Found on the back porch:
Buttsong
One early morning I heard noise from Debra’s butt.
“Debra, you have a buttsong!” “What?!”
“There’s no such thing as a buttsong!”she yelled out loudly. So,
“Yes there is” I yelled on back, “You just don’t know!”
So we spent the whole day arguing, laughing to and fro.
Now, I think, “Oh how funny was that, oh!”
This little masterwork comes to you, dear reader(s), courtesy of Rhonda’s oldest, the originator of the “buttsong” concept.
So last week The Lovely Rhonda came down with some kind of grippe. It seized her by the scruff of the immune system and shook her like a terrier shakes a rat. It wasn’t pretty.
The next day, it came for me. Even less pretty, it must be said.
And so I spent Thursday in bed. In. Bed. I do not lay abed for anything, except pneumonia last fall. So you can safely assume I felt fully wretched.
The fevery part of it departed fairly quickly and by Friday evening I felt almost human again. Except I lost my voice. This had happened to TLR a day earlier, so it made sense. We tried to back out of an Obligation that we had made, but alas, there was no one else to do it so we pressed on. One cannot stand up the church, and we have the reputation among the charity-auction circuit for being efficient and accurate when it comes to the cashiering process, which is complicated and takes place in a huge rush of semi-irritable people trying to get home. They have dressed up and given generously and now they want to get back to whatever it is that people watch on TV these days. I can’t blame them.
Sunday was fairly uneventful except that we both still felt terrible, but then Sunday night TLR coughed and coughed until I forced a Chloraseptic lozenge on her.
I love the word lozenge. It’s so specific. And it has a z in it and sounds kind of exotic. Not just a hard candy, no! It’s a lozenge! And then you must present it with a flourish.
At any rate, this lozenge helped her, and thus was I the hero once again.
No really, it was nothing. *preens*
Anyway, I spaced off that you really can’t take Sudafed if you want to sleep at night, so last night I tossed and turned. Eventually I realized that I was also rubbing my eye, and it was unpleasant, and I woke up to full-blown pinkeye. As did TLR.
Also? My head felt all ‘splody.
So today we visited The Best Nurse Practitioner Ever, who was kind and decent and decided that we had not just pinkeye but most likely bacterial pinkeye because we both have sinus infections and I myself am flirting with ear infections as well. (So far just a bit of slap-and-tickle, but you know how fresh these out-of-towners can get.)
So we got antibiotics and eye drops.
I’m a huge fan of antibiotics, used wisely and judiciously, and based on the sheer misery of the past five days I’m going to declare this a wise and judicious use of them. That being said, I’m also allergic to a lot of the really common ones, so when I get sick with this kind of thing I’m often prescribed Keflex. This is a cephalosporin and you have to take it fifty times a day for months. Okay, four times a day for up to two weeks. By the end of the two weeks you can’t remember why you were ever taking it in the first place, and if one of the capsules ruptures on its way down you’ll be coughing up a dusty cloud of evil all day. Needless to say I take it with a lot of water.
But! Then they invented the Z-Pak! Which is azithromycin, and you only take two tablets the first day and then one per day for three days after that. Hurrah!
So… for pinkeye they commonly give a sulfa-based eye drop. Guess who’s allergic to sulfa?
YES, THAT WOULD BE ME.
Guess how much sulfa eye drops cost, and where you can get them?
Four bucks, and practically everywhere.
Guess how much azithromycin eye drops cost, and where you can get them?
FIFTY DOLLARS, and — oddly enough — Costco.
So it was that I spent half an hour wandering around Costco waiting to buy eye drops. I tried not to touch stuff, but if you hear about a massive pinkeye epidemic over by the airport, I KNOW NOTHING AND WAS NEVER THERE.
By the way, they have a nice deal on fluorescent light bulbs right now.
So last summer we took in a tiny cat who had been abandoned in an empty apartment. She was all of six pounds, and striped, and we named her Mrs. Norris after Filch’s cat. Because Harry Potter.
She did not care to be held, nor petted overmuch, but would allow for some cuddling now and again. If you sat on the couch she would sit on your lap if there wasn’t too much fussing about by dogs or children nearby.
