Surly Thursday is BACK, BITCHES

 Back when I used to blog more regularly I accidentally started the Surly Thursday tradition - first because it just coincidentally seemed to happen that I had stuff to bitch about on Thursday and then because I liked the companionable 'ur's, I would save stuff up to complain about near the end of the week and theoretically purge the bad stuff before the week-end. 

This morning I thought it might be one of those Thursdays where I had to make up stuff, because I felt pretty good. And then I thought back over the past few days and realized that, instead of my usual Slough of Despond at this time of the year, I am instead experiencing brief bouts of exuberant energy interspersed with spates of absolute rage. Last week I was having a perfectly splendid day and then I started to make dinner and suddenly had an overwhelming wave of anxiety and irritability. I then spilled about a tablespoon of dry rice on the floor and OMG, do you have any idea how impossible it is to then clean up every grain of rice and how infuriating it is to feel a grain or two imprint itself into your foot with every step? The rest of dinner prep was me swearing, brushing off my feet and then having to wash my hands again every twenty seconds, swearing, sweeping, vacuuming, and swearing. 

The last couple of days have been the beginning of an unseasonably warm stretch of weather, about which everyone is ecstatic except for -- you guessed it. My head hurts, my nose won't stop running, my hair is frizzy and weird and I just want it to be normal November again. Okay, drinks on my friend's back deck last night without my extremities going numb was pleasant, but other than that. 

It's also possible that I am PMS-ing right now, which, given the fact that I have been a bit of a raging bitch today is likely, but not confirmable because after my fibroid removal and ablation last year I don't actually get a period anymore. You would think this would preclude my becoming a raging bitch at regular-ish intervals, but apparently not, sorry Hon.

This one is not for me, but my friend Dave, who showed up at our last outside bar night with the unwelcome news that Stella Artois has reduced its can size but is still charging the same price for 24 beer. HEY STELLA, THAT'S NOT COOL.

Sometimes I like to buy these grown-up lunchables for work. They're generally great, except there aren't equal numbers of each thing. What am I, going to eat a cheese or salami without stacking it on a cracker in a perfect little tower? Wth, Schneiders?

I was reading and reviewing a bunch of scary books and novellas in October and took another crack at Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, which I found unfrightening and a bit of a snore the first time I read it. I figured maybe I was old and sophisticated enough to appreciate a more subtle class of horror now. I was wrong. It was a little bit more interesting, but still not scary, and while I did a bit better with the Jamesian long, meandering sentence, there were a few times where I became completely lost in all the indirect objects and subordinate clauses. To wit: "This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming work."

Um? Mr. James, did you just have a small cerebro-vascular incident, or did I? Did we really need two 'nots' AND an 'essentially' in there? 

Wait, I just read it again and I think I finally understand. Which is still annoying, because now I feel dumb for putting it in here when maybe it's NOT EVEN THAT ANNOYING, SCREW YOU HENRY JAMES.

Okay. I feel better. Feel free to vent in the comments about whatever is chapping your butt currently. 

Free Look at My Drawers

 Here is a picture of the dresser in our entrance - I really needed Lynn's positive validation on this, because cleaning out the front closet has been a demoralizing lesson in humility. How many feet are in this family? How many shoes can possibly be needed for six (currently occupying) feet? How many sneakers has Eve outgrown and yet they hang on the shoe tree like poisonous cluttery long-gone-off fruit? 

Don't be fooled. 

And the closet shelf. We have a double shoe rack against the wall opposite the closet. At some point I got the bright idea that I would put a second double shoe rack up on the closet shelf. Double the space! Okay, full disclosure, "at some point" is roughly TWENTY GODDAMNED YEARS AGO when we moved in. Did it work well? It did not. A double wide-open shelf is not at all what you need for hats, mittens, scarves and sunglasses. A double wide-open shelf that is not solid but rather thin slats of wood? EVEN WORSE. The closet has been a nightmare of falling mittens, crammed-in wads of hat and scarf, people chucking other people's winter accessories aside to find their own, absolute fleecy chaos. "Someone should do something about this", I thought at least fifty times a winter (and it's Canada. We got weather). 

