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Wednesday, November 10, 2004
the conspiracy of depraved inanimate objects
The conspiracy on the part of inanimate things, against me personally, has progressed to an outright rebellion. Today, if it could slip between my fingers, it would. If it could fall in the butter at dinner, it did. And needless to say, whenever it was possible for something to spill, smash, shatter, or explode (OK, so maybe 'explode' is a bit of an exaggeration), it did. In spades. Even my nice cozy jammies snickered at me every time I tried to wipe my hands on their acrylicness and got, instead of dry hands (I have discovered, by the way, thanks to these jammies, that I wipe my hands on my clothes, um, way too much), that shuddery wet acrylic feeling. I shudder again now, just thinking about it. And the refrigerator has become especially crafty. I've had an ongoing feud with it for, what, a year? And tonight T pointed out that I needed to defrost it. Now. Not tomorrow, when our milk has been sitting at 55 degrees for another eighteen hours or so, but now. He wasn't so forceful about it as it sounds, he just kind of guilted me into it. So I played the martyr card -- "OK, you just go on to bed while I stay up for two more hours defrosting the freezer. You didn't know it takes that long? Well, it DOES, and if it weren't MY SOLE RESPONSIBILITY to do this task, you would have known. Go, go, off to bed, I don't need you resenting me on top of the lack of sleep and everything else, go on." (Yes, as a matter of fact, I did say every word of that. Not all together. But still. Cripes.) And then it only took ten minutes to defrost the freezer, thanks to my patented "Two Liter Bottle Filled With Hot Tap Water And Fitted With A Squirt Lid" method. So I had to putter around in the kitchen doing a lot of other stuff so that T (who probably was still awake when I finished) wouldn't hear me come over here and start typing after such a distinctly un-martyrish expanse of time. And of course it was all the refrigerator's fault. Cocky piece of... machinery.
And now the B key on my keyboard is acting all sticky. Fantastic. Now I can add that to my list. Nothing like having to spend an entire data entry paycheck on our, what, fourth ergonomic keyboard in thirteen months? so that I can keep doing data entry (and, well, everything else too, to be fair).
While I was going about my beleaguered existence today, I had the most fantastic ideas for my NaNoWriMo book -- which, by the way, is still laughably short. It's the data entry, see. Maybe if someone was paying me, what, about a quarter of a cent per keystroke? I'd be more motivated to spend time working on the novel. Anyway. I had all these great ideas and I thought, I can't wait till the kids are in bed and I can sit down and actually bang out a few thousand words, and then as soon as I sat at the computer, the whole defrosting saga began. And now that I'm at leisure to sit here if I want to, and it's "only" almost 1 AM, the ideas are fleeing my brain like it's the site of an impending nuclear attack.
On a more serious note, I'm starting to actually worry about C's hearing. The medication they gave her cleared up her congestion completely, and very quickly. She no longer has a stuffy or runny nose, or a cough. The thing is, though, that her hearing is almost no better at all. So my worry is that the hearing thing may be completely unrelated to the congestion and maybe she needs to get into a specialist, like, NOW, before it gets worse. The pediatrician thinks it's just a lingering infection (note: C has no pain or feeling of pressure in her ears) and wants to try another round of stiffer antibiotics before we move on to a specialist. I am giving it five days. If she is not 100% better on Monday she's going to an ENT whether her ped (whom, by the way, we like a great deal; she's been the kids' doctor since LT was born; in fact, she was the pediatrician in the room when they removed him from my body) thinks she needs to or not.
I'll close with one picture:
This is a self-portrait: the back of my head after spending about fifteen minutes at Salon Chez C, who says (at least while she's at it) that her "very favorite thing to do in the whole world is fix Mommy's hair." Who could say no to that?
