Oxycontin mixed with Jack D. Put it in a cup, it looks like ice tea.

Seriously. It's been a bitch of a week. A brief overview for your perusal.

Saturday
Chaperoned a band trip to a competition. I was pleased with how well those little flag brigade girls behaved. When one parent found out I was chaperoning the brigade bus, she patted me on the shoulder and said, "Good luck." That leaves one a little apprehensive about how matters may go.

Maybe the lady was confused because they behaved well. No one was knifed. I never saw any brass knuckles or people bent over mirrors sucking up mysterious powders with a straw. It wasn't anything like the Dangerous Minds idea I had going on.

We finally made it home around 1 A.M.

Sunday
I don't remember much of Sunday very well. It turns out that hanging out in busses until 1 A.M. is not good for me.

Maybe I went over and cleaned my mom's house. Like I said, my people do a lot for me and I try to do for them. I don't think I did very much, though.

Also, an older gentleman  I used to "sit" with last year died. He was 94 years old and he hadn't been doing well for a while. I've never had any really nursing assistant experience, but I was in desperate need of a job since my last employer up and died on me and my gentleman needed someone to heat up his coffee and help him bathe. He was also a special friend to my eight-year-old DMan.

I spent half the day trying to decide whether to tell him then or wait until closer to the funeral because I didn't want him to be upset all week at school. I finally opted to tell him on Sunday  because I didn't want him to find out from someone else or realize that I'd withheld information from him.

DMan experienced a good bit of dying the summer of 2008. Death is not something you ever want your family to experience, but it happens and we have to deal with it the best we can. I lost two uncles (one of them being my employer), a great uncle, a cousin, and a chiropractor. While I didn't take my children to all of the funerals, they did attend a couple of wakes at their request.

DMan was upset about his special friend and it took a good while for him to work through the initial sadness. I emailed his teacher to let her know what was going on with him so he didn't have to try to explain it on Monday.

Monday
My daughter magically developed a staph infection on her leg that required an after work trip to the doctor and antibiotics. This is my second kid this year to develop this shit so I asked the doctor if I was doing something wrong.

I bleach all the sheets, bleach the tub, bleach towels, bandaids and bandaids and bandaids,  think about bleaching out my brains, tell them not to stick their fingers up their nose and flick their boogers, yet I don't seem to have achieved very much. He said there wasn't very much I could do. Basically, he said "shit happens" but put it in nice medical terms. I'm still thinking about giving them a can of clorox wipes to use at school.

All four of us actually went through a round of this about three of four years ago. It started off with Dman who developed some weird, disgusting, greeny black puss thing one summer after being bitten by some kind of insect on a Friday. By Saturday evening, it was really freaking me the hell out because I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Fearing that he'd been bitten some necrotizing mosquito and his leg was going to rot off before Monday, I took him to the emergency room.

The doctors and nurses all agreed it was some sort of spider bite and they'd been seeing a lot of these "spider bites."

Then Tuba Girl was bitten by some flesh eating fucker a couple of months later and the doctor said it was a spider bite.

I spent months beating the hell out of necrotizing spiders. Previously, I was a sort of live and let live chick. Stay out of my line of vision and you were safe. Now I was Arachno Hunter.

Months later, I developed some weird pimple in my nose after a snotty cold. When it started to eat my face, I realized that either these were very tiny, sneaky spiders or there was an entirely different problem at hand.

After having my children treated by one emergency room doctor and a couple of pediatricians, I finally had someone tell me all about cellulitis. It was a wonderfully enlightening experience and I now I want to run around shouting, "UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!" So that was Monday.

Tuesday
Tuesday was looking good until the flat tire incident so that put me off. After I changed the tire, I splurged and took the kids to Wendy's. I was damned tired and I can't afford to drink to cover the stress of weeks like this. Besides, it was for a good cause. Sort of. The local area schools routinely partner with restaurants and name it "KAR's Elementary School Night!"

(Okay, well the school is not named KAR Elementary, but the real name is not something I'm going to share with strangers who may turn out to be freakier than the people I know in real life. Besides, I've been a KAR Elementary parent for over ten years so it's my school.)

A share of the proceeds go to whichever school is being sponsored by the restaurant. I was tired. I was starting to get really pissed off about how long this week was shaping up to be and I sure as hell didn't feel like cooking. So I tossed $14 into a vat of greasy fries and called it an evening. The boy heathens also recieved homework passes. It was worth it to me.

Wednesday
Wild Boy had his follow up appointment with his pediatrician at 9AM. Thankfully, it wasn't a long appointment and I had plenty of time to take him to school and get to work on time.


