The Lady Next Door's Greatest Hits, Vol 1

Haah? (The I Can't Hear You Song)

Uh-uh, I Ain't Playin!

Get Yourself To Church

Gimme One A Them Seizure Salads And A Parfet

Look Like You Tore Up From The Floor Up

Can't Talk To Me Like That (Not Your Mama Remix)


Bonus Track: 8 Minute Cackling/Pounding Fist On Desk Solo

(Overheard at work.)
(She's a counselor... of sorts.)

Observed

Some quick church-related items:

• Yesterday, I was driving behind a van that was printed with "Follow me to meet Jesus!" and I debated on whether this was a clever idea or maybe a warning not to tailgate? 
• I know last Sunday was Easter and all, but "For all you do - His bloods for you" on a church sign seems... well again, somewhere between clever and just bad taste. 
• Speaking of bad taste, I was raised Catholic and remember after my first sip of wine at Communion, I returned to my seat and excitedly whispered "That wine really does taste like blood!" where - as you can imagine - I was quickly shushed. 

Morning Bird/Bun Watch

(I like how she taps his shoulder with her tail, and he's all "whuh, who dat?" while she gets the optimum birdie view)

Pitter Patter

Well, then. That doctor's appointment I was all nervous about last week turned out just fine, no big woop. But you know, I worry. I'm glad that I held out to be scheduled with the doctor who is so kind and relaxed - no wonder she's always booked up.

The kitties are doing well, it's just a bit of an adjustment period for all of us right now. Tiger (he'll have a real name soon!) and Gracie are most likely from the same litter (if not, at least from the same household) and are about 7 months old - adolescents, I suppose. Well, first we were told that they both were 7 months, but Tiger's paperwork just says "about 1 year" and he is quite a bit larger. Maybe they got it mixed up and these 2 cats didn't even know each other? I need more back-story! It probably doesn't matter - I just thought maybe they'd have more of a bond if they were siblings or litter-mates. They do have some similar features, and seem to get along pretty well (last night, they even snuggled a bit while napping together on the couch - aww!) Tiger can get pretty rambunctious and Gracie occasionally has to hiss and put him in his place like "Hey, I'm just wee, watch out jerkass!" but I've never seen him act aggressively, he's just VERY playful. Gracie is a bit more delicate and reserved and prefers to get a toy in her mouth and sneak off to play with it in private. They're both really good about being picked up and held, and will purr while bonking their head against yours if the mood is right. They turn into little wiggle-puppies while being petted in a reclined position and seem to appreciate all the attention.

I'm sure it sounds silly, but this last week has had me EEKing and fussing quite a bit. I know, they are just cats, cats that we wanted! Much less responsibility than a child, or even a dog! So what am I getting all worked up about? I guess we were just so settled into our quiet old-fart routine, and changes to that just seem to throw us a little off balance. (I know, it was our choice to get two cats so soon after losing Jones - I just hope it was for the best for everybody.) It just seems like I tend to be so filled with doubt and second-guessing about everything, which is a really irritating habit of mine. Life, it can change! And still be okay!

OMG2Kittehs!

The wee gray one is Gracie... (she came with the name and we like it)


And the bigger kitty is her brother, Tiger (or the kitty who has yet to be officially named by us)


Lookit those lil' faces!

Nervous Girl Is Nervous

Sweaty palms, sped-up heart rate, spontaneous jibber-jabber, repeated hair fussing, shaky tummy, increased bathrooming... (which reminds me of my favorite search term that led to this blog - "nervous poo poo pants")

All this, just because I have a doctor's appointment in an hour. And it's just a ROUTINE check up, with a doctor I KNOW and LIKE. CAPITALIZED. Sheesh. But still. I probably shouldn't have had coffee this morning.

Also: I really don't want to get on that scale. The digital one always seems to display a number, pause, then adds 3-5 pounds (which is just a drop in the bucket, but still - jerkass scale!)

Also: Upcoming cat-related update!

