Please don’t smash on me.

Damn, here I was all stoked up to write about the topics chosen for me by my readers, and then the circumstances of the past couple of days kept me from doing so.
Wednesday: Well, Wednesday I was kind of waiting around for you guys to choose some topics and let me know about them. So Wednesday doesn’t really count.
Thursday: Thursdays and Fridays are Rob’s day off, so when we woke up we were like “Today is a fun day!” and started watching the Trailer Park Boys. We have the first 4 seasons on DVD (season 5 starts Sunday, are we excited? Yes, we are) so we were all set to be watching a zillion hours of Bubbles and his kitties.
It must’ve been the kitties.
If there’s a malady anywhere in my family tree, I’ll inherit it. Seriously. My brother and sister? Both perfectly fine. Wait, my brother’s allergic to penicillin and my sister to sulfa drugs. I’m not allergic to any drugs… I’m allergic to everything else in the world, such as fur and feathers (so’s my mom), about every form of plant life there is, meat (meat?! that is so stupid). I have eczema (so did my mom’s mom). My hair loss comes from both sides of the family, apparently (my cousin on my mom’s side is a total baldie, like me, and apparently my father lost half the hair on his head when he was 15, but it all grew back by the end of the summer and it never fell out again). Asthma? Yeah, my dad’s dad had that. Blah blah blah. I’m not going to go on with a laundry list of my aches and pains because you’ve all probably had that from your grannies before .
Anyway, Eczema Arm ™ set in on Thursday afternoon, just as we were settling in to our Trailer Park Extravaganza. My left arm is always the first thing to react to any kind of allergen. I have no idea what I might have come in contact with but all of a sudden my arm broke out in gross hives and I put my steroid cream on it and it HURT LIKE FUCKING HELL (imagine cutting your hand in 85 places. Now imagine dipping your cut hand in Lysol). It hurt so badly that my entire body was shaking and Rob said I was as white as a ghost — so what could I do? I took two Benadryl, which is usually my last act of defense. 1) it works on the hives. That’s the main thing. But 2) it puts me right to sleep. For hours. So I don’t feel the Huge Immense Pain anymore.

So that’s where Thursday went — I slept for about 9 hours, woke up, did some knitting while watching TPB, then fell asleep again and woke up Friday at probably noon, still hung-over and weird-feeling from the Benadryl. What the heck is IN that stuff?

Friday: Rob spent lots of the day doing magical things to the computer and I hung around playing vidya games and running around with Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson. They are both fat little piggies, you know. We also went grocery shopping where Rob made the most Incredible Purchase of our Lifetime. Which he kept from me as a surprise, because he knew I’d have been like “We can’t afford that!” even though I’ve been desiring it forEVER and it was so on sale that it would have been stupid not to buy it. In fact it was so cheap that I’m not even gonna say how cheap it was (like, a dollar! Okay not a dollar but close to it) and just let people assume that we’re richie riches who can richly buy stuff like this for full price. Which we totally didn’t! Just because the plastic cover was ripped and the parka thing was a bit frayed which I can fix by like, just pulling that thread off, it was practically free! Okay! I’m way too excited about this! Uhm. And then we came home from grocery shopping and watched Blazing Saddles and ate supper and I don’t know what until 1 am (seriously can’t remember. And no, I’m not on drugs) and then I went to sleep. Oh wait, I was reading for awhile and I had a bath and uhm… I don’t know. Yeah.

So that’s that. Right now it’s about 6 am on Saturday morning. I woke up at 5 and couldn’t sleep anymore (yay 4 hours sleep! woo!) and I’ve been told to not just lay in bed if I can’t sleep, to get up and do stuff, and then if I feel sleepy to go back to bed. So that’s what I’m doing. Aren’t you glad? Yes I thought you would be.

And now, for all the lovely participants in my little reader-participation thing, well, here we go.

Sheri asked: Just heard Britney?Äôs ?Äúofficially?Äù preggo. Whatcha got?

Aw man, I got nothin’. Okay, I got lots, but then I worry about it being too mean, because she’s just a girl. Not yet a woman. It’s not NICE to say things about her and her fetus and her stuff! I mean it’s Her Prerogative to have a baby, right?
By the way, I often wonder who is listening to her music now. I doubt that moms are holding her up as a role model to their little girls anymore, and anyone older than 9 should be able to discern that she is just… not right. Shouldn’t they?
As for the preggo business, well, good luck to her. I mean, it’s not as though she and Kev will have absolutely zero experience between them in taking care of smaller people — Kevin does already have all these children after all (remember how they got married when his girlfriend– well I guess ex-girlfriend– was pregnant with their second child? I think that was classy) and Britney’s been taking care of her little dog-thing for like, a year. Right? She even dresses it! So it’s all gonna be great!
The best part of it all is when they made the announcement, they had to say they are expecting their first child together because of Kevvie’s other kids.
Upside? Maybe having the baby will stop her from like, singing, or something. Maybe?

