Wish You Were Here

I miss you, Ryan.

My Dears (and not so much)

Dear Mr. PTA President,

I am SO GLAD you don't like me, Senor -I-Tell-Everyone-I-Teach-High-School-Sex-Ed-But-Really-It's-Just-HEALTH-CLASS. Ridiculing the teacher who just got out of intensive care because her kidneys almost failed during delivery, and whose baby is in serious condition in the NICU, is grossly tasteless, especially at a PTA meeting. I don't care that your wife (who teaches enrichment at the school, aka, Josie, every day) doesn't like her because she's scatterbrained. I work there too sometimes, asshole, and although maybe she's not a gifted music teacher, she's just young, not that it matters, and I wish I hadn't been too shocked by your comments to rip you a new one. Just because I had the nerve to stand my ground about not having that ridiculous Chuck E Cheese standing outside the school on the day of the fundraiser, reminding poor kids that other children are going to what is essentially a party when they can't afford to (and pissing off parents who aren't taking their kids), doesn't mean you need to make snide remarks when I talk at a meeting ("oh, are you sure you're not going to complain?") for the NEXT SIX MONTHS. Your wife isn't fond of me, either, because Patrick's teachers have asked two years running that she do her job and work with all the advanced kids at the school and not just grades 3-5 (requests which you have refused), and your stellar wit makes me pretty sure of how you both talk about me as well. Thank God. If you liked me, I guess I would be a giant douchecanoe, too. If you're both really *that* too cool for school, then you shouldn't work in one.

Thankfully,
Unpopular

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Dear Principal,

Grow a pair. When someone ridicules one of your staff, especially like that, speak up. Don't just look down and type on your laptop like a pussy.

Sincerely,
Not Planning to Work for You When I Graduate

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Dear Patrick,

Seriously. Telling me at 8:15 that you're supposed to bring pretzels for the belated Valentine's party this afternoon is a bit much. Calling home twenty minutes later to say that you can't find the lunchbox that you took off of the counter this morning, before getting into the car and going to school, is even worse. Are you sure you didn't just eat it, box and all? Sometimes I think you're going to eat ME if I stop moving. It's not in the house and it's not in the car, so if it's not at the school, that means it's in your stomach. If you poop out a cloth Towmater later, I won't be surprised.

Signed,
Good Grief

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Dear Snow,

Please stop melting. Every day, it looks like the dogs have pooped fifteen times because a whole new poop field gets uncovered by your hasty retreat. I'm all for archaeology, but three-week-old frozen/melted dog crap doesn't count. Not to mention, at this rate, everything is going to be mud in a week. Gross!!!

Sincerely,
Pooped

on a related note -

Dear Dogs,

Please stop pooping. You're killing me. I'm going to cork your asses shut pretty soon. Enough, already!

Sincerely,
Grossed Out

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Dear Jeans,

Et tu?! Noooooooooooooooooo! It was bad enough when one pair ripped out the other week, but now this?! Now all of my really comfy jeans are dead!!!! Why, oh why, is the crotch the first to go when you're an adult? Knee-holes are mildly attractive, but crotch holes are skanky / revealing of granny panties. Either way, NOT attractive, especially when bent over scooping poop in the yard.

Sadly,
Soon-to-be Stiff New-Jeans Owner

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Dear Town,

WHEN are you going to finish plowing the streets!? I'm tired of driving on one-lane, taking-turns-coming-and-going roads! Having a bus come by is like taking your life into your hands!!!! Just because there were people parked on the street during the storm doesn't mean that you can leave the six-foot pile of snow there until spring. No one can see around corners while driving, and someone's going to get hit, and sue you, and then we'll NEVER get plowed again!

Sincerely,
WTF?! It's been WEEKS!

Flying Solo

In our last installment of Astarte is Craz-ay, I had the total drug reaction from hell last Friday night when I took my first Cymbalta. Needless to say, I haven't taken any more of THAT, and rather than starting back on Zoloft right away, I decided to wait until I was sure my system was completely empty of anything that might react with it... just in case.

That was six days ago, and since Cymbalta has a 36hr half-life, I'm pretty much free of it now (by noon Sunday it was half gone, midnight Monday was a quarter, noon Wednesday was an eighth left). The thing is, I feel fine, and not just reaction-recovery-wise.

I mean, my system is essentially drug-free for the first time in almost seven years, and I feel fine. I'm not depressed, or at least I certainly feel better than I did when I was on Wellbutrin. My OCD isn't acting up like it was even a week ago. My stomach problems have scaled way back. I actually feel, dare I say it, pretty damn good, comparitively.

