Monkling’s Blog

It is not pouring out, it is not 38 degrees below zero, I have no men working on my house and I have no house guests. All that added up to finally getting in my car and running some long postponed errands.

Now this may be a shock to those of you who live in uh, shall we say, more suburban areas but my bank does not have a drive-through. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know banks did have drive-throughs until one afternoon, a few years back, when my friend called me while she was doing her banking.

I knew she was in her car but didn’t know where she was going. Suddenly she says, “Hang on a sec,” and to someone else, “Blah blah blah.” Back to me again, “I’m at the bank, going through the drive-through.” I was amazed. I’ve ordered food through a drive-through, usually speaking into some odd shaped clown or hamburger but never set eyes on a bank like that. I wondered if you talk to a giant plastic 100 dollar bill…

Getting back to my bank, there’s a parking lot. It isn’t huge but it’s adequate. Usually. I found a parking spot pretty close, went in, took care of a couple of things and left. While I had been in the bank, my cellphone rang. I didn’t pick it up so as I got in my car, I called my daughter back.

The conversation was less than a minute and, as I was hanging up, a man was approaching my car. He motioned me, asking if I was pulling out. Yep, I was, although clearly not fast enough for him. As I start backing up, I see another man walking so I stop. I’m watching that walking man on my right when I hear someone yelling, “Come on!” I turn and Mr. I’m In A Hurry is waving me out.

I roll down my window. “I really don’t want to run that guy over.”

“You’re not going to run him over. I’m helping you pull out.”

“I don’t need any help pulling out,” I told this guy who was in diapers when I first got my license. He just repeated how he was helping me. You will all be very proud of me. I did not run him over. It was tempting, but I figured why get all that blood and guts on my car.

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Remember that bump I had on my lip? (If you are joining us late, you can get up to speed by reading this and this.)

I don’t think I ever said what the lip bump actually was. It turned out to be a benign granular cell tumor. That’s not the strange part. The really weird part was what I read up about them: “Presentation of granular cell tumor in the lip of an adult is extremely rare.” It seems I can’t get something normal. No, it has to be rare. Not just rare, either but extremely rare. What the heck is up with that?

To further this whole rare thing, today I went to the dentist. 3 years ago I had another fairly rare thing happen - my body was attacking the root of one of my teeth & re-absorbing it. That meant the tooth had to be removed. Instead of going with a bridge, I opted to go into debt and get an implant. For the past few months, the stupid implant has been bothering me - thus the dentist trip.

“That’s very unusual. The implant is failing. I’ve been doing this for 19 years and have a 99% success rate and I’ve never seen it fail after the first year. If they’re going to fail, it’s usually right away.” Yep, that’s me. Can’t do things the normal way. What fun would that be?

I’m expecting that sooner or later, when we hit something rare, it’s going to have to be “good” rare for a change, don’t ya think?

And we could use some prayers around here. My sister is back in the hospital again.

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Today has been a fairly boring day. I have no stories. Not even from my hairdresser, which is unusual. And why do they call them ‘hairdressers’ anyway? They don’t dress your hair. Or is that a long outdated term and I am now dating myself here? Ah, well, anyone reading this blog for any length of time knows I’m 50, anyway.

Getting back to my non-story post, so it’s been an extremely uneventful day in Monklingland. It’s cold and dreary & drizzly out and all I’ve accomplished all day was finally getting rid of my gray, catching up with a friend with a phone call this afternoon and messing around with webmaster work.

What’s really sad is I have a to-do list. It is sitting right here next to me, quietly waiting for me to cross things off. It turns out that my list isn’t really a to-do list. It’s a “Let’s Ignore This Stuff” list. Why do I bother writing it if I’m ignoring it? Because I prefer to ignore work that I have to do rather than forgetting to do it. Given the choice, I’d rather be lazy than forgetful. I figure it this way: laziness is just a character flaw. Forgetfulness may mean there are brain cells just dying off left and right. You can see the sparkling logic is this train of thought, can’t you?

One last thing before I go - Jenn says today is compliment day. In honor of that, I want to compliment my faithful readers. You’re the reason I continue to blog every single day, the reason I strive to be funny, you give my life meaning. Without you, I would just be here talking to myself and then the men in the nice white suits would come to take me away. You are the few, the faithful, the great Monkling Blog Readers! (that great is referring to you, not the blog)

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…a delivery person. Seriously, if you’re horribly bored and have no life, order something for yourself that has to be delivered. The trick is not to just get it delivered by regular mail or UPS or Fed Ex. No, we’re talking about one of those store delivery trucks; the ones that say, “We will be there sometime between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.” Because you know they lie.

