I'm really not always rude.

Lest anyone who was  kind enough to leave a comment think I was being rude by not replying to the comments they left, I have no fucking clue why my replies to your comments didn't do show up.

In spite of blogging off and on since 2003 and being on the internet for 20+ years now, there's some things I still haven't figured out yet or I figure it out and then the format/user friendliness changes and I'm back to square one in my technical illiteracy.

So, I apologize for my technical failure and I do hope you come back to visit on occasion.

Yesterday, I washed my hair with a teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in twelve ounces of water and then I rinsed it with two tablespoons of white vinegar diluted in two cups of water (this acidic rinse restores the pH balance of my scalp and is necessary after the alkalinity of the baking sda), so I'm having a damn fine fucking hair day today.  I had a good hair day yesterday after my hair dried.  My hair has body, is fabulously shiny and smells clean and is halfway down my back.  And no, I have no damage from using the baking soda as a wash because I only use it maybe once a month.  This is what I attribute my hair to going back to normal growing after a year of chemo.  Six months after I had finished chemo, my hair was still not growing and I hated it because all it did was stick out.

After researching hair care products, methods, and whatever else I could find, I decided on not using conventional hair care products.  After all, if my hair messed up, all I had to do was shave it again and start over.  Believe it or not, there have been people who did not A--believe I shaved my own head when my hair started falling out from the first (over)dose of chemo and B--wouldn't believe if I messed up my hair by these unconventional hair care methods that I would, in fact, shave my head again.  (Obviously they have no fucking clue about me because when I got diagnosed, I went and got my nose pierced and they won't believe I want ink done, which  I still don't have ink to cover the fugly scars on my chest because of taking a blood thinner right now.  Or they don't believe at my age, I can and do walk around with my gray streak of hair colored purple.)  Just because you wouldn't think of doing something unique doesn't mean I don't think and act upon doing something unique.

Just saying.

I'm rearranging my blog here and putting together a page from it for the Bunker Punk links and one for breast cancer related links since my links to other sites in the sidebar is rather long.

And speaking of links, like I said, I've been on the internet 20+ years now.  I know how the reciprocation thing works.  If I'm linking to someone and they actually communicate with me about it and say they will link to me in return and then don't, well, I'm going to ditch that link, especially if the person is claiming to want to help other people.  Shouldn't resources like that be shared, rather than kept one sided?  Wtf?  If I can hunt down and find links to helpful stuff for other people who have had their lives wrecked by breast cancer, it would be pretty shitty of me not to share, even if I don't always agree with the stuff that's been posted 110% of the time on those sites, I'll still share them because what may not click with my brain may be very helpful for someone else.

I was reading about blog content on a blog.  It was "write what you know" and I had to kind of laugh at that.  Really?  What do I know?  What makes me uniquely qualified to blog when there's eleventy one gajillion other blogs out there?  I suppose my perspective does.  After all, there's only one me.

After 15,600+ loads of laundry, the thought occurred to me that I had a way to solve some of my laundry issues, namely the clean laundry camping out on the couch because the teenage monkeys don't want to pull their stuff out of it and then take it to their rooms to put away.

Be envious of me.  I have solved my own problem.  (Oh, if only I could solve my other stupid problems like having twenty five pounds of fugly steroid weight, no boobs, and the ever present dilemma of when to dust.)

Football Monkey's laundry will be done as a load.  No more sorting.  It will be washed, dried, and put on his bed for him to deal with.  

College Monkey's laundry will be done as a load.  No more sorting.  It will be washed, dried, and put on his bed for him to deal with.

The husband's laundry and mine will be washed, dried, and then put on our bed for me to wrangle into submission, folded, hung, ironed, etc.  

Is that a plan, or what?  I feel like this genius plan, which I came up with and haven't ever incorporated into my laundry doings over 25+ years of marriage will work and should be rewarded with barn time. 

Oh wait, I was planning on barn time this afternoon, anyway.  Woot.  Now, I wonder if I can research the pH balance of horses and figure out a really nice mane and tail care regimen for them.

Blog Tour

Here are your questions.

What is your most prized possession?

It's not a possession.  It's the fact that my husband has put up with me for twenty five years.  (Miraculous, isn't it?)

How do you unwind after a long day?

I don't.  I never completely shut down.

What is one song that has followed you throughout your whole life?

It hasn't been around that long, but probably I'm Still Alive by Meatloaf the singer, not the food.

