car auction

The more chaotic my life becomes the less likely I am to blog about it. It’s just too difficult to sort it into digestible chunks, and besides, who cares anyway?

But here I am again anyway, and since I’m so far behind I might as well just jump in where I am, I suppose.

My husband, aka Mr Moth, bought me a van on Sweetest Day. Not for Sweetest Day, but it’s cute to say that’s why. The timing was coincidental. Neither of us actually knew it was Sweetest Day until after the purchase.

We went to the auto auction, where we have purchased a vehicle the last three Octobers in a row. Two years ago, we bought Silver, a Caravan, for Mr Moth to drive when his Sonoma became even more aggravating than usual. Last year we bought Forest, an F-150. This was also for Mr Moth, and Silver passed to me because Berta (my previous Grand Caravan) had passed 200,000 miles. Silver has been pretty reliable, but she has some quirks that I am not in love with.

So this year Mr Moth decided Forest doesn’t get good enough gas milage for the commute he will probably have to make when he graduates and starts a new job. But instead of him getting a third vehicle he (we) decided it was my turn and he would take Silver back. So we started our auction routine. Maybe we shouldn’t call it a routine, since we’d only done it twice before, and refined the process each time, but whatever.

The routine involves making a list. Mr Moth downloads the full inventory from the auction website and then we go through it and eliminate anything inappropriate, such as vehicles that don’t run, are wrecked, too much hassle. Also no school busses, golf carts, sail boats and etc.. Then we go to the auction location the day before the auction, which is when they let you start the vehicles and listen to them. You aren’t allowed to actually drive them, because that would create a rodeo. It’s a negative, not being able to drive them, but you can put them in gear, and test to see what works, look for leaks, and suchlike. This is the part of the process where I actually contribute the most because I have this superpower.

I am an engine whisperer. I can hear things. Not just obvious things anyone could hear like a bearing going out, but subtle things that I can’t quite put my finger on. I call it the Death Rattle. Sometimes I have heard it in my own vehicles for quite a long while before anything bad happened so maybe it’s my imagination (since all vehicles die eventually) but you have to decide based on something, so this is what I do. I find the vehicles that sound the best.

After this, we refine our list, crossing off anything with the Death Rattle or any other newly discovered condition that create a nope situation. The new list gives us priorities, first choice, second choice and so on.

The thing with auctions is, they go in order. Your first choice might be the last car sold. If you wait, you might miss out on somehting good, and still not get your first choice. It’s gambling. I’m not a gambler by nature, so this is all very exciting but also very stressful, and it takes days. By the end of the auction experience, I’m seriously depleted and ready for emotional collapse.

And then next year I want to do it again.

This year was worse, however, because I made a mistake. I had been waffling between passenger vans and cargo vans. I really liked the cargo vans, but they only have two seats. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that’s all I need; it’s either Mr Moth and I, or Zor (my youngest spawn) and I. But sometimes my parents need a ride to a medical appointment or the store. If that happened I could always use Silver. Buying a cargo van was no worse than buying a pickup I figured. But there was still a lot of guilt, because parents. (They didn’t put it on me. I took this guilt for myself.)

The mistake was, I found one car, the perfect car. Another Dodge van like the two I already love. A passenger van, with fold down seats, in really pretty shape and it sounded beautiful too. The color is technically beige, but it looks kind of goldy-champaign to me. It matches my cell phone, ha.

There was only one.

I know better than to get attached, I told Mr Moth. I don’t want to be stupid. We looked up the Kelly value on that van and decided on a top end price. Based on the list of sold-prices from the last auction, I was sure it would go at least a thousand over that amount. This isn’t going to happen, I told myself. Don’t get attached.

It was too late.

So we finally get to the day of the auction. I had decided to let a couple of other possibles go by for a chance at The Van, although I had picked three others that would come after.

There was one van exactly like Berta, even the same color except with half the miles, that we hadn’t listened to because of hideous rust holes. Mr Moth suddenly suggested we could have bought it and put Berta’s body on it. Other similar vans were going for less than $500. I really wished we had listened to it; Berta has a lot of good parts because I took care of her. Then this one went for a thousand, and I felt less bad about not thinking of this the day before.

It’s during the bidding that Mr Moth works his superpower. Somehow, people mysteriously stop bidding. He has ideas on why this happens, but my hypothesis is, it’s a Jedi mind trick. “This is not the car you’re looking for.”

