Two problems, one solution

I’m moderately proud of myself, this morrow [7th April] as I found two problems with one solution.

Since we had the jungle lawn slashed down to lawnlike levels, we’ve had a LOT of grass lying around in clumps. Including clumps near the fence, which threatens the wood palings.

We also have a lot of pit traps where Hound decided to imitate Simon from the Yogscast and diggy diggy hole.

So early in the morning, before the sun decided to threaten my unhealthy pallor with melanomas, I took out the rake and the mulch bucket, and redistributed the dead grass clumps by the fence.

I filled four holes and topped up the compost tumbler.

This may not seem like an earth-moving accomplishment to you, but Hound digs holes big enough to hide himself in. And he’s about labrador-sized.

The process goes like this: Rake up a small stook of dead grass, compact into bucket until bucket overflows. Haul bucket to nearest doggy diggy hole. Upend bucket over hole. Attempt to stomp down, lose sight of leg up to mid-shin. Keep calm and recover leg, continue compressing until compression is not an option. return with bucket to rake. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Just clearing the fence line is accomplishment enough for me.

Ugh.

Reasons why I’m bitching a lot about my dying Mac

Hubby pointed out to me that I talk about my dying mac a LOT. As in, almost every time I speak to him, a lot.

I didn’t mean to pressure him. I just really, really hate not having a mac.

And here’s a few reasons why:

1) All my stuff was on there. Well, almost all of it. I was still trying to figure out how to get all my photos off my iPhone and onto the mac[without wiping said photos in the process] when it died. Not to mention innumerable projects including a story-in-progress I had yet to export to the iPad.
2) I hate BSOD’s. The most annoying thing in the world is to be flying along in the middle of whatever best suits one’s fancy and just before one hits “save” or reaches a much-anticipated goal - the whole box and dice crashes worse than moths into gravy. Best case scenario, the computer can salvage everything but the last three paragraphs. Worst case and most common scenario, one has to start all over again.
3) The one project that had me on fire is on hiatus until further notice. Hubby will be the first to tell you that I have motivation problems. If something doesn’t catch my interest, it’ll pile up until it annoys me and I have to do it, or it reaches crisis point and someone helps me do it. This project - the MathMagician adventure map in Minecraft - had me so motivated I was rebuilding the original build. Now I’m seriously thinking about re-rebuilding from scratch in a Windoze environment. Yup. I’m just that bat-poop crazy about teaching my kid that maths [and education] is worth something.
4) Least Important Family Member Syndrome. This is just a feeling I get, but you gotta admit, I might have a point. Timeline goes thusly: Mayhem gets a new mac for his birthday. Mother-in-Law gets a new mac apparently for teh lulz. Shiftless gets a new mac for work. My birthday rolls around and I get dinner at Sizzler’s.

Yup. 6k goes on the blood relatives and about 160 bucks goes on me. I’m still understandably upset about this.

I always wind up with the hand-me-down tech that everyone else has finished with, except that one time when I got a fresh-release iPad1 because it’s better for my eyes than books. The iPad2 came out soon thereafter and I blatantly stuck to my guns to await the iPad3. Hubby has one for work. I still have my iPad1.

Make no mistake, I’m not stomping my feet and screaming, “It’s not fair!” until I get another pony [well, maybe a little…] but I am rather used to doing without and making do and holding things together with duct tape and paperclips until convenience declares that I’m greenlighted for something good. But, of course, something steps in between me and my ultimate goal(s) as more important and I end up scraping by for even longer on whatever I have left.

So I’m being a bit more vocal about the whole thing. That doesn’t make me a bitch. It just means I’ve had a bit more than enough and I’m speaking out.

It also means I’m putting my foot down. I’m going to seek out some temp agencies and see what they can do for my gainful employment. I’ll sign up for every freelance writer’s thing that lets me in for free [my current budget, remember?] and I’m going to frigging EARN myself some better tech. And more resources for my family.

Kids are coming home, soon.

My week off is nearly over. Soon, it shall be back to the slog of chasing after two kids and a dog and bitching about various life trials.

Good news: It means I’ll have blogging material again [seriously, you’re all two posts away from ponies as I write].

