Category Archives: Whining

Hungry Eyes*

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Last night seemed normal at first. I got Catie to bed, checked my email one last time, took my melatonin pill and headed off to bed. Dave had left the TV on in our room, and “Dirty Dancing” was on. I ended up watching it that rather than going to sleep. Why? I don’t know. I can never seem to turn that movie off when it’s on. It’s one of those guilty pleasure movies – it’s awful & I love it.**

By the time the movie was over and I turned the TV off to try to sleep, I noticed that my stomach felt… wrong. It was hurting and cramping a bit. I thought it was probably something I ate, but didn’t think too much about it. I just tried to ignore it and go to sleep.

I woke up about an hour later in major pain. Seriously, I don’t even know how to describe it. My entire torso was cramping up, and it kept hitting me in waves. I didn’t know if I was going to poop, barf, poop AND barf, or die.

And even though it’s totally illogical? It felt a whole lot like labor pain, and I thought for a few minutes that I was going to end up like one of those women on I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, and my big 15 minutes of fame was going to happen when Joel McHale mocked my stupidity on The Soup.

Seriously, I was half-asleep and in pain. Sound reasoning isn’t top-notch at 2:30 in the morning. The only thing that calmed me down is that I had a physical back in August and I’m pretty sure that the doctor would’ve noticed if I was pregnant during my pelvic exam. So the idea that I could be nine months pregnant and about to unknowingly deliver a baby? Well, it seemed a bit unlikely.

So… I’m not pregnant. Of course. I do, however, seem to have a pretty vicious case of food poisoning. No idea what caused it, either. I’m feeling a little better now – I had some chicken soup and a piece of toast, and everything is staying down, so I think I’ll live.

Dave very kindly got up with Catie this morning and took her to Target so I could get some more rest, since I had been awake and sick during so much of last night. They came back with a “get well, Mommy” present for me. A box full of miniature plastic dinosaurs. Just what I’ve always wanted. Oh well, the dinosaurs are keeping Catie happy and occupied, so I guess that’s good enough.

*That song is stuck in my head after watching Dirty Dancing last night. But believe me, my eyes are anything but hungry right now. Blech.

** Random thought: Is it just me or was Jennifer Grey way cuter before she had a nose job?

Saturday night's alright for whining

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Yesterday was a day of suckage the likes of which we haven’t seen for a while. FYI, this post is going to contain a lot of whining and it’s all very stream-of-consciousness blurted out by a crazy person in the midst of major sleep deprivation. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1. We found out that we will not, in fact, have our money from the UK in time for our closing date on Friday, the 11th. The sellers have the right to completely back out of the deal and keep our earnest money that we put down, which we’re praying they don’t do. Hopefully they’ll just allow the closing date to get bumped further out. Again.

Meanwhile, this house that we’re currently living in has been re-rented, and the new tenants are moving in on Saturday, the 12th. So, we’re still moving out on the 11th, with nowhere to go. We’ll be putting our stuff in storage and then moving into a hotel, or with Cat & Tony, or who knows what. And then we also have to figure out what to do with the cats – our awesome neighbors have offered to help us out with them, so that’s a huge plus. Still, there are about 10,000 other details that we’re going to have to figure out in the next week. I’m not so much looking forward to that.

2. My dad’s cousin that I mentioned earlier is really not doing well. She has pneumonia, she can’t speak, they’re keeping her sedated, and the doctors expect that she’ll die sometimes in the next three days or so. I don’t know if I’ll be able to take off and fly to Mississippi for a funeral if Catie is sick and we’re in the middle of moving, but I’m going to try and do what I can.

3. Catie is sick. I’m praying that it’s just a bad cold and not H1N1, but the poor kid is really miserable. The cold triggers her asthma, so we’ve been having to give her medication through the nebulizer every couple of hours. As a result, none of us are getting very much sleep, so our house is not a very fun place right now. She started barfing tonight, but my Mommy Ninja Skills (acquired through countless other episodes of puking from this kid) meant that only one barf ended up on my socks, and none of them fully hit me. The rest I caught in a mixing bowl, and even managed to grab her hair with my other hand to keep her from puking in it. I’m telling y’all, that is talent. If only I could figure out a way to make money off of that type of skill… well, we wouldn’t be having issues with our house financing, that’s for sure.

* However, there was one good thing that happened yesterday: I got a job! Kind of a surprise because I went into the interview with zero expectations, but I’m going to be doing some freelance technical writing for a new, local software company. It should be a lot of fun, and the extra money will be really nice, so I’m excited about that.

