Giant Dwarf vs. Max and Bettina

So I get this email from my sister-in-law:  "Do you think you can borrow a pack-and-play for our visit?"

A what?

What the fuck is that, really?  Without knowing, I went to the interweb and posted a Facebook plea to borrow said pack-and-play.  The responses fell into two categories:

1) "Of course you can borrow mine but I live at least 300 miles away from you."
2)  Instructions on how to MacGuyver a pack-and-play from various household items.

I still didn't know what it was and no one could give me one anyway.

I finally took the time to look it up on the Google machine and found that it is what we used to call, back in the old days, a "playpen."  More accurately, I guess it's a "portable playpen."  Whatever.  Pack-and-play clearly does not accurately describe the item so I don't know how I could have been expected to know what it was.  And yes, I tend to avoid baby showers.

Look, here's the deal.  My nephew, El Frijolito, is only 9 months old but, like all modern kiddles, he travels like a spoiled rock star, with tour bus-loads of baby items that I'm not going to pretend I understand.  And whenever I think of children and their accoutrements, I think of Max and Bettina.

It's one of my favorite Absolutely Fabulous episodes.  Eddy is all anxious because she remembers her friends as this:

They were minimalist and oh-so-judgemental back in the day.  When Eddy and Patsy go to visit their new über-chic apartment and bring a wine bottle, there is literally no place to put it.  Flash forward to the present time and Eddy is throwing away everything in her home in anticipation of their visit.  However, when Eddy opens the door upon their arrival, she sees something like this....

...entering her front door.  She's horrified that her once-minimalist friends are now weighed down with the sundry of modern parenting.  Max and Bettina are the quintessential helicopter parents (well, Bettina is) and they are trying to teach the baby advanced vocabulary while he is still an infant.  And the baby needs constant stimulation, hence the sherpa-like presentation of Max, bogged down by all of baby's accoutrements.

The day was saved by the Spazz's cousin, who drove 45 minutes to our apartment and dropped off her pack-and-play.  She also loaned us a baby seat chock full with little toys and a rocking-sleepy-chair (I have no idea what the official names of these products are, so here is a photo....please let me know if you know).

Look, I'm not going to pretend that I understand all this baby stuff.  I really don't understand babies.  Spazz and I are one of those childless-by-choice couples and we're both a little intimidated by tiny, crawling humans in our apartment.  But, I have to say, it was all worth it.  El Frijolito is freaking adorable and fun as all get out.

It would have been nice, however, if he had not chosen his visit with us to meet his developmental milestone of "stranger anxiety."  I will never regain my full hearing.

Giant Dwarf vs. the First Horseman of the Apocalypse

Pestilence.

The Beast we adopted is neither a white horse nor has any knowledge of scripture, but she has indeed brought a plague upon our house.  At first, she hated us, hid from us, attacked us; we disliked her enough to want to send her back to the people who gave her to us.  Her tiny little brain must have understood our desperate conversation with the original owner, because, all of sudden, she became.....sweet.  I'm sure, in her cat brain, she is realizing that she can kill us with kindness, but we fell for it anyway and decided to keep her.

So once she gets all loving and nice, and sleeps on our bed with us, and sits on our laps and snuggles agains us, what happens?  She brings in a flea infestation.  And I'm not talking a few fleas here and there.  I'm talking a full-fledged, Biblical-level scourge.  The kind where we pay an exorbitant amount to exterminate the buggers, only to have a reinfestation two weeks later with the spawn of the dead fleas.

Hundreds of dollars later, the Beast is fine.  There are no more fleas on her because we have given her pills to poison the f**kers.  But the eggs keep falling onto the carpet and hatch there and make us want to burn our own apartment down.

One of my friends asked me why I can't ask the landlord to replace the carpet with hardwood floor.

She has clearly never rented a rent-controlled apartment before.

The Spazz deserves a medal as the best soldier in this battle.  He has vacuumed the apartment dozens of times; we added more flea poison to the guest room (only to find out our houseguest is still being bitten).  We've done countless loads of laundry, washing bedding and clothing in the hopes that we kill them off.  We do daily carpet scans looking for those little pests, pressing our faces to the floor with flashlights in hand, ready to kill and vacuum some more.  Friends with pets sigh with condolences for our situation, but no one has a ready remedy.

