Maybe it's time to go to bed

In the last 30 minutes I have put ear drops in my eye (OW!), worn two different flip flops to the pet store, and referred to a cool skull-shaped bottle as "a skeleton head." It's totally time to call it a day, but instead I'm going to go dye my hair. Anyone want to place bets on how this is going to go?

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I wouldn't drink that if I were you....

Once again, it was time for me to leave a urine sample in my urologist's office as part of the instillation process. Instillations are a fun part of having interstitial cystitis, since this treatment is a medicine that is instilled in the bladder through a catheter. Catheters are super fun and exciting instruments of torture. Wohoo!

This time I was lacking some creativity on what to write on the outside of my urine specimen cup. If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you'll remember that I like to write a bit of whimsy on the outside of each cup, just because. This was fun at first but then the nurse admitted that sometimes when she has a crummy day, she actually looks forward to handling my pee just because of the little statement on the cup. Pressure!

So, I resorted to asking for ideas on facebook. I got several, but the winning idea came from Scott Lovelis. He suggested getting a Mott's apple juice sticker for the cup. Now, I didn't have one of those hanging around but I did have a bunch of Mott's juice boxes and the cardboard thingo that goes inside the shrink-wrapped container of boxes. So I got out my scissors and packed the cut-out and some tape in my purse. And I giggled a little.

This idea only worked because I’m in pretty good shape, pain-wise, nowadays and I don’t have to use bladder pain meds very often. The pain meds make urine either fire red or an odd toilet-bowl-cleaner blue. Neither would be likened to apple juice.

I went into the bathroom to execute my plan. I decorated the cup, took the picture, and then realized I could never pee in it and not bump/knock off/mess up the Mott’s sign. So I had to employ a second cup and then poured the pee in the creative cup VERY CAREFULLY. I am very committed to this gag, clearly.

The nurse loved it, of course! She complimented me on my creativity. I had to admit I’d gotten the idea from someone on facebook. I’m pretty sure she still thinks I’m awesome.

To add to today’s fun, my regular nurse was training a new nurse. This nurse had never done a catherization before (and she still hasn’t; today she was just watching, thankfully) and so my regular nurse had to give a step-by-step lecture on the whole thing. “You see this? This is the urethra.” Wonderful.

Life. It just doesn’t get much better than this!

The "or not" part was all me. 

For more posts about Interstitial Cystitis, including all my crazy urine cups, click here. 

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The Banana Song

My daughter has suggested that this (very excellent) Marina and the Diamonds' song be renamed "The Banana Song." Can you guess why?

Also, Marina is hella cute, and her lyrics are smart, funny, and ironic too. That is all.

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Yay! I'm! So! Excited!

OK! I would LOVE to put my items in this basket! What an great idea!

Librarians must be easily excited. Or, at least, easily excited by the idea that library patrons might put their returned stuff in its place rather than leaving it all the hell over the library. 

Remind me to never be a librarian. That ish is hard work.

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Good one!

Yesterday, like every day this summer, I was arguing with The Boy about wearing sunscreen. He's got some sensory issues and hates the application of sunscreen, particularly to his face, neck, and ears. Recently I got sunburned myself because I was busy applying the kids' lotion and then I sent them off to the pool and haphazardly sprayed my own back. I had stripes of non-burned skin where the spray had saturated surrounded by red areas. As a twitter friend of mine, @revfridge, said, sunscreen is SO literal.

Anyway, since my children have never really been sunburned, I used my artistically striped back as a lesson, showing them what it looks like to be burned and describing that it hurt. So, when the latest go-round of "Why do I have to wear sunscreen" started, I told my little 8-year-old darling, "You should see my back; it’s still in pain." And he replied:

"You should see my butt, because you’re a pain in it."

Husband and I were stunned silent for a moment, and then I said:

"I gotta say, that was one of your better ones."

And then Husband went back to applying The Boy's sunscreen.

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Never smirk, even internally.

Karma's a b!tch.

Today at Vacation Bible School, some of the kids made door hangers. You know, those things you hang on the knob that say something like "Keep out!" on one side and "Come on in," on the other. I'm not sure what, if anything, the door hangers had to do with the lessons of the day, but no worries, it's a fun, innocent project, right?

Well, maybe.

The first door hanger thingo I saw belonged to the six-year-old daughter of a friend. On one side of the hanger, it said, "Cum in," and on the other side it said, "Do not cum in."

