Making Noises

“Mr. D” is my husband.  We live in a big city and often have long commutes to and from work, friends, and the like.  Mr. D, a laid-back, relaxed, polite man most of the time, finds an alter-ego when driving.  Think Clark Kent turned into Superman, without the cape, tights and flight capabilities.  Or Bruce Banner transformed into the Incredible Hulk, minus the green, roar, or super-human strength.

He often has tips for new drivers on the speed limit:

• “Gas pedal’s on the right”

• He’s very helpful and points out the posted limit, maybe in case the driver has vision difficulties:  “The speed limit’s 80 km/h, not 60” [or whatever the posted speed limit is.]

• Sometimes he blasts:  “If you can’t drive the speed limit, get off the road!”

• “Pee or get off the pot” – for hesitant, timid drivers.

Other utterances include:

• “Is there a particular shade of green you are waiting for?”
• “Drive like you mean it.”
• “Is this your first day with your new license, or are you trying to quit?”

• “Must have been an option that year” – muttered when the driver fails to signal a lane change.

• “By all means, don’t let someone in.”   Drivers in our city don’t like to change lanes when someone is trying to merge.  When a driver lets us into their lane, the comment is “must be from out of town.”

• Takes pleasure in the fact that, when someone cuts him off to pass him, meets that same driver at the next light.

Note these comments are all uttered in the safety of our own vehicle as a way for Mr. D to let off a little steam.  Unlike a friend of ours who, when someone in front of him failed to proceed through the intersection after the light changed, got out of his car, walked up to the other driver’s vehicle and “offered” to drive the car through the intersection for them!

And above all, Mr. D must be the first driver in the pack, which I suspect has something to do with birth order (he’s the youngest.)

If Mr. D. was a super hero, he’d be a combination of Superman (to fly over vehicles) and The Incredible Hulk (to move the offensive vehicle out of his way…way out of his way!)

image from we heart it

Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and  you weep alone – Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Chronic Babe http://www.chronicbabe.com is hosting the next Patients for a Moment  blog carnival on May 5th.  The topic is:  What’s your most laugh-out-loud illness-related experience?

I love to laugh and have an awesome sense of humor. Sometimes, though, it’s tough to find something to laugh about when you are challenged by living with fibromyalgia, which I was diagnosed with in 1996.    This preamble leads me to recall some LOL Moments:

• In 2009 we went with friends to our city’s zoo.  I decided to rent a wheelchair so that I could last longer and enjoy more.    Little did I know how “tippy” this wheelchair would be.  My friend Steve was pushing me at the time and decided to take the chair on a run at a bit of an incline to get over it.  I was nearly spilled out of the chair in the process.  Fortunately I didn’t fall out but we all had a good laugh as the wheelchair spun crazily.

• I used a wheelchair for the first time in 2008.  My husband was my pusher when I toured the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio and Wrigley Field in Chicago that year.  I wondered what people may have thought when they saw that I was able to get out of the chair.  (I pondered exclaiming as  I stood up:  “It’s a miracle!  I’ve been healed!”)

Me being in chairs enabled us to spend more time at these attractions.  It also conserved my energy and reduced my pain levels.  Intellectually I know this.  Emotionally I fight the stigma attached to being linked, however ephermally, to a mobility device.

I prefer to get around under my own steam, even if I run out of it.

Coffee- You can sleep when you're dead

The Fat Nutritionist http://www.fatnutritionist.com/ is a blog I read.  Her tag line is “eating normally is the new black.”  I am so down with that.  Death to Diets I say!  Anyways, her post “Get Out of Jail Free Cards”  http://www.fatnutritionist.com/index.php/get-out-of-jail-free-cards/ talks about “largely irrelevant” food labelling.  It began with a treatise on coffee and “Canadian style wussy coffee”, that is coffee with cream and sugar. There was a brief introduction and contained a very funny line:

black coffee is an abomination unto the Lord and shall not defile this house

After I finished laughing, made an appropriate comment on her blog about how much we in this house agree with that statement, I started thinking.  What other food and/or beverage items are, to our household, “an abomination unto the Lord and shall not defile this house?” I came up with the following list. Note:  there’s a bit of a legend:

• items marked with a single * are those which only my husband thinks fall into this category;
• and since we’ve agreed that we only buy things that both of us eat, items marked with a double ** are ones I miss eating unless I’m out, or have batted my eyelashes at him enough (i.e. whined) to get his agreement for purchase.
• items marked with*** are those which I only think are an abomination.
• no *’s at all means we both agree that these items shall never, ever defile our house.

List of Foods – Not Exhaustive, although I’m a bit tired after typing now.

• Offal
• Head cheese
• Coffee whitener
• ***processed cheez in a jar — my husband says it “adds personality.”  I say it’s one step from being plastic.
• Anything with the word “bean” attached to it [i.e. green beans, lima beans, kidney beans, et al.], with the exception of “coffee bean”
• Brussel Sprouts
• Octopus
• Squid
• Pork Sausage (possible exception:  Mennonite Sausage.  Good Mennonite Sausage that is)
• *Chickpeas**
• *Sweet Potatoes**
• *Squash of any type**
• Fruitcake
• Christmas Pudding
• ***Raw tomatoes
• *Porridge — this one comes in–never get between me and my cooked oatmeal in the morning!
• *Cottage Cheese** (exception:  Lasagna)
• Caviar/Tapioca – eerily similar, visually, don’t you think?
• *Asparagus**
• Anything with the word “blood” in it i.e. blood pudding, blood sausage.

Which stage are you?

Humour helps us learn. This marriage series “Laugh your Way to a Better Marriage”  is coming to our area this weekend. Here’s a Youtube video of Mark Gungor talking about the difference between a man’s brain and woman’s brain.

Tale of Two Brains

Will post more information after the conference.