Surprise! We’re still here! No, the blog isn’t abandoned or dead. We just have been too busy to post anything. I’d like to say it was working on Book 7, but see one of the previous posts about life intervening…I tell ya, retirement can’t come soon enough.
Anyhoo, today’s post is about life interventions, interestingly enough. But it’s about those life interventions that piss you off until you think you’re just going to go blow up the world. What better way to calm myself down than put it in a blog post? Here we go!
One of my favorite kid’s books has always been “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.” I swear it was written just for me. If there’s a way to draw the short end of the stick in EVERY SINGLE MOMENT, you can bet it’s gonna be me that draws that fucker. Today, Fate has decided to single me out, and I don’t know what I did other than open my eyes. Here's a look into my morning.
Quick side-story #1: Back in December, my Napoleon-driven, over-achieving immune system decided it wasn’t killing shit in my body quickly enough and decided to start attacking major organs. The result was a nearly-overnight change from standard (or what passes for standard for me these days) to full-blown Type 1.5 diabetes, with a blood sugar count that touched the stratosphere and enough ketones in my urine to drop an army of elephants. How I avoided hospital time remains a mystery, but I’ll consider that a smidgen of good luck, so thanks to whomever blew some sage smoke in my direction. But now I get the joys of wearing a continuous glucose meter (CGM) thrust into parts of my body, along with injecting insulin into my belly every few hours in order to keep me alive and kicking. What fun. I do NOT recommend, 0 out of 10 stars.
So, back to the interventions that piss you off. You know, those little things that just jab and jab and fucking JAB until you go nearly vermilion with an approaching apoplexy. Yep, drew that short end of the stick! Better yet, I drew it on the most romantic day of the year. My poor husband.
At 3am this morning, my CGM app blasts me awake with an alarm that can be heard in furthest Siberia, warning me that the signal with the CGM has been lost. Like I care? I’m asleep, goddammit! Or at least I was. The reason it went off is that said CGM is on the back of my right arm (an FDA-approved location!), and I was sleeping on my right side, shoving the little sensor deep into my arm fat, and it had to let me know that it was drowning. Quick side story #2 – This is why I hate these things on my arm. You turn in your sleep. And I’m a side sleeper. I’d wear the thing on my belly all the time if I could, but I need a chance to let the skin heal – yanking one of these fuckers off is a full-time workout, wrestling with alcohol wipes, baby oil, Goo Gone, etc. and trying to work out the extremely sharp sensor needle without tearing a seam. By the time it finally parts with my skin, I am like a greased pole at the county fair, sullenly nursing a large, throbbing red circle of abused dermis. It bruises spectacularly within 15 minutes. And you have to put a new one on immediately. Since I sleep mostly on my left side, I avoid putting them there like the plague. So my only choices are (1) on the right side of belly and (2) the back of my right arm.
Back to story. So there I am, awake at 3am. After reading for a while I managed to fall back asleep, and was jolted awake by my loving husband, bearing gifts and cards. I had no idea where I was, what day it was, even who he was…I thought I’d missed the bus, or that there was a test that I hadn’t studied for. Then time righted itself, and things were lovey and on track for a while. (Get your head out of the gutter right now.)
I injected my first insulin of the day and went to log it in. My blood glucose has an astronomical reading of 259. I immediately panicked. What the hell decided this? I quickly stabbed my finger (which I cannot tell you how much I hate doing) to take a manual reading, and it’s actually 94. Hence my story above. Put pressure on the CGM, and it tries to incorrectly kill you. I calibrated the CGM app, called it several colorful names, and got dressed. The only red shirt I could find to celebrate the Day of Love is an actual Star Trek Red Shirt, with the phrase, “I Might Not Make It.” Is this providence or what. If you know, you know.
We began our day. First on the list, doc’s office for bloodwork. You have to get there at the buttcrack of dawn because you will sit for an hour. We made it there, first in line…and guess who forgot their lab order? Yep, sitting on my desk, at home. So it took an extra 10 minutes to find my order in the computer because I drew the brand-new lab tech who hadn’t learned the system yet. It took him another 15 minutes to figure out how to switch from the paper printer to the sticker printer. Oh, and I needed to provide a urine sample. Who peed before they left the house? Another 10 minutes while I waited for my bladder to fill back up.
