How did I get so.......old?

Yesterday, I took the day off of work....at the end of what would have normally been the working day, I realized that I have gotten old. What really brought me to this conclusion was the activities that I chose to do on my day off and that I actually really enjoyed them. I took the entire day off because we "had to take our taxes to the accountant to be done". Somehow I could justify this, when in actuality it took us about half an hour with the tax lady to give her all of our stuff. I started my day off by taking our son to preschool. Then I came home, brewed a pot of coffee and went at a morning of domestic goddess duties. I even changed the sheets on our beds! My mother was a "ritualistic sheet changer"--once a week....I change them when the thought crosses my mind...and I can't even begin to tell you the last time that thought crossed my mind. I straightened our son's room, vacuumed the downstairs, picked up my huge pile of clothes off of our bedroom floor...I was in fact, a true Domestic Goddess Friday morning! It was awesome...the sick part is that I really enjoyed myself...being at home, by myself, cleaning. Damn, I'm old.

Prior to going to the tax lady at 11am, I went to a local fabric store...I was truly not impressed with the selections of materials to make an evening gown for my brother's wedding. Another moment, where I feel like I am being a true Domestic Goddess...taking on the endeavor of creating a fancy dress....WITH ZIPPERS....I will have to keep you posted on how that goes. Then I went to the Dollar Store which was next door Shitty Fabric Store and bought supplies for "Girls Night"--gummy dinos, caramels, sourcream and onion chips, and other mindless activities for children under 5 years of age.

After taxes, my goal for the afternoon...a serious nap. I wasn't fooling around with this one. I had to survive to and through "Girl's night". I allotted myself up to four hours for this nap, starting at 12:30 I even closed the blinds, got under the big blankies...laid there for about an hour, slowly losing hope. Then I must of dropped off into a coma because it was suddenly 3:30pm. Mission accomplished...

I have to say, it was one of my best days off...and I did nothing truly exciting...just the mundane activities of daily life....but in somewhat more of a mindful way....

The best day off was followed by one of the best impromptu "Girl's Nights". My husband had a "Guy's Night" with some work buddies earlier in the evening and told me that he would be home by 9pm...well, he didnt get home until almost 10pm....Shortly before he arrived home I kept having the feeling the evening was fucked...I had called, Depressionista, host of this Girl's Night, there was no answer...a bit of panic...I tried again later...her husband answered and said she was sleeping. He told me to come on down anyway. In true SnickleSnackle fashion, I headed for Depressionista's house, which I should add is about 35 minutes from my house. I get there, she is still sleeping....more panic. But she rallied, and it was awesome. We ate, we drank coffee, we collaged, we talked, we filled the notebook with even more of our brilliant thoughts...It was wonderful and very much needed!! Thanks to our naps....we made it to 4am!! WE RULE!!

And because I am old....I know I need to get some rest before "Girl's Night".

I'm a bloser baby.....

The title of today's post is my apology to Depressionista for not commenting on every post she has made...I am not as blogliterate as she is and I am still getting comfortable with the whole thing.

Anyway, I feel like I really WORKED today at my job. Not that I usally dont put an honest effort forth...but WOW. As I have said before, I pretty much facilitate meetings with family's to help them make plans to make sure their children are safe, etc. I have to admit that my job is not the bitch that it use to be when I had an ongoing caseload of 60-75 kids I had to make sure were safe on a daily basis. Now I just meet with families, talk about meetings, set them up then actually facilitate the meetings. I have been spoiled lately; I realized this morning. I had the meeting from hell. First of all there were about 15 people present. The parents are not together but are both extremely jealous of one another. Mom has some mental health issues of her own. Enough for it to be difficult to reason with her and for her to continually make snide remarks half under her breath the whole meeting. I spent almost two hours facilitating this meeting...It was constant redirection..."lets stay focused..."...."I understand you are angry and frustrated"..."but we really cant do much about that issue here today"....yada, yada, yada....It was truly emotionally draining. This meeting was bad enough that I decided that we needed to go to the Flying Weinie for lunch...for some reason I find their hotdogs and fries to be the most amazing comfort food. I dont know if there is a bit of a Freudian thing with that. So I drug my poor male coworker, M, and my work spouse, M, met me there. That was a damn good weinie!! It was one of those days that made me realize "hey, my job is not too bad usually!!"

