sigh...

this whole week's just been a flash...seizures at the beginning of the week had me in the hospital...now momma has taken it upon herself to be the one in the hospital - a urinary tract infection, combined with the radiation she's going through has just completely sapped her strength - we had to call an ambulance yesterday because she couldn't get off the toilet. this royally sucks. i know i can't take care of her the way she needs taken care of, and yet i don't want to say "alrighty, off to the rest home you go" *sigh*

lots of huge life decisions going to be made in the near future - and i fucking hate it.

a guaranteed winner...

think i'm gonna buy 146,107,962 lotto tickets so i'm guaranteed to win the $205 million Powerball jackpot - that leaves me with $58,892,038...of course, with my luck, this would be the week that the jackpot gets split 92 ways....

never a dull moment...

*sigh* monday i took mom to her radiation appointment...after we saw the doc, i went go get the car. waiting outside the St. Francis Cancer Center, i decided there wasn't nearly enough excitement going on and while waiting for mom, i had a seizure. one feature on my mom's car that irks me is that when ya get in the car, it locks you in. thankfully, i wasn't driving the car, i just had it in park, so it was just a matter of security getting a slim jim to break into mom's car. then it was off to the emergency room. fun fun fun.

today i slept the whole day, and still i find myself exhausted. i definitely don't need this shit right now.

a buck twenty two...

i swear, i should be the poster child for Coupon Clippers Anonymous - LoBill (the el cheapo Marsh grocery outlet store) had good prices on Prego spaghetti sauce and Hamburger/Tuna Helpers this week. with my coupons added to the good prices, i made out like a bandit. and it's really cool cuz these are items that are in high demand at the food pantry - i can't give em oodles of cash donations, but i can clip coupons like a mofo and spend a little time to give em goods that are needed just as much as cash.

Purchased:

10 jars of Prego spaghetti sauce
6 boxes Tuna Helper
2 boxes Hamburger Helper
1 2 liter bottle of Orange Soda (Tropicana sent me a coupon for a freebie)

After coupons, i paid:
$5.72

then the register spit out three separate coupons for $1.50 each off my next purchase of anything there at the store, making my net cost a grand total of $1.22. not too bad.

next stop - kroger. *8-)

how are you doing?

"how are you doing?" that's what several friends and family members have asked me today - well, the answer has been "Fine" - fine until you asked. then i want to just completely fall apart. i was a bit on edge because at 3pm Mom was scheduled to meet a lawyer, to do all those legal things, draw up a will, etc...

didn't happen. at mom's regular 2pm radiation treatment the medical staff noticed she wasn't doing too good - her breathing's really labored and she has no strength at all. sent her for a chest x-ray and to the emergency room, not particularly because it was a major emergency but because they'd find out what was going on faster than if they sent her to her pulmonary doc and then he ordered tests, blah blah blah... so, at the er we find out that she's not holding her oxygen very well, they're giving her breathing treatments and gonna keep her overnight. she was having some pain, so they gave her a little bit o morphine - i'm praying it was the morphine that had her in la-la land. she was talking to me, and i asked her to speak up - "Flanner & Buchanan?" she said. now, even if it is just the drugs talking, when Mom babbles about funeral homes, i'm FREAKING OUT.

so i came home to get her meds so that we can tell the hospital precisely what dosages of what she's taking (why she doesn't have a list of hers printed out like i do mine, i dunno) and now i'm waiting for the hospital to call and tell me what room they've put her in so i can go to her.

this is so damned hard.

friday nite!!

this thing's weird....

Guess the Dictator or Television Sit-Com Character - i have yet to stump it, it's guessed all the sitcom characters i've recollected - Kip Wilson, Marge Simpson, Cliff Huxtable, Peter Brady, Mork, Fonz, Balki, Arnold Drummond, and on and on and on...

Northern Sun...

i'm not sure which i find more obnoxious - the plethora of Lance Armstrong bracelet knock-offs or all the of magnetic car ribbons out there nowadays. not sure if the magnets started with the yellow ribbon "support our troops" message, but nowadays there's something for everyone...

got a Northern Sun Merchandising catalog in the mail today, and literally laughed out loud when i saw this magnet:



too bad i can't stick magnets to my made-of-plastic saturn...

StumbleUpon...

StumbleUpon is a cool utility for surfing the web, finding websites you didn't know existed but are spiffy...

apparently someone on fark has similar StumbleUpon prefs to mine, cuz there have been fark discussions about things i've recently seen and/or mentioned - ie the Speech-Bubble Stickers in NYC...

obnoxious...

...yet it still made me laugh. Republican Women vs Democrat Women

speech bubbles...

this looks to be cool project, tho the results probably wouldn't be as spiffy if we tried duplicating this in indianapolis - alas, we don't have as many signs (or creative/funny/mischievious people) in Naptown as they do in NYC...

wandering around...

amazing the stuff you can stumble upon while wandering around the internet...

i found this updated version of American Gothic when i stumbled upon this website while digging up info for freeway blogging projects...

one liners/goofy shit culled from the net...

Two parrots sat on a perch. One said to the other, "Do you smell fish?"

I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.

