Ouch!

So I got one of the new Fruitista Freezes at Taco Hell today because it’s like a million degrees outside in Memphis today. I got the just Strawberry instead of the Strawberry Mango, ‘cos sometimes mango doesn’t taste too good to me.

I give it a pretty enthusiastic thumbs up, even with the half dozen ice cream headaches that came with it.

The Squirrel Queen claims that one can relieve brain freeze by pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth, adding that it warms the nerve endings there that cause the ache. And Rachel agreed with her. But I dunno about that, that sounds awfully weird to me. I’ll try it next time tho.

Saturday Afternoon’s Alright For Fighting, Apparently

Pretty much everything I had planned for the weekend, especially dog baths, has been put on hold while I nurse a sore finger and hand (other hand). A neighborhood dog somehow wandered into my back yard yesterday and, naturally, there was a dog fight, and apparently I lost.

My left index finger is bruised and purple and swollen and hurting lots more today than it did yesterday, though I don’t think it’s broken, and my right hand is faring only a little better. There’s really only so much you can do in that situation and you can’t REALLY break up a multi-dog altercation like that when you’re just one person, and frankly I didn’t even realize I was hurt until after it was all over with. The wandering dog appeared to be okay and probably more frightened than hurt, and again, I was probably more injured than anyone else.

I know the wayward dog’s owners are having trouble keeping him from getting out of their own fence; like many Labs and Lab mixes, he’s apparently a master at sneaking out. And he’s loose all the time, a sweet dog but skittish, and tends to bark at people. I stepped out the front door once to find the postal carrier standing on my porch with mace in her hand and scared to death, so much so I had to walk her through her next two or three stops and past the neighbor dog to assure her it would be okay and he wouldn’t bother her. I think the postal service, if not someone else on the street, has called about him being loose before. He’s loose so much, and for such long periods of time, I worry about what might happen to him.

On the other side of the coin, mine never get out of their back yard, save for a couple of accidental escapes where they were reined in quickly. In fact, they don’t even go out unsupervised because I know there’s a few places they could scoot out, even though they are clueless about it.

One time when one of those accidental escapes occurred, the utility meter reader lady was standing at the side of the house, and at first I was worried sick what might happen, but then Tweedledee and Tweedledummy (Buster and Bruiser) were just walking around her and then walking around the front yard like la-la-la-la-la. I just rolled my eyes and herded them back through the gate and into the back yard.

People come in the house and they’re fine, if not a little hyperactive. When the AC repairman came the first time, I managed to get everyone put up in the bedroom except Bruiser, who refused to go. And who hid under a table the entire time the guy was here.

Bruiser and Buster have wiggled through the gate and run around the front yard with that very same dog out there outside the gate before, with no ill effects. My dogs live with numerous cats. I could bring that dog into the house (though it would never happen, he’s much too skittish) and aside from the hyperactivity that would result, things would be fine.

But let that dog or another cat that’s not theirs or a bird or a rodent or whatever that’s not supposed to be there show up in their back yard – their territory – and all hell breaks loose. Especially, I guess, another male dog being a supposed huge threat.

I know it’s only natural for dogs to defend their own territory from other dogs, and then there’s the protection factor – i.e., in their dog minds, they’re protecting me and Daisy and probably Lulu (even though she’s a grump) – but it makes me so mad and I was just furious with them and when they finally got some sense into their heads, they knew they were in trouble with the real pack leader (me), especially Dobie, who so knows better. I suspect Bruiser didn’t have much to do with any of it though I really can’t remember. Yet another episode that probably lasted less than a minute, though it seemed like an hour to me.

It’s just irritating. I know it’s natural, I know dogs are territorial animals, and as Say Uncle has recently reminded us all, dogs are natural fighters and natural killers.

And it’s not just dogs – many years ago, one of my cats shot out the front door to attack a feline interloper who had been bothering the next door neighbor’s kitten playing outside, and that was as vicious a fight as yesterday’s event. I have a scar on my shoulder from childhood, from picking up an indoor cat who was ready to kill another male cat standing outside growling on the other side of a sliding glass door. My cat’s claw went ALL the way into my shoulder and got stuck, and later I got my first tetanus shot.

In any case, historically, I seem to always be the biggest casualty in any cat or dog altercation. Maybe one of these days I’ll learn my lesson.

In the meantime, my finger aches like crazy. And it’s really hard when you’re right handed to put Band-Aids on correctly on your right hand with your left. Unless you’re ambidextrous, I guess.

Looking Through a Cracked Mirror

So, welcome back to Jeez, This Blog is Turning Into a Drag Central again. Sorry, I seem to have misplaced my sense of humor temporarily. The Lynnster Zone, Your Daily Dose of Blah.

Today I got four whole hours of sleep, which is certainly more than I’ve had at one time in the past two weeks, so that was good. Except I would have really liked to have stayed in (my very warm) bed for a few more hours, seeing as how it was my day off. But nope, there were vehicle matters to be attended to, so I rose to greet the day with hope and a halfway decent night’s sleep behind me.

So about those car matters. Dead Vehicle #1, the one that conked out last weekend, remains where the tow truck left it in front of my house. It’s older and has needed much more work besides just the known popped drive belt, so the logical decision was to get Dead Vehicle #2, the newer, in for quick repair.

It was thought – keyword there being THOUGHT – that all Dead Vehicle #2 needed was a new battery. Got the battery jumped off, drove it to the auto place. Battery and some other general maintenance, winterizing, and tire rotation (and airing up since DV#2 had two near-flats) planned. It was noonish. Estimated time of departure: 2 p.m. Which would have given me the rest of the afternoon to take Dead (and Expired Registration) Vehicle #2 through inspection, and then to the clerk’s office to pick up new tags & plate.