1am...emergency trip to Walgreens...

Not a good way to start a Monday morning. 1am...my 4 year old son comes up stairs screaming, "my forehead hurts". I scour the house for Children's Tylenol...how the hell do you run out of Children's Tylenol without restocking...so I trudge off to Walgreens...Like Tingle said in her Blog, I love Walgreens! I love the fact that they are open 24 hours and have every kind of pediatric pain killers known to man. I bought Tylenol, Motrin and some other cold thing when I was there just to make sure I had all of my bases covered. So then I came home, gave him some Tylenol and he fell a sleep on the sofa watching "The Iron Giant"....thank gods for that movie. At first I was laying in bed with him, he was miserable, thrashing around. Then I decided "why lay here and be miserable". We might as well get up and watch a movie, one that usually puts him to sleep. It worked like a charm. He only woke up screaming on one more occasion! Then I just rocked him on my lap and he fell asleep on me till 6am...that was kinda nice. I hadn't had him sleep on me for a long time.

He seeme to be ok this morning...so I drug him off to preschool. Part of me was like "should I take him? What if he is really sick yet?" But he made it through the day and was in fairly good spirits when he came home. Just a bit tired.

It is amazing how an unhappy/sick child can really dominate your life at times.

Craziness abounds....

Wow, another week of insanity.

My husband spent the first two days of this week in bed. Like I did last week. I felt bad giving him this one. It was killer.

It was an odd day...not a bad odd day, just odd...

Weird factoid #1. So today, I go out and meet with a family. What I do for a living is try to help families "empower" themselves to develop plans to achieve whatever goal it is that they want to achieve--usually it is to get their children back in their home or to get the "Welfare" out of their lives. I live in a town now that is about half an hour away from where I went to college. I wondered how long it would take for me to encounter someone who I had crossed paths with in college. So I go meet with this family and I am looking at the dad, thinking "man, he looks familiar"--I hope I don't know him TOO WELL, if you catch my drift. Big fear of mine....I sowed my wild oats...luckily, I had only hung out in a lot of the same places as this guy when I was in college...the local smoke shop. He happens to be friends with one of my husbands' best friends. I just thank the gods that I didnt know him that well...It got me humming, "Its a small world after all...".

Weird factoid #2,. A few months ago, I found an old friend of mine, M who also happened to be a boyfriend of about fifteen years ago for a brief stint. During our relationship, I got to be friends with an old girlfriend of his, L. The story is a bit more complex than this but I shall leave it at that. M had told me that she was also working for the state, as I do. I look her up on our address book at work thinking "she probably isn't listed here, she must be in some other branch". There she was listed right on the address book...Then I think, "god, I wonder if she would really answer if I called"...It took me a few minutes to get the gumption up--I mean what do you say, "Hey, I havent talked to you in about ten years, remember me??" Would she even want to talk to me??So I got over that, picked up the phone and called her...and about shit myself because she answered the phone...and she seemed honestly happy to hear from me. She gave me her email. I am hoping that she will become a contributor to snicklesnackle.com and it will be interesting to catch up with her again.

These are the kind of things that happen that make you think a bit. I felt like I was needing some distraction with the shitty weather and the illness lately. Lets see what crazy shit abounds tomorrow!!

Lanny Eugene Vernon Kampfe, gives the best root canals ever but....

....is definitely not a people person.