Meanwhile, as I write this, the Beast is sitting behind me, shedding more flea eggs and plotting her next attack on our household.

Giant Dwarf vs. Internet Cafe

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Are you fucking kidding me?  Here’s how my day goes today:  I wake up early, do my stupid physical therapy exercises which are not providing much improvement, go to Physical Therapy where I’m given even more exercises which may have minimal effect and then I go home, put on some make-up so I don’t look like a total slacker and then head to lunch with a former intern who was in need of a bit of support.

THEN…..I muster up all my strength and resolve to change clothes again and get the hell out of the house so I can work on a stupid presentation on child abuse that I never wanted to do in the first place but I’m doing it because I need to do things that make me look good at my job.  My intention was to go to the library, where people really want to get work done (or at least stay out of the sun until the shelter re-opens for the night) but I forgot it is President’s Day (!!!!) so I packed up my computer in my backpack and walked to the closest café.  I like this café, it has good coffee, but it is littered with pretentious assholes like me working on their computers and never leaving their tables. 

I order my coffee and even find a table near an outlet, which is a total bonus since my laptop is considered elderly at only 5 years old and the battery dies after about 10 minutes of use.  I plug in, enter the password for the wifi and…..it doesn’t work.  I try multiple variations of the password, finally get on, but now there’s some other kind of trouble, the kind I can only diagnose with a degree in IT or if I were 8 years old.  I am so freakin’ annoyed because the only thing I can do right now is to create a Word document, so that is why I am writing a blog entry because I need to do SOMETHING while I have this massive laptop plugged in in front of me with a giant cup of café au lait right next to it.

So I tried to make the best of it and do the research from my phone instead.  But as I started doing my google search, in came rapid fire texts from my husband and my work supervisor.  Had my laptop internet connection worked, my phone would have been safely hidden in my bag, allowing me to ignore any incoming missive until I deigned to look at it on my own volition.   So now I can’t even research on the tiny internet screen next to my giant laptop screen because everyone feels the need to contact me just at this moment.

I’m done.  You may not enjoy this Giant Dwarf entry but I needed to vent.  Hope you at least liked the photo.  And to Café Bolivar, THANKS FOR NOTHING!

Or should I say....¡GRACIAS POR NADA!

Giant Dwarf and the Great Kindle Mystery

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I blame my work schedule.  Really, I do.  It’s because I don’t work the same days every week and I get all discombobulated and can’t remember which day it is on any given day.  It’s because I don’t have a normal 9-5, Monday through Friday schedule and therefore cannot be a creature of routine.  That’s why.

That’s why I can’t find my Kindle.

There are a lot of other things to blame on my schedule, but let’s focus on this one.  I last saw my Kindle on Sunday – Superbowl Sunday, to be exact – which was my last day of work before today.  I was eating lunch in the breakroom, sometime around 12:30 in the afternoon, a good THREE HOURS before the Superbowl.  As is my habit when I “dine alone,” I bring a book and in this case it was my Kindle Paperwhite 2013 (which I highly recommend).  I remember being horrified that there was pre- pre-Superbowl coverage on the TV in the breakroom, and I remember checking my smart phone for lord knows what on Facebook and I remember that I didn’t actually read my Kindle at all during lunch.

And that’s the last time I remember seeing it.  I was so distracted by my perceived meaninglessness of the pre- pre-Superbowl programming that I can’t remember what happened to the Kindle after that.

But I didn’t yet register that.  I had the next two days off and spent my valuable time running errands with the Spazz and taking the Beast to the vet.  I woke up extra early this morning and was still late getting out the door (okay, obviously I do have some routine….I am routinely leaving home later than I should for work).  I ran to get my Kindle from it’s place on my night table and IT WASN’T THERE!

I did a quick toss-up of areas in my home frequented by the Kindle, then hustled out the door.  As soon as I got to work, I asked my coworker (who was there with me on Sunday) whether she had seen my Kindle.  She had not.  Desperate to continue reading my Lena Dunham memoir, I composed an email to the entire Emergency Department staff, asking if they had seen my Kindle.

Yes, I felt like an asshole.  Most staff-wide emails about lost items are for finding misplaced stethoscopes.  I’m looking for a Kindle.