Also: Thanks for still reading, my bloggy friends. I <3 yous, srsly!

It's okay (or it's going to be)

Sometimes when the power goes out, I find myself mindlessly trying to do things that obviously require electricity. Like trying to turn lights on while looking around in the dark for a flashlight. Or trying to turn on the stereo because it seems so quiet without the TV on. Maybe it's a shoddy comparison, but I've been feeling similarly mindless with the loss of our cat. I can be thinking about Jonesey all the way home from work and still get thrown off when I don't hear "Brrrmow?" when I walk in the door. I'm so sad that I just want to hold my cat, but that's the reason I'm sad. Sigh. We are creatures of habit.

I visited the local SPCA shelter a couple times last week. I don't know if it's too soon to be looking for a new friend, but it does lift my spirits to get to interact with all those cats (they must have at least 40). There is that familiar feeling of "Didn't we just do this?" - it was only two years ago that our calico cat passed away and we were searching for another cat to fill the void. We were so lucky to find a cat as awesome as Jones, and hopefully we can provide a loving home to another great cat (or cats) again soon.

Crazy cat lady out!

Unexpected

As angry, sad and depressed it makes me, I can't change that life just doesn't make sense sometimes.

Our furry little friend, the bestest cat ever - Jonesey - passed away early this morning. It came as a shock to us, as he hasn't seemed sick and is only about 5 or 6 years old (we've had him for just two). I found no evidence of him having an accident or getting into something dangerous. He greeted me like he always does during the night when I went to the bathroom. When J found him this morning, he looked like he was just taking a snooze... there's no good way for a pet to go, but we are relieved that he doesn't appear to have suffered. Still, J and I are feeling pretty heartbroken. That cat brought so much joy, love and entertainment to our lives and meant a great deal to us - I just can't believe he's gone. I'm glad we spoiled him a lot and hope he enjoyed his time with us. If I keep thinking of all the what ifs or what we could've done or we should've somehow known, I'll drive myself crazy(er). It's just incredibly shitty and sad.

In honor of Caturday

It's so tough being a cat...


Facepalmin'

Each one feels like the first one

Hey, just wanted to let you know that there's a great album - The Weepies' Hideaway - for super-cheap as the Amazon MP3 deal of the day today. By "great", I mean that it's a great album if you like light, catchy, indie folk-pop duos (they're a couple, aww) that are sweet but not obnoxiously so.

Recommended tracks: Hideaway, Antartica, Just Blue

Suggested as background music for: a coffee shop, a laid-back Sunday morning, doing the dishes, something calm and happy that's safe to play around the kids and/or your conservative parents, something chilled out to listen to at work, shopping (I'm pretty sure I've heard some of these songs while at Kohl's - they actually have a surprisingly good mix of indie-ish music playing there most of the time.)

Back with a real post soon.

Oh yes, I do no

So, not a whole lotta news here.

After hemming and hawing about going back to my original doctor or finding a new one or getting a referral, I finally just went and saw my original, favorite doctor. See, everyone likes her so much that she's hard to schedule an appointment with, and I had been seeing a NP at the same practice the last few times. Trouble is, even though the NP is really nice, it seemed like every time I saw her something got screwed up (wrong prescription called in, not returning my lab results, etc.) and then I worried about the whole not being able to actually diagnose a condition thing. And the whole talking to a colleague about me in the hallway and I could totally overhear it thing. So, I asked to see my old doctor for my yearly exam. The practice said they could only schedule my exam as part of a shared medical appointment (she won't look at me naked unless it's along with a bunch of other naked people?) which just seemed kind of silly. I mean, the point of the shared medical appointment - I think - is to put a group of similar chumps patients in a classroom type setting where they can ask the doctor questions and gain possible insight from others who may have similar conditions. My mom has done this before and said that rest assured, you don't get examined in front of other people, but still. When I read the paperwork for this appointment, I got to the part where it said "Each patient will be given a name tag to identify each other more easily in group discussion" (maybe they had a problem with patients referring to each other as "the one over there with the rash" or "that chick who asked about discharge") or something like that, and I started to rethink how much I wanted to "share".

