A vision of the future: Strugglebucket in 50 years

This morning I woke to the sound of an electric mixer.  When I wandered out to the kitchen in bare feet and bathrobe, I found the mixer running by itself in what appeared to be a baking war zone.  Chocolate chips were scattered across one counter, surrounding a bowl very nearly overflowing with pecans.  Greasy butter wrappers lay face-up under measuring cups and teaspoons, and eggshells were strewn across the sink.  A solid brick of brown sugar sat defiant on a cutting board, small crumbles carved away from the corners with the giant knife that lay next to it.  Powdered sugar stuck to my bare feet and, not finding her anywhere at first glance, I was afeared for my grandmother's life.

Thankfully she came in again moments later, though she was fuming and clutched a claw hammer in one fist.  (It was for the brown sugar, I later came to learn.)

This is the start of the countdown to Christmas for Grandma, because her best friend of many decades is coming to stay in three days (which means I am presently in the rather involved process of trying to move out).  I'm pretty sure this is what prompted the baking, anyway, because when I found the recipe it was one of her friend's.

In any case, she had started everything without checking the brown sugar supply, and then she couldn't leave to get more because the plumber was supposed to be coming, so the whole operation ground to a halt until she could leave the house to make a grocery run.  At this point I went to bed again.  (I'm sick, and desperately need the sleep.)

I woke up again around 11:00.   The plumber had still not come, but the kitchen was slightly less chaotic.  The floor was clean again. The counters were tidy.  The butter wrappers had been thrown away.  The eggshells were down the disposal.  The measuring-stuffs were in the dishwasher.  The brown sugar was now in finger-size chunks (the hammer was still on the cutting board).

Drank half a gallon of orange juice and blew my nose into an entire box of kleenex.  Back to bed.

Up again at about 2:00.  Plumber came and went and Grandma had gone for more brown sugar, but she'd put the dough-mixture-so-far into the fridge while she waited and now it was too stiff for her to even mix in the sugar.

Drank the other half-gallon.  Back to bed.

Up again around 8:00, and this time to a nice faint smell of something sweet baking.  Then I opened the door and stepped into the hall and got the full brunt of burning sugar smell.  In the kitchen, Grandma was cleaning the oven and muttering under her breath.  When asked, she explained that she had test-baked a few cookies because they are supposed to spread a lot, and she wanted to be sure she would be leaving enough room and they had SPREAD ACROSS THE ENTIRE COOKIE SHEET AND OVER THE EDGES AND DOWN ONTO THE HEATING ELEMENT DAMN IT.  (Such was her vehemence, these capital letters.)

As it turned out, in her relief at finally having brown sugar of a pliable nature, she had forgotten to add the flour.  So by the time I was awake, she had added the flour, though she realized as we spoke that she used the full amount of flour called for by the recipe, despite the fact she had already "made" five test cookies.  She has now given up for the evening, and plans to add another egg and some more butter in the morning to see if maybe that will compensate.  She's too annoyed to clean up the kitchen tonight (there is flour EVERYWHERE), and tomorrow can only be an adventure.

Maybe it's genetic?

Holiday Decorating Debacle

In my family, we put up Christmas lights.

But only barely.

I say this because it is a half-hearted attempt to begin with, and then we usually almost always fail in that attempt.  Though we do somehow manage to eke out that small win each year.  Here's how it goes:

Our house is a split-level, so it's half-a-story too tall for us to do the whole works.  We do actually have a way to get up to the roof, but it's pretty iffy, and with my family "iffy" is plenty enough a deterrent.  Mom's scared, Dad's old, and I'm Strugglebucket; any way you look at it, this would end in tears.  So instead we just put lights up above the garage and along the line of the house's level-split until it frames the front door.

This is a long, involved process which begins with trying to find the box of lights in the garage.  All of our Holiday Stuff is together in one convenient location, but somehow each year it seems to be a completely different location from the last, so it requires quite a bit of rummaging around.  As soon as Dad and I manage to wade through all the snorkels and inflatable pool toys and find the winter goods, Mom will come running out from the house demanding we find the box with her holiday clothes, because god forbid it snows before she's wearing the sweater with reindeer on the sleeves or (more importantly) the socks with snowflake-lace trim and jingle bells sewn onto the hem.

As soon as Mom's wandering off again with a box large enough to have once housed a refrigerator, Dad and I drag out strings and strings and strings of Christmas lights, which we swear we had put away all wrapped up neatly and untangled last year, damn it. 