She loved to sit on my desk so much that I had to create a little bed for her to keep her from sitting directly in front of my screens. This became her haunt, and she and Our Hermione occasionally skirmished over it.
She was an odd little thing, keeping mainly to herself except when there was food to be had. When I crate-trained Dobby using lunch meat, the demon hellspawn cat within was awakened. She preceded me across the dining room toward the crates, yowling loudly and launching herself from surface to surface. When the lunchmeat was offered she would snatch it away and devour it nearby with a zeal that was frankly terrifying, or would be in an animal weighing more than a small bag of sugar. She was nearly as enthusiastic about Cheez-Its. More than once she was caught making off with chicken bones left on dinner plates. She was voracious and extremely focused.
In retrospect it was probably a couple of weeks ago that she started slowing down. She was never terribly playful or active, so it wasn’t that noticeable until a couple of days ago. Then it became apparent that she was losing weight. She still wanted the lunchmeat, but today when I got home, the lunchmeat was still on the table with just a few chew marks on it.
Not, as they say, a good sign.
I took her to the vet this afternoon, which I had already decided to do in any case. She had lost two of her precious six pounds, two that she could not really afford to lose, and was dehydrated. The vet warned me, gently, that she was terribly sick. They wanted to do labs.
Her labs were terrible. BUN was off the charts. Like a normal value is around 30… hers was 239. This is an indicator of kidney trouble. Essentially, her kidneys were failing.
She was only two years old or so. We don’t know why they failed. Maybe she got into something outside… we don’t know. But the road to recovery was looking long, hard and expensive.
We made the decision to put her down, because it seemed like the compassionate thing to do. Poor sick little thing.
Goodbye, Mrs. Norris. We hardly knew ye.
So we have this little black dog and he occasionally gets a little neurotic and pees in the hallway.
My theory is that he does it when he thinks he’s home alone. We crate him and the other dog when we’re not home, but sometimes The Lovely Rhonda leaves for work before I get up and I think that Jake, for that is his name, forgets that I’m home and figures it’s his opportunity to saunter down the hall and leave us a little token of his esteem.
This morning was one of those mornings, and after putting enzyme solution and a towel on the offending spot, I texted TLR to inform her of her dog’s actions.
He’s not my dog. He’s HER dog.
MY dog is the one we got to keep HER dog company. MY dog digs holes in the yard and is too mouthy, but what he does NOT do is pee in the house.
So anyway. TLR came home from work and looked at the hall and festered about the pee stains until I got home.
We decided to think about laminate flooring. We decided to do this at Ikea, because reasonably priced probably horse-meat-free meatballs. Sadly, Ikea is phasing out their laminate flooring, at least at our location, so even after traipsing all over the store we came away empty-handed. Well, sort of. It was Ikea. We had to buy a Kermit-the-frog-green spatula and some other odds and ends. One does not simply leave Ikea without buying things. Gah.
And we ate dinner. Because HELLO MEATBALLS, GET IN MY BELLY.
What should we have been doing? Going home to do our homework, of course. What did we do? We went to Home Depot instead.
So now we have laminate flooring. Because painting the entire interior of the house isn’t enough to do.
This is where Kenny comes in. He comes in, rips out carpet, and lays down laminate flooring like a boss. He does this without displaying more than a soupçon of buttcrack, and for this we shower him in money. And sarcasm.
Mostly sarcasm.
So yesterday morning we took the children to a Girl Scout event held at a local park. It was called “Fairy Myst” and the girls got to make their own fairy crowns, wands, and houses. There were snacks and they all got some pretty high-quality fairy wings too. It was kind of awesome.
The second best part of it was a song they sang as an icebreaker while waiting for girls to arrive. It was called “Wiggalo” and went something like so:
Hey hey Betsy!
Hey what!
Hey hey Betsy!
Hey what!
Show us how you Wiggalo!
With my hands up high and my feet down low, this is how I Wiggalo! (throws hands up high, then points to feet, then performs movement or gesture)
Wig, wig, wiggalo! Wig, wig, wiggalo! With her hands up high and her feet down low, this is how she Wiggalos! (everyone throws hands high, points at feet, performs movement)
My kid, the oldest, had that deer in the headlights look at first, but got into it before too long. Rhonda’s oldest was grumpy and stated that she would refuse to participate because it was embarrassing, but we more or less forced her to take a turn. When it was time to present a movement, she blew a raspberry. It was completely delightful that without missing a beat they all went, (shrug), Okay! and raspberried right back. And thusly was she assimilated.
