It’s always something like, “Go north for about 10 minutes, and you’ll pass a strip mall, a Chinese restaurant with a gold-leaf picture of a dragon in the big front window, it’s that place that serves the great buffets on Tuesdays, and go under a highway overpass — not the one that’s been under construction for the past six months. Go west on the interstate, and ….”

Wait – when did I get on the interstate? What about the buffet? Now I’m hungry, dammit. You’ve already lost me, and that’s just one left turn so far. And now I want egg rolls.

I don’t even care that some of the event photos are too yellow and fuzzy; my heart is melty. :o)

P.S. It’ll be later tonight before I get videos uploaded to my YouTube account. Family members who couldn’t be there — check out my YouTube page in a few hours. :o)

We were in Greenville, Miss., most of today, anxiously waiting for my husband’s brother to come out of diaphragm hernia surgery (he did fine). While we read our books and drummed our fingers at Delta Regional Medical Center, that’s where I learned about one distinctive element of the city — its brown water.

I first spotted it in the potty and assumed that someone (*cough*hubby*cough,cough*) had lost his veneer of civilization and forgotten how to flush. Eww! Then I ran water in the sink and … well, you see the picture, right?

I sniffed, but it just smells like plain ol’ water. And braver people than I say it tastes good. Apparently, it’s not from rusty pipes (my first guess) or effluvia from the nearby Mississippi River (my immediate second guess). It’s tinted by the local aquifer, where water seeps through three ancient cypress swamps.

Still … I drank the diet Coke today, just to be sure. I’d have gone for wine, but — curiously — the hospital doesn’t dispense that.

Pity, really.

Dear Crazy Cone-Collar-Wearing Cat Who’s Sulking Upstairs, aka “Nibbles”:

I wish we could figure out what cat food ingredient makes your wee little head itch so badly. Failing that, I wish we could either (a) find a readily available food that works for you or (b) just remember to go shopping when the vet’s office is actually open so we don’t run out of the special hypoallergenic food that must be made of angel’s tears and gold-plated unicorn farts (if I’m judging by the price).

I’m glad that we and our vet guessed correctly it was some kind of food allergy when this happened previously, or otherwise I’d have been clueless when we spotted you trying to peel your head again. So I whipped out the ol’ cone collar (you’re a clawer), the SoftClaws (you’re a fighter), some ear cleaning and ear mite meds we had on hand (just in case), the credit card for the catfood/angel tears (you’re also pitiful), and some salmon kitty treats (we DO have hearts). We’re all waiting most anxiously for you to recover so you can lose the cone collar and stop sulking up in your favorite corner of Caitlyn’s room.

I can only imagine how hard it is for you to traipse up and down the stairs with said cone head, like you’re an ambulatory satellite dish. That’s why you’ve now got litter boxes, food, and water both downstairs AND upstairs. We’d even carry your furry princess butt wherever you wanted to go … if you didn’t completely spaz out whenever we pick you up.

Until that happy day comes, however, wouldya couldya not do your Linda Blair-slash-Freddie Krueger imitation when we apply the antibiotic and the anti-itch meds? You’re waaay good at it, but the twice-daily bloodletting is a bit tiring. I’m beginning to suffer from anemia. And I really miss some of those chunks of my flesh. Thanks ever-so.

Love,
Mom

More pix of Nibbles and her fuzzier brethren, Larry, here.

Well … poop. I did it again.

I signed on for a month of intense novel writing, got 10K into it, and then let my new writing habits die away. So 2008 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? FAIL.

I’ll try again another year.

This year, I let myself get caught up in some other time sinks:

• A lovely technical conference that I thoroughly enjoyed attending and helping to organize.

• A not-so-lovely sinus infection that has survived two rounds of antibiotics and is still merrily wreaking havoc with my head.

• A weekend of setting up our Christmas decorations early for a change, with the help of one of my younger daughter’s friends.

• A sick cat who violently resists all attempts to cure her. (She’s sensitive to some food ingredient we haven’t identified. We cheaped out and changed her food and it worked fine … for several months. Now she’s back to clawing at her head again until it’s raw. Lesson learned. We have expensive food back in place, rubber tips glued to the cat’s front claws (thank you, SoftClaws), and a cone collar on a very, very, VERY annoyed and pathetic cat. Sorry, kitty.

• A long, long, looooooong month of wallowing in fairly serious and mostly silent depression over the fact that I haven’t seen my moved-out 18-year-old daughter since July 28, that she apparently doesn’t want to visit home even though we have loving phone conversations every week or so, and that it’s the holidays without her for the first time. I’m worried she hasn’t moved past her first-ever job of waitressing into something that will pay her actual benefits (my insurance coverage of her runs out in about six months). I’m sad she has ditched college. I’m still a little angry at the cowardly way she chose to leave (while my husband and I were at work one day), even if I understand that it’s intimidating at 18 to face down one’s parents. And I’m sad, angry, and depressed that I didn’t have the transition of the college years — or even a discussion — to ease me into the fact she was leaving home. It was literally a change from one day to the next. With the holidays, it’s hitting me — HARD — all over again. This is like a very sore and loose tooth I can’t quit poking at with my tongue, day in and day out, over and over and over. Metaphorically speaking, my gums are bloody.

• My mother, who has lived with us for the past 14+ years, is getting worse. She’s 80, for heaven’s sakes. Her mind isn’t what it used to be. It’s hard to watch. Hard to live with. I’m sure for her it’s hard to live through.

