In which I usher my money out the door

Two things I want to say about money in this post:

One: I have discovered the joys of thrift store shopping! Last weekend I spent three very fruitful hours hitting various Goodwill and other thrift stores in the city with B. I have never been much of a thrift store shopper. Certainly it never occurred to me to shop for clothes there. I hate pawing through racks of stuff, and I've always assumed that the clothes at Goodwill were from the Nixon administration. But I've changed my mind.

For the first several shops, I was just futzing around, laughing at the checkered sports coats and run-down sofas. But then we got to the Goodwill at 50th and MacArthur and I started singing a different tune. I picked a random pink skirt off the rack and found it was an Ann Taylor in my size, like new, priced at $2.99. Suddenly my interest was seized. I started paying attention, and when I left an hour later, I left with five new skirts, all brand names and in perfect condition, for under $11.

I'm a convert. I'll be back very soon to paw through their collection of tops and jackets.

It makes sense. Goodwill is where I used to take the nice stuff that I was sick of or too fat for or whatever. Most of it was in fine condition, I'd just gotten sick of it or outgrown it. So of course I'm not the only one doing that, and there are plenty of ladies with a lot more money than me for clothes in Oklahoma City. B ribbed at me a little, told me I'd come full circle -- from donating to Goodwill to shopping there, and I guess he has a point... my lifestyle has certainly changed. But $2 for an Ann Taylor skirt that probably sold for $60 or more is not to be scoffed at.

The other thing I have to say about money is that I got my tax refunds today and have been playing traffic cop with the money today... doling it out to various deserving institutions, like Chase credit card, for example. I took my car in to get the brakes fixed this morning, paid off one credit card and a big chunk on another one, moved money into my savings account where it wouldn't be so easy for me to get my grubby little hands on it. and went to get my eyes examined. So the money is mostly all gone... in just over five hours.

Ah, but it was a heady feeling while it lasted, paying people off, checking things off my list. Tomorrow I'll rejoin the gym, clean my carpets and take Flower to the vet and then the windfall will be really and truly gone. But I'll feel so responsible!

Oh, I have another update, as well. Yesterday, after a seven month wait, I finally went in to see the rheumatologist. There's good news and no news, but no bad news. The No news is that, based on my current bloodwork and the examination the doctor did, he can't confirm any definite diagnosis. But he said he doubted it was lupus, and based on what I told him, it sounded more likely to him that it's fibromyalgia.

Now, under other circumstances, I might not be so chipper about a possible diagnosis of fibromyalgia, but it sure beats lupus! Fibromyalgia hurts, yes, but it doesn't do any damage to the body (your joints hurt, but it's not hurting them, if you know what I mean), and it's not degenerative... it's not going to get worse over time. There will be times when it goes away, times when it flares up, some times worse than others, but it's not going to gradually become more and more debilitating. Flare ups I can deal with. I was terrified at the prospect of gradually getting worse until I was incapacitated. So Hooray for Fibromyalgia! Hip Hip Hooray!

Of course, I've no definite diagnosis there, either. Doc pulled more blood to do a more detailed screening, and told me to come in if I have another flare up, so he can look at me while it's active. He also told me that Effexor, which is the antidepressant I've taken for something like seven years, is commonly prescribed for treatment of fibromyalgia. So it could have been screening symptoms for some time, and that would explain why I had my first bout with whatever-it-is during the time when I was trying to go off the Effexor. So I am, in a sense, already being treated. He prescribed nothing, just told me to wait and see and come back in 6 months. So there's a bit of a load off my mind, anyway.

A Hint of Spring

Ah, the tortures of late February and early March! This is the time of year that it should be spring and isn't. Today's weather is a perfect example of the divine cruelty of the season. A teaser, a taste, a tantalizing carrot waving in front of us of the promise of spring... no doubt destined to be snatched away within the next 36 to 48 hours, if it lasts that long.

