Velma

Well, Sunday I woke up at 5:00 AM, screaming into my pillow because I'd tried to roll over in my sleep only to discover immeasurable pain.

Just another Sunday, right?

Um, NO.

So I took ibuprofen (the medicine that God and Andrew Dunlop gave us so that we could function as adults in an ever-changing world), and I went back to sleep.

Except that later, when I woke up again, the ibuprofen had only made my neck angrier, and I could not get up. Also I could not roll over. Also I could not reach anything, including the remote for my television, my book, my knitting, and my laptop. Since not having any form of entertainment made being stuck in bed boring as well as excruciating, I grabbed my cell phone (fortunately, I had forgotten to plug it in to charge the night before, so it was within reach), and I called home.

Did I mention I was home?

Yeah.

I heard the phone ring on the other side of the house, and I prayed silently that this was not one of those days when my mother decided picking up the phone was a bad idea (she does this). But it wasn't, and she answered.

"Mum?" I said.

"Yes? Laura?"

"Yes," I replied. "I am trapped here."

If this had been a Stephen King novel, that would have been a very creepy sentence. Also it would have been nighttime, the East coast, and probably Maine.

"What?" Mum asked.

"I cannot get out of my bed."

This is one of those shameful things you say as an adult, all the while remembering those advertisements with the old lady on the ground crying out, "Help! I've fallen, and I can't get up!" The lady we made fun of on the playground in elementary school. I am that person now, but younger and with better clothes.

Mom helped me up, but I regretted it instantly.

An hour later, I was in the ER, waiting.

The ER is boring. Also it takes up to three hours for them to call your name, even if it LOOKS empty inside the waiting room. This is because everyone has better things to do than go to the ER on a Sunday, including medical staff.

To my shock, Dad had responded to Mom's notification that I was heading to the ER by also going to the ER. And so there were three of us and I felt like a four year old with two worried parents, which was slightly awkward until Dad found Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark on the ER television set, and then it was like home but with uncomfortable chairs.

It is whiplash. Which means I have this sexy collar to wear.

 

It is offensive, but it is an orthopedic device, so what can you expect? It's better than the way I was holding my head before (balanced on my right shoulder), even if I do have to eat like a dinosaur now (meaning I reach my whole head and neck toward my food like a stegosaurus, causing The Brother to hum the Jurassic Park theme at me as I ate my dinner last night. Since I am me, I made dinosaur calls as I ate instead of getting angry and throwing things at him.

 But because I am a knitter, I instantly found a better way to wear the neck collar.



There is a reason why I knit all these little scarves.

I was feeling pretty good about the whole scarf/collar combo until my friend Melanie brought up that I kind of look like Velma. Which meant nothing to me until I Googled Velma, and lo and behold, I am one orange turtleneck away from solving crime with a cowardly dog and a VW van.

Velma from Scooby-Doo. No, I did not 

draw this. It is all Hanna-Barbera, folks.

I don't know whether to be ashamed of this or proud. Without intending to, I have clearly reached cartoon immortality. I know what my Halloween costume will be now, if I ever have need of one. I mean, some people live their whole lives without ever knowing who their cosplay double is, but now I know, all it would take is a costume change and I would be Velma from Scooby-Doo, only not in a gross way. (Don't ever Google pictures of Velma and you'll never know why the gross. No really, don't Google Velma pictures. Don't.)

They also gave me muscle relaxers and prescription ibuprofen and a SHOT. The shot made me feel cozy, which was necessary, because without it I would have torn that neck collar of in a minute flat, like I want to do now. Apparently, the shot made my hyper-sensitive fear of strangulation (the reason why I don't already own a Velma-style turtleneck) fade enough that I could be comfortable in the brace thing. But the shot has worn off now, and it is only fear of agony that is keeping the brace on.

I should be okay soon, or so they tell me. But two weeks ago, they told me I was "clinically insignificant." So we'll see.

Please Make the Hurting Stop

I am a broken, broken person.

I mean it. Parts of me are about to fall off, or wither away. I feel like I have been tumble-dried, or hurled down a flight of stairs, or, gee, I don't know...in a CAR ACCIDENT.

It's been almost two weeks since Bethany and I were bounced about like rag dolls. She still has her hands bound up in gauze as her burns heal, but I have nothing visibly wrong with me anymore.

Nothing VISIBLY wrong.

My back is killing me. It isn't really my neck, but a spot between my shoulder blades. After a while, it grows and encompasses my right shoulder and neck. And that is when I want to curl up in bed with my heating pad. Except that is not always smart.

I had nestled into bed like that earlier this week when I discovered at bedtime that I was unable to move. I had frozen there, like a turtle, my arms and legs the only mobile parts of me. My back had resigned its position as body-mover, and I was trapped there, waving my arms and legs, wishing it weren't so late and that I could call my family for help.

