Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Spring is broken

Well spring was springing.  Now our crocuses are lying sad, frozen and dead.  I'm not sure what the rest of the flowers have done, are doing, are planning on doing, or if they really care.  I attempted to help the guys mulch a bit (gee won't the neighborhood lawn nazi's be happy) in a vain attempt to keep down some weeds.

Spring is ok, I don't mind it....but it brings summer.  My most dreaded time of year.  The horrible, bright shiny sun, the heat, those stupid May bugs that people insist are June bugs, but they can't be June bugs because June bugs are cute little scarab looking things around the size of an oat.  That's what Mama told me and I will swear that's what they are.  The others are just hideous May bugs.  They shouldn't even be able to fly!  Hideous brown unwieldy things.

Our cat LOVES spring, and summer....from 5am until about 9pm we hear canigooutcanigooutcanigoout, outoutoutout, in various forms of meows, groans and attempting to chew open windows.  He loves to eat grass, chase bugs and until summer before last, enjoyed playing on a swingset.  The swingset was taken down and he was FURIOUS.

Spring is a crazy time here, for some reason when our son goes out...he comes home smelling like some type of odd fish, covered in mud, swearing he was no where near the frog pond.  I'm not even sure how frogs live there, because the lawn nazi's all fertilize the living crap out of their grass for the 2-3 months it grows.  All of this fertilizer runs into the frog pond.  Algae blooms EVERYWHERE in every pond in every yard with a pond because of this insane need to fertilize.  Why can't nature just take it's course and leave grass dry in the hot summer the way it should be.  If things were supposed to be green they would be green naturally...(that does not apply to hair color!)

I refuse to spend well over $1,000 between water and fertilizer to make my neighbors happy.  I got the thistles (love them!) because of them and their insane need to feed birds thistle seed.  At this point if they don't like my thistles which have now hopefully blown into all their yards then they can stop feeding thistle seed or come weed my yard.  I'm medically not allowed to weed my lawn (yay bad neck!) the guys don't have time....so lets put that neighborly gossip train and back stab bandwagon to work helping out people.

I tried to and did shovel my driveway and walk with my cane winter before last (that has been disallowed too!  again yay neck!) people stopped, stood, watched and commented to their kids...but not one single person (all men) even offered to help.  So neighbors who want nice lawns....work on your own, and leave my weeds alone!

The fact still remains spring is broken and can remain broken until well into July!  I can't tolerate heat anyway   :)

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

I am raising myself

I hear the sassing, whining, nasal snottiness and it's like I'm listening to 14 year old me.  I am positive I have written about this before.  I am also positive I was every bit as sassy and horrible as my son is.  I can hear me coming out of his mouth.  Not grown up me brimming with some wisdom, but horrible teenage me brimming with imagined logic and wisdom.  Kind of the way future me will be laughing at how ignorant and self important the now me is.

It still amazes me that I am alive at all.  The Grandmother curse is true.."I hope you have a child just like you"  My sassy brat thinks this would be just fine.  "Good! I hope I do, because I like me!"  I am glad he does because he is down a few fans in the form of parents at the moment.  Today was just so horrible it was comical.  6 separate times he was asked to put away his clothes.  Those are my emergency pants for summer, those are pants I might wear to school tomorrow, that's a shirt I might wear to school tomorrow (you wore it yesterday) ok then I might wear it the day after, those are socks I might wear tomorrow.  I can't put any of that awaaaaayyyy!!!  I NEEED a shower!  Don't you understand?  I DON'T NEED TO PUT ANY OF THIS AWAY!  You're such a jerk!!  No one asked you to do my laundry anyway!  I had clothes!!  This goes on in spurts from 2:40 until 8pm

Did you clean the litter box?  Yeeeesssss!  Gosh!  (I recleaned the litter box and left the non existent litter in a bag on the stairs) What's this??  (the litter you must have missed)  FINE!!!  2:45-2:50pm

Fortunately we didn't have any dishes to put away tonight I can't imagine where they would have ended up.  I have rewashed clean dishes because he didn't feel like putting them away, taken down dirty dishes he put away because he was "In a hurry because you're being so mean to me!!!"  usually about 45 minutes to put away a dishwasher load of dishes

I am wondering if I can plead some sort of insanity, perhaps sign myself into some treatment program.  I wonder if I could quickly become an alcoholic or drug addict for a brief stint in treatment?  The sad thing is..about 15 minutes after deciding running away or homicide might be a good idea...I no longer want to throttle him, but I find myself wanting to hold him and tell him I love him, then spend time with him.  Perhaps I really AM insane?  What sane person would want to hug this rapidly growing, teenager, sassy, annoying sometimes idiotic thing I live with?  I must be totally insane.  Nothing has taught me I'm insane any better than parenting has. There should be a parents only halfway house where we can run for a few hours a day or a week as need be.