I'm in my usual state of itchiness and impatience that this in-between season brings. I'm drawing sketches of the layout of my vegetable garden, wandering lustfully through the new displays of hoses and garden gloves that are blossoming in Target and Walmart. On Saturday I was overcome by an excess of springtime enthusiasm and went out and actually WASHED MY CAR. Possibly it was just an excuse to use the hose and be outside, smelling wet earth. But as I was putting the hose away I found several green shoots of daffodils poking up through the wet leaves that are still choking my front flowerbeds. Oh the zing of those first green things coming up! I got down and cleared the leaves from around them -- like tucking in a baby for his nap -- and felt all zippy. There's hope for us, yet, I tell you. Spring is coming!

Of course, it's still way too early to go out and start turning shovels of earth, but the day is coming soon when I'll be able to get digging. I have a plan for my new vegetable garden. This year I will dig with extra enthusiasm for having missed planting last spring when we were living in the apartment.

Ironically, the morning after I washed the car and discovered the daffodils, we had a perfect little blizzard. Valentine's Day morning the snow arrived around 8:30 and kept on coming until 10:30 or so. Big wet flakes, and plenty of them! Within half an hour the ground was covered. But by 12:30 the sun had come out and it was all gone. Very strange. That's the sort of thing you get this time of year. It could happen again. I have to put my dreams of gardening on hold for a little while longer.

Why I'm tempted to kill Roxy

Okay, have I mentioned that Roxy is really sweet dog? Really sweet. She's not aggressive, doesn't pee in the house, and loves me and my boy. Okay. Did I say that? Good.

She's. Driving. Me. NUTS.

Sunday night I actually MADE DINNER for Grayson. This is news. I made dinner from real ingredients. I cooked up some nice tilapia fillets, steamed some broccoli, and made some nice brown rice. I put Grayson's plate on the table and called him to dinner, turned around to pick up my own plate, and when I turned back around...
Grayson's plate was empty.

No, not quite EMPTY. She'd left the broccoli. But in under 20 seconds she had caused an entire tilapia fillet AND a piece of bread with butter completely disappear. The top of my head flew off and I began speaking in tongues. I was obliged to scramble an egg to feed my son, while my own dinner grew cold (I had used red pepper on my own tilapia, so it was too spicy for G, or I would naturally have just surrendered my own fillet to him).

Then last night, at about 2:30 in the morning, we had ourselves a dog fight.

I had purchased rawhide bones for the dogs, there being a shortage on cow hooves. (See earlier post here.) Rawhides are less desirable because for some reason Kobi and Roxy will not always actually chew them up, but often just walk around guarding them, or, in Kobi's case, "burying" them in the sofa or behind the bed. At bedtime I had taken one of the remaining rawhides away from Kobi so she wouldn't stay up all night watching it. But apparently Roxy still had one hidden somewhere.

At 2:30 Roxy came in asking to go outside, and when I stirred, Kobi jumped down from the bed. Moments later.... all hell broke loose.

In the dark hallway, sudden escalating growls and barks, snarling and then repeated high pitched cries from Kobi as she proceeded to get her butt chewed. I lept out of bed and threw myself into the fray, grabbing Roxy's collar where she had Kobi pinned to the floor and hauling her away. I scooped up Kobi, expecting to find her ears dangling by a thread and blood dripping from wounds all over her, but no. Thank god, it was all sound and fury. Apparently in the dark Kobi had made a grab for Roxy's rawhide... and Roxy wasn't having it. Okay, I understand, but seriously! It scared the living bejeezus out of Grayson and me both!

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the occasional fights, the food theft, the refusal to go outside (which is now infecting Flower, as well), the door charging, the constant barking, the clawing of doors and window frames and the chewing up of socks, washcloths, toys and anything ball-shaped. I've had it, I tell you. Had it.

But then I go home and she tucks those ears back and gives me that look. Sigh. Okay. She can stay. ONE more day. One more day....

