All I'm Saying there's a joke in here somewhere

I hate it when I struggle trying to think of something to post to the blog, then I have a really good idea and I'm sure I'm not going to forget it, so I do something else first, then I come back to the computer and...it's gone.

That just happened to me. Sorry to disappoint you.

Edited: But then I got another idea. I finally caught up to Shit My Dad Says, and realized that while his dad is funny, my dad says some pretty incredible stuff, too. It's just more along the lines of traumatic. Want a few examples?

"You know, I probably slept with over 50 different women while I was married to your mother." This was on what I think was probably my 22nd birthday when he took me out to lunch. At this special occasion, he also said, "You can have anything you want, as long as it is one of the value meals."

"You know, a lot of young men don't really know how to satisfy a woman in bed. If you find yourself with one of those guys, let me know and I'll take him aside and have a little talk with him about what to do. Just let me know." Yeah, thanks, Dad. I really want to hear my boyfriend say, "Did you like that? That was one of your dad's moves."

Was this post funny, or just scary?

Matt and I made the decision this morning that Cookie has to go. I think I had emotionally detached from her last weekend after the calamity at the park, and he and Cookie had their Waterloo moment today as well. He had her and our older dog at the nearby soccer field, and for the umpteenth time in a row, Cookie ran into Grover at a high rate of speed, bowling him completely over. Grover is eight, and is a slow-moving dog. Cookie is literally going full-tilt when she barrels into him chest first, hitting him broadside. She's going to break him someday.

This came on the heels of her having eaten a hole in our canvas gazebo cover yesterday.

So, I put in a call to the lady at the rescue and left her a voice mail this morning. I've waited all day for her to call me back, and she just did. I sort of wish she hadn't...I didn't exactly get read the riot act, but there's no question that they're displeased, disappointed, discouraged, disgruntled, dismembered...wait, not that last one.

I can't say I wasn't expecting to get the third degree. It's not cool to be giving an animal back. We don't feel good about it at all. You know what, that's not true. We're not proud of it, is what I should say. This isn't how we wanted it to work out. We never expected it to work out this way. But I can't say that it won't be a good thing for our family when the dust settles on this and Cookie has found a new home.

She needs someone she accepts as her pack leader. That's not me, and it's increasingly less so Matt. She needs someone who can consistently exercise her for an hour every day. That's rarely us. We can manage 30 minutes on most days, but that's only half of what she needs, and we can't guarantee it. She needs a home where she's not in trouble all the time. That's not here.

Now we're going through a process of finding her a new foster family (the rescue does this part), and that will likely take a week or two. In the meantime, the rescue's trainer is still coming over tomorrow to work with all of us and identify Cookie's issues, so that we can hopefully have a peaceful remaining time with her, and also so that we are handing on less of a problem to her new family.

I really did realize that conversation would suck. I wish I hadn't been right.

I've got a beast of a cold going. It started the night I was in Coeur d'Alene, and I've ended up spending the last two days at home. I'm probably going to be home again tomorrow. There's a lot to be said for that, in that I get lots of nice naps and am clearing out my Netflix queue like it so desperately needed. ("Stepbrothers" sucked for the ten minutes I watched it. Buh-bye to that one.)

That said, I'm getting to the point where it isn't that fun anymore. I'm starting to look around the house for little tasks that need doing. I could clear out the closet like I've been meaning to do. I could dust all the baseboards.

Or, I could build a sinus vacuum. Someone has beaten me to the patent, but this is fairly well explained. I don't know what "mortise" is, but I'll bet I could figure it out. There's probably everything I need down at Ace Hardware, right?

On the other hand, with my luck I'd over-do the vacuum strength and would have to spend the rest of my days with my head shaped like a Coke bottle. Maybe I should just weather this out.

We just made an appointment with the dog trainer who works with the rescue group we adopted Cookie from. She'll be coming over Sunday to watch us all interacting with Cookie. I'm a little nervous about it, because I know there's certainly a bunch of things we don't do perfectly, like how both dogs charge the front door and bark their heads off when the doorbell rings. Nothing like making a good first impression, right?

So she's going to watch us interacting at home, and then we'll go for a walk with Cookie to see if we can find anyone for her to bark at. I may have to create an artificial setting for her to do her usual--the barking and growling happens if we're sitting still somewhere and someone goes walking past. I think I can talk our friends across the street into pitching in with that. In talking to the trainer tonight, she said it sounds like Cookie doesn't feel like she can trust me to protect her when we are out and about, and so Cookie goes on the defensive. While that sounds a little odd, we'll see if it plays out in person.