I laughed, but only on the inside. Her mom quite calmly complimented the child on her work and gently said, "By the way, come is spelled C-O-M-E." The daughter said, "OK. But I did it myself you know?" and her mom praised her efforts again. I was still smirking a bit, until my son came out with his door hanger.

Sigh.

The Boy flung his work of art at me and then went to wait for his friend. On one side, there was a bizarre drawing, which he later explained to be a scene from a Mario game involving a flag and various characters. It was the other side that got me. It said... get ready...

"Do not do it. I am on the toylit."

Honestly.

I said, "Boy! I can't imagine that your teacher liked this! What did she say?"

All smiles, clearly proud of his naughtiness, he said, "She said if it was bad she was going to throw it out and we would have to make a new one. She didn't throw it out, so I guess she thought it was OK!" He dashed off to resume waiting for his friend.

I'm so proud of his work.


Oh good, another chance to use this photo.

UPDATE: I asked his teacher and she said she did not, in fact, see his door hanger and approve it. Figures.

Clearly, I'm going to need to send this kid to college. I may need to take advantage of upromise online rewards to help make that happen. Plus I should also find Walmart coupons because I'm totally going to need a lot of help. Better start saving now. He really needs to learn how to spell "toilet," at the very least. 

I didn't really know what it was about when I put it on hold.

The copy of Fifty Shades of Grey I requested is now available at my local library. I sure hope the pages aren't sticky.



You can't really click to look inside. My apologies for the lie. 

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Maid you look!

Damn right I'm unhappy with my maid service! Those people do a piss poor job of cleaning this house. The woodwork is atrociously dirty, the floors seem to always need mopping, and have you seen the master bedroom? It's dust-city. Honestly, those people ought to be fired because...

Oh wait.

I don't HAVE a maid service. Guess I had better enter their free housecleaning drawing, eh?

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A talent nobody really wants

Girl: Mom! Mom! I am SOOOOO talented!

Me: Oh yeah? Why is that?

Girl: I just peed like a boy!

Me: What?

Girl: I just peed like a boy! I put the toilet seat up and walked up to it and leaned like this [she demonstrates] and I peed standing up!

Me: Wow. You probably shouldn't try that again.

Previous post: I really need to put a hamper in the bathroom

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I really need to put a hamper in the bathroom

Recently, The Girl went streaking through the house, naked, to put her clothes in the laundry room before her bath. As she ran by, The Boy said, "Heh heh heh. I see your balls."

Me: What?

Boy: I see her balls.

Me: What do you think "balls" are?

Boy: Uh... Her butt cheeks?

Me: No. Balls are testicles. They are part of a boy's privates. She doesn't have any balls.

Boy: Oh.

Girl: HA! Balls, balls, balls! He has BALLS!

Me: Please don't repeat that at preschool.

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Honey, I shrunk my notepad!

I had hoped to steal borrow a hotel notepad to use while interviewing people at a dog event I'm covering. No, the pen in that photo is not super-sized. I included it for scale so that you can see what I'm working with here.  It's a post-it note sans the sticky. 

Expect really, really short interviews from this show.

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Ever the optimist

I found out today that I had already paid for two things I thought I still needed to pay for. I choose to look at this as really good news rather than as evidence of poor record keeping and memory loss. I'm a glass-half-full kind of gal.

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That's OK, you don't know what I'm making about you....

Not long ago, I posted a fantastic spam message that came to a business account for a company. Yesterday, I got a great direct message to the same business's twitter account. This came from a hacked user, and it went like this:

Hi this user is making terrible things about you... [link removed]

Direct message sent by XXXXXX to you 

This message brings up a lot of questions. I can't imagine what kind of terrible things someone might be making that have something to do with me. A statue of my likeness that breathes fire? A computer virus named after me? An unauthorized biography full of scandalous stories (obviously made up because, as you know, I am awesome)? What else could it be?

Also, I'm really torn up about the lack of reasonable grammar in this DM. Honestly, if you are going to go to all the trouble to hack and spam, have a good editor look over your message first. 

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The one where I eat some crow

So in my last post, I may have cast aspersions on my local Walgreen's based Red Box. (Quick, define "cast aspersions" without looking it up. Yeah, I thought so. Me too.) I may have accidentally suggested that the odd-looking DVD we rented of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo might possibly have been a copy rather than the original. You might have even gotten the impression that I was implying that something funky was going on. I assure you that was not my intention. Ahem.