An old person is like a Slinky: Not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.

How do you circumcise a whale? You send down four skin divers.

What is brown and lives in a bell tower? The lunch bag of Notre Dame.

Why do fire departments have Dalmatians? So they can find the hydrants.

I recently took up meditation. It beats sitting around doing nothing.

I almost fell in love with a psychic, but she left me before we met.

I am a kleptomaniac, but when it gets really bad I take something for it.

Two antennas meet on a roof, fall in love and get married. The ceremony wasn't much but the reception was great.

When a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds.

I'm not into working out. My philosophy is no pain, no pain.

I'm in shape. Round is a shape.

If you don't pay your exorcist, you may get repossessed.

What do Eskimos get from sitting on the ice too long? Polaroids.

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

What's brown and sticky? A stick.

I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.

Wrinkled was not one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up.

People like you are the reason people like me need medication.

Save the trees, wipe your butt with an owl.

Rock is dead. Long live paper and scissors.

Practice safe lunch: Use a condiment.

Rehab is for quitters.

I'm not crazy, I've just been in a very bad mood for 30 years.

Allow me to introduce my selves.

Sarcasm is just one more service I offer.

Stress is when you wake up screaming and you realize you weren't asleep.

Is it time for your medication or mine?

Out of my mind - back in five minutes.

Jack Kevorkian for White House physician.

I have the body of a god. Buddha.

I doubt, therefore I might be.

If you're happy and you know it see a shrink.

Keep the dream alive: Hit the snooze button.

flowers...

it was really nice of all of mom's friends to send these beautiful bouquets and baskets of flowers while she was in the hospital, but it's made me realize something - i fucking HATE carnations. they're pretty enough, but the smell just reminds me of death. perhaps because they're predominant in funeral arrangements? i dunno, but the arrangements that have carnations in them are gonna be gone sooner rather than later.

cool online kaleidoscope...

a neat thing to take a mind off of a crappy life:

http://www.zefrank.com/dtoy_vs_byokal/index.html

topsy-turvy...

i tell you, things seem soooo different nowadays...i guess it's like being Alice in Wonderland, i'm looking through the Looking Glass and everything is just soooooo - i don't even have the words for it.

one thing i've noticed is how completely ABSURD things seem.

i'm noticing lots of ironic things as well...case in point: i'm a non-smoker, smoked only socially in college, might every once in a while have a clove cigarette. when kris and i were together and she worked at bars that tobacco reps visited (primarily the Slippery Noodle) and we'd fill out a card and get some little prize - i've gotten cigarette coupons in the mail for YEARS although i don't smoke. friends i've had that smoke tons never get coupons and i get stuff in the mail all the time. so now i've got a mom with lung cancer, most likely from her smoking. yesterday's mail brought a package addressed to me from Marlboro - "On your big night nothing beats LIVING IT UP with a full house" says the outside of the box - inside there's a note that says "Here's to a year full of action - Happy birthday from Marlboro" and a deck of playing cards included.

it's gonna be a less full house these days, with me taking mom to radiation treatments for the next month.

as for the "year full of action" - that seems a bit fucked up, because the small amount of research i've done on mom's cancer says that she's got a year or two to live. yeah, guess we'll be making the most of that year, since that might be all she's got.

so, they have to put the surgeon general's warning on the box, even tho there are no cigarettes in the package: "Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health." Mom quit smoking about eight years ago.

i know it's just chance that this stuff would come in the mail the week of my mother's lung cancer diagnosis, but sheesh...

*sigh*

so i just brought mom home from the hospital - the story is that she's got lung cancer that metastasized to her brain. 3 tumors in her brain, 1 in her lung, and we're waiting on results from the bone scan to tell if it's anywhere else.

if there's anyone out there reading, please say a prayer (be it to god, the flying spaghetti monster, whoever your higher power may be) for my momma - she's a damned good woman.

reading stuff on the net has its good and bad qualities - i always think it's good to be well-informed, but then again, do i really want to read "Prognosis typically is poor...Patients with the best prognostic indicators often die within 18-24 months."?

there just aren't words for what i'm feeling right now.

shattered

just got home from taking mom to the emergency room this evening - we found out why she's been feeling so awful these past few weeks...cancer. after numerous blood tests, an ekg, more blood tests and more tests came back with nothing, the doc ordered a cat scan. the cat scan's showed multiple lesions on her brain. "is it cancer?" i asked the doc? because i have lesions on my brain that cause my epilepsy, but they're not cancerous, they just scramble my brain with seizures. yes, he told me, the probably were cancerous, but were not brain tumors, they probably have come about from cancer elsewhere in her body - possibly her lungs, of which the x-ray came back abnormal.

i just can't fucking believe it. thankfully, mom was a bit drugged up when the doc made the announcement, so she didn't go off the deep end like i did. and i so did not want to freak out - this isn't the end of the world, we still have a lot more learning to do, but it's just sooooo....there aren't words for it.

so many kinds of wrong...

so you know i love it - check out JesusDressUp!

The George W Bush Speechwriter

maybe if Dubya used this site himself, he wouldn't have to spend so much time removing his foot from his mouth...The George W Bush Speechwriter