So as I was surveying the general area preparatory to painting it, I suddenly had the blinding, largely unwelcome realization that I AM SOMEONE. So I pulled out all the coats and sweaters and a bewildering number of jean jackets and baseball windbreakers, emptied the shoe rack and took it out, sorted the coat things and the winter accessories, ordered some bins and a set of matching wooden hangers because I am a goddamned half century old, and the time for mismatched plastic hangers - some still child-sized - is long past. Then I realized I had jumped the gun a little on all of this because I will have to empty the closet all over again to paint it, but I actually don't care because the dopamine hit I already get from surveying the vastly improved closet situation is extremely welcome right now. 

I should post a picture but I'm too lazy. I'll post a picture tomorrow. I have figured out that I have to add at least one picture to every post or when I post to Facebook it defaults to the same stupid Christmas card picture every time and makes me look even more confused and disorganized than I actually am.

So I didn't actually talk about the dresser, which yay! now we have yet another fascinating home organization post to look forward to tomorrow! It has just now occurred to me that it would maybe make more sense to put the hats and mitts and scarves in the dresser - which the kids do, in the bottom two drawers. The rest of them are reserved for the annoying crap that you sort of want to have near the door and anything else that I want to tidy away when people are coming over and have no room for. This results in having to clean it out a couple of times a year and becoming convinced that it is the Tardis of dressers - bigger on the inside. Matt invariable wanders through the minefield and says "how the heck did all of THIS fit in THERE?" It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to realize that, when cleaning out and reorganizing drawers and cupboards, it's not really enough to just move things around - you actually have to commit to moving a good third of the stuff elsewhere or throwing it out. I am bad at this, but getting better all the time. Given the rate of progress, by the time I'm 134 or so I'll be a pro.

Right then, I'm off for cold backyard drinks. At least I'll be able to easily locate the stuff I need to bundle up with. 

Hormones (I feel like this title works on a couple of levels)

 Okay, I was sort of joking about exploiting Eve for NaBloPoMo, but she just came down and gave me some really great material, so I'm going to ride this wave as long as I can. 

It's her last quadmester week of grade 12 Biology, which has been extremely challenging and fast-moving. I have personally learned how the PCR Covid test works (sent her Bio teacher a Starbucks gift card for that one), a bunch of stuff about DNA and RNA, and there was an impassioned speech about how she answered the question on why cyanide is poisonous, which I was with until she said "and then... you know what entropy is?" and Matt said "WHAT?" and she said "yes - the tendency of the universe toward disorder" and he expressed skepticism but she swears she sold it (I just checked - she got full marks and no giant question marks or referrals to the school psychologist, so I guess we're good). 

This week they have to learn, apparently, every single hormone. "There are SIX HORMONES IN THE PITUITARY GLAND ALONE. Okay, in fairness that's the most for any gland, I led with that to be dramatic". The lesson today was very difficult - "we're supposed to suddenly know the ENTIRE MENSTRUAL CYCLE" - and when she had her twenty minute break she came down to make lunch and was going to make a salami sandwich with some Miss Vicki's chips and she put her bread in the toaster and got the chips out and then there was NO SALAMI, so she melted cheese on her toast "like a three-year-old" and it was toasted for a sandwich so it wasn't even really toast, and the avocado was a little watery and when she looked for a paper towel to mop it up a little we were ALSO out of paper towels" (she is not genuinely complaining here, she is making fun of herself and her lunch meltodown, to be clear), and then she went upstairs and there was only two minutes left in the break and she was facing the entire menstrual cycle and everything was terrible. 

(Teaching Lucy Biology)

Then she brought down a list of brain stuff (I am at the end of my ability to sound remotely knowledgeable about all this) to illustrate how Game-of-Thrones-ish it sounded. "Axon. Dendrite (I knew that one). Nodes of Ranvier" - I mean, she's not wrong - "We shall convene at the Nodes of Ranvier before the battle". Then she mentioned myelin sheath, which I do kind of know about and find interesting. THEN she said they did a Cahoot for brain nerves and Chloe ALMOST beat her. I assured her that there are worse reasons to do well in Biology than spite. 

Last night I started cleaning out the dresser that lives by the entrance preparatory to moving everything before I paint. This had me questioning all my life choices. I'm not going to talk about the election as much this time - four years ago I was also doing NaBloPoMo and I felt silly talking about anything else with this giant thing hanging over all our heads, but there's really nothing I can do, so I'm going to talk about stupid stuff anyway. I wish my son wasn't over the border, but if I brought home everyone from the States that I love and am worried about my house would be standing room only. So let's focus on what we can.

