2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 4,500 times in 2010. That’s about 11 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 110 posts. There were 8 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 5mb.

The busiest day of the year was May 8th with 115 views. The most popular post that day was for you mom – happy mother’s day .

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were righthealth.com, blogger.com, search.aol.com, nonnasnonsense.blogspot.com, and student-loan-consilidation.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ovary, ovarian cyst, cyst on ovary, catalpa worms, and ovarian cysts.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

for you mom – happy mother’s day May 2009
10 comments

2

ticking time-bomb in my tummy, thursday March 2009
15 comments

3

say it with pictures sunday November 2009
3 comments

4

slick, sleety, sweaty*, snow-sledding, saturday January 2010
7 comments

5

silly snow-sledding saturday January 2010
9 comments

my randomness list

this was something my bff over at seashore subjects asked me to do about a year ago. better late than never it was actually so long ago that i had to go through her archives to see if there were any instructions along with this meme. luckily, i was not told that i have to rope others into doing this, but if you desire to play along with us, then let me know in a comment so i can go read your list.

oh, and here was MY comment to seashore:   “oh, you stink! you just threw me in there to make me do an actual blog post instead of my pictures and videos i’ve been trying to get away with! man…alright! i’ll do one soon, but i’m not promising how soon. so there “

guess i was right about the time frame for my list

1. i like banana and onion flavored things, but don’t like to actually eat bananas or onions.

2. i taught myself how to knit last winter and everybody who knows me is amazed by this domestic achievement. I’ve decided it’s insulting my intelligence that they are so surprised i taught myself how to do this

3. i have become addicted to Link’s Crossbow Training on my Wii. When i’m feeling mad at the world (which seems to happen a lot lately), i like to go and shoot things. EVEN things you’re NOT supposed to shoot, like the chickens and such (this one is so old that i have long ago beaten all the levels and now have to find other ways to vent my frustrations)

4. i tend to forget that i’m pushing 40 and still want to stop anytime i see a cool playground and go swing, climb, & slide.

5. i worked last spring and this summer for the 2010 census bureau.

6. i like bird watching (we have some of these birds stealing cat food), but i also enjoy watching my cat hunt the birds.

7. if you ask me to do something, 9 times out of 10, i will do it. tell me to do something and 9 times out of 10 i won’t do it.

8. my cat is a hired assassin for my dogs. she hunts and kills mice and rabbits and gives them to the dogs. i haven’t figured out what they are paying her with though.

9. i would rather drive the big john deere tractor round and round the front yard for hours mowing, than spend 5 minutes dusting, polishing, or any other type of housework.

10. i grew up surrounded by water, whether it was swimming pools, gulf of mexico beaches, or even just heavy rain puddles. i honestly CRAVE the water. i think i’m half mermaid (obviously the half without all the pretty hair, perky boobs, and shiny tails unfortunately the only water i have access to are rivers that you have to either drive or hike to get to AND there are only a few months that are warm enough to swim unlike in florida where you can swim until thanksgiving!

our cross country road trip…part 1

first a little background…my step-son jonathan

was posted in iraq for the last year and before he left he shipped his dodge magnum to us. while the army takes pretty good care of it’s soldiers, they kinda suck at caring for their vehicles while they are overseas. they park them in a big field and take the battery out. that’s it. so, all of those poor soldiers that didn’t have another option, get to come back home to a car that has been sitting out in the weather for a whole year. nice. the plan was for us to drive the car back to him at ft. lewis in washington (state that is) and then he would fly us back home to tennessee. i was so excited about this!! i looooove to travel. hubby, not so much, but who cares what he wanted? lol

i spent hours and hours months before the trip was due, googling different routes, finding state parks, restaurants and anything that sounded fun or interesting to me err us to visit.  i knew right off the bat that i didn’t want to take the traditional route of heading straight west to colorado and then heading north because that way is quite boring, and i knew this would probably be the only chance i had to see the northern states. i also made sure that we would only have to drive about 7 or 8 hours a day so we wouldn’t get too sore or too tired.

so, the first day our goal was St. Louis and the Arch….more to come

finally freaking found fodder for friday :)

bless me, oh bloggy-god for i have sinned…a BUNCH. i checked and my last confession..errr..post was jan 31!!! i have committed many sins since then. the sin of falsehood (“i’ll blog something today” to my mother/sister/best friend) the sin of sloth (see when last post was),  the sin of envy (have you seen how popular WoW is??), the sin of pride (i mean come on..i haven’t posted in almost a YEAR, but i still look at my stats to see if any poor soul has wandered by), the sin of lust (well, that’s lusting for my hubby, so i might get to slide on that one also, i can’t find the right sin in the 7 deadly sins, but surely this would qualify as one. the sin of abandonment (like as in i get my best friend roped into writing a blog and then completely abandon my writing AS WELL AS i quit reading hers and everybody Else’s too. oh! the shame of it all!)