We leave the lab, and I’m already annoyed. On to pick up our grocery order at Walmart. Usually scheduled in the 8am-9am slot. Guess who somehow managed to schedule for the wrong slot? Now we have to wait for 9am-10am. Loving husband says don’t worry, we’ll run to Dunkin and get some breakfast, and then you can run into Giant Food and get the things Walmart isn’t carrying. Sounds like a plan. So we go thru the Dunkin queue, I shoot up with the morning’s insulin, and we park to eat. Loving husband picks up his coffee, the lid comes off, and boiling hot coffee goes everywhere. I reach for the stack of napkins Dunkin gave us and – well, you know how that goes, you can’t pull out just one, you end up with like 20 in your hands. It pissed me off so much that I balled the entire pack into a knot and jammed them in the Dunkin bag. My fist goes through said bag. Everything goes on the floor. My poor husband, burned and dripping, shakes his head and reaches for another stack of napkins. We wipe everything off, I get our breakfast from the floor of the car, and we do our best to laugh it off. We eat without further incident and head to Giant. Only need some iced tea and coffee creamer, will take like 5 minutes, right? Ha.
Inside the store, it’s bloody chaos. So many men grabbing wilting flowers in the flower department, fighting each other in the cards area, carrying massive balloons and giant stuffed animals. Who decided it was a good idea to give a giant red gorilla as a Valentine’s gift? I was dodging heart balloons and thorny rose stems and gorilla arms and by the time my cart squeaked to a stop I found myself in the wrong side of the store. Everything I needed was clear back behind me. So I had to subject myself to another tour through the Frogger Game of Love. By the time I got to the checkout counter, I realized I had bought more than was on my short list, I’d left my shopping bags in the car, and I would need one of the really cheap paper bags that immediately tear if you look at them the wrong way. I hoped I’d make it back to the car with it. Of course I didn’t. Fucker tore halfway down as I picked it up. I managed to hug it all against me without dropping anything and chucked all of it into the back of the car, bag included. My husband looked startled, but to his credit, he didn’t say anything.
My coffee was now cold. That deserves a sentence of outrage all by itself.
The run to Walmart for our pickup was now ready. That went relatively well, friendly guy moved everything to the car. Side story #3, we don’t let Walmart bag anything anymore – ever since one dipshit packed water bottles on top of the bread and the English muffins, we figured it’s just too hard for them to figure out, so we just toss everything in the car and we bag it ourselves when we get home.
We have several grocery store bags, including some big ones to haul stuff like water jugs and oddly-shaped items. We’ve had two green “Grab Bags” (“As Seen on TV!”) for probably 20 years. They expand and clip onto your grocery cart so you can bag stuff yourself as you buy. Most of the grocery stores around here don’t allow self-scanning anymore so we just keep them in the back of the car and fill them up with the aforementioned items as needed. Well, last week, our bags simply disintegrated into nothingness – they’ve done their duty, it was time – and I ordered some new ones from Amazon. These replacements are not their predecessors. They’re complete Chinese-homespun shit. The plastic clips now bounce all over the place and fall out at the most inopportune times. You guessed it, today was one of those times. I wrenched two of them apart and one plastic clip grabbed the other and twisted in the fabric, cracking in the process. Long story short, one of the bags is now in the trash, and the clips on the other one have been forcibly removed, snapped in half, and thrown across the driveway. They're not even officially paid for yet, I'm still awaiting my credit card statement! It was a scene of great hilarity after the burst of rage was over. Fucking junk. The other bag behaved, quivering in terror, probably, as I stuffed it full of water bottles and hauled them into the house.
Now, you all know that we have a bevy of happy felines. We adore our little fuzzballs and they always greet us at the door, hoping we’re bringing something tasty into the house, and they always forgive us for the shitty hunters we are. We’re always glad to see them. But god DAMN it, must they always make the trek from front door to kitchen a veritable mine field? I can’t see my feet because my arms are laden with heavy bags and handles (because God forbid I make more than one trip to carry stuff, I have to carry As Much As Possible), and one of the cats always manages to make a run for my ankles as I’m stepping forward, usually resulting in a mad little dance to keep my balance or dropping or spilling something. Today was no exception. Also add to the mine field the possibility of stepping into a large puddle or pile of cat vomit. Side story #4, our cats are daily pukers; for some reason they happily empty their stomachs on the carpet on a regular basis and then run to the kitchen to gobble more food to take its place. We’ve tried everything from sensitive stomach food to slow feeder bowls to scheduled mealtimes. Nothing works. They open their mouths and eject whenever the need hits them. Always on the rugs, too. Then they try to cover the mess with some of their favorite toys so we have to clean them too. The vet calls it “social vomiting.” I oughta try it out with people who show up at our front door sometime.
