Keeping it Together

So, with three kids I have a hard time remembering everything I want to get done. Needs are another matter, I always remeber those. So, with projects that aren't essential, I keep a notebook next to my chair with a pen shoved in it. In it I write down all the stupid little things that I'd like to get done, but easily get lost in the shuffle.

Shoulder Surgery

So, I was told by my orthopedic doctor that I need rotator cuff surgery. Ugh. I have a negative MRI, but all my tests indicate that I need this surgery. He claims that about 40% of MRI's are wrong. So, should this erode my confidence in what some feel to be an uber medical diagnostic tool, or should this increase my confidence in my doctor that, through exerience, he feels he can do a better job of diagnosing than a machine. I know that the same situation happened with Pat, and the same doctor was right. I don't want to have surgery without a reason for it. Therefore, I certainly hope he's right.



Unfortunately, we don't know when the surgery will be scheduled. The doctor said that he is having surgery in the end of July which may delay mine until November, I hope not. I want my insurance to cough up and authorize this.

Definitions by Mini-Me

Weepy Eye = Onion

Book Review - Curious George

I wish we could return to a simpler time in children literature. It seems that every book nowadays has to be screened over and over to make sure we don't expose our young ones to something that might influence them and the result, to me, is a bland pablum of happy books with nothing to really laugh at. If we look at the older books we get the menage of mischievous characters dealing with exotic situations that are funny and interesting to children because they are not perfect and politically correct.

One of their favorites is Curious George, a perennial classic. But Curious George is not the innocent storybook character that he would appear to be. Some may think that George is simply a curious little monkey, but did you realize that George is a pawn of Philip Morris? GASP. Yes, in the original classic, George displays his loyalties on his first day in the Man with the Yellow Hat's home. He has dinner and then he smokes a pipe, complete with illustrations to show my impressionable children exactly what transpired, just in case they weren't listening closely enough. But, George, in spite of your foibles, I still love you. I will still read your many adventures to my children who manage to overlook your follies. But maybe we should consider a new book, Curious George and the nicorette patch.

Then we have the Man with the Yellow Hat. Dear Man, you're not exactly being an environmentally friendly partner with the Earth. After all, you removed a little monkey from his home with no thought of the consequence. Perhaps George was an endangered species, or maybe he had a family he left behind. Surely he would have been better off in his home territory. For all we know, he never would have gotten into so much trouble had he stayed at home. In the jungle he would have had normal monkey diversions. Hanging from tree limbs, and swinging from vines would have occupied his time as opposed to eating puzzle pieces, and soaring over the city on the tail of a kite, although then we would never have had his adventures to entertain our children.

Father Memories

My dad was a strange man, and simple things amused him. He used to love maps and to plot out the way we were to go on a trip. In 1993 we went on vacation to Las Vegas, mainly to appease my brother who was fascinated with gambling. It was a trip we couldn't afford but we went. As usual, Steve went and got a road atlas and started mapping the trip. As he studied the maps he noticed two, rather unusually named, mountains - Nellie's Nipple and Squaw Tit. I don't remember what we saw on that trip to Sin City, but I remember those two, politically incorrect, peaks seen in the distance as we sped down the highway, and the glee with. which my father looked forward to seeing them

Plastic

I love my crock pot. Pat got it for me for Christmas 1 1/2 years ago, and yes I did ask for it. But the handle on top broke with in a month, and Rival was not exactly willing to work with me to replace it. Well, I broke down and got a knob at the hardware store to give me an easily usable lid. For my 3 dollars I got a plastic bag with a plastic bag in it holding the knob, and a plastic bag holding a screw. Don't you think that's a lot of plastic for what I bought?

Plastic is one of man's curses to Earth. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a "green meanie" as I refer to the diehard environmentalists such as ELF and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Plastic is different, it never goes away. Every microgram of plastic that was ever created is still with us today. It gets smaller and smaller, but it's still here. I try to do my part and recycle, but like in the packaging for my crockpot handle, I wish the companies would try to do their part too.

Walpaper

6 years ago, about a week before I found out I was pregnant with Mini-Me, I started pulling the wallpaper off the walls in Pat's kitchen and he grabbed the flooring to pull it up. Now we were in the middle of a kitchen refurbishing. One thing followed another, and, while we finished the kitchen, we never got the wallpaper trim up on the walls. Well, we did that this weekend.


That trim has been languishing in Pat's washroom for 6 years now. This past Friday I decided that we would measure the kitchen then:

1. Install the trim if we had enough.


2. If we didn't have enough we would buy another roll online or chuck it and call it a day.

Well, we had enough, and we got it up on the walls. But then there was the case of the missing blank plate.

Pat has a receptacle on the wall over the door to his washroom. It's wired up and good, but we've never needed it so we put a blank plate over it, then hung a clock over that. Well, Pat was unscrewing the plate so that we could fit the trim around it. He set the plate down and it disappeared. We never found it and, given that he was on a step ladder at the time, there weren't too many places for it to go. So, Pat must be the David Copperfield of the Do It Yourself set, or that switch plate was magic.