Category: Marriage

The Walk from Hell

I did not enjoy our walk this afternoon, no not at all. It started off so promising. Mitch was busy putting brakes on my car when I got home from work, so I fed the dogs and changed my clothes. I put their harnesses on them, grabbed my phone, stuffed a couple of poop bags in my pocket and grabbed the leashes off the coat rack. We walked outside, I leashed each one up and told Mitch we would be back shortly and would fix dinner then. It was a beautiful afternoon, mid-seventies and a light breeze, perfect for a dog walk.

Nobody else was around just the dogs and me; we were about halfway to the dam when Charlie stopped to sniff something in the ditch next to the road, took a step and jerked sideways and sort of jumped and limped to the road both at the same time. I looked at him and he was holding his left foot up as if he had stepped on something and cut his paw or had been bitten. I looked down at his elevated paw and saw something sticking out between two of his toes. It looked like a small stick sticking out of a dark brown rock wedged between his toes.

So being the loving caring pet owner I am, I reached down to pull it out. Imagine my surprise and disgust when I discovered it wasn’t a rock wedged between his toes, but instead it was dog poop. I now have dog poop on my left thumb. Gross! Charlie had stepped in some other dog’s feces and was as disgusted about it as I was when I touched it. I walked over and pulled a leaf off of a bush to try and wipe as much off of my thumb as possible. I didn’t have a Kleenex with me and if I did it would have been in my pocket and I certainly wasn’t going to stick my poopy thumb in my pocket to retrieve it.

After wiping as much as I could off of my thumb, I picked a bigger leaf to try and wipe the poop off of Charlie’s toes. Charlie was being his usual uncooperative self and jerked his paw away from me causing me to get dog poop on my right thumb. Now I have dog poop on both thumbs, I am thoroughly disgusted and feel super gross. I can’t touch anything with my thumbs because I don’t want to get the gross icky poop on anything else. I decided to turn around and walk back home. I held the leashes in each palm curling my fingers around them with my thumbs sticking straight out so I wouldn’t accidently touch anything with my thumbs.

Halfway home and so far so good, no other people or dogs show up and both dogs are behaving rather well, when all of a sudden now I have a goddam gnat flying at my face. There was nothing I could do, I couldn’t swat it, just wave my arms around like a crazy woman and jerk my head spasmodically to try and keep it away. I can only imagine what someone thought if anybody looked out of their window at me.

Where is a wet wipe when you need it?

Forgiveness

Can you ever forgive yourself? Is it even possible to really forgive one of your transgressions and fully move on? Forgiving yourself is harder than forgiving someone else. We can look at another person’s faults and misgivings, come up with a hundred reasons why they did what they did and forgive them for it. It may take a while to move on, but eventually we accept the misdeed or error in judgment by someone else and get on with our lives and relationships. So why is it so hard for us to forgive our own missteps? Do we have higher expectations of our selves than others or is it that we look at a lapse in judgment as an insurmountable failure?

I am not proud of my youth. I have done some really stupid things growing up. I made a lot of bad decisions born out of low self-esteem and when something jogs a memory I still cringe inwardly. I look back into the past with loathing for my actions. Granted I was a stupid teenager then and am well into my fifties now, but something about that time in my life still haunts me. There are so many regrets and a desire for a do over, knowing the outcome would probably still be the same, but that doesn’t stop the wishing.

I didn’t kill anybody or maliciously try to hurt others; my transgressions were all directed at me. I wish I had pushed myself more in school, gone to college, had some direction, instead of going along with the aimless mindset of a self-absorbed teenager. I thought that if a boy paid attention to me it meant he loved me. It took me a few years to figure out what real love was.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my life, my husband, children and my friends, but I wish I could have been better. I wish I had made smarter decisions and wiser choices, not the bonehead mistakes that I can’t seem to put in the past forever. I know I’m not the person I was then; I don’t need validation from anyone else now. The validation has to come from me and grant me the forgiveness of my past sins.

