Aflux.net

I really wanted to write a blog post about this weekend but LIFE and STUFF and EXCUSES. So here is a photodump. I think they are in order.

It was an amazingly fun weekend. I got completely drunk. I did not have any kind of hangover. There is fun stuff that happened that we didn’t even get photos of like a couple hours of boogie boarding. SO MUCH GOOD FOOD. Such great friends.

I like to do this thing with Cassidy in the car where I mock her pop music by changing the lyrics around. I’ll start loudly singing then change the words just enough to make a completely sweet song into something it ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT BE. When she was younger she’d MOOOOOOOOOOOM me and become really annoyed. But now that she has a more developed sense of humor often times we end up laughing like a bunch of lunatics.

Today? She ACTUALLY SANG ALONG WITH ME. As this song was playing I started to realize that if you just changed the word “fight” to “fart” (and a few other small changes I bolded below) it suddenly became pretty much the best song every written in all of history.

I have embedded the video so that you can sing along with my new, much more awesome, lyrics.

Like a small FART in the ocean
Sending big waves into motion
Like how a single FART
Can make a heart open
I might only have one match
But I can make an explosion

And all those times I didn’t FART
Wrecking balls inside my brain
I will FART them loud tonight
Can you hear my FART this time

This is my FART song
Take back my FART song
Prove I’m alright song
My power’s turned on
Starting right now I’ll be strong
I’ll play my FART song
And I don’t really care if nobody else believes
Cause I’ve still got a lot of FART left in me

Losing friends and I’m chasing sleep
Everybody’s worried about me
In too deep
Say I’m in too deep
And it’s been two years
I miss my FART
But there’s a fire burning in my bones
And I still believe
Yeah I still believe

And all those times I didn’t FART
Wrecking balls inside my brain
I will FART them loud tonight
Can you hear my FART this time

This is my FART song
Take back my FART song
Prove I’m alright song
My power’s turned on
Starting right now I’ll be strong
I’ll play my FART song
And I don’t really care if nobody else believes
Cause I’ve still got a lot of FART left in me

Like a FART boat in the ocean
Sending big waves into motion
Like how a single word
Can make a heart open
I might only have one match
But I can make an explosion

This is my FART song
Take back my FART song
Prove I’m alright song
My power’s turned on
Starting right now I’ll be strong
I’ll play my FART song
And I don’t really care if nobody else believes
Cause I’ve still got a lot of FART left in me
Now I’ve still got a lot of FART left in me

Now that I’ve finished this post I’m realizing that perhaps HER sense of humor didn’t become more developed, maybe I’ve just regressed to having the sense of humor of a 16 year old and at that age farts are still funny.

Yeah, no. Farts are ALWAYS funny, I don’t care how old I get.

The other day I got two delightful comments on my blog post about Hoda Kotb and Kathy Lee Gifford from SEVEN YEARS AGO. It had been three year since I’d received a comment from another internet illiterate bored housewife commenting on that post like they were talking directly to the ladies on the show so I assumed it had fallen off the Google index. Both good and bad. Good because the level of stupid in those comments made my left eye twitch and bad because it was a delightful little treat when they would pop up randomly in my email.

These new comments were special because the first one reprimanded my grammar… then she followed up 5 minutes later with an actual on point comment. I thought this was odd so, against my better judgment, I decided to respond. Below is the exchange.

I know that Ben is reading this with a sly grin on his face because I am a complete Grammar Nazi but more about STUPID mistakes (your, you’re, there, their, they’re, to, too, etc) but COME ON. I add an extra word on a rant post from SEVEN YEARS AGO and you expect me to be, what? Gracious that your first comment ever on my blog was to criticize? Does that make you feel better, Evan?

I mean, you ARE a professional. You are so motherfucking professional that you didn’t even make a single mistake when you left that brilliant comment about how nice your bankruptcy lawyer was in 2010!

And your videos for your public speaking class? They are NEXT LEVEL professional!

Good luck on that Master’s Degree, Evan! And thanks for reminding me that you can buy an education but you can’t buy class.

Have a nice day!

Not going to go into the entire ordeal now because: TOO LONG.