These aren’t excuses. Just some of the reasons I chose not to honor the promise I made to myself to really DO NaNoWriMo this time. My head and my heart are not in the right place. Or should I say, the “write” place. :o)

I’ll keep thinking of things to do to keep myself busy so I don’t dwell on unhappiness. But I don’t think I’ll try to kickstart any writing projects until January 1.

Gee … harsh, Mrs. Restaurant Owner. Harsh. :o)

1st stall: Must flush 5 times. It is not Bacardi; it will not “get the job done.”

2nd stall: The super-flusher, aka, The Flushinator. If you so much as lean forward, it’ll auto-flush. Multiple times, like it’s saying, “Get out. Geeeeet ooooooout!”

3rd stall: Doesn’t matter; always in use.

4th stall: Will spray the back of your legs when it autoflushes. For God’s sake, don’t turn around.

5th stall: The handicapped stall. People of conscience tend to avoid hogging its lovely roominess, unless all other thrones are occupied and a bladder is about to burst. Also a calf-sprayer.

All stalls: Don’t make the mistake of leaning against any wall when pulling up pantyhose (shut up, some of us pale old gals still wear it). It’s only attached at the ceiling (the row of stalls, not the pantyhose — pay attention), and the whole row will wobble alarmingly. Don’t make a roomful of peeing women shriek.

Apparently, I’m constitutionally unable to hot glue a project before school without burning the crap out of my fingers at least twice. Once, because I’m cutting corners to hurry (translation: careless), and the second time because – hello – I forgot about the whole “hot” thing.

Yeah, I’m alert.

She made the doll totally by herself, and it’s adorable down to the quirk of her lips and the flippy train created for the dress out of wired ribbon. We also added a pomander that her character carries around on her belt; our version is some of the sheer wired ribbon glued together to hold rosemary and oregano. That’s one pungent pomander.

I’ll insert an updated photo here later.* Here’s the pre-glue version: http://twitpic.com/nwaz. (Check out the uniboob this gal is sporting, along with the booby ink. Even styro grrlz got booby tats!)

*I’d insert the actual photo now if my attempts to connect to Twitpic & grab the photo from my last night’s Twittering didn’t totally alarm my office’s vigilant IT team, who set an automatic giant block on accessing any “storage” sites. Nooo, I’m not rolling my eyes … why would you think that? *blink*

Maybe you’re like me. I blog just to talk. It’s hard to find a time and place for more than passing banter with work friends nowadays, and I don’t get out much. You wouldn’t think that someone who’s blogged about her ass-tastic hemorrhoids is a bit shy, but I can be rather quiet in person until I get to know you.

Aside from my full-time job, a *lot* of my spare time goes into my family, my younger daughter’s interests, reading, fiction writing, and the chores of daily life. Very few of my remaining hours are social: I don’t have parties or go to many of them, am not a dancer, and don’t go bar hopping. It’s not a bias against frivolity. Hell, I love me some frivolity. Middle age just feels like a time when I need to be — and want to be — focused on home life.

And that’s OK – I’m a happy homebody. But good grief, I completely enjoy friends when I get off my lazy butt and make the time. I wonder if a lot of other adults find that friends are placed on the “I’ll have more time someday” shelf.

For me, it’s not a matter of focusing on myself as if I were the pivot of the world. Mostly, I often feel overwhelmed by all that I want to do and have to do — so much so that I often don’t feel up to the task of sorting it out. (Anyone else in that same frame of mind? I’d like to just lie in bed and let a weekend pass me by.)

So you’d think I wouldn’t have time for being online, right? Weirdly enough, it fits right in with my “find 10 minutes here, find 20 minutes there” life. Blogging and particularly micro-blogging on Twitter fill in some of my social gaps, and it’s all delicious and enriching. Friends are still out there, listening and chatting and sympathizing and laughing with me. Even if I’m just darting in and out of their timelines.

What niche does blogging, Twittering, or other social media fill in your life? What parts does it stitch together for you?

Photo credit: Foxtongue

I am glowing with pride that my country rounded a sociopolitical corner yesterday. A black man will be the next U.S. president. Although he didn’t carry my state of Tennessee, he did carry Shelby County with the help of my one tiny vote. And we will finally have a mature, urbane, coolly intellectual president who will get down to the business of un-George-Bushing the country (and Iraq).

But election victories are bittersweet.

I’m sickened to see the anti-gay agenda spread its poison a little further into my country’s heart, because so many states are already lost in anti-gay bias. Yesterday, a majority of voters in Florida, Arizona, and even California approved bans on same-sex marriage. This means that more of my fellow Americans have confirmed homosexual people as the new national minority to set aside as “other” — the people who they believe are less deserving of full human rights.

We are, at long last, making serious progress in seeing people AS people and not just as racial categories. So why does my country now seize this moment to find another focal-point prejudice? When will sexual identity  become just another matter-of-fact element in a person’s life rather than something for bigots to grimace about?

I am still waiting and working toward the day when my country recognizes the rights of adults to marry whom they choose. We must firmly separate personal belief systems from public laws. Religious beliefs and resistance to change are all that keep us focused on sexual identity as a divisive issue. The milksop solution of “civil unions” is something of a peace maker, but it’s not enough.

“Separate” will never, ever be “equal” enough.