I can't believe anyone would want to read this

Sing it, Merle....

2011-12-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

Lap top computer: broken
Zoom lens to camera: broken
Front door to house: broken
TV remote control: broken
TV: broken
Bank account: broken
Blow Dryer: broken
Iron: Broken
Feet: Broken
Washer and Dryer: never installed

Our Day at the London Eye

2011-10-14T17:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's been months since I wrote about my 2010 trip to Europe. My computer broke and I've just gotten it back. So let us now continue with my saga of "My year of living erroneously". (keep an eye on the black cloud that was hanging over my head...in case you don't remember...in the few posts previous to this one regarding 2010...I had lost my job and then totaled my car.)

When you are vacationing in Europe you don’t let a little bit of arctic freezing cold rain get in the way of a good time. I’m sure I’m not the only one of us who felt like I lived in my long johns and wet tennis shoes. My scarf had pretty much adhered itself to my body. We would bundle up as we were leaving our apartment building because to do so even one minute earlier would result in passing out from the heat. Once we got outside it was a whole different story. Noses would run. Eyes would water. Hair would frizz. Cheeks would turn bright pink. We were a stunning bunch! Our plan for this day was to walk over to the London Eye. Katie and I had wanted to go on it since the minute we got off the plane but couldn’t convince Tori and Rebek to go on it with us. So on this very rainy day Katie and I decided to go on it without them. Neither Katie nor I wanted to admit that we were terrified of heights so we put on our brave faces, got our cameras and our monkeys and stood outside in the rain and waited in line. The London Eye never stops rotating even when it is loading and unloading passengers but he rotation speed is so slow that you can’t even feel it moving. I was very happy to see that there was an air conditioner in each unit, (and thus we wouldn't run out of oxygen) and the glass capsule was large enough to walk around in if you so chose.(two very big deals for the claustrophobic!) It only took a couple of minutes for me to realize that there was nothing to be afraid of. The ride was smooth. There was plenty of oxygen. The view was amazing. I’m hooked!

After our ride on the London Eye Tori and Rebek were supposed to meet me and Katie at the rides exit. Some people don’t know how to follow directions and thus Katie and I were forced to walk around and try to find them. I found this guy instead:This is Bruno from "Dancing With The Stars". He is much shorter than I imagined. Sorry this picture is so bad but I got in trouble for taking his picture while he was giving an interview, so this picture was taken with my zoom from about a mile away.

It took us almost an hour to meet up with Tori and Rebekah, to this day I don't know where they were when they were supposed to meet us right next to the London Eye. (bone heads.) Katie and I told them what a fantastic time and we just about begged them to give it a try but what I think convinced Tori to go for it was when we told her about the amazing photo ops up there. We managed to convince both of them to go on it and Katie and I were more than happy to go on it again.

This is what the pods looked like:

This was inside the pod:

This was the view from the pod when were even with Big Ben: This was the carnival at the base of the ride. You can see the bridge over the river Thames. ("Tems") This bridge was in one of the Harry Potter movies...but I don't know which one.:(

Cousin Katie:

After all was said and done Tori and Bek admitted that the London Eye was awesome and were sorry they hadn't gone on it sooner.

In the winter months there is an ice rink just below the London Eye. Rebek was the only one brave enough to strap on some skates and give it a whirl:
We had a wonderful adventure at the London Eye and it was a day I will never forget, but it wasn't because of all the fun we had this day. When we got back to our flat Tori and I found out that our beloved cousin Gary had passed away. She and I adored this man and it was a loss that neither one of us were really prepared for. Gary had been ill off and on for the last few years but, like my father, he would get sick...go to the hospital and get better and come home. Sadly this time he didn't come home. He and my dad were partners in crime so I'm sure there was a terrific reunion when Gary reached the pearly gates. There is no doubt that my date met him there with a Coors for each of them. Rest in peace you two. (yeah, right!)

The Tate Modern

2011-10-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

On one of the few days that we got up before sundown we took off on a walk down the banks of the Thames. We weren’t really on the banks because that is where the bums hang out, we were actually up on the street that runs along side of the river, (much safer.) We saw this phone booth and I begged the girls to pose and they were more than happy to oblige…that is until they all got in there and discovered that those quaint red phone booths make for a dandy toilet for homeless people. The urine index in there was enough to gag a maggot but the girls were troopers and I got the shot!

After taking the phone booth picture we walked through a park and took a full series of pics of Bek gleefully throwing leaves up in the air. Tori and I both got some great shots but I’m sorry to say that at this late date we can only find two of the pictures from the whole series. Look at how nice they turned out:.

Now imagine the last picture in the series where Bek got murky water in her mouth and she was coughing and sputtering! I know this sounds so mean but the murky water situation made me laugh so hard that I had tears running down my face.

There are two Tate Modern Museums in London and we visited both of them. I am the type of museum patron who walks very slowly and try’s to absorb everything I see through every pore of my body. I love museums but even I could have run though both these places at full speed. I really can’t distinguish what we saw at either museum so I might be interchanging what we saw at either particular location, but you’ll never know the difference because if you are smart you won’t waste your time by going to the Modern Museums.
Bek and I were sooo excited to get to see the Andy Warhol exhibit. I had made a special effort to pack an old coveted tee shirt, that was once the uniform of my youth, that bore a silk screen of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe so that I could give it to Bek while in the presence of all things Warhol. It was from way back when I was skinny so it was a small enough size that I could roll it up and put it in my camera bag. Once we got to the museum I all but herded our group to the Warhol salon. Boy was I disappointed to find that there was not one of his famous celebrity silk screens, nor even mention of his Campbell’s Soup can. No, instead we found ourselves in a room that was covered in Pepto Bismal pink and yellow cow print and aWarholian-esque picture of a pistol. WTH? I still managed to give Bek the tee shirt and I think she was touched by my gesture. I’ve seen pictures of her wearing the shirt so apparently she likes it.

Negative pictures on tin. Ok.

Amongst the works of art that were proudly displayed in the Tate were a pencil written script of “Top Gun”:

We also saw an entire room with nothing more than what appeared to be several years worth of dryer lint. I am not kidding. We also got to watch a short film of a naked women who was standing on a big rock next to a river. She was covered in blood and someone was throwing feathers on her. Yeah. Artistic. We got to see what we presumed was the original “ugly stick” and the best part of the day was when Tori dared to put her finger on an authentic WWII chrome fighter plane. We almost got kicked out over that faux paux. (how do you spell that? Spellcheck didn't have any suggestions.)

The only true piece of art we saw was the sculpture called “The Kiss", by Rodan. I loved it and even to this day I still enjoy looking at the pictures.
The museums in London have full bars and so of course we thought if we had a couple of cocktails then maybe we would have a greater appreciation of the works of art. Between the 4 of us it cost over 50.00 BPS. Bek ordered a smoothie. Word to the wise…in London a “smoothie” is a cup of room temperature watered down yogurt with a little bit of honey mixed in. Upon her first sip of this concoction you could just see it in her face…she didn’t want to swallow what was in her mouth and she was not going to take another sip. Tori told her that for what they paid for that smoothie Rebek had better know that she was going to drink every last bit of it. Bek told Tori if Tori took a sip of it and still thought it was consumable then she would try to drink it. Tori took one sip and lo and behold…the drink was trashed.
This was Bek innocently trying to take a portrait of herself. We thought it would be better with accompaniment. Seriously, what picture isn't improved by bunny ears?

The Dolphin House

2011-10-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

Our apartment at the Dolphin House consisted of two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a nice size living room and a kitchen that was so small that only two people could fit in there at a time. (No exaggeration.) An odd contrast to the kitchen we had last year which was big enough to hold a square dance.

These pics were taken within the first 24 hours of our arrival. I know this because after the first day you pretty much needed a shovel to make your way through the living room. We are not a tidy bunch.

We threw our luggage in to our respective rooms, turned on all of the radiators, you can see the radiators behind the sheer curtains in the pic above, and took off on a walk-about. It would be nice to come back to a toasty warm apartment. We bundled up in our new rain coats that we all got just for the London weather, and headed out in to the early evening rain. After walking about 3 blocks from the apartment I discovered that my cool new coat was not water proof and I was rain soaked to the skin. (Yay! I get to spend my entire autumn vacation in rainy London with a coat that absorbs water!)

(I am SO pretty.)

We raced back to the apartment and were all shocked to not be greeted with the delightful hug of warmth from the radiators. All four of us thought we were smarter than the other and we all tried our hand at making the radiators work. Tori got bored with this and decided to turn on the television. Imagine if you will…the tv didn’t work, either. We called the front desk and reported our broken radiators and television. It took a couple of hours but they sent up the first security guard they could spare...because clearly a security guard is the most capable person to send to fix electronics and plumbing. Oddly enough after frittering around with the radiator and the television the security guard told us that the tv and the radiators were … are you ready?…. “broken”. Obviously he was an expert in his field. (I don’t quite remember exactly but it was a couple of days before both items were actually repaired.)

There is an 8 hour time difference between London and California and it’s really hard to adjust to the change. We were all a little jet lagged but thought that we were handling things pretty well. One morning I decided to get up when I heard the others stirring, as opposed to sleeping in as I had done every day thus missing out on a lot of daylight, so even though I was still really tired I dragged myself out of bed. Katie was up and cooking Top Ramen. (Breakfast of champions!!) I convinced her to share it with me and we enjoyed our ever so nutritious breakfast while Tori and Bek slowly made their way to start the new day with us. Tori did as Tori does and turned on the television which thankfully was in working order. There was even less of a choice of what to watch than usual and it was at that point we found out that it was 2:00 AM!! We were all amused at our early start to our day and since there was nothing to watch on TV we watched “Harry Potter” on Katie’s laptop. Since Rebek missed out on eating Top Ramen she decided to cook some Uncle Ben's rice. The directions said, “Boil a large amount of water”, and to that Bek said, “SHOULD I FILL THE BATH TUB???” I don’t know if it was because we were all up and out of bed at such an ungodly hour or what but we all thought that that was just about the funniest thing we’d ever heard.

I'm sad to report that we all fell asleep while watching "Harry Potter" and once again wasted half of the day by sleeping through it.

Stay tuned for the next posting where we actually make it out of the house during daylight hours!

Airplane ride..

2011-09-30T17:52:00.000-07:00

So what do ya do when you are stuck on a plane, in a tiny little seat for 12 hours? Of course! You take pictures of your monkey in compromising positions…

First the little simian drinks all of the vodka...

Then the cheeky little dude swipes my headphones! You just can NOT trust a monkey on an overseas flight!

For the better part of 3 hours we played word games. We ate. We drank. We watched movies. We watched TV shows. We made fun of our neighbors. We took pictures.
(I like to take that zit on my chin with me on all of my trips.)

Then we tried to sleep. We all put on our movie star sleep masks and closed our eyes while sitting straight up. I dozed off for a while and when I woke up I discovered that we were draped all over each other like a basket full of sleeping kittens. I wanted to move but I feared that if I were to even try to get up I would decimate this delicate human Jenga game. So I sat there letting my legs go numb trying to be nice and accommodate the rest of the gang. Then Bek woke up and flung everyone off of her and the rest of us all but flew out of our seats.

After sitting for over 12 hours we were very happy to get off of that plane. I couldn’t wait for Katie to see the London style taxi cabs so we all but ran through Heathrow Airport. Just before we got to the door we saw an ice cream machine. Bek stopped to see if the machine had Nobbily Bobbily ice creams and Tori noticed that when Bek got close to the machine animated head gear appeared on the front of the machine and sync-ed up to our heads. I am embarrassed to admit that we spent the next hour playing in front of the ice cream machine.

NICE PINK FRO, KATIE!!!!!

The weather outside was a slightly rainy, a bit chilly...a perfect autumn afternoon in London. We had to wait for a taxi that was big enough to fit all four of us and all of our luggage. In mere moments the charm of the chilly afternoon had worn off and it felt very good to get into a warm cab. Sadly we wound up riding in a van because the regulation taxis were not big enough to accommodate 4 of us and all of our luggage.

As usual the ride to downtown London was just like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland. I will never get used to riding on the wrong side of the road. Every twist and turn in the road is exactly the opposite of what we are accustomed to so I would bob and weave one way and the car would go the other way. How I didn't crack my head on the side window is beyond me.

This year we were staying at The Dolphin House which was right on the Thames.(I'm sad to report that there was nothing "dolphin-y" about the place.) The woman who checked us in was a typical polite Londoner but I couldn't help but feel like we were the first party she'd ever assisted. It took us over an hour to get checked in! I was anxious to get our luggage up to our room and then set out to show Katie the sites of London.

Stay tuned for the next chapter... :)

P.S. I have no idea why Tori isn't in any of these pictures.

Europe Trip 2010

2011-09-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

This trip across the pond was going to be different from any of my previous trips because this time my niece Katie was going with us. Katie is actually Tori’s husband’s brother’s daughter, but I have always referred to her as my niece. (Hi Katie!)

Before our trip was even set in stone Katie was perusing travel websites, (SOO unlike her Aunties!), trying to make sure that she was as prepared as possible for such a big trip. Most of the sites suggest the usual things such as electrical plug converters, the best places to exchange your money, special sightseeing attractions and the like but there was one site that had an odd suggestion that turned in to a very funny competition between the 4 of us. They suggested that travelers bring along condoms and use them as coin purses! (They were completely serious. Can you imagine buying a souvenir and whipping out a condom full of change!) They went on to say that condoms had a million and one practical uses for travelers but they didn’t go in to detail…so we made up our own lists. In the weeks before we left on our trip we must have texted each other 50 times apiece. And I could tell that this was something that was heavy on all of our minds because some of the texts would arrive at 3:00 in the morning. So…other than the obvious use for a condom…some of the uses that we came up with were: wind sock, emergency shoe lace, scrunchie, windshield wiper cozy, toothbrush holder, shoe liners to keep your feet dry in the event of wet weather~(Katie actually tested that one out!), balloon animals, stuffed animal shower caps, room décor, water balloon, pencil holder, soap carrier, luggage tag, finger gloves, ear rings, and on and on... (sorry if I offended any of my readers...I thought long and hard about including this part of the story and I just decided to go for it because at the time we thought it was so funny.(

To make this trip extra fun Katie and I decided that it would be fun if we all got each other gift bags to be opened when we got on the plane. The night before the trip we were all at Tori’s house packing and repacking and doing whatever we could to make our luggage lighter. (Our last trip to London resulted in a $70.00 charge because Bek’s suitcase was too heavy. Oddly, the charge was only given on the way to London…and not on the way back. Go figure.) We wound up exchanging our gift bags in the middle of the suitcase mess. Katie got everyone a decorated canvas bag and inside was lots of candy, a stuffed monkey, (I named my monkey Skeeter!), glitter pens, and condoms of various sizes and colors! Tori also got us canvas bags and inside was an airplane neck pillow, satin sleep mask and a cotton gauze scarf and a fleece blanket. She got me a custom made journal that had a picture of the 3 of us on it and it said, “Two Pendell’s and A Wyatt”. Bek got everyone cute pajama bottoms. This gift exchange was awesome and we will do it again the next time we travel.

On the way to the airport we all got our “dork packs” prepared. (For those of you who haven’t been reading my blog since our first trip to Europe..a “dork pack” is a document holder that hangs on a string around your neck. This handy dandy item looks sooooo dorky but it saves you from having to look for your passport, drivers license, plane ticket, etc.)They seriously make the trek through the airport much easier and I highly recommend them. It wasn’t until we got inside the airport that I realized that a cat had peed on my dork pack. (Welcome to my life.) So I threw my beloved pink dork pack away and bought a new one that cost me about 3 times what the pink one cost. There is no such thing as bargain shopping at LAX.

It is tradition between Tori and I to have a drink before we get on the plane. It calms us down yet makes us giddy and we love it when we are giddy. The problem with our plan to find a drink was that Bek wasn't 21 so she couldn't go in to a bar with us. Katie and Bek just went and sat by our departure gate and Tori and I ran around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to find a bar with an open seat. We wound up at a bar inside of the Chili's restaurant. We ordered 2 dirty martinis...and it was a good thing we had alcohol in our system when we were handed our bill...$30.00!!!! Whatcha gonna do? (We learned a lesson for sure!)

This was our first trip to Europe sitting in Coach. Let me tell you…there’s nothing like riding in coach to remind you just how spectacular it is to be in Business class. We were in the very back of the plane but we got to get on first because I was still hobbling around from car accident related boo boos. We were lucky enough to get 4 seats in one row. We didn’t purchase our tickets at the same time and we were afraid that we would be sitting in different sections of the plane. The plane wasn’t even fully loaded when Rebekah says very loudly….”WHO DO I HAVE TO GIVE A LAP DANCE SO I CAN GET A SEAT IN BUSINESS?”

Thankfully there were no takers to the offer and before we knew it we were up in the air...

(Stay tuned for the next installment with pictures!)

The last of the Mitsubishi accident story

2011-09-14T18:24:00.000-07:00

Immediately after they towed my car away Tori took me straight to a 7-11 and bought me a diet Coke. I don’t know if it was because I had just watched my life pass before my eyes or what but this simple act of sisterly kindness just about moved me to tears. Everyone who knows me well knows that a Diet Coke can fix just about anything. I didn’t really want to spend the night alone so she took me to her house where I had a very fitful night of sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I relived the accident over and over. I would just finally get to sleep and I would gasp myself awake. When the morning came and I finally got out of bed I was astonished as to how sore I was. I knew I was going to be sore but I never dreamed that it would be as bad as it was. Even my corneas hurt. I hobbled out of the bedroom and made my way into the dining room. I took about 2 steps into the dining room and the next thing I knew I was doing the Fred Flintstone shuffle in midair. One of the kids had spilled water on the linoleum floor and just left it there and I slipped in it. Just as the car accident had seemed..this slip happened in slow motion. I saw myself being perpendicular to the ground and I knew it was really going to hurt when I landed. As I was on my way to the ground I reached out and tried to grab anything to break my fall and I connected with a baker’s rack that was fully loaded with dishes and large bottles of alcohol. Sadly the bakers rack didn’t break my fall but it did cause me to all but pull my arm out of the socket. Tori raced in and tried to help me up. She reached down to me and instead of her pulling me up I managed to pull her down on top of me. So there we both were..laying on the floor in a puddle of water. I took a quick assessment of my injuries and was pretty sure none of my bones were broken and then we sat there and laughed.
A few days after the accident the tow yard called me to let me know that I was racking up storage charges so I wound up signing my car over to them so that I wouldn’t continue to accrue charges. I was planning to give my car away once I got a new one but I can assure you I had no intentions of giving it away when I was still using it nor was I going to give it to a total stranger.
I continued to relive the accident 100’s of times a day. I can only imagine that this is the way the brain works through the details that I didn’t notice when the accident actually happened. During one of these episodes I finally had an epiphany. I couldn’t stop wondering what caused me to hit the other car…and then it dawned on me~~I was expecting her to move…and why was I expecting her to move??? Because the light was green. I have no idea why she was just sitting there or why it took me so long to realize that she wasn’t moving but I’m certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that the light was green. Sadly this realization came to me after the police report was written up and the accident was deemed 100% my fault. Mazeltov.

Onward and upward…I had a trip to Europe to plan…..

My Year of Living Erroneously 3

2011-08-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

I was invited to meet Tori at Downtown Disney where she was going to buy me an early dinner. Since my income had completely stopped and my unemployment benefits had not yet kicked in I was thrilled to be getting out of the house and not have to worry about where the money was going to come from to pay for my entertainment. Sitting around the house was starting to depress me so I was pretty excited about getting to be Disneyland adjacent.

It was a warm and beautiful day. The sun was still shining brightly as I left the house. I was less than 10 miles away from my house doing about 45 mph approaching an intersection. I had a 2 second fleeting thought that something was wrong but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it and before I knew it (insert ominous music here..) I had plowed in to the back of the car in front of me.

In slow motion I heard my breaks screech, I felt my head turning away from the explosion of the airbag in my steering wheel, I inhaled the powder that is inside of the airbag, I heard the sickening thud of my car hitting the car in front of me, I heard glass breaking, I heard metal bending, I felt my head snap forward and backward and the next thing I knew I was standing outside of my car. My first thought was that I was very, very happy that I was standing up because that meant that A. I was still alive and B. Apparently I wasn’t gravely injured. Then I realized that I had actually hit another car and I could have killed someone. You just don’t know the relief I felt when I saw the person in the other car get out and walk over to the sidewalk on her own two feet. I had never before in my life seriously thought that I might have killed someone and it’s a thought or feeling I do not ever care to have again.

My shaky, wobbly legs carried me to the sidewalk and I walked up to the woman from the other car. She literally greeted me with open arms and embraced me saying, in broken English, “I’n sorry…I’n sorry.” I asked her if she was injured and she said no. Any further conversation was going to be very limited because she didn’t actually speak English. Out of nowhere a father and his teenage daughter were suddenly standing by my side asking me if there was anything they could do to help us. As if by some miracle the daughter spoke fluent Spanish and was able to confirm that the other driver was not injured and did not need medical attention. The girl told me that the driver was asking me to not call the police because she didn’t have a driver’s license. She said that the car wasn’t hers but she was insured to drive it. I asked the father if he could help me to dial my phone because I had made about 10 attempts to call my sister and IMOM who are both on my speed dial but I was such a nervous wreck that I couldn’t make my phone work. It was a total out of body experience when I heard myself telling Tori that I wanted her to come and get me because I had just totaled my car.

I tried several times to call my car insurance representative and wouldn’t you know it…when I was finally able to successfully make the call the police showed up. So all at once I was trying to answer questions from the police officer and talk to my insurance agent. Neither one wanted to yield to the other so I had to hang up on the insurance guy. The police officer asked us if either one of us were hurt at least 5 times. He offered to call an ambulance if we thought we needed one. We both assured him that we were fine and he separated me from the woman in the other car and we both gave them our version of what had happened. When he asked me what caused me to hit her I had to tell him the truth…”I have no idea…” Sounds just as lame today as it did last year.

I was able to get the insurance people back on the phone and requested a tow truck and answered all of their questions. I had finally been able to calm myself down enough to realize that my right inner arm was on fire. I was wearing a tank top and thus there was nothing between my skin and the exploding airbag. My whole upper arm was burned. Not so bad that I needed medical attention but bad enough that it really hurt.

Tori arrived just in time to help me try to get some of the stuff out of my car before they towed it away. Mr. Paul was there to offer his help and Jake was doing his best to run around in the intersection in an effort to show us exactly how he felt about his trip to Disneyland being thwarted. People who know me well know that I pretty much live out of my car. I keep clothes, shoes, blankets, cds, food and everything but the kitchen sink in my back seat. As Tori and I dragged object after object out of the car the tow truck driver grew impatient. I asked Paul to carry a 13 lb. bag of cat food over to his mom’s car and he assured me that it was too heavy for him to carry but he was sure that I could do it just fine. Finally the truck driver told us that he had to get my car to the tow yard and that if I wanted anything else out of it I would have to get it later.

I will never forget watching my smashed up car go off in to the wild blue yonder, Jake still having a cow because he still wanted to go to Disneyland, cat food still sitting on the sidewalk because no one has picked it up, arm on fire because it was attacked by an airbag, the relief that I didn’t hurt anyone and thanking God that this mess was only as bad as it was…and thinking that my life couldn’t get any worse than this.

October 14, 2010

Ha!

My year of living erroneously part 2

2011-08-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

I spent most of September sleeping in, (Yay!), looking for a job, and worrying my head off. (Boo!) Apparently I shouldn’t have been spending so much time sleeping because one morning as I was snoozing on the couch I didn’t get up soon enough to please Lorenzo and he started a riot among the masses of felines in my home. I was trying to ignore Mr. Idiot Foolish and his minions when all of a sudden one of the cats came flying over the back of the couch and touched off on my face. I got mad and yelled at them to “knock it off!!” (Yes, I was yelling at a deaf cat.)

In the long run Lorenzo won because I got up and gave the kitties food so they would stay the hell away from me. After I fed them I resumed my snooze fest on the couch.

Annnnnd when I woke up..I looked like this:

Now, who wouldn't want to hire that beautiful woman?

My Year Of Living Erroneously part 1

2011-08-17T08:26:00.001-07:00

My blog has been sorely neglected for the last 12 months and it isn’t because there hasn’t been anything going on in my life. Much to the contrary. .. it seemed like for a while there it was whammy city. Every time I turned around something major was happening. Some things were good…some things…not so much. I hope I can remember everything that happened so I can share it with you. If not…then this will teach me what the consequences are when I don’t blog about things as they happen. Let’s sally forth, shall we?

In August of 2010 I was sitting at my desk in the Legal Affairs office of the major institution of higher learning where I had worked for the last 4 years and 9 months when my boss came out of her office looking like she has seen a ghost. Her voice wobbled as she said, “I have some very bad news for you.” My mind immediately thought that something was wrong with someone in my family and I just about had a heart attack on the spot. She just stood there looking at me with tears in her eyes. It seemed like 5 minutes had gone by but in reality it was more like 10 seconds before she told me that the powers that be had decided to restructure our office and I was going to be let go. As my boss blubbered over the news she had just delivered I sat there dumbfounded. W.T.F. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Although I never did like my job in that office I was a very dedicated employee. They had absolutely no reason in the world to justify letting me go….except for the fact that it was determined that my office would surely parish if they didn’t get a paralegal in their midst immediately. A paralegal who also does clerical scut work. A paralegal who also does scut work for less than $20.00 per hour. F.M.L. After learning about the details of my pending departure it was ME consoling MY BOSS and it was me telling her that everything was going to work out just the way it was supposed to and that I’d be fine.

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I am a home owner. I like to eat. I’m fond of my much used medical benefits. Everything wasn’t going to be fine! This country is in one of its worst recessions in history and I was about to have to go out and find a new job.

Upon hearing the news of the loss of my job...Amanda, Tori and my mom all assured me that if need be I could move in with them. IMOM told me that my bills would get paid and I was not to worry about money. These were all wonderful assurances but I like to pay my own way and take care of myself. It was going to be very difficult to accept all of this help.

