rickEy aka hubby
jamie = youngest daughter
james = 1st grandson (jamie's)
sis = norene
jonathan = middle son
randy & lori = eldest son & DIL
reagen = newest grandson (randy's)
twinkaye = momma
tom = step-dad (sis & phil's dad)
twinfaye = mom's identical twin(oh and 5 min older, hehe)
and the 3 bros & 2 SIL phil (holly) mike (anna), & (currently disowned) Chuck
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
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:
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!
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)
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.
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
my ongoing, getting quite ridiculous, journey to get this stupid cyst removed:i guess i should update y’all very briefly about this saga:
murfreesboro VA sent me to nashville VA because they couldn’t actually see any ovarian tissue so they can’t do the surgery in murfreesboro due to the lack of a general surgeon if the ovarian cyst turns out to be something else.
nashville VA surgeon wants a gyn/oncology surgeon AND a general surgeon, AND a bowel surgeon there just to cover all the bases.
nashville VA doesn’t have all of these types of surgeons so they send me to vanderbilt gyn/oncologist.
then original vandy surgeon drops me and hands me off to somebody else. now, i have my gyn/cancer surgeon (like THAT’S not enough to scare the crap out of ya) and now i have a bowel surgeon that keeps saying the words tumor and colon re-section and colostomy bag (more scary crap).
finally get a surgery set for august 18th, 1pm. so here is how that went:
are you ready for this one? i’m lying at Vanderbilt hospital, i.v. in place, totally cool err warm hospital gown (with built in heater) on, waiting to speak to the anesthesiologist and the surgeon…
…in comes the nurse. surgery is running quite a bit behind. might be a couple hours late to get started. my response: ok, can i go smoke a cigarette?? she goes and checks…nope no cigarette allowed but just hang in there. ok, back to waiting game…
….in comes the surgery student chick. somebody’s surgery has changed from laparoscopic to full blown open abdominal surgery (just like what my surgery might be). surgery resident(?) says the dreaded words: “i’m so sorry to tell you this, but you’re surgery has been canceled.”
1st thought: oh, crap i gotta take the bowel prep stuff all over again. nope, surgery chick says the dr. isn’t gonna make me do the bowel prep again.
2nd thought: how long am i gonna have to wait for a new date??
3rdthought: doesn’t anybody else see the danger of continually delaying this surgery??!!! the longer the cyst/mass/tumor (take your pick) is in me, the more it grows, the more chance there is that it will attach to my colon or bladder! ok, so i resign myself to the fact that i can’t talk the nice surgery chick into bumping the other person before me and send them home…
…in comes a nurse to remove my i.v. she tries to offer some stupid platitudes that i guess are supposed to magically make me happy and not be upset that i was this<–>close to having this damn thing removed. well, it didn’t work. then the bowel prep comment sinks in. i look at my mom and say “how the heck can i NOT do the bowel prep next time?? if i needed it now, i’ll need it just as much if not more the next time! i think the dr. is just trying to make me feel better today and then she’ll change her mind later.” then i said something about how i guess i was wrong thinking that having my surgery at vandy would go smoother than thru the V.A.
remember that nurse that was removing my i.v.? well, she decides it’s her place to jump into MY conversation with my MOM and tell me how she doesn’t appreciate me taking my anger out on her. what?! excuse the holy-f’ing-shit out of me!! you want to see anger, lady, well you just pushed the wrong button! how dare she! i can air my grievances to my mom any flipping time i like! i don’t remember what i said to her since i went from zero to redneck in about 1/2 a second but the conversation ended with me telling her to get out of my room and me slamming the door in her face. i’m still in shock over her gall to try to reprimand me for being upset, when they just made me, my husband, & my mom drive over 2 hours, sit and wait for another 3 hours for nothing! to say nothing of the fact that i was hungry, thirsty, got up early, AND had no coffee. stupid wench. she’s lucky i didn’t take that i.v. and poke her eye out with it!
so, now i am rescheduled for 8/31 at 7 freaking 30 in the a.m. which means i have to be there at 5:30 a.m., which means i will have to leave at 3-oh, my lord, i might as well stay up all night-30 in the a.m. OR fork out money for a hotel room in nashville the night b4. oh, and now i will totally miss the g-kids b-day party which is gonna be on the 5th at an indoor bounce/slide type place where the adults are allowed to play too! double bummer! ok, i guess i’ve vented enough. maybe i’ve gotten it out of my system.
several of these comments were actually heard around our campsite in NOT-so-sunny Florida last month:
No, our tents did not pass the leak test.
