Why yes, this IS what middle-aged hair looks like...

"Heather, what do you want for... HOLY CRAP!!!" says David as he sticks his head behind the shower curtain.  He's reacting to the shower wall, upon which I have left all the 'extra' hair from my head.  And by 'extra' hair, I mean the hair that I regularly lose when I wash my hair. 

"Are you okay?" he asks, genuine concern in his voice.

I glance to the wall.   "Oh, this?"  I shrug.    "This is pretty much normal."  I scoop it up and offer it to him, a hamster-sized practical example of what happens when you're a middle-aged woman in peri-menopause with thyroid disease.  He shrinks back a titch.

"No, I think I'm good."

"By March Break we could make another ME - out of hair," I suggest.  "Which I will then sell to the AGO and become ridiculously wealthy and famous."

He nods mutely and backs away.

I go back to conditioning my hair.  I've never had silky, manageable hair.  My hair never bounced and behaved.  It has always been coarse and disorderly and then after I had kids, it went curly with the coarse and disorderly.  If I brush it out I resemble Rosanne Rosannadanna.

The incomparable Gilda Radner...

But on the plus side, I now feel an odd kinship with Pamela Anderson.  Although I'm less leather corset and more just barbed wire on my head.  Almost 30 years of hair dying and strangely my hair is... dry...   I've been hanging out in the alley behind the beauty shop...

"Psssssssst.... Hey... HEY!!!  Can you slip me some deep conditioner?"

I Google up on how to deep condition and apparently, I have to find another 15 minutes in my day to sit under a bonnet hair dryer with a plastic bag on my head allowing my hair to suck up moisture.

Wait a second!  I actually own a bonnet hair dryer!  And 15 minutes?  There's gotta be 15 minutes somewhere in my day!  And I'm supposed to sit during that 15 minutes?  That's a requirement?  Oh sweet Jesus, I could sit and read... an actual book!! Because you know, I 'd be trapped under the hair dryer and all...  I could have a book in one hand and a cocktail in the other!!!

If my hair weren't in such terrible shape, deep conditioning would make it greasy...  Because my hair is such crap, I will now be required to read and drink alcohol.  15 minutes??  Hell, I'll make it 30!   Watch out world!  My hair will soon be so smooth and soft that I will injure myself and others when I whip it around as I travel in my own imagined deep conditioning commercial.

Who let the dwarves into my uterus?!?

WARNING: There will be foul language in this post.

MOTHERFUCKING DWARVES.*  I'm sorry, but... REALLY...   REALLY?!?  I'm sure that the lining of my uterus is chock-a-block with rich mineral deposits which can be sold at a premium on the Disc World, but I would just like to state for the record that I did NOT give my permission for a team of mining dwarves to bring their motherfucking pick axes into my uterus to collect its bounty.

At the very least, the little rat bastards could give me a cut.  If the (WARNING: TMI) 2 and a half inch blood clot, which they apparently spent the entire night chipping away, is worth so fucking much - I deserve at least 75% of the take when they sell that fucker to the black market.

I am sure that peri-menopausal blood clots hold a certain cachet - maybe the sick twisted pricks who buy them from the motherfucking dwarves eat them à la placenta ingestion...  I don't give a cat's fragrant ass who is doing what with them, I just want my fucking cut.

There are a lot of us out there gals - if we unionize, I'm sure that we can negotiate a more than fair business contract.

2, 4, 6, 8 - OUR FEMALE BITS AREN'T YOURS TO TAKE!

WHAT DO WE WANT?  COMPENSATION!!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?  WE'LL FUCKING DECAPITATE YOU!! 

*I choose to go the Tolkien route - not the Disney route

It all comes down to chicken vaginas...

"So what did you do in school today?"

"We had a work period in English."

"Journal entries for your ISU?"

"Yep."

"Oh, and in Geography we got to watch a video."

"What kind of video?"

"A video about sewers.  It's called Crap Shoot."

"Seriously?"  I burst into laughter.  "Madame showed you a video about sewers and it was called Crap Shoot?  That's freaking brilliant!"

