Archive for ‘My Venomous Life’

December 31st, 2011

My Venomous New Year’s Resolutions

by Venomous Kate

This is the first year in memory that I’m making New Year’s Resolutions. But, as I’ve realized recently: we either grow as people, or we just grow to be old people. So here’s my list; ambitious it is not:

1. I will plan to blog more often.
2. I will try to eat more veg and less processed foods
3. I will do my best to “get” Twitter.
4. I will make time to exercise on weekdays.
5. I will drink less.
6. I will work at resisting change less.
7. I will read more stuff that makes me seem smarter.
8. I will think less negatively.
9. I will remind myself that every asshole has a momma who sees something special in him/her.
10. I will try to be nicer to my husband when he’s not pissing me off.

December 20th, 2011

My Theory On The Candlestick Park Power Outage

by Venomous Kate

If you caught last night’s game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Pittsburgh Steelers, you know the power went out at Candlestick Park not once, but twice during the game. PG&E, the company providing the stadium’s power, says they still don’t know what caused it. Oddly enough, the outage was entirely limited to the football stadium; no one else in San Francisco experienced the blackout.

Needless to say, this has caused all sorts of speculation about the real cause. Some folks say Steelers LB James Harrison must have run into the power grid with his helmet. Others suspect it was part of a ploy to get more money to rehab the 51-year-old stadium.

My theory? Karma was doing me a solid.

See, we’d just finished dinner and, instead of tackling the dirty dishes piled in the kitchen sink (because I’d handled the cooking), the Venomous Hubby sat down to watch football. This, after pretty much sitting around all day Sunday watching football while I handled all of the holiday preparations by myself. Rather than start an argument over the matter, I shrugged and told him to enjoy the game while I went upstairs to read. After all, the dishes would still be there after the game, right?

Not two minutes later, VH came trudging upstairs to not only do the dishes, but to finally install the tv wall mount in the kitchen. The one that lifts the kitchen TV off of the sideboard, finally frees up a much-needed horizontal surface area to which I can move the pile of papers that has been taking over my kitchen island. The very one that I’d asked him to install LAST Christmas, with little success, because he was too busy watching football then, too.

And the truly funny part? The instant he’d moved the TV to its new mount and turned it on to make sure everything was working, the power went back on at Candlestick Park.

Thanks, Karma, I owe you one!

 
 
 

December 18th, 2011

A Glimpse At My Christmas To Do List

by Venomous Kate

With just one week left until Christmas, my husband and I have been busy all weekend working on our respective To Do lists. Now that I’ve put our lists on the same page, I can understand why!

How I'm spending the weekend before Christmas

So, you know why Santa says “Ho, Ho, Ho!” around this time each year? It’s not that he’s laughing. Oh, no. He’s reminding husbands of the only person who’ll have the energy for sex after their wives have spent the weekend working themselves ragged while they watched football.

November 10th, 2011

A Little Pre-Thanksgiving Unpleasantness

by Venomous Kate

Have I ever told you that Thanksgiving is my very favorite holiday of the year? It’s true, I love it even more than Christmas (sorry, baby Jesus) or my own birthday (which really ought to be a national holiday, don’t you think?) despite the lack of gifts associated with Thanksgiving. See, it’s all about the food. Or, rather, the lack of guilt over eating it. What other meal is it not only acceptable, but actually encouraged, to gorge one’s self to the point of pain and then, as soon as a bit of wiggle’s returned to the waistband of your pants, do it again and again? As someone who loves to cook — and to eat — it’s the perfect holiday!

Or, rather, it would be the best holiday of all if there wasn’t pressure to get together with far-away family members, particularly She Who Must Not Be Named, who begins her campaign of terror and manipulation hinting about getting together for the holidays sometime in March.

Last year, I was smart enough to pre-empt her visit by inviting my mother who waited until the last minute (at my request) to let me know she couldn’t make it. By then, it was too late for SWMNBN to make travel plans. Even the discount car rental places were all booked up. Pity.

This year, I really can’t get out of it. After all, I stayed home alone this summer when VH and the Big-Eyed Boy went to pay homage visit. Fortunately, she can only stay three days, and not the marathon week- or two-week visits of years past. Sure, it still means the same amount of vacuuming, scrubbing and dusting, and I’ll be making — and doing the dishes by myself after — three meals a day while she’s here. But it’s only three days and, best yet, she’s flying out ON Thanksgiving morning.