Rhonda had to actually get a good grip on the youngest and put her through the motions like a puppet, but once everybody sang and wiggled her wiggle she loosened up a bit (pun probably intended, knowing me).
But that was only the second best part, because the best part of course involved me injuring myself doing something stupid. Because me.
I had raced home to fetch something we left behind and as I returned to the park I got a work call. I was hanging up the phone and checking that it was really hung up, because I have the stupidest phone ever. It likes to make me think that I’ve hung up, so that the party to whom I was speaking gets to hear anything humiliating that I might feel compelled to do once I believe I’m safely off the phone.
Naturally I wasn’t really looking at where I was going, so the humiliating thing I felt compelled to do was to walk straight into a thick, heavy metal cable strung around the shrubbery in lieu of what any normal person might construct, i.e. a solid, visible fence.
I hit this thing going full bore as I hurried back to Never Never Picnic Shelter Land, and it hit me a few inches above the left knee, effectively stopping me in my tracks.
Also I nearly performed a head-plant over it, but managed to prevent this by windmilling my arms and cursing loudly and repeatedly, which is my default response to painful accidents. (I once wrecked my bicycle at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge, and the good Samaritan who helped me up and dragged my bike out of the path of traffic was treated to some really, really interesting language. Sorry, nice lady!)
Fortunately nobody was near enough to have their ears blistered, and I’m fairly sure nobody witnessed this brilliant act either because the picnic shelter has a big high wall at the end facing my location. There weren’t that many other people around because it was a misty, breezy morning and all normal people were probably at home watching TV.
Naturally this forces me to confess the incident to both of you, dear reader(s).
I was left with a stripe of puffy, swollen bruise running across my leg above my knee. It happens to be in exactly the right place for The Lovely Rhonda to poke and/or punch me if I say something insulting when we’re in the car. She likes to arrive places quickly so she usually drives, because I am boring and old and drive sensibly. So she’s usually sitting to my left and if I am bothersome to her, she jabs at me in exactly that one spot on my leg which is now painfully bruised. I only wish this stopped me from saying insulting things as we drive, but no, and nor does it prevent her from jabbing or poking.
I think I’ll drive for the next couple of weeks.
So Monday in Vegas was spent shopping with The Lovely Rhonda and Allie. Josh opted out as he is not much of a shopper. Mel and Marie wanted to bask their comely figures by the pool since a) cheap drinks could be had there and b) they are from Minnesota where, as they delighted in telling us, it was currently snowing.
Once the fun of shopping was over we found ourselves at the Hard Rock Cafe.
The food was great and there were things to look at, like some Britney Spears costumes and a hairy jacket belonging to John Entwistle of The Who.
And a real live Elvis leisure suit of which sadly I did not get a photo! Rhonda drank a really enormous beer. We felt cool for a few minutes, both literally and figuratively.
We also wandered through the Coca-Cola store where the polar bear was available for photos also. It seems that Vegas is filled with casinos and people in costumes to take photos with. Rhonda pretended to be freaked out by the bear who of course made creepy advances to her every time we passed by. It was hilarious. And creepy.
As we walked back to the bus stop or some casino or something, who cares what, I saw this sign and was amused:
After that we went back to the hotel and cleaned up a bit for the Penn & Teller show. Which was super fun! Penn Jillette is both smart AND tall. And Teller is like a cheeky little elf next to him. I learned a few things and laughed like an asshole many times.
Once we’d been mystified and hoodwinked we set out for The Fremont Experience, because Mel and Marie were supposed to meet up with us there, but there was an unfortunate occurrence in which Marie fell into a large amount of alcohol and the only cure was to dance with strangers and almost get abducted. We received several texts from Mel on this topic, each one more desperate than the last, and TLR was ready to mobilize in defense of Marie’s endangered virtue. But Mel prevailed by sheer force of will and managed to hustle Marie into a cab and spirit her away back to the hotel, so by the time we got to Fremont they had left. This did not stop us from checking out the Fremont Street Experience, which is super cool. The only way it could be better was if I had a lawn chair and a yard-o-marg, but we made do with standing around gawking like tourists.