They gave me one months’ notice and boy was it made perfectly clear just how nice they thought they were to have done so. I was told about another employee who was a friend of mine who was given about 5 minutes’ notice of her imminent departure on the very same day that I was given the news that I was going to be gone in 30 days. So as much as I wanted to tell them to stick their 30 days where the sun didn’t shine I guess it was better than getting no notice at all. I spent the next 4 weeks searching the internet for job leads. I kept my eye on the campus employment website. And there was just nothing out there. I applied for a couple of positions through the edjoin website but I couldn’t even secure an interview. As the days went by I was determined not to let my boss know that I was devastated over the pending loss of my job. I wasn’t even going to ask her for a letter of recommendation. If she wanted to give me one then she could just offer it to me. (Yeah, maturity reigns when I’m mad.) By the end of August I had wizened up a bit, swallowed my pride and decided that my resume looked pretty lame with letters of recommendation from to 2005. I braced myself and sauntered in to my boss’s office and asked her if she would write me a letter of recommendation. Well…if I was stunned to hear that I was being let go…imagine how I felt when my boss told me…”It is against company policy for us to write blanket letters of recommendation. Tell me where you’ve applied and I’ll give you a letter that is addressed to them exclusively.” I was so taken aback that I just said, “Oh, ok…I’ll let you know”. But it didn’t take me about 2 seconds to decide that I wouldn’t take a letter of recommendation from that woman if it arrived tattooed on Jackson Browne’s ass! (I called the HR office and asked them if there was indeed a rule about writing letters of recommendation and of course no one knew the answer but if the legal counsel for the entire university said that was a rule then they were going to err on her side.)

Just before my time in that office was up I saw a posting for a clerical position at the offices of the campus church. The job description was almost exactly the same as the job that I had been doing for the last 4.5 years so I applied for it. The interview went wonderfully and I waited for about a week until they got back to me. The reverend who interviewed me called me personally to tell me that the position that needed to be filled had been empty for quite a while and there had been a temporary office worker at that desk for the last several months. Even though they pretty much knew that they were going to give the job to the temp worker they still had to post the position and conduct interviews. They thought their temp was a shoe in for the permanent position….until they interviewed me. The reverend said that she just loved my spark and my sense of humor and she especially loved that I had been doing the same job only in a different office for almost 5 years. I thwarted their plans to just hand the job over to the temporary worker. However, after much prayer and deliberation they decided that it just wouldn’t be fair to the temp to not give her the job. Urgh! It would have been so nice to just seamlessly transition from one office to the next without any down time…but no…it was not to be. The reverend went on to tell me that she was so impressed by me that she had given my name to a reverend friend of hers who had a church in Garden Grove that was looking to hire a clerk. I thanked her profusely and even though I didn’t get the job she managed to make me feel pretty good about myself. BTW..I wasn't interested in working in Garden Grove. If I couldn't work at the university I would be looking for a position much closer to home. Beggars can't be choosers but it would have been really foolish for me to take a job any further from my house.)

My boss was going to be at a seminar on my last day of work so there would be no awkward goodbyes and that suited me just fine. I was going to walk out of that office with my head held high because I knew that there were better things on the horizon just waiting for me. Instead as the clocked ticked 5:00 on my last day I grabbed my purse and started to tell my co-worker good bye and I blubbered like an inconsolable baby. Although I had known for 4 weeks that I was losing my job it wasn’t until that very moment that I seriously, truly, honestly realized that …whoa shit…I don’t have an income anymore.

Red pen sighting in the Viet Namese section of Orange County

2010-08-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

While sitting at a red light yesterday it took me a few minutes to figure out what a "barrer" was.

So much has been going on the last few months...I swear I'm going to sit down and do a recap...I will have a lot more spare time as of September 7th as that will be my last day of work here at the Chapman Ranch. Stay tuned for the update.

Where's my red pen?

2010-07-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

This sign is hanging on the fence that divides "Bill Dunn One Stop Shop" from "El Pollo Loco" on Beach Blvd. in Huntington Beach. You can't see it from the street...it is only for El Pollo Loco drive through customers to enjoy.

It just slays me that the sign maker doesn't have any sort of spell check device. Or maybe even a dictionary.

Do you want to call him or should I?

A short story...titled..."Irony"

2010-06-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday my mom and her precious dog, Angel, a Lhasa Apso, were sitting on the porch in front of her house.

Out of the clear blue sky a huge Rottweiler appeared and charged toward Angel. My mom did her best to keep the Rottweiler from harming Angel. There was barking and growling and slobbering and crying...the Rottweiler knocked my mom over, which caused her to break many accrylic finger nails, but my mom was still able to keep Angel from harm.

My mom screamed, "Help me!!! Help me!!", to no avail. A couple of girls walked by and watched the melee and didn't offer any assistance. (Idiot Foolishes!)

Finally a couple of young men from across the street showed up. They were completely afraid of the Rottweiler and who could blame them. Rottweilers are big and scary. They have a bad reputation. They are nothing like sweet little Lhasa Apso's.

The young men helped to keep the evil Rottweiler at bay. And then when no one was looking Angel went over and bit the young man.

Now everyone knows why I call Angel "Sid Vicious".

The end.

Another adventure with Paul..

2010-05-28T11:37:00.000-07:00

This post is written about the adventure I had with my nephew, Paul, last weekend.
This is Paul:

He is 24 years old and we call him "The Mayor" because he never meets a stranger. He was diagnosed as "slightly mentally retarded with autistic tendencies compounded by extreme ADHD". I have written about him before..as a matter of fact he was the subject of my very first blog post...

Anyway...

While Tori was away in Hawaii last week I spent the weekend at her house so that the house sitter could have a break. I got there late on Friday night. I told Paul that he needed to take care of the multitude of dirty dishes that were languishing in the sink. (Of course the dishes were all Andrews but I knew full well he wasn’t going to do anything about them.) Paul went in to the kitchen and looked around then came back out and told me that the dishwasher was empty and thus his work was done. I told him that I wanted him to LOAD the dish washer. This skeeved Paul to the core of his very being because Andrew had left spaghetti dishes and it was quite a mess. I told Paul to do his best. This took about 5 reminders...Paul was in an out of the kitchen 100 times and then Paul said he was finished. I went in to the kitchen to discover that Paul had rinsed most everything off but he hadn’t put anything in the dishwasher. I figured that 50% was better than nothing so I loaded up the dish washer and turned it on then I went to bed.

I got up early the next morning because I couldn’t sleep in that sarcophagus my sister calls a bed and I collected about 100,, well maybe it was more like 5, soda cans and dirty dishes from the living room. If I didn’t know better I would have thought that Paul and Andrew had thrown a party during the night. I tidied up the bonus room and living room and then fed and watered 2 bearded dragons, 1 baby leopard gecko, 1 African Grey parrot, 2 cats and 2 ferrets. The dragon’s water was so putrid that I just about gagged. Why, oh why, does anyone have reptiles as pets?

I sent Bek a text telling her that I wanted to go to San Juan Capistrano to see blog writing superstar, “Crazy Aunt Purl”. Her second book had just been published and she was going to be doing a reading and meet & greet. Bek texted back and she said she’d come home and sit with the boys. I don’t know if she thought that Andrew needed a babysitter or if she just simply forgot that Jake was gone but I was shocked that she would even volunteer to stay home with the boys. I told her that I had wanted her to go, too, and we could have a photography field trip.

Paul was feeling kind of superior that he got to go on the road trip with us. I could tell this because he was almost silent most of the way. I think it was a big deal for him to get to ride in the Jag especially with Bek behind the wheel. I had Bek look up directions on Mapquest.com and I wrote them down. Sadly, she followed my directions the same way I follow directions given to me on a GPS. (Just in case you don’t remember…ask Mother how many times we wound up in the same stupid vacant lot on our last trip to Hawaii..) The map said to take the toll roads which made for a lovely drive. There was hardly another car on the road and the scenery was beautiful.. The first toll cost around $2.00 and there was a friendly person in the booth to take our money. We only went a few miles on that road before we were supposed to take an exit and Rebek exited 1 road before we were supposed to and of course there was no way to turn around and go back so we just kept on driving. The signs said that we were going to have to pay another toll so we decided that we’d ask the toll person where the heck we were and how to get back to where we needed to be. Lo and behold this toll booth was automated and unattended. Of course we thought this was very funny. We asked the machine for directions and the machine just would not answer us!! We paid the toll and Bek drove onward. We took the first exit from the toll road and it dumped us in to the middle of Tustin. (For anyone who is reading this who is not familiar with California…starting from the city of Riverside on the way to San Juan Capistrano…Tustin is completely out of the way.) It took us several miles before we found a gas station where we could go in and get directions to the 5 freeway and as if just to make us look even more stupid…the on ramp was just on the other side of the gas station. Once we got to the 5 and went a few miles we realized that if we had stayed on the toll road that we had gotten on to mistakenly…we still would have wound up on the 5. We. Are. Idiots.

It didn’t take any time at all to get to Capistrano but it took us almost 30 minutes to find a place to park. The library is right next door to the mission and since it was such a beautiful spring day there were a million people visiting the mission and it appeared as though every one of them each brought their own car.. We got lucky and found a spot at an adult school. We decided that if we were questioned about why we parked at the school we would lie and tell the parking police that we had enrolled in a class for remedial map reading!

When we got in to the library I’m sure Paul heard the angels sing. A room full of friendly women and a table FULL of cookies, cake, cupcakes, carrots, tomatoes, barcly, (that’s what Paul calls broccoli), dip, coffee, decaf, tea and water. I found a seat and saved the one next to me for Paul but of course he didn’t want to sit next to me. He had to sit in his own aisle behind me. Ok, fine. Laurie, “Crazy Aunt Purl, was out talking to people in the audience and when she made it down to my area I was so excited. I stood up and started talking to her and she was as cute, sweet and gracious as she could be. Paul was immediately up in her grill with dip and cookie crumbs all over his. I’ve never been so proud.

Bek took a couple of pictures of me and Laurie and then the nice woman sitting next to me took pics of me, Laurie and Bek. We had to take several shots because each time one of us had our eyes closed. I think Laurie and I were cut from the same cloth. (and yes, I do think it's a good idea to stop putting make up on half of your lower throat area, why do you ask?)

Laurie moved on to talk to other people and Paul engaged the lady sitting next to me in conversation. After about a minute I told Paul that he needed to be quiet and take his seat and the lady said that it was A Ok and that she was enjoying the conversation. I took that opportunity to go plug in my camera battery in so that I would be able to take more pictures later in the day. When I came back from finding a plug I saw Paul was playing paparazzi with his game box. It is so amazing how children, even man-children learn what they live. He likes to take the photographers stance of putting one foot out in front of the other and then he bends his front leg sort of like a semi lunge, and then snaps a picture. He is always very proud of the shot he gets and it doesn’t matter to him if it looks like his subject was jumping up and down.

Laurie was ready to start her reading and Paul went and barreled over a handful of unsuspecting ladies who were innocently standing at the dessert table. He didn’t really hurt anyone but I’m sure they were wondering what this obviously starving young man was doing at a book signing. Bek left the room and sat outside in the sun and read her book. Paul was talking to the woman at the table…I’m sorry to say that he wasn’t apologizing to them for mowing them over…I think he was discussing the pros and cons of decaf vs. regular and I think he also let them in on the little secret that he was going to have iced tea on his next round at the table. I could hear most of this from my seat so I turned around and gave Paul the death stare. He brought his 5 course dessert meal to his seat and sat down.

Laurie started her talk by introducing herself while Paul is sitting behind me giving a blow by blow commentary to everyone and no one regarding everything he was eating. I turned around and gave him another death stare.

“SORRY AUNTIE.” (‘just stop talking’. ) “BUT I SAID I’M SORRY AUNTIE!” (death stare.) “Grunt”. (death stare.)

A couple of minutes go by….BURP!!! (death stare.) “SORRY AUNTIE I BURPED!” (death stare, jut jaw and close eyes as I turn away.)

Another couple of minutes go by..”SLLLUUURRRRRRRPPPPPPPP!” (ignore, ignore)

“MMMMMM-ahhhhhhhhh, SSSLLLUUUURPPPPP!!” (‘knock it off right now or you are going to sit outside.’)

“MY TEA WAS GOOD, AUNTIE!!!” (‘stop TALKING!’) “BUT AUNTIE…MY TEA WAS GOOD!”

CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CHEW. CHEW. “HEY AUNTIE, DO YOU WANT SOME SALARY?” (‘noIdon’twantcelery! be. quiet!’)

This onomatopoeia fest continued throughout Laurie’s presentation. I didn’t take him outside because I knew that he wouldn’t have gone willingly and it would have created an even bigger scene.

As Laurie read her book the crowd laughed and Paul guffawed. I’m certain that there wasn’t a thing she said that he understood but this is one boy who knows his laughing ques. When she was done with the reading she did a Q & A and this was Paul’s opportunity to get another plate of snacks. I’m actually glad that he was distracted because I had visions of him raising his hand, getting called on and then asking to Laurie if she wanted some salary or barcly.

After the Q & A a line formed so that she could sign books and I just stayed in my seat waiting for the line to dissipate. Of course Paul wanted to leave as he always thinks there is something better to do. I explained to him that it wasn’t over and we would leave as soon as I was finished. The lady sitting next to me engaged Paul in conversation again and she was being so kind to him. She told me that her name was Connie and she was from San Diego.

I left Paul with her while I bought my book and had Laurie sign it. When I came back to Paul the kind lady’s husband was there and he was talking to Paul, too. As they left she gave me her card and asked me the name of my blog. She didn’t even write it down so I didn’t figure I’d ever hear from her so how shocked do you think I was when she wrote me a letter the very next day telling me how much she enjoyed my blog and how nice it was to meet Paul!

Connie and Laurie

I hope that Paul and I have made a new lifelong friend. It is very, very rare that people want to befriend this ever innocent man child and I want to take this opportunity to thank Connie from the bottom of my heart for going out of her way to be so kind to Paul. And I will apologize in advance for the first time Paul uses her shirt to wipe off his mouth.

The best way to keep your kitty fresh....

2010-05-26T11:50:00.000-07:00

Is to keep her in Tupperware!

These are the people to whom I pay huge amounts of money to care for the health of my kitties...

2010-05-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

Please don't confuse this with the animal hospital where Elijah lived last year. Not only do they know how to save lives ... they also know how to structure a sentence.

I thought I was seeing things....

2010-05-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

Would you or anyone you know EVER purchase this and/or put it in your hair???

Just in case you said, "Yay!!! Yes, I DO want to put something called 'Moco De Gorila" in my hair!!"..You can purchase this at the Walmart in Buena Park, California. Right down the street from Knotts Berry Farm.

I just can't get over how gross this is.....

I'd like to make an announcement....

2010-05-11T16:37:00.000-07:00

My niece, Rebekah, just got her high school graduation announcements. They say, "REBEHAHA".

I'm the meanest aunt in the world because it's been over an hour and I still can't stop laughing about this.

See! Even SHE thinks it's funny....

Is it just me.....

2010-05-10T15:49:00.001-07:00

Or are there other houses in America that have a bottle of rubbing alcohol or hydrogen peroxide with a Q-tip floating around inside?

Bloggers

2010-04-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

When I started blogging it was really only for my sister and my mother. They have always enjoyed my take on things so I recapped my weekends for them. Little by little my writings grew in to more than just things for the two of them. I started telling stories about my ever growing herd of cats, I started writing my occasional column called, "Free Paint" and my other column called, "Where's My Red Pen". I never, ever dreamed that anyone other than my two family members would be reading...and I never dreamed that I would get so caught up in the reading of other blogs. There is an entire world of people out there who write blogs. Pretty much all of them have more readers than I do and that's fine. I don't know if I could survive the pressure if I had had an actual fan base full of people I don't know.

Last week I attended a meeting of bloggers and as I sat in "Las Brisas" the beeautiful cliff side restaurant in Laguna Beach..and watched the following people come in one by one...I wondered if they ever dreamed that they would reach such great heights of popularity as they are all enjoying these days. All of them are simply women, (and one man!), who have the ability to put their thoughts in to writing and make me laugh just about every day. And to me they are rock stars!

Please meet Y from http://www.joyunexpected.com/ Suzanne from http://www.twentyfouratheart.com/
Neil from http://www.citizenofthemonth.com/
Meredith, who currently doesn't have a blog..

Kim from http://heartshapedhedges.blogspot.com/
Kirsten from http://coffeeteasodapoppeets.blogspot.com/
Beckey from http://hippobrigade.com/

And last but not least...the reason why we all met at this fabu place on a cliff...

Meet Georgia from http://www.iambossy.com/

Georgia, or Bossy as we tended to call her...is on a cross country trip on her "No Book Tour". Ford has given her a lovely car to drive that she has lovingly named Harrison. ("Harrison Ford", get it?) This is her 2nd cross country trip where she goes from state to state and meets up with groups of her blogging friends. I would love to say that I had a nice long chat with her and was as eloquent as I am when I'm speaking to anyone...however...I was dumbfounded the minute I met the 2nd person to arrive from this group. (I was worried about being late and I got there first!) As each person arrived I found myself turning more and more in to an intimidated goon. I was engaged in conversation by everyone pictured and pretty much every time I opened my mouth something a tad less intelligent than, "Um, duh..." came tumbling out of my mouth.

I hope to get a do over with all of my new friends so that I can prove to them that I am capable of stringing together a complete sentence...and I might even be able to make them laugh, too! (Look at me setting my sights all high and everything!)

I took some pictures this weekend...

2010-04-14T14:30:00.000-07:00

I took some pictures this weekend. I think I had more fun than the girls did. These are all just straight out of my camera..except for the last one. I played with it a little.

Can I take your picture next time?

Where's mah red pen?

2010-04-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

I saw this at the Huntington Beach Tuesday night street fair.

Free Paint

2010-03-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

Question: What is periwinkle, turquoise, chartreuse, and occasionally black and white?

I just don't get it.

For any of my new readers...

2010-02-24T11:36:00.001-08:00

The last post I wrote regarding Dave's lost weekend...

Just so you know..my big, white, deaf cat, Lorenzo has an alter ego. He thinks he looks just like Dave Navarro. (google him if you don't know who he is.)

That should clear things up.

:) Tami

Dave's lost weekend

2010-02-19T16:12:00.000-08:00

A while back I was away from home for the weekend and when I got home I did my usual greeting to my kitties, "Hello Kitties...did you miss me?" 6 of my 9 fur children come running towards me and try to trip me by circling around my feet and brushing up against my legs. Elijah is hiding behind the toilet as usual and Nort is under the bed. Lorenzo sometimes doesn't greet me upon my arrival because he doesn't hear me come in. I can usually find him sleeping in close proximity to wherever Elijah is because it it Lorenzo's goal in life to lord over Elijah. Since Elijah was in the bathroom I figured Lorenzo would be asleep on my pajamas that I always leave on the counter...but he wasn't there. I went to my bedroom and found Lorenzo laying on my pillow...I said, "Renzo, hey buddy...what's up?"

A gravely voice answered.." Why are you calling me Lorenzo? I am Dave, and I'd appreciate it if you could keep it down. I have a nasty hang nail and your voice is making it worse."

Me:
"Oh, Dave, long time no see. Sorry about the hang nail..let me go get my clippers and I'll cut it off for you",

Dave:
"YOU CAN CUT OFF MY HANG NAIL? SERIOUSLY?.. I've never heard of such a thing...um, where do you cut it?

I went and got the nail clippers and returned to Dave but as soon as he saw the clippers he curled his toes underneath him and said, "What are you doing with those implements of torture? I don't need a trim. You can put those things away!"

Me:
"You told me that you had a hang nail and I told you I was going to cut it off...now let me see your toes...."

Dave:
"I don't have a hang nail on my TOES~!"

Me:
"Well then...where do you keep your hang nails?"

Dave:
"Right where everyone else keeps them...in my head...in my stomach..DUH!"

Me:
"You have a hang nail in your head and stomach?"

Dave:
"Yes, now stop making so much noise and get me an Alka Seltzer.. I hear that should help my hang nail. "

Me:
"Alka Seltzer for a hang nail?" Pause...pause.."Dave, do you mean that you have a hang OVER?"

Dave:
"YES. Hang nail, hang over? What's the difference? All I know is that I have a huge headache and you are making too much noise..."

Me:
"So what did you do while I was gone? How did you get a hang over?"

Dave:
"Well, I found the stash of nip you had in the entertainment unit and I chewed and scratched on the plastic bag until I got it opened. Then I took a couple of whiffs and then I rolled around in it and I don't remember too much after that. I think someone took my picture.. I THINK I had a good time but I don't really remember much. Now can you get me something for my hang nail?"

I went to the kitchen to see what I could get Dave for his aches and pains and that's when I found these:

Me:
"DAVE...it looks like you were the life of the party..."

Dave:
"Yeah, well 'party' has always been my middle name..."

Me:
"Why do you have plastic wrap on your chest?"

Dave:
"Huh? Oh, cool...looks like I got a new tat!"

Me:
"Can I see it?"

Dave:
"Sure. I'm kinda curious as to what it says myself!"

I pulled the plastic off and looked at the tat...

Me:
"Who is Angel? And why are you wearing a wedding ring?"

Dave:
"OHMYGOD...THAT'Swhy my cell has been ringing off the hook... it's all coming back to me...I got married. Angel is my wife!!

Me:
"Well, mazeltov, dude. Who is this Angel gal?"

Dave:
"She is this awesome girl I met at the party. Some people think she is vicious but I think I can handle her juuuust fine. I thought there was a picture of her in that stack..look through them again...."

And that is when I saw Dave's beloved Angel...

TO BE CONTINUED

Very quick catch up

2010-02-17T14:12:00.000-08:00

Daughter in the hospital. Chronic ulcerative colitis. 3 blood transfusions and some antibiotics and now she's home.

Mother has first chemo appointment. Ok for a couple of days then WHAM! Sick as a dog. Mother in same hospital that daughter was just in. Given tons of antibiotics, tons of potassium, tons of fluids, one dose of Zoloft that made her hallucinate, and now she is home, too.

Make it stop.

Thank you.

Toooornaaadooooo....

2010-01-20T10:08:00.000-08:00

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN SAN DIEGO HAS ISSUED A * TORNADO WARNING FOR... ORANGE COUNTY IN SOUTHWEST CALIFORNIA... THIS INCLUDES THE CITIES OF...SEAL BEACH...HUNTINGTON BEACH...WESTMINSTER...GARDEN GROVE...IRVINE...FULLERTON...COSTA MESA...ANAHEIM... * UNTIL 130 PM PST * AT 1237 PM PST... NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM CAPABLE OF PRODUCING A TORNADO 17 MILES SOUTHWEST OF HUNTINGTON BEACH...MOVING NORTHEAST AT 30 MPH. * THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR... HUNTINGTON BEACH BY 110 PM PST... FOUNTAIN VALLEY... COSTA MESA... WESTMINSTER AND GARDEN GROVE BY 120 PM PST... SANTA ANA BY 125 PM PST... TUSTIN... TUSTIN FOOTHILLS... ORANGE AND 6 MILES NORTHWEST OF IRVINE BY 130 PM PST... PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... IN ADDITION TO THE TORNADO...THIS STORM IS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING THREE QUARTER TO ONE INCH HAIL AND DESTRUCTIVE STRAIGHT LINE WINDS.

Instruction:
WHEN A TORNADO WARNING IS ISSUED BASED ON DOPPLER RADAR... IT MEANS THAT STRONG ROTATION HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE STORM. A TORNADO MAY ALREADY BE ON THE GROUND... OR IS EXPECTED TO DEVELOP SHORTLY. IF YOU ARE IN THE PATH OF THIS DANGEROUS STORM... MOVE INDOORS AND TO THE LOWEST LEVEL OF THE BUILDING. STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS. IF DRIVING... DO NOT SEEK SHELTER UNDER A HIGHWAY OVERPASS. THE SAFEST PLACE TO BE DURING A TORNADO IS IN A BASEMENT. GET UNDER A WORKBENCH OR OTHER PIECE OF STURDY FURNITURE. IF NO BASEMENT IS AVAILABLE... SEEK SHELTER ON THE LOWEST FLOOR OF THE BUILDING IN AN INTERIOR HALLWAY OR ROOM SUCH AS A CLOSET. USE BLANKETS OR PILLOWS TO COVER YOUR BODY AND ALWAYS STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS. IF IN MOBILE HOMES OR VEHICLES...EVACUATE THEM AND GET INSIDE A SUBSTANTIAL SHELTER. IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE... LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS.

Sent: 2010-01-19T12:45:38-08:00

No where in this official memo does it say to run around like a chicken with your head cut off but that is precisely what happened when I found out that a tornado was headed for my neighborhood. I was home from work sick and I wasn’t even watching tv… Tori called me and asked me why I was still at home when there was a tornado fixing to touch down in Huntington Beach. At first what she said didn't compute and then when I realized what she was saying I had no idea what I was supposed to do. It was raining in every direction and there was hail bouncing off of the tin roof of my house. The wind was blowing and howling and it was very scary. I tried to turn my tv on but the wind had knocked the satellite out of whack so I had no reception for a couple of minutes. When it finally came on the news reporters were saying that if you lived in a mobile home in any of the reported areas then you needed to head for higher ground. So my first thought was that there was no way I was going to be able to round up all 9 of my cats and get them in to the car so I decided that Lorenzo and Elijah would be the two most vulnerable in the event that my house fell apart. I wasted a good 10 minutes trying to get either one of them in to the cat carrier. You would have thought there was a bear trap in there! There was no way that either one of them was going to ever SORT of get inside that box. I wasn't able to get either one of them even 1/10 inside of it. It was raining and hailing and making so much noise that Elijah was scared to death and my trying to shove him in to the box that takes him to the vet wasn't making him any less afraid. I wound up wrapping Elijah and Lorenzo in a towel, individually, and throwing them in the car. By the time I got inside the car Elijah was sitting under the brake pedal and Lorenzo was sitting right on top of him. It took me another 5 minutes to pry them out of that spot. It is amazing what cats can do when they do not want to be moved. There were 8 feet glued to the carpet. When I finally got Elijah out from under there there was white cat fur EVERYWHERE. And I mean it was flying like fairy dust. When cats get scared they hit the "eject" button and there is more fur in the air than on their backs.

We drove out of the mobile home park and up a residential street and it looked like a war zone. The rain was over the curbs and there were palm fronds and debris everywhere. It was a mess! My mom called to make sure that I was evacuating and then my brother in law sent me a text telling me they had just gotten word of a tornado in my area. I would expect this notification from my mom and sister but I was blown away when my brother in law took time out of his busy day to think of my well being. I told Tori this and she said that the person who alerted her to the impending disaster was her hair dresser who remembered that I lived in a mobile home in Huntington Beach. (It’s amazing the things that people remember. I barely even know the woman who called Tori. What an angel she turned out to be.)

