Archive for November, 2008

With This Ring

I am cringing. My beautiful 15 year old daughter is walking around with one of these nose rings. This is not my daughter. It’s just an example of another pretty girl who should not have a ring like this in her nose.


It’s fake (thank goodness, because I’d have to tear it out otherwise), but I can’t even look at it without thinking of this.

Does anyone really think this is an attractive look? I like to consider myself open minded and for the most part, I think I am. I let Oldest Daughter get her bellybutton pierced and I let Middle Daughter get the side of her nose pierced and I think they both look really cute.

However, not all piercings are “cute”. Tongue rings, bull-like nose rings, eyebrow, lip and ear cartilage piercings make me want to gag. Seriously. I can’t barely even look at them. When I hear of people piercing…let’s just say the more sensitive areas of their bodiesI want to pass out. WHY would anyone do that?!?! ACK!

While Middle Daughter is trying to persuade me to get a permanent septum pierce (not gonna happen, but it might be fun to let her try), I have to go iron my matador outfit and and get ready to wave my red silky cloth around the living room. Olé! You know, just for fun ;)

OY!

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Pop Quiz!

Yes, it really is a pop quiz! I was just reading Yahoo News! (I really have to stop that. Really!) and was frightened by a story. Maybe “mortified” is a better word, but at least this is more interesting than Adam’s Block, which I told you about yesterday.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) complied a 33 question test designed to measure the level of a typical American’s civil knowledge. They surveyed 2,508 people and 164 of those 2,508 people said that they have held an elected office, so they divided the results into two groups. Those who had been elected to public office and those that hadn’t. Easy enough.

Apparently, though, the questions are the test weren’t as easy as making to categories of respondents.

The average overall score for people who have never held an elected office: 49%
The average score for the 164 people who said that they had been elected to a public office: 44%

NO WAY!” I said to myself, “ That CAN’T be right. Just where exactly is this test and how can I take it?”

I found it here. 33 questions. It took me just a few minutes to complete this test and I should tell you, I am smack dab, halfway between doses of my extra strength Vicodin, too. I wouldn’t operate a motor vehicle or a power tool, but I did take the test.

And what did I score? Well, lookee here…..87.88%.


It’s 1 AM, I’m in terrible pain and stoned on Vicodin and I still scored and 87%.

How the heck can the average of the general public be 49%. That’s frightening to me. Since I know my readers are people of superior intelligence and are always teaching me new things, I am conducting my own study and challenging you to take the quiz and share your score.

No cheating, of course. If I see notes written on anyone’s hand, I’ll have to send you to the principal’s office and whack you with a ruler. Unless, of course, you’d like that and then I’ll have to think of something else.

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Block Party

As you know, I’ve been housebound with terrible back pain. Worse than the back pain is the boredom that comes with not being able to do pretty much anything.

In the last month, I’ve become addicted to Facebook and chocolate chip pancakes slathered in whipped cream. I’ve written, dumped and rewritten five chapters of my book and I’ve seen more episodes of Law and Order than I care to count. My DVR? It’s actually empty because I’ve had time to catch up on the shows I tape.

I’m not tired because I haven’t done anything so I end up staying up at night when everyone else in the house has gone to sleep. People, I am bored!

Anyway, tonight I was going through Yahoo News and one of the headlines was a horrible story about a young man who had committed suicide on a live web stream at Justin.tv. I learned at this site that you can stream video through your webcam and have a chat room right next to it. People can watch your live video and comment to you.

I had never heard of Justin.tv before so I took a look-see over there and discovered this site called Adam’s Block. it seems this guy Adam just hangs a webcam out his 6th floor apartment window. Adam’s description leads one to believe that perhaps this might be a seedy neighborhood in San Francisco.

I watched for a few minutes and realized that there were almost 200 other viewers, too! Some of the regular chatters were talking about things they had seen happen on the block like car crashes, prostitution and a drunken little person laying in the middle of traffic. Before I knew it, I had watched for almost 30 minutes. There’s something hypnotizing about it, I guess.

So, if you’re really bored (and I mean really bored) head on over to Adam’s Block and check it out.

You can watch it right here or you can go to the site if you care to chat with the somewhat obnoxious chatters.

Watch live video from Adam’s Block (San Francisco) on Justin.tv
There’s something very strange about 200 people watching a video feed of an intersection on a Friday night. And, yes, I was one of them! I told you I was bored!

