Karaoke Queen

I like Suzanne Vega a lot. I like her blend of intelligent lyrics and folksy tunes. Here's a little trivia for you. Did you know that Suzanne Vega actually started out as a dancer? It's true. Anyway, here I am singing along to Suzanne Vega's The Queen and the Soldier.



P.S. I'm on vacation next week, so I may or may not post depending on how bored I am.

That's not right.

I just paid 60¢ for the worst damn cup of coffee I've ever had. It's my own fault because I bought it out of a vending machine, so what the hell did I expect, right? Well, I don't think I expected it to melt the tastebuds off my tongue. But I drank it. Oh, sweet caffeine is a hard mistress to deny. I guess I should be thankful I didn't have the 85¢ needed to buy a large cup.

I just saw Mad Max for the first time last night and I'm not understanding how the world of Mad Max transformed into the world of Thunderdome. The Mad Max world looked pretty civilized to me. They had hospitals and television. Obviously, I will have to watch Road Warrior at some point to fill in the blanks. I thought Mad Max was supposed to take place in a post-apocalyptic world, too. I was also surpised at how quickly Mel Gibson popped off the motorcycle gang after they got his wife and kid. That all takes place in the last half hour of the movie. Usually, the wife and kid get bumped off in the beginning of the film and the hero spends the rest of the movie tracking down and killing the bad guys. It was definitely an interesting film to watch.

It is what it is.

We're heading to DC next week for spring break. I wish we were staying here so we could housetrain the puppy, but my mom worked the guilt thing, so we've got to go. It should be OK, it's just going to be a pain traveling with a dog. We'll have to stop every couple of hours so Mookie can have a break and that's bound to make the drive considerably longer than it would normally be. I'm excited to see my family and all, I'm just not looking forward to the actual trip.

I find myself in a dilemma. I'm getting run ragged with all my daughter's activities. I'm sure she's getting run ragged, too, but I forced her to do guitar, so I'm not going to drop that. I think it's the taekwondo because it takes up so much time. Here's the problem, by the time we get home at the end of the day, she really doesn't have enough time to do all the practice and studying she needs to do before it's bedtime. She's supposed to practice her guitar six times and week, and if we're lucky, she gets two in. She's also been having a problem memorizing "math facts," which are basically just memorizing basic addition and subtraction. The do these things at her school called mad minutes where the kids have one minute to answer 30 or 40 addition or subtraction problems. The kids are supposed to be able to do this, but my daughter counts on her fingers and usually only ends up answering around 18 or so. This is not acceptable according to her teacher. The teacher says if she can't answer at least 80% of the problems, she's going to have problems in math next year, which I think is a load of shit. She understands math concepts very well. She knows exactly how to get the answer she's supposed to get, she just doesn't have the answers to simple problems memorized. Anyway, she's developing a complex about the entire thing. It's akin to when we had to memorize our times tables and it's something you've got to do, but to be perfectly honest, I couldn't immeidiately look at something like 6+8 and know it was 14 until I was in college. I still had to add on my fingers, but it didn't keep me behind in any way. I don't know how to help her get over this.

Podcast #10

I can't believe we've already hit episode ten. It's amazing, isn't yet? Yeah, well maybe not. Anyway, Korean Celt Squared talks about why men can't handle it when their buddies get married, among other things.

T minus three days and counting.

My husband and daughter go to pick up Mookie the Mutt on Friday. To say my daughter is trembling with excitement is a major, major understatement. I fully expect her head to explode within the next day or two. I am cautiously excited about the entire thing because we must first get through the crucial housetraining stage. I am girding myself for the tough job ahead of us. I don't really know how difficult it will be since I've never housetrained a dog, but I'm not expecting it to be easy. We've been reading books and stuff, but it still seems like it is going to be fairly challenging ordeal. Although, the fact that you are not encouraged to let the dog have free rein of the house until she is fully housetrained is a saving grace. We're going to keep Mookie in the kitchen, so any accidents should be fairly easy to clean up.

In other news, I bought myself some clothes over the weekend, which is a pretty momentous thing for me since I almost never buy anything for myself. I had to get an outfit for this charity dinner we went to Saturday night. I also got myself a t-shirt and pair of capris while I was at it. Of course, I felt guilty about spending the money as soon as I walked out the store. Oh, did I mention the shoes? I got shoes, too. That was nice.

Guest Karaoke

Hold on to your socks everyone because I have got a special, special treat for you today. My husband has decided to take a stab that this whole Karaoke Friday thing and appears for the first time to entertain you with his smooth karaoke stylings. Please give a hand to my husband singing House of the Rising Sun.




