Tuesday, January 16, 2007

because really what i am is an interior designer

time for a social worker story.

when i meet with new clients, we go over what household items they need -- things like pots and pans, toasters, towels, etc. sometimes i can help find furniture, but mostly i can round up things that have been donated to the shelter and that fit in my car -- and that is what i tell them. so today i meet with a new lady and she writes out a list for me of things that she wants/needs for the place she is moving into when she leaves shelter...things like beds, dressers, blankets.....and hardwood flooring.

hardwood flooring?

you would not BELIEVE how many people call up the shelter asking to donate their hardwood flooring! let me just put that in my trunk real quick, and at our next session after we go over your weekly goals i'll just go ahead and install it. did you want me to tile a backsplash for you as well? because after all, that is what a case manager is for, right???!!!!!

Monday, January 15, 2007

our little shitten

julie and i went to indy to see her family during the first week of january. i had made ALL of the good luck foods for new year's day, including but not limited to a corned beef brisket. i don't want to talk about it, and it is not the topic of this post, so don't get excited. so the fridge was stuffed with food and we were going out of town and it was all going to spoil if it didn't get eaten. enter our lovely and beloved friend, who we will call yon-diddy. his responsibilities during our absence were to make sure that the cats didn't claw each other's eyes out, and to eat every perishable food item in the house (no small task -- fortunately yon-diddy was up for such a formidable challenge).

a few days into our trip, we spoke with yon-diddy to check on his belly and the cats' eyes, and he made some timid murmurings about having something to confess. apparently he was here one day, and without realizing it he locked billie out on the sun porch, and then did not return until nearly two days later. no serious harm was done -- yon-diddy said her eyes looked as if perhpas they were bulging out a little and she made some fairly distressed mews upon her release from sun porch prison, but after a good long session with her food bowl and an equally long session in the pooper she seemed good as new.

until we arrived home some days later. see how long it takes you to discern where this story is headed, if you haven't already.

i was very excited to come home to my lovely nest and most especially to my even lovelier bed. lo about 10:30 on the evening of our return, i decided it was time for my bed and i to join in blissful union. into my jammies i went, pulled back the covers and slipped between the sheets. oh wondrous heaven! but wait! what is that sensation of dampness -- nay, wetness! -- that i feel on my legs? gasp! what is that wretched aroma wafting up to overwhelm my senses with its rancid tendrils of stinky??? HORROR!!! TERROR!!!!!!!!!!

the shitten had peed in the bed. she also left a little note that said: "i hope you bitches learned your lesson. go sleep in the guest bed and spend some time reflecting on how you have scarred my wee impressionable little kitten psyche. next time, i'll pee all over your closet. fuckers. love always, billie."

Saturday, January 13, 2007

b-i-n-g-o

no, i haven't given up on blobbing, i just was hibernating for a minute and avoiding human interaction. NO BIGGIE.

one of my favorite things that happened over the holidays was bingo night at the lion's club in new palestine. let me give you a minute for that to sink in.

....

this whole thing started because julie's sister -- older sister -- asked for a bingo set for christmas. i thought that was a completely ridiculous thing to ask for. silly me. it only took one evening of rolling the little cage around with its little number balls for me to become completely obsessed with bingo. and so i decided i needed an even bigger, better, more bingo-y bingo experience. lucky for me, julie's sister was able to provide exactly what i was hoping for.

if you haven't played this kind of bingo, then there is no way i am going to be able to adequately describe what it is like. for one thing, you don't play one bingo card at a time, you usually play 24. and getting a bingo doesn't just include getting 5 in a row. you have to have at LEAST two bingos, in some games three, on the same card, and bingos can include four corners, big diamonds, little diamonds, OR clusters. except there are all these other specifications like if your two bingos are clusters they can't overlap and in some games clusters have to be in the corners, and on and on and it is so much more complicated than i ever DREAMED bingo could be. wonderfully BEAUTIFULLY complicated. so we pay $10 and get our regular 24 card sheets and then some other special ones for the $500 and $1000 (!!!) games. a whole evening of bingo blissfuless.

i wish wish WISH that i had taken a camera with me so that i could include pictures. bingo ladies are CRAZY. they have these lucky bingo charms that they bring with them -- things like troll dolls, and little embroidered thingies that say "i heart bingo," and pictures of their kids, and rotten apple cores (didn't make that one up. didn't.). and they smoke cartons upon cartons of cigarettes, and they have little bingo bags with all of their "dobbers" in them. (there is your new bingo vocab word for the day. a "dobber" is this special ink thing you use to mark your bingo cards. the serious bingo players have them in every color of the rainbow. i only had one -- it was hot pink). it is all craaaazy intense and SO. MUCH. FUN. we sat next to this crazy bingo lady who got really miffed at us because we talked too much during the "warm up games" (because we were trying to figure out what the hell a "crazy cluster game" entailed), but then once she decided we met her standards regarding acceptable character, she talked our ears off about her lucky numbers and how many cashews she had eaten.

needless to say, i have been busily searching for a bingo hall ever since we returned to nashville. haven't found one yet that is open to non-senior citizens, but i haven't given up hope. raise your hand if you want to come play bingo with me. thats what i thought.

no, i didn't win any money. but i do have a memory about winning $100 playing bingo on cruise ship when i was like 3 and all of the grown ups were PISSED that the little kid won. i don't think i ever saw that money.