I'm also reading a cheese book... I don't remember the name and I'm too sore to go into the living room and grab it. But it's pretty good and it has listings of farms in Illinois and Wisconsin (lots in Wisconsin) where I can get good quality goat cheese. But I'm not sure that anyone, including myself, cares about my damned addiction to goat cheese so I shall move on.

We got the house and we got the house pretty cheap. Six hundred dollars a month plus utilities for a four bedroom house with a yard, gas stove, garage, super safe neighbor and so forth versus eight hundred and fifty dollars for a two bedroom apartment with a concrete balcony, an electric range (die!), fires and domestic outbreaks on an almost daily basis... I'm sure you realize what a hard decision it was for us to move. The gentleman that lived in the house was admitted to a nursing home about seven months ago due to a seizure (long time readers may remember him as the Unabomber neighbor due to his uncanny resemblance) and hasn't lived there since. Well, not only did he look like the Unabomber, apparently he had the same tendencies as well - the house is FILLED with crap. Boxes upon boxes of Ensure, wheelchairs, magazines from 1956, photographs from before that, fine china, a gurney, canned food from the 70's, and so forth. So before we can move in, we have to wait for the landlord (the guy's cousin who also has power of attorney over the house) to haul out the Ensure, the medical equipment, the magazines, books and photographs and everything else. But we have the first month free and the keys are in my possession (well, okay, actually Dad's because he's fixing some stuff in the porch - did I mention the porch? There's a screened/windowed porch area facing the backyard) so everything is good.

I lied, my back isn't good. My back is throbbing and burning and ugh. I went to Good Sam yesterday because the lady who's training me called in and honestly, after the first day of lifting wheelchairs and pushing people all day, my back was ready to give up. I headed over to Mom's house and we called around trying to find free clinics (no insurance, woo) but there were none in the phonebook so we called around to the local emergency rooms asking if anyone knew where one was. Good Sam told me "we're here if you need us" and so eventually, I picked them, mostly because they were the closest to Mom's house. Ugh. They did all SORTS of shit - a catheter, X-rays, and two different ultrasounds, including the vaginal where they had to put me on something closely resembling a Liberator and then stick something closely resembling a vibrator inside me and continually beat the fuck out of my cervix with it). Eventually the doctor came in and told me that the ultrasound showed reduced blood flow to my uterus and that could explain the on and off spotting/bleeding but he doesn't think the back pain is related to the pregnancy/bleeding anymore. In fact, he thinks it's an orthopedic issue and/or something with my thyroid but "it's very expensive to do all that and I don't want to do more tests and keep you here all night". So what'd he do? He wrote me two prescriptions, one for a muscle relaxer, the other for a painkiller and went on to tell me that if I felt okay, I was fine to go to work, just take the muscle relaxers before I do. I inform him that I work in a nursing home/rehabilitation center as a CNA and taking muscle relaxers before work wouldn't be a great idea. He waves his hand at me and tells me I'll be just fine but "again, if you don't feel good, don't go, you shouldn't be doing such heavy, heavy work so soon anyway". He started to really piss me off after that so thankfully the nurse arrived and gave me the discharge papers so I could go.

All right, just found out AOL members can watch a full episode of "Everwood" using Real Player. Yes, I love that show. Yes, I'm a nerd. Yes, I'm going to watch it now instead of sleeping because I always miss it because of damned wrestling being on Monday nights. Mind you, I could go in the bedroom and watch "Everwood" but there's no remote and, well, it's in the damn bedroom. End whine.

before & after