Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Odd Things Continued....

There are a few more things worth mentioning...well, maybe not really "worth" mentioning, but, alas, I will tell you anyway.

In the booming metropolis of Red Wing we have 2 Kwik Trip gas stations. I went into one the other day and decided that I was a little hungry. I had gotten burned once before when I bought something called a Tornado, which is kind of like a Taco Bell burrito. I thought I was buying a beef one, when in fact I bought a Southwest Chicken. I cannot handle any type of spicy foods, but since it did taste good, I ate the hot thing with lots of soda. I was not going to go down that road again, so I looked around a little more. Soups. Interesting. But wait! One of the containers was marked Macaroni and Cheese. Odd. I had never seen Mac and Cheese sold at a gas station. Any normal person would keep walking, because who buys Mac and Cheese at a gas station? Now you know someone who does. I must say it was SO good! And very hot.

I love working with kids. They are always saying things that are so funny and unique. I was playing Uno with one boy (yes I do get paid to play games sometimes, leave me alone!) and he put down a "Skip" card. With that he said "Skip-a-dee-doo-dah". I don't know why I found that so funny, but I couldn't stop laughing. Another girl announced when she got to the room that she had gotten a shot on her "Booty cheek" and that it had hurt. I tried not to laugh at that one because she was so serious about it. The kids really aren't odd, but they are funny so I had to include them.

Claire has learned the alphabet. She won't pee in the potty to save her life, but she knows her alphabet song. Well, mostly, until she gets to L M N O P. She says, "L N N O P" She also says at the end of the song "Next time don't you sing with me". But I do anyway, at everyone's dismay.

And the all time most odd thing you will read about for a long time......drum roll....Dion and I are actually starting to think about taking some sort of small vacation (the crowd gasps!). That's right. A vacation. And it will have nothing to do with hospital beds, procedures, pain, worry, fear, cancer. Can you imagine? I can't.

Monday, June 20, 2005

Odd Things I Have Seen in the Past Few Days

I don't know what has inspired me to write about this, but we'll just go with it. Today, on the way to drop the girls off at daycare, I saw a woman riding her bike. That's not odd in itself, but what was in her hair was a little odd. She had gift ribbon, purple in color, tied into her hair. I'm not really sure what the fashion statement was, I can only guess she was at a party this past weekend, and that is leftover from it.

I tend to be a little pale in skin color. Ok, VERY pale. Ghost-like, if you will. But I am sporting a nice little sunburn from this past weekend. We had a garage sale, and I am still not very sure how I got burned sitting in the garage for most of the weekend. Odd.

At the above mentioned garage sale, a different sort of fella showed up to look at the push mower we were selling. He asked the lowest price I would take, and I said $10. He paused and said, "I'll give you five." Hmm...I could have sworn I just said ten, but what do I know? I turned him down. He walked away. He walked back. Without warning he started the mower up, startling everyone at the sale. He said since it started on the first pull, he'd pay the $10 for it. Now, one would think that he is the odd thing I was talking about, which, yeah, he was a little odd, but the REALLY odd think was the blasted mower starting on the first pull. I swear it would take me about 5 pulls to get that thing going.

We are looking into getting siding put on our house. We had a Sears guy come out. He looked like Wilfred Brimley, and I waited for him to whip up a bowl of oatmeal. He didn't. He didn't talk about diabetes either. He did however choose to walk on our railroad ties after it had rained and fell on his butt after proclaiming "ohhhhhhhh!" I think in the end that is why he wanted to charge us $20,000-30,000 for siding. Now that is odd!

Today I saw a cat jump from it's cage into a woman's arms. I felt like I was at a Vegas show, waiting to see the cat jump through a ring of fire or something. Enough said.

I'm sure there is more that I am missing since for some reason odd things seem to fall into my lap. But, I will stop for now and try to get some stuff done around the house....that's a whole different odd story to tell!

Monday, June 13, 2005

The Magic of Veet

I am sure by now you have seen all of the nifty commercials for Veet. They show a woman's leg with what looks like shaving cream on her leg, and she is making a zig zag pattern with what looks like a razor, but really isn't. Fancy. Painless. No cuts from razors, no ripping off of the skin with wax, total hair removal unlike what the electric razors do. But I will put in a plug here for an electric razor. It came in VERY handy when I was humungously pregnant and could not reach to shave myself. I really would not trust anyone to shave my legs with a razor, I have a hard enough time, so the solution was electric and Dion could shave my legs for me. What a guy!