I had only been able to make it a few blocks from my house when my mom called again and told me that the tornado had already blown through HB and was now on its way toward Tori’s house. So I slowly drove back home and me and my little boys sat in the car for a while. I wanted to make good and sure that the worst was behind us because I knew for certain that once I got the boys back in to the house there was no way I would ever get them back in to the car. (point in case..I never saw Elijah again once we got in the house and Lorenzo, who usually sleeps on me..slept on the other couch..and I caught him looking at me a couple of times and I’m pretty sure that he was thinking that he’d better keep his distance from me because I had obviously lost my mind.) Had we not been given the "all clear" I don't know where I would have gone. There was no way I was going to try to carry two scared and angry cats inside of a shelter and I wouldn't have left them in the car alone. I truly thank God that I didn't have to figure out what I should have been doing, but I think that I should come up with an escape route in case something like this ever happens again.

Tori called me again and told me that she went to Hannah and Jake’s schools to check them out early because she felt safer having them at home. Apparently many parents in the greater Riverside area wanted their kids home before any tornado ravaged the place because there was a mob scene at both schools. (Having been on the other end of that situation as a clerk at an elementary school… most parents don’t realize that the majority of schools are also designated foul weather shelters and school is pretty much the safest place the kids could be.) But anyway, she got them home and she said that of course by the time she got them both out of their respective schools it was sunny and bright and it wasn’t even raining anymore.

So…all’s well that ends well. Actually the only damage I sustained was a leak in my roof...directly on top of my computer. Mazeltov!

Final post about my European vacation LAST AUGUST

2009-11-20T13:43:00.001-08:00

I'm the kind of person who gets all excited if I run in to someone I know at the local Walmart. I am thrilled to no end if I'm lucky enough to get to meet up with friends in any of the local so. Cal cities in my area..so imagine my delight when I found out that we were going to be in Paris at the same time as one of my oldest and dearest friends!

I have known my friend, Greg Parvin, since my first day of high school. We were..(cough..cough..)highschoolmarchingbandgeeks together. He and his beautiful wife Jodi, were planning a trip to Paris to celebrate Greg's 50th birthday. They had a full schedule of touring and sight seeing and we were very lucky to get our schedules to coincide for even a few hours.

Of course we made no concrete plans in advance, (a huge habit of mine that drives IMOM nuts), so I was very happy when my phone rang that afternoon in Paris and I heard a familiar voice say, "BONJOUR!" It is hard to explain how funny it is when your friend, who grew up with you in the Mexican 'hood' of La Puente, who's only french lessons came off of 'YouTube', attempts to speak French. His enthusiasm made up for any lack of actual French speaking skills, but at least his skills didn't start and stop with "SACRE BLEU!", like ours did. (Greg did admit to us that his attempt at speaking French did back fire on him at least once on their trip to Paris...when he tried to fake his way through ordering dinner in French and wound up with salted cod on his plate. This, if I'm not mistaken is one of those dinners where you basically have a whole fish on your plate, head, skin, scales, and eyeballs.!!)

We agreed to meet up at a particular restaurant at 7:00 pm. Most people in Paris don't even think about eating dinner until 10:00 so we thought we'd be in like Flynn without making reservations. The joke was on us. The bistro turned out to have about 5 tables in it and they were all taken and there was a waiting list that would have put us at the table in a mere few hours. It was a hot and muggy evening and the idea of waiting all that time for dinner didn't appeal to any of us so we wandered around the streets of Paris until we found a restaurant that could accommodate two non meat eating diners, seat us immediately, inside and had air conditioning.

It's amazing how much one will compromise their demands the later and the hotter it gets. By the time we found a place that had 5 empty seats I was willing to eat cigarettes for dinner. The restaurant had a table for 5 so we marched right in. You know that amazing blast of cold air that hits you when you go inside of an establishment after you've been out in the sweltering heat?? Well, this restaurant didn't have that. In fact most places in Europe do not have anything in the realm of A/C. And they do not like to put more than 1 ice cube in your drink either, so I don't know how they manage to cool off. Most of the people sitting around us looked fine. We, on the other hand were all red in the face and ready to start discarding clothing

I can't remember what we ordered but every dish was different than we had pictured it. Rebekah and I got what they called ravioli but when it arrived it looked more like macaroni and cheese. It was very yummy but sadly the "ravioli" was about the size of a moon pie. It tasted good with the wine the Parvin's picked out and since the dinner was so little I was able to save room for tira misu. This was presented to me in a high ball glass! I had my doubts about eating cake out of a glass but I needn't have worried. It was heavenly. Sadly, Greg ordered some fancy pineapple desert that the rest of the table was going to share. I tell ya...we laughed and laughed when that plate arrived with a simple quartered pineapple with the tag still on the leaves. No cake, no whipped cream...no powdered sugar. We all agreed that we kind of thought of Paris as the place where you get fancy deserts. Sadly, the tag on the pineapple was as fancy as it got. I have a feeling that this story is one of those where you just had to be there...We spent the evening laughing our heads off but as I try to look at this event from an outsiders view...it's not very funny. Well, hopefully the Parvin's will read it and it will make them smile.

This next part is a little less "you had to be there"...

The next day we got on the train and headed back to London. We did as much sight seeing as my screaming foot would allow. IMOM had to leave to go back to California 2 days before we did and we only got to see him for a very brief moment the night before he left. So we were on our own for a day and a half before we had to get out of Dodge. Tori, Rebekah and I had a decent amount of English pounds left over and there was enough change in our pockets to almost warrant a wheel barrow. So what do you do when you have scads of foreign money and nothing but time? Of course you spend, spend, spend it with reckless abandon.

The day that we were supposed to leave we got up early and packed our bags. It was a tight squeeze but we still managed to get everything in our original 3 suitcases. We bid a fond farewell to our lovely apartment, squeezed in to the tiny elevator and checked out of the hotel. We weren't supposed to catch our plane until later in the afternoon so we left our luggage at the concierge desk and went to have one last leisurely look at London.

We had walked past this one particular restaurant several times during our stay and I decided that that was where we would have our last meal on this glorious vacation. It was called, "The ha ha Cafe", and we spent a good long time yukking it up.. Oh the fun we did have! Laugh, laugh, hardy har har. Good times galore....hoopla abounded....

How fun it was...
to laugh.

And then for some reason I thought to check the paperwork I had in my purse that had all of our flight details on it. I looked at the paperwork and I thought that I had to refocus because I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing. Have you ever really, truly, honestly had a moment in your life where your heart makes that boiiinnnng, striking a timpani sound that causes you to actually shake your head?? Well this was one of those moments. The paper work said that our flight was scheduled to leave at 12:00 PM. It was 3:00 PM there in the ol' ha ha Cafe in down town London, England. Even as I write this, 5 months later, I still get that sick feeling in my stomach when I realize that I had to tell Tori and Rebekah that a huge error has been made and even though they all had the same paperwork that I had and they had the same opportunities to check flight times as I did...I was the official tour guide of this vacation and thus I had dropped the ball. And in this case the ball was made of lead and I dropped it right on my own head. I looked up at them and I didn't know if I was going to laugh or cry when I told them..."This just in...we missed our flight."

Even though our first day back was supposed to be Rebek's first day of her senior year she was JUBILANT. "YES!!!", she shouted. She loves Europe as much as I do and I really think that she would have gladly stayed there for an extended amount of time given the opportunity.

Tori just sat there looking at me seething. Our first day back was also supposed to be Jake's very first day of kindergarten and now she was going to miss it. In this picture you can see that she was beginning to either plan my immediate demise or maybe she was beginning to see the adventure unfolding.

Even though I was almost hysterical with laughter we were all pretty much in a panic at this point. We paid our lunch bill and literally ran, (excellent exercise for someone with a nasty case of plantar faciitis!), all the way back to our hotel to see if the concierge could do anything to help us out.

When we got to the hotel we all started talking at once and I am pretty sure that that was as close to the Three Stooges that the concierge ever hoped to be. Tori went and stood outside to seeth and Rebek and I continued to try to talk to the concierge. I gave her my flight paper work and she immediately got on line and tried to see if there was any possible way to get us on our flight. I pointed out to her that the plane had departed over 3 hours earlier so she started looking for any other flights leaving for Los Angeles that night. While doing this she had also called American Airlines and had a brief, yet very meaningful conversation with a ticket agent. She smiled as she hung up the phone and told us..."You didn't miss your flight...your flight is tomorrow." So this whole tragedy stemmed from the fact that I didn't know what day of the week it was. Ahhh, the relief I felt knowing that Tori was going to get to take her baby to his first day of school and I wasn't going to have to call my boss and tell her that I would be needing to take an additional day of vacation until I realized that we were now officially homeless. We had already checked out of our hotel and my credit card was beyond maxed. I couldn't have bought a piece of gum on credit at that point.

Tori, Rebekah and I pooled our money together and with the exception of the money I had put aside for our taxi ride to the airport we had...drum roll please...35.00 Pounds Sterling. I asked the hotel manager, who had been standing there watching this whole thing unravel, if there was any room, any room at all, even a closet or an empty ballroom that we could use for one night and he said no. I was actually getting up the nerve to ask the concierge if we could go home with her when the manager said that he would see what he could do for us. He called around and finally found us a room at the Holiday Inn right next door to the London-Heathrow airport. We thanked him profusely for all of his "help", (but I still think that it wouldn't have killed him to find us a room in his hotel. I'm curious to wonder if he thought if he did give us a room did he think that we were going to go put the word out on the street that if you stay in his hotel in a very nice room for 9 days then cry alligator tears to the manager they will let you have a room for an additional night for the nice price of 35 pounds???)

We took a taxi to the Holiday Inn and I saved what little money I had left by not giving the driver a tip. (believe it or not...in London..taxi drivers do not expect tips so this wasn't a shock to the driver.) We checked in to our teeny weeny room and all breathed a sigh of relief. Here is a picture of Tori reading our flight information for about the 100th time just to make sure we had finally gotten it right.

We had one double bed and a cot squeezed in to a room that is about the size of most American walk-in closets but none of us were complaining. We spent the evening playing cards and reciting our favorite "Family Guy" one liners. (If you ever want to make Bek laugh just sing Peter Griffin's version of "The Little Drummer Boy"...)

We took a little walk around town and thanks to the fact that Tori had found a hidden 10 pound note we were able to have a festive dinner at the local McDonalds. This McDonalds had mozzarella sticks so Rebek and I were actually able to partake in a dinner at the most carnivorous restaurant on the planet. On the way back from McDonalds we found a little store that sold our favorite English treat, "Nobbly Bobbly" ice cream cones.

The next day when we checked in at the airport we were surprised to discover that IMOM had upgraded our seats from business to first class. That was an unexpected treat and I'm glad that Tori and Rebek got to have that experience. Of course now I fear that from now on when ever Rebek gets on a plane she is going to expect someone to hand her a mimosa and a bowl of warmed nuts.

Bummin' around Paris

2009-11-16T16:13:00.001-08:00

Our next adventure in Paris was the Fat Tire Tours Segway Tour. Tori and I did this last year and Rebek couldn't wait to get to ride a segway. At first we all balked at having to wear helmets but if you don't wear a helmet then you can't ride their segways so we acquiesced. The segways we were assigned had just returned from the morning's tour and the handle bars were grimy with sweat and God knows what else so Bek and I whipped out the hand sanitizer and went to town. (Helmet straps come with extra chins!)

We rode all over the place, over bridges and through the woods...

On this bridge that crosses the Seine a custom has been started where couples go to the bridge and put a lock on the cables representing their love being "locked in". After they lock the lock they throw the key in to the river. Some of the locks are just plain little locks...
And other locks are a little fancier....
There was even one sad couple who put a combination lock on the bridge. I don't know if they missed the point of the whole exercise or if they just got caught in the moment and used the first lock they could find.

Our segway ride ended in the park in front of the Eiffel tower.

After our tour we posed for some pictures...

and then Rebek spotted these girls giving out "Free Hugs", (http://www.freehugscampaign.org/):
I got to hug the huggers ..
but Tori was too busy taking pictures so the huggers were gone by the time Tori was ready for her hug ...so Rebek hugged her instead.
For anyone who has never been to Paris I have to tell you that it is such a beautiful city. Everything is pretty. Everything is nice. They work really hard at keeping everything just so... So when you see something like this is was no wonder that everyone was staring at him:
This guy had obviously been having a really bad day...or a really good day...I really couldn't decide which. He was already blasted out of his mind drunk when we saw him stumble in to this seating area under the Eiffel Tower. He had a grocery sack with 3 very nice bottles of wine, and a brand new cork screw. In another bag he had a brand new boom box, a new CD, a brand new set of head phones and a package of batteries. It took him quite a while to rip the cork screw out of the packaging and then he just flung the package to the ground. After he got the wine bottle open he just started chugging from the bottle. When he had quenched his thirst he then tore in to the boom box, headphones and cd and again just flung his trash all over the place. He was talking and laughing to himself the whole time. We sat and watched this guy for quite some time..but then as the sun shifted he go too hot where he was sitting and changed seats. This change caused him to no longer be down wind from us. Whooo Betty! In less than 2 minutes the smell was so bad that we had to pick up and leave. As we were gathering our stuff to leave I'm happy to say that he made an attempt at cleaning up his mess. Sadly, when he bent over to pick up his trash he just about fell on his head so he decided to just kind of kick the trash to the side. I'm sure in his mind he thought it was cleaned up reeeeal niiiice.

I wonder if it's not against the law to drink alcohol in public in France? This guy was openly drinking wine out of the bottle and was obviously very, very drunk and the police didn't bother him at all. However...on the other side of this park we watched some heinous criminals being hauled away by the Eiffel Tower police. These criminals were selling fake Eiffel Tower trinkets and they were being led away in handcuffs. Apparently free enterprise is a much bigger crime than public drunkenness.

While speaking of crimes/vs/non-crimes....On this very same afternoon I saw not one but two different families not only allowing...but encouraging and aiding their older than toddler children to relieve their selves in the garden at the Eiffel Tower. I don't care if you are 6 months old or 6 years old...urinating or defecating in public is wrong and yet no one in the park seemed to be bothered by it other than me.

What is your opinion on this??

(Believe it or not I still have one more post about Paris and then I'm done!)

More Adventures in Paris

2009-11-13T16:53:00.001-08:00

There are a few things in this world that push me over the edge. Two of those things are heat and crowds. Put the two of them together and I will pretty much fall apart without fail. I used to be prone to anxiety attacks but in the 10 years since I've taken anti depressant meds I have been pretty much anxiety free. Then all of a sudden I find myself in a foreign country, in 100 degree heat with about 500,000 of my closest world travelers in the most magnificent art museum in the world. It was really important to me to get to show Tori and Rebek the "Mona Lisa" and I was really excited about getting to do so. The walk from the taxi queue to the front door of the Louvre just about did me in. It. Was. Hot. As usual I expected the cold blast of air conditioning when we walked in side the building but was instead greeted with the muggy hug of a wet blanket. There were 100's of people in the lobby and there were lines to get in to everything. There might have been some air conditioning in that room but there is a huge sky light that allowed the bright French sun to come beaming down and envelope the entire lobby in a steamy, sticky fog. I was a little apprehensive once I took this all in but I decided that if I had a diet Coke in my hand then I would be good to go. So we stood in a line of about 50 people, I am not exaggerating, and I got my diet coke. In a can. Out of a box. With no ice. Ahh. Refreshing.

There is so much to see in the Louvre but at this point I decided that all I wanted to see was the "Mona Lisa" and then I was going to be done. So we followed the signs and the farther we got in to the museum the hotter and more crowded it became. I thought if I just barreled through the crowd then I could get to the salon that housed Mona, we could look at it and then get out of there. I got as far as this:

Mona is up another flight of stairs to the right but this here is all she wrote. I made 4 attempts at getting up and beyond those stairs but it was just not going to happen. It was just too hot, too crowded and there was no air up there.

At the top of the stairs is "Winged Victory" and so of course there was a permanent mob scene at her feet. You had to go up another flight of stair to get to the floor that housed Mona and the more stairs I climbed the hotter and muggier it got. I'd get almost to the top and then without even realizing it I'd be turned around practically knocking people over as I raced back down the stairs. Tori and Bek gave me pep talks, I gave myself pep talks...but it was just not in the cards. I think the deal breaker was this:
This is a very strong air conditioning vent in the hallway that led to the stair case that housed Winged Victory. It was behind a lovely white marble statue. I sat down on the vent and told Tori and Bek to go off and see what ever they wanted to see and if I could get my act together I would meet up with them, but otherwise they could find me right there when they were finished. In the hour that I sat there I had about 15 different people sit down with me. Everyone was red in the face and wondered aloud why it was so hot in that place. It made me feel better to know that I wasn't the only wuss who was over heated.

After seeing this picture I'm actually glad that I didn't force myself to make it to the Mona Lisa salon. As you can see the mob scene didn't stop at the top of that stair case. (This is Bek taking a pic of Mona. See all of those people with cameras.....Well, Tori got in trouble for having her camera out and not pointing it at Mona. The guard thought she was taking pictures of the people in the crowd and apparently that is against the Louvre law.) (I neglected to mention that Tori had gotten in trouble on the train to Paris, too. Tori had the nerve to put her feet up on the seat facing her and the ticket guy reprimanded her. He got away before I could point out to him that everyone on the train was also doing it...poor Tori. Rule breaker that she is.) (NOT!)

While I sat on the A/C I missed something other than all of the wonderful art work. Tori and Rebekah were looking at something when this boy walked up to Tori and said something about a picture. Tori thought he was asking her to take a picture of him and his mom. She agreed and waited for them to pose...however the boy floated over toward Rebekah and made it clear that he wanted his "picture taken with girl!" This is Rebek and Wang. He asked if he could correspond with her and so she gave him her email address. She asked for his email address and he gave it to her written in Chinese. His mother rolled her eyes at him and apparently told him to write in English because he took the paper back from Rebek and re-wrote it so she could read it.
After they were finished trying to exchange pleasantries they went their separate ways. Rebek told me that his English wasn't very good but I pointed out that it was worlds better than her Chinese!

We left the Louvre and even though it was still hot outside at least it wasn't muggy. We walked all over trying to find a place to sit down but seats were at a minimum. There are not a lot of bums in Paris but here is one laying on one of the few benches at the Louvre. Apparently the sun was bothering him because if you look really close you can see that he has his head inside of his bag.
And if you look even closer you can see that his finger in in his belly button.

We walked around the streets surrounding the Louvre and found ourselves inside yet another Mc Donalds. The prices were still as expensive but this one had something I never thought I would see: McBeer! (I had a picture of the McBeer cup but in my effort to move it on this page I erased it and now I can't find it.)

We found out that in a crowded place such as the McLouve Mc Donalds seats are at a premium. So if you are sitting at a table for 4 and there are only 3 of you some one is going to take that 4th seat and join you at your table. Apparently it's something that comes along with the territory because I saw it happen a half a dozen times before it finally happened to us. Fortunately you aren't required to make small talk with your temporary dining buddy but it's still kind of weird to have a stranger sitting at your table.

Can you believe it's probably going to take another 2 posts to finish my stories about Paris? Stay tuned.

The MUCH nicer end of Paris...

2009-11-10T15:32:00.001-08:00

Our transition to the Hilton was painless. The taxi took us right to the front door and a bell man immediately helped us in with our luggage. There were no reservation snafus, no complaints and no arguments. The staff were kind and courteous to a fault. Our room was beautiful and it had air conditioning. It was in the 90's that day so the blast of cold air as we opened the door to our room was a welcomed perque.

Our view of the Eiffel Tower was 100% better in this hotel 5 miles away than it was in the other hotel that was basically on the same piece of property.

And here is Bek standing on the coffee table in our room trying to get a picture of her with the Eiffel Tower in the back ground. (I don't know why but this picture cracks me up. If it was my table it wouldn't be so funny. And my mom took great exception to seeing Rebek standing on a table right next to a plate glass window...)

We decided to get cleaned up before we hit the town. The shower felt wonderful since it was so hot out side...I was a whole new woman when I got out. But imagine my surprise when I attempted to dry my hair and this was as far as the cord would go:
I had pulled it out as far as it would go. Actually we were lucky that there was a blow dryer INSIDE the bathroom. Europe has some law against having any plugs in the bathroom and thus you generally have to dry your hair in the living room or the hallway.

Before we left the hotel we stopped off at the Concierge Lounge and had some snacks. We started out on the veranda because there were seats galore out there. We had a beautiful view and couldn't imagine why no one wanted to sit out there...and then we found out why. There were bee's up there. We thought we could hang with the bees but then once they brought out their whole retinue we decided to join everyone else inside.
Even though my right foot was screaming at me we decided to take a walk along the most famous street in Paris...The Avenue des Champs-Élysées. We had been walking for about 10 minutes before I had to sit down. This beautiful flower garden was right on the corner of the Champs Elysees and the Rue de somethingorother.

We walked another 500 yards and then I needed a diet coke so we went in to a Mc Donalds. This McDonalds was HUGE. It was two stories and there were about 1 million people in there. Here is a picture of their price menu. The price you see is in Euros...so to convert that in to the American dollar you double it.

A little further down the road I spotted a beautiful french kitty sitting at a restaurant. I thought he was calling my name and asking me to pet him.

But apparently he was saying, "Leeef me ahlohne you ugly American! Ah deed nhot seh that yu could touch meh!"
(his tag said his name was "Totem".)

This is one of my very favorite pictures ever. I hate to have to admit that I'm not the one who took it, nor was the pose my idea. As we were crossing the street we saw some other tourist taking their picture in the middle of the street. I was too busy hobbling through the intersection to even notice that Tori and Rebek were out there risking life and limb for this picture.

We shopped in many, many stores. Every store had beautiful clothes and shoes and I would have loved to have shopped like Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman" however there was nothing I found that I could justify the price. I was in awe as we shopped around and watched people spending money like it was water. I know IMOM would have told me to get anything I wanted but this was just insane. I can't remember how much these shoes were but I took a picture of them because there were outrageously expensive. (And beautiful.)

We made it all the way down the Avenue to the Arc de Triomphe. By this time the sun was starting to set and the wind was picking up. I was so glad that it was cooling off but it went from too hot to too cold. I wanted to go up to the top but there was no way I was going to climb hundreds of stairs and pay 5 Euro for the privilege. (I found out, after I got home, that there is an elevator. Good timing.)

There's more where this came from so stay tuned!

Now on to Paris

2009-10-23T11:34:00.001-07:00

We caught the train at the St. Pancras International train station and of course we had to crack every "pancreas" joke we could think of. "Did I pack my pancreas?" "Don't touch my pancreas!" "My pancreas hurts!"...but I have a feeling that you really had to be there to enjoy the silliness.

The train ride took a couple of hours but I wouldn't have minded if ithad taken a couple of days. I love to ride on trains but I especially love to ride on trains where there is food and drinks served to you non-stop, there is laughs galore and the scenery gets more and more beautiful as each mile passes.

If you look really close you can see Tori's reflection in the left side of this picture of the French country side.
After several Bloody Mary's and about 100 hands of Gin Rummy Tori and Bek were very happy to get off of the train and let the world know that they were in France!
We hopped in to a taxi and had them take us to the Pullman Hotel in Paris. This used to be a Hilton property and I've stayed there twice before. I was familiar with that part of town and I really liked the hotel. I had to move heaven and earth to find out what it was called after Hilton sold it but I managed and I was very pleased with myself.

Annnndd then we got to the hotel. Wow. It was not quite like I remembered it.

In all of my European travels I've always been lucky enough to stay in really nice hotels with basically nice people. The people in France aren't really known for their warmth and adoration of Americans but I really never saw that side of them until I checked in to the Pullman Hotel in Paris, France. Tori, Rebek and I were the only 3 people in the lobby and yet the clerk at the desk was waaaay too busy to stop what she was doing to check us in. The 3 of us stood there wondering if we were being punked and then I finally spoke up and asked if she could help us. The clerk begrudgingly stopped what she was doing and checked us in. I reminded her that I wanted a room on the concierge lounge and I wanted a room with a view of the Eiffel Tower. She looked at my reservation and said, "Yez. I see you wequested a mini-suite wis a view of zee tower." "Are we on the concierge level?", I asked. "Yes", she said, "You are on zee concierge level." (I must point out here that you pay extra to stay on the concierge level because you get food and drinks from the concierge lounge.)

The clerk gave us our key and then stared at us. I asked if we needed a separate key for the concierge lounge and I just stood there in a state of disbelief when she said, "Noh. You don't need zee seperate key. Zee concierge lounge is closed for zee entire month of August." "WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME THAT BEFORE YOU CHECKED US IN?", I said in a voice that only dogs could hear. "Well", she said "...eets closed." We just stood there glaring at each other until Tori suggested that we just check in to our room and get on with our vacation. So we went up stairs to our "mini-suite with a view" and once again we thought we had to check for hidden cameras or to see if Ashton Kutcher was going to come out and tell us that we were being punked. Our "mini-suite" was previously a regular hotel room with a double bed, dresser and television. They had recently installed a lattice divider that separated the doorway from the rest of the room. In that small separation was a velvet couch about 2 feet long. (Kind of like the type of little stool that you would find at the foot of a queen size bed.) I stood there shaking my head not knowing if I should laugh or cry when the sound of Tori's voice shook me out of my stupor. "LOOK AT OUR VIEW OF THE TOWER!" I moved the curtain on the small window and yep...there was the tower all right. Well, not the whole tower but simply a small part of one of the legs of the tower. The rest of the tower was obscured by another building. I wish I would have had the foresight to take pictures of this insane situation but I was too mad at the time. I told Tori and Rebek that this is not what I ordered and we were not going to stay in this room.

We all marched down stairs and once again the clerk was very busy doing nothing and we had to hail her to get her to help us. I took a cleansing breath and was as nice as I could be when I told her that the room wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to be. It was much smaller than proposed and there really wasn't a view of the tower. (I didn't even bring up the concierge level snafu.) I told her that we would like a different room and that we would pay for an upgrade if necessary. Before I knew it the desk clerk was yelling at me about how I was the one who made my reservation and that I got what I asked for and she pretty much told me that if I didn't like what I had then I could just go somewhere else.

Oh. My. God.

I silently walked over to the lobby concierge and asked him to get the Hilton on the phone. He asked which one and I told him that I didn't care which one. (Apparently there are several Hilton's in France....but I'm lucky he didn't call the one in Honolulu!) And within 2 minutes I had secured a room at the Hilton across town near the Champs-Élysées. I had enough Hilton points accrued that our room would be free and they upgraded us at no charge so that we could have a room on the concierge level. Please congratulate me for not slapping the desk clerk as we exited the building.