That’s right: I’ll be getting the holiday visit with her over before the actual holiday! If you ask me, that’s a good enough reason to have a second piece of pumpkin pie. Maybe even a third.

November 3rd, 2011

My Kitchen Renovation Is In Progress

by Venomous Kate

The kitchen is really the center of our house, as it probably is in yours, too. Ours has a fireplace and one wall that’s almost entirely windows. You can’t enter the house without traipsing through or past the kitchen, and since I’m an avid home cook, most of our visitors wind up hanging out there. So I guess it’s not surprising that the kitchen is the room for which I have the biggest plans, and yet the room in which we’ve done the least.

Oh, we’ve rid the room of the hideous roosters and apple green paint. We repainted the wood cabinets and replaced their contractor-grade door- and drawer-pulls with tiny silver spoons and forks I bought at an antiques store. When our refrigerator died a couple of years ago we bought one that actually matches the other appliances. I felt like a real grown-up then.

One thing we haven’t fixed? The floor. The white porcelain tile floor that shows every drip, drab and crumb. The white floor that’s still shiny enough in most spots to make it obvious when I skip mopping for the day. The white tile floor that is cracked in at least a half-dozen places where we walk, while by the stove there’s an entire tile missing so I have to keep a mat there to cover the subfloor.

I hate that floor.

So why haven’t we replaced it? Well, like a lot of things in our lives, it still works. That is, we’re not walking on plywood, and spills are still easy enough to mop up. (Daily.) But the main reason is because ripping out a porcelain tile floor is a truly tedious, back-breaking job that involves spending hours on one’s knees wielding a hammer to crack the tile, then a chisel to get down to the subfloor, then a wheelbarrow to cart loads of broken tiles out to the garage where our trash company will not pick them up. That means, getting them out of the house doesn’t mean the work’s done: we still have to load them into the van and drive them to the city dump, one van load at a time. It’s work for young people, I tell you, which is probably why we should have made it our first project in the house since these last six years have been doozies.

Today, though, I decided I could stand it no more. I’d taken the kitchen rugs out to the deck so I could mop the floor (again), and forgot to bring them in before washing the breakfast dishes. One wrong move and — YOWZA — a cracked tile sliced a nice chunk off the bottom of my foot. Naturally, I bled everywhere.

Now, I could’ve cleaned up the carnage. That’s one nice thing about porcelain: blood splatters wipe up real well. But I’d already mopped the dang thing once today; I wasn’t about to do it again. So, after tying a kitchen towel to the bottom of my blood-soaked foot, I hobbled to my husband’s tool bench and found his hammer and chisel. By the time I needed to pick my son up from school, I’d only been able to crack up and haul out six tiles. SIX! And meanwhile I’ve worked so hard that my knees are locked up, my back is aching, and my hand has stiffened into something sore and claw-like.

So I’ve decided I was right: tearing out this tile really IS a young person’s job. As it happens, I know a young person with destructive tendencies and too much time on his hands. A young person whose adolescent hormones have lately led him to mouth off far too much for my liking. A young, smart-mouthed person who, when it comes down to it, is behind 99% of the drips, drabs and crumbs that made me hate this white porcelain tile floor in the first place.

Now, every time he mouths off, talks back, argues, rolls his eyes, calls me names or even breathes funny, he’s required to crack, remove and haul out one tile. At the rate he’s been at it this afternoon, we’ll be down to the subfloor in my 20′x26′ kitchen this weekend.

I love it when a plan comes together.

October 25th, 2011

My Brush With Breast Cancer Awareness

by Venomous Kate

As you no doubt know by now, October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. If the store shelves full of products suddenly packaged in pink didn’t clue you in, then the endless headlines about breast cancer detection, the marathons and walks to raise funds for breast cancer research, and the little pink ribbon buttons worn by people who have had, or who’ve known someone with breast cancer, surely reminded you about the effort to stop this killer of both men and women alike.

Now it’s my turn to tell you my story.

