Swimming on top, for a change...

Many months of bottom feeding now are history.  I have risen, sort of, back to the sunlight, and now am thrashing about on the surface.  Let me tell you the story of me and lawnmowers.  I bought my roommate's machine when she moved to an apartment, where they mow the lawns for her.  It was a Sears, balky but serviceable.  Then, it got to be hard to start.  Then the starter cord stretched out so badly, it was impossible to start.  To get it fixed would cost as much as a new one.  So I bought a new one.  At Sears.  And, like the old one, I just pushed it in the garage when mowing season was over.  And, this year, guess what, it would not start.  I had my mechanical neighbor over to get his opinion.  Finally, I enlisted a friend to help me get it to the lawnmower repair shop.  Where it still is, a month later.  After attempt to contact them, they "thought" it needed a new carburator, which I told them don't do until I know how much that costs.  Not another word from the mysterious folks over there in Toro land.  So I bought a new one. Again.  A Toro.  An   ELECTRIC one.  It came today.  The UPS man set the box on its end on the porch.  Happy to say the machine came out of the box just fine.  Upside down.  On my foot.  We wrestled for a while, the box, the lawnmower and I.  It finally got right side up, and it was deceptively easy to assemble.  Currently, it is charging, which the manual said would take 16 hours, but the charger thinks only took 5.  I'm going to let it simmer all night before I try to start it up and mow down the yard of shame.  We are all happy here, me, the Toro, and my blue foot.       

Changing woman here....

Ah, therapy!   How vast are your revelations.  This week I had a breakthrough.  Now, it was just the tiniest of shifts, like a piece of a giant puzzle dropping into place.  While discussing my very unhappy and angry mother, I said "that's not my fault".  Now, I have known this for decades, that it isn't me that is my mother's problem, it's her.  But at that moment in time, it fell from my ivory tower of a mind into my mushy little heart, and I knew it with my whole being.  What a relief!  And that only took 69 years!  What can I say, I am a broken person.  No matter how healthy I get in mind and body, I will always limp.  There are scars and wounds still only thinly scabbed over.  I spent most of my life fleeing them, with alcohol, with men, with (and this is my favorite) shopping.  Now I am rolling around in them, getting the mess all over me, hoping they will settle down and give the rest of my life, whatever that may be, some peace.  So I got up today and had a piece of apple pie with sliced almonds and a mountain of whipped cream for breakfast.  I have resigned from the Kate Moss look-alike contest and am happily fluffy.  WYSIWYG woman - what you see is what  you get.  Love it or leave it.  I no longer want to leave.  I am working on loving every poochy inch.

Hslp help thank you thank you, send money.

That is my constant prayer.  Well, it does say in the Bible "ask and you shall receive", probably the only part of the Bible I really like.  Couldn't hurt.  And gee, I asked the IRS to refund $151, and they sent me $1,900.  Really nice of them.  So I bought myself a new CPU for my system, one that doesn't have to clear its throat several times before opening anything.  I can get on the Internet super duper fast, and Photoshop, wow, it just breezes along, though it did take a few long minutes to load that sucker.  I use this thing a lot.  I photograph all my paintings and archive them here.  I download royalty free images as references for paintings.  I write brochures and print cards and business cards of my own images.  I play games.  A lot.  And this has a dynamite sound system, basically my only stereo at the moment.  I convert vinyl into files for my ITunes.  Not a day goes by that I am not online, perusing my thought for the day from Hazelden and cyberlurking in my children's lives on Facebook.  And as much as I love the speed and wonder of this newness, it is unfamiliar and feels weird.  Not a huge fan of change, when you come right down to it.  I learned a while ago that one can change one thing in twenty-one days.  I am going to work on that.  The really fine thing about the new system is that I will be writing it off next year on my taxes, and it may mean another fine bunch of money will land in my bank account, again.  Ah, life is good, confusing, but good.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I woke up this morning and noticed that the world had not ended, and neither had I, so I realized that, at some point, I was going to have to get up.  This is not an unusual situation for me.  Not a morning person.  Not even an early afternoon person, now that the forces of the Universe have so perversely stolen an hour of my life, again.  The dogs haven't caught the drift yet, either, and are happy to hit their snooze alarms and join me in late arising.  After letting out dogs/brushing/flushing/thyroid pilling,  I slouched to the kitchen to grind/brew my Sumatra, cook up some whole wheat pancakes, smear them with lemon curd, mound them with whipped cream and sprinkle them with toasted slivered almonds, and plopped myself in front of the boob tube to inhale the whole thing.  It was so late, the dogs did not appear for their tiny morsel.  They were too busy exploring every inch of the backyard to see who visited us overnight.  I am now mulling the possibility of some laundry, much of it necessitated by Punkin's obsessive stealing of any article of clothing I mistakenly left on the bed and depositing said article on the back pseudo-lawn.  I am currently out of shelf-bra cammies that I wear to tame my runaway girls that have a tendency to get caught under my arms in my sleep.  Aging gracefully is an art, you know.  So, now I have been online, cyber-lurked in my kid's lives via Facebook, checked my bank balance (which got a little plumped with yesterday's $$$ for teaching two classes of fourth graders an art lesson, which explains why I REALLY did not want to get up today), and have promised myself that I can do some frivolous shopping, once the laundry is folded.  That may be next Wednesday at the rate I am going.  And for those not in the know, the title of this post refers to the plethora of westerns that filled my young life.  Johnny Mack Brown was my fave.  There, I have dated myself sufficiently for today.