But yeah, even in spite of the job news, it’s not so much a fun holiday weekend here with the sick toddler, terminally ill family member, and house troubles. I’m praying Catie sleeps a little better tonight, since I think that one solid night’s sleep alone would probably help improve my outlook drastically. Here’s hoping!

are they at least ill-tempered sea bass?

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A couple of months ago I went to the eye doctor and got glasses. While I was there, my doctor told me that she thought I might be showing early signs of glaucoma, so she had me come back and do a really gross eye test that involved a little plastic doohickey touching the surface of my eyeball. (And yes, that really is just as squicky and gross as it sounds.) However, she couldn’t tell much from the test, so she sent me to a glaucoma specialist. Great.

That appointment was a couple of weeks ago, and I can’t believe I didn’t blog about it, but I think I was in some sort of “lalalala-I-can’t-hear-you-lalala!!!” denial mode about it. It turns out that yes, I actually am showing early signs of glaucoma (thanks for the crappy eye genes, Dad!) and I need to have laser surgery on my eyes to make sure that I don’t suddenly go COMPLETELY EFFING BLIND. Um, yay?

The doctor said he could do my eye surgery on August 4th, then said, “You aren’t traveling anywhere between now and then, are you?” I said actually, yes, I’m going to Chicago at the end of July (I didn’t tell him about BlogHer, I was worried he might look at me funny), and he said, “Oh no, that’s no good. Ok, in that case, we have to squeeze you in sooner.” Apparently the air pressure changes in an airplane could cause the fluid pressure in my eyes to change and again with the blindness and OMG are you kidding me with this?

So, I’m having laser eye surgery next Friday, July 10th. At 4 p.m., which sucks because it’s not a daycare day, and it’s right at the end of Catie’s naptime, and Dave has to be there at the eye doctor’s because I won’t be able to drive myself home afterward and blaaaaah I so do not want to deal with this. Also, I have no idea how I’m going to be feeling after the surgery, but we’ve had two invitations for fun stuff that weekend, and I’ve had to turn them down just because I’m worried that I’m going to be feeling weird, or at the very least I’m still going to be wearing those giant protective goggle sunglasses from the eye doctor’s.

Yeah. Laser eye surgery. Yippee. But let me tell you, if I walk into that doctor’s office and see a shark tank (sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!), I am SO out of there.

because sometimes there IS such a thing as a geographical cure

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I mentioned last week that we had a visit from my friend Brittany. What I didn’t fill in was a little of her backstory. Brittany shared her story on a website called Violence Unsilenced, which provides an outlet for survivors of domestic abuse to tell their stories. If you don’t know Brittany’s story, go read. I’ll wait.

Ok, then. Now you probably understand why I want to go back in time about 20 years to rescue toddler Brittany and to kick her father’s ass. Actually, I’d be willing to kick his ass in present day too. Doesn’t matter. But more than anything, I wish I could spare her some of the pain and suffering that she’s experienced.

Here’s the rest of the story: Brittany currently lives with her mom, three doors down from the father who abused her. He continues to be a threatening presence in her life to this day, and she lives in a constant state of fear and anxiety. It’s a completely toxic situation, and she needs to get the hell out of there.

The problem is, despite having a job (two or three jobs, really, if you count the work she does at summer camps with special-needs kids), Brittany doesn’t have the money to move. And like a lot of abuse survivors, she is not the most adept when it comes to asking for help. So yesterday, Brittany’s friend Aman enlisted my help to set up a PayPal account on her behalf, without telling her about it. Well, actually, he set up the PayPal account. All I did was send direct messages to every single one of Brittany’s friends on Twitter who I thought might help us out.

And you know, the Twitter community is pretty amazing. Aman opened the account in the morning, and by yesterday evening, we had already raised over $500. And I had several emails from people pledging to give money as soon as they get their next paycheck. We decided to go ahead and tell Brittany about the account, since it was obviously going to be way too big a deal to keep a secret much longer. She was pretty shocked, and I think I might’ve made her cry a little bit. (It didn’t help that we were on a video chat on Skype, and I had Catie in my lap, and I was having Catie say things like, “Britty, move here!” Manipulative? Moi? Never!)

