Joshilyn Jackson's Blog, page 13

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cat Vomit

There’s things I can’t blog about. Stories I can’t tell. Sometimes I can’t tell them because they aren’t mine. Sometimes they are PART-mine, but if it isn’t mine outright, I do not tell the story. I try not to even refer to the stories.

The upshot is, last year I blogged very little, and when I did, I blogged about …

the extremely loud and incredibly close cat vomit festival that woke us up around 2 am. Let us set the stage. Our bedroom is ALL hardwood floors, with a single, tiny, rectangle of...

MLK-hristmas

We skipped Christmas this year. Dad had a very difficult and fraught recovery, and he just didn’t feel like having Christmas. WE didn’t feel like it WAS Christmas.

Christmas is welcome to come without ribbons. Or come without tags. It can come without packages, boxes or bags. But I need Daddy carving the roast beast to have it feel like the real thing.

SO we shelved the presents, put the ham order on hold, and agreed to meet up on MLK weekend and do it up CORRECTLY.

And oh, but we have.

The mov...

Bravest Bird

Soon after we moved here, Scott hung this bird feeder up on my office window . It has a silver mirror panel, so the idea is, the birds can’t SEE IN and don’t know I am sitting here, trying to work on a new novel and desperate to be distracted, as I ALWAYS am in the beginning.

The feeder was up for more than four months, but it was apparently too spooky-close to the house for the delicacies within to be tempting. Then one day, only a few weeks ago, a little tufty headed fellow landed on top f...

Black Pig Christmas, Cow New Year

Actual black pig

When Sam was three, he noticed this black wrought iron pig on the fireplace. More specifically, he noticed it was EVIL. The pig loomed up huge in his dreams, chasing him and knocking him down the stairs and pouncing on him and eating him from the feet on up, “While I was ALIVE!” as he said, indignant and trembling at 2 am.

I had to hide it in a drawer, as toddler-Sam visibly SHIED whenever he had to pass it. He was SO convinced of its inherent evil that he convinced Bagel, who...

She Doesn’t Get Eaten By the Eels at This Time. Neither Does Her Father.

What's that swimming toward me??? Is that... LUPUS?

So, hi. Still not any sort of settled. Update, Short Version: My dad came home from the hospital, was home 18 hours, couldn’t breathe, went back, fluid around his heart, complication, more surgery.

He came through the second surgery like the eel-killing bad-ass that he is, and after another 4 or 5 days in the hospital, he is finally at home again. I have been in Alabama, sleeping at the hospital so my mother could rest a little bit.

She has...

Fun and Weepsies

A sadly PARTIAL LIST of everything that has made me ugly-cry publicly for the last two weeks:

In Sunday school we were discussing Eli, who raised just GODAWFUL sons, but I defended him, saying, “Hannah took Samuel to live in the temple when he weaned, so at most the kid was four, which means Eli pretty much raised him and it’s obvious that *snuffle* Eli was *snork* a good, good father *tear spurt* to SAAAAAAMMMUELLL WAHHHHHHHH.”

Full Wheel (although I weep so often in hot yoga it is hardly wort...

CHEERFUL THINGS

1) They moved dad out of ICU. He is on the mend. Man, that guy is tough. He will be home soon, they say. I’m going to Bama to help mom. I am SO tired from being sleepless and fretful and such—and if I feel like THIS, she must be feeling like this CUBED. Maybe cubed plusplus. But the good, oh the good, it so outweighs the tired. I will VERY SOON catch up on the two things I need to do – GANGNAM things and PINK SOCK things, just let me get my dad home and settled and mending, okay?

2) Look! This...

AFK for a Bit

SO hi there. On Tuesday, after I posted, an ongoing heart problem put my dad back in the hospital. (He’s had 8 stents tucked into a single messed up artery in the last 5 years.)

Last year, when the 7th stent failed, they sent him to the best heart specialists in the country, who told him that due to a longstanding blood disorder—THANKS VIETNAM WAR! You and Agent Orange are the gifts that keep on giving!— he was not a good candidate for open heart. They put in an 8th stent and changed his meds...

Well…Crap

A small portion of the mighty Warhammer forces currently infesting my mantel shelf

You know how you SAY things if, you think a thing is super unlikely to happen, like how you might SAY if your kid gets on the honor roll you will buy them an EXHORBITANTLY expensive Warhammer model kit, thinking, “OH, the stress of moving, and he just changed schools, they have him in AP classes, he historically is not GREAT with change; it’s nice to give him an incentive, but COME ON, I can safely plan to spend...

Business End

SO. PRETTY is in the semi-finals. Which means they wiped all the votes. Which means if we want to make the finals, you have to basically all go do it all again. HEH. I did not understand the process, clearly, or I would only just NOW be asking you to vote, but there it is. I kinda blew all my GoodReads GoodWill before the round that counted. SO.

The bad news is, I am still nto back on TOPIC but should be UNPINKSOCKING by next week when this will be over.

The good news is, the likelihood that...