According to Wikipedia, Juan/ita should be hatching as a fully fledged monarch butterfly sometime within the next 2-5 days. I might be imagining it, but the chrysalis looks like it’s getting lighter, which, if my research is correct, may be a sign that it’s going to hatch soon. I know the chrysalis turns clear right before the monarch emerges but I don’t know for sure if it gradually turns lighter or not. It must, right? The yellow spots that were on the outside of the chrysalis are now shiny and golden metallic but I doubt that would show up in pics.

Since butterflies usually hatch/emerge in the morning, according to Wikipedia, I’ll probably miss the big event, but hopefully the kids will be able to see it.

So, since I probably won’t see it happen, I probably won’t get pics of it happening, but that’s okay because this video that Lisa Cole posted last weekend does a way better job of showing the entire process than I could ever do. Enjoy!

I’m exhausted, I don’t even know why I’m writing this.

This morning I had to get up early so we could be in Toronto for my 11:30am post-op appointment with the endometriosis specialist who did my surgery in August. Getting up early kinda sucked because I had trouble sleeping the night before, but it was free hashbrown day at Tim Horton’s if you bought a breakfast sandwich and their bacon & egg breakfast biscuits are soooooooo good and I hadn’t had one in about 6 months. So at least the day started off okay despite the suckage of early rising.

It took us forever to get to the Dr.’s office because of construction but we finally got there and I barely even got to sit down in the waiting room before they called my name.

First, here’s the post-op report (most of which I don’t understand) and then I’ll get into what the resident told me about the surgery:

Page 3 just says that the anesthesia was reversed and I was taken to the recovery room.

So long story short on the post-op report is that things were pretty fucked up in there, in fact the resident said flat out it was the worst he’s ever seen (no idea how long he’s been a resident). There was endo on and in my bowels, colon and bladder…just, as you can read, everywhere. What was interesting though is that they cut some nerves in there somewhere without asking me beforehand if I was okay with that. I am okay with that, but I find it a little strange that this part of the surgery wasn’t explained to me in the beginning. The resident who was explaining how the surgery went mentioned it (I forget what it’s called and I’ve stopped trying to make sense of the above report) and said it like I knew what he was talking about. When I said no, Dr. Leyland didn’t explain that to me beforehand, he looked a little embarrassed and explained that they cut these nerves in there so that when the endo grows back, which it inevitably will, I shouldn’t be in as much pain and in the meantime, my periods should be less painful both with the removal of all the disease they could find and these severed nerves, but that it could take 3-6 months for the effect to kick in. (I don’t know why.)

But of course, they don’t want the disease to grow at the rate it had been over the past 8 years, so to slow the growth I’m on a birth control pill continuously for 3 months, then I’ll have a period, go back on the pill for 3 months and repeat for a year. Then they want me to come back. If the pill doesn’t lessen the pain of my periods, they’re going to try an IUD that secretes the same(ish?) kind of hormones as the birth control pill but in different amounts.

All in all, I’m optimistic. I got emotional in the car when we left because already I’ve been able to do a few things that I haven’t been able to do for a long time because I’ve always been in too much pain, like dance around my house.

On the way home, Blake asked if I minded if we stopped off at his work because he had to change some data tapes and he said it would only take 10 minutes. I asked him what was in it for me and he asked what I wanted and I decided on a cherry slush from Dairy Queen. So he went into the mall and into work (his work is the top floor of a mall) while I baked in the car and tweeted like a crazy person and came up with the most brilliant idea ever which I shared with him when he finally came out with my slush: we had enough time to spend an hour & a half at the beach before the kids got home from school.

So that’s what we did. We got home, got our pool noodles, towels and swimming attire and headed off to Wasaga Beach, which is about 10 minutes from our house and, as I’ve maybe mentioned before, is like, the longest fresh water beach in the world. I took this pic with my phone and sent it to Twitter:

We walked out into the water, which was cold, but felt soooooo good after being in the hot car all day and floated there, just talking about random stuff for about an hour and then we got cold so we decided to get out and go to the grocery store to grab some stuff for dinner. That’s one of the cool things about Wasaga Beach, you can walk into the grocery store with wet hair and a damp towel wrapped around you and no one really cares.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I’m addicted right now to these shishkabobs they sell at the meat section of a certain chain of grocery stores and that’s what we intended to get but instead, we got these steaks that were marinated in the same stuff as the shishkabobs (which I think may contain crack). We said hi to Wayne, who works at the grocery store, then we got in the car and went home.

There was still about 15 minutes until the kids were going to be home from school so Blake and I HAD THE MARITAL RELATIONS IN THE DAY TIME and then the kids came home and we bragged about going to the beach. they were not pleased with us.

Then I went over & hung out with my neighbour Judy for a bit while Blake made dinner. The marinated steaks were okay, nowhere near as awesome as the shishkabobs, but still pretty good and Blake also did garlic butter potatoes on the BBQ so dinner was more or less amazing.