So, long story long - I called back and asked to just see my doc one on one - even if she won't look at my girl parts - to discuss meds and moods and thyroid worries. I'm waiting for the lab results, which I imagine could range from "My God, you're a 30 year old woman with the stats of a 53 year old man" to "well, nothing clinically wrong here, you're just a lazy fatass" - alright, that's a bit harsh. We'll see. In the meantime, my doctor suggested lots of calcium and vitamin D and to get out and walk during the daytime. She also switched my birth control pill to Seasonique, which I'm a bit skeptical about since it seems like one of those "trendy" birth control pills. Of course I looked around online and read all kinds of reviews saying that this is the worst pill ever and accounts of nonstop spotting and all kinds of bad side effects. But the quote below was by far the best one I read, that's still making me giggle:

"the only problem i had with this BC is that a week b4 my period, i would start to spell bad( if you no what i mean)"

Wellll put. (starts slow clap)

But you have to take birth control experiences and opinions with a grain of salt. I've had several people tell me that BC pills are all horrible and no one should take them, when the individual might have only tried one and most likely has way different hormonal things going on than I do. I'd like to not have to take them either. Side effects certainly do suck, but besides the whole preventing pregnancy thing, there's also the reminder of how my cycle would be without the pills. 7 to 11 days of heavy bleeding and nearly debilitating cramps plus wicked PMS is something I'm willing to tweak with hormones if it means improvement! TMI there, sorry.

Speaking of TMI, you can't really be TMI with me. I mean, when somebody writes a warning about TMI, I'm only more interested. Maybe I'm just not a very classy lady - but I don't shy away from discussing woman stuff with other women. When I was around 12, I wanted to talk about everyone's period experience. When I was around 15, I wanted to hear about everyone's sexual experiences (ok, probably still do) and in recent years, I've wanted to know all about the individual pregnancy/birth/parenthood experiences. So maybe I'm weird in that way, or I just like to be prepared. Or maybe I should've taken that shared medical appointment after all - there's gotta be some TMI going on there.

Before It Gets Better

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it is broke, well... crap, I still might not fix it. Where do I even begin? Can it even be fixed?

That seems to sum up issues in most areas of my life right now. The car. My health. Our house. My mind. Our relationship. The accounting crap at work. It all needs some fixing up but even broken down separately it seems too daunting to even know where to start. I tend to fall into the "Oh, bother. What's the use?" shrug and sigh mentality quite easily, but then the problem becomes that there are not only all these things unfixed or undealt-with, but that I hate myself for not doing them. When negativity, depression and procrastination meet, it's amazing the amount of things you can NOT get done!

Anyway, I was going to write this post to remind myself of how happy I felt after just getting my car out of the shop. It hasn't been running well for months, I'd been putting it off, I was stalling at 3 or 4 intersections each way between home and work and there was increasing fear that one of these times it wouldn't start again, for good. But I figured it would be such an AWFUL and expensive problem that would lead to finding out even MORE AWFUL problems that I couldn't afford and that I'd get screwed over paying to fix, that I kind of didn't even want to know. Somehow, the car didn't fix itself. It ended up being $300 - that I didn't want to spend and certainly didn't just have lying around - but what a relief! To just fix it and be done with it! Like normal people must do! Now I can just worry about the shitty roads and other drivers, but not about whether my car is going to make it home or not - yay!

And then of course my "check engine" light comes on just a couple days after getting the car back. RARRGH.

I'm still having cookies for breakfast

Without being overly critical, I'd have to say the Christmas festivities went quite well. With being overly critical, I'd say that I didn't do enough planning ahead, I should've done more for people, I probably made some bad gift purchases, I should've sent packages, I could've been a much better hostess, blah blah blah, etc. But no major hitches, most likely because we kept everything low key and didn't travel. I feel like we got off pretty easy. I've got to remember that it's hardly ever as bad as I think it will be - it can even be, you know, heartwarming and stuff. I have so much to be thankful for... and I'm fighting not to follow that with any negative statements. (Note: It's okay to let yourself be calm and happy. P.S. Shut up.)

