Somewhere Over (under, around, below) the Rainbow

...you may want to seek professional help

2006-04-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

So just for fun I took the basic stress level test. Here's one link where you can take it
http://www.amtamassage.org/room/lifechangestest.html

My score was 331. Cool! I thought. Isn't it always a good thing to have a high score? Turns out no, that's not a good thing. Kind of like golf. You want a lower score. So the advice with my score was "You may want to seek professional help."

What does this mean? What do you mean my stress is too high? What do you mean I have too many life changes going on right now? Tell me, tell me now!!!!!!

OK, I've calmed down a little. I didn't need the test to tell me what I already knew. My biggest stressors that are really having an impact are:
Death of a family member
Change in job status
Child getting ready to leave the nest
Major illness
Finishing up my doctorate
Major change in sleep habits

I really need a vacation. I can't remember the last time I took a trip away from responsibility. I need to drag my husband away to a spa, before I get dragged away against my will to a place where you stand in line to get meds.

Although...three hots, a cot, and some happy pills doesn't sound too bad.

is your cat pregnant?

2006-03-31T12:06:00.000-08:00

This is a question I often get from visitors to my house. No, my MALE cat is not pregnant I say indignantly! He is just heighth challenged. Really.

The weird thing is he only gets cat food. He doesn't even like people food or anything else but his kibbles. So the vet says he needs to lose weight. Well duh! I could have told you that. I try really hard not to overfeed him. Really! I don't think you believe me.

so he's on a diet. and he is not a happy camper. in fact, i think he's gained weight since his diet started. just out of spite. my husband thinks he's supplementing with outside food. and i mean outside literally.

what's a girl to do?

i need a ride...

2006-03-27T19:56:00.000-08:00

so my husband and i bought a harley. i had to laugh later because when we went to a museum exhibit on the history of harleys, we matched the stats for the average harley owner (mid forties, married, college educated...you get the picture). and here we thought we were so cool! my husband has taken lessons and has his license but i am still too chicken to learn to ride by myself. besides i look really cool on the back of the bike (ha ha!)
our first ride was up lookout mountain, which if i had been on the front end where i could see what it looked like as we made the hairpin turns, i probably would have puked. but i got to lean against hubby which was great and just learned to lean the way he leans (which if you've never done, is really hard to do because your inclination is to lean the other way to keep from falling off).
so now we're just waiting for better weather to ride again. it is just amazing what you see of the world when you are on a bike.

what color green are you?

2006-03-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

You Are Emerald Green

Deep and mysterious, it often seems like no one truly gets you.

Inside, you are very emotional and moody - though you don't let it show.

People usually have a strong reaction to you... profound love or deep hate.

But you can even get those who hate you to come around. There's something naturally harmonious about you.

What Color Green Are You?

it's 2am do you know where your sanity is?

2006-03-25T08:18:00.000-08:00

so i wake up at 2am (2:12 to be exact) every day. sometimes i can go back to sleep but often i wake up every hour on the hour after that until i can't stand it anymore and then i just get up.

it doesn't help that my cat now thinks this is normal behavior on my part.

Of course, once i'm up he thinks it's time to go back to sleep. Easy for him to do!

anyway, it's weird how my mind does this every once in awhile. and on top of that i have really bizarre dreams. like last night i dreamed i was catching baby alligators in my house. i would grab them by the neck to keep them from biting me. which for the most part was working okay. but then i squeezed one too hard and it started suffocating. then i felt bad and decided to kill it quickly by putting it in a ziplock bag.

what is wrong with my mind? what would a dream interpreter say?

really, i am a very nice person. quite normal. Really!

but she never eats leftovers!

2006-03-22T20:28:00.000-08:00

Today i really needed comfort food. Not only am i lost somewhere in the grief cycle, but i may also be losing my job soon or be forced to change jobs or something...

so i rememberd that there was one bowl of chili left from the other night in the fridge. now, no one in my family (husband or teenage daughter) eats leftovers. so when i woke up from my pity party nap, a bowl of chili with some cheese on top sounded really comforting.

went into the kitchen, and before i even got to the fridge, i saw the lid to the tupperware container that held the chili. mind you, JUST THE LID. and when you add that to the fact that my daughter had arrived home minutes before and cooked something in the microwave, I knew i was doomed.

you know how it is when you build something up in your mind and you have that taste in your mouth before you even take the first bite only to have your bubble burst.

so being in the frame of mind i'm in, i made her go to the store and buy me the ingredients to make another batch. which led to a whole nuther headache.

mind you, this is the girl who has been dragged to the grocery store for her entire 17 years on earth. she has seen me shop for food; she has helped pick out items; she has heard me lecture on reading labels and checking prices.

so here was the list i gave her:

onion
lb of beef
2 cans tomato sauce
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can each of pinto beans, chili beans, kidney beans
1 small can diced chiles

She called me FIVE times from the store!