When I look back over the years of my adulthood there have been many great accomplishments. My husband who I love with all of my heart, my two sons, who are all grown up and have families of their own, a daughter that I didn’t give birth to, but love as much and a few truly special friends that I would walk through fire for. These are all the best part of me, the today me.

So what is it about those short seven years of my life that haunt me more than the thirty plus years since? How do I absolve myself, move on and truly face the future with hope and resolve? I can’t answer that, but I am working on it.

The Bane of My Existence

Once again modern technology is making me insane. I thought computers and the internet are supposed to make our lives easier, but no, not so. Every day we use the internet to shop, do online banking and surf thousands of search engines for things like more shopping. Almost every place you go out there in cyberspace to do business has you set up a username and a password all in the name of security. And of course all of the IT gurus tell us to create a different unique password with capital and lower case letters with numbers and special characters at least a million characters long for each time we create a password. Some tell us to use a phrase such as, “Mary had a little lamb” but change some of the letters like this, “M2ryh#daLIT*&%-098b” to make it even more secure. Good luck remembering that one.

I don’t know about you but I have a bunch of passwords to remember. There is my work password to sign on to my computer, the password to sign on to my payroll, taxes and vacation, password to sign on to my health insurance benefits, retirement account, bank, and multiple shopping websites. Passwords, so many passwords to remember and of course you only get three tries before the web site locks you out. I bet hackers and identity thieves get more than three tries. So what’s a memory challenged internet user to do? Write down all of my different passwords, but then where do you store them, in a file on the computer? What if you get hacked, can the hacker find the password file and now have access to your whole life? Do you write it down on a piece of paper? If so where you hide it so only you know where it’s at and still have easy access? Or do you use one the password managers that come with your firewall protection software?

But I’m not so sure those are the best option either. I used one of those password managers and it forgot the password for the website I tried to use. Can you believe it, I logged on, my username and password populated perfectly, and evidently it was not the correct password. I even tried the “forgot password” button and it took me to a screen that wanted my phone number, are you kidding me, my phone number, what about my email address? I have no idea what phone number I put down, but I always know what email address I use. After trying every phone number I could think of I got the death message, “Too many tries, contact IT support to access your account”. It was nice enough to give the phone number of a live chat, but these people keep bankers hours, I can only call from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm and whatever you do don’t even think about calling from noon to two, everyone will be at lunch. I have things to do today and sitting around waiting until 8:30 to talk to someone about resetting my password is not on my list. Seriously, the internet is open for business twenty-four seven, why is it that we can’t get technical support the same way?

There goes my blood pressure, perfect the doctor will love that.

Cranky Me

Stand back everyone I’m going on a rant. Run, don’t look back, save yourself, I have passed irritated and have reached flat out cranky. I am working on three days of sleep deprivation and am pretty sure there will be a fourth and a fifth and so on. The reason for this new state, the weather has finally cooled off enough to allow us to open the windows and turn off the air conditioning. Refreshing you would think, but no, our neighbor has a Chocolate Lab puppy that is about nine or ten months old, a sweet loving and totally out of control monstrously large puppy. The neighbor’s will put the puppy out on a run I think just to get some away time from him. And what do puppies do when they are bored and have no one exercising, training and loving on them, puppies find ways to entertain themselves. They chew on inappropriate things like the deck, and furniture, dig up the yard and most of all, bark. Lucky us, the puppy is tied up outside our bedroom window.

The first night the puppy barked for an hour. He would bark nonstop for about five minutes, then stop for about five minutes lulling me into the false sense of relaxation, thinking that the neighbor had enough of him yapping and took him in. No such luck, he was just resting his vocal cords. This on and off barking continued on and on so that when the neighbor finally did take him in for the night, we were both so keyed up, neither one of us had any restful sleep. Getting up at two thirty in the morning for our work schedule makes for a short night anyway, but add only maybe a couple of hours of sleep and we have the start of short tempers. The second night we went to bed earlier because of the prior night’s lack of sleep and hoped for the best. The puppy started off again and barked his on and off routine for about forty-five minutes making another night of misery for us. Last night, he barked for an hour and a half. Mitch finally broke down and called the neighbor and left a message.