At around that same time, it occurred to me that our ancient heating pad might not actually have an auto-shut off feature. And if that was the case, I would slowly bake to death and die like that king Paul told me about who slowly roasted to death waiting for his servant to come help him, because he was too lazy to move his chair further from the fire. That was it. Laziness. Except in my case, I couldn't so much as unplug my heating pad, because I could not reach the cord.

I was trapped.

Clearly, I lived. But I could have died, and that is why we need a new heating pad.

This morning I tried the heating pad again, because I woke up feeling as if my head was connected to the rest of my body by a single, rusty hinge. I have spent my day attempting to remain as still as possible, not an easy feat with four classes coming through the library for activities. Meanwhile, I have taken ibuprofen, and I have taken Tylenol, and it has been as if the pills stared at me with their blank faces, laughing silently at me as they refuse to help.

Does anyone have a full-body cast they aren't using?

I keep telling myself to tough it out, because I'm from the Midwest, and we tough things out, but MAN does this hurt. And I have a really high pain tolerance. I know this because three different doctors told me so. Otherwise, I would have thought the opposite because I've always found pain pretty painful, generally speaking.

I want to be the kind of pioneer woman who plows things and then says, "Huh. This tooth hurts," gets the pliers, and does her own dentistry before going back outside to plow even more things.

I am not that sort of girl.

Instead, I'm resigning myself to the fact that I'll have to go back to the doctor to have him check me over again, just in case, so that I can maybe get that back brace I've never wanted, like Deenie from that Judy Blume novel of the same name.

In the meantime, whatever you do, don't hand me anything or give me things to do, because I can't hold anything or do anything. I'm lucky I'm standing right now. Wait. I'm sitting. You get the idea.

Instead, remember that I really want to be a fun, happy person, but pain has made me bitter and sarcastic. More bitter and sarcastic than normal. Remember Old Laura, and hope as I do that she will come back, with her fully functioning spinal column intact.

Dad's Withered, Aged Lungs

Sunday was Dad's birthday, so we vowed to take him out to celebrate on Monday, as none of us had to work that day, including him. He always works Sundays. It's a pastor thing.

I did an appalling amount of research and found a Chinese place that seemed promising, Wu's Fine Chinese, in Fort Wayne. We went. We ordered.

And the food was AMAZING. Not clumpy, corn-starchy grossness. No MSG, either. And rather than just listing negative things they DIDN'T do, everything was well-seasoned, cooked properly, and well presented. The wait staff was fantastic, too.

Dad was in heaven. He was eating everything, and then it happened. He sucked a chili pepper into his LUNGS.

The wait staff thought he was dying. Everyone came to make sure he was still alive, because his face had changed colors three times and the coughing still hadn't stopped. Finally, he fled the table to the restroom so he could cough without terrifying other diners.

A waiter came and asked us if we thought he should go check on Dad. I think he thought Dad had DIED.

When Dad came back, he finished sucking down his dinner and finished Paul's. He tried to explain to the waiter that he would have coughed that badly if he had choked on water, too. But no one believed him.

Best birthday dinner ever.

A Happy Interlude

In between almost dying (after the car accident and before I was almost run down by a speeding white pickup truck outside the library this morning), Rachael and I went on an excursion to Indianapolis to meet up with our friend Maureen and my coworker Juliann AND go to a book signing. We got to go meet YA author C.J. Redwine AND we got to see Rae Carson again and pick up their new books. New SIGNED books.

Because we are Knitters, this trip also involved two yarn store visits. Knit Spot in Indianapolis was our favorite. And yes, that is Habu.



And because we love food, our trip also involved a trip to a yummy sushi place in Kokomo. This is my bento box. I ate ONE PIECE of the sushi. I am proud of myself, because usually when I try to eat sushi, regardless of what it contains, I try to throw up the sticky rice the second it touches my tongue. I need rice to be drenched in sauce if I'm going to eat it, apparently.

AND a cheese shop. And a cupcake shop. We HAD to bring the authors cupcakes. It's what we DO.



And a pizza place.

And the Barnes and Noble Cafe.

Don't you judge us.

It was Juliann's FIRST book signing, and I am proud of insisting she leave college the second her last class of the week ended so she could come. I mean, why stay on campus when you can go to a book signing? That's ridiculous.

  



We had a blast, and my head didn't fall off, even with my car-accident neck issues, which are obvious if you look at the weird way I am holding my self. What is up with that hunched neck look? Not attractive, Laura.

While I was at the bookstore, I snatched up Rae Carson's The Bitter Kingdom, which I couldn't wait to get my hands on, and Defiance, which is the first in C.J. Redwine's trilogy. I also discovered that Jasper Fforde's Song of the Quarkbeast had finally been released in the states, so I fangirled a little bit, then bought it, too.

