Awkwardly Social

 Well, I feel much better after yesterday’s rant.  I feel much better also because I’m down to only 4.2 pounds over what I was on my retrieval day. I can sleep almost flatly, and other than the terrifying sharp pain I experienced in my ovaries each time I coughed, I don’t really feel much worse than if I had eaten a huge Mexican dinner and washed it down with 2 margaritas.  Damn I wish I could have some margaritas.  Or, wine.  Or, champagne.  Or a pumpkin spice latte.  But alas, I am still pregnant unless otherwise notified tomorrow.  I have a blood test hanging heavily over my head tomorrow.  I am kind of worried that I’m not barfing or feeling even slightly nauseated.  But nothing!  Lula on the other hand…

Lula has something going on digestively.  She spent yesterday puking every couple of hours, and then again last night we were awakened to the sweet sounds of a dog horking right underneath our heads.  Seth did the majority of clean up as I had been having the horrible sharp ovary pain and he didn’t want me bending over piles of dog vomit. And Lula sat next to the bed breathing her barf breath on my face and looking concerned.  She finally went back to sleep and seemed fine this morning, until at noon she horked again and looked at me worried again.   I made her a dinner of rice and have been making sure she’s staying hydrated, and if she can’t keep the rice down tonight, it’ll be a nice trip to the vet tomorrow.  Just what I needed! Blood work for me in the morning, blood work for the dog in the evening!

We have a gigantic apartment/duplex/house thingy. We are required (it says so on our lease) to cover 60% of the floors with rugs.  The economic state of affairs in our checkbooks was such that we could not afford to do this immediately, so when our landlords offered to leave their big (and kind of ugly) rug in the dining room, we were like, “SURE AWESOME GREAT!  ONLY $20,000 more to go in order to cover 55% more of the floor!”  So, anyway, there is a borrowed rug in the dining room.  Before we put the dog door in, Lula took great offense to this rug and showed us her disdain for its pastel flowers by adding her own special something to it.  She marked that rug to distraction.  It was so owned by her.  So owned that we rented a steam cleaner, cleaned it and rolled it up because we didn’t want our landlords to hate us for having a pissing dog who pees on their rug and their rug only.

We got the dog door installed and Lula went back to peeing outside where she belonged and last week we unrolled the rug and gave it another dose of Natural Miracle Pee Smell Remover That Costs a Billion Dollars and all was right in the world.  Until she peed on the rug yesterday.  I have a feeling it was a combination of me going back to work and Seth talking loudly about something that freaked her out and she felt the need to let us know things were not right in the world and also she hates that stupid rug.

It was with all of this rug peeing and dog sensitivity in mind that late last night I got up to investigate Lula’s mysterious wanderings about the house.  I didn’t have my contacts in and my glasses were safely on the nightstand and I had no slippers on my feet.  I heard Lula outside beside the house and didn’t want to interupt her if she was peeing because who knew if she would then come in and pee on the rug again.  So I hovered by the back door trying to see what she was doing, when I heard her crunching on something.  I stage whispered her over and she slunk towards me trying to hork down whatever thing she had found in the tiny dirt alley beside the house that I automatically assumed was some kind of neighbor placed chicken bone meant to sabotage my dog.  (I am super paranoid that everyone is out to get me.)   I grabbed her mouth and pulled out a soggy piece of balled up paper that looked kind of like it was covered in dog vomit.  I shooed her into the house, grabbed the flashlight and touched the paper again and realized it was a piece of toilet paper covered in shit.  That I had now touched twice.  I flased the light across the alley and saw that it was strewn with wet toilet paper and smelled like sewage.  Awesome!  My dog was eating raw sewage in the middle of the night and I was grabbing it out of her mouth!  I’ll never eat with these hands again!

I don’t know much about houses with sewer systems because I grew up in a house that had a septic tank, but I had NO IDEA that sewage could just come out of an overflow pipe and into your yard.  I did not know that could happen.  Why is that allowed to happen? Why do they have some kind of sewer scenario that allows raw sewage to flow into the yard, but also why are they letting us use a rug that my dog likes to pee on and that made me paranoid enough to get up in the middle of the night and pull raw sewage out of my dog’s mouth?

Not only do I want to avoid all social contact with my upstairs neighbor for normal social anxiety reasons, but also because I probably touched their poop.  I pulled their poop out of Lula’s mouth.  Lula ate my landlord’s poop.  I might have to move.  And get rid of my dog.

On Sunday, I pulled a muscle in my neck trying to be cute while getting out of bed.  That’s the full story.  I feel pretty lame about it.  It still kind of hurts.

