Reason #2 I have a husband

I explained reason #1 for me to have my husband in a previous post, although I did not label it as such.  Reason #1 is because having a husband means I almost always have a spider killer at my disposal.  Reason #2 is that I am afraid of the dark and have an over-active imagination.

Last night husband got to go spend the night at a sleep clinic because his snores are starting to wake the neighbors and I'm tired of buying earplugs.  Before leaving he commented that I would probably sleep great because he would not be next to me making the wall vibrate, and I have to admit, I almost believed him.  But then I realized it would be my first night alone in our house.  The animals don't count because the dog is going deaf and sleeps harder than a narcoleptic alcoholic and cats are crazy.  I thought, mind over matter, I would be able to convince myself that I am an adult, the doors are all locked and the likelihood of a serial killer choosing the one night I was home alone to randomly attack me are pretty slim.  I was not able to convince myself of any such things.

I stayed up really late, thinking that would cause me to fall instantly asleep when I turned the lights off, and walked through the whole house and checked windows and doors so that my brain wouldn't be able to suggest the possibility that the door wasn't actually locked and that's not just the furnace making that noise.  You can guess by that last run-on sentence that those things didn't work.  I think I may have slept 2 hours last night?  At one point, I think I was actually asleep, but I was dreaming that I was laying in bed, not asleep but with my eyes closed and I was hearing someone walking around.  In the dream I finally convinced myself that I might actually be hearing something scary so I got up to let the dog out and when I got to the back door I realized it wasn't latched!  So that's when I think I actually stopped sleeping.  I had to actually get up and re-check everything and then proceeded to wake up every time the furnace kicked on or off, the dog shifted her position, a car drove by, and one of the cats made a noise.  It was a long night.

So despite husbands intense snoring, and likely sleep apnea, and the fact that he sleeps deeper than the dog and the likelihood of him hearing a serial killer and having the capacity to do anything about it as he sleepily stumbles about is even less than me convincing myself that there is not an alien zombie ghost in the hallway, I have decided that reason #2 for having a husband, is that he is someone warm in bed next to me and his snoring presence allows me to put earplugs in my ears and not hear anything that may or may not be creeping around my house.

Super Graceful

So I ran across this ecard on Pinterest a while ago:

And I thought, "wow! That it totally true!"
I am always finding bruises all over myself and have no idea where they come from.  What's more, I've started making mental notes, and not so mental comments to myself and husband when I run into things.  I'll bash into the coffee table or a desk and say, ow! holy whatensuch and other shorter, four-letter type words, and then tell husband or whoever happens to be nearby (because I rarely do these things when there isn't at least one person around to witness the extent of my coordination deficiency), that "hey, I'll have a bruise there later."  But here's the really crazy part, I rarely actually end up with a bruise from those events which I notate!  Or maybe I do, but my attention span for bruise development is severely limited...I'm not sure.  All I know is when I think I'll end up with a bruise, I rarely witness one come to pass, but then other times I'll catch a glimpse of one, or I'll touch one I didn't know was there, and have NO CLUE where it came from!

This all had a point, I'm sure that's hard to believe.  Last week, I think it was last week, I noticed I had a severely dark and intense looking bruise on the back of my arm.  This thing was good, deep purple about the size of a half-dollar (do people even know what those are anymore?) and looked suspiciously like a large thumb (as if someone grabbed me).  For those of you who don't know I am a counselor for domestic violence offenders, and I have become much more aware of domestic violence as well as things that can be construed as domestic violence.  No, husband does not beat me.  But I am increasingly concerned that someone is going to think I'm one of those counselors with similar issues of my own and this is only fueled by the appearance of bruises I cannot explain!  Needless to say I did my best to hide my arms last week at work.  I did wear a t-shirt under a sweater though one day and my supervisor noticed the bruise so of course I'm all, "IHAVENOIDEAWHEREITCAMEFROM ISN'TTHATWEIRD?" She wasn't nearly as concerned about it as I was, which I have to admit was kind of a let down after I built it all up in my head. I guess I expected like an intervention or something.  But alas no, no unnecessary intervention for me.

Oddly enough, that was also not my primary inspiration for this post.  Although, that's sort of a lie, it has a similar theme in the mysterious bruise area of things.  My inspiration is a totally un-mysterious bruise I have forming on my right butt cheek.  I have no pictures as of yet, but I cannot promise there won't be any, I can promise I will edit out anything that could visually prove the location of the bruise.  Anyway, the punch line is I have learned definitively that I cannot read and walk down stairs.  I am as surprised by this as anyone who may read this and actually knows me might be, that I did not know that about myself before now.  The story is not all that exciting, partly because I don't really remember what happened.  But I was walking down to our laundry room and I was reading the packaging on something and I guess, missed a step? Thought a step was bigger than it was? Decided to try my hand at levitation?  Either way I went down and hit at least 2 steps with my rear before coming to a stop.  And now, to show (or not to show) for it, I cannot sit strait and have a lovely bruise developing that I really kinda want to show off.  At least I know where this one came from!