P.S. Odeo is again giving me problems with the audio uploading. I don't know what the deal is, but I'm started to get peeved.

What are you looking at?

That's basically my mood today. Just leave me the fuck alone. I've been fighting a cold the last few days, and that coupled with my overall gimpiness is putting me in a foul mood. Man, life is just relentless. There is definitely no rest for the weary. I got home yesterady and just zonked. I still got a normal night's sleep on top of that. Obviously, I needed it. My daughter's had a cold, too, which doubles the misery because she's such a little pain when she's sick. I know I shouldn't say something like that about my kid, but it's true. I know she feels like shit, but so do I. I'm starting to enter the unforgiving stage of parenting. It is everyone for their goddamned self, Toots. I'm sure I'd be much more motherly if I didn't feel like crap.

What the Hell?

I had my first official session at the physical therapist yesterday and I am left wondering what the hell I am paying them money for because they didn't do a damn thing I couldn't have done on my own for free. I get there and the first thing they have me do is my normal exercises that I've been doing all week, then they have me step up and down with my bad leg and then they put me on a bike for ten minutes. Nobody did anything to me, they just told me what to do and then left me alone. Oh, someone did wrap my leg in ice for five minutes after I was done with all my exercises, so that's probably what I'm paying them for. On top of it all, it took them twenty minutes to even get me started. That probably pissed me off more than anything because if they were going to have me do everything on my own anyway, why didn't they just set me up as soon as I walked in the door? I have a life. I have a schedule. I've got better things to do than sit and wait to exercise on my own. Anyway, they better show me something worth something next time I go in.

I've been thinking a lot about my birthday, which is coming up in a couple of weeks. I've been thinking about turning 37. I don't know why. I'm not weirded out about it or anything, but I've sure been thinking about it a lot. Probably because if there's something I was to accomplish while I'm still in my 30's, I'm realizing I don't have very much time left. Which brings the question, what do I still want to accomplish in my 30's? Writing a book would be nice if I could get around to it. Seriously, do we ever reach an age where we figure out this entire life thing?

Oops.

You know, I only realized today that I hadn't posted anything yesterday. Maybe I didn't have anything interesting to say. Yesterday my eldest nephew turned 12 and it was making me feel pretty old. He's the first grandkid in the family so he's sort of the marking point for old because I still remember him as a little baby. He'll be a teenager next year and that's really freaking me out. How will I feel when my daughter turns 13? I really don't want to think about it because she's already PMSing half the time as it is. I really don't want to imagine what it will be like when she's actually got the hormones to back it up. I'm running a slight fever today, but I just swallowed a handful of drugs to get me through the day, so we'll see how it goes. I'm on the Dayquil, which is my favorite cold medicine because it makes you loopy. Loopy is fun. It gives you a good excuse to be ignorant for the day. I have physical therapy today. I've been doing my exercises pretty religiously and I think I can tell there is some improvement. I didn't do my exercises as much as I should have over the weekend and I could sure tell yesterday morning because my knee did feel stiff. The exercise that's actually the hardest for me to do is the easiest. I lie on my stomach face-down while letting the bottom half of my legs hang off the edge of the bed so that gravity pulls my knee straight. That one hurts like a mother and I am counting down the seconds for my five minutes to be up with that one. It pains me.

Podcast episode 9

It's Korean Celt Squared at you today for episode nine. My brother and I discuss Tom Cruise in the closet, among other things.

Karaoke Replay

I haven't had the time do any new recordings so I thought we'd go back, back, back to a more innocent time when a crazy gal had a crazy idea to share her crazy dream with the world. So today let's relive the day when it all started, when I decided to start my Karaoke Fridays. Here I am singing my first post, Hit Me With Your Best Shot.



I'm going to try and stockpile a bunch of new songs over the weekend so I don't have to worry about all of this for a long, long time.

By the way, HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY. Hope you chase all your snakes away.

Light as a feather, stiff as a board.

My daugther just got invited to her first slumber party. She's pretty excited about it. She asked me, "Mom, isn't it true that all little brothers try to seek into the slumber party at 1 a.m. to wake up all the girls?" I told her that hadn't been my experience. She's asking this because the friend hosting the sleepover has a little brother. Surprise, surprise. The funny thing about my daughter is that once she gets something into her head, she's not going to let go. Once I told her I'd never been awakened at 1 in the morning by a wayward little brother, she asked, "Well, isn't that something they like to do?"

