Wow, from Monday morning to last night, I was channeling Sam Kinison. I was screaming on the inside though. Not nice. Not pretty. Not feeling like a good girl at all. In fact, I wondered if I’d be in jail by the end of the week. I felt just a tad angry.

I feel much better today.

The teeth clenching thing - I bought an over-the-counter mouthguard at Rite-Aid for $25. Best money I ever spent. My head and neck doesn’t hurt in the morning (or at night) any more. I didn’t know that my neck pain was related to the teeth clenching.

Wednesday night I got up to go to the bathroom, and passed Sandy at the computer - he was up until 4 am playing computer games - grrr - and when I saw myself in the mirror it was a real double take. I don’t think I’ve ever looked so awful in my life. My hair was standing straight up (I fell asleep with it damp), my lips were pooched out with the mouth guard, and my face was all saggy and droopy from crying most of the day. A sight like that will straighten your ass out. I don’t recommend mouth guards if you are trying to have a romantic sleep over with your new lover.

But if you grind or clench your teeth and live alone or with a husband of twenty years that you’re mad at, by all means, go for it. I’d wear it all day if I didn’t have to talk, eat, or see people.

I never appreciated Sam’s humor until this week. Rest in peace, buddy.

Thanks for the kind wishes, y’all. The fruit fly remedy will be undertaken tonight. Trust me, I have a inclination to drink the rest of the beer!

Later last night, after I wrote the last post, we got a bit of good news, I hope. Sandy’s old boss, from the company that was so good to him and who was really pissed when he left for this new job in October, called and said that there might be a second shift opening on their help desk in about a month. He said that he would offer it to Sandy if it came open. I cried and thanked God. It doesn’t take much right now to make me grateful, but this really did. Forgiveness. I need to learn from this - I’m not a good forgiver.

It’s not guaranteed, but it looks likely that they’ll hire him back if something comes open that he’s qualified for.

So things are looking up. This is a lousy time of year to job hunt - the last time Sandy lost his job was just before Christmas. He didn’t find permanent full-time work for over two years that time. In fact, I had just begun writing this blog when he went back to work, so it has not been so long ago. One of the reasons I was so upset is that this has been a pattern throughout our marriage of twenty years.

I hope that he will use the time to get some things done around here that have been neglected.

Okay, I think that I’m finally calm enough to write this post.

Bad - Sandy left a banana in a vinyl lunch box for several weeks and we have fruit flies all over the house now. Extremely annoying.

Bad - $quirt, although his urinary tract infection is much improved, is still on pulse therapy of antibiotics and probably will be, like, forever. His thyroid was not much improved, and so she’s moved him to a stronger dose of pills. Surgery is probably in his future. In addition, his kidney “values” are up (not a good thing), his lymphocytes are down (has to do with bone marrow, not a good thing), and I’m starting to look at some real money here since I now have to get this test run a third time just before Christmas at about $170 a pop. His heart murmur is “significant.”

Good - he was absolutely charming at the vet, at least until they took him in the back to cathaterize him and I heard someone say, “Looks like he had a full colon, too.”

Bad - the co-payment on my new anti-depressant medication is $50 a @#$%ing month. I wish I’d known that BEFORE I started the damn things.

Good and Bad - I wasn’t able to get an appointment with a dermatologist until Dec. 19. I don’t know why I thought it would be easy. My mother has a history of skin cancer and can’t get in for two months down where she’s from, even when she has a suspicious new spot. I managed to get an appointment with my Ob-gyn in only a couple of weeks, which I consider to be a Christmas miracle. I rescheduled the dentist and scheduled my mammogram for February. A nice birthday week that will be! But I was going to be doing it ALL this month.

Bad - I’m going to Memorial Hospital next week to be with my sister while my brother-in-law has another last shot at heart surgery to repair his heart rhythm problem. My sister is a nervous wreck right now. I’m going to have to draw heavily on my BA in drama training since the idea is that I’ll be there to support her.