Well, first of all, don’t know why I didn’t expect the monkey wrench to fall in my lap anyway. Because it always does. It shouldn’t have been unexpected. I am not a pessimist, I’m just a realist. If something can possibly go wrong and I’m involved, it most likely always will.

Oh no, DV#2 doesn’t JUST need a new battery (might not even really need one, but it has been a while). DV#2 has an electrical short. That is going to require DV#2 to be towed to another shop that does electrical repair since where it currently is doesn’t. Then, after however much money said tow and repair will cost, expected then No Longer Dead Vehicle #2 will return to Place #1 for the rest of what it was supposed to have done today.

So about 6:30 p.m. (my entire day off now pretty much having been spent in the waiting area at the auto shop), I walk a few blocks to Kroger because I have no food I want to have for dinner at the house. Then I walked a couple more blocks to Starbucks for a white mocha latte while I wait for the cab I called, since I decided not to walk the three or so miles home in the freezing damn cold and my not-as-bad-as-the-bad foot was hurting pretty bad anyway.

Funny thing about my feet. The bad one is the left one that I sprained horribly a little over three years and wish I had broken instead, because (as the doctor said at the time) it’s given me trouble ever since that it might not have if I’d broken it. But that one wasn’t acting up today. Instead, because I walk just wrong enough to compensate for the bad one, I have effectively now made the right foot probably worse than the bad left one as far as pain, swelling, and general yuckiness. But enough about my f’d up feet.

So now after having gotten home pretty late, spending most of the evening on the phone with my mom, my future mom-in-law, and my friend and former neighbor (who is doing much better, thanks) and generally getting nothing else I had planned today and tonight done… I think I’ll just finish catching up for the evening and soon crawl in bed since it’s like two degrees anyway. Soon anyhow.

At least I did almost finish Anthony Kiedis’ Scar Tissue while waiting around the car shop, after having started reading it, I don’t know, nine or ten months ago. That wasn’t exactly the accomplishment I had planned today, but I guess it’s one.

Well, tune in tomorrow, it can probably only get worse…

Let It Bleed

If you get a chance tonight or in the morning, hop over to Secret Cables and give nashgirl some encouragement towards her making another effort to give blood tomorrow. I know just how she feels, and I think it’s awesome she wants to try again and wants to help.

I have only given blood twice in my life, and not only am I an extremely slow bleeder like she is – both times I passed out cold. I also accidentally tried to cut my hand off once, and the same thing happened.

You may say to yourself, “But Lynnster, I thought I read that you have worked in the medical field since you were 16 years old.” Indeed that is true. And I have even worked in two emergency rooms, including a busy one in south Nashville back in the late ’80s. That’s why this story’s even more crazy.

And ironically, the first time I gave blood was when I was a senior in high school as well, back four million years ago. The Beta Club at my school was sponsoring a blood drive, and pretty much all of us who were 18 and eligible signed up to give. They had assigned a time for each of the givers, and I just happened to wind up the first one on the list.

So the morning came, and we were all lined up by our assigned times in the gym. I was #1, and a boy in my class who had not only the biggest (size 14) feet in class but the entire school – we’ll call him Bigfoot (don’t get excited, Newscoma) – was #2. Bigfoot and I went thru all the usual registration rigamarole they do when it’s your first time, and then were sent to the other side of the gym to take our places on the lounge chairs they had set up.

So they stick me, and I commence to bleeding. A girl in my class who was in the Beta Club was parked next to me as a “watcher”, and we were just hanging out there chatting about whatever.

She told me, later, that I was in the middle of a sentence and suddenly, my head just went down - thunk! – on my chest. I was out like a light.

It gets better. Bigfoot, in the next lounge chair over, passed out just seconds after I did. And not only that, but he went into mild convulsions as well. Rad!

I don’t know how many of the other seniors standing waiting in line turned around and walked out of the gym at that moment. I know there were a few. When I came to, it was like I’d been asleep for half a day, though I was only out for a minute or two. And I felt fine. It did take forever for me to fill the bag, but I did eventually finish bleeding.

Not sure whether Bigfoot stuck out the rest of the day or not or went home. He was still out when I came to, and there was the convulsions thing.

I would have chalked that experience up to the possibility of it having been the first thing in the morning, and I wasn’t a big breakfast eater, and that being why I passed out. But then I tried to give blood again about five years later.

The Freeloader Ex and I were living together at the time, and he was waiting tables for a living and would go give blood or plasma any chance he got, because over at the University blood center they’d pay for blood, and the plasma center paid for plasma. One day I was off work and he was going to go give blood, so I decided I would too.

Once again, it was taking forever for them to take mine. He got through, and I’d barely started. He waited around a few more minutes, and then decided he’d go outside and smoke, since it was taking me so long.

When he finished and walked back in, he about had a heart attack. Not only had I passed out again, but I had started going into convulsions this time, and the nurses were furiously trying to bring me back. And what was really freaking him out was, he said, my lips had turned blue.

Of course, I was eventually conscious again and all was well, but I didn’t feel so good this time. And there wasn’t any obvious reason for it to have happened, I’d eaten lunch, wasn’t dehydrated, none of those things.

A year or so later, Freeloader Ex and I are at home watching TV with one of our best friends, who just happened to be staying here with us and living in our guest room at the time. That best friend just happened to be the fella now known here nowadays as The Edge, nowadays known as my current better half. Yeah, I know, funny how things turn out.