The first order of business is to plug in all the lights and make sure they are all still working.  After a few minutes of manful boasting about being able to handle the cold, Dad agrees to bring the lights inside for this process.  I am volunteered to brave the cupboard under the stairs to find an unused powerstrip (this cupboard is a veritable graveyard of extension cords and cables of all kinds).  Said powerstrip is then plugged in to the already daisy-chained set of powerstrips that branches, hydra-like, from the only outlet in the work room.

Our two strings of lights, one for above the garage and then two together for along the front of the house, are wrapped around orange plastic extension-cord spools, which gives the illusion of order, despite the fact we will later spend twenty minutes untangling it all.  We plug them into the powerstrip without unwrapping them, one at a time.  Neither string lights up.

We spend fifteen minutes carefully unscrewing and re-screwing each bulb, one by one, just to be sure they are all in their sockets properly, before Dad plugs them in again.  Neither string lights up.  Dad curses mildly before starting to check the socket casings, but thankfully it is at this point that I notice our powerstrip is not actually turned on.

Both strings light up.

There are, of course, bulbs out.  Not to fret, however, because we also have three boxes of unused strings of lights, all of which are in better condition than the ones we use but that isn't the point damn it we already have these specially configured for our purposes so why bother trying to recreate it all with new strings when it would only be a headache and we can just keep fixing these up each year now shut up and hand me the other box...

We cannibalize these other strings for bulbs instead.  Dad reaches for the oldest-looking box, the images on the cardboard case faded and yellow and clearly from the early nineties, at best.  There are already a dozen bulbs rolling around loose in this box, and he insists on trying these first, because surely if they were broken, we would have thrown them out?  Surely, I agree, since we have two drawers upstairs full of dead batteries and jars upon jars of pens that have little or no ink in them.  But Dad will not be swayed.

We swap out a dead green for a rolling-around-loose-in-the-box green, and then plug in the string.  There is a pop, a flash, and the whole string goes dead.  I burst out laughing and Dad looks daggers at me.  Grudgingly, he agrees to throw away the other loose bulbs.

But now our string has shorted out, and needs a new fuse.  Dad braves the cupboard under the stairs and returns ten minutes later with several old film canisters full of varying sizes of fuses, none of which appear to fit the lights, which doesn't matter because when we opened up the plug to check the size we realize there are actually spare fuses inside the plug casing itself.  

Fuses replaced, we begin the slow process of changing each burnt-out bulb.  Pulling replacements bulbs from the newest box (late nineties, maybe?), we try to match color-for-color but end up very red-heavy.  I also forcibly take each old bulb from Dad and very purposefully throw it away.

By now it is dark outside, and feels twenty degrees colder than when we started.  I dig the ladder out from the back of the garage while Dad starts setting up extension cords, both of which turn out to be tasks surprisingly free of difficulties.  Next come the twenty minutes of untangling the strings from their spools, which takes place on top of the hedges along the house, because otherwise we would doubtlessly manage to step on the bulbs.

There are three separate occurrences of two red bulbs side-by-side.  Strugglebucket's OCD tendencies demand immediate rectification, and Dad agrees, if only to stop me whining.  We swap out bulbs to make things more adequately random, and when the string is plugged in it does not light up.  Ten more minutes of finagling and some more muttering from Dad and everything works again.

To put the lights up above the garage, I sit on the lowest rung of the wobbliest ladder on earth to make sure it doesn't pitch my father onto the concrete of our driveway.  I also have a pocketful of the plastic hooks we hang from the gutter to hold up the lights, and the first one I hand up to Dad snaps in half.  So does the second.  And the third.  Dad jerry-rigs the clips on the bulb casings themselves, and most of them work.

Then he uses eleventy-seven pieces of electrical tape to hold the extension cord against the underside of the roof.  It falls off before we put up the second string of lights.  Later when Dad notices a piece of tape had gotten stuck on one of the bulb casings, he pulls it off.  The lights go out.  We discover the tape was holding the casing together in the first place, and I casually suggest again that perhaps we should use one of the other, newer strings of lights.  Dad re-tapes the bulb casing without looking at me.  The lights come back on.

The second string of lights goes along the brick at the house's split level from the garage to the door, and then above around the door.  For this we just tuck the cord that separates the bulbs down between the plastic trim that separates the brick from the vinyl siding, though we do have to stand on the low hedge in front of the house to reach the siding.  Halfway through this process, the trim snaps off.  Through sheer force of will and stubborn anger and the need to get in from the cold, we force the trim back in place and finish tucking in the lights.

