Suzanne Calling

I'll bet you all were expecting more posts from me, now that I am out on disability. To be honest, I thought the same. However, the first few days of rest and relaxation were truly that. I had no idea how worn out I'd become over the past few months. I have been a lazy ass, with my butt parked on the couch for many hours. I've been sleeping a lot, but the sleep is erratic. I was up until 5am the other morning, and then went back to sleep once I got the boys off to school. Today is the first day where I don't feel like I've been run over by a mack truck. Monday is my first visit to Nurse M since going on leave. She and I haven't specifically put a time frame on this leave. We've both agreed that I need to get off the vicodin. Small problem there is that the pain has been WORSE since I've been off from work. Time will tell whether I am crazy to think I'm going back...

How many of you blog out there? Really. Blog more than once a week, month, year, presidential administration? Have you noticed the dynamic of the various blog sites? MySpace -Most people have under three blog entries, and those were posted within the first month of joining the site. The purpose of MySpace is to have a 'bulletin board' on the net like you probably had on your dorm room door. Everyone leaves comments, some of your friends send you a bulletin every day and if you're over 30, you're not hip. I have a MySpace page, and I am so uncool. It's been over a year since I started it and I have less than a dozen comments. Why do I have it? For the bands, dude. That's probably the best thing about MySpace-bands create pages and keep you up to date about their concert tours and albums. The one feature that they have that I love is that you can filter who reads an entry. Then again, no one is on there to WRITE anything, especially if they can't use...

Whenever we have a teacher conference with a new teacher for Gameboy, there is no small measure of trepidation. He's a smart kid, but he is a handful for anyone. The best laid plans of meeting with teachers before the school year started did not go as planned. Instead, we met the teacher that used to run the program that he was to be enrolled. Tonight, I met up with the teacher that has him for half of the day and was pleasantly surprised. It was similar to the meetings we had with his teacher for the previous two years. We talked about how much his intelligence impressed her. She told me how he was a rapt listener in class, remembered EVERYTHING she taught and had insightful answers for the questions she posed. For instance, the students are currently reading 'The Skin I'm In,' a book about a young girl with poor self image. The girl speaks of her mother, but the mother does not really have a role in the book. Ms. O asked the students what the character though...

From the annals of great late night TV, we bring you Kenny Everett. A little backstory: Back in the late 70's and early 80's, Saturday Night Life was the best thing going on TV. The original cast was the original NBC "must see TV". As a young teen, too young to be going out on a Saturday night (not that I had anywhere to go, anyway), I of course had to watch. Being the night owl that I was (and still am), I'd invariably watch Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. After that show was over, NBC had this wonderful nugget from across the pond. The Thames production "Kenny Everett Video Show". It was another wonderful import. We had Benny Hill and Monty Python. This was more topical humor. It was a rare week that I wasn't there laughing for the entire program. While I can tell you some of the ideas of the sketches he presented, this one stood out in vivid memory for 27 or so years. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did as a teen.

I've been a member of Imagestation for a few years now. It's been a good site, I use them to host pictures that I occasionally post on message boards, as well as allow friends far and wide to view. Another person hosts about a thousand pictures of mine on her site as well, but I feel like that is rude-since we aren't in contact anymore. (It's a good thing she had them, I lost a lot of pictures in the hard drive crash) Imagestation announced that they will be shutting down. They suggest that users port everything over to Shutterfly, but I'm not thrilled with their site. This leads me to find a different site to host my pictures. But which one? The front runner is Flikr . I notice a lot of the bloggers I read use them and it seems so easy to use. However, no one I know IRL seems to have it. Shutterfly has not impressed. I noticed Da Mooch has Fotki, which I'd never heard of prior to him linking me pictures of the new house he and da wife are building. ...

I have a day off. Lately, that means I've taken ill in some fashion. That probably would explain the aura I've got right now. Damn, it's almost 6pm, and I thought I'd escaped it this time! It's making typing interesting for sure. Disability begins next week. My boss contacted HR today and they are FedEx ing the forms. The call went out to Nurse M. Apparently, the practice charges 25 dollars for these forms to be filled out. Instead, she gave me her fax number to complete them and return to my employer. An indication of how much she likes me: she told me to do it this way so I don't have to pay the 25 bucks! Hmm, I think I need to bring a batch of brownies or cookies to my next appointment. As far as work goes, I feel bad. I've been hoarding my vacation time to use in the first 8 days of my time off. The company counts sick days in the payroll budget for the store, but not vacation pay. This sucks-not only does someone have to come in to cover ...

Lately, I've been reminiscing about my childhood and events shared with my parents. For two people who worked full time (plus), they each made efforts to do things while we kids were off from school. A sampling: The restaurant mom worked in was closed Monday nights. For a time, she'd pick up a bartending/bookkeeping job on Mondays at a bar in Baldwin. Summer was different, she'd be home Mondays (and many a Thursday, too). We'd have dinner out at the picnic table on the patio and at least one of those nights, after dinner, we'd head down to Newbridge pool for a swim. The green flies were abundant (the pool is right on the canals leading to the Great South Bay), but the breeze off the bay made even the hottest summer night quite pleasant. Mom would sneak in her white wine spritzer and camp out under on of the canopies with all the towels with her cigarette in hand. She'd finish the smoke and a drink, then she'd come join us in the pool. She loved it. ...

