Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

The Best Thing I Heard This Weekend

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

This past weekend I went up to North Carolina to visit my family. I spent a night with my brother and sister-in-law who just got married last summer and are settling into their own domestic routine.

They talked about how they don’t really get out so much anymore, now that they’re married, and I said that the same thing had happened to me and my husband too. Then my sister-in-law said to my brother, “Ooh, tell Jenny what you got last weekend.”

“Oh yeah!” said my brother, brightening.

I looked at my brother expectantly, excited to hear what had gotten the two of them so excited.

“I got a new pair of nasal hair trimmers” my brother exclaimed. “It was the best Saturday night ever!”

Can You Feel The Love Tonight?

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Yesterday after the wedding we all went back to the hotel to change clothes before heading over to a post-wedding party at my aunt and uncle’s house. As we were waiting for our group to gather in the lobby we started talking about some of the cousins who weren’t able to attend the wedding, and my 13-year-old cousin asked how much older they are than she is.

“Oh, I know,” I said, and then proceeded to list off the birth years of the cousins in question. “I know when everyone was born. [First cousin] was 1971, then me in 1972,…” and then continued through cousin #12 who was born in 2001.”

“Hm,” replied my aunt. I thought at first that she was impressed by my vast repository of family knowledge until she turned to my husband and asked, “So, what’s it like being married to Monk?”

You Know It’s Going To Be A Long Day

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when, as you are sending your husband off to work in the morning and you casually mention that you will see him in a few hours for your lunch date, he stops, really looks at you, and then is forced to resort to sign language in order to convey the message of, “OK, yeah, but first you really might want to do something about your GINORMOUSLY pouffy-assed hair.”

Love, Honor, Behave

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A couple of years ago my in-laws bought a home up in the mountains of North Carolina. They have slowly been re-doing it, but haven’t yet gotten to the upstairs bathroom, where the previous owners made the unfortunate choice to paper the walls entirely in sheet music from old show tunes.

bath

I guess it does give you something to look at while you’re in there, but mostly it’s just kinda weird.

This week when we were up there for Thanksgiving, my husband drew my attention to a particular title to which he wanted me to pay special attention:

behave

To which I replied, “Not once in our wedding ceremony did I ever utter the word ‘obey’ dude! And I have the video graphic evidence to prove it.”

Secrets

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A couple of days ago my husband and I were sitting on the couch catching up on this week’s episode of NCIS. The Director of NCIS, played by Lauren Holly, was talking to Special Agent Gibbs, played by Mark Harmon, about a case they were working on involving a man who was engaged to multiple women at the same time. She was talking about how even if you are in a relationship with someone, you may not really know them. They might be keeping secrets from you.

“I don’t have any secrets from you,” I told my husband.

“I know!” he replied. Due to some quirk in my own personal makeup, I can neither lie nor keep secrets. It’s like any kind of secret information is a foreign body in my system, and I must vomit it up and out as soon as possible in order to keep my system running smoothly.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Do you have any secrets?”

“Nope,” he said, and we went back to watching the show.

In the next scene Dr. “Ducky” Mallard is talking to Agent Gibbs about the corpse he is examining. “I got a hunch and I decided to trim his (the corpse’s) nose hair,” said Dr. Mallard.

At this my husband pauses the show (all hail the awesomeness of TIVO!), leaps up off the couch, and says, “Oh yeah, I do have a secret from you.”*

Oh, dear sweet Lord In Heaven, I thought to myself, completely panicked. What the hell kind of secret does “nose hair” remind you of?!

“Um, that’s okay, dude,” I said, backing away from him. “You can just go ahead and keep that particular secret to yourself.”

*It turned out all right, though. For some reason I still don’t completely understand, that just reminded him that he’d brought me back a present from Mexico.

Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: Little Kids

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Last weekend after visiting my brother and sister-in-law, we went up to Virginia to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins. We were there through the day after Labor Day, which meant that we were there when all of the kids returned from vacation to the daycare that my aunt runs.

As I am used to spending my days either alone, with cats, or with grownups, it was quite a different experience for me to be surrounded by a group of one and two-year-olds, especially when I overheard the kinds of conversations that routinely took place.

Like the time that my aunt had to yell out, “[Name of not-quite-two-year-old child], will you please STOP licking my chair!”

Or the time that I heard her helping another child to practice subject-verb agreement.

“Yes, she has,” I heard her say to the child. “She has poo.”

Chain Reaction

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Have you ever had one of those days where you have clearly mapped out everything you need to do that day, but Thing #2 depends on Thing #1, and Thing #3 depends on Thing #2, and everything is woven together in an interlocking chain of Stuff That Is Not Getting Done because you can not, for the life of you, figure out how to complete Thing #1? Well the other day was like that for me.

Normally this is entirely my fault, since Thing #1 is usually something like, “Put on clothes.” (Dammit, you mean there’s no naked grocery shopping today? Well, forget it. There’s no point in even showing up for this day then!) But this day was a bit trickier, because Thing #1 was, “Make The Vacuum Cleaner Not Smell Like Poo”. [Read more…] about Chain Reaction

Wow, My Powers Really Do Do Good!

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Today I received what is maybe the most wonderful comment I’ve yet received on my blog and my writing. And it came as a result of a pretty difficult situation for our family.

My grandfather had one of his knees replaced at the beginning of this week. Everything was going fine, until two nights ago when he had a heart attack. Apparently they are having trouble stabilizing his heart rate, so they had to move him from his original hospital to a hospital 3 hours away. [Read more…] about Wow, My Powers Really Do Do Good!

Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: More Spam

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Today I received this extremely helpful and thought-provoking email:

“Listen to the voice of your penis. He is asking to get Penis Enlarge Patch.”

And I thought, “Dude, if anyone’s ‘stuff’ actually started speaking to them, I think they would have problems W-A-Y beyond the scope of anything a penis patch could help them with.”

Why I Love My Husband So Much: Reason #1

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He “gets” me.

Today my husband invited me out to lunch, and as we were eating I was telling him how I was kind of nervous about a meeting I will be attending tomorrow. Everyone is very nice and very welcoming, but they have the entire agenda planned out Minute. By. Minute. and everyone has a specific title that you must use when referring to them, and basically there is just a lot of protocol, all of which I am completely unfamiliar with.

It’s not that I don’t respect those kinds of things, or that I purposefully want to be disrespectful. It’s just that I’m nothing if not non-conformist, and I’m afraid that the stress of trying to follow all of those rules will just build up inside of me until the point where I lose all control over myself and just start screaming out “ASS! ASS! ASS!”in the middle of the meeting because I can no longer take all the pressure.

Not only was my husband not horrified by this confession, he actually thought it was pretty funny. And then he offered an extremely insightful comment on my situation, saying, “Hm, kind of like Tourette’s by stress?”

Exactly.

See? He really gets me.