Back in August, I woke up with an itchy right breast. At first, I thought a mosquito must’ve found a particularly tender spot. Lord knows, I’m a mosquito magnet. If there’s one in our house, it’ll fly right past the Big-Eyed Boy, past the Venomous Hubby and any guests we might have, and head for me, even if I’ve bathed myself in mosquito spray (my summer perfume, as we call it). So this itching? I figured it was nothing to worry about. The next day, I woke up to find the side of my breast was deep red. Had I scratched that mosquito bite like crazy in my sleep? I slapped some hydrocortisone on it and put it out of mind as best I could.

As it happened, the following day was my regularly-scheduled breast self-exam. I do mine in the shower. It’s easier, and it gives me something to do while my hair conditioner sinks does its thing. In other words, I’m usually thinking about other stuff while I do it, but this time was different. This time, I found a lump. In my right breast. The one that was now also slightly swollen, still itchy, and still incredibly red.

There’s really nothing that can prepare a woman for finding something like that. Oh, we’re all used to our breasts doing strange things around a certain time of the month: they get larger and tender. If you really want to scare the hell out of yourself you’ll do your self-exam at that point. All the hormone-filled ducts and lobules in there feel like a science project when you’re having your period. This lump felt nothing like that. But since it was nowhere near the red, itchy space, I decided to wait and see if it changed much.

Two weeks later, when it was large enough that even my husband noticed it, I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I made an appointment with my doctor for my annual womanly checkup for the following week and, again, put it out of my mind. Meanwhile, the itching never subsided, and the redness never quite went away. Darned those mosquitoes!

At the doctor’s office, I waited until she’d done a cursory breast exam before mentioning the lump that I’d found. After all, as well-endowed woman (though not so large-chested that I need to weigh the things on a platform scale of their own), I’m used to my breasts doing weird things. She hadn’t felt a lump, so maybe I’d just imagined it? I told her what I’d found, and she went back to probe further. Sure enough, she found the thing, too, right there at the base of my breast, buried quite deep, and almost like it was part of my rib. Except it was round, and it moved.

“Probably nothing to worry about,” she said. “Maybe a cyst. But just to be sure, let’s send you for a mammogram and an ultrasound.” So, off I went for my first-ever mammogram (yes, I should’ve had one a few years back but I’ve been lazy). The radiologist said it was perfectly clear — he didn’t even see the lump that we’d all felt — and cancelled the ultrasound. Back at my general physician’s office, she just about blew her lid. After all, a mammogram that doesn’t show you a clearly palpable lump isn’t an accurate mammogram, is it?

The following week — a month after I’d first felt the lump, for those who are counting — my doctor sent me to a different place for an ultrasound. There, they found the lump and, for good measure, they took screens of the red, swollen, itchy part, too. (By then even I realized that mosquito bites don’t last that long.) But, being a professional, neither the radiation tech nor the radiologist told me anything about it.

The following day my GP’s office called to tell me they were referring me to a surgeon. No, no reason to worry, they said. Breast cancer isn’t itchy, cancerous tumors aren’t smooth and round like mine, and, besides, nothing looked malignant on the mammogram or ultrasound. But it’s best to be safe than sorry, so off I went to the surgeon’s office the next day.

Only by that point, my right breast was incredibly painful. We’re talking shooting pains that felt like someone was stabbing me with an ice pick. And when those weren’t happening, it just ached. Then again, a lot more people had fiddled with my breast in the past day than in the past, oh, 15 years that I’ve been with my husband. So I did my best not to punch the surgeon as he, too, palpitated it, found the lump, declared that it’s probably not cancerous because it’s smooth and round and painful (apparently, breast cancer neither itches nor hurts). But, since the thing was right on my bra line and it hurt, we should probably take it out.

Last Monday, I went in for surgery. Honestly, I don’t remember much of it except that the anti-anxiety stuff they gave me before wheeling me into the operating room was good. So was whatever they gave me in there, because even though it was just supposed to sedate me, I don’t recall a damn thing. In fact, my next memory is of a flock of nurses descending on my bed as I came out of anesthesia, apparently screaming for my husband to come help me. Wisely, they bustled him to my side.