At this point we're too tired and frustrated to deal with really securing the string around the door, so we just leave it loose and go inside and have something hot to drink.  There is a small betting pool on whether or not it will take someone accidentally slamming a bulb in the screen door before Dad bothers to fix it.

Also when changing into pajamas later I found burrs from the hedge stuck up my pants.

But the point is, our house is pretty.

Also, apparently, we have enough net-lights to cover roughly a third of our hedge. Dad did this when I wasn't looking, because why the hell would you only cover a third of it so the house looks ridiculous now shut up and take them down right this instant. I put them back in the garage when he wasn't looking.

Strugglebucket's First Hangover

I am a lightweight.

By this I mean that a single bottle of Mike's hard lemonade will have me sufficiently giggly, and two bottles will have me sufficiently giggly from the floor.

I hate the taste of beer, to the degree that the last time I trusted one of my friends enough to try a sip of "No, this is much better, it's [positive beer-adjective of some kind]," I spit it out so vehemently I almost fell off the roof.  So I mostly drink traditionally girly drinks (e.g. sex on the beach) or dessert drinks (e.g. black Russian).

Also I am one-quarter Japanese, which, while not enough to give me the classically Asian almond eyes and epicanthic fold that would visually legitimize my last name, is apparently plenty enough to give me the "Asian Glow."  After just half a bottle of Mike's, my face, neck and chest go BRIGHT PINK.

I really do know my limits, so I've never been fall-down drunk (though I was close at my best friend's bachelorette party, and since I was the one who threw it, I think that's fair), so waking up feeling like my head is trying to explode was a new and unpleasant experience.

But this time I hadn't been feeling well and hadn't really eaten anything, so two black Russians made by a heavy-handed barman were enough to make it difficult for me to stand up without having to immediately cling to the nearest person or piece of furniture.  Of course, at the time it was delightful because I was with a friend and was in that wonderfully giggly state where very little can actually bother me.

He drove me home and I poured out of the car and into bed, but I woke up the next morning thinking I was dead. My more hangover-savvy friends never gave any helpful description ("a really bad headache" just doesn't quite say it), but it turns out I can't do much better. So, simply put, hangovers are icky. I intend to never experience one again. It's like an ambulance ride: you only need to do it once, and then the expense is enough to warrant a careful avoidance of any future repeat performance/opportunities.

Did I tell you how the city once charged me $800 for an ambulance ride?

Blearglarghlargh. Never again.

Totoro Troubles

Due to all the construction ruckus (still) going on over at my house, I have been living at my grandmother's place for the last two weeks.  While here, I have been going through my late grandfather's sizable VHS collection (because they always had all the Disney movies here as grandkid-bait when I was younger) and stumbled across our copy of "My Neighbor Totoro," one of Miyazaki's early-ish animated features.

This copy, despite being VHS and therefore full-screen-cropped and English-dubbed, is absolutely invaluable to me because it is something my cousin and I always watched together with our Japanese grandfather when we were younger.  Just looking at the cover art reminds me of him, and I find myself suddenly desperate to own the DVD.  Actually, not suddenly, I have always wanted it, I just want it more RIGHT NOW.  And of course, it is out of print.  I can't find it anywhere, physically, locally (i.e. any specialty stores in Washington state), and through Amazon Sellers the factory-sealed copies start at $98.35 (at the time of this entry).  And I am the type of film lunatic that is even now itching to press that damn button.  A hundred bucks for a DVD and I actually have to physically restrain myself from buying it.  What the hell is wrong with me?

Anyway, to go along with my sudden Totoro renaissance I carved a Totoro pumpkin for Halloween, which is ADORABLE (it also had little pumpkin ears sticking up, but they're impossible to see in the dark).  It was the shading method rather than the cut-through method, so it took ages to get it all close to a similar depth, and then I had to shave out the inside of the pumpkin anyway to make sure it was thin enough for light to shine through.  Because it ended up so thick (1/4 inch, maybe?) I needed a lot of light to make it visible...

Enter the first of my (many) pumpkin troubles: it was impossible for me to find tea-light candles, even in the Halloween specialty stores, in smallish quantities.  I ended up buying the smallest bag I could find, which cost $5.99 and had about four pounds of the tiny candles.

Good thing, too, as it turned out that my Totoro required seven candles.  This number was particularly exciting because it meant I had to light each one and then reach my hand down the 8 inches or so inside the pumpkin so as to place each one, without lighting myself (or, more importantly, my hair) on fire.  Despite the obvious Strugglebucket disadvantage, I did actually manage this without being horribly burned.

