Quit Needling Me

I work in HR, for those of you who don't know.  I am in charge of the economic future of quite a few peeps and take my job very serious on the occasion when I am required to do so.  However, due to the fact that my occupation begs certain trainings to be completed I found myself being peer pressured into doing something I was uncomfortable with and feared losing street cred with my co-workers. 

I was to be TB tested. 

Now, I know some of you are rolling your eyes and snarfing into your cookie-ensconced hand but I ask you to see it from MY point of view:  THERE'S A FRICKIN' NEEDLE INVOLVED!

"It's no big deal, they just inject you with some stuff and then you turn into an insect like that Gregor guy or become the guy from the Jurassic Park movie and it's no big deal!" I can't verify that this is what was exactly said as the room started spinning after my co-worker said the word "inject."

My child-hood was a horrendous mass of lab coats and needles so my fear of being poked is deep-rooted and very much real.  However, this means little to the nurse in my building. Nor did it mean much to her friend who was sitting, cross-legged - with one leg - in the chair in front of her desk.  

"I don't like needles," I said as I pulled up a chair.   "I don't like needles." I repeated as she smiled and waved the thing in front of me like it was a baton with streamers. 

"That's nothing!" The man in the chair spoke up as he watched her unwrap the instruments of torture. "I've had more needles in me than you can imagine!"  He leaned back in his chair and put a hand on his metal leg for emphasis. 

"I. AM. SQUEAMISH!" I repeated, loudly. I picked up a paper and fanned myself as I felt a pinch on the inside of my arm.  "SQUEAMISH!"  He cackled and my co-worker appeared in the doorway looking quite the anxious little one. 

"Do I need to carry you back to the office?" She asked - half-kidding. 

"No," I said, sniffing and holding my alcohol pad on my arm.  "I'll be fine..."

So far my little dot is red, bruised-looking and kinda bubbly. 

I think I may have the TB!

hee hee Just kidding!  I'm fine and dandy! Really!  No more tests need to be performed on me today. Fine!  I'M FINE!!!  :)

How to Lie - Badly

Actual conversation between my parents- as told to me by my sister, Summer:

Mominator:  "Hey - you were gone a long time last night. Where'd you go?"

Dadfus: "Well, I went to see Steve in the hospital-"

M: "It doesn't take no two hours to go to the hospital and back! Where else did you go?" (Sidenote - mom gets allllll kinds of Redneck when she is mad.  Her roots start sproutin' like a weed in a cornfield)

D:  "I went TO THE HOSPITAL!  I talked to Rocky and Steve and - I WAS AT THE HOSPITAL!"

M: "You were gone for TWO HOURS!"

D: "WHERE would I go? I don't go anywhere! I have no money - I go nowhere!  WHERE WOULD I GO???"  

With that he heaved himself up and went out on the back porch. A few slamming doors and twenty minutes later and Dad walks back into the living room.

Dadfus: "So when I was at Walmart last night-" he slapped his hands over his mouth.  In the timeframe it took him to walk outside, close the doors to his outbuilding and come back in he forgot he was in the middle of a fight.

I wish I'd had been there to see it.   I love my dad - I do - but his attention span and short term memory rival that of the goldfish he sentences to a cold fate in his pond. 

:)

Not-so-Grand-parents

Yesterday my mother called to tell me that my grandmother, we call her "Nan-nan," was admitted to the hospital for pneumonia.   Mom rushed from the house, hair still damp from the shower and clad only in old for-the-house-only sweat pants and sans any make-up.  When she arrived at the ER she found my grandmother a bit under the weather but decked out like her Talbot's photo shoot would be taken after the blood was drawn. 

"You and Summer can come see her tomorrow," she warned us. 

So today after a long and kinda boring Job Fair where we got stuck in Road Construction work on I-64 which turned out NOT to be Road Work but to, instead, be Road Closed Due to Body Found in Trash Can (EWWWW) I waited for Sis to come over. 