Anyway, so I take the plunge and buy myself some Veet. "Refreshing" is the scent, if you are interested. In reality, it's not so much refreshing, as it is potent, with a dash of scent. That should have been my first clue, but I am not one to easily receive clues. So I read the directions, twice, since they make such a huge deal about open wounds, getting Veet in your eyes, the time frame to leave it on, and such. Another clue that escaped me was when they said to wash your hands IMMEDIATELY after applying the cream. Hmm. I did think for a moment why does one have to wash it off their hands so fast, but it can remain on your legs for up to 6 minutes? Ah, whatever. It did say to test a small area of your skin in case you had a reaction to it, but there's no time for testing! I need hair-free legs within the next few minutes. So I applied the cream and waited the directed amount of time. Pee-ewe! It stunk! I did feel some minor burning on the back of my, ahem, upper thighs. Have you seen the episode of Raymond where the bull is charging Robert and he gets stuck? He says it's in his upper thigh, everyone else says it's his butt. Dion called me Robert tonight. I used to think that episode was funny. Not so much anymore.

I take the fake razor and start "shaving". I was getting a little nervous about the burning, so I didn't even get to do the whole zig zag move like in the commercial. All I knew was that I needed that satan cream off of my legs, and I needed it off fast. Shave shave shave....burn burn burn....Ow ow ow! Holy crap! I had to get into the shower very fast to try and soothe the burning. My legs felt ok, but my upper thighs were still on fire. Crap. I had to go pick the girls up from daycare in five minutes. So I got dressed and ran up the stairs to locate the Dermaplast, which after having my kids worked wonders. It sort of numbs the area, which is what I desperately wanted. Spray spray spray. YEEEE-OWWWW! Why the hell was it burning?!? It was supposed to numb it! I had to grab toilet paper and try to blot off the Dermaplast. Now I was down to about 2 minutes before I had to get the girls. So I did just that, and tried not to whimper with every step I took.

When Dion got home, he had a job. I had saved some of my radiation gauze strips, and I needed them oh so bad. He had the fun job of putting them on my butt, whoops, I meant upper thighs. Ahhhh.......

So here I sit with less, but some pain, cursing the Veet company, and dreading tomorrow when I have to pull the medical tape off of myself. Which is lesser of two evils? I'm not sure at this point. I do know that I will retire my can of Veet, and there has to be something I can do with the fake razor thing. Squeegee some small windows, or something. So it's back to the good old razor and soft soap, until they come up with some other new product that I HAVE to try.

Sunday, June 12, 2005


Nadia has a little something in her hair...

that's not a little something...it's poop!!

Claire denies to comment

What the hell?!?

So I am in the basement trying to find the title to the van we want
to sell (hard to sell without it) and I am going through so much
CRAP in our files trying to find it. You'd think I would put it
neatly into a nice hanging file folder and label it "van title" but
what fun would THAT be? Onward...so my husband is "watching" the
girls (Claire will be 3 in Sept, Nadia turned 1 in March) but mostly
playing on the computer. They are in the dining room, he is in the
living room. All of a sudden he screams downstairs for me to come
up, it's an emergency.

I RUN up the steps and burst into the dining room to see Nadia
sitting in one of the book shelves (I got tired of cleaning up books
and took them out, so now the girls sit there and play). Her hair
looks a little funny, but what's new? Ok. What's the worry? Then I
see Dion chasing Claire around yelling, and she of course is
laughing. She pauses long enough to stick her hands down into her
pull-up and pulls out POOP that sticks to her fingers until she
shakes her hand and it flies all over. The dog is following her
around EATING THE POOP THAT IS FLYING THROUGH THE AIR!!!! At this
point I look back at Nadia and I understand why her hair looks
funny. Little miss Claire rubbed poop all over Nadia's head. What
the hell?!? (hence the title of the subject) Dion informs me that he
kind of was watching them and they were playing quietly. Quietly. We
all know what it means when kids are playing quietly. So it's off to
the bathtub. I washed the poor child's hair 4 times and she still
smelled like poop. Oh lord.