This was was pretty impressive in its own right, considering that the matches I was using were easily over twice as old as I am.  I had to go rummaging around in the spider-infested cupboard under the stairs to find a box of matches at all, and then each pack had the image of a 50s housewife on the cover, I kid you not.

Anyway, the tea-lights only lasted about twenty minutes before burning out.  Which meant I then had to reach back down in and retrieve the candles, which were now just small, flimsy metal dishes full of hot melted wax.  And then repeat the whole damn process with seven new candles.  And again, after another twenty minutes.

We lit the jack-o-lanterns around 6:30 when the little kiddos started showing up.  The older trick-or-treaters stopped coming after 9:30.

So my pumpkin was cool and adorable (and one of our neighbors taking her son trick-or-treating knew who it was--I was so excited I hugged her), but by the end of the night our porch was littered with several dozen empty metal tea-light-dishes and a thick coating of candle wax on the inside of my pumpkin and many many burns on my fingers and hands.  Sigh.  But he was so damn cute...

Pride Goeth Before a Fall

Or, to be more accurate, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before the fall" (proverbs 16:18).  I know this from the internet, not from any personal bible study, as by and large I am a good old-fashioned heathen, which is to say that I am successfully not forcibly converted by any major religion.

Anyway, the point is that we have a new library, and it is large and pretty and a nice place to sit and work, although all the chairs near electrical outlets are uncomfortable as hell.  And for the life of me, I can't figure out how this library is organized.  The Dewey decimal system is a wonderful thing, but when you can't find an entire genre of books (say, for example, the mysteries are suspiciously and delightfully ironically missing) the reference number isn't going to do you much good.

This library is a two-story building, so I spent a lot of time going up and down the stairs in search of the book I wanted, as it never seemed to be on the floor I was on at the time.  Unfortunately, the stairs are that type of almost purposefully unkind proportions, where they are a little bit too deep and the risers are a little bit too short and it makes climbing them a very awkward process that requires almost too much concentration.

Now all of this would be a moot point if I had just asked the nice women at the information desk for help, because they could have told me that the mysteries were upstairs behind the tall magazine racks that I thought went on forever.  But pride, or at least embarrassment at not being able to figure this out on my own, kept me from asking.  So my visit to the library was easily four times the length it should have been, and by the time I found the book in question I was both annoyed and relieved and the combination was enough to keep me from concentrating properly on the stairs.

So I fell.  After two steps, I misjudged the distance in the whole depth-to-height ratio and got that jarring feeling when you expect the ground to be a little bit farther away than it actually is, and my other foot failed to find the next step at all.  Down I slid, my years of experience in falling allowing me to avoid going ass-over-teakettle by just leaning back and riding the stairs like an incredibly painful and jagged slide.  Thankfully, at the half-way point there was a small landing and I managed to catch my feet under me and stand up again, taking the second half of the stairs nonchalantly, trying to play it cool and hoping no one had noticed.

Pretty much everyone had noticed.

I walked red-faced to the front desk and, to add insult to injury, discovered I had no cash to pay off a fine from many many years ago that prohibited me from actually checking out the book I had gone through so much trouble to find.  

I haven't been back yet.

Escape!

This morning there were about half a dozen strangers in our house by 8:00, tearing apart the walls and ceiling. I slept through my alarms (yes, all seven) and woke up to the sounds of scraping and hammering and various kinds of power tools.  I put on appropriate-enough clothes to peek out into the hall and found myself sealed in by sheets of plastic taped over the door, ceiling to floor, with vague shapes of figures moving around outside.

I had a brief vision of me bursting through the plastic, bellowing like the Hulk, but thought better of it almost immediately.

So I needed to come up with some other way to escape from my own house.  Planning ahead, I grabbed my climbing gear* for work this evening and packed up my laptop and accoutrements and kicked the screen out of my bathroom window.

Since we moved in twenty years ago, there has been an emergency rope ladder coiled up behind my toilet in case of fire, break-in, heat-seeking missile, incoming meteorite, etc.  And now I have finally tested it!  It held my weight fine, though it did have twenty years of dust-and-dead-spider accumulation that made me cringe and make odd strangled "yick!" noises every few moments.

To start, actually getting out of the window (the sill is about mid-chest height) was tricky; I had to stand on the back of the toilet  and lean forward to put both hands on either side of the window frame, then nearly do the splits to stick one foot through so I could haul myself the rest of the way, turning around halfway through the process so I was actually facing the ladder on the way down.  All this, of course, carrying a massive backpack that barely fit through the window at all and probably maxed out the weight limit on the ladder.