If you could give one piece of advice to new bloggers in your field, what would it be?

A spell checker can be your new, instant BFF.

Now that you're famous, we need a quote from you.

That's all there is, there isn't anymore.

Seriously, coffee.  That's the answer to life.  Coffee.

Because vaginas and penii, the plural of penises!

Because we're all adults at the Bunker group, on occasion, adult words happen.  It's amusing.

I decided to turn that into a blog post because that's just how I am.

I also participate in a hair group that's (obviously) hair-centric and it's about alternative hair care methods, which was what got my hair back to normal after the year of legalized torture/abuse of chemo.

On occasion, discussion turns to more personal things of the crunchy/healthier variety, such as diva cup use, etc.

Naturally, there's always a prude wanking about how that's off topic, do such things REALLY have to be/need to be discussed and when that happens, myself, along with a few other ladies, immediately go into immature mode and start spelling out words of the adult variety, such as vagina.

"Give me a V!"

"A!"

"G!"

"I-N-A!"

"What's that spell?  VAGINA, vagina, VAGINA!"

So one time, I started spelling out vajazzling vaginas just to be a pain in the ass to the prig brigade.  After all, we all have bodies and some people have legitimate questions about stuff they don't know about or want to know more about, for example, diva cups.  Why get bent out of shape about that?

The prig brigade are usually the same kind of people who get bent out of shape about my brutal honesty about the cancer industry and what it does to people like me.  They want to hide behind the pink ribbon shit and glitter.  I'm a realist (And spiteful and rebellious, as if you haven't figured that out yet.) and I'm here to put the vile realities and scars of breast cancer in the faces of people like the prig brigade because I'm a bitch that way.

Now it's time to give equal time to the penis.  I have decided that penii is the plural of penis because it's more fun to type than penises.  

Did I make you laugh?

Tidying up.

Saturday and yesterday, we watched season one of Marco Polo from Netflix.  It was great, stunning costuming and hair, beautiful scenery, good plot without being complicated.  Would I watch it again?  Definitely.

Yesterday, I also spent time with one eyeball on an ancient email account and I worked on going through the stuff which was stored on it.  Now I feel old.

I've also been cleaning today.  The master bedroom and bathroom are clean.  This includes cleaning the husband's desk and shelves, sorting through the tons of paperwork piled there, which yet further includes dental, medical, and pharmacy related papers like EOBs, miscellaneous stuff, and yes, it all got sorted according to what it was and by year.  It's all in neat little file folders.  I also spent nearly two hours shredding things which needed to be shredded.  The thought occurred to me that if I called this the start of spring cleaning, at this rate, I might be done with spring cleaning by the time the school year is over with in May.

During the above activities, the Smooky Boy Cat supervised.  He pounced on papers, attacked shreds that escaped from the paper shredder, and flopped on the papers to hold them down to keep me from shredding them, I guess.

I discovered it helps to have the fucking vacuum cleaner on the correct setting for carpet.  Evidently, one of the monkeys decided to monkey around with the settings on the vacuum cleaner and not put those back the way they found them, which means any vacuuming that's been done for however long has not been done in an efficient manner.

An envelope attacked me and gave me a paper cut on the wrong hand.  (With lymphedema issues, even a hangnail or paper cut can cause serious problems.  So now I have to be a basket case about my finger for the next several days.)

At least I was able to put my hair in a fabulous sock bun before that happened, so hello fabulous sock bun hair.  It truly has that Tinkerbell look when it's done like this and looks awesome.  I will never achieve the perfect princess bun thing that Streak is able to achieve with her hair because her hair is four feet long, but mine is definitely better than it was and probably  halfway down my back now.  Definitely able to do multiple bun things now, even if the ends need to be trimmed.

I want to do barn time tomorrow morning, but I'm thinking mornings are not all that great for me right now, so I'm thinking maybe I'll ask if I can shoot for going over in the early afternoons.  Hopefully, that will be okay with them.

So I'm old and intolerant.

Thanks to Streak, I've developed an appreciation for taking 3mg of melatonin at night.  It helps with the sleep thing so much, except when I can feel the coiled wire in my neck from where the aneurysm was repaired back in October.  Yes, I can feel it.  I don't know if that's normal or not, I just know I can feel it when I lay down at night and I'm still.  It feels strange and once I even felt it shift or move in my neck, but that was within the first few days it was in there.  Of course my brain had to go into spaz mode about it.  Fun thoughts like what if it twists and the end starts poking out of my neck.  Would I bleed to death before I woke up?  Would my husband wake up before I was done bleeding to death out of a hole poked in my neck by the wire put in it to fix the aneurysm?  Why does my brain even think about these things?  Is it because I stared Death in the face for an entire year and I'm still alive, somehow?

