Universe

So I generally think that most of us can agree that 2016 has been a god-awful year in a number of ways.  Started with the shooting of one ape and ended with less than half of America voting for another, who will then become president.  And in between, all kinds of craziness.  Life has been pretty crazy around here too, starting with Charles's arm, then our pets dropping off at an alarming rate, the children continuing to insist on growing, and wrapping up with me starting the downhill decline to 40.  Like seriously, 36 you are supposed to be an adult.  I am the least adult adult that I know.  The fact that I am allowed to drive, consume liquor, watch and buy porn (though really, who pays for it nowadays?) AND save for retirement is simply astounding when on the inside, I am playing with my She-Ra dolls in my fort behind the chair in the front room of my childhood home.

However, there are some things that 2016 has tossed at us that makes me believe that the universe is totally out to get me.  Or at least drive me crazy.  Crazier than I already am, that is.  More paranoid, too.  So of course I am going to list them, in no particular order, and say why I feel that 2016 personally has it out for me.


1.) Big Joe broke

If you don't know what Big Joe is, then consider the fact that the woman who has not seen National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation nor watches any kind of TV knows what it is and you don't.  Fucking Cougar Town, bitchez.  Wine glass the size of your head.  Well, maybe more like the head of a really small infant.  But still, bigger than the average wine glass.

Once that bad boy broke, I was forced to do things such as refill my glass multiple times.  And do you know how much of a lush that makes me look like?  Pretty hard to swallow down the Xanax with a regular size glass when you have Sjogren's...you need some extra fluids to swallow pills.

Didn't have mine this time period, but I felt this was appropriate.  And illustrative.

2.)  Those fucking Christmas lights

You know, those ones that shine little polka dots all over your house?

What. The. Fuck.

So you mean to tell me that either making you house look like it has amoebas swimming all over it or it has come down with a bad case of elf acne puts you in the Christmas spirit?  Has America reached new depths of laziness that we can't even be arsed to untangle Christmas lights?  I don't know about you, but swearing at my lights as I try to untangle them and figure out which end goes where (why the FUCK don't both ends just have prongs for a plug?  WHY???) while precariously balancing on ladders in the freezing cold and cursing whoever invented outdoor Christmas lights signals the true start of the Christmas season for me.  Simply shining a light at your house for Christmas decorations is un-American, for the love of Peter, Paul, and Mary.

3.)  Our pets

We lost this year, in rapid succession, three of our pets:  Bean the hamster, Angel the psychocat, and Spartacus, our husky/border collie.  Never in my lifetime did I envision a year where I had to explain both death X3 AND why an orange misogynist won an election with the aid of Putin.  2016 really wanted to test my medications...but first, let's take away Big Joe!

4.)  The Mannequin Challenge

OK, 2016.  Rub it in my face that you managed to find a way to get people to stop what they are doing, be silent, and not move.  And by people, I am meaning my children.  Seriously, what a genius idea!  This is the quiet game taken to the next level, and I am intensely bitter that I did not think of it.  And to video it too, as proof that it actually happened...how have I parented this long without this?


And there you have it, folks.  My pretty weak evidence that this year had it out solely for me. Because that is totally how it works.  And by it, I mean paranoia.  I blame Reggie.

Letters II

I had originally thought that I might be up to writing one of those letters people used to send out around Christmas every year on this blog, but let's be honest here bitchez...I usually can't be arsed to commit to anything that serious as I have a hard time choosing the appropriate shopping cart in the grocery store,  I can't even pretend that it is going to be an every other year thing as the last (and, well, the first really) was in 2013.  2016 has been a super special year, though, so I figured that it deserved a letter as well.  Enjoy, and happy holidays!

Dear Bitchez,

Well, 2016 has been quite a year.  And not just for this family, really, but for the nation as a whole...staring with Harambe and ending with Donald Trump and some super fun conversations with my daughters as to why slightly less than half of the nation thought it would be OK to vote for someone who lacks the appropriate knowledge of the female anatomy and thinks that you can grab women by their pussies in an attempt to get them in bed.  Seriously, Donald, if you are gonna be a misogynistic douchebag, at least make your pathetic attempts at exuding toxic masculinity somewhat believable.  No one grabs women by their pussies.  Hair, maybe.  Pussies, no.

This letter has gotten off to a great start, just like 2016 did for us!  Sadly for my husband, there was not as much talk of felines as there was of surgery and physical therapy and being off of work for 5 months.  The good news was that he was able to stay at home with the little girls this summer while he healed.  The bad news was that he had a slight look of despair in his eyes most of those days, but let's be honest, he is married to me so that *might* have had something to do with it.  Don't worry, he's back at work now.  He totally missed the mismanagement and politics of his job, and was super excited to return to the news of no Christmas party or raises this year!  Go team!

I left my former employer and went to private practice full time.  So far, the reduction in stress has been worth it and I have remembered that I am in fact an adult who is capable of things such as time management and good decision making skills.  Waiting for the insurance companies to pay up sucks monkey balls, but the trade off is totally worth it.  Charles also decided to go and buy me a new to me vehicle that was more reliable for the longer commute since the van only had like 191K miles on it and was in totally great shape.  If a heap of rusted metal with sometimes working parts constitutes "great" shape....

Elizabeth has graduated from high school and started college.  She so far seems to be loving it and has managed to get a paid job running social media.  She claims that the only reason she got it was because it is for the practice I am working at; however I only tried to extend nepotism to getting her an unpaid internship.  She did all the work involved in getting them to pay her.

Alexis continues to barrel full speed toward puberty, which I look forward to with as much anticipation as I do things such as my yearly pap and a colonoscopy.  She has continued to dance in competitions and to date has not descended into any kind of unsavory behaviors as a result, so I'm thinking that was a solid parenting decision there.  High five for me!

