Karen Chatters » things i don’t understand

Possessed by the non-sleeping devil

Karen — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:00:24 +0000

Courtney’s historically been a good sleeper. We put her down in her crib, she rolls around for a while and falls asleep. We’ve been very consistent with the bedtime routine – bath, books, some snuggling and down to bed. Paul’s done the bath gig from day 1 and he’s a rock star at it. But something has happened over the past week, I don’t know what it is but my beautiful child is possessed by the devil.

Paul does the bath, books and snuggling and he puts her down for the night. And then she SCREAMS. Bloody murder. BLOODY MURDER. She throws her pacifiers on the floor, her stuffed animals across the room, stands up and SCREAMS. Part of our problem is that she can’t sleep without the pacifiers. She has one in her mouth and one in each hand. But, she has all that when we put her down so we have to go in at some point and give it back. But this is totally out of hand. She screams for a while, we go in there and give her all her things back, she screams more, we go back after a while and then eventually I go in and hold her for a while. She immediately throws her arms around me and pats my back, as though I’m the one who’s been screaming my head off for an hour or so.

I don’t know what to do though. She’s SCREAMING. I’m almost certain that if we don’t go in there to give her her things back, she’s not going to stop screaming. Ever. What do I do? What’s going on? What’s with the screaming? We’ve changed nothing about the routine. She’s going down around 8, maybe 20 minutes later than she was at one point but still not late. We’re at a loss. Someone help me.

Monday is not for me

Karen — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:00:42 +0000

I’m pretty sure nothing good has ever happened on a Monday. Well, Paul was born on a Monday but other than that, NOTHING good has come from a Monday. Ever. In the history of the world. Yet, we still have Monday’s. It’s the first day after an enjoyable weekend and no one wants to get up to go to school or work. You have to get up earlier than you’d like, you have to deal with people you may or may not like, you may have to be “on.” I dunno, Monday’s seem unnecessary to me.

Especially now. Yesterday was a day of epic fail and disaster. If you follow me on Twitter, you already know about my day. It started like this:

I woke up at 3:10 to pee (shocker) and never fell back to sleep. This is not how a week should start. Ever.

Why doesn’t she ever sleep in on a Saturday or Sunday? Or when I’m sleeping?

The birthday card I was writing, which is going to be late, even though I’ve had it for 2 weeks, was spared from my exploding pen but my hand wasn’t.

As for the poop in the pool. Oh my GAWD!! We were at swim lessons and I’m changing Courtney when we’re done and SURPRISE! Poop in the swim diaper (and we don’t use the disposable kind). (Oh, and for the record, the disposable swim diapers do NOT contain poop.) All I can say is thank goodness she was wearing a one piece suit because if she were wearing this other suit she owns, it would NOT have been contained. But I had to be all, “Uh, Deb? Courtney pooped in the pool” while 2 other moms and their kids were there and one of the kids was in the pool. And then what do you do with the “stuff?” I had to ask one of the ladies for wipes and then I used all of hers and all of mine and there was just poop everywhere. So gross.

I thought I deserved a nap, seeing as how I was up at 3:15. I had the worst dream. Awful. Terrible. It was so realistic. Someone broke in and killed both Courtney and I. My heart was beating in my throat for a good 30 minutes and I was completely freaked out.

Who needs all this shit to start the week? Not me. I say we just get rid of Mondays all together. Who needs them? We could go to a three day weekend or just eliminate the day all together and have a 6 day week. I mean, what happens on Monday’s that’s any good? I’m thinking nothing. How do we get rid of a day? There has to be a committee we can go to that’s in charge of these things. Who’s with me? Monday’s, gone.

Pedaling for a purpose

Karen — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:25:25 +0000

I’m going to try and keep this short but I make no promises…

In the early-mid 80’s, I was in junior high. I was concerned about boys, being smarter than my parents and generally being a rotten, pain in the ass child. At that time, AIDS was born. It was a gay mans thing. It was a thing for people to be ashamed of. It was a brand on a group of people that other people didn’t understand or accept. It was terrible and horrible and no one understood it. I’m pretty sure that I was not really paying attention to what was going on because I was self-centered, in the 7th or 8th grade, and was more concerned with my budding boobs. I do remember that it was all over the news and you couldn’t escape hearing about it, the horrors of it all.

