And really bad eggs...

I would really like to organize my book shelves by color sometime.
I feel that this would be very challenging because it is my nature to have everything organized logically (Author, Title, alphabetical, chronological) and this is not... but it would still be organized... and pretty.

I totally jinxed myself this weekend. I was on the phone with my mom and I told her that my new mattress was beyond wonderful and - dramatically lowering my voice to a near whisper - I haven't had ANY sciatic pain since we got it! Maybe I'm cured!

I said it in an awe-filled voice - one of reverence and fear. I did not want the demons of malice or jinxery to overhear me and then joyfully thwart my momentarily pain-free existence.

Apparently I didn't whisper quietly enough because that night, my leg started to twinge.

This weekend I enjoyed a visit from my in-laws. They left early saturday morning to get to us at around 10 AM and almost immediately we all dove down the rabbit hole and into a complete renovation of our dining room. When we moved into this house, there were drop ceilings in the living room and the dining room. These drop ceilings are things that we DEFINITELY wanted to replace. I could tangibly feel the house's desperation to be rid of the eye-sores. It was a gigantic relief when we took down the living room drop ceiling, repaired the plaster, and finished the room. However, the dining room has been haunting us for 2 years now. It was finally time.

We moved everything out of the dining room (Including an electric piano - huge, looks like a grand -I play the piano, yes, it has touch, and it is much more mobile than a real piano - no it is not as sexy or satisfying to play as a real piano). Soon the living room was choked with the guts of the dining room. Our new deck played host to our table and chairs and cat scratch post. Soon after, the drop ceiling started to come down.

Within a very short period of time I started getting Day One period cramps wherein it feels like a malevolent spirit has taken up a very personal vendetta against my lower back muscles and insists on tightening them continuously with a no-frills, I-mean-business tire iron. The magical heating pad can stave off the twisting pain, but only so long as it is on the highest setting and desperately pressed to my back with the occasional shifting so that it doesn't actually start to melt my flesh. It's probably pretty funny to watch - a grown woman slowly trying to hump a heating pad with her back whilst still looking normal and involved with the renovation of her dining room.

All the while my mother-in-law has miraculously washed the dishes, cleaned the stove, vacuumed twice, and is now onto the basement - a part of the house I refuse to visit. The basement plays home to 53 species of spider, and a museum of their webs dating back to mid 19th century. Anything that has resided in the basement for over 2 hours has grown a skin of grime, sawdust, and resignation. Greg does the laundering, and therefore I do not complain about the highly flammable and growing mountain of lint next to the dryer. I am afraid of the washer and I know that it mocks me with it's lack of an actual "start" and "stop" mark - so you never actually know if where you turned the dial to is going to wash clothes or just dampen them. It's cement floors and cement walls with what I'm sure is a plague-harboring permanently brown-stained toilet in the corner. There is a door to the outside and there are stairs up to the foyer. The stairs are old and are held together with dignity, and little else. I have a hard enough time getting up the energy to dust and vacuume the living room or the bedroom - forget about the basement.

My mother-in-law swept down into the basement with the energy of a carebear on uppers. She simultaneously did all of our laundry and cleaned the entire basement.

I take this on faith as I still have not ventured into the depths. I am both scared of the basement as it was and how inferior I will feel upon viewing what she hath wrought.

By about Mid-day on Saturday I was trying to mask my pain with a happy face - slowly back-humping my heating pad, cringing at what was becoming severe sciatic lightening pain in my right leg when I tried to move, and jumping up whenever there was a clear task to assist with. I did not want to appear lazy or useless - I could not appear energetic or entirely useful - so I settled for a mediocre middle place where most of the time I was on the couch anyway, but at least I looked mentally engaged in the action.

Truth is, if it had been just Greg and I, I would have been laying quietly on the couch - not getting up-, making love to the heating pad and wondering what it would be like to be an amputee.

The Sciatica got so bad that on Monday, when I woke up and actually could not roll over in bed without yelling, Greg sweetly suggested that I stay home. I had been jumping up out of my seat so much over the weekend that I probably overstrained and overworked the muscles that were already causing much mayhem and I paid for it Monday by staying in bed, without movement, till noon. Then I limped to the couch and stayed laying down till Greg got home.

Today, the sciatica has decided to play games with me. The pain started out as almost nothing this morning. Now, it strikes halfway through my walk to the ladies room and I start to limp like all-of-a-sudden my right leg has become a new form of matter - both wooden and jell-O at the same time. So not only is there pain, but it is tearing down my emotional confidence, as well. My self-induced paranoia is fueled by the idea that my office-mates are staring at my back thinking that I'm either drunk or I enjoy walking like a pirate gorilla.

I read an article today about women's walks relating to whether or not you have the ability to orgasm. Apparently if you have a particularly fluid, relaxed sort of walk, it is a direct indication that you have a more full and capable ability to orgasm. A study was conducted with many women and two sexologists who were able to correctly identify 80% of the women as either having previously had an orgasm or not ever having had an orgasm just by the way they walked.

I bet my drunken, peg-leg, hairy primate pirate walk would have messed 'em up.