No bites all day.  I go home and ask Spazz if he’s seen it.  He remembers the last time he saw it being several days before my last sighting, so that’s no help.  But Spazz and I proceed to search the apartment again, and he even goes down to the garage to search my car.

At this point I think it is gone forever, so I load the Kindle app on my smart phone and open Dunham’s book.  I go to the kitchen to do some dishes and at one point I turn around, and there’s the Kindle on the kitchen counter.  Now, I know it wasn’t there ten minutes ago, so I look at Spazz.  He looks at me with a smile on his face.

“Where was it?”

He is super-amused and very self-satisfied.  “It was on your night table.” 

“No it wasn’t!  I looked.”

Spazz took me into our bedroom to show me exactly where he found it.  Rather than it’s usual place on the lower right corner, I had, for some unknown reason, placed it under some items in the upper left corner.  So I am a creature of routine after all…..I didn’t even think to look for it there.  We are talking about a maybe 18 square inch surface, by the way.

Email to the Emergency Department staff the following day:

“Kindle found.  Crisis averted.  Thank you.”

Giant Dwarf vs Punxsutawney Phil

Punxsutawney Phil Sees Shadow, Predicts Six More Weeks of Winter

Well, sometimes writer's block sets in and you have to take suggestions from your audience.  So thanks, JL, for throwing this one at me.  The fact is, I've had a fascination with Groundhog Day since I was a kid.  My father's birthday and Groundhog Day fall within a few days of each other so that piqued my interest.  Also, as an animal lover, I was entranced by a groundhog who could predict the weather.

I was always a logical kid, but I also loved ritual and the yearly showing of the enormous rodent was fun to me.  I never understood the idea of his shadow being the predictor since I always figured they'd brought him out in broad daylight and of course he'd see a shadow.  Which made me always suspect that the whole thing was just a fun way to tell you that you were going to freeze your ass off for the next six weeks, no matter what.

It wasn't lost on me, either, that the whole thing took place in Pennsylvania, in the same state I lived in, but in a whole other world.  I'm sure the last thing my parents wanted to do was take a 270 mile road trip in the middle of winter to watch a just-awakened groundhog tell us all what we already knew.  But the idea that it was happening in my home state was another source of pride for me.

So Punxsutawney Phil was dragged out of his hole again today and predicted another six weeks of winter.  This means nothing to me now in Southern California.  It was a gorgeous 70 degrees today, which we enjoyed by eating our breakfast on our porch at our bistro table.

The closest thing I have to a groundhog here in LA is a 13 pound black cat who predicted a certain chill in feline-human relations today by hiding behind the couch for 8 hours straight.

Giant Dwarf vs Giant Dwarf

So I promised you a list of completely ridiculous stuff I have found in my anti-treasure hunt.  Most of the stuff I've gone through so far have been papers.  I know that computers have been around for  quite some time now and everyone and their mother scans records except for me and my mother, but I have a lot of trouble getting rid of paper and files.  I mean, you never know if you're going to need these records 25 years from now!

I FINALLY got rid of all of my papers from graduate school.  Social work research tends to be years behind anyway, and these papers were at least 15 years old.  Which means they were based on research from at least 20 years ago.  GARBAGE!  (Actually, I recycled them.  I'm a good girl.)

I had forgotten that I used to write an employee newsletter called the "Cheat Sheet" for the Magic Theatre; it was distributed with each paycheck.  They were actually quite entertaining, in my humble opinion.  I kept those.  Sigh.  But, they're like writing samples, right?

I found this:

It's my hospital bracelet from August 1991 when I slipped down the stairs at Fort Mason in San Francisco and sustained a compression fracture.  It was a workers comp injury so I kept the file.  For 23 years.  I get it when my mom keeps her hospital bracelets from when we were born.  This does not have the same significance.  SHRED IT!

I still have two rolodexes.  One from the Magic Theatre (I worked there in the early 90s) and one from my social work career, which I stopped using 3 years ago when my department issued me an iPhone.  I started filling that second rolodex in 1999.  There are dead people in both rolodexes.  Seriously.  I know I need to trash these but I don't know how.  It's a massive shredding job but if I go through each card, it will be agonizing.  And I can't think of any other way to chuck them.