What kind of beef? (me: ground beef like we always buy when we make chili; her: Oh yeah, huh!)
What size cans of tomato sauce? (me: the medium size like we always buy; her: Oh yeah, huh!)
I can't find chili beans. (me: in the same aisle with the baked beans and canned tomatoes, probably just right where you were; her: Oh yeah, huh!)
Um, did you want all the bean in cans? Cuz I have a bag of the dried pinto beans in the basket. (me: just like the list says, CAN of pinto beans. We've never used the dry kind to make chili; her: Oh yeah, huh!)
What are green chiles? (me: in the Mexican food aisle, the small can of diced green chiles we get to make the chili; her: Oh yeah, huh!)

Now, she comes back to the house, without (YOU GUESSED IT) the onion. I didn't have the heart to tell her. she really does try, but she has two strikes against her right now...she's blonde and 17.

I think she will have to find another way to a man's heart besides through his stomach...

Bottom line, I made my chili and put the cheese on it and chased that down with an anti-anxiety pill and all is right with my world for now.

this, that, and the other

2006-03-20T19:30:00.000-08:00

so each day gets a little better and in some ways a little worse. i've discovered that reading blogs really helps occupy the mind. i've been random bloggering (my term i guess for randomly reading through blogs) and have really been entertained. i also feel like i've made some new friends and that always helps a person feel better.

got my dissertation back yesterday and the good news is my advisor isn't asking for a lot of changes. so i made the few changes and now it is on its way to my committee member. fingers are crossed for a quick turn-around. i'm still hoping to walk in graduation in june.

i have now spent 4 days in my pajamas. a new record for me. i'm on bereavement leave and don't really feel like getting dressed. so i'm not.

it's been snowing here all day and the good news is that i don't have to go out in it!

no gold at the end of the rainbow

2006-03-19T09:09:00.000-08:00

so i haven't written in a week. things went from bad to worse with my m-in-law and she passed away on Friday morning. it was not a "what you see in the movies" kind of death. she didn't lay her head back on the pillow, take one final breath and slip quietly into the heavens. she had freakin' cancer that ate away everything she loved...her independence; her love of shopping at all the thrift stores in Denver; her love of wrapping everything in plastic, because you know things might get dusty if you don't; her love for her son, not that it diminished, but that she knew how much it would hurt him when she left this world; and so much more that I can't think of right now.
yesterday we went and made arrangements. very simple. she wanted only cremation, no service, no obit, no eulogy. we will pick up the cremains sometime this week. we will eventually spread them with her brother's cremains later this spring. we will have our own kind of memorial in way that shows how much we loved her.
she was a very private person and we respect that. we have done our best to carry out her wishes to the very end. i was with her when she passed from this world. it wasn't quiet and movie-like. it was painful and one of the hardest things i will ever do in this life.

but i wouldn't have missed it for anything. it was an honor to take care of her this last 18 months and it was an honor to be there for her as she left this world to start a new journey. free from pain. free from cancer. free from a body that just couldn't fight any longer.

we love you.

why can't I breathe?

2006-03-12T12:12:00.000-08:00

"Why can't I breathe?"
That was her question this morning. Why is it so hard to get air? Because you're dying I guess would be the real reason. But I can't bring myself to say the words. Because cancer sucks and is the most evil monster to inhabit a human. That would be another response that I can't bring myself to say.
so I just say, "I don't know." I ask her if she wants a drop of the morphine which is supposed to help relax the breathing a little. "Yes, but only a little tiny bit." This is because she does not want to feel like she isn't in control.

I begin to research the web on signs that death is near. I find I can't read enough about it. All the signs are basically the same. the problem is I'm looking for the one that tells me when it's going to happen. And that doesn't exist.