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Sex, Lies and Videotape

If anyone is looking for someone to cozy up with this holiday season, you might be glad to know that sex taping Paris Hilton is back on the market. Yes, she and Benji Madden, brother of Nicole Richie’s baby daddy, have split. Sad, right? I’m not even sure I’m not even sure I’m going to be able to get out of bed tomorrow.

Oh wait, I can’t get up anyway because my back hurts so bad. Darn it!

This isn’t my only gossip. Hysteria Lane is in a tailspin and they all know I’m trapped in my house so I can’t even hide from them. Not that anyone is innocent in the following story, but I have changed the names to protect the guilty. You know, so nobody comes after me and drowns me in a bathtub or disappears me or something sinister.

Guess who else has split? You’ve all heard me talk about my friend, Cami, right? Cami (that’s my nickname for her-short for Camilla Parker Bowles) has been having an eighteen year affair, as well as a secret love child, with a married man. Long story short, Cami found out (after quite an extensive surveillance project, I must say) that Prince Charming was not only two-stepping on his wife, he was two-timing Cami, too.

Is that three-timing? I don’t know. What I do know is that there was some 22 year old girl who was recently diamonded by this serial shyster.

I say “was” because Cami went berserk. Downright bonkers. She called the fiancee. She called Prince Charming’s current wife, one of his ex-wives and the rest of his babies’ mamas (there’s five mamas in all) and told them about the previously secret sibling of their children.

It seems that unbeknownst to Cami, current wife (we’ll call her Diana for simplicity’s sake) was becoming suspicious. Not suspicious of Cami, but of the new chickadee. She said she tried to toss him out on his dupa (my grandmother’s favorite word) now that she’s finished nursing school and has a steady job of her own. A violent fight ensued and she says Prince Charming threatened to kill her, so she let him stay.

A call to the previous ex-wife revealed that shortly after their divorce, Prince Charming wanted to reconcile. He wooed her non-stop, but neglected to tell her that he had already married Diana at that point and was sleeping with Cami, too. When she found out and threatened to tell Diana, Prince Charming threatened to kill her, too.

YIKES! Can anyone say Drew Peterson? I have got to stop answering my phone and I have got to help Cami find a job so she has something else to do. Better yet, if I found a way to fix my back more quickly, I can return to work so I won’t have time to listen to all of this!

Anyway, all of Prince Charming’s baby mamas are meeting for pizza on Saturday night so that all of the siblings can meet. I told Cami that I don’t think it’s a good idea. Prince Charming obviously isn’t all that charming and let’s face it, Cami is a hoochie mama and a little bit sleazy, too. If he doesn’t try to do her in, one of the baby mamas just might.

I used to work with Cami at the police station and when she got pregnant, she had slept with so many of the guys there that somebody made a mug shot lineup of a lot of the guys with “Whose The Baby’s Daddy?” written on the top. I have zero doubt that Prince Charming is the father of her baby. One look at her will tell you that. She is like a mini carbon copy. Good looking is the only admirable trait I can use to describe him.

I wish I had the skills to make this shit up, people. I’d have my NaNoWriMo novel written in no time, right?

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Away In A Manger

Since I am going out of my mind because I can’t do anything with this back pain, I got a wild idea to go out into my freezing cold garage and make a nativity scene.

I don’t know why. It just came to me.

Anyway, I spent all morning with my scroll saw making the manger and the Jesus, Mary and Joseph figurines. I stained the manger, but am doing some funky painting on the figures before I stain them. Will it work out? I don’t know. If not, I’ll just re-cut them.

I still have to make all of the wise men, angels and animals, of course, but here’s a sneak peak just in case it turns out really cool!

I apologize for the crappy pic. I had to take it with my cell phone camera because I can’t find my expensive digital camera anywhere! Hmmmmmmmmmm. Sounds like a search of the kids’ rooms is in order, don’t you think?

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Eye Can See Clearly Now

Ok, it’s not me, it’s Little Daughter. She can see clearly now!

It seems, with everything that’s been going on around here, I’ve spent the better part of the year in doctor’s offices, hospitals and waiting rooms. Today was no exception, but I am pleased to say that the doctors we’ve been encountering lately have been wonderful and have been restoring my faith in the medical community. I didn’t think this was possible.