One hour later, I was home on the sofa in my pajamas with an ice pack clutched tenderly against the four-inch incision on my chest. And that’s how I’ve pretty much spent the past week: clutching either an ice pack or a heating pad to my chest, in my pajamas or something equally loose-fitting, doped up on pain meds at first but now just popping ibuprofen as needed. Since I hadn’t remembered any of the things they’d told me in post-op, I didn’t know at first that I’d need a sports bra two sizes larger than I usually wear (which, believe me, is NOT easy to find!) so I’d worn my regular bra. Big mistake. That caused a hematoma, which in turn led to more pain, which in turn led to slower healing. So slow that I’m frankly at the point where I don’t care what they pulled out of me. I’m just tired of this taking up space in my brain.

So, what did they find? I still have no idea. Although my one-week follow-up with the surgeon had been scheduled this past Monday, he’d been called in to a surgery that ran much longer than expected so they called to reschedule. The next date that worked with his schedule, my husband’s and mine was this Friday.

Yes, I’d like to have had the results earlier, but as everyone’s pointed out: if it was cancer they’d probably have dragged me down there ASAP. Besides, as I’ve been told by my doctor, the initial radiologist, the surgeon, and the pre-op nurse, breast cancer isn’t painful or itchy, and cancerous lumps aren’t smooth and round, so we’re all certain there’s nothing to worry about.

That makes me lucky, I know, and so many women who go through this same experience aren’t. Having been through this, I’ll never be able to look at the color pink without thinking of those women who’ve lost their lives to breast cancer, and the women who’ve yet to be diagnosed. I’ll think of them not just this month, when it’s Breast Cancer Awareness, and not even just this year that I’ve gone through my own scare. When you’ve gone through something like this — even when you’ve been lucky — you can’t put it out of your mind.

I hope you don’t have to wait until you, or someone you know, goes through this kind of scare before you start wondering why there isn’t more being done to stop this killer. Why insurance companies and even our government are trying to discourage regular mammograms. Why, when we know certain chemicals in our food supply feed cancers like this, we aren’t doing more to eliminate those lethal concoctions. Why, even with all the headlines about how 1 in every 8 women will be diagnosed with this, so many women skip their monthly self-exams and annual mammograms. Because, trust me, not knowing doesn’t spare you from a damn thing.

September 26th, 2011

VK and the Seven Dwarfs of Menopause

by Venomous Kate

Seven Dwarfs of Menopause Once upon a time, I was a nice lady. A nice, energetic, fashionable and happy lady. Then one day, the seven dwarfs of menopause began showing up, and nothing has been the same since.

Itchy arrived first, but I just slathered on more lotion and didn’t give him much thought. Bitchy started dropping in now and then, though fortunately not very often. Sweaty came along one night and woke me up. At first I mistook him for his cousin (Pissy) but since the sheets were soaked through near my head, too, I quickly figured it out. He’s pretty much been a regular feature since then, visiting at all hours of the day and night. I guess it’s not surprising that Sleepy arrived not long after; waking up a couple of times per night to pee, and sometimes to change sheets thanks to Sweaty, has a way of wearing one out. That peeing part has done very little to keep Bloated away, though. As for Forgetful, I don’t remember when he showed up, but I’m pleased to say that Psycho has never made an appearance. Really. No, I mean it. Why do you doubt me?

My family, of course, is completely baffled by these changes in me. (Okay, maybe not the Bitchy part.) Much to his credit, my husband didn’t grumble much over the summer when I’d insist that our thermostat was NOT working, that there was no way in hell it was only 74F in the house, and that even if it was 74F that was still too dang hot as evidenced by the huge drops of perspiration rolling down my face. (Hello, Sweaty!) Oh, he might have suggested at one point that perhaps I’d be cooler if I wasn’t wearing pajama pants and a baggy t-shirt (Hi there, Bloated!) but after I gave him a death stare (Hiya, Psycho!) rolled my eyes, he dropped the matter. Now when I stand with my head in the freezer, or sit with an ice pack shoved down my shirt, he just asks, GotMenopause.

And, unfortunately, I do.

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August 11th, 2011

In Praise Of Minty-Fresh Toilets

by Venomous Kate

What really happens when a bug says kachoo Back when the Big-Eyed Boy was still a cuddly toddler, one of his favorite books to read was Dr. Seuss’ Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo!. You know, the story about how a bug’s sneeze sets off a long, improbable chain of events with global ramifications? Only, my son — who was still cute as a bug himself back then — would stop me after the first couple of pages, spreading his chubby hands out to prevent me from continuing the story.

