The Funny Pages - Tickle Me Elbow - The Original

[Jestgar]

One of his goals is no babies.

Sounds pretty practical to me. And certainly doable.

[Loey]

Hi My Dear Psillies,

Back from our short trip to NJ. It was wonderful to see all of our phriends and U2 (in an outdoor arena - now that's just not phunny - it was 102 until the sun set and then it was in the 80's). I hope all of you in the areas that are even hotter are pharing well. I've been thinking of you all. By yesterday we were homesick for RI.

Right now Celiac is the least of my medical problems. What a difference a year makes. The best part of the year was phinding all of you. I wish there was a way for us to teleport to a gluten-free party and all be together (maybe someday there will be a way - beam me up Scotty). I've been catching up on all of the posts (165) I missed since I was away - that includes the song thread.

I've missed you all and I am glad to be back! And now I must return to our laundry. Tony is still away for another week and will deal with his laundry when he returns (aren't you proud of me Queen Kareng? Tony and I have phinally grown up).

Loey

P.S. Clark got a call from a pharmaceutical company he sent his CV to and they already called a phriend of his who knows a lot of the higher ups for a recommendation. They called him and will set up an interview. I think he's a little disappointed that college would have to be delayed but the income would be a relief until Tony gets through college and I get Disability (thinking positive thoughts - I WILL get Disability even if it takes two years).

[kareng]

I've missed you all and I am glad to be back! And now I must return to our laundry. Tony is still away for another week and will deal with his laundry when he returns (aren't you proud of me Queen Kareng? Tony and I have phinally grown up).

[Loey

P.S. Clark got a call from a pharmaceutical company he sent his CV to and they already called a phriend of his who knows a lot of the higher ups for a recommendation. They called him and will set up an interview. I think he's a little disappointed that college would have to be delayed but the income would be a relief until Tony gets through college and I get Disability (thinking positive thoughts - I WILL get Disability even if it takes two years).

I'm sooo proud!

Keeping fingers crossed on the job. Glad you had a fun time.

[Jestgar]

Loey

:wub: :wub: :wub:

I'm glad you're checking in. Take care of yourself.

[elye]

Hi, Loweeee! Was wondering when you'd be back. .. . thanks for the update -- we always need those around here... . . .

[psawyer]

Hey, Loey, good to hear from you.

I saw Open Original Shared Link and immediately thought I should share it with the sillies, and one certain silly in particular--Emily.

[GlutenFreeManna]

Should be doing something but its too hot to move! Which got me thinking about the hot move GFM is having.

Wondering - Have the ILs melted yet?

- What of the trailer full of junk?

- Will gluteny or dairy foods sneak into new house?

- Has FIL made peace with the hotel?

- Will the top story on the national news tonight be: Heat Related

Death : Woman Goes Nuts during move. Kills In-Laws

You about nailed it except for the first and last one. Although both of those have gone through my mind. We just got working internet at the new place and the IL's are STILL here! They don't plan to leave until tuesday! I will give a longer update later tonight when everyone is asleep. Let's just say it has not been fun.

[GlutenFreeManna]

Trailer full of junk found on side of the road with a complaining couple inside.

We tried to lose them once while they were following us but it didn't work. They have GPS and were waiting for us at the new place.

[GlutenFreeManna]

I had some steak for breakfast, and there was a lot of juice left on the plate, so I mixed it with some quinoa flour, and stirred it up with chunks of fat I had cut off the meat. It looked like something that would be really tasty if deep-fried. Gave the big girls their share and brought the rest out to the teenage chicks. Chickens are suspicious of most new food, so I thought it might take a while for them to try it, but it turns out they make an exception for fresh steak. They were on me before I even started scooping it out.

About half of them grabbed a chunk, and the other half chased them around. The little silkie sat happily nipping the flour coating and ignoring the big chunks. I left them to figure it out, and a few minutes later I heard loud honking. The Brahma, who honks like a goose, apparently got the last piece, 'cause she was racing around making her muffled 'neener-neener' honk and the entire pack was chasing her.

That's today's episode of "Chicken TV". Don't forget to tune in for tomorrow's adventure.

I agree with Karengee! I want some chickens someday. They seem so entertaining!

[GlutenFreeManna]

Some day, I'm going to get some chickens. I never knew they were such fun.

Forgot that GFM might be off line. Really she should go to the library & send an update. The carrier pidgeon or chicken never made it here.

I apologize. My inlaws intercepted the pidgeon or else I would have been in touch sooner.

[elye]

Hey, Loey, good to hear from you.

I saw Open Original Shared Link and immediately thought I should share it with the sillies, and one certain silly in particular--Emily.