The annual rant is on...

I hate this time change rigamarole.  Okay, I like the extra hour in the fall, but only because I feel so assaulted by its loss in the spring.  As I grow old, adjusting to change gets to feel like recovering from a hit up the side of my head.  There are all these clocks that need changing, everywhere.  I keep looking up at the wall clock over my computer and mentally subtracting that hour I added last night.  What time is it, REALLY?  So this year, I went on strike.  Not that the powers that make up this stuff are going to notice, but I slept in till noon, which was really only 11 AM, because I stayed up till 1 AM, which was really midnight.  The dogs were getting restless for their normal feeding time, which is usually 11 AM, but today was noon.  It is 2:30 PM now, really 1:30 PM, so it probably is not so shameful that I am still in my PJs, streaming some Rachmaninoff on ITunes and playing computer games, with a cup of coffee which I usually stop drinking at 1 PM.  Oh, hell, I think I'll just go shopping.  And I better hurry, because it is bleeping Sunday, and everything is closing an hour sooner than it should.

Yet another rarity, whoopee...

Have I  mentioned that I am a rare bird?  I have exploding head syndrome, and yes, there really is such a thing, you could look it up.  It happens just before dropping off to sleep, a huge booming noise, coming from inside my head.  Or a ringing, or a shouting, or a big dog barking.  It seems to come most often when I am stressed, so it has diminished somewhat since I began my anti-depressants.  Yay.  And I had narrow-angle glaucoma, an anatomical anomaly that threatened my eyesight till I had the corrective surgery a couple of years ago.  Made me pay good attention to my eyes, that's for sure. Which is why when I woke up nearly blind in my right eye this morning, I called right away and scooted over to the eye doctor.  Just like that, my vision in that eye had dimmed and blurred.  Good news.  There is nothing wrong with it.  The other one, either.  Bad news.  She doesn't know what is wrong.  Best case scenario is ocular migraine, in which case this is temporary.  And it is -wait for it - VERY RARE.  If this is permanent, it can be corrected somewhat with glasses.  No more driving without them I guess.  It is what it is, as Eckhart is fond of saying.  Hoping to wake up tomorrow with my regular old bad eyesight back. 

Slight jog to the left...

Here I am, in therapy again, working on the core wounds that are still festering within, moved closer to the surface now that my father has gone to the big golf tournament in the sky and left me with my mother, the wicked witch of west county.  Old stories I told myself, about being discounted because I was female, lost child in a family where each parent had their favored son, blah, blah, blah, turned out to be TRUE.  Ouch.  And yes, I am over the hill and cruising toward 69 years of age, and still have that wounded little girl to soothe and comfort.  And settle down.  Because she's PISSED.  Something has to change.  Probably it is me.  So, there I am, all embroiled in my scapegoatism and my mother's narcissistic personality disorder and wham, I am flat on my back with a wretched cold.  Nothing better to take your mind off your difficulties than a doozy of a cold, that's for sure.  And it was a whizbang, for sure.  Started with a raw throat and painful tight cough.  One week later, I have passed the just-shoot-me-phase and am now in the will-this-ever-end phase.  Mucinex, I love you.  It loosened everything up and made coughing ever so much more comfortable.  And I am grateful.  Yes, gratitude has sunk to that level.  The good thing:  I spent four days in bed, watching Castle and Mentalist reruns on TNT, read four books, got jumped on by the dogs, slept sitting up, took excellent care of myself.  Gone are the days when I would medicate myself to the eyeballs and muscle through it.  In fact, rumors abound that this crap loves to keep coming back.  So, since my duties for the day are over (quick trip to Costco for tomorrow's meeting treats, dogs are fed and aired, just the essentials), I am headed for a little nappy-poo, just me and the poopies.  Retirement, it doesn't suck.  Angst will be back soon.