the prep before the prep

i figure that if i have to guzzle an ounce and a half of powerful liquid laxative tomorrow at 4 PM then again at 7, i'm likely to spend the evening circling the bathroom and since i have to cook some food to freeze for easy warming while i am down for the count . . . i don't want to be mixing cooking with toilet visits, you know? so this evening i've been racing around like a madwoman trying to get things done. i am the furthest thing from a domestic goddess, so you have to understand that this is hard work for someone like me. for instance, i'm incapable of making Jello without reading the box instructions word for word. i just made some because after breakfast tomorrow my diet is strictly curtailed to Jello and clear liquids. then at 4 PM, well - you know what happens then.

first on the agenda after work was a visit to the grocery store. i loath the grocery store. it's like my version of hell on earth. i shop like a european usually, stopping for stuff at the nearby little family grocer where i no doubt pay twice as much. and the irony is - that means i end up shopping 5 times more than if i went once a week! but i just can't stand the Big Shopping. however, i had to do it tonight so my usually empty cupboards and fridge would be stocked for the duration. i got 3 bags of oranges for the price of one, so if anyone local wants oranges i have plenty to dole out. lots of toilet paper, naturally, because that's gonna be a must-have tomorrow night! 3 bags of cat litter (hey, i have 6 cats), so much deli ham and cheese i will never want to look another sandwich in the eye again after this, and lots of my favorite Pepsi 0. people wonder why i drink it - it has 0 calories, 0 sugar, and 0 caffeine. but it's a nice change from my usual gallons of water.

when i got home and unloaded all the stuff i set about trying to shovel the godawful slop mother nature dumped on us today. heavy slush is a bitch. only half the walk is shoveled and sanded (yes, just the part i need to get to the driveway and back). pedestrians will just have to take their chances from there. around here they tend to walk in the middle of the street with their dogs anyway, a joy for those of us trying to navigate snowy streets. it's a law to shovel your sidewalk and yet they don't use the damn thing! but, with my luck, one will, and that person will fall on their ass and yell whiplash and sue me. i'll take my chances. the back porch steps are a bitch and i am worried about being able to get out to feed my bunnies and the wild birds . . . but maybe the little kids across the street would like to earn a couple bucks. i decided not to change the litterboxes until the last minute tomorrow night so they are as clean as possible for the upcoming week or so.

now i am washing my button-butt longjohns, which i suspect i will spend the majority of my time in (i need to find the other pair!) after 4 holes in your belly, you really don't want to be in anything with a waistband and i am a big fan of the button-butt for winter visits to the john. all my blankies and robes are washing. since i suspect i'll be on the couch downstairs for the first night home at the very least, i covered the cushions with a snuggly wool blanket. but then i covered that with another blanket because i know my cats - and one of them is bound to vomit a hairball on my bedding. the little bastards will never hurl a hairball on the wood floor. no, it has to be in one of my shoes or on the rug or on the couch. so i am prepared! particularly since i just fed Mikey some shrimp tails, his favorites. he puts them down with gusto, but they seem to come back up with equal gusto later on. but with those cute pleading yellow eyes, how can i resist giving him his treat?

i'm making angel hair pasta, spinach, shrimp and feta (with olive oil) for my dinner and enough left over to freeze. this is a meal i can manage to make because it doesn't require much of my presence at the stove. yes, i hate the stove. if it takes longer than 15 minutes to cook, i'm not interested in cooking it. since bob died i think i've turned the oven on all of 3 times. the microwave, on the other hand, gets good use. i have 2 pots and 2 frying pans. i can also make spaghetti and meatballs. i am an expert at cooking hot dogs.

a friend of mine promised to deliver some tubular meat (the best kind) on sunday. goddammit, i hope he brings some crackers to go with that sausage!

i forgot to borrow some DVDs from the library for moments of boredom. daytime soaps might drive me to suicide and i don't think there's much else on. i have 5 books to read and hey, you ineternet people can entertain me. how long i am supposed to be laid up, i don't know. when i had regular laparoscopy i guess it was a couple days but this time there's 4 holes instead of 2 in the belly and organ removal so . . . i doubt i'll be tuning into the exercise channel to tone my abs. i wonder when i can drive again? i forgot to ask. i drive a stick (jeep wrangler) so it requires a little more of the abdominal cavity than a regular weenie kind of automatic car. but when there's a will there's a way. in due time.

