Faux Fall

Everything is still green, blooming and warm.  It's Florida Fall!!

I combat it by decorating with Fall items.  I bought some autumn colored fake leaves (yes, you read that correctly) to drape around my doors.  I put up a festive mum wreath on my front door with colors like orange and yellow and rust.  I put a pumpkin display out in front of my house.  I had to use fake pumpkins because if you use a live pumpkin, in less than a week you'll have pumpkin pie... or pumpkin soup.  The closest thing we get to autumn is a single tree in the neighboring yard.  The house has been in foreclosure for about four years and the lone tree goes through its firework display untouched.  Every year, staring around November... it begins to change color.  A veritable cornucopia of color happens as it does it's thing.  It's a wonder to watch... until the leaves begin to drop off.  The tree has leaves the size of shoe boxes and when they fall they all land in my back yard.  They actually drift against the fence where my dogs run and play and poop.  I have to go out a pick up these leaves because they hide the poop so once a week during our little faux Fall, I have to rake the leaves of the tree in the yard of an abandoned house.  Ah... suburbia.

Is your brain there even if you never saw it?

I had to get a brain scan the other day. That's right. A brain scan. Scary right? You know what's even scarier? The "idea" of having your brain scanned. I mean it is one of those organs that you really take for granted. You assume it's there and in some kind of working order, depending on how many mind erasers you drank the previous night. I was going along happily with that assumption and then one small minuscule event had me head first in an MRI machine (which loosely translates into ear splitting, mind numbing, eye bleeding machine) . This thing has more rhythm than a drumming circle. I tried to listen to the radio that they pipe to you via headphones but they really only piped static with small increments of really loud music that nearly makes you want to rip off said headphones and head for the door. I started counting the beats per rhythm section. It calmed me and made me think about something other than the magnetic vibes dancing around my cranial area. About 15 minutes into the fun I get this little internal message (via the headphones) that I would be getting a shot to enhance their viewing pleasure. I hate shots. Most normal people do. I hate shots even more when encased in a tomb like device that pounds and throbs and I feel very much like someone being abducted for alien experimentation. I get the shot. Ouch. Now I fill with some sort of dye so that my brain can be illuminated. Charming. I finally get out of the building in relatively one piece. As I change out of the XXL scrubs that they gave me to change into (after removing all metal items from my body) I realize that I left my bra on. Guess I showed them a thing or two. I am a rebellious... uh, rebel. About 15 minutes later I'm wandering the aisles of Albertsons trying to decide what to make for dinner. I look like everyone else in there who wanders zombie-like up and down the aisles in the quest for a perfect meal or reasonable facsimile. I don't look like someone who just got their brain scanned.

Two days later and I still haven't heard word on the results. This is profoundly disturbing for a person like me who can imagine all sorts of things if given adequate time. Do you know what an adequate amount of time is? A few hours. This was TWO DAYS AGO!!! I am freaking out. I have all sorts of ideas on why the doctor hasn't called me to give me the devastating news. I can't stand it anymore and I call his cell phone. Yeah, I have my doctor's cell phone. Long story. He sounds vaguely bored when he answers the phone. I tell him that I left him messages to call me with the results before I go off the deep end of my imagination. He sounds bored as he tells me his staff failed to give him my message. I asked him to finally tell me the results. I assume he has all the information at his elbow and just couldn't bring himself to call me. I am wrong. He barely remembers ordering the procedure and now that I dust off those memory cells he tells me he will check and call me back. He does. Several hours later. He can't find the results. Where did I have the test done?? Where?? The place you send me to... that's where?? I am still waiting to hear any news. One wonders why people don't trust the medical establishment. I trust my doctor but with too many patients and too little time, he really didn't worry about whether or not I had a brain and if said brain was doing something it wasn't suppose to be doing. Oh, here is the last component to this tale for the day... I got the scan because I have dizzy spells. Annoying and tip over strong dizzy spells. I roll over in the middle of the night and my mind keeps right on rolling. It's been two weeks and they won't stop so I dash off to the doctors and hence my fairy tale begins. I'll let you know if they find Dorothy and Toto wandering around tap dancing on my Labyrinth bone, panning for gold and other artifacts. Scan says??