Ok, so everything quieted down, I put the kids in bed and came
downstairs to clean up a little, when Dion sprinted through the
living room screaming like a little girl saying the
following, "There's a bat in the house!!!!!!!!". Every once in a
while he hit the deck when the bat swooped down at him. I had to
cross my legs so I wouldn't pee my pants laughing at him. Tears
flowed openly, and you know that laughter where it really just hurts
and you can't get any air, but you don't care? Yup, that was me. He
took the towel from me, and I was left with a blanket that had
Claire poop on it from before. Great. I held the blanket up to try
and trap the bat, while my partner in crime would roll the towel up,
randomly throw it through the air, and take off running and
screaming. The bat made it's way upstairs, back down, back up, with
us following. And by "us" I mean I had to go first as Dion was not
able to scream upstairs due to the children sleeping. So when the
bat dive bombed him upstairs I would hear this hushed "OOOOOOOOOOO!"
I could not stop laughing. I have to add here that at one point the
darn thing hid behind a clock. Since I could not reach it, I told
Dion he had to get the clock down. He did not like that idea so
much, so he left the room and came back with a can of air freshener.
Interesting. I do have to say though that the bat flew out from
behind the clock after being sprayed.

I finally got the bat into the upstairs bathroom, grabbed him with a
towel and took him outside. Fly, be free you sick little dive bombing
bat! And that is how our night went. I never did find that title.....

Wednesday, June 08, 2005


The fashionable look of oatmeal on the face after self-feeding.

Nothing like a nice big bowl of oatmeal in the morning!

Monday, June 06, 2005

Herceptin and Other Things

It has been a while since I blogged, so, since I have about a half an hour until I have to get the girls up, I thought I would use this time and be productive.

I had my second and third treatments of Herceptin and I am so happy to say that they went well. Other than a little headache and being a little tired, there's nothing worth telling. I got the blasted port put back in for treatment....fun for everyone. My doctor threatened to leave it in for five years because of the difficult time she had putting in back. I threatened to take it out myself and we had a good laugh. Me....the one who gets happy drugs BEFORE going into the operating room, me, the one who gets a little faint at the sight of fresh scars, me, the one who pees and moans about every little ache and pain. Yeah, right, I'll take it out myself....ha ha ha. But really, I HATE ports, hence the reason I had her take it out a month after chemo was done. We'll see what happens after the 48 weeks is over.

Oh my. I sat here thinking apparently too long because the screen saver came on. I better get typing. So here's the thing, I was talking to one of my friends about really nothing specific, when we touched on the fact that I have a hard time sitting down and relaxing and doing nothing. For example, this past Friday I got both of the girls laying down for a nap at the same time. I thought to myself, boy, I could watch a WHOLE movie at one time! As fast as that thought came into my head, I was out in the garage getting the lawn mower out and priming the hell out of it. I cut the grass, trimmed, and watered the plants (by the way, I have only missed one day of watering, a HUGE milestone for me as all my plants seem to die every year due to lack of water. Opps.). I went back into the house and sat down. I turned the tv on for about 3 minutes, then called my mom. I cannot sit still anymore. It is physically impossible. So where am I going with this? Well, the friend who I mentioned above has a theory, which may or may not hold water, but since she is my doctor too, and has seen many many woman with breast cancer, I might give her the benefit of my doubt (yeah, I know, Beth...better write this in you little tip calculator/palm pilot). Her theory is that I am living as though I still have cancer and feel the need to get everything done before I die. I suppose there is some truth to that. I believe that there are other factors though, such as I have spent so much of this past year and a half (almost) unable to do things. Sitting around, watching others care for me and my kids. I have missed 14 weeks of work during all of this fun. I look back a year ago and I was bald, doing chemo, feeling so crappy, and unable to do fun summer stuff. I need to make up for lost time with Dion, the girls, and my family. I owe it to them, they helped get me through this to where I am today. My friend said "You HAD cancer. Had had had." And yeah, I did have cancer. I just have to find and believe somewhere in my heart that I am going to live a long time. I was told over and over that it will take at least 2 years to start feeling normal again. I have decided that who I was as a person before cancer, is gone. There is no normal anymore. There is only new, and I think that's ok, but we'll see.

Now I have to get the girls up for daycare. My summer program is starting at work today, and I think we are going to have a good season. We have a lot of field trips planned, lots of swimming days, and my staff is ready and excited. Here we go....