December 2009

Where’s the stick?

/ wvfurandroot / 13 Comments

I didn’t get the house cleaning/furniture moving gene. Or the vacuuming one.

No pictures. Are you kidding? Let you see the mess I have wrought with one good foot, a bad back, and a Loratab fog?

Last year's Little Tree that started this monstrous horrible mess.

As my father would say, Where’s the stick? [You’re supposed to ask, What stick? And then he says, The stick you stirred this mess up with.]

It’s a flippin’ mess. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. Well, yes, I can. It went something like this.

Mom is coming up eventually to wallpaper the ceiling in the cow bathroom.

While she’s here I should ask her to get the little tree out of the closet for me.

There’s no place for the little tree.

There is a place if I move the sofa forward a couple of feet.

Ah, but, now there’s no room for the desk. [I’d rather die than do without the desk. I love desks.]

OK. If I move the Evil Sewing Machine, I can slide the desk down 10 feet and Voila! room for the tree.

Can’t move the desk. It’s too heavy, I have one foot, and my back already hurts.

Take the drawers out.

Push.

One inch at a time.

Gaze in horror at the mess behind the desk. [I found Willy’s toad, may he rest in peace.]

Drag out the vacuum cleaner. [I’d rather clean the cat box with my tongue than vacuum, but sometimes you just gotta break down.]

Oh No!!!!!!!!! Where do I go with all the crap on the desk and the walls.

Connie wrings her hands in panic and considers another Loratab.

At present, the Evil Demon of Fabric Manipulation is in the middle of the floor as are the vacuum and the carpet cleaner. There’s a toad carcass, a forest worth of dried leaves, several acorns, and a letter I never mailed on the floor where the desk was.

The puppies are wild with consternation.

I never move furniture. I never vacuum. And Willy is mourning the toad.

It’s my mother’s fault.

My mother sewed, vacuumed and moved furniture the way some women buy shoes or bake. It was a great comfort to her to stir everything up (Where’s the stick?) and then re-assemble it in a completely different pattern – often using the Torture Implement of Bobbinhood to whip up some curtains or table runners along the way. When she’s stressed, she vacuums. Vacuums when she’s happy. Vacuums when she’s sad. Vacuums because she needs to and vacuums because there is nothing else to do. At any one time, she owns three or four vacuum cleaners. She lusts over them in stores like I do desks (and shoes).

I spent my formative years listening to the drone of the vacuum cleaner and bruising my shins in the middle of the night.

I only move furniture around until I have found the exact perfect configuration. I’ll move it round and round for some months, maybe years, and then I find the one setup that works and there it remains until it disintegrates into a dust heap. I term it finding the spot the universe wants that piece in. The family room and the Christmas tree are always a battle. The exact perfect configuration does not accommodate the tree.  I was not happy with last year’s arrangement and so here I sit.  Completely demoralized as I lose this battle.

And. So. Here I sit. The family room is in complete disarray. I’m completely out of oomph. My foot hurts. My back hurts. And there is a dead toad lying on the carpet.

I hate being a grown-up.  I have to clean this up whether I want to or not.  And it’s going to involve the vacuum cleaner.  And I have to touch [shudder] the Beelzebub of Thread to keep from bruising my shins in the middle of the night as I stumble down here to guzzle Coca Cola.  (I never drink soda, but Loratabs provoke a need for massive quanities of Classic Coke.)

A Not So Fun Silly Shoe Season

/ wvfurandroot / 8 Comments

Talk about your silly shoe season.

The last couple of months have just been crazy. Oh sure, I can hear you saying, So what else is new?” It’s true that my life is a tragicomedy that would provide good ratings to some television channel should they decide I’m worthy of a reality show. But I’m opposed to reality TV. In fact, after living without for a couple of years, I’m pretty much opposed to the boob tube, in general.

So. What’s new?

I had foot surgery again. Oh, yes, again.

A few years ago, I developed a soft tissue mass” following a car accident. (Got my feet tangled up in the pedals.) The more precise term is inclusion cyst. As near as I can figure, this damn thing is a giant zit trapped deep in my foot resulting from skin cells that got trapped in joint fluid. Parts of one’s body is allergic to skin cells in the wrong place.  Go figure.

The original lump - May 2007

A couple of days after the accident, my foot started screaming in pain – loud enough to deafen the caterwauling of my back and hip. I trundled off to the emergency room where they first told me it was broken and then that it wasn’t. After rounds of doctors and weeks of pain, I finally got the correct diagnosis.

My surgeon, who can’t possibly be old enough to slice and dice people, assured me that it was a simple outpatient procedure that would fix me up for good. He was astonished when I walked into his office a few weeks after the first surgery with another good sized lump in the same place. He muttered something like, “In all my years, I’ve never seen one of these come back.” [All what years? He can’t be more than 16.]

No yoga for me.

So, he sliced and diced again. A couple of months later, I limped back into his office and told him I thought the damn thing was back. He looked horror stricken. He did this and he did that (I think the term is palpitated) and determined it was just a lot of scar tissue. He shot me full of steroids and sent me on my merry way. My foot felt fine for a week or so.

Determined to quit nagging the youngun’, I learned to accommodate a foot that always hurt. A few months ago, the pain started ramping up.

I was far too busy for such inconveniences.

Then the lump got big enough that I couldn’t sleep in my preferred position.

Well. When you start messing with my sleep, I get serious.

I hobbled back into his office. Suddenly, his story has changed. From inconceivable (I don’t think that word means what you think it means – name that reference), he now tells me these things can be lifelong nuisances. So we scheduled surgery.

Loratab and lounging - hey, they said to elevate it. So I am. With all the style and grace I can muster. I am I am.

In terms of surgery, this procedure is a No Big Deal. In-and-out outpatient, a few days whacked out on controlled substances, and a sexy shoe for a couple of weeks. That’s how they describe it.

The pain is significant. Walking around in the damn surgical shoe makes my back unhappy. Trying to negotiate life living alone while under the influence of pain pills is daunting.

And, of course, the timing couldn’t be worse. (HMOKeefe is acting up again.) I couldn’t put the surgery off because I had reached the distressing point where the lump was pressing on nerves – apropos of nothing, my foot would go to sleep – while driving, while walking, while negotiating stairs. It also hurt like hell. The lump also got big enough that finding a shoe that would fit on my foot turned into a search for the lost grail. There’s also the monetary consideration of having to start the HUGE DEDUCTIBLE all over again in January.  (Health care reform, anyone?)

While I have time for sinfully long, baths, it's not all I could hope for.

So instead of preparing for the holidays and nursing HMOKeefe, I’m elevating my foot, learning the art of trashbag duct-taping to prevent wet bandages, and enjoying, so to speak, the soft puffy pink cloud that my brain turns into on Loratab.

I’m also catching up on sleep, reading and laundry. The problem is that Chapter 3 makes no sense because I can’t remember Chapter 2. The other problem is I get so caught up in the wonder of fabric textures that my clothes wrinkle before I can get them folded. So, I’m trying to stretch out the Loratab fix as long as I can so that I have a couple of productive hours now and again.

But as inconvenient and unpleasant as it all is, I’m getting some badly needed downtime. This working 70 hours a week crimps my lifestyle. The puppies are delirious with joy that I have time for them – they’ve been even more neglected than this blog.

So, fa la la, people. I’m back – at least for a few days while I enjoy Loratab la la land.