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Whaddaya mean I have to get out of bed?

Jillian and I are both coming down with a cold. It’s only to be expected, what with the weekend of rainy travel and scads of friends and relatives smooching on my baby. We were bound to get something.

Yesterday started with The Snots, which is always fun. Jillian is now able to run away when she sees me coming with a tissue, so I have had to come up with alternate methods of snot-wiping. Namely, the sleeve of my shirt. Sure, it sounds glamorous, but when you have to do it every day, it really becomes a very normal thing.

Because of The Snots, the sleeping thing has been slightly interrupted. Naptime was nonexistent yesterday, and bedtime was interesting because she was obviously exhausted, but since she couldn’t breathe through her nose, she couldn’t sleep. Some Benadryl and the humidifier fixed that and she woke up with fierce crusties this morning.

Jillian seems to be fine today - she’s running around the house at light speed, talking a mile a minute. I, on the other hand, feel as though I’ve been run over by a truck, plus I had some extremely vivid dreams last night, so I don’t feel as though I slept at all. FUN!

I need sick days or something.

Whew. Ten whole minutes to myself! Whatever shall I do?

The time is flying by lately. I’m up to my eyeballs in my Super Secret Project, plus I have a toddler now, so I’m trying to keep her from killing herself or destroying the house. That’s fun. She is becoming a better walker, though.

My little brother got married last weekend. The ceremony was lovely, his bride is beautiful, and a good time was had by all, especially Jillian, who got to hang out with her cousins for the first time. Everyone hit it off and the boys spent the evening chasing the baby. If only they lived closer to us (or we to them), I’d have all kinds of babysitters at my disposal.

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again - it totally sucks not having any family in New Jersey. There is no one around who will watch the baby! We have a babysitter, but she’s expensive. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents charge a lot less. But they are all miles away. Sigh.

The end of my ten minutes is approaching. I apologize for the dearth of posts of late, but there is much to be done and little time in which to do it.

What the hell happened to the Indians?

MY GOD, PEOPLE. All they had to do was win ONE MEASLY GAME, but no - they had to lose.

And not just lose, they got KILLED.

Sigh.

Go Sox, I guess.

I went to the dermatologist today to do a mole check. A long-overdue mole check, in fact.

Most of my spots look okay, but there was one that worried the doctor. I knew right away which one it was, since it worried me as well. It was a dark spot on my inner right thigh, which appeared during my pregnancy and never went away. It didn’t get any bigger or darker, but it was a whole lot darker than the rest of my moles, so the doctor decided to chop it out and biopsy it.

AIEE!

Now I have a lovely hole in my leg. She numbed the area and used a desiccator tool which left a beautiful, black-edged crater. EEEW! Fascinating! It will heal, of course, but it’s definitely ugly.

When a doctor utters the word “biopsy,” most people freak right out. Since she said she wasn’t too worried about it and the biopsy is just to be on the safe side, I’m fine with it, too. But still… a biopsy? Yikes. Perhaps I’ll do a pre-emptive leg amputation.

I’ve always thought of myself as a bit of a slob. Indeed, my approach to housekeeping can be described as “somewhat lax.” This annoys Freddie sometimes, but he has to remember that he was raised in a more or less sterile environment (very clean and utterly devoid of personality), and I was raised by hippies. You do the math.

However. There is always a ‘however,’ isn’t there?

Slob I may be, but I am quite capable of keeping the house from becoming filthy.

The previous owners of our new house were apparently incapable of doing this. The more I clean the place, the more grossed out I am at just how disgusting the house is. For instance, I cleaned the oven on Saturday. When I opened it up to wipe out the insides, I noticed that the hinges of the doors were full of that greasy dust you tend to see on an oven that hasn’t been cleaned in DECADES. And, had this oven been decades old, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.

This oven? Is not quite four years old. Color me grossed out. The window on the top oven (it’s a double) is so grimy, it is impossible to see in when baking. How the hell does this happen? I cooked like a slob in our previous house for three years and only cleaned the oven ONCE and it wasn’t even a tenth as gross as this one is. I am just baffled as to how it got this way. Were they baking caramels or something?

I’m tempted to just replace the oven, but that just isn’t in the budget at the present time.

Same deal with the fridge. The inside was a mess, which is to be expected, but the outside was all nasty, too. The fronts of the cabinets need to be cleaned in a very big way, which I will probably do in the next few weeks. It’s just gross.

And don’t get me started on the outside. The backyard is destroyed, since they had two dogs penned in there. There is a worn track going from one side of the house to the other and if we can ever get grass to grow there, I’ll be shocked.

The front was apparently “professionally landscaped” at some point (this was noted in the real estate listing, too), but it was never ever maintained. I spent a good part of yesterday with my clippers hacking down a beautiful but out-of-control butterfly bush, cursing all the while. I was merciless, and I think I’m going to make Freddie buy me a saw so I can chop down some of the bigger branches and try to shape it a little more. If it dies, it dies. I’ll put something else in there.

Today’s project is the rest of the front landscaping. It is seriously out of control and I think I’m just going to hack it all down and see what survives.

I know it’s rare to buy a house and have everything be exactly how you want it, but this is just… let’s just say the way this house was kept makes my housekeeping (or lack thereof) look like Martha Stewart-level housekeeping. I literally throw up my hands and curse the previous owners a couple times a day.

Ever since the Great Mets Choking Incident of 2007, I haven’t been paying attention to baseball. However, now that it looks as if the Indians might make it to the World Serious (as my dad calls it), things are looking interesting again.