Daylight Savings Blows

I really truly hate daylight savings.  Or the lack of daylight savings.  Honestly I'm not really sure if we are on daylight savings now or off of it, all I know is that it is 5:09 and I feel like I should be getting ready for bed.  And that's not only because I am already in my comfy pants and sans bra.  I hate that it is dark already.  Now this may have something to do with the fact that I wanted to get some more done today and I needed outdoors in order to do it.  I wanted to do some painting after I got back from my run but it was a little too cold and a little too dark by the time I got back.  So now I'm siting on the couch feeling like I should be doing something productive but I'm not sure what. Husband is playing a video game and I sort of wish it was 2 player, but it's not. I should probably get up and take our soup out of the freezer so it can thaw, but I have a snuggle-y new baby kitty in my lap and so I can't really justify getting up right now.  The other option I can come up with is folding laundry or continuing the project I started yesterday while looking for my painting supplies, organizing the office...but, well, that just doesn't sound fun at all!  And this being my symbolic Sunday I feel like I should do something I enjoy.  Which is why I wanted to paint! Dag-nabit!  Stupid daylight savings or lack of daylight savings!  Do they have these problems in Arizona?

My husband the hero

The other night while the husband and I were peacefully enjoying a lovely steak dinner, we were unknowingly being watched.  Who knows how long we were being monitored.  Perhaps an hour, perhaps the whole day.  All I know is we were being stalked.  Our every move, observed and evaluated in hopes of finding a pattern or a weakness.  Something that could be used against us when the time was right.  This is why I believe it was awhile that we were watched.  How else could it have known that I would be the weakness? How else could it have known I was the one to corner and ambush in a moment of distraction? Virtually defenseless.

As I was saying, the husband and I were enjoying our dinner.  We were in the living room, husband on the couch, me safely protected, or rather cornered; sitting on the floor, husband to my left, couch to my back and right.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement to my right.  I froze.  In my hand I gripped my steak knife. Suddenly movement again! It was coming towards me!! I leapt!! I leapt from the floor and halfway into my husbands lap! Holding fast to my steak knife as I went! I am certain that I must have been attempting to protect my husband by throwing myself between he and the giant eight-legged fiend that was coming toward us!  Luckily for me, husband knew that I was no match for the spider.  He knew, that despite my bravery, the massive size of the quarter-inch creature would be too much for me to over come.  Husband saved me.  After he removed me from his lap and the knife from my hand he took the beast between his fingers and slayed it with one pinch! My Hero!!

The Neighborhood

So we have lived in the new neighborhood now for a month...or a month and a couple weeks.  Honestly I don't even know what year it is some days!  Anyway, we have lived in our new neighborhood for a couple weeks.  We are responsible adult types, all homeowning and bill paying and cooking and cleaning.  Such grown ups.  That's beside the point, not at all what I was going to talk about.  I was going to address some of the peculiarities of our neighborhood, which have become more noticeable as the excitement and newness of homeownership is wearing off and the responsibility and annoyance begins setting in.  So in no particular order, things about our neighborhood!

1) We have a nosy housewife

Well actually at least two, there may be more.  Anyway the nosy Ms. Noserson I had in mind is the neighbor directly next door.  We met our neighbors the very first night we had our house, those who know me may remember pictures of the husband and I trying to hook up our water heater...or rather pictures of him trying to hook up the water heater whist I sat in the room taking pictures and providing witty commentary.  So we were planning how to go about getting the water heater in the house (very heavy) when a man walked by and asked if we were the new neighbors.  "why yes, we are, its a pleasure to meet you" we replied.  But not really because we aren't that polite.  Long story short, he helped us out and introduced me to his wife.  Since our first meeting, neighbor wife has managed to conveniently be outside every time I am.  That's a bit of an exaggeration.  She's a bit of a "know it all" and has informed me that we can purchase a new garage door opener at home depot for $30, that we could buy sod for the lawn at home depot "it's not expensive," that she knows a tree guy who can trim our tree for $300,  that the people who lived in our house before us repainted the exterior (although I have evidence to the contrary) but did not remodel the kitchen, and that we probably should get new windows, guess what? we can get those at home depot too...I'm beginning to think she actually works for home depot and that bit about staying home with her kids is a lie, they're probably just small employees she houses to keep her mortgage payments down!