I made the first run to the kitchen, only slightly tripping over Vesper as she darted through my feet. As I brought in the second load, I noticed a sizeable kibbly pile of vomit under the piano bench. This was Podrick’s doing; he works in vomit and shit like some artists work in oils or pastels. It’s funny how you can guess who left what on the floor after a while. I set the groceries on the counter, picked up the nearest canister of Lysol wipes (we have these strategically placed everywhere in the house, invest in some stock), and proceeded to attack the mess. Yep, Pod; he vomits in one spot, walks two inches, vomits again, walks a foot, and vomits again. Picasso the cat. I get up all of the chunks and then proceed to scrub the carpet with a fresh wipe…which immediately rolls itself up into a snake, thereby sinking my fingernails and tips of my bare fingers into stomach-churning sludge. I nearly puked myself. I managed to carry on and carried the pile of smelly wipes to the trash can. I spent the next few minutes scrubbing my fingernails and hands with lemon anti-bacterial soap; as I’m drying my hands, the unmistakable sound of hack-gulp-hack-gulp reaches my ears. Goddammit. I picked up the Clorox wipe canister by the sink and headed into the living room, where Podrick had decorated another section of the floor with his artwork, looking proud. He dropped a toy in the middle of the mess as I came up and gleefully took off into the kitchen to gorge some more. The Clorox wipe canister in my hand has one lone wipe in it, so I used that to scrub the toy and throw it aside and get up to get the Lysol canister I was using earlier and nearly trip over Vesper again as she once more darts under my feet. Despite what they say, counting to 10 does NOT help.
Finally everything was clean, and I carried the empty canister to the kitchen and tossed it nonchalantly into the recycle bin by the basement steps. Didn’t notice the recycle bin was overflowing – we haven’t taken it out for a couple of days due to bad weather – and the canister bounces around like a Michael Jordan rimshot. I thought, if that goddamn thing goes down the stairs it can stay down there until Judgment Day – but luckily the canister must have sensed my rise in blood pressure because it stayed in the bin. Loving husband to the rescue again, he grabs the offending recycle bin before I kick the entire thing down the stairs. (Yes, I’ve done that. Yes, I had to clean it up afterwards – but boy, was it satisfying.) He arranged everything in the can and I took it out and emptied it. On the way back I stepped in a mushy mud puddle in the driveway and spent the next few minutes wiping mud out of my shoes.
Gotta put away the rest of the groceries. I bought too much, again. No room in the freezer for a lot of this stuff, so I’ll take the Klondikes out of the packages and just stack them in the basket. I swear to Jesus that the plastic the Klondike bars are wrapped in should be wrapped around Fort Knox. I yanked and I tugged and I pulled and finally got a pair of scissors from the junk drawer and ripped it open, threw the bars in the freezer, and threw the box across the kitchen. Vesper thought I was playing and happily ran for the box. Tried the count-to-ten thing again. Nope, still didn’t work. Husband was laughing. I was laughing too - sort of. Fate really is a bitch. No more room; everything else got taken to the back freezer.
Side story – what are we on now? Oh, #5. Our back freezer has been there since God was a boy. It’s one of those monsters from 1975 or so, needing manual defrosting every summer, and it’s a beast. It’s also nearly impossible to get into, since the room it’s in was actually built around it, closed off with slatted doors. (I hate slatted doors. I despise slatted doors. I swear these slatted doors are going to the dump at some point in the very near future. They exist only to mock me.) So the door to the freezer opens from the left, which is precisely the wrong way for the room; you have to actually stand in the room, then back against the pantry shelving and yank the freezer door open, and then squeeze by the open freezer door to actually see the inside contents of the freezer. The door stopped sealing itself closed in probably 1987, and is held closed by a long piece of wood that wedges itself against the wall…so having my hands full of frozen stuff, squeezing my not-so-skinny self into the room and around the door, using my shoulder or something else to unwedge the wood, etc. – not something you want to do when you’re already being tested beyond endurance. Oh, and let’s throw in Seneca while we’re at it, because hey, (1) an open door, (2) my feet, and (3) Mom carrying a ton of bags. This is why I overstuff the freezer in the kitchen.
Okay, so the items have been put in the back freezer and I squeezed through the hated slatted doors and nearly step on Seneca again because she’s standing on the litter box trying to figure out how to get in and trip me. Now put the stuff in the fridge, always fun because Vesper tries to climb in there (an open door, see). The celery I purchased was green and crispy, but it's too damn long to fit in the crisper. I tried this way, I tried that way, and finally ended up breaking the greens off tossing them on the ground while I struggled to get the crisper closed. Vesper immediately decided to roll in the greens and got high. Husband turned to get the bread box and nearly killed himself trying to avoid our drugged-out cat writhing on the floor. I managed to grab the cat food and fill up all of the bowls so something would keep these monsters out from under our feet for FIVE FUCKING MINUTES while we put away the rest of the food.
Boy oh boy. I tell ya.
“I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair.” Truer words were never spoken. As the fridge door closed and the last cabinet clicked into place, Husband and I looked at each other and sighed. And it was only 10:00 in the goddamned morning. This deserves some chocolate and whiskey. The hell with blood sugar numbers. Sometimes you’ve got to write stuff down for others to appreciate, or not. At any rate, it’ll help me feel better.
Because shit happens. Even in Australia.