By having someone specify a delivery time, you can have hours of fun. Every time you hear a truck rumble outside, run to the window to see if it’s your truck. This is especially fun if you live across the street from a school where there are constantly trucks bringing assorted items all day long.

If that’s not enough to keep you hopping,there are the eating and bathroom questions. Will they come just as you walk into the bathroom? What if they ring the bell but run off and leave before you get to the door. That would mean you have to rearrange for a second delivery date and do it all over again.

Will it be okay to eat something? Can you eat quickly enough or will they interrupt you? Which is better - to have something cold that will get warm or something hot that will get cold while you direct the delivery men?

The final question is how long do you give them before you call saying, “Uh, someone was supposed to be here X hours ago.” Do you start bugging them after half an hour? Is there some sort of protocol for this sort of thing?

Oh, I have to run. I think I hear something outside…

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There is something very strange going on in the land of the Nursing Home. My mother in-law has been in the nursing home since August but she’s been in about 4 different rooms due to trips back and forth to the hospital. This newest room she’s in must be haunted by some sort of evil demon.

Remember her previous roommate, the one who said we were in there drinking and doing drugs? That woman is no longer there. MIL has a new roommate. This one seemed okay at first, at least as far as we could tell. She can’t talk so she wasn’t yelling at us to leave and she didn’t throw anything at us. She didn’t hold up signs saying, “Get Out!!”

It seems that over the last couple of weeks, she’s gone downhill mentally. Today she was hitting one of the nurses. Most days lately, they keep her in a wheelchair by the front desk so they can keep an eye on her.

Now I ask you - how is it possible that not 1 but 2 women were in that room and, at first, seemed perfectly fine. Then both of them started acting just a little odd. Coincidence? Or alien abduction, invasion of the body snatchers, pod people. I go for the second.

Either that or my MIL really isn’t as incapacitated as she appears and is doing something to them…

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Right now I could use a little global warming or maybe a hot flash. I’ve been cold since the contractor was fixing something by the front door and I haven’t warmed up since. Somehow it never occurred to me that if you have a man replacing a rotted piece of wood by your front door, this would require that the door be opened for good long stretches at a time. If I had thought of that, maybe I’d have postponed that part of the fix-it work until the spring.

In order to take my mind off the cold, I decided to work on some web related problems. I will not go into the long, boring details of web servers, databases and php but let me tell ya - people lie. “They” said it would be easy. You just install this software and everything is all set up. Yeah, right, in that fantasy land you live in, maybe. I will not even tell ya’ll how many hours I have spent on this yesterday and today but I am giving up for now. Instead I am going to make another batch of pizzelle.

Speaking of pizzelle, I am currently reading “Brother Odd” by Dean Koontz. I came across this line last night, which had me laughing out loud: “He sat at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of coffee, eating stacks of his mother’s pizzelles…”

I don’t think I ever came across a reference to pizzelle in a book before. How weird that within a week of getting my little pizzelle iron, I read that?

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I was tagged by Katie to do this Blog Meme so here goes:

How long have you been blogging?

Since March 2007 although, as a learning experience in a programming language called PHP, I tried creating my own blog software for about a month prior to that. Then I realized I don’t know much about programming but that blogging was sorta fun. I jumped ship, installed Wordpress on my website and there was no turning back.

What inspired you to start a blog and who are your mentors?

Ah, well see the answer to that first question because that explains why I got into blogging in the first place. What keeps me at it is I like being funny. I like finding the humor in ordinary situations or even in bad situations. I love writing and I love making people laugh. Having a blog gave me an audience.

Katie said she’s a comment whore. That, basically, is what keeps me going - knowing people are reading this, knowing people are finding my blog amusing.

A mentor? Am I supposed to have one? Is there a law against blogging unless you have mentors? Damn, yet another rule I’ve broken!

Are you trying to make money online, or just doing it for fun?

The only people who make money from blogging are people who have hundreds of readers. I only average about 30 a day so I’m not likely to make anything off this blog even if I did put on those ads. This is purely fun. And if I suddenly did get hundreds of readers, I still wouldn’t put ads on my website. Of course if some rich person showed up on my blog, loved my writing and wanted to send me a few thousand dollars, I wouldn’t turn him down…

What 3 things do you love about being online?