In order to close the sliding-style window behind me again, I fashioned a sort of hook from a wire coat-hanger, attaching it around the inside frame and making a loop at the other end.  Once safely on the ground again, I found a broom handle from the garage and used it to lift and pull the rope ladder free, then used it again to catch the wire loop and pull the window nearly shut, though it took quite a bit of finagling and a good lot of swearing.  Then I glanced around, hoping no one was calling the police about my suspicious behavior, and stashed the ladder and broom handle in the garage.

I then spent the day feeling ridiculously pleased with myself.  Thankfully, when I got home from work at 8:00 at night I was able to enter the house through the front door.  I think trying to reverse the whole going-through-the-window process in the dark would have been asking a lot from my already strained good luck.  

So now we have a two-story house with no way to move from one floor to the other without going outside and around the house, and half the time I can't get in or out of my room without about five minutes' ridiculous effort.

It's going to be a trying two months.

*Only now am I realizing that I even had my old rope in the closet; I totally could have rappelled down the side of my house!  Damn it!**

**I'm going to have to try this now.  Expect a post soon, entitled something like, "Should Have Seen This Hospital Visit Coming."

Mysterious Tiny Key

The household is in a panic, at the moment, in preparation for a big remodel in the kitchen, living room, and dining room.  This means a lot of Stuff is moving around, and we're trying to get rid of a lot of said Stuff via that age-old summer favorite: the yard sale.

Mom and I are TOTAL pack-rats, so there is plenty of Stuff to go around.  I was working in my room, trying to go through my closets for clothes I never wear, and I found a tiny key sitting on my dresser (which has actually been serving as a bookshelf for many, many years now).  It's very thin and about an inch long, and clearly a mass-produced-copy kind of key that isn't specific or unique to one terribly important item.

In any case, this finding-a-key business would not be so much an issue for a "normal" person, but for Strugglebucket it was practically a call to arms.

I spent almost an hour running around the house searching for the lock it might fit, more or less regardless of the actual plausibility (e.g. we have a gorgeous antique oak bureau and I tried it despite the fact it clearly needs a classy old skeleton key of some kind).

First, I have a little wooden box I got for Christmas from one of my aunts--though god only knows why she thought I'd like carousel unicorns--but it didn't fit that.  Then I tried all the suitcase mini-padlocks, which are actually all in one place in the cupboard under the stairs because the TSA will cut them off these days anyway, and none of them fit the key.  There are also several locked file cabinets scattered through the house, some of which I should probably not be trying to break into (my parents') but leave no stone unturned, right?  No luck there anyway.

Then there's this old Ford Model-T piggy bank that I found years and years and years ago in some of my great-grandmother's things and which has been a constant source of frustration to me because it has a lock and it is FULL OF CHANGE.  Anyone who knows me at all knows that coins are practically my kryptonite.  I LOVE to sort and count coins, and I can pretty much be distracted from anything, ever, with enough pocket change.  The world could be ending and everyone could be relying on me to race to the doomsday device and press the "off" button, but god help us all if there was a penny on the ground on the way.

In any case, the key now sits on my desk, and every now and then I notice it and my fingers itch to find the lock it fits.  I don't know what to do about it.  Probably I should throw it out and be done with it, but on the off-chance I will someday come across its lock...  It will sit on my desk for the rest of my life, or at least until I lose it (the latter being the more likely of the two).

Canada is wary of the Strugglebucket

I have a summer job I absolutely love; it sends me all over the country to set up interesting workshops, I get to work with great people, and frequently Delta and Denver team up to force me into visiting one of my best friends and her husband for an evening. But that's another story.

My last week working this summer was up in Calgary, which is beautiful and really a friendly place, but it took an extra fifteen minutes or so to get there than it really should have.

A harrowing, anxious-making fifteen minutes, wherein customs sent me to immigrations.

Travel to Canada wasn't always this terrifying, but that's what national paranoia will do to you. General customs procedure now goes like this: on the plane, the flight attendant will hand you a form to fill out and will assume you have a pen with which to do so. If you don't, it's just too damn bad for you and you get stuck writing in pencil against a textured wall in the hall of the Calgary International Airport on the way to customs.