So why can't I breathe? I am overwhelmed by this twilight zone I am living in right now.

random thoughts on a random kinda day

2006-03-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

death continues its march in our house. my m-in-law told me she was afraid. I asked her afraid of what? and she said afraid that when she opens her eyes my husband or I won't be there. You see last night, despite our best intentions, we didn't hear her over the baby monitor. Oh yeah, we bought a baby monitor and put it in her room and then the two monitors around the house. Normally we can hear everything going on in the room she's in. But I was extremely exhausted last night and fell into a really deep sleep. Normally I am a very light sleeper, having been a mother for 21 years. However, I didn't hear anything. My husband on the other hand is a deeeeeeeeeeeep sleeper. So we didn't hear her calling out to us.
I felt like shit when she told me that this morning at 6 when I dragged my ass out of bed. And then of course she said she was afraid to open her eyes and not see one of us sitting there. So we take turns sitting in her room. I really hate cancer. I hated it before, but now I hate it on a personal level. She's had it twice. Breast cancer 10 years ago, which she beat, and now this.

and not that this is really on topic, but when I am stressed and tired and emotionally exhausted, I eat. Today's menu was chocolate morsels (left over from the cookies I made yesterday; yes, I know hard to believe that there were any leftovers.) But this is because I also used reese's peanut butter chips too and so I had some of those left over as well. So I mixed them together and put them in a plastic container and have been eating them. Then i got creative and took a spoon with REDUCED FAT peanut butter and dipped it in the chips. Hint: The reduced fat cancels out the calories of the chips. anyhoo, it was really good and it helped reduce my anxiety until i realized that it probably went right to my thighs anyway.

and for my food obsessing encore

2006-03-10T17:06:00.000-08:00

Well today i decided it was time to eat some cookie dough. Oops, i mean MAKE some cookie dough. I used to wonder why when you made the recipe on the Tollhouse bag, it never made as many cookies as it said it would. I discovered two reasons for this. One, I make bigger cookies than "drop by teaspoonful". What the hell is the point in a teaspoonful? What would you get, one morsel? I drop more by huge-ass spoonful. So when I make the recipe, I get about 12 cookies. and then Two, I eat some of the dough. Well, sometimes I eat half of the dough. And I don't buy the bullshit that you shouldn't eat raw eggs. That rule doesn't apply when you eat cookie dough. So bottom line is that if I followed the directions and didn't eat an cookie dough, I would probably have a couple dozen bite sized cookies. Which I would probably eat in one sitting.
Ha!

Kentucky Fried Chicken, because I'll never call it KFC

2006-03-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

is there anything better than the skin on Kentucky Fried Chicken? It reminds me of the episode of Friends where Joey has a bucket of chicken, eats the skins and then asks who wants the chicken. I LMAO because that would be me! Here is my list of things that I would eat the whole thing of (not in any particular order):
1. all the buttercream frosting off of any cake (if you watched the episode of The Biggest Loser where they could eat all the wedding cake slices and win jewelry, I would have eaten all the slices even if I wasn't going to get the jewelry).
2. a big gigantic bag of Twizzlers, all of it, in one sitting
3. a whole bag of Dove milk chocolate (however, nothing is more irritating than taking the foil off and not being able to read the sentiment)
4. a whole bag of M&Ms (an no, not the Fun Size; what the hell is fun about a little bag of candy?)
5. a whole pan of mashed potatoes (gravy optional, butter even better)
6. a whole loaf of french bread with real butter, heated (the bread, so the butter melts)
7. a whole cheesecake (never tried it, I'm sure I would be incredibly sick)
8. all of the Halloween candy (yes, I stole it out of my kids' bags when they were little and yes I usually run out of candy every year, and not because I have tons of visitors)

Now before you get the wrong idea, I don't really ever do those things (well, with exception of Twizzlers). But it is my fantasy. And yes, I have food issues, before you go asking that question.

I adore sugar and fat. Stay out of my way when I NEED it.

new calling as a therapist

2006-03-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

I have spent the day counseling people. it isn't my job, not even remotely. and i usually need counseling myself, probably daily. anyway, so far, I have counseled my boss to stop drawing attention to himself as being an asshole; my mother-in-law that it is okay to have anxiety attacks when you are dying of cancer; and someone I choose not to name that he really blew it when he chose someone else over me.

thoughts on death

2006-03-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

my mother-in-law is dying of cancer. in our house. i came home to check on her today at lunch and she looked like a corpse. it really scares me sometimes to think about a person actually dying in our house. i can think about death in the philosophical sense, but to see it happen is something completely different.

...rambling, rambling, rambling

2006-03-06T20:54:00.000-08:00

Here are the mad rambling's of someone who has finished writing a dissertation. You would think there would be relief, euphoria, jubilation, whatever. I just sit and play the waiting game now...will they or won't they accept it. What errors will they find...tiny miniscule errors that in the grand scheme of life mean NOTHING