Thennnnnnnnn nothing happened, we just screwed around online and bugged the children and I watched Deal or No Deal with Wayne and then it was time to come back home to watch the season premiere of 90210 and now here I sit writing this post.

So as the title says, today was a pretty good day. Tomorrow I can sleep in, maybe get some painting done and watch a few movies and then it’s the weekend! Yay!

THE END.

Here she is, full of fire with her matchstick wands in hand!
And she’s for sale in The Shop!

Some people have expressed interest in “Sparkle”, “Shimmer” and “Shine” but I’m not really sure what’s going on with them yet because I entered them for consideration into an art show and I won’t find out if they’ve been accepted until probably mid-October. When I know, you’ll know!

Yesterday was…a friggin’ day.

For some ungodly reason, I got up at 6:30am and I’m not really sure what I did between then and when the kids and Blake got up, probably internetting and screwing around on Buttercup, but after they left I decided to go over to the neighbours’ to see what they were up to. They were cleaning out their car and wanted to borrow my vacuum, so I brought it over and chatted for a bit and then I left to let them do their thing.

When I came home I don’t know what got into me but I looked at my stove, was immediately repulsed by the state of it and started taking it apart. I cleared the top of it, where the knobs are, of spices and my recipe box, then I took out the elements and set them on the counter while I pried the metal rings around the elements out (they were so filthy and stuck I needed a screwdriver for one of them – my stove came with the house and has NEVER been thoroughly cleaned) and with them, the metal…I dunno, grease catcher thingies that sit beneath the elements. The rings and the grease catcher things were BLACK, so after an unsuccessful cleaning with dishsoap, I put them all in the kitchen sink and doused them with a can of oven cleaner.

Prior to taking the last element out of the stove, I boiled the kettle and made myself a cup of coffee with this single-cup plastic coffee thing Blake has. I NEVER drink coffee, in fact I don’t really even like it, but I wanted to maintain the energy I woke up with so I figured I’d try that and it made me hyper as hell.

While the metal stove pieces were soaking, I happened to find two packs of the aluminum liners you put under the elements so the greaser catcher thingies don’t get as dirty, so score there and then I Mr. Cleaned the shit out of the wall above the stove, the top of the stove where the spices sit, the panel where the clock & knobs are and then the surface of the stove itself. Then I did the dishes from the kids’ breakfast and while I had a sink of hot, soapy water, I cleaned out my plastic recipe box.

Oh did I mention that I never clean? Okay that’s not totally true, I clean the toilet and the shower if I’m feeling industrious, but Madison does the dishes and Blake does the vacuuming and then Blake & I both take care of laundry and that’s pretty much the extent of our housework aside from lawn mowing (Blake) and taking out the garbage, compost (we have community composting, it rules) and recycling (Blake & Madison).

As my recipe box was drying, I came into my office to sit down for a minute when I realized the wooden landing, which is painted white, was looking more dark grey than anything else, so I got out the Mr. Clean again and washed that. Then I went outside and took pictures of my newest painting, which is finally finished.

After that, I went back over to the neighbours’ to see what was up and we shot the shit while they drank a few beer before Judy had to go to work. After she went to work, Wayne & I continued to sit on the deck and talk about how awesome it was that the kids weren’t there. I brought Lucky over with me to play with their dog Mandy and we just had a good afternoon. Periodically I’d come back over to my house to get another Coke Zero, take pills and check the progress of my stove parts, but other than that I just hung out with Wayne until it was time for the kids to come home.

Before I go any further into the tale of my day, which I know is oh so riveting, I have to tell you about what a shit Wayne is. We kind of have a feud.

Three days ago he opened the gate of his deck to find a dead “mouse” and apparently it was huge, he says, and he got the rake and flung it onto the empty lot next door. He kept telling me how huge this mouse was and how disgusted he was and I said “Wayne, that wasn’t a mouse, that was either a mole or a vole,” because mice, at least the ones around here, are NOT the size he indicated and our cat brings home dead voles all the time. (For those who don’t know, a vole is a small rodent related to muskrats that look like big mice except they have shorter tails.) Wayne is born & bred in Toronto and has no clue about the flora & fauna of “up north” so this isn’t the first time I’ve had to educate him seeing as I’ve lived “up north” my whole life.

Anyway, he said I was making up this whole vole thing because if such a creature existed he’d have heard about it. He claimed that was he flung with his rake was a grown up mouse and the little ones in his house are just babies.

WELL…I had my laptop over at their house yesterday to show them something on the internet (because our wifi miraculously reaches their back deck) and I got on Wikipedia and showed him what a vole was and read to him the part about how they’re 3-7 inches long and live in Ontario. Then I Wiki’d mice and lo & behold, the average mouse is about 9 centimeters long and THEN I showed him this picture of an adult mouse that I rescued from the cat last year and told him to note the size of the kernel of corn beside it.