We're trying. It seems like there's a pretty diverse opinion on the keep her/don't keep her decision among those we talk to. We asked a friend of ours tonight what he thought of Cookie, and he said, "She's cute... I think she's going to be a good dog in a couple of years." I think that too. I'm just not sure if we can hold it together that long.

Stay tuned.

I can't really go into any detail on this because it's a family matter and would stir up an utter shitstorm if the wrong people chanced across the blog and this post. But I have to rant for a moment and I beg your pardon for it.

One family member has some kind of a grudge going against another. It's couched all in terms of concern, but there's an underlying current of...hatred is too strong a word...but distaste figures in, and animosity is certainly a part of it. The concern is less for the person with the problem, and more for how this person's problem can affect the other.

I find the whole thing totally distasteful. I really don't want to get involved in it, but someone is just cruising for a Casey's Patented Bitch Slap. It's a darn good thing I'm such a paragon of virtue and self-restraint, ain't it?

I'm going on an overnight work trip to Coeur d'Alene tomorrow. For those unfamiliar with Idaho geography, that's due north of here, almost at the top of the state. It's probably an hour or so from the Canada border.

Because it costs an arm, leg and nipple to fly commercially in to Spokane and drive to Coeur d'Alene, we've chartered a plane. A small plane. I hate small planes. I seriously considered taking a flask along and giving myself a little hit every time I started getting anxious, but I can't really get there half-tanked.

I've got fiery visions pushed just outside the range of my third eye, but if I allowed myself to, I'd be adding some very graphic detail to what is currently just a tickle of a phobia. I'm trying to tell myself that we'll be flying over some gorgeous scenery, since the northern part really is the pretty part of Idaho.

Matt did me the favor of checking the weather report up there--tomorrow it's supposed to be 58 degrees and getting up to a half-inch of rain, along with flood warnings. Woo hoo! Summer just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

Anyway, send calm thoughts to me, will you?

It's Cookie. (The dog we adopted over the holidays.)

We're having trouble with her. That is, we continue to have trouble with her. She's very high energy, and she's very hard-headed. She's got a few awful habits, particularly that she rams into people. If she's playing or running around, she's not careful about her body, and she will just clobber right into you. This is bad enough for adults, but it's really bad when it's Freya or one of her friends. She's bowled Freya over countless times, sending Freya into tears every time.

Since she's a boxer mix, she's notorious for...well...boxing. She paws at you with her front feet, which leads to some nasty scratches.

And ultimately, there's the energy. We walk her when we can, and we take her and Grover to a nearby soccer field and throw the Chuck-It for them for 45 minutes three or four times a week. Sometimes, I go for a bike ride and run her alongside me. Those things tucker her out, and she is often pretty good for hours after physical exercise.

Finally, there's her socialization. We have friends over regularly, and she's rowdy and rambunctious with them. She sits at the front window and growls and barks at kids going by on their bikes. I've been trying to work on this by taking her to parks on the weekends, walking her around, and then just sitting in one place for an hour or so and working with her when she barks and growls at people. Freya and I met Mishell and her son David at a park for a picnic tonight, and I took Cookie along to keep working with her. She barked and growled at little kids; she barked and growled at grown-ups. When people approach her, she turns into a tail-wagging mess. But they usually don't approach--after all, there's a pit-bull/boxer growling at you, right? When she does that, I've been telling her no, or giving her the "Tssht" noise Cesar Milan recommends. I grab her collar and try to get her to focus on me. If she keeps going (and she usually does), I give her "the claw," as Cesar calls it, where you make your hand claw-shaped and give her a strong pinch, mimicking a bite from a mother dog. And if she still keeps going, I try to assert my dominance by getting her to roll on her back.

The thing is, lately, she won't submit. At all. I'll have her rolled over and am trying to keep her down, and she just keeps fighting. She doesn't bite, but she wiggles, kicks, and thrashes around. I can't keep a hold on her idefinitely.

At this point, I really don't know what to do. I feel like we have a dog we can't take anywhere, and I want a dog that can be part of human society. We've taken her through obedience classes, we exercise her as much as we can. We've read the books, watched the videos, talked to dog trainers. And we feel like we're not making any progress. We remain as frustrated today as we were six months ago.

Tonight Matt and I started the discussion of turning her back over to the rescue group we got her from. Our adoption contract stated that we would not take her to the pound or give her to someone else; we would give her back to the rescue. That's our option right now. The other side of the coin is that we keep working with her and try to ride it out until her energy level drops. She's eleven months old right now; pit bulls settle (in the rare cases that they're not already mellow--Cookie is a bit of an anomaly) down around 18 months. I don't know what it is for boxers.

