Speaking of....

Ha!

Panties. Period.

Well since most of the men have been conspicuously absent from commenting (well, not Joe of the Dutch Oven fame, or Tom, who made a brief comment about veggies being evil before getting the hell out of here) on my last post about flatus, I thought I'd take advantage and ask a question that I've been dying to know.

Since it will prolly be a week or so before any of those guys are brave enough to poke their heads back in here.

You chickas have been really cracking me up!


I grew up with two brothers, so I never had a sister to ask. My parents were somewhat "older" when they adopted us---with me they were 35. Nowadays that's nothing, but when I was growing up, that was almost elderly. They were of a completely different generation than my friend's parents.

My dad was near the bottom rung of 10 kids, my mom was a total afterthought baby herself, so they were basically unattached to their parents' generation as well. They were both practically raised in Victorian households.

When I was about 8 my mom was so uptight with the whole sex thing that she gave us a book called "A Doctor Talks to 6-to-12 Year Olds" and said we could ask her questions later. Privately, one on one. Uh huh. Sure. Nowadays, it's easier to talk to your folks and others about this stuff. Hell who hasn't been on Maury? Back then for me? Not.

When I unexpectedly started my period a few years later, I happened to be at a "Dad" weekend (things had changed dramatically since we got the "book"). Dad was an "old" fart and left it all up to young Trophy Wife #1 to deal with.

She, of course, first ran out and bought me OB tampons, and handed them to me through the bathroom door. I was 11. When I wouldn't come out of the bathroom or stop crying (I didn't know what the heck to DO with them), she ran out to probably the only drugstore on the planet that still carried sanitary pads that had to be hooked into a belt. And bought the belt as well. Totally skipped over the shelf that had the ones that had adhesive and could be stuck into your own panties.

When I got home on Sunday night and told my mom, I got the big tearful "now you're a woman!" speech. Which was actually kind of nice. She bought me the right kind of pads, and a funny kind of cloth cigarette pack holder to carry one in. Oh, and she told me that if I got blood on my panties, or my sheets, or my clothes, that I had to scrub it ALL out in the sink with cold water before putting it in the laundry.

Yeah right.

When I think about all the time I spent over those years scrubbing and scrubbing after accidents (like who is regular the first couple of years or so---you usually find out you've started once it's already there? Or what if you roll over in the middle of the night and everything gets bunched up at the front or the back and you leak somewhere?), I started to think my Mom was some evil sadistic menstrual harpy. Really.

Mom was in a natural holistic phase at that point and wouldn't even give me an aspirin for cramps. Now I'm convinced that she was so prissy that she probably threw her own panties and sheets away, bought new ones and scarfed down valium by the bowlful (docs were handing it out like candy in the 70's) but told herself it was theraputic because she had a prescription. Just kidding. Heh. LOL

For those Buffy/Angel fans out there---that episode where Fred was scrubbing and scrubbing Jasmine's sweater until her own hands were bleeding gave me a big "Aiigghghhhh!!" moment. Not pretty.

So anyways, when I became an adult, I was done with all that. Yeah, if I had an accident, I'd do the obligatory soak in cold water, but I'd be damned if I'd futilely scrub and scrub. I'd have a few pairs of panties that had old stains, and instead of wearing pristine ones while on my period, I'd wear the stained ones. Heck, they were already stained, but they were technically clean and otherwise in perfect shape, so what's the big whoop?

That's when I started thinking about them as my Period Pants.

Now other than Hubby (who does his own laundry) the guys and I pretty much throw our dirties down the new laundry chute and do our laundry communally. Except for my Period Pants. I wash them separately with
some of my other stuff, and fold and put them away myself.

Until recently. We've been so busy that I had a load in the dryer when Hubby went to wash some of his own clothes. Sometimes, if there's something in the dryer, he'll bring it up and fold on the ottoman in the living room while we're watching TV as he waits for his own laundry to get done.

So he's pulling all my Period Pants out of the laundry basket (I was in the other room) while they're all watching The Simpsons (I was in the other room JUST to avoid it) and folding them in front of the guys, and they're like---ewwww! Mom!

From the other room, I said "What????"

Your underwear!!!!

That's when I saw what Hubby was doing. Gak!

We had to have a big family conversation about how I bitch at them for leaving skid marks in their undies for willfully not wiping their butts good enough, but I'm not being a hypocrite because sometimes I have an accident and these panties are around 4-6 years old. I can't begin to tell you how embarrassing this was.

Tell me, what do the rest of you do with them? Do you have Period Pants?

I swear, I'm just going to start being my mother and throw them away.

Rambling and Padambling...

A couple of years ago, I confessed that I'm one of those people who are gassy and sometimes inadvertently rips ass at the most inconvenient times. I have difficulty burping, and I guess the gas has to go somewhere, which is usually south. ;-)

Anyhoo, after the first of the year, I stuck ALL of us on Weight Watchers points plan. It wasn't really a New Year's resolution, but sort of a plan to make us all lose some pounds and get healthier.
The Big Kid and Little Guy don't follow it if they're out of the house, but there is no longer ANY processed junk here to snack on. I got one of those "choppers" that cut veggies into little itty bitty chunks and have been slowly replacing meat in low-fat sauces with vegetables, etc (you can hide them better that way).

