Friday, August 26, 2011

Little Miracle



An open letter to the unborn of the world…
Well, unborn, but really, really close to being born.
You know. The HALF DAY between water break, and crowning…

I know it must be nice and comfy floating around safe in mommy's belly for months and months without a care in the world. Tumbling around, doing front handsprings, kicking and punching for a giggle…You have a Wii in there or what??
But when that 9th month approaches, sorry kiddo the vacation is over. The fat lady is doing her tongue trills and is ready to hit a C sharp. We have been waiting so very long to meet you, so after the water breakage, why must you make us wait so long to see you?
One day, probably in the middle your gymnastics routine, unexpectedly, you’re going to feel and hear sudden GUUUSSSHHHH of water, kind of like a tsunami, but without all the drama. That day when the parental flood gates finally give way... Do us all a favor and HEAD FOR THE LIGHT! When your 90 and they tell you to “Head for the light” don’t fall for it… but you’re ZERO, so dagnabbit, when you feel the water pressure go to NIL... Come on Down! 14 hours of labor!!?? Seriously? Even Teamsters give up after 8 hours of labor. Are you waiting for that perfect moment? Maybe when Mommy is finally getting some sleep? Your entrance is going to be grand enough, the red carpet is down, so no more of this tomfoolery. The ribcage death grip and grasshopper shuffle might be good for a chuckle, but it isn’t going to stop the inevitable, it only delays it… a lot, and we find that really annoying. Just pretend you’re on the H2WHOA slide at Mount Splashmore and come say hello to us. You have some very irritable, exhausted, cranky, nerve wrecked people outside waiting for you, otherwise known as family.

On Monday, August 22nd at 6:23am we have an addition to the family.
My first granddaughter, Chloe Michelle Johnson.
It has been over 30 years since I have seen a newborn baby in person, and I must say it drew some tears. The wait was worth every second.
Such a tiny little girl, so fragile, so helpless, so perfect.

As we go through life we see many amazing things.
Things that take our breath away.

But they all pale in comparison.
Because today, right before my eyes,
I have seen God’s greatest little miracle.
Welcome to the world Chloe,
With all my love… Grandpa.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Family Dog




Recently our 5 year old mini Schnauzer, Molly, was diagnosed with bladder stones AND a herniated disk in her spine. All within 2 days. I guess if you’re going to have 2 things go bad, may as well do them at once and get all the cutting and stitching over in 1 shot so we don’t have to have her heal up then go right back through it all. Bladder ¾ full of stones and a disk that has disabled her back left leg. I think doing research on the illnesses is a good thing, but its also pretty scary to read some of the horror stories. The stones are out, no big deal, change the diet and should be good for the rest of her life.. but rehabilitating the leg is another story. It might come back in a month.. it might come back in a year.. it might come back never.. there is no way to tell.
The week she was in the hospital was one of the most difficult things we have been through.. We knew she was in good hands, but we also knew she was pretty scared and alone. The first day home she was pretty much out of it, like a 17 lb floppy eared marshmallow.
Then day 2 she started to realize she was home with us and safe.
Day 3: eating, reacting to our voices, growling at the cats and squirrels through the window.
Day 4: standing, gingerly moving around showing some movement in the leg.
MUCH more improvement than we ever expected, especially in such a short time.
Here we are at day 5 and other than her leg she is just fine. She shows improvement everyday and we have no doubts that before too long she will be running around the back yard looking for that special “spot”… We were having trouble getting her to “evacuate her bladder”, (Cindy with her medical terms rubbing off on me.), ugh, getting her to PEE. And since that’s where the stones were we knew we had to find a way to get her to go...
It took a little learning on our part though to get her to “Go” in the back yard after her surgeries.
We would suit up for the cold carry her in the back yard, gently set her down and try and get her into the required position, but she just wasn’t going at all. This worried us.
It seems Molly is a little timid when it comes to whizzing in a crowd... Who would have thought? Most dogs do it all the time. Although I guess I would be a bit hesitant myself to free the beast with 2 people lurching over me with a 6 cell MAG flashlight shining directly on my junk. So after trying several different things, we decided to get her in position, go behind the gazebo and give her some privacy.
TA-DA! On the road to tinklesville! What a relief…
… for all of us..