Good - I got a nice raise this month.

Bad - I’m gonna need it, because Sandy lost his FREAKING JOB.

(Cue LOUD SCREAMING)

Ain’t many girls has got a house with a wood floor and a husband that hardly ever hits her.

~Briscoe Darling, to Charlene Darling Wash.

(In North Carolina, natives of a “certain age” received a lot of moral instruction from the “Andy Griffith Show.”)

(Lest anyone should misunderstand my dry sense of humor, Sandy has never hit me.)

Daddy! Isn’t he a cocky fella? So sua-vay with those blue, blue eyes. He still has some baby fat in this photo - later he was very tall and lean.

I’m actually on my second cup already. I slept blissfully late on the futon in the cat-free room. This morning will be spent in my pajamas doing relaxing things or nothing at all.

Here’s the first thing that I do with the Sunday paper - throw all the ad inserts in the recycling bin. That reduces the weight to less than half, and I’m not tempted to buy stuff I don’t need right now.

If I am still to go to Italy this summer, I will have to watch my pennies. I still don’t know what will be in store for $quirt, and Jazz and Guido are older than him. I don’t wish to think negatively, but the fact is that I’m probably looking at a bunch of doctor bills for myself as well. The next few days will be busy. I’ll have to see a dermatologist early this week, and that will probably require at least one follow-up visit, $quirt has to go to the vet early this week, I have to go to the custom pharmacy for his medication assuming she won’t want to do surgery, and I have class on Wednesday night, which I can’t miss because I have to drop off our group project to the third person in our group to finish it off.

There might be some whining. Then again, maybe not. Sometimes I can be surprisingly stoic. It’s just that I’m so phobic about cancer that it’s hard to tell what will happen if I have it. I’ve had three friends dealing with it this year - John, who didn’t survive, Terrilynn, who is growing a new liver (woo-hoo!), and Masoud, who seems to be recovering from stomach cancer, but he is so thin and wan. In a way, I’ve expected skin cancer at some point in my life, and that’s not the way to go if you believe that your thoughts direct your reality. And I’ve wondered if my fears and obsessive thoughts have attracted it to me. Anyway, I don’t know yet and I need to stay positive about it. It’s hard not to think about it. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be feeling silly that I made a big deal out of nothing again. But at least I’m facing it head-on instead of pretending that everything is okay.

Some of my anxiety is simple embarrassment. I imagine the doctor saying, “Whew, what a train wreck! Why haven’t you seen a dermatologist before now? What have you been doing (not doing) to your skin?” Yes, it always comes back to me pummeling myself. I’m trying to work on that.

Deb gave me the name of someone she likes and I remember her talking about changing doctors because the first one was not kind and understanding, so if she likes this woman, she must be compassionate. Deb wouldn’t recommend her to me if she wasn’t. She knows how neurotic I am.

Anyhoo…the last thing I want to do is go to a store today, but Deb and I didn’t quite finish our part of the group project because I was out of strong glue. I hope that I can get it at the drugstore when I go for my prescription today. This needs to attach thick pieces of leather around the edge of a wooden board (and there’s not a lot of leather at the edge), so it has to be extremely strong. Then I have a fabric piece with batting to attach the two wood/leather pieces of the cover to. I think that it will work. The whole thing has been an exercise in problem solving from start to finish.

And I have to buy cat food, and it can’t be just any kind of cat food, so that might be a trip to PetSmart, which is next to Target. Ugh. I don’t even want to be near a big box store this weekend.

Once I get this project done, I am done, done, done with all my school work! DONE! It will be novels and weaving for me for a long, long time! In preparation for that, I hit Ed McKay’s and picked up a lot of paperbacks from the free section, as well as buying a few used copies that I’ve been wanting to read. Here’s a list:

Boy, am I being lazy. I should have been to the market and back home by now. This will have to be short, but I sure don’t feel like leaving the house right now. My friend Deb is coming over at 1:30 to hopefully finish up our part of the group project, which actually wasn’t our part, but became our part when the person who was doing the cover had to drop out of the class for major surgery.