That was the whine, here comes the rant. I love dogs, but a barking dog grates on my soul. I cannot stand listening to a dog barking nonstop. If the dog starts barking go and check on the dog and find out why he’s barking. If it’s an intruder, shoot him and let the dog eat the intruder, the dog won’t be barking while he is eating. If nothing is wrong and the dog is just bored, get up off of your duff and go play with him. Run him around the yard throwing a ball, put him through some training drills or walk him. Anything to exercise his body and brain, but don’t leave the dog outside on a run to make the rest of the neighbors miserable.

I would be mortified if a neighbor called me to complain that my dogs were causing any inconvenience for them. I just don’t understand people anymore. What has happened to manners and thoughtfulness? The saddest part about the whole mess is that the puppy will probably be the one to suffer the most from our sleep deprivation. He will probably be kenneled more and for longer periods causing more out of control behavior or worse turned over to a shelter because the owners don’t want to deal with the problem.

Okay so much for my rant, I’m still tired and cranky, but I feel a little better getting that off my chest. Mitch and the dogs thank you too for letting me vent. Cross your fingers for us that maybe just maybe we might get a decent night’s sleep soon. That or pray for cold weather so we have to close the windows and turn on the furnace.

What I did on My Vacation

We were on vacation this week and it didn’t come a moment too soon. I was in desperate need of some de-stressing. Our original vacation plans were to drive to Washington State and go on a serious week long wine tasting trek with some scenic vistas thrown in. But after going over the vacation budget and the cost estimates, we were a bit short and I am loathe to running up a huge credit card debt for a week of drinking and debauchery. Even though I am always up for debauchery and of course, drinking, I do have some limits.

After plan A tanked, we decided on plan B, a driving trip to New Mexico, going the NRA shooting center in Roton, New Mexico then driving on to Taos and tasting some of New Mexico’s wines. New Mexico is half the distance to Washington so I figured half the cost. Logical right? So that is what we decided on, drive to New Mexico, shoot up a bunch of ammunition, drive some wine and eat spicy food, what could be better?

Well fate decided that she had a better plan and evidently a sense of humor too. Not something I saw any humor in but I guess someone else might. There is a homeowner in this tiny burg that had let her property fall into extreme disrepair and the neighbors had been complaining. Original plans were made to condemn the property and tear it down. At the eleven hour the property owner showed up to a city meeting last fall to plead her case and of course our soft hearted codes enforcement officer, Mitch, fell for it. The city ended up giving her time to clean up the property and guess what, nothing was done. After many months of fruitless efforts to contact the owner, Mitch was finally able to serve her with a summons to come to court and guess what, the court date was smack dab in the middle of our vacation. There went plan B, straight down the tubes.

That left us with a very short window for any time away. We ended up with plan C, a quick sashay to other end of the state for a couple of days with Mitch and my camera. The two hooligans went to a pet spa to corrupt many new dogs and we got to sleep in hotel beds by ourselves, something very novel. We found out that we could sleep in a much smaller bed when it was just the two of us. We tasted a few Missouri wines though, I am not a fan of the wines here but I did buy an awesome t-shirt.

We found a few places to hike and got lost a couple of times hiking. You would think that being at a nature sanctuary with marked trails one would not get lost, but then one has never hiked with us. The nice lady at the Wildcat Nature Sanctuary even gave us a trail map and told us the direction to take and we still made the wrong turn, took the course backwards and ended up on the wrong side of the highway in the middle of a dry creek bed totally lost. Thank god we are smarter than most or you would be reading about a couple of idiots lost in the woods in southern Missouri.