I was trying to get one of those annoying plastic wrapped packages open, and had gotten out an X-Acto blade to try to get the stupid thing open. It wasn’t cooperating.

In fact, it wasn’t cooperating so much that the next thing I knew, the blade slipped and stuck itself way down deep in the lower part of the palm of my hand. Oops. And ouch.

I was rather oddly calm sitting there watching blood pour out of the wound. I didn’t seem to be bleeding all that slowly this time.

I tapped Freeloader Ex, sitting next to me on the couch, on the shoulder. “What?” he said as he turned around. And then he looked down at my outstretched hand, his eyes nearly popped out of his head, and panic set in.

Not really sure why he did this first part, but first he led me to the bathroom and held my bleeding hand over the toilet. Then (also inexplicably since yeah, we did have a bathroom sink) he led me to the kitchen, turned the cold water on, and held my hand under the water.

I think I was saying something like it didn’t really hurt that much when – they told me later – I went down and basically just melted into the floor, crumpled in a ball.

Once again, I was only unconscious for seconds, maybe a full minute at best. When I came to, the two guys were carrying me to the couch – The Edge had my feet, Freeloader Ex dragging me from under my arms. Sat me down, propped my feet up. Did probably a hundred things they thought might make me better, the only one of which I remember now was The Edge making me drink a Coke (a regular Coke) with sugar added to it.

What I remember about THEM was their faces were whiter than sheets and more drained than mine, it completely freaked them out. And they fussed and fussed over me for hours until they seemed satisfied I wasn’t going to fall over and die any second. Well, after we’d stopped the bleeding, which we did. I still have a nice little scar there.

So yep, medical person with nearly 25 years experience here, and quite a bit of experience working in the ER. And I apparently can’t stand the sight of my own blood, or at least not more than a little.

Now, I can watch anyone else bleed all day, and have seen plenty of it in the ER for sure. I can watch you have surgery (though I draw the line at brain surgery – brains are gross). Nooooo problem.

But when it comes to my own, nope, apparently not.

I keep thinking I might try to go give blood again one of these days, just to see what’ll happen this time. Stay tuned, I’ll certainly let you know if I do.

Gonna Sign It, Gonna Seal It

Oops sorry, I’ve been soooo freakin’ swamped, so much so that I have fallen into this habit lately of literally falling asleep sitting straight up at the computer, on a whole lot of occasions after the main workday is thru. I am working the equivalent of about five different jobs right now and I am just absolutely exhausted. Apologies.

I think I forgot to mention that in the summer of 2003, I almost broke my foot, but didn’t break it – just sprained it badly instead – and consequently I wish to god I’d just broken the damn thing now ‘cos almost two years later it still hurts ALL THE TIME. A lot of walking aggravates it very nicely but I don’t even have to do that, don’t have to do ANYTHING. What happened was I was walking very quickly across the back yard and stepped in a hole and fell, twisting it as I went down. It is a fair piece from there to my back door and for a while it was rather questionable whether I was going to make it back there or not, for a while I thought my neighbor might find me lying there still writhing in pain some nine or ten hours later when he returned home from work. You have rarely seen skin turn so many different colors but the predominant ones were black and purple, top and bottom of foot both. It got so bad that I, who have always worked for doctors but don’t GO to them – the very idea – broke down and went that very afternoon. The doc looked at it and before he sent me for the x-ray he said, “Well, if it’s not broken, I think you got about as close as you could to breaking it and I think you’re going to wish you had.” Boy, was that an understatement. It wasn’t but close enough and I wound up in one of those removable casts for weeks, but the biggest problem with the removable cast was that most of the pain was in the TOP of my foot – right where most of that part of the cast’s pressure was. So that didn’t last long, after a few weeks I was over that and decided I’d rather struggle with it moving around than deal with the pain inflicted by that cast. He also wanted to send me to physical therapy, which I didn’t do, but even he admitted it probably wouldn’t help much and I’d already done far more than I normally would by even seeing a doctor. So hobble along on my own I did. I have had a few brief periods of respite but mostly it just hurts like a… yeah, that. And like I said I don’t have to do anything. Lie in bed and it just throbs. I’m about to the point where I have half a mind to break it on purpose and see if it will FINALLY stop torturing me eventually – I feel sure that is not a cure and would probably just make things worse tho. Even better, now the OTHER foot hurts all the time too because I walk funny – not noticeably but not right – because of the bum foot. Yeah, my body has been falling apart steadily since I turned thirty and this has just really exacerbated the degeneration. If I make it to forty only lame and deaf and without my teeth all having fallen out (another story for another time! aren’t you excited) it’ll be a miracle I think.