It's always interesting what one finds when looking for something completely different on the internet. A song has been in my head since a friend's admission of infatuation with someone otherwise spoken for. So, off I go, searching You Tube to see if I can find the Roches' "The Married Men" to send to the friend in an email. No, it's not on You Tube, but over 25 years has not lessened the memories of their eponymous release. These women are the shining example of well crafted three part harmonies and sarcastic lyrics. One of my sisters had the album in heavy rotation in '79/'80, so much so that I remember ALL of the lyrics from the album. Of course, the YouTube mining expedition didn't find the cut I was looking for, so I went to their website to see if they had some snippets. Something to send to the friend (alas, I'll have to point her to the lyrics). As is typical, I had to nose around their website. What I found is the Paradoxical ...

Today, I had a glorious plan in mind. In it, the boy's rooms would have floors you can SEE, rather than ponder their existence. What color is the carpet in them? If I didn't remember that the builder made me choose the same color carpeting for the entire house, I'd be hard pressed to tell you. It started at 10am, this wonderful idea of mine. Of course, the boys thought that they'd just *pretend* to be cleaning (Chef Jr) or outright complain that cleaning was boring (Gameboy). They probably figured Mom would tire of telling them that there would be no TV, games or out of the house travails until and unless the rooms were clean. Ha ha ha ha....WRONG! The stalling tactics, of course, are many. Hunger, bathroom, need to get dressed (like that's ever stopped these two before), hunger again. Round about 11:40, I venture in to see their efforts after Chef Jr has appealed to me several times for some help. If they'd made a dent, I sure couldn't tell. I sta...

(*term used by many busy airports when they can't allow all the planes to land as they arrive in their airspace) The doctor's appointments, that is! Wednesday, I saw the neurologist. Thursday found Gameboy meeting his new psychiatrist and today, it was my turn (again) with vascular. The upshot of things is that I will be taking short term disability from work, probably four to six weeks. I'm being nice-I'll wait until the assistant manager returns from his vacation. It is a relief, since the past few months, when I'm scheduled more than three days in a row, I'm dragging myself into the store. I enjoy what I do, but the pain makes it less than fun. Today is day number four and I'm grateful for a three day weekend to rest this leg up. The neuro wants me to find physical therapy with a pool and wrote a script for three times a week. Last night, I did some PT work on my own and it is abundantly clear how tight and tense the left ankle is. Baby steps-...

Yesterday, I visited the neurologist. I've had some new symptoms crop up that I wasn't sure were due to the RSD or inidicative of something more. Thankfully, he ruled out other issues, since they are only occurring in my left leg. Phew. For now, I suck it up and deal with the pain as best I can. I don't want to shell out the 500 bucks for the deductible now, only to have to do it again in January. The plan is to limp along (ha ha) until then. He strongly urged trying physical therapy in a pool, or at the very least, get myself into a warm body of water at least three times a week. Basically, if I don't improve with a few months of PT, the nerve blocks are to identify which nerve is causing me all this fun. If they work, after a few of those, then the nerve will get cut-no more pesky pain impulses. Sounds good to me, especially since the leg has been quite insistent that it is HERE and it HURTS. Oy. I mentioned Nurse M and Dr J's opinion of going out on disa...

This past weekend, I was lucky to have two days of the three day holiday off with the kids. In years past, that would have meant we ran our butts all over creation having a ball. Now, not so much. To be fair to the kids, I got my butt off the couch and ventured over to Sea World with them. It's nice that we've got annual passes to a local theme park. We venture forth at our leisure, or in my case, as much as the leg will allow. So, off we went for a few hours of fun Monday. For a holiday, the place wasn't as packed as I would expect. That said, I think we are starting to see the slowdown of vacationers from elsewhere. There were several encounters with 'vacation daze'*, but we were unscathed by the experience. On the agenda was seeing on of the shows we had not seen before, Clyde and Seymour take Pirate Island. Front row seats, courtesy me using the walker to get around now. The pre show consisted of a young man in mime white face parodying people walking b...

to borrow a line from "Animal House". I have had my Netscape email account since 1998. Yep, almost TEN years. In that time, I've been able to accrue a vast many email addresses. I've saved tons of emails in it. Hundreds, perhaps thousands (because I am a packrat that way). The email address has hung on through four moves and two presidents. It is not exactly accurate, because after six years of working for the mouse, I am sick of the character contained in the address. However, it's what everyone is used to-so I've kept it. It should be noted that I didn't create folders for one or two emails from someone, so there were things contained in that inbox since 1998. Really. Alas, with the stupid upgrades they've done to the stupid fargin Netscape, if I did not save an email into a folder, it was deleted. Yep, anything over 60 days gets dumped. Unless you don't bother reading it-then it stays with you forever, like luggage. Why am I ticked? ...

Yesterday marked 10 years that Ed and I have been married. We marked the occasion by treating it like any other day. The week was filled with the usual crap: 1. Dealing with yet another RSD flare. Of course, after the last incident of running out of meds, I was proactive in calling Nurse M. When she and I spoke last, she had said she'd call in a prescription to the pharmacy for me. Alas, two days before I was to run out, we went to Target. No prescription. I left a voice mail for her. She later left me a voice mail that I should be running out that day (Thursday). This was true, I had two pills left. However, we were heading into a long weekend and I did not want a repeat of the last occasion of not having any meds-especially with the flare this week. Lots more stabbing and stinging. I see the neurologist on Thursday. 2. Gameboy is having a rough adjustment to middle school, and on Thursday, the teacher withheld a device he uses to complete writing assignments. Things...