I think I’ve written this before but, in case you missed it, I’m in San Diego dog sitting Sam and Abby, two pug dogs for my friends that are at Burning Man. My mom is here for the week also. Abby has pancreatitis. She eats special food and can only have apples and carrots for treats. They have to be separated at feeding time. Abby goes crazy, jumping, snorting and crying while the food is being prepared while Sam sometimes doesn’t even start eating until five minutes after the food is put down. If I wasn’t forewarned about Abby’s behavior I might have made a 911 call to the vet. She practically goes into convolutions at the sound of food pellets hitting the metal dog bowl.

The other day in the living room my mom bent over to pick up something and a package of chicklets in her shirt pocket opened up and spilled all over the tile floor. To me, it seemed to be happening in slow motion. All I could think about was Abby getting to the gum before me, eating it all and her poor little pancreas failing. I threw myself arms and legs splayed, face down on top of the spray of gum pieces like it was a granade and wildly flailed to sweep up the stragglers before Abby hoovered them up.

I was successfull and no gum was eaten. The pugs are safe for another day.

I wish I had video of the event. It was truely heroic.

I’m still in San Diego. Celine (Helene) has been here with me for a week. We’ve found her a house. She’s flying back to Chicago tomorrow and then driving back to move to SD permanently on September 15th. I’m feeling a little downtrodden at the moment. A week with Celine is a little too long. She probably feels the same about me.

Andy and Vlad drove here from Vegas for a short two day vacation. On the first morning they were here, Andy ended up at the emergency room. He’s okay, but for the forty five minutes or so that I didn’t know what was going on it was terrifying.

My mom and I were going to the property management company so she could sign papers for her new house. Andy called and said he was in excruciating pain and Kevin was taking him to Urgent Care. Just the fact that Andy admitted he was in pain at all was cause enough for alarm, but excruciating? I knew it was bad. I told him to go to the emergency room. He said he would consider it. Ten minutes later while we were in the car driving towards Kevin’s house I got a call from Kevin telling me that he was taking Andy to the emergency room. I put the hospital in the GPS and cried some quiet tears behind my sunglasses while Celine diagnosed his symptoms as kidney stones and had had a one sided conversation about them interspersed with “blinker”, “are you getting off at this exit”, “coast!” and “you can move to the other lane if you want to”.

When we got to the emergency room, Andy was in with the lady that puts all of your personal and insurance information into the system. He was drenched in sweat. It looked like he had just walked in from being in a rainstorm. Although now, he had absolutely no pain at all. He said he felt silly and asked if he could just go home. Everyone of course said “NO”.

Kevin, Andy, Celine and I took our seats in the waiting room and recounted the events leading up to us being there. Kevin and Andy both said that they were really worried when they noticed sweat coming out of Andy’s fingers. Andy was writhing in the back seat with a burning, clenching, searing pain in his kidneys trying to convey all of his symptoms to Kevin so that if he passed out, Kevin would be able to talk to the doctors. His arms and hands were tingling and going numb. They staggered into the emergency room while Andy was on the verge of unconsciousness.

Then, as suddenly as it came on, it stopped.

When we saw the triage nurse and Andy described his symptoms, she said it was most likely kidney stones. Andy was not very happy with the diagnosis. Kidney stones are for old guys that don’t take care of themselves. We went back out, shared the info and listened to Celine go on (and on) about the radio show where she heard about kidney stones, Uncle Ralph’s kidney stone and all the medical things that Andy was going to have done to him. We told her to please stop, but most of the time, there’s no stopping Celine.

After a while, we were called back into a room with a bed and medical type stuff and had a consultation with a nurse. She gave Andy a jar and pointed the way to the bathroom. A few minutes later Andy came back and said, “Ummm, I think my kidney stone just came out”. It was in the sample jar. The nurse was amazed. The doctor came in, laughing and amazed. He said that Andy must have set some kind of record. All the information we’ve read since the incident said four days minimum and sometimes up to four to six weeks to get it through your system. He gave Andy a cursory exam, wrote a prescription for pain medication just in case and released him.

We went to lunch and spent the rest of the day at the beach. Andy feels like he has a new lease on life and we both feel very, very grateful that it turned out the way it did.

I’m back in San Diego with Helene….excuse me…..Celine. We (Nova and I) changed my mom’s name from Helene to Celine. It’s her new San Diego moniker. After a morning of house hunting, we’ve arrived at pug central and have commenced to dog sitting for Shawn and Amy who are off to Burning Man.

Celine found the perfect house to rent today and is a little frantic that she can’t get a hold of the property rental company. We left a few voice mails, put a note on the door of the house and sent some emails. The tenants were moving out when we drove by and were kind enough to show us the place. We all knew it was perfect for her. Centrally located in her favorite neighborhood, a corner house with lots of natural light.