He did it again.

We never saw who bid against us because whoever it was stood on the other side of The Van where we couldn’t see. I don’t expect it matters, but I kind of think it was this short guy I heard a bit later who was bitching up a storm about what a sucky auction this one was.

Because The Van was so low in the numbers, we still had plenty of time to make it to the nearby BMV and register for a temp tag, and use the blissfully clean bathroom there. The porta potties at the auction are my biggest complaint. They are disgusting, revolting and horrible about ten seconds after you get there. Obviously women are not supposed to go there, or at least not go there. Next time I think I’ll take a big bag of cleaning supplies and maybe a hazmat suit.

Then we went back to the auction and by then they had “cleared” the row where The Van was parked, meaning they had finished auctioning there and buyers were allowed to remove the vehicles. When Mr Moth pulled The Van around, there was a lot of brake noise which we could not have discovered sooner because we couldn’t drive it. That’s also when he noticed Silver, which we had driven there, had developed a substantially low tire on the driver’s side rear. Blargh.

We stopped at the Duke station on the way home and aired that up, which gave me time to play with the controls in The Van. There are a lot of controls. Power everything, except seats. The side and back windows all have controls, along with the mirrors. There are separate climate controls for driver, shotgun, and rear positions. The sound system has a radio, a cd player, and an mp3 player jack. It sounds really lux, too.

So we came home.

We recalled that when we purchased Silver, Berta had suffered a minor repair issue that required mechanical intervention, and we concluded that Dodge Vans are slightly jealous bitches.

Upon returning home, we discovered that the plates on Mr Moth’s truck, Forest, had expired in mid-September. Probably because we transferred Silver into my name then, and in his head that trip to the BMV was the trip for his plates. So we had to make an emergency run to our local BMV to renew him. That made one too many things, and we didn’t address Silver’s tire problem until Sunday.

So the next day, Sunday, Mr Moth tried to change the tire and couldn’t get one of the lug nuts off. So he put in fix-a-flat, we reminded each other how we always mean to get an air compressor but it’s never quite a priority, and drove it to Wal-Mart. They couldn’t get the damn lug nut off either. So on Monday Mr Moth called Car Guy and made an appointment to take The Van in on Wednesday (brakes), and Silver afterward (lug nut).

I didn’t want to drive The Van and risk creating or worsening any brake damage and increasing the repair costs. This left Zor and me sharing Berta. When I got in, the power steering–which I just had replaced a couple of years ago, not by Car Guy, I forget why–let out a heartbreaking squall. Because it never rains, but it pours, right?

I skipped school on Monday. I had such a stress headache. But I had to go on Wednesday because I had a poem due. Car Guy finished The Van for $80-something. All it needed was front pads, which he said were as close to metal-to-metal as you can get without actually being metal-to-metal. Also he sanded some rust off the rear discs. He said it looked like it had been sitting for a while. And Silver ended up costing $10, because he was able to get that dag ratted lug nut off without breaking it. I love Car Guy. Besides Mr Moth, he is my other hero.

Berta is still pending. I am burnt out on decision making.

So I have not driven The Van anywhere but home from the auction, and to and from the Car Guy’s place.

However, The Van has a name now. Mr Moth and I were returning from not getting Silver new tires, and I told him a couple of names I had toyed with but was not in love with. Berta was named after the housekeeper on Two and a Half Men. Big but likable and got the job done. Silver was named after Bill Denbrough’s bicycle in Stephen King’s book It. Forest, Mr Moth’s truck, was formerly a Parks Services truck, and is also green, so.

The Van is formally beige, but looks gold-ish or champaign to me. I thought about blonde TV charactes. Bernadette is my favorite Big Bang character, but I just lost a hamster named Bernie so I didn’t want to do that. Maybe Penny?

Mr Moth said, “It’s your van, you can name it Agnes for all I care.”

“Ohmigawd, that’s it! Agnes! Perfect!” Not after a blonde character, but after Agnes Moorehead.

So world, meet Agnes, the newest member of my fleet, I hope for a long time to come.

cleaning under the makeline

I have a spotty employment history, due to my previous stalking situation and the PTSD and anxiety that goes with it. I spent a lot of time working in the pizza delivery field. (1) They forgave me a lot of quits, (2) being on the move made me feel safer, and (3) when Stalker found me (and he did…a lot) I could just move on to another store, another company, another map.

