Pickles & Dimes

We took our last camping trip for the year to St. Croix Falls, the same campground where Jason proposed to me three years ago, and where we’ve been forced to leave early twice, once due to a tornado and once because we were tired of being rained on in our leaky tent.

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When I was in 4th grade, I got a new doll for Christmas. It had blond hair and a turquoise dress, and when you pressed its belly, it reassured your intense need for affection by chirping, “I love you, Mommy!” I’m guessing the sentiment got old for my parents after the 50th gut jab, but I loved that doll.

I brought her in to class for show & tell and nervously awaited my turn. When the time came, I marched confidently to the front of the room, announced, “This is my new doll,” and triumphantly squeezed her midsection.

Apparently, the batteries had died, because instead of a happy “I love you, Mommy!” what bellowed from the doll’s belly was something straight out of a horror movie: “I……………lovvvvve…..yoooouuuuu………..mommmmmmyyyyyyyyy,” it croaked maniacally, fueled not by a happy baby-girl voice, but instead, the malevolent mutterings of Satan.

Horrified, I ran out of the classroom into the bathroom, where I cried. “Stupid doll,” I hissed, as I punched it in the stomach.

“I love you, Mommy!” it sing-songed.

What’s the best/grossest/worst thing you ever brought (or told) at show & tell?

I have a doctor’s appointment on Monday, and the clinic mailed me a 4-page questionnaire to complete. It started with standard information, but then quickly derailed. For instance, it stated: Please document which medications you are taking, how often and the dosage. Also, bring your medications with you to your appointment. Look, I take my inhaler and allergy medicine so sporadically, it’s not even worth the hassle to cart them around with me. Plus, when I looked at my inhaler to record the dosage, the prescription was for Jason, who never once used the thing after a doctor prescribed it for a bad cold. So now I am going to get yelled at/arrested for using someone else’s prescription. For fun, I should bring in a giant satchel stuffed with drugs, but the only items we have in our medicine cabinet are vitamins, generic ibuprofen, Jason’s expired pain medication from a car accident two years ago and Abby’s homeopathic arthritic joint treats.

The questionnaire also nosily inquired whether or not I have had any incidents of uncontrollable rage in the past year, which um…DUH. Have you ever seen me during my commute? I could easily have checked a box labeled, “YES. A gazillion times a day.” (Because I figured I was already in trouble for the not-mine prescription, I marked “No.” Good thing the follow-up question was not: Are you a liar?)

The None-of-your-Business-Questionnaire then concluded with: Please check the areas you are most interested in learning more about, and included: weight loss, healthy eating and exercise tips. I checked nothing because I already know how to do those things but choose not to, and besides, ignorance is bliss.

Also bliss? These things that are making me happy right now:

- Caramel apples

- Football

- Looking forward to our last camping trip of the year

- Shorty’s not-a-morning-dog antics, which include pretending to be an alligator, fake itchiness, pretending to be deaf, and pretending his legs are boneless

- False hope that GMAC will allow us to refinance our house

- New TV shows

- Emails from the library saying my books are in

- Browsing Etsy

- Knitting

- Still being able to wear my summer clothes

- Waking up at 3 a.m. to find one cat nestled next to my chest and the other sleeping on my spare pillow on the headboard

- Days where Jason and I are both in fantastic moods

- New posts on my favorite blogs

- Getting to leave early from work

How about you?

Lately, I feel like a duck in a shooting gallery, grinding along the same path, getting shot at, having near-misses, getting shot at some more, getting hit. All following that same weekday monotonous path where jerks are trying to blow me away and my only view is of the duck’s butt in front of me. The same old same old, is, well…old.

The weekends are pretty fun, though.

To shake things up, I am breaking out of my introverted hermit shell and participating in five, count ‘em, five, social activites this month, most on weeknights, which goes against my moral principles. To some of you, that might be a typical Monday-Friday, but for me this is a major deal. One of my social engagements is going to meet Sassy Buster, whom I think I have managed to convince that I am not a stalker. She lives very close to where I work, and I am super exicted to see her and learn some basic knitting techniques if she can stop laughing at my crappy knitting long enough to help me.

I am also taking a 2-hour self-defense class this weekend from Jason’s brother’s martial arts business, which I am excited about if only for the reason that I can now defend myself whenever Jason tries to put me in a headlock or armbar or rear naked choke or whatever he feels compelled to do at least 328975698 times a day.

I’m going to have to be sure to stretch a lot beforehand though, because my hips have been completely out of whack lately, like the skeletal/joint equivalent of missing a buttonhole when buttoning a shirt. As such, I am reduced to performing my Old Lady Osteoporosis routine multiple times a day as I contort and bend and lean awkwardly to force my hip to painfully relocate itself into the proper socket position. I’m like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, all wild eyed and grimacing, trying to pop things back into place – only slightly more sane.

Speaking of sane, or a lack thereof, this work week has made it abundantly clear that it is going to suck. It showed right up on Monday morning, bright and early, and basically announced: Allo. You killed my father. Prepare to die. Today I came in early and worked for five hours without a break while encountering all kinds of epic cliches: a deadline that is technically two weeks away but the boss wants met today, a document that I spent 20 minutes editing only to open later to find it didn’t save any of my changes, 50,000 interruptions, and a printer that partially crumples the corner of every page. My boss and I are wild-eyed shrews taken to shrieking preemptively at people to get out why they still can when they come to ask us questions about non-deadline-related items. There is no Communications Department here today, only Zuul! To top it off, as I went to retrieve a printout from the Crumpling Machine, I stubbed my toe on a nearby table so hard it drew blood.

Forget Murphy’s Law: today is being governed by Murphy’s Angry Group of Vigilantes.