On this form, among questions about how much cash or biological matter you are bringing into the country, there are three small boxes denoting possible reasons for visiting Canada:

STUDY
PERSONAL
BUSINESS

In my pencil-on-textured-wall haste, I marked "personal" for honestly I have no idea what reasoning. I was technically there on business, but it's only four days of administrative assistant work, and part of that time we had a trip planned to Lake Louise so I figured--no, hell with it, I wasn't figuring anything, I was just exhausted.

So by the time I got to the front of the line and slapped my now faintly perforated customs form on the officer's desk, I was tired and sweaty and no doubt my hair was thoroughly ruffled and by and large I probably looked pretty grungy and disgruntled. At this point in the summer, the novelty of twice-weekly air travel had worn off in favor of great annoyance, and I just wanted to get to my hotel room and collapse on the cool, smooth expanse of king-size bed.

I honestly couldn't tell you what went wrong in the conversation, but obviously I couldn't defend my "personal" reasoning then any more than I could now, and it seemed fishy enough to send me to immigrations.

The immigrations office itself is set behind rather ominously frosted glass, and the only other suspect/victim in there was a woman nearly in tears who was talking to someone behind a desk while another officer rifled through her carry-on. I don't do well with new and stressful situations, as you might have gathered by now, so at this point I was not only more and more nervous with each passing moment but also suddenly terrified I had accidentally sneaked some biological matter or another into the country in my backpack (did I finish that bag of raisins before I left Seattle???).

They waved me up to the first available officer. Firstly, I noticed the difference in elevation; when you're just speaking to the nice gentleman (or lady) in the customs booth, you are at eye-level and can exchange pleasantries as your passport is being stamped. In immigrations, the rather more gruff-looking gentleman (or lady) is set at a desk a full foot/roughly-third-of-a-meter higher than you. (I work with math teachers, and we all spent the whole time we were there trying to think in metric conversions, with very little success all around.)

So they took an extra long time now looking at my passport and asking me vague questions about my work. I travel with all my plane/hotel/taxi/shuttle information in one folder so I can't possibly end up lost (knock on wood), and I just handed it all over to the man, including offering to call my emergency contact in California if it would just get me out of there not in handcuffs. Such is the measure of my paranoia.

I wonder now if they put an additional "Looked suspicious initially" stamp in there, tainting my permanent record... I should go look.

Nope, no special "shifty-looking" stamp I can find. Maybe it's in black-light ink. Damn.

In the end, they let me go with the advice that next time I should put "business." And so I shall. Twenty bucks (Canadian dollars) says next year I put "business" and they pull me anyway.

To add insult to anxiety, everyone else in our group--the people actually working the full 8 days--put "personal" and didn't have a problem.

A last note: Canada is nationally bilingual, and as such they have customs forms in French as well as English. I briefly considered filling mine out en Francais, but decided against it in the end. Thank God, else the whole of this awkward situation would have been in French.

Early onset hypochondria

This is just great.

Every morning, Dad gives me a wake-up call to say "hi" and make sure I'm actually conscious in time for class. Most of the time I am actually able to pick up and mumble a fairly convincing "Good morning!" but then sometimes I forget to put the ringer on, or am so tired I think it's just another alarm (I have 7) and turn it off automatically and climb back into bed.

Yes, I have seven alarms. Five on my phone and two on a clock radio/CD/aux across the room. In fact, on my phone you're allowed to name the alarms, aside from the first one. Mine, in order, are:

WAKE-UP ALARM
GET UP
SERIOUSLY
NOW, BITCH!
YOU'RE COMPLETELY USELESS

Anyway, my inability to wake up properly is not the point of this entry. This morning, Dad called me to say hello and also inform me of the new outbreak of swine flu that has killed a hundred people in Mexixo City in the space of about two weeks. It's spreading fast and has been reported all over the world, and there have been twenty cases in the US by now. It's an entirely new virus, with a combination of human, avian, and swine DNA, which makes it nearly impossible for our bodies to deal with it, and it's hitting young and healthy people the hardest because their healthy immune systems go into overdrive.

Dad's afraid of anyone who has traveled to Mexico in the last several weeks (spring break, anyone?) and has asked me to wash hands excessively and obsessively and maybe grab a couple bottles of the alcohol hand cleanser to carry around with me.

The problem is, instead of reacting in what I would think to be a normal manner, with maybe some concern and plans to keep clean and what to do if you get flu symptoms, my first thought was, "I have the world's worst luck; I'm going to die."

This a really uncomfortable feeling. It's never happened before (the feeling, I mean, not the death--though that is also true), but with the last two years being what they have...anyone could see a pattern here.