So there was this one time when I went back to work at one of my favorite stores. My first night, almost as soon as I walked in the door, someone I had worked with before, A, pulled me off to the side and said, paraphrased, I’m so glad you’re back. I’m the only one who cleans under the makeline.

This is the makeline, that big refrigerated silver table with all the food:

It gets pretty gross under there, with cheese and flour and bits of dropped food. Nothing a good sweeping and a thorough mopping won’t take care of though. It’s heavy and awkward and there isn’t much room

So I nodded and went on about my business, and later in the night another person with whom I had worked before caught me near the dispatch table and said, paraphrasing, I’m so glad you’re back. I’m the only one around here who ever cleans under the makeline.

Ok. So whoever was supposed to be closing driver that night realized I was there and they could skate outta there and did so, and so I found myself pulling out the makeline to clean under it because I never want to be part of the problem, and especially not on my first night back. I didn’t expect it to be too bad under there; after all if both A and J were cleaning under there occasionally, how bad could it be?

Bad. There was this…splotch. Black, tarry, furry around the edges, and with King Tut’s chicken wing stuck right near the edge of it at about the two o’clock position, which ironically, was about the time of the morning it was when I found it. I have never seen anything so gross in all my years of pizza. While the stores do get trashed during the dinner rush, that is only mess, not actual filth, and I have never been hesitant to eat at any of the stores where I have worked…including the one I am talking about now.

I don’t really want to talk bad about my co-workers either. I’m sure they thought they really were bearing more than their fair share of the burden.

In order to clean the splotch, I had to get an old dough scraper, which is something like a huge putty knife, and chisel that chicken wing up out of the goo, soak the tarry residue with dish soap for an hour, and mop it repeatedly. It finally sort of went away,mostly, although it left a stain that faded over a course of months. And every time I saw that stain I thought about how everybody thinks s/he is the only one who cleans under the makeline. Which brings me to what I want to say.

You probably aren’t, so stoppit.

head cold

This is day nine of a grinding summer cold. Normally I don’t, or am not able to, keep track of such things, but I happen to remember this one because I woke up with it on the day of my Primary Care appointment. She, Trecia, said that viruses have to run their course, which I knew, but I felt bad for her having to explain that a dozen times a day.

We live in a society where you’re not allowed to stay home, and you’re not allowed to go out sick either. People are pissed at you either way, so lots of us turn to doctors and urgent care for the answer. Because the choice is, stay home a few days until you’re not contagious, or go to work and school sick. Everybody faces this sooner or later, including you, so cut people some slack.

Yes, some people are slackers and malingerers, but there’s no way of telling for sure who, so this is something we have to live with. Yanno, like colds.

This is actually my second cold this year, the first having happened right after Horton’s arrival. It seems odd, because I normally only catch one cold a year, or none. This cold, Zor, the live-at-home spawn, dragged home in the second week of her new job. It involves a carousel of symptoms that began with a headache and an exceptionally sore throat that made my ears itch, and has added the usual symptoms–sinus pain, drainage, sneezing, coughing, fever. All intermittent, except the sinus pain. I finally took a forbidden decongestant, and am afraid to check my blood pressure.

I have also had ear pain, mostly in the morning. I suspect Horton’s high pressure blows mucous back into my head and into my ears.

This cold has made me completely self-absorbed. I find myself literally pretending to care about other people. I suppose that might mean I care enough to pretend, but more likely I just care enough about me to not want to napalm my relationships.

School started this week. I feel very sorry for myself trying to do JavaScript while strangling on phlegm. Thank goodness it is an online class, because every time I cough or sneeze I pee a little. Even though I have set a timer to visit the facilities every half hour, I still find it necessary to cover my desk chair with a hefty bag, and leaving the house is a roll of some very weighted dice. Not that I feel like going anywhere, but as I mentioned earlier, no one is allowed to stay home when they’re sick. I still have to taxi Zor, and run errands, and etc.