Bad news: I’ll have two shoulder surfers and a hound to worry about.

But I also have Plans. One is a trip to the cinemas for good behaviour - dependent on Mayhem’s actual good behaviour… and another is a trip to Chermside where they have a Build-A-Bear.

I might make it two trips in one. It depends entirely on how much I feel like risking another hound escape.

There’s a whole week to make a decision though.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Bad news

My computer is dying.

It’s limping along for about twenty minutes or so before it crashes and has to cool down.

Which means I have just enough time to write in my blog before it’s out of commission again.

30 March. Sic transit gloria mundi.

And since we’re saving our shekels so I can have a holiday, blogging is going to be low priority. As is Facebook and minecraft. All my projects are officially on hold until further notice.

I can write about life, here, but since I’ll be doing so on my tablet from now on, it’s going to be slightly arduous. Yes, I have the Tumblr app. I have not played with it yet, so I don’t know if it’s going to make me do the paragraph tags so I don’t have a pure wall of text for a blog entry.

What I do know is that it won’t let me re-order my queue. That’s a desktop-only privilege that is grudgingly loaned to laptops as well since they’re technically “real” computers and not glorified tech toys.

Seriously, Apple… You spent a lot of money on developing the iPad - why not give it more functionality and let people decide what’s convenient for them?

But I digress.

Any text entry could be the last before my mac finally turns its metaphorical toes up. After that, eleven days of ponies before normal rambling resumes.

Be prepared.

It doesn’t mean I have nothing to say. It just means that saying it has now become massively inconvenient.

Dawn breaks…

Not literally. No. This is a metaphorical dawn. A dawn in the mind.

Followers of my ramblings - the ones who aren’t bots - will know I recently discovered the anti-joy of having a spur in my heel.

It’s painful to walk, most of the time. So I have gained a new appreciation of being able to walk without pain.

And last night… I cooked a meal for the first time in four fargnaxing weeks.

It was a triumph. Nothing fancy. Just pork mince in butter chicken simmer sauce with veggies and pasta. I was overjoyed.

I’m guessing the rest of you are less than impressed, but think about it. Really think. Imagine being unable to walk very far at all for four weeks.

Four frikking weeks. Four weeks of watching the house go to shit and eating pre-packaged snackies because they can be carried to one’s chosen resting spot in a plastic bag. Four weeks of having someone assist you when you need a drink. Four weeks of it being way too much to reach the dishwasher/sink/laundry/bathroom or rubbish bin.

Twenty-eight days of watching your hard work turning into a gigantic slob trail.

Of course, the first day off my crutches, everyone instantly expected me to be All Better and transform into SuperMum and thus wise reverse entropy in a whirlwind of activity.

Even with the heel inserts, it hurt like walking on knives, halfway through the day. I spent all my spoons and was utterly exhausted by the kids’ bedtime.

Three days later, most of the time it’s “stones” or “beads” under my bad foot and I can handle that. Sometimes, it’s “knives” again and I still have to cope because I’m supposed to be all better and nobody is going to help a “malingerer”.

I miss my life before I whacked 90-some kilos of me onto one tiny little spur.

But I can also see the potential of that life coming back. Slowly.

I am never going to take it for granted again.

Everyone who can walk - be glad you have feet that support you, and knees that don’t suddenly decide to quit with a loud “snap” and a pain like being shot. Be grateful you can take one step after the other with blithe breeziness. Be thankful you can run. I still haven’t made the attempt because running requires all of one’s weight landing on one heel again.

It won’t kill me, I’m sure, but it might just make me wish it could. Or set me back into a chair and crying because entropy is winning again.

Be grateful that you don’t have to play “let’s see if I can climb stairs, today” - by the probably painful expedient of trying to mount one stair. It’s odds evens that that “crack and snap” might happen and I’ll be a whimpering heap.

This is why I habitually carry Deep Heat and all my bracers in my purse. Just in case this is the day I’ll need them.

I have a good day when I can muscle through my joint pain or foot pain and get things done anyway. I have a brilliant day when there isn’t any joint pain or foot pain.

And I am getting better. Glacially slowly.

Here’s to more brilliant days.

Getting better slowly.

