Walking through the laundry room, I heard something scratching inside the furnace. Bindu heard it too. We went to investigate.

I determined the sound was coming from behind our 50-year-old gas furnace’s removable panel. I put my hand on the handle, and Bindu stationed herself at my feet to catch whatever might fall out and munch its head.

I pulled the panel off… and a bird flew out.

I have no idea how it got in there. Sometimes things come down the chimney and end up inside the wood stove, but how an entire adult bird came down the chimney and ended up inside the access panel of the damn gas furnace I will never understand.

After bonking into a few windows, the bird finally found the open door and flew out to blessed freedom, and probably a much-needed brunch of bugs.

I wonder if it will blog about the experience.
——–

I’m uploading pics of my new tattoo in the background, but since I’m on dial-up out here in the sticks, it’ll take forEVer. And yes that is my ass crack, thank you. (If you’ve never had a tattoo: the reason it looks like this is that it’s new, which means it’s still a little swollen, and it’s shiny because one keeps a new tattoo covered in ointment for a week or so, so that the skin doesn’t dry out and scab off. The tattoo above the new one is several years old.)

I slept more than five hours in a row last night, which speaks volumes for how fatigued I was after our whirlwind Chicago trip. Yay! And my GOD I had so much fun. Have I mentioned how much fun I had?!? I HAD SO MUCH FUN!

Today we took the eBay guy’s new toy to ABF to ship it, by way of 1-Stop rental for a box and some bailing wire, but they weren’t open yet. After a call to determine they’d remain not open for more than an hour, we came home and had a nooner (it was actually about one, but Mr. Brett insisted on calling it a nooner anyway) and then I took a nap.

UNTIL SIX.

IN THE EVENING.

Brett had gone out to mow the lawn and failed to notice that I hadn’t gotten up, and he totally laughed at me when I wandered into the living room at SIX P-fucking-M looking all touseled.

I called ABF and they were still open, so we drove back into town and dropped off the pallet, which proved to be rather fun in a redneck way, and then hit the Dairy Bar for malts. And Mr. Brett had a chili dog, which I enjoyed watching him eat almost as much as he obviously enjoyed eating it. “Only thing that would make this better is if it was a foot-long,” he pronounced afterward.

Then we hit Wal-Mart for canning lids and twelve pounds of salt and came home.

The canning lids were because Brett wanted (me) to pickle some asparagus, and the salt was for the asparagus patch. Aparently some old farmer dude told Brett in a bar recently that salt will kill grass and weeds but doesn’t harm asparagus, and since our asparagus patch looks more like lawn than garden he’s been wanting to give this salt approach a try.

There wasn’t all that much asparagus to pick this evening, so we only did a couple quarts, but I put four asian red hot chilis in each jar along with many cloves of garlic, so this batch should be hot as hell. My previous batches (here’s my first foray in pictures; but I’m much more legit now and I have a big canning pot and everything) were yummy but not particularly hot, and Brett wants some that is, to quote his redneck self, “so hot you need two assholes”-hot.

Now, if our VCR is actually still cabled to the entertainment center, I intend to go downstairs and so something I rarely do: commandeer the glass teat and watch something. On purpose. I’m rather in the mood to see Contact, a movie I adore, and I just happen to have it on video. Hopefully those tatt pics will finish uploading eventually.

When I went out to leave for work this morning, the Jeep wouldn’t start.

I had to walk up and down the hill between the house and the barn several times. First to find the charger. (In the barn. Not in the garage or honey house.) Then I had to find an extension cord. (Not in the garage, house, barn, or honey house. In the yard, in a pile.) Then I hooked it all together and plugged the Jeep in, and went inside and watched half of some morning show about well-balanced, clear-skinned virgins with good morals.

The boy, a virgin, asked his friend, a virgin, to double-date with him and the cute new girl, also a virgin. The friend, I believe, was in love with the boy and was pissed at being an extra on a dumb double with some other guy who had no lines. They all looked like they were 25, yet they were playing highschoolers. Dawson’s Creek, I think it was, or some shit.

Anyway. Then I went out and started the Jeep up and drove to work. Got here a freakin’ hour late, damn it.