Having grown up in NE Ohio in the 80’s, I was witness to years and years and YEARS of bad Cleveland baseball. I mean, the entire premise of the movie Major League was based on the Indians winning some games, so you knew that it was fiction. You couldn’t make that same movie with, say, the Yankees (even though they have had their sucky times as well). The Cubs, possibly, but the Indians were far more believable.

So I shall watch the game tonight with interest. I doubt Boston can again pull off a crazy comeback a la 2004, but I heard a rumor once that I was wrong about something, so anything is possible, I guess.

Go Tribe!

Whew. What a busy couple of weeks it has been. And what a busy couple of weeks I have coming up! I feel like I’m completely out of the loop with all of my online activities. I’m behind on blog posting, blog reading (so, yes, I am neglecting you), and other stuff. It’s been busy.

For one thing, Jillian is walking. A lot. She walks more than she crawls now, so it’s only a matter of time before she starts the Toddler Running Thing and my reflexes will be put to the test. Thankfully, the house is all on one level now, so no step-down in the living room and no stairs that need to be gated off! All I have to do is gate off the kitchen, close the doors to the rest of the rooms in the house and Jillian is pretty safe. It remains to be seen if the house is safe from her, however.

The job search is still going on. I’m saying “no” to a lot more that I otherwise might, but this is because I don’t want to take just any old job and find out two weeks from now that it makes me want to kill myself. Or my boss. Or my co-workers. So I’m holding out for something that interests me in more ways than simply what it pays.

I’m not panicking, which is a nice change from my normal way of going on. We have enough cash to get us through the next couple of months, and that is very helpful knowledge. Of course, if I don’t find something by the first of the year, I will have to get a lot less picky, but for now, I am still looking. I also have some other things up my sleeve that may solve the employment problem nicely. But these ideas are not yet fully-formed, so they will stay up in my sleeve for the time being. Good thing I put deodorant on.

The move went very well. Jillian hung out with my mom while we did all the icky things like sign our names to loan documents for obscene amounts of money. My husband is a certified crazy person, so we got the bulk of the house unpacked in the first weekend. The only boxes that are left hold things like office supplies, and we don’t yet have anyplace to put them, so they can stay like that for now. We do have to empty out the storage unit, and I am not looking forward to that at all.

But we’re moved, and it’s starting to feel like home. I have to schedule carpet cleaning, because the previous owners had dogs and the office, especially, smells dog-tastic. And there are other things that need to be done here and there, but for the most part, we are comfortable. My only problem now is getting Freddie to calm down about all the work that needs to be done. We plan to be here for a number of years, so all the improvements he wants to make can be done over time. We’re not going anywhere.

OHAI.

We’ve been here at The Butterfly Ranch for a week now, and things are going well. Unpacking is progressing nicely, and we are about to start the Great Organizing.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about today. Oh, no. I spent most of last night throwing up my dinner AND my lunch. When there was nothing left to throw up, I dry-heaved.

Food poisoning is not a pretty thing. At one point, I was curled up on the bathroom floor with my bath towel over me, twitching and moaning. Around 3:30 this morning, Freddie had to practically drag me out of there, and he set me up with a trash can and stuff so I could continue retching from the comfort of my bed. What a sweet boy.

I’m a big, giant baby because this wasn’t even a very severe case of food poisoning. I’m fine now, for instance. If it were fish-related, I can imagine I would still be in the bathroom. Ugh. But I can’t remember the last time I dry-heaved, and I used to be a champion booze drinker. Now I’m just on the JV team, what with the baby and all, but I have had my moments.

Still. The dry-heaving? Not recommended. I think I pulled a muscle on my chest at the base of my neck. I’m pretty dehydrated and although I made Freddie go buy me some Pedialyte, I’m not sure if my stomach will tolerate it just yet. I need to consume something soon, however, or I’m going to pass out from lack of calories.

I feel really, really terrible. I’m sure not sleeping but maybe an hour or so didn’t help my case much, but I’ll survive that.

Oh, where did I contract this lovely case of Barf-o-rama? Chipotle. This disturbs me, because I like that place, dammit. Now I can’t eat there ever ever again, ever. EVER! This SUCKS! Or else it’s Mother Nature’s way of smacking me upside the head for eating fast food, especially after all the disgusted bitching I do about it. I can honestly say I have learned my lesson, and aside from the occasional Arby’s run (hey, PMS sucks and Arby’s sauce cures everything), fast food can suck it.

I’m off to Target now. We’re out of TP.

I am very angry today. On the one hand, it’s utterly exhausting to be this angry for an extended period of time. Trust me, I spent YEARS being as angry as I feel today, and it sucks. On the other hand, I know enough now to channel all this energy into something useful, and boy oh boy am I going to get some stuff done today.

Here is a list of the things I have been doing for the past week:

1. Packing.

2. Moving.

3. Unpacking.

4. Watching my daughter walk.

5. Unpacking.

6. Looking for things that have been unpacked, then “put away” by my husband.

7. Unpacking.

8. Keeping tabs on the escalating train wreck that is Britney Spears.

9. Putting stuff away.

10. Losing the boxcutters.

11. Yelling at the cat: “This is where we live now. Shut the hell up.”

12. Rearranging the furniture, again, some more.

13. Watching my daughter walk with increasing skill.

14. Thinking about painting the house.

15. Wondering just how much pruning the butterfly bush out front can take, because it needs some serious help but I don’t want to kill it. Yet.

16. Trying to get the dog smell out of the house. It’s not dog pee, but there is definitely Eau de Puppy floating around the house. It’s not bothersome, but… oh wait - it is.

17. Not blogging.