I'm IN! I'm IN!!

I'm IN!! I'm Bleedin' IN!

Months have gone by, as they usually do when one approaches old age faster than a fart, without my posting anything. I tend to get wrapped up in troubles--mostly my childrens' troubles--and I forget promises I've made to myself. Promises to do something just for Priscilla: promises to accept reality, promises to simplify my environment, promises to clarify my mental process, promises to BE HERE NOW, as we used to say when we were hippies and read all that eastern philosophy written by fat, bearded westerners with the stench of quarter-pounders wafting out from their beards.

I continued to read my three daughters' posts with delight. Despite their interminable thrashings through young adulthood, no one can say that these little women are not bright, and funny beyond belief, and beautiful as Arabian thoroughbreds. Well, realistically, gentle readers of these musings would have no way of knowing my girls are beautiful; I mean, they could be as ugly as viperfish. So we will have to take my word for it: they have trails of drooling, tumescent males following behind them on most excursions. Mr. Pseudonym and I, just to witness the amusing spectacle of the male reaction to something of beauty, stay quite a few steps behind them when we are out as a family. And then we whimper a lot and wring our hands and sigh pitifully.

My girls have repeatedly urged me to balance out their blogflections with those of the previous generation. I would be able to offer buckets of sage wisdom on varying subjects of interest to those of the vaginaed persuasion who regularly visit the girls' blogs, having personally (myself) experienced dysfunction in my family of origin, depression, the Seven Year Itch, addiction, the Therapeutic Process of Continuous Co-Pay, infertility, becoming an older parent, multiple female offspring parenting, turning 40, multiple teenaged female offspring parenting (and accompanying gentleman callers) (!!!SCREAM!!!), caregiving parents who have slipped on the banana peel (metaphorically speaking), loss and grief, turning 50, young adult parenting, the wedding of the first child, the birth of the first grandchild (there is no adequate description for how this feels), the acquisition of pet rats and the inevitable onset of sliding on one's ass* toward the senior years.

I didn't blog, however. I sat with my children, argued, hugged, listened, fed, cried, yelled, gave money, comforted, annoyed, made tea, lectured, cried a lot more, reinforced, changed direction, celebrated, meddled, backed off, let go and grabbed back for more hugs. It just didn't occur to me to write about the events of the past few months or the past five+ decades. There was just too much to do, too much to worry about and too many conversations to have with Mr. Pseudonym and the kids.

Then, yesterday, I went to the doctor. I was feeling decidedly snotty and out of sorts, but just going in for a routine check of my meds and sausage ankles. My doctor, a kind man who likes to help his patients, was delighted to see mucous and a red throat in a patient whose spine has been turning to poorly-glued broken china for the past ten or so years. "Yep, Priscilla," he intoned while emerging from the samples closet, "you've got a BAD, BAD infection! You have to take this medicine right away and go to bed!" So I limped out of his office with a brown paper sack full of antibiotics, the name "Mucinex" written on a prescription form and feeling much sicker than when I had bounced in thirty minutes earlier.

Too ill to stop at the drugstore to find out what "Mucinex" was, I sent SarLiveSound (AndSweetie) out to the store, muttering "it had better not be guaifenesin" under my breath while sliding into my bed of gasping anguish. It did indeed turn out to be guaifenesin, but in a pretty, bi-colored tablet form, one color for instant release and one color for extended release! I could have bought a gallon jug of guaifenesin on my way home and taken a big slug every four hours, but the $12.00 charge for Mucinex somehow lent creedence to the severity of my illness. The antibiotic tablet actually did make me quite ill, as would ingesting any tablet that would choke Seabiscuit. Wait...maybe I was supposed to poke it up my... . (no...that's just not logical!)

Upshot? I'm sick and not doing laundry, gardening, cooking, visiting or any sort of errand today. After much username/password anguish, necessitating a frantic bout of whining to my oldest, Mrs. Thumbscre.ws a.k.a. The 24/7 CompuHelpDesk & Mother's Milk Machine, I'm signed in and blathering prodigiously about nothing! Mr. Pseudonym's workshirts remain wrinkled, the terrier's unexercised, J.Q. will not be pulling Grandma's hair with one hand and yanking her glasses off with the other tomorrow, the mail's unopened (bills getting colder and colder), Junket has gone over to the neighbor friend to help with the Alzheimer's grandmom by herself, the stove is cold, the garden bleak and dusty, with one lonely dried clump of manure sticking up from last year, and I'm sitting here going on and on and on! About SQUAT! Ha-HAA-HAA-HAAAAAAAA! *cough*

Y'know what? It feels good to write. It's something to do for myself...just for myself.
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*this misused word being the only vulgarism to be employed in this blog, my daughters having used up all the the f-words and variations available.