So until I can breathe again, I hope everyone has a good idea.

dumb bird

This morning a bird got in. I’m not sure how it got in. I had let the dogs out and set about loading the dishwasher. Then I heard Artemis crying to come in, so I opened the door but she didn’t come in. As soon as I went back to the dishwasher, I heard her again. I called to her that she would have to wait, under the fool me once rule. But then Cobie came and bumped the door open. I didn’t leap up to close it again, although I should have. The air conditioning was already running. It turned ugly hot a few days ago, kind of sudden, after a long cool summer so far.

After I finished loading the dishwasher, started it, made my coffee, and took my empty-stomach pills, I went to close the door, and that’s when something really large started flapping around the lamp just above my head. I startled hard, because I thought it was a bat. Then I saw it was only a bird. I closed the door. I decided a bird could wait. Like, until Mr Moth woke up. I had not had coffee yet, for god’s sake. I wasn’t even wearing pants yet.

Nobody should attend a wildlife rodeo without pants.

So I came to The Keep. I gave out morning treats. I opened my laptop without drama, a welcome change of pace since it’s been squirreling around lately. I started to play Pearl’s Peril, which is what passes for morning meditation with me. I heard a bunch of yapping, woofing, and meowing from the kitchen. I wondered if it would wake up Mr Moth. I felt no particular compunction to make sure it didn’t. Then everything went silent. The dogs came back to The Keep and lay down. This did not bode well for the feathered one.

Cry havoc and let slip the ckatten… Here came Artemis the ckatten. She leapt and twisted and stampeded up and down my shelves and across my desk. I looked up, and there was the bird. I’m not sure what kind. It looked kind of hawklike, but regular bird sized. I stood up and ushered out the dogs. I tried to usher the ckatten, but forget that. She had more havoc to wreak. So I snagged her and ejected her forcefully. She twisted in midair and I slammed the door in her face. She sat there yowling. I can’t believe Mr Moth slept through that, given the proximity and all.

So, bird in The Keep. Flying from edge to edge. Crapping. It crapped on my diploma. It crapped on my photographs. It crapped on my Done is Better than Good sign. Damn bird. I decided to hell with air conditioning, there’s a crapfest in here, and opened the window. Bird is too dumb to fly out. It keeps flapping around the top edge of windows and doors, looking for places to perch. Now is not the time to perch, dumb bird. Now is the time to fly the hell out of here. I opened another window. Still it wouldn’t fly out.

Okay, bird. I get that (a) there is a reason for the term “bird brain,” and (2) fear doesn’t make anyone smarter even if they have a magnificent brain to start with. But fly out already!

Dumb bird fails to comply with my wishes. It tries to perch on the upper edge of a poster. Don’t crap on my puppy poster, dumb bird! I pick up a dust mop and try to steer the dumb bird toward an open window. A metric crapton of hamster seeds fall out of the dust mop all over The Keep. I, dumb human, switch to a yard stick. Dumb bird outfoxes dumb human and evades yard stick, crapping in a few more places just for good measure.

It is not too surprising I was outfoxed by a dumb bird. It might not have been in the house in the first place if I had not been outfoxed by the ckatten so thoroughly and often that I gave up trying to keep her indoors.

Anyway, once upon a time I owned two finches. When one would escape, I sometimes captured it by throwing a towel over it. But The Keep is towel-less, as I failed at the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Especially since the only things I remember about that book is the number 42 is important, and something about keeping a towel handy, which I obviously have not done. I don’t know what, if anything, the Guide might say about being trapped in a Keep, besieged by predatorial pets, with a dumb bird. So I had to use my head. Before coffee. Not cool. After a few minutes of chasing the poor dumb bird around with a yard stick, I had an idea.

Since I wasn’t wearing pants, never mind a skirt–I only own two skirts, one I only ever wore to Porfolio Review and the other I have never worn–I decided I would do what heroes always do when bandages are needed. Who knows, maybe a hero would also do this if trapped in a Keep with a dumb bird and no towel.

I took off my shirt. I figured I could use it as a towel, net, dumb bird-catcher. Not that I wanted to, because it’s white and hasn’t any stains on it yet, and I really didn’t want it crapped on. But sometimes sacrifices have to be made. As I finished pulling my shirt over my head, I caught my last glimpse of the dumb bird, streaking out the window and away as though it had caught a glimpse of hell’s depths.

I think I have a complex now. Take off my shirt, terrorize a bird.

I hope you have an idea today, and that it doesn’t result in you needing body image therapy.

health and school, is there anything else?