If any of you want to help Brittany out, the link to the PayPal account is . Even if it’s just a few dollars, it all helps. I just want to help my friend get to a place where she can finally feel safe, and where she can start to heal. Because absolutely nobody should ever live in that kind of fear.

looking for my party dress

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I’ve got a bunch of stuff swirling around my head right now, but most of it is not really all that interesting. I doubt any of y’all really want to hear about:
* This chapter I’m writing, which is due on Friday, and has got me all sorts of stressed out. Oh, and how yesterday I drew the most awesome diagram of an Active Directory-integrated DNS zone in the entire history of diagrams of DNS zones. Yeah, baby.
* The fact that my house is a mess (because of the aforementioned book deadline) and it’s starting to gross me out. I’m already making a mental list of which tasks I’m going to tackle as soon as I’m done writing.
* House-hunting and my ridiculously long list of criteria, and how we sort of like this one new development, but there are a whole bunch of risks associated with new developments these days, and oh my god, how am I supposed to make a decision like this? Whine whine, woe is me and my privileged little life. People are losing their dream homes left and right and I’m debating over whether to buy resale or have a house custom-built for us. Yeah. Poor me, I know. Shut up, Cindy. God.

So instead, let’s talk about BlogHer. Because I’m going.

BlogHer '09 In Real Life

It’s next month, and I’m already getting a little nervous. As it turns out, when you go to BlogHer, it’s not just the conference itself (which is on Friday and Saturday), but there are also a bunch of parties. So, I’m flying in on Thursday evening, and I’ve already RSVP’ed to two different parties that night. And that’s just Thursday! Before the conference has even officially started!

”The

And I’m also going to the Room 704 party that night (alas, their badges aren’t working).

The parties are at different times, so that’s fine, I should be able to attend both. But here’s the thing: everyone dresses up for these events. And my wardrobe consists mostly of jeans and hoodies. Seriously, you should see the shoes that some people plan on wearing. (Hi, Heather!) It’s crazy. I’m definitely feeling the pressure to cute-ify myself up a bit. (Yes, I just used cute as a verb. Shush.)

So I’m now shopping online for dresses that I can wear on the plane, so I can arrive at the hotel looking gorgeous and ready to party. It’s only an hour and a half direct flight, but you know, it’ll be July. So the sweatiness (and ensuing shiny forehead) is a concern. And I need a dress with at least a little bit of sleeve. Because as much as I might act like my flabby upper arms don’t bother me and I’m fine and “yeah, I’m cool with my size 12-ness” in person, I also know people will be taking pictures at these parties. And if I see photos of my flabby upper arms, my whole self-acceptance facade will fly out the window, and I will cry and beg people to delete the pictures of me. So that’s no good. But it does make it harder to shop, since it seems that most dresses are sleeveless.

I did, however, manage to find these online (thank you, Macys.com – now if you’d only make linking easier so I don’t have to copy & paste everything):

black & white dress
I think this one is my favorite. It’s so pretty and looks like it would be very flattering.

black & white patterned dress
I honestly can’t tell if this is flattering or not because of that ridiculous pose the model is doing. But I think I might like it? Maybe?

brown dress with cap sleeves
I’m not sure what I think about the brown, but it also comes in black. It meets my two requirements as far as covering a little bit of arm and not being too clingy on my tummy area. And if worn with the right bra, it might actually give the illusion that I have boobs. Hmm.

black & white print dress
I don’t usually like all-over prints on me, but something about this dress really appeals to me. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s cute.

little black dress
This one might work, since I know I won’t look nearly as severe and dead-behind-the-eyes as the model. I probably won’t lean on walls like that either.

What do y’all think? Votes?

As for the shoes, I think I’m going to have to find some cute ballet flats or something, because I refuse to be That Woman who wears heels through the airport. Maybe I’ll toss something cuter in my bag to change into once I get to the party, but I haven’t figured that part out yet.

live from a new web host

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In case you missed the drama about my website last week, here’s the short version: my website went down for 3 days, and when it finally came back online, all of my data was gone. Every last entry since I started this blog 6 years ago? Gone. So I was a tiny bit distraught, as you might imagine.

While I was freaking out, I wrote about it on Twitter, and within a few minutes, I got a response from a web hosting company called PinchHost offering to help me. They’re a new company, and didn’t have much of a proven track record that I could find online, but I appreciated how fast they responded. Especially considering that the customer service at my old (then-current) web hosting company, Globat, was always somewhat lacking. It’s basically impossible to get anyone on the phone, they take an extremely long time to respond to email support tickets, and while yes, they do have support via live chat, the techs aren’t exactly helpful. Usually the only response I get is, “We’re so sorry for your inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.” Not exactly top-notch problem-solving.

But really, my main problem with Globat is the availability. They were fine when I first signed up a few years ago, but over the past year or so, my website crashed a lot, because I seemed to always be under Denial of Service attacks by spammers. So that’s my main beef with them – if you can’t keep my website running, I’ll go host it elsewhere.