Vacation part 3

2009-10-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

Once we arrived in Brighton it was only about a 5 minute walk to the ocean. It was a warm yet blustery day but I was still rather surprised at how empty the beach was when we got there. (This must be because at any given time of the year the beach across the street from my house is always over run with people no matter what the weather.) (ok, not so much when it's raining but that's not very often.)

Even though IMOM warned us that the beaches were full of rocks and pebbles I wasn't prepared to see this when we got there:

I thought that once we waded through the soft piles of pebbles that it would be hard wet sand the closer we got to the water....I was sadly mistaken:

IMOM was wearing dress shoes and long pants, (I think he did that on purpose), so he didn't elect to trudge through the pebbles with us. He did a quick retreat and found a sidewalk cafe. We were going to give him our purses and back packs but he was too fast for us. (I think he did that on purpose, too!)

The main reason we wanted to go to the beach was to look for sea glass. IMOM had never heard of such madness and he truly thought that I was making it up. When I told him that not only did I not make it up by I subscribed to a sea glass newsletter then he really thought I had lost my mind. He said that he couldn't think of a more tedious, boring or fruitless hobby. We all told him, "fine", and then we told him that we wouldn't share any of our booty with him! So for the next couple of hours Tori, Bek and I slowly walked along the uneven terrain of the shore in a half hunch to which only other sea glass explorers can relate. I've never searched for sea glass on a beach that had so much green moss or sea weed. The sea weed in California is brown and dull and doesn't resemble glass. Green sea glass looks quite a bit like green moss so there were a lot of false alarms but in the end we wound up with enough bits and pieces to make it worth our trip.

Here is Tori doing her best "Aztec Sun Tan Dance". (Please tell me if you recognize that reference or not...)

Another odd contrast to Orange County beaches is the height of the beach showers. The ones in the OC are very tall so that you can stand under them and wash your hair or get the sand out of your wet suit.. and there is also a much lower outlet in case you just want to rinse off your feet. Well apparently in England the showers are for rinsing off your mid-section or legs. Too bad for you if you have sand in your hair:

The people we saw at the beach that day were in various states of dress:

I am fully dressed while the kids behind me frolic in their undies.

Here is a Muslim family. The dad and one son are in bathing suits and one son and the daughter are wearing soccer uniforms. What you can't see is that the daughter, who is partially blocked by her brother, is wearing a soccer outfit and a pink turtle neck sweater. Oddly, mom's bathing suit looks just like her Sunday go to meetin' clothes or her sweats and tee shirts:

Tori took this picture of the artsy striped chairs. I don't even know if she knows she caught the honeymooners in the back ground.

Annnnd.... I've seen a lot of purchased cleavage at the beach but I have to say that none compared to this:

This is Tori and Rebekah sitting on a jetty type wall. You should have seen the rigmarole that took place in trying to get Tori up on to the wall. It is moments like this that remind us that we are no longer 18:

We could have searched for sea glass all day but we knew we were on a limited time budget so we took a walk on the boardwalk. There were many more people up there than there were on the beach. (It's just too dang hard to try to walk on all of those rocks.)

I'm not sure what this sign was for but I liked the pictures:

We checked in with IMOM at his sidewalk cafe. He encouraged us to eat lunch with him but there was a huge problem. His sidewalk cafe didn't serve diet Coke. And they didn't have any vegetarian options. So Bek and I went to the cafe right next door where they did have diet Coke and veggie burgers and we scooted our table up next to the fence and dined with Tori and IMOM like we always ate our meals with a fence dividing us.

When our appetites were sated and our backs were rested we resumed our walk. Imagine our surprise when we discovered you could buy G-Strings from a gum ball machine~

This was the biggest G-String I have ever seen!

This is a pregnant young woman all painted blue and wrapped in blue tulle. I'm not sure what she was supposed to be but she stood perfectly still holding a metal plate with cotton friendship bracelets on it. People would put money on her tray and then just take a bracelet. I hope she finds a better means of support when her baby gets here.

Some of the other things we saw on the boardwalk but I'm not posting pictures: a one man band, a marionette puppet show, 2 great danes up for adoption, cardboard cut outs where you stick your face in the cut out and take pictures, a penny casino and the longest line I've ever stood in to use a public restroom. (Coffee at breakfast, drinks on the train, drinks at lunch and the roar of the ocean. I thought I was going to die! I seriously thought about going to the front of the line and offering money for their spot!)

This beautiful piece of architecture is "The Grand". This picture does it no justice for it is truly a magnificent building inside and out. After our long day of searching for sea glass and going to the pier arcade, walking along the board walk and eating ice cream we wound up in here:

. The 3 of us were really looking forward to sitting at the elegant bar and shooting the breeze with a jolly old English bar tender. Of course our bartender from was Florida. We sat at the bar for a couple of hours where we ate snacks and drank adult beverages. (yay for vanilla vodka and diet Coke!) When it was time to go we all kind of headed off like amoebas. Everyone went in a different direction. First one of us had to go find a restroom and everyone else waited... then by the time the first person got back someone else had to go. Then we had to stop and address and mail post cards and then we had to buy souvenirs. I think at this point we had gone back to the bar and had an other drink.

We finally got out of The Grand and headed back to the train station. I have no idea how we didni't notive this on the way to the beach but it wasn't until we were on our way back that I saw the sign for St. Paul's Cathedral. It looked like any other building on the block until you got inside:

This was just one of the many stained glass windows. As far as cathedrals go this one pretty small but it was very old and simply beautiful. We had to catch our train so we really couldn't linger....Annnnddddd.....of course when we got to the train station we just missed our train by 2 seconds. By then I had to go to the bathroom again but we couldn't get off the the platform because we already put our tickets in to the turnstile. When our train got there we weren't certain that we were on the right train but I told them that if we weren't then I'd some how take a taxi to London because I was off on a hunt for a potty and couldn't be bothered with the petty details of whether or not the train I was on was going in the right direction. I had to go about 10 train cars up before I found a restroom and lo and behold, there with the door wide open was a man in mid pee. "Good job, Dude! Jeez, close the door!", I said as I went past the door. "The door's broken.", peeing dude said. I went through a few more cars before I decided that I, too would use the potty with the broken door. At that point I didn't care anymore. However when I got to that potty...turns out I did care! So I walked all the way back down to the car we were riding in and went beyond it and I finally found a working bathroom.

Once I was able to finally sit in my seat and just relax...a couple of other people came and sat down next to us. All of a sudden this dreadful, pungent smell wafted over to our seats...waft...waft... How could those people not realize that a tom-cat had sprayed on their luggage? Somehow it didn't seem to bother them even a little bit. I wish we could have said the same.

London Part 2

2009-10-08T14:58:00.001-07:00

IMOM had made the arrangements for our hotel. (He doesn’t spend enough time there these days to be afforded a flat so we now have to stay in hotels.) Weeks before our arrival IMOM went to the Crown Plaza Hotel and hand picked a mini suite for us. This would have worked out very well because it is right next door to Buckingham Palace and thus centrally located to just about everything. When we got to the hotel the desk clerk told me that the room we had reserved was unavailable but that it was ok because they downgraded us and now our room wouldn’t be so expensive. I stood there flummoxed wondering if I had heard her correctly. Tori and Rebekah and I looked at each other and then I asked her to repeat what she had just said....and yep...they were not going to give us the room that we had reserved for several weeks in advance but they thought they were doing us a big favor by giving us a down grade/less expensive room. Isn’t it the usual fare to upgrade someone when their reserved room isn’t available and let the hotel make up the difference in cost? I remained as patient as I could while I asked why our room wasn’t available. The reservation had been in place for weeks..it wasn’t like our arrival was a surprise. The clerk couldn't come up with a reason as to why our room wasn't available and I think I must have scared her because she went and got a manager. Between the two of them they couldn’t answer my questions. They insisted that I go see the smaller suite before I made any decisions.
The “mini suite” they showed us was a joke. For such an elegant hotel this room looked like something they threw together when a broom closet became available. The furniture was shoddy and nothing matched. This was the entire living room. All 6x5 feet of it. The living room was about the size of a walk in closet and the bedroom was only slightly smaller.

This was the view from the "mini suite":This greeting on the television showed their keen eye for detail:

(In case you can't see it says: London St James welcome MR Tami Wyatt. We hope you enjoy your stay. )

By this time IMOM had shown up it was a whole different story. They stopped showing us dumpy rooms and the next thing we know we are being shown luxury apartments that have full kitchens and views of London. THIS was more like it. When all was said and done we had an apartment that was bigger than my house and we were paying the amount that was quoted to us for our original “mini suite”. This was the view from our lobby. This was the view from our kitchen:

Although you can't see the entire bathroom it was huge.

I couldn't get a good angle to photograph the living room but it was a very nice size room. It had a 9 foot long couch and two lounge chairs, a coffee table and a desk with a chair and a lamp, a flat screen tv and a dvr, an iPod player and a HUGE picture window.

The kitchen came equipped with a washer/dryer, a sink, a microwave, a refrigerator/freezer, a stove and oven dishes for 4 and various pots and pans and linens. Oh, and the canisters were full of coffee, decaf, tea, sugar& cream.

We had our first dinner in London at the "Texas Embassy". That is about as close are you are going to get to Mexican food over there. It's a pretty sad commentary when I can honestly say that my gringo self can cook better Mexican food than we were served. Tori ordered tortilla soup and she was served a bowl full of tortilla strips and a tea pot full of tomato soup. She figured out that she was supposed to pour the soup over the strips and voila...tortilla soup London style. (Much to IMOM's chagrin we took a picture of her soup but now I can't find it...) After the Embassy we took Rebekah to her first pub. The drinking age is 18 over there and even though she is only 17 she never got carded. This was a traditional English pub that was smoked filled and packed to the gills with merry makers. In addition to the thrill of having her first drink at a pub I think Bek enjoyed the fact that this place had a couple of soccer teams there so cute blokes were everywhere.

On Sunday we took the train to Brighton Beach. We were amused at the difference between first class and regular seats on this train. See if you can spot the difference in these pictures:

Can you see the difference that $100.00 per ticket gets you?

>

Our trip to Europe 2009 part 1

2009-10-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

Ok, here is the beginning of my story..I hope it was worth the wait.

The night before our trip Bek had come over to spend the night. We were both so excited that we could hardly sleep. I was amazed at the size of her suite case and all that she had packed. Her mother and I have traveled the continent with various drum and bugle corps in our youth and we know how to travel light so it just always blows me away when I see someone with a suitcase the size of a mattress. I talked her in to going through her clothes and doing what she could to lighten the load. In the end she took out maybe 3 tee shirts.

Our plane wasn't going to leave until late in the evening and our pick up service was going to pick us up after work so I had to take Bek to the office with me. On the way to the office IMOM called and I answered the phone. It was only after answering the phone that I saw the motorcycle cop right behind me. I hung up as soon as I could and tried to give the police officer the "nothing to see over here...just move on"...look but it didn't work. I got pulled over. I'm not good at talking to police officers so I didn't even bother to try to explain why I was actually talking on the phone instead of using my blue tooth. I had just activated a “global phone” that I had borrowed from Verizon and my blue tooth wasn’t synced up to it. He was very friendly when he gave me my ticket and seemed kind of amused when I found my 2009 license plate tags in my glove box instead of on my plates where they should have been. What a way to start my vacation!

Later in the day my mom and my sister arrived at my office. As I was telling them my tale of woe they laughed because my mom had gotten a ticket that morning, too! Hers was for parking her car in the street on the day the street sweeper was scheduled to sweep that particular side of the street. I was hoping that this was not going to set the tone for the rest of our trip.

I had arranged for my oldest and dearest friend that I've known since kindergarten to use my car while I was away. She and her son were coming to my office via the city bus. She called to tell me that they had gotten off of the bus but couldn't find my office. I told her to start walking south and I'd send my sister to find her. In the 20 minutes that Tori was gone with my car I managed to 1. Almost have a heart attack because I couldn’t find my car keys..(which of course were in the car with my sister…) 2. Send my niece to my car to get my suitcase 3. Panic again because I couldn’t find my car keys. I was Lucy and Ethel and the 3 Stooges all rolled up in to one person! ( I couldn’t help it…I WAS EXCITED!)

When the town car,(Um I ordered a town car and they sent an SUV) arrived Tori was still off looking for my friend however my friend had already made it to my office. I was going to call Tori on her cell phone to let her know this but of course she had given her phone to Bek. When she finally came back down the street that we were on she could see that my friend had made it to the office and that our chariot was awaiting. We did a scene straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon trying to get the truck loaded and then say our goodbyes to my friend. (Tori and my friend hadn't seen each other in over 20 years and there was a lot of catching up to do~)

By the time we got to the airport I had finally settled down. Here Bek strikes a careless pose with our SUV:

We had printed our tickets out before getting to the airport so we didn’t have to stand in line. All we had to do was scan our passports and our boarding passes popped out of a machine.(YAY) But when it came to going through security, as usual my, sister had to go through 3 times before the alarm didn’t sound off. She never remembers to take the change out of her pocket and it gets her every time. (I thought we were going to breeze right through because I had begged her to wear slip on shoes. We usually have to wait for her to put her tennis shoes back on and it is just so much quicker to wear slip ons... and this time she did, but the metal detector still grabbed her.)

Because we had business class seats we got to hang out in the executive lounge at American Airlines. We hadn't even made it through the foyer before my cell phone rang. It was my cat sitter calling to tell me that Ashleigh had given birth to 5 kittens. I had put her in a huge dog kennel with a box and blanket and anything a mother could want and of course she didn't have the kittens in the box or on the towel...she had them the one spot on the kennel floor that was not covered.. on my white carpet. At the time this picture was taken she had only had 4 kittens. The 5th one was born before we hung up.

There was a huge gala going on in the lounge because AA was celebrating 50 years of flying to Brazil. The lounge was full of semi naked women dressed in huge feather head dresses and not much else. They were playing music and the ladies danced and shook what their mamas gave them.

When you go in to the lounge you get two free drink tickets per person and Tori and I have made it a tradition to have dirty martinis. We are semi nervous flyers and a martini always seems to make the flight better. (What? You don't drink your martinis with a straw, which causes you to put Brazilian feathers in your hair? Try it! It's fun!) (Oh, and I didn't write a post about it because I was still sick with mono when it happened but can you see what IMOM got me for my birthday...I'll give you a hint...it's a carat but it's not orange..)

I swear that I only had one martini but I can't for the life of me remember what was so funny in this picture:

I also can't remember what prompted Rebek to sit on my lap but I do remember that I was trying to lick her before she could lick me. She is very sly about her new fun game from Kenner....she will sidle up to you and act like she is going to give you a hug or tell you a secret and the instant you let your guard down she will lick your face! This also is a good time to explain the bright green thing and the bright pink thing we have around our necks. They are "document holders" but we called them "dork packs". It has only taken me 3 previous trips to Europe to realize that having your passport and tickets easily accessible is the key to easy travel. We knew that we looked dorky wearing them but it was sooooo much easier than having to dig through our purses or carry on luggage every time we needed to show these documents. (It also stopped me from clutching at my purse and saying, "WHERE IS MY PASSPORT??", every 3 seconds. And just for those of you who haven't traveled internationally, (MOTHER), you have to show them to a different person every time you turn around.

They called our flight and most of the lounge cleared out. The Brazilian gala disbursed and we all got lovely parting gifts as we exited. I gave most of my gifts to Rebek as I didn't need any flowery perfume or brightly colored nail polish. I did keep the lip liner and a deck of cards, an emery board and a couple of other trinkets. Here Tori and Bek look at all the booty:
We were among the first to board the plane so we had time for MAC Book photos:

We were lucky enough to have a non-stop flight. I watched 99% of the Renee Zellweger movie, “New In Town” and a couple of sit-coms before I went to sleep. I like to sleep on airplanes because if there is turbulence I prefer not to feel it! Tori is a bit more of a "nervous Norvis" because she can't really sleep on airplanes. She took pictures of her view from her seat...Here she is ...

Then here is Rebekah:

And then this is me:
They woke me up to eat and I don't know if it was the fact that I was still half asleep or what but I had no idea what to do with all of this silverware:Why would anyone need 3 knifes?

Our flight was very smooth and we didn't have any turbulance at all. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon when we landed in London/Heathrow. Tori and I had told Bek what a huge united nations it is when you walk through the airport so of course when we were there you could have done cartwheels down the aisles and not hit anyone. The airport was empty. I'm so disappointed that Bek didn't get to see the people from all of the different countries dressed up in their native garb. I found that to be very exciting on my first visit to Europe.

We were ablel to find our luggage on the first try. As a matter of fact someone had already taken the luggage from our flight off of the carousel so all we had to do was walk up and take it. (I'm always afraid I'm going to grab my suitcase off of the carousel and go flying down the way with my arm yanked out of the socket...)

We walked outside and it was a bit of a thrill to get to see Rebek see the typical "Nanny 911" taxi cabs all lined up. We jumped in to a taxi and we were off on our European adventure!

Stay tuned for more...

We interrupt this vacation blog (that is taking a month to produce)...to bring you these important messages..

2009-09-11T13:55:00.001-07:00

Ok, it's been a few weeks since my return from Europe and all one of you have been waiting patiently for my stories and pictures. I JUST got the pictures off of Rebekahs computer last week and I have been very busy going through them, sorting them and I'm just now starting to edit them. Hopefully next week I will start my vacation stories...

But for now...here are a few things I've seen and done since I came back from London...(in no particular order..)

A while back I mentioned "Stella" on Facebook and my reader asked me who she was....I have been remiss in introducing my newest feline room mate, so lo and behold...this is Stella.

She was born to Ashleigh on March 30, 2009. I think her daddy is a Maine Coon or at least part Maine Coon because she is huge. In this picture she is only about 5 months old and she is already much bigger than Nort and Matilda. She is actually bigger than Ashleigh. Below is a picture of her playing with her Uncle Lorenzo. He took very good care of her when she was a tiny baby and they still have a very strong bond. I have seen Stella bite his ears and yank on his tail and he just sits there and takes it.

Yes, I know Ashleigh is far too prolific and I do have plans to get her spayed. I'm embarassed to say that on my first day of vacation...I hadn't even left LAX when my pet sitter called to tell me that Ashleigh had just given birth to 5 more kittens. The instant she is done nursing this litter she is going in to get fixed. I have done everything short of nailing her tail to the floor in order to keep her in the house. (11 cats in a single wide mobile home is just insane.)

In other news...At the Huntington Beach street fair that is held every Tuesday night I saw this:

A YORKIE IN TENNIS SHOES!

He was wearing shoes on all 4 paws and he was just prancing around looking fabulous. He was far too busy to pose for a picture so I had to take this on the run with my cell phone.

And lastly, Rebekah and I take pictures of cute guys...on the sly... and then send them to each other. This was the last one I took:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm going to win a Pulitzer for that one....

Anyway...stay tuned...Europe pics and stories are right around the corner.

Vacation log #1

2009-08-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Last night at about 11:00 I discovered that I don't have a single pair of Levi's that fit my ever expanding hind quarters. I haven't worn jeans for a couple of months because it's been so hot so it was a complete and total surprise when I tried on all 3 pairs of my Levi's and couldn't button any of them. It's been in the mid 70's and pouring rain in London the last couple of days so I should be a real hit in my shorts! I'm hoping that Tori will have a spare pair of jeans that I can borrow. It'd like to think that I could buy a new pair in Europe but my last couple of visits have shown me that I do not fit in European clothes and now that I've gained a ton of weight I'm sure it will be even more obvious.

After I got done throwing a fit over my lack of Levi's I discovered that a bottle of shampoo had exploded inside my carry-on bag that matches my suitcase. This carry on bag was designed to fit on the handle of my suitcase so it didn't flop around and it looked so nice...Now I'm going to have to use a beach bag that is bright yellow and I'm sure it will be flappin' in the breeze as I walk through the airport.

As I was packing and Rebekah was going through her suitcase trying to eliminate things that she might not need...we had a lot of help as shown in the picture below:

That's Elijah inside the suitcase and Lorenzo beside it. No matter how many times we made Elijah move he was right back in there .2 seconds later. When Rebekah finally picked him up and put him on the couch...Stella has already taken Elijah's place inside the suitcase. Then this morning they all had to take turns sitting on top of the suitcases. I always imagine that they are thinking that if they hold on tight enough then they can go with me!

Before we left this morning I put Ashleigh in a huge dog crate. I know for certain that if I hadn't done this I would never have seen her again. The girl who is taking care of the kitties would never have been able to get Ashleigh back in the house if she got outside when I was gone. I hope Ashleigh thinks she has her own private condo instead of feeling like she's in kitty prison.

On the way to work this morning I was talking to IMOM on the phone. My bluetooth isn't properly synced up to my phone so I had to hold the phone up to my ear. Well...guess who got pulled over by Newport Beach's finest and got a ticket? Yes. That would be me. I'm hoping that this the beginning, middle and end of my bad luck for the next 10 days. Pray for me?

Time for Vay Cay Shun!

2009-08-12T16:09:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow Tori, Rebek and I are getting on an airplane and we won't get out of the airplane until we are in London. I have been running around like a chicken with my head cut off for the last week and while I've accomplished a lot I still feel like I've forgotten something....

1. I've done about 10 loads of laundry. I wound up getting rid of 1/2 of what I washed because I've gained so much weight in the last couple of months that none of my clothes fit anymore.

2. I've secured someone to feed the cats.

3. I've bought enough cat food to feed my cats for the next several weeks.

4. I've bought kitty litter.

5. I have a huge dog crate to put Ashleigh in because she darts out the door when ever it is barely even open and I don't think my cat sitter has the time or patience to sit and wait until Ashleigh brings her furry little ass home.

6. I have all of our airplane tickets.

7. I have all of our Eurostar train tickets for our side trip to Paris.

8. I have the reservations for our hotel in London.

9. I have the reservations for our hotel in Paris.

10. I have made arrangements to meet up with a dear friend of our who is going to be in Paris the same time we are.

11. I have received my "Global Phone" from Verizon. (So has Tori.)

12. I have received my orthopedic flip flops. (Sadly I'm taking my plantar faciitis with me.)

13. I have my passport and pass port holder.

14. I have updated and charged my iPod.

15. I have a book to read on the plane.

16. I have someone to pick up my car from my office.

17. I have made arrangements for a town car to pick us up and take us to and from LAX.

I have a mani & pedi appointment tonight and I think all I have left to do is pack.

Can you think of anything I left out?

Bon Voyage...
Tanu

Knock, knock..."It's for you..." Surprize party conclusion

2009-08-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

Our ruse for getting Mother all dressed up for her party was to tell her that IMOM was going to take us out to a nice dinner. Sadly, he wasn't even in the country at the time so he wasn't able to even attend the party, let alone take us out to dinner. I made the mistake of telling Tori that he wasn't coming so with that information she decided that she and the kids wouldn't need any dress up clothes. My mom and I were getting ready in one bathroom and Tori and the kids were getting ready in their bathroom. When we all met up in the living room it looked like Mother and I were off to Lady Astor's Ball and Tori and the kids were going to head out to the pool. Happily my mom didn't acknowledge this fashion faux paux.

Tori had to run out to her truck to retrieve some more of the party goods that we couldn't sneak in earlier. I was pacing around like a chicken with my head cut off and my mom was calmly sitting on the couch waiting for IMOM to show up.

The door bell rang and then there was a knock on the door. I looked at my mom and said, "IT'S FOR YOU!!!" She looked at me like I was nuts and said, "It's Tori. Go open the door and let her in." And I said, "YOU open the door." I'm sure she wondered why on Gods green earth I couldn't open the door when I was totally standing right next to it. As she headed for the door I lunged for my camera and had it at the ready. My mom opened the door and kind of stepped back when she saw friends of hers from elementary school:

Linda Walker Peace

Cathie Stewart Brown
Friends she made in the 1960's when she was in the East San Gabriel Valley Mother's Of Twins Club:

Joan Smith and Joy Allen
Then she opened the door to friends of mine from high school:

The son she never had, Greg Parvin
Noel Troy Lucia & her husband Dave
Kathy McLaughlin Mindiak
Then there were in-laws:

Son in law, Mike Pendell

Grandson in law, Mike Stoughton
And there were out-laws:

Mary McHugh and Kathy McHugh Yumi Tsurimoto
A former boss:

Pete Lucero

There was lot's of food and lots of fun had that night. The room was full of love for my mom and it was wonderful. All of these people drove over 100 miles in the searing southern California summer heat to wish my mom a happy birthday and there are no words to express how much it meant to me that they were able to do so.

Greg Parvin, Kathy & Mike Mindiak, Me, Tori, Michael J. Noel & David Lucia

Flo Kemp, Linda Walker Peace, Mother, Cathie Stewart Brown (Getting a picture of my mom where her eyes look open is close to impossible. Believe it or not her eyes are not closed here. It's just that when she smiles her eyes disappear!)

Greg Parvin

My son in law Mike Stoughton, my daughter, Amanda & Mother

Mary McHugh andn Kathy McHugh

Pete Lucero, Mother, Rachiel Lucero

Joy Allen, Mother, Joan Smith (Ok, now here my mom's eyes are closed. Sorry, but it was a nice picture of the other two! )
Mike Stoughton

Joy Allen & Joan Smith

Mike Mindiak, Mother, Kathy Mindiak

My high schooll friends. Betcha didn't know my nephew Paul went to high school with me, didja? (of course he didn't, but he insisted on being in the picture)
Noel Troy Lucia, Mother, David Lucia

Happy birthday Mother. Let's do this again when you turn 100! I LOVE YOU!

Surprize part 3

2009-07-20T11:18:00.000-07:00

On Friday morning we got up bright and early and made it out of the hotel at the crack of 1:00 PM. (My sister's children are NOT early risers. As a matter of fact we could have easily left in the morning when me and my mom and Tori woke up, did our running around and come back and they would all still be asleep.) We dragged them out of bed and threw them in the showers and they came out smelling sweet and fresh as daisies.

After the showers Rebek was brushing her hair and putting on her makeup...that is until Jake decided that he could do a better job.

Believe it or not Rebekah convinced Jake that since she let him put make up on her it was only fair that she get to put make up in him.