Bird sightings and funny things people do

I must be hyper aware of birds for some reason this week. I keep noticing whole flocks of robins in the yards across the street from me. They are all puffed up, foraging for food as I drive to work in the morning.

This morning I drove under a tree full of crows on Chautauqua. They glared at me, cockeyed, the way crows do, then shrugged me off.

Most spectacularly, however, was the red-tailed hawk that swooped right down over traffic on Boyd Street yesterday as I was driving home. It glided about six feet over the tops of the cars for a couple of blocks and then pulled up and perched atop a telephone pole, bold as brass. Can't imagine what it was scoping for in 5:00 traffic.

This morning, on a completely different note, I noticed a big black dog running down the sidewalk alongside the museum. It was a Belgian shepherd: a huge, beautiful animal, half again as tall as a regular German shepherd, and running full-out. It came around the front of the building just as I was waiting at the light going into the parking lot and I remember saying "You shouldn't be running out here, big guy."

About this time, a woman in a huge SUV pulls into the lot ahead of me and stops. The dog stops, too, panting on the grass. The woman waves me and another car around her and then turns around. I thought "aha! She's chasing her dog." But she drives back out onto Chautauqua, and the dog takes off as well, running alongside the car on the sidewalk. I watched her turn left onto a side-street, dog loping along, and out of sight.

I mentioned it to the museum guards and they said "Oh, yeah, she does that every day." Guess it's her way of walking her dog.

People are funny.

Sex and the Dragon

In case you were wondering: THIS is what 1,000 giant mealworms looks like.

I received two boxes by Fed Ex at the museum last week: my orders of 500 live crickets and 1,000 live mealworms from Flukers Farms. Even with the $20 FedEx shipping fee, it's less than half the cost of buying crickets for Mambo from PetCo. My co-workers got a kick out of letting me know that my crickets were waiting for me on the dock. It's a little surprising that anything animal-related even raises an eyebrow around here. I guess most of the time the stuff coming into our museum is dead, but nobody bats an eye if one of the curators walks through the front door holding a wriggling pillowcase or a cart full of mouse skeletons... so why are crickets such a riot?

I took them home and dumped the crickets (500 IS a LOT of them) into their Rubbermaid tub, and shook the mealworms into a Tupperware container with a cup of cornmeal and stuck it in the fridge. I'll have chow for Mambo for a couple of weeks at least.

Last week, driven by the boredom of the ice storm and the mutual illnesses of both myself and Grayson, I went online and looked up "how to tell the gender of your bearded dragon."

It was not, I have to say, all that helpful. There are theoretically two bumps under the tail of the male bearded dragon indicating where his two (two!) penises are located inside his body. The female has no humps or just a single central one. Mambo might have humps. Or not. Grayson and I spent some minutes peering at the poor creature's backside, with nothing definitive to show for it, except for a slightly irritable bearded dragon.

Perhaps he/she is still too young to tell. Mambo is only about 4 or 5 months old. So we'll check again in a couple of months. I'll keep you posted.

As I mentioned, I've been under the weather. Just your garden-variety cold, for the most part. But I was obliged to work through part of it, so I think that's delayed my recovery. I had to host the film crew from Extreme Makeover Home Edition last week, just after coming down with the cold. That was not quite your typical out-of-town film crew. They used four or five cameras all at once and were done in record time. They were a little intense and off-putting at first, but either they warmed to us or we warmed to them and I felt good about it by the time they left.

ANYWAY... I'm still trying to shake the cough and stuffy nose. And then this weekend I had a strange return of the all-over joint achiness that sent me to the doctor for bloodwork back in July. That's when I got the call that I might have Lupus and should see a rheumatologist. Well at last, on the 25th of this month, I will actually visit said rheumatologist. But until now I haven't had a return of the pain. I was sore on Saturday night and in real pain on Sunday morning. I lay on the sofa on a heating pad, feeling sorry for myself for a couple of hours until the ibuprofen kicked in.