The reason the battery dies is that I sit in it with the door open a lot, since I’m often too lazy to go find a lawn chair. The dome light kills the battery quite rapidly. I need a new battery, but am and will be too broke to buy one for another month or so.

(After that length of time, my DH assures me, he’ll be working a nicely-paying job and has plans to BUY. A. MOTORCYCLE. He never, ever, EVER stops buying stuff. I am so serious. I’ll be struggling to get my never-to-be-sufficiently-damned credit cards back under control and he’ll be shopping for ANOTHER. FREAKING. BIKE.)

Have I mentioned I want a Mac? (A Mini. And a powerbook. Yum.) Yes, I officially hate Windows now. The opsys I use is five years old, I hate XP too much to use it, and I’m certain the next Windows entry to the opsys world will be another bloatware behemoth. (I’ll keep at least one Windows box to run all my warez on, natch.) OSX, here I come!

Er, here I will come, if my husband ever stops shopping long enough for me to buy new geek equipment!

Brett rented a tractor this weekend and fixed the driveway. Turns out the culvert itself was totally fine; it was just that Nature had decided not to use it and instead had made a new path under the driveway… a much lower path, which is why the pond’s been so low for the past two years. Brett filled the hole in and hopefully the pond level will be higher after we get more rain.

He also graded most of the driveway, and did a bunch of earthwork in front of the porch. (In this area, basically.) He’s hoping to get that picnic table finished this summer. I am so excited!

I’m glad the driveway fix only required some of Mr. Brett’s time, and not thousands of dollars. Whew. And the whole driveway looks great now, and verges on being smooth!

(Yes, I took pictures. But they’re still on my camera. I’M BAD. I KNOW.)

My lawyer’s sent off a letter to the hospital’s lawyers, telling them what I’ve done to ‘hide’ the offending blog entry. I hope it satisfies them; I can’t express how pissed off I’ll be if they decide they want to go to court to get the whole entry removed. It’s so utterly out of line to demand I remove a post simply because they don’t like it. And no, of course they didn’t literally try to kill me, but it’s a diary post – people know the title isn’t literal.

I tell you three times I tell you three times I tell you three times: this is so fucking stupid. At first I was amused that my site was generating, you know, craziness, but now that I’m actually paying someone to write letters it’s not quite so funny any more. They’re being bullies, and it aggravates me.

Saturday night I went on my first blind date. I’d never been on one personally, so I sort of vicariously lived one through Erin and Dave… I have a friend from work who’s looking for a nice guy, and Brett’s friend Dave’s been looking for a nice girl forever, so we hooked them up.

We joined them for pizza at Torino’s. Dave was tense, Erin was nervous, but I had a great time! After pizza we walked up to that new bar, Deja Vu. (Boy was THAT a strange place.) After a couple of drinks there, we went to the bowling alley and played pool, and after that Brett and I went home. I think Erin dropped Dave off at his car and went home herself; I have no idea yet if they liked each other or not. Dave told Brett he’d had a good time, but I haven’t talked to Erin yet.

Conclusion: blind dates are fun, but only if you’re the double-date part. Snort!

It rained yesterday and much of the night.

Our driveway – a culvert between a pond and a runoff – collapsed. Now there’s a hole smack dab in the center that’s about three feet wide and twelve feet deep.

Do you have any idea how much it will cost to FIX THIS?!?!? Arrrrgh!

Sunday morning, we got up at four AM. I know, I know! You’re right! That IS gross!

We did it so we could drive to Nebraska, meet a total stranger, and pick up a flathead motor and tranny that Brett bought off of eBay.

Four. In. The. Morning.

By the time the sun was up I was feeling pretty groggy and bitchy. I had to pee, I was STARVING, and my dearly beloved kept driving past all the exits with golden arches. By the time my situation became intense, we were in B.F.E. with no hope of a decent exit in sight. I finally got him to just pull the hell off so I could pee before I suffered permanant bladder damage, and we ended up in a town with literally nothing in it – a quaint but empty square two miles from the highway. Argh! Brett located a Casey’s before I had to pee in a ditch, and he bought himself breakfast but I got a doughnut because some lady in front of me bought the last croissant with no dead animal flesh on it. Hurumph.