"Wegogetcontrabandfirst?" she said in her normal non-pausing speech which still makes my head spin in a mini-circle. 

"Yes," I said. "We can go to Wal Mart and go get her some contraband."  

Two hours later (ugh.) we end up in a double suite at one of the local hospitals.  

"They ask you stupid questions," Nan-nan said, explaining her love of medical doctors. 

Summer nodded.  "Like your sexual history?"  I tried to kick her but she moved.  

"Well, they asked me if I had ears and I said yes, two of 'em and went like this for some reason," Nan-nan grabbed her chest a bit and bounced. 

"Why would you do that?  Couldn't you just say, 'I have two ears'?"  I wasn't sure why they were testing her sanity but I feared that she would do worse if they asked her to count a body part of only one. 

"Holly," Summer said slowly.  "They didn't ask her about her ears, they asked her about her piercings and she gestured to her boobs."  

"Wha-huh? Nooo - did you?  NAN-NAN why did you tell them you had pierced nipples?!?!?"

She giggled and went back to pulling her pants legs up over her bare legs and flailing them about.  And then she hid her candy from the doctors.  Or us.  

So - needless to say - my grandmother is doing fine and dandy with enough spunk left in her to amuse all of the orderlies on staff. 

Or scare the crap out of 'em. 

Either way.  

I'm Drawing a Blank

 Two years ago I hung those blank canvases on either side of my french doors.  Two years ago I decided I was going to paint something brilliant on them.  Or simple.  Or colorful.  Something to compliment the mounds of Blenko glass that are placed above the door, around the fireplace and on virtually every other surface around my house.  

Lemmie just preface this by saying - I'm a color whore.  I LOVE color.  My kitchen's green with bright red accents, my living room, though painted a muted almond color, is decorated in bold punches wherever the addled eye should wander.   So when I decided to paint my own art instead of buying it already framed from Walmart as many as my WVian neighbors do (if I see ONE more framed poster of Water Lillies...) I thought, "Easy peasy.  I'll splash a bit of orange here, a twirl of green and a punch of red and - done!"  But I couldn't bring myself to do it. 

I'm - uninspired. 

Those blank canvases mock me from the large walls upon which they hang crookedly.  Their white-eyed stares follow me from room to room like the paintings of the Masters whose subjects have eyes that seem to stare through you.  

I'm not really sure why I'm so daunted.  

Maybe because they are so starkly white?

Or because there are two?

Or maybe it's because my husband stares at me from the end of the couch with that look on his face like "Hey - what are you doing?  Should you be doing that?  Hey - is that what I would want you to do?"  

Any suggestions for artwork?  Short of squibbles and dots - I'm at a loss. 

I've thought of painting a large Blenko-like bottle on them that stretches from one to the other, or a grouping of bottles so that you can see two slices of it from each canvas.

Or a large green happy face on one. 

And a large orange one on the other. 

So maybe I am Wal-mart inspired after all.   :)

You'll Put Your Eye Out!

I'm alone - a LOT - so when it comes to fixing dinner for myself it usually ends up being some poor excuse of an ordeal involving a fast food joint or whatever is stuck to the bottom of the freezer.  Today was no exception as I came home, stuck my freckled nose in our fridge (handles still crusty from the meal Harry prepared me during my illness weekend before last since a symptom of mankind includes the inability to prepare meals withOUT covering the walls like they were part of the dinnerware) and came up with - a bag of frozen broccoli.   

Two pieces of cheese and a sleeve of Ritz crackers later and my dinner was complete.   It was unbalanced, a bit crunchy at times, but it was (mostly) edible so I was moderately pleased.  

 

But I wanted more. 

Creeping back to the icebox I glanced around as if worried about getting caught and slowly slid open the bottom freezer door.  Reaching one pale, bespeckled arm into the cold abyss, I pulled back and held in my tiny little hand - a half eaten pint of Cookies and Cream ice cream from Baskin and Robbins.  It wasn't mine.   But who was going to stop me?