I hope you all had enjoyable holidays too, and if not - at least you can enjoy that the holiday season is almost over. Cheers!

In which I'm failing to find my bootstraps

I keep almost saying something and then swallowing it. What seems like the end of the world one day, often seems not so major the next. In hindsight I can tell myself to calm down and stop being so damn inconsolable but when I'm within "it", it's hard to see my way out. So I usually end up writing more when I'm semi- to not so much depressed, rather than when I'm seeming moderate to severe. Side note: I need some kind of color coded Nervous-Watch system to define how anxious, sad, angry, relatively normal I'm feeling (i.e. aqua would mean sad enough to feel sad for inanimate objects and hating myself for buying the wrong toothpaste, and so on.) Or not. Anyway. I think my point was that there are days upon days that I probably should write about, or talk to someone about, because these issues, well - they're not REALLY going away, they're kind of piling up as bad as the laundry at our house. I don't expect to feel great and sunshiney every day, it's just the lows get lower than usual this time of year and I'm not finding the best ways to cope with that. And then I feel GUILTY for not coping and blah blah shame spiral blah. I know I'm not crazy enough to not know when I'm being crazy - but well, self-realization is just a piece of the getting better puzzle and all.

The holidays, especially these last few years, have been getting to me. I know, they get to everybody and that doesn't mean people don't deal with them. I'll just say - most of the reason I'm writing this right now is from a less than pleasant talk I just had with my mom that I knew was coming. It's funny how I'll feel immediately 16 again - sorry that I said anything to her and wanting to go to my room and sulk. I feel like on one hand she does at least have an understanding of my... issues? illness? but on another she REALLY doesn't, and maybe still doesn't completely believe it and has a "oh just knock it off already" attitude about it. I don't know how to explain other than it just reinforces the guilt, shame and patheticness I was already feeling. Her voice got flat and short and she was starting that thing where she speaks slowly like to a child that's in trouble "Well whatever you're doing is obviously not working" and I sort of recoiled in a way and felt dumb and pathetic for bringing it up. And feel kind of dumb and pathetic writing about it but oh well. I'm sorry for not explaining this better and doing the stream of consciousness thing, and I'm also sick of being sorry. And maybe when the PMS dies down and there isn't the impending doom of winter storms and white-knuckled driving and everything falling apart or already being broken and the holiday stress bearing down, etc... then I will look at this more clearly.

Also, I need to shop and bake a mess of cookies. (Not a complaint, that's the bright side.)

Coughs Taste Metallic

Oh, the woes of the last day off before going back to work. But hey, at least it's not sno- aw fuck, it is snowing. Bah! Cold, cruel world!

This year, instead of holding the Thanksgiving festivities at our house, we had more or less decided to spend it up north with my mom's side of the family. But at the last minute, we ended up getting reservations for two in Sickytown. There are better ways to spend a long weekend than going through six boxes of kleenex and comparing the nastiness of horky coughs with your loved one, but it hasn't been all bad. J went out Thanksgiving morning and rounded up plenty of food for us, so we had a nice dinner complete with a big ol' bowl of yukon gold mashed potatoes and gravy - NOM! I attempted to make a chocolate bourbon pecan pie according to Paula Deen's recipe, and I think it would've turned out great if I had given it about twice the baking time that was indicated. Instead, it looked like the pie had set up nicely, but was still too glorpy inside upon cutting into it. Oh well. Yesterday I made another attempt with a pie I'd never made before - cranberry apple - and it turned out much better.

I'm thankful for sleeping in, for the two ridiculously soft blankets I ordered from Amazon that arrived last week, for being able to watch Netflix videos on the 360, for my favorite person to commiserate with, for porn 'staches, for potatoes and pie, oh and for the 'tussin.

