I have given into the demon peer pressure and created a quiz about myself at QuizYourFriends.com. Won't someone please take it so I don't feel like a complete loser? Thank you.
Post your results in my comments section if you are so inclined.
Meet Bob the flower. Bob is angry. Bob hates bad punctuation. I want to marry Bob, or at least have this panel tattooed on my face.
Apparently Cosmo has an abcess in his leg. He is running a bit of a fever so he's being sent home with antibiotics. She shaved his leg to look at it but didn't see anything that needed to be lanced so I guess what we do is just give him the meds and wait for it to go away.
I'm relieved but still extremely cautious. I have had more pets than I care to mention go completely downhill after I'd been convinced by the vet that everything was going to be fine. (Not this specific vet, though.) I don't think I'll be able to relax completely until the lump on his leg goes away and he's back to acting like his old self.
I totally forgot I hadn't updated on the car situation yet. D'oh!
I can't do it right now as I have to go get Cosmo ready for the vet (see post below) but I will post an update later today. We have excellent news, folks.
Sorry to leave everybody hanging.
My cat Cosmo came up limping yesterday and it's worse today. It appears there is a large bump on his leg, or perhaps it's just swollen. He is also not acting himself, although he IS still eating and drinking. Robert is going to take him to the vet and drop him off, as we only have the one car till later in the week. I will be waiting to hear from them what is wrong.
He has never had any health problems before (he's 9 years old!) He's only been to the vet for shots. I'm kind of freaking out because, while I think it's more likely it's a sprain or a fracture, I am thinking of all these worst-case scenarios, like it's a tumor or a break that will require surgery or something.
Aside from the worry over his health I am also a bit anxious about the vet bill. We WILL fix it, whatever it is.....but it would be really, really good if it was a fairly inexpensive problem.
Please think of Cosmo today! I will update when I have news.
I spent five minutes the other night laughing my ass off over this.
For Easter I got the kids a set of window markers. You can use them to color/draw on glass and it is washable so it wipes right off with a wet cloth. Day before yesterday was the first time they'd played with them. When I was showing the markers to them I picked up one and wrote the first thing that popped into my head, which, because I am apparently still 12 years old, was "poop." Then I went away and left them to their coloring.
I hadn't paid any attention to their "artwork" until later that night when I went in to feed the bunny. Upon closer inspection I found the following inscriptions in Madalyn's writing:
Madalyn is a poopy.
JZ is a poop.
Mom is a poop.
Dad is a poop.
And me, being the cracker-jack parent I am, stood out there laughing hysterically over it. Probably I should've been horrified or disgusted or something but it just cracked me up. I guess if she'd just written that one of us was a poop I'd have taken it more personally, but, I mean, she included herself in it, as well, so I can hardly take offense to that. Plus, ahem....who gave her the idea to writ it in the first place? Physician, heal thyself.
Sometimes I wonder whose idea it was to give me two children to raise.
I've just been doing a bit of sleuthing and happened to discover that Movable Type has been ever-so-kindly taking it upon itself to junk some of the comments you lovely people are leaving me. I wouldn't have known except my friend Dave, whose comments usually go through, mentioned he'd left me one yesterday and it had disappeared. This led me to poke around in my control panel and I discovered the "Junk" section. Sure enough, Dave's comment was there, along with ten others from the past week that never posted. When someone posts a comment I'm supposed to get it in email....but since these comments weren't actually posting I was never made aware of their existence. I haven't the slightest clue what possible criteria the program could be identifying that would make it categorize certain comments as junk (especially since more than half of the comments were made by people who've made comments previously and not had a problem). But now that I know I will be checking the junk folder every day and also will do what I can to tweak the settings so it isn't so militant.
If you've left a comment since I got my new design and it never showed up -- this is what happened. I'm thinking that comments are only kept in the junk folder for a specific amount of time and then automatically deleted, so I'm wondering if there is a bunch of stuff I missed altogether which is now gone for good. At any rate, my apologies to anyone who's had this happen. Please don't let it discourage you from commenting in the future. I have identified the problem and will be monitoring the junk folder closely.
Hang on, folks....things may not be as bleak as they seem.
Watch for more updates as information becomes available.....
I don't even know what to say except that we got a call this morning from the dealership. The van has to go back. It took them a week to figure out the financing won't go through.
I wish I could say I was surprised but I'm not. I have been extremely cautious about being excited this past week because I've gotten so used to having any even vaguely good thing that happens to us yanked away as soon as we start to get excited about it. This is more of the same. Someday I will sit down and write out a list of all the stuff that's happened to us in the past year to prove I'm not just being melodramatic. I would like to know who's idea of entertainment this is, to keep handing us blessings and then ripping them away. I'm worn down. I've had it. I'm tired of being optimistic and trying to convince myself that there's a reason for everything. Who else does stuff like this happen to? Not many people, I'd wager. What we did to bring this upon ourselves, I can't imagine. I always thought we were pretty decent people.