:lol:

OMG. . . .. This is an incredibly enlightening, entertaining article. And full of such important, ponderable information!.. . ... A country's given economic situation intrinsically tied to its male citizens's penises (excuse me, penii) and their respective lengths... . ...who'da thunk??

"The healthiest economies grow in countries with the penis sizes of 13.5 centimetres (5.2 inches), just shy of the average. Happily, Canada measures 13.92."

Well!! THAT explains it!! Canada has fared incredibly well during this economic recession, better than any other developed country, because Canadian men have average-sized penises! Man, I should have known......

At last, a reason to celebrate the very Canadian ordinariness, mediocrity of which we have become reknowned.

"One striking result is the collapse of the GDP after male organ exceeds the length of 16 centimetres"

So, um. . . ... . ..you Yanks have had a real crisis happening, economically..... . ..

Hmm... . ...think I need to head back down there, hit some more beaches... . .

[GlutenFreeManna]

Not everyone's asleep yet but they have left me alone in a room finally. I will try to review and give the highlights so far:

Thursday: In-laws call to tell us they are on the road to visit us, bringing with them a small U-haul trailer full of stuff they want to get rid of and think we must need. This was despite our telling them SEVERAL times that this is not a good time to come since we are MOVING on Saturday. They lied to us and said they would come the week after we moved instead and then called around noon to tell us they were halfway here already with the trailer full of crap we requested they NOT bring. We book a hotel and told them they MUST stay there. They did stay there but not without complaining loudly about it to anyone that would listen.

Friday: We get the keys to our new place. I had made a list of things that needed to be done on friday prior to knowing we would have unexpected guests. My list of objectives for Friday was as follows:

Go over the move in check list to make sure there is nothing else that needs to be fixed

Clean the bathrooms and kitchen

Move the things that are fragile/irreplaceable/expensive

Move personal items we don't want moved or seen by other people (I have an entire box of KY I didn't want people seeing as well as a bunch of pregnacy/fertility related books--we don't have kids ),

move food from freezers and fridge--since it was so hot we needed time to make severeal trips in order to get all the food packed in ice in a cooler.

Prep food that the movers were goign to eat Saturday

Take down some shelves in the washer dryer closet so that our washer and dryer would fit (we have oversized frontloaders).

Those were the ONLY things I wanted to accomplish Friday to prepare for Saturday when we had rented a U-haul truck and had all our help coming. Had it been just hubby and I we would have zipped through that list like a well oiled machine and had plenty of time to rest.

Here's how Friday ACTUALLY WENT:

6:AM Call from FIL wakes us up. Now let me just say the this is not early for us. My husband gets up to go to work at 3:30 AM daily. BUT he had taken Friday off and was planning on sleeping in until 7 at least, especially since Thursday night we had to spend 2 hrs convincign the in-laws to stay in a hotel and we stayed up way later than we planned. We got nothing done that we wanted to get done thursday and wanted to take our time getting things together friday morning. So FIL calls and says they checked out of the hotel are at the new place and wanted to unload the trailer. Oh, and could we brign them coffee and breakfast? The hotel they were stayign in had coffee and breakfast and they didn't eat there or take any coffee to go. My husband (love him!) tells them point blank they will have to go get thier own coffee and breakfast and tells them a few places to go. I would have liked to tell them where to go myself, but my imput wasn't requested.

Although he did tell them off a little, Hubby is now concerned they will unload the stuff on the grass and we'll get a fine from the HOA or something. We don't want to piss off our new neighbors before we even move in. He jumps out of bed and starts putting stuff in the car that we had originally planned to take. I have to stop him from taking a few things that I wanted to take however as I now have visions of my in-laws rifling through the boxes to "help" unpack things and finding the fertility books and KY. While this COULD be really comical I don't want to have to answer questions about whether we are having kids or not (I have had 3 miscarriages unbknowst to them) and I don't want to discuss my sex life with them. So in the scramble we only get about half the things I wanted to take in the car.

7:AM Neither one of us are showered. We are rushing to prevent an impending disaster but it's like theres nothign we can do. On the way there we debate on just getting on the interstate and driving to Kansas or someplace far, far away where they will never find us. On the way there the AC in my car stops working. We just had it fixed two weeks ago and now it's not working again. The temp is 100 degrees with a heat index of 115 and we are dyign in the heat on the way there. By the time we get there (it's a 45 mintue drive one way) the heat has darn near lulled us to sleep so that we can't think straight. We find ourselves just unloading the trailer as fast as we can and hoping they plan on leaving when it's done.