Hope you all had a good weekend.

Heeere's Jonesey!

O HAI. MY I'S R ALL DIALBATED
(DA BETTER TO KILLZ U WIF...)

P.S. Please also see: How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You if you haven't already. Get informed, before it's too late!

Minor Peevances

• When I go to transfer clothes from the washer to the dryer and the Downy ball is open, yet still full of Downy - but of course I don't realize this until I spill it all over the clean clothes, because it was hiding inside a damn pant leg.
• Boss still pronouncing it "O-BAM-uh" not Oh-bah-mah. It's like hearing your mom talking about "that Snoopy-Dog" or [insert cultural reference of your teens here]. Cringe.
  
• Meredith Viera.
  
• Socks - most of the time, I don't feel right if I'm NOT wearing them. So how come I have so many crap pairs that either bunch up, fall down, or cut off circulation? Stupid socks.
  
• The sound of nails being clipped.
  
• Sites that work with Internet Explorer but not Firefox.
  
• This bra. I like how the Victoria's Secret Angels/Secret Embrace bras look under clothes and keep the girls in their upright position, but why do they have to be made of friggin mousepad material? It doesn't breathe! Also, the straps suck. Also, going to the store bites. I think I'm gonna have to kick it old school and get bras from Penneys next time.
  

Talkin bout gratitude, don't give me no attitude...

Well, how about something a little less negative up in this piece for a change?

The other day, Swistle posted a list of happy, (inspired by the daily gratitude blogging over at Black Sheeped) and I thought yeah, I should get my gloomy ass on that bandwagon for a bit!

Here are a few things that are currently helping to turn my frown upside down - in no particular order:

• Genius playlists in iTunes, hearing songs I forgot I had
  
• Something I'm wearing smells good
• The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comics. Brilliant.
• Relatively uneventful work day
• Those new Quaker Toasted Coconut Banana Macadamia Nut granola bars (sorry, couldn't find a product page for some reason, but got them at Target last week) - a lot nummier than expected.
  
• President-elect Barack Obama (you know it!)
• It's time for a new season of Top Chef already? Sweet!
  
• Reading your blogs
• Thinkin' about mah boo (J, who needs a better way to be referenced on this blog)
• Feeling 30% better than yesterday

If you've stayed there, you know what the accommodations are like

Maybe that whole seasonal affective disorder thing just punched me in the face, or I'm coming down with something, or I'm repressing too much these days? Because this morning I feel extremely low, like - I can't face the world even though my world is pretty small and relatively safe in the bigger scheme of things - low. I feel... crumpled up and separated from my regular self. But it helps to remind myself that it won't always feel like this.

I'll feel the need to try to explain my depression, defending it like it's something I'm guilty of, because I can understand that when you're not in it or never have been, it seems like it would be easier to snap out of than it is. It's hard to explain to someone who says "Smile! What do you have to be depressed about?" what you're going through. Most days it's manageable, it's some wispy gray clouds in the distance - and then some days it's a raging, thundering storm cloud right over your head. That metaphor probably doesn't quite cut it, but whatever.

I've been coming across a lot of great blogs lately, and I admire and appreciate those who are participating in NaBloPoMo - I love opening my feed reader and seeing a bunch of fresh posts waiting for me to read. It helps. More on that another time.

I'll see you on the other side.

Everyone Has Their Reasons

Some people will vote for what they believe in. Some people will vote to rebel, some will vote to conform. Some people will vote based on race and some people will vote based on religion. Some people vote based on facts and some vote based on rumors and pre-conceived notions. Some will vote for who they really like, and some will vote for who they dislike less.

For me, I'm voting for the candidate that not only has made me care about politics and the state of this country like I never had before, but someone whose ideas for change and hopes for the future are what I support.

These are some crazy, exciting times, folks. Get out there and vote for what you believe in! (Well, unless like most people you already have voted... then you can um, sit around being proud of yourself or have a hot pocket or something.)




P.S. I'm voting for Obama, obvsly!