If this was an isolated incident, by the way, I would be disappointed but would get over it fairly easily. But this is just the most recent in a list as long as my arm of crappy things that've happened to us. Not only did this happen with our car, this is very similar to what happened with our mortgage on the old house. The bank idiot telling us, "Oh, sure, this is no problem! We've got it all wrapped up!" and then we take over the house and it turns out they DIDN'T have it "all taken care of" and our payments will be $500 more a month than we thought because of it. Do we have "Please screw us" tattooed on our foreheads or something? Why the hell would you tell someone something is no problem when you don't know for sure one way or the other? Why would you tell someone they are approved for a mortgage when they weren't yet, and why would you let someone take a car and keep it for a week if you weren't even sure the deal was going to go through?
In closing, a word of caution for anyone in Oklahoma who is reading this: I would definitely NOT recommend Joe Cooper Ford in Midwest City.
The very first movie I ever saw in the theater multiple times was Labyrinth. It was the summer between sixth and seventh grades. My mom didn't take me to the movies a whole lot -- we're talking once every couple of years -- so I'm really not sure what made us go see that movie in particular. All I remember is we both liked it -- a LOT. We went back to see it at least twice more and I know I saw it at least one other time with my cousins. I even got the comic book....er, graphic novelization of the movie.
In the years following I saw the movie numerous other times when it had been released to HBO and the like. I probably rented it once or twice on VHS. However, it's been years and years since I've seen the movie. I know I haven't seen it since I moved to Oklahoma, which was 9.5 years ago. Even so, I looked up the movie on IMDb yesterday and read the quotes page and I could hear, in my head, the exact tone and inflection of the voices of the characters when they said the lines -- that's how many times I watched it.
The other day a friend online put up, as her avatar, a picture of the little worm Sarah meets in the labyrinth. This sparked a conversation between a few of us about the movie and someone mentioned that, yes, it is, indeed, available on DVD. All the talk about it had made me long to see the movie again so last night I went out in search of it and found it. I wanted to show it to Madalyn but it was too late to start it when I got back home so I have saved it till today. When JZ wakes up from his nap we'll go pick Madalyn up from the after-school program and come home and watch. It's a crapshoot whether she will like it or not -- like myself as a small child, she is sensitive to a lot of things and gets, for lack of a better term, creeped out easily. (The reason I've never read The Hobbit is because my mom took me to a viewing of a cartoon version of the book when I was about four and it gave me the creeps. I've never been able to pluck up the desire to read the book since.) So, she may love it or she may be completely unimpressed. I know I will enjoy it, though. It's a great movie.
My new wheels!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, our long national nightmare is over. I have transportation.
A certain person has been asking that I post some pictures of the kids. The wait is over! Here are a few shots from our photo session of last month. Here is Madalyn, solo. (Click below)
A shot of the happy siblings together.
And, finally, brotherly/sisterly love. Awww.
I am pleased and thrilled to announce the arrival of:
Our tax refund!!
Vehicular ownership is just around the corner. We will be shopping around town tomorrow and going up to the city later in the week.
(For those just tuning in I have been without an automobile since June of last year, due to a fiendish convergence of financial difficulties.)
As much as I'd like to be able to say we are going new-car shopping, alas, this is not the case. The credit, she is bad. So much so that it will probably be a couple years before anyone will finance a new car for us. We will be browsing in the pre-owned section and probably our choices will be fairly limited as there are likely not too many places who will be willing to deal with us at this point. We remain optimistic, however, that we will come away with a car that is not too many years old and in the moderate- to low-mileage department. Something that is going to fall apart on us in a month would not be terribly beneficial.
My dream vehicle, oddly enough, is a conversion van (go ahead, mock me. I know you're thinking it.) I have been fascinated by the idea of them ever since I rode in one on a class trip to Magic Mountain when I was in the eighth grade. Since I've been car-less I have been thinking a lot about what I'd really want and a conversion van is it. What I would truly love is one of the brand-new, macked out models with a flat-screen LCD t.v., backup cameras, and every other bell and whistle you can imagine. Unfortunately we are several years away from one of those at this time. Very nice used conversion vans are available but, as mentioned previously, with our ugly credit situation we will be limited to the stock on hand at the very few places who will even consider speaking to us. So it looks as though we will have to work up to the conversion van. I am willing, in the interim, to drive a mini-van as long as it's a relatively nice mini-van. Not my favorite type of car but I can deal for a year or two. Hell, at this point, I could deal with my old, two-door, 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass. So long as it runs reliably and doesn't have vermin infestation in the upholstery, I can deal. Just let me be able to get out of the house when I want!!!