I Used to Like Shots of Tequila on a Thursday Night

When I first got diagnosed with Crohn's, I went in for a four-hour IV treatment every eight weeks. I got a hefty dose of Benedryl first thing when I got there to prevent any reactions to the medicine and it knocked me out.

My mom was really curious about what went down in the old Ambulatory Surgery Unit at Boulder Community Hospital and wanted to go with me for one treatment. I didn't think it would be too much fun for her to watch me zonk out for four hours, but moms can be weird that way. She thought it was pretty fascinating.

My medicine options have come a long way in the last five years. For a while I gave myself a shot using an epi pen every two weeks, which I wasn't very good at doing. It wasn't even the needle that was scary - it was the clicking sound that the stupid pen made that freaked me out and made me misfire (multiple times). I eventually got the hang of it though. Now I'm on a medicine where a lovely nurse comes to the house to give me a shot every 4 weeks.

The medicine (Cimzia) arrives in an oh-so-eco-friendly over sized Styrofoam package complete with chemical ice packs and bubble wrap. There were a few months in there where I had to fight with my insurance company over medicine and was amazingly relieved to finally see my environmental hazard of a package arrive.

This medicine gets administered by a nurse who comes to the house. At first, I thought this was overkill. I did master the epi pen (eventually). Even knowing that the medicine needs to be mixed together using various needles to transfer from vial to vial to syringe, I thought I could handle it. What I couldn't handle is the hard jab required to get the shot into your skin. And since Cimzia is covering even the copay for my insurance in return for my opinion on the drug, I'm more than happy to have a mad chemist/nurse do the shot part. One less thing to worry about.

The nurse is always kind enough to remark on how little flab there is to pinch for the shot. I think her other patients must be huge, or that's just nice nurse small talk because there is more than enough to grab in my opinion. The jab usually doesn't hurt, but the medicine can sometimes sting. And at the end of the day, I have two little marks on my stomach that I cover with band aids and then watch with amazement as they bruise and then fade over the next week.

I just got a shot tonight - let's hope that it kicks in and coaxes my digestive system into behaving nicely going forward.

Left Behind

The last time I bought a house, it was pristine the day I moved in. The guy I bought it from, Larry, called me a few times in the days before he moved out to see if I wanted to keep anything he was thinking of leaving behind. I didn't want his cooties despite his excellent taste in paint colors so I politely declined and moved into a junk-free house.

This house, however, has lots of prizes left behind. It is like one big treasure hunt - you never know what will greet you when you open up a closet door. I made a few giant donations to Goodwill when moving out of the old house, and I'm collecting lots more for a new humongous donation courtesy of the new house.

Here's a random sampling of what Will and I have found:

Half empty bag of cotton balls - why thanks for sharing these nifty soft things, I've never seen them before!

Cleaning supplies - ironic because I don't think they actually got used before we moved in. I kept the Mrs. Meyers cleaner & the laundry detergent and tossed the rest of the mostly used bottles.

Assorted kitchen stuff - my parents came up to help us on Sunday and I gave my dad the task of taking down the multiple paper towel dispensers and magnetic knife racks in the kitchen. Really, who needs paper towels in two different spots? In the same kitchen?

Super sweet lamp - this nifty little ditty was attached to the wall above my desk in the office. It had a pee-yellow metal lamp shade with a Norwegian type flower pattern on it. I couldn't concentrate on a conference call it was so distracting. 

Iron - perhaps original to the house, circa 1960. My dad thinks I should take it to an antique shop, my mom and I disagree.

Light bulbs - not in light fixtures, mind you. Just laying around the house, in the back of closet shelves, in the laundry room, on the kitchen counter top.

Coat racks - I love coats a little too much, but even I don't need more space than the coat closet allows.

Spiders - seriously wondering if the previous folks bred spiders for research and had an unfortunate escape episode. I'm normally a capture-the-spider-in-a-glass-and-release-it-outside girl, but I have to admit I've become jaded and I squished one last night.

Canadian coins - eh?

And that, my friends, is my assessment of the great moving adventure week 1. 

Inching Toward Moving On

At what point do I start the break-up process with my now-under-contract-townhouse? Or did I already start it the minute I signed the paperwork to put it up for sale?

I love this house. I have since the minute I walked in the door while house hunting and saw two Birds of Paradise flowers on the dining room table beneath the orange pendant light. It was totally over my budget and my realtor was only showing me the house because he wanted to set me up with the seller. It was love at first sight with the house, not so much with the guy.