No such luck. They plan to stay. In our new place. So now my new place has a bunch of junk sitting in it that is not mine and I haven't even been through the place to see if there is anythign that still needs fixing prior to moving in Saturday. I also haven't cleaned it. It was somewhat cleaned by the previos tenants but the kitchen needed to be comepletely scrubbed and sanitized. The bathrooms needed work too. I try to mildly protest them staying there but my mind is fried by the heat and I'm light headed fromt eh paint fumes. Our place had been freshly painted on Thurday and there were still paint fumes. I mention that the fumes are bothering me and FIL wants to open all the windows to air out the house. We tell him not to dare open the windows--it's 101 and we just turned on the air conditioning! It takes a lot of convincing to make him understand. The heat will make me sicker than the paint fumes and we have just moved some items that need to be kept cool like electronics, paintings and photo albums.

The rest of Friday is filled with us trying to fruitlessly get things done at the new place and not getting a single thing accomplished besides moving about half a carfull and getting all their junk in. The pattern pretty much goes like this all day friday (and most of saturday).

F/M/BIL: "what can I do to help?"

me/hubby: "Well we still need to do XXX."

F/M/BIL: "I don't think you should XXX. I think you should do YYY instead." OR "Okay I'll do that, but I'm going to do it this way instead."

me/hubby: "We don't want it done that way. We want it this way."

F/M/BIL: "But it will be better this way. You don't really want it that way."

me/hubby: "Yes. We do. Please do it this way or don't do it at all. You don't have to live here once it's done. This is how we prefer things."

We wasted a lot of time on friday trying to get them fed too since we didn't want them bringing gluten or dairy into our new place. Hubby had already told them the ground rules of no gltuen or dairy in the house. If we sent them out for food they said they would get fast food and bring it back to eat here. We told them they couldn't do that. They had to eat in the restaurant. Everything was packed and I was not in a position to cook food I can eat on friday to give them so they had to go out to eat. I had prepared some food on Wed (before I knew they were coming) that was just enoguh for me and hubby to eat on thursday and friday. The food situation is where thigns all fell apart....

To be continued....

[kareng]

Oh! Honey! I wish I lived close. I would have been the rude bossy one for you! It's just as hot here in Kansas but you can get a direct flight from Dulles or Regan. I'll come get you. We have a lot of dairy in our house, but we can figure something out. Everyone would giveup the dairy except J's chocolate milk. You de die to flee to Kansas, just pm me.

[GlutenFreeManna]

Oh! Honey! I wish I lived close. I would have been the rude bossy one for you! It's just as hot here in Kansas but you can get a direct flight from Dulles or Regan. I'll come get you. We have a lot of dairy in our house, but we can figure something out. Everyone would giveup the dairy except J's chocolate milk. You de die to flee to Kansas, just pm me.

thanks Kareng! It gets worse. I just typed a long reply describing the rest of friday and saturday but we are having lighnting storms and our power got knocked out for a few seconds taking down the internet. I lost my reply. Will try to retype some of it. Maybe in installments this time in case the power goes out again.

[kareng]

thanks Kareng! It gets worse. I just typed a long reply describing the rest of friday and saturday but we are having lighnting storms and our power got knocked out for a few seconds taking down the internet. I lost my reply. Will try to retype some of it. Maybe in installments this time in case the power goes out again.

Let me know what airline and time your flight comes in tomorrow to the Kansas City (MCI) airport.

[Jestgar]

Good grief. I hope hubs comes up with some permanent way to get them to respect your decisions. Sounds like you deserve a real break. Can you assign them to clean the place you're vacating so they'll be out of your hair?

[GlutenFreeManna]

Noon on Friday: I go into the ktichen to get some water and see fresh cracker crumbs all over the stove. I start freakign out and yelling. Il's are not understanding what all the fuss is about. Hubby gives them a good talking to and reviews the rules about no gluten or dairy in the house. He finds their bag of contraband (bread and crackers) and makes them take it to their car and promise not to eat it in the house. we also find yogurt and other dairy products (cheese, milk, etc) have been placed in our hew fridge at this point. FIL makes a run to the store for ice and they are all placed in a cooler full of ice. They promise not to eat them around me. Hubby agrees to take them someplace to eat to appease them and to give me some cooling down time. I go back to the old place hoping to get a few things on my list done, eat my leftovers and shower.

1 PM I get back to the old place.

2 PM I've eaten and feeling a little better and have some things organized and a few plan B's thought out in case the IL's want to throw more wrenches. I'm about to take a shower when there's a knock on the door. They have shown up with their trailer to take thign to the new place. Now on the surface I will admit this seems like a nice gesture. But It's now 2 PM, we have not done a single thing on my list for friday and they want to do things we had not planned on doing (we had a moving truck and lots of help coming Saturday). Not to mention they are trying to do these things in the hottest part of the day and they just came from eating fast food...

[GlutenFreeManna]

Good grief. I hope hubs comes up with some permanent way to get them to respect your decisions. Sounds like you deserve a real break. Can you assign them to clean the place you're vacating so they'll be out of your hair?

