An oldie, but goody

Other than Stuart getting new glasses and me getting the worst allergy attack of all time, life hasn't been too exciting recently.  In order to keep you all reading, I'm copying a popular story from my old medical blog about our adventures with an elliptical repair man.  Hope you enjoy, and hopefully there are more exciting moments soon to come.


Stuart bought an elliptical. It is super awesome, except for the fact that it doesn’t work. After spending a few hours putting it together we spent a few more hours taking it apart to find that one teeny green wire had snapped in half. I don’t know if we did it or if it came like that, but we called the repairman nonetheless.

So, being the good fiancé that I am, I offered to study here at Stu’s house today so I could let in the repairman who was to be arriving at 8am sharp. At 9 there was a knock at the door. I answered to find a tall man in black denim jeans and a black collared shirt with rose-colored glasses on. I let him in and then he said, “Um, my wife is with me. I hope that’s ok.” As he turned to gesture towards his car I noticed the reason for the tinted glasses: two lazy eyes. I invited the wife in as I wondered how one could take apart machinery and do wiring with two lazy eyes.

A few minutes later his wife appeared at the door. She looked like she hadn’t brushed her hair in a week and introduced herself with unmistakable slurred speech. Yes friends, she was drunk. I am alone at Stu’s condo with a lazy eyed repairman and his drunken wife.

I explained the problem to the repairman and told him I was pretty sure there was a faulty wire. I even pointed out the location where the wire was to save him some time. He got to work and I came into the living room to find wifey flopped on the couch, playing with Mardi and calling her “Titty Tat”. I offered her the television or a book, which she refused. I sat away my board studying materials and we started chatting. I found out her youngest son was graduating from high school tonight. That, somehow, led to her telling me her entire life history. Sometimes it was hard to make out a few of the slurred words, and sometimes the sentences were out of order. I will abbreviate the story for you below. And no, I am not making any of this up. Names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

When “Jane” was 18, she moved out of her parent’s house because she could never get along with them anyway. She moved in with two of her good friends, who just so happened to be sisters. What do you know but a few months later she was married to their father, a man who I could only imagine to be at least 20 years her elder. They were married for 12 years and “it wasn’t too bad”. They had two sons, and after a while her hubs started getting a little too friendly with a girl from work. And this wasn’t just any girl. She was ugly. And she had a glass eye too. So Jane got suspicious and drove to glass eye girl’s apartment one night to find the blinds open and her husband standing there with no shirt on and his pants unzipped. Needless to say, they got a divorce, and her ex-husband and the girl with the glass eye were married 4 days later.

Then after the divorce, Jane went out partying for a while. She had fun being single, and then married someone else for a year. That was the “worst mistake of her life”.

By this time, her two sons grew up. The oldest son, we’ll call him Jim, got a job and became friends with a “real far out girl” that he worked with. They hung out some and then one night decided to go out to a bar together. They both woke up in bed together the next morning (surprised, anyone?) and then fell in love. They bought wedding bands and called each other ‘wife and husband’ but never actually got around to getting married. Who needs papers, anyway? They had a baby soon. Jane never fully believed it was her son’s baby. Everyone knew that Jim’s wife cheated on him a lot, but strangely only with black men. The son was white but Jane was still suspicious. After the baby was born, Jim’s wife went kooky, packed up a diaper bag, and boarded a 3 day bus to Colorado with the baby. This led Jane and her new husband (lazy eyed repair man) on a wild goose chase to gain custody of their grandson. It never worked because the judge never wanted to hear their case. After a few years the wife broke off her and Jim’s fake marriage and they never heard from her again. Now Jim is married to a new lady and in the army. He and his wife have a new baby named Tobias McDonald (real name there). He is in Iraq and just got a new tattoo on his side of a naked lady. His wife drew it for him. He showed it to Jane on Skype.

Well, back to Jane now. Here’s how she wound up with husband number three (repair man). Let’s call him Jake. Jane was trying to get back on her feet after the 2nd divorce and losing her job. Jake’s mom, who she apparently knew, suggested that Jane move in with Jake. Just for a week, just to see how it worked. So she moved in. It “wasn’t too bad”, they fell in love, and 3 months later they were married and living in his trailer with their 4 dogs and 3 miniature ponies (I assume those live outside).

Now, while her husband was in the next room with our new elliptical machine, Jane proceeds to tell me about their marriage. It’s pretty good. She really wants to kill him sometimes. He makes her wash his clothes and fix his lunch. Why doesn’t he ever do anything for her? He likes her hair long, she likes it short. She doesn’t like it that he controls her life so much. Sometimes she really regrets getting married again at all. Sometimes she wants to just be free so she can move away somewhere else.

After TWO AND A HALF HOURS OF THIS (interspersed with 3 bathroom breaks, a tour of the house, comments about my tomato plant, etc), Jake comes back in the room. He has discovered that there was a faulty green wire. In the exact spot that I showed him. He’ll have to come back next Friday to fix it.

Don’t you just love learning people’s stories? =) This is why I always talk to people on planes … in the hopes that I get to hear something like this!