Way back in, what, May? When I first got Horton, I caught a cold. It was relatively minor as colds go, and was mostly a PITA because it made adjusting to Horton harder. On the third day of it or so, I pulled a muscle in my back coughing. It hurt for a day or so and quit.

Then T the CNP twiddled my medications (all of them it seems like) and suddenly that same muscle started hurting again.

I was supposed to wait a month and then go in for blood work. I did that two Wednesdays ago. Still no word on the results, but I have gone back off the statin on my own because I am crippled. It hurts to change positions at all, in any direction. It hurts to climb steps. It hurts to lie down, and it hurts to get up. It hurts to get dressed, and it hurts to undress. I want to whine and cry constantly. Hell, I probably do whine and cry constantly. I’m doing it now, right?

If I don’t hear from them about the results by Monday, I’m calling.

This pain thing is made worse by the fact that Mr Moth hurt his shoulder, and now we are both lamed up.

Meanwhile, on the school front, and also filed under People Who Won’t Give Me the Information I Need To Get On With My Life, my financial aid was terminated for Fall term because I had maxed it out. But, come to find out, they were still using my allowance from my first degree in Graphic Design. So I had to go in and get a new degree form from the financial aid office and carry it to the records office, who was supposed to fill it out and send it back to financial aid. Of course they didn’t do that until I called and nagged. So ten days later the financial aid office told me they had received the form and processed it, but it still needed to be entered into the system.

Another ten days later, it still isn’t showing up in Web Advisor so I can’t accept the aid, and it won’t be credited to my account. So I have to call some more. (Note to self, added to my Monday to-do list.)

Mind you, I’m not sure I’m able to go or want to go…but I don’t want the option to be taken away by failure of the school to process effin paperwork. I want to make that decision myself.

mouse tails, ew

Partly I stay up too late because after everyone else is in bed is the only time I can take my armor off and even somewhat relax, but usually I am not relaxing. There are things I need to get done without being bothered (and without bothering anyone else) and those things also get squeezed in when I should technically be holding down the bed. Like dishes. What is the point in running the dishwasher when people are still eating? And someone is always eating. Also, it is very discouraging to spend way too much time clearing the piles off the kitchen table and then, as soon as I sit down, someone comes in and puts something there. So, although I know it’s poor sleep hygeine, I do tasks late at night.

One other downside is, I am never actually done. I finally crawl into bed, not because I’m half-past tired, but because I feel ready to collapse. Then I usually have to get up again at least once because my OCD convinces me I need to check the stove knobs one more time to make sure none have gotten bumped and that the house is not filling with gas.

At some point late in every night there is usually an OH CRAP moment where I realize there is something I needed to do that isn’t done and can’t wait, some urgent thing that I had temporarily forgot but that my stupid brain is now serving up to me as a convenient dessert. Last night there were two. I had forgot to wash my CPAP cushion, and I had forgot to fill my pill sorter. So I did both those things.

I hate filling the pill sorter. For one thing I am always reminded–chaCHING–of how much this shit all costs. For another, the dogs want to mill around my feet, and Oliver wants me to feed him. He has three feeding stations. One is in the laundry room, and one on my desk. But I keep the Keep door closed at night to keep Tyrion safe from Artemis the ckatten, so Oliver also has dishes on the kitchen table. I know that is gross, but he is old and gimpy and not very vertical anymore. He still tries to jump, but sometimes misses. All three feeding stations are in places where dogs can’t hassle him (or eat the food) and where he can get up in increments, via the kitchen chairs in that room, or via a folding chair I have provided in the Keep. (My desk chair has wheels, so it is not appropriate for incremental leaping purposes.)

So last night I let both dogs and Oliver out around 1:00 a.m. and set up my pill sorter and then let them back in. They hadn’t gone out long because it was raining still and again, and had been waiting in the garage for readmission. And then, just as I was about to shut the door, here came the ckatten, who proceeded to drop a dead mouse on the floor right next the line between the living room carpet and the kitchen tile.

Both dogs run to sniff at it.

I looked for the broom and dustpan, both of which were missing from their usual spot by the door, so I dart into the galley part of the kitchen and snag a saucepot off the stovetop where I had set it to finish drying overnight after taking it out of the dishwasher so I could run a second load.