It's a really good thing I just went through my bookcase, because if I hadn't, I would have nowhere to put all the new books coming out this fall.

Christine Johnson stopped by, too (she took the group picture) and so did Mike Mullin. It was a YA Lit party. Basically, the most fun ever.

Still More Terrible Things

Because this is the best summer ever, I was in another car accident. ANOTHER.

This time, I wasn't driving, so Francis was spared. But it was super-freaky and much worse than the last accident. My friend Bethany was driving, and she ended up with second degree burns on her hands from the airbag. I ended up with bruised ribs, a messed-up neck (no whiplash, thank goodness), and a brokennotbroken finger that hurts like the dickens. Stupid finger.

We were heading to Fort Wayne for Indian food--which, by the way, I still haven't gotten--and a car pulled straight across the highway were were driving on. The people in front of us moved into the left lane to try and avoid the first car. They collided anyway. And then we hit the first car, because there was nowhere to go.

Bruised ribs suck. Also so does having your neck unable to support your head, and a finger that makes using my dominant hand impossible.

Here is Bethany's car.

   

And here is the car we hit. The side impact was us...the front impact was from the car in front of us, who didn't manage to miss them when they swerved.

   

Did I mention ouch? Because ouch. Luckily, everyone walked away. But really. Ouch. OUCH.

If the fates are listening, no more car accidents, okay? And if the Summer of Suck can be over now, all the better.

Epoxy! Epoxy on Both Your Houses!

I started this evening with bits of broken curtain rod and a container of epoxy.

I finished the evening with a partially-used container of epoxy and a broken curtain rod. And did I mention that the curtain rod is now disassembled, torn from the wall, and outside the house?

Apparently, when the bottle of epoxy says, "Do Not Inhale" it really means, "If you use this inside a dwelling, even one with no walls and barely a roof at all, it will dissolve your brain like an alka seltzer tablet in 30 seconds flat."

I tried to fix the curtain rod, but the epoxy could not seal without some kind of clamp or stabilizer, which wouldn't work with the construction of the curtain rod, so my hand had to be the clamp, and I have a tremor, so it wasn't all that stable. In the course of a few minutes, I had gone from a happy, hopeful person to a violently ill shadow of a girl.

And then I said, "This is ridiculous," so I ripped the whole curtain rod out of the wall, mostly with my bare hands because the screwdriver wasn't fast enough. Then I drug the whole assembly outdoors and chucked it into the garage, probably ruining it further.

Now I'm in bed with a migraine, and I might be dying. Was this worth saving money on a curtain rod? No.

Was this experience worth it, just for the Shakespearean home-improvement joke? Yes. Yes it was.

The Bookcase

The bookcase in my room has long been an eyesore, an object of shame and discomfort, a blight upon the decor of my living space.

When I was finishing junior high, Gran generously offered to buy me new, grown-up furniture, since I was basically living in a room designed for a five year-old, and I had limited resources to do anything about it myself, since my idea of transportation involved smiling politely at one of my parents in the vain hope that one of them would agree to drive me somewhere, or, alternately, riding my bicycle the several miles it takes to reach the nearest gas station in hope that they would have whatever I was looking for. But since the one-room gas station only stocked lottery tickets, powdered donuts, cigarettes, and the occasional inexplicable onion (Where did they come from? who bought gas station onions?), I was usually out of luck.

I picked out a glorious bedroom set, but it didn't come with a twin bed (as my room is too small to accommodate a larger mattress), and it didn't come with a bookcase. Mum and I didn't so much care about that, we resolved to replace the bookcase at some unspecified time and to find a twin bed that matched or blended with the new furniture.

The bed was eventually replaced with a metal sleigh bed contraption that was probably the worst-constructed piece of trash ever produced by whatever company J.C. Penny ordered it from. It had no support for the mattress aside from a single metal beam across the middle, which wasn't anywhere near enough support to hold even my slight junior-high school frame, leading to the box spring portion of my mattress bowing and, eventually, breaking.

Nothing makes a girl feel skinny like snapping the mattress she sleeps on. It was the sort of thing that gives lifelong shame and insecurities, like being asked if you're having a girl or a boy when you're not pregnant, like splitting your pants, like looking into a full-length mirror when you're dressing, like sitting down in a chair and having the chair give up the ghost in that very second, leaving you on the ground, littered with chair bits, wishing you didn't like food as much as you do, or that maybe you liked exercise a whole lot more.*

But, even though it was horrid and ill-constructed, the new bed stayed. And so did the plain, white, Sauder bookcase.