I'm not sure why this is. Maybe it's that I still have a tiny bit of Cymbalta left in me, and since I had such a strong reaction to it, perhaps that tiny bit is all I would have needed as a dose, so I'm still riding that particular chemical wave. Maybe it's that I had such a scare last week that I'm thrilled to just be alive. Maybe it's that the Wellbutrin was really messing with me in a much more serious way than I had thought. Since all of this happened, I've been reading a lot of forums where people have reported their reactions to Wellbutrin, and there are a bunch of people out there who have reported that their depression actually got worse while they were on it, and for people with OCD, many times their symptoms got worse because it can cause hyperactivity/anxiety, which also leads to insomnia, which I had while I was on it. I can tell you right now, the kind of OCD I have, when it's really acting up, is enough to make you want a lobotomy, so that in itself can be enough to increase depression.

Also, I've lost a few pounds. I haven't lost weight in years, no matter what I've done.

So, we will see. If I need to take the Zoloft, I will, but I'm going to wait and see what happens. I have it if I need it. I'm hoping maybe I won't. That would be amazing.

Booyeah!

Who got a new stove today?



(I got a new stove today!)

Who rewired the outlet?


(I rewired the outlet!)

Ooh yeah, ooh yeah!

(Who's your daddy mommy now, beyotch?!)

(I totally push your buttons, admit it.)

Not-So-Fun Friday Freak-out

Most of you know that I have OCD - obsessive compulsive disorder. It makes me have uncontrollable, obsessive thoughts and fears that are basically mental home horror movies that spool, unwelcome, through my head like Mike Myers popping up from the dead. Most of them have something to do with my losing control of myself and hurting someone, which is ironic because even the thought is uncontrolled and unwelcome, never mind the ridiculous fears they show. When I was a child, the thoughts were mainly comprised of doors opening and closing continually, or lights flashing on and off, although I didn't know what the fact that I had those thoughts meant at the time, and even if I had, I certainly didn't have anyone to tell about them, anyway, except the person who probably brought the whole mess on. Now, suffice it to say, I am sporradically fearful of anything and everything that could possibly be used to harm someone. I'm cooking? What if I somehow smash someone over the head with the pan? What if I somehow spill the boiling water on the stove on the people in the living room (don't ask me how this would occur)? And so on.

I used to take Zoloft to control my OCD, and the depression it brings on (because fighting this stuff all the time is not only exhausting, it's also really depressing for obvious reasons), but it made me gain a lot of weight, so last year I asked my doctor to let me try something else, and she put me on Wellbutrin, which is in a different class and has actually been off-label scripted for weight loss. While it didn't make me lose weight, it gave me a lot of side affects, like blurrier vision, difficulty sleeping, hyperactivity, and, on top of all of that, it didn't control my depression or OCD, which were worsening as time went on. The tricky thing was, since both things are a little sneaky, I didn't realize how depressed I was getting again; I knew the OCD was acting up, but until recently, when it started being unbearable, I was trying so hard not to focus on it that I didn't put two and two together, probably because I was too depressed to notice.

I actually went back to the doctor the other day, not because of those things, but because I have had *terrible* intestinal problems for the past several months, and I had chalked it up to my gallbladder being removed a year and a half ago. Turns out, Wellbutrin can - and often does - cause insane, shall we say, trots, in a lot of people, particularly those who are already predisposed. Then it all came out about how it also wasn't working for anything else, and after a little bit of looking around, she gave me some Cymbalta to try, 30mg samples for 7 days, 60mg for the next 14, come back in three weeks.

Hooray! I thought, and I couldn't wait to take it, which I did at midnight when I went to bed.

An hour later, I sat straight up, unable to breathe. My heart was hammering so hard I couldn't tell the individual beats; it was like a butterfly in my chest. My head was swimming, and I was on the verge of passing out, not to mention vomiting. This, of course, brought on a massive panic attack, and DH called 911. He rubbed my back until they paramedics got there, and I did my best to deep breathe; by the time the guys arrived, I had managed to control my heartrate somewhat, and wasn't on the verge of passing out. My blood pressure was still way up, for me, but I was coming around. They stayed with me for awhile, and then let me stay at home rather than go to the hospital. I managed to go to sleep about an hour later.

The next morning, I got out of bed and came downstairs to let the dogs out, only to have everything go grey about five minutes later. My legs were like lead, and I had to crawl back up the stairs to the bed so I wouldn't tumble down the stairs if I should pass out on the way there. I had to stay in bed for the next several hours. DH brought me some pancakes, and I finally made it to the shower. I was pretty out of it for most of the day, and didn't get back to normal until Sunday morning.

The one benefit that came out of all this is that, even with the horrendous side effects, I noticed an immediate difference in both my ability to cope with the OCD and in my depression - it actually pointed out to me exactly how depressed and unpredictable I had become. Not to mention, now that the Wellbutrin is out of my system, my extended vacations in the bathroom have stopped. I've decided that I'm going back to Zoloft. I still have some of the lowest dose here because I had just filled a new bottle when she switched me. It never trapped me in the bathroom, which is completely undoable when you're in the classroom, or made me freak out, and it controlled everything I needed controlled. I will work with the weight thing as best I can. This has taught me a valuable lesson - stay with the devil you know!

If the Stove's Too Hot... Maybe It's On Fire!