All in all though the time away was short, we had fun just being away and hopefully my mental health has improved. By the way, here is the t-shirt I bought. It fits me don’t you think?

SAMSUNG

Treachery

The treachery of your words
Sweet and soft
Belie your actions
Deception and duplicity.

The look in your eyes
Guileless and loving
Seek to hide the truth
With smoke and mirrors.

Your lies are now exposed
I will not fall victim again
I will become as deceitful
And use your tactics against you.

What a Couple of Fair Weather Sissies!

My chair has been bashed for the third time now and I have almost been knocked out of it twice, all because these two hooligans have decided it’s game on. When Charlie and Orso go at it, furniture gets moved whether it’s occupied or not. It is eighty-five degrees outside and these two sissies think the only place that they can play and wrestle is in the house. At almost nine years old, Charlie is a tad on the cranky side most of the time and won’t play with Orso. Orso who is the perennial puppy is always up for a free for all, so when Charlie is in the mood Orso will take advantage of every moment of neck chewing he can get.

Normally the wrestling only lasts for five or ten minutes tops, but tonight this has been going on now for twenty minutes. There is lots of heavy panting, but no one is giving an inch of ground. Barking, snarling and bodies leaping on and off the bed, means a good time is being had by all. Mitch has been trying fruitlessly to stay out of the line of fire, but it’s not working. He’s been bowled over twice now. I call a time out when one of them grabs the edge of my rug in his teeth and wants to play tug of war. Nothing is safe from the jaws of death around here.

After twenty five minutes Charlie has finally called a truce and both have tongues hanging all the way to the floor. A quick drink and both collapsed on the floor to cool off. Now I just have to cross my fingers that maybe they will both sleep all night long and not come nudge me in the middle of the night to see if I’m awake.

The Day That Shall Remain Nameless

My Monday started off okay, nothing spectacular one way or the other. The dogs actually behaved themselves on the walk. They did their business sniffing and peeing on everything, but acted like perfect little canine gentlemen. I showered, put on my makeup and tamed my crazy, curly hair. My hair hates me and generally does its’ own thing, but I got it to look presentable. So far so good, no sign of impending doom.

If I had any inkling as to how my day would turn out, I would have crawled back into my bed, pulled the covers up over my head… and I would have stayed there for the rest of the day.

On my drive to work, I apparently forgot to remove the target on the back of my car. I had three different morons think that my lane was their lane too. I try to play nice but I draw the line at sharing an eight foot wide space with an idiot driving a pickup truck who was too busy drinking his coffee AND talking on his phone. I have no idea how he was steering and I’m not sure I want to know. I’m a little protective of my 2002 Pontiac Firebird. Even though it’s eleven years old, it is the first car I bought off the showroom floor. It’s too bad I don’t have a bazooka… I wonder if I can get one online.

Walked into work, climbed the stairs to my Department and sat down at my desk. I poured a cup of coffee from my thermos. I’m all by myself in the mornings, so I get a calm moment before everyone else gets in and the crazy starts.

At nine, my boss called me and asked that I come into his office. A project I had worked on for weeks had become a top priority and was needed for a big meeting in half an hour. Super. The spreadsheets won’t work properly on his computer. Double super. So I did what any sane person would do, I called a friend and coworker for help. Crisis averted with a few minutes to spare, keeping me from spending the morning in ladies room crying.

The meeting was almost two hours of looking at spreadsheets on the big overhead screen. Long meetings are a death knell for me, my eyes glazed over and I started to nod off. I can’t sit still that long without falling asleep. So I sat there scribbling on my note pad, wiggling my feet and fidgeting like a six year old, trying to stay awake.