I have had a few friends at work that ask how she is doing and express their concerns and support, and I can’t thank them enough. And there are the few, special co-workers.. more “farmer types” that express support in a more instant, permanent kind of way.., “ you’ins spent $4000 on a dog? Heck, if’n yall want, I’ll take her out behind the sleepin barn an vittle her up to the cayotes”
Hmm... What do you say to that? Ok, so I’m exaggerating... a bit.
After many, many prayers from us, our family and friends Molly is doing just fine. And if her leg never fully recovers from this than that’s ok, we are just happy to have her back home where she belongs. Some would say we are crazy for spending so much money on Molly, after all, “its just a dog”.
I tend to look at it a little differently.
Molly didn’t choose us, we chose her, and to me that carries a great responsibility.
It was God’s plan to bring Molly into our lives,
But it was our plan to make her family.
Bless you Molly, we love you very much.

Friday, August 28, 2009

ParANNOYia

I have been married almost a year now and I must say I never thought I would ever meet the right woman to spend the rest of my life with. But after many years and many heartless, diabolical, bloodsucking, broom wielding witches, I have. I never realized the weight that bore on my mind and soul thinking that I would go through life one failed relationship after another… never finding her. But no more. It seems people think that to have a successful marriage, you need to have everything in common… similar interests, similar loves, similar hates, similar hygiene... All of that is good, and probably somewhat important, but the one thing I have found that’s critical to a successful marriage, is to be best friends... If you are best friends, everything else will fall into place. I got lucky, because not only have I found a best friend, we also have so much in common… and the things that we don’t have in common we just make fun of.. Like her “crappy preference in movies” and my “crappy taste in music”... I don’t know one person that considers the movie “Moulin Rouge” a visionary masterpiece... But EVERYONE is a Slayer fan.. Am I right?
I truly love her.
There is a particular common opinion we share... One that I thought only existed in my sometimes scary brain and no one else’s… And that is, we both find most every person we meet, sit next to, or encounter at any time anywhere…… at minimum……..annoying… a lot of times brutally annoying… From the corpse at the Wal-Mart entrance to the booze jockey at the club and the happy family at the mall to the sack monkey at Kroger…and the tone deaf hag singing behind us in Church... All annoying. No one but our family is safe from this ParANNOYia. We don’t know why, we can’t explain it…. it just is... It’s nothing we verbalize other than to each other in the car on the way home... It’s nothing that consumes us, it’s just a funny personality flaw we share and can’t seem to suppress. My wife is an EMT which makes it hilarious... So if you happen to be lying torso deep through your car windshield and my wife is the first EMT to respond… don’t whine about the pain... or get any blood, piss or puke on her uniform... or start with that “tell my wife I love her” crap... she can save your life just fine without all the drama.
Speaking of singing behind us in Church, why do people raise there hands during the songs?
Are they airing out the pits?
Do they have a question?
The first time I saw Eudora Welty next to me "singing", raising her hands I thought she was starting a WAVE so I raised mine and yelled WOOAAHHH! But it wasn’t a WAVE. It’s bad enough we have to hear her gargle and hack through the songs… we then have to “say hello to some folks sitting around you”… and shake hands with them. I am germ-phobic so this is absolutely horrifying for me. We get there early so we can get a front row seat to lessen the number of people we have to come in contact with. I get overwhelmed when I have to shake hands with people both in front and in back of me. I envision the creepy crawly germs packing their stuff to migrate to my person… To ease my stress, my wife started bringing a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer with us to Church. After we shake hands with everyone I slowly sneak it out of my pocket, quietly dispense it, and carefully pass it to her, then she does the same and sneaks it back. Stealth-like... I am not sure if we are worried that someone might be offended that we are disinfecting after shaking their hands or if God might not appreciate that we think his children are dirty. Anyway, it’s helped my germ anxiety, and I thank her for that, but what’s with the hand sanitizer that has aloe, lanolin, Vitamin E and moisturizers… poofing little pink bubbles when you rub it in your hands… UGH!, COME ON!.. When I use hand sanitizer I want it to feel like the flesh is burning off of my bones…. I want it to feel like I just took a shotgun blast to the palms… all that other crap is just making the germs supple... I am going to create a hand sanitizer for men... “Chemical Warfare”. “Comes complete with a pack of wind resistant matches for convenient ignition”…

