July 2005 Archives

Not so great with the details.

For example, my friend Jules and her son Malcolm are coming to visit next week. Which first of all, yay, because they are far away in New Hampshire and I miss them. But anyway, they will be our first overnight guests, and I got to thinking that the bed in the guest room isn’t really big enough for two people. Also, it is an antique, so it is very high off the ground, so probably not so great for a 21 month old. And I happened to notice that they had these queen sized airbeds on sale at Target this week…so problem solved, right? Except that when I got to Target, I saw that the king sized air mattresses were the very same price as the queen sized ones, and thinking “hey, even more room for the same price! I know, I’ll get the king sized one.” Great plan. With just one flaw, which I didn’t realize until last night. We don’t have any king sized sheets. Oops.

And then there’s Mumbai. That’s what they call Bombay now, if you didn’t know. I had noticed this in a vague way, but hadn’t really paid much attention. But today, I was reading an article and it talked about Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and I got curious. So I looked it up in Wikipedia, and it turns out they changed the name back in 1995! Hi, I’m so oblivious, I’m a decade behind the times. And I consider myself to be an informed, citizen of the world type. How did I miss this? The amount of time I’ve spent in Indian restaurants consuming Indian food over the last ten years alone should have given me enough exposure to the fact that the city had a new name.

And this inability to pay attention to details is, I’m sure, exactly why I still can’t get my laptop to connect to the internet. But I will figure it out sooner or later and…well, I don't really know what the benefit for you in that is. More frequent posting because I don’t have to arm wrestle John for control of the computer? You may or may not see that as a bonus, but I’m excited about it.

Am. So. Frustrated.

I wrote a post I quite liked yesterday, but you haven't seen it yet, because I wrote it on my new laptop.

Which I love (and thanks to Amy for the Toshiba recommendation) but which has so far resisted all of my attempts to connect it to the Internet. It can't find the wireless router I installed. It can't find the cable modem even when I connect it directly to the laptop.

So, I'm afraid you're all just going to have to wait to hear about the 9,000 degree weather and my bewildering trip to Toys R Us. Because if I spend one more minute tonight trying to convince this stupid laptop to find the Internet, I'm likely to do something I'll later regret, like throw it off the deck. I don't think the warranty covers that. The worst part is, I'm sure it is something simple... really, I blame Bill Gates and his crappy operating system.

Have you ever had one of those days where you hate everyone and everything? I am having one right now.

• I hate the woman I met a party yesterday who made it clear she didn’t think I was worth talking to after I said I didn’t have kids. Thanks, bitch. Two years of infertility hasn’t left me feeling crappy enough. And by the way, if the only way you can make conversation with another woman is if she has kids, I’d say you’re the one who is lacking, not me.

• I hate the stupid “Report Suspicious Activities” messages they put on the highway message boards. It makes me feel like I’m living in 1984.

• I hate that I live 25 miles from the closest grocery store that sells organic fruits and vegetables and food that isn’t all completely processed.

• I hate that there are people who I think I’m weird because buying organic and natural foods is important to me. I’d like to point out that I’ve been saying trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup are bad for you for at least 10 years now. Not looking so crazy anymore am I?

• I hate that gas prices are so insanely high.

• I hate that the newspaper is filled with depressing stories about how pretty much everything, everywhere, sucks for everyone. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

• I hate my stupid tooth socket which is still hurting, and worse, triggering my TMJ, making my jaw ache like you wouldn’t believe.

• And most of all, I hate insurance companies. I hate USAA for raising my rates 128% because I had one minor fender bender at 2 mph and scraped up a guy’s bumper. Not even dented – just scraped! My car was fine. I hate MetLife dental for sending me something that appears to say they aren’t going to cover the tooth extraction. But I called them before the surgery and they said it was covered, so they will pay. And I hate UnitedHealth for not covering fertility drugs.

Ok, I think that is enough hating and feeling sorry for myself for one day. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to my new site!

So what do you think? Didn't Zoot do an awesome job? I am thrilled with it. I'm still figuring out Flickr, but you can see some photos over there in the sidebar. And look how pretty everything is.

I'm still a little dopey on the painkillers, so I'm keeping this short. But I hope you like the new digs!

Or Vicodin, if you want to be all precise about it. Darth Tooth is no more (and now you can all breathe a sigh of relief that you won’t have to listen to me go on and on about it anymore!)

The oral surgeon’s office called me on Friday afternoon and said they’d had a cancellation for first thing Monday morning, would I like to take that appointment? So I checked with my boss, made sure John could drive me – “what the hell else would I be doing?” he asked – and said yes. And then went to the bathroom and got violently ill. I may have been just a little more anxious about the procedure than I wanted to admit.

I spent the weekend escaping with Harry Potter – I love, love the new book – I think it is my favorite since Prisoner of Azkaban! And then yesterday, bright and early, had my surgery, which went fine, at least from my point of view. They put the IV in, I went to sleep and when I woke up, the correct tooth had been extracted. It hurts, and I’m all puffy and swollen, but on the plus side, I get to eat all the pudding I want. And they sent me flowers from work, which was really nice.

The bad part is the Vicodin. I don’t know how anyone can get addicted to this stuff. It helps with the pain, but it also makes me sick to my stomach, dizzy, fuzzy-headed and itchy. Yesterday I realized I was having trouble keeping up with the plot of the silly trashy novel I bought specifically for post surgery reading. And today I tried to work from home, which didn’t go all that well. I got maybe five hours of work done and I had to take a nap in the middle of the day.