I've lost 17 pounds since the first of the year (which has hardly made a dent, IMO), Hubby has lost a bunch, and Little Guy has lost a few. It's hard to tell with Big Kid, through all the layers of clothes he wears (his new thing is not to change his dirty clothes, but add a layer of clean on top of the dirty, which is an entirely different story for another day).

Oddly enough, while all the extra fiber in our diet has increased the number of ducks my guys are stepping on, my own barking spiders have inexplicably gone silent. Now I'M usually the one who gets spot-welded in the middle of the night. The dogs aren't afraid of me any more. For the first time, they come running to ME when somebody is blaming them for being the poofter or putting a hurt on their noses.

Except when I'm in the grocery store.

For some reason (maybe YOU guys can help me figure this out), the last 3 times while I was in our local store, my lower abdomen started churning and I had a sudden, painful, and urgent need to cut the cheese. Seriously! I don't think it's like extra walking or anything, because I've been out walking every time the sun is shining.

The first time it hit me, I squinched up my butt cheeks and made it five steps to the organic corner of the produce section (I was across the store from the bathroom and there was nobody around) and totally let fly before scurrying away.

I figured that if anything wilted, it could be blamed on the lack of preservatives or pesticides or veggie genetic engineering. Who knows---the last 3 out of 4 times I've bought organic veggies in a bag, I've found some kind of larvae in there noshing away. The best scenario would be that my natural gas suffocated them so the next person didn't get a live and wiggling surprise.

At least that's what I tell myself. ;-)

During the second visit to the store, the guys and I were standing in front of the Lean Pockets in the freezer section (which was fairly crowded with shoppers), and I was telling Big Kid---"the difference between Hot Pockets and Lean Pockets is the fat content, and no, I'm not going to buy any Hot Pockets, so if you avoid the nasty multi-grain ones, you're not going to find much of a difference in the taste. Pick one that you might eat already or not".

I'd just spent the last 15 minutes fending off loud and public whines from this 21-year-old who doesn't HAVE A JOB or contribute any way to the household, that ran along the lines of, "Why won't you buy me chocolate milk? I have a RIGHT to have chocolate milk if I want it! Why do YOU have to be so cheap?" or "Why can't you buy GOOD stuff like Fried Mozzarella Sticks?" or "You don't expect ME to eat GENERIC BRAND mandarin oranges/oatmeal/kidney beans/whatever do you? I'm not going to eat diet or generic crap! And why are you so CHEAP?" arrggghh

So we're standing in front of the Lean Pockets, he's still bitching and moaning, and I had sudden and massive cramps. The bathrooms were just up at the end of the aisle and over 1.

I took a step in the right direction, but that little solitary step unleashed the butt monkeys from hell. At that point, I figured that trying to rein them in would be futile and just let them run rampant. Prolly hit the Richter scale at about 7 out of 10. In noise, at least.

On to Plan B.

I turned to Big Kid in the middle of his "I'm not going to eat diet food, and why was I so damn cheap" rant and said loudly, "For God's sakes, if you have to fart that bad, can't you at least go outside? What in the heck is wrong with you?"

So while everybody in the freezer section was giving Big Kid the hairy eyeball I took the cart, and Little Guy and I ran like hell (with disgusted looks on our faces).

The 3rd time was just Little Guy and me. Big Kid was too embarrassed to show his face at our store after "his"--ahem--21-bun-salute. Luckily, when the cramps hit me, I was 10 feet from the bathroom. So I left Little Guy with the cart, locked myself in there and farted myself silly. Came out (no fan in there, so I left the door open to air it out) and got hit with another wave of cramps. Went back in and did it again.

Came out, and there was a lady waiting to use the facilities. Boy did I feel bad. Apologized to her in advance.
Since then, I'm sort of afraid to go back. I've been having Hubby drop by and pick stuff up. Is it some sort of psychological trained response like Pavlov's Dog? Any ideas?

The Suckage of Life

I know I haven't been around much posting or commenting lately, and I feel really bad about it. It seems to be my excuse de jour for the last few months.

The last couple of weeks have been particularly bad. You ever have those days when you just feel so overwhelmed by stuff that it's hard to just get out of bed each day and slog through the crap that makes up your life?

A lot of it for me has been the weather. It's springtime in the Rockies, which is the season when we get the most snow days. All the gray makes me feel gray inside too. I suffered from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) a lot when I was in my teens and early 20's, and I think it's just biting me on the butt right now.

I've had a lot of family stuff going on lately that's been consuming me. Not my hubby and kids but some other stuff that I've had to deal with. My dad died a little over 10 years ago, and I'm ready to close that chapter in my life and move on without a "things that ultimately have to be taken care of" list hanging over my head indefinitely. Mostly involving shared assets that my brothers and I put aside to "deal with later". I decided that it's time to finally deal with them now, since most of those "shared assets" have had to be financially maintained by myself (and hubby), and I'm ready to get out.