Yes, I did a lot of name calling in this post, but we aren’t really that way, it’s just me trying to be funny.
However,
my wife and I finding most everyone but the family annoying??
...We are most definitely that way.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

me

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Heywujashuvit


Our amusing version of a theme park is called 6 Flags Kentucky Kingdom.
Some genius in marketing came up with the idea to allow free admission and "front of the line" privileges for a day for any dinkus willing to eat a
3 inch...........
Yeah, sounds ok.
Madagascar...........
Please be a giant tootsie roll
Hissing................
OK, a hissing tootsie roll?
cockroach!
Um, ok.
Well thank you fear factor....That's just wrong, disgusting and foul. I refuse to eat anything that can survive a nuclear holocaust. If we could just get all the patrons to eat one....the "front of line privilege" concept would be screwed....but probably funny to watch. I am sure 100's of people will partake risking all self respect and dignity, but how bad could it be? They are fat free. Eh, just pretend your eating a White Castle.... With legs... and horns......the hissing, the spitting, putrid ooze filled....... Oh, wait it's exactly like eating a White Castle. Here is the funny part, like said, The challenge: Eat a live 3 inch Madagascar hissing cockroach and get free admission into KK with full line privileges. Some battle-hag from P.E.T.A. actually called Kentucky Kingdom and demanded the Marketing department be terminated and KK fined because this activity was cruel to the roach. Cruel to the roach. Cruel to the roach. That phrase is burning my brain! You have got to be kidding me! I guess I should turn my self in. As a kid I used to burn the shit out of anything crawling on the driveway with the sun and a magnifying glass. Hint: If you use a flashlight through the magnifying glass at night, bugs tend to stagger and smolder instead of just poofing into dust. If I was the husband of this woman I would fill my undies with concrete and jump off of a bridge. Ugh....If you are that desperate for something to do here's an assignment and a support group for you Ms. P.E.T.A. Find Cindy Sheehan assemble all the other jobless nutjobs in your circle of friends and discover S.H.U.V.I.T! Spinsters Having Ungodly Volumes of Inane Time.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

forgive and forget....