This bookcase, let's be honest, is crap. It was not designed to last the length of time it has lasted, and it was not designed to be used as hard as I use it. I think Sauder thought it would hold a couple books, maybe. For me, it holds hundreds of books, because each shelf has a front and a back row of books on it--that's right. I double-stack those babies. I have to. If I didn't, I'd have to buy two more giant tubs to fill with excess books and my closet doesn't have enough room for more than three--I know, I measured.

The back of the bookcase is composed of cardboard that was coated with a plastic/waterproof substance. The rest is made of laminate-covered particleboard. And yes, some of those shelves HAVE bowed from the weight of my books. And no, I don't have a problem. If I had a problem, I'd be like those brothers from Harlem who had a maze of newspaper in their apartment, eventually dying in the labyrinthine passages and remaining undiscovered even as the police began an investigation following their disappearance.

And the bookcase clashed with the entire room. If it had been merely painted white, I could have done something about it easily. But no. And according to everyone I talked to, you couldn't paint on that laminate stuff it was made with. I was out of luck. I also wasn't about to buy another bookcase made of fake wood. It would have to be, at the very least, GOOD LOOKING fake wood, and it would have to be the right color fake wood to make it match with the real wood in the rest of the room. Such a fake wood bookcase does not exist, so I lived with the white, even though the room is painted in a cream parchment paper color that clashes terribly with white.

But then I saw an episode of Oprah (whose show I watched quite a bit when I was in college, because boredom and only dial-up internet at home). and Nate was on, and he said you COULD paint laminate, but you had to prepare the surface properly using this special spray paint.

Which does not exist. Or, maybe it exists in the fancy home-decorator places he goes to in Chicago, but in Indiana, it does not exist.

And then Pinterest came, and I found a tutorial. This blogger details how she managed to make her shelves fit with her decor, which was exactly what I was going for, the hasn't-been-chewed-on-and-then-spat-out-again look.

I had a bit of vacation time last week, so I spent the time going to Lowes, buying primer, grabbing paint chips, choosing a color, priming, painting, and applying a clear topcoat to the bookcase.It took ages, it killed my back, which at this point is made mostly of bone dust and held together by string or maybe by the clothes I'm wearing, but it was so worth it.

Since I suck completely at chronicling projects I do, here is a random, highly-unflattering picture I found of myself modeling a tee-shirt in front of the bookcase before.


See that yellow/cream wall and the white shelf? And the freaky-exhausted-looking girl who doesn't know where to put her arms while taking a picture of herself using her camera's automatic timer? That was what we wanted to change.

The color I chose was Mustang, which was a dark brown with just a hint of purple to it. I know that sounds bizarre, but it actually matches the quilt on my bed and the

And, well, let's face it, I have a lot of books. Clearly, when the picture on the left was taken, I had just removed many books...because I have space on the shelf behind me.

Because this is what was on that shelf when I pulled out all the books.


If you take a closer look, you'll see that there are also VHS tapes and CDs in that pile--those weren't actually on the bookshelf but in the tiny space between the shelf and the wall. They now have a new home, along with the DVDs I had crammed on the bookshelf, in storage under my bed. I would have liked to do this for under-the-bed storage, but my bed is so horrid, it won't allow me to have anything this wide.

However, Sterilite makes these great boxes with wheels that will roll under your bed and out again easily, no matter how many seasons of The X-Files you cram inside them. And they just so happen to fit between the bizarre leg/post things my bed has.


And here is the bookcase after my ministrations.

You will note that it does not clash with the wall behind it, the drapes, or the carpet. You will also note that there is SPACE for more books, even if a few of the shelves are stacked double. You may also notice that, in moving the bookcase prior to painting, I knocked two leaves off the hook that holds back the drapes. So when I go home today, that's getting put back together using jewelry cement, like the leaves on the curtain rod were when I knocked those off.

Apparently, I suck at making my room nice and keeping it nice for more than 30 seconds at a time.

The bookcase could look better, sure. It was my first furniture project, and next time, I think I'll tear the furniture as far apart as possible--for this project I just took out what shelves were removable. And I'll stick to a roller for everything, instead of using a brush. It turns out, I hate brush marks like a sickness, and I couldn't really sand the primer as vigorously as I wanted to, for fear of removing chunks of primer and leaving exposed laminate.

That being said, I'm thrilled with the results. For once, it looks like my bedroom wasn't thrown together by a drunk monkey on a budget, and I am a happy girl.

If you want to try out the tutorial I used, you can find it here. In looking over it a second time, I noticed she does recommend using a roller for the primer, so I suck at reading and following directions, no surprise to the many elementary school teachers who scribbled that in the margins of my worksheets. In the meantime, I'll be working on another home improvement project, so more on that later. Here I am buying supplies...

We can thank Rachael for immortalizing this moment for us. It was like holding a cloud.
















* One of those things has not happened to me. The rest have happened. Some of them more than once.