We adults tried to sit around and drink coffee but there were only 4 coffee cups in the suite and the kids had used them all the night before. We are not above washing our own dishes however there was no dish soap in our kitchenette. I looked through the cupboards and found that there were no more coffee cups. Not only that but I also saw that there were not nearly enough wine/beverage glasses for our pending surprise party. I called housekeeping and had them bring us additional coffee cups but I also wrote a note to leave for the maids asking them to bring us enough glasses to accommodate 20 people for a "SURPRISE" party. And I specified that I needed the glasses to be put away in the cupboards because it was a "SURPRISE" party.

When we were walking out the door as luck would have it the maids were working on the room right next to ours so I lingered behind as the rest of the family went to the elevator and I spoke to the maid and asked her to bring us enough cups for about 20 people for a SURPRISE party and I asked her to make sure they were put away so they wouldn't be obvious. I even gave her the note I had written so that she would know that this was in preparation for a SURPRISE paryt. She said ok and I thought I had everything under control.

We went to a mall and shopped until the boys couldn't take it anymore. I can't really blame them..we held them captive at the Victoria's Secret Super Sale for a couple of hours and they behaved very well. Rebekah and Hannah scored a couple of nice things but I didn't get anything because A. they don't sell mastectomy bras and B. anything else I found that I wanted wasn't on sale. I don't do a lot of shopping at Victoria's Secret...

After we had all the fun we could have at the mall we took the kids to Lego Land. The last hour of the day they allow everyone to get in for free. We were very fortunate in that they let us in almost an hour and a half early.

We went on quite a few rides and the boys had a blast. Lego Land is a very nice little amusement park. The foliage is lush and beautiful. We saw a hibiscus plant that had flowers that were HUGE:

We were able to see a lot of Lego Land in the little time that we got to spend there. We had to leave when they closed the park and I'm glad it was time to go because I had just about had enough walking around. (Mono. The gift that keeps on giving.)

We left Lego Land and then spent a couple of hours at a "Ross" department store. We girls all love to shop at "Ross" and Paul and Jake are always happy when they can play grab ass in a shopping cart. The shopping trip was a success. I think we all got something and the boys managed not to knock over any displays or cripple any innocent bystanders. We were all starving so we headed over to our favorite restaurant in the greater Solana Beach area; "Pizza Nova". They have the best garlic bread and pesto pasta ever. We all inhaled our dinner and just to make things official Jake picked up his drink by the lid and of course the lid became unattached from the cup which resulted in both he and me being covered in Dr. Pepper. Jake was wearing the knights costume he got at Lego Land and he very kindly put on a show for the other people who were also eating on the patio. Never underestimate the ability of a small child to tell a tale when they are outfitted like a knight and they have a wooden shield and a plastic sword.

When we got back to the hotel Tori and I almost had a heart attack. When we got inside our suite we were greeted with a virtual sea of glassware. There were over 50 glasses all displayed on the bar in our little kitchenette. We all just did our best to ignore the imaginary neon light that said "SURPRISE PARTY TOMORROW NIGHT" that was flashing over the glasses. What part of "please make sure to put the glasses away in the cupboards" did they not understand?

Thankfully my mother was blissfully unaware of why we were given so many glasses. I think she just thought that every suite gets a deluge of stemware and ours just happened to arrive a day late.

The next morning we pretty much went through our same routine. By the time we got out of the hotel it was past lunch time and we were all starving. Our priority was trying to find someplace new and exotic to eat. Because we are all adventurous and carefree...we wound up eating at Subway. I guess that's just the way we roll. With a vegetarian and a 1/2, and a man child that can mow through expensive cuisine we were much better off going to a place where we knew that we could get something for everyone on the cheap.

We still had to pick up a few things for the party so we made some excuse as to why we had to hit up a grocery store. Tori and the kids held my mother hostage at a bagel shop while I literally ran through Ralph's throwing wine and soda and chips into my cart. When they left the bagel shop Hannah sent me a text to let me know that they were on their way in so I parked my cart off in a corner and ran to greet them at the door. As luck would have it the grocery store was having a "cake walk" and I rushed everyone over so they could participate. I ran back to my cart and paid for my goods and then went and put everything in the back of the truck. I made it back to the cake walk and I'm sure I was red in the face and sweating but my mom didn't even notice. Oh, and P.S. Tori won a cake! How nice of Ralph's to provide us with a birthday cake!

Ok, this brings us to the evening of the party and this story will be concluded....in my next post.

Surprise! Part 2

2009-07-17T13:44:00.000-07:00

When last we spoke I was telling you about the splendor of our suite at the La Costa Resort and Spa. It was obvious that the kids were overwhelmed but we adults were trying to maintain our cool. I felt like such a total goofball for being almost speechless until Tori came up to me and said..."Why do I feel like Ellie Mae?" That cracked me up. (For anyone who is too young to understand that reference...Ellie Mae was the hick daughter on "The Beverly Hill Billy's" television show of the '60's.)

We got settled in for the evening and just kicked back and relaxed for a while. Then Tori, Hannah and I decided to go sit in the jacuzzi for a while. I am not a fan of any sort of community pool of water but especially not Jacuzzis. All I can think is that I'm sitting in someone else's used bath water. People tell me that it's ok because the chlorine will kill any germs that happen to be floating around but sadly I don't like the idea of sitting in chlorine any better than I do sitting in someone else's filth. However I wanted to be festive and I know how much Tori likes to sit in a jacuzzi so I put my bathing suit on and threw on one of the big terry cloth robes provided by the hotel and we walked down to the pool.

That is Hannah's hand. And those are purple bags under my eyes. Do you like what the water in the air does to my hair?

Tori and Hannah Bathing Beauties

There is just something about being in my bathing suit out in public at night that makes me feel like I'm walking around in my underwear. During the day time I don't have that feeling but as soon as the sun goes down..it's a different story. (Does anyone else feel this way or is it just me, again?)

Once we got to the jacuzzi I was happy to see that there was no one else there and we had the whole pool are to ourselves. Tori was the first one in. She loves to sit in hot, hot, hot water. I was just going to stand on the 3rd step and hope that the warm water would ease my aching feet. Well, imagine my chagrin when I stuck my toe in the water expecting the first step to be at least 6 inches under the water only to discover that it was actually only about 2 inches below the water. I plowed my toes right in to the first step and almost took a header right in to the water. I. Would. Have. Died. I didn't die but I did scream the "F-word" loud enough for just about anyone at the hotel to hear. When Tori saw me do this she said, "Oh, did you hit your toe? The water is really shallow on that first step..I did it, too." THANKS FOR THE WARNING SISTER O MINE!

We stayed in the jacuzzi for about 30 minutes and then I decided that I'd had enough so we went back to the room. I decided that this would be an excellent time to sit in my own jacuzzi in the master bathroom. The hotel provided sea salts to add to the bath and I thought that sounded so soothing that I just couldn't wait to ease my tired body down in to the warm water and just let the stress of the day wash away. I needed to rinse my bathing suit out so I didn't bother taking it off and it's a good thing I left it on because....

I have no idea why these pictures are so small. They are from Tori's camera and apparently they shrink when they are emailed. I will try to make them bigger but I don't have a lot of faith in my computer wizardry.

Jake proceeded to jump and hop and swim and splash and kick and play with all of the jacuzzi controls and make bubble beards and bubble wigs and have more fun than a barrel full of monkeys. After about 30 minutes of this I was exhausted and I got out of the "pool". Jake stayed in until his fingers were wrinkled. By the time he got out of the tub the bathroom looked as though a porpoise and an otter and a seal had been in there with him. There was water dripping from the cathedral ceiling and Jake had a smile from ear to ear.

In an effort to keep my tiara, Miss Mononucleosis 2009, I was the first one to go to bed. I bid everyone a good night and I sank in to the delux sheets and pillows on my bed. Just as I was drifting off I heard Jake walk in. "ARE YOU SLEEPING MOMO?" "WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING? IT'S VACATION." "CAN I SLEEP WITH YOU?" "I DON'T WANT TO SLEEP WITH YOU." "CAN WE WATCH TV?" "CAN WE LISTEN TO THE RADIO?" "CAN YOU GET ME SOMETHING TO DRINK?" "WHY ARE WE AT THE HOTEL?" "WHY ARE YOU TIRED?" "LET'S JUMP ON THE BED!" "CAN YOU TAKE ME TO THE POOL?"

This is pretty much standard fair whenever I spend the night with Jake. Usually I can just fall asleep and he will eventually get bored with me not answering him but apparently that jacuzzi bath envigorated him because he was on a roll. I finally had to tell him that I was really tired and he needed to go back out in to the living room and leave me alone. He didn't kick up a fuss but it was obvious that I had hurt his feelings. As he left he said, "I'll leave the light on for you so you don't get scared." And he turned on every light in the bedroom and the adjoining bathroom and the hall way.

It's nice to know that someone is looking out for me.

Surprise Party!

2009-07-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

Have you ever tried to give someone a surprise party? If you have then you know the feeling of being hyper sensitive to everything that is said around the surprisee before the party takes place. My sister and I had scheduled our annual beach trip weekend, (my mom, Tori and I spend a weekend in Carlsbad every year.), and IMOM offered to send us to The La Costa Resort & Spa instead of the usual motel. I figured that since we were going to get to stay in such nice digs we should take advantage of the situation and throw my mom a party for her upcoming 70th birthday. I didn't think she would be suspicious because her birthday was not for another month.
I was able to get email addresses of her friends and Tori called the few who don't have email. I would have loved to seen Tori in stealth mode as she attempted to get in to my mom's drawer that holds her rolodex without my mom watching. She sits on the couch right next to the drawer so Tori had to wait until my mom left the room before she could even open the drawer. The fact that Paul didn't say, "HEY NANA! MOM IS WRITING DOWN PHONE NUMBERS FROM YOUR ADDRESS BOOK..." is nothing short of a miracle.

In the weeks between corresponding with my mom's friends and the actual party there were about 100 times when I almost offered updates on people I had no business talking to. My mom would say something about one of her friends and I caught myself getting ready to say, "Oh, when I talked to her the other day she said....." There were so many times that I started a sentence and then would just say..."I...I..I forgot what I was going to say..." Thankfully my mom never caught on or at least she acted like she didn't have a clue.

Tori and her kids and I went down to the resort in advance so we could see how big the rooms were. We thought we were so smart to do this in advance so that we would know for sure that we had enough space to hold a party. Sadly we were not as smart at we wanted to think we were because we did this on Memorial Day weekend. Not only could we have walked faster than we were going on the freeway...but there were no rooms available to be looked at. We decided that since there was nothing we could do at the resort then we would stop by the Carlsbad Flower Fields and take pictures of the kids. Imagine our surprise when we got to the gardens and saw that they had pulled every single one of their plants. There wasn't a flower to be seen for acres and acres.

I wound up having to make our reservations over the phone with the room sight unseen. The reservationist suggested that we use the Presidential Suite if we were planning on having a party. I told her that that sounded lovely however I was sure we couldn't afford anything that included the word "Presidential". She told me that the suite was discounted at 60% and I told her "We'll take it!"

We headed down to the resort on a Thursday evening. Tori's Escalade was packed to the gills which was a good thing because then my mom couldn't see the poster boards full of pictures or the bottles of alcohol. On the ride down there which was a little over an hour from my house...each one of the kids referenced.."When my dad comes down on Saturday...." and somehow it never registered with my mom that my brother in law isn't usually one to join us on our yearly get away. Even though this happened 4 times we thought we were still stealth and we were good to go.

When we got to the resort I went to the lobby and checked us in while the porter unloaded the truck. They have large golf carts that they use to take you to your room. It made us all feel very important and tres chic. Paul jumped in to the front seat with the driver and the rest of us squeezed in as best we could. We were heading down the sidewalk when the driver welcomed us to the resort and then said, "So, who's birthday is it?" We were all wide eyed and dead silent. Once again I was waiting for Paul to smile and say, "It's Nana's birthday!!", but he remained quiet and then we all started talking at once. I said, "It's Rebekah's birthday next week", then Rebekah said, "Yeah, my birthday is next week. I'm going to be 17.", then my mom said, "And my birthday is next month" and then Tori said, "But we're not here to celebrate a birthday this is just our yearly beach weekend." And then more dead silence. I was trying so hard not to just laugh and blurt out our secret but I remained calm.

The porter walked us to our room and before we even went inside the room we bunch of hayseeds were totally impressed.

Our room had mahogany double doors and they had tied a huge bow on the door handle. And let me tell you...if that impressed us...what we saw when we opened the door was enough for all of us to let out audible squeals of disbelief.....

Our room was beautiful. We stood in the foyer looking like a collective Bambi in headlights. The kids started running around and me and Tori and my mom just kind of stood and took it all in. This "suite" was bigger than my mother's house. It had two bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 5 closets, 5 telephones and 4 flat screen televisions.

(This television got the most attention because it was in the Roman style bathroom over looking the sunken jacuzzi style tub. The kids just couldn't get over the novelty of having a tv in the bathroom so they spent many hours sitting on the tile floor watching cartoons.)

On the bar there was a delightful plate of chocolate dipped strawberries and a card. I swiped the card and stuck it in my purse. When I had a moment of privacy I opened it up and sure enough it was a birthday card. Dodged another bullet.

Before I knew it the kids had devoured the strawberries AND the chocolates that were on all of the bed pillows. They were absolutely bouncing off the walls with excitement. As if having candy strategically placed through out the room wasn't fun enough...Jake found something that was even better. "MOM! AUNTIE!! Come and look at this little sink in the bathroom!!!" "Little sink"? Could it be that they accommodate little people in the Presidential Suite? Well...no. It was the bidet. Tori tried to explain to him how it was used and he was certain that she was making it all up. We tried so hard not to laugh at his reaction that I'm sure that is what made him think she was pulling his leg.

Part 2 to follow.

Just in case any one is wondering about how Elijah is doing....

2009-07-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

Here are two pictures I took of him a couple of weeks ago with my cell phone. It's kind of hard to tell what he is doing..but take a look at them and see if you can tell what's going on....

He is being ever so helpful by walking around on my back while I bend over the sink to brush my teeth.

Obviously he is feeling very healthy.

How do you like his "poodle cut"? The fur on his legs is growing back slowly but surely after his stint in the Fountain Valley Pet Hospital. At one point he had an IV line in all 4 legs.

Finally, the 2nd part of my fascinating health story...

2009-06-30T15:38:00.000-07:00

When I wrote the first part of my fascinating health story I left you hanging with me in the ER of Huntington Beach hospital.....

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful....

The day after my ambulance ride I had my mom take me to the doctor. My mom took me to see the doctor and at first I was irked because when I don't get to see the doctor of my choice I always feel like I'm forced to see the doctor who has the most time on their hands, and of course they have time on their hands because they are probably a crappy doctor and no one wants to book an appointment with them. However..I was so sick at this point that I didn't care if my appointment was with Dr. Bombay. (for you youngsters..."Dr. Bombay" was Samantha's witch doctor on the original "Bewitched" series.)

I was very relieved to find that this doctor spoke English very well and he actually had a sense of humor. He asked me a million questions and ordered further blood tests and asked me to get my lab results from the emergency room and come back to see him in a couple of days if I didn't feel any better. My mom and I went to the hospital and easily got my lab reports. I really figured that it was going to be a monumental hassle as is anything to do with hospital paper work but this time my mom walked in there and 25 minutes later came out with my lab sheets.

My mom took me to her house so that she could take care of me. It was a huge relief to not have to go back home and attempt to take care of myself. When I am by myself and I'm sick I will not eat. I don't eat if I'm not hungry and I don't drink if I'm not thirsty and if I don't feel good that usually trumps everything so I don't eat or drink, which is how I wound up in the situation at Albertson's. My mom is the kind of nurse who will cook or purchase anything in the world that you might want to consume and usually just the idea that she went out of her way is enough to inspire me to eat something.

I thought that being back in my childhood home would make me feel better but unfortunately I had seen nothing yet. As soon as night fell my fever went up and up and up. I was taking 800 Motrin piggy backed with 2 extra strength Tylenol. That helped a little but there was some times when it didn't touch the fever. My mom called the doctor to see if we could up the milligrams of meds but he said no. Instead he wanted my mom to take all of the covers off of me, take my pjs off and wash me down with luke warm water and put a fan directly one me. If I had one ounce of strength I would have gotten up and ran out of the house. The absence of blankets was bad enough but when the fan got pointed on me that was torture. I did my best to deal with it and fortunately it worked like a charm.

We went back to see the doctor with my ER lab reports and the doctor couldn't believe his eyes. My heart rate was way too high and my sugar rate was way too high. He asked me if I had a history of diabetes a couple of different times. I guess he just couldn't believe me when I told him that I didn't have diabetes. I told him that other than the high fevers my biggest complaint was a serious pain in my back. So I left that appointment with a referral to have an ultra sound scan of my kidneys, a referral for a Holter Monitor and a lab slip for more blood work.

Luckily the Holter monitor didn't reveal any heart problems and my blood sugar report came back within the normal range. (Later I was told that the heart rate was probably due to the fact that I was scared from the episode in the grocery store and the sugar was probably high because they took my blood after hooking me up to my IV which was pumping sugar in to my veins.) (As I write this I still haven't heard anything about my kidney scan and it's been 4 months!)

My fever continued to rise and fall and I slept and slept and slept. When the fever rose so did the pain in my back. If I didn't have a gall bladder I would have sworn that I was having a gall bladder attack. At one point the fever was so high it made me throw up.

Test after test the doctor still couldn't find what was causing the fever. Fever is a sign of infection yet nothing appeared to be infected. The doctor asked me a million more questions none of which led him to any reason for my fevers. I told him that I had had mono as a teenager and wondered if I had it again. He looked at me and laughed and flat out told me, "You don't have mono." Ok, fine. I don't have mono. He gave me a prescription for Levaquin and some big whopping shot of some other antibiotic and told me to come back in a few days.

By the 5th time I had seen this doctor he was ready to test me for everything under the sun. I brought up the possibility of mono again. He asked me if I worked with children or teenagers and I told him that I didn't. I told him that back in 1999 my ex-husband had been diagnosed with hepatitis C after we had split up. I told him that I had been tested for that and for every STD known to man kind and all of the tests were negative at the time. So, he sent me to the lab again and had me tested for hepatitis and just for "shits and gigs" he also had me tested for the Epstein Barr virus. EB causes mono.

I was very happy to find that I didn't have any of the hepatitis's and I was not really surprised to find out that I had a whopping case of mono. Once you have it it remains in your system but 99% of the time it will be dormant. There is really no rhyme or reason why my mono reared it's ugly head but the doc told me that the "titers" on a mono test usually show up as .01 and mine were 5.0. He kept looking at the results and shaking his head. He couldn't believe someone of my age and demographic had mono. He wrote me a note for the month of February off of work and sent me home. No one loves a vacation more than me but the idea of being at home sick for a month didn't excite me. However it didn't take me long to realize that I was free to sleep for as much as I wanted and let me tell you....sleep I did. I slept 17 hours at a stretch. My mom made me eat and drink when ever I woke up and it was usually a fever that made me wake up.

IMOM came to visit me, which I thought was very brave of him. He brought me a bouquet of roses and 2 bottles of Perrier. I'm happy to report that even after seeing me with sick-bed head and wearing flannel pajamas that were two sizes too small...he still says he loves me.

When I went back to my own house Lorenzo still woke me up at 6:00 am and at 6:00 pm. That is when he eats and he had no sympathy for my plight. All of the kitties were happy to have me home and they were usually piled up on me as I slept.

During the last week of February I tried to get up and move around in order create energy so that I would be able to go back to work. It was really hard to drag myself off of the couch but I was happy about getting to go back to work. I like having a reason to get up in the morning and I had had enough of sitting around watching day time tv and playing with the cats.

When I went back to work it was no fun to get up in the morning but once I got started I usually felt pretty good.

It is now June 30th and I have had some peaks and valleys. The peaks are simply weeks when I am able to come home from work and do something before going to bed at 10:00 pm. The valleys are days like yesterday when I get home from work, feed the cats and go to bed at 6:00 pm and still don't want to get up when the Lorenzo T2000 wakes me up. I've seen my official primary care doc and she says that all of my blood work looks good. She ordered a scan of my liver and a mammogram. The mammogram results were "within normal range" and that is enough to make this cancer survivor want to dance. I need to call in to get my liver results and hopefully they will still have the results from my kidney scan from February.

I'm supposed to go to Europe in August. Hope I can stay awake.

An answer to the question.....

2009-06-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

Sunday, June 28, 2009 1:07 PM
From:
"Jason, as himself"
Jason, as himself has left a new comment on your post
"So have you abandoned your blog for Facebook? :) ."

Dear Jason and Kathy, Mother and Tori,

You are my 4 most ardent readers and you have no idea how happy it makes me to know that even 4 people in the blogsphere miss me. I have not given up my blog for Facebook. I do have things to write about and pictures to post and I'm glad that I haven't lost all of my readers.

While I'm 98% better than I was, pertaining to my bout with mono...I still have many days where I come straight home from work and go right to bed and sleep for 13 hours. I'm trying to do things to create energy, like not head straight to the couch upon my arrival home, but it's a long, hard road.

Thank you so much for checking up on me. I'll be writing again very soon.

Love,
Tanu

Meme

2009-05-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have been ignoring my blog for a few weeks. It's not that I don't have anything to say...heck, I left you guys in the middle of a story...I've just been busy. So here is a riviting meme about me me. I hope I have even 1 reader left. Hi Mother!

1.You have 10 dollars and need to buy snacks at a gas station:Diet Coke with a lot of ice, caramel Ho-Ho’s, Tiny Size Chiclets

2. If you were reincarnated as a sea creature, what would you want to be?Dolphin.

3. Who’s your favorite redhead?
My cousin Sandy and her daughter Trisha

4. What do you order when you're at IHOP?Plain ol regular pancakes and decaf

5. Last book you read?.
“While My Sister Sleeps” by Barbara Delinsky

6. Describe your mood?
Bored

7. When was the last time you were injured?
This morning when Lorenzo was insisting that I get my ass out of bed and feed him he scratched me pretty deep. I know he didn’t mean to but his claws are very long. I am not able to cut them without assistance and so far no one has offered to come over and help me...(I have this situation with all of the kitties except for Elijah. They clipped his nails when he was in the hospital.)

8. Of all your friends, who would you want to be stuck in a well with?
The one with the tallest ladder in their hand.

9. Rock concert or symphony?Rock.

10. What is the wallpaper of your cell phone?
A picture of me, my sister and my niece from when I was in the emergency room on Super Bowl Sunday.

11. Favorite Soda?Diet Coke. There is no other soda.

12. What type of shirt are you wearing?
Pink girly tee shirt

13. If you could only use one form of transportation.
Jet pack

14. Most recent movie you have watched in theatres?
Night at the Museum (I thought it was very medium.)

15. Name an actor/actress/singer you have had the hots for?
My Keanu

16. What’s your favorite kind of cake?
I’m not really a cake fan, but if I have to eat cake it would be because I wanted the frosting...and in that case it would have to be German Chocolate cake with coconut pecan frosting.

17. What did you have for dinner last night?
BK Veggie Burger

20. Favorite toy as a child?
Baby dolls

21. Do you buy your own groceries?
Well, I tried sending Lorenzo & Ashleigh out to do it but they just came back with nothing but Greenies and sparkly cat nip toys so I am forced to do it myself

22. Do you think people talk about you behind your back.
Ya think?

23. When was the last time you had gummy worms?
I don’t like gummy worms.

24. What’s your favorite fruit?
Cherries

25. Do you have a picture of yourself doing a cartwheel?
Although I was the cartwheel queen in my youth I don’t believe there is any photographic evidence to back it up.

26. Do you like running long distances?
No, nor do I like running short distances.

27. Have you ever eaten snow?
Yes. It didn’t taste as good as I thought it would.

28. What color are your bed sheets?
Beige and light teal and brown, with white and grey cat hair thrown in for a little zing.

29. What’s your favorite flower?
Daisy

30. Do you do ballet?
I was a total ballerina as a child and teenager. Now I’m too fat to don a tutu.

31. Do you listen to classical music?.
Yes.

32. What is the 1st TV Theme song that pops in your head?
The theme to “Family Ties”

33. Do you watch Sponge bob?
Not usually

34. What temperature is it outside right now?I have no idea. I ‘ve been inside since 8:00 am and it’s now 11:22. It looks sunny and bright but there is a breeze.

35. Do people consider you smart?
As long as you aren’t asking either of my ex-husbands.

36. How many piercings do you have?
None.

37. Are you signed in on AIM?
Right now? No. They frown on instant messaging at work.

38. Have you ever tried gluing your fingers together?
When I was going to manicure school I super glued my fingers to someone else, does that count?

39. How do you feel about your family?
I love them more than anything.

40. Do you have an iPod?.
Yes and I used just about every day. The hardest thing about listening to an iPod is resisting the urge to sing along.

41. What time do you go to bed?
After I wake up from falling asleep on my love seat.

42. What CD is currently in your CD player?
A mix cd that I made. It has Aerosmith, Jimmy Buffet, Clash, and a bunch of others that I can't remember off the top of my head.

43. What movie do you know every line to?
Pretty In Pink, 16 Candles, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Arthur, Arthur 244. What is your favorite salad dressing?

45. What do you want for Christmas this year?
A segway. Get right on that won’t you?

46. What family member/friend lives the farthest from you?
My boyfriend lives in London, does that count?

47. Do you like hugs?. From the wino on the bus? No. From my friends and family?
Yes.

48. Last time you had butterflies in your stomach?Yesterday. I had a doctor appointment for my yearly physical.

49. What’s the way people most often mispronounce any part of your name?Instead of saying Wyatt they say, “Watt” or “White” or “Wy-At”.

50. Last person you hugged?Rebekah

Back to my fascinating health story....

2009-05-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

When last we discussed my health I told the story of my inability to walk in a straight line. For the majority of the last 2 years this was my biggest health problem and once I found out that I didn't have a brain tumor I didn't really worry about it. Aside from running people off the sidewalk and the occasional "shuffle off to Buffalo" move to get me back on track it really wasn't that big of a problem. At least not for me. Now my mom or my sister might have a different take on the matter since they are usually the ones I'm running off the sidewalk or grabbing on to as I veer off of the beaten path.

But let's go back to about August of last year. My sister and I got back from our trip to Europe and I was sooooo tired. I had the worst case of jet lag EVER. I did what I could to catch up on my sleep but I just couldn't get over the heavy feeling of complete fatigue. I got sick with the flu in late August and it just kicked my butt. I missed a couple of days of work and did nothing but sleep. I went to the doctor and was told, "It's a virus. There is nothing we can do. Go home. Drink plenty of fluids." So I went home and went to bed.

