clickmom

I got braces today

If you know someone getting braces give them soft gentle love and affection, maybe a well blended smoothie or a comforting warm beverage. Braces freaking hurt.

But, it's 8 months of suffering for a restored beautiful straight toothed smile, which I'll hopefully get a ton of mileage out of and not die early and have spent 8 months suffering for a beauty I will not get to enjoy.

Did I ever tell you that one of my dog park friends told me that I should lose weight and get date-able (which I took to mean F-able) before the demise of the husband so that when he goes I'll be ready to jump back into the dating pool? I hang out with some real characters at the dog park. I need to work a character built on this friend into a story.

Speaking of stories, I have not written a single word of my porn novel, but I have given a great deal of thought to how I am going to go about polishing it up and moving forward with it. For some reason, I have spent very little time sitting in front of my actual computer and an embarrassing amount of time peering into my phone. (Proof of that is in the last post) I am however, feeling the weight of seasonal affective disorder lifting from me now that the sun has made it's return. The days are getting blessedly longer. If only it would stop being freezing out. May is a day away and we are still wearing down coats in the morning. I should live closer to the equator. 

So, update: Nothing is broken, but yesterday when I realized I could not move my purple big toe I did squeeze my swollen foot into an unlaced stretched out shoe and hobble over to the orthopedic walk in clinic. Even the PA over there thought that big grape charm's blow pop of a toe looked broken. They X-rayed my foot, wrist and back. Nothing broken. They did give me a wrist brace, a plank of black foam with velcro straps on top for my unbroken foot, and two prescriptions to get me through the healing process. And let me tell you, how amazing I feel when taking a combination of muscle relaxants and anti inflammatories. I feel freaking fantastic and I don't have weird dreams all night long. This is where drug addictions come from, I know. I don't even know which pills I am taking because (and you know this is true!) if I look too closely at the labels, I am bound to see a warning and then I will not take them, and I need them right now. I so don't want to know what kind of toxic mess is making me feel so good that I photographed the bottles and handed the orthodontist my phone so he could see what I am taking without me having to know. I'm so clever. And also, flexible and in less pain except for the 3 hours when I can feel them wearing off before I take my next 24 hour dose. Seriously, I went to stand from a chair late this afternoon, and thought, "What the heck?" Then I realized I was in count down until the next dose. Which is 49 minutes from now, but, hey who's counting? 

Anyway, I have 44 minutes left until pill time, I'm going to go lie down because that is about how energetic I feel.

 

Same thing every year

Oh my gawd 

I just fell fell down the stairs 

I won’t call it until the morning but there is a good chance I did something serious to my left foot. I can’t fuck up the feet folks! I need the feet for trekking though the woods. I also hurt my right knee and my tailbone, which incidentally just freaking stopped hurting from the last fall down the stairs 2.5 years ago. I need a ranch house.  

But back to the spaz out of the day....  I’m not sure what I did my foot but there is a bright red slash at the base of my big toe and it is throbbing with heat and pain. I’m sure there is some expired opiates from some dental procedure lying around so I will manage to get a good night’s sleep that way. I’m not kidding. Fingers crossed that by some miracle I wake up after my drug induced sleep wondering if a miracle cure happened over night. 

I was all set to tell you about the two tick bites I got on Thursday. They’re both on my back and I discovered an embedded tick around 9:30 at night. I had to ask Josh to pluck it out with a tweezer and then look for any other ticks. He found and removed another one. (Big deposit into the future therapy jar) One tick came out clean but the other one didn’t so I brought the tweezers to the dog park the next morning and asked my dog park friends to scrape it out. We were quite a scene with me sitting at a picnic table, head down trying not to fuss while three women tried to squeeze and pluck  out the freaking tick head while blotting away the blood.  

Today I went into the pharmacy and got allergy medicine and itch spray ( since I have to ask Josh to apply it I figured it was better to use spray than something he has to rub onto my hot red swollen tick bite sites) and the cashier told me that the way to get ticks out is with peppermint oil. Who knew?

the NYTimes had a gift guide for lother’s Day which completely inspired this text from me to the kids: 

I want a day with all three of you in which I can take as many photos of the three of you that I want. This means, all you have to do is show up and cooperate. Figure out a day that works for everyone and I'll figure out the activities.

Now I have to come with some fun plans. I’m on a few different Facebook groups for local persons. One is for here in new town and people so stuff like complain about being snowed in with their kids and ask for restaurant  recommendations for places in France with their picky eating not well behaved children and then there is the site where Matt lives, where people alert each other to huge pit holes, tell their neighbors when they put stuff out for free on the curb and are neighborly and helpful to each other. I want to ask the folks where Matt lives for some crazy ideas about photographing their three children since it’s actually a one day thing. Maybe I’ll ask for the same thing every year. 