Short story, in the last two weeks I went to urgent care twice, doctor’s office, three day hospital stay, back to the doctor, had a sigmoidoscopy and finally have a diagnosis. It’s actually been a MUCH LONGER process than that. It all started a few years ago when I had a horrible flare up in my colon then again last February which led to a colonoscopy. The problem with the colonoscopy was that it took so long to schedule that by the time I went in the flare up was over and my colon was in perfect working order.

This time when I went in for my post hospital checkup I mentioned that I’d had blood in my poop that afternoon so the doctor squeezed me in for the sigmoidoscopy the very next morning. He wanted to see my colon DURING a flare up to see what was actually happening.

My colon was a MESS. Here the top picture is from me colonoscopy February of 2014, bottom is my colon in June filled with ulcers!

Here are some much larger ulcers:

And here you can see the inflammation. The wall of the colon should be smooth here like it is in the first picture above. All that white “fluff” is inflammation. SEE: PAINFUL

Since this was taken I’ve been living on the FODMAP diet, had a pill endoscopy (will post photos once I have them), lost 14 pounds, still bleed pretty much daily. Chrons is NOT the diagnosis I want. It’s SUCKS not to be able to eat the foods I love, but I am SO RELIEVED that at least now I have some direction and a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve had these stomach issues for as long as I can remember. As far back as high school! Now I can get on some maintenance medication although my end goal is to get my diet figured out enough that I can get off meds and mostly control the chrons by eating non-trigger foods.

It’s been SUCH a long and hard and frustrating road but I could not be more thankful to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. (SO MANY BUTT JOKES!)

Most normal days:

Me: *fart*
Ben: Honey!
Cassidy: MOM, SERIOUSLY!?
Me: It’s a NATURAL REACTION TO FOOD! GOD!
Ben: *sigh*
Cassidy: *slams door*

In the hospital after the nurse asking me for two days if I’ve been able to pass gas yet:

Me: *farts*
Ben: GOOD JOB!
Me: Seriously?
Ben: YEAH!

Being really sick did have SOME upsides.

1. A lot of bikes get stolen in Gilroy.
2. A vast majority of the community do not know the difference between “your” and “you’re”.
3. Even fewer know the difference between “their”, “there”, and “they’re”.
4. People really don’t like fireworks but can’t be bothered to actually attempt to figure out who is setting them off so that they can stop them. It’s far more productive to complain about it on the Facebook page.
5. Letting your dog off leash on a mostly deserted trail where you usually never see another human or dog is exactly as bad as attempted murder of a child. SAME THING!
6. People very often mistake the page for Google and ask things they could easily answer themselves.
7. In the comment thread of these useless questions they will receive the exact same answer from approximately 358,413,543 people that didn’t check the comments before posting.
8. Then at least one argument will break out over whether that topic actually belongs on the page.
9. Any time there is an accident in a 50 mile radius, Peggy will post a screenshot of the Pulse Point phone app that includes exactly ZERO information about the accident except a location.
10. 2,345,315,364 comments will follow asking for information that nobody has or will give the information they received from their brother’s friend’s cousin’s barber.
11. 74,293 will comment with one word: “prayers”
12. If your car has a scratch on it anywhere FOR THE LOVE OF GOD don’t park in on the street where people will have to look at it. Be a good commoner and park it in your garage so that the good people of the land aren’t subjected to that filth.
13. If you hear the neighbor’s baby crying for more than 15 minutes a few times a week you definitely need to let CPS and the cops know because those parents are bad and clearly don’t know how to raise a child. Also, inform the Facebook page so we can all properly ridicule said parent.
14. If you have a problem with a neighbor’s barking dog, don’t just call he non-emergency police line to report it, FIRST post it to the Facebook page so that we can all pat you on the back for being a passive-aggressively perfect neighbor.
15. BANG HEAD REPEATEDLY AGAINST KEYBOARD

I’ve had this post with just a title in my drafts folder for over a week now and I just can’t seem to find the time or want to write a post about it so I’m just going to leave these here for your viewing pleasure. I DO have a funny story to write about how small the internet is and how this trip was SUCH a good example of that but it will have to wait for another day because: SKYRIM

This was by far my favorite shot of the bunch. After the ride we just about wet ourselves from laughing so hard when we saw the picture. Cassidy said, “MOM! I WAS GENUINELY SCARED FOR MY LIFE” between bouts of hysterical laughter. Love that kid.