If by ‘online’ we’re talking about blogging only, then there’s just 1 simple answer to that one - what I love are the people I’ve met. In the 14 years I’ve been online, I have met so many great people and have learned so much.

What 3 things do you struggle with online?

Nothing, really. The only down side to having a blog is that I have to be careful of what I say. Since it’s public and anyone can stumble upon it and read it, I have to be careful about revealing too much that may identify people or hurt people.

And, as usual, I won’t be tagging anyone but feel free to steal this and do the meme yourself. Oh, and I added some links to my blogroll. If you’re on there and don’t want to be on there, let me know.

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This particular love/hate relationship isn’t towards a person. It’s towards technology. I have spent the better part of today trying to get a Bluetooth hands free headset to work with my cell phone.

In New York, it is illegal to talk on your cell phone unless you are using a hands free device. That means that whenever Theresa calls me and I’m driving, I have to pull over. For Christmas, Theresa got me a really cool Bluetooth headset. I’ve been fiddling with it ever since.

I suspect that I’m not the only one with the love/hate relationship thing going on. From what I can tell, so does my cell phone and the headset. One day the phone says, “Oh, there you are! Let’s hook up.” Another day the phone says, “I’m sorry but I have no idea who the heck you are. I’m not going to hook up with a stranger.”

At first I blamed the poor little headset. I even threated to return it to its maker. That seemed to do the trick because after I threatened it, it worked. Briefly.

Today I was determined to get the thing to work. First I had to track down who was causing the problem. My mini-tablet has Bluetooth capabilities so I set it up to find any Bluetooth devices within range. Imagine my surprise when it immediately found the headset but couldn’t find my phone. I’ve been together with that phone for a year. I was so disappointed to discover that it let me down. I felt so rejected. To teach it a lesson, I reset it. To punish me for resetting it, it deleted all my really cool ring tones.

I then spent hours getting the phone to accept my headset, recreating my custom made ring tones (which I had been stupid enough to delete off my computer) and sent them back to the phone. Everything is working now. I think.

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On Monday, when my pizzelle iron arrived, I was unpacking it and reading the little manual out loud to amuse Frank. There was a line in there about removing all the packing. That caused Frank to have a flashback to the time I tried to set the house on fire.

Just over a year ago, Theresa was bugging me about getting a toaster oven. I forget exactly why she wanted one but I do remember she made some valid points so I said what the heck, might as well get one. It was delivered just after Christmas. (Did I mention I love shopping online?) I unpacked it and set it on the kitchen counter.

A couple of days later, on New Year’s Eve, Frank went out to buy bagels for breakfast. We decided to toast them in our new toaster oven. I put them in and wandered off to do something (probably checking email). Then we smelled smoke. I went into the kitchen to see flames shooting out of our new toaster oven.

“Honey, open the front door!” I yelled at I unplugged the toaster oven and grabbed it with oven mitts. I put it outside on the porch so that my entire kitchen wouldn’t go up in smoke. It seems that I overlooked a piece of packing that was shoved all the way inside the little oven.

At the time, we had guests visiting from out of town. Luckily they were staying at a nearby hotel rather than our house. If they had been here, they would have been woken up by the smoke alarm. I’ve never been woken up that way but I can’t imagine it being a pleasant way to greet the day.

Now everyone double checks to make sure I didn’t forget to remove all the packing in any new electrical appliance. Geez, you make one tiny little mistake & they never let ya forget it!

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When Melanie was staying with us, she had these Italian cookies called pizzelle. I had seen them before but had never tasted them.

We loved them. They were light and crisp and had a touch of anise. I decided that I wanted to make them. There were 2 little problems with that. The first problem is you need a special device to make them. It looks like a mini waffle iron. That problem was solved within minutes of deciding I wanted to make them, after a little cyber-shopping:




The next problem was duplicating the pizzelle we had eaten. Now if Melanie could remember who gave them to her, we could have just asked for a recipe. However, she had no idea who made them. There are about 23,413 recipes online for pizzelle. Oh, what is a person to do?

Fortunately, this is also rather easy to solve. We will just have to eat our way through a mountain of pizzelle as I try out different recipes until we hit upon the right one. Of course I may gain a few pounds during the experiment but that’s such a small price to pay. It’s all in the name of research, after all.

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