Pre Vacation Freakishness

My vacation is just 3½ days away and I’m panicking. Part of it is because I only have enough money to cover the motel room for the week we’re there, and the gas to get us there and back. That’s it. We’re going to have to raid my refrigerator and pantry for food we can bring and microwave in the room, because we can’t even buy Subway’s $5 foot-longs for sustenance while we’re there. There will be no souvenirs, no rides on boats, no romantic dinners, no paid parking spots, no smooshed penny machines, and absolutely no driving around town more than necessary. There is no wiggle room. There is simply no money.

Another part of the panic is that I’m still not feeling well, and while many of my medication side effects have waned, I’m experiencing new ones that are pissing me off something awful. My muscles are getting weaker and weaker, to the point where my arms tremble and threaten to give up when I brush my teeth. It takes an hour to blow dry my hair because I can’t turn my brush through my hair more than three times before my wrist feels as if I’ve been kneading dense dough all morning. Walking up the 13 stairs of my house makes my thighs shake with frailty, and recently I’ve started having lower back pain, which I’ve never had in my life. I can’t do dishes, I can’t stand for any length of time, and sleeping is not something that comes easily anymore. Today the pain in the backs of my shoulder blades started, and no matter how much I massaged the muscles, it would not go away.

So, what exactly can I do on vacation without money, and with muscles that are burning and so weak that I can’t even walk up a flight of stairs anymore?

It’s freaking me out!

But, I will not let this stop me! Foliage color reports are predicting peak color in the Hiawatha National Forest to be this upcoming weekend and next week. I gambled and picked the perfect week to go! And since the we’re entering into a depression, the likes of which we haven’t seen in almost a century, I don’t know if I’ll ever get up there again. Plus, I just went to the store to buy something utterly essential, knowing I had very little money in the bank, and the total came to $3.01, but my debit card was denied for insufficient funds. THAT’S humiliating. Then I opened my wallet and thought I only had two singles, one for a Coke for each day at work for lunch until we get paid on Thursday, but there was an extra dollar and I was able to pay for my purchase with cash. THAT’S a sign! A sign from where or whom, I don’t know, but if a magical dollar can appear in my wallet when I need it, I can conclude with confidence that magical dollars can appear in my wallet in the future as well. I believe in magical dollars. You know? Like the kind they print up that have absolutely no basis whatsoever on anything but faith in the monetary system. Like magical dollars that will bail out our banks, who have been cheating and conniving and lying for so long that it’s finally catching up to them, and suddenly there’s squillions of dollars to help them out of this crisis. Magical dollars are everywhere. Let’s just hope that the American people keep believing in them too, or pretty soon we’ll have our own tulip mania, only ours will be called dollar mania.

And what this all boils down to is that I shun the signs telling me to stay home and save my money, which is scarce enough, and choose to go far away, draining all my savings and remaining open credit, all for some colorful leaves.

Sometimes, when I think about it that way, it freaks me out. So I try not to.

But the day wasn’t a total downer.

I’m working on improving our dog book collection, and Marina suggested I find books on the unofficial poodle mixed breeds that are popular, like goldendoodles and schnoodles.

Let me first say that I cannot say shih tzu without giggling. Then I started reading some of the other poodle combinations and I was in hysterics.

Do you havapoo?

Do you affenpoo?

Is it a serious case of lhassapoo?

Can you only afford chi-poo?

Have you ever had to jackapoo, perhaps with your cocka-poo?

When you try too hard, is it a shar-poo?

Or do you have delicate pinni-poos?

Does you mommy criticize your papipoo?

Do you have bossi-poos?

Are you the kind of coworker who has a poo-chin?

Are you shy and prefer to pekepoo?

Do you sometimes try to hold it too long and find that laughing causes an eskapoo?

Or are you a proud person who embraces their poo-ton?

Go ahead and look them up. They’re real.

And people think having a dog named River because he pees a lot is nasty. At least he’s a pee-vert and not a poo-vert.

Justice

Christi and I had a conversation about children recently that bears repeating.

Me: Don’t you think you’ve had enough experience with poo that when you have kids, they’ll be born without colons or something, so they produce absolutely no poo?

Christi: Yeah, you’d think I was owed that, right?

Me: Or maybe you can even out the justice in the universe by taking your kids to the local library to poo on the carpet there.

Christi: Oh yeah! 'Mahhhh-ahhhm, I gotta go pahhhhh-teeeeee.' “Okay, everybody in the car. We’re going to the library! Okay, go ahead, honey. Take a crap right there. I’ll cover you. Go!”

Me (laughing): “And no wiping! This is a library, after all!”

Christi: “No, just wipe yourself on the floor. That’s what it’s there for.”

Me: “Got dingleberries? Just scrape them on the shelf over there.”

Christi: Yup, someone left me crap on a shelf on my first day of work. I should have known that was a bad omen.

Me: That shit was going to follow you everywhere after that?

Christi: Uh-huh. And it has.

Okay, maybe this wasn’t appropriate conversation in a crowded Olive Garden, but I laughed so hard it hurt.


Not that long ago, Christi and her boyfriend signed a lease and they’ll be moving in together. This is a move that makes her a little nervous, and one day her boyfriend was a upset and wounded that she didn’t seem to be as excited about the upcoming cohabitation as he was. I giggled and suggested she should take her enthusiasm and crank it up to 110%, only she should start raving and gushing about how excited she is to have her own place finally, and how long she’s waited to decorate the entire thing in pink, with glitter, unicorns and rainbows everywhere. I told her to really crank up the cheese factor and juvenile dreams of pastels and gumdrops all over so that he’d panic and wish for her to be a little less enthusiastic. It could work!

Recently, she did just this. They were searching for home décor items and walked into a Target, where Christi promptly started squealing and giggling, and then skipped around in place, wanting to know where the glitter department was. Her boyfriend quickly asked her what the hell she was talking about and she explained that she really wanted to put glitter on all the walls and decorate with big, pretty unicorns. He started freaking out. She pushed it more and began searching for glitter paint and the unicorn aisle in Target, really taking it to the next level and talking about where she wanted what unicorn, and where the big rainbow would go. He was horrified. HORRIFIED!

Christi is vindicated.

She may get stuck with an unfair amount of poo in this world, but occasionally she comes out of a struggle on top. It’s true she is the recipient of much shit, but when she dishes it out, it’s almost beautiful.