FateWineRoses wanted me to do a bunch of stuff with a newspaper, but I couldn’t find any dice (I just realized that I could because we have a Monopoly game here, but we’ve just recycled all the newspapers so it wouldn’t work). Instead I will tell you about a dream I had the other night. Also? My dreams have been really weird lately. Like in one, I was disguised as Pamela Anderson so that I could be on the Surreal Life, only I was black. But no one noticed, and they all just thought I was Black Pamela Anderson, and that’s fine, except these two people who were trying to blackmail me, all “You’re not Black Pamela Anderson! You’re Louise in disguise!” so I offered them money and they left me alone. And then I had to steal one of the other Surreal Life peoples’ money to give to them (Sammy Davis, Jr. Except not dead. And he didn’t care that I stole his money because I told him I’d show him my boobs later. Which I totally didn’t, because I am cunning). And then Mary, Queen of Scots showed up. But I don’t remember much of what she was up to, aside from wearing a really fancy dress. Oh, and then, I was me again. Not Black Pamela Anderson. And I was taking my maid of honour shopping for material to make her dress with. And we had agreed on this dress and she said she liked it and I was glad, and then I went into another room and heard her complaining to the fabric store lady that she hated the dress but just wanted me to shut up so she said she liked it, and I got really mad and burst in and was like “Damn it all to hell! You’re supposed to TELL ME if you don’t like it, I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU WEAR!” and I threw the fabric at them and stormed out… except it was all muddy outside and I got stuck in the mud and my maid of honour had to come help me out of the mu-uhd so my fit of pique was wasted. Then I woke up.

Then came a couple of comments that are un-respondable-to because I have a suspicion that the posters didn’t really get the nature of the post or whatever. I will leave it at that.

Finally, my darlin’ Lee said: Spiders! Everyone has a story about spiders.

And he’s right, I do. In fact I have quite a few stories about spiders. None of them interesting, but hey, I can still tell them.

I have never, ever been afraid of spiders. Actually I’m not afraid of any bugs, really. It doesn’t mean I LOVE them, or want them crawling on my face when I’m sleeping, but I have no problem if they’re around. They’re part of nature. Whatever.
BUT. When I was in Kindergarten, I noticed that everytime there was a spider around, all the other little girls in the class would scream and freak out. I thought that was just something that five-year-old girls were supposed to do, and I had missed out on the memo. I didn’t realize it was because they were afraid of them, I just thought that you were supposed to scream and dance around when you saw a spider. Boy, was I embarrassed when I realized that I hadn’t been doing what the In Crowd does.
So from then on, whenever I saw a spider, I would scream and lurch around and be like “Spiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiideeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrr!!!!”, just like the other girls. Except for the fact that I kind of defeated the whole thing by PICKING UP the spiders and moving them to safer spots so that we wouldn’t accidentally crush them when we were doing the Spider Dance.
I wasn’t very popular in kindergarten.
Second story: When I was in university, one year two friends and I rented this huge house. The huge house was full of spiders. They were both afraid of the spiders and would always make me come and take them away. The next year we rented the complete opposite of the Huge House (which had four bedrooms, a living room, a den, two bathrooms, a huge kitchen and dining room– and cost us a mint to keep heated, even though the rent was only $500 a month between the three of us)– this tiny apartment in the back of a house, which had two bedrooms (E. and I had bunkbeds, S. had her own room the lucky lady), one bathroom, and a kitchen ‘nook’. But it was only $250 a month and the heat was cheap. Anyway, there were spiders there, too. So they would STILL have me come and take the spiders away. Even when they were in the bathroom– one day one of them (I won’t say who) was in the middle of showering when she started yelling “LOUISE LOUISE COME IN HERE” and I was like “WHAT? NO WAY!” because hey, no! but in the end I did end up going in there because there were all these crashing sounds and screaming and I thought there might be a Ninja Attack going on in there. So I got in and she was all crouched over at the end of the tub with her towel all over her so she looked like a towelly ghost and also she had the shower curtain sort of pulled over her head which was also interesting. “I can’t move. There’s a spider on the showerhead. Oh my God. Get it”. And I took it away and put it outside, where it probably crawled back into the apartment.

And finally? There was a child in my class last year who proudly announced to me that he had arachnophobia. Yep. “Madame, I’m arachnophobic”. Now this presented a problem because one of the books that we had to use last year was called ‘l’araign?©e’ (the spider). And it was full of pictures of spiders. And he was fine reading it, but then when someone else would read it? He would cry and be like “They’re reading that book! They’re trying to scare me!” and I didn’t know what to do– tell him to get over it, or be all sensitive because I know there are phobias out there but there were 29 other kids in the class and what did he expect me to do, pull another book out of my ass when we didn’t even have any budget for new books? I finally settled on calling his mom to see what she did about this stuff and she told me to just let it go and tell him that if he had a problem with other people reading the book then he should just not look at them.
And I kept the rest of my curriculum entirely spider-free.

Okay that’s all for now.