Trying to be better about documenting life so while the dishwasher and washing machine are running I’m going to try and get a weekend recap done without getting too distracted by the Internet. So far I’ve started this post about 17 times then stopped to download a TV show to watch while I blog, then got sucked into a Facebook wormhole which lead me to catching up on other people’s blog posts and now I’m back here to try for the 18th time.

Last week I started to become REALLY ANXIOUS about a trip down south to watch my cousin graduate from Pepperdine with his Doctorate in Education. So much so that I got to the ANXIETY OVERLOAD point where I pretty much just stopped doing anything other than working. I’d get home and start to stress about what time I’d be leaving and if I’d be dressed properly for the weather and what if I get lost and will Cassidy be too tired for school on Monday and… you get the idea.

And all that worrying was POINTLESS. Finally on Friday night I had dinner with Ben and told him how I was feeling and he walked me through each step of the trip from packing to driving and I was able to relax a little.

Then I got home and realized that I had not cleaned the house in a week and it was a MESS so I got anxious all over again because Melanie was going to be dropping the dogs at home for us on Sunday and would SEE MY MESS. But before I could start to stress clean which would have kept me up all night and make me REALLY tired all day on Saturday I took a Xanax and went to bed and messaged Melanie to please not judge my mess. She responded with something along the lines of DON’T BE SILLY WE LOVE YOU IDIOT! 😉

It turned out all my worrying was silly because all my over planning made the trip run more smoothly than I could have imagined, even though my battery died and I forgot our Magic Mountain tickets! Dropped the dogs off at The Dog House Inn at exactly 9:00AM and because I had come in the day before to pre-pay and drop off all the necessities, we were in and out in less than a minute. We even had time to stop by Starbucks before hitting the road and pulled into Pepperdine at EXACTLY 2:00PM as planned.

The graduation ceremony was great. The speakers were actually quite interesting and witty and had some great messages. The best part though was getting to cheer and yell for Jarrett as he received his diploma. So much work goes into getting a Doctorate and he did it all while moving his family across the country and finding out that they are expecting their third little miracle shortly before flying out to defend his dissertation. He’s a pretty amazing guy!

After the graduation his wife Katie had set up a little party on a patio overlooking all of Malibu and the Pacific Ocean on campus. It was such an amazing view and a great visit with all of my family. I absolutely love getting to spend time with them. It’s always belly laughs and good food and great fun.

Here are some of my photos and some from the family from the day.

Last Sunday after grabbing some breakfast with friends we got home and as I threw something away in our trashcan I saw this:

Me: OMG!
Ben: WHAT!?
Me: THE NEIGHBORS BOUGHT AN X-WING FIGHTER WHY DON’T WE HAVE ONE OF THESE?!
Ben: Really?
Me: Yes look!
Ben: We SHOULD have one of those!
Me: HANGING FROM FISHING WIRE IN THE LOFT!
Ben: LET’S GO LOOK IT UP ONLINE!
Me: OKAY! This is why I love being an adult! You see a toy you want… AND YOU JUST BUY IT!
Ben: And you don’t even have to ask your parents!
Me: RIGHT!?

We went upstairs and hopped on our computers and saw that it was only $35.00 and I was getting ready to order it when I realized that it had really bad reviews. It’s wings don’t even open into an X! WHAT!?

I looked around and found one that is FAR better, has wings that open and looks more like the original and is, of course, $104.00 + shipping.

Me: This is the part of being an adult that sucks.
Ben: *nods*

In my head I had immediately listed out all the costs we have coming up in the next few months:

1. Finishing up the tile flooring.
2. New downstairs bathroom including new toilet and vanity.
3. New couches for the living room.
4. We NEED a new refrigerator as soon as we can fit it in the budget.
5. Hopefully we can convince the rest of the neighbors to split the cost of the rest of the 2/3 of the fence that needs to be replaced.
6. I’m going to Malibu in June because my cousin is graduating from Pepperdine with his PhD! Plan on spending a day at Magic Mountain on that trip.
7. I might join Ben in New York for a work trip in late May.
8. And oh yeah, we are buying a new car this weekend.

So no new X-Wing Fighter for us.

Sometimes being an adult can really suck.

Ben: So, should we tile?
Me: No…
Ben: What are you going to do?
Me: Play video games all day!

