Losing my Nouns

I know that I know this...  Give me a sec...  Starts with a B maybe???

So lately, at least a 1/2 dozen times a day, I lose my nouns.  Yesterday I couldn't remember the word BANJO.  I could see the thing in my mind, knew it was roundish on one end, that you play it like a guitar, picks are really needed to make it sound good - what it was actually called?  Not a fucking clue.  So then this moment of panic sets in.  In the vaccuum that is left of my mind - I'm like a freaking USB drive with nothing on it.  And then later - all of a sudden I'll let out a mighty YAWP of realization:

BANJO!!!!

Relief slides over my being and I can breathe again, because I've been holding that breath ever since I couldn't remember the word.  It's called aphasia.  I know that word, but apparently banjo is just too difficult.  Or economy, or Gwen Stefani or the frickin' colour chartreuse - how can a person forget the word CHARTREUSE??   I mean just LOOK at it!  I'd remember having a stroke right?  I'm pretty sure that I haven't had a stroke, but given what else I've been forgetting, who knows?  I sometimes look in the mirror just to be sure that one side of my mouth isn't drooping.  Nope, still good. 

So this could just be middle age, or peri-menopause - or even thyroid - which I vowed just yesterday that I wasn't going to mention, but from what I've been reading 'brain fog' can totally be one of the symptoms.  Or, it could be from a brain tumor, infection or dementia.  Awesome.  So what I've learned is to never Google 'aphasia' when you're freaking out.  Basically, never Google ANYTHING when you're freaking out.

Let's put some spin on this:  If it's dementia - it could happen relatively quickly and I could be one of those happy demented people who smiles and wants to have sex all the time.  Maybe if it's a brain tumor it could press onto a part of my brain that suppresses hunger?  Or suddenly I might be able to play the piano?  Infection...???  I'm sure there's a positive way to look at that too, I just can't remember the word.

I am NOT an 83 year old woman...

I hear these words coming out of my mouth:  "Oh it's just the microvascular angina, hypothyroidism and the reynaud's syndrome...."  I think: Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!! You are not an 83 year old woman, just say you're 'fine'!  When someone asks you how you are, JUST SAY FINE!!!    Nobody wants to hear it.  Nobody wants your torrent of symptoms and self-diagnoses lobbed at them like a grenade full of energy-sucking leeches.  SHUT THE HELL UP!!! 

Problem is, people keep saying "How are you?  Are you okay?  You're looking a little green."  'Cause right now?  I look like utter crap.  Lay me next to a cadaver and we'd have the same skin tone.  Hence my honest reassurance to folks by poo-pooing all my many symptoms.  "Nothing to worry about... I've got my nitro spray... yadda yadda, sick speak, sick speak."  You can see when their eyes glaze over at the 'too much information."  It's pretty much the same time that the word microvascular leaves my lips... annnnnnnnnd.... they're... done.  Because people don't want you to be honest.  They want you to lie, like everyone else does, and just be FINE. 
 
So this is me, taking a different tack.  I will slather on the makeup - add some blush to take away the pallor, smile and say "I'm well, how are you?"   Cause I'm NOT 83  and won't be for another 39 years.  And even when I am 83, I don't want to be that person who defines themselves by their maladies.   My Granny lived to be 103 years old and I never once heard her complain.  When she was 100 she was knitting knee blankets for the 'old folks.'  She was mostly blind and mostly deaf and dropped a few stitches in those knee blankets, and they are the most BEAUTIFUL knee blankets in the world!    And when I get cold for absolutely no reason in our 20 c house because of my weird-ass health crap, I can wear one of those blankets around my shoulders, put on a hat and a scarf, shut the hell up and channel my Granny.

The most beautiful slipped stitch I've EVER seen!

There's a frickin' blue sky out there today and I'm going to catch some of those rays.  Cause I know for damn sure that fresh air helps EVERYTHING and that all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other and I am determined to do just that.

Candy Cane Coated Porn

Flyers... oh, sweet, non-denominational deity, the holiday flyers that have begun arriving at our house.  GIANT EXPERTS' SALE!  HOLIDAY BLOWOUTS!  BREED YOUR OWN REINDEER!

I want, nay verily, I NEED, a Self-Shaping Pre-Lit 8' Fir Tree for a mere $399.00!  No wait!  There is a 7' Pre-Lit Flocked Blue Spruce which has FAKE SNOW on it for only $199!!!  I can balance it on 6 large hardcover books, to make up that foot difference in height!  Plus I'll have saved a whole $200!!!  No brainer really.  Must buy, must consume, must own...    