At any rate, she will be prepping herself to be rudely awakened in the early hours of the party. The girls are second graders, so I don't think they'll be partaking in the time-honored, slumber party tradition of light as a feather, stiff as a board. I have to wonder how this game got started because ALL girls know about it and they ALL do it at slumber parties. I don't know anyone who's never done light as a feather, stiff as a board at a slumber party. I think it would be akin to living in America and never having eaten a Big Mac. I'm sure they're are people out there who haven't had one, but I sure don't know them. We also liked to do the Bloody Mary thing where you stand in the bathroom with the lights out chanting, "Bloody Mary come to me. Bloody Mary come to me." You do this while facing the mirror so that when you flip on the lights you get to see if Bloody Mary came. And the seances. We always had seances. However, those always freaked me out a bit because I heard that once a spirit is invited into the house the only way to get rid of it is to burn down the house, so I used to try and call people that seemed nice to me, like Henry Fonda. I used to call Henry Fonda a lot. We'd tell stories about idiots who'd tried to call Dracula or some other scary creature like that and all the party goers would be found dead the next morning with puncture wounds in their necks. Trust me, little girls know how to scare the shit out of themselves.

A tale of two prejudices.

I watched the new Pride and Prejudice last night (I'm liking the NetFlix) and, overall, I don't think it was as good as the A&E miniseries, which is the best adaptation of Pride and Prejudice ever. EVER. If you don't agree, hit the road. I thought the movie did some really nice things, but being used to the slower pace of the miniseries, I was somewhat taken aback by how quickly everything happened in the movie. Of course, everything has to move more quickly because the movie is telling the same story in less time. I will say that I thought Matthew Macfadyen (Darcy) was brilliant in the scene when he and Elizabeth finally come together. I loved how he stumbled over his words and lost his breath. I literally swooned at that part. I didn't like how they seemed to dumb down the language a bit with the movie, explaining things a little more bluntly than was done in the miniseries. I felt it betrayed the true nature of Jane Austen's dialogue somewhat. And I really thought Jennifer Ehle did a better job of portraying Elizabeth than Keira Knightley. I thought Ehle was much more poised and graceful in her performance and there was a bothersome ragamuffin aspect to Knightley's portrayal that annoyed me. In all, I did enjoy the movie and would eagerly recommend it, but only after encouraging a person to watch the miniseries first.

Feel the burn.

I had my first visit to the physical therapist yesterday and it was OK. He basically took measurements of my knee bends and extensions and stuff. It was exciting. But really, it was OK. At first I thought he was going to start wrenching my knee and twisiting it and shit, so I asked him, "Are you going to hurt me? Because if you are, I just want to know so I can warn you that I'm a yeller."

He laughed and said he wasn't going to hurt me and that he wasn't going to make any sudden movements or anything like that. I was much relieved because everyone kept telling me that they were going to seriously bend and push my knee all over the place and I was a little bit nervous about that. In the end, he just showed me the exercises he wants me to do at home and made sure I knew how to do them properly. It was all good. I actually noticed a difference this morning. My knee seemed much looser than it has, so I'm pretty hopeful everything will be in good working order by the end of the year.

One thing does bug, though. They gave me a sheet that said my insurance only covers 20 sessions a year. They want me to come in two times a week and at a minimum, I'm going to need therapy for six months. Twenty sessions is only ten weeks. What am I supposed to do after that? It's pretty stupid on the part of the insurance company because it costs them less money to just pony up and cover all the physical therapy until my knee is good and strong. Because what will likely happen if my knee isn't good and strong? I'll probably end up injuring it again and fixing it will cost more. I don't understand why insurance companies seem to be lacking the most basic common sense. I know they're all about the money and don't really care about the members, but doing things the way they are doing them DOES waste money. They just need to be a little smart about it. Stupid pricks.

Podcast episode 8

Finally, Odeo fixed its upload problem. Sexy American Girlfriend and I discuss several things, including rude Canadian consulate employees and her father's birthday. Enjoy.



Changing the subject a bit, do you have any idea how hard it is to find solid white crinkle chiffon? It's damn hard. I need it for my daughter's communion dress and I haven't been able to find it anywhere. I even looked on the internet and can't find any. You wouldn't think that was such a rare fabric. I bought regular white chiffon because I have to use something, but it upsets me when I can't use what I'm supposed to use. It just throws off the mojo in a big way.

No karaoke Friday.