This is the last house my old-man cat lived in. This is the house where Will proposed to me. This is the house where I got really sick, and then got healthy again (and again). I still call the guest bathroom "Carrie's bathroom" after my roommate and dear friend who lived here with me for the first three years. Somewhere in this house is the ring that my mom gave me with the green stone that I'm super bummed I misplaced (okay, lost). Will and I have put a lot of work into this house - we've rebuilt the decks, redone the bathrooms, painted and painted again, replaced crunchy dead evergreen bushes with a xeriscaped garden, and so much more. 

I want to move (believe me, I wouldn't go through all the headache of house hunting for nothing). I want new and bigger projects to tackle with Will. I want potential to make a house a home without an HOA dictating how that can be done and what colors can be used to do it. I want a garden with room for more than a pot of tomatoes. And the new (potential) house is perfect for all of these wants. 

But I'm still wandering around the current house, thinking about all of the things that I'm going to miss. That will go away, right? 

Nostalgia

We are getting ready to put our house on the market.  So far, "getting ready" has entailed creating a list of the home improvement projects we didn't quite finish or get to, convincing my Mom to be our realtor, and creating piles of stuff we don't want anymore.  Needless to say, we've got a lot of work ahead of us.

I went through my books and CDs today and separated out the keepers from the get-rid-ofs.  It was so much easier to get rid of the CDs than the books.  I get really, really attached to my books. Even books I didn't love, I feel like I'm somehow betraying the characters by admitting that maybe they aren't worth living in my library.  

CDs on the other hand, are pretty easy to get rid of. The good ones I've got on my computer. And the bad ones are the hardest to get rid of because I have to admit that I actually purchased that music at one point (um, Candlebox? I plead the insanity of the 90s).

I also found a whole bunch of tapes that I held onto.  Mostly mix tapes from old friends and a large collection of U2. I know I got rid of tapes a long time ago and I must have held onto U2 because the tapes are all from when they were beyond awesome. I purged the tapes, but found a few that I just couldn't get rid of:

To: Anne From: Chris Keep Jammin' in the Car, Chica. A mix tape from my friend, Christine, from our junior year of high school. Having good tunes in the car in high school was key. I took this mix with me to Architecture Camp the summer between my junior & senior years of high school and the mix became famous in my studio for its awesomeness. Plus, I'm feeling all nostalgic.

Learn Xhosa with Anne Munik. This tape is from my Xhosa language class in South Africa. Anne Munik was my teacher and she was the cutest little white lady. She had grown up on a farm outside of Cape Town and absolutely loved the Xhosa culture and language - enough to dedicate her career to teaching it to other white people so they could appreciate it as well. The thing I absolutely adored about Anne was that whenever we'd learn something contradictory from our host families to what she taught us in class, she'd say, "Well, it is their culture, so they know it best." And she'd make a note. In a country where white people had for so long ruled as oppressors, it was amazing to see this woman who not only loved and appreciated the African cultures around her, but realized that she could never be the ultimate expert despite all of her learnings. 

A Reading for Anne 2003.  I usually get my tarot cards read about once a year, usually around my birthday.  I adore my Mom's friend, Bonnie, who reads the cards and records the sessions for us. She is such a gentle soul and I love that there are people in the world that see things that I don't. I also think that this is the reading she gave me where she said I would have a husband whose birthday was very close to mine. I met Will later that year and his birthday is 5 days after mine. Coincidence? I think not.

An unopened, blank tape. You never know when you are going to need ancient relics like this.

Now that I've decided what to keep, I need to figure out what to do with the old.

Lost in Translation

On Saturday morning, I had a voicemail message from my mom:

"Hi Anne, it's me.  I can't believe they named the baby Costco!  Give me a call when you get a chance.  Bye!"

Some dear friends, Marc & Perrin, had a baby boy late last week.  They didn't share the baby's name ahead of time, just like their last pregnancy with Malia.  I think we were all pretty sure that this baby wouldn't end up with a name like Joe or Bob.  If the mom's name is Perrin, it doesn't really work well to go everyday with the rest of the family.

And Marc & Perrin do indeed have a membership to Costco - I clearly remember that they got their membership before moving to Hawaii earlier in the decade.  But being the Boulderites they are, I'd assume they'd choose a local business name (McGuckin's has a nice ring to it) before a national chain if they decided to indeed name their progeny after consumerism.  

Fortunately for all involved (especially the baby) there was a horrible connection in the game of telephone announcing the baby's name.  I told my dad, who told my mom, who got it all wrong when she called me.  And baby Costco is actually baby Kosmo.