We have had a stove that some friends very generously gave us almost two years ago, when they redid their kitchen and got new stuff, because the stove we inherited when we moved in here was really junky and definitely older than I am. It's bisque-colored, which matches our cabinets, and looks pretty. It cooks pretty well, and the oven temp is usually right-on.

Until two days ago, when it decided that it was done with me, and decided to cook its own meal. Namely, my beautiful, shiny red teapot.

It was very windy here that day, and the heat was on, plus the gas fireplace, so we didn't think anything of it when something smelled a little hot. I was on my way into the kitchen to make some cocoa, and even the kitchen was kind of warm, which is unusual in this drafty old house, since the pantry was built over the crawlspace under the porch, meaning it's not insulated. That's actually what caught my attention first, that it *smelled* warm in the kitchen. I looked around, and there didn't appear to me anything amiss - the burners were black, the oven was off, my shiny black kettle sitting quietly...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My kettle was scorched black!!!!!!! The burner *was* on, and was so hot it was black too, I just couldn't see the little indicator light because the handle of the kettle was in the way!!!!!!!! The thing was, the knob was in the right place, but the burner was on anyway, and the knob itself was so hot by then that we couldn't try turning it, plus the blackened kettle was glued to the burner in front of it, anyway. We hadn't heard anything because the lid to the kettle was off so the water we had boiled hours before could cool. We ended up having to unplug the stove to get it to go off.

A few hours later, once everything was cooled off, we were able to pry my poor, ruined kettle off of the burner, which had red ceramic baked onto it, and move the knob. It turned out that something inside the knob area inside the stove must have broken off, because the "off" position is now about half an inch to the left of where it used to be. So, even though it had been turned off, the burner was still on, and probably had been for a long time.

We are SO lucky this didn't happen at night, or worse, during the day when I wasn't here. I'm certain there would have been a full-blown fire at some point, or maybe the kettle would have melted all over the stove, or exploded somehow. Either way, not a good situation. Now I'm afraid to plug the damn thing back in, so we're stuck until our new stove, which is a gorgeous, all-pushbutton convection model (even nicer than the one the county forced us to leave behind in the house they'll be knocking down in a few months, so there!) arrives sometime on Tuesday. I will probably use the oven for dinner tonight, so I'll plug it back in and then unplug it again when I'm done. I'm not comfortable with it being plugged in when I'm not looking at it.

Rest in peace, pretty kettle. We bought a replacement last night, but it just won't be the same. :(

Here We Go Again - Winter Edition

Well, here we are, buried in snow again.

I know, I know, to you midwesterners and Canadians, what's been happening over here in the mid-Atlantic is nothing. Hell, I've seen worse myself, having lived in New England until Iwas 23. However, for this part of the country, this is incredible. After all, it didn't even snow AT ALL last winter (which was a terrible disappointment). Frankly, I feel that if it's going to be cold and winter, it might as well snow, and the more snow, the better. I would be thrilled if we got a yard every week. Eventually, the county would get used to it and the kids would return to school.


Oh, you didn't know that kids don't go to school here when there's snow? Welcome to my world, people. The kids haven't been in school since noon last Friday, and from where I'm sitting, it's more than likely that there will be no school this week, period. There are many places that haven't finished digging out from the 30in we got over the weekend, nevermind the new 10-20in we're getting between yesterday and today!


So, the kids and I have been having a LOT more together time than usual. Josie is doing OK, but Patrick is starting to crack. He needs to get out and go to school. He's run out of normal things to talk about nonstop, and has moved on to the ridiculous - " What if we got millions of inches of snow?!" "What if snowplows fell from the sky?" "What if cars all piled up like giants?" It's the what if's that are going to kill me people. Snow, blizzards, 40mph winds, fine, but the what if's are going to drive me straight to Jack Nicholson territory.


Know what's great about heavy snow, though? Watching the dogs plow through it, and the concerned looks on their faces when they have to figure out how to poop in snow up to their necks. Mostly, though, they tear around like crazy people and beat down what amounts to racetracks in the snow.


At least DH is finally home. Like AndreAnna, I didn't mention this much (if at all), but DH hasn't really been around since new year's. He was gone the entire first week of the month at a conference in CA, and two days after he returned, a massive request for proposal was issued from the government that involved the merging of a contract his company won years ago and that of another contractor. As manager of the entire technical portion of the 75pp proposal, he had to be there pretty much all the time. Since he got back from CA, DH has pretty much been living at the office, getting home later and later until, finally, he started staying overnight. Last week, he stayed Wed night, and then, knowing we were going to get a ton of snow, he got a hotel room near his office last Friday... and then proceeded to be snowed in THERE rather than here at home. (Yes, people, that means I waded out and shoveled the sidewalk, front and back walks, and our two car driveway BY MYSELF last weekend, all 30in of it.) Then, Monday night, the powers that be decided to pull an all-nighter to get the thing out a day early, so they worked from the usual 7am Monday until noon yesterday straight. DH got home around 1:30, and will be taking off the rest of the week.