But I think the worst part is behind me. And I did get to spend two extra days at home with John and Seamus which is always nice. Maybe not so nice for them, since I’ve mostly been silly, sleeping or holding a ice pack to my face, but nice for me.

Today was supposed to be the day that I got my bad tooth pulled, so it could never bother me again. And yet, it is still sitting there in my mouth, being all hurt-y and evil. Why? Because nothing with my teeth is ever simple.

I went in for my appointment with the oral surgeon, who was running late, of course. So I got to sit in the waiting room for 40 minutes or so getting more and more anxious. That’s always fun. There was a little more waiting once I got back into the room. And then the doctor came in, looked at my x-ray, and said it was infected, and fractured, and they couldn’t take it out today. He spent another ten minutes or so terrifying me, explaining that the tooth is going to break when they take it out, so they are going to have to dig pieces of it out of my bone, and that I really need to have anesthesia for that. It will be worse than having impacted wisdom teeth removed, he said. And that was all I needed to hear, because my wisdom teeth were impacted (naturally) and getting them removed was horrible.

So I agreed we’d do it with the anesthesia on Tuesday, went and got lunch and headed back to work. Kind of anti-climactic after getting myself all worked up, although I’ll have the whole weekend now to whip myself up into a frenzy of worry.

Oh, and getting the titanium tooth implant involves more surgery and costs $1,800 – just for the part the oral surgeon does! That doesn’t even cover the fake tooth they put in later. I wonder how much it would cost to get a gold tooth? I could pretend I was a pirate.

Well, really 10 p.m. confessions, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it as far as a title goes, does it? Anyway – want to know a secret?

I feel almost like I’m going to jinx something by saying this, but lately, I’m happy. Really, really happy. To the point where I’ve actually started wondering if something huge and bad is lurking around the corner, because everything is so good right now. I’m so in love with my husband, and it feels like our relationship gets stronger and better every day. Settling in to our home has given me a sense of peace and balance that I didn’t even know I was missing. And I just feel...good.

Of course, there are still things that worry me. My continuing infertility, for one, but I have to believe that is going to work out eventually. Work has been a bit of a challenge lately, but I’d rather be challenged than bored. My friend Laila moved back to San Francisco last week, and I miss her and her little boy Noah already. I miss Jules and Julie and Ariane and Mary Pat and wish they weren’t so far away, but I have friends here too. I’m still obsessing about whether or not to spend the money to get a laptop, and if I do, whether or not to spend the extra money to get a Powerbook. When I manage to look outside of my own petty concerns, I get down about the state of the world – children starving to death every three seconds, bombs going off in London, bombs going off in Iraq every day, which no one seems to care about at all.

Even so, underneath it all, I’m happy. And I guess I wanted to acknowledge it here, to say to you, to the universe, to whomever – I recognize what I have, and I’m grateful.

This morning, I, Bad Penguin, notorious hater of mornings, actually got up and exercised before work. I didn’t whack myself in the head with a hand weight or anything, and I felt very virtuous all day!

It went so well that I’m going to do it again tomorrow morning.

I do feel a little bad about that blizzard that hit Hell today though. Those poor bastards never saw that coming.

Sorry for the looong interval with no posting – work has been crazy with a capital “K” lately. I’ve been getting home so late there’s mostly only been time for dinner, a quick walk with the hound, and then half an hour of lying on the couch moaning at John before I head off to bed.

But now the weekend is here, and I’m feeling relaxed, refreshed and rejuvenated! It’s been a good couple of days. Yesterday I had a lovely lunch with the Cactus-Fishes, who are every bit as fun, funny and nice in person as you’d expect them to be from their sites. I was worried that it would be a little awkward, meeting online people in the real world, but I really enjoyed it. Hopefully they had as much fun as I did.

Then I hit the outlet mall, which was insanely crowded, and not as bargain-filled as I had hoped it would be. When I go to the outlet mall, I want deals, not $137 shoes and $700 coffee tables – Cole Haan, Restoration Hardware – I’m looking in your direction. I did manage to find a pair of curtains that are almost the same shade of green as my comforter cover, so my bedroom is finally blessedly dark. According to John, “it’s like the Bat Cave in there.” Bat Cave is what I was going for. Hopefully now Seamus will stop waking up as soon as the sun comes up.

I got home in time to catch some of the best acts at Live8, including the Who and most excitingly, Pink Floyd. I called that they would play Money, and John accurately predicted that they would play Wish You Were Here. Amazingly, MTV even managed to hold off on breaking in and ruining it until the very end! It was very cool to see.

Today we’ve been focusing on getting house stuff done. We finally found the right combination of furniture for the basement, so we’ve been assembling and rearranging stuff in the family room. It’s really coming together, and is actually a usable room now! Before it was mostly full of piles of books and you had to sit on the floor, or perch on the corner of the couch. Now we just have to find a coffee table and a china cabinet and the house will be pretty much set, furniture-wise.

The best part of this weekend though, is the extra day. Instead of work, tomorrow I’ll do some more relaxing, and then head down to my mom’s for a cookout in the early afternoon. Except she told me this morning that she doesn’t feel like scrubbing the grill, so she’s going to make pasta instead. So it is really more of a 4th of July pasta dinner, I guess. Doesn’t matter. Just so long as I get that extra day off!