Why Women Are Crabby

My sister sent me this:     Why Women are Crabby (amen to all of this!)    
    
    We started to "bud" in our blouses at 9 or 10 years old only to find that anything that came in contact with those tender, blooming buds hurt so bad it brought us to tears. So came the ridiculously uncomfortable training bra contraption that the boys in school would snap until we had callouses on our backs.    
    
    Next, we get our periods in our early to mid-teens (or sooner). Along with those budding boobs, we bloated, we cramped, we got the hormone crankies, had to wear little mattresses between our legs or insert tubular, packed cotton rods in places we didn't even know we had. 
        
    Our next little rite of passage (premarital or not) was having sex for the first time which was about as much fun as having a ramrod push your uterus through your nostrils (IF he did it right and didn't end up with his little cart before his horse), leaving us to wonder what all the fuss was about.    
        
    Then it was off to Motherhood where we learned to live on dry crackers and water for a few months so we didn't spend the entire day leaning over Brother John.  Of course, amazing creatures that we are (and we are), we learned to live with the growing little angels inside us steadily kicking our innards night and day making us wonder if we were preparing to have Rosemary's Baby.    
   
        Our once flat bellies looked like we swallowed a watermelon whole and we pee'd our pants every time we sneezed. When the big moment arrived, the dam in our blessed Nether Regions invariably burst right in the middle of the mall and we had to waddle, with our big cartoon feet, moaning in pain all the way to the ER.   
        
    Then it was huff and puff and beg to die while the OB says, "Please stop screaming, Mrs. Hearmeroar. Calm down and push. Just one more good push,"  (more like 10), warranting a strong, well-deserved impulse to punch the ***** (and hubby) square in the nose for making us cram a wiggling, mushroom-headed 7-10 lb bowling ball through a keyhole.   
     
    After that, it was time to raise those angels only to find that when all that "cute" wears off, the beautiful little darlings morphed into walking, jabbering, wet, gooey, snot-blowing, little poop machines.     
    
    Then come their teen years.  Need I say more?  
      
    When the kids are almost grown, we women hit our voracious sexual prime in our early 40's - while hubby had his somewhere around his 18th  birthday.   
     
    So we progress into the grand finale: "The Menopause," the Grandmother of all womanhood.  It's either take HRT and chance cancer in those now seasoned "buds" or the aforementioned Nether Regions, or sweat like a hog in Spring and Summer, wash your sheets and pillowcases daily and bite the head off anything that moves.    
    
    Now, you ask WHY women seem to be more spiteful than men when men get off so easy INCLUDING the icing on life's cake: Being  able to pee in the woods without soaking their socks...

   So, while I love being a woman, "Womanhood" would make the Great Gandhi a tad crabby.  Women are the "weaker sex?"  Yeah right.  Bite me.ut soaking tocks...
 

Sunday Ramblings

I have been pretty busy this week.  Our weather has finally become cool.  I actually used my furnace early Friday morning.  (Just because I wanted the chill taken off the air before the kids got up.)  I had the air on for a while today, though.  I'd love for it to stay like this for a few weeks.  I don't mind it getting cool, but I'm not looking forward to frigid temps, bone-chilling winds and cold rain or wet snow!  Uhggg!

I did my presentation on diversity during our staff meeting on Friday, and I think I did a pretty good job, especially considering I was getting a migraine.  I've had migraines since I was six years old.  My mother didn't know what they were called; she called them "sick headaches", since that's what her mother had called them.  I remember it distinctly.  I was watching tv with the family and my head started hurting suddenly and horribly, and my vision got blurry.  I told my mother and added that I felt sick at my stomach.  She immediately put me to bed in a dark room with a cool cloth on my head, and she gave me two aspirin (this was in 1972 before Tylenol had become well-known, if it even existed then, and before it was  known that it wasn't safe to give aspirin to children).  Then I can remember having to throw up.  I didn't start feeling better until the next day.

The second one I remember having was when I was eight.  I had gone to spend the night with one of my married sisters, P.J., and I was keeping her son and his cousin busy while she cleaned house and made dinner for a dinner party she was giving.  I was playing games with the boys when I felt it coming.  This time the headache and extreme nausea came at the same time and I had little jagged lights in my periferal (sp?) vision.  I told her and she said, "Oh no, you have migraines too!"  She gave me two Tylenol and put me to bed in a dark room.  I found out later that all my sisters and my brother had migraines, but that she had very severe ones where she'd have to go to the emergency room for a codeine shot whenever she felt one coming on.

The next one I remember having was when I was 11 or 12.  This is when the vision problems became really bad.  I would have the jagged bright lights inmy periferal vision, but then I'd have blind spots.  The lower half (on a diagonal) of whatever I was looking at directly would simply not be there.  I found out this was standard in my family.  My mom and siblings almost always had these blind spots.

Then I had one at 13, another bad one at 15, and then I started having a couple a year.  The last really, really bad one with the headache, stomach pain and blindness was when I was 21, about two weeks before my wedding.  That was the worst one I have ever had.  After that I starting having four or five a year, but I rarely, if ever, have nausea, and sometimes I don't even have the headache.  I just start feeling kind of woozy and out of sorts; it seems like I'm looking through a tunnel, and then I get the bright, jagged lights and/or the blind spot.

My doctor told me that was classic migraine.  Nothing that has ever been prescribed for me has ever worked any better than OTC stuff.  Usually if I can take an Excedrin Migraine as soon as I feel it coming on I can stop it or at least keep it from becoming severe.  For a few years I rarely had any, but for the past couple years they've become more frequent.  I guess as I get older my hormones are going screwy again.  But at least I rarely have the pain and nausea now, and when I do they're no where near as severe as they used to be.  I can handle the vision problems, as long as I'm not driving and can just stop whatever I'm doing and wait it out.