I don't like the thought of giving up. But honestly, that's the sole bad feeling I have about it. If I don't feel like I'd miss her, isn't that a sign?

We're going to sleep on it and talk about it again later. It's obviously not right to make a decision like that in the heat of battle, as it were.

Anyone have any input? What would you do?

Okay, the last you knew, we had switched from Qwest to Clear. And it all turned into one giant clusterfuck. Clear was not working out--our phone calls sounded like the worst cell connection you could get and still be connected. We had a technician come out, and he fiddled with the location of our modem and got it to work a little better, but he ultimately said he'd tell Clear to let us out of our contract because we're in a hollow (geophysically speaking), and the service wasn't adequate.

We dithered for a day or two, and then Matt ordered The Magic Jack. It's this little dingus that plugs into your USB port and you dial all your phone calls through it. To summarize in two words, it sucked. We have friends who use it and they do great with it, and maybe our internet connection is too slow or something, but the connection was way fuzzy and there was a one-second delay between speaking and the person on the other end hearing you.

Finally today we admitted defeat. We went back to Qwest, in spite of our hatred. I need my Netflix to stream video freely. I want YouTube to load videos without having to wait through five annoying minutes of buffering. It's ultimately worth it.

In other news, I'm working hard at mastering my complexion issues. I had the IUD taken out, and thankfully that was a whole hell of a lot less painful coming out than it was going in. I'm back on The Pill, and went to the dermatologist today. She gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and explained that I've got some kind of bacterial issue going on that is causing the breakouts. I have to be on these antibiotics for two months. Yikes.

So you want to hear something scary? I went to get the prescription filled, and I had a card from the manufacturer that gave me a one month supply for free. I sauntered off to CostCo, and the pharmacy tech had forgotten to process the discount. It showed $50 owing. So they fixed that, and the tech mentioned something about it being a darn good thing I had the discount. I said, "I know, I'm not used to seeing fifty bucks--usually my co-pay is ten!" She gave me a tight little smile and said, "No, that's what the cost would be with your insurance. This is what the retail cost is." She pointed to the receipt. Are you ready for this? Are you sure?

Take a deep breath.

For thirty pills, the total cost for filling the prescription without insurance would be $699.80. Twenty-three dollars per pill, folks.

I hope they work like a motherfucker. And they're specifically prescribed for acne--the info sheet I got from the pharmacy explained that they are developed for the treatment of acne. They're not even set up to cure...you know...bacterial meningitis or something. Just pimples.

Christ on a cracker. Stay tuned, though. I'm about at the point that I'd pay the retail price to get my face cleared up.

I have this friend. I can understand why, after reading this post, you'd think he might be a made-up friend. But his existance and this little factoid about him that I am going to share can both be verified by another friend, a certified psychologist. (Why she hangs out with either one of us, I don't know. Unless we're some sort of project she's working on.)

So this friend of mine recently disclosed that he collects bacon grease.

Yep, bacon grease. He says he knows there is something big that he's going to be able to do with it someday. He's got jars of it stored in his garage. He mentioned something about how, when the planet runs out of fossil fuel, he'll be able to scoop it into his diesel gas tank and drive for like another 17 yards or something, which will certainly be one of those, "Ha ha, I told you so" moments for him.

Believe it or not, the grease evidently doesn't smell that bad. He pulled out his oldest jar (which is about five years old or something) and pulled the cap off. I was worried that the neighbors would be calling the HazMat Unit out to deal with it, but there wasn't any smell that I could make out. I didn't stick my nose to the jar and sniff it like others did--I'm not that easy to fool, thanks.

Anyway, I came home and started doing a little research. Here are some things you can do with bacon grease that you might not think of right away:

Make Bacon Soap
Pop popcorn in it
Mix it with dried fruit and sunflower seeds to make suet for the birds
Some say you can use it to help start fires in the fireplace (or fire-pit)
And these gun nuts recommend a variety of uses, including putting it on your bear bait and treating mange.

How about the rest of you? Any non-cooking uses for bacon grease that you can think of? Seriously, dude has like 5 half-gallon jars of it just sitting in his garage...

I decided today to stay on the anti-anxiety meds. The decision has been coming for a few days, but I made it official tonight and popped that second pill.