Texts I sent today

To Matt at 8:30 this morning:

OMG. I've been waiting since 5:50 this morning to text this to you. Last night I dreamed that I was visiting you in jail. I was in a large square room with other visitors- lots of kids. We were all waiting and there was some issue with someone else's kid where I managed to bring her under control, and then all the prisoners filed in, got on a stage and began performing this cabaret which it turned out that you directed.  (Not a surprise). I watched you and the other prisoners singing and dancing on stage and all I could honk about was how great your hair looked and how you should continue to use the prison shampoo when you got out. 

(This text was too long to capture in a single sreen shot so I copied and pasted) 

 

To Josh: 

 

and finally To Evan, who is totally rocking his new legit university 

sad hostage

I suppose that if I'm sitting around wondering if I am depressed that means I am not actually depressed.  I'm trying to think back to the two times in my life when I was actually clinically depressed and I do not recall ever tossing around the question. 

But I'm older and wiser and hopefully more self aware now, so there is that.

Motivation is a huge issue for me, and by motivation, I mean just going through the mail seems like a huge victory, and I let it pile up for days on end before I sift through the piles of mostly recycling and pull out the bills to pay. Cooking seems like climbing a mountain every day. If I didn't have Josh here I'm not sure I would be doing it at all. Something that completely concerns me is that I've been napping every day. I do not like napping, I hate that groggy feeling waking up from a nap and I also hate how it messes up going to bed at night since I don't have to option of waking up what ever time I want to in the morning.

I suppose I do have the option to sleep as late I want in the morning, but I choose to be the kind of mom who makes her kid breakfast every day. That's because, as a kid, I had to leave my house at 6:50AM in order to get to my 8:15 first class on time when I was in high school and my mom told me it would not be possible for her to wake that early but I should give her a little shake and let know I was leaving every morning.  So I would get up, shower, dress, and on my out the door, I'd tip toe into her bedroom where she and my dad were fast asleep and shake her shoulder and tell her I was leaving. Needless to say I was amazed by my classmates whose mothers made them breakfast and packed them brown bag lunches every day and decided back then that I would be that kind of warm and fuzzy mom. I didn't eat breakfast and if I ate lunch it was something I purchased from the food cart on the corner outside my school. So, as an adult, I wake up every morning and do those things I wished were done for me. Sometimes I ask Josh to buy his lunch at school, but 95% of the time I hand him something in a thermos that I hope will stay warm until he can eat it. It's important to me that my kids know without a shadow of a doubt that they are loved, cherished, wanted and valued by me every single day.

Anyways, I'm wondering if I'm actually depressed or just a sad hostage to a demented husband.

Probably the latter.

I wouldn't take antidepressants if I was depressed, because these things solve themselves for me, so there really isn't a reason to pursue this any farther.

I do also feel like I am somehow in a survivalist modern day ice age movie since it's April 18th and its still so cold every night that I have to wear my long down coat to the dog park every morning. I also wear a scarf and gloves and maybe a second layer of polar fleece underneath. What the hell, weather?? I was afraid that I was being a bit of a wimp until I realized that everyone was wearing the same gear they were wearing in February, so we are all feeling the hurt here.

At least I dusted off the camera and photographed today. The light was right. I was feeling it. I knew that the temps would be working their way to 40 (easier on my hands holding the camera without gloves)  if I walked for an hour or so before actually shooting. My head was in the right space. Last night I took a long hot bath, which is where, for some reason, I begin to assemble visual ideas to inspire me to write poetry, which is pretty much describing to metaphorical visual ideas I build and refine in my imagination while in my bath. I need to figure out some way to place a pad and pen within reach of the tub. Sometimes I come up with so many ideas that I can only recall the most recent ones by the time I towel off and grab writing material. 

 

 

short list

I'm pretty sure that I once before posted about Picasso's Guernica. But, just incase I have not, I will give you the reader's digest version of my relationship with the masterpiece. 

When I was in grade school some organization (probably a museum) donated a huge amount of Guernica prints on beautiful thick poster board to my school. They used to give them to us so we could use the plain white backs for our own artistic creations. I was mesmerized by the image we were supposed to ignore. I could never look at Guernica enough. I would like to see Guernica in person one day, so here is my short bucket list.

1. See the real Guernica painting (not the Rockefeller commissioned woven version) in person.

 

I'm easy to please. Gotta go to Madrid.