so what’s my punishment oh wise bloggy-god? (who, btw,  is totally just make believe and in no way refers to anything sacrilegious or a false god or anything else that will get me in trouble with any churchy-type readers

what?!  i have to post 2 hail mary passes posts in one 24 hr period, leave 5 “i’m sorry i haven’t read your blog in forever” comments,  and worship type at least once a week to the bloggy-god AND FINALLY  i have to promise to sin no more (bloggy-sins that is. we don’t wanna get carried away here

well, i hope i can stick to this punishment and carry it all out with a new light shining in my bloggy-soul and i will try not to continue to hide my words under a bushel.

hmm am i missing going to church? let’s think about it… have to get up waaaay too early on a sunday morning,  have to wear a DRESS and MAKEUP and SIT STILL for hours and hours on a hard wooden pew…NAAHHHH i think i just thought it was a funny twist on a serious subject that might possibly make somebody smile and maybe even be able to tick some ppl off. ya never know

slick, sleety, sweaty*, snow-sledding, saturday

ok, weaselMomma…this better be enough snow/sleet for ya cuz…

it’s probably the best we will get in my lifetime!

last time we had like barely and 1″ of snow. this time it was hard to accurately measure because it would keep snowing, then sleet would pack it down, then it would snow again….you get the picture. so. this is me on my 1st run down the very sleet-slick, snow. and no i totally didn’t SREAM like a girl yes, i do wreck at the end, just watch the horizon lol

this was early on during our version of snow-fest there was about an 1" or more just during the first 45 min!

this was later at night when even the tops of the onions are covered!

this is just a beautiful magnolia tree that totally got lost amongst the circuitry highways of my cell phone. i would have loved to see the color of the leaves, but c'est la vie!

ok, i’m off to bed now cuz i forgot and took my sleeping pill over 2 hours ago, and i don’t think my spelling and typing are doing very well anymore

*p.s. the sweaty refers to the heatstroke i get from hauling my thirty-something butt uphill 5 times. i’m refusing to wear a toboggan next time! and i might not wear two layers up top either! we’ll see if i turn into a Popsicle (did y’all know that’s supposed to be capitalized??) or i just chill & have fun

silly snow-sledding saturday

after recovering (mostly) from our snow fun on thursday, i decided i just couldn’t miss out on yet another day of snow fun. chewie decided he wanted to go for a walk, which would require much layering of clothes, so i decided to go sledding again since i was bundled up like the little kid from “A Christmas Story”. i even managed to get hubby to go down a couple of times! here are the 3 videos i got:

that’s all i got for ya folks!

friday fragments

Gotta give thanks where thanks are due! Click the link below to go check out Mrs. 4444′s most excellent page filled with friday frag links!

g-kid to mommy: please play mario karts. i’ll try really hard to let you win…

g-kid to mommy as they are laying down together for a nap: why don’t you dream about racing a team game with me on mario karts.

***********************************

mommy to g-kid: my head is hurting so much i think it’s gonna explode.

g-kid: i will be very upset if your head explodes and if it does, i’m NOT helping you clean it up.

***********************************

g-kid to mommy: what kind of music is that cd?

mommy: i think it’s a country one.

g-kid: are you sure it’s not a city one??

***********************************

mommy: (singing) won’t you to take me to….funky town

g-kid: won’t you take me to funky town…cuz i can’t drive and i don’t know where it is!

***********************************

g-kid: ow! i stubbed my toe. see it’s the medium one. (as in not the BIG toe lol)

***********************************

Ding! I have an idea

He came up with this all on his own. We have no idea where he got it from.

***********************************

all of my knitting projects that i did for christmas (minus seashore’s cuz she hasn’t received hers yet):

***********************************

what it looks like out my front door right now:

We got a whole 1/2" of snow!! lol

I would be outside doing more of this:

But i’m still recovering from it today

say it with pictures sunday

some of the many excuses reasons i haven’t been blogging or knitting or much of anything else for that matter:

my wonderful hubby bought me a kindle for my birthday and i am in book lover HEAVEN!!

i soooo heart me some kindle!

(gift cards to amazon.com hint hint are now the BEST GIFT EVER )

watching my adorable and growing like a weed g-kid:

they dressed up like pilgrims and indians and delivered food

another of my excuses reasons for not posting:

hiking at Burgess Falls State Park for our anniversary….