Back on the freeway. We’d been driving for four hours and it wasn’t even eight in the morning yet. Fortunately, there was a McDonald’s a few exits down and I finally got something to eat. Whew. And then: I took a nap. Damn right.

By ten AM we were parked in the parking lot of a Super 8 at the predetermined exit off of I-80. Brett called the guy, the guy was running late. I ran around in the Super 8’s yard with Meathead and we played fetch with a plastic pop bottle (until he popped it – he was so startled when pop started spraying out – so cute).

The guy and his partner showed up, and they transferred this big, old, rusty looking engine/tranny from their truck to our truck. Then the three of them stood around smoking cigarettes and talkin’ parts for awhile, Brett gave the guy his money, they strapped the engine down, and the other guys drove off.

Brett was totally stoked with his new flathead. There’s a rumor the thing might actually run; wouldn’t that be cool?

Then we drove some more. By now it’s noon, I’ve been in the truck since ten to five, and if my hubby wasn’t so pleased with the world I think I would have been grumpy. As it was, I commandeered his stereo and rocked out to some iPod action for awhile – so nice to listen to soul and R&B instead of blue eyed blues and rock! Eventually, we returned to Des Moines. And Mr. Brett was Ready For Dinner.

So I called Tahmi. She answered, “Hello, this is Tahmi.”

“Tahmi! It’s Mush!”

“Hi Mush!”

“Will you be OnStar for me?”

“Sure!”

“Okay, I’m in Des Moines on the way back from Nebraska, I’ve been up since four AM, and we’re hungry. Where do we go to eat in Des Moines?”

“What are you in the mood for?”

“We don’t care. Something good. Uh, Italian.”

“Oh! Yeah! And you’re with a big eater! Go to that place, ah… I can’t remember the name. It’s family-style Italian.”

“Oh! Yeah! We ate there together once, right?”

“Yeah. Where are you at?”

I read her the upcoming exit name and she squealed, “Get off now! NOW! That’s your exit!” I relayed her urgency to Mr. Brett, who crossed two lanes in about six feet of forward motion and got us off at the exit. Such a stud. Tahmi gave us directions to ‘that Italian place past Olive Garden, on the right’ and I thanked her profusely and hung up.

“You’re gonna love this place,” I told Brett.

So we ate delicious food at Buca Di Beppo and I’ll tell ya, it made the WHOLE TRIP TOTALLY WORTH IT, even the gross getting-up-at-four part. Their food is awesome, and my beloved redhead had some kind of foodgasm when he tucked into his veal parmigiana. We ordered a second garlic bread to take home with our leftovers. Yum, yum, YUM.

I love that place. I’d only been there twice: once with Krista & Barb, and once with Tahmi, but it’s so fun there. The place is stuffed to the rafters with tchotchke, the staff is great, the food is amazing, and, well, I just really enjoyed myself. AND we had delicious left-overs to take home with us. (I had two manicottis to look forward to, Brett had more veal, and there was a whole order of garlic-cheese bread. Yes!)

Back in the truck. We drove home. By the time we got there it had taken over ten hours of driving, I’d been in the truck so long my ass was sore, and I was exhausted even though I hadn’t done anything but sit all day. We ate our leftovers around 7:30 and MAN OH MAN was the stuff delicious!

I think we were both passed out by eight o’clock.

The moral of the story is this: don’t let your husband get on eBay. Ever. But if he does, maybe you’ll get a decent meal out of the deal!

Apparently nothing’s happening, because I haven’t blogged in days. Other than the new old-fashioned deep freeze that Brett and Jimbo unloaded into the driveway, life is normal.

I’m LimeWiring for Prince and Erykah Badu in the background.

With a big freezer, maybe I could become that Organized Woman who makes several lasagnas and freezes a few of them, who always has frozen homemade soups and burritoes and dough and produce in her freezer.

Maybe I could get so organized that I only cook once a week, and the rest of the time I just heat whatever I’ve defrosted and make a salad. Could that happen?

Maybe. But not before we get the damned freezer out of the driveway and INTO THE HOUSE.
——–

First of all, today’s Chicken’s birthday. For some reason, this means that Brett and I went out to the Dew Drop last night and Drank. Our. Dinner. (Several times over, to judge by the way I feel today.) We didn’t get home ’til nearly ten – on a work night!