When I went to the new psychologist on Friday to talk about cognitive behavioral therapy, she was a little surprised and a little dismayed (but willing enough for my sake) that I was going off the meds without having a solid skill set to fall back on. She felt that CBT would help carry me through any issues that might come up, but that I really needed to have some good experience with it first.

I noticed that I have been a little more waspish than usual the last few days. We went out with friends on Friday night, and on Saturday morning I really did not want to get up at 8:00 and start being Freya's maid-servant for the day. I was snappy with her a couple of times during the morning, and at one point she asked me, "Mommy, do you need to recharge your love light?" That's a little thing they do at her Montessori, where kids who are tired and grumpy spend a few minutes semi-meditating about their heart and seeing it fill back up with love. I took her suggestion and had her guide me through their process. The cuteness alone made me get back on track.

So I figured I'd let the pills work a little while longer. I got the IUD out on Wednesday, so hopefully that will help my complexion improve. I'm now on a birth control pill that has shown some signs of helping with bad complexions (it worked pretty okay for me in my early 20s). We'll give it a go. Maybe it'll help with my night sweats, too.

In the meantime, I carry on.

I cannot even begin to tell you how much I love Don Williams. I shouldn't even try--it would be sad to attempt to quantify it. I was able to see him in concert in Boise in the mid-90s, and it was hands-down the best concert I have ever been to. Ninety minutes of listening to him sing was like a day-long massage. Something about him just mellows me. I was in an extremely grouchy mood yesterday and happened to catch one of his songs on the radio. Before I knew it, my blood pressure had dropped and I was feeling much more zen.

Anyone else love the Gentle Giant? Or is there someone else who just seems to have a chemical affect on you?

Matt is reading a book about forensic detectives. It's part of a series that takes place at The Body Farm at the University of Tennessee. The concept of this place totally fascinates me. I don't care to study rotting corpses at all, but I would LOVE to donate my body for study. Once I'm done using it, that is.

Believe it or not, as I was looking the Body Farm up for this post, Matt and I started discussing our remains and I asked him if he'd feel weird if I made arrangements to be donated. He said he'd actually been thinking of the same thing, and I think we're going to pursue it! Isn't that cool?

See, I don't think there's any kind of connection between one's body and your soul once you've died. I feel that a corpse is nothing but a husk, and I'm thoroughly grossed out by the concepts of embalming and open caskets and preservatives and burial. I figure the most practical thing you could do with my remains is chuck me out under a tree somewhere to become part of the natural order of decomposition, composting and re-creation as a worm and some bacteria and a flower and the shell of a raven's egg.

It appears that the University gladly accepts your donation, though you do have to pay the cost of getting your corpse shipped off to them if you live more than 200 miles from Knoxville. There's a bunch of paperwork and stuff to get done in advance and you must make your relatives well aware of your wishes. It seems to me that the cost of shipping my mortal remains is likely quite a bit less than buying a plot and a headstone and all that rigamarole.

Is it strange that I'm really rather excited about this? It just seems so cool that I could still be useful and still do some good even after I've flown the coop.

1. The rain continues. Our lawn is utterly mush underneath the grass. We frequently have standing water. This is getting ridiculous.

2. We went to Boise Bully Breed Rescue's fundraiser today at Camelsback Park. It was really a fun time--there were so many cute dogs, and it was good for Cookie to meet new people and dogs. Mishell and her son met us down there. The kids really enjoyed checking out puppies, belly dancers and "ninjas" from a local karate dojo.

3. I'm going to my GP tomorrow to get my prescription modified to taper off the anti-anxiety meds. I've found that when I miss a pill or two, I get very dizzy and disoriented, so I can't go off them cold turkey. I have an appointment with my OB/GYN on Wednesday to get my IUD out. I'm earnestly hoping it doesn't hurt as badly as I imagine it might.

4. Our wireless connection with Clear is better after another conversation with a technical representative. We had to buy new cordless phones--evidently, our old one operated on a very similar frequency as the wireless. And while it pisses me off that I should have to buy a new phone because someone else's technology doesn't play well with mine, I guess we'll stick with it for a while. We have a service rep coming out tomorrow to see if there's anything else we can do--it's a nice thing to have our Roku player working again.

5. We had Freya's school clean-up day Saturday, and I am freakin' sore. I did a lot of weeding, and my quads are very tight. It was actually a really fun day--the sun came out, I got to play with power tools and climbed up on top of the school building to cut branches off a tree (to the amazement of the kids hanging around, my own included) and we bonded with other parents there. It's been fun to make friends via our daughter. You don't really expect that as a benefit of a preschool, but we've become pretty close to a lot of the people we have met through the school.