That's alreay happened, well, sort of. I'll get to that part in a few posts.

Friday at lunch, Hubby laid the smack down on them pretty hard about the cc issues. Once we returned with a load of boxes in their trailer (um the ones I didn't care about moving) he made them clean the kitchen from top to bottom (and he made sure they did it right). The bathrooms still didn't get cleaned and stuff is strewn everywhere but at least the kitchen is now cleaned.

9 PM I'm reserved to the fact that we won't be getting most of my list done on friday. I'm dirty and tired and just want a shower. There is just one thing that has to be done before the moving truck arrives saturday. We need those shelves taken down or our washer and dryer won't fit. They promise us they will do it and so we leave our drill there so they can do it quickly. We were so tired wo also left our two hand trucks there...

[GlutenFreeManna]

Saturday

6 AM: Phone call from IL's. Hubby asks them if they took the shelves down and they say they have. He asks them to come and bring the drill and the two hand trucks. they say they will be there after they stop for breakfast.

7 AM We pick up the U-haul.

8 AM Our friends arrive to help us load. No sign of the In-laws with the hand trucks and drill. The light stuff goes in fast and before we know it our friends are havign to lift heavy furniture tha thtey would not have had to lift if they had those hand trucks.

9 AM everythign is in the truck except our heavy washing maching which needs a hand truck.

9:15 IL's finally arrive with the hand trucks and drill. Half our help has left at this time but we still have plenty of help to unload. We have to skip taking things down with the drill however and just go to the other place. We leave the drill at the old place because they told us the shelves at the new palce were already taken down.

10 AM Our U-haul and caravan of helpers arrives and unloads things in record time. When I go upstairs to look in the closet I notice that only the top shelf has been removed. We had needed the top shelf to STAY and the bottom two to be removed. And now we have no drill to do it. So I find a screwdriver and start going at it while the truck gets emptied. But our moving help is too fast and we end up with everythign excpet he washer/dryer unloaded. We have two nice strong guys that agree to wait for us to be ready for the washer dryer to be moved. They get it done in the end but it took longer and was more hassle then it should have been.

11 AM the last two guys leave. We tried to take them out to lunch but they graciously refused. Perhaps they sensed how stressed we were. Perhaps they just wanted to go shower since their shirt were soaked through with sweat. I about cried at how awesome our friends are though. In sharp contrast to the family members trying to "help" us, our friends asked us where we wanted things, put them there without questioning it and didn't complain about it or criticize our choices. Then they refused to even let us take them out for food.

[GlutenFreeManna]

Sat. Continued

Sometime around noon I'm in the kitchen trying to figure out some quick food I can put together to give them so we won't have a repeat of the cracker incident. I notice a puddle around their cooler. It was leaking all over the floor and into a few boxes. I start cleaning up right away because the boxes it's leaking onto have books in them. As I'm gettign them to move boxes I notice the white towel I'm usign to mop up the water is pink. what would make the water pink? My stomach suddenly dropps as I realize what it is. Hubby investigates and confirms my suspicions. A yogurt has leaked int eh cooler. So now I have mopped up a pink puddle of something that could kill me in minutes if I ingest it. Another freak out and more yelling at them mostly from hubby. I go to decontaminate myself in the shower. The cooler gets put outside. Fortunately I did not have any reaction to the dairy. That was not fun though. We had even shown them the epipen and expalined prior to this. The rest of Saturday was a series of trying to get things done as far as unpacking but failing because the IL's kept putting up road blocks. I did manage to get a homemade meal prepared for them on Saturday evening.

Today (Sunday) was not much better. I'll write more horor stories later. They are still here and staying through Tuesday.

[Darn210]

Wow Manna . . . I know you just moved and all, but since everything is in boxes, don't you think it would be in your best interest to move again . . . say on Wednesday after your IL's leave . . . to a new place where they won't have the address?

[elye]

Can't find any other way to put it, Manna. . .. . ..what hell!

Stay strong, keep us posted, and get on that plane for Kansas. Kherrighnne has two great sons and a terrific lab -- a perfect respite.. . . ...

[kareng]

GFM!

Put a TV in your room, lock the door & turn the TV up really loud and don't come out until Wednesday?

[GlutenFreeManna]

Wow Manna . . . I know you just moved and all, but since everything is in boxes, don't you think it would be in your best interest to move again . . . say on Wednesday after your IL's leave . . . to a new place where they won't have the address?

Believe me this very conversation has come up several times between hubby and I.

[GlutenFreeManna]

GFM!

Put a TV in your room, lock the door & turn the TV up really loud and don't come out until Wednesday?

I am doing this today, but with the computer not the TV. I'm locked in my bedroom and plan to watch several TV shows on hulu all day today. Will also try to tell you more stories.