I raced back to the throng and slammed the pot down over the mouse, but not before noticing it was not dead. It was doing that tail twitch thing that I know so well, both from Oliver’s younger days and another cat I had named Rikki Tikki. Rikki was always and forever bringing live rodents in and turning them loose. Often Hannah would get them while they were in the tail-twitching stage and finish them off by tossing them into the air and chomping them like Cobie does with a Stuffeez. Once Hannah flang a sodden slobbery dead mouse across the room and into my coffee. SPLASH.

Anyway, I thought I would use the dustpan to scoop up the inverted pan and the mousebody both, take the whole shebang outside, and release, even though releasing a tail-twitcher is a crapshoot. Often they die anyway. Sometimes the cat just re-catches them anyway and polishes them off. (Oliver’s MO.) But sometimes they recover–maybe they were only faking? or maybe they were only in shock–and streak off into the sunset…or your house, depending on how successful you are at relocating them before the recovery occurs.

But that plan was a no-go, because as I mentioned, I couldn’t find the dustpan. I have one of those long-handled ones you can use without bending over, and which allows you to remove nasties like rodent carcasses without getting your hands too close. I know it is unreasonable that I have Tyrion yet despise other rodents. It’s the tails. I hate rodent tails. Especially when they twitch. My skin crawls at the sight. So I try not to hate on wild rodents, even though they carry disease and yadda yadda, but then I see their tails, which kind of lash around like worms, serpents, or tentacles, and I’m all, ICK GAG FREAKOUT. Kill it, kill it with raid, kill it with fire, KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT.

I try to overcome that because I know it is unreasonable, but the best I seem to manage is to not set the house on fire because there’s a twitching tail in it somewhere.

Getting back to the dustpans, I also have a regular short-handled one, but it’s downstairs because I only ever use it for sweeping up litter around the litterpans. My feet and legs have been tremendously swollen this week, and the stairs? At going on one-thirty in the morning? No, sorry.

I snarled at the ckatten who was up on the kitchen table polishing off the canned food I had given to Oliver, and which she had chased him off of while I was distracted with the mouse. Why are you up there eating cat food while a live mouse twitches under a saucepan in the middle of the floor, you hellcat? I poked her, and she jumped down and started sniffing around the pan.

So what I did was, I stuck a box of soda on top to weigh the pan down, wrote T-Moth a note, and went to bed.

Then I realized he would not see the note until he had tripped over the moused-up boobytrap in the kitchen doorway, so I got up, wrote him a note, and taped it to the bathroom mirror where I could hope he would see it before he stumbled over the boobytrap, possibly releasing the mouse into the house.

The note apparently worked, because he left me one of his own. It said, “I tried to get [the mouse] but it was STILL ALIVE. Ran into the garage. [The ckatten] followed it. Sorry.”

So this is one of those stories with no satisfying ending. And yet, this is the end.

Have a good idea today.

thankful thursday on sunday

Because I whined on (thankful) Thursday…

Zor’s new job.

Money for groceries.

My dentist and her crew, who have treated me with utmost care and respect, and that…

My extreme dental adventures are almost over. Only one more visit! And then I will become a normal dental patient. Well, maybe not. I don’t think I’ve ever been normal. Maybe “ordinary” is a better term.

Long phone calls with my mother.

My blue tie-dye shirt. My docs probably think this is the only shirt I own, because I wear it when I am stressed. It is like a wearable blankie.

Air conditioning. And fans. Because I never did like hot, and one of the recently increased medications causes increased sensitivity to hot.

Our mechanic, whose affordable brake job just saved Me, Berta, and a disney-colored deer.

Bonnie at Mr Handy, who told Mr Moth how to fix our dishwasher with a hair dryer.

put a big C on my chest because…

I am a super crab today. First off, I–queen of compression socks–couldn’t get my compression socks on on the first attempt, and then I couldn’t get them on on the second attempt, either. Now I have one on correctly, and the other on wrong, because I got sick of the entire thing. I was hot and sweaty before I even got out of the bedroom. UGH.

Like a stupe, I bought black compression socks, because I thought they would look more interesting. I failed to take into consideration that, GOT notwithstanding, summer was coming. And it has arrived, early and gross.