(Getting a higher Biology mark than Chloe and making sure she finds out about it, obv.)

Day 2

 Sorry for the confusing-as-hell post yesterday. I realized as I was getting into bed that it was the first day of November which - Nicole called it - is traditionally the first day of the month that I post every day. It used to be NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) sponsored by BlogHer, and there was a giant blogroll of people who did it and there were prizes but I think you could only win prizes if you were in the U.S. which, like, wtf? So much for the global village. I think the original official NaBloPoMo and possibly even BlogHer are defunct now, but I did it the first year I blogged and found it really fun. Then I did it every year afterwards, less for fun than because I am weirdly obsessive and superstitious and somehow locked myself into HAVING to do it even when it's NOT FUN AT ALL, so welcome to my nightmare (not really). Actually I missed a couple of days when we went to Mexico and couldn't get a wifi connection a couple of years ago, and nothing bad happened, so I will treat this like I have my plan to walk every day that I made a few weeks ago - I walk every day that I can at all reasonably fit it in, and I don't sweat it when I can't. Sometimes I'm on my fall visit to Zarah I make really lame posts because I'm too busy drinking and shopping, or I just post a picture of whatever new bra I bought from the awesome bra lady at the awesome bra store in Barrie, and I have just realized that I can't visit Zarah this fall THANKS FUCKING COVID. 

The picture that I posted yesterday is from when we were cleaning up the garden in the back and found a chamomile plant growing up among the skeleton of our lavender bush.

Depending on your perspective, it's an example of life finding a way, or one of "hey stupid, you're in the wrong place".

This morning I was driving Eve to school and she was telling me how this girl in her bio class who took grade 12 chemistry last year and is obnoxious about it was being nasty in their group chat again. Another girl said "the urinary system isn't on the test right?" Which Eve said was a reasonable question based on what the teacher had written. "Chloe wrote 'it's literally all we've done this unit DOT DOT DOT, which, I know adults use dot dot dot differently but this was definitely a bitch move." Eve pointed out other stuff they had done this unit and Chloe said "wasn't that review?" "EXCUSE ME, FUCKING CHLOE, I can guarantee you've never seen the word 'poikilotherm' before. If she had asked that in a non-bitchy way I would have said "I don't think so", but she didn't, so I just said no." 

I kind of love that Eve thinks peak bitchy is just saying "no" without any qualifiers. Bet Chloe's still feeling that burn. 

See you tomorrow, and every other goddamned day after that. It's cool if I just type out funny stuff Eve says every day, right? 

Day One

Living Systems and Bodily Fluids

We've gone over a week without a new Covid-related catastrophe, although I did lose much of last week to a days-long migraine (the temperature's up! it's down! It's balmy on Friday! It's brisk on Saturday! My head is a football being gleefully punted around between pressure systems). Angus's college is probably online until the end of this term - they almost got to go back, but then the cases spiked in the surrounding county. Eve is in the last couple weeks of the first quadmester - less formally, at the 'trigonometry is ASS' mile marker in math and learning how much water different living things add to their pee in Biology. Last week she explained to me how the PCR Covid test worked in terms that even I could understand, so I sent her teacher a Starbucks gift card. 

Both Eve and I have hit a bad run of insomnia. I used to have prescribed sleeping pills but since I got the sleep apnea diagnosis (thirty years late, not that I'm still bitter) they don't love giving me stuff because apparently it's not great to be sedated when you have a tendency to stop breathing. But, I mean, I use the CPAP, so I don't really understand the reasoning - in fact, if I could take something to help me sleep longer I would use the CPAP for longer, which means I WOULDN'T be stopping breathing. Anyway, for a while I could take a Benadryl and it would help, but now it just has the tendency to exacerbate the restless legs problem. Then I remembered that the very first thing that helped with Eve's relentless insomnia as an early adolescent was a high dose of melatonin - which she hasn't been taking recently because her sleep was so much better. So I told her to take a shit ton of it Sunday night and I did the same and it did the trick for both of us. I'm still exhausted from the sleep debt and I suspect I've had a mild melatonin hangover for the past couple of days, but it's worth it.