2) The neighborhood goes down hill

Literally! I noticed it the first time I went for a walk, I took our dog and a friends' dog we were watching (Mr. Wes) to a near by park.  The park is like a half mile away and mostly down hill.  On the way back I noticed that houses were getting progressively nicer and yards more maintained as I climbed toward our house until I eventually made it to our street.  Overall, I'm happy about this observation.

3) DOGS!

Holy hell there are a lot of dogs in our neighborhood!  The reason I know this is that they all bark like all the time! And when they aren't barking, don't worry, there is a fire department on the next street, and the fire department can be counted on to respond to calls, day or night, any time the dogs aren't already going.  Let me explain, first you hear the sirens start up, then one dog: BRRROOOOOOORRRR then another dog: WOOOOOOOOOO and another dog: BARK BARK HOOOOOOOO and another dog.  You get my point? Eventually we have a concert of various howls and barks in different tones and pitch, it's quite relaxing. At 2 am.

The other aspect to my DOGS observation is nosy neighbor's dog.  Don't get me wrong, he is a very sweet, very old, very fat black lab.  I took a picture once upon a time, but I cannot seem to find it at the moment.  But neighbor dog likes to bark.  And this is not an exaggeration.  He barks the entire time he is outside, which seems like it is all day some days.  If you are outside, he will bark at you.  If you are not outside he will bark at someone else.  If no one is outside, he must bark at squirrels, I'm not sure.  But quite literally, he barks constantly.  It's not an urgent or intimidating bark, more like he's just reminding you he's there, every 3-5 seconds, all day.  He stops if you pet him...although I found out after such an act that he has a skin condition...ew.

4) Our mail lady is an evil ninja

Or possibly just over worked and underpaid.  Or maybe lazy.  I'm not sure, but either way she's sneaky!  I'm home at least 3 of the days when she brings mail, but even with the door open she comes by and drops of mail without my noticing until she is at the next house! I don't know how she does it!  I say she is evil, because she is kinda grouchy and "evil ninja" just sounded more intriguing than grouchy ninja.  But she also does not like to look in our box, which is by the door on the house.  Maybe she's just shorter than she looks from a distance, but she routinely leaves mail in our box that I wanted her to take...so again, evil? Trying to take over the world by slowly driving me into a fit of frustrations which would lead me to talk badly to a client, cause hurt feelings and then through some unseen steps I'm too sleepy to verbally illustrate lead to the downfall of society? Maybe.

5) Dog foody deliciousness

Again, I'm talking about dogs...not really though.  What I am referencing is an occurrence we have experienced possibly 3 times since finding this house in which our entire neighborhood smells like dog food.  "huh?" You are confused I see.  Well, for those of you not in Denver, you may not know that there is a GIANT Purina dog food factory off of I-70.  "That's miles and miles from your house" you may say.  Yes, we realize, but that does not stop the pungent and oh so tempting smells from the factory from drifting their way north all the way to our neighborhood and settling in for the day from time to time.  I cannot explain it.  Guess it probably has something to do with wind currents and weather and the right day (or wrong day) in the cycle of dog food making...a perfect storm if you will.  Luckily we've only had a few "dog food days" since the move, which is good.  I cannot describe how hard it is to run when every breath tastes like dog food.

Okay, there you go, 5 things I have sarcastically observed about our new neighborhood.  There were probably more, but that's all I can remember right now.

I don't even know

Truly, I don't even know where to begin.  I guess to start, I probably shouldn't be trying to blog anything at 11:30 at night after a 14.5 hour day today, 5 hours of sleep last night and a 10.5 hour day yesterday.  The reason I say this is, obviously, my ability to express myself in writing (or verbally for that matter) is severely limited when I am this tired.  My grammar goes to poo...as if it was any good to begin with, spelling goes down hill, and my train of thought is all warbally.  And yes, I have decided that is a real word. What?