Yes, the campfire was kaput after the first night.
No, we didn’t have harmless flies.
Yes, we had lovely, hungry, blood-thirsty mosquitoes.
Yes, the old man was snoring (and seashore said cheeseburger’s snoring had quieted some – if that’s true, i think she is a saint, cuz i woulda murdered his noisy butt in his sleep a lonnnng time ago!)
No, we didn’t get to go fishing outside the tent.
Yes, the raccoons went fishing in my cooler!
No, we didn’t give in to nature.
Yes, we went tubing. in the rain. in the coooold water.
Yes, we turned blue.
No, we didn’t see any gators (thank goodness!)
Yes, we saw river otters, turtles, and many many fish.
No, the rain didn’t stop. ever.
Yes, we took over the pavilion and had a blast playing Aggravation.
yes, i should be posting about the camping trip..go read seashore’s version and hush
yes, i should be posting about my bone-marrow biopsy (that got cancelled cuz of poison ivy breakout and resulting shot – woohoo!)
yes, i should be posting about my surgery to remove my “tumor” (it’s a freakin’ ovarian cyst! stop saying tumor you stupid dr.s!)
yes, i should be posting about my beautiful, bountiful garden…got the pics, i’ll get to it later than sooner
so, you must be asking yourself what has got me excited enough to break my silence and sit down and post, right? well…..it’s WORMS!!!
no, not the “uh oh, fido’s scooting across the rug on his butt” kind of worms…CATALPA WORMS! these are the BEST catfish bait known to man (well at least known to this WOman). i bought a couple of catalpa trees from the nursery where i used to work hoping that i would have the right sphinx moth among my many, many, way too freakin’ many moths around my house. the sphinx month lays the eggs for the catalpa worms. i’ve got them!! here is a pic of the tree (it looks a little rough because it got a little wind burned on the way home)
the brown leaves on the bottom are from the worms eating their first meals. they will hatch in early spring and late summer and pretty much strip the tree of leaves. that’s fine with me though, cuz it won’t kill the tree. you can take the worms and pack them in either sawdust or cornmeal and freeze them. then you just thaw them out (and supposedly they come back to life) when you’re ready to go fishing. here is what my little babies look like now:
aren’t they just adorable?? i have about 2 or 3 more leaves with this many on them and i swear i think they have doubled in size from just yesterday! my other tree didn’t have any on it yet, so i took a few off of this tree and transplanted them to the other. this is what they will look like once they are full size and ready to be bait:
here is a little blurb about how to fish with these juicy worms:
“There are several ways to use this worm as bait. It can be cut in half, turned inside out and threaded on the hook. Another way is to cut them in pieces just like an earthworm. But the most common way seems to be cut (or bite-YUK!!!) its head off, use the end of a match and turn its body inside out. The common thread here is to release its aromatic scent and green fluorescent juices.”
if you’re interested you can read the rest of that article here.
oh, and i am soooo not gonna be biting off the heads. that is just WRONG. i will however pinch off the heads and turn them inside out as i’m putting them on the hook.
and yes, mother, i will hook your worms for you.
well, that’s all for now. my surgery is tuesday and i’m hoping to talk step-daughter into letting me borrow her laptop for a little while so i can post all of those things i’ve been too lazy to do. hopefully, i will get to catch up on a bunch of blog reading too!
and swimmin’, and tubin’, and campin’, and whatever else i can get into with seashore and company…
miss me? i’ll try to tweet my trip if i can figure out my new LG ENVY TOUCH!! oh, i’m nonnasnonsense on twitter too
update:
ok, so i couldn’t figure out how to get on twitter. well, acutally, my phone just wouldn’t bring up twitter or wordpress’ sites. go figure! thanks for all the “have funs” and “tweet comments” i will be posting a blog of our adventures soon. i’m sure seashore subjects will do it sooner than me, since i’m a better procrastinator than she is