Weekend(s) Update

We officially have internet at home now!  Which means I can probably blog (and study) a bit more consistently!  A lot of exciting stuff has gone on the past few weekends and I've been waiting to blog about it until I could use the internet, so here goes:

8/28 - Gettin' our groove on!
Stuart decided to celebrate my birthday via tickets to see Train and Need to Breathe.  The concert was at The Wharf in Orange Beach, AL.  It's an outside amphitheater in the middle of a swamp/wetland sort of thing.  Pretty awesome setting if you ask me.  Unfortunately it provides no protection from rain... and rain it did.  There were no downpours; just one of those constant light mists that leaves your clothes soaked.  But it was worth it because the concert was outstanding!  Need to Breathe opened up for Train, which was pretty exciting considering they are a Christian band.  It was actually a bit ironic seeing everyone around us dance and sing along to Christian music whilst guzzling their Bud Lights.  All in all, Stuart and I had a great time jamming out to some good tunes!

 Here we are in our cute (and Auburn colored I might add ...) ponchos.  You may also note from the picture that I now have bangs!  Of course here the humidity caused them to not be in their finest form

 

Here's Need to Breathe!  The guy on the left played a banjo for a few songs, and any band with a banjo is a good band in my book!  Regardless of if they all wear skinny jeans.  

As an aside, I wonder what the next generation will say when they look back on pictures of their parents in skinny jeans.  I must admit I gave in and purchased a pair.  Surprisingly they are one of the most comfortable pair of pants I own.  But when men wear them and they are tight enough so that you can make out the dents in their knee caps, something may be wrong.

 And now, the main event!  The lead singer for Train is either ADHD or on crack.  It could go either way.  He is more energetic than some kids I have seen in the clinic who are on double doses of Ritalin!  This was a particularly cute moment of the concert where he got lots of little gals up on stage and called them "Trainettes" and let them sing the songs.  Good times.

9/4 - Go Dawgs!
Football season begins!  I think everyone knows that I am an Auburn Woman through and through, but have now married into a Mississippi State family.  Fortunately, the MSU family is just as nice and pleasingly filled with Southern Charm as the Auburn family.  I feel right at home there with Stuart and all the Saulters clan.  I must admit, however, that I don't yet own a cowbell (they hurt my ears!), nor does my cheering come quite from the heart.  I'm sure I'll get there one day.  But I still miss seeing that eagle fly!

 At our tailgate with the Grenada fam!

Uncle Stu and Aunt Kacie with Sal, Brian, and Vera Kate!  This was her very first football outing and I think she enjoyed the game very much!  

It's very convenient that Brian works for Hilton and gets awesomely cheap hotel rooms we can all stay in for the game.  However, it is not awesome to have 6 adults, 1 baby, and a large dog in that hotel room together.  To keep it short, Stu and I slept on a partially inflated air mattress that was half propped up against the wall and got about an hour total sleep.  But it was worth it!  


After all the football excitement we drove to Gadsden for church with the fam, followed by lunch with my extended family at the best Mexican restaurant in the world, Villa Fiesta.  We also got to visit with my bestie, Megan and her husband, Daryl.  Good stuff!


9/11 - We sold all our stuff.  
Have you ever seen the movie Borat?  If you haven't, I wouldn't recommend it.  It's pretty terrible.  However there is this one scene that I love where Borat, a foreigner in the USA for the first time, goes to a yard sale and thinks that anyone leaving their possessions on the front lawn must be a gypsy.  And the more I think about it, yard sales are a pretty ludicrous thing to do.  You gather all the junk that you don't want/like anymore, lay it all out in your yard, and hope someone will think it is nice and come pay you for it.


My yard sale experience goes way back to my childhood when my Aunt Charlotte and I went on yard sale excursions quite regularly.  We would scour the papers for the ones that sounded the best, leave at 6am in her old jalopy, and not shower so that people would feel sorry for us and give us better prices!  I had many a success buying things I didn't really need that way.


Anyway, our yard sale included all our leftover stuff from the move, some of Stuart's old decor, and various and sundry items from Aunt Alexa and Uncle Phillip.  Oh yeah, we also put out all our living room furniture.

This is what Memaw's lawn looked like when we got finished.  We wound up selling about $120, which isn't too shabby considering only 2 groups of people stopped by!  One family took all our kitchen stuff, and another cute little man in suspenders took all the furniture.  We were pretty excited about that until we came home and realized that we had no furniture left but a coffee table.

Stuart is now getting a better football-watching experience since he has to sit in a stadium seat!



That's all for catching up ... next weekend is going to be filled with decorating and furniture-acquiring!

A pain in the neck

I realize this isn't my medical blog and you may not not want to read about medical things. However I have 2 hours to kill before my calm shift starts in the childrens ER and am bored out of my mind.

Anyway today I was walking to my noon lecture when I realized my neck was hurting. Also while walking I kept clumsily bumping into my white coat with the swing of my arms. I passed a window and discovered with horror that my white coat was making me look like I have a lot of "junk in my trunk". As I tend to collect things in all those pockets, I decided to empty it out when I had a few moments. Here is what I found:

3 pens
16oz water bottle
Articles on gestational diabetes, HIV treatment for infants, and neonatal sepsis protocol
My beeper, which has yet to be used
Chapstick
A disposable toothbrush
Car keys
Stethoscope
Pen light
A small textbook
Vaccination guidelines
An article on what to do If a baby vomits green stuff
Eye chart
A half eaten kashi bar
A banana

No wonder I was in pain.