(Streak, if you're out there, you need a blog so I can link to it on the side.  You could call it Streak's Corner and it would be awesome sauce!)

Speaking of, if there ever was a song that was fitting as part of a soundtrack to my life, that would be I'm Still Alive by Meatloaf, especially after being poisoned by chemo for an entire year.  That is my anthem.  Yes, I'll be pretentious enough to say that.

Yes, I say poison because that's what chemo is.  It's poison.  Don't believe me?  Look it up.  No, I won't change my mind about that because facts are facts.  It is poison and I will be outspoken about it.

I suppose with any new readers coming in, they will notice they can leave comments, but said comments will be moderated.  Any comments I decide are on the ridiculous side will be quoted from, picked apart, and treated as entertainment, especially comments like "You're mean!" and "You're evil!"  I will be very amused and generally not give a fuck that someone wasted enough time to tell me I'm mean and evil, just so you know, because haters gonna hate and Idgaf if they do.  Or I could just already say I'm a SOB; sassy old bitch.

Moving on to other things besides being mean and evil, I changed the wash for the hair to liquid drained off garbanzo beans with a diluted white vinegar rinse.  We'll see if my hair likes that wash, so far it made it super soft to where I couldn't do much of anything with it. Loading it down with silicone and paraben laden products seemed to make it unmotivated to grow more and faster, so alternative hair care methods have definitely done it a favor. After all, I may be steroid fat and shaped like a pear because I have no breasts, but by damn, I will have decent hair.

And I will have clean laundry, be it from my own laundry soap I make or the rocking awesome Foca laundry soap.

The coffee grinder we have had for a million years, okay, well, maybe not a million, it's just been the one and only coffee grinder we've had finally bit the dust and I had to go get a new one.  That was an interesting experience, let me tell you.  How complicated can coffee grinding be?  I mean there was like eleventy one of them to choose from and they all did multiple of fifty thousand things.  Wtf?

Upcoming celebratory number on Pinterest.  When that happens, I'll announce it on here just because I know you people have inquiring minds and want to know about this sort of thing.

Moving on, I got barn time in.  A couple of the horses looked like they'd thrown mud pies at each other's manes.  I guess I'll be picking dried mud out of their manes for the next three months, but that's okay.  I don't mind because horses are amazing creatures.  I love horses the way a horse-a-holic loves that horse fix because horses, fuck yeah!  

Some people I wind up encountering and/or dealing with on an occasional basis, I just have to fucking wonder about and wonder where Darwin is with his Award for them.
And some people are just fucking interesting as hell.  I accidentally found a blog post by Melissa Gilbert, yes, THAT one.  She called it A Tale of Two Titties and I think it's fucking awesome she shared.  Some of you may read it and say it's TMI and Idgaf if you do.  This stuff needs to be spoken about.  (For those of you interested, check out this awesome photography project, What is a Perfect Woman? and The SCAR Project because I'm a bad ass who figured out how to embed links.)

As I began reading, and continued to read, what I discovered was that I was agreeing with much of what she said, especially about body and self-image stuff.  I was pleasantly surprised she'd breastfed her babies, and amazed to see she has many of the same issues that any other of us females have to contend with.  The relevance to my blog in conjunction with her blog post is that she's having her implants removed.  Breast related, correlationally (I just made a new word, woot!) speaking, it's chest related surgery.

Melissa, if you're out there and tracking your stats on your blog and you see traffic from my blog to yours, you are probably wondering "What the fucking fuck?" to utilize your fun phrase.  Best of luck to you if you ever see this and I hope you recover well and quickly.  (I wore Holly Hobby dresses when I was a kid because they were vintage looking before the vintage look was cool.)

It's time to tackle the four loads of clean laundry piled on the couch because I am an Angrivated Laundry Faerie Housewife Minion.  (See what I did there?  That was clever of me.)

To quote Johan;  Toot, toot.

(No, you're not going to get that unless you're a big fan of coffee.)

Taking charge. Yes, it's possible.

People, it appears as though I have acquired some readers out there in varying corners of the world.  To those of you who have a deli which you go shop at on occasion, I am here to encourage you to take charge.