I guess that's enough about migraines!   

Can you say...PRO - CRA -- STI -- NAT -- ING?

Okay, so I'm wasting time.  I have the house to myself this evening and I really should be finishing up a diversity presentation I'm doing for a meeting at work tomorrow, but instead I'm wasting time here on the computer.  I thought I'd see what Google thinks of me, so here are a few things that I am.......

Lori is --

   Genetically incapable of artifice (that's nice)

   Jailed on charges of treason against Peru (???)

   Made with rolled oats, Rice Crispy cereal, dried fruits and nuts (the nuts part is right!)

   A singer/songwriter from the Bay Area (not!)

   A photographer who bends the line between truth and illusion (But I'm "incapable of artifice" remember)

Anyway, now what?  I really don't want to do the diversity thing right now.  I just have some finishing touches to put on it.  So I'm going to play some more.  It isn't every evening I have the house to myself in the middle of the week! 

Hello!?

Is everyone having trouble with their comments alerts?  I'm not getting alerted when someone leaves a comment.  I just went the rounds and commented in my favorite journals and now I'm wondering if the authors are getting alerted when they receive comments. 

A Lesson In Retaliation

The story a couple of entries back about my niece Evonne and the spider in her soup made me remember another family tale involving her.  When she was about five years old she was being watched one day by her aunt (my sister Dennice), who took Evonne with her to the laundromat in her apartment complex.  The laundromat was next to the apartment complex's playground and was built with windows along one wall looking out onto the playground.  So while Dee did her laundry she was able to keep an eye on Evonne and a little boy about the same age while they played.

Of course she couldn't keep her eyes on them 100% of the time.  She was emptying a dryer when Evonne came running in, calling loudly, "Aunt Dee Dee! Aunt Dee Dee!  You don't 'posed to pay back evil for evil, do you?"

"Huh?" Dennice gasped.

"You don't 'posed to pay back evil for evil, do you?"

Dennice gathered her scattering wits.  "Uh, no! No, of course not!"  She became aware of several pairs of curious eyes -- what does that little kid know about paying back evil for evil?-- and said decisively, "No, we aren't supposed to pay back evil for evil.  Why?  Who's trying to do that?"

"He is!"  Evonne turned and pointed an accusing finger at the little boy, shrinking behind her.  "I hit him and then he hit me back!"

Neverending Pears!

I spent most of the afternoon peeling pears!  Lots of pears!  Lots and lots of pears!

A few weeks ago Thomas and the kids picked several bushels of pears and then Thomas with a little help from Eler Beth peeled and prepared all of them and he now has several five gallon jugs of pear must, currently making wine.  He made pear wine last year and it was delicious!  Neither of us drinks much of anything alcoholic, so we ended up only keeping about four bottles of the wine.  We gave the rest away as gifts.  And as I said it was VERY good!  We also made preserves.

Well, then a friend told Thomas that his tree was just full of pears and to come help himself, so he and the kids picked them, and now we have sliced pears ready for making preserves!  I peeled and Thomas cored and sliced.  (I really gave my $1.00 vegetable peeler a work out!  I really love that thing!)  Of course a lot of the pears have been eaten as "pears", too.  They were really good this year!  Anyway, I'm glad to have them out of the way.  Now I'll be making and canning preserves.

I spent the first part of the day sleeping.  I was up most of the night coughing and nothing would help until I took some Thera-Flu early this morning.  That always makes me sleepy, especially when I haven't slept well anyway.  So peeling pears is about all I accomplished today. 

It is finally getting cooler here.  The rain we got yesterday and today helped make it feel even cooler than it actually was.  I'm not ready for it! 

My daughter brought home five As (one A+) and a B on her report card this week!!  I'm very proud!

Well, that's all I've got tonight!  It's late and I'm tired, so more later.

And that reminds me.........

Well, Sunday I redeemed myself by making homemade vegetable soup and cornbread, and as I sat down here to decide what I was going to write, the vegetable soup reminded me of a "soup" story.  This story was written down by the family "historian/scribe", my sister Barbara, years ago, and I'm sure she did a better job than I'm going to do, but I'll give it a shot -- because it's a cute story.

I was about 10 years old, and it was a cold, snowy, blustery day.  My nieces and nephew and I had been playing outside and were very happy to come in to my Mom's nice warm kitchen, smelling deliciously of her homemade vegetable soup.  We gathered around the kitchen table, bowls of soup in front of us, my mom and four of my sisters ladling soup into their own bowls, pouring cups of coffee and talking away.

Suddenly in the middle of their conversation, my three-year-old niece, Evonne, piped up with, "Pidah in my tsoup!"  The conversation continued, so she tried again, "Pidah in my tsoup!"

"What's she saying?"

"I don't know; sounds like she's saying there's a spider in her soup!"

"Well, there is!  There is a spider in her soup!"

No one knew how the spider came to be in her soup, but the soup was disposed of, a fresh bowl was given her, and talk turned inevitably to such topics as -- places in the earth where spiders might be eaten -- times of famine in which perhaps we might be happy to have spiders to eat, etc.  My seven-year-old nephew, Bill, always a picky eater anyway, stated, "Well, I  wouldn't eat it!"

My seven-year-old niece, Sheila, (definitely her mother's daughter!), tried a compromise.  "Well, if you cut its head off...."

Bill:  "I still wouldn't eat it!"

Sheila:  "Well, if you cut its legs off...."

Bill:  "I still wouldn't eat it!"

Sheila:  "Well, if you drained all the blood out!"

Bill:  "I STILL wouldn't eat it!"

At which point Sheila's mother, my sister Dennice, offered reassuringly, "That's okay, Sheila.  Sometimes no matter how you prepare something, the men won't eat it!"