I wonder how many google hits I get for that title.
It seems to me that major appliances have a suicide pact. Like the year our furnace and our water heater died. At Christmas. Or when the oven and the dryer went to that big appliance repair shop in the sky.
The brand new dishwasher. Is fine. 
But the aluminum wiring isn’t. Next weekend poor husband and father in law are switching out the aluminum for copper.
It makes me afraid for the washer. Perhaps I can stage an intervention.
1) you get to keep your drain. Really bad rhyme. I know. Drain stays till Friday. I’m back on Levaquin (which the doc stopped a while back to put me on Bactrim) because my infection is resistant to Bactrim now. Yippee. I get the overachiever bug. Anyway, Levaquin is scary expensive, even with insurance (For instance, I’m lucky it *only* costs me $50.) with even scarier side effects (like your Achilles tendon detaching somehow…) Anyway, I’ve just got to keep in mind I’ve taken more toxic things in my life, like chemo and some really bad stuffed green peppers I made long ago. I still have 8 pills of Levaquin left from a previous prescription and I’m hoping I can take those (I think he only wanted me on it for 5), so cross your fingers for me that the goddess of cheapness smiles on me and I can use it.
2) Pray for a friend’s mother (who is also my friend) whose Mom is dying. You are never too old to miss your mother. Or your grandma. Or your great-grandma.
3) Pray for my sister and her husband, for his mother passed away unexpectedly last night. Death is never easy, expected or otherwise.
4) Pray a bit for me, because tomorrow all their children will be at my house. I can handle it and it will be fine. But a little prayer never did anybody any harm.
So my daughter asked me what “Throws Like a Girl” meant. She’s already heard the negative version at school. I told her that some people use it as an insult and how it’s not ok to use someone’s gender as a cutdown. L is a girl and is frighteningly accurate with a ball. So we talked about how it’s silly to say it and the best response for her would be to say, “Of course, I throw like a girl, I AM a girl. And I throw just as well as you (annoying little boy, I add in my head.)”
When I named the blog, I had two things in mind. Using the insult Throws Like A Girl to mean something positive and a clever (or so I thought. Grins.) play on the knitting aspect of the blog. I knit by “throwing”. I’m a girl. etc.
I am actually quite offended by the idea that being female equals being weak or subpar. That’s probably why I love Sarah Haskins over at current.com so much. She is great at pointing out how the media encourages us to stay in archaic gender roles. She points out the absurdity that yogurt will fix all our problems and that men can’t cook dinner or do laundry without the help of some special cleanser.
I always thought Throws Like A Girl would be a great name for a girl’s softball team, too.
You’re told you have cancer. You need life saving surgery that might disfigure you for life. You need chemo. You will lose your hair. You will feel sicker than you ever have in your life. You might die.
Imagine all this. Except you’re a kid.
September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
I’ve told this story before, but the first person to really help me come to grips with having cancer was Dawn. Her daughter, Sam, was diagnosed with cancer roughly 8 months before I was. Dawn was the one to tell me to get off the internet. Not to look at the statistics. To ask for clinical trials. She took the time to help me when, by all rights, she could have just focused on her crisis. But I’m finding that’s not what cancer survivors do. We help those who come after.
So I’m helping. Check out Dawn’s blog and the Miracle Party, a fund raising event for all childhood cancers; leukemia, neuroblastomas, aplastic anemia and a host of other -emias and -omas that children and their parents should never have to face.
Helping Mama.
So Tuesday morning rolls around and still we have no power. We actually lucked out in terms of damage but there was (and is still) a lot of clean up to do. Taking the children aside, we talked about how when things like this happen, we come together as a family to help make our yard right again. Got the kids on board and we cleaned up the driveway. In fact, it was pretty cute. We have a neat gaggle of children on our block, ages 3ish to 11ish, and they were all at each others’ houses helping with the pick up. So, when we were done with the driveway, I let the kids go play in the basement.
Here’s where my day starts to droop.
We have one of those ancient bouncy horses in our basement and apparently the kids decided to see if they could exceed the maximum load. Of course the horse fell over and the kids bonked their heads, but they seemed ok to me, so I finished my conversation with a neighbor and about 15 to 20 minutes later I went to check on them. Couldn’t find the girl. I asked her friend where she was and he told me she had gone to bed. Mama Spidey Sense is starting to tingle now, so I wake her up and she is still crying about how much her head hurts.
So let’s take a reality check here.
1. Tired kid after hitting head.
2. Mom on medication who can’t drive.
3. No power.
After checking with my friend the PA in GA (heehee) who is quickly becoming my medical interpreter, the decision is made to go to the hospital.