Charlie decided to stop competition, briefly did gymnastics, then returned to the dance studio for acro classes.  She started kindergarden this year, on the same day Elizabeth moved into college.  This worked super well except for the fact that I had managed to injure my groin in a misguided attempt to start running to better myself, and this turned into a massive ball of suck to try to move her into college and then come visit while limping/on crutches.  It also worked super well while trying to get a five year old ready for kindergarden.  Yeah, I try not to think about the kindergarden/college thing too much....

It has been a bad year to be an animal in our household, too. Unless you are Reggie, then the prepping and ninja skills will serve you well.  It started out with Bean getting mauled to death by Deogie, possibly from the frustration of not being allowed to hump Angel.  I am sure the aftermath of this did not add to any therapy needs Elizabeth has AT ALL.  Then, Angel passed away as well.  She went fairly quickly and unexpectedly...started to pee a lot, and then died before we could get her to the vet.  Then, Spartacus died unexpectedly shortly after this as well.  Nothing like losing three animals in rapid succession to generate some super fun talks with the little girls!

All in all, things have been just a wonderful ball of change around this house!  And stress.  And uncertainty.  So super fun and exciting and not at all anxiety-provoking!  Here's hoping that 2017 has a little less of the change that 2016 has.

Merry Christmas!

Laura, Charles, Elizabeth, Alexis, and Charlie

Animals

Have you ever looked at someone and thought "Well, aren't you just a big bucket full of fucked up, with a dollop of crazy on top with a sprinkling of insanity?"  Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about my cat.

I swear, she's plotting my death, probably when I'm sleeping.  It's a good thing that we sleep with our door closed because I'm pretty sure that she would try to smother me or slit my wrists in my sleep.

Nothing to see here.  Move along, now.  Move along.

It's bad enough that she does things like run into the big window in our living room over and over again to catch the leaves in the fall, or tries to burn the house down by chewing through the cord of a lamp while it is on and getting electrocuted in the meantime (for weeks after, you would take a tissue out of the box and she would about jump out of her skin)...but she also pretty frequently tries to murder the dogs.  Most specifically, Deogie.  That poor guy is so confused, he doesn't know what he is or wants to be.  He's the most metrosexual dog I know, almost to the point where he's *just* this side of straight but really really wants to experiment. He tries humping the cat on a pretty regular basis, so I can understand her irritability with him.  (He also tries to hump the other dogs and blankets pretty regularly, too, hence the confusion reference.) She takes her irritation to the extreme, though.  Deogie can be just walking past her and she was be all like "Hiss hiss", which I am assuming is cat speak for "Imma cut you, bitch.  You best check yourself before you wreck yourself."  That cat is totally ghetto, but if I was ever in a bar fight I'd totally want her on my side.

Now Maximus, he's a bit of a different story.  He's caught in a constant battle with Spartacus for the alpha male position, but Spartacus wins just because he is built like a brick shithouse.  Spartacus is like the old time bosses in the factory, the blue collar guy, who got to the top by hard work and has dirty hands.  Maximus is the fresh college grad who's coming to the factory and gets a management job by virtue of having that college diploma.  Unfortunately, he's also the frat boy who drank and snorted coke all his way through college and ascribed to the philosophy of "C's get Degrees".  Plus he totally does not know how to change a flat tire.  He was most likely banging a freshman and got her to write all of his papers for him.  He lacks what one would refer to as common sense.  Like for instance, if you pushed him over he would totally just stay there on the floor lying there, looking up at you.  He also struggles to find his way out from under a blanket. Not that I have experimented with either of these before.  *Ahem.*

Spartacus is the strong, long-suffering, silent type.  That dog doesn't bark for much of anything, which really defeated the original purpose in getting him, which was for me to have some sort of protection when I was home alone with Alexis all those years.  We once had a fucking deer, in our back yard, not 10 feet from that dog, and he just totally looked at me when I came outside like "What?"  He totally hates cats, though, which I blame solely on Angel because she's fucking certifiable.  He will bark at a cat if it is within a quarter mile of our house.  He's also an emotional eater.  I'm pretty sure that he would totally drink beer and eat pizza and pretzels every night, and would be a perpetually single man who yearned for a family of his own but never found Mrs. Right.  Or in this case, his owners chopped off his balls and he is never able to act on his crush on the neighbor's dog Rosie.  He's my baby, though, and the first pet I ever owned as an adult.  Or as a kid, really, except for an assortment of fish and that one frog that I caught from a pond and kept in my room and would feed crickets.  Do you know you can buy crickets?  And do you know how loud those fuckers are?  Never again...

We also have some fish.  Dorothy, Charlie's left overs from her Elmo obsessed days. There is also a sucker fish thingy that no one ever named, poor thing.  I'm not exactly sure, but they could both be plotting some kind of escape, Finding Nemo-style.  Or perhaps the sucker fish will really be the one to murder me in my sleep because we never bothered to name him.  If I ever wind up mysteriously dead, seriously, look at the pets.

I totally need this for my house.

Then there is the rabbit, Toby.  Actually, Toby II as the first Toby died the night I had my hysterectomy, giving the whole the rabbit died thing a new meaning.  Elizabeth maintains that it is totally fucked up that Alexis named the rabbit Toby again, but Alexis does what Alexis wants cause honey badger don't give a shit.  I've not quite put my finger on this guy, but he's not actively tried to kill me or hump me yet, and nor do I have any expectations of protection from him, so I guess he is all right.   Fucker better not die before fair, though, or I'm making all of us, Charles included, take a pregnancy test.