I Thought It Was Menopause

What a week this turned out to be! Where do I even begin?

One of my mugs got pulled from my Zazzle shop due to “closely resembling intellectual property owned by someone else”. The mug in question was the one about “Parental Advisory” and I guess I created it a little TOO much like those invitations to buy albums with bad words warnings we see everywhere these days any time there’s a chance parents might be offended by language that’s probably less offensive than what their kids hear in the schoolyard.

I have to give credit to the team at Zazzle. They were really nice about it and sent a very polite email explaining that they had to remove my design and inviting me to email them with any questions. They didn’t send the trademark police to my front door, so it was all very civil.

Anyway, I have redesigned the mug to read a little differently, but still has the same basic idea. You can find the new one here.

I also want to congratulate the winner of my Zazzle shop giveaway! Terry will soon be the owner of my Angel Who Swears calendar. Congratulations, Terry, and thank you for supporting the blog!

The real fun, though, happened on Thursday when I woke up feeling rather warm. I knew I didn’t have a fever because I didn’t feel bad, but we usually keep the thermostat set lower at night because everyone in the house sleeps better when it’s cold and we can snuggle under warm blankets.

I didn’t really didn’t think about it too much as I was getting ready for my day until I was putting makeup on and realized my face was perspiring like it does in the summer time when the bathroom is still steamy from my shower. I looked at my face in the mirror and realized my cheeks were flushed and I had beads of sweat on my upper lip and that’s when I went into DEFCON FIVE mode.

I proceeded to may have run around the house screaming something about THE CHANGE IS HAPPENING AND MY OVARIES ARE FINALLY SHUTTING DOWN because I thought I was having an honest-to-God hot flash and I was celebrating the fact that I might not be getting my monthly visitor much longer. DIE BITCHES! DIE!

I was just about to run in and do a chest bump with The Husband Dude, who I’m sure would’ve been very confused because he doesn’t have ovaries and doesn’t like to talk about them, when I happened to look over at the thermostat and saw that it was 80 degrees in my living room.

Well shit.

I’m sorry to report that my menopause has been menostopped indefinitely because it never really menostarted.

I checked the settings to make sure it was still set correctly and sure enough, it was set correctly on 72 and I could still hear/feel the furnace blowing. Our furnace is upstairs so I trudged up the steps, lamenting the fact that my ovaries are twat waffles and are probably going to hang on until I’m well into my fifties.

Stubborn Bitches.

The thermostat upstairs registered a nice, balmy 90 degrees, which is great if you’re at the beach but not so much if you’re on the second floor of your house. Poor Shane. His bedroom is upstairs and he never complained once that summer had come early to his bedroom.

I shut off both thermostats to see if I could get the rogue heat machine to shut its shit down, but it kept blowing like a fucking Oklahoma wind sweeping down the fucking plain.

To make things more interesting, it was a mild 50 degrees outside when all of this was happening but we were expecting an arctic blast to hit some time around late morning that was going to cause the temperatures to sink into the teens and produce a dusting of snow. So now my dilemna was, do I shut the power source off on the furnace all day while we wait for the guy to come look at it, or do I let it keep heating up the house all day, hoping the arctic air outside cools it down some and keeps all the fake candles in the house from melting?

My question was answered by Kova, my dog, laying on the tile floor, panting. As bad as I was burning up, at least I wasn’t wearing a thick fur coat.

I turned off the switch in the furnace closet that cuts the power and let it sit and think about what it did wrong for about twenty minutes while I turned on every ceiling fan in the house. When I switched the power to the furnace back on, it instantly started blowing again but in just a couple of minutes settled down and switched off.

I’ve come to the conclusion that much like everything else in our lives, the temperature in our house just jumps from one extreme to the other. Almost exactly a year ago, our old furnace died on the coldest day of the year and we had to wait a week to get it replaced because of the Christmas holiday. We suffered through a week of cold temperatures in our house and I was even sick for part of it.

This year we’ve gone to the other extreme. Instead of our house being a refrigerator, it’s a sauna.

Ying and Yang. Balance in the Force. The scales of justice.

Maybe not.

I blame The Husband Dude. He’s a Libra. The scales. Life is just full of extremes when you marry a Libra.

Once I escaped the pizza oven that is my house, I encountered a very impatient grandma driving a Chevy Equinox (which is what I drive, but she was driving a newer model). I could see her trailing behind me, speeding up then slowing down, and looking like she wished she could get around me. Unfortunately for her, she had to follow me into the left turn lane so that we could turn onto the same street.

Once we completed our turns, she whipped out from behind me into the left lane and sped past, throwing me the bitchiest face I’ve encountered from anyone in a long time.

It reminded me of…well…me.

I’m sure you’re thinking I threw her a dirty look back, or replied with a one-finger salute, or that I let loose a trail of curse words that are still hovering somewhere around 61^st and 129^th.

Nope. I laughed.

I’m pretty sure what I experienced was a hole in the time-space continum and I just saw my future self speeding down the road impatiently, still driving a freaking Chevy Equinox and with my luck, still having fully-functional ovaries.

Well played, future self. Well played. I’ll see you in twenty years.

Here are a couple of goodies I’ve added to my shop:

I really love these new shirts. I guess you could say that they tell you pretty much everything you need to know about me.

 

 

I want to point out that on Zazzle, nearly everything is customizable. I only display my shirts in certain colors but when you go to order any of my shirts, you’ll actually have options to choose different styles (long-sleeve vs short-sleeve) and colors. So if you like my design but don’t like the color or style it’s featured on, you can always change it to suit yourself!

I call this the Melanie Mug. I’ve named it after the friend who inspired it!

 

I first met Melanie at work seventeen years ago, and I’ve treasured her friendship ever since, but it seems that a vast majority of my memories with her include a lot of inappropriate behavior.

A few things that come to mind are happy hour on work nights, belly button piercings during lunch breaks, and the bachelorette party. Oh my gosh. The bachelorette party.

I’m not allowed to discuss the details of that night, but let’s just say that it started at TGI Fridays and ended at a gay bar downtown in the early morning hours and when The Husband Dude picked me up at Melanie’s house, I’m told I handed him a Walmart sack with my own vomit in it and proudly announced, “I threw up.”

I can neither confirm nor deny.

Let’s move on, shall we?

Everybody has a Melanie in their lives and I’m so glad to have mine. She has been my biggest supporters since I started this endeavor and so I’m happy to present the Melanie Mug. Buy one for the Melanie in your life!