I drank so much I actually puked before I could get to sleep. (Ugh.) Brett says he managed to pass out before the spins hit him, but I wasn’t so lucky. And no, I have no idea what the hell we were thinking. It’s just that Chicken and Hoss were so terribly fun – and the fact that drinks are so cheap in Iowa that you can put yourself in the hospital with blood poisoning for less than twenty bucks.

Incidentally, Chicken’s birthday party will be celebrated at the Ba-tavern this Saturday night, if you’re so inclined. We told him we’d bring him an inbred, cross-eyed, buck-toothed chick from Missouri for his birthday. Snort!

This morning I woke up still drunk, took a really long hot shower, and made myself some White Trash Breakfast From Hell while sucking down glass after glass of water. Brett informed me that the blower motor on our prehistoric Lennox furnace had seized up during the night. This is not good, since our furnace is so old that they probably don’t make parts for it any more, but Brett’s working on finding something for it this morning. Hopefully he’ll find a motor that will fit, and everything will be hunky-dory. If he doesn’t, we’ll have to run space heaters while we’re gone and hope it’s enough to keep the house from freezing. I hope he remembers to find someone to let the dogs out tonight and tomorrow morning while he’s at it.

I came all the way to town to work for a mere three hours this morning, mostly because Buzz said he’d probably be late today and someone should be here. My commute sucked: my body decided a hangover wasn’t sufficient punishment for being an idiot, and now I’m having a panic attack. Every few minutes my chest feels… weird, I get one of those hated, never-to-be-sufficiently-damned adrenaline surges, and I have to remind myself that the very fact that I’m amped and afraid means I’m not actually dying.

I hate hormones.

Seriously.

Dude.

I’ve been paying attention to the days I have attacks and the days I don’t; sometimes it seems tied to my fertility cycle and other times it seems utterly random. I started thinking it might be dependent on my estrogen/progesterone balance after the miscarriage was followed by a week of the worst panic hell I’ve ever known. (Honestly, I don’t know how something as complex as the female fertility cycle could possibly fail to affect the rest of my hormone production, but who knows.) All I know is that [a] I’m not REALLY dying, despite the hormonal messages to the contrary, and [b] FUCK having to feel like I’m dying. Ever.

I’m not even particularly afraid of dying. I’m afraid of pain, yes, but not dying. Believe it or not, that’s my panic attack mantra: If I were dying, I wouldn’t actually be afraid, so that means this is not a heart attack but adrenaline and safe to ignore.

I hate this whole trip. Yes, I’m definitely learning a great deal from it – about life, health, attachment, the mind, and the nature of fear – but I hate it anyway. I hate feeling physically terrified while mentally I know I’m fine. I hate the thumping heart, the skippped heart beats, the obsessive hyper awareness of my heart and lungs, the tension I keep having to relax from, over and over again, when I find myself utterly locked up – it’s really no wonder I feel pains in my chest, and my fingers get cold or tingly, I get so tense. The adrenaline and other hormones make me so tense I can’t even breathe naturally.

Worst of all, I swear I’m not doing it. Most of what I read says the start of these attacks is mental, that I have to be thinking something that sets off the fight-or-flight hormone reaction. But the thing is, I’m just… not. Ever. I have observed in myself how I can make the attacks worse by freaking out or better by not freaking out, but this is a physiological issue and simply not a mental one. These attacks start all on their own whenever they want to, and what I’m thinking or doing is totally irrelevant. And the best news is – yay – there’s absolutely nothing medicine can do about it. I just get to pursue the non-allopathic paths and suck it up. Thank God for yoga and meditation, that’s all I have to say. And I really, really, really need to see an acupuncturist already!

Oh, being an optimist by nature, I do have to report that there is one benefit to this stupid anxiety condition: it’s its own laxative. Once you’ve got a circulatory system chock full of adrenaline, well, it’s stronger than coffee!

At noon I’ll go collect Joe from his tooly habitat and we’ll head farmward. There, we’ll load up into Brett’s truck and take ourselves, our XMs and iPods, and a change of clothes each to Columbia, MO. The Dew Droppers agreed last night that the drive will be about three and a half hours; so we should get there in the 3:30-to-5:00 range, depending on how much we screw around. I confirmed our hotel reservation last night, so most likely we’ll check in there first and then wander around until it’s time to get in line for the show. I expect to have fun, but I sincerely doubt I’ll be drinking much – if at all!