Social workers:  what do you do with the materials you receive from continuing education?  I have 15 years worth of this stuff and I've never referred back to it.  I did chuck most of it, but I still believe, for a few of those classes, that I'll refer back to the material.  And yet I know I won't.  I mean, don't we all want to keep slide handouts about Personality Disorders for ten years?

As it turns out, most of the stuff I need to purge in my household is not photogenic.  However, since I'm sure you've all been anxiously awaiting photographs of items from an excavation, I'll give you those found in my parents' house, both in June and on our recent visit last week:

My book report on Rickets from 1977, I think.  A masterpiece.  I'm almost sad that I threw it away.

My favorite Angel.  She seemed like the smartest one and the one that Charlie most respected.  Her name was Sabrina and I loved Sabrina the Teenage Witch comics, and one has everything to do with the other.  Also, I loved Dynamite magazine when I was a kid.

This single roller-skate.  For a tiny little foot.  I tried mightily to find the match and was unable to, so I didn't chuck it.  Besides, when we do find the match, they'll be perfect for my soon-to-be-born nephew, otherwise known as the Crown Prince.  These were more modern than their predecessors since, instead of a key, there was a wing nut on the underside to adjust the size of the skate.  We also didn't need to wear helmets when we used these.  It's a wonder any of us survived.

Obviously, I used to collect these adorable little dressed-up mice.  We would go to Jeane's Hospital Fair every year while we lived in Philly and I could buy one of these with my allowance.  I loved them.  I can't believe I donated them, but I was in a fit of purge with my brother breathing down my back.  Especially that colonial one 4th down from the right.  How awesome is that little guy?

By the way, the yellow headboard in the background?  My friend took that bedroom set.  It was over 40 years old and she loved it more than I ever did for the last 35 years.

Last but not least, and I only post this because this blog is based on me humiliating myself:

I found the bottom bra in a record cabinet in my old room (devoid of records, by the way).  I cannot remember when I was ever a 32B, let alone a B cup at all, but it has to be mine because I know my mother was NEVER a 32B.  The top bra is one of my current ones, placed there for comparison.  I would need several of the bottom bras to fill out the top bra.

So, depending on your feedback, I have plenty more photos of random stuff we found during the purge.  But I think this is enough of a tease and some of you may even have nightmares from that last photo (lord knows I've been grappling with my emotional response since found that 32B amongst the ruins).  And I'd love feedback on the things you've kept forever and either kept or threw away and why.  I need to feel not so alone.....

Giant Dwarf vs Misery

Yeah, I can't write about any kind thing-purge right now.  I've got tougher stuff on my mind.  I often joke that I was probably a criminal in my previous life and now I am paying penance by being a social worker.  I mean, really, what kind of person chooses this work?  I admit that I left the theatre because I didn't feel like I was helping people or contributing to humanity (mostly because the theatre we were producing in the '90s was utter crap and the audiences were smugly validated by the playwrights and vice-versa).  But my original intention when I went to graduate school in social work was to become a sex therapist.

WHAT HAPPENED?!?

Briefly, it turned out I hated doing therapy and was more suited to crisis-oriented work (theatre, go figure) so here I am with 13 years of Emergency Room social work under my belt.  When I first started, and I was 13 years younger, we got a lot of knife and gun club members (that's ED-speak for assholes who prefer to settle arguments with weapons rather than words).  With another trauma center that opened up closer to the thick of things and a general decline in crime in our fair city over the last decade, we haven't received as many of these hardcore homicides.  

But today we did have a homicide.  And a sexual assault.  And a lonely old man who fell on a bus.  Last week I dealt with two more sexual assaults, one on a child.  I see domestic violence, substance abuse and addiction, and homelessness on a daily basis.  I see families ignoring their elder relatives or outright abusing them.  I see families who care "too much" and end up doing more harm than good.  I work with schizophrenic and bi-polar people.  Sometimes people thank me for my assistance, and sometimes a patient will curse me out with some pretty awful epithets.

And you know what?  It's exhausting.  Really exhausting.  My husband spends 12 hours on his feet in another Emergency Department and he is tired too.  But his tired and my tired are a bit different.  I deal with peoples' misery, emotional crises, and unhappiness for my entire shift.  It affects me in ways I've internalized so much that I don't even notice until something even shittier happens, like the murder of a young person.