Then September rolled around. I got the flu again. I thought this was strange. I usually get sick once a year and then I'm fine. But to get sick twice in two months was a bit much.

October. By this time I'm not going to lunch at work any more. When 12:00 comes around I am dragging myself out to my car and going to sleep. This makes the afternoons much more tolerable. If I don't take a nap by the time 2:00 rolls around my head is actually bobbing from trying to stay awake. And I got the flu. Again. I went back to the doctor and was told the same exact thing by a different doctor.

November. Now, not only am I sleeping in my car during lunch I am going home directly from work and going straight to bed. On a big day I'm able to stay awake until 7:00 and watch Jeopardy. And of course...I was flat on my ass in bed with the flu, again.

December. Everyone is out Christmas shopping, decorating, eating, drinking and being merry...and I'm sick in bed. I was so sick that I seriously considered skipping Christmas all together. I was afraid that the rest of the family would get what I had. I decided that I would totally regret not being around my family for Christmas and went out to my sister's house. No hugs, no kisses. I kept my distance from everyone. I spent most of the Christmas eve and Christmas day asleep on my sister's couch. I get the time between Christmas and New Years off from work, (Thank God.), so I got to sleep, sleep, sleep. I felt a little bit better just after Christmas but by New Year's eve I was down and out again with the flu. I saw yet another doctor and was told that I had a virus and there was nothing anyone could do.

January. The two weeks off of work really helped me out a lot. I was able to rest up and get some of my strength back. I was no longer sleeping in my car at lunch and I was able to stay awake at night until the crazy hour of 9:00. Just when I thought I had been able to rise above this relentless virus I GOT SICK AGAIN. I thought I was in bad shape from September to December...HA! This time around was about the sickest I've ever been. I had a whopping fever. I had chills. I didn't eat. When I slept I had nightmares. I coughed until I thought my lungs were going to come flying out of my chest. My head was killing me. But all of this paled in comparison to the ache in my back. If I didn't know better I would have thought that I was having a gall bladder attack. (I had my gall bladder removed in '05.)

On Superbowl Sunday I was at home. I had depleted my Gatorade and my Tylenol. I was burning up from the fever. I didn't know my temperature because I didn't own a thermometer. I knew that I needed to do something about my fever before my brains started to melt out of my ear so I called my sister and asked her if she would go to the store for me. Mind you, my sister lives like 50 miles away so this was a pretty ridiculous request. She told me that she had a house full of people but if I was totally desperate she would go get me fluids and medication. I realized that it would be silly for her to have to leave her party and make a 100 mile round trip so I told her that I would be fine. After I talked to her on the phone I felt a little better so I decided that I would just throw on a jacket and go to the grocery store myself. (Mind you..I haven't bathed in approx. 4 days. It wasn't pretty.)

So I got my down jacket and a scarf and bundled up. I went to Albertson's market and got Gatorade, Tylenol and a thermometer. As I was standing in line to pay I started to feel a little light headed. When it got to be my turn to pay I started to get my wallet out of my purse and suddenly I was blazing hot, the room started to spin, my heart started to beat in my throat and I knew I was going down for the count. The lady at the cash register asked if I needed some help and I couldn't even answer her. I stumbled a couple of steps away from the cash register and sat down on a bottled water display. By then I was sweating and the room was spinning like I was riding on a Tilt-O-Whirl. I couldn't even hold my head up. Several grocery store employees were trying to ask me questions but I couldn't even speak. They asked me if I was on any medications and I tried to tell them that I wasn't on drugs nor had I been drinking. (with it being Super Bowl Sunday I assumed that they assumed that I was probably drunk.)

Within 5 minutes of parking it on the bottled water display an ambulance and a fire engine arrived. (I've always wondered why the fire department accompanies ambulances. Nothing was on fire and we didn't require a ladder.) My hands were completely numb and drawn up towards my torso. The EMT asked me a bunch of yes/no questions. I could nod or shake my head so we were able to communicate. They needed to take my pulse so they tried to take my jacket off. Unfortunately my scarf was caught on the Velcro on the jacket so I managed to get strangled as they pulled on my jacket. It was sweet relief to get that down jacket off. They put me on a stretcher and loaded me in to the ambulance. Even as sick as I was I still could not believe that I was being put in to an ambulance. It was scary!

They put the "pulse ox" thingy on my finger and we headed out for the hospital. They asked me if there was anyone I wanted them to call for me. I managed to get my phone out of my pocket, which was not an easy task for someone with stiff and contorted fingers. I hit the redial button and they were able to talk to Tori. Looks like she was going to make the trip out to Huntington Beach after all. After they hung up from talking to Tori I asked them to call her back and tell her not to tell our mother about this. As nice as it would have been to have her there for comfort, I didn't want her to be driving on the freeway with all the Superbowl Sunday partiers, in a panic.

The EMT took my blood pressure and told me that I was having an anxiety attack. By this point I could form words and told him that I knew from anxiety attacks and this was NO anxiety attack. I told him that I had been sick off an on for the last 4 months and that I had a fever and was obviously dehydrated. He continued to tell me about anxiety attacks and that I would be ok and blah, blah, blah. I finally asked him if he'd ever heard of an anxiety attack happening to someone who was taking Lexapro on a daily basis and also....did he ever hear of an anxiety attack causing a fever...? He had to admit that the answer to both questions would be no and then thought about what else could be happening.

The entire ambulance ride didn't take 5 minutes. We got to Huntington Beach Hospital and they handed me off and rode off in to the sunset.....with my cell phone.

Once I got in to the emergency room they took my temperature and blood pressure. They monitored my heart and took a chest xray. Temp=high, blood pressure=low, heart rate elevated, chest films=clear. They gave me 2 extra strength Tylenol and hooked me up to an IV and told me to rest. The fever was giving me the chills but they wouldn't give me a blanket. They told me that the fever was doing it's job and if they warmed me up then I would be defeating the work of the fever. Well, Mazeltov!

Tori and my niece Rebekah made it to the hospital in record time. They got to come back and sit with me and listen to the lunatic in the bed next to me. She had been in a fist fight with her male neighbor. She wanted to talk to, cry to, whine to, complain to, ramble on incessantly to anyone who would listen. She snagged a police officer who listened to her as long as he could until he finally asked her what exactly did she want him to do for her. She wanted her neighbor arrested but the cop told her that if the neighbor was arrested then she would have to be arrested, too. She had her two little kids with her and she wouldn't allow the nurse to take them to the waiting room. Those kids were all over the place playing and fighting and wandering around. Just what people who are sick enough to be in an ER want; two kids whooping it up and a rambling idiot who doesn't know how to shut up.

After freezing to death in the ER for about 5 hours they told me that my blood work came back and everything was ok. I simply had a virus and there was nothing they could do about it. I just needed to go home and go to bed and follow up with my primary care physician as soon as possible.

I honestly thought that the hospital doctors would be able to find out exactly what was wrong with me so when they gave me the same virus speech that I had heard 5 times before I was a tad disappointed.

The next day I had to fess up and tell my mom what had happened because I needed a ride to the doctors office. I couldn't get an appointment with my primary care physician so I had to see someone else in the practice. I have failed to mention that through out this whole ordeal I haven't once seen my primary care doctor so I never even dreamed that I would get to see her this time either.

To be continued....

Good News

2009-04-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

I get to bring Elijah home tonight! The doc wants him to keep his feeding pik line and I have to learn how to use it in case Elijah's appetite doesn't improve. He is eating as well as possible considering he is wearing a cone collar around his neck. That thing impedes eating and cleaning. I take it off of him the instant I get to his cage and he usually starts to groom himself immediately. Then he usually tries to eat a little bit. I don't think he likes the canned food they are feeding him and I can't say that I blame him. It is venison and jeez louise does it stink!

I'm going to set up a huge dog crate for Elijah and hope that will prevent him from jumping or climbing. If I know my cats...I will probably come home tomorrow and find him hanging from the ceiling of the crate by his toe nails. I'm hoping the crate will also help to re-introduce Elijah back in to the family. He's going to have a lot of different smells and he's going to be weak and I'm certain the other varmints in the house will be offended and try to give him a smack.

(Speaking of the other varmints....Lorenzo and Ashleigh decided that breakfast time was at 4:00 this morning. I have the scratch on my nose to prove it.) (Oh, and no! I did not feed them at 4:00. I got up and surveyed the perimeter, concluded that everyone was well and accounted for, confirmed that there was dry food and water available and then I went back to bed. Lorenzo followed me in to the bedroom, jumped on to the night stand and pushed the clock radio on to the floor.)

I have taken many nice pictures of Elijah that were specifically for this post however the card reader that I purchased just this afternoon doesn't work so these pictures of this other good looking guy are just going to have to do for now:

Yep! My Keanu won the celebrity Long Beach Grand Prix this weekend and my friend, Christi, was there to take pictures. Thanks for sharing the pictures, Christi!

(Man, do I wish he would shave that beard....)

A quick note from the home front

2009-04-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

When Lorenzo, (Elijah's father), wants my attention he resorts to rearranging the little things in my house. When I don't get up at the crack of o'dark thirty to feed him he will very purposefully push my clock radio off of my night stand. There have been a few times when he scored big time by managing to knock the clock on to my sleeping head.

He has no problem pushing dishes off of the sink counter or sending framed pictures in to flight off of the bakers rack. None of these moves require much skill or precision.

Apparently he has had some time to hone his mad skillz because yesterday I came home to discover this:

Yep. That would be my sterling silver watch in the bottom of his water bowl. I don't know what he's trying to tell me but I think I'd better start listening with both ears.

Lately I've been concerned with the health of someone else....

2009-04-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

Most of my reader(s) know that I have 5 cats. I didn't plan to have 5 cats and I know that 5 cats is an excessive amount of cats. Especially for someone who lives in a single wide mobile home. So all of that aside...here is what has been going on with me and one of my cats for the last week.

On Friday, April 3rd, I came home from a wonderful date with IMOM. We celebrated my birthday which was last month but I was too sick to want to do anything. I got an amazing birthday gift but that's whole 'nother blog post. Anyway....I came floating in to the house on cloud 9 and almost stepped in cat barf. OMG. It was everywhere. My first thought was that Nort, my kitten who had a rough start in life...(read back in my blog under "Nort Report"), but Nort was running around being her little goofball self so it obviously wasn't her doing the puking. I went in to the bathroom and there was poor Elijah. Apparently he had been throwing up for a few hours. I cleaned him up and then cleaned up my carpet and the bathroom floor and then I sat in the bathroom and held him on my lap hoping that would help him to feel better. He didn't throw up again until way early the next morning. He threw up 10 times between the hours of 6:00 AM and 9:00 AM.

Saturday early AM
I found a box and put a bath towel in it and loaded him in to the box. When he didn't fight to get out I knew he was a sick kitty. I put him in the car and he just layed there and cried. Of course by the time I got on to Pacific Coast Highway he decided that he didn't want to be in the box and was trying to climb out. Fortunately there is a vets office about 3 miles from the house so I was able to drive with one hand on the wheel and one hand on Elijah. (No, I don't own a cat carrier. My kitties do not like to ride in the car and thus I do not take them for rides. )

The vet said that it sounded like he probably had a foreign object in his belly and they needed to do some xrays. About an hour later they called me back to look at the xray. That could have been an xray of a lizard and I wouldn't have known any different. The doc said that it looked like Elijah had a "linear foreign object" in his intestine. His plan was to give Elijah barium and then wait a while and xray him. He would do this repeatedly until they could see exactly if the foreign object was actually blocking the intestine or simply interrupting the flow of things. The doc told me to go home and they would call me later with a report. When the doc called he said that the barium xrays indicated that the foreign object was blocking the intestine 99% but that 1% of non blocked area would allow them to try to flush the blockage from the other direction.

On Sunday they were going to give Elijah an enema and hope that between the barium coming from one end and the enema coming from the other end it would pick up the blockage and move it out. After they gave him the enema the vet clinic called and said that the enema had really cleared Elijah's innards and now he was a dirty mess. (I found out later that they had given him 3 enemas.) They asked me if I wanted them to bathe him before I came to pick him up. I knew he wasn't going to like having a bath but he was a pretty dirty little boy just from throwing up and. I couldn't imagine how he must smell after having an enema so I told them to go ahead and bathe him. A couple of minutes later they called and told me that they would have to sedate him in order to bath him. I told them that would be ok. Then they called me again and said that since he was sedated did I want them to go ahead and neuter him. I thought that would be a good idea so I told them to go for it.

After work I picked him up and brought him home. He was not a happy camper. Who could blame him? He'd been poked and prodded from both ends and when he woke up he was missing body parts. I put him in his bed and I got him clean towels in case he wanted to lay on the floor. He wasn't allowed to eat or drink but I don't think he wanted to anyway. I held him for quite a while and then I put him in his bed so he could get some uninterrupted rest.

Tuesday
That morning he was supposed to try to eat and drink and I had meds that I was supposed to put in his food. He was not interested in eating so I just left his food in there with him hoping that he would feel like eating later. By the time I got home from work it was obvious that he hadn't even sniffed his food. He had thrown up a couple of times but I figured that was to be expected after having abdominal surgery. Later that night he started throwing up again but now when he retched he would scream. It was the most awful sound I've ever heard coming from a cat. I hate to say this but it reminded me of the sound my elderly grandmother would make when the grand kids would accidentally step on her toes. He continued to throw up through out the night.

Wednesday
By the time the sun came up I had him in his travel box so I could take him back to the vet which I thought opened at 7:00 AM. WRONG. They open at 8:00. I need to be at work at 8:00 and since I had just taken an entire month off of work I didn't think they would look too kindly at me coming in late. So.. I raced Elijah back home and flew to work. All morning long I fretted over taking Elijah back home when I knew that something was wrong with him so at lunch time I drove home as fast as I could and loaded him up and took him back to the vets office. When I got there the receptionist told me that the doctors were all out to lunch and that I had to wait for them to return before they would take the kitty. I explained that Elijah had just been in their care and was returned home in worse condition than when I originally brought him in. I begged her to let me leave him there and just have a doctor call me when he returned from lunch. To my amazement she agreed so I left him there and went back to work.

Just when I returned from work the doctor called me and told me that they had to do exploratory surgery. Since he had resumed throwing up that indicated that the blockage was still there. I agreed to let them do the surgery and was glad that something was really going to be done to take care of the problem.

About 30 minutes later the vets office called me and told me that Elijah had gone in to cardiac arrest. They wanted to know if I wanted them to do CPR. "YES!", I said. " DO CPR! DO IT NOW!" It took them about 20 minutes but they were able to get him back. They told me that they were not equipped to handle such a critical situation and I needed to come and get him and take him to an emergency hospital.

When I got to the vet they brought me a heavily sedated kitty wearing one of those stupid cone collars. He looked like he had been wrung through the wringer. His eyes were glazed over and his little tongue was actually hanging out of his mouth. His mouth and rear were both green from all the bile he had passed. It turned out that Elijah had swallowed over 6 feet of black thread. It had wrapped around the back of his tongue and then went down his esophagus and through his stomach, small intestine, large intestine and his colon. They had to open him up in 8 different places to take the thread out because it was tangled up all over the place. The doc said when they first found it they tugged on it hoping that it would just come out but when they pulled on it hard enough to dislodge it...both ends of Elijah's body came off the table.

I had to drive about 7 miles to the emergency hospital and apparently that is just enough time for some of the sedation to wear off and cause Elijah to want to attempt to climb out of the box and try to sit on my lap. This made the drive very challenging.

The emergency hospital took him in right away and had him hooked up to fluids and pain meds. I had to stay in the lobby while they took care of him. After about an hour they came out and told me that Elijah was a very sick kitty and was going to require a lot of care. I had to fill out forms and pay in advance. They took xrays and did an MRI and they looked at his incisions. He had a pretty bad infection and they were going to treat it with antibiotics for 24 hours but if the incision drainage didn't improve greatly they were going to have to do another surgery to find out what the heck was going on.

Thursday

Elijah had a pretty rough night. His drainage was still very heavy and he was still throwing up in spite of anti-nausea meds. They put him in the hyperbaric chamber in an attempt to flood his body with oxygen. Oxygen should have caused his infection to start to clear up but it did little good. They called me and asked me to authorize a 3rd surgery.

They opened him up and did a lavage on his abdomen and they discovered a thrombosis (blood clot). They removed the thrombosis and left his incisions opened so that it would drain faster and heal better. The surgeon also installed a pik tube. This is a feeding tube embedded in to the stomach. They wrapped him in gauze and red ace bandage from stem to stern and took him to the recovery room. They let me come in to see him and he was still quite "gacked out" on anesthesia. He was the floor, on top of several blankets with a warming blanket on top of him. There was a tech holding oxygen tubes up to Elijah's nose. I wasn't able to stay in recovery with him for very long. I guess they just wanted me to be able to see that he was still alive and didn't have another post surgical cardiac arrest.

Good Friday

Early in the morning they offered Elijah some baby food meat. He gladly ate it and then spent the rest of the day throwing it up. They gave him anti nausea and pain meds so he had a very quiet day. Later in the evening they tried to feed him again and had the same results so they fed him through his pik tube and resumed his anti nausea meds.

Saturday

Still throwing up. Still on major amounts of drugs. Spent 90 minutes in the hyperbaric chamber. When I came to visit him for the evening visiting hours he was much more alert and even seemed happy to see me.

Sunday

Imagine my utter happiness to walk in to the critical care ward and see my beautiful little boy sitting up!!! He had been laying down for over a week. It also looked as though he had attempted to clean himself up a little bit.

Monday

Well now he's just showing off! They have taken most of his heart monitors off and they have removed some of his IV lines. He was sitting up and his eyes were wide open. When he saw me he chortled in his own cute little way and he purred. He rubbed all over me and talked to me as much as he could. The surgeon saw me and came over and told me that Elijah was finally holding ground and they were going to go back in and clean things up one last time and close all of his surgical openings.

Tuesday (Yesterday)

Elijah looked really good when I went in to see him in the morning before work and then again when I came back after work. He was still unable to eat without throwing up but the doc said that he wasn't throwing up as violently as he had been. They resumed feeding him with the pik line so that he would be in better shape for his last surgery. He continued to talk to me and squirrel around my hands and arms.

Wednesday (This morning)

I went in to see him at 6:45 just like I have done every day that he's been in the hospital and they told me that he had just gotten out of surgery and was in the recovery room and that I would have to wait a couple of minutes before I could go back. After waiting 25 minutes I asked what was taking so long and I was told that I wasn't allowed to go in to the recovery room. I told them I was in the recovery room last time he had surgery...what had changed? They told me that there was already 4 people back in the critical care unit and that was their visitation limit. I was already going to be late for work so I didn't argue with the girl at the desk. I just left the office with flames shooting out of my ears. As I walked outside I wondered if those 4 people that were already in recovery had walked to the hospital because mine was the only car in the parking lot. I was trying not to think the worst, but failing. Luckily as soon as I got to work the surgeon called and told me that everything with Elijah was fine. He repeated the story about already having 4 people in the critical care unit. I didn't tell him that I had been at the hospital every single day since Elijah had been admitted and there hadn't been 4 other visitors in that until COMBINED. I have to convince myself that there must have been some new sick animals admitted during the night and their keepers all stuck around unlike the 40 or 50 other animals that had been through the hospital that week.

I will be heading out to see him as soon as I get off work. We will take all the prayers we can get.

My sweet, sweet Elijah

Part 2 will be delayed....

2009-04-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

This morning I was all set to write part 2 of "My Fascinating Health Story", but now it's going to have to wait until tomorrow because I have something to bitch about.

Back story:

I don't think I've said much about the fact that I crochet. I like to make blankets because they are simple to make. I don't read a pattern but I know how to make a square or a rectangle. I stopped doing any sort of work that involved yarn after I got Lorenzo and Ashleigh because they would just tear the yarn to shreds or drag it through their wet cat food. They also liked to sneak up beside me and swat at my hand as it moves the crochet hook.

Now that Lorenzo and Ashleigh are older they don't really fuss with the yarn. Lorenzo is too busy making sure his oldest son, Elijah, doesn't come out of the bathroom and Ashleigh is usually too busy gestating to worry about anything else. Matilda won't come out from sitting on the shelf directly in front of the tv long enough to deal with any yarn. Nort loves to play with yarn and she has mastered the art of dragging the yarn through the kitchen and through their food and water. And just so you don't think I'm party to this....she gets the yarn out of the project bag. I don't leave it out. I guess I'm going to need to get a project bag that actually seals closed.

Anyway...apparently the only thing more fun than ruining my yarn when I'm not looking is to swipe my crochet hooks. I have had crochet hooks for years. Years and years. And years. There is never really any need to replace them. I like the size I have. They don't break and I don't lose them. And now in the last month I've gone through 3 of them. While I have not seen Nort running around with my crochet hooks in her mouth I have to assume that she is the one who is taking them. I have looked under my furniture and in the couch cushions and they are no where to be seen. Vanished in to thin air.

So...a couple of days ago I went to Michael's to get a new crochet hook. While I was there I looked at the yarn. I found some beautiful yarn that was more expensive than what I usually get but I decided that I could wait to get it when my current project is finished. When I paid for my lone crochet hook the cashier gave me my receipt and also a coupon for 50% off of my next purchase. Cool beans! This would help to make me feel less guilty for buying hoity toity yarn.

A couple of days later I went back to Michaels and picked out my yarn. I only got one skein and as I was standing in line I added a pack of gum to my basket. I paid for my yarn and gum but I was very preoccupied with another event that is currently going on that will be blogged about later, so I didn't pay any attention to my receipt.

Here's where the bitch part of the story comes in:

It wasn't until today that I took out my receipt and looked at it. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that the cashier took the 50% off of the price of my pack of gum! Did she really think that I saved that coupon and brought it back to the store and stood in line so that I could save .30 on a pack of gum? I realize that it is standard operation procedure to give the discount of the least expensive item purchased but could she maybe have told me that I was completely screwing myself out of the coupon by grabbing a last minute pack of gum??

I think I'm going to write a strongly worded letter to Michaels...or at the very least I'm going to pout about it for a couple of days.

Fascinating story about my health, part 1

2009-04-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

Ok…if I have any readers left I’d like to thank them for sticking around during my hiatus. This will be a catch up post and hopefully I will be able to resume blogging on a more regular basis.

I’m going to explain my health situation…get a score card…it gets complicated.

Issue #1

For over 2 years I have not had the ability to walk in a straight line. I brush in to hallway walls, I run people off of the sidewalk, I trip, I fall, I’m fun to watch. I thought it would go away but when I found myself well in to the 2nd year of this I finally decided to go to the doctor and see what was going on.

My primary care doc did a very rudimentary neurological exam and I passed with flying colors. The doc drew many viles of blood and she gave me a referral to have a brain scan to rule out a brain tumor. Friends and family were happy to discover that there is now medical proof that I actually have a brain and we were all happy to know that the scan showed no tumors. The blood work came back clear, too. It took a couple of months for my next referral to come to fruition. I was sent to an audiologist. I was very happy to finally get to see an audiologist because I have suffered from tinnitus, (ringing in the ears), for decades. I also thought I was losing my hearing because I tend to keep my television and radio turned up so loud that my neighbors can enjoy my programs with me.

The audiologist exam came back stating that there wasn’t a thing wrong with my hearing, so my next referral was for an Otolaryngologist (Per Wikipedia: Otolaryngology is the branch of medicine that specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of ear, nose, throat, and head and neck disorders.) This guy looked in my ears, up my nose, down my throat and in my eyes just like the last 2 doctors. But then he had me stand up flush with the wall and close my eyes and walk heel, toe, heel, toe away from the wall. I lifted my foot off the ground to take my first step and I almost fell over. He stopped me and had me step away from the wall and cross my arms and close my eyes. Again I almost fell over. The doc said that he needed for me to have an ENG evaluation and that meant another referral.

Weeks later I found myself in a Clinical Audiologists office wearing this thing on my face that looked like a scuba mask only much bigger. The mask had doors in front of the eye area so that they could block your vision one eye at a time. There was also a teeny, weeny camera inside the mask that looked straight in to my eye balls. I had to watch a darting and flashing red light with both eyes and then with either eye isolated. This was enough to make me feel like I needed a seat belt to stay on the exam table. The next test included sticking little tiny water filled balloons in to my ear canal. (I looked very attractive and I’m just sorry you all weren’t there to get to see me.) The balloons were attached to a machine that regulated either warm or cold water to flush through the balloons. It was a very noisy process but not as unpleasant as it sounds. This process also made me dizzy. When the test was completed I was told that I would probably hear back from my primary care doctor in the next couple of days. That was in January. By the end of February I had asked my primary care doc 3 times for the results to the ENG and I finally got them on February 20.

“Caloric testing shows a unilateral weakness on the right with a directional preponderance to the left. Non-caloric subtest are within normal limits except for the Dix-Hallpike maneuver. The Dix-Hallpike maneuver for BPPV is positive with the head hanging to the left and the right.”

Alrighty, then. As I have yet to hear back from my primary care doc I did my own internet research on BPPV and discovered that means that I have deposits way inside my ear that have floated off and wound up in places where they don’t belong. The most popular cure for this is a simple doctor applied head maneuvering that causes the deposits to get released from where they are trapped. When this doesn’t do the trick the deposits can also be removed surgically. I’m hoping for the head maneuvering. (And I hope that I will be able to get this taken care of sooner than later. Last Saturday evening I was at a very fun and highly attended barbeque and I stumbled and fell and skinned my knee. Not a glamorous moment for someone of my age.)

Ok, that's issue #1. Please stay tuned for issue #2 and #3. The last one includes an abulance ride!!!

Almost a milestone

2009-03-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

Today is my 49th birthday and this is my 200th post.

When I was 33 and diagnosed with cancer all I wanted was to be able to live to see 40. I was lucky enough to get the entire decade and for that I am truly thankful. Now, I think I'm going to shoot for 90!

Happy Birthday to me and happy birthday to my twin sister, Tori.

More of the same...

2009-03-08T18:43:00.000-07:00

Jason's comment on the entry below caused me to think of another mispronounced word that drives me nuts. I'm very lucky that I don't have to hear it on a daily basis any longer because I don't have the pleasure of being an attendance clerk for a high school these days. I swear that I would cringe every time I had a parent call in and tell me that their student wouldn't be at "skoo" for what ever reason they made up at that very moment. "Skoo"? It gives me the willies even to write it!