Turns out, being an adult isn’t so bad.

So we sold Ben’s Mazdaspeed 3 this Tuesday. Good lord there is a whole story there in itself that I might get into someday but for now I’ll just say that we decided to sell the Mazdaspeed to get Ben a more fuel efficient car now that we have the M3 for a “play” car and it decided that it was not happy about it and tried to commit car suicide. It was a lot of stress and conversations and more stress and as much as that car was a good car that served us well, I was not all that sad to see it go.

Maybe what played out at the bank the next day was karma for not feeling sad.

When we were getting into bed Tuesday night I posted this to Facebook and my best friend and others tried to PEER PRESSURE me into playing with all the money.

I didn’t give in. Mostly because the money was all the way downstairs and I was upstairs and it would have required me to but clothes back on and move my body. Ben and I had talked about who was going to deposit the money and it sounded like he was going to do it the next day so I was surprised when I got home on Wednesday and the money was sitting on the table still. I messaged Ben to see if he wanted me to deposit it and he must have been busy because I texted him twice, called twice and left one voice mail and was getting no response.

So I got bored.

And then I could not help myself. So this happened:

While I was taking all these pictures I was starting to feel a little anxious. It was 115 hundred dollar bills and when I laid them over Danica’s paws I started to imagine her seeing a squirrel out the sliding glass door and jumping up, money going everywhere, her ripping through 10 of the hundreds with every step and then flash forwarded to trying to explain to Ben how now we only had half the money to deposit.

So I very carefully counted out the money TWICE, put it back in the envelope and left it on the table exactly where I had found it. It wasn’t till 5:40PM that he texted to ask me to deposit it. I jumped up and was trying to get out the door quickly because I knew the bank was going to close in 20 minutes. I was trying to wrangle the dogs, get my sunglasses out of their case and was holding onto the envelope… and dropped it.

It was like a perfectly choreographed slow motion movie scene. The money went sliding out of the envelope three feet like a deck of cards. Then the dogs ran back and forth across it spreading it out while I stood there frozen and unable to breathe and internally screaming profanities at myself for not ever living up to my name (PS: Anna means “Graceful”).

I picked it all up and ran out the door. In retrospect, the smart thing to do then would have been to recount the money. But I was just trying to get to the bank before it closed and my brain was still in some shock at seeing all that money flying around under the dog’s feet.

Wells Fargo has these annoying people that stand at the front of the bank line and ask what you are needing to do that day. I told him that I had a cash deposit and he tried to guide me to the ATM. I was keenly aware of the envelope in my purse with $11,500.00 in it and tried to quietly tell him that I had a large cash deposit. So he asked me HOW MUCH. SERIOUSLY!? My answer was “A large sum. Like, selling a car large sum.”

I kept trying to get him to understand that I was trying to NOT broadcast to the entire goddamn grocery store that I was carrying a large amount of cash but he was just NOT. GETTING. IT.

Thankfully, the teller finally called me up and I started the deposit process. He carefully counted out the money… $11,300.00. Um, no. I explained I had counted the money twice before I left and there was $11,500.00 so he counted it again. And then one more time. And then I requested that another teller count it. Then I insisted they “use one of those money counters like in the movies” and they all got the same amount: $11,300.00.

And I pretty much had a nervous breakdown in the store. I had completely blanked on dropping the money on the way out the door and was trying SO HARD to figure out how I was going to explain to Ben that I had lost $200 because I was PLAYING WITH THE MONEY and posting the pictures to social media because I GAVE INTO PEER PRESSURE!

I told them to just deposit the $11,300 (again, if I had been thinking clearly I’d have just asked for the money back until I could find it all) and started praying to Gods I don’t even believe it to PLEASE LET THE MONEY BE AT HOME WERE I CAN FIND IT OMG!

It was about half way home that I suddenly remembered dropping the envelope on the way out the door and started to calm down a bit thinking that I had probably just missed the two bills somehow.

I threw open the garage door, looked into the bathroom and:

There are several morals to this story.

1) MY NAME IS A LIE.
2) Never trust a blonde with a lot of cash and a camera phone.
3) Karma is a thing that exists and sometimes it sucks.
4) Peer pressure will bite you in the ass. HARD. WITH SHARP TEETH.