I’m also a little worried ‘cos I keep catching myself doing REALLY strange stuff, like the other day I was bopping around the house straightening up or something (limping, of course) and I all of a sudden realized that for about the last thirty minutes I had been walking around humming the Bay City Rollers’ “Rock & Roll Love Letter”. Then tonight I was putting up groceries when it suddenly dawned on me that I had been whistling Foghat’s “Free Ride” the whole time. Help, I would appear to be stuck in my least favorite decade of all time. I’m afraid it might be disco next or something…

Hey, if you’ve not dropped by here in a while check out March 2005 since those were the first new entries in a long while and there’s lots of stuff on there in catching up the last two years. If I ever stop burning the proverbial candle at four hundred thousand different ends I might update here again soon. ’til then, as R.B. used to say be easy, and if you can’t be easy be slow…

Look Straight at the Comin’ Disaster

OK, you know what? It’s cold. I am freezing my tail off. It’s supposed to warm up a bit tomorrow and so I decided since I’ve got to get out and do some stuff tomorrow anyway I’d just put off all the things I need to do around town ’til then. Thus, as soon as I get all this pending Web stuff uploaded and stuff, I intend to curl up with a good book, which will undoubtably make me go straight to sleep, and hopefully get up before four in the afternoon tomorrow. Errands to run, vintage Barbie stuff to seek out at my favorite little haunt across the river in Arkansas, and other chores… I figure the only thing I am dangerously on the verge of maybe running out of before Saturday night is cat food, and don’t think I will, so I’m going to curl up, drink a bunch of Bailey’s & coffee (I also received a new bottle of Bailey’s for Xmas this year so I don’t have to be so stingy with the other one, yeeha, thanks Troy & Andra), and try to stay warm. OK. Brrrrr.

There’s been much discussion among the AW camp lately about various and sundry musical influences and other such stuff, lately we have been “re-discovering” some old stuff, like the previously mentioned Cheap Trick remasters as well as many more, and nodding our heads and saying really highly intelligent things to each other like, “Well yeah” and “Oh so that’s where that came from” and other highly insightful things such. (I think I will start a Memphis chapter of Mensa for Musicians…)

Anyhow, with all the Trick nostalgia lately I was thinking, you know the musical influences spread far and wide (and certainly includes Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen!) but my biggest musical influence, by far, would be my dad, as that’s exactly where I get the musical, uh, sickness from. I am ever grateful for that… I was exposed to so much cool stuff at such a very young age and, while I suppose I would have more money were it not for the musical sickness and certainly wouldn’t have to always be finding a place in the house for all the stuff I have to go – that great big CD rack that was less than half full for a long time is now, ugh, almost full – what I have musically, materially or otherwise, is worth more than any money I’ve lost to record stores and music stores all over the world. I dug some of my dad’s music and tolerated some of the rest, and, in turn, he dug some of mine and tolerated, with an unending supply of patience, the rest. We’ve always had a mutual respect for each other on that level, which I in turn share with many of my friends and former friends – we may not like all of each other’s music, but we appreciate each other’s huge appreciation of it, and vice versa. Does that make sense?

I dunno, I was just thinking during one of those recent long drives that it was kinda cool that there was never any generation gap musically there in my family – I grew up digging Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Gene Vincent… in turn, my dad, being a drummer, always thought Mick Fleetwood, Bev Bevan of ELO, Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick, Charlie Watts, and Keith Moon were awesome drummers. I don’t know – and there’s really no point to this – I just thought that was kinda cool.

Anyway… you non-musically-inclined folk and anyone else are welcome to skip this paragraph as it won’t be interesting in the least… I’ve been scribbling on pieces of paper I can’t read now and Josie, Greg and I have been exchanging one sentence e-mails (“How about this – (insert whatever here)”) and have just about come up with a list for what’s supposed to be a kinda quiet but a little noise allowed semi-acoustic set (maybe bass and Jo’s drums too, no less, but basically unplugged), however right now it’s a little heavy on Lemonheads and light otherwise… all suggestions and revisions welcome. For the moment it looks like, or at least what I can read in my own handwriting, in no particular order: Trail of Tears and Sleepers Awake (Guadalcanal Diary); If I Could Talk I’d Tell You, The Great Big No, It’s A Shame About Ray, Mrs. Robinson, Into Your Arms, and Frank Mills, (Lemonheads, god bless Evan Dando); Feed The Tree (Belly); Wonderwall (Oasis); September Gurls (Big Star); House of the Rising Sun (The Animals); Until I Fall Away, Mrs. Rita, and Allison Road (Gin Blossoms); Drive, Cuyahoga, and Try Not To Breathe (R.E.M.); As Tears Go By, Wild Horses, and Angie (Stones); The Brown Song (Martini Age); It’s Too Slow, Death Defying and Heart of Darkness (Hoodoo Gurus); Hey Joe (Hendrix); Your Ghost (Kristin Hersh); Behind Blue Eyes (The Who); Late At Night (Buffalo Tom); Horseshoes (Moxy Fruvous); Shivers (Birthday Party); This Very Second (Bill Lloyd); Misfits, Sleepwalker, and Celluloid Heroes (The Kinks); Dover Beach (Bangles); The Door Into Summer (The Monkees); If You Could Only See (Tonic); Swingin Party and Here Comes A Regular (Replacements); Voices and Downed (Cheap Trick); Song For Liars and We Don’t Care (dig); Alive (Pearl Jam); maybe a couple or three originals; and I guess no Clash ending since that just sounds crappy without being plugged in. It sounds like a lot but some of those are really short it’s like two for one. Basically the idea is starting out quietish then as things progress, dinner’s over, and everyone starts getting really drunk the volume gets upped. Revision suggestions (as well as requests from those who will be in attendance) are welcome, except for KC who is not allowed to bitch about “enough of the freaking Lemonheads”…

Speaking of handwriting, one of my ultimate goals for the year is to write letters to everyone I owe, some I’ve owed for many years now!, letters to… these are things I’ve put off and put off and put off again, and I really must, but lord, it would all be so much easier if everyone I knew was online. Well, then again, then I’d probably owe them e-mail like I do everyone else, but honestly, I can’t even stand to pick up a pen and paper anymore. Once upon a time I had perfect beautiful precise and perfect handwriting, and I could write ten page letters, no prob. Now I can’t even read my own handwriting it’s so pitiful.