“Mommy, do you know what really happens when a bug sneezes?” he’d ask. And I, although I’d heard his version a dozen times already, would shake my head. “When a bug sneezes on the other side of the world,” he’d squeal with glee, “YOU get sick!” Sadly, he’s not all that wrong.

It irritates my friends and family, but the reality is that I catch just about everything. Colds, flus, viruses, you name it — if there’s a person anywhere near me who’s been anywhere near a sick person themselves, I’ll come down with whatever that distant stranger had. It’s all but inevitable, even if I practically bathe in Purell after being in public, take more vitamins than a 70s health guru, and consume a produce stall’s worth of fruits and vegetables each week. I. Just. Get. Sick.

And I hate it.

It’s not just that I hate being sick — though I do, especially now that I’m a mom since “Mommy’s sick” really means no one’s going to lift a finger to do a damn thing around the house because that’s all my work, so the place just goes to hell in a hand-basket until I drag my phlegm-filled, feverish self out of bed to feed the starving cat, pick up my son’s dirty underwear from the kitchen floor, remind my husband that we do NOT use the kitchen sponge to clean our tennis shoes, and defrost some frozen dinner I’d stashed in the freezer in anticipation of days just like this. (And if you’re thinking that perhaps the reason I’m continually sick is due to my family’s horrifying inability to comprehend sanitation basics, let me just say the same thing’s dawned on me, but good luck trying to convince them that the germ theory of disease isn’t really a theory.)

So. I’ve been sick in bed since sometime on Tuesday. I don’t remember much of that day except that I had a long To Do list, much of which revolved around my daughter, who’d come home to earn college spending money by cleaning my house. Three hours after she’d started cleaning, I was on the sofa, sick as a dog, except when I was in the bathroom being equally sick. My first thought was how VH shares an office with a man whose live-in girlfriend just got over what they’ve been calling “the grunge”, some malady that lasted close to three weeks. Maybe he’d brought the germs home somehow? But, after comparing symptoms, I learned she hadn’t been camping out in their bathroom with her head in a toilet, so clearly, it wasn’t the same thing. I chalked it up to yet another weird bug I’d managed to pick up somewhere and got on with the business of puking my guts out.

Meanwhile, I kept mentally blessing my daughter for having just cleaned the bathroom right before I got so very, terribly sick. Seriously, there are few things more miserable than hanging your head in a toilet that smells, well, like a toilet. Okay, finally getting a chance to catch your breath and looking up to find that you’ve been resting your forehead on a crap- and urine-splattered toilet rim is pretty damn miserable, too. It’s also been known to prompt even more puking, just when you thought you couldn’t possibly hurl one more chunk.

So I was glad — so very, very glad — that my oldest child, my responsible daughter, my sweet angel who’d initially come up with the idea of cleaning my house in exchange for pocket money had, in fact, cleaned house so I didn’t have to. I was glad for a minty fresh toilet in which to puke, and for the knowledge that once I stopped puking I wouldn’t find my house filth-riddled and in need of my immediate attention.

Which is why this morning, when I finally felt well enough to shuffle to the kitchen, I was shocked — shocked, I tell you! — that I didn’t find two yowling, starving cats or my son’s dirty underwear or a grime-riddled sponge left by VH to float amid the detritus of last night’s dinner. They’d kept the house clean! I didn’t have to jump into action! I could finish recovering, rather than wearing myself out!

Or, at least, that’s what I thought until I found the pile of cleaning rags my daughter had used to clean house while she was here. Filthy rags. Rags from the bathroom, rags from the kitchen, rags she’d used to scrub the laundry room floor near the cats’ litter box. Rags, I was horrified to see, which she’d piled right on top of the non-used cleaning rags. The very same clean rags I’ve taught VH and the Big-Eyed Boy to use to wipe up messes instead of using the kitchen sponge or my dish towels. Then, thinking back, I realized they’d been there the last time she’d cleaned, and the time before that. In fact, I’d assumed all this time that she had been washing the cleaning rags along with all of her laundry that she does whenever she comes home.

Silly me.

Silly sick, tired, incredibly irritated and disgusted me, who must now clean — and disinfect — the house from top to bottom.

Not that it will keep me from getting sick again, I’m sure.

 


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