Little Daughter has been complaining of headaches for a long time. She does get migraines, but these are different. She always passed her vision test with flying colors and the doctors could never find a reason other than simple stress and anxiety. (We do have a lot of that going on here.)

All of a sudden though, Little Daughter complained that she can’t see the chalkboard at school. Again, I took her for a vision test and again, she was 20/20, but this time the optometrist we met with wanted us to see an opthamologist because he was suspicious that she had something called “latent hyperopia” (farsightedness) and she would need special drops to paralyze the focusing muscles in her eye or something like that. This way, she wouldn’t be able to do whatever she was doing to correct her own vision and the farsightedness would be revealed. It was true!

Little Daughter is extremely farsighted and she also did need a very mild correction for farther away as well, so the doctor prescribed bifocals for her. This vision problem didn’t appear to just start either. She’s 14 and in hindsight, I think it’s always been this way, but she’s always passed her vision tests at 20/20. Very bizzare, but she can now see all obstacles in her way!

I had never heard of hidden prescriptions before, but of course if they exist, they’d happen to one of my kids. It’s just the kind of luck we seem to have.

Now if we can just get Middle Daughter fully recovered, my back fixed and my husband’s dizzy spells gone, we’ll be all set.

Sigh. I’m hoping for a bight, sunshiny day. Very soon.

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Seven Deadly Sins

It’s 3:39 in the morning. I have insomnia and I just committed the cardinal NaNoWriMo sin. Since I’m confessing, I have actually broken seven, to be exact, write-yourself-a-novel-in-thirty-days sins.

(1) I second guessed myself and tried to make changes in my predefined storyline. I then proceeded to scrap my first idea (2) and run amok with the idea number two (3). I drank coffee and I keyboarded over 11,000 words into a word processor. I then did something I probably shouldn’t have done. Far short of my 50,000 word goal, I stopped my writing at 11, 473 words (4) and read them (5) and let me tell you folks…it was crap.

I may not know how to get to be an A-List blogger. I’ve long given up trying to figure out how I can be a rock star or even Bon Jovi’s webmistress, but, one thing I do know is crap. I had four kids in four years. That’s a lot of diapers and a lot of crap. My book was stinking worse than the cat’s litter box.

So, I did what everyone does with their crap. (No, I didn’t stash it in the garage. That’s what I do with my good crap.) I selected Edit>Select All>Delete (6). I contemplated for a minute over the “Undo” feature but chose File>Save instead (7), sending hours of work spent writing all those individual words that together amounted to (yes, you guessed it) crap straight into the recycle bin. Actually, I sent it somewhere into hard drive hell with a waving flag just begging to be overwritten by something else. Regardless, my file that was secretly codenamed “Book” is now a blank page.

I was writing a memoir and factually it was exact, but it read like a textbook. The words didn’t seem honest as they were too void of emotion. There seemed to be no point to the story and no sense that sharing this story would help or inspire anyone else. I didn’t even know how I was going to end this story as I don’t have a resolution completely in sight yet.

I thought about these things as I read what I had written and realized that I had no purpose yet of telling this story other than trying to write a book in thirty days. It could be that perhaps you shouldn’t try to write a bestseller while experiencing excruciating sciatica pain from a herniated disc. Maybe I shouldn’t tell my story while taking painkillers. Maybe I’m just not ready to tell that particular story as of yet…I don’t know. I do know that nobody would want to read that and I’m not sorry I committed the seven deadly sins of NaNoWriMo.

I’m not giving up. Tomorrow, ok in a few hours when dawn breaks and the kids are doing the mad scramble to get to school, I’m going to swap out the hot tea I’m currently drinking for a steamy cup of hot coffee and start another story. I’ll probably never make 50,000 words in the allotted thirty days of November, but that’s ok, too. I have other stories to tell and a vivid imagination and I want to be a paperback writer. I want to hold a copy of a book with my name on it, but even more so, I want it not to be crap.

Anybody can write crap and The Rock Chick is not just anybody. She may or may not be a lusty glutton of a greedy sloth wrathed with envy, but she’ll be proud of the book she’s signing at a Barnes and Noble near you. That’s for sure.

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Vertigo

Unos, dos, tres, catorce [1,2,3,14]

So as usual in The Rock Chick household, when it rains it pours.