I’d better go check in on the DSL database before noon arrives. Ciao!
——–

Yesterday afternoon, while I was helping Mr. Brett set the three remaining columns on the porch, I found out that he was havin’ a hankerin’ for Mt. Hamill chicken.

We left for town around 4:30 and met up with the 1-Stop Rental crew for a bit. Jason was in the middle of balancing the till, but still had the manners to say “thank you” when I told him he was cute, and didn’t get pissed off when I bolted the front door and then proceeded to push it open.

Joe hopped in Brett’s truck with us, and we followed Bo home and picked him up, and off we went to find fried chicken!

In Mt. Hamill Iowa, a town consisting of a dirt road and about five buildings, there is a rather large tavern that serves the best fried chicken in the world. The t-shirts you can buy there say, “To get a better piece of chicken, you have to be a rooster!”

I don’t eat chicken, of course, having a trendy eating disorder and all, but the stuff does appear to have a lovely beer batter on it, and you really can’t go wrong with beer batter. But they have a salad bar and they make cocktails, and plus Brett probably wouldn’t leave me at home anyway ’cause he’s bossy like that, so I usually end up going even though I couldn’t care less about fried chicken.

Anyway, there was a cluster of pre-teens in front of the jukebox playing AC/DC songs and singing along that warmed the cockles of Joe’s heart, and Brett was just so damned pleased to be eating fried chicken after craving it all day that I thought my heart would burst for being happy for him. Bo just seemed mellow and glad to be out somewhere.

When you order the chicken dinner at Mt. Hamill, you get half a fried chicken, french fries, cole slaw, a couple of dill pickle chips, and a single piece of white bread with margarine on it. This bounty comes on a styrofoam plate and the meal is piled about four inches deep. The waitresses – there are at least six of them at any given time – never use trays and can carry six or eight of these meals each. On a busy night, the kitchen goes through a thousand whole chickens. Any time after 6, it’s standing room only in there, and you never get your dinner in fewer than thirty minutes after ordering. People pour in and out the doors all night, the bar is busy, the waitresses defy laws of physics, and kids run around screaming while the empty beer bottles pile up on their parents tables.

The whole place is a trip.

After eating we rode back to Fairfield in silence, digesting and listening to disc #3 of Brett’s new Gov’t Mule album, “LIVE… With a Little Help From Our Friends.” We dropped Bo & Joe at their place and headed home ourselves.
Continue reading Well, I'm Hung Over →

In a fit of foresight and organization, I went outside this afternoon to disinter the Jeep from its icy cocoon.

I haven’t driven it since the ice storm(s) and snow, so it was basically frozen to the ground and entombed in ice with a blanket of snow.

I had to kick the handle several times before I could get the door open. I started it up, put the defrost on full blast, and then went into the shed and plugged in the compressor.

I went inside and shifted laundry from one machine to the other. Then I put on a pair of jeans.

I went back outside and filled the Jeep’s flat tire with air, then unplugged the comressor and tossed the air hose back into the shed.

I moved the car about ten feet, and I even had to do it in 4WD: back, then forward again about a foot to the right of where it had been frozen to the ground. I did this for no good reason other than it seemed seemly to unstick it from the icy puddles it had been sitting in.

I took our old blue plastic-bristled utility broom and went to attack the Jeep. I swept snow off of it, scratched huge chunks of ice off of it. At some point I was removing old snow so vigourously that I broke the old broom handle in half. “Damn!” I exclaimed, surprized at my herculean effort, then matter-of-factly used the pointy end to scrape ice off of the windshield wipers. I inspected all the windows and door handles for ice. The Jeep was clean and in working order.

Finally, satisfied that I’d work-prepped my car and wouldn’t have to do much more in the morning other than turn it on, I turned it off and headed for the house.

I heard a splattering sound. It sounded like a race horse peeing. I turned back from the door and squatted so I could see under the Jeep, and damn if it wasn’t just busily pouring a few gallons of antifreeze right on the ground.

THAT’LL teach me to try and have an organized morning.