*Note, flu epidemic information comes from Dad, with me as a sleepyish intermediary. You should definitely check this out on your own. Be safe.

Public Restroom Doors Phailure

This is not a Struggle, it is a rant.

Why the hell do bathroom doors open backwards? Am I the only one who has noticed this?? You push to get in, and have to pull to get out. THIS IS WRONG. For one thing, isn't there a fire hazard issue the like of the Iroquois Theatre? (1903 - look it up). Yes, I will admit that at any given time in a women's restroom there will be considerably fewer than 602 people (though not by much, at larger public events), but the same principle applies; the door opens against the direction of travel.

Fire hazard is the least of my worries, however. HYGIENE. I wash my hands, as I pray does everyone else, but I know there are various idiots and smallish children who do not. These people open the door by the handle just as I am forced to do. ICK. So I have to keep the towels I use to dry my hands and use them as the hygiene equivalent of oven mitts to protect myself. Then I can only pray there is a garbage nearby outside so I can dispose of them immediately rather than carry this thing (now covered with idiot-and-smallish-children germs) around, or alternatively pull the door open as hard as I can, chuck the trash in a bin and try to jump out the door before it closes on me.

Don't get me started on those air-dryers; sometimes it's just so goddamn disgusting I'm basically stuck there until someone else comes in. Actually, being stuck in a bathroom just because of sudden spell of hypochondria would probably count as a Struggle.

But the fact remains, SOMEBODY NEEDS TO FIX THIS.

Uneven sidewalks...

...and the resulting puddles when it rains.  And it has been doing so for quite awhile here.  No one seems to have told April that it is, in fact, supposed to be spring now.  Don't give me that "April showers being May flowers" garbage, I want sun!  I want to go outside and stand on people!*

Anyway, seeing as how I have been falling over a lot due to the vertigo, those cracks that jut up in the sidewalk pose a more serious threat than usual (which, honestly, is pretty serious for me in general).  Add the rain and the puddles that come with it, and you get a bruised, wet, and unhappy Strugglebucket.

At least I can laugh at myself.  When there is no need for immediate medical attention, anyway.

*It's called acro.  There'll be an explanation and related Struggle from the archives in a forthcoming post.

Ambulance rides and Jell-o for breakfast

This technically isn't a Struggle; it's a misfortune. However, its effects are far-reaching and will doubtlessly come up in future Struggles.

I have Labyrinthitis, which is a virus of the inner-ear. Technically, I had it and am getting better, but every now and then I still lose track of the world around me and fall over. It seems I contracted this sometime right before spring break (almost three weeks ago, now), because I spent a night in the hospital a couple days prior to leaving for break. It was my first, and hopefully last, experience riding in an ambulance (I just got the bill from the city; it was an $800 chauffeur service).

The short story is that the labyrinthitis gave me so much vertigo that it made me nauseous, and I spent an hour vomiting into a friend's toilet before it looked like it was coming up blood and she called 911. The bad news (oh yes, there's more) was that the sleep medication I take had already kicked in, so my body was trying to both throw up and fall asleep, which are somewhat mutually exclusive.

At the hospital I was misdiagnosed with gastritis because I was too out of it to explain that the fact I kept falling over was because I had vertigo, and wasn't drunk. I've never been fall-down drunk, you bastards! I've only ever been pretty-damn-but-still-standing drunk at the bachelorette party of one of my best friends, and because I was the one throwing it I reserve the right to get sloshed.

Anyway, they pumped me full of fluids again and sent me home. I spent the next few days eating carefully and feeling generally okay, until the vertigo and nausea kicked in again when I was down in Anacortes with my mother. Now there was a fun five hours driving home. Finally my primary care physician got me proper meds for labyrinthitis and I spent the second week of spring break in bed eating only "wild strawberry" flavored Jell-o and occasionally sipping a whole plethora of differently flavored Gatorades.

Blah blah blah, didn't get the chance to finish any homework or study for my major exams, etc. etc., but the school is being very kind to me to get it all worked out. That is the story as it stands.

This was not a Strugglebucket-related fault, but I do seem to attract misfortune, especially that of a bodily injury nature.

Two important things I would like to share to wrap this up:

1) It was my best friend whose toilet I was throwing up in, who called 911, who stuck with me in the ambulance and at the hospital, translating my drug-slurred responses to the medical-type folk, who was the first thing I saw when I could pry open my eyelids, who stayed until the wee hours of the morning to make sure I was okay, and who--most importantly--brought me a hedgehog named Francois.* I owe her a ton.