So yesterday I had my root canal completed. For those of you out there less experienced in the world of denistry, which I imagine most of you are less experienced than I have had the misery of being, root canals require two appointments approximately 10 days apart. The first day the endodontist is opens the tooth, then with a wire, he cleans out the root and puts a temporary filling in so that the infection can drain. If you are having bad enough tooth pain the root canal can be almost a joyous occasion. Now, yesterday I had the second part of my root canal completed with my endodontist, Lanny Kampfe ( I don't usually use real names but this is for Depressionista's benefit). Lanny is one of the best root canal guys I have ever experienced. I can say this because I had a root canal experience from hell prior to going to Lanny...I cannot even begin to describe the horror here...suffice to say that it was a foriegn dentist who should have not been doing root canals. Lanny can get in there, open up a tooth, clean it out and have you on your way in usually about 15-20 minutes....Which is good, Because this is about all I can handle of listening to him talk. He has the best dental skills ever....his "social" skills suck. I have to sit there with my mouth wide open, with a rubber dam in it listening to him talk to his assistant about what ever sporting activity he went to the day before. Then, I think his wife, Janet, must go to "Bible study" every fucking day because he is always, always talking about Bible study! ....he said the words "Bible study" five times, I counted, in about 10 minutes yesterday. I have had about 5 root canals done by this guy...He has never asked me anything about myself. This time he had the audacity to tell me that "I should make sure I get the tooth that I had the root canal in in early January crowned soon and if I dont have enough insurance, I could do a permanent filling of some kind until I could get the crown"...Have you looked at my teeth or maybe the thick ass file you have here at your office?!?! Maybe I know a bit about dental care and that I need to get yet another fucking crown on that tooth soon?? I was very brief and to the point with the man...Maybe I am too aware of interacting with people due to my chosen line of work...Then to top the appointment off he says "you know the real secret is to not have anything else to fix for the rest of the year" in regards to not using up my dental insurance...I didnt even respond...I did say "well, I do have 2 dental plans"...and wanted to follow up with, "I am having a fucking upper GI next week to help determine what may be causing the acid reflux that is eating away my teeth". But that was way more of a conversation than I felt like I really wanted to have at the time....The moral of the story for me is...they really need to supply people in the medical/dental field with more training on how to basically "interact" with members of the human race in a way that makes those humans want to be around them at all...

Other than the root canal, in my attempt to "get healthier" this week, I have had salads for one meal a day for the past couple of days. Of course, my coworker had to bring in bagels and I felt I had to eat one and another coworker had to bring in this fabulous spice cake--all today. Wed I had three smokes, Thursday I had four smokes and today, Friday, I and my work spouse, Mel, both ended up buying packs of smokes. Mel makes me carry them...for her so I have two packs of smokes in my possession at this time...so for today, I completely fell off the wagon.... My goal is to enjoy myself this weekend and climb back on the wagon on Monday. This weekend I hope to start going for some walks and lifting the hand weights. I need to get more active. I feel better then!! Well, my faithful readers, I believe I am going to go "lay peacefully"...and probably eat something bad for me!! Have a good weekend!

Back to the Land of the Living....

..or at least the land of the pseudo-living! Sheesh....I am recovering from one of the worst cold/flu illnesses I have had in a long time. I spent the last two days pretty much sleeping. I was home sick from work TWO days in a row. Those of you that know me, know this is pretty rare. I hate staying home sick if I can avoid it. Its like I am coming out of this crazy haze of illness. Yesterday I put a sincere effort into going to work...I actually drove to work, got there and sat at my desk....I sat there looking at all of the shit I needed to do and didn't really understand any of it and thought "what am I suppose to do now". It seemed like anything I would have to do including phone calls, talking to any other human beings was going to be way more work than I anticipated....Like I was in some foreign world. It was at that point that I realized I was way too sick and out of it to be dealing with human beings and trying to help family's keep small children safe...
The only good thing that has come out of this illness is that I have seriously cut back on smoking. During the throws of the whole illness, I smoked on Sunday morning--one cigarette. Then today I had two smokes....Not too bad overall in my move to be healthier. Food was another issue today...I had to have a frosted sugar cookie and a bag of gummy worms from Casey's across from our local women's drug rehab center when I went there for a meeting today...something about frosted sugar cookies that gets me every time.
Tonight, my husband, R, offered to fry us up some dinner, bacon, eggs, hashbrowns, the whole works... One of my favorite meals is breakfast for dinner. We recently broke out my Gramma G's old electric skillet...that thing makes me nostalgic. Now, Gramma G was not my favorite Gramma but she was a woman of her era. When I see that electric grill I am reminded of her in her white tank top, big old cleavage with her hanky nestled between her large breasts, smashing potato pancakes for our lunch. She was a gossiper, the kind of Gramma you go visit and she tells you what nasty thing the neighbor has been up to and you have no idea how she could have gotten that juicy bit of gossip. I hate to admit it....as much as it pains me...I got a bit of Gramma G in me....I like a good juicy bit of gossip...So I am a bit trashy at times....I think a true Snickle Snackler revels in her trashy side....Thanks, Gramma G!!!