I am going to kind of enjoy the day when my sweet little angel calls to tell me "I am ready to strangle this brat child of mine!  He REFUSES to put away his clothes!!  Gosh!"  I'm sure I will still be finding underwear he has hidden in various places throughout the house with him on the phone complaining about my darling, wonderful grand child who will of course do no wrong.....hahahahahahaha

I know my grandma is in heaven just LOVING this!

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Our cat hates us

Yesterday was not a happy day in the life of our kitty cat.

For the past year our cat has been struggling with allergies.  It's been a real fight because he had some bacteria that went undiagnosed.  When he was finally diagnosed after a few unsuccessful rounds of antibiotics we were told that he had likely damaged his nasal structures and would have allergies.  They did blood work the results only showed high allergy markers, we were told what otc's were safe for him to take, how much and how often.  The poor kitty has been sneezing large volumes of mucus for months.  The last month I noticed it didn't seem the same.

Suddenly the mucus stopped. He still sneezed, but nothing came out.  Then his eye started to look runny and puffy.  I washed it with a warm cloth.  It didn't get better, the swelling increased.  I made an appointment on Tuesday for Saturday.  I can't navigate him in and out of the building by myself.  I needed my son or husband with me.  Saturday was the only day.  Later Tuesday he was looking like he had gone a few rounds with an MMA fighter.  I called that evening, they could see him Wednesday evening.  He just looked worse the next morning.  I seriously began to wonder if he was sneaking out and having cage fights.  By the time his appointment rolled around his eye looked very pink near the tear duct, his forehead was swollen and to touch his face would illicit the big paw.  (the big paw is when he makes his paw as large as possible and sticks every single claw out, then pushes)  I got the big paw when I tried a warm compress before we left.

We got him to the vet.  I got my son to lacrosse practice then came back to find an unhappy cat with a grumpy husband.  Cat had lidocaine on spot on his forehead.  Eventually the vet came back.  She was brandishing a needle to aspirate his forehead bump.  Cats are bendy.....very bendy, they are also part liquid...very liquid.  Eventually she got the needle in, nothing seemed to come out.  She left.

We were pointedly ignored after several snorts, tail twitches and in general pissy cat behaviour.  Apparently she did get a few cells out and the news was good.  Nothing horrible was wrong.  We got antibiotics for bruiser and some steroids.  He already looks better after one antibiotic.  He ate a lot of ham tonight but still isn't very happy with us.  He seems to no longer be plotting our demise, but I did get the big paw tonight giving him his pills.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

temporary distraction?

I can hear my son yammering away in the other room on xbox.  He spends so much time on there chatting with friends, playing games, sharing cheats..etc.  I think to myself, "it's just a temporary distraction, he will out grow it".  The same with texting, "it's just a phase". I dawns on me with horror...he may never out grow either!

He doesn't spend hours on the phone the way I used to as a teenager.  I assume guys did things like that too.  Talk on the phone?  Didn't they?  I know I talked to guys on the phone when I was a teenage girl.  We also met up to just go "walking around"  large groups of us would go "walking around"  We had no destination in mind, just the aimless shuffle from house to house collecting friends, saying "hi" to a Mom or Dad at home, then walking blocks to nowhere or perhaps the local park.  We would also go outside and find a friend.  That "seeing who's out"  happens less and less.  They seem to make all plans via text or xbox live before they ever set foot outside to go do something.  Even when the doing something involves boxing in our basement there are rituals they adhere to, texting, xboxing, time syncing, dressing, putting on cologne but not brushing one's hair or teeth.

Other horrors radio, television, movies, rock n roll (all things said to be a fad or passing fancy) are all most of us know now, it's how we grew up.  I have never known life without all those things.  My Mom knew life with out television, telephones and rock n roll.  My Grandparents knew life without cars, telephones, televisions and not every one had a radio.  I look back at my own life, I knew life without a color tv for years, a home with only one tv  until I was in my late 20's, telephones on the wall, a one phone home,  no cell phones, a computer wasn't in many homes, there was no access to the internet even in the 80's with a computer. All we used computers for in school were to type word processor documents and fill in some answers on a math quiz.  I don't recall it actually checking the math.  I'm sure it could.  We were just too amazed that we were typing on something that didn't clack and have a piece of paper in it.  Saving work to a floppy disk and printing it out later was kind of weird. Working on a paper little bits at a time, coming back revising it? Mind-blowing   I remember our first computer in the late 90's.  Search engines were a strange thing to navigate, I knew of metacrawler, hotbot and some nameless search engine that the emachine 300 or whatever it was had.

Maybe x-box live, texting and skype are all here to stay and aren't temporary distractions.