Hot Cranky People

My landlord (who is also the Chicken Wrangler) knocked on my door this morning and handed me these.

Fresh eggs! And they are blue!

So long, sex neighbors. I am MOVING OUT.

Meet my new neighbor.

Yes. That is a chicken. In my driveway.

I had to say goodbye to Sallypnut tonight.

She’s been fighting cancer for the last two months and it finally got the best of her. She didn’t suffer, and the end was very peaceful, but she was family and my heart is aching.

If you have an indoor cat, please read up on VAS (vaccine associated sarcoma) and discuss the risks and benefits of vaccines with your vet.

I haven’t lived in a city with Chick-Fil-A access since 1988. I miss it desperately.

I have lots of memories of going shopping at the mall with my mother when I was a kid in Atlanta. We always had lunch at Chick-Fil-A together. It was kind of our thing. I would get the combo that came in a box, with the waffle fries and the cole slaw. I remember one time in about 1980 when we were there over the school Christmas break. I was about ten years old, and had just had surgery on my ears and I had crazy huge bandages wrapped around my head. I was self-conscious about going out in public but braved the mall anyway. Some woman in the Chick-Fil-A restroom took one look at me in horror asked what had happened to me. I was mortified.

That is a weird phenomenon that I experienced again at the age of 31 when I had hip replacement surgery, and was on crutches for many weeks. Total strangers kept asking me what had happened. And inevitably when I said I had a hip replacement, they would say “Oh, you’re so young! What happened?”. I found it odd. And I wanted to say…none of your business. I know they were just trying to be nice, but people, take my word on this: If you see someone with crazy bandages, or on crutches, etc, the odds are that whatever they went through probably wasn’t fun for them, and perhaps they don’t want to relive it again and again with total strangers. Using crutches is not the equivalent of someone wearing his Senor Frog Spring Break t-shirt who is just dying to tell you about that night he did body shots off a hot girl in Cabo.

But back to Chick-Fil-A. When I was in the hospital for my hip surgery, I barely felt like eating for days, especially the gross hospital food. But when my parents showed up with a Chick-Fil-A for me…I felt better.

When I was in high school, my friend Bryan worked at the Chick-Fil-A at the food court in the mall. He always smelled like chicken. I couldn’t mock him though, because I worked a few stores down at the Blimpie, and always smelled like oil and vinegar. We envied my friend Rich, who worked at the movie theater and smelled like popcorn.

My family is also a big fan of the Chick-Fil-A cole slaw, and my mother would send my dad to buy the giant containers of it to serve at every bbq or cookout we ever had. It was the cole slaw equivalent of the famous Snack N Shop potato salad, which I wrote about here, and is the slaw against which all others are judged.

These days, I make it a point to go to Chick-Fil-A whenever I am visiting my parents in Atlanta. It has become something of a tradition that my dad picks me up at the airport, and we stop at Chick-Fil-A on the way to the house. It’s kind of our thing.

Come to think of it, a big part of my love for Chick-Fil-A is its connection with my parents. I’m sure they will enjoy reading that I may on some level equate my love for a pressure-fried chicken breast sandwich with two pickles slices with my love for them, but there you have it.

So I’m thinking about Chick-Fil-A today, because it looks like I am not going to be able to make it to Atlanta for Thanksgiving in a few weeks. Missing the post-airport Chick-Fil-A trip with my dad is just one of the things I’ll miss this year. Have some slaw for me, guys.

I just received a text message from my 63 year old mother.

Apparently she saw something awesome in a store that she wanted to tell me about so she TOOK A PHOTO WITH HER CELL PHONE AND SENT IT TO ME.

Way to rock the technology, Mom!!

p.s. I am so totally on my way to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy that sprayer thing for my sprayer-less kitchen sink.

ambien capsule
my limbs shake like green jello
your work here is done

Sometimes I sign up online for free samples. You know, things like Jelly Belly candies, or a new Swiffer product. Maybe some Dentyne Ice.

Yesterday I got a good sized padded envelope in the mail.

“Enclosed is your free sample!”, it proclaimed joyously.

“Excellent!”, I thought.

I am pretty sure I never signed up for this one.

So I’ve jumped on the podcasting bandwagon.

Listen to me and my pal Robbie gab about stuff we like, and how much we like it, at

How Much Do We Love….

Subscribe in iTunes

Because I do.

How about now?

So pleasant to use them on your sad, sore, allergy-ridden nose.

So sad when you realize you’ve just cleaned your glasses with them.

“Why is it so cloudy in the living room?”

:-/

Yesterday my sister gave birth to my precious nephew.

She squeezed that little bugger out in less than 3 hours. He is wonderful and amazing.

As I left the hospital with my sister’s sister-in-law (or my brother-in-law’s sister, you pick), I couldn’t help but notice something else wonderful and amazing in the corner by the security desk as we turned in the sticker badge thingies we had been given when we arrived.

Yes. It’s a giant ball of sticker badges. After the stickers have been turned in at the security desk and they’ve checked you out, the security person sticks your badge on this ball. Why? Because it’s fun, and they are bored.

It has its own chair.

“It’s just sittin’ over there chillin’.”, said the security lady.