We wish you a Capitalist Christmas!
We wish you a Capitalist Christmas!   
We wish you a Capitalist Christmas.... 

I LOVE Christmas. J'adore Noël!   Jeg elsker Jul!  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it!  The carols, the ornaments the window displays...  I salivate just thinking about it all.  Literally.  There must be some sort of gastronomical response when I see sparkly Christmas things.  I'm like Pavlov's Dog, but with twinkle lights.  So when the Home Hardware flyer comes into the house with HOLIDAY merchandise, it's pretty much porn to me.  Candy Cane Coated Porn.  (insert drooling, slathering noises here) And I need it all!!!

Except that I already have an entire ROOM in the basement filled with holiday decor.  It used to be the Coal Room, when houses used coal.  Not huge, but about 200 cubic feet of space to stack holiday things.  I have many boxes - all labelled.  My favourite:  Whimsical Ornaments - filled to the brim with Patience Brewster Krinkles ornaments that cost a frickin' arm and a leg at full price.  

But most of them I got after Christmas for 1/2 price - on account of the fact that paying $40 for a single ornament is  demented.  Although I did once spend $200 on ten 1/2 price ornaments.  But even David himself couldn't be mad at me when he saw how ecstatic I was as I showed him each dog in pajamas, each crocodile with fancy shoes, each polar bear in a tutu.  

Every year when I bring these whimsical ornaments out to put on our dining room tree*, I dance around like a frickin' sugar plum fairy.  The glitter that remains on my hands after placing the ornaments, I spread all over my body.  "Mummy, you have glitter on your knees!"  "Yes I do!!  It's CHRISTMAS!!"   And then I douse her in glitter as I listen to Elvis's Christmas album -  the best and the worst of Christmas music all rolled into one cd, but that's what my Mom always listens to - so it's the first album on our playlist every year.  But really, after Elvis gets played, I'm a traditionalist - Christmas circa 1930-1950.  Campy, sappy and deliciously steeped in nostalgia.  Christmas Lounge = Musical Perfection. 

For those other Christmas Fiends out there - this is for you...  Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians doing a 1954 tv special - at around the 10:00 mark there is a tribute to the Nutcracker suite which is almost my favourite Christmas thing ever.   (Uploaded by XmasFLIX.com Vintage Christmas Films on Jan 1, 2012)
Enjoy!

 *Three.  We have three.   Christmas trees.  THREE.  Dining Room Whimsical, Living Room Traditional and the Front Porch Slender. If I could afford it, I'd have one in EVERY room of the house - around which I would dance, covered only in glitter.

Autumn Chore Weekend

This weekend is the weekend things are supposed to get done.  Caulking (snerk - yes, I have the mind of a 12 year-old boy) of windows and such.  Maybe even a hedge trimming (snerk).  Round 1 of leaf raking was Thursday.  My inner thighs and quads are still complaining about that.  I guess I don't do a lot of squatting in my day-to-day activities.  Maybe I should have stretched first?  Oh GOD.  That's what it's come to... stretching before yard work.  Hello body - welcome to your 40s.

Errands that don't get done during the week while I'm carless are left until the weekend.  I've got my hands full, so here is a post about my crazy cats and the resulting stompery from late October...

Thou Peevish Sheep!

Meeeeh...

Yesterday morning...

David had been looking forward to sleeping in.  15 more minutes of it.  He wasn't carpooling because of an after-school literacy meeting.  He set the alarm in anticipatory joy -  there may have been some contented chortling and 'nom, nom, nom' noises as he snuggled into the bed.  Then, the cats fucked it all up.

Rissa got up before we did, but didn't feed the cats.  This had the cats looking for people in the house who would feed them.  Launching themselves onto the bed, they began their own version of an intricate Bollywood dance number.  David, doesn't enjoy cat dance at the best of times, less so when he thinks he should be sleeping in.  There may have been some hurtling of the cats off the bed, perhaps propelled by under-the-blankets feet, followed by some growling and stomping on David's part to get them out of the room.  Then a door might have been slammed.  Grumbling ensued and not the under-the-breath kind.  After two minutes of this, he left the bed and STOMPED down the hall.

What you need to understand is that we are emotional vampires in our house - we suck up the energy of others around us.  We then magnify that energy and spit it out onto unsuspecting civilians.