I know you both will find this shocking, but there on Fremont we also found a variety of people in costumes standing around for photo opportunities. One of these, of whom I sadly do not have a photo, was a rather scroungy looking guy in high heels and short of the “Daisy Duke” variety, also a halter top, and wielding, for reasons known only to himself, an inflatable toy hammer. I believe he wanted people to pay him for the privilege of appearing in a photo with them, but everyone stayed away. Like, far away. Comically far away. I would have felt sorry for him but he was a grown man in Daisy Dukes, a halter top, and ugly pumps. Clearly he had brought this on himself. As they said when I was doing my practicum in the regional burn center: A lot of people end up here as a result of making a long series of really unfortunate decisions in their lives.
Then we saw him: ELVIS.
The REAL Elvis.
And of course we had to give him five bucks to marry us in the street.
He was pretty frisky, and I found that it was necessary to specify NO HUMPING.
A little later on we came across a couple of the guys from KISS, and Josh let a girlish shriek fly. We therefore had to agree to get his picture with them too.
Um… where’s your other hand, Josh?
At some point we hopped a cab back to the hotel and after drinking and gambling to a very slight excess we wandered off to bed ourselves. The end.
(Note: we will return to Disneyland blogging once I have thoroughly beaten this horse to death)
So we went to Las Vegas last Saturday to have some fun. We took some friends with us and met other friends there. None of these people required us to prompt them to take potty checks (although The Lovely Rhonda did anyway). Only one of them needed a babysitter (more on that later). And all of us were of legal age to drink anything we felt inclined to drink and/or distribute perfectly good money to various casinos in exchange for free beverages and secondhand smoke.
So in other words, a fun group of people.
(Disclaimer to participants: I might make merciless fun of you in this blog post, and it’s all just for laughs. Disclaimer to readers: certain sequences of events and/or personal traits of persons described herein may be slightly embellished for comedic flair. Suspension of disbelief is therefore highly recommended.)
TLR and I flew in with our friend Josh on Saturday evening. We started this thing off right by getting our drink on at the airport:
My BFF from high school, Alison, joined us a mere half hour later. By this time we were already steeped in ennui, as evidenced by this photo:
Shortly thereafter we engaged a taxi and made our way through the unwashed masses to our hotel. In the interests of litigation avoidance, let’s just call it CARNIVAL CARNIVAL.
When we told the cab driver where to take us he said, “Oh man, CARNIVAL CARNIVAL? Who’d you piss off?” I am not making this up.
CARNIVAL CARNIVAL is a hotel that caters to families with children, and we are not ever staying there again. Not because the rooms were inadequate; they were perfectly nice — but a hotel that caters to families with children is overrun with — not surprisingly – families with children.
Children who were up at all hours. Bored, tired, whiny children in strollers that blocked the aisles. Horrible, screamy children with permissive/disinterested/incompetent parents.
Nevertheless we endeavored to have fun, and fun we had, but not so much within the confines of CARNIVAL CARNIVAL.
It did have several things in its favor, not the least of which was the 24-hour Krispy Kreme donut counter complete with barista service. We instantly loved the ladies staffing it when we witnessed them making merciless fun of an older couple who attempted to use a hotel-issued coupon to get a free cup of coffee. It turned out that you only got the free coffee if you purchased a dozen donuts, and evidently this was a deal breaker for them. It seemed to me that the bewildered husband-unit of this couple was still interested in coffee and a (single) donut, but no, the wife felt strongly that if you had to pay for the coffee it was no good. So off they went. We stepped up a moment later and although the Krispy Kreme ladies were being discreet about it, it was evident that there were shenanigans being perpetrated and, being us, we had no choice but to join in.
So anyway. We checked in and went to find some dinner, as Allie had not eaten and was beginning to wilt like a delicate little flower.
Did you know, dear reader(s), that casinos in Las Vegas are HUGE? We ambled around in increasingly frantic hypoglycemic states searching for an open restaurant within the hotel. Finally we located one. Unfortunately they were playing loud dance hits for the approximately zero patrons showing an interest in dancing. We sat as far from the speakers as humanly possible, and every so often a waiter was dispatched to visit us in the hinterlands. The food wasn’t bad, though, and they did serve drinks:
… As you can see, Josh doesn’t get out much.