On the subject of being an attendance clerk the couple of memorable excuses I received from parents that I remember....

I was completely taken aback the first time I got a call from a parent excusing her son from school that day because he was witnessing the birth of his son. What a green horn I was!

In the 14 years that I was an attendance clerk I got several calls from moms telling me to excuse their student simply because they said so. I tried to explain that I had to have a reason, no matter how vague, so that the state could determine if it was an allowable excuse and thus still pay us for the student. These moms all apparently went to the same school of etiquette because they were not to be deterred. They all stuck to their "because he/she is my child and I said so" declaration. I just love it when people cooperate.

I will never forget the "harumph" of indignation when a parent would call in or write a note to excuse a student because they were needed at home for baby sitting purposes and I had to tell them that not only did the state not consider that a valid excuse for being absent but it was also illegal. Of course suddenly these students would all of a sudden have many appointments with the doctor or a sudden rash of illness. High school grades be damned.

Anyway, just in case any one is still reading at this point...I saved my most memorable phone call for last. One morning I had a very nice lady call in and tell me, "My daughter won't be at skoo today because she's...you know..."atministrating". I was gracious. I didn't laugh. I just took her excuse, wrote it down and knew that I would remember that call forever.

I must be in a bad mood...

2009-03-05T15:41:00.000-08:00

The next time I hear anyone use these words I think I'm going to pinch them. Hard.

Cu-nent (Couldn't)

Wu-nent (Wouldn't)

Shu-nent (Shouldn't)

Coon't (Couldn't)

Wun't (Wouldn't)

Shun't (Shouldn't)

Hunnert (Hundred)

Senence (Sentence)

Alls

Who's with me?

Ok...I'm back...sort of....

2009-03-03T10:20:00.001-08:00

I sure hope I have any readers left after my sabbatical. I thought my first post after being sick would be about my adventures in Epstein-Barr Land but I've grown weary of even thinking about what's gone in this last month so I'm going to write about something else. Maybe in a couple of days I'll rehash the events of my illness but not today.

I would like to show you the works of my favorite new artist, but first I need to apologize for the red aura on the 2nd picture. No matter how I tried to take a picture of his drawings my flash would drown out the drawing. The red flash is the pre-flash warning light on my camera. If I take a picture with the flash turned off and my camera thinks I should have the flash turned on it gives me the red warning light.

So with no further ado I present the sketches of:

"CHRISTIAN BAXTER"

This work depicts a parade whose participants include all of the characters from the movie "Wall E" and 4 members of the "Peanuts Gang". The character leading the parade is Christian. He created an animated character to portray himself and he includes the character in most of his drawings.

This second drawing portrays Mickey and Minnie Mouse tickling the artist.

What is so amazing about this artist? You've seen better you say? Well, what if I told you the artist is a 4th grader? A 4th grader with Asperger's Syndrome? I wish I could make these pictures bigger so that you could see the detail included. I didn't get to watch him draw these two pictures but I have been able to watch him draw. With just a pencil and a blank piece of paper the artist whips these out in about 2 minutes and then moves on to the next one. He. Is. Amazing.

Rumor has it Christian is going to send me some more of his drawings. When he does I am gladly going to post them so that all the world can see just how proud I am of him.

Christian Baxter of southern California. Remember that name. You'll be glad you did.

Wow! If I could only live up to this....

2009-02-19T17:45:00.000-08:00

I received another "10 Truths About Tami" from a very dear girl friend of mine. I am, once again, stunned to read the nice things people have to say about me. I hope my readers aren't getting bored with this...but honestly...I could read this all day!

So from the bottom of my heart I would like to thank Miss Archer for putting in her .02.

1. Tami is incredibly efficient and intelligent at whatever job she does
2. Tami put up with numerous random craziness phone calls from me
when we worked together.
3. Tami inspires others who are stuck with cancer (It really does
SUCK!) to persevere and move forward.
4. She loves other people's cats (especially my little sick dude).
5. She is a talented writer (I keep telling her to WRITE that BOOK!)
6. She has an amazing music collection and can put together AWESOME mix CDs!
7. She is super funny and if you read through the archives of this
very funny blog, you, too will have the pleasure of discovering that.
8. Can we talk pretty nails?
9. She can keep a secret...when I was TOTALLY lying about being out
of school to have in vitro fertilization treatments, she knew I was
lying about having toe surgery but she never said anything :)
10. And how about that really ginormous, compassionate heart?

Another brief post from a guest poster....

2009-02-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm starting to feel like I have a real life fan club. How nice that the two charter members are my sister and my mother. She wrote a 10 Truths About Tami and it's enough to make me blush. After I read this I told her that she makes me sound so nice that, heck, if I just met me...I'd be friends with me!

10 - A true friend forever
9 - Sleep is a wonderful thing
8 - Gentle and easy
7 - If it bothers you - then you fix it
6 - Animals - domesticated or wild - either will do
5 - Quick wit and conversation
4 - Lets try it!
3 - My camera and everything else is in my purse
2 - Wanta be groupie for several singers
1 - Loving, caring, concerned

Now, if my chiropractor reads #3 I'm going to be in big trouble!

Thanks, Mother. I appreciate the time it took for you to make this list, now I just have to live up to it.

I want everyone to know that I'm trying to wean myself from getting so much sleep. I keep thinking that eventually I will just not be able to sleep but that hasn't happened yet. I'm now trying to stay up when I get up to feed the cats at 6:00 AM, and then I do what I can to keep myself occupied so that I don't take naps during the day. The rainy weather is not helping because my bedroom is the only room in the house that is not affected by the horrendous sound of the rain hitting my roof in my living room. I don't have any insulation in my ceiling in the living room and you just wouldn't believe how loud it is when rain hits the roof.

Next week I'm hoping to have the energy to have a repair man come over and replace my front steps and possibly install insulation in my ceiling. If I get on a roll I might even have the gas company come out and look at my stove and see if they can tell my why my pilot light won't stay lit. It will be a whole new world!

A brief post from a guest poster...

2009-02-14T19:02:00.000-08:00

Before I got sick I was given a blog award from one of my new readers. It truly made my day but I got sick before I could post anything about it on my blog. I'm sorry to say that all of the information regarding the award is on my computer at work and since I'm on an official leave of absence I am not allowed to access my computer.

Upon receiving the award I immediately told my sister and she got all kinds of happy and helped me with one of the stipulations for winning the award.The stipulation was that you had to tell 10 truths about yourself. Without even asking her to do it, Tori wrote 10 Truths about me and here they are:

10. She will never tell you no ( unless its about meat!)
9. House keeping dilutes her joy.
8. She has a bazillion pairs of socks.
7. One day, she will marry Jackson Browne, oh yes, she will.
6. If she has money, you have money!
5. As a child, her body did not know how to sleep.
4. In high school her pants size was double zero.
3. She has an amazing memory for useless facts.
2. If you want to make her cry, just show her a picture of a snake.
1. She needs the dog whisperer to change species and teach her cats that Tami is the Alpha being.

Thank you dear sister for coming to my rescue without even knowing that I was going to need you.

If anyone else would like to write a list of 10 nice things about me go right ahead. I'll publish your list, too. (please send it to clydejackson@yahoo.com)

And now, I'm off to get 17 more hours of sleep.

Everything old is new again...

2009-02-10T17:11:00.000-08:00

I have been sick off and on since October. High fever, head ache, body ache... I've been exhausted to the point of sleeping in my car during my lunch hour and if I didn't have plans to do something after work I would just go home and melt in to the couch. I've been to a few different doctors and have been told the exact same thing each and every time, "It's a virus. There is nothing we can do for you. Go home, get plenty of rest and fluids."

I'm leaving out a huge dramatic middle to this story and I will probably write about it later but after 5 months of illness I finally got a diagnosis this morning. I have mono. I had it when I was 18 and it has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving. My friends and family and I are actually relieved to have a diagnosis. I have been so insanely ill that we all privately thought that it was something much worse. (as a two time cancer survivor I can hardly get a hang nail without fearing that the cancer has returned.)

There have been no progress made in the treatment of mono in the last 30 years so unfortunately there is no magic bullet. I'm off of work for the next month and I am pretty sure that that is going to drive me nuts. My employer has been very sympathetic and that is very comforting. I hope they remain as sympathetic in the weeks to come.

So I'm off to take another nap and drink more fluids. As my energy level rises I'll be back. I've just recently gotten a few new readers and this seems like the perfect way to lose them. Hang in there with me and the martini's are on me when I'm feeling better.

Look at me! I got an award!!

2009-01-30T13:23:00.000-08:00

This was awarded to me from my new friend Suz. She writes a blog, too, and you can find it here: http://daybydaywithsuz.blogspot.com/

I would love to say that I wrote a post that changed her life in some huge way but actually all I did was be one of the last 7 people who left a comment on her blog. That was pretty easy.

The rules for this award are:
1.Choose a minimum of seven blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.
2.Show the seven winners' names and links on your blog, and leave a comment informing them that they were prized with “Honest Scrap".
3. list at least ten honest things about yourself.

Ok..I read a lot of blogs every day. How am I supposed to choose who to bequeath an award? I wouldn't read a blog that I didn't like and yet it seems to be such a huge cop out to award one to everyone. So...instead..here is just a sampling of the blogs I read... Please check them out if you get a chance.

Crazy Aunt Purl
She Just Walks Around With It
The Jason Show
Kevin Charnas
Frank Notes
The Bloggess
Joy Unexpected
I am Bossy
Citizen of the Month
Dooce
Hippo Brigade
Glamorous Life
Heart Shaped Hedges
Sweetney
24 At Heart
Steam Me Up Kid

We are hanging our shingle.....

2009-01-28T11:59:00.000-08:00

For the couple of decades my sister and I have really enjoyed taking pictures. We've progressed from taking pictures with our little point and shoot camera to fancy schmancy Canon AE1 with a zoom lens as long as our arm. I loved the zoom lens especially when I was taking pictures of the kids. When you are using a camera that doesn't have a zoom...the instant the kids see you pointing your camera at them they stop and give you their camera smile and more often than not what you see is a face, frozen in time, wearing something that feels like a smile yet looks like the child is in pain. With a zoom lens you can be in the back of the room and the kids don't even notice you and it's easier to get a good picture.

We rolled right in to the new millennium and got digital cameras. The zoom is built in and the pictures are sharp but I'd still like to have my old camera back.

I've gotten a few lucky shots through out the years but since I have no desire to take technical classes or learn how to build a camera so my skills are very limited. My sister, on the other hand, is married to a man who started his career as a photographer and is now producing '90210'. He has taught her a lot about composing shots and how to use lighting properly and I am able to ride in on her coat tails.

We have talked for years about opening our own photography business and have just never gotten the ball rolling. It has more to do with our confidence level than anything else. We are afraid of being thought of as professional photographers and then not being able to deliver what is expected of us, so instead we take 100's of pictures of every event we attend and then just give them away to whom ever wants them. It is a fun hobby. No expectations and everyone is usually very happy with the end product.

Enter my daughter. She is very, very artistic. She can draw. She can paint. She can take wonderful pictures. She can decorate. She can coordinate. And she can arrange flowers like no ones business. She has done the flowers for several of her friends and each and every one of them have turned out stunningly beautiful. She doesn't usually charge for her services, she only charges for the purchase of the flowers and accoutrements. Her arranging and delivering of the flowers is her gift to the bride and groom. I have done everything I can to convince her to open an actual business and go for it. She is very talented and very accommodating and there is no reason that she shouldn't get paid to do something she enjoys so much. (double standard much?)

She has a friend who's father is getting re-married and she asked Tori and I if we would like to photograph the wedding. I said YES!, and then proceeded to just about throw up. WHAT WAS I DOING? WHAT IF WE SCREW THIS UP? WHAT IF EVERY SHOT LOOKS LIKE I WAS JUMPING UP AND DOWN WHEN I TOOK IT? WHAT IF MY CAMERA BREAKS? WHAT IF MY PICTURES DON'T DO THE COUPLE ANY JUSTICE? WHAT WAS I THINKING????

Just as I was having my own private heart attack my sister sent me some shots that she took at a recent birthday party and my fears instantly subsided. She is an awesome photographer and she is very good at doctoring photos on the computer. I think that between the two of us we will do very well if we just remember to breath in/breath out.

Now, the real purpose of this post....I would like for you to tell me about wedding photos. What was your favorite pose? What was your least favorite pose? What are the most important shots that some photographers miss? Of course we know that there should be pictures of the bride and groom at the alter, the bridal party walking down the aisle, candle lighting ceremonies, etc. What I want to know is what is out of the ordinary that we shouldn't miss? What is out of the ordinary that we should skip? Input! Johnny 5 neeeds more input!!!

It bothers me to see wedding party pictures where dress straps are hanging off of shoulders or bouquets are not even or some jackets are buttoned and others are swinging open so I will have those details covered. My daughter has a picture from her wedding where it's just a picture of her and her husband from the back and she's grabbing her groom's butt! I love this picture...but would it be as fun for a couple who are in their 50's? Give me ideas....and wish us well!

Fanks!
Love, Tami

Bucket List

2009-01-26T16:48:00.000-08:00

I'm getting pretty good at hijacking ideas from other bloggers so here I go again. I took this bucket list from Jason. http://www.jason-thejasonshow.blogspot.com/

I've accomplished a lot of things on this list but I have some things I'd like to add to my own personal bucket list...I will do that on another post.

1. Started your own blog
You’d look pretty silly being on this page if I hadn’t!
2. Slept under the stars
I have slept under the stars on a couple of occasions but the most memorable time was in 1977 when my family stayed at a place in Mission Bay called “Campland”. My sister, her best friend and I slept in sleeping bags outside of our rented mini Winnebago. I was awakened due to something touching my face repeatedly. At first I thought it was a pesky fly or something then as I was more awake I thought it was a wild animal or that prolific serial murderer with the hook for a hand...so I tried to jump up to get away…not an easy feat when you are entangled in a sleeping bag. I was very happy to discover that the wild animal serial killer who was tapping my face was a very beautiful kitty who belonged to the campers next door to us. The kitty was on a leash and he was streeeeetcccchhhhed as far as he could be in order to reach me. His hind legs were paralyzed so he rolled instead of walked. The sun was up so he thought it was time to play.
3. Played in a band
I am assuming that my tenure in the Fairgrove marching Falcons and subsequent enlistment in the Workman High School marching Lobos doesn't count.....
4. Visited Hawaii
I have been to Hawaii many times and I can’t wait to return. It is truly paradise and I would move there in a heart beat if I could get my family to move with me.
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Bathed in a river
I swam in the Colorado river but there was no soap involved.
7. Been to the Taj Mahal
I really have no desire to see that part of the world.
8. Walked on a glacier in Alaska
I stuck my foot in glacier water when I was in Canada and it was so cold that my foot instantly went numb. Does that count?
9. Caught and held a snake
Not if it would save the universe from certain extinction.
10. Spoke in front of a big crowd
I have done public speaking but never to a crowd that was so big it required crowd control. I have no fear of public speaking.
11. Bungee jumped
Not yet, but one of these days.
12. Had a whirlwind love affair that broke your heart
Not really a whirlwind kinda gal…
13. Found an arrowhead or fossil
Found the skull of an animal in the hills behind my high school…does that count?
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
I taught myself to crochet. I can’t read a pattern and I don’t even know if I’m doing it right but I’ve made several blankets and scarves and they haven’t fallen apart so I must be doing something right!
15. Rescued an animal
I have rescued a tiny baby bunny, and so many kittens that I’ve lost count. You’ve never lived until you’ve tried to hand feed a litter of kittens who need to eat several times a day while you have a full time job on the other end of town. (prepare formula, warm it up, put it in a bottle, wrap kitten in a towel or get kneaded to smithereens, feed kitten, get milk all over everything in the vacinity, burp kitten, encourage kitten to pee, clean up mess and start with the next kitten.) Kitten Milk Replacement (KMR) stinks and it's sticky. I've been covered from head to toe with it on many, many occasions.
16. Ate sweet breads, glands or tripe
Truly, truly, not if I were starving to death would I put that crap in my mouth. I would eat cement before I would eat sweet breads.
17. Seen Mount Rushmore in person
18. Grown your own vegetables
I have had many of my own gardens and while tomatoes and cucumbers are really good there is nothing better than eating sugar snap peas right off the vine.
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
Yes, I’ve gotten to hang with Mona. If you look in my archives…I wrote all about it and even posted a picture of her. It was a dream come true.
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hiked to base camp on Mt. Everest)
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
Is there anyone in the world who hasn’t done this?
24. Built a snow fort
25. Watched an animal being born
Kittens, puppies and a cow.
26. Gone skinny dipping
I have done some crazy things in my life but so far I've never been inspired to do this.
27. Learned a foreign language
I’ve taken 3 semesters of sign language in college. If you want me to tell you that you are beautiful or that someone is a flying asshole than I’m your girl! Other than that...I can do my ABC's....
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
I rode a gondola in Las Vegas. That is in my archives, too.
29. Seen a total eclipse
I’ve seen one and while I know it’s rare I just didn’t understand why it was such a big deal.
30. Stayed up for more than 24 hours
I’ve done this on several occasions. It was much easier when I was 20.
31. Trained a dog to do cool tricks
32. Been on a cruise
I’ve been on a 4 day Mexican cruise twice. I LOVE being on a ship in the ocean and I would like to do it again...maybe the 3rd time will be the charm. Both times my cruise was cursed with cold and rainy weather. Sat out on the deck just long enough to say I did it. When I got too cold I came back inside. That took about 45 seconds.
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
I’ve been to Niagara Falls twice. If you get too close to the spray you need to beware because all of a sudden you will be starring in your very own yet very public wet tee shirt contest!
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
Last summer I got to go to Wales and I’m glad to see that I come by my affection for thrift stores because of my Welsh ancestry.
35. Seen an Amish community
I’ve been to the Amish country in Ohio twice. It is fascinating to think that there are people in today’s world who don’t use electricity yet still run a business on a daily basis. I went to a shoe store that had gas lighting and they used scratch paper to figure out the cost of my shoes instead of a cash register.
36. Can drive a stick shift car
Of course I can drive a stick shift car….easy peasy lemon squeezy!
37. Won over $1000 in a raffle or lottery
I won much more than that in a class action law suit that I never expected to produce .05 so it was like winning the lottery. (When I was married to my 2nd husband we came within one number of winning the lottery. We had all but one number but we had the bonus number. I honestly just about fainted. We did win a nice amount of money but we had to split it with 19 other people.)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
My sister and I sang karaoke and cleared out the room at a littlel girl's birthday party! I have played "Rock Band" with my little nephew and I thought I was really bringing it home with "Blitzkreig Bop" until he said, "Why are you singing it like that, Momo?"
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
Yes, and while it is beautiful it stinks!
43. Been serenaded
I've been sung to but not officially serenaded.
44. Visited Africa
Not yet….
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
Yes, on more than one occasion. It is always lovely, of course it is more lovely in Hawaii because the water is warmer.
46. Broke a bone
I have broken my funny bone on more than one occasion and it was painful but it pails in comparison to tearing or stretching ligaments. I’ve torn more ligaments than Carters got pills and the pain is relentless and it takes forever to heal. I highly recommend breaking a bone over tearing a ligament.
47. Started your own business
Funny you should ask…this will be the subject of tomorrows post.
48. Quit a job because you were totally unhappy
Yes. I. Did. I worked for a company who’s initials were the same as a monthly womanly plague and I swear the name was perfect. The woman I worked for was completely insane. If I could remember her name we could search for her email address and tell her that I hope she gets many painful hangnails. (I actually do remember her name…but the name she used at work was a nom-de-plume. She didn’t use her real name because the company screwed many people out of a lot of money and when they regrouped she didn’t want anyone to know that she was still working there.)
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the Eiffel Tower
I’ve been to the Eiffel Tower twice and it was glorious both times. On my second visit we went to the 2nd landing. I couldn’t convince my sister to go any higher but one of these days I will make it to the top.
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
I have gone snorkeling in Hawaii. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life and I can’t wait to do it again. I would love to learn how to scuba dive but I am too afraid of the tank being too heavy and drowning me.
52. Kissed in the rain passionately
53. Played in the mud
One time my sister and one of our cousins and I played in the mud when we were quite old enough to know better. We were supposed to be waiting patiently to go somewhere but we went to the mud hole instead. We were covered in it from head to toe. I remember having so much fun….but I also remember being embarrassed when we came back home and looked like a bunch of 5 year olds.
54. Gone to a drive-in
Many, many times.
55. Been in a movie
I’ve done extra work on the tv show “Life Goes On”. It was the longest 3 days of my life and that quelled any possible ambition I ever had to become an actress.
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Joined a prayer group
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
Two Thanksgivings in a row I flew to Ohio and helped a church group put thousands of meals together for homeless people and elderly shut ins. It was a very rewarding experience and I was in awe at seeing so many people come together and do something nice with out fighting about anything.
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
I was a cadet girl scout and I’ve been a Brownie leader and I had to sell cookies whether I liked it or not. Then I switched to being a Daisy leader because they don’t have to sell cookies.
62. Gone whale watching
I’ve been whale watching in southern California and in Hawaii. In California we got so close to whales that I thought they were going to fling our boat out of the water with just a tiny flick of their pinkie. You feel very invincible and secure in a commercial cabin cruiser until you get near a whale …that’s when you realize just how small you really are.
63. Received flowers for no reason
Both of my husbands were very generous at bringing me flowers for no reason. Of course they were the flowers that you buy from the illegal immigrant on the freeway off ramp but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
I was always too thin to donate when I was younger. You had to weigh 100 pound and I didn’t break 100 pounds until I was well in to my 20’s. Then when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 33 I wasn’t allowed to donate…so I guess the easy answer to this would be no.
65. Gone sky diving
YES!!!!!! And I want to go again. Who’s with me??
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
I haven’t done that but just recently I went to the Japanese Museum in Los Angeles and I saw their Manazanar Exhibit. It really made me furious to think that the government just plucked all of the Japanese people out of their homes, schools, jobs, etc. and put them behind barbed wire fences just because of their ethnic back ground. Innocent children…families of G.I’s who were fighting on our side….just thrown into camps so the government could keep an eye on them. It just made me sick. Then I stopped and remembered after 9/11 how afraid I was of anyone who looked like they were from the middle east. That must have been how the powers that be felt back in the days of Manzanar. I’m glad more humanity was shown to the middle eastern people of America after the 9/11 tragedy.
67. Bounced a check
I bounced one small check over 30 years ago and just about died of humiliation. Then when I was in the process of divorcing my first husband he cashed a check from our joint bank account for over $100.00 at Vons. That’s a felony! I still can’t write checks there.
68. Flown in a helicopter
Not yet but I want to. Anyone have a helicopter??
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
I have a bunch of my childhood toys. I don’t know why I insist on saving them at this point.
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
Again, not if I was starving to death.
72. Pieced a quilt
I used to be the advisor of a “Key Club” http://slp.kiwanis.org/KeyClub/home.aspx and we participated in many service projects. One of the funner things was “The Binky Patrol”. http://www.binkypatrol.org/ This is a world wide group that makes blankets and then donates them to children that need them. Some of them are kept in the trunks of police cars, some of them are kept at homeless shelters, some of them are kept at hospitals…the Binkie Patrol believes that EVERYBODY should have a blankie. And I agree with them. Our group made several quilts and I know they were going to a wonderful place but they were still hard to relinquish.
73. Stood in Times Square
I’ve been to Times Square on several occasions. The last time I was there I was sitting on the steps of an Army Recruiting station and a kitty came out from under the steps. A news paper reporter took my picture and asked for permission to publish my photo. I said yes, but I have no idea what news paper it was for and thus never saw it. Also, in or around Times Square I was standing there, minding my own business, taking a picture…when…a…bird…shit in my purse and on my head. My fellow traveler thought this was hilarious. There wasn’t a napkin to be seen. She’s lucky I didn’t clean myself off with her sleeve.
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
I have been fired twice from the same company! One of my first jobs was at a bank in down town Los Angeles. I worked in the real estate loan department. I was fired for “grossly taking advantage of (my boss) good nature”. (“Good nature”!!! HA!!!!) A couple of days after being let go they called me and asked if I would like to work in the branch. Anything was better than nothing so I went back. I can’t remember how long I lasted but it wasn’t long. It was one of my many stints in Hell.
76. Seen the changing of the guards in London
Last summer my sister and I hoofed it all the way to Buckingham Palace from our flat nice and early so we could get a good spot to watch the changing of the guard. As the minutes passed the crowd grew larger and larger. We waited and waited and there was no changing of any guard. Apparently when there is even the slightest hint of inclement weather they do not have the ceremony. The weather forecast called for a slight possibility of rain that day but we never saw a rain drop. It would have been nice if someone could have made that announcement before we all waited for over an hour.
77. Broken something extremely expensive
I wrecked my mom’s Country Squire station wagon. Does that count?
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
Husband #1 had a motorcycle. He took me for a ride and before I got on I made him promise 2 things: that he wouldn’t go fast and that he wouldn’t go on the freeway. He did both and he’s lucky I didn’t pee his pants.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
I have been to the Grand Canyon twice. It is much more glorious than you would ever think a big hole in the earth would be.
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Got a tattoo
83. Been to a coffee shop in Amsterdam
84. Seen the aurora borealis in person
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
I could NEVER do this. This is one of the main reasons I gave up eating meat in 1974 and have never looked back.
88. Had chickenpox
Yes, and I was very pretty, as was my twin sister.
89. Saved someone’s life
When my oldest nephew was a baby he found a penny in the shag carpet and he put it in his mouth. I walked in to the room just as he was turning purple gasping for air. I swooped him up by his foot and while he was hanging upside down I slapped his back. The penny went flying across the room and he was able to breath again. I am truly thankful that I found him when I did but I am more thankful that I didn’t break his back.
90. Sat on a jury
I was a jury foreman on an attempted murder trial. It was very exciting. Our verdict: guilty. The entire jury was very smart and thoughtful….with the exception of one woman who was so dense I thought I was being punked.
91. Met someone famous
See previous post
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
My best friend died in a car accident after leaving my house and the thinking the accident had only been a fender bender her parents called me to go pick her up at the accident site. When we got to the accident site it was the most awful thing I’ve ever seen. Another story for another post.
I’ve lost all 4 of my grandparents and my dad and two beloved cats.
94. Toured the UN
95. Hiked to Machu Picchu
96. Swam in the Indian Ocean
97. Conversed with someone when neither of you spoke each others language
When I worked at the high school it was my job to enroll new students. We had people enrolled at the school from Mexico, China, Japan, Turkey, Greece and they didn’t speak a lick of English. Somehow I managed to get them enrolled and we didn’t even have to draw pictures!
98. Dirty danced
Not on purpose...but one time back in the days of disco...I was wearing a tube top underneath a sheer blouse. And I was dancing...whoo hoo...dancing machine....dancey dancin'...la la la...and I raised my arms up and the tube top went down. I tried to be as discreet as possible and then I thought DISCREET? I'm half naked here...so I just blatantly pulled it up and thanked God that YouTube hadn't been invented yet.
99. Been stung by a bee
The first time I was stung by a bee was on the road traveling with a drum and bugle corps. We were in Pennsylvania and I was standing out in an open field at a high school watching the drum corps rehearse. All of a sudden I felt a sharp pain and I thought I had been shot with a bb gun. In. My. Butt. I grabbed my butt and went running to the cafeteria where the rest of our group was and told one of the mothers my story. I was relieved to know that I had only been stung by a bee and not shot with a gun. The mother poured vinegar on it and the pain instantly went away. Remember that…it could come in handy some day.
100. Acted in a play.
My latest foray in to play acting was in 2005. I was working at the high school and they had a few parts for adults in the spring musical. I was cast at Lulu Warniker in “Footloose”. Lulu is the aunt of the main character. She doesn’t even have any lines in the moves! I had 6 lines and you could almost hear me in the front row! I never got that Tony nod I was promised….

