Bed time at Team Wy HQ

"Thanks for participating in dog urine recovery unit."

"Unh."

"Do you think she's trying to tell us she wants to get out more?"

"Unh."

"Ah, dog urine--so gross. Cat urine--so much grosser."

"Unh."

"Just so I can think about it, do you have a laundry itinerary for tomorrow?"

"Unh."

"I'd like to get there by 4."

...

"I also need to go to the ATM to get money for quarters."

...

"Good night sweetie."

"Shgood nighht."

Easily hooked

Loki looks into my eyes, “Meow.” He turns a circle and paws my leg.

“Oh, Loki Toes.”

Eye contact, and he begins to walk toward his bedroom door. “Meow?” He paws the bedroom door, “Meow?”

“OK, baby.”

We walk in, and he circles his special towel. His meows increase, and he paces, pawing the towel eagerly. He never disengages eye contact.

“Meow?”

I look at the plastic tub. He knows where it is and what I’ve just done—“Meow!”

I gauge that there is maybe a pinch and a half left. “But Loki, this is it.”

“Meow!” he cries as he paws the towel.

I open the tub and think of his original owner. I drop a generous pinch of catnip on the towel. “You are just like your mother,” I say as I stroke his back. I love him anyway.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

I was just told by a friend's boyfriend, "I don't know the difference between shit and shinola."

When's the last time I heard someone say that? Is this slang we should recycle to preserve its heritage?

Either way, it was both shocking and refreshing. Like a curiously strong brain mint.

PS I hadn't talked to my friend in ages, and when she saw my Flickr photos, she was impressed with my "Ba-zooms." Yep, so am I.

Maybe this is the real source?

You know those terrible forwarded e-mails you get that say "If you don't send this to ten people, your first-born son will get polio and die of ebola"? I have a cousin who is WAY too into these awful forwards. Way too into them. One of them was "Send to ten people and you get a special wish." Her closing line was, "I have a very special wish, so please help me!" Turned out she wanted a baby. Oh she got it alright. No details. I've blogged her before, and I'm rude and mean etc.

What if they're true? What if the interweb really can curse you? What if all those deleted quasi-spam are some sort of judgment against me for not toeing the internet's line? Is the interweb the new supreme judge of all?

I hate forwards. Hate them. Just got one from crazy cousin again. Didn't even open it (Actually, that's a lie, but I didn't read it.) But do the forwards know something about the universe that I don't? Gawd I hope not.

Sorry, Super-Fans

A particular story was requested by Boyd, and this is sort of to say to her and all my Super-Fans that, sorry, can't do it.

I've been taking a lot of Benedryl (the dog hasn't, coincidentally), and I'm just so darn tired and spacey. I'm trying. I got the first sentence of the post written, and then I think I fell asleep.

I believe the state of Benedryl is coming to a close soon. I am taking it because I was allergic to a medication I was prescribed, believe it or not. Slowly (way too slowly), the bad drug is working its way out, and I am taking Benedryl less often.

I am about to fall a sleep on my keybpard an d make random letters, so I'll sign off, yours truly, Christine Wy.

Hockey fan face-off

Husband just came home from work and commented on someone's beard: "If our beards were to wrestle, my beard would kick his beard's ass."

“Why I will never be a good parent,” or “Please don't take my dog away!”

Some couples get dogs as trial children. They seem to think, “If we can handle a dog, then we can handle a human.” No. I would like to inform that using a dog as a prop is totally unlike having a baby. Or, I would like to inform that having a dog is exactly like a little human in that someone is always doing something wrong to the family baby.

Sunday my husband called me from Orlando. I said, “The dog is scratching a lot so I’m giving her a Benedryl.”

His sage response, “I’m not there to stop you, so go ahead I guess.”

And I did. I gave my dog a human medication she had never had before, locked her in her crate, and left for work. A few hours later I thought, “Oh man, what a shame. I’m not there to see if the Benedryl is actually working.” A few hours after that I thought, “Hm, I hope the Benedryl doesn’t make her sick.” Fast forward a few more hours, “Oh my god, I probably killed the dog with Benedryl because I gave her an unknown medication then left her alone in our house and she’s probably going insane or already covered in flies or having a doggie heart-attack right now!”

I tried to convince myself that all would be well because The QC Report often talks about her dog’s amazing ability to be allergic to everything and its inability to swallow pills.

One of the problems with me, the dog, and pills is that she loves them so much that I have a hard time not giving her random medication. Let’s see, I’ve given her multi-vitamins, calcium pills, flax seed oil capsules, and now Benedryl. I’ve given her tons of Dramamine, but the vet actually said that was OK. Once, she was driving me so crazy when we were on a road trip, I gave her one of my clonazepam. It made no difference. Something that knocks me out cold, and she didn’t stop barking and shimmying for a second. The clonazepam is probably my greatest offense against canine pill safety, but she was never the worse for it. Of course, she thought it was a treat. Maybe that’s why she was still insane. Pills are the greatest thing on earth to her, second only to rawhide.

I am the type of mother that would eat unpasteurized cheese while pregnant and feed my infant honey just because she liked it. I am the kind of parent that would FREAK at a fever and fill the bathtub with ice and cold water—just in case. I would be the type of mother upset by poop consistency. “Oh my god, Matthew, look at her diaper! It’s totally not like it was yesterday! Did she get in the dog toys? Oh, wait, did I give her Benedryl then leave her unsupervised for eight hours? Oh yeah, that’s it. But totally look at the diaper anyway. It’s really gross.”