For years, except the year I got sick and was out of commission as a wife and mom doing wife and mom things, I have, so many times it's not even funny, had people purchase what I was purchasing at a deli because that's what I was purchasing.  This has happened more times than I can count and the most recent experience with this was Saturday evening.

This is hard core absolute truth I'm speaking, or rather, typing, here.

Don't fear the deli, embrace the yummy-ness of all the potential it can hold with all the tasty goods on display there.

Here's how this goes.

Deli Employee:  Hi, what can I get for you?

Me:  A pound of this, a pound of that, and a pound of that cheese.

Deli Employee:  How would you like that sliced?

Me:  Well, I'm going to do XYZ, with this, so I need it shaved, and the other is for Monkey Lunch, so please slice that as ABC and the cheese at a 1.5, thanks.

Person who has walked up and heard my request:  I'll take the same thing she's ordered!  I didn't know what I was going to get, but now I do!  I'm so glad I overheard this!

Me:  Glad I could be helpful.

Other Deli Employee:  All right, then.  I'll get to work on that.

People, seriously, take charge of your deli selections!  It's not that difficult, even with picky eaters.

Look at what the deli has.  Beef, chicken, ham, turkey.  That's one per week for each week of the month.  Choosing a cheese and some bread to match isn't that complicated.  Cheese preferences are as individual as, well, cheese itself.  As for bread, let's take a look at that for a moment, shall we?  Beef, a nice sourdough anything.  Chicken or turkey, any sort of honey wheat would nice.  Ham, a sourdough or country type bread would go well with that.  Of course there's always any sort of multi-grain breads would be tasty, too.  I like rye bread, pumpernickel, and ancient grains types of breads, so I'd choose any of those for myself.  Unfortunately, the menfolk don't, so we get slightly more conventional breads and wrappy things.  One can skip on the overall  healthy content of the bread as far as being super vigilant about the carbs on it because of the other healthy things one can do with the contents of said sandwiches and/or wrappy things.

And that, readers, concludes my commentary about taking charge of your deli shopping.

Acceptance and tolerance? Not me.

I don't have either one and I have no plants of acquiring either one regarding myself.

Why, you ask.  Because I have not developed acceptance nor tolerance of myself after having had an unexplained cancer diagnosis a few years ago and I never will, and in my brain, acceptance/tolerance means I lose and cancer wins.

As simplistic as that may seem to most people, some people just do not fucking get it and I don't know why.

It used to piss me off beyond belief when people would talk about "fighting" cancer.  

What the ever loving fuck all is there to fight, exactly?  You can't fucking fight something you have no control over, you can't see it, you can't put on boxing gloves and beat the hell out of it.  Let someone try to her my family or myself and I can try to hurt them to put a stop to it.  Let a stupid disease try to, and well, see what I'm getting at here?  I have no control over that.

Sometimes, trying to "fight" something makes it worse.  So doesn't it stand to reason that being more bendy and trying to go along with whatever rather than "fighting" it make more sense?  Wouldn't that be better for someone's mental and emotional state?

Logic would dictate that saying "This is what's going on, it's beyond my control, beyond my fixing, so I will just try to manage." is the best way to cope with something.  I wish someone had said that sort of thing to me when I wad diagnosed.

Instead, I got stuck with stupid doctors telling me I should be drugged and in therapy like I had done something wrong when I hadn't, which is NOT the way to deal with some patients, namely a patient like me.  Perhaps patients should be told that talking with someone could be helpful and that there will be tons of stress because of the lack of control over the diagnosis and all the fucking hell that follows.  

No, I didn't go through the torture and abuse of cancer drugged and in therapy.  Why should I have had to be drugged and in therapy for what was being done to me?  I shouldn't have.  Yes, I'm mean about it, no, I don't give a fuck about that since I'm mean and evil and yes, I'm aware that my logic about this is rather warped, but there you have it. 

My warped logic says no acceptance and no tolerance for myself because that means cancer wins.

As for other people, it's not my business unless they ask.  Then I share my warped, skewed, and fucked up perspective about whatever, be it the vile cancer industry, what's done to people like me, being exposed to legalized torture and abuse, why the fuck all I wouldn't want reconstructive surgery even if it was an option but it's not because of what the surgeon did to me, and whatever else topics come up for discussion.

Because I'm helpful, evil, and mean that way.  Just saying.