We were utterly mesmerized by this. “Try to pick it up!”, Security Lady said. It weighed approximately one jillion pounds.

Security Lady was so tickled by how much we loved the StickerBall that she let us put some stickers on it ourselves.

It was a good day.

The diagnosis is official. I have contracted “I can’t stop planting vegetables”.

Sure, there are worse diseases I could have picked up, like “I can’t stop punching people in the mouth”, or “Crabs”, but I maintain that my illness is a serious one.

This is the first time I’ve lived in a place with both ample space and sun. And an intricate system of soaker hoses on timers, preventing me from having to actually remember to water. I thought, awesome, I will put in a cucumber, a yellow squash, a zucchini, and 3 or 4 tomato plants. And maybe a pepper.

Here is what I planted instead:

Cucumbers:
Slicemaster
Lemon
Burpless

Squash:
Ronde de Italia zucchini
Green zucchini
Eight ball zucchini
yellow crookneck squash

Tomatoes:
Celebrity
Jubilee
Better Boy
Beefmaster
Green Zebra
Yellow Pear
Sweet 100s
Brandywine
Cherokee Purple
Black Krim
Kellogg’s Breakfast
Mr. Stripey
Hillbilly
Mortgage Lifter

Peppers:
2 California Wonder
1 Big Bertha
1 Jalapeno
1 Sweet banana pepper

Eggplant:
1 Japanese eggplant

27 plants. 14 kinds of tomatoes. FOURTEEN. And eggplant? I don’t even LIKE eggplant.

What was I thinking??

If all this stuff actually grows, I’m going to be begging all my neighbors to take some off my hands. Yes, even the sex neighbors. (Actually, I haven’t heard any sex from over there for a while. And I haven’t seen their cats in my yard either. I wonder what’s up. Am I using these ridiculous headphones to watch tv for nothing??)

I may have to open a produce stand on the corner.

The other night I got attacked by a mosquito in my bedroom. I felt all itchy and oogy all night.

The next day I was in a friend’s car and there was a mosquito flying around inside. We both kind of freaked out. I felt all itchy and oogy and like bugs were crawling on me the whole evening.

That night I got in bed, I turned off all the lights, and opened my laptop to catch up on e-mail. I thought to myself, “God I still feel so itchy and oogy and like bugs are crawling on me.”

And then a giant spider DROPPED OUT OF NOWHERE FROM ABOVE ONTO MY KEYBOARD.

It even made an audible “thwap!” sound as it landed.

OMG.

I have never moved so fast.

I slammed the laptop shut and leaped out of bed and turned on all the lights. I got some tissue and opened the computer, scooped up the offender, and flushed him. Then I went back to my room. Shaken. Oogy. Itchy.

And there was a huge mosquito hawk on my lamp.

I think it was laughing at me.

Help.

This has not been a good week for me and gardening.

First, the azalea thing.

Next we have the tale of the Burning Eye Pores.

Yesterday at about 6pm I was out in the back yard, and I decided to pull a few weeds. This turned into about 20 minutes of vigorous weed-pulling. Normally I wear gloves in the garden, but since this was an impromptu weeding session, I didn’t bother.

That was my first mistake.

I came inside at about 6:30 and washed up. A few minutes later, my eyes started burning. And watering. I’m talking a steady stream of tears pouring down my face. I flushed my eyes out with water, but it didn’t help. It was seriously bizarre.

After about a half hour, it was getting worse instead of better. I was ready to go to the ER. I called Dr. Dad, who advised me to take a dose of Benadryl and give it another 30-45 minutes before worrying too much. I took the Benadryl at 7:15 and cancelled my plans for the evening,

By about 8pm, the left eye was a little better, but the right eye was still on fire. I’m not sure but there may have been actual flames shooting out of my eye. I had flushed my eyes, scrubbed my hands and arms up to my elbows, washed my face, and it wasn’t getting any better. I decided maybe I should take a shower, in case whatever I was reacting to had gotten into my hair or something.

This was Mistake Number Two.

Apparently, the heat from the shower was not helpful. By the end of it, I felt like my eye pores must have opened and sucked in even more of whatever was causing the problem. Okay, fine, I don’t think there’s such a thing as eye pores, but it’s fun to say.

EYE PORES! EYE PORES! EYE PORES!

The left eye was feeling ok, but the right eye was now worse than it had ever been. I could barely open it without a surge of burning pain, and the tears weren’t stopping. DAMN YOU, EYE PORES.

I dried off as quickly as I could and went to lie down in the dark, since any sort of light seemed to make it worse. I put a cold washcloth on my eyes and waited.

By about 9:30pm (three hours from when the pain started!) my right eye seemed to be calming down a bit, so after a brief period of TV watching, with a homemade eye patch made of paper towels stuck over the right lens of my eyeglasses, I tucked myself in and went to sleep.

This morning my eyes are fine.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s post. After showering and washing my hair last night, I was too distracted by the ongoing eye pore trauma to put any sort of product in my naturally curly hair. This never happens. EVER.

So when I woke up this morning and looked in the mirror at the puffball-afro-medusa-baby chick-Don King thing happening on my head, I realized it was official: I can never be on a reality show that involves a lack of quality hair care products.