And the only sad part is that I can’t figure out just how to thank God on a blog without it sounding hokey. I guess that’s what prayers are for.

I have a little boy who carries a blankie with him just about everywhere and uses it for just about everything.

I have a dog with way too much attitude.

And when my husband and I talk, all the kids seem to hear is “wra wraaa wra wra-wra-wra.”

Well, trying-ish.

I’m not really much of a reader, generally speaking.  I like books, but I don’t always make it all the way through, unless it’s fiction.  There have been very few fiction books I’ve hated intently enough to put down and not even care what happens to the characters.  LOTR fans brace yourselves – The Hobbit is one of them.  And I’ve put it down like four times.  I couldn’t tell you if I like that book, but oh how I hate the first 50 pages.  Enough to make a girl cry.  Or at least take an F on reading it for school.  Twice.

But most non-fiction books I don’t finish.  I don’t usually even start at the beginning, unless you count the Table of Contents as “the beginning”.  Then I flip to whatever part I’m interested in, read that, and then maybe a little more until it references some other part of the book that looks interesting and then I read that and keep hopping around until I run out of time, fall asleep, or get a papercut.  I hate papercuts.

So I’m putting some of the books on my shelf on Goodreads.com, right?  And it wants to know if I have read, am currently reading, or want to read each book.  They need a “partially read” category.  Because I feel completely stupid saying, “Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is such a cool book!!!” when it’s on my “to read” shelf…  I actually started at the beginning of that one though.  And why haven’t I finished it?  It’s freakin’ huge, for starters, but mostly because I only read it when I want to give my brain a complete work out.

And it’s nice to have for that.  Maybe the greatest part of owning books is not having shelves and shelves of things you’ve read and can re-read whenever you want, but having shelves and shelves of things you love that, although you haven’t experienced every single aspect of them (yet), you know that they will love you back in ways that you haven’t even imagined – and all you have to do is open them.

So far, I’ve only been counting pages of books as I finish them as incentive to haul all the way through them.  But maybe I need to mention my nibbles as well as my feasts.

Walking down a road one day, there shined a shiny demon (it’s really a shame that everything cool sounding that I’ve ever said has been said by someone-else first…).  And he said (!!!) that you can choose between having cancer or having depression.  Here’s why I think I’d choose cancer.

(Quick note:        By “depression”, I mean the real thing, not the junior high definition, as in “Joe didn’t call me!  I’m sooooooooooooo depressed!”  I mean the kind where something is chemically wrong with the fluid surrounding your brain that makes it impossible for your little brain sparks to get where they need to go.)

Now, the top six (because that’s when I ran out of ideas) reasons to welcome cancer with open arms:

1. With cancer, you are guaranteed to have ~you~ on your own side.  Cancer survivors always talk about the attitudes that they developed that helped them become a survivor instead of a victim.  However, when your brain is what’s sick, the only thing you hate more than all the crappy things that you perceive as happening just to you – is you.  You are not someone was just minding your own business and trying to get through life in one piece when your doctor got a very serious look on his face and started talking about removing body parts.  You feel like the villain.  You’re heart is trying desperately to communicate with the world – and even with itself – through your head and your head just isn’t cooperating.  So the question comes up:  are “you” in your heart or your head?  You’re heart is just fine – both physically and emotionally – but something’s getting lost in translation.  Something about your head is fuzzy and foggy and thoroughly pissed off.  So, if you define yourself as more emotional than logical, I would think that at least you could justify disassociating the sickness from “you.”  Problem is, I’m an emotionally defunct chunk of nerd.  Which leaves me with nothing but the enemy harping on my every move.
2. With cancer, you are pretty guaranteed to have friends and family on your side.  The same is usually true with depression… after you’ve got a diagnosis for it.  Before then, everyone just thinks that you’ve managed to transform magically from someone they like to something that I won’t actually specify because I want my mom to be able to read my blog and not get any, “I’ve been concerned about the language you’re using on your blog…” phone calls.  And after you have a diagnosis, you still are pretty hesitant to tell anyone – ever – for every reason from job discrimination to lectures on why you need to pray more frequently.  But that’s not the worst.  No, the worst is when you try to explain to someone you are close to why you have managed to do such an effective job at messing up…. everything… and to ask them to please be patient with you while you wait for the meds to kick in.  You try to assure them that you’re doing your best, but they act certain (or worse, say that they’re certain) that you’re just using it as an excuse to be a lazy duff.  To make matters worse, you’re only partially sure that they’re wrong (see #1).
3. Cancer leaves visible signs and scars.  You don’t have to tell anyone, “I had X removed last week and am on intense chemo,” because everything from your skin color to your IV scab to your surgical wrappings tell everyone around you that you’re not exactly up to snuff.  Being brave yet honest about your need to be brave is perfectly acceptable in our society.  Curling up in a little ball and emotionally hurting for no apparent reason and to the great inconvenience of others is not.  Even emotionally hurting for an apparent reason isn’t particularly acceptable.  Why did people stop wearing black bands around their arms while they were mourning the death of a loved one?  Because it was “private” and they would rather seem strong to those who knew them than weak to those who didn’t.  The signs of cancer tend to be fairly obvious and can only be mostly hidden with great effort.  The signs of depression are also only hidden with great effort, but it’s great effort that we have been trained to do for our whole lives.  We are taught to choose to be happy when we are children, never being warned that actual happiness is not always a choice.  And, yet again, what we’re hiding is a secret because we’re not entirely sure if something is being done to us (like cancer) or by us (again, see #1).
4. The word “cancer” has two commonly known definitions: the constellation / zodiac sign and the dreaded disease – and the two meanings are different enough that it’s pretty easy to tell which one someone is talking about based solely on context.  On the other hand, “I’m depressed” is a perfectly common expression meaning, “I’m sad because I’m having one-of-those-days” or “I’m sad because my cat died.”  And, to make things even worse, both “sad” and “chemically messed up” can look similar for short periods of time.  Only problem: “sad” is temporary because it will change ( ease up and go away) or you’ll change (get used to it and live your life with it) and depression can be ridiculously permanent.  I have been taking meds for depression for almost ten years now.  That’s over one third of my entire life.  And that doesn’t count the year or two before I was diagnosed.  I’ve had major cases of “sad” before, like when my brother was killed in a car accident.  Very really here one day and gone the next.  It took a couple years to get used to that pain and carry it around without minding too much.  Being “sad” depressed for two years sucks. Being “chemical catastrophe” depressed for one year is significantly worse.
5. Cancer has three options: 1) fight until you die,  2) fight until you live, or  3) don’t fight and die.  So the step right after “congrats, you’ve got cancer” is pretty clear cut.  And if you’re willing to swap cancer treatments for coffins, you always have that as an option.  But depression doesn’t kill you directly.  It just nags at you until you give up and kill yourself.  And (yet again, see #1) you can’t even really fight it directly.  A person can fight cancer like Mike Tyson vs Muhammad Ali: prepping, gearing up, and giving it all you’ve got.  A person can only fight depression like Steve Urkel vs Muhammad Ali: try to annoy it to death and, if that doesn’t work, curl up in a little ball and hope that either Ali feels bad for beating up on a sissy and stops hitting you, or that he manages to kill you in the quickest and least painful way possible.  So your depression options?  1) sleep on your mom’s couch and try to keep breathing long enough for some kind of med to work,  2) sleep on your mom’s porch in an effort to catch pneumonia and die before you wait yourself silly, or  3) don’t tell anyone that you fantasize about hurting yourself like other people fantasize about sex until it’s too late for them to stop you.
6. Cancer has morphine to ease the pain; depression has sleep and Spider Solitaire.  It’s not physically possible for an otherwise healthy depressed person to sleep for two weeks solid (trust me I’ve tried).  And eventually someone else will want a turn on the computer.  (Granted, someone else might want a turn with the morphine, but at least you have a legal reason to tell them “no”.  Honestly, which do you think is going to hold up better in court?  “He tried to use my morphine illegally and possibly sell it to underprivileged schoolchildren, so I beat him with a stick” or “He took the batteries out of my mouse so I attacked him with my keyboard”?  It’s time to ask ourselves, what would Judge Judy say?)

