March 10

Thank God we changed the clocks! Another baby step in the right direction. Especially since I'm still not on anti depressants. I finally heard back from Dr. Rob today. He submitted the script incorrectly so I will now be picking up the correct medicine on Wednesday. By the time I get the damn things I'm not going to feel like I need them! I also noticed that he didn't bother to offer to reimburse me the copay for the incorrect pills. Wonder if I should hit him up when I see him a few weeks from now. As far as I'm concerned, he owes me. :-)

Okay, maybe I'm not so stupid for checking on my seedlings every day after all. Check it out!

My green onions have started to come up after only 5 days! Woo hoo! I'm on my way to having a garden this summer! I had to laugh as I got sealed into my glass coffin this morning. I was in the one on the left instead of the one on the right so I was right next to the dreary, gray windows. I was thinking that I am much like my little seeds that are germinating. If you're going to put me under glass, at least shine a little sun on me and keep me warm and moist so that I can grow flesh!

I can't wait for my appointment with Dr. M this Friday. I really want to know what's going on with my neck. Is it healing? Are the HBO treatments working? If not, should we do another skin graft? Dr. Rob was asking me how I would feel if there was nothing more to be done and I will simply have a hole in my neck for the rest of my life. I was NOT happy contemplating that. I sent off a note to Michelle today letting her know that as soon as there is progress in healing this damn hole then I'd like to meet with her again. I'm hoping Dr. M will check on the TEP this Friday too. I still haven't been using it. First it was being held in by a couple of stitches. Then it seemed like it wasn't sealing all the way around it. I want him to take a look at it and let me know where it stands. Meanwhile time is short. My insurance ends on 3/31. I'm likely going to pay for COBRA for a month or two to bridge me until I can get some help from The Marketplace (I think). Hopefully I'll know more about that whole mess after my meeting on Wednesday.

Speaking of the reams of red tape and paperwork that I'm currently wading through, the only real update I have is that I got the application for the Hartford Long Term Disability completed and mailed today. Phew. I was up past midnight working on it last night. Tonight I'll be spending a little time on the SS Disability paperwork before baby doll and I snuggle in and watch Mary Poppins. We just watched Saving Mr. Banks which was a very sad but very good movie. I had no idea there was a such a back story to Mary Poppins. So now I'm really interested in seeing the movie again (I'm pretty sure I own it) and baby doll has never seen it at all!

I canceled my subscription to the paper. I only want the Sunday paper but they make you subscribe to get weekends and holidays too. I decided I would just head over to the 7-11 on Sunday if I really felt the need for the paper. Which is what I did this past Sunday. And for the first time ever, I looked at the grocery store ads. I hate Tops but man, it sounded like they had some pretty sweet deals going on. So I spent some time last night, did some research, and started a spreadsheet of prices for the grocery items I most commonly purchase. I then stopped at Tops today. It turns out you DO need to be careful of their ads. They were offering Arm and Hammer laundry detergent, buy one get one free. Sounds like a good deal, right? Well, Wegman's sells the 50 oz container for $2.99, Tops sells it for $6.99. What the hell?? That's certainly not a deal! And then there was this big thing where if you bought a family pack of chicken breasts, there were (7) food items you could have for free. That deal was iffy. It turns out that Tops charges $3.99/lb for their breasts whereas Wegman's charges $1.99/lb. And you had to buy a 5# package to get the free items. The free items were valued at over $20 but then the question became, would you ever really use them? Some of them were a yes. Baby doll will drink the bottled water, and I'll use the BBQ sauce, but will we really eat 1/2# potato salad and an angel food cake? I don't know. I ended up getting the deal anyway because I really want to try Tops' chicken breasts. I'm told that as cheap as the ones are at Wegman's, they're also tasteless. So baby doll has a taste test coming at him some time this week to see if he can taste a difference in these breasts.

Speaking of taste tests, I gave him one tonight too. He mentioned a few months ago that he'd like me to make him some meat sauce and when I found a good recipe, he'd like me to teach him how to make it. So I had printed off 6-8 recipes a while back but never did anything with them. Now I have a free can of baked beans and a free 1/2# of potato salad to use up. What goes better with those than some hot dogs with meat sauce?? I made two different recipes. One was called Coney Island meat sauce and the other was called Garbage Plate meat sauce. They had some pretty radically different ingredients in them. He loved them both. So, they both go in the book, I'm ditching the other recipes I printed because two meat sauce recipes is enough for any cookbook. Now we just need to get invited to a cook out so that I can teach him how to make this stuff and he can bring it as a dish to pass.

I'm so glad my joy of cooking is back. That week or so of resenting cooking totally sucked. I am once again happy to be puttering around my kitchen. So much so that I recently rearranged everything in there and on Wednesday I have a rolling island kitchen cart being delivered. I never have enough prep space when I get on a roll with the cooking so I decided to remedy that. I had really wanted to go to a home show two weekends ago and have a contractor come look at taking out the wall between the kitchen and living room and building me a breakfast bar or work island instead. Now that I'm broke and jobless, I decided to scrap that idea for now and I splurged $160 on a piece of furniture that will hopefully take care of the need in the meantime. I've also been carefully evaluating all of my fun kitchen tools. A blender looks really cool on a counter whereas a wok takes up way too much room but in reality, I never use the blender whereas I use the wok every week. So I'm setting up my kitchen to accommodate the toys that I actually use and the rest are being stored downstairs in cabinets until needed.
 
BTW: I wanted to give a shout out to Aunt Helen. Your card made me feel so much better. Thank you for sharing that stuff with me.

So baby doll recently told me that he would never let me live on the street. He said if push came to shove, the two of us could move into his brother's basement which is where he was living before I came along. He has even said that if we break up and he suddenly finds out that I'm homeless that he will take me in and take care of me before letting anything happen to me. Seriously. Where did this man come from and what did I do to deserve him? 

I think that's about all the excitement over here. I hit the movie theater with J-man yesterday. We went to Webster with the reclining seats to see 300: Rise of an Empire. It was pretty good. Not as awesome as the first one of course. And those damn seats, there's like a 10 minute blank in the movie for me when a nap attacked me without warning. We hung out at my house afterwards and I fed him some paella that I had made the night before. It made me realize that I simply don't socialize as much as I used to and I need to fix that because I really enjoy it. So next week I'm luring Jamie over for dinner to help us celebrate the first day of spring. We're going to do up something yummy on the grill. And I think the week after that I might try another poker game. The fridge in the garage is starting to make some really wretched noises. I think it will be going to the curb once the snow melts. This means I need to empty it some though since it's chock full of beer. Hence, a poker game. I still need to find someone to lavish some attention on this week though. I need to adopt some more single peeps who like to be fed. I wonder if I could put an ad on Craig's List for that? HA!