Friday, December 11, 2009

Fractured Friday

Today was/is Friday and some of my fellow bloggers call today something like Fractured Friday, Fragment Friday, Freaky Friday, hell I can't remember, something like that where you just kind of post random stuff about your day and/or week.

So, here's random stuff about my day and/or week:

The Big Storm that was supposed to hit last night? Still waiting. Yes, yes, we SoCal people get our panties in a twist at the thought of rain but the news channels have been hyping this Big Storm all week.

The 2009 racing season came to an end this week and for both TheManTheMyth and Thing 1, it ended with both a whimper when TheManTheMyth got lost and missed his race and a bang when Thing 1's motorcycle wouldn't shift and a Good Samaritan let him use her motorcycle and he done blowed it up. That boy is hard on motorcycles. And yes, it's been repaired and returned to its rightful owner who probably won't be so quick to offer her motorcycle again.

Now that the 2009 racing season is over, TheManTheMyth doesn't know what to do with himself and he's all lost and just kind of wanders aimlessly around the house. Which means this weekend, his 1st weekend all year that he has absolutely nothing to do, he will drive me absolutely barking mad.

I won a major battle against Thing 2 this week, which is pretty rare because she's not known as the Pitbull for nothing when it comes to fighting for what she wants. And what she wanted was to stay home from school one day this week because it was the Freshman Retreat, where they go off for the day and do some kind of peer group workshops and she did not want to go because "it's stupid and boring and none of my friends are going." She offered me cash money if I would let her stay home which should tell you something because my daughter, Scrooge McTightwad, "collects" money. Seriously, this kid has more liquid assets than her parents. When the bribe didn't work, she got mysteriously sick. I told her to nut up and walk it off. Long story: she went. I won. So HA!

I can't believe Christmas is in 2 weeks. I'm so not feeling the Christmas spirit/mood. We haven't gone out to get a tree yet. Maybe this weekend. Not that there's any presents to put under the tree. Santa didn't work this summer and the money tree seems to be dormant. My seester and her family are coming out from Colorado, unless they get snowed in...again. This has happened more than once. We're all excited and then comes the phone call and Christmas just isn't the same.

I've been a bit of blah mood this week for some reason. Wait, let me check the calendar. Oh. That explains it. Anyway, I've just been a bit of a funk, feeling all nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I'm gonna go eat worms. Then today, when Lucy and I got to the park, there was a whole group that was just so dang excited to see me. I'm telling you I have never had such a warm welcome. I had barely stopped the car before they all came running as fast as they could, knocking each other over to be the first to greet me. I got out of the car and they all surrounded me, letting me know how happy they were to see me. Ok, so maybe I'm talking about ducks, geese and mud hens but hey, it's nice to know that there are creatures who are happy to see me. Even if it's because I bring stale Cheerios for them and yes, I know I'm not supposed to feed the wildlife but these ducks are so not wild anymore so I don't feel guilty. Anyway, I felt a bit happier after such a warm greeting.

So that was my fractured, fragmented Friday and/or week. Oh, and I still haven't done a RAK. The days are counting down to Christmas and I'm still drawing a blank. I'd better get my butt in gear otherwise poor Stephanie will be sitting there, without a gift in the Random Act of Kindness gift exchange because I suck.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Spellcheck

I am not a talented person. I can't sing, draw, play an instrument, juggle, do math, decorate a room, throw a successful party or put together a stylish outfit out of the odds and ends in my closet. I do not have the ability to accessorize. I'm not crafty (nor do I want to be) or artistic. Several years ago I jumped on the scrapbooking bandwagon and despite buying all sorts of scrapbook gadgetry and going on two separate scrapbooking retreat weekend getaways, I have made a grand total of ONE scrapbooks and really have no desire to put together another one.

The one talent I DO have, aside from my great tact and diplomacy skills, is my ability to spell. I love spelling. I used to win every spelling bee/contest in school. My skills in proofreading for typos were in high demand. If someone needed to know the correct spelling of a word, they could pick up the red phone that would instantly connect them to Kelly's Spelling Hotline and I would correctly spell out the word for them and they'd be all "Thank you, Kelly's Spelling Hotline! You've saved my job!" and I'd be all "It's a gift; the least I could do is use my powers for good."

I used to work for a direct mail marketing company and once or twice a month, I'd have to sit in a little room, all alone (which was sheer torture for me at that time) and sit and do quality control on the hundreds of fliers that the company printed up and mailed out. I was just supposed to make sure the colors were right and that the ad fliers were legible and that the correct franchise codes were on the ads. However, Champion Speller that I was, I read every single flier and could not believe how many words were misspelled. And I'd go running out to the printing department screaming "STOP THE PRESSES!" while waving a handful of ads, forcing the mostly non-English speaking print crew to think there was an INS raid or something. And I'd be told that I was only supposed to make sure the ads were legible. That's it. It would drive me nuts that those ads were allowed to be delivered to millions of home with TYPOS! It was just SO wrong! I don't work there any more. And not by choice but we're not discussing my dismal employment history now are we?

Anyhoo. Spelling is my "thing." At least it USED to be. Lately, I'm reaching for the dictionary every time I try and type up another blog entry or letter or Facebook comment or post on a message board. The other day I was trying to spell a word and it just didn't look right so I reached for my handy-dandy dictionary and damned if I couldn't even find the word in my dictionary. Which when you think about it, if you don't know how to spell a word, how are you supposed to find it in the dictionary? Huh? Huh?