This afternoon I ran into one of our staff who deals with employee crisis intervention.  She thought that those of us in this profession should wear something akin to a "radiation badge" that xray technicians wear:  the badge warns the wearer when the exposure is too high.  She said that we all need to wear "exposure badges" that let us know when we're at our limit.  But it won't work.  We all work beyond our limit because we want to help and we have our own addiction to this crazy, chaotic place.  When she surmised that at the point the badge tells us we're reaching our limit, the employee would be placed in another work area.  And that's when I balked.  Where else would I work?  It's killing my spirit but it's feeding it too.

So it must be penance for a previous life's transgression(s). 

Giant Dwarf vs Packratitis

In 2009, I started this blog at the urging of my friend C., who, upon learning that I took a week-long staycation to purge my apartment of superfluous "stuff," encouraged me to write about the experience.  Five years later, here's what I have to show for it:  sporadic blog entries and the continuing saga of apartment purging.  Just like a hoarder's passion, it never ends.

It's been two years since I moved in with the Spazz and we are chock full of THINGS despite the fact that we have a three-bedroom apartment.  Yes, three bedrooms.  It's shocking when I think about it too.  So let me introduce my mother:

My mother is a well-known hoarder.  It spills out a bit in guest areas, but, in general, the hoarding is confined to rooms where a run-of-the-mill dinner guest can't see the disease.  That means that all three of our childhood bedrooms are crammed with stuff, including things we don't want to get rid of and know are safe on the mothership.  There are two more bedrooms, by the way.  They are also storage areas, and one of those bedrooms my parents actually sleep in.

So last June my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary (don't worry, this is germane to the story).  My parents planned a grand trip to Berlin and Amsterdam and off they went.  A few days after their departure, I get a call from the Golden Child (our middle brother and the one my parents deemed to be the most responsible....and I'm good with that).

"Hey, you are not going to believe this," says GC.

"What?"

"You know how Mom and Dad left for Europe on Friday?"

"Yes."  Okay, I'm getting bit nervous because I can't tell from my brother's voice if something really bad happened.

"I got a call from mom's friend on Sunday.  She went to check on the cat (aka The Beast) and she walked in to ankle deep water."

"Holy shit.  What happened?"

"Apparently the reservoir on the toilet in the hall bathroom has a crack and the water kept slowly draining for a day and a half.  The reservoir self-fills, so the water kept filling and leaking."

Golden Child proceeds to explain to me how he contacted the insurance company and the disaster is no-fault so they'll pay for all the damage (famous last words in regards to an insurance company).  Then he says:

"THIS IS THE BEST NEWS EVER!"

And he was right.  Because almost half of the house was flooded, many items were destroyed.  Items my parents never needed and actually probably didn't know they had.  A few weeks later, the Spazz and I and the Golden Child and his very devoted girlfriend convened at my parents house to clean up what my mother considers "our stuff."

And there was a lot.  We filled a small dumpster and made countless trips to Goodwill.  And we barely made a dent.

So the Spazz and I drove home with two small shopping bags of keepers that I just couldn't part with and my beloved woven chair from my parents' living room that I've coveted for 40 years (and that's a whole other post.)  On the way, we started talking about our own hoarding issues.  Of our three bedrooms, ours is relatively junk-free and we use a second room as a guest bedroom and tend to have that one under control (for the most part).  But the third room, aka "the office"......well, that's a disaster area.  And we vowed to clean it up.  Two months ago.

Two weeks ago we started.  The room now looks worse than when we started.  But I have found some treasures so far.....so stay tuned for the next post.  I'll be enumerating the ridiculous crap I've kept for so many years.  It's truly staggering.

Giant Dwarf vs. The World-Wide Interweb

Yes, I have been off the blogger grid.  Way off.  For way too long.  Which probably upset no one.  But I'm back, which may or may not be good news to all 6 of my sometime fans, who have all probably already given up on me.  But the Spazz challenged me tonight:  after failing to teach me one of his latest Kenpo moves, the Spazz said I'm not doing anything new and admonished me for reading too much and not writing enough.  So I'm back.