There was a weird mail situation wherein someone stole our mail, then returned it to us all opened and crumpled.  I guess they felt bad after seeing my credit card balances.  And my bank statement.  I know I would.  But for a minute I thought it was some kind of blog stalker sending a weird message to me.  That message being, “I know where you live and your mail sucks!  Keep it, asshole!”  Then I realized I was being paranoid.  Also, the biggest expert on threat assessment (I’m too scared of him to even name drop him here) told us that we were being weird and paranoid.  So, there’s that.

The rat is gone.  The exterminator set some traps and sprayed some rat repellent and since then, we’ve been rat free.  Which leads me to believe that the rat saw the writing on the wall and split.  I like to believe this war is over, but rats… man, until you’ve seen one in your own kitchen, you can’t really know how you’re going to react.  Lula on the other hand, is a bonafide rat dog.  Too bad she couldn’t close the deal.

And speaking of Lula, did I tell you she bit an opossum’s butt?  Sort of?  It was more of a love nudge with teeth.  I know general wisdom on possums is that they are ugly, but I’m here to tell you they can look so cute.  Especially when dangling their little asses over our deck and Lula is trying to disembowel them (albeit badly).

Sorry about his paw there.  It’s really disturbing.  Don’t look too close.  I don’t want to alarm you, but it might have human fingers.

How many of you wish you lived in my house now?

I hate Lula.

But I like that I grew up in a house where if you didn’t have a perfect thing to do the job you needed it to do, you just put 6 or 7 imperfect things together and weighed them down with something else that maybe wasn’t supposed to be a weight and voila, you have the thing you orginally needed, or somekind of pile of something that looks bad, but is serving its purpose.

Lula, in the middle of the night, keeps leaping off the deck to the small awkward alley between our house and our neighbor’s fence in pursuit of some creature of unknown origin.  Cat?  Racoon?  Too fast for a possum?  Does this thing even really exist, or is Lula just fucking with me?  Then, because she is a shithead, she can’t get back onto the deck and back inside through her dog door.  Why don’t we just keep her in at night?  Because she has developed nighttime incontinence… and I don’t know.  I’m a moron?

So we created a barrier using a folding chair, a ladder, a wicker table, a tool box and another folding chair.  It looks… well you don’t have to really look at it, because there are no windows in that area.  Also, it didn’t work.  So we added another tool box and a folding table.  And last night I still got up with her three times because I was sure I smelled a skunk and that she was going to run out there, the skunk was also going to be trapped on our side of the ghetto gate and we would all die.  So, yeah.  I’m tired.  I cried three times at work today.

I really hate that dog.  Almost as much as I hate myself.

• The raccoons are back.
• The skunks have babies.  (They are so fucking adorable, that I can’t stand it.)
• There is something living under our house.
• Lula has three nightly wake-ups dealing with all of the above.
• I will be performing some janky construction project this weekend involving lattice, chicken wire, electric fence, dart guns, and a guillotine.
• Lula is being fitted for a ball and chain.

I think the last time I was in a hospital I was visiting my college roommate’s sister.  She had just had her entire bowel removed because of Crohn’s disease.  Thankfully, this was much less stressful than that.  It’s way easier to talk to someone about their fainting spell, busted head and broken collar bone than their missing colon.

Other than hanging out perched on a window sill while my ass numbed and trying to figure out if the names being tossed around were people I should know or if I should just straight up acknowledge I had no fucking clue who they were talking and being told that sitting on the portable toilet chair thing that was awkwardly placed in the middle of the room  was totally fine (because you can put the seat down!), it was a really nice visit.

The only other thing I could manage doing this weekend was dragging Lula to the groomer.  They were really skeptical when I tried to explain I wanted her shaved, but not shaved naked.   I had to explain that she loved to sunbathe and I didn’t want to her to get burned.  (Sometimes shit just flies out of my mouth and all I can do is go with it.  But really, sunbathing?) Then they asked if I was ok with bows and perfumes.  I told them they were clearly blind to hegemony and she shouldn’t be burdened with the trappings of modern sex distinctions.  Actually I made up some bullshit story about her being ‘embarrassed by bows.’  WTF?  Just about then they were dragging her away to the gas chamber (at least that’s what she thought) and I said, fine, put a stupid bow on her, I don’t care!  And when I went to pick her up she was wearing a pink bandana with pink skulls on it.  For the record she didn’t seem embarrassed in the slightest.  And all I could do was laugh because while she wasn’t naked, she has almost no hair.  It’s adorable.

I feel like I’m going a little crossed-eyed with exhaustion.  My weekdays are long and full of jolts of creativity stabbed with pauses of drudgery.