No song this week. Sorry, but I'm just coming off the surgery and all. You understand, right? We just joined up Netflix. I'm hoping there are movies in my mailbox today so I can watch something tonight. My daughter is jumping around to the Pokemon theme song right now. I'm sure you can imagine how enjoyable that is to me. Something is up with Odeo and it's not letting me upload audio files for some reason. I've got a new podcast episode waiting for y'all, but I can't do it until I can upload the file. Boo hoo. I'm feeling a little jittery right now. I wonder if it's from my pain medication. The medical supply people are coming to pick up my continuous motion machine today. It makes me a little sad because having to use that thing was a good excuse to take a break for an hour. Oh, here's something new I learned. The birthday cake flavor mix at Coldstone Creamery really does taste like birthday cake. It's good.

Eerrrrgh.

Before I say anything, just let me state that I love my mother. I love my mother very much; however, I'm a little irked with her right now. And I really do mean just a little. She called me yesterday to tell me that if I hadn't already gotten a communion dress for my daughter that I shouldn't because she just bought one. I told her that I was planning on making my daughter's communion dress and she asked if I'd already gotten the material and I said yes. In fact, I just bought the material over the weekend. She responded by saying, "Oh, well, now you don't need to worry about making it." I'm upset because it wasn't going to be a hassle to make it. I want to make it. It was supposed to be a special mother/daughter thing for me to make my daughter's dress. Plus, she had picked out the pattern and helped pick out the material, so she was excited to wear it. Anyway, when I talked to my mom I told her I hadn't cut the material yet, so I could always make something else. The truth is that untless my daugther plans to ever attend a cotillion for her coming out, which doesn't really happen around here, I won't have any reason to make something for her with the material I purchased because it's bridal fabric. Fabric intended for use on a wedding gown or some other similar garment like , oh I don't know, a communion dress. I told my daughter about it last night and she's upset. But I told her that her grandmother wants to feel like she's contributing to the day, which she is, and that she's not trying to ruin it. My daughter gets that and is willing to be gracious about it, but the more I thought about it, the more I got peeved. This is my daughter and it's the only opportunity I'll have in life to make a communion dress. I've decided I'm going to make it anyway and then probably have my daughter change into the dress my mother bought her for the party afterward. As it goes, my daughter may end up liking the dress my mom got her better than the one I'm making. I guess we'll just see how it goes.

I am sooooooo over it.

I've pretty much been a gimp since the beginning of the year and I'm pretty much fed up with the entire thing. I'm sick of not being able to move the way I'm used to moving. I'm sick of not being able to walk without pain. I'm sick of being denied my ancestral right to kimchi squat. I am sick of the entire ordeal. I just want to get started with the physical therapy so I can get back to being the way I'm supposed to be. Sad to say it does take a prolonged injury or illness to truly appreciate being well-bodied. But we're human and stupid. I think when I'm back to normal, I will always skip just because I can.

Eeew! It's so gross, yet strangely fascinating.

That's what my daughter has been saying about my knee. Here's a picture of the mutilated, swollen monstrosity that is my leg about four days post-op.



So, I'll be sporting some big ass scars when all is said and done. My daughter says I should tell people that I got my scars while in the Army. She seems to think that explains everything. The fact that I was never in the Army doesn't seem to concern her too much, though. I had my staples taken out yesterday, which stings like a mofo. I mean, really. It stings like mad when they take those staples out. I tried to get the nurse to give me the staple remover because I thought that they threw them out after one use because they come in these sealed plastic bags, but she said they sterilize them and reuse them, so she wouldn't hand it over. Bitch. It looked like a very handy tool. I'd already taken out one staple myself Saturday night because it was elevated above the skin and kept getting caught on things and pulling, which hurt. Plus it was moving around a lot, which was really irritating to the area, so I used tweezers and a pair of needle-nose pliers to rip that sucker out. Actually, I was very careful. But when I took it out, I was left with a scar that looks like a division sign. My daughter thinks that's pretty cool. I had to stop taking the Tylenol 3 I'd been giving because I'm driving pretty regularly now, so the doc gave me a script for Darvocet. But when I got home and read the pharmacy information, it said darvocet is a combination of narcotic and non-narcotic pain medications and I was a little upset because I told the doctor I wanted a non-narcotic medication. Anyway, I'm taking it, I just hope there's not enough narcotic to get me in trouble with the coppers.

Podcast #7

My brother and I discuss several different things which are all very interesting.

I'm baaaaaack.

I'm back and in pain. I've got a lot of catching up to do, so I'll just run through the highlights. My knee surgery went fine and I'm hoping to get the staples out today when I see the doctor. I've been exercising my leg all week in a continuous motion device which has been all right, I suppose. My knee hurts, though. I won't kid about that. But anyway. I've got gory pictures to show you tomorrow, so until then.