We're paying for 2 college educations, I'm getting zero return on some of this stuff as is---if I had set aside the "sentimental attachment" (not mine) and insisted we cash out years earlier, I could have even conservatively invested it in CDs or bonds and gotten some kind of return. But I think 10 years is enough for them to get their sh*t together, and I just want out.

So there's been some hard words exchanged, and it makes me feel very very sad and depressed. Hopefully most of it will be wrapped up in the next couple of weeks or so.

Sorry to be such a bummer.

Eyeball Rolls of the Week....

Where to start, where to start?

How about with Lisa Marie Presley. She's suing the Daily Mail for calling her fat thereby "forcing" her to announce her pregnancy sooner than she wanted to (she's due next fall).

Oh please. You're a public figure by choice, so not going to get a lot of sympathy here. You announced on TV that you had sex with Michael Jackson ferpete'ssakes, and THIS bothers you? Heh. You can't chase the dragon known as fame and cry when it turns on you.

The next eyeroll goes to Dr."Do As I Say, Not As I Do" Laura. She says that because Mrs. Spitzer wasn't willing to dress up like Miss Trunchbowl in Nazi boots and spank the Luv Guv with the BIG hairbrush, his $80,000 ho habit is her fault.

Ok, I made up the stuff about the big hairbrush. But Dr. Laura says Mrs. Spitzer doesn't "validate him" enough. Yeah. Validate this, you lying, cheating peckerwood.

Considering what a big crappy mess Dr. Laura has turned out to be as a wife, mother, daughter and talk show host, does anyone even listen to her any more?

I don't know which deserves a bigger eyeball roll....that MSNBC is quoting the National Enquirer as a news source or that the Enquirer is reporting that Star Jones is dumping her husband. Like nobody ever saw THAT coming.....

What's got YOUR eyeballs rolling this week?

Waaah!

Yes, I know, I've been MIA. I'm sorry.

First Hubby was finally cleared by his doctors to fly back east to visit his mom. Yippee! But because they haven't determined the cause of his blood clot, it just ratcheted up my anxiety over the idea that he might fall over the drinks cart on the way to the mini-bathroom with an embolism mid-flight.

He was supposed to fly back in last Tuesday night, but his original flight was delayed on departure for a couple of hours (they didn't have enough crew---believe it or not), so he missed his connecting flight home from Denver. He got there in time to catch the last flight out of Denver, but the airline inexplicably canceled that at the last minute. They said, "well, you can be on stand-by for the first flight out at about 6am", but it wasn't until he raised holy hell that they arranged to put him up at a local hotel.

By the way, he says the "sleep number" beds suck butt. But then again, he probably didn't know what his "number" was. He was able to get a seat on the second flight out in the morning and got home around 11am. Tired, stiff, feeling dirty (he didn't get his luggage overnight) and royally pissed off.
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While he was gone over the weekend we had a big snow-storm which sort of knocked out our cable-broadband-internet connection somehow. Of course, the cable company will never admit that it's their responsibility. Apparently every house in my subdivision has small children and/or dogs that somehow knocked each of our individual cables loose at the same time.

And after checking and rechecking every connection while on the 800 number with some customer service doink from another state (who first insisted we power everything down for 5 minutes as if we hadn't tried that 4 times before calling because this has become a habit), we were put on a list for service by the 1 cable guy who was on call over the weekend.

There is only one provider up here, so it's not like we can threaten to go somewhere else. However, I'm keeping track of the down-time to try to get it pro-rated off our bill, simply because it's happening more frequently.
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Big Kid and I also had mid-terms this week, so we've been studying like crazy. We both think we did well.
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Another Aerogarden Update! I have to get a new memory card for my camera, so there's no recent pic, but at 7 weeks of growth, I harvested about 20 snow peas. The supports that came with the package (weird insulated wires that you're supposed to wind around your fingers and stick into the seed pods) don't do poop to support the plants, so I ended up sticking 12-inch wooden skewers into the back plant pods and draping the front growth on top of the back. It looks ugly, but it's working.

You're supposed to "sex them up" for germination by sticking your hand in there and shaking them all around hokey-pokey style once there are blooms. I didn't even get a chance to do it. One day they had a couple of flowers, and the next they already had mini-seed pods. Since the first harvest, I've picked maybe 5 more pods, and there are another 20 or so buds just waiting to bloom in the next few days. I've got to refill the tank about twice a week now, because boy, they grow fast.

By the way---anybody know how you're supposed to harvest chives? That one pod has a lot of growth, but I've only snipped off a little bit. And how do you store it for future use? Dry it? Freeze it? gak!
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Ok, my personal Waaaah is done. From what I've read in emails etc, a lot of bad stuff has been happening to some friends around blogland this week. I'm so sorry, and will be down to visit pronto. :-(
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As a final note, I really thought that I've seen everything. Silly moi. For the man who has everything:

Here's something new. What twisted mind thought THIS up?


xoxox

ATM