I want to get back to this space and write all about my life and my partner and my house and my weekends but I also want to sleep.  Sleeeeeeep.  Also I sort of feel internal right now, like I don’t want to share some of the things that are going on right now because if I’ve learned anything in my (holy shit!) five years (!!) of blogging is that writing about your personal life on the internet can be equal parts liberating for oneself and shamelessly exploitative to the people who happen to share moments in time with you.  So that leaves me with charming stories about my dog and my bitchy neighbor next door that I don’t even have the energy to spin into anything remotely readable at the moment.  I will say this about that bitch next door, passive aggressive!  Her kids, it seems, had trouble getting ‘put down for their nap’ this one time (weeks ago!) when Lula was in the back yard whining.  But really, ’she was only worried about our dog.’  Sure she was.  So worried that she only brought it up weeks later when we were just casually walking by her house and politely said hello.  Rest assured, we make sure Lula’s dog door is locked now when we leave… Also, it was an awkward conversation to have while her dog was yapping uncontrollably and trying to rip Lula’s face off, but I’ll just leave it there.

The only other thing I feel like sharing with the class right now is that Seth purchased me a champagne bottle stopper.  It has changed my life.  Now I can have a glass of champagne at the drop of a hat and don’t have to worry about wasting the precious bubbly elixir.   It’s the little things, people.

We had all the doors flung open to enjoy the unseasonably balmy and clear night.  I was sprawled out in the living room trying to get the energy to walk Lula when she dashed out into the front dark, gave one yelp and dashed back in.  Seth calmly looked out the front door as I stumbled to catch Lula and said, “Skunk.”

In another second’s time, Lula had rubbed her face all over me, my bag, and, it seems, the back of my head.

I mean, that is the only explanation for the back of my head smelling like skunk, and I am still confused about the whole thing.

Silver Lake is really beautiful and all of god’s creatures and blah, blah, blah, but shitbaghellballs, I am so sick of the smell of skunks.  May they all perish from the earth from a virus that simultaneously renders them scentless.

Mr. F had an engagement that had him leaving early and getting back late today.  We had a cup of coffee together then he left, leaving me in this big rambling house all by myself with the dog.

I’ve been feeling a little anxious here when I’m by myself.  Something about how big it is, how echo-ey how nearly empty it is makes me want to hole up in our bedroom under the covers with the TV blaring and the dog by my side.  Which is pretty much what I did all day.

I got Lula’s test results, and it turns out the little fucker is completely healthy except for a high PH level in her urine.  Leave it to my dog to have bladder problems.  If there’s one thing I wish modern medicine would take care of it’s my bladder.

So after the happy news I forced myself to get dressed and go pick up her (probably unnecessary) antibiotics, but the minute I got home I got back into bed and took another angst filled nap.

Finally I heard back from Mr. F that he would be home in a couple of hours and I decided I needed some fresh air, so the bird dog and I took a tour around the reservoir and got home just in time to fall even more in love with Mr. F.

It was not a great day, but it ended well.  Small blessings.

Traditionally on holidays, the eve of big trips to faraway places and pretty much any inconvenient time to be sick, I would get really, really sick. I think I snuffled and groused through 7 years of Christmases. The time I got sick at my cousin Bobby’s wedding remains part of our family lore.

This year the little bird dog decided to pick up where I left off and spent the day at the vet. She’s been drinking a lot of water, and had some enormous flood type ‘accidents’ over the past week and a half and after googling the causes I decided it was time to take her in. The socially awkward low talking vet told me there was nothing he could do until the results get back, and he sent me on my way with a $200.00 vet bill. Sorry, $235 vet bill. Accuracy is my middle name!

She’s laying beside me acting as if nothing is wrong, so on the one hand I’m suspicious it was some kind of ploy to garner sympathy for the long weekend, but on the other hand, man, I have never seen that much pee. I mean, I was looking around trying to figure out if a pipe burst.

I already wrote about how my quest for tradition last year was cut short when I got my ass dumped right before Christmas, and in the spirit of not repeating that tradition I’ve agreed to play nice and go to Mr. F’s parents house with his kids for Thanksgiving dinner. Which… Why is it that when someone includes you in their way of doing Thanksgiving it always feels absolutely wrong and stupid until somehow it just turns into your tradition? They have dinner at 7PM on Thanksgiving Day. When I heard that I was all, “Huh?” And Mr. F was all, “I don’t know…” And I was like, “Wait, really?”

Which brings me to two Thanksgivings ago, when I scoffed at someone else’s Thanksgiving tradition of having champagne all day long because, and this may come as a surprise, I didn’t like champagne. Last year I made sure to have champagne all day long, and this year, even though dinner isn’t until 7pm (WTF? really?) I have a bottle of Veuve chilling in the fridge. Because once repeated just means you’re trying something again, but twice repeated is just about a tradition in my book. Also, my boyfriend’s kids are going to be so much easier to hang out with if I’m half in the bottle.

Tradition!