And oh hey, that big bad boy of a blister’s gone and completely healed up… surgical topical anesthesia and little needles and scalpels work wonders. So anyway, til later…

Wipe Out

Well, I had good intentions anyway… I was going to update a whole bunch of pages on the site Wednesday night, mainly in the Bands and related sections, and actually did start doing some, but had to stop because I had the biggest most painful blister on one finger I’ve ever seen and typing was making it hurt much, much worse, that sucker was huge. You wouldn’t think one single solitary blister would make one feel all over that bad and you wouldn’t think just tapping on the keys of a computer keyboard occasionally would be so tremendously painful but my god, it was, I just had to stop what I was doing and go to bed.

This will hopefully teach me a bit of a lesson as what happened was that I played guitar Tuesday night for the first time in, I dunno, a couple of months or so anyhow ‘cos I’ve been so busy otherwise, so not only does practice make perfect but practice keeps blisters the size of the state of New Hampshire off one’s fingers I suppose.

At the point where I stopped what I’d been doing with web pages, I would have just about as soon amputated the hand (luckily the left… but read on for news about the right hand). And, anyone who’s ever seen me type knows how fast I type, do you have any idea how hard it is to try to avoid not typing with one of your fingers? Eventually I just gave up and went to bed in agony.

So, lucky me I work for a surgeon, and spent part of yesterday morning spraying my fingertip with Cetacaine and poking holes in the blister with a needle, which probably wasn’t good for it but certainly better than me popping the thing wide open and actually maybe it was good for it since it’s almost healed up now, not even 24 hours later yet. I really do have to stop being lazy playing and get back to normal as not only do the guys and I have an acoustic gig coming up pretty soon but the annual birthday party for all the coolest people, who are, of course, the cool people born in March, is coming up fast on the horizon as well and I am currently in no condition to be able to play for eight or nine hours until sunup as is always required. (giggle) Seeing as how lately my hands are falling asleep all the time I may be useless anyhow but hey, you know, anything for the sake of music right? (snicker) Since the boys will let me play in public now I’m not about to let any silly carpal tunnel BS ruin my fun.

To top all of this off, last weekend I accidentally slammed my right hand in a (very heavy) door and got yet another finger – wouldn’t you know it’d be the index finger of my right hand and I’m right-handed – really good. It finally is no longer purple and as big as my thumb.

Then we have the weird recently-acquired ailment in my right arm – which began after carrying all that luggage thru the airport at Christmas – which I have just had to learn to live with, but at its peak of agony I tried to squeeze the trigger on a spray bottle of household cleaner and couldn’t. Better now, but with all that plus the recent sprained ankle (which I still don’t know how, where or when I did that) and some other really odd aches and pains lately, I’m just like, what’s next??? I’m telling you younger folks, you hit 30 and it all falls apart, it really does!! Something to look forward to.

I never had any problems like that before I turned 30, save for chronic sore throats and whacking out my tonsils 10 years ago took care of that. My mother thinks I’m too old to have kids, my grandmother cracks jokes about my age, and I’m falling apart, I give up.

So anyway…. well, I had a bunch of other stuff but spent too much time this evening doing some major updating overhaul of many pages, none of which are up yet because it’s too late for me to deal with uploading them, so this weekend sometime, I’m sure, along with more graffiti and no musculoskeletal system issues hopefully (I shouldn’t have said that, now I’ll probably slam the car door on my foot in the morning or something worse…). I have a three-day weekend and god knows I need it.

So ’til later, I am your tired, crabby, broken, yet still happily skipping along the garden path of life and snickering sarcastically all the while – and much in need of just one decent night’s sleep!

December Boys Got It Bad

Well, the Zone is pretty much like, oh, I don’t know… the desert maybe?… of late, and for that I apologize… ’tis a desolate place in more ways than one and I’m too lazy to update much of anything lately. Offline life is really not a shade much better.

This weekend was certainly one of the more unproductive weekends in history… my dishes aren’t done, my lawn’s not mowed, my dogs aren’t washed, nor are a number of other things that must be done and soon. I’ve got like a little over a month to get some warranty work done on my car, I’m late for the dentist and the vet this year, and everything’s in pretty much a mess at the moment… except my house, which is surprisingly and frightfully clean, wow. I have also just recently, and in retrospect rather dumbly, agreed to take on some extra work again which was probably a really stupid idea, but I suppose my checkbook will thank me later… and that, of course, will mean even less time to goof off on the computer. But at the moment being busy will probably be a godsend, the less time I have to hang around the house doing nothing the better. (Which means, no, there’s no news.)

As for my unproductive weekend, well, I watched Meet Joe Black at some point, which kept me in yet another state of Brad Pitt-induced euphoria for a few hours (drool…). Thought about mowing, thought about doing dishes, thought about washing dogs, didn’t do any of it, played guitar with Greggie instead, heh. He came down on Sunday (it would appear I am being babysat again and no, I am not oblivious to that fact, fellas… although I am not really complaining, better Greg than KC, KC would have made me mow the yard and do the dishes…). We eked out a little Big Star (“December boys got it bad…”) and some old Cheap Trick (“You didn’t know what you were looking for ’til you heard the voices in your ear…”), among some old standards, and had much fun.