My weight went up yesterday. Not because of extra eating now that I’m on my feet [7th Mar] but because of the extra moving I’ve been doing.

I put on some muscle mass.

Muscle weighs more than fat, so I’d rather have it.

My fat-weight’s been going down, too, according to hubby’s technoscales. And I have some nice looking graphs to show for it.

Today, I’m getting some laundry done whilst the sun doth shine. Though I do have to check the clouds now and again for signs of rain.

My heel still hurts. Less and less with the heel insert in/on. That still doesn’t stop me having “rock days” or “knife days” when it feels like treading on the aforementioned nouns. On a good day, it’s like having something round and hard lodged in one’s footwear.

On a bad day, it’s like trying to walk with an open wound.

The extra good news seems to be that my knees are behaving themselves.

You know you’re getting old when your body says “snap, crackle, pop” and your breakfast says nothing.

I should keep a look-out for my passport, but the way my feet are going, I think I’ll just pick up the “we missed you” card and collect it from the post office.

I’ve already decided that, should I need a cane, I want it to be just like Lawrence Talbot’s :) only in my size, of course.

Ah well. That’s for another day. I have a washing machine to check and laundry to put out. 

5th Mar 2012

This is the first day walking without assistance. My weight has steadied out at 88.5 kilos for the second day and the house is a fucking sty ‘cause everyone left everything because they knew this day was coming.

Walking hurts like a rock in my shoe, even with the gel pads made to make walking easier. Without them, it hurts like a knife in my heel. Ergo, walking costs spoons. I have to sit and rest when I can no longer stand to stand.

However, despite goddamn painful feet, I have: swept the debris on the floor into piles, put a load of washing on, put two loads of dishwashing on, put out the garbage and the recycling, and re-swept up a pile because Shiftless is a goddamn fat, lazy, insensitive arsehole.

When I started sweeping, I knew I could only do it for so long. I could not sweep delicately around debris piles like Shiftless’ shoes and socks, so I took up a policy - if it looked abandoned, it would be swept.

I knew Shiftless was awake [music at an appreciable volume] so I knocked on his door and told him to gather his shoes and socks before I swept them.

Shiftless, in his fine tradition of ignoring every last thing I say to him, ignored me. I swept up his shoes and socks. Mayhem rescued the shoes, but left the socks to be tumbled about in cockroaches, dirt and debris.

Shiftless finally wakes, I gave him the “I told you so” speech. Shiftless pretends he’s deaf and roots through the quasi-neat pile after his socks like a pig after a truffle.

I apologise for that remark.

Pigs are way neater, politer, more considerate and smell better than Shiftless. And you can train them to help you clean the house.

At the time Shiftless was doing his bad pig impression, my knees had decided to go on strike after I had to sit down and sort out the overflowing garbage bin, so I couldn’t put my weight on either leg. I could not, as far as I knew, stand up again. I was trapped on a bar stool and watching an inconsiderate dick scatter my hard work to the four winds.

So I yelled at him. Loudly.

Hubby noticed, but said nothing.

I can only hope and pray that Shiftless gets a brother-to-brother lecture on the way to work about being less of a prick to a wife who’s doing the best she can with fewer spoons than normal.

Hubby has me for the rest of our lives together.

Shiftless is only staying until he can afford to move out - or I finally snap and dump all his shit on the footpath and change the locks 'cause I’ve had bar of him.

So tell me, dear readers - am I already justified?

Lies, damn lies, and Mayhem

My son seems to be a pathological liar.

I’ve reduced his computer time. I catch him out and lecture him EVERY single time [average: about 5 times a day, including made-up stories to “fit in” with the conversation]. We’ve even spent an entire night telling lies to him so he gets an idea about how frustrating it is to live with a liar.

He still lies.

He lies to get the things he wants. He lies to get out of the things he doesn’t want. He lies about shit nobody cares about. He lies about who did what with whatever and without permission.

Short of chaining him upside-down to a wall [or similar over-the-top punishments, like the parenting classics of smacking his arse ‘till it glows in the dark or washing his mouth out with soap] I have run out of ideas.

And every single time, he promises that he’ll never lie again [or, recently, he’ll try to cut down] and every single time, it’s the same story.

He forgets to stick to the truth.

Gah.