Anyway, things have been... well just really busy.  I don't really mean to be complainy lady, just the way things have been going.  I feel behind, confused and a little lost in almost every area of my life.  Like when someone taps you on the shoulder and you turn to look but they're standing behind your other shoulder and you kinda knew that when you turned you wouldn't see anyone, but you did it anyway and now you feel sort of justified because people shouldn't play tricks on eachother, but also kinda stupid because you should also know that people sorta suck sometimes. By the way, the fact that I just said "people sorta suck sometimes" is a total compliment on humanity since I just came home from 3 hours of domestic violence offenders.  That may not be totally fair, my groups tonight were great!  I really truely like both my Thursday night groups and despite my overworked-underpaid-sleep deprived state of mind, they totally rejuvenated me tonight!  I think I actually made sense as a counselor and we graduated a guy which always (usually) (sometimes) (often enough) refreshes my faith in what I am apparently choosing to do with my life!  It's nice to hear that someone actually learned something and appreciated what I at least tried to do for them.  Wow, that was a little bit of a redirect...See what I mean about my train of thought?! I'm like the dog on Up! I'm all, bla bla bla, overwhelmed, bla, bla, boo hoo SQUIRREL!  hehe.  And with that, I think I am done posting for the night!  Like I said, I don't even know...guess I just needed to type something about myself instead of things about clients, victims, probation officers, to probation officers, judges, supervisors...yea.

Night night!

So this is me...this is my life

A few of my friends have blogs, which I read often enough to probably warrant being called a stalker of said friends.  Although I don't ever call said friends so it's more like it's a way for me to lull myself into believing I'm keeping in touch when in fact I'm not, I'm just being a creeper.  Anyway, I have had a few people tell me I am funny/weird/entertaining/should start a blog.  For a long time I have thought about this, but not actually done it because, well, I didn't think people really wanted to read about my exhaustion in grad school and I had some fun stories from/about clients, but it would be really unethical of me to share those.  So yea, here I am being told I should start a blog, but not really thinking I have anything all that interesting to blog about.  Until recently. 

Recently, I graduated from graduate school, began "working" at the place I did my externship, and my husband and I bought our first house.  I seem to have lots of things to share recently from tales of giant black crickets in our basement, adventures to/from/at HomeDepot and most recently, as in today, slicing my foot open on our refrigerator door handle as I was trying to make it open the opposite direction.  See? Things to share!!

Of course now that I have started this blog I fear my life will get very boring and I won't have anything to share.  Sad face.  But then, that might feel like a good thing when we get the bill for my 12 stitches from the urgent care clinic!

There is a picture at the bottom, be warned (it's not that bad, but then I don't really have a squeamish stomach)

That's not even really a good story I am sorry to say.  As I said I was trying to switch our new refrigerator's doors so they opened the other way.  This wasn't really something I cared about at first, but then my mother and grandmother, whom I adore!! (should they ever read this, and naturally grandmothers and mothers cannot read inside parentheses), informed me that my doors were on the wrong way because they didn't open into the kitchen.  Again, I did not really think I cared about this, but they both seemed so...what's the word, appalled? disturbed?...basically I felt that they pitied me because my refrigerator doors didn't open right.  I decided this weekend I would fix this myself, since the directions seemed so simple, minus, hey did you know refrigerator doors are REALLY HEAVY!?  That's not really part of the story...I got the doors off, hinges had been moved and I was on to the part where I needed to move the actual handle.  The thing came off easy enough, and I set it behind me, but then I had to take off these other little screws and I looked at them, and, well the thing is, they can't really make things like this simple.  This little operation of mine required at least 3 different bits for the screwdriver, plus a supposed "included" alan (sp?) wrench, that was less than included.  Anyway, I was looking for one of the bits that I needed, because, why would I put things in an obvious place where I might find them when I need them again.  I was sitting on the floor, so I thought I might be sitting on the bit and I did this weird contortionist kick move and kicked the handle that was laying behind me.  Now this was one of those moments where it hurt, I just kicked something and it hurt, but I also expected it to hurt more in a second.  You know that feeling? When you know it's going to be worse in just 2 seconds?  Well that feeling never came, it just hurt, and then it didn't.  And that's when I realized I didn't want to look.

I don't want to get graphic, but there was blood, there was not wanting to look, but knowing I had too, and then there was trying to talk the husband through googling a nearby hospital or urgent care...because of course we've only lived here 3 weeks and you don't worry about these types of things until you need them right?  Finally convinced the husband that I was not going to bleed out on the living room floor and could get to the car without him carrying me and we got to the urgent care place with the help of google, my new smart phone (wonderful investment) and my frantic husband.  Really you would have thought I was in labor with our first child the way he was running around!

I ended up with 12-ish, I think, loops in my stitches...I'm not sure I can say 12 stitches because there's only one knot...I really don't know how this works, but anyway 2 inches worth of stitches and a sore foot! Yay for home ownership!!

Here comes the picture, don't scroll down if you don't want to see!

The best, and by that I mean absolutely worst, part was getting the 5000 shots in the GAPING wound to numb it.  Really? I think I could have dealt with the stitches after I survived the shots to numb the dang thing!

Okay, that's it, my first blog post.  Hope it was everything you dreamed it could be!