I think you’re beating yourself up with the wrong wet trout, there.
Me, Dad, Littlebro: positive stress makes us be productive as hell. We love, love, love a challenge that we know we can beat but nobody else believes it. Getting the impossible done is what makes our year. Negative stress makes us shut down from the whole world. Not the kind of people who “need to talk in order to digest things”, but the kind who “need to digest things so we can talk about it”. And by the time we can talk about it we don’t want advice, we want whomever has been chosen as a shoulder to cry on to make sympathetic noises. We most definitely do not want backseat-driver advice: “you may want to do this other thing next time” or “perhaps you can patch things up this way” is acceptable, “what you should have done is…” is fucking well NOT.
Grandma, Mom, Middlebro, SiL: when they’re moving all over the place, looking busy, busy, busy? They’re not getting shitall done, and may be moving what someone else was using out of place. “Can I have the salt back?” “Oh, I was going to put it away” “I happen to need it, I’m cooking in case you haven’t noticed” “Oh! stares at salt box in hand like she has never ever seen a salt box before” And they do the same whatever the source of stress is. Mom and SiL are also the “need to talk in order to think” kind; Middlebro is but only in the presence of someone who won’t try to upstage his woes (his wife does, can I kill her now?).
The transmission just dropped out of the car. Not literally—it means the rubberband finally broke. It’s been jerking into gear for a while now but now the car won’t move at all.
That’s great because the washer broke a couple months ago and we were going to go to the laundrymat again tomorrow. Our younger son, who has a newish working car, is going out of state tomorrow on a job for two weeks. This means:
our older son is going to have to walk to school. (He’s started college after being out of school for almost twenty years. He has a B average in all his classes right now and knows this is his only chance to make a change.) He already has a ride to his job.
We have to go grocery shopping sometime this week. Maybe his ride can take us to the store.
Bright note: at the end of this month I become old enough to draw Social Security. Maybe after a few months we can save up enough to get the transmission fixed.
I thought it was gas moving from your inflated abdominal cavity into the spaces between your muscles, as it worked its way out. I don’t know why they can’t deflate you while they’ve got the hole open. I suppose they must do to a certain extent, but can’t get it all out that way.
It might be…I was told that the gas dissolved into the bloodstream, and then tried to undissolve. I might have been told wrong, or I might have been too woozy to completely absorb the information properly.
I’m very frustrated with my g/f right now. I just typed out about 3 paragraphs of details, but deleted them because they don’t matter. Long story short, she has a medical concern that she ignored forever, and finally went to the doctor. She has surgery scheduled for the end of this month.
She has been having complications the last couple weeks, and her PCP told her yesterday to call the surgeon today. Well, she hasn’t called. She just wants to lay down and rest and let everything magically get ok. I even told her that I’d go pick her up if she made an appt., so she wouldn’t have to drive herself.
So pissed off. That is how you take care of yourself when you have a cold. That is not how you take care of yourself when you actually have something wrong.
I did use a heating pad, and it did help. I think the gas is finally out now.
Send her on in here - I’ll have a chat with her.
Part of what makes my husband and I good together is that I look at things one way, and he looks at them another - I want to do everything at once, as fast as possible, but I’ve learned to check with him first - “Can I walk to Safeway today?” “No - that’s too far. Walk around the block instead.” “Okay.”
Yay, a winter storm warning in Philadelphia and New Jersey that could result in additional power outages! With the added bonus that it hits right while I’m driving 90 minutes back to my home.
I can’t take much more of this. Og help those poor people without shelter.
Half of my FB friends have completely lost their damned minds. I expected one or two to go off the rails after the election, but there’s been horrific frothing from people I just didn’t anticipate. Thank the gods I didn’t end up sleeping with that one friend of mine way back when- I’d have completely lost respect for myself.
I haven’t mentioned it to anybody. Partly because, hell, I know he’s just a gecko. He didn’t care two whits about me, just wanted to make sure his worms still came and that his tank was warm and nice.