Celebrity List touch up...

2009-01-23T12:00:00.001-08:00

I don't usually post the same thing twice but I wanted to add some more people and include brief comments about my sightings....

Al Jarreau (Sat next to him at a restaurant in Westwood.)
Angelyne (At a restaurant in Hollywood)(Picture Estelle Ghetty with botox and spandex!)
Anson Williams VERY NICE GUY. (Spent the summer with him in Hawaii, he was directing Baywatch and my bro in law was the 1st AD.)
Anthony Edwards VERY NICE GUY (On the ER set)
Arnold Schwarzenegger (At the Jay Leno show)
Bean Baxter (Local celeb from KROQ morning show) (At a VIP party during a concert)
Bill Mahr (At a Jackson Browne listening party)
Bill Smitrovitch (On the Live Goes On set)
Billy Barty (At the Billy Barty Show)
Bob Colburn (Iconic DJ at KLOS radio station and host of “Rock Line) (At an interview)
Bobby Sherman (He attended my 10 year high school reunion!)
Brian May (guitarist of “Queen”) (Saw him at a Kiss concert in the audience)
Carmine Appice HIT ME IN THE HEAD WITH HIS ELBOW AND DIDN'T SAY SORRY!(At a convention)
Catherine Bach VERY DRUNK (Stepped on my date’s toe at a Prince concert)
Cee-Lo (Lead singer for “Gnarles Barkley”) (Saw him leaving the venue of a KROQ concert)
Chad Lowe VERY NICE GUY (On the Life Goes On set)
Charlie Brumbly (On the Baywatch set)
Chastity Bono (At the Sonny & Cher show)
Chris Burke (On the Life Goes On set)
Corbin Bernsen (On the Baywatch Set)
Daisy Fuentes SELF IMPORTANT BEAST (On the Baywatch Set)
David Hasselhoff (On the Baywatch Set)
David Lee Roth WOULDN't GIVE ME HIS AUTOGRAPH (In a 7-11 on Sunset Blvd.)
David Letterman (At a filming of Don Kirchner’s Rock Concert)
David Naughton JERK (“An American Werewolf in London”) (At a benefit concert)
Denzel Washington (At the Jay Leno Show)
Dr. Drew VERY NICE GUY (Celebrity Rehab) (At a KROQ concert)
Efren Ramirez (“Pedro” in “Napoleon Dynamite”) (At a KROQ concert)
Ellen DeGeneres (At her show)
Elton John (Ran in to him leaving the Jay Leno Show)
Eriq LaSalle (On the ER set)
Fred Savage (At the Pasadena Play House)
George Clooney VERY NICE GUY (On the set of ER)
Gloria Reuben (On the set of ER)
Gov. Jerry Brown (At a No Nukes reception)
Ike Turner (At a bar in Hollywood)
Jack LaLanne (At a Fashion Show)
Jack Sherman (Red Hot Chili Peppers) (I know his sister and I met him in his dressing room.)
Jackson Browne NICEST GUY EVER! (In the line for the bathroom at a listening party)
Jacques Cousteau (At a No Nukes reception)
Jason Brooks (On the Baywatch set)
Jason Mamoa NICE, NICE GUY. (On the Baywatch set)
Jay Leno (At his show)
Jeff Conaway (At Bono’s restaurant)
Jessica Lang (Arriving at the Shrine Auditorium to see Baryshnikov dance)
Jewel (At the Jay Leno show)
Jim Belushi TRIED TO GET ME TO JOIN HIM IN HIS WINNEBAGO DRESSING ROOM IN THE EARLY 80's.(On the street when he was filming a movie)
Joe Perry (At an interview)
Joe Walsh (At a benefit concert, in the audience)
John Ritter (At a restaurant in Westwood)
Jose Eber’ (At the Dream Maker show)
Juilana Marguiles SELF IMPORTANT (On the ER Set)
Kabir Bedhi (Bollywood actor) (At the Mike Douglas Show)
Kate Jackson MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU'D IMAGINE (In the elevator of the 1 Wilshire Bldg.)
Kelly Martin (On the Live Goes on set and at the Pasadena Play house.)
Laura Diaz LESS THAN 5 FEET TALL. (Newcaster on ABC channel 7 in Los Angeles) (Interviewed a student at the school where I used to work.)
Loretta Swit (At the Farmers Market)
Luther Vandross (At a bar in Hollywood)
Marty Allen (In the elevator in Century City)
Michael Anthony (At a girl friend’s house and again at a music store in HB)
Michael Bergin (On the Baywatch set)
Michael Newman (On the Baywatch set)
Mick Mars VERY GENTLE HUMAN BEING (At a convention)
Nigel Olsen (In a bar in Hollywood)
Nikki Sixx (At a convention)
Noah Wiley (On the ER set)
Paul Stanley (At a convention)
Patti LuPone (On the Life Goes On set)
Psycho Mike (Local celeb from KROQ morning show)
REO Speedwagon: Gary Ritchrath & Alan Gratzer (At the bank)
Richard Simmons VERY NICE AND FUN PERSON(at his show)
Rockin’ Fig (Local radio celebrity) (At the beach)
Rod Stewart (On Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills)
Ronald & Russell Mael (“Sparks”) (At the Farmers market)
Ronnie Vanucci (Drummer for “The Killers”) (Walking in to the KROQ show)
Scott Weiland (Lead singer of “Stone Temple Pilots” & “Velvet Revolver”) (At an interview)
Sharon Lawrence (At a premiere party)
Sheila E. (At a convention)
Sherry Stringfield (On the ER set)
Sonny & Cher (At their TV show)
Stacy Kamona (On the Baywatch set)
Steven Tyler REMIND ME TO TELL YOU MY STORY ABOUT HIM.(At an interview)
Stryker (Local celeb from KROQ morning show and one time Ellen DeGeneres DJ) (At a KROQ concert)
Susan Blakely (70’s super model) (In the audience of the Stephen Bishop concert)
Susie Coelho (Actress/model, Sonny Bono’s 3rd wife) (At Bono’s restaurant)
Suzanne Somers (At the Ellen Show)
Ted Lange (Walking down the streets of Westwood)
The Cars (In a hotel lobby)
Tim Mc Graw (At the Jay Leno Show)
Timothy B. Schmidt (At an Aerosmith concert)
Todd Rundgren HUGGED ME! (In the bar at the House of Blues)
Tom Arnold NICE GUY (On the Baywatch Set)
Tom Delonge NICE GUY. (Lead singer for “Angels & Airwaves” & “Blink 182”) (Walking in to the KROQ show)
Tom Sholz (At a convention)
Tommy Lasorda (At the high school where I used to work, scouting Chuckie Tiffany)
Tony Danza (At Bono’s Restaurant)
Trudy Styler (Sting's wife) (At a benefit concert, in the audience)
Vasili Bazianos (“Benny Sago” on “All My Children”) (At the Pasadena Play House)
Wendy Jo Sperber (The older sister on “Back to the Future) (At the Pasadena Play House)
Ralph Garman (Local celeb from KROQ morning show, he is also a voice character on Family Guy.) (At a VIP party during a KROQ concert.)
Don Steele (Iconic DJ from KRLA) (At the filming of the original “Death Race 2000)

Taking care of old business

2009-01-22T13:22:00.001-08:00

I didn't post anything in December because I was si-i-i-i-i-i-ck. I had some un-named virus that knocked my socks off. I missed many days of work and I sounded so bad that my boss actually came to my house to make sure I wasn't on death's door step. I went to the doctor 3 times and each time they said that it was a virus and that they couldn't do anything about it other than to treat the symptoms. So I spent a huge amount of December laying on my couch. I was sick for Christmas and I was sick at New Years. While everyone else was toasting in the New Year with champagne I was toasting with Delsym. Mazeltov!

Anyway...I have a few things that I wanted to write about really quickly.

#1. I read a very funny blog that is written by Craig M. (http://puntabulous.com)
A while back he asked his readers to draw a self portrait using a template that he had created. (If you would like to see the pictures go here: http://puntabulous.com/2008/11/21/puntabulous-people-on-parade) (if you visit...let him know I sent you!) Anyway...after I had so much fun with the template I sent it to my family and asked them to make me a Christmas card. I was going to make that my Christmas post but then I was too sick to write anything on Christmas so that went down the tubes. However I wanted to share my Christmas card with you:

In case you can't tell...this is a rendering of Ashleigh flying in to the Christmas tree. I haven't had a tree since she was a kitten, but this is a pretty good explanation as to why I don't have them anymore.

#2. Several posts ago I wrote about the debacle that was my first and last product review. When I wrote the review I wasn't able to post pictures to my page. So without further ado...here's a picture of the faboo Pinhole Glasses:

#3. One of my ongoing series in this blog is a little ditty I like to call "Free Paint". I am always in awe of houses that I see that are painted odd colors. When I see them I can only think of one reason why anyone would paint their house this color...and that would be...Free Paint! This house, as most of the houses in this series, is in the neighborhood where I grew up. Salutations from La Puente, Ca...

#4. On my to work I saw this license plate. I know what they were trying to say but I think they missed the mark:

I'm sorry but I see "Sweat Pee". Am I the only one?

Brushes with greatness

2009-01-20T16:52:00.000-08:00

It seems like I've been spending a lot of time at The Jason Show (http://jason-thejasonshow.blogspot.com/2009/01/star-sighting-divine-miss-m.html) but who can blame me? He always has something fun going on and I enjoy his company. Last weekend he told the story of how he went to a concert and saw Bette Midler sitting in the audience and then asked what celebrity sightings we in blogland have had. I started to write up a comment but my list got so big that I thought that I should just make it a post on my own blog instead of taking up so much space on his comment section. So my list is below. I'm sure that it could be longer if I put more thought in to it, this is just off the top of my head. I have been very blessed to live in Southern California all of my life and especially to have lived in Hollywood/Beverly Hills and to have a relative in the biz.

I tried to identify some of the more obscure celebrities, but if you don't recognize them or if you want to know where I saw them just ask in the comments and I'll fill you in. Please note that none of these sightings are from events I paid to attend. (Well, some of them were people I saw at events I paid to attend but I saw them in the audience...they weren't who I paid to see.) That list would be twice as long!

Al Jarreau
Anson Williams
Anthony Edwards
Arnold Swartzeneger
Bill Smitrovitch
Billy Barty
Bobby Sherman (He attended my 10 year high school reunion!)
Brian May (guitarist of “Queen”)
Catherine Bach
Cee-Lo (Lead singer for “Gnarles Barkley”)
Chad Lowe
Charlie Brumbly
Chastity Bono
Chris Burke
Corbin Bernsen
Daisy Fuentes
David Hasselhoff
David Lee Roth
David Letterman
Denzel Washington
Dr. Drew (Celebrity Rehab)
Efren Ramirez(“Pedro” in “Napoleon Dynamite”)
Ellen DeGeneres
Elton John
Eriq LaSalle
Fred Savage
George Clooney
Gloria Reuben
Gov. Jerry Brown
Ike Turner
Jackson Browne
Jacques Cousteau
Jason Brooks
Jason Mamoa
Jay Leno
Jeff Conaway
Jessica Lang
Jewel
Jim Belushi
Joe Perry
Joe Walsh
John Ritter
Jose Eber’
Juilana Marguiles
Kabir Bedhi (Bollywood actor)
Kate Jackson
Kelly Martin
Loretta Swit
Luther Vandross
Marty Allen
Michael Anthony
Micheal Bergin
Micheal Newman
Nigel Olsen
Noah Wiley
Patti LuPone
REO Speedwagon: Gary Ritchrath & Alan Gratzer
Richard Simmons
Rod Stewart
Ronald & Russell Mael (“Sparks”)
Ronnie Vanucci (Drummer for “The Killers”)
Sharon Lawrence
Sherry Stringfield
Sonny & Cher
Stacy Kamona
Steven Tyler
Susan Blakely(70’s super model)
Susie Coelho (Actress/model, Sonny Bono’s 3rd wife)
Ted Lange
The Cars
Tim Mc Graw
Timothy B. Schmidt
Todd Rundgren
Tom Arnold
Tom Delonge (Lead singer for “Angels & Airwaves” & “Blink 182”)
Tommy Lasorda
Tony Danza
Trudy Styler ((Sting's wife)
Vasili Bazianos (“Benny Sago” on “All My Children”)
Wendy Jo Sperber (The older sister on “Back to the Future”)

Score card...for anyone who is new and needs to catch up...

2009-01-16T14:57:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the fabulous Jason, http://www.jason-thejasonshow.blogspot.com/, I have a handful of new people looking at my blog. I would do pretty much anything to get them to stick around and continue to read my posts and I figured that it might make it easier on them if I made a cheat sheet so they would know who everyone is.

My story is pretty much on the intro on my page. I'm 48 years old, live in a little mobile home across the street from the ocean with my 5 cats. I'm a two time breast cancer survivor, a daughter, a twin sister, an aunt and a step mother. I love music of most genres and I like to read. I've been known to take some nice pictures, create a few scrap books and crochet a few blankets. I've been married twice and divorced twice. I'm dating the international man of mystery and he has turned me in to a wine snob. I've been to Europe 3 times in the last 2 years and I can't wait to go back. I'm short, I color my hair, and I'm on a never ending quest for the perfect chocolate martini. I like to play board games, go to concerts and hang out with my family. I've been known to dance in the grocery store just to entertain my nieces and I sing loudly in the car.

I have written about my twin sister, Tori. She has 5 kids and lives off in the desert with tumbleweeds and rattle snakes. She, too, is a breast cancer survivor. She makes me laugh more than anyone I've ever known and sometimes she doesn't even have to use her words to make it happen.

My sister's children:

Andrew: 25 years old. Used to live with me until he trashed my house and let all of my cats out during my last trip to Europe.

Paul: 22 years old. Diagnosed as "mildy mentally retarded with slight Autistic tendencies and extreme ADHD". Goes to work bright and early every day and loves to get his big $10.00 paycheck at the end of the week. (He's paid by the unit and he has a hard time staying on task.) He's about 6 feet tall and quite the handsome lad. He can't tie his shoes but he can kick your ass at just about any video game.

Rebekah: 16 years old, head JV cheerleader. Just got her belly button pierced. Wears a size 0 and doesn't seem to believe me when I told her that I wore a size 0 when I was her age and that she'd better appreciate it now because one day she's going to wake up and she'll be wearing a size 10 just like me and her mom!

Hannah: 12 years old, one of 3 7th graders on the Jr. high dance team. Received the principals award last week. (She's gotten it every year since she started school!) She is smart and sensitive.

Jake: 5 years old. A running ball of energy. He just started pre school and he couldn't be any cuter.

My daughter Amanda: When I married my first husband he came equipped with 2 little girls. Even though I treated them exactly the same from the moment I met them...one of them liked me and the other one didn't. Amanda came to live with us just a couple of days after my first cancer diagnosis. What I thought was going to be the biggest mistake ever turned out to be my biggest blessing. When I packed my bags to leave her father she packed hers, too. She is the sum total of my divorce settlement and I really couldn't ask for anything more. She is now happily married to Mike, gainfully employed and currently looking to buy a house. She suffers from bouts of "acute infectious colitis" and winds up in the hospital about once a year. The last time she was in the hospital she was in intensive care and had to have 5 transfusions. That was almost 7 months ago and we are hoping that she's seen the last of the inside of the hospital for a very long time.

My mom: My mom still lives in the house she and my dad bought in 1957. She doesn't take well to change. The neighborhood is less than stellar but apparently she likes it. She retired a couple of years ago and is enjoying doing her Red Hat things and playing card with her friends from high school. She and I go out to eat and to the movies and shopping all the time. We also take weekend trips together and we have a ball. Our next scheduled trip is a "turn-around" trip on a bus to Laughlin.

The International Man of Mystery or IMOM: I have been dating IMOM for 3 years. It will be 4 years in March. I have known him for just about 30 years and we dated before as very young adults. His work sends him to Europe so often that he keeps an apartment over there. He treats me like a princess and that's the way I like it, uh huh, uh huh. He has asked me not to write about him and I asked him to compromise...if I don't mention his name or show his picture ...would that be ok? Well, so far, so good.

My 5 Cats:
Lorenzo: 3 years old, deaf, big white boy. VERY talkative. Dave is his alter ego. (When he has gravy on his face he thinks he looks just like Dave Navarro of Alice In Chains fame.)

Ashleigh: 3 years old, petite, grey girl. Sister/wife to Lorenzo. Lorenzo adores her and falls apart at the seems when she gets out. She pretty much couldn't care less about Lorenzo. She is a lone wolf. She has ruined every screen in my house by clawing her way through them. She is now working on an escape route through the ceiling.

Elijah: 2 years old, small white boy. Elijah was born in the heat of the summer when Ashleigh was suffering from a major flea problem. I couldnt' use anything on the fleas so sadly enough Elijah had fleas, too. He got very sick as an infant and spent a few days in the hospital with "flea anemia". He lived through it but has remained very timid and baby like. He is a very sweet boy but Lorenzo picks on him relentlessly.

Mathilde: 8 months old, small white girl. She is very quiet and I've never seen her do anything naughty.

Nort: 8 months old, fat grey girl. Always doing something naughty. She gets away with murder because I almost lost her last summer. In a freak accident...Andrew bent down and picked up Nort and another kitty. The other kitty kicked up such a fuss that it made Andrew trip and on his way down Nort hit the edge of an end table. She was a very, very sick little girl for about 10 days. I thought we were going to lose her but she rallied. She has a little bit of a neurological problem that causes her to wobble when she walks but that hasn't slowed her down at all.

I think that is my entire cast of characters. If you have any questions...please let me know and I'll answer anything that I can.

Thanks for stopping by.....

It's very sleepy in here.....

2009-01-16T14:32:00.000-08:00

Mathilde is taking a much needed rest in the bay window. She was so tired she couldn't clear the boxed scratcher. She had to lay on the lid.

This is as about as tired as Nort gets. She doesn't usually sit still for longer than two minutes and there is usually a cat nip toy underneath her. (Nort Report: Nort has discovered how to kick ass and take names. If it is her idea to cuddle up with me or one of the other kitties then...fine. But if it isn't her idea then you'd better be wearing your suit of armor because you are going to get a growl and a swat and a hiss.)

Lorenzo is simply exhausted. He and the girls had a very busy day. I wish I had a picture of him wearing his hard hat.

And Ashleigh is probably the most fatigued of them all. What, with supervising such a huge undertaking can anyone blame her? A decorator's work is never done!

The escape hatch is almost finished! Now if they didn't have to do all of this work while dangling from a curtain it would probably go much quicker. (In case you can't tell what this is...it is a destroyed ceiling tile in the "pop-out" portion of my mobile home. Ashleigh and the kittens climbed up the curtains and clawed, chewed and did what ever they could to destroy it.) Ashleigh has an unquenchable need to be outside and when she can't escape through the front door or through a screened in window she has to take drastic measures. Sadly for her...there is no way out through the ceiling so all of this work was for naught.

The Jason Show Interview

2009-01-12T16:43:00.001-08:00

For the last year I have been reading a blog by a wonderful man named Jason. http://www.jason-thejasonshow.blogspot.com/ He is smart and funny and good looking and one of these days I hope to get to meet him. He's one of the few bloggers I follow who actually lives in southern California. A couple of days ago he created this very fun project:

Jason Interviews the Blogosphere
Welcome to Jason Interviews the Blogosphere, where Jason interviews you with questions that other bloggers like you wrote! Each blogger who has volunteered to be interviewed has been matched up with questions written by other Jason Show readers.

Here is my Jason Interview:

1. What is your ultimate fantasy?

I come home from work and discover that my house key won’t unlock my front door. As I stand there thinking…”WTF”… a town car pulls up and the driver gets out and tells me that this home is not up to my standards and that my new home is now down the street. I get in the town car and we drive down Pacific Coast Highway. The driver pulls in to one of the 3 story homes that has direct ocean views out of every window. “This is your new home”, he says. “I can’t afford this, I can’t live here…” I say. The driver then tells me “This house is bought and paid for. It’s a new program send down from Heaven. Everyone who has survived the ravages of a life threatening disease gets to live the rest of their long, healthy life in the lap of luxury. This is your home.” I walk inside and all of my kitties are all ready there. They are all sweet tempered and delighted to see me. Ashleigh doesn’t dart for the opened door and Nort doesn’t wobble when she walks. They have all been trained to use the toilet and their favorite thing in the world is to have their nails clipped. The house is fully furnished with furniture that deflects cat fur.

As I walk through the house in awe I am delighted to see my reflection in the mirror. I am now much taller and I have legs for days! “OMG! Look at my legs!” I scream. My next thought is to look at my chest. “TWO BOOBS!! I have TWO boobs and they’re magnificent!” I’m so happy I start to twirl. As I spin I’m shocked to see my former husband, (Husband #2). “What are you doing in my fantasy house!!!???” I ask him. “As penance for throwing you under the bus in 2005, uhm, my job for the rest of my life is to clean your toilets, but I’m not allowed to talk to you.”, he says as he quickly disappeared.

I walk further down the hall and see a door with a sign that says “Music Room”. I open the door to peek inside and I see Jackson Browne sitting on a stool plucking at a guitar.” “Oh, hi.” he says. “I’m just working on the phrasing of a new song that Todd and I wrote about you. When he gets back, we’ll sing it for you, ok?” “Todd?” I say. “Yeah”, says Jackson. “Todd Rundgren. We live here with you and we will sing and play for you when ever you want. We will also have our friends come over and sing for you, too. You are our new best friend and we will teach you how to sing with us. Steven Tyler will be here in a while so you’d better rest up!”

My bedroom is upstairs. It has a picture window with a panoramic view of the ocean. There is a big beautiful bed full of pillows and comforters. There is a fire place off to the side. I open the door to a walk in closet full of clothes that all sort, wash, dry, iron and put their selves away. And the shoes! Oh the shoes! Glorious designer shoes, comfy fluffy slippers, fun tennis shoes and stilettos of every color known to the rainbow…and none of them make my feet hurt! There are purses to match every shoe and sunglasses to match every purse. Towards the back of the closet I see that all of the pants have elastic panels across the front and the shirts are all blousy. Maternity clothes, I wonder?

“Dinner is ready”, I hear from the kitchen. I walk toward the kitchen and I meet my new chef who will forever more do all of the food shopping, cooking and washing of dishes. I ask my chef if she knows why there are maternity clothes in the closet. She smiles as she tells me that my infertility problems are no longer an issue and that even though I’m 48 years old I have been granted the ability and energy and health to finally give birth to my very own child.

My head is spinning at this point so I go in to the dining room and sit at the lavishly set table so that I can eat dinner. I hear the door bell off in the distance and then I hear the door open and close. I hear the cook say something about “the man of her dreams”…and then he walks in to the dining room, bends down to give me a kiss and says, “Honey…I’m home.” I’m stunned as I say, “Welcome home, my Keanu. Welcome home.”

2. What is your ultimate nightmare?
Having an earthquake while I'm sitting in the doctors office being told that the cancer has come back, having an anxiety attack, with snakes everywhere and then finding out that it is true that no one reads my blog.

3. Which do you prefer, spiders or snakes?
I would rather be in a vat of spiders than to be in the same general vicinity of even a tiny little baby snake.

4. Where is your favorite travel destination?
I love Haliewa, Hawaii more than any person should love a destination. It is the most peaceful, tranquil, beautiful place I have ever been. I want to marry Haliewa.

5. Who is the most famous person you know personally?
Years ago I spent a summer in Hawaii with my sister’s family when her husband was shooting the television show, “Baywatch Hawaii”. Anson Williams, “Potsie” of “Happy Days” fame was the director. We were at the set every day and we all got to know Anson pretty well. I feel fairly confident that he would know who I was if we ran in to each other, but we do not keep in touch.

6. BONUS QUESTION: Would you rather only be able to eat super spicy foods or super bitter?
What kind of honorary Mexican would I be if I couldn’t eat super spicy foods? I live on spicy Mexican food.

I'm being hounded by idiots

2009-01-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

Please note that I didn't alter their verbiage or spacing in any way.
Ed.

From: J P
Subject: Correction On Pinhole Glasses Review
To:
Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 3:54 AM

You wrote an incorrect review for our product Pinhole
Glasses.We need you to make the corrections necessary.You inserted the keywords
and the links but you did not anchor the links with the keywords.It's useless
just to have keywords with no link.So please make sure that the keywords
are hyperlinked to our site url.Please send me an email when this is done.

From: Tami Wyatt
Subject: Re: Correction On Pinhole Glasses Review
To:
Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 4:46 PM

If you would like to explain to me how to do that I will gladly go back and make this correction.

Now perhaps you would like to go to your website and correct the spelling and grammatical errors.

From: JP
Re: Correction On Pinhole Glasses Review
Date: Friday, January 9, 2009 8:00 AM

Just hyperlink the keywords and make them go to our site URL.

From: Tami
Re: Correction on Pinhole Glasses Review

I don't know how to create hyperlinks. If you would like to tell me how to do this I will do it....or do you just like to boss people around?