My sweet hubby is so dizzy, his head is spinning. I wish it was because he is swooning over me, but alas, he’s found himself at place called vertigo. (hola!) We don’t know where this dizzyness comes from (¿Dónde está?), but every couple of years it just keeps coming back for him. I’m guessing Murphy and his laws have no one else to bother because….(well, geez!) This has been a dizzying, spinning, twirling tornado of a year.

I guess the saying “Life happens while you’re making other plans” has some truth to it.

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Injection

After a reschedule from earlier in the week, The Rock Chick is finally having her Epidural Steroid Injection this afternoon to help alleivate the pain caused by a herniated disc.

Not that this sounds pleasant, but it sounds amazingly better than the lumbar discectomy the doctors believe I will need based on my MRI results.

Even though the articles say only 50% of patients get relief from this ESI procedure, I am trying to feel hopeful. I’ve been researching and the majority of people who do get relief are the ones suffering from radicular symptoms, like the sciatica pain that I am experiencing.

I’m also a little bit (ok, a lot) scared. I’ve been on the end of when common “don’t worry, we do these every day” procedures go wrong, at least twice.

Long story short, I suffered a long lasting nerve pain condition resulting from a misplaced c-section incision, among other things. The pain was bad, a little worse than I am experiencing now and they decided to do some sort of spinal nerve block at the pain management doctor.

That, unfortunately, was on a Friday (which is why I will never have anything done on a Friday again) and I was left for the entire weekend with what they call a post dural puncture or spinal headache. These spinal headaches are horrific and the reason I was left with one was because the doctor insisted there was no way that could happen based on the procedure I had and that it must be a migraine.

Yeah, it wasn’t. It was a spinal headache and they did fix it for me with a blood patch.

I intended to swear off things like this for the rest of my life, but that’s easy to say when you’re not in excruciating pain. I can’t walk, work or function like this, so I have to do something.

Anyway, I am wishing, hopeful, nervous, frightened and anxious today. Hopefully, they will have some type of medication available to relieve some of those symptoms, too. Wish me luck! I’ll let you know how it goes!

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The Name Game

According to Yahoo! Buzz, the code names for the new first family have been released. As you may (or may not, I don’t know) The Secret Service uses code names for The President, The First Lady and their children as well as for other other prominent persons and locations. From TV shows and novels, you are probably already familiar with POTUS (President of the United States) and FLOTUS (First Lady of The United States), but each person also gets their own monicker, too.

This time they’ve chosen “Renegade” for President Elect Obama, “Renaissance” for Michele Obama. Daughter Malia will be known as “Radiance” and little Sasha is “Rosebud.” No idea what the future First Puppy will be named or code named, for that matter, but if it were me, I don’t think I could resist getting a pit bull puppy and calling it Lipstick :)

During the election, John McCain was “Phoenix”, well because he’s from AZ and Cindy McCain, “Parasol”. Sarah Palin was called “Denali” after Alaska’s highest mountain peak and Todd Palin was known as “Driller”.

I don’t know why the Secret Service uses code names because they really don’t keep them a secret, but I always think it’s interesting to see what kinds of names they come up with. Just in case you’re interested, here’s a list of some of the code names for Presidents and their families over the years.

Dwight Eisenhower – Scorecard or Providence
John F. Kennedy – Lancer
Jacqueline Kennedy – Lace
Caroline Kennedy – Lyric
Lyndon Johnson – Volunteer
Lady Bird Johnson – Victoria
Richard Nixon – Searchlight
Pat Nixon – Starlight
Gerald Ford – Pass Key
Betty Ford – Pinafore
Jimmy Carter – Lock Master / Deacon
Rosalynn Carter – Dancer
Amy Carter – Dynamo
Chip Carter – Diamond
Jack Carter – Derby
Jeff Carter – Deckhand
Ronald Reagan – Rawhide
Nancy Reagan – Rainbow
Doria Reagan – Radiant
Maureen Reagan – Rhyme, Rosebud
Michael Reagan – Riddler
Patti Davis – Ribbon
Ron Reagan – Reliant
George H. W. Bush – Timberwolf
Barbara Bush – Snowbank or Tranquility
Marvin Bush – Tuner
Neil Bush – Trapline
Jeb Bush – Tripper
Bill Clinton – Eagle
Hillary Clinton – Evergreen
Chelsea Clinton – Energy
George W. Bush – Tumbler
Laura Bush – Tempo
Jenna Bush – Twinkle

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