For whatever reason, I decided to tweet Red Box, showing them my photo of the DVD and asking them what the heck was up with it. I considered linking to the original blog entry to show them what I was talking about, but then I (wisely, it turns out) decided to just attach the photo.

This is the tweet I got back:

@0Brenna0 That's how the disc was designed by the movie studio because Lissbeth (the main character) plays a computer hacker.

Whoops.

Never in the history of ever would I have thought that that's how the disc came from the manufacturer. Honestly, I blame you people for my glaring error. Didn't at least one of you guys rent or buy that movie? Surely one of you read this and knew I was completely off-base and could have told me before I went and got all tweety over it. Sheesh.

OK, maybe it's a tiny bit my fault for jumping to conclusions. MAYBE. 

So, anyway. Yay, Redbox! You rock at providing awesome, not-bootlegged DVDs at low, low prices.

Please don't sue me.

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Red Box rip off?

We don't rent a lot of movies, but Husband read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and wanted to see how the movie was. So he went to Red Box in my local Walgreen's (which is currently out of cherry Zotz because I bought them all) and rented it. This is how it looked:

Yes, that's a DVD with the movie title written on it with a sharpie. These leads me to some questions about how exactly Red Box gets the movies that they provide for the obscenely low price of $1. Does Billy Joe sit in his seedy, McDonald's-wrapper-filled living room and make copy after copy from a movie his boss bought for full price? If so, they're making out like bandits with that one dollar rental fee. Does every Red Box movie look like this or did someone perhaps return a bootlegged copy to the machine while keeping the original?

It was a fine copy of the movie but it didn't come with any extras or anything. Suspicious....

IMPORTANT: READ THIS FOLLOW UP TO THIS POST.

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In competition for the best spam message ever

I just opened this spam email, which came to a business address, no less. I think it's made of awesome (but, of course, I'm not clicking the link):


Do you want to have sex for a long time, and be the best in bed sama? 


This web portal will help you to be skipped, it will make of thee a porn star 


I m in this store has to order a year-round pills and do not feel trouble, the fastest delivery of all very reliable. - 


[link removed, just in case you have an accidental spasm in your clicking finger--LATR]


Watson Coffee


I need to google "bed sama" for sure because I need to know if I even WANT to be the best at it. Plus, do I want to be "skipped?" And I really like the use of "thee" because who doesn't want a little Shakespeare in their bed sama? Mr. Watson Coffee, you really have this pitch-thing down. Rock on.

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Listen at your own risk

Today I bought this song. I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I figured that I needed to reimburse the artist for all the airplay it's getting inside my head.

You're welcome. 

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Hopefully it'll look good when it matters

On Friday night, my family will be going to get a picture taken of all four of us. It's for our church directory, and it will also provide us with photos to hand out to various relatives who want to save this moment in our lives forever.

I would rather shove forks in my eyeballs and eat a fire sandwich than go have a family photo taken. I know that in 20 years we'll be glad to have it blah, blah, blah, but I will still dread every minute up to the appointment. I absolutely hate the idea of trying to make everything perfect for a photo.

When I called to make our appointment, I was picturing late April, with plenty of time for me to forget about the impending experience before it arrived. But there was only one appointment available that meshed with my husband's work schedule, and that's now. There is no time for denial.

Conveniently, we've all had haircuts recently. I found clean clothes that coordinate well enough so that we won't look like our photo accidentally happened to four people who just coincidentally wound up in the same place and time as a photographer. But there's the issue of my hair color.

Last week, I dyed my hair with a new dye. This in and of itself is no surprise. I buy whatever's fairly cheap in the right color. I can't remember what kind I use each time. But previously, I used dark brown (instead of my normal medium brown) and liked that because swimming so much makes my color fade pretty quickly. And since my main interest in dying my hair is to have any color that isn't gray, my system has mostly worked for me.

This time, however, I got this foaming color stuff. It's supposed to be easy to apply and less messy than traditional hair dyes, or so I have heard. It turns out, what I've heard is all lies. That shit got EVERYWHERE. And, like any good hair dye, it was invisible until it developed, so when I got out of the shower I got to play a fun game of "find all the stuff you ruined with brown dye." And then I followed that with a round of "scrub the crap out of that to try to save it."

Meanwhile, said dye colored my hair, scalp, forehead, and shoulders in a most thorough and annoying fashion. I've never had my scalp stained for a week before. What a treat!