Meanwhile, during that whole incident where I had no blog entries at all? I threw a temporary WordPress blog here that you might’ve seen if you happened to click over here. On it, I mentioned that my last manual backup of my website was from May 2008, hence my panic. (So all the entries about selling our house, moving to North Carolina, the holidays, Catie’s 2nd birthday? GONE.) Then the tech from PinchHost – the same guy who responded to me on Twitter – left me a comment telling me that he had gone through Google’s cache of my archives and found about 100 entries from May 2008 to now, and saved them to a zip file for me to download.

Which, DUDE. I wasn’t even a customer of his, and he did all that legwork for me? Yeah ok, they’re a new company, but with that type of customer service, I’ll take a chance on them. So I switched over yesterday, and it was basically seamless. I might be imagining it, but my website even seems to load faster now. Obviously, I am very happy with them so far.

Of course, the hard part now is cancelling my account with Globat. They’re notorious for having a crappy billing department, so I know I’m in for a fight. Example: over the past few years I’ve gotten over 100 emails from them telling me about new offers, and unless I clicked the link to opt out, they automatically charged my credit card for the upgrade, regardless of whether or not I wanted it. If I called afterward to say, “hey, you billed me for this, and I don’t want it, so give me my money back,” they’d try to hem & haw and squirm their way out of refunding me the money for a service I’m not using. So, yeah. I’ve gotta get my Don’t You Dare Try to Eff With Me, Buddy hat on and let them have it.

But the fact that I’m now basically done with them and have a cool new hosting company that actually responds to my problems promptly and seems to give a damn about my user experience? It kind of makes me feel like one of these dancers.

(If you haven’t seen that yet, you’re welcome. I’ve watched it about four times already and I smile like a moron at my computer and get all misty-eyed every time. What can I say, I’m a sucker for “The Sound of Music.”)

fleeeeas!

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I have to admit, it’s been kind of nice for the past few days to not feel pressured to post something just for the sake of posting, but at the same time, I find myself constantly thinking “gee, I should really write something.” I guess that’s the point of NaBloPoMo, to get yourself in the habit of writing on a regular basis, so you don’t end up posting once a year (hi, DaveM! I totally just called you out!).

Anyway, while Catie and I were in Mississippi, Dave mentioned that Teenie had some bald spots on her back. She tends to groom excessively when she’s stressed out; she actually has permanent hair loss on her belly because she licked herself bald every time I moved (which was once a year for a few years in my early 20’s). I figured that she was just upset because I was gone, poor kitty. I felt bad, but I didn’t worry about it too much beyond that.

When I got home, however, I realized that Dave was actually making light of the situation. She has two huge bald spots on her back. I started to freak, and Dave said, “yeah, it seems like something’s wrong with her skin too, we’re probably going to need to take her to the vet.” Now, it was 1 a.m. and we’d had a hellishly long day, but I still sat down on the floor and called her to me to try to check her out. And I realized that her skin wasn’t just bumpy, it was… moving. My cat is quite literally infested with fleas. Besides all the fleas crawling all over her, she was also covered with these tiny black grains of sand, which didn’t take me long to figure out were flea larvae. Oh my lord, I wanted to vomit.

Our cats never go outside, so I really don’t understand how they got fleas in the first place, except that we must’ve brought them in somehow. But Ive never seen anything like this before. I’ve seen cats that had a flea or two, but nowhere near this level. The poor thing must’ve been in absolute misery. It’s probable that Beaumont has them too, but his hair is so long and black, it’s impossible to tell. We’re treating him as if he has them too.

There wasn’t anything we could do about it in the middle of the night, but the next day we trooped off to PetSmart and stocked up on anti-flea stuff. We got both the spray to kill them now, plus the maintenance anti-flea stuff to use in the future.

Today I went to re-wash everything in the laundry room, since Teenie’s been sleeping in the laundry basket for the past several days. The basket and the floor surrounding it are also covered with black sand/flea larvae. So. Unbelievably. Gross. I would take pictures, but seriously? Y’all don’t want to see this. I’m about to go scrub the whole laundry room down with bleach, because that’s the only way I’ll actually believe that it’s clean.

Here’s a question: any of y’all know what we’re supposed to do next? I’m sure there must be other fleas in the house, and I have no idea how to get rid of them. Do I call an exterminator? I thought about getting one of those foggers, but both Dave and Catie have asthma, so I’m sure that even if we leave the house for hours, it would still mess with their lungs when they come back to those fumes. Surely there must be some sort of “natural” way to get rid of fleas? Anyone? Help?