But I do miss him. I mean, I used to feed him every other day, and I picked him up every day, and in the summer he’d run all over my hands, and in the winter, snuggle his belly against the warmth of my hands.
I’ve had him for almost ten years now.
I buried him in the backyard. I was raising a whole batch of potato fed mealworms for him to eat, and I buried them with him, too (I’ve got nothing else to do with them(. I figure he’ll go like one of the Egyptian kings - lots to eat on his voyage to the next world.
I’m just not sure why I don’t want to tell anybody about it. It’s not a big deal. Pets die all the time. My coworkers are all dog lovers, though, and I am the weird one for not owning or wanting a dog. I don’t get made fun of a lot for being the reptile lover, but it does happen.
It is a big deal to lose a friend, and 10 years is a long friendship. I’m sure he knew you cared for him, and in his little lizardy way he liked and trusted you. I think it’s an honor to have such a small fragile creature trust you like that, it may not be love in the sense that we commonly know it, but it’s meaningful just the same.
I am sorry he’s left you, even the tiny ones can leave a big hole when they go
eta - I’ve felt a huge sense of loss when a favorite tree was dying and had to be taken down. I seriously cried looking at the stump and piles of sawdust and debris. There’s no accounting for affection and attachments, and you feel what you feel. No need to apologize for caring
Sorry to hear of your loss, Anaamika. I’m an animal lover, and I’ve been known to cry even when a favourite fish died, so I understand what you’re going through.
My own rant now: Today I got into a little spat with a classmate, but we made up, and she was reassuring me, and trying to make me feel better - when the teacher came into the class and reprimanded us for not speaking French to each other.
Yes, I understand that we’re in a French province, etc. etc., but English is the mother tongue of both me and the other classmate, and come on, I was upset and couldn’t think of the right words in French. Damn me.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t hate the French language, and I do speak it relatively well.)
One of my e-mail friends who sent me the most ridiculous stuff before the election (Obama’s College ID says he’s a Foreign Student!) sent me one today to say “the Russians and the Chinese are drinking champagne.” I wanted to ask him if I should be studying Russian or Chinese but was afraid to open the dialogue!
ETA I forgot to say RIP to the gecko and what a nice way to send him off, with a bunch of mealworms.
That was nice, Anaamika, I’m sorry about your gecko friend.
My rant:
Dammit eye doctor, I get it, I’m due for my exam! In the last week your office has sent me a postcard, a letter, two emails, several texts, and at least four robo-calls.
I like my eye doctor, his office is close by, he has evening hours, his prices are reasonable. But good God man, tell your office staff to lay off! I just got back in town, I had no way to schedule an exam until now. If an actual person had called me I would have been happy to talk to them and get it scheduled. But you can’t talk back to those damn robo-calls.
Please have your friend congratulate the Russians and Chinese on their economies and social stratification having improved so much that their whole populations can afford champagne. Also the French, that’s sure been one big sale!
Oh, and if he gets scared in about, uh, 6 weeks because “the Spaniards are drinking champagne!” (assuming he cares about a country smaller than yours), it’s not champagne, it’s locally-brewed cava.
Anaamika 10 years is a long time for a gecko. Of course you are going to miss him. I had a sad face while reading your post.
I"m so tired that I’m having problems typing. Sorry purplehorseshoe, I looked at your thread, tried to respond, but couldn’t think of anything witty to say.
I worked the elections yesterday, as an official whatever. Mostly what I did was plug things in and then tape the cords down so they wouldn’t get unplugged again. 16 hours of stomping fires out.
While I was loading up to head back out, one of the poor people who were manning the phones commented that working a presidential election was like planning a wedding. You think that everything is in place, but then when the day happens, its just a steamroller.
I have to confess that I whimpered at that image.
Because of the comp time deal, I went to work at the usual time and spent the day tossing files down the maw of the shredder.