Finally we all stumbled blearily to bed, it being 1am and myself having been up since 7am furiously cleaning and packing and so forth. (I recall allowing TLR to sleep in a bit that morning, which I mainly do in self-defense. A tired Lovely Rhonda is a cranky Lovely Rhonda.)
The next day we arose at the princely hour of around 9ish and got on with our day. We purchased discounted vouchers to some shows and then traipsed from hotel to hotel turning in our vouchers for actual tickets. We also ate things and drank things and timidly ventured into the shallow end of the gambling pool: penny slots. Penny slots are the equivalent of training wheels for noob gamblers and those with an aversion to spending money on anything intangible, i.e. me. We wandered idly from casino to casino, taking in the soulless debauchery, and finally I required resting. By this time my terrible non-functional feet were essentially hamburger, so I spent my rest period laying on the bed with ice packs pressed to the soles of my feet. GOOD TIMES, PEOPLE.
/BEGIN RANT:
Also? Thanks, nurse practitioner, for grumbling about being asked to prescribe a few lousy TyCo and then screwing up the RX so that I couldn’t actually get it filled. Because it makes me feel awesome to ask for pain medicine to manage my not inconsiderable pain while I attempt to do something really reasonable like enjoy my fucking vacation — you know, like other people who have normally shaped feet — and then have you piss and moan about me like I’m a drug seeker, and then make it so that I can’t pick the stupid medication up anyway.
Usually I love NPs and feel like they are great at what they do — but you can bet your shiny metal ass that I’m going to have a word with the head NP (who owns the clinic) about this.
/END RANT.
Okay, anyway back to the story.
Eventually, about midway through an episode of “Frasier,” I got the long-awaited text message from TLR. I sprang into action and hot-footed it (literally) down to the lobby, where I found and was hugged by Mel and subsequently by her enthusiastic friend Marie. And then TLR brought them both yard-o-margs, which set the tone for the rest of the vacation quite nicely.
Exhibit A: the “Yard-O-Marg.” Available in an assortment of fun colors!
Its resemblance to a bong is unsettling and merely coincidental.
So, Mel is a friend from the blogosphere. We met ages ago on a different blog site and have been virtually stalking one another for years, long before I met TLR, but had never met in person. Mel wanted to come to the wedding in January, but alas, her son inconveniently turned 18 that very same weekend. So no dice. But then when we started talking about Vegas, Mel hinted that perhaps that might be a little fun… maybe… We invited her, and she came!
And she brought her BFF, because meeting strange lesbians on your own in Vegas when you are as cute as Mel is probably a bad idea. She had no way of knowing that we are completely harmless, unless of course you run afoul of TLR’s sense of fairness in some way. In that case one half of us is not so harmless. I’m harmless in pretty much all events although I do occasionally exceed the speed limit by three or four miles per hour.
So once they got checked in we dorked around and had drinks and made our way to Caesar’s Palace.
A beverage containing alcohol purchased on the patio at Caesar’s will set you back fifteen dollars. Let’s just let that sink in for a moment: Fifteen. Dollars.
Despit its delicious alcoholicness, TLR was a bit dismayed at the price tag.
Later that evening we saw Absinthe.
How to even describe Absinthe?
Lordy.
Okay, imagine a Cirque du Soleil show but on a miniature scale. And then imagine that the master of ceremonies is the oiliest, most offensive person ever. And then imagine that his assistant is a frenetic, perverse, loud, short, extremely cute girl with the foulest mouth ever. And then let the rest of your imagination just go completely batshit crazy with all of that, and you might come close to Absinthe. If you’re not easily offended, by all means make it a priority to see this show. There was near-nudity, feats of daring, a high-wire act, gymnastics, foul language, sexual references, audience participation. It was raunchy and risque and so much fun OMG.
By the time the show was over it was midnight, which was 2am Mel time, so they were exhausted and went to bed. I think we might have stayed up a little while and gambled? It’s all a blur. Rumor has it that alcohol may have been involved.
I guess we’ll never know for sure.
Don’t miss the next thrilling installment: What Happened in Vegas, pt. 2! Coming soon to a blog near you!