David was in a mood, ergo I was too.  And I already wasn't thrilled to be woken up by violent kicking followed by doors slamming.  What with Hurricane Sandy being en route, the barometric pressure was wreaking havoc with my head.  I was hoping to stagger to the bathroom, dope myself up and sleep the morning away.  And now?  Now I was up.  And worse, my stomach thought it was time to be up so I needed to eat.  So I STOMPED down the stairs.

And there was poor Rissa, minding her own business with two stompy parents grumbling and growling and having yet to even said good morning to each other on account of the fact that David was convinced that the cats should be thrown into a bag and then into a box and that box should be thrown into Lake Ontario; (it would never happen PETA - so re-fucking-lax, and un-twist your panties!)  and I was mad because instead of him asking me to do something about it he just got all stompy and slammy.

By the time I told Rissa that she couldn't wear her brand new ballet flats to school in the rain, she was ready to burst into tears.  I managed to turn her around by reminding her that her rain boots have polka-dots on them and that's ALWAYS a good thing to have on your feet. Then she got into the spirit herself.   She found a pair of knee high rainbow socks to wear underneath the polka-dotted rain boots,  and put on her stylish navy rain jacket - with belt.  Soon after, via email, David and I apologized for our peevish sheep attitudes and, at the end of the day, we all helped make dinner together.  Long-standing angry grudges averted.

We are NOT a mouse house...

Ahhh, the joys of autumn...  (Insert contented drinking your cocoa sigh here.) I sit typing at the north end of the dining room.  The early afternoon sun warms my shoulders.  The house is deliciously warm.  If I wanted, I could take my laptop and write in front of a blazing fire in the family room.

And yet...and yet... Our three cats stare with x-ray vision at the dining room walls... What's that noise?  What do I hear?  scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch...  I knew it was too good to last.  Rodentia.  Renovating our house to make it theirs.  To be fair it only sounds like something small, mousish in size and perhaps only one of them driven indoors by the cooler weather to stake claim on a rodent condo in our... main floor ceiling / 2nd floor flooring joists.

I just want to say, "DUDE.  Please.  Not now.  We can't afford an exterminator.  We still have to patch the roof where the frickin' raccoons roosted last season." 

I am a lovers of animals.  I had an encounter with a squirrel last weekend that was delightful.  He ate spiced pecans OUT OF MY HAND, and then hung like freaking Spider Man from the tree trunk upside down to eat them.   I love rodents of all shapes and sizes,  I just don't want to HOUSE them.  We already have three cats and frequently take in animals to babysit.  No more animals in our house. 

Unless, of course, if someone said, "This poor blind, nearly lame, elderly dog has to find a home or be put down." David would then have a fight on his hands 'cause my immediate go-to is "I'LL DO IT!!!" And then I hold onto that animal in a near-suffocating hug as David tries his best to quell that urge within me.  Limpid blue eyes would blink blink up at him and I would win.  'Cause really, if person says NO  to a blind, nearly lame, elderly dog who won't live for much longer any way and really has nothing wrong with them apart from the being blind, nearly lame and elderly?  That person must be a Nazi, and nobody likes being called a Nazi.  Right David? So we're keeping this theoretical dog!

But now that there's the scritch-scritching, I'm imagining there must be an infestation, possibly of Biblical proportions - 'cause they apparently did plagues up really well back then.  So in the same way that when a pet has fleas every itch you have MUST be a flea bite, or when someone in your acquaintance has pink eye your own eye begins to twitch and water... Now, every sound in my century home that scritch scritches... is now a rodent with 26 others having a house party in our walls.  On the plus side though, the boiler isn't leaking as much...

I see Zebras...

...where there aren't any.  We were driving past a farm on the weekend and I was convinced there were zebras grazing.  With delighted glee, I thought to myself, "Hey look!  ZEBRAS!"  I was just about to point them out to David, but as we drove by, I realized that in actuality they were horses wearing plaid blankets.  Which had me in near hysterics because they really looked NOTHING like zebras seeing as it was brown and white plaid.  Really, I could have been imagining golfers dressed as horses and it would have made the same amount of visual sense.  Then when I tried to explain it to David he just looked at me like I was insane... AGAIN.

NOT a zebra.