I grabbed a big spoon from the drawer, threw caution to the wind as I bypassed a bowl and slid back into my still-warmed seat at the kitchen table.  

I mercilessly began digging out all the cookie chunks, hacking at the creamy mound with wild abandon until it loosed its bounty unto my waiting shovel. Spoonful after spoonful of velvety

 goodness found its way to my lips as I spotted the mother of all chunks stuck to the very bottom of the flimsy pink carton. 

Forgetting my cautious ways, I held the carton up at an angle, peered down into the depths and pushed with all my might with my spoon against the side of the carton. 

"FWOOP!" 

The carton gave way, the spoon found its mark and - I flipped a large chunk of ice cold ice cream up into my face. 

And into my eye. 

INTO MY EYE!

I yowled and hollered and cursed as I banged my spoon on the counter and plucked the milky bits from my cheek, chin, shirt and eye.   

And then I looked back into the carton with my watery eye. 

The cookie chunk mocked me as it held its ground. 

Squinting so as to protect my retinas from anymore flying cookie shrapnel, I dove in, caught my foe and ate it in one fell swoop.

I then sat down the carton and quickly texted Harry:  "I tripped.  fell into your ice cream tub.  ate it all.   Complete assident.  I assure u... :)"

I win. 

Little Miss Muffett Sat on a ....

When one enters the sanctuary of one's own lavatory it is a most vulnerable event as - well - you can be caught - quite literally - with your pants down.   So, as I'm perched on the porcelain potty and wishing I hadn't drank such a large glass of water right before bed - I see it.  Not three feet away and dangling suggestively ---over our toothbrushes.

A pale yellow spider, about an inch long and very meaty, was dancing and swaying, weaving and bobbing as it mocked me.   "Watch me!" It seemed to say, "watch me as I put my spidery legs really close to the bristles of your toothbrush.... I eat bugs!!! YUM!!!"   

I'm stuck - mid-pee.  I can't move.  I'm not wearing shoes to throw and since my aim is only as good as myopic vision is, I wouldn't have landed my foe anyway.  

I formulate a plan on the fly, grabbed some two-ply, fluffed it across the necessary region with one hand, flushed, and grabbed a squirt bottle with the other one. 

There, in my bathroom, with my lime-green Kmart sweatpant pooled around my pink feet, my "I love you!" post-Valentine-day mark-down panties nestled in the floor, I sprayed the spider with fifteen short bursts of water.   

Which it laughed off in tiny non-audible spidey laughs and crawled behind the freakin' mirror.  I had missed.  

And now must sleep with one eye open in fear of retaliation...

Until we meet again, Spidey, until we meet again....

Holly LVS 2 TXT!

"I sent about 500 text messages last month," Harry said to me as we got ready for bed the other night.   

"Wow! That's a lot!"  I said.  I lathered up my facial bar and began scrubbing the lingering black residue from around my eyes.   Cover Girl is a stubborn bitch sometimes. 

"You sent 2,464."

I sputtered and laughed as I tried to rinse my face off and not get soap into my eyes. 

"You sent 2,464 text messages in February.  February has 28 days.  Which is less than other months,"  Harry continued with his stupid, infallible logic . 

I was giggling hysterically at this point and careening around the bathroom trying to find somewhere to hide while water and soap bubbles clung to my cheeks.

"We have unlimited texts!  I'm getting our money's worth!" I screeched. 

"That's 88 texts a day."

I tried my best to sober up and to kick the giggles that threatened to overtake me again.  Sighing deeply I walked up to my loving husband and put a hand on his chest.

"Don't worry, babycakes," I said, my voice dripping with earnest.  "Those relationships are purely textual."

ahahahahahah!

ahahahahah!

(snort!)

ahahahahahah!

Textual!  ahahahahha!