"Not only that, but this is the second time I've seen it."

"I'm sorry?"

"I've seen it twice now."

I almost pee my pants.  "You've seen Crap Shoot twice?"

"Yes.  Last year in Science Class.  But that's not even the best part."

"There's a better part than just getting to watch a documentary about sewers called Crap Shoot?"

"There's this big sewer in Rome, one of the earliest sewers ever, and it's called the Giant Chicken Vagina."

"I'm sorry?"

"It's called the Cloaca Maxima - which is latin for Giant Chicken Vagina."

I snort.  "You're making this up!!"

"I am NOT!"

"This was in the documentary?"

"No, Connor just knows this because she lives on a farm.  A cloaca is part of the reproductive tract - pretty much a chicken vagina."

"So Cloaca Maxiuma would be...?"

"Giant Chicken Vagina."

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

"What is going on up there?" asks David from the kitchen below us.

"Clo...clo... a....ca... Max... i... ma!"  My stomach hurts from laughing now. "Seriously??" I ask.

"Seriously.  Connor and I almost got kicked out of class last year because we were laughing so hard.  This year, Connor isn't in Geography class with me, so I had to keep the hilarity inside."

Even better?  I get to recount this to David when I go downstairs.  He too, was impressed with a sewer documentary called Crap Shoot.

"Hey Rissa!" I yell upstairs.

"Yes?"

"Cloaca Maxima!!"

"BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAA!!!!"

Cat Lap Dance...

Minuit, the oldest and most crotchety of our cats has a predilection for lap dances.  Not the pervy receiving of...  it's not like she's hanging around at the Brass Rail with $5 bills in her paws, waggling her eyebrows at the dancers.  This cat, this 6 year old, overweight feline... she gives a kick-ass, albeit slightly disturbing, lap dance.

Seconds after you sit on any sofa in our house, Minuit appears.  She wends her way over the arm of the sofa and begins her descent lapward.  She'll take a moment before slowly placing one paw at a time upon any and all available thighs.  On occasion, she has been known to straddle two laps, front paws on one and back on another.  Then, the kneading begins.  It's usually at this time that David says 'I'm out!'  and shifts her to my lap.

This morning, as Rissa snuggled up to me on the family room couch, Minuit bestowed her lap dance upon us.

"WHOA!!  NOT COOL MINUIT!!" from the kid.  Rissa turns the cat around so that her front paws are now on my lap.

As Minuit once more displays her mad kneading talents, Rissa cuts me a glance. 

"What?" I ask.  "I'm just trying to figure out how we can make money off this ability."

"You're so gross."

"I believe the word you're looking for is 'practical'."

When did my eyelids turn to crepe paper?

I've never been a real eyeshadow kind of gal.  My eyelid landscape is less pastoral and more one bedroom walk-up.  Sure, in my late teens, I went all out with the blue eyeliner and shadow, but lately, I've stuck mostly to some eyeliner on my upper lids.  If I'm heading out for something fancy, something festive, I might throw on some shimmery highlights to make  my eyes looks bigger than they actually are.  Not anime big - that'd be impossible, and just fucking creepy - but big--ger.

Sometime in the last month, my eyelid canvas lost its stretch.  This past week alone - filled with holiday events - has sent me on a fruitless search for my lost lid collagen.   

Maybe it's under the couch...  Well there you are - climb back up here you little dickens!

Putting on simple eyeliner now involves carefully pulling my upper lid into some semblance of smooth all the while guesstimating the costs of a eye lift.  For eons we have been told to only use our ring finger to smooth anything near our eyes, on account of the fact that the skin there is so freaking delicate.  I'm now terrified that if I use more than one finger to do the stretching for eyeliner, that I'll actually leave a tear in my crepe papery eyelids.

"Heather, how are you?"

"Feeling less like myself and more like Yzma from The Emperor's New Groove... and you?"

But, on the bright side, my eyelids are so loose that I can now use them for finger plucking percussion! 

This does NOT taste like gingerbread!