2) Here is a description of what vertigo feels like, for those of you fortunate enough to have never had the experience: my inner-ear suddenly goes, "Holy shit! The ground is over there now!" and my body is like, "Okay!" and my brain is like, "No it isn't! Move, feet! For fuck's sake, MOVE!" But they don't. And I fall over and crash into things.

*Apparently I clung to Francois for dear life for most of the night. One of the only things I really remember of my hospital stay was the man at the X-ray saying, "Okay, honey, I need to take a picture of your stomach; you have to let go of the hedgehog."

An old classic

It is the middle of the first week of spring break (in my part of the world), and my mother has dragged me across the mountains in the hopes that I will use the change in scenery to suddenly be inspired to write several papers in French.  My major exams are the day I return to school after the break, which I consider severely unfair.  Ah well.  I will persevere.  And probably fail my writtens the first time around, but I'm sure that will come up in a later post.

At the moment I am sitting in a study carrel in the most beautiful library I have ever seen.  This public library is gorgeous!  It has a particularly impressive mystery novel collection (I'm sitting nearish that section), and has a lovely view out over the sound, in that I-can-kind-of-see-the-topmasts-of-the-largest-of-the-sailboats sort of way.

But the point of this post is that I am sitting in this beautiful library wearing second-day underwear because, of course, I forgot to pack any for the trip.

Trip to the K-Mart (or the Anacortes equivalent) in the evening, woo!

From the archives

For those of you who don't know me (or have not yet seen me fall down the stairs), I'm going to give you some idea of my background.  Here is an example of one of my more catastrophic Struggles:

In 6th grade I attended the same middle school where my mother worked as a math teacher.  Surprisingly I did not catch as much hell for this as you might think.  Or at least I didn't care, which is probably more likely.  I would work in her classroom in the afternoons once school let out, and I did pretty much whatever she needed (she was my ride home, after all).  One afternoon I was using the paper-cutter, one in that nice slicing-guillotine-arm style, and I was distracted by--of all things--my mother requesting something else of me.  And I sliced off the tip of my left index finger at a diagonal, from the very tip to almost the first knuckle.  I remember not feeling pain until there was blood everywhere and I realized it should be hurting.  And then I was screaming in appropriate Strugglebucket style.

The really fun part of this story is that we couldn't find the bit of finger I'd lopped off, so they put on a big plastic artificial scab to hold my finger together until the skin grew back over the wound.  Once it had healed up, the plastic scab would just fall off like a normal one and POOF finger good as new.  I don't remember how long it took, but fall off it did and then POOF good as new, although my fingernail still grows narrower, which I figure is what happens when you cut off part of your cuticle.  Put my index fingers side-by-side and you'll see the left one really does look like it just had a bit of the corner sliced off.   Also the skin where it healed looks as though the two halves of the wound stretched to meet in the middle rather than growing new skin, so the fingerprint whorls are stretched and warped and meet in a scar line. It's pretty cool, but also pretty distinctive, so it looks like no life of crime for me.

...as if I could keep my cool in any kind of rule-breaking situation.  Strugglebucket Struggles under just normal stress-levels, thank you very much.

Oh wait, I forgot, the really fun part of this story is that two weeks later my mother came and pulled me out of my social studies class, dropped something into my hand and said, "Look what I found!"

Strugglebucket Struggles

The name "Strugglebucket" was given to me by one of my best friends as a somewhat mocking term of endearment.  Very early on in our friendship,  he noticed and was fascinated (and quite frankly amused) by the level of difficulty I have doing the simplest of things.

The phrase I might hear from him most often is "What did you do..."  This is no longer a question, really; its tone very clearly suggests that a more appropriate interpretation might be "I know you did something stupid and I'm coming to you in case it's something worth catching on film."  The fact that he is not with me at the time of this "What did you do..." non-question, and must come looking for me, is also indicative of the fact that I make a lot of startled noises, a lot of the time.  Or crashing noises, depending on the Struggle in question.

I have embraced the moniker, mocking though it may be, because it is also pretty damn accurate.  I spend most of my time just falling up and down stairs and tripping over invisible items and knocking full drinking glasses off tables and getting my hair caught in things (it's really long, okay?), but there have been some pretty epic and catastrophic Struggles in my long and varied career, and no doubt I will only continue taking my Strugglebucketry skills to ever higher echelons of phailure.  I only hope to document some of them here for posterity, in case I ultimately Struggle my way to a horrible accidental death.