Wanted: One clone for immediate hire, full time, great benefits ...

Here we go again, kiddies.

I have officially re-entered school, and my new term starts, well ... today. The class officially opens Wednesday, but it's up and I can access it, the syllabus, discussion board, etc., all today. Which, of course, I will - despite my grumblings at having to be all grown-up and responsible-ish again. I was rather enjoying the evening- and weekends-time off. 'Specially now that I've got kittens to play with (they're so distracting!)

So - big sigh - it's back to the grindstone. Not that this is really anything new: even though I was off of school for a few terms, I was still busting butt moving and cleaning and organizing and now taking care of Matt.

Matt just finally had surgery on his left shoulder last Friday, to fix the tear in the rotator cuff he suffered from having a 30-40 lb grate fall on him from overhead while working down in the pit at the car wash and lube shop where he works. The doctor had scheduled a room for three hours, and wasn't sure exactly what he'd find but didn't expect it to take that long.

It took four hours.

The doc took plenty of photos while he was cutting and sewing and grinding and stitching, and told Matt he needed to show them to the worker's comp people, his boss, and the horrid phyisical therapy chiropractor (who is the boss' friend, who denied Matt pain killers for two months) so they can see for themselves that Matt was not "milking" the paid time off, and that there really was something very very wrong with his shoulder. I want to be there when he shows his boss, who - when Matt told him he'd be needing surgery for it - had the gall to say to Matt that he couldn't believe a "glancing blow like that could do that much damage."

I want to be there when he shows the boss' chiropractor buddy who treated him like shit - even flat out ignoring him and walking away at one point while Matt was asking about what he could do at home to ease the pain - just why the physical therapy wasn't working, why Matt was in his office several times a week, why he legitimately needed painkillers stronger than over-the-counter Tylenol.

Matt is in incredible pain, and has only the use of his right arm at the moment, needing help with all sorts of things. While I'm more than willing and happy to help, I wokr full time, and will now be doing school work in the evenings, leaving him mostly to fend for himself. He's getting better at doing things one-handed, but he can't do it all, and there are times when his pain is so bad that what he could do while he Vicodin is fresh he can't do till he takes more again, and I have to help out more. This will certainly not be an insurmountable issue, I just worry about either not being able to help him when he needs it or not being able to devote enough time to school work. Or both.

While he's first in my heart, school is first in practicality so that we can get the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible. This makes for conflicting interests, and I worry that I won't be there when he needs me, or when my class group needs me, or that the kittens' needs will be ignored, or the fishes, or Harry's.

Or mine.

This break from school hasn't been a vacation - it's been a life saver. We are now even further understaffed at work, so that while I can take a day or maybe even two off here and there, every now and then, I can't take a real, full one- or two-week vacation, and I really realy need that. I need a real break away from everything that's going on in my life right now. I need to get away from work, from school, from cleaning the house (or ignoring it and hating the mess), from Matt's entirely understandable grumpiness that has worn me down anyway after so long and made me feel like shit from his words and my reasonable but maybe selfish reaction to them, from bills and and shopping - and yes, even from the kittens. Cute as they are, funny and sweet and snorglable as they are, they're a handfull, too, and I need a break from running after them, stopping them from chewing on wires, keeping them away from the stove, locking them into the kitchen and dining room area at night (all night now, too, not just from 9:30 to 12:30) to play themselves into exhaustion away from us while we try to sleep.

I need to run away from the world for a week or so, and I cannot do it. I am unable (and with Matt on disability, I can't afford to anyway) to take the time off work. I cannot leave Matt alone right now because he's hurt and one-armed at the moment and bored and loney to the point of depression. I am starting school again, and so am handcuffed to the world by my computer. I have kittens to train and take care of and keep off of Matt's bad arm (they jumped onto and then launched themselves off of it yesterday while he was sleeping, the little shits). I have dishes to wash (Matt can't right now) and meals to make (he can't do that either). I have laundry to do and a cat-box to clean, a fish tank to clean, a lizard water-dish to clean, and somewhere in all of that I need to keep me clean too.

I've decided that, like going to the bathroom and sometimes eating, showers are a horrible waste of time. I mean, you're just going to get dirty again anyway, right? There are so many other things I could do and need to be doing in that half-hour period of time where I'm locked away from the world in the shower.

And I've been tryng to fit walking every morning into all of it. I haven't walked for a few days now, what with Matt's surgery, and probably won't again until he's doing considerably better than he is now. He's not been sleeping well (too much stress, now too much pain) so I don't want to risk waking him when he's finally zonked out in the morning, and because of taking care of him and being paranoid about accidentally bumping his bad arm in the night, I haven't been sleeping well the last couple days either. I hope to be walking again within a few weeks, but we'll see how things go.

I feel a little overwhelmed right now. Hence the lack of posts lately, despite my having a bunch of great kitten photos and even a few videos to post, along with just some things I've wanted to blog about. For instance - we've got some pretty weird people in El Dorado County. As I'm sure I've mentioned in previous posts, I type up legal documents for publication in our newspaper at work. One of the things I get to type up is name changes, which are usually pretty boring; just adoptions and marriages and "I hate my parents so I'm coming up with my very own name which is nothing at all like the one that my parents - who I hate, remember? - gave me, which I will probably regret in, oh, say five years. Maybe even two."

Bo-ring.

There is an apparently very non-boring man in El Dorado County who is legally and officially changing his name to Flesh Moy Plezure.

No, really. He apparently has three different last names he has used in the course of his life, and has also used the longer as well as the shortened version of his first name, and so listed out every single version of his real name he's ever gone by, and changed them all to Flesh Moy Plezure. I have to wonder if he's a porn star, or simply a fat, balding, socially inept, mid-thirties gamer/computer geek still living in his parents' basement who either lost a bet or serisouly thinks it's cool to change one's real-life name to relfect one's World of Warcraft screenname.

I need a break from El Dorado County, too.

A vacation is simply not going to happen anytime soon - maybe not even at all this year - so I have to look forward to the occasional day or two I can manage to snag here and there. Right now I'm looking forward to the Sunday before my birthday I'll have off because I'll be out of town that weekend and one of Matt's friends' wedding, and the Tuesday two days later I'll have off so long as nothing comes up, which is my birthday.

Before that I get next Monday (Memorial Day) off, and I suppose that's great too, except that a) Matt will not be feeling up to getting out anywhere, and b) damn-near everyone else has that day off too, so even if he were just fine I don't want to deal with the traffic and the whiny kids and rude parents who will be flooding the area. So it's really not much to look forward to other than being able to sleep in.

So all this is to say, basically, pardon my recent absence and bear with me. I probably won't be feeling too terribly chatty for a little while yet.