Bits and blurbs: Welcome back, blogger edition

• Yeah, yeah, it's been a while. I have no excuse for myself other than using the computer requires me to get off the couch and sit upright at a desk. I don't do that much outside of work hours these days.


• This past weekend, I spent most of my time cleaning up around the outside of our house. The 80-ish year old man we bought from (we'll call him Vernon) left us all kinds of "treasures," mostly in the garage and back yard, that no one has bothered to clean up yet. This year is the first time since we moved in that I'm not pregnant or on the verge of killing myself, so I actually have some desire to do something about the disaster that is our house.


• Saturday, I hauled out all of the metal things that were in the back yard. I filled B's entire truck bed and it was heaped up high enough that I couldn't use the rear-view mirror. I wish I would have taken a picture of how much shit this man left us (and there is SO. MUCH. MORE. in the garage that B hasn't done anything about...I mean, we have a four-car garage (two wide, two deep) that we can barely park one car in, and even that's only been since about January. This is why you don't buy a house from a hoarder, kids). No one can even really tell the difference because it was mostly in this little fence alcove thingy where I think Vernon kept his compost, but I feel so much better now that all of it's gone. The scrap yard was sort of terrifying, but all that metal stuff is gone.


• I spent Sunday pulling out bushes. There were seven or eight evergreen-type shrubs around the front of our house, and I've hated them since we moved in. Again, no one bothered to do anything about them for the first 2.5 years, but I got the bug up my butt this weekend and took care of them all. I used a chainsaw for the first time ever to do it! It was hard work, but very satisfying. Now that the metal is out of the truck, I have to load up the shrubbery to take it all to the yard waste site. Maybe next weekend.


• I also eventually have to figure out how I want to landscape this place. I figure it's too late in the summer to plant anything (and if it's not, I don't want to hear it), so I'll wait 'til this fall to plant some bulbs and call it a day. I don't do gardening, so I want stuff that is going to require little to no effort on my part. Perennials are definitely my thing.


• In health news, my ass still hurts. Still. It's only been eight months since surgery...no big deal. I had another MRI to make sure there weren't any fractures or anything in there, and, of course, there weren't. My orthopedist doesn't know why it's still hurting. He basically said to suck it up, and it should be better by a year post-surgery. He didn't have me schedule another follow-up appointment or anything. So that's awesome. I love that something that was supposed to make me feel better in four to six weeks is now maybe, if I'm really lucky, going to make me feel better in a year.


• I took my last antidepressant yesterday. I've been weaning myself off of everything for the past six or so weeks, and I feel fantastic. I did it on my own (hush!). I know that was probably a bad idea. But I did a ton of research on it before I did it, and was very careful with myself. I had a couple of days where I felt really sick and had to go back to my full doses, but I reconfigured my plans, and it seems to be working really well. Luckily, my withdrawal symptoms have generally been mild, so it hasn't been an awful process. My goal when I started was to be off of everything by my next psychiatrist appointment, which is next Tuesday. And I did it! I'm ridiculously proud of myself for this, and how good I've been feeling tells me I did the right thing.


• Related to all that, I went to see a naturopathic doctor recently. She gave me some supplement recommendations (they should be here by the end of the week), and wants me to start transitioning to a whole foods diet. It's been 24 hours and I can already tell I'm going to miss my sweet, delicious refined sugars and handy convenience foods. *Sigh* But if it helps, I'll give it a shot (with minimal grumbling). She also wants me to start exercising, but at my initial visit I hadn't yet been cleared for that by the orthopedist. He didn't exactly clear me when I saw him last week, either, but I'm assuming I'm allowed to do some stuff now? Nothing I do for my butt makes any difference, anyway, so I figure exercising can't hurt.


• Diet related:  I'm still allowed Diet Coke. She told me I'm allowed a couple of vices and she wouldn't take that away from me. Smart lady. I might have stabbed her with my pen (or just laughed very loudly at her in my head) if she had.


• My sister-in-law gets married in a month. This is petty, but I really want to come up with something bitchy to do at her wedding. At our wedding, she wore cowboy boots. I told the bridesmaids I wanted silver shoes, but didn't put any stipulations on them. So my SIL bought and wore silver cowboy boots because she thought it would piss me off. I didn't care at the time, but now I really want to be able to get back at her (told you it was petty). She has completely shut me out of this wedding, however (I know nothing about it - no idea what the colors are, what her dress looks like, what the bridesmaids dresses look like; don't know when it starts; don't know when or where the rehearsal is; don't even know if I'm invited to the rehearsal; etc. The only time she ever talked to me about anything was to get information from me - the addresses from our guest list, sites in the area, who we used for a DJ, etc.), so I'm not sure how this could work. My only thought was that I can sugar up W before the wedding so he's a pain in the ass during the ceremony. But I'm going to be the one in charge of him during the ceremony, so that would really only be hurting me.


• I'm also a bit concerned about SIL's expectations of W. He doesn't do well with crowds or lots of noise. I can't recall the last time we were somewhere with lots of people when he didn't flip the fuck out. I keep telling B that he needs to explain this to SIL and manage her expectations of W's behavior at the wedding. If the kid's bawling and refusing to walk down the aisle, he won't be walking down the aisle. Simple as that. But B seems to think that W will be fine and we don't need to worry about it. I don't know what kid he's talking about, but whatever. I just know that I'm going to get the blame if I don't make W walk down the aisle, so I would like to do some advanced preparation of the bride just in case it comes to that. W could surprise me and be a complete angel that day. But I'm not willing to put money on it.


• My super-awesome BFF has decided that she's taking me somewhere for my 30th birthday this year. We don't know where yet, but if you seen any super-cheap deals to super-fantastic locations, send them my way. For reference, I've never been to New York or Vegas, never been further north than Niagara Falls (er, maybe Michigan's Upper Peninsula is further north...but that's still on US soil), never been further west than St. Louis, have been to Mexico (Riviera Maya for our honeymoon), New Orleans (when I was 18 and on a youth group trip), and Orlando (Disney trip for law school spring break! Woo!) once each, and have never been to any other countries. So I've probably never been wherever you might suggest and I'll think it's fabulous, even if it would be a boring trip for normal people. My BFF is much more well-traveled than I, but she doesn't care where we go as long as I like it. We don't have any real stipulations on when we can go, but I don't have a passport, so we can't pick up and go anywhere outside the US without some advanced notice.


• I've got some more to ramble about, but I'll stop for now. This got long. Next time I'll try to blog more frequently than once a month so my posts might be a bit more manageable.