…and hiking with hubby, g-kid, & the dogs around our house

watching my friend field dress a deer and laughing with him over said deer managing to dive into a coyote den after she got shot. he said he’d been hunting for 20 years and never saw anything like this before

(don’t worry didn’t video the gutting…just the pulling the deer out of the coyote den)

oh, at the very beginning he is saying “ow, briar….ow, briar” lol i also just fried some of that deer meat for dinner tonight and it was pretty tasty!

entertaining myself watching chewy eating peanut butter:

see?? with all of these fun things to see and do, do you blame me for not wanting to sit in front of a computer?? i am trying to figure out how to read my fav blogs on my kindle. i think all of you awesome bloggers should look into getting on amazon.com’s blog list. (don’t ask me how to do it…i’m too busy looking for free ebooks to download to my kindle)

friday fragments

it’s been so long since i did one of these i hope i remember how

******conversation with the g-kid:

• me: i’m all full of milk but i want some coffee, james. what should i do??

• james: umm, go pee?

******conversation with the hubby regarding new pet:

• me: should i spell chewy’s name c-h-e-w-y or c-h-e-w-i-e ? (it’s short for chewbacca)
• hubby: g-o-n-e

******speaking of new pet, here is a pic of my new baby. chewy was originally my step-daughter’s dog, but she is working 16 hr shifts twice a week, and the poor thing was miserable while she was working. also, he didn’t really like the g-kid and she was worried he might bite him. nonna to the rescue!! the most shocking thing is that hubby (who was adamantly against an indoor dog) is letting him sleep with us!

******conversation with the g-kid after seeing a squished fox on the road:

• james: what do foxes eat?
• me: mice, squirrels, rabbits…small animals like that
• james: ewww i wouldn’t want to eat a rabbit (i guess mice and squirrels are ok??)
• me: i’ve ate a rabbit before
• james: really?!? what did it taste like?
• me: chicken (hehe) maybe i should try to find a store that sells rabbit so i can try to cook one.
• james: i know the perfect store to find a rabbit.
• me: (incredulously) really?? where?
• james: well, my me-me took me there once and i want to go back there again. i bet we could find a rabbit there. it’s called ….Toys-R-Us! (had to give him an A for effort on that one)

******we are actually doing good in darts! we are in first place (which shocked us) and i’m in first place for the ton run even with missing a week for my surgery!

******i think i must be the only person alive who can actually injure herself sitting on the couch. i have no idea what i did to it, but i got up to go to bed last night and could barely walk on my left ankle. usually, when i have some strange pain like this it goes away overnight, but alas, i am still hobbling around today. who’da thunk it??

******i have my final hearing for SS Disability set for Nov. 10th. hopefully the judge will agree with me on the issue of the SS dr.’s ridiculous report. did you know that i am able to lift AND carry ONE HUNDRED pounds for eight hours a day??? hopefully the judge will realize that the dr. was full of shit and the less than 10 min. assessment she performed was waaaaay out of line.

******i’m sure that there have been 50 million other things to frag about, but i can’t remember any more of them. now that fall is here and the weather is yucky, hopefully i will start blogging again. course i said that after my surgery and totally lied between babysitting (way more than usual lately), reading, knitting (oh yah! i taught myself to knit! lol), watching tv & movies, and taking walks with the dogs i just cant seem to make myself sit down at the puter anymore. i’ve missed yall (even though it doesn’t show by my lack of reading/commenting) and hope to get back into the swing of things soon… some day…. ah, hell. i have no idea if i will or not you’ll just have to cross your fingers and hope i do.

finally feeling fine (mostly) friday

here it goes:

had surgery on monday the 31st. i did in fact stay up all night, rather than sleep a little and get up at 3:30am (btw: NOT recomended). the surgery went great. the recovery room sucked, because they talked me out of doing the epidural if they only did the laparoscopic surgery. i was in more pain and stayed in there longer, than this poor woman who had a double mastectomy! i have decided that between the fibromyalgia (which increases your nerve receptors or some such) and the EDS (which makes my muscles have to work a lot more than they should), i just don’t respond normally to what should have been an “easy surgery”.

so, after several shots of different pain meds, they finally got enough drugs in me to inform me that i would be going home that day.  they sent me to another holding room. now, A) i wanted to stay overnight because i know how much pain i would be in and it’s much easier to just push that morphine button than trying to ride home 2 hours away and popping pills all night. B)holding room = gurney. which SUCKS! i wanted a bed so bad! after laying on the gurney for upteen hours before, during, and after the surgery my back and hips were killing me. C) i hate the whole send you home before you know for sure that your wounds are going to heal correctly, etc..

well, i guess they have figured out how to get someone like me to leave. they wouldn’t let me take a wheelchair and go outside to smoke. it was going on about 11 hrs without a smoke and i was dying for one. they said that i could go have a smoke if i am leaving, so all of a sudden i was really ready to leave! lol the ride home was not fun. my last dose of pain meds had started wearing off and we had to go over to the V.A. to get my ‘scripts filled. THANK GOODNESS the v.a. nurse took pity on me and just gave my scripts to the doc so i didn’t have to wait through the whole ER process. i took my nausea med, waited a while and took a pain pill. we got about 1 or 2 miles from the hospital and  i threw up (good thing i took my puke tub with me when i checked out). that brought on a kind of mild panic attack cuz i was afraid of what it would do to my stomach and cuz my arms and legs were tingling like when you hyper ventilate. i started breathing in a paper bag, but it didn’t stop so i freaked and tried calling my mom (she was a nurse). she didn’t answer so i called her twin (aunt faye who was also a nurse) and she talked me down from my panic attack.