the best "gift" i bought myself for this upcoming exile to the couch is an electric blanket. all the heat in this 150 yr old house goes upstairs even with the door closed at the bottom of the stairs. i can crank the heat to 75 on a 10 degree night and be lucky if it gets up to 61. with a $290 natural gas bill this month, i've definitely decided an electric blanket down here is the way to go! i literally go into a heat-induced coma beneath it and so does Biggie, my 20 lb cat who should, by all rights, be hot enough with all that fat, but never is. my biggest fear is Biggie deciding to pussyfoot across my tender belly, as cats are wont to do. mine are horrible. Spanky sits on my chest, Mikey swats me in the face when he wants me to get up. they all use me as a natural bridge to get from one side of the bed to the other. assholes. i feel sorry for Baby, who has never come downstairs of her own volition since she arrived here in September of 2007. apparently, she is queen of all upstairs. my bed is her bed, she has her dainty water goblet bedside, the spare room has her food and her Baby-Only litterbox. if i am down her for a while she will be lonely. well, perhaps not. she has 5 boycats to keep her company, all of whom are allowed on the bed only by virtue of her grace. that is, except Mikey, who is top cat to Baby's queen cat. he is 18 and nobody fucks with him.

today the hospital lady told me to bring as little as possible for my overnight stay (in the maternity ward - which i find somehow quite amusing). no jewelry, no nail polish, what? - no false eyelashes?! no lipstick (but what about that Lifetime show i saw advertised called 'Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy'?? i can't wear lipstick to my ute removal? that's just not fair. so i hesitantly asked, "is it OK if i bring my pink stuffed bunny? i can't sleep without him." the nurse laughed, but nicely, and said of course. just not into the operating room. that's OK, he's not sterile after all, and no amount of washing seems to get the little balls of Baby's black fur off him.

it's weird, i never felt the least bit anxious about any prior surgery. in fact the nurses laughed when they had to wake me up to insert the IV i was so relaxed (and no, it wasn't thanks to drugs). see, bob was there. i felt completely at ease in his presence and tend to just surrender myself over to the hospital staff (really, like there's a choice anyway?) i took for granted that if i died, not that i would have or will, he'd take care of things. but there is no more bob. the hospital has so many unpleasant memories for me, since this is where he died. bob won't be there. he won't sit with me beforehand, won't be there in Recovery, won't visit, won't take me home and take care of me. someone today told me "but he will be there" and i like that thought and could kiss her for saying so.

the toilet god

when i told a good friend that i'd cried over the open pool of a toilet tank, he wisely said, "valerie, you weren't crying over the toilet." well, literally i was. tears really were dripping into the tank. and it really had made me cry. but he was right. i was crying over far more than a wayward toilet. crying because i had to fix it and it should have been so easy and it wasn't and because i never would have had to if bob were alive. for him it would have been a two-second job and me? i didn't even know enough to turn off the cold water supply before plunging my hand in to the elbow. he would have known that the toilet fix-it kit in the basement was not for our toilet, but for those at my parents' house. but me, i'm trying to make a little flapper cover a big drainhole. so for a week or more i took the lid off every time i flushed to make sure the crumbling old flapper i'd reaffixed covered the hole right because of course it no longer fit right when i reinstalled it. i simply couldn't face the toilet all that time. a little job was just too big a job for me.

sometimes everything's too big for me. i feel so useless and incapable. lost and floundering. and i'm really no slouch. i mean, i know how to run a chop saw, a skill saw, a table saw. i have my own drill. i've been stripping the aluminum siding off the house, sometimes up on a steep roof, sometimes on a scaffold. i've been scraping and painting and replacing window glass. i've lost all fear of menacing carpenter bees and instead stand there like a warrior princess, brandishing my weapon paintbrush, daring them to bring it on. i can move huge ladders. i can patch a roof with tar. i can run a bead of silicone, of caulk. i can do alot of things. pop raised me as if i was his oldest son instead of oldest daughter and though he pretty much floundered as a carpenter because he was really a professor and the two don't readily seem to mix, we still made do. we built fences and horse stalls and a hay loft. later still, with bob's help, we built a shed out of the old barn's wood once it fell down. i had my own tool belt, like a holster. i was tough and i could work side by side with the men. now the men are dead and sometimes my holster seems empty against all the enemy things wrong.