Things were clicking along pretty well so I stopped at the Family Dollar to pick up some toilet paper, tooth brushes,and shit since it was on the way to work. The thing I discovered about that Wal-Mart brand of toilet paper is that one pack only lasts a week. If hadn't bought more on Wednesday, we'd have been wiping our asses with the stray dogs out in the yard.

When I got back in the car, I realized I couldn't find my phone. After a very long and gas-wasting trip around the county to retrace my steps, I was forced to go work phoneless.

I found it later. Apparently I dropped it in my front yard when I was in a hurry and it spent the day being rained upon by the forces of my life. However, much like myself, it came through a little damaged but still serviceable.

Thursday

Picked up some Honeycrisp apples. Honeycrisp apples are the frigging bomb diggity, yo. If you've never had a Honeycrisp apple, then you need to pick one up today. These apples only hit the stores in the fall and then you don't get anymore until the next year.  The name says it all. Honey. Crisp. Apple.

These aren't those mealy mouthed McIntoshes or piss ant little Granny Smiths. These are apples. Real apples. I wish I had a Honeycrisp apple tree. If I rubbed a lamp and a big blue genie popped out and told me I could have anything I wanted, I'd wish for a huge orchard of ever-bearing Honeycrisp apples trees.

Where was I? Oh, my boring blog about my boring week.

Leroy the Lover showed up at work today. Leroy is a fucking 65-year-old nutbag who seems to have taken some sort of "special shine" to me. The last time he was at the library, he left me with a very special religious tract about how there are real angels (good ones and bad ones!) right here on Earth! I wouldn't mind the religious tract so much, but Leroy is a sort of . . . prophet of the Binny Hinn-TBN network type. Also, Leroy just over shares his particular world view. It's a world view deeply in need of Thorazine. I am ever so pleased.

After hearing about Leroy's life for ten minutes or so and catching a definite whiff of the special ass funk/dog shit breath aroma of Sun laundry detergent, I abandoned him to Matt the Library Assistant while I went and alphabetized all the books. Again.

After work, I took my Tuba Girl back to the doctor to check up on her leprosy. Cellulitis. Staph. Whatever. It's all starting to feel the same in terms of UNCLEAN.

I was ever so happy to discover that Stinky Motherfucker takes his children to the same doctor. I do not have time to explain Stinky Motherfucker. To give a brief overview, Stinky Motherfucker is that one damned dude that seems to randomly show up from nowhere and have no fucking concept of boundaries and personal space. One day, I may devote an entire post to Stinky Motherfucker, but not today. I spend a lot of time wondering what I've done in a past life to warrant having this person popping up in all the places I go.

Stinky Motherfucker finally left after hinting at needing a ride home. I'm sorry. Stinky Motherfucker and his strep throat filled children must take the Stinky Motherfucker cab. I do not want to be in the doctor's office next week for strep throat.

Finally, we were the last ones left in the lobby when the nurse noticed us. It turns out no one pulled our file, put us down as having come in, and seemingly lost our initial sign in sheet. There was nothing to indicate we were there other than our very tired presence in the lobby. Yaaaaay.

Tuba Girl is healing nicely. Tuba Girl also needs to come back in Saturday morning for a real check up and the Hep A shot. We're late on that one.

As we didn't leave the doctor's office until 7:30 PM, I did not have time to cook dinner so I picked up sandwich shit for dinner from Wal-Hell since it's right across the ever loving street from the doctor's office and went home.

My cellphone calendar sounded a little reminder around 8 PM. I am due to start my period tomorrow which inevitably explains how the world has ceased to rotate on it's normal axis.

Plans for the Weekend
I will be manning the concession stand at the high school football game until sometime around 11PM tomorrow evening.

Saturday, we will have to pick up the Angel Food by 8:30 AM, bring it home and have Tuba Girl at her doctor's appoint by 10 AM. The children's paternal side of the family has scheduled a family reunion for later in the evening. I still have not gone grocery shopping at all this week. I've been snatching random shit like apples and sandwich ingredients.

Maybe I will go clean my mom's house on Sunday, but this week is seriously starting to get to me and I want sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

On an up note, I will try to remember to post something tomorrow that Mr. J wrote in 1978. Mr. J is the guy who volunteers to keep our library lawn nice and flowery. He also lost both of his legs to undiagnosed diabetes a few years ago. It went undiagnosed because most construction workers don't make a whole lot of money and most construction companies are small affairs that can't afford to offer insurance.There may have been resources to help him, but I'd guess they're hard for a guy from a farm in backwoods Georgia with a limited education to locate.

But you know, Mr. J is like the most awesome damned dude ever. I don't know if he ever gets depressed or wants to tell people to screw off, but that is one guy who really plugs away at making every day count. He's big on being a solid member of his community and wants to serve as inspiration and motivator to the people around him. He rocks.