If I was a dinosaur, my scientific name would be itchyscratchosoreus. Let us just briefly (or perhaps not so briefly) review my current physical state, shall we?
sore forehead where a shovel handle fell and hit me - check
sore neck – check
sore shoulders – check
sore chest muscles – check
sore biceps, triceps, and forearms – check
sore hands, wrists and fingers - check
sore back – check
sore front - check
sore butt muscles – check
sore thigh and calf muscles – check
sore shinbone from when I fell down - check
sore ankles, feet and even toes – check
bruise on top of foot where I dropped a brick on it – check
swollen left hand where I slammed a big metal gate on it - *&%$, I mean “check”
blister on right thumb – check
2 bright red zits on the tip of my nose – check (thanks pro*metrium)
Add to that scratched up arms and legs, which are covered with a variety of bug and spider bites, a little bit of poison oak, and a nondescript rash and voila, you have ME in all my calamine-lotion-scented glory. Calamine lotion which, by the way, it not working at all. (I just looked at the bottle for an expiration date. February 2003. Perhaps that’s why.) I am itching so much I couldn’t sleep. That’s a lot of itching.
So my closest girlfriends and I have a little phrase that we use from time to time:
“Out of my head, out of my house.”
To be “in your head” basically means one of two things:
1. You are currently sad and blue and frustrated and generally unhappy about something you have absolutely no control over (infertility anyone?) but you spend vast amounts of time in your house thinking, fretting, and stewing about it and feeling worse by the moment.
2. You are currently sad and blue and frustrated and generally unhappy about something you DO have control over (being overweight, being in a bad relationship, hating your job, etc.) but are unwilling to do anything about so you spend vast amounts of time in your house thinking, fretting, and stewing about it and feeling worse by the moment.
Whatever the situation, whatever the problem, nothing good can come from being “in your head”. We’ve found that the quickest way to correct that is to get out of our houses. It helps to realize that there is a whole big bright world out there that has absolutely nothing to do with us or whatever it is that we're concerned about.
Thus, “out of my head, out of my house.” Except that in typical ME fashion I may have taken it a bit too far.
In an effort to stop thinking about IF and babies and lack of babies and thick uterine linings and pro*metrium cravings, I have become a landscaping demon. Since Monday, with some help from my husband, I have:
1. Made a flower bed lined with hundred-year-old bricks around the pecan tree in our backyard and around a rose bed beside our house.
2. Moved 20 azaleas from in front of our house out into a new bed where they will be happier.
3. Replaced said 20 azaleas with some sort of boxwood thingys and knockout roses (thus the scratched up arms).
4. Raked the leaves out of our front beds.
5. Removed the landscape timbers that lined the flower beds running entire length and around one side of our house. Replaced them with old bricks.
6. Spent the better part of two days walking and crawling through the old home site on the far side of my in-laws’ property gathering eleventy-thousand bricks to complete the above projects.
7. While gathering said eleventy-thousand bricks, happened to notice beautiful fieldstones that used to be a part of the old house and decided that life would not be complete unless we had a fieldstone walkway from our back patio to our smokehouse. Husband and I dig out and bring home 15-20 at great peril to our backs.
If I am able to fully stand upright, today will be a day of more bricking, mulch spreading, transplanting, and digging holes for fieldstones.
There will also probably be aching, some occasional moaning and/or groaning, copious amounts of itching and equally copious amounts of scratching.
Oh, and perhaps I should run to the pharmacy and see if they’ve actually produced any calamine lotion since 2001. Ya think?