American Idle

That's how I feel sometimes when I come home from work and putter around without a real goal in mind. I try to avoid the television but once I flip that switch on my brain goes into freeze frame and I find myself lost in whatever world that happens to appear in front of my eyes. Can you imagine how frightening that can be? If you land in some worldly cool place like in One Hundred Best Beaches you are golden. You find yourself sitting on some white sand in Kauai just chilling with the beautiful Hawaiian breezes around you. Life is good...right? But. What if you land in the middle of the island on LOST? No wait. I've never seen that show so I don't know what the hell would happen but it always looks like there is some major drama going on. That and sweat. And dirt. Lots of dirt. Everyones face is always soiled and streaky and they all look anguished so at the very least you have that. Sweaty dirty anguish. Maybe you land in the chronically mundane. The living room of some rerun show like Everyone Loves Raymond. The food is good but the yelling. You might as well stay on the island in LOST. I wouldn't mind spending a few rounds on Top Chef. The food is much better and there is still sweating and anguish. Maybe a pitstop on Project Runway so you can look "fierce" as you eat your gourmet grub. Maybe I should just shut the T.V. off. If only I could find the remote. Wait. What's this? My favorite Scrubs. It's the one with the seal named Betty. She has the best timing... my brain is melting!!!

Okay. I admit it. I love dogs.

It's not like in that movie either. You know, that movie MUST LOVE DOGS that is about this lovely girl, Diane Lane, I think, who would never have problems meeting a guy except in a movie. Apparently someone else runs an ad and tells her would-be suitors that they must LOVE dogs because she LOVES dogs, but there's the rub. She doesn't. Now to me that is the true flaw in this movie. She doesn't love dogs??? Are you kidding?? What kind of mutant is she? What's really wrong with her. Obviously she has some weird genetic defect that leaves her unable to experience true love - as it is the only kind of love a dog gives. Mutant. Freak. Social misfit. Anarchist. Bed Wetter.

Okay, so I do love dogs. Really love dogs. Okay so maybe I'm a little over the top about them. Well, not all of them. Mine in particular. I'm looking at one of mine right now. He's sleeping. He is very handsome. He's dreaming right now. He's kind of a big boy so he encompasses this whole chair that he is sleeping in right now. It's his daddy's chair only daddy never gets to sit in it anymore because the big boy is always in it nowadays. See? I just referred to my husband as my dog's daddy. As if I gave birth to a 145 lb. Great Dane. Ouch!! Nevertheless, he is adorable. He is my baby. I am... his mommy. I know. It's nauseating. I gotta go. I need to give him a hundred kisses. Right now!!

Saturday. Blah.

It's one of those defining moments. I'm sitting at the computer. I want to write something brilliant. All I can think about are those puffed cracker snacks that are sitting in the closet downstairs. Why do I always get hungry at times like this? Paul is relaxing with his favorite robe and his favorite dog. He's cramming in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern as much as one can cram when one is basically sleeping. Hoagie is resting his 20 lb. cranium on Paul's stomach so he is captive. This dog can make himself comfortable faster than any living creature I have known. He has the ability to lay some body part on me and totally trap me for hours. At night I've been known to move less than 2 inches at a time in any given direction because he has monopolized the rest of the bed between Paul and I and we are forced to the very edges of our Kingsdown mattress. Good thing it's oversized or I'd be sleeping off the edge... or on the floor. Not that he doesn't make us enormously happy mind you but those nights when he is having a dream it's like being on a ride at Universal. I am so used to being kicked and farted on during the night that I barely register just how wild things get. I wake up just long enough to log in the thought "Hoagie is dreaming again" and then I drift off. I don't know how. He must be dreaming of chasing badgers or something. The feet are going in four different directions. The lips are curling in an Elvis Presley like grimace. Occasionally there is boofing. Boofing is the non bark that happens during dream. It's the suedo-bark. It's the dream bark if you will. It's just another noctural noise that saturates my own dreamscape and wakes me up for the fourth time that night. I wonder why I have bags under my eyes.