We also tried to figure out what’s wrong with my left foot as my toes look all weird and for several weeks now it’s occasionally been feeling like I dropped a concrete block on it or something, comes and goes and this weekend it came back with a vengeance… in other words, I was crippled most of the weekend, another good reason not to mow the yard!! So there!!! (And yup, I can talk real big from this side of the Atlantic… snicker.) So anyway, Greg pronounced me “basically okay and still short”, so the rest of you worrywarts can stop making him drive to Memphis every week to check up on me since I know that’s what you’re doing. :P

Nothing much else to report, so I’m going to stop for now while I’m feeling rather calm and agreeable and before the mood swings again, or I might be tempted to start verbally ripping people to shreds just ‘cos I feel like picking a fight for the sheer pleasure of it, and boy, has that temptation been huge in recent weeks, so I’ll just, like, retract the fangs and can the venom, because, you know, it just ain’t worth it. I’ll probably get really drunk sometime in the near future and just spit poison all over the place (KC to Greg RE: me about a week or so ago: “If she gets mad, for god’s sake just keep her away from her computer!!” Snicker…), but for the time being the simple fact is the objects of my derision aren’t worth one iota of web space, which is what I keep reminding myself of every time I get good and p.o.’d again.

So, gotta go – but oh, yeah, the flowers! Thanks to my buddy Jimm in Sydney for the spiffy cheery springy flower thingy! And thanks to everyone else, you know who you are, and thanks to those who have been very understanding and patient the last few weeks. It’s always nice to be reminded of whom your real friends are and I luv each and every one of you and now I’m really going to go before I get all sniffy and stuff… (giggle) Peace, luv & Gurus!

I Guess Maybe I Was Having a Bad Day

Ah, finally I am beginning to feel like a normal human being again. So, what exactly happened to me last week, you ask? Well, I’ll tell ya… mainly because I don’t want to repeat this story over and over again a hundred times in e-mail, phone, etc.

OK, starting from the beginning… my mother was on a business trip in Miami and the night she arrived, as she and her colleagues were coming back from dinner, she tripped over one of those concrete parking lot barriers and broke her wrist, bigtime, spent all night in the ER, you can do the math on that part. Well, she ended up staying in Miami for the next three days and completing her duties there… they couldn’t have done what they needed to down there anyway as far as surgery (well, technically they could have, but she certainly couldn’t be staying down there for weeks). Luckily this was her left arm, as she and I are both right-handed and boy wouldn’t that have sucked.

Anyhow, via friends of the family we had arranged for her to see a doctor back home and have what we thought would be fairly minor, no big deal, surgery, on Thursday last week, the morning after she was to arrive back in Nashville. There was some discussion between her and me over the course of the early part of the week about whether she could drive her car home from the airport or not – most unfortunately, this just happened to be one of the few times she flew out of Nashville instead of Memphis (oh thank you to my faaavorite airline, Northwest, for jacking up prices so high in Memphis and being such buttholes about letting other airlines have terminal space that it most of the time makes more sense financially to fly out of Nashville or Little Rock. Jerks. I recently caught the head of the Memphis airport saying in the paper that Northwest does what’s good for Memphis or something like that… bullsh*t.)

Anyway, it was finally decided that whether or not she could drive I was going to drive to Nashville Wednesday night anyway to either drive her home or follow her home, no problem. Since I hadn’t been truly prepared for this (my usual procrastinatory fault) I wound up sleeping about two hours on Tuesday night, with expectations that I could still get from Memphis to Nashville and backtrack halfway to eastern Northwest Tennessee and still be able to get a decent night’s sleep on Wednesday night… little did I know.

So, OK, it’s Wednesday by now and the first thing that happens is I walk out of the office on my way to my car late in the afternoon and the tornado sirens are going off, but the sky in Crosstown is clear as all get out. I even stop to get gas at the hated Tiger Market on Union, standing there pumping my gas while the sirens are going off and thinking, well, it must be the siren in Whitehaven I’m hearing ‘cos there is nothing going on up here in Crosstown and Midtown, which turned out to be true for the moment. I have the good sense to listen to talk radio on the way home to make sure I’m in no imminent danger, get home and my weather-predicting dogs go bounding outside, which is a pretty exact indication that nothing weatherwise is about to happen for the time being, so, great. Just about the time we get back inside I hear thunder – NBD (no big deal).

Then the sky turns black, then comes the monsoon. At this point it appears to be just lots of rain and thunder and lightning, but I turn on the TV just in case, to keep an eye on things. As I’m trying to get some stuff ready (in vain, ‘cos it will be another three hours before I can even go outside to put stuff in my car), I keep noticing interesting things on the weather report on TV, and my plans (“OK, I’ll leave about 7…”) kept getting later and later (“OK, I’ll leave about 8… OK, I’ll leave about 8:30…”). Then Channel X scares me to death by pinpointing what they think may be a tornado in southwestern Shelby County, tracking its upcoming path northeast up over the south loop of I-240, then up to Airways and Lamar, then toward… you guessed it, straight for me.

Dobie and I are sitting on the couch watching this phenomena and I have already gauged my direct route to the hall closet and how long it will take me to get there once I hear what everyone says tornadoes sound like, like a freight train or something… I can get there in seconds, yank everything out of the closet and have me and Dobie in there. (Baby, of course, being scared to death of not only thunderstorms but just plain rain, always has the safest place in the house anyway, under her usual table.) Well, I never heard the siren go off if it did – it’s right behind my house at the fairgrounds – nor did I hear any freight-trainlike noise – so I just stayed put and lo and behold, no tornado. (Of course, the other problem with the weather reports, which stayed on for about four or five hours straight that evening, was that it was raining so much and so hard the Doppler radar was barely able to pick up anything thru all the rain anyhow.)

