Taking A Pseudo(fed) Trip & Never Leaving The Farm

For the past few days I've been having a really hard time keeping my concentration. I'm doing some pretty thought intensive work at my job and this little problem is starting to affect my productivity. I'm normally prone to fits of attention deficit and hyperactivity but usually I can take a few minutes and walk around the office and return to my task clear headed and ready to work.

To compound this problem, my sinuses have been acting up, and after a while I got tired of sniffing and snorting so one morning I headed to the department medicine cabinet for a little allergy relief. The generic packet that was labeled as "Allergy Relief Tablets" had two teeny weeny red pills and I wasted no time in swallowing them down. I didn't give it much thought as I returned to my tasks at hand until about an hour later. I noticed that I was having an extra hard time concentrating and I was having trouble forming words. Being the oblivious person that I am, it never dawned on me that perhaps I was feeling funny because I had taken sinus pills.

After a few hours of feeling VERY loopy I began to get concerned that maybe I had experienced a mild stroke or something. I was talking, but the wrong words were coming out. I was woozy. I couldn't hold a thought. I voiced my concerns to a friend and she began quizzing me about my current activities and also asked me if I had taken any medication. BINGO!!!!! Meds!

My theory is that those tiny little pills had righteously kicked my ass. And not only had they taken me down, they took me down for about 12 hours. It wasn't until the next day that I began to emerge from the sudafed fog. Now, if anyone accuses me of being silly/loopy another day I won't have as good of an excuse but for at least one day I took a trip and never left the farm. Good times people...good times.

Ice? Not nice!

Down here in the south if there's even the threat of bad weather, companies close early and everyone in the city raids grocery stores and empties the shelves. And we don't usually get snow storms, we get ice storms, hence the need to purchase a months worth of groceries. This happened here in Big D a few weeks ago and the media coined the storm "Icemageddon".

After unseasonably warm temperatures the weather service stated that a major cool down was headed our way and the smart citizens of my fair city sprang into action. Milk and bread evaporated from store shelves, people hit the liquor stores hard and fast because you know, you want to enjoy a cocktail when you're socked in, and many companies sent their employees home early as the temperatures began to plummet.

I was a bit of a skeptic because I've seen the city freak out over supposed storms only to witness a non-event time and time again. Since it had been so warm around here I figured that even if it snowed 10 feet, weeks on end with temperatures in the upper 60s would have the ground so warm, any frozen stuff would melt right away. I went to bed listening to gusty winds and clear streets and woke up to many broken tree limbs littering my lawn and a quarter inch of ice everywhere. The weather event actually happened!

I figured that even though the ice appeared, the warm ground would clear things up in no time but I was wrong. Day one turned into day two and day two turned into day three. I was trapped in my own home and by day three, I was getting a major case of cabin fever. But I didn't have it as bad as bad as some people around here. Motorists and truckers were stuck at a standstill for days because the roads were impassable. I mean, they were literally stuck in their vehicles which were stuck in a long, long line of trucks and cars on the highway and they weren't moving at all. Even though the department of transportation tried to prepare for the weather by sanding the roads, they couldn't keep up with the amount of ice falling. This resulted in frozen roads with lumpy ice that would kill the undercarriage of any car. It was bad!

About a week after the storm blew in I decided to tackle the cleanup of all of the limbs that had broken off of my trees. Since I'm crippled for the most part I was having a hard time figuring out how I was going to chop up branches that were as big around as my thigh but I have wonderful friends and one in particular, Amazing Anita, insisted that her and her man were going to do the heavy work for me. That girl dogged me for days before I relented and accepted her offer of help. When Manchild found out the plan, I think he was threatened by the fact other people would be helping me (when he should have been), and he stepped up to the plate to do the work. He cut the wood and I hauled it. Bad plan. Baaaaadddd plan. My poor little body rebelled and I was laid up for days afterwards but the big stuff was out of the way. I still have lots of little stuff littering my yard and about 10,000 cubic feet of leaves to rake but at least the sidewalk is passable. Maybe I'll get lucky and a typhoon will blow in and blast those leaves away. It is Texas and we do have crazy weather here. Anything is possible.

The ice in my yard lasted for almost a week and I was plenty happy to see it go. Snow I can handle, but ice is a real pain in the ass, let me tell ya. The motorists are long gone, the stores are restocked and life is back to normal. We're in the clear for at least another few weeks if all goes well. 

(Since the writing of this post, an arctic blast blew in and we're having temperatures in the teens but at least there isn't any ice.)

Foxy the Watcher

This is Foxy II

When I was young I had lots of stuffed animals like many young girls probably did. I loved each one of them as if they were real, live pets. My brothers took great delight in abusing them by punching and throwing them which sent me into fits of rage.

Foxy took plenty of beatings from the boys as well as from my cats. I had a crazy cat who thought Foxy was his love mate. He'd actually try to "woo" her if you know what I mean. Having been raised on a farm, I knew exactly what the old boy was up to and I didn't like the fact that he was raping my precious Foxy one little bit. Another cat just gave him baths and kneaded his tired (nonexistent) muscles with her paws.

All of those years of my petting and the boys' pounding and the rapings and kneading from the cats took a toll on poor old Foxy and by the time I was a teenager, all I had left of Foxy was his tail. By age 17 I finally had to give him up and let him rest in peace (pieces).

Fast forward 33 years to my 50th birthday. The one brother who pounded on Foxy the most was super excited to give me a birthday gift. As I reached my hand into the gift bag I felt the  most wonderful thing. Could it be true? Did I feel the familiar rough fur from so many years ago? YES!! It was another Foxy! Foxy #2!! Apparently, my sweet brother searched for years to find a mink from a broken mink stole just like the one I had as a child. He found lots of them but they were attached to whole wraps and cost hundreds of dollars and all he wanted was one and it had to be cheap. He finally hit pay dirt when he visited an antique store, found 5 minks sewn together and after telling the shop owner the story of his long, long quest, the guy sold it to him for super cheap because he liked the story so much. Mission accomplished.

At my birthday party, family members who didn't know about my love for Foxy looked on in horror as I pulled out those musty dusty minks and deeply inhaled the scent of a long lost friend. They grossed out at the fact that the minks still had feet and toenails and dusty, rough fur but I loved them. I played with one of Foxy's feet so much on the way home, one of them fell off and I carried it around in my purse for months. I LOVE all 5 of my Foxys! Who would have thought that a musty old partial mink stole could be such an epic awesome gift? I love that my brother thought enough of me to search for 35 years for something so odd and let me tell you, Foxy 2 has a special place at the foot of my bed and NO cats are allowed around it. This one will last a long time because I don't have pesky brothers beating up on it. Who knows, Foxy might last long enough for one of my future grand kids to adopt it and love it just as much as I do.