And then, to add insult to injury, when my hair was dry I discovered that large sections of the underneath part DID NOT GET DYED AT ALL. This has never happened to me while using non-foaming hair color. So I had to go out and buy a root coloring kit, which I convinced Husband to help me apply (he kept saying, "I don't know how to do this," and I kept saying, "Do you see gray hair? THEN PUT DYE ON IT!"). Maybe if I keep making huge messes and employing Husband to help me fix mistakes, someone will give me a year's worth of hair coloring sessions at a salon.

Yeah, that's probably not going to happen.

So tonight, after a long day, I was sitting at the table and I asked Husband if he thought my hair would look OK for the picture. Both he and The Girl looked at my head and said, "Well, not right now." I gave them a blank look until I realized that chunks of hair were sticking out of my ponytail much like I had stuck my finger in a socket. The Girl followed it up with, "Yeah, it's a little messy."

I'm pretty sure I said, "I meant the color," and silently added, "you morons." At least, I THINK it was silently.

"Oh yeah, the color is fine," they agreed.

Whatever. Maybe I'll wear a hat.

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UPDATE: We survived! And the Boy, who has some bizarre vomiting virus, was cheerful, well-behaved, and non-barfy the whole time. The Girl was also well-behaved and kept all bodily fluids to herself. Next time I get my picture taken, though, I'm not wearing a white shirt. I look like a boat. But my hair looks awesome, so there's that.

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At least I made the sloth happy

I stumble onto a lot of funny things on the internet (thank you, Facebook). But this is the perfect combination of witty and adorable, and you just can't get that at the corner store*.

So check out 33 Animals Who are Extremely Disappointed in You and enjoy the stylings of someone much funnier than me. And tell me which animal is your favorite!

*Is that a saying or did I just make that up? 

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Hey, I'm not MADE of money

On Saturday, the kids and I went to the grocery store to pick up a few necessities for Easter. The Boy, who is 8, and The Girl, who is 5, reminded me that we needed to buy flowers for them to take to church to place on the cross. Every year, all the children who attend Sunday school bring different kinds of flowers and put them on the cross that is displayed outside of the church. It turns out to be a beautiful, wonderful smelling creation. It's really awesome.

So we went over to the fresh flowers section and the kids bantered about which bouquet to buy. We decided on one with a variety of colors of flowers so that each of them could choose their favorite. Except the bouquet cost $8 for a bunch of cheap, dyed flowers.

Me: Man, I'm going to have to pay $8 for you guys to each take ONE flower to church. Man.

Then I looked and saw some carnations.

Me: Hey, here are some carnations. They are only $4, and they are red. Everybody likes red.


Girl: Red's not really my favorite color any more.


Me: Yeah, well, it's a good color. Plus, these are only $4. We're getting these.


Boy: Really Mom? You're going with cheap for Easter? Really?


Me: 


Me: Yes, I am. And you don't need to be telling everybody.

They looked FINE on the cross. Still, I'm hoping Jesus doesn't ask for my receipt.

For what it's worth, there are FOUR of our carnations on this cross. Three of them are clumped together. Can you find them?

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I'm sure it's her BEAUTY that's the problem

This woman laments all the wrongs done to her in life because of her amazing beauty.  Draw your own conclusions.

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This was just the first thing that went wrong today

"Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

IC sucks!"

That was my urine cup commentary for the day. My Interstitial Cystitis (IC) had been flaring up over the last week so I went in to get in instillation today. Prior to every instillation, I have to give a urine sample, which the nurse tests to make sure the I don't have an infection (you can't have an instillation when you have an infection). That's the fun of having a disease that mimics the symptoms of a urinary tract infection (among other things): you never know when you have an actual UTI. 

Although I've rarely failed tests in my life, today I certainly did. The good news is that, when you fail a urine test, you get antibiotics instead of an "F". Now I get to go back next week and try again. Isn't that special?

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Guaranteed to freak your kids out on Easter morning

@Karendipitee shared this photo of her Picasso bunny with me so that he can live on in infamy even after being consumed*. Isn't that what we all want for our lives? Anyway, I think this guy had a part-time job as a flounder. Or maybe some dude in the chocolate factory eye applying section was on crack. But I prefer to think that Mr. Bunny had an alter ego as a bottom dwelling fish. Because that makes more sense, right?

Here's hoping this bunny was one of a kind, otherwise some kid will probably be scarred for life on Easter morning. 

*I'm told that he was delicious.

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