Finally all the blasted rain and thunder and lightning dissipates and I’m getting things ready to go again, and I’ve already called the Nashville airport to get them to give my mom a page when she arrives, allegedly at the time on a 10:15 pm flight, to tell her I’m running late because of the storms here. I finally split town about 9 pm, about two hours after I’d initially planned and an hour after I’d planned during the course of the nastiness down here. Also, during the course of all the weather chaos there was a three-alarm fire at the FedEx superhub, so I hope there weren’t many of you expecting something from FedEx last week…

Anyway. Finally, I am on the road, slightly tired but having a great time as I’m in love with my CD player anyway and have some good music completely blasting. The weather’s calmed down by now tho I’m trying to keep an eye on the sky, prepared to pull over and hit the ditch at any moment if necessary, but for the first hour and a half, everything’s cool. I start hitting a little rain just north of Jackson, but that’s okay, rain’s no big deal other than the fact that every time an eighteen-wheeler passes me or I pass them I’m temporarily blinded by waterfalls over my car. Just about the time I get across the Tennessee River and the land where my beloved hometown lies, it starts getting worse. Nasty, nasty, nasty, but still quite driveable. Nooooo problem.

About the time I see my second humongous tree lying on the interstate, I decide maybe I better turn on the radio and see what’s up. KDF in Nashville, which I listened to and supported for years and years when I lived up there, let me down and, unable to find anything substantial on any other station, I was forced to listen to the big FM country station up there the rest of the drive (you know it had to be bad if I was listening to the country station). About the time I’m getting up around Kingston Springs (home of Christabella Wilson, grin), a caller calls in from Fairview (a very tiny town where my car once died about fifteen years ago on a drive home from college, I was stranded for hours and after a while beginning to feel like I was stuck in the movie Deliverance). While listening to the caller’s tale, it occurs to me that, had I left Memphis when I intended to, I would have hit the Fairview/Franklin exit on I-40 just about the time the tornado touched down in Fairview, which is only a hop, skip and jump from the interstate exit. I don’t know which of my guardian angels (all of them, I reckon) was looking out for me that night to make me wait out the weather in Memphis and then piddle around a little longer than I meant to getting ready to split town, but, man. (shudder)

So, I’m listening to the radio the rest of the way to Nashville and listening to how there’ve been touchdowns in ten counties, including Davidson County (Nashville), and by the time I hit the city limits I already know that most of East Nashville and a good deal of the rest are without power and there’s power lines down all over. Most of West Nashville looks okay so I’m sort of starting to take the death grip off the steering wheel, while still keeping an eye out for fallen trees and power lines, as I tool around the 440 loop. Well, it’s still raining, and I’m having a little trouble seeing, and then I realize why I’m having so much trouble seeing, because by now I’m in East Nashville and it’s pitch black. After finally maneuvering my way to the Nashville airport, I’m trying to do the right thing by parking where I think I’m supposed to park in short term parking, but I can’t see a darn thing, pitch, pitch black. I get parked (thanks to the little construction guy who was walking around with a flashlight, who was nice enough to inform me that the airport had been hit by a tornado), and walk thru the completely dark parking garage and up to the main door, where a security guy asks if he can help me. After telling him my mother was supposed to have arrived on a 10:15 pm Delta flight, I’m informed that the airport shut down around 9 or 9:30 due to the tornado. Great.

So, I leave the airport, thinking my mom is still in Atlanta at this point, and nearly have about fifty wrecks driving up Murfreesboro Road trying to get somewhere where there is electricity. I park at the Waffle House (ahh!) and then proceed to call everyone save for the people I really don’t want to be waking up at 1 in the morning trying to figure out where my mother is. (If you’re doing the math, Nashville is about a 2 hour, 45 minute drive or so from Memphis, and I left Memphis at 9 pm.) One of the first calls I made was to Delta, misguidedly thinking my mother was still in the Atlanta airport, and then I am informed that my mother got on a standby flight that landed in Nashville at 5:30 pm.

Okay, so, now I don’t know whether my mom is at the Nashville airport (in which case I was going to make her get a cab to the Waffle House as I wasn’t relishing any more possibility of a wreck on the way back to the airport), or if she got her car and tried to drive on home, in which case she might have gotten caught by the tornado. In any case, there’s no answer at my mother’s house; nothing on the answering machine at my house; and the Nashville airport folks, who I also called, were no help (“This lady is having surgery at 9 in the morning two hours away and you won’t go look for her?” – “Sorry, ma’am, we can’t.” Bah.)

Having exhausted all possible phone attempts and being on the verge of just getting the heck out of Nashville and driving back westward, I realized I had no other real choice than to retrace the murderous, war-zonelike path back to the Nashville airport. So I do, without incident (I should interject here that one of my thoughts as I was leaving Memphis that evening was, “OK, God, if this is gonna be my night to die then so be it, but if it’s not gonna be my night to die, then please don’t let me wreck my car!!”). This time I go up the arrivals ramp of the airport and park where they would have probably arrested or ticketed me if there hadn’t been a tornado and ensuing blackout, and go in search of my now-handicapped mother. The emergency lights are on in the airport so you can pretty much see, but I walked around for about a half hour in the utter chaos the airport had turned into with stranded passengers with no luck. I was just about to leave, having decided that I didn’t know where she was but she wasn’t there, when I decided to make one more trip around. As I got ready to start up some stairs, a fellow standing at the bottom stops me and goes, “Are you looking for your mother?” I say, “Yes, a blonde with one arm in a sling?” Bingo. After having been in Nashville for almost two and a half hours, finally.