On the other hand, though, I doubt that typing a blog entry would ever actually make me feel better if I had cancer.  But, even though I’m waiting for my meds to level out so I can go see the doctor so he can straighten them out and then I can wait for them to level out again, I feel a little better.  Maybe it’s because I’ve thought of something even worse than depression that I have complete control over.

Life can dish out a person a whole bunch of different piles of garbage, but it never dishes out mandatory time watching Judge Judy.  Life is good.

*sob*

• In large saucepan, boil until soft and then drain:
• 5 medium-sized red potatoes
• 1 large sweet onion
• While veggies are cooking, combine in stock pot:
• 2 1/2 qts milk (skim)
• 2/3 c sour cream (fat-free)
• 1 can chicken broth
• 4 T butter
• 3/4 c flour
• 1 T salt
• 1 T parsley
• 2 t sugar
• 1 t ground pepper
• Slowly bring stock pot ingredients to a boil, stirring regularly with a whisk to prevent scorching.
• Defrost, place in strainer, rinse, and squeeze out extra moisture:
• 1 bag or brick chopped spinach
• Cut up:
• 13 oz. chicken breast (I’m lazy and use the canned kind)
• Once milk-mixture is steaming, add potatoes, onion, chicken, and spinach.  From now on, only stir soup gently with a spoon (not a whisk).
• Let simmer for at least 10 minutes for flavors to blend, but, if you’ve got the time, let it sit on lowest (or next to lowest) heat on burner for 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally.
• Serve as-is or with grated colby-jack cheese (about 1/4 c per bowl), hot bread, and saltine crackers.

And Lydie really did try hard to like it, sweet thing.  Damon, on the other hand, was at least nice enough to not get too creative with his adjectives and just left it at “yucky”.

Oh, and one last note on the recipe:  It may be tempting for all you veggie-philes (i.e. my mom) to add carrots and corn and celery and such, but try it with just the three veggies the first time around.  I invented it to have a very soft and subtle texture… to be a nice comfort food.  So try it as-is at least once.  Please?

And this is why I’m such a great recycler:
- stuffing:  the innards from a comforter that was disturbingly too hot… even for Idaho…
- new base (I’m tallish and so like tallish furniture, so I added a 4-inch base between the current base and the feet): scrap wood that I keiffed from the trash heap of a construction site across the street from me (yes, I asked first….).  According to the papers stapled to it before I disassembled it, it was packaging for fiberglass shower walls.
- covered in fabric that I got for $2 a yard from The Design Company’s back room.  (Okay, so that’s not recycling; it’s just being cheap.  But “being cheap” is why I’m recovering this free-to-me chair with all this free-to-me stuff in the first place.)

Maybe that’s the trick to getting people to reuse old stuff — take away any possibility of getting new stuff.

Yeah, I think I deserve an award.  A green one…

And so I’m doing something about it.

Update on my life:

I now live in Idaho. Ever notice how people from Idaho drive slower than a drunk dead dinosaur? I always thought they just didn’t get out of the state much and, when they did, they forgot how to drive. Yeah, well I was wrong. Idahoans can’t drive in Idaho, either. It’s completely maddening.

My babies are getting bigger! I had to change the “info about me” part to update their ages. So weird–I feel so old!!!