I realized my error about a week and a half ago and ordered some white compression stockings online. Once again, the post office has allegedly lost my order. It’s amazing how often this happens between the time a shipping lable has printed and the time the post office receives the package. I mean, you’d think occasionally something would get lost after being scanned in at the USPS. You’d also think that things would occasionally be found again. Is there somewhere a big room full of lost ebay and marketplace items?

Yeah, I think I’m being bullshitted.

Anyway, they’re supposedly sending “another” order. Not that I believe they ever sent the first one. [Epithet here.]

Second off, plumbing issues in the kitchen. Mr Moth is working on it, but it is beginning to feel never-ending. It is making him crabby, and crabbiness ripples outward.

I have to hand carry Horton’s memory card to the HME company because the envelope didn’t arrive in time for me to mail it in and have the data sent to my pulmonologist by Monday, and I am really sick of medical crap taking over my life. I have other stuff to do.

I’m pretty sure the latest medication changes are what is making me feel like a rug, and I’m not happy about that, either. First medical stuff sucks the life out of me, then it uses up whatever energy I have left plus 1d4.

Snarl.

I turn fifty tomorrow.

Happy birthday to me.
Rhymes with the BMV.
Where they give me a sticker
In exchange for all my money.

So add the BMV to my list of errands. Also, as mentioned above, it is hot. Berta’s air conditioning is permanently borked, as in I refuse to pay more than I paid for her to fix it. So I get to cook in my black socks while running errands.

I’m crabby but not quite hateful, so I still hope everybody has a good idea today.

soldiering on with horton

Sleeping with Horton is no picnic, but it’s not a constant struggle anymore. Or perhaps I’ve just got more used to this level of struggle. Nothing epic happens in any given night, just annoyances that seem relatively minor, mostly related to mask leaks.

I’m not sure if the mask leaks because my face is fat, or because my head is fat and the headgear rides up, or because my pressure is high. My guess is a combination of all three, but with an emphasis on the headgear riding up. I think next time I get headgear I will ask about the larger size.

The sites all say that having the mask on too tight makes leaks worse, but I started loose and gradually tightened until the leaks stopped. Well, they stopped in that there are no leaks when I first put on the mask. Then, at some point during the night, the shenanigans begin (usually). Whistling, burping, farting. Joy.

So an example of an, oh, lets call it a micro-disturbance, is, the mask shifts and starts to whistle. Kelly thinks it’s calling her, so she jumps on the bed and sniffs my face. I try to pet her, and accidentally pet Oliver, who claws me.

Yes, I know I could kick all the animals out of the bedroom, but if you know me at all, you know that isn’t going to happen. Overall, I sleep better with them in the room. Hopefully they will get used to Horton eventually…and by they I mean Kelly. He doesn’t bother anyone else, although once or twice Cobie has awakened me walking under the hose. He’s actually very good about ducking and going under the hose and not just ramming through; he was trained on Xbox controller cords.

Yesterday I read (somewhere, wish I could remember where to give credit) that if your mask springs a leak in the night, pull it completely off your face so the seal can reinflate, and then reposition it. I had reservations about this. For one thing, MyAir takes off points for mask removal, and I care ridiculously about getting good grades on MyAir. And for another thing, I have the thing cranked so tight, it’s quite difficult to pull the mask completely away from my face. But I tried it, along with pulling the headgear back down, and it seemed to help.

Waking up to adjust kind of irritates me, though…but my brain is working better so I suppose it’s all worth it. I almost beat my husband at Words With Friends yesterday. Almost.

I am so looking forward to the day when sleep in general and Adventures With Horton don’t dominate my thoughts. This stuff is geting teejus even to me. But until that day comes, have a good idea!

(one of) the nicest thing(s) anyone ever said to me

The old man and I were shopping at Meijer yesterday, and as we were headed toward the checkout we passed the greeter, who said something, which might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me, or maybe only the coolest, or most interesting thing, and maybe only this month…but wonderful anyway.

She said:  Have a good idea!

Then she realized what she’d said and stumbled all over herself apologizing and correcting.  “I meant have a good day, I don’t know why I said that, have a good idea, day!  Have a good day!”

I liked it how she said it, and not ninety seconds later, I had a good idea.  And on the way out of the parking lot, I had another one.

I’ve decided to adopt her slip of the tongue as a thing, because I like it that much.

Thank you very much, Meijer greeter!

And may you all have a fabulous idea.