I have 3 a.m. hallucinations.   There was a small hooded woman on the back of our bedroom door not too long ago.  Reality: David's grey bathrobe with a burgundy towel on top of it - but to me - random hooded woman freaking me out to the point of hyperventilation.   The ceiling fan might have been a luminescent sea creature, or a large bug with five wings and four eyes, or an alien face.  What's just a titch scary?  This is what I see when I'm 100% completely sober.  How schizophrenic does a gal have to be to hallucinate things?

I can walk down the street and make "come here, kitty, kitty" noises to a small bag of garbage on the curb.  It's only when I'm THIS close do I realize that I've been talking to a bag.  Or I'll see a miniature crocodile, and be REALLY EXCITED over the prospect of getting to touch a MINIATURE FREAKING CROCODILE (Just WAIT until Rissa and David hear about this!!!), in the middle of our sleepy little provincial town, only to find out it's just a boring ol' fallen branch.   I like to think of it as "hopefully hallucinogenic."   (TM Heather)

Those thingies that connect power lines to each other?  Couplers?? Groove Connectors?  Whatever the hell they are?  To me?  Frogs.  Well-balanced frogs with asbestos feet so that they can withstand the power from the lines beneath them.  Although they might just be balanced on telephone wires which I don't think have the same kick to them - otherwise there'd be an awful lot of fried pigeons up there.

But then, on my walk the other morning, there was a fox.  An actual REAL fox.  A red one.  On the boardwalk. 

Walking right towards me.  Foxes move differently than dogs.  They lope.  They gambol.  Which is why I knew, even from a 100 meters away that it wasn't a dog and I got EXCITED.  But I didn't want to get my hopes up in case it was just some random stray, skinny dog with palsy.    It walked nearly up to me - about 6 feet away it sat, regarded me (at this point I was crouched down on the boardwalk to make myself as un-threatening and friendly as possible) and then it skirted around me and loped on its way.  If I'd put my hand out, I could have touched it.  I didn't.  On account of the having had a series of rabies shots just this last July from the whole feral kittens incident and David's voice was in my head saying "I will not take you to the hospital if you deliberately keep touching wild animals."  This close.  I was THIS close.  And I wasn't hallucinating nothin'!

Brought to you by the letters... S C O T C and H

Clumping cat litter?  When it gets covered with a deluge of water?  When you're trying to get it off the floor with paper towels or scoop it up into a dust pan?  VERY close, in consistency and appearance, to cat diarrhea.  (quelling urge to vomit)  Even though I KNOW that it's NOT cat diarrhea, the look of it, the feel of it...  and given that the water covering it was slightly warm... the temperature of it?  NOT what I want to be cleaning up first thing in the morning.

Which is why the last time I had to do it, I then gave the job of emptying  the emergency (HAH!) water catcher container thingie, which resides under the boiler's pressure valve in the depths of our Hannibal Lecter basement, to Rissa.  Has she done it?? No, she has not.  I gave her the job because, at the age of 12, her brain should still work.  And yet, as per yesterday's post, the passing of that particular baton was... pre-mature.    Apparently, in all my peri-menopause, multiple concussions, wonky freakin' thyroid glory - my brain still works better than the other people co-habitating with me.  And I forget things ALL THE TIME!!  And I forget WORDS.  Words for nouns, like 'teapot' and 'dish towel'... and that's on a good day.

I'm going to have to put post-it notes all around the house, like someone with Alzheimer's, reminding me to do things because I get distracted.  (See Don't Open That Tupperware - 4th paragraph.)  Nearly last on my daily list of things to accomplish has been to empty the emergency water catcher container thingie.  We already had to safeguard our unreliable-boiler-circumvention-system by putting a paving stone in the bottom of the emergency water catcher container thingie, so that the cats wouldn't keep knocking it over, you know, for cat fun.   They would dance around in the faux cat diarrhea soup (quelling urge to vomit) and then leave little clay cat footprints ALL over the house.  Good times.

Some would suggest that it might be time to replace our inconsistent-at-best boiler.   Some have WAY more money in their savings than we do.  We just need to keep vigil over the water level and empty it every couple/three days during the heating season.  Easy Peasy.  (HAH!)  I had a EUREKA!! moment this morning and finally moved the kitty litter boxes further away from the sub-boiler flood plain, scooped, paper toweled, mopped the floors AND reorganized under the stairs (because I got distracted) ALL before 9:00 a.m.  And you know what?  Scotch smells really good at 9:30 in the morning.  Cheers!