I’m an honest person. Apart from the occasional fling at amusing hyperbole, I’ve been accused by my best beloved of being “too honest”. And that’s the sort of thing you can’t tell people 'cause they assume it’s a lie.

Massive win for the forces of cosmic irony, there.

My husband’s an honest fellow. He actually manages to include the societal norm of “little white lies” that help others out and whatnot.

To be honest, I never quite figured out how often and how big is “okay” to lie, so I stick to a safe zero.

So how can my first-born son be such an outrageous liar?

He definitely doesn’t get it from the people nearest and dearest to him. He may pick up being an outrageously antisocial arsehole from Shiftless[on his bad days], but not lying.

He picks up an astonishing amount of rude words from yours truly [and a “just because you can” slightly-hypocritical lecture when he uses them] but not lying.

He’s definitely inherited his father’s love of sitting in front of computer screens for hours on end… but not lying.

Maybe it’s my fault. If I instantly landed on him every last time he told me something as gospel, or checked up, or otherwise treated him as a very small criminal suspect, he’d give up trying.

Maybe if I constantly treat him like a liar for a month or two he might get the hint.

And maybe pigs will fly and I can get bacon by skeet shooting…

Any parents out there with ex-liars who managed to turn their young to the ways of truth? How did you do it?

Last week off my feet

It’s Wednesday of the last week I’m supposed to stay off my sore foot. Come Monday, the crutches go back to the chemist’s and I pretty much have to clean up after all of the slobs who left everything to the forces of entropy.

I’m already gnashing my teeth.

Right now, whenever I put weight on to my sore foot, it hurts like there’s something sharp stuck in the heel. It probably won’t be much better come Monday.

And of course the whole house expects me to be a whirlwind of cleaning activity. I’ll be a limping near-disaster of activity within my limits and it seems like I’m the only one who knows it.

At least it does, here and now.

Powerhouse is still extra busy learning nursing and the only other people who really want to help me out are in Perth [Hi!] and that’s pretty much it for my social network.

I’m sick with worry about whether or not I can get back on top of the housework before it’s time to leave on a holiday we possibly can’t afford and I have no money this week.

D'aaaarrrgghhh!

At least the passport paperwork’s finished - if not filed. That’ll happen when the express post parcel arrives from scenic Coominya and I can personally haul it off to the post office and finally get it on the way. Urf.

And since it’s the 29th of February, we have a fine tradition of Topsy Turvy day. Where the kids get to boss me and Hubby around - within reason. The kids’ll have fun with that, at least.

I have fun, too. I play up like the kids do when I ask them to do something.

Drama Llama is moving in….

The dog somehow got into my car. He chewed the back seat. He chewed the driver’s seat belt. He didn’t get into anything else, thank goodness, but I’ve been packing death.

It could have put the kibosh on my travel plans.

Thanks to the blithe spirits, the insurance mob told me they’d spring for everything shy of $500. Ouch. But not so much ouch as total replacement would have cost sans insurance.

I need to pack summer stuff and I may be buying most of it in foreign lands, ‘cause everything over here is winter themed, now. Blarhhhh.

And I have to get special shoes just for the airport so I don’t track foreign greeblies into other countries, or track them back into here. I’m thinking Ballet Flat type shoes. At least the heels can’t fuck up my feet.

It’s them or some converse sandshoes.

I did get some hep shots. Last week. My shoulder is still effing tender. They weren’t kidding when they said there’d be soreness in the arm.

And in six months, I can do it all again so I’ll be protected for twenty years. Yay.

One more week of hobbling and I should be back on my feet. IF I can find some of those damn spur heel inserts in a ladies’ size ten, I should be able to walk around without too much further pain.

I might have to order them in. More $$$ down the drain.

On the plus side, I have a rental car for the week it should take for my car to get fixed. I just have to remember to not be paranoid about qualifyers. And be completely paranoid about locking the thing when everything that should be out of it is out of it. And do the same for my beloved zippy little car when it comes back home.

And a nice person from the RSPCA is going to come around for free and help us teach the hound not to chew the expensive things.

Now I can’t work on the adventure map 'cause I have to stake out the front door and the phone for the people who are supposed to come by and do things. Nargh.