My Mom passed away a several years ago, and for the most part she had a miserable life. But she hid it well. It wasn’t until after she died that my sister and I realized just how unhappy she was. Unfortunately the last 12 years of her life, she spent living with what truly has to be the most disgusting, foul……looking for a word here.. Person, no. Human being…..definitely not. Spawn of Satan? There we go. She spent the last 12 years of her existence living with what I now know was the spawn of the devil. If his parents would have just named him Spawn O Satan, it would have made it much easier to identify his curse and maybe Mom wouldn’t have dated him. But his parents are Evil too, so too trick us all they named him Greg.
Mom was very settled, in that she didn’t like change. They had a house together and she didn’t make that much money, so I am sure she stayed with him for fear of not being able to make it on her own. I moved in with them 6 months before she died. 6 months that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I had just gone through a divorce, and could have easily bought my own place, but because she was sick, something told me to stay with mom. I now realize that if I had chosen differently, Mom's suffering would have been much worse.
She was drugged up on morphine most of the time to dull the pain she had in her leg. (She had cancer that damaged her nerves), so she never ate, she didn’t understand what she was watching on TV, she couldn’t understand what you were telling her, she was pretty much a walking vegetable. As sad as that is, the piece of shit she lived with couldn’t care less. And he is the point of this post.
I sort of let it go after Mom died, but my sister felt compelled to write about him, and in my opinion she was way too nice, so here we go. First let me give you the visual. 37 years old, 5 feet 7, pushing 300lbs, giant man-boobs, grey teeth, and a foul odor. Those however are his good points.
Eating with him was dumbfounding. He would eat with his mouth gaping open, and I don’t mean a smack here and there… mouth gaping! Half of what he shoved in came back out. You know the sound when you stir wet mashed potatoes. Double that, Add some gurgling and verps and that was the sound of him eating. The only thing civil about it was that he actually did use a knife and fork, as opposed to cramming food in with his fist, which I suspect he did when he ate alone. He had diabetes, (which I won't make fun of), and 100% of the time he was on schedule with his insulin shot. Which is great, but does no good when you eat an entire bag of candy before bed. Mom used to have to get up 2 or 3 times a week to go in and give him tablets to shock him out of seizures. Even when she could barely speak, she somehow knew when they were happening and would go on to help him. Once she got too sick to help him, he was on his own, I wasn’t about to go in and baby-sit that asshole. I told him once mom is too sick to help that it will be a cold day in hell before I get out of bed in the middle of the night to shove a half dollar size tablet down his throat. It would be one thing if he had a condition that he couldn’t help, but he brought the seizures upon himself by eating candy all night. Fucking dumbass!!!
You have no idea how many times I heard the waterbed shaking in his room for about 20 minutes then suddenly stop. Half the time I expected to go in and find him dead. But he was a trooper, so I never got that lucky. So why did he eat candy all night? He had a bad marijuana habit. He would get home from work, go into the basement smoke a joint, come back up for his feeding frenzy, go back downstairs and smoke some more. Come back up stairs and watch TV and eat for the rest of the evening. He could never keep a job for more then 6 months and once they fired him, he would find a way to sue them. Suing people was his way of making up for lack of income. Once he went into a seizure while driving and injured his thumb. He got at least 3 lawsuits out of that one injury that was his own fault in the first place. He sued the driver that he hit. Then a year later claimed he injured it on the job and sued the company, and then later in another car crash, sued again because the injury was re-aggravated. He was fired for reckless driving, insubordination, and I think once he was actually fired because his co-workers took him out to lunch and witnessed the horror of his eating like a starving cow. Ok, I made that one up.
He also had a temper that I now wish I would have purged by smashing his face in with a man-hole cover, but with Mom being sick I didn’t want to cause any trouble. And bashing his face in might be a little unsettling. He was absolutely the rudest, loudest, cry baby piece of shit on earth. Restaurants, movie theater, the mall, he simply had no idea what a complete fool he repeatedly made of himself in public. Unless I told him, which was quite often. But he didn’t seem to care. I won’t go into it, but his family wasn’t much better. Especially his mom. That bitch I am sure is most of the reason Greg was the way he is. My sister was in college at the time and at least 3 times a week Greg’s mom would tell me “your sister needs to drop out of school and come home to help with your mom!” I finally lost it and told her “I have everything under control; college is the single most important thing right now for her, so shut the fuck up and let it go!!!!!” Her husband looked at me as if to say, “Finally someone said it”. She never mentioned it again. And I was right. Ang came to visit plenty. She was with Mom when she could be. There was really nothing more she could have done.
For so many years after Mom died I held hatred in my heart for that man. Sometimes I was consumed with all the things I never said to him. Consumed with letting him get away with his boorish and disgraceful behavior one more time. But I am older know, and have learned to forgive him. (Thank you G). If I hold hatred in my heart then he just continues to win. And I am better than that, so Greg, all is forgiven. A lesson to all: Forgiveness can heal the heart. Of course it’s a little easier for me to forgive because, well... what comes around goes around. A few years ago, what came around was a massive heart attack killing him before his face hit the floor. What goes around is the fact that he is going straight to hell. If he doesn’t go….. Then we are all safe. Living well is the best revenge? I would never seek revenge. In this case just living is good enough for me.

Nothing....... is bad


What is the most important thing in life? There are many arguable answers…..Religion, Family, Love? These are all very important things and life certainly wouldn’t be the wonderful thing it is without them, but if they all went away tomorrow we would still have to find a way to be happy. In a perfect world we would have them all. But in this world happiness is what is most important to me.
Spend time cherishing your family. Spend time living your religion. Spend time loving the one your with. Whether you have all of these or none, always make time to find happiness, because without family, we are empty. Without religion, we are lost. Without love we are alone. But without happiness we are nothing.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Brokeback Mountain?


Why would any one want to see a gay cowboy love story? There are no gay cowboys, that’s just silly. You will never see a homosexual man ride a horse, jump off of it landing on a defenseless calf, flip it over, and hog tie it in 20 seconds. OK, there was one gay cowboy, but he was in the Village People, so he didn't really get dirty or have to hog tie anything. He just sang and pranced around in bare assed chaps... don't get me wrong... I have nothing against being gay...I just have a problem with cowboys. And where were the zombies? That would have made the movie worth seeing. Maybe next year they will make a movie about lesbian ballerinas.....it's just as believable...call it Plie' in the Bush......HA!