As time went by, we all learned that it wasn’t just a gay man’s disease but a disease that impacts everyone and anyone. But for a long time, none of us knew anything about it or how you got it or where it came from. All we all knew was that it would eventually kill you in a long and horrible way. And people were really afraid, especially of those that had it.

Fast forward to 2001 and I participated in my first ever AIDS vaccine ride. I didn’t do it because I knew anyone with HIV or AIDS or anyone who had died from it, I did it because I wanted to ride my bike across Montana (which is weird since I didn’t own a bike). It seemed like a fun thing to do. The following year I signed up for another ride, this time in Europe. Months before the ride I received an email about a fundraiser taking place in Atlanta, hosted by a group of people that were also going to Europe. I emailed them to see if they’d allow me to train with them and much to my surprise, they asked me to join their team. It turns out that the team consisted of 17 people and while I didn’t know any of these people, I grew to love them and felt like they were family and a group of life long friends.

The ride in Europe kind of sucked. Not because Europe isn’t beautiful and wonderful and full of croissants but because it rained for 6 1/2 of the 7 days that we were there. A cold and wet and miserable rain that totally sucked.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

The organizer of the ride returned a pathetic portion of the money raised to the beneficiaries and as a team, we were pretty pissed. So we decided that as a group, we could do better. When we returned we formed a 501c3 called Action Cycling Atlanta that puts on and organizes a 2 day, 200 mile bike ride from Atlanta to Athens and back – the Action Cycling 200 (now called the AIDS Vaccine 200). The first year of the ride I think we had 17 riders and raised $35,000 and this year the ride had 138 riders and raised $184,000. A HUGE and ridiculously major accomplishment. The BEST thing about this event – over all 8 years the organizers have returned 100% of ALL the money raised to the Emory Vaccine Center, almost $750,000.

What’s so amazing, and maddening, to me is that after all these years, there’s no cure. There’s no way to stop the spread and no way to eliminate it. Sure HAART (the cocktail) is wonderful and people can live for years and years with it but HAART can have horrible side effects, it doesn’t work for everyone, or it can stop working, among many other things. We can preach all we want about safe sex and monogamy but someone is still diagnosed with HIV every 9 minutes. It takes longer to boil an egg.

There are very few vaccines that have made it into trial and I think only one that’s made it to human trials. Vaccines are crazy expensive to create and then get into trials. Depending on the trial, the drug, and so many other factors, one vaccine can cost between $10,000-35,000 per person to test. That money has to come from somewhere and it’s events like these that help to make this possible.

I know there are a lot of diseases out there, all of them worthy of support and donations and a cure. I wish I could say that I’m still that self-centered young lady that didn’t know anyone with HIV. I wish I could say that they have the vaccine needed, or the magical pill, that has made them all better. But there isn’t. And until there is, I’m going to have to continue to volunteer and raise money and walk and help support those that can make this terrible and awful disease be a footnote in the history books.

Things I don’t understand

Karen — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:30:11 +0000

If you’re in the left lane, and I’m riding on your ass, and people are passing you on the right, why are you still in the left lane?
Related: Why don’t people use their review mirrors to see I’m riding their ass?
Why my hair looks so much better one day than the next
How Courtney can eat something and love it one day and hate it the next?
Why carbs are bad for you or how is it if I eat a bagel, it immediately goes to my hips
How one minute I sort of have to pee and the next minute I’m on the verge of peeing in my pants
Why people care what Tiger did. Is anyone really surprised?
How do you cut a toddlers nails?
Where does all the dog hair come from and why isn’t the dog bald?
Why do people insist on leaving their grocery cart in the middle of the aisle?
How my memory got so bad
How the bed we bought 14 months ago sucks so bad and why we didn’t return it within the first week
Just because you disagree with someones political beliefs doesn’t mean that they are a bad person. Why can’t some people separate the two?
Why did Weeds jump the shark and why is it still on? And why am I still watching it?
Why is it that the really great pictures I take seem to be out of focus?
How is it I could go almost 30 years and not like chocolate and now I can’t get enough?
Why don’t they redo the pollen scale? How is it that if >120 PPM of pollen is considered extremely high, we can have a pollen count of almost 6000?
If I have a 2:00 appointment for the doctor, why don’t I get seen until 3:00 and then it only takes 30 seconds.
Why do some of these things even surprise me anymore?

The dumbest post ever or How retailers suck

Karen — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:30:51 +0000

Our house was built in 1980, which wasn’t that long ago but apparently home craftsmanship in 1980 was kind of crappy. I shouldn’t say that, maybe it’s OUR house or the people that have been there over the years and the things that they did to the house. But, there are days when I feel like our house is going to fall over.

Our latest household project is for new windows. We don’t want to replace all the windows, just 8 of them. They’re crappy. In some ways, the windows may as well not even be there. They let the cold air in and let the cold air out, depending on the season. I’m quite sure if we replaced these 8 windows, our bills would go down and I could stop wearing layers and layers and layers in the winter.

So, I’ve been getting pricing on windows.

The first company I called wanted to know what my husbands name was. I told her it wasn’t relevant. She said, “when can we come when he’ll be there?” I said she couldn’t come when he was here, I just want some pricing. “Well ma’am, are you allowed to order windows without him?” Um, excuse me? I said, “I don’t need my husbands PERMISSION to order windows.” “Uh, o-o-ok.”

We had a guy come out on Saturday afternoon from a MAJOR company that everyone in the world has probably heard of. He was a talker. About nothing. It took him a while to get going on his spiel. I didn’t really care about him or his kids or his car or where he was from, I wanted to know how much the windows were going to cost and when they could install them. He talked and talked and talked and THEN had to go out and get his laptop so he could show us some lame ass presentation on the history of this HUGE and well known company. Again, I don’t care. And there wasn’t a word in there about the WINDOWS. He then said that he had to go to his car and get the windows to show us. I told him I didn’t want to see the window, just tell me what they cost. They were twice as much as the other quote. I told him there was no way we were going to spend that much on EIGHT windows and at that point, he stopped talking. Just stopped. And then I couldn’t get him out of my house. And after talking my ear off, when I thanked him for coming and to have a nice weekend, he was SO rude to me. Now you can bet I’m not going to buy ANY of the home improvement offerings you have.

The third company I talked to was similar to the first but worse, apparently. “What’s your husbands name?” You don’t need his name. “When can we come when he’ll be there?” You can’t come when he’s here. “Well, are you ALLOWED to order windows?” WTF people? What year is this? Listen lady, I just want you to come and give me an estimate on windows. We finally scheduled a time and I immediately got a call back from the company. “Ma’am, this is Y, you just talked to X. It’s our company policy not to come out if your husband isn’t there.” Fine, don’t come. I’ll spend my money somewhere else. I then looked up this company on Kudzu and it turns out I’m HUGELY grateful that they didn’t come out, I guess you can’t get them out of your house in under 3 hours.

But really, what is this, “Do I have permission to spend money?” If I call you, then I’m going to spend money. If I call you and tell you that he doesn’t need to be here, then he doesn’t need to be here. It’s 2010 people, women make something like 80% of all household decisions. That guy that I’m married to (for the sake of this post, I’ll continue not calling him by name) mentioned that when he was selling door to door, often times women would say they needed to ask their husband. And I get that, they didn’t ask for this salesman to come to their door. But if I CALL you, we’re probably going to spend some money. Hell, if I go to a car dealership to spend $30,000, no one asks me if I have my husbands permission. I just can’t imagine that someones business is going so phenomenally well that they’ll turn me away, won’t try and sell me something because the man of the house isn’t home.

It looks like some retailers are completely missing the mark. Completely. But really, all I want to say is, what a bunch of jackasses.