The rest of the tale is a little shorter… we arrive at my mom’s house around 4:30 in the morning, get up a couple of hours later (at this point I’ve had four hours’ sleep in two days) and head to the doctor’s office, where we think she’s going to be having fairly minor, not a huge deal, surgery. Wrong. At 1 that afternoon she’s headed into what we now think is Same Day Surgery, which turns out in the course of the surgery to wind up being fairly major surgery. Actually this probably turned out for the better, since the other would have put her in a full arm cast (in which case she wouldn’t have been able to do much of anything and would have probably had to come to Memphis to stay with me indefinitely), and instead she’s got the whole rods-and-pins thing, which is gnarly and has been quite painful but she’s able to move fingers and elbows and such, so that in the end is much cooler. You do not even come close to realizing how much you need your fingers and shoulders and elbows until you break something like this…

Anyway, other than the fact that it was a pretty painful situation it was kinda neat since we were there at the hospital back home and the majority of nursing personnel around were either Mom’s students or former students and also included my best friend from the 7th grade, as well as many of my mother’s colleagues, and we pretty much got the VIP treatment, which was cool. My mother was insisting on going home but finally gave up insisting, someone sent me home for a while on the premise that I could get some sleep but, knowing that if my head hit a pillow I wouldn’t wake up ’til the next morning, I just did some stuff and went back and spent the night on a very uncomfortable hospital couch. And in the morning we got to go home earlier than we would have probably had we not been getting slightly VIP treatment, so that was cool too.

There was much to be done at the house too, tho, before I could leave and go back to Memphis, suffice it to say I didn’t get all that much sleep the rest of the week either but that was okay! There was also the problem of how to get my mother’s car back to where it should be from Nashville, and let me tell you I was not looking forward to having to drive back up there, but that turned out spiffily as my grandmother and her husband (who live in Nashville) just happened to be coming from there that weekend and were kind enough to drive the thing back to us, yay. So, with Mom situated and I having gone out to the store and bought enough stuff to keep her from having to go to the store for probably three or four weeks, I moseyed on back to Memphis and arrived home in the middle of the night early Monday morning to deal with the certain chaos there would be at my own house, and here I am. Still tired this early Friday morning, but better.

In any case, last week was not a good week.

So, what else… well, I saw Tommy Womack and his lovely wife, Nashville’s Channel 5′s Beth Tucker, on TV briefly while I was home, that was kinda cool. Tommy informs me that at the moment he is not on the schedule for the downtown Nashville thing with NRBQ in June so that’s a bummer, I hope that changes.

I am tickled that my eBay rating is edging closer to 200 now, although it would have been nice if everyone I’ve sold stuff to would have bothered to leave feedback since it’d be closer to 300 than 200 if they had, sigh.

And I’m in the middle of some rather extreme life-changing decisions, but more on that some other time, maybe, as things are pretty tentative right at the moment… let’s just say some things were just meant to be, it just took me about five and a half years to realize it? We’ll see, in any case KC won’t speak to me for years, which is usually kinda a blessing. (snicker) Gotta go as I’m still pretty exhausted, talk to some of you more over the weekend, and happy late birthday to Jules – ’til later…

My Brain is Hanging Upside Down

The only non-yuck thing to report today is that my eBay feedback rating is about to hit 200, woohoo! For all the horror stories I’ve heard from other eBay sellers and buyers (and have had a couple of deadbeat bidders myself – beware the Rock & Roll Memorabilia category, sigh), I have to say the folks who are into Barbie stuff are the most terrific buyers and sellers on eBay!

Now, I have some bad news for the Zone (and for bored people with laptops) for the rest of the week as everything here will be on temporary hold yet again, thru sometime probably after the weekend. My mom broke her wrist while on a business trip to Miami (where she still is at press time) and is going to have minor surgery back home tomorrow morning – unfortunately (and talk about Murphy’s Law in action!!) this was one of the few times she flew out of Nashville instead of Memphis, so your favorite blonde will be leaving to drive to Nashville after work tonight, driving back to Paris, and not only dealing with the surgery stuff but also trying to figure out how to get Mom’s car out of Nashville and back to Paris, and possibly making a Paris to Memphis back to Paris and back to Memphis trip in the interim, sooo… yup, it’s a week alright. (sigh)

And I have folks arriving in town here in Memphis Friday, tho I won’t be here ’til later, but after getting back to Memphis that’ll probably tie me up thru the early part of next week, so, in any case, consider yourself forewarned that there will be no updating around here until late in the weekend at the very earliest. Sorry laptop dude!

In any case I can maybe finally get some reading done (not only have I only listened to the new Westerberg album once, believe it or not after all my dying for it to hurry up and come out, I still haven’t read Anne Rice’s Armand yet and she’s even got a new vampire book out now!), plus I’m gonna take my dirty dishes to Paris and do ‘em up there so I can procrastinate the plumbing repair a little longer, hehehe.

ANYWAY – gotta go ‘cos it’s going to be a loooong day, and I’ll only have half as much time to get ready to split town tonight. I did update the Lyrics Zone with some stuff I forgot I’d already done and hadn’t put up yet, even tho nobody ever reads any of it anyway, the Scott Hackwith Hall of Fame now resides in the Lyrics Zone… some definite clues as to why I dig (pun much intended!) this band so much. Buy the album, buy the album!!! (giggle) (Feeling pressured? Call… OK, never mind, enough of the puns for now.) (snicker) OK, with that, I am officially offline until, maybe earlier, but probably Tuesday or so – sayonara…