Cats, however, are the perfect training tool for deciding if you want to have children or not. They never do what you want them to do when you want them to do it. People, get a cat. A dog will only teach you that crate training is a miracle on par with sightings of The Madonna. Or just Madonna sightings, if that’s your thing.

Enviable living circumstances

I'm pretty sure I just overheard my neighbor's miscreant friend say: "I fall down a lot, but that's because I drink too much."

Ceramic expectations

“Oh my gawd that hurt!”

“Why did you just do that?”

“I wanted to spit in the garbage can, but I didn’t notice the ceramic toothbrush holder would hit my head.”

“Why did you want to spit in the garbage can?”

“I don’t know; I just did.”

“But the sink is fixed. The ban on expectorate is lifted.”

“I’ll remember that next time. Man my head hurts.”

To flush or not to flush? And, why?

My psychiatrist asked me to add a retinue of vitamins and supplements to my medical regime. I hesitated because I'm broke, but I only buy the good supplements from the whole earth store. I grabbed some plastic, and (an undisclosed large amount of money) later, I've got pills! LOTS of pills.

Somehow, I forgot to buy B-3 though. Silly me, who could forget B-3? I returned to health food money hole, and looked and looked for B-3. Guess what? B-3 is called "Niacin." Maybe you knew that. I didn't. I looked around and found my fave brand of vitamins and supplements, Solaray (I am not a spokesperson or medical practitioner, but the comforting name and look of the bottle make me feel like I'm doing the right thing), and, there it is, my new Niacin. Grabbed, paid, left on my gas-leaking scooter.

I went to put the B-3/Niacin with the other morning supplement regiment in the kitchen, and I was followed by Huntress Supreme, Blanche DuBois. She thought there would be food involved.



Instead, I took an illustrative photo of the vitamin army:



This is how Blanche looked after she realized there were no dry spaghetti bits or frozen peas on the floor to eat:



Yes, Blanche definitely lacks pea-ness.

But, wait? Let's look at that vitamin picture again (indulge me):



Do you see that? It says "No Flush Niacin." WTF? Is this some sort of fat deposit thing I need to worry about? Like they say "excess vitamin C is flushed out through your urine." Did I just buy Niacin that won't flush? And this made me think about how some vitamins make your pee turn yellow. Is "No Flush Niacin" something that won't show up in your toilet?

Niacin is getting mysterious. And illogical. So I turned to my best friend GOOGLE! (Like Solaray, I am not a spokesperson or medical practitioner for Google, I just like that they do cute search page icon changes for the holidays.) After much sorting through blurbs about how Niacin may prevent Alzheimer's and how Niacin isn't proven to prevent anything, I finally found this gem that explained it all:

"Niacin (but not closely related niacinamide) expands CAPILLARIES and can lead to itching and flushing at doses commonly used in multivitamin supplements (100 mg or more).... "Sustained release" niacin may cause less flushing."

Thank you internets. You mean my face. You mean my face may become red, a condition also called "flushing." Ergo, I must have purchased a "sustained release" niacin since it is "No Flush." Thank you, Solaray, for caring about my capillaries enough to not make my face red. Un-Thank you, Solaray, for making me wonder what the hell I was doing flushing B-3 down the toilet!

Oh, and Solaray, my dog says thank you because she thinks pills are treats, so I give her the more harmless vitamins on occasion. I wonder if she flushes....

Quit staring at me!

It's resume time again, and every time I click on my Word window, that huge, blank, white canvas glares at me. It's intimmidating. So many "no's" lately that it's hard to get pulled together to conquer that blank, white screen. Words for Word. I need black ink on a white screen.

For some reason I'm thinking of Picasso. I need to channel him to turn my abstract ideas into something relatable on canvas. Unless you don't find Picasso relatable. I do. I hope the next person who reads my resume does too.

You didn't even know I was away

My dad instilled in me a deep paranoia about ever letting anyone know when I was going out of town. Surely, he was convinced, some miscreant would take advantage of the knowledge and rob my home of my crockpot and espresso machine.

I was away, and I didn't tell you, internets, because some cyber criminal looking for blog posts on vacations might have taken my stash of yarn and collection of dollar vases from Ikea. Or my favorite couch pillow. God bless me if they took my favorite couch pillow.

Lovely husband and I were in North Carolina for his cousin's wedding. We were south of the Outer Banks and north of Cape Fear, somewhere called Top Sail. Which is funny because there was visibly a huge sandbar that makes sailing in the area pretty much impossible.

I'm glad I survived the vacation. Matthew's parents rented a huge condo and the ENTIRE Wy family of in-laws and babies and sisters and sister's friend stayed together in one house. Everyone was on their best behavior (except when inebriated), and the whole trip went much more smoothly than I would have imagined. It's a compliment to my mother-in-law that she pulled everything together and it went so well.

The wedding was odd in that the etiquette of the bride and her family didn't jibe with the way I was raised. I was constantly surprised by her sudden departures from parties thrown in her honor. Really, she's a lovely girl, and I like her a lot for someone I barely know, but I couldn't wrap my Southern Trained Brain around some of her behavior. I told myself, "Everyone's different. She can do it her way," but that only helped a little.

I took more than 200 pictures, and the ones shot on film I can't wait to develop. Once I weed out the loser photos, gobs will be going up on my Flickr account. As you know, internets, I am incredibly lazy, so don't expect the photos quickly. Maybe a few of me hula hooping in the ocean will go up soon, but some of the wedding photos need to be Photoshopped to correct for bad exposure (It was my fault for not getting the aperture right on the first few photos).

Team Wy is back. Some of us slightly sunburned, both of us very tired, and the dog thrilled to be reunited with the loves of her life.

Now we just need groceries.