(How we wind down for the night, can't think why anyone has trouble sleeping)

So, want to hear about my bloodwork adventure? Just to feel better about yourselves, if for nothing else?

So. I saw my doctor at the end of July and she gave me a requisition for bloodwork. Then we went camping. Then we were getting Eve ready to go back to school. Then my dad fell. Then my dad barfed up huge quantities of blood. Then my dad was in the hospital for two weeks. Then Eve had to get tested for Covid and we were in isolation. Then I had to get tested for Covid and I was in isolation. Then I thought "hmm, I was supposed to get bloodwork a couple weeks back, oh no, look, it was three months". 

I knew there was some kind of sign-in system that meant you maybe wouldn't have to wait in line for as many hours. So I woke up Friday, already later than I meant to (refer back to not sleeping, not before 5 a.m. anyway) and tried to sign in at the lab close by. It was already not taking any more sign-ins. for the day. So I found another one not too far away and signed in there. It said the wait was 82 minutes.

Cool, I though. I'll shower, have breakfast, and head over.

I showered and went downstairs and checked the wait again: 135 minutes. 

Cool, I thought, I'll grab a book.

I dished out my Greek yogurt and checked again: 32 minutes.

Wtf, I thought, scarfed my yogurt, slid my shoes on, and headed for the car. It's only an 11 minute drive, so no worries.

I get halfway there. There's no traffic, the weather is nice, I'm feeling good, I'm getting shit DONE, I.... have forgotten the requisition on the dining room table. 

I am torn between rage and resignation - I am a goddamned half-century old and I STILL can't get my shit together. But honestly, I'm just too tired to panic, so I turn the car around, head back to pick it up and see what can be salvaged of the process.

I get home and check the wait in the driveway: 24 minutes. Hm. Still doable.

I go in, grab the paper, yell I FORGOT THE REQUISITION I'M A FUCKING IDIOT, so that had to be fun for Matt's work call and Eve's Zoom class, get back in the car and check the wait again: 11 minutes.

Clearly, the universe is just fucking with me now. 

I am somewhat less observant of moving violations and land-speed records this time around. I squeal into the parking lot, and then get hung up in the entrance trying to buy these fucking token things that you need to pay, but none of my payment methods are working and and I am losing what's left of my composure and then a woman opens the door and says, oh, don't pay for parking, the gates are up! And also, are these your car keys on the ground? And thank goodness we are wearing masks or I might have kissed her, like, with tongue.

Then I walked down a four-mile-long hallway to find the lab, and they checked me in and I sat down and I was called in under thirty seconds. 

So obviously I win at bloodwork. 

I have to get a mammogram soon, so stay tuned for for that fun-filled frolic.

Peripheral Covid Stuff and My Weird-Ass Kids

 So Angus texted us this the other night:

So I had a minor heart attack. Then he texted this:

So naturally I disowned the little shit. 

Taking Eve to get tested was easier than I expected, considering we had been hearing about five-hour lineups at testing centers in Ottawa. We called a place a little further out at nine a.m. and got a window of between eleven and twelve. She was supposed to be in school, but for math she is able to follow in online if she can't be there, so she was listening to the lesson on her phone as we drove. 

We found the place and parked. 

It was a community center and the parking lot was surrounded by little apartment buildings, so we sat for a a bit while Eve's class was on a break looking at how people decorated their little entrances or balcony railings - window boxes, a line of inukshuks, patio lights. Then a truck pulled up with a really cute dog hanging out the window, so we squealed at him for a while. Then we talked about nonsense. At one point Eve said "do you know that if you pet a bird under its wings it messes it up and it will chronically masturbate?" I lifted my jaw off my chest and whispered "how... does a bird masturbate?" Eve threw her arms out and yelled "I DON'T KNOW! It must have a penis, right? Does the bird have sex? Where the bird penis at? WHERE IT AT?" Then I looked at her phone and said "you're on mute, right?" and she lunged for it in desperation.

They called us and checked her health card number and told her to come to the back door. She went in and I drove around to the front door and she came out almost immediately. She'd been pretty nervous about the test but said it wasn't bad at all (she had the two nostrils and throat swab - I have since been tested in just the one nostril and I did not KNOW my nostril went up that high, so I am glad she had a better experience).

So that was all good. Then we got home and I went on Twitter and experienced the weirdest instance of Bader-Meinhof phenomenon of my entire life: