ink you stink

When I shaved my head the first time, for kids cancer, I thought I would celebrate by getting a tattoo of a shamrock of the Celtic knot kind. Alas...I dragged my feet and never went to get it.

Then my pal Jenna brought up that she wanted a tatt, turning 50, it would be her permanent milestone. Excitedly I said I would like to honor my own promise and get one after this St. Baldrick's, "Why don't you wait till you shave your head with me, then we will both go and get a tattoo!"

Marvelous plan.

I had found a different shamrock, a lil less detailed and a lil more tribal and I loved it. So did Jenna. So did LTR. Three leaves - three pals - marking a moment in our lives.

It all worked out quite nice. It was a bit more painful than the last. But the last was 13 years ago and it's the "kind of pain you forget", and I have to agree. But 15-20 minutes later, I was a marked woman with a $32,000 tattoo (if you total both times I shaved my head) at my collar line.

"Put A&D ointment on it 5-6 times a day. Take off the gauze and let it breath. Keep it out of the hot shower stream.......blah blah blah.

The 3 inked women stopped at the local Rite-Aide on the way home to get ointment. We found the generic brand of what we thought was the right stuff. We sat around the dinner table, drinking wine and sharing pain levels, as all of us had a different location marked that day.

Next day, at work, armed with my ointment, I started smearing. Then the itching began. Then the rash developed. Then my lymph node popped out of my neck like a T-day turkey timer! That doesn't happen very often, but when it does...there is infection in my body. It didn't take a medical degree to figure out where it entered my body.

A couple nights later, I stood talking to a friend in the mall, my collar rubbing on my weepy tatt, the itching searing down my back. I felt like a crazed junkie, bugs crawling down my shirt, twitching and adjusting my collar, seeking relief.

The next morning the redness around the tattoo spread out to a bumpy, burning halo of unhappy skin!

"Dry it out with alcohol." my tattooist suggested.

"Looks like shingles." my chiropractor mused.

"Have you had chicken pox?" a co-worker volunteered.

"Oh dude! That's not cool." a close friend helpfully suggested.

Cortisone, Benedryl, alcohol swabs and gauze the size of beach towels...I type to you, shifting and squirming in my chair, begging for relief.

"Don't swear, don't drink, don't lie and never get a tattoo."......Mom is always right.

Oops, I did it again.

Two years ago I shaved my head for kids cancer. I was the only woman on a male team. It was very moving to sheer my locks of vanity in-front of a packed house.

This time 10 women banded together to all shave for the same event. Plus we made our goal of $20,000 in the last few minutes before we took the stage.

It was incredible. It's one of those moments that you put a pin into and always comeback to it. Not like some memories that have that shity post-it-note glue on them, that dries, and the note falls behind the desk. Those memories are sleeping with the dust bunnies.

It's the kind of memory that stirs your emotions and warms your heart. It keeps the recall embers burning so that it's always fresh when you want to revisit.

The crowd seemed to love the idea of an all female team. When we stood outside to take picture, folks honked and waved as we assembled on a street corner outside the pub.

As I travel around town, I'm greeted with, "I know where you were this weekend." Folks 'in the know' are more then ready to point out my lack of hair.

It's cold without hair! But it's too much a badge of courage to cover with a cap.

Someone said only 50 women out of 400+ participants shaved. We were 10 of them. I feel pretty durn good about that. I'm pretty durn proud of those 10 women as well.

I think this is the last shave for me. I mean, how do you one-up an all girl shave team. And as they say in Gypsy, "Ya gotta have a gimmick." Now maybe it's time to warm my heart with giving, instead of trying to keep my head warm after shaving.

Jouney to the center of the backyard

I've had a number of dogs in my day. Roxy is the first one I've had on the East Coast. There's something we have here, that I didn't have on the Left Coast - winter. With winter comes snow. Snow covers a lot of things. One of the main things is poop.

Yes...I said it...poop. Lots and lots of it. If your squeamish, you might want to stop here. I'm going to talk a LOT about it. Hell...I'm going to even sing about it.

While it's covered in pretty white stuff, it is easy to forget that down below, is a layer so unholy, that it would give you nightmares.

The first winter we had Roxy, and mind you she was yet a pup, it was shocking. Even more shocked was LTR who had a life time of litter pans and never had to deal with puppy poops. I was of the mind to celebrate and say, "Cool! I don't have to pick anything up all winter!"

It was anything BUT cool when winter went away.

I handed LTR a plastic grocery bag, tiptoed out into the ungodly mess and started to poop-scoop. LTR hung with me for maybe the first, full bag. When the second bag started to fill up I noticed a strange green hue creeping up around her cheeks. As I heaped a hearty scoop into the bag, she turned tail and was nothing more than a cartoon puff of smoke with bobby pins spinning in the air.

And I was alone.....in a wasteland of waste.

Over the years I learned from that experience. For starters, don't count on LTR to help with the winter clean up. More importantly; work in layers.

As the snow starts to melt and the levels start to shrink, you see on the horizon, lil zombie turds rising from the snow. Get out there and SCOOP! Scoop like your life depended on it.

You don't want to wait till the snow is gone and the Baby Ruth's have thawed. It's not going to help you in the picking up process. Turds on ice is the only way to scoop.

After you get used to this horrific part of spring, I find myself trying to look at the positive, such as: this year I found, in a perfectly flattened dropping, a preserved squirrel's paw print. I wondered if the squirrel, after stepping in it, looked at his paw and said in a Alvin the Chipmunk voice, "Ah shit!"

There was evidence of the Xmas M&M fiasco, where we dropped them and Roxy sucked them up faster than we could get our hands on them. What laid before me was filled with red and green polka dots.

I also like to hum while scooping, it seems to distract from the horrors I see before me. Often times changing the lyrics to fit the occasion. Of course show tunes are my favorite.

South Pacific

I'm gonna wash that poop right out of my shoe

I'm gonna wash that poop right out of my shoe

I'm gonna wash that poop right out of my shoe

Or throw it right away

Or some Guys and Dolls

Scooping turds it is so laaaaame

Nothing is so absurd

That stupid dog she is to blaaaame

For this scooping is such a pain

Or my favorite...Oklahoma

I'm just a turd that can't stay low

I always rise to the top

I should stay just un-der the snow

But as it melts I go 'pop'!

Sigh...when faced with a messy job, I try to make the best of it, what can I say?

Oh the nerve!

I've been bad about keeping up regular appointments with my chiropractor. What does that mean? Well, when she moves stuff after they have been in the wrong position for so long, they end up moving back, and not in a good way.

This time around, they moved so that it must have pinched a nerve in my back. I've never had a pinched nerve. (and mind you I'm self diagnosing till I get to my appointment in 20 min)

Lets see if I can do it justice: It feels like there is a carving knife jammed just to the left of my tailbone. And some invisible Gnome is pounding it in with a mallet.

Otherwise, it's fine.

But knowing that the knife could plunge into me at any moment, makes me move like a 90 year old woman. Washing my hands this morning was like Tai Chi: I moved slowly, tilting to the left, dipping one hand into the stream, then following with the right, rotating the left up and out. It was quite beautiful, except for the excruciating pain.

I'm ok sitting, till I have to get up.

I can actually lift my legs up and stand on one at a time, but I can't lean left or right when they are both on the ground.

I can sit on the couch and lean all the way forward, but once I start to lean back, tears well up in my eyes.

There might be issues with me marching in the local St. Paddy's parade this weekend.

YA THINK???

I've found that, as you get older, more things happen to you that keep you from doing things you use to do. You don't want to admit it, but ya just don't get around like ya use too.

I guess things could be worse, the knife could be in my back...that's a whole nother problem, indeed.

Due Process? I say shoot 'um!

So this scumbag, sex offender in San Diego snatched a beautiful, vibrant girl in a park, and now she's gone. Only god knows where she is, or what she's gone through. Or if she is alive.

And it seems this piece of shit has been linked to a previous case as well.

When are we going to stop letting these worthless, meat bags out of jail? If you are a sex offender, you are in jail for life. I don't care what level you are. If you are a proven sex offender, rot...rot down to your bones in a dank cell where rats won't even gnaw on your filthy soul.

Why can't these people control themselves? It's a mental disorder that can't be cured.

I'll tell ya what...nothing makes me want to don a mask and become a vigilante more than sex offenders. I'll pass out some justice. Just give me a lead pipe and a locked room. I'll show them a 'whacking off' they won't walk away from.

God forbid if anyone ever tried to do anything to me....it would be the last thing they remembered.

These people make me sick....sick! Stay at home and look at your freaky porn and stay away from people. You have NO right to touch another human. What am I saying.....You don't have a right to breath on this earth!

My hope is, when they get this guy, guilty and locked up, he never gets out. And some guy named Bubba learns him what it's like to be held down and given a size 7 poop-shoot. I hope he spends every day in jail screaming for his life. I hope he ends up in the medical bay every week, sewing him up, so someone else can split him in half again.

But ya know what....he'll be out on a technicality. Or cuz his parents have money. Or cuz the judge is having on off day. Or that whole good behavior thing. Cuz even mentally damaged folks can behave themselves from time to time.

And he will find himself another house, next to a park, where he can sit on his front porch and pick out his next victim. Like a fresh pile of farm grown tomatoes.....so ripe for the picking.

I pray it's not from your garden.