And THEN I showed him pictures of pink baby mice feeding from their mothers and read him the part about how, as soon as they have hair and open their eyes, they stay with their mother about another week and then they’re considered full grown and even after I showed him ALL OF THIS GODDAMN EVIDENCE THAT WHAT HE SAW WAS A VOLE, he still says I’m full of crap and don’t know what I’m talking about. He is so frustrating!

Anyway, around 3:40pm Blake called me (I take our home phone over to the neighbour’s when I go because miraculously, the signal goes that far too) and asked me if the kids were home. I said that they weren’t and he said “the school called, there’s a missing kid named Tyler and they think he might have walked home with Wes,”. I guess this Tyler kid, who is the same age as Wes (6) and, as it turned out is also in Wes’ new class (and they’re BEE-EFF-EFFS), was supposed to get picked up by his parents and when they got to the schoo, he wasn’t there.

So I explained this to Wayne when I got off the phone with Blake and we set our lawn chairs in the driveway to wait for the kids. When they started coming up the street, with Emily & Alyssa, our other neighbours, in tow, we looked and there was no Tyler. So I explained the situation to the kids and asked if they’d seen Tyler and Emily said she saw a little kid named Tyler at the crosswalk near the school walking home alone. Madison volunteered to take her bike and go look for him, so I gave her my cell phone and off she went with Emily.

About half an hour later, Madison comes home and tells me that Tyler had realized that he was lost and backtracked his steps to get back to the school where they called his parents and he was now home safe. So disaster averted.

By this point it was almost 5pm, my stove was in pieces and I had a roast to get in the oven, so I told Wayne I’d see him tomorrow (today) and I headed back home to finish my stove & do what needed to be done. before I left, Wayne gave me 2 S.O.S pads to help with my task, which, as it turned out, I desperately needed and currently my arms are spaghetti from scrubbing the burnt on foodstuffs from my stove parts. But I got it done, got the roast in the oven and then I started filling out the bajillion forms each kid came home with.

People, it took me an hour and 15 minutes to fill out all these goddamn forms.

Then I signed Madison’s school agenda to confirm that she got her homework done and by that time dinner was ready (and Blake was home), so I ate and ate and ate because I hadn’t eaten all day and Madison did the dishes after dinner.

When I was done eating, I had to pee, so I went into the bathroom and stopped dead when I saw myself in the mirror. I don’t know how the HELL I did it because we were sitting in the shade all afternoon until about the last hour of being on the deck but I’m burnt again, making this the third time in a month & a half. My eyelids are burnt. I can honestly say that I’ve never gotten so much sun in my entire life, I mean, I’m kinda known for my death pallor, but right now I look like I’d been vacationing in Florida. It’s so strange, I barely even recognize myself.

After that, I said goodnight to the kids and hung out with Blake on Buttercup for a while and then it was 11pm, which is when I go next door again to fill Judy in on how the day went because that’s when she gets off of work. (I see her daughter after school and get the scoop and I tell her of Wayne’s antics and stuff like that because with the shift she’s on, she usually doesn’t see Wayne until late the next day and that’s just in the car for 15 minutes.)

I left Judy’s at around midnight and while I was absolutely exhausted, I didn’t want to go to bed yet, so I decided to go to the park across the street and swing on the swings for about 20 minutes. While I was over there, I looked out at our street and realized it was garbage night because everyone had their stuff on the curb, so when I came back over, I put our garbage and recycling out so Blake wouldn’t have to rush to do it in the morning (I forgot the compost though, oops!) and then finally, I took my burnt ass to bed.

I slept like the dead until about noon today and when I woke up, Lucky had his head on Blake’s pillow and as soon as I opened my eyes, he slurped his tongue up my face.

While today’s been a much slower pace, I did have another coffee (which I drank as fast as I could because I really DON’T like it), I made Jell-O for the kids’ lunches in little Tupperware containers and cut up celery which GODAMMIT THEY WILL EAT, as well as bringing in the garbage can & recycling bins. I was going to get industrious and clean out under the carport because it’s a huge mess that makes me crazy and my in-laws are apparently coming to visit the last two weeks of the month, but man, it’s like, 40 degrees outside with the humidex and I’m not in the mood to sweat.

Today Judy gets off work at 3:30pm, so she’s going to pick up the kids and when they get home, I’ll go over there to hang out with her and help her fill out the bajillion pieces of paperwork the school sent home yesterday (like explain to her a few of them, which were confusing, and give her our contact info for the emergency contact stuff) and then I’m going to come home and edit the pictures of my new painting until it’s time for my Buttercup staff meeting at 9pm.

*WHEW*

When I saw my shrink last week, I told her I thought I was sort of on a high, but like, a mild, good high and she told me that this was the level where she wants me all the time so she upped my meds. I’m not happy about having to take 11 pills after dinner (which make me feel barfy), but from my behaviour since she upped them, I’d say they’re doing their job. She also gave me a light box to use starting at the beginning of next month so S.A.D. doesn’t set in and bring me down.

So yeah, things are pretty good in Sunnyland right now. I mean, we’re fucking broke and that sucks, but other than that, everything’s good!

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