Luckily the grandparents were home and one took the boy while the other took the girl and I to the hospital. L barfs in Grandma’s car. Mama Spidey Sense is now smashing me over the head with a frying pan. And I get to hold a barfy towel for the rest of the trip. We made it to the ER without further incident and took L inside to get checked out. They got us right in but there was a really long wait for the CT. (Cat spelled CT not CAT, L likes to tell people when she tells the story.) The nurses and doctors had L retell the story of how she hit her head a bazillion times and I will say it’s very scary when your 6 year old who usually knows her birthday cold has to be prompted. The first tellings of the story were very confused, probably sounding a lot like I did last year on chemo. Much too freaky.
Towards the end, after the CT, she began to perk up and start speaking her little college professor English again. The last time she told The Story, it started off like this, “Apparently, you’re not supposed to put 3 people on a bouncy horse…” (Apparently, she has heard her mother use the word “apparently” a few too many times…) The other thing that made me laugh was her insistence that the room smelled like barf. No YOU smell like barf darling. Because you barfed. She just couldn’t be convinced that was what it was.
We made it home and their daddy called to see how we were and whether I was still going to Planina.
Heck ya, I’m going to Planina. Are you kidding?
Oh, and bring some McDonalds please.
Shouldn’t we be eating out of the…
MCDONALDS PLEASE
I had pie for dinner before rehearsal. I’m such the picture of health. Grins.
To Be Continued
Ok. Not really. It’s been some sort of week anyway.
This weekend I was spiking fevers of 102 and 103 at night, which can be pretty scary. It could have been a few different things but the Ockham’s razor says that it was most likely an infection to the surgical site which can lead to all sorts of problems. SO, I had to stop taking my pain meds and not eat or drink on the off chance that the doctor had to admit me when he saw me bright and early Monday morning. That was pretty brutal. Luckily, all my incisions look great, so then they sent me off to the regular doctor to see if we could find some other reason. We’re still not sure. Could be as simple as a sinus infection or a UTI (woo). I’m on a pretty strong antibiotic that knocks out pretty much all of the above.
On the up side, I’m down to two drains, which feels like a vacation compared to 6. I’m pretty sure the last ones will come out Friday. I’m working on my arm range of motion. It’s slow but it’s coming.
This brings us to Monday. Not a bad day all in all. Kids went to bed. I went to bed and watched the pretty lightning show off in the distance. Or so I thought. Suddenly a chilly breeze came through the window and I realized it was raining. Really raining. The kind I called Florida rain as a kid, when you can’t see anything except the rain. Then the hail started and it suddenly occurred to me to start closing windows. I turned the light on in the backyard and was just amazed at the amount of hail bouncing around outside. It sounded like rocks pummeling the roof. (And yes. Both kids slept through the whole thing.) It was the first time I’ve ever watched a hailstorm and felt like I needed to back away from the window for safety. Then we lost power. And there was really nothing to do but go to bed.
To Be Continued
Austin TX is beautiful and weird. And fricken hot. Sort of like us girls who went there. Grins.
Disclaimer: the good pictures were taken by my friend, the bad ones were taken by my cell phone because I was too lazy to carry the camera.
We are so well behaved now.
So much good food. It’s a miracle I didn’t gain 10 pounds.
Why yes. Those ARE marble floors. And leather sofas...
The rental house was amazing. We were just as happy to sit around there as we were to go out. Must be getting old.
Franklin was here.
Because my girls love me, they drove me to the Knitter’s Nest. Which is NOT as near Austin as one might think.
Handspun, compartment boxes and canvas bags, oh my!
Saw some music.
(I can’t figure out why this picture is so small.)
I may or may not have used beer to take some of my pills during the day. (Ok. I'll come clean. They were vitamins.)
Did I mention it was hot? Walking back to the house, I mentioned to my friend that I thought I might be burning. She said, No you’re not red. And I said, No. Not sunburning. I think I might be actually on fire.
I already miss it.
So I decided to wear a dress to church today and since I haven’t worn a dress since around 2007, I had to go on a search for a pair of tights. Happily, I found a nice pair of black ones with no runs in them and thought,”Score!” I put them on and was surprised when they wouldn’t stay up. I thought, Finally! My Wii Fit workouts and point counting are finally paying off! Until I thought about it for a moment more.
And realized that they were maternity tights.
Heh.
So I just got a new smartphone that uploads all my contacts in Outlook from my laptop.
Imagine my surprise as I’m scrolling through, looking for a number, and come across.
King, Christ
The Episcopal church that we attend is called Christ the King. Heh. So yeah. I’ve got Jesus on speed dial. Grins.
Another funny related to that is a couple of years ago, someone called me from the church. A friend of mine looked at the caller ID and said, “Um. Jesus is calling. Probably should answer that.”
The knitting style I primarily use is called throwing. :) Thus, Throws Like A Girl.