so why the hell should a toilet flapper beat me? once i regrouped (so what if it took a week or two?) i revisited that toilet like a woman to be reckoned with. i could hear bob saying honey, you can do this. so i flushed the enemy toilet and turned the water supply off and removed the offending flapper. marched my Jeep right over to the hardware store with the crumbly rubber wrapped in paper towel because i didn't like touching it. Universal Toilet Flapper one package said. universal should mean what it says, but i double-checked with a man in a name tag. yes, it should fit. should? i didn't like that word. i needed a definite yes or no with all i'd been through with this toilet. so he obliged, yes it will fit. as an extra treat i bought myself a pound of my favorite philips head screws. i love screws. you can never have too many screws. there's a certain satisfaction you can't beat when you powerdrill a screw into wood. but my toilet awaited.

i detached the little hose that helps refill the toilet so i could slip the new rubber ring on the little pipe and attach the robust new flapper to it. i am sure they have official names, but i don't know them, and frankly i hope not to see the inside of that tank for a long time to come. my flapper fit perfectly first time in. i even got the chain length right on the first try. just one flush and i would know for sure if i'd mastered the flapper. so i leaned over to that place we all hate, the place in back of the bowl where the plunger and the toilet brush hide, and turned the metal knob to refill the tank with water. then i stood up with proud satisfaction only to be sprayed full in the face by a wildly flopping nozzle. i'd forgotten to reattach the filler nozzle to the tube. face full of toilet tank water. i had to capture it as one would a hissing snake and clip it back where it belonged, but this time i could laugh instead of cry. sure, the toilet had the last laugh with its porcelain chilled Fuck You but i laughed along. and i think bob, surely watching as always, had a good laugh too. after all, this was a show he would have loved.

here comes my saturday nervous breakdown

this morning my hands were in both the toilet and the garbage. i may never bite my nails again. why should a toilet flapper leave me sobbing over the tank like Lucille Ball, wailing as if i'd lost my best friend? but i did lose my best friend. he would have known how to fix it. he knew how to do everything and, if he didn't, he figured it out or made it up as he went along. he'd never cry over a toilet flapper, or over cheap trashbags that breed holes and spill cat letter all over the bed of the truck on the way to the dump. he never would have filled the trashbags beyond their apparent "Hefty" capacity. "always trying to stuff ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag," he'd say to me. and it's true. the men at the DPW with their tanned legs and orange shirts look the other way when i don't have enough lime green dump stickers on my trashbags. they let me slide. they knew bob and they know he died. perks to being a widow.

so my hands smell and i find myself wondering what it is about all garbage that makes that singular smell? and why is the inside of a toilet tank black when the water is allegedly clean? i scrub my hands only to get dirtier, spending an hour or so on the back porch roof buttering it with tar patch. my red Vixen nails outlined in tar. i've added gasoline to the mix because that's all i have to remove the tar. if i lit a match would my hands explode into torches?

bob used to put cigarettes out in open coffee cans of gas. it's not the gas that ignites, he'd scoff dismissively, it's the fumes. and if it's in an open container in open air then you got nothing to worry about. still, i'd back way off when he did it, convinced every time that he'd explode into a human torch. but he never did. he always knew his stuff.

a long, achingly hot shower and i'm still vaguely perfumed with Regular Unleaded and my nail beds are still black. the trash is gone and the roof is almost entirely patched, but that goddamn toilet flapper still has me down. when i removed it from the tank i found that the reason the toilet runs is because the rubber stopper is crumbling at the edges, letting water seep. i can't wait to see this month's Water & Sewer bill. bob, always prepared, had a toilet repair kit on the basement workbench. so i brought it upstairs with complete confidence that it should be a snap. but of course it wasn't and now the old flapper is back in its place and i have to remove the tank lid and make sure the damn thing securely plugs the hole every time i flush. so i'm flushing a whole lot less.

i'l try it again tomorrow. surely if i can fix a roof i can fix a toilet. bob never would have imagined me fixing a roof or a toilet. i'll show him i can do both. i'll put on 1.75 strength reading glasses and maybe i can see through that water better. maybe this time i'll read the directions or consult my Tuff Chix Guide to Home Repair. my sister gave the book to me for my birthday five months after bob died. hard to misplace, being bright pre-teen pink. bob would have a good chuckle because he knew i never read directions, much less a guide. but i swear i did read the "how to" stop a faucet from dripping and i'm still intimidated by plumbing. so my answer was to shut the cold water supply off and brush my teeth real fast. the Hot, after all, turns hot real fast.

did so many things break when bob was alive? did he invisibly fix everything before i ever knew it was broken? could he fix me if he was here? if he came back alive, it would fix me, i'm sure.

but the reality is i am stymied by a jammed garbage disposal (hint: there is a Reset button). jammed it trying to stuff ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.