I have a scary new mole on my back so I will have to make an appointment with a dermatologist on Monday. It will be the first time I’ve seen a dermatologist since I was a teenager. I am in serious denial about my skin problems, and I’ve been afraid to go to a dermatologist because I’m not sure I want to hear the diagnosis. I definitely do not want to take antibiotics if possible.

I am very sensitive to fragrances and other unknown chemicals - one of the reasons I started going organic and fragrance free in this house. Before, when I had a really terrible rash, I’d see my G.P. If it was bearable, I’d suffer through it with hydrocortisone. I have a lot of discoloration and scars on my skin, and skin cancer in my family, and I used to get seriously sunburnt as a child/teenager until I started getting sun poisoning. That broke me of my vanity about getting a tan. This really might not be pretty. Augghhh! Damn these anti-depressants, making me come out of denial and face up to facts!

Thanksgiving was nice. My nephew is pretty amazing. Handsome, great personality, intelligent, talented, and no girlfriend. If you live in Wilmington and are in your early 20s you should look him up. He can do this juggling kind of thing with sticks. My brother-in-law told him that and a cute puppy would get him a girlfriend any day of the week. I don’t think that he’ll need the puppy or the sticks.

My brother sort of tried to explain about not telling me about his wedding, but I told him that it didn’t matter and that I wish I had done it his way. So an awkward moment is over - he never told me and I never acknowledged it - and we’re good.

My brother-in-law is having heart surgery again in early December. My sister is way more stressed out and depressed than I am, and I’m going to sit with her in the hospital that day.

Six-year-old great nephew is just wonderful. He found a typewriter and thought that it was the most awesome thing ever. He was completely fascinated by things that he found at Ma-mo’s that we take for granted. In so many ways, we can learn from kids this age.

And we all agreed, again, not to buy gifts for each other this Christmas except for my great nephew. We had, little by little, gotten away from that agreement one gift at a time. It was very frustrating.

I spent some time scanning old family photos and I was thrilled to find an obituary that gave me the link I needed for my Henley family tree. This line of my family came over from Derbyshire to Calvert County, Maryland in the early 1600s! There were so many Darby Henleys that it was very, very confusing on Rootsweb. Plus, the spelling of names are often wrong or different. My great-great-grandmother’s name was either Mittie or Hiddie. I figure that this has to be her because I can see how that name may have been heard wrong. Her husband and place of birth and marriage is right.

It’s weird that my great-grandparents lived and fought during the Civil War. That’s what happens when you’re the youngest child of an older parent, who was the youngest child of older parents, who was the youngest child of older parents. My other roots are Cornish and Welsh, maybe a bit of Irish, although he may have been British in origin. I am a British Isles descendant all the way around for generations.

Oh well, this was fun but I guess I’d better change out of my pajamas and go. It would be so nice to spend the day just like this. I have photos to post to Flickr, old and new. Maybe I’ll post some here later.

Celebrate freedom from corporate mind control!

Freedom from huge crowds!

Freedom from hours standing in line!

Freedom from stress!

Freedom from debt!

Freedom from piles of unnecessary stuff!

Give thanks for the valuable things you do have - your friends, family, talents, health, time, and life. And ENJOY them today!

BUY NOTHING TODAY.

I’m just about to ditch the hubby and go spend Thanksgiving Day and tonight with my family in Marietta. Sandy has to stay home and give $quirt his medicine, but he is going to eat dinner with the fabulous Zha K, so he is in very good hands. I’ll be back tomorrow, and in the meantime, have a wonderful rainy Thanksgiving Day!

Don’t forget to stock up for the next couple of days today, because Friday is the BIG DAY!

BUY NOTHING DAY!

Participate by not participating in mindless consumerism! Celebrate it with the ones you love.