heavy O2 and they had shot her up with morphine just the night before. I didn’t think we were getting out of there before the weekend. But, happy day, she came home.

The first few days were kind of scary because she was still so physically beat. OTOH, getting her out of a place where her most comfortable position was sitting in a chair hunched over a table with her head in her hands seemed to do wonders. The swelling everywhere went down pretty rapidly and her mood perked up exponentially. We even went outside once or twice over the weekend.

Home for a week now and she’s mostly back up to snuff. We still bump the O2 up every so often during physically demanding tasks but the snappy wit and willingness to laugh at nearly anything is back. Things are good at the house and everyone is way less tense these days.

In other news…

The garden is coming along slowly. Flea beetles are doing battle with the eggplant and the rabbits decimated my first row of snap peas. The rain is keeping everything kind of stunted too. The grapes look gorgeous this year although one of the concord vines is kind of meh. Not sure what’s wrong there but it looks like it is muddling through. The mulberries are about 3 – 5 days from feasting and I think we’re going to get raspberries this year too. We got jack from the raspberries and mulberries last year due to the late frost so we’re trés eager this time around. Ice cream and pie crust is at the ready.

That’s all the big news for now I guess. Just wanted to push the previous entry off the top of the page because it’s increasingly irrelevant.

Some Words

In the last few days I’ve encountered a number of words that, while previously unknown to me, have come to define this week. Words like hemoptysis, friable, pulmonary lavage, and bronchoscopy.

While I’m glad the latter two exist, the whole ordeal from Elz suddenly coughing blood on the way to do some mundane provisioning to the four total hours of sleep I’ve had the past two nights to spending lunch and evenings in ICU with my poor lady who is just physically beat down, I could really do without encountering any of these words again. She’s slowly on the mend and might even make it home some time this weekend. As a favor to me, please hug and/or kiss [as appropriate] those around you who matter most.

As for me, well, the dogs need to go outside, some semblance of laundry needs to be done, and there’s a special lady who requires adult supervision.

Celebrating Entropy

Listening to M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us and I am struck by the overpowering evocation of longing and despair the album has. Seriously. I’m sitting here at work and all I want to do is sigh and maybe let loose with inexplicable sobbing. Haven’t felt like this since my at-the-time spouse seemed to be purposefully incinerating our marriage and all I could do was watch. I want to say the music personifies reckless waste for the sake of dystopia. Not so much reckless I guess, because it’s as if there’s a compelling need to bring about destruction just for the sake of destroying something.

Celebrating entropy maybe…

I think this mood has been prevalent lately because the slow-mo incinerating marriage is also finally approaching its terminus. That, and the fan blades gained their fecal coating about this time of year two years ago. The judgment is final on the 9th and this completes the cycle that began June 18th, 1993. From then on, she becomes no more than any other person I might run across on the street and I am protected from having to clean up anymore of the messes that have been spawned in the past two years. The dissolution has been exceptionally drawn out for reasons beyond my control and for the past two years it has been to my emotional well being what smog is to Los Angeles.

Oddly, we’ve been forced to correspond a bit over the past month and change because she insists on soaking up every last bit of support she technically has coming to her. I’ve changed jobs and this means a change in insurance and the like. So, anyway, a rash of email back and forth. I was somewhat struck by the apology she issued in her last communique but, ultimately, I’ve just got to file it away with everything else. Sometimes a wholesale paper shredding policy is best. At any rate, I have a great thing going with Elz and I’d have to say that I’m better off now than I have been in the past 20 some odd years.

Anyway, M83 reminds me a lot of Sigur Rós which, oddly enough, I listened the heck out of almost two years ago. Time to find me some juju right quick so I can reverse this emotional trainwreck. King Sunny Ade is completely antithetical to depression which is what is called for at the moment.

Praise the Roof

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The Elz and myself went out to draft a baseball team in lovely Chicago. It’s an annual migration for myself and given the events of the last two years, an annual migration for Elz as well.

Observations about Chicago:

  1. Your lodging dollar goes a lot further in the suburbs than it will in downtown Chicago.
    1. Duh
    2. But, seriously, $99/night for the full business class traveler experience. I thought about loading up books from Project Gutenberg and printing them willy-nilly because free printing was an included room perk.
  2. Holding the season opener at Wrigley is a rather silly idea.
  3. The lynch pin of my draft strategy went for $8 more dollars than I had given myself as the strict upper limit for a player. This led to a messy draft that I don’t have sufficient preparation for to properly judge. It could either be a long year (most likely), a mediocre year (the best we can hope for), or the best team accidentally drafted (LOL).
  4. Getting out of Chicago always takes longer than anticipated even though the expected crapular traffic on the Ryan never really materialized. Instead it was the Eisenhower that screwed us out of 45 minutes of our life

We continued on to Elizabeth, Pennsylvania for a few days of family-oriented frivolity. I wish I could say it was the most incredible experience of my life, but I wasn’t expecting that anyway. Instead I met some really nice folks who took me in with bemused arms and I learned a great deal about my newest infatuation—ham radio. I will be adding this to the stack of pursuits I already juggle, but have always wanted to do so. Having someone take me by the hand and show me around the block was exactly what I needed to get me off my ass.

On the trip out things got a bit silly as we ended up two and a half hours later than expected. The anxiety level in the car was increasing with every mile until we called a truce. Then Elz did the “raise the roof” gesture and said “raise the roof” in respect to something. I, on the other hand, thought she said “praise the roof” which both of us found to be incredibly more humorous. We then spent the remainder of that dark night on the back roads of southwest Pennsylvania running through various ramifications related to substituting the current monotheist deity of choice with the simple, humble, all-protecting roof. More on that later…

Really, lots more later… My UTS is really acting up with the two straight days of poor posture and driving with my elbows propped on door handles and center consoles. Still, wanted to say that we’re home safely and had a great trip. The Picts might just muddle through another year and avoid the cellar (we’ve posted anywhere between 3rd and 7th so far this week) so I consider the trip a success.

Also, the puppies are racked out on the bed after a hard week at the kennel and if I expect to get any space of my own I’m going to have to force my way in soon before positions become established.

Bargain Bin STDs

10:15 Elz: maybe she got herpes
10:15 Me: lol
10:16 Me: ’tis better to give than to receive.
10:16 Elz: yewwwwwwwwwwwww
10:16 Elz: I want none of that!
10:16 Elz: Mister!!!!!
10:16 Me: It’s the thought that counts.
10:16 Elz: yeah…well….you can’t take it back
10:17 Me: It’s like getting something someone bought on clearance?
10:17 Me: Herpes == the clearance rack of sex
10:17 Elz: lol