I just registered the domain SoCuteICouldPuke.com.
I had to.
You see, I took this picture, and I just downloaded it onto my computer and looked at it, and had this instant reaction which was, well, “this is so cute that I could puke”.
What do you think?
And what do you think that I should do with the domain?
Who would ever have thought that a seemingly innocent thing like mint toothpaste could incapacitate someone with what can only be described as a “phasers on stun” response to being accidentally inhaled?
Well, let me tell you, don’t try this at home, kids.
When you think about the act of toothbrushing, and how often you do it (uh, hopefully), the fact that you probably don’t hold your breath when you brush your teeth (although you should if you don’t brush your teeth – at least if you are standing near me), and the proximity of all that toothpastey backwash to your epiglottis, well, it’s amazing that this doesn’t happen more often. Certainly it’s the first time that it has happened in my forty-mumbledy-some-odd years.
But there it was. I was brushing my teeth, with Crest cool-as-ice-ultra-minty gel, and somehow, a tiny bit ended up going down the wrong way.
And let me tell you – when that searing hot mint hits your delicate pulmonary tract, you experience a full minute and a half of “oh please God let me die NOW” intense pain with every attempt at breathing, every futile cough which only serves to re-sear the entire length of your trachea as you desparately claw at your throat and chest and wonder if you will ever live to see another episode of Knotts Landing.
Then for the next five minutes the coughing hurts somewhat less (only somewhat), and you have the bizarre sensation of having minty fresh breath that is minty fresh all the way from the bottom of your lungs on up.
An altogether unpleasant experience, and I think I’m switching to Tom’s of Maine orange/mango toothpaste from here on out.
Searches that led to this article: https://www mangemerde com/its-ok-to-brush-just-dont-inhale/,
So what with doing all this raw food stuff and all, I figured, what the hey, and picked up a couple of tomato plants, and sank them in our front yard.. yep, right between the Margaritas and the Calla Lily.
We planted one Early Girl, and one Beefsteak, and despite the names, they both had their first ripe fruit on the same day.
On the way in the door just now we grabbed the one of each, and brought them in, rinsed them, and took a bite of each.
Ohmygawd… is there anything better than a still-warm-from-the-sun, fresh-off-the-vine tomato?
If there is, I want to know about it.
We were at the Tech Museum yesterday, where I was given the code name “Curious Orange Hedgehog”. Make of that what you will.
In any event, they have this really cool feature – there was a computer set up, open to a page where you could ask a Stanford University geneticist a question!
So of course I snooped the URL for you guys:
And here is the list of already asked and answered Ask a Geneticist questions; some of them are quite interesting!
You’re welcome.
So I go to the doctor today. It’s a specialist who is going to take some diagnostics for my main doctor. I’m told to pound 32 ounces of water an hour before my appointment, because not only are they going to prod me, but they need to prod me while I have a full bladder. More accurately, they need to prod my full bladder. (A little bit TMI there? Naaaah, you’re not squeamish, are you?)
Now, telling a woman who has had two children to “hold it” is a laugh enough on its own. Telling a woman who has had two children to hold it after drinking 32 ounces of water – while they prod her bladder – is beyond a laughing matter.
However, as it turns out, after pounding the 32 ounces of water, and hauling tail in my lovely old Volvo wagon to get to the appointment on time, the appointment started with this exchange:
Me: I’m Anne, I’m here for my 1:15 appointment to get my overly-full bladder prodded to see who gets wetter when it bursts. Hope that Dr. Smith will be wearing a face shield.
Her: Hi Anne, ok, let’s get you checked in. Ok, now you have Aetna insurance, right? (She knew this because when I made the appointment they asked me what kind of insurance I had; they’re smart like that.)
Me, brightly: Yes! That’s right, I have Aetna. How kind of you to remember!
Her: Ok, well, we don’t actually participate with Aetna – they are one of the only two that we don’t, so you will have to pay out of pocket.
Me: I see. And how much is that?
Her: $605.00.
Me: I see. And, you knew that I had Aetna how?
Her: Because we asked you when you made the appointment.
Me: Uh huh. So, wouldn’t it have made sense to have told me then that you didn’t participate with Aetna, what with your having taken the trouble to ask me what insurance I had at all (at this point I could feel my inner Sam Kinison begging to get out).
Her: Why yes, they should have. Didn’t they?
Me: Why no, as a matter of fact, they did not.
Her: Well, they should have.
Now here I am, thinking “why yes, they bloody well should have.”
So we were left at this impasse, which I finally broke by saying, cleverly, “Well, I’m not paying you $605.00 out of my pocket, so I guess we’ll just have to agree to part as friends.”
And I took my full, unprodded bladder and left.
Oh sure, I felt a little bad that they had a $605.00 procedure scheduled and instead they ended up with an empty room for an hour. But here’s the thing – I wasted nearly an hour in the car, 15 minutes chugging the water, 20 minutes at the office before all was said and done, and hey, about an hour emptying my bladder – given my billing rate, the amount of my time that they wasted with their little oversight added up to a bit more than that $605.00 they just “lost”.
So, think that I should send them a bill?
At last! I have the wonderful Volvo wagon that I’ve always wanted!
I am SO excited! I ordered my new Sidekick 3 today!