It's a strange feeling. Starts out as a general stiffness and achiness, and I don't know if the level of pain actually gets worse or if it is just so pervasive that it wears on your psyche. But it becomes debilitating. I'm glad to have the doc's appointment coming up so there's a chance he can tell me what the hell is going on.

Today I'm back to my usual bad back and creaky hips: run-of-the-mill, B-flat everyday pain that I'm accustomed to. Strange that should seem like such a good thing. It's like my friend Jill said once: "Being 43 feels just like 33, only everything hurts."

The Tooth Fairy Moves In

After that last post on the tooth fairy's shenanigans at my house, you'd think I'd be done with teeth for awhile, but no. Grayson lost yet another tooth (the third in ten days) yesterday. He was at my folks' house for the day, suffering from a fever and cough.

You'll be pleased to hear that the Tooth Fairy was much more on the ball this time. She got the alert as soon as the tooth was out, and managed to stop by the bank on the way home so she had cash on hand. She bought dinner on the way, as well, and remembered to get a $10 broken into two $5s. Then she set her alarm for 9:30 p.m. so she wouldn't forget.

The whole thing went off without a hitch. There's hope for the old broad, yet.

About the Tooth Fairy

Grayson lost a tooth on Sunday night: the second in a week. He bellyached about it all day, barely eating anything for fear it would come out in his food and he'd swallow it. But finally, round about 8:30 in the evening, out it came. So he put it in his little tooth box next to the bed for the Tooth Fairy.

Now, we have not had a lot of luck with the tooth fairy here lately. Last week he lost a tooth at his dad's house, and put it out for the Tooth Fairy at our house and – can you believe it? – she didn't show! Monday morning came and the tooth was still there.

Well, we figured maybe the Tooth Fairy was confused because he had lost the tooth at Dad's but put it out at our house, so we very carefully put the tooth out again on Monday night, loudly announcing to the walls of Grayson's bedroom that we WERE PUTTING THE TOOTH RIGHT HERE. Sure enough, she came Monday night and left $7... her usual $5, plus a bonus I guess for being a day late.

THIS time we were going to be extra sure that she got the message, so again we were very LOUD in announcing that the tooth was being placed in the box as Grayson went to bed Sunday night.

Well, at 6 a.m. Monday morning, the Tooth Fairy woke up with a start and realized she hadn't taken it. She also realized that she had no cash in the house at all.

So she fluttered around the house in the dark in a panic, trying to scrape something together, and ended up leaving three dollar bills cadged from Grayson's own bank, plus a handful of dimes, nickles and quarters cobbled together from every known change accumulation in the house and car. It amounted to a little over $5. She piled the change up in little towers by denomination, rolled the bills into a tube and put them in the box, and crept off to bed with the tooth.

Grayson was delighted that she had showed up, and was amused at the random assortment of bills and change she left for him. He put it all BACK into his allowance bank.

We have a theory about the Tooth Fairy, Grayson and I. We think there are many tooth fairies: that every kid probably has a different one. We think this because A) we have determined that no single fairy could handle the job alone... kids lose teeth all over the world every day. But also B) because not every kid gets the same thing from the tooth fairy. Levi's tooth fairy, for example, leaves comic books. Some kids have cheap tooth fairies, that just leave a quarter or a dollar for a tooth. Some have extravagant tooth fairies who cough up ten bucks or more (Heck, I'd considering cashing in my own teeth for that kind of money).

And sometimes you get a tooth fairy who's new on the job or new to your beat who does funny stuff. One time the tooth fairy put the money under Grayson's pillow - which she had never done before. One time there were five $1 bills all crumpled up into little individual balls and scattered on the bedside table. One time it was a single, perfectly flat, crisp new $5 bill. One time it was all in quarters. Twice she has brought books.

You just never know with fairies.