Coming back was not easy.  Imagine my surprise when I tried to sign into my blogspot account and Google showed up.  WTF?  Apparently, the one email list I am not on is the one that would have advised me of this when it happened, and I have no idea when that was.  In any case, I had to figure out how to get on with my non-Google account which Google apparently accepts as it's own anyway. If you know what I'm talking about, you are ahead of me.  It's all binary to me.

So A LOT has been happening while I have not been blogging, but most of what I've been doing is falling down the internet rabbit hole on a daily basis.  It was bad enough before I got a smart phone a couple of years ago, but now it is decidedly worse.  I can ostensibly be on the internet 24 hours a day and it doesn't cost me a thing (the Spazz pays that bill).  This is very bad.

I work ten hours a day and when I come home it takes me at least an hour, if not more, to just get through the TON of junk mail in my email account.  Then I go to Facebook and it's over.  I get sucked in by every single post until it's so late I've now squandered valuable sleep hours.  Then, when I finally get off the computer, I get ready for bed, get into bed, and play Words With Friends and look for an interesting Bitstrip to post.  Maybe I'll look at the yoga schedule if I'm off the next day.  Maybe I'll check my email and Facebook again, because it's been ten minutes and there might be something important happening (there never is).

Finally, I get the fuck off the interweb, turn down the lights, and open my Kindle.  And I read.  I read so slow it can take me a month to get through a novel.  By the time I start reading, I'm already half asleep and doze off with the Kindle still glowing in my face.

And that's why I haven't been writing. 

But that's all going to change.  It has to.  Because, even though this blog is part of the Web of Evil, it's still something creative and I need to do this.  I really do.  So any encouragement, feedback, or just plain editing is welcome.

Now, if I can only figure out how to lose weight while I'm doing this.

Giant Dwarf vs. the Orange Monster

How long ago did I promise you an entry on painting?  Long enough ago that I barely remember the debacle that ensued, but I will dutifully report the events to the best of my ability.

As I had previously mentioned, the Spazz's apartment has been inhabited by my friends or friends of friends for over 20 years.  I'm fairly certain that the landlord has not painted the interior in that time.  However, I know for sure that my friend C had painted it and that the last paint job was over 8 years ago.  The buttercream yellow living room was already fading, and the remnants of her booger-green bathroom were showing through the rather quick white cover-up that was painted in later years. 

And then there was the orange bedroom.

I was there when C painted that.  It really wasn't that bad, but orange is a really hard color to work with when you are trying to build a love nest with your betrothed.  It was time for it to go.  I felt this would be a good job for a professional painter.  The Spazz felt it would be more fun to do it ourselves; I tried to explain how much I hate painting and asking friends to help was asking too much.  He wouldn't budge.  Since I already made the executive decision to hire professional movers (and I'm glad I did) I let him have this one.

So, in anticipation of the move and the painting combined, I took a week and a half off work and encouraged the Spazz to do the same.  About three weeks before the move, I checked in with Spazz to discuss the moving schedule and he informed me that he did not have many of those days off. 

WHAT?!?!?!

In fact, from the time his roommates moved out until the time I had scheduled the movers, the Spazz had only 3 days off....compared to the ELEVEN days I was scheduled off.

The conversation went something like this:

Me:  "You know we have, like, six rooms to paint."

Spazz:  "Yeah, I know.  We can do it."

Me:  "Really?  We're going to prime each of these rooms and paint them all by the time I move my stuff in?"

Spazz:  "It won't be a problem.  We'll just work on that the days I'm off."

At this point, I again begged to hire a professional painter and pay away the problem, but he dug in his heels.

So off we went to Home Depot, buying primer and paint and tape and rollers and buckets and all other weapons of painting destruction and......we started.  Now, on top of all of this, my brother and his friends were coming to town for an overnight, so one of those days off was already blown.

One friend was able to come over on one day to help.  The rest we did ourselves.  We primed the entire orange bedroom and half of the living room in two days.  My brother was coming the next day.  The Spazz was returning to work the day after that.

This was not going well at all.

My brother offered to buy some more painting tools and help.  Great vacation for him.  And just when the Golden Child was pulling into the Home Depot.....

The Spazz gave in.

"Hire the painter."

It was July 4th.  The painter, from here on out known as our lifesaver, came over anyway, surveyed the premises, gave us an estimate and a date and then did it all in one day.

And I must say that I have been very pleased with myself that I have not once said "I told you so" in all this time.