As anybody who has followed any of my writings for more than, oh, a day, knows, I extoll the virtues of the Sidekick whenever I get a chance. It is only the most versatile, under-rated of all of the all-in-one devices out there. In short, it kick’s the Blackberry’s battery door all over town.
In fact, I wrote about how by using a Sidekick you can keeep all of your data, on every single computer you own (PC and Mac) synced – all with each other.
You can read that article here:
http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/syncing-your-life.
And now the Sidekick just got even better! With the release of the Sidekick 3 they have added EDGE (finally) and bluetooth (FINALLY!), and even an MP3 player.
I have a friend who works for T-Mobile, and they let me play with theirs (the Sidekick!.. get your mind out of the gutter!), and let me tell you, it is one sweet device.
If it works as I hope that it will, I will finally give up carrying a separate phone, and be down to one single device that truly does it all.
I’ll keep you posted; it’s due to arrive early next week.
This is a contraband picture:
Today it was definitely time to take the dry cleaning in. First, it hadn’t been done in way too long. And second, our female cat had decided to stake her claim – if you know what I mean – on one of my husband’s dress shirts, and so that shirt definitely needed a little spot and odor removing TLC.
So I bundled it all up and took it to a certain dry cleaning shop in Sunnyvale – let’s call them “$1.75 Cleaners” because, hey, that’s their name – and I had the following somewhat surrealistic, and thoroughly irritating conversation.
Me: I have some clothes here that I need to have cleaned. Let’s see, I have four sweaters, some shirts to be laundered, and a suit – do you do suits here?
$1.75 Cleaners guy (whom, I might add, was no spring chicken, certainly someone who had seen a cleaning or two): Yes, we do suits.
Me: Super. Ok, oh, and this one shirt is in this plastic bag because our cat urinated on it.
$1.75 Cleaners guy: What do you expect us to do with it?
Me, rather stunned: Uh..clean it?
$1.75 Cleaners guy: Oh no, we can’t do that.
WHAT…THE…
$1.75 Cleaners guy continues: They wash them all together, it will get on all the other laundry. We can’t have that.
So correct me if I’m wrong, but when an article of clothing or linen gets a stain on it, or – gasp – an odor, aren’t you supposed to take it to the dry cleaner?
Isn’t that what they DO?
Isn’t that their reason for BEING?
Morons.
We had been going to that particular shop ever since it opened; now we’ll go past that shop and thumb our noses when it closes.
Which it probably will soon, what with its not actually wanting to do what cleaners do for their customers.
Not to mention that new sign in their window which says, in effect, “It now costs $2.50 to get your item cleaned at $1.75 cleaners.”
Nice.
I give them two months, tops.
Ohmygawd. What has become of me?
I just made my first smoothie.
And I liked it.
It had a banana, organic raw almond butter, organic dates, home-extracted coconut water, and..gasp … hemp seeds (yet the only buzz was that of the Vita Mix).
And..
Yeah, I liked it.
Does this mean that I’m turning into one of… them?
(In case you didn’t already know..I’m experimenting with adding more less-processed food into my diet.. you can read more about that at my Adventures in Raw Food site.)
Today is Father’s Day.
My father passed away unexpectedly in 1989. It was the end of June. I had just graduated from university, and it was the week that I was packing and moving out to California for law school. I lived in Buffalo, and my father lived near Seattle.
I had seen him just a few weeks before. He had made the trip – not easy for him – out to Buffalo to see me graduate, and to see me accepted in to Phi Beta Kappa. That was very important to him, and he was so proud of me. He himself had graduated Summa from Princeton – no slouch was he.
He had stayed with me, and attended my graduation, and my going away party. I had surprised him by turning that party into a birthday party for him, as his birthday had been just a few weeks earlier. When they wheeled the cake in, which said “Happy Birthday” in Russian (my father had been a Russian translator for most of his adult life, even though he was neither Russian nor had even learned Russian until he was an adult), it was a lovely surprise.
We also had a wonderful, deep talk during that visit. A talk in which I told him how much he meant to me – what a wonderful father he had been and how much he had given me. He hadn’t thought so at all. I made sure he knew. Knew that I loved him dearly, and appreciated those things he had given to me – which I listed for him: a passion for reading, the skill and knowledge of proper use of our language – both spoken and written, a love of classical music, the ability to read and play music, and an appreciation of art.
I had been so excited that I was going to live so much closer to him. I dreamed of the day that I would be a law school graduate, well-employed, and able to help him out. To take care of him.
And then, he was gone.
When the phone rang in the middle of the night that night, I already knew. I won’t say how I knew – that’s a story for another time – perhaps – but I knew. I was already in tears (as, indeed, I am now). I didn’t want to take the call, but of course not taking the call wouldn’t change anything. As I hung up the phone, my first thought was “now I’m an orphan.”
But my very next thought – even in that unspeakable anguish of having just lost a parent, was “I’m so grateful that we had that talk.”
I cannot begin to express how very grateful I was, and am, that I had the chance to say those things to him, and that I said them to him when I did. Because if I hadn’t then, I would never have had the chance. And he would have gone to his grave thinking that he was a terrible father. That might have been his last thought as he sank to the ground (which he did) – that he had failed his daughter.
Instead, he went knowing that I loved him and thought him a wonderful father, who had given me some of the most important things in life.
I am so very grateful for that.
And damn it, if you haven’t said these things – these most important of things – to your father, now, while you can, then do it. Now.
Because at any moment it could be too late.
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