We stayed at Kevin’s house last night and this morning I woke up to Kevin explaining to my mom what Burning Man was and showing pictures and video. To put it mildly, Celine was amazed. After Kevin left to drive Shawn and Amy to the airport we watched forty five minutes of Burning Man Youtube videos. Who would have thought that my seventy year old mother would turn out to be a burner. I think she might really be serious about wanting to go next year.

Celine is also very excited about dressing up like a zombie for one of Kevin’s and Shawn’s new projects about surviving a zombie scourge. All morning she was making calls to family and excitedly taking about being a “mummy” in a movie and a thing called “burning bush”. It was pretty cute.

I really hope she gets this house because I’m not sure anything else will compare.

I’ve done too many things this month and now I’m uninspired and have too much to write about. I guess the first and foremost thing that overrides all is that baseball season is over for us. In case you didn’t hear BASEBALL SEASON IS OVER. Not for MLB, just for us.

It was getting later in the season and we were in between a profit we were happy with and a profit we would have been really happy with so, we decided that for preservation of sanity and bankroll we would stop at either of the two choices. Just days after our pact we had our largest and most impressive one day loss record to date, and ended up happy for the season.

All this went on while I was in Baja Mexico eating bean burritos and drinking tequilla. I decided on a last minute trip with friends from LA so Andy could get some programming work done and watch the Olympics without me hovering over his shoulder. You may or may not know this about me but watching any length of televised sports really harshes my mellow. I think it’s the constant crowd noise that does it. I thought if I went on a short trip Andy could get a healthy dose of Olympic coverage while programming without worrying if he was hurting my head.

There were many interesting Baja stories, but I’m not sure if they were interesting enough to commit to paper. Margaritas, laying around on the beach, a short trip to “Scandalosa” Ensenada’s only gay bar. Since there were zero customers in Scandalosa we went over to Hussongs, Ensenada’s oldest bar where ironically enough, I watched the Olympics.

When we left Mexico, we were sent to secondary screening at the border. I accidentally got into the speed pass lane without a speed pass. It was my first time in secondary. I didn’t have anything illegal in the car, but my mind raced anyway. Thank god I didn’t take up the offer (not that I would) in Puerto Nuevo from the restaurant owner who sold us home made vanilla and cinnamon tequilla and then offered that he owned the farmacia next door. Xanyx, Valium, Ecstasy, Cocaine…..whatever we needed. Caesar said he was our man.

Secondary turned out fine. They didn’t even search our car. They saw the yellow ticket (everyone else had orange tickets) wagged a finger and said, “don’t go through that lane next time”.

I flew back to Vegas for the week and I’m going back to SD on Friday (I left my car there) to meet my mom and help her to find a place to live. The house that I grew up in is sold and in a very short amount of time, my born and bred Midwestern mother is going to become a California resident.

We’re going to be staying at our current place until September 15th while Andy finishes his hockey season then, we’re not quite sure what comes next.

RV,
originally uploaded by cindigodotcom.

I think we’ve decided to sell the RV. We don’t really want to but it’s been baking in the Vegas sun and Vegas is not kind to vehicles. We would love to keep it somewhere in San Diego or anywhere with a more temperate climate. If anyone has any ideas as to how we can do that, please speak up.

Here’s the site I made for it:

http://www.cindigo.com/RV/index.html

If you click on the thumbnails, you can view a bigger picture.

We put alot of work into it and really would like to keep it for future adventures, but the right thing may be to sell it. If we can keep it, I found a place in Mexico that can do the exterior painting for cheap. The exterior looks not great, but the inside is. We told ourselves that it was on purpose, you know, for theft deterrent.

super fly mom,
originally uploaded by cindigodotcom.

Swiped from my cousin’s blog: “Woman” refers to my mom. She basically made a split-second decision to pursue and ultimately catch an intoxicated 20 year-old that ran through our yard, into our garage door pushing the other car through the wall. She heard the noise of the screeching car got up and was watching from the kitchen window. She was furious and jumped into the untouched second car in the driveway.

“‘I was afraid he would ram my car, but he didn’t,’” she said. ‘Some people looked out of their house and I hollered, ‘Call the police,’ and I guess they did.”

It was a pretty exciting night. I think I was five or six when it happened. I still remember being slightly embarrassed about being around all the cops and neighbors outside in my pajamas. My sister slept through the whole thing.

The first time Andy’s and my parent’s re-met, Andy’s mom brought up this very subject while we were having breakfast. She said, “Remember that lady from the neighborhood that chased the drunk driver down with her own car?” We all had a good laugh over that. What are the odds?

For those of you not in the know, Andy and I grew up a few blocks from each other. We met in kindergarten, were friends in grade school but hung out in different circles in high school. We lost touch until I got that life changing note six years ago through classmates.com. Cute? Embarrassing? Awesome? I never quite know how to feel about the classmates story.