So. I'm getting frustrated because I can't find the word (and I don't even remember what the word was) and after pitching a fit at the stupid dictionary I realized that the word I was trying to find was spelled with a "u" instead of an "e" which is why a) I couldn't find it in the right place in the dictionary and 2) it looked wrong when I was writing/typing it out. Don't you hate it when you write/type a word out and it just doesn't look right so you look it up just to make sure and yeah, it's right but it still just looks wrong? Yeah, me too.

By the way, my expert spelling does not include punctuation, grammar and syntax. I'm always ending sentences with prepositions here, dangling participles there (and I have no idea what a dangling participle is; I just get a kick out of the term, "dangling participle." It sounds kind of naughty heh heh), using slang including Ebonics instead of the Queen's English. Makes it more fun to read, doncha think?

Oh, and you can bet I've misspelled at least ONE word in this here blog post. It's seems to be par for the course these days.


Wednesday, December 9, 2009

I Love Lucy

I was originally going to post this yesterday because yesterday was The Big Day but I decided to wait until today to make sure.

What Big Day, you ask? I'll tell you. Yesterday, December 8, 2009 was My Lucy's 11th birthday. And I wanted to make sure she survived before writing anything. She did, so I am.

When we got Lucy, our old dog, Jamie had decided she did not want to live in a house with children. Every time I would visit my sister and BIL, when it was time to leave, Jamie would "look for ants" as we called it. She would pretend she didn't hear me telling her to get in the car because she was busy looking at the ground. She wanted to stay there. Where there weren't any noisy kids and she would be spoiled. More spoiled than she was at home. And BIL would BEG me to let Jamie stay with him. So little by little, Old Jamie spent more and more time over there and eventually, the move became permanent because Jamie was much happier in their childless house. BIL not only renamed her, he changed her breed and her gender and Jamie, the female black retriever somehow evolved, in BIL's mind, into Rusty the male Golden Retriever. We played along and Jamie/Rusty would respond to both names because that dog was the smartest dog in the world.

So, my house was feeling pretty empty without my doggie and TheManTheMyth was missing having a dog in the house even though we were NOT missing Jamie's stinky smell. It's like when she turned 8, her skin just got really, REALLY stinky and nothing would get rid of that stinky dog smell. Almost every Lab I know gets stinky when they hit 8 years old.

Anyway, we needed a new dog and after searching around, I found My Lucy. She was one of 10 puppies born to a Golden Retriever and a Black Lab. Perfect!

Because I wasn't working, I got to spend all my time with Lucy, training, housebreaking, keeping her occupied so that she wouldn't become destructive, etc. Lucy became my constant companion and I would take her everywhere. When I took the kids to school, she'd go along for the ride. She didn't care where we were going as long as she got to go. She also slept with us. On the bed.

Thank goodness we have a Kingsize bed. She took up A LOT of room. She also was a sofa hog:

Yeah, we were REAL strict about keeping the dog off the furniture...NOT. Lucy was considered one of our children and had all the rights and privileges of our biped kids. Sometimes more.

3 years ago, though, we thought it was over. Over the Christmas holidays, we knew something was wrong. She would pant, moan, groan, whimper and she had an accident in bed one night. I took her to the vet and she was diagnosed with diabetes, which I didn't know animals could get.

We started her on insulin and the vet told me that because of her age, we'd be lucky if she survived 2 years. Fast forward 3 years. She's mostly blind now but it doesn't stop her at all and going to the park is her favorite thing in the whole wide world and don't even think of telling her that we can't go to the park today because it's storming because she doesn't CARE, that's MY problem and don't try to go to a different section of the park than usual because it's not The Park and she won't fall for it and will refuse to budge until we go back to The Park, HER Park and then she's happyhappyhappy:

Several months ago, we thought we'd lose Lucy again. She had recently lost most of her sight and even though she got around just fine by memory and scent, every so often she'd get lost if things had been moved. One day we were over at my sister's house, which was like a 2nd home to Lucy, and while we were out at dinner, Lucy fell into the pool. We still don't know how she managed to find her way to the steps, being blind and confused and all, but she did and was able to drag herself to the front door before collapsing in exhaustion.

She survived but picked up a new quirk (she develops new quirks almost weekly): she wouldn't go into the backyard any more. She'd go right out the front door and hang out on the front porch but our backyard had become a place to be avoided. After about a week or so of this, I finally took her out front and around the corner (we live on a corner) to the back gate and through the back gate and back in the house. From then she was fine with the backyard.

One of her latest quirks is how she eats her breakfast. Because of her insulin injections, she has to eat at specific times and in the mornings, she's not really ready to eat at the appointed time. So I started spoonfeeding her the first few bites and then she'd go ahead and eat the rest. Unfortunately, now she won't even acknowledge her breakfast until I sit down and start hand-feeding her. At least she's not demanding airplane or choo-choo sound effects. Yet.

Every day that Lucy is still with us I consider a victory and I don't mind (much) all her demands and funny little habits that I had a hand in creating. She's my baby, my constant companion.

Happy Birthday, Lucy! Mamma Loves You Best!