Chookah

Schizophrenic tunes

Many of you who know me understand my love of a varied (and deep) catalog of music.

I hooked the iPod up in the living room - *shock* it's STILL working! - and set that sucka to "shuffle".

This experiment with the "shuffle" setting proved to me that I do indeed have a lot of different types of music.  In the past hour I've heard songs from the following artists:

• Lords of Acid
• Alice in Chains
• Marc Anthony (don't ask)
• Fatboy Slim
• Cameo
• Some hard rockin something or other that I didn't recognize
• Chris Isaak
• Kidz Bop (again, don't ask)
• Ani Difranco
• Madonna (old school - Lucky star kind of old school)
• Henry Rollins
• Squeeze (anyone remember them?)

The one type of music that I don't have on my iPod...Country. Thank God I'm not that desperate or insane.

Glasses

This is the reason why I got the scratch-resistant coating on my glasses.

The Colonel

The Colonel Sanders bubble goatee.  Gotta love it.

The Hot Zone

Word to the wise.. if you want to live, stay out of my office.

While moving my "peeps" to our new digs I noticed that I didn't feel too hot.  Run down and kind of achey...I blew it off as a new office environment that I would simply have to get used to.

Yeeeah...not quite.

5 AM this morning, I wake, sit up in bed, cough my GUTS out and feel the fire (inferno) in my throat.

The biohazard suits are now hanging directly outside my office.

Here we go again, and just when I was starting to feel better! argh.

The Petrie Dish

Daycare.  Every child who attends daycare can expect to bring home every bug that walks through the door.  It's a fact of life.  I figure, Sebastian is either going to be sick now or when he goes to Kindergarten, might as well get it over with.

This season has been especially tough on the little ones.  Cold after cold and illness after illness and rampant influenza!  Sebastian and I have had our share of illnesses - and share with each other, we do.  What can you do?  This crap is so contagious that even the most germophobic person is sick.

I walked into school tonight to pick up Sebastian.  The director was almost in tears.  She and I had a little talk and I let her vent about all the stuff going on at school.  She told me that over the last two months 30-40% of the kids were consistently out sick.  The same percentage of staff is also out.  The other director is out sick and with a sick child.  I gave her a hug and told her that her day was almost over - tomorrow would be a fresh, new day.  I feel for her and the stress she's under.  It's hard keeping your cool with adults, let alone stressed parents and sick kids.

Sebastian's preventative checklist:

1. lots of hand washing (check)
2. change clothes when we get home (check)
3. obscene quantities of fluids (check)
4. extra sleep (check)
5. limiting trips to public places (check)
6. avoiding babies or other people with depressed immune systems (check)
7. memorizing the pediatrician's phone number (check)
8. antibacterial wipes in the car, purse and house (check)
9. mini-bottles of Purell - especially the moisturizing kind - whoo hoo! - in every conceivable pocket and location (check)
10. flu shot (check)

Whew! No wonder my memory is shot!

<knock on wood and raising a huge glass of gatorade> Here's to weathering the next couple of months with minimal or controllable illnesses!

Thank You

To the person (or people) who shoveled my driveway and walk this afternoon.  It was a very nice suprise to come home to.

I don't know who you are and the neighbors won't cop to it but I wanted to say, "Thank You," anyway.

Word of the Day

Truthiness: The quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

Origin: Stephen Colbert, "The Colbert Report," 2005 (turn off your pop-up blockers and prepare to spend 5 minutes painfully chuckling)

"And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

"Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word.' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart."

   

Definition courtesy of www.urbandictionary.com

How you know when tub-time is over

Sebastian loads a bucket full of water, takes a sip of it, laughs maniacally and then throws the rest of it out on the floor, soaking Momma and the bathroom floor with half a gallon of water. <insert additional wicked belly laugh>

Tub "all-done".

Bowling with Nancy Kerrigan

Y'all remember Nancy Kerrigan, right?  "My knee! My knee!"

Tonight she and I are singing the same damn tune, we've "gone bowling" per se.

The only parking spot available at the daycare was a spot that I don't like to park in.  It's at the end of the row and on a slight angle - forcing the right side of the car lower than the left side.

Sebastian's car seat is centered in the middle of the back seat, this requires me to put half of my body inside the car in order to plunk him down and buckle him in.  The other half of my body (mostly leg) dangles outside the car and acts as something of a stabilizing base.

The shifting weight in the car (Sebastian's a pretty dense kid) caused the angle and the dangle to collide in a most painful way.  The door swung shut and crunched my leg between the door and the frame of the car. 

"Owwww!" I howled. (I'm pretty proud of myself for not screaming some profanity that my little mockingbird would most certainly pick up and repeat in polite company).  "My knee!  My knee!  Owwww".

I'm no orthopedic surgeon (though I might be visiting one if the swelling doesn't go down) but I think that I crunched my Patellar Tendon. 

I rolled around and howled in the back seat of the car for about 30 seconds and then regained my composure.  Yes, it hurt *that* much.  I looked up at Sebastian and he was staring at me. 
"Momma ouch?" 
"Yes, Sebastian, Momma ouch." 
"Kiss?"
"You want to kiss it better?"
"Yeah"

So, I hauled my maimed leg into the car and pulled out some random yoga move to get my knee close to Sebastian's face.  He kissed it, stroked it and said, "all better".

How freaking sweet is that?

(yes, I'm a dork for a)putting myself in this stupid and predictable situation and b)allowing this to happen *again* - not a newbie to this particular injury)

The song that keeps on giving

Over the past couple of days Sebastian and I talked about different animals and where they lived.  He'd pick up one of the many plastic animal figures that he got from Santa, tell me what it is, what it says and bounce it around on the carpet, "hop, hop, hop."  I didn't know that hippos hopped... but I'm getting off topic.

Tonight, Sebastian and I chatted and rocked in his chair, decompressing after our day.  We talked about what we ate, the people we saw, what we played with and then we started talking about animals:

Sebastian: Tiger...rooaaaar!
Me: That's right.  Where does the tiger live?
Sebastian: youn-gle
Me: Yes, in the jungle.  Where does the elephant live?
Sebastian: in da grass
Me: That's right, in the grass.  Where does the hippo live?
Sebastian: Hippo live da waaa-ter.
Me: Yes, the hippo lives in the water.
Sebastian: (without skipping a beat) Horse...wheeeee, wheeeee...live on farm.....eee-iiiiii-ee-ooooo
Me: (smiling and stifling serious chuckles which would completely derail our bedtime routine) Uh huh, the horse lives on the farm.
Sebastian: (pointing in the dark room with his index finger as if he were counting individuals in a line) duck, quack quack, pig <insert horribly offensive snortling sound>, cow, mooooooo, on farm.
Me: e-i-e-i-o

Yes, this story is only funny if you're the parent of a toddler or you personally know Sebastian