"Oh God... gag... gag... BLECH... shudder

"What?  What is it?"  David asks from upstairs.

"Putting molasses on top of peanut butter toast doesn't help," I say.  "Anne-Marie was wrong."  I shudder, still gagging, as I begin to scrape the molasses layer off of my peanut butter.  gag... gag...

Two days ago, when I was complaining about how eating raw molasses tasted like crap - Anne-Marie had suggested to put it over top of peanut butter on toast.

I had already tried drinking molasses in warm water and when two sips of that made me want to hurl, I tried swallowing an undiluted tablespoon of it. That method, was also unacceptable.

Why, one might ask, was I attempting to eat raw molasses in the first place?  After my bloodwork showed that my iron stores, while normal, were on the low, low, low end of normal, my dietician gave me a list of high iron foods that I could add to my diet.  I had been making my way through the list.  So far I'd tackled lentils and molasses. Lentils - not a problem - I added some to meatloaf - I added some to rice.  I should have been happy - I shouldn't have changed tacks.

But next on the list was molasses - a single tbsp of molasses.  You use molasses in baking - in GINGERBREAD for frickssake!  I seemed completely reasonaable that a tincture of molasses with warm water would be akin to drinking gingerbread cookies. I have never been more wrong in my life.

I'm not usually a taste wuss.  On rare occasions there are flavours, when they hit my tongue, kick in the gag reflex.  Cherry cough syrup?  One of those flavours.  I actually choose to take Buckley's Mixture for my cough because I prefer camphor to the taste of fake cherry cough syrup.  Brussel Sprouts -  those suckers touch my taste buds and the pre-vomit saliva kicks into high gear. But those two taste were pretty much it.  I now have a third.  Any health food nut who tries to sing the high iron praises of molasses to me is going to get a graphic gagging replay of how my mouth reacts to molasses.

No worries, I will continue to move down the list... Quaker Instant oatmeal??  I could have just had Quaker instant oatmeal?!?  You know those exams where the first instruction was to read the entire exam and the last instruction was not to do any of the questions?  I didn't have to gag nearly as much as I've been gagging... (that's what she said...)

And THAT is how Peri Menopause makes you healthier...

Blergh.

"You okay?"

I don't even want to admit what I've done.  "Fine.  I'm fine."

David's eyebrows raise.

I'm sitting on the sofa in our petite grande room.  I have a Rusty Nail in one hand and cheap-ass Christmas romance collection in the other.

"I might have eaten bad things," I mumble.

"Pardon me?"

"grumble... grumble..."

"Pardon?"

"I HAD THREE RICE KRISPIE SQUARES BEFORE DINNER!" I eventually blurt.

David sighs.  He shakes his head.  "Oh, love..."  He knows.  He knows that it's been a rough week.

Day 5 of my period - I'm having record-breaking blood flow.  Sweet merciful Gaia how much blood can a woman lose?  David has been handing me random glasses of water all week to keep me hydrated.  And my food cravings?  They are through the roof, hence the three Rice Krispie squares before dinner, and the empty bowl that had contained chocolate chips and Skor bits in it beside me, and the Rusty Nail in my hand.

During the night, I suffer.  I suffer miserably from night sweats.  Because why?  Because of all the sugar and alcohol running through my body.  Usually I avoid it.  Not all of it because that would be bananas, but most of it.  I have no caffeine, I limit myself to one drink, I avoid overly sugary foods... 

As I flap the blankets around me, it's revelatory.  THIS.  This is how to begin living healthfully...  Not because it's good for you, but to avoid the worse stuff.  I love caramel, I love enjoying more than one of anything in life, but now that there are ramifications... ramifications that affect my sleep...  I gotta change my ways.  Surely to God there are better things out there than a caramel and alcohol!  Things that won't make me feel ill and won't give me hot flashes...

Sex!  I CAN HAVE LOTS AND LOTS OF SEX!!!  That will give me an endorphin rush AND it will HELP ME SLEEP!!!  How is that for solving things the natural way?  I am a freaking genius.

"David, come here..."