The final blow to the day was when I slammed the middle finger on my right hand in the door to the ladies room. Granted most bathroom stall doors aren’t very menacing, but the bathrooms were built European style with each stall designed as a sort of closet with floor to ceiling doors, just like a regular interior door with sharp corners. I slammed it so hard that the door cut my finger on one side and produced a giant blood blister on the other side. I stood in the stall squeezing my finger that sent throbbing pain all the up my arm and to the pit of my stomach. I thought I was going to get sick. It took a minute for the finger to start bleeding but when it did I had drips all over the floor. I had a nice blood trail going and, with my loud epitaphs, a body would think that someone had been murdered.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Monday’s suck. No beating around the bush on this, no sugar coating it. Monday’s just suck. So, I have decided that I am no longer going to refer to Monday as Monday. From now on Monday shall be called “The Day That Shall Remain Nameless!”.

To quote Yul Brynner in The King and I, “So shall it be written so shall it be done, etc. etc. etc.,”. Great movie, I bet it wasn’t filmed on a Monday.

Banned Television

The list of television shows that I have been banned from watching has grown. The newest TV show on the no-watch list is the Dr. Oz Show. The reason, I watch part of a segment think what a great idea and try it. The results are never what the show touts. Granted, it’s not the show’s fault that I haven’t seen the complete segment, but nonetheless I am not a responsible adult when watching these shows.

I see some new exercise that looks easy, but in reality I need to be twenty something weigh about ninety pounds and have the bone structure of an octopus. I try but there is no way I will ever be able to twist my body in the pretzel shape that is supposed to relieve back pain and make me more flexible. All I did was help my chiropractor pay for his summer vacation.

I landed on the show one day while channel surfing and caught the end of another segment where a man was espousing the benefits of taking Cayenne supplements to help get the maximum metabolism benefit while exercising. He said that taking the supplement would help speed up more calorie burn even when not exercising. So I rushed to the store and bought a bottle of Cayenne capsules. The directions said to take one three times a day with meals. It didn’t say that you should also drink a gallon of water too. I can’t say that my metabolism has sped up and haven’t lost a pound but I do have the worst case of heart burn ever.

I should also add health magazines to the list of avoiding. I read an article in a small health magazine while waiting in the doctor’s office about a super food, Chia Seeds. The article told about vast health benefits of eating just a tablespoon a day, mixing the seeds in a smoothie, sprinkled on a salad or in baking. The article claimed that the seeds contained omega 3 fatty acids, had more antioxidants than blue berries and fiber. So I figured trying it would give me more energy, helping me get back into shape faster and lose weight. No added energy and I gained three pounds.

My reading selections are now limited to the tabloids and the only television I can watch are crime dramas. Maybe I can figure out whodunit and sell it to the tabloids.

Orso, Orso, Orso What am I Going to do with You?

Orso is trying to kill me, or at least maim me. This morning as I was waiting for Mitch to come out to the car so I could take him to work as I do every morning, I reached over the driver’s seat to pet Orso when he turned sideways pinning my arm against him and the barrier bars separating the front seat and the back section of the station wagon. He leaned against the bars crushing my arm, invoking a string of foul language and screeching on my part. It hurt deep down to the bone, I was amazed my arm wasn’t broken.

Of course that would have changed our plans for the morning and I wasn’t dressed for a trip to the emergency room. I hadn’t showered yet or put on any makeup, definitely not a pretty picture at four in the morning. I could see the whole scenario in the emergency room now.

The first question would be, “Are you in an abusive relationship?” and the nurse would look sideways at Mitch.

I would hesitate and say, “Yes I’m definitely in an abusive relationship, but not him. It’s my dog that beats me up.”

The nurse wouldn’t believe me and call in a counselor and then the whole day would be shot which would put Mitch in a foul mood, getting him arrested. Then after I get my cast I would have to go the ATM and get money to bail him out, go to court and try to explain why it wasn’t Mitch. I’m not sure that I would be allowed to take Orso into court as evidence, but anyone that owns a big lunkhead like him would believe me.

Luckily for all of us, Orso didn’t break my arm, but I am sporting a huge knot and a bruise that runs across my foreman. That dog is out to get me.