6. I finally ordered a subcription to the New Yorker, my favorite magazine. Some of the content is way over my head, or geographically irrelevant, but it's really one of the best magazines I've ever read. I'm excited!

How about you all? Any little updates to share?

I had a call earlier this evening from a friend who works in another of our offices asking me if I could go up to Alaska and help out one of their fire management teams. Of course, I got all excited about it, worked it out with Matt, called and left a voice mail to clear it with my boss, and then started having second thoughts.

And...I turned down the assignment. All expenses paid trip to Fairbanks, one of my favorite places in the world, and while there wouldn't have been any time for sight-seeing, I'd have been pulling down some heavy overtime.

So why didn't I go? Well. I'll give you a hint: she's about 36 inches tall and still connected to me by the ghost of our umbilical cord. I have a frightfully hard time thinking about leaving her, particularly on short notice. I've gone away for a number of trips before, but not the 2 weeks this would have entailed.

And I can't put it all to that--there is also the matter of my anxiety. Ever since I was a small child, I've been freaked out about leaving my family. The first time I remember it really being bad, I was in about the fourth grade and my mother was planning on taking my little brother and I down to a Jehovah's Witness convention in Utah for 5 days. The day before the trip, I had myself a little breakdown and refused to go. When asked why, all I could say was, "Because something bad will happen if I go; I just feel it." There was no changing my mind, and my dad was glad for the company.

As an adult who's been in counseling for a while, I can look at that and ask myself, "What was the bad thing?" At the time, I thought about it being a car accident or something, and if I didn't go, it wouldn't happen. But when I examine it now, I realize that I was scared that Armageddon was going to come while we were gone and I'd never see my dad again.

Unfortunately, that still translates to some degree for me now. I don't get panicky when I have a long time to plan a trip and I feel that I am in control of it, but when something just comes up out of the blue and I have to make a quick decision, I choke. What if something bad happened?

I know I have to break out of this mind-set that says I can somehow avert disaster by doing this thing or that thing. That's my obsessive-compulsive side playing off my anxiety--the two are pretty tightly wrapped around each other.

Man, I can be a total basket case.

So those of you who see me regularly may have noticed over the last few months (and have been too tactful to say anything) that the lower half of my face looks like I have been attacked by angry bees. And it's my blog, so I can use as much hyperbole as I want.

I have been dealing with cystic acne for about the last 20 years. However, it's usually been centered around one week a month, and I get 2-3 breakouts at a time, and then things go back to being pretty much normal. But recently that has changed, and now I deal with anywhere between 6-12 FREAKING ENORMOUS zits on my face full time. It's painful, it's embarassing, it's painfully embarassing.

I actually responded to a medical trial request for cystic acne last week and went in for an appointment. Because I was at a "low" point in my break-out cycle, they sent me home to come back when I had more acne before they could accept me. That got me to thinking, and thinking got me to researching. Now, I realize I could probably prove just about any point I wanted to by using the internet (as well as the opposing point and numerous others), but I believe I have learned a few things. Want to hear them? Okay, here we go:

One: I have had an intrauterine device (IUD) for the last 2 years as my birth control. It has progesterone in it, and that hormone does a number of things to my lady cycle. It gives me raging night sweats and amenhorrea. And likely other things...like a proclivity to increased acne.

Two: I have been on SSRIs, a class of anti-anxiety medication, for 18 months. I really haven't thought about them as something that could affect me hormonally, but hey, guess what? The whole point of SSRIs is to fiddle with your brain chemistry a little bit, and you'll never believe what those chemicals consist of...wait for it...HORMONES. In fact, the medication I am on has increased my night sweats. Seriously, I wake up absolutely soaked to the bone at least five nights a week. It's gross, and my general practitioner has just said, "Yep, that's the Effexor and your IUD working on you."

So here are my thoughts. My acne is hormonal, hence, I need to straighten out my hormones. I will do that by having my IUD removed (ouch) and slowly phasing off the SSRIs. I'm also thinking of asking for a referral to an endocrinologist, who might be able to help me manage my hormones more naturally, or help phase me into some kind of medication regimen that will manage my needs more gently.

I feel ready to be off the SSRIs anyway. I haven't experienced bad anxiety in a while, and am going to try a new type of behavioral treatment with a new psychologist in the weeks to come that will hopefully teach me to be mindful of how the anxiety starts and will give me tools to overcome it on my own.

In the meantime, I hope so much that my skin will come back under control. Thirty-five year olds shouldn't have to be dealing with worse skin issues than they had when they were fifteen.