I’m writing a book for NaNoWriMo. I would make that a link to their website or throw one of their buttons on here, but I’d have to look up and figure out how to do that and I just finished convincing myself that I had time to blog regularly because blogging takes up almost no time. All in all, it’s actually a ghost story–kind of a suspense/horror type something, but without the gore and the annoying “boo!” thing too many suspense/horror stories rely on. I can just hear you thinking, “isn’t that what defines that genre?” Maybe, but I think I can write something far scarier than blood and boo without relying on them as a crutch for bad writing/characters/plot development. It might end up just sucking beyond all reason, but at least I’ll get my 50,000 words in!

That’s probably all there is right now. Aren’t I just fascinating? Well, I hope to bore you more later this week or maybe next week. (Or, judging from the date of my last entry, next November…)

And THREE THOUSAND CHEERS FOR OBAMA!!! I can still scarcely believe he actually made it! And I can still scarcely believe that he’s real. Wow, wow, and wow.

That said, I’m never overly surprised, although usually ticked off as all snot, to find chapstick, kleenex, or gum remnants in my dryer. Usually I’m pretty lucky, though, most of the time. The lids have stayed on the chapsticks all time but one (when I had a full batch of mediums that smelled like watermelon LipSmackers for a few washes and never quite lost that pinkish grease spot). And, although the kleenex disintegrating all over everything, most of it ends up in the lint thingie and the rest shakes out okay, And the GUM would really suck, but I rarely have a piece of actual GUM in my pockets. The wrappers, though…

So, tonight, I’m getting Damon in his super-cute glow-in-the-dark footsie dino-jammies (seriously, someone ought to start a charity to make sure that every boy born in this country leaves the hospital with at least one pair of super-cute glow-in-the-dark footsie dino-jammies…anyone looking for a cause?) and there’s something that’s bugging his feet. I reach in there, expecting some lint ball or one of Lydie’s favorite little rocks she found in the gutter. And it’s a Trident wrapper–nice and pokey, even fresh out of the dryer. I tease Damon about how it really does serve him right. If he would just check his pockets before throwing his overalls and onesies in the laundry, this really would not be an issue. He just gets his “Yes! I found TROUBLE!!!” grin–

And then I see them. Mile upon mile of empty gums, with only four little front teeth peeking through. And I realize that there is only one creature in this house who does not chew gum (if we leave it down low enough, even Attie will go through a pack a day) and is the only one who has a gum-wrapper in an extraordinarily uncomfortable place.

Poor fella.

As soon as he has molars, though, I have every intention of showing him how, although he no longer has “mile upon mile” of visible gumline, he can then at least enjoy stick upon stick of chewing gum.

Speaking of chewing gum, I’ve only recently discovered how absolutely divine the Trident fruit flavors are. Highly addicting, highly recommended. Just throw your wrapper in the garbage or some sad little foot is bound to get poked at.

So, I had an epiphany today–my computer always seems to run super-slow when the “Page File Usage” thing on the Task Manager is kinda high. So I have this brilliant idea–is there a way to make the page files, whatever they might be, bigger? Well there is. Speed your computer up today. Follow these instructions. Follow all subliminal messages. Give me all your money.

Here’s how to do it for WinXP and WinXPHomeEd. It might work for other versions of Windows, but this is the only one I’ve run in a while, so this is what I’ve got.

1. Right-click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and select Properties. (If you are allergic to “easiest way” of doing things, go to Control Panel>System.)
2. Click the “Advanced” Tab.
3. Click the “Settings” button under the “Performance” heading.
4. Click this newer and much more exciting “Advanced” Tab.
5. Click “Change” under the “Virtual Memory” setting.
6. After looking at the space available on your hard drive, increase the “Initial Size” and “Maximum Size” values. Set them both to the same value to avoid file fragmentation and speed up your sweet little system. (I’ve got over 16,000MB of free space and have a bad habit of running several RAM-hogging programs simultaneously–and I’m impatient–so I set the Page file Sizes both to 2,000MB.)
7. Click the “Set” button.
8. Click the five billion “ok” buttons to get you out of all the dialog boxes.
9. Enjoy your newer, faster system and say goodbye to eating your meals in front of the computer while waiting for your crap to load.