alright. we get home finally and i can’t go to sleep! i’ve been up since 11am on sunday and it was 11pm on monday before i could get to sleep. i don’t know why. i was exhausted, my eyes hurt like hell from something they put in them (i swear it was sand) during the surgery. i finally get to sleep, wake up every 4 hours or so for meds, and then get up around 8am on tuesday. i was sooo freaking restless tuesday that i hardly never sat still. i don’t know what was wrong with me (again) but it seemed like it i was only comfortable if i was walking instead of sitting. i decided to take a shower and wash my hair thinking that might calm me down some.

…yadda, yadda, yadda…(don’t really remember much of tuesday eve/night except taking pills earlier and earlier)

wednesday morning i’m up early even though i wanted to sleep in. i’m taking my pain pills every 3 hours now (which i found out accidentally was the correct dosage. i had assumed they were every 4-6 hrs like most pain pills and i had been trying to stretch it to 5 hours! lol) and the pain is not going down at all. i decided i needed to write down when and what i was taking, because i was afraid that i was taking so much that i would forget and take too much. the pain was increasing and it should not have been that bad at that point. i tried doubling my pain pills. no effect to the pain. went to the bathroom and noticed that the inside of my shirt had something on it. my incision was oozing something that didn’t look very good. ok, call the v.a. clinic in my town. they don’t want to touch me. they want me to call the surgeon. i call her office. her nurse starts to tell me that i can come in the next day and they can check it. i told her that there was no way i could drive 2 hrs  feeling the way i did, nor could i wait another day in this pain. i read off the meds i had taken since last night and didn’t even get through half of them when she told me to go to my local ER.

off to River Park (hospital that kills people, that you only go to if you’re dying so they can stabilize you and send you to a real hospital) we go. they check me in and the nurse looks at my incision. first thing she says is “oh, yeah. that’s not right”. it’s amazing how many conflicting emotions you can have at the same time. relief-cuz i know there’s actually something wrong and i’m not just being a cry baby. anger-cuz they should have let me stay in the hospital long enough to make sure this wouldn’t happen. scared-because there is now something ELSE wrong with me and all i can think of is staph infections and flesh-eating bacteria lol

they gave me an i.v., gave me some morphine which totally didn’t work. it seemed like it made all of my minor pains from the 3 other small incisions go away which amplified the infected one to 10x worse pain. don’t ask me how. i just know it did. so i begged for something else and they gave me a shot of toradol. that stuff is my new best friend. after only about 5 minutes or so i was feeling much better. then they took x-rays. i guess to make sure they didn’t leave something inside of me they didn’t see anything abnormal, but they informed me my bowels were quite full. NO SHIT (pun intended) i was backed up 4 days before the surgery and after all the pain meds i was stillll backed up. half the time i didn’t know if it was my surgery or just my stomach hurting.

friday off we (poor hubby/chauffeur & me) go back to nashville to be seen by yet another dr. that i haven’t ever met. my surgeon is on vacation this week. so he looks at my nasty oozing wound and tells me he is more concerned with the not going poop for 9 long-painful-days. he pokes around on my stomach and says that he doesn’t feel any abscesses or such. tells me to violate myself with an enema and sends me on my way.

get home. violate myself. NOTHING HAPPENS!! also, as i’m changing my bandage i happen to push down on this very hard area right above the incision. now, i mentioned this area to the dr. earlier, but he said it was fine. well, low and behold, when you press that area, more stuff comes out!! hmmm, to me that seems like one of those abscesses he was checking to make sure i didn’t have. at this point i just give up. i tell hubby that i don’t give a crap any more i can either rot away from the inside or blow up. i’m not going to another dr. about this crap. i’m not trying to call another dr. that’s it! i’m done.

saturday comes and i was just going to lay in bed all day and wallow in my self-pity. nope. my tummy starts cramping. off to the “loo” i go. yeah! splash down lol. things started getting better after that. i think my incision is pretty much healed up. just a little bit of oozing going on. hard place is getting smaller (still there a little bit, which worries me some, but i’m ignoring that voice). oh! and i think i have thrush from the antibiotics. never had it before. never want it again. just about everything i eat hurts! oh and smoking? FORGET IT! it burns like a, a, something that burns really bad. lol i totally lost a good comparison.

to make long story just a little bit longer…hopefully from now on i will only be blogging about funny, happy things and can leave my pathetic, pitiful, health crap off of here. i can always torture my family with that