Author: Average Jane

My husband and I went to a concert at a nightclub last night. The lineup was Conquest, Lacuna Coil, Shadows Fall and Stone Sour.

I should back up and mention that ever since I went out of town last weekend for a conference, I’ve had one shoulder spasming extremely painfully. I have a chiropractor appointment today, but that didn’t help me yesterday. I had my husband put some Flexall on my upper back and shoulder and I soldiered on.

We got to the show and I was not at all put out to be asked for I.D.

It was a sold out show and the first band was playing by the time we arrived. We made our way as close to the center of the floor as possible and noticed that a mosh pit had already formed, off to the right. Note to selves: stay away from the pit.

After the opening act, we moved back into the main part of the club to get beers and a little fresher air. We noticed a great, upper level area that seemed like the perfect place from which to watch the show. Naturally it was a VIP area and we lowly peons were not allowed in. Considering that I’m acquainted with one of the club’s owners, it made me mad at myself that I hadn’t just gotten in touch with him ahead of time.

I gave up trying to reach the main bar and just bought a $5 Miller Lite from an auxiliary bar near the door. Lacuna Coil – the band we were mainly there to see – was up next.

We managed to get back to the center of the floor, but we were fenced in by gigantic men, many of them 6’5" or taller. I guess we grow ’em big in the Midwest. Seriously, though, even on my tiptoes I could barely see the stage and my husband later said that he was in the same boat.

Lacuna Coil’s lead singer is apparently rather short as well, and I only got a bare handful of glimpses of her performance.

I was interested in seeing how a metal crowd would react to a female vocalist and, as far as I could determine, they reacted pretty much the same as they would to a male vocalist. I did hear one fan near me shout out an anatomically-questionable desire, but it sounded sincere, if that makes any sense.

The mosh pit remained a looming threat, particularly as crowd surfers tended to end up back on their feet not far from us. More than one pumped-up mosher shoved his way out of the pit in our direction, but fortunately no fights broke out.

There were still two bands left to go when Lacuna Coil finished their set, but my husband and I had had all the crowd and heat we could stand already. My shoulder was aching and so was my back. We left and were home watching "Heroes" before 9:30.

I know it sounds crazy that we’re actively working on a heavy metal album when we can’t even make our way through a few hours in a concert crowd. However, it’s a lot easier to perform eight or nine songs and then go sit down backstage than it is to stand in a sweaty crowd all evening. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

I know I’ve been neglecting my blog lately. I guess after keeping up the 5-posts-per-week schedule fairly consistently for almost three years, I deserve to be a bit of a slacker now and then.

Truth is, I just don’t have much to talk about right now. I’ve already discussed at length all of the primary things that are happening right now:

• the kitten and her post-surgical travails
• raging acid reflux and its effects:
  • inability to sing properly
  • inability to eat normally
  • denial of coffee (nooooooo!)
• revived yoga practice

Those are just the most dramatic ways in which every day is the same, which tells you something right there.

Even when I’m out and about lately, I just don’t seem to have my writer’s brain in the proper gear. Rather than my usual habit of composing little snippets of blog prose every time I see something interesting, it’s as though I’ve stopped noticing anything outside the narrow tunnel of the given task at hand.

I think my post title sums it up: I’m just tired. Mainly I’m tired of having heartburn, a sore throat and difficulty swallowing no matter what I eat or what medication I’m on. That all leads to me not getting enough sleep and then I’m literally tired as well.

I’m sure I’ll get everything sorted out sooner or later. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to keep posting and hope I can get a little spark of creativity going from time to time.

Xena the Coneheaded Cat is loving, friendly, sociable and sweet. She is also single-minded in her determination to reach her post-spay sutures by any possible means. She scrapes at them with the edge of her Elizabethan collar. She reaches for them with her front and back feet, stretching her own belly flesh to pull them closer. It’s driving us crazy.

She visited the vet three times last week. The first time, the vet wrapped her midsection with bandages, turning her into Xena the Wasp-Waisted Conehead, and prescribed a week’s worth of antibiotics. By the time my husband took her back to the vet the next day, Xena had managed to yank her bandages up and reach her sutures anyway. That was it for the wrapping.

By the time I took her back to the vet the third time, she was looking better. She made it through the weekend okay and I hoped that she had finally decided to leave her sutures alone.

This morning as I was getting ready for work, Xena jumped up on the bathroom counter and put her paws on my shoulder for a hug. I sneaked a look at her belly and saw sutures askew around an ugly, unhealed spot. Criminy.

The vet has already said that in the 35 years he’s been in practice, he’s never seen a cat mess with its sutures so relentlessly. Pain pills don’t deter her, nor does the collar. Oddly, she acts as though she feels perfectly fine in every other way.

I’m taking an early lunch today to bring her back to the vet yet again. It’s possible they’ll have to actually replace some of her sutures.

If she could just chill out for another week, she’d be healed and ready to resume her cone-free lifestyle. It’s too bad you can’t reason with a creature with a brain the size of a Brazil nut.

Saturday was my niece’s seventh birthday. My sister is out of town, so my niece, my brother-in-law, his mother, his aunt and her fiance (husband? I may have missed a development), my husband and I met for dinner at a Japanese steakhouse to celebrate. My niece chose the cuisine, evidently for the opportunity to stuff herself with shrimp. She’s a shrimp-eatin’ fool, that girl.

After dinner, my niece came back home with us for a sleepover (and to bake chocolate chip cookies, per her specification).

Taking a leaf from my friend Me’s book, I’d decided to start a tradition with my niece of taking her shopping and letting her choose her own birthday gift. That was the plan for Sunday afternoon. Somehow I had failed to fully convey this to her, as evidenced by the following conversation:

Jane: Okay, let’s bake cookies!

Niece: And then we can open presents.

Jane: What presents?

Niece: The presents you got me for my birthday.

Jane: I didn’t get you any presents. Tomorrow we’re going shopping and you can pick out your own presents.

Niece: You didn’t get me any presents?!?

It took a little more explaining, but before long she had decided that we would visit Target in the morning to expand her already enormous collection of Littlest Pet Shop stuff.

We baked cookies until well after my niece’s bedtime. She brushed her teeth, settled down into her sleeping bag and asked me to read a story. She hadn’t packed any of her own, so I decided it was time I introduced her to the Oz books. I chose one of my many copies of The Wizard of Oz (which you can read in its entirety here) and read her the first chapter and part of the second before she started to nod off. I tucked it into her suitcase so her parents could read her the rest.

The next morning, we made our Target run and my niece chose a Littlest Pet Shop Digital Mouse. We went back home to release it from its plastic shell and I offered my niece the instructions, but she had it figured out in no time on her own.

She brought her toy with her as we drove to Lawrence, Kansas to meet my aunt for lunch at the Free State Brewing Company. After lunch, we shopped up and down Massachusetts Street for a while until we reached an enormous toy store. My niece spotted something in the window that got her very excited, and beelined into middle of the store before we even realized she’d taken off.

I followed her and found out the source of her excitement: a big bin of Ugly Dolls. I had seen Ugly Dolls online, but assumed that they were only ever purchased by graphic designers as cubicle decorations. I’d considered buying them for my niece and nephew, but had decided they were too weird. Boy, was I wrong.

My niece knew all their names and took a good 10 minutes deciding which one she wanted after I told her I’d be happy to get her one as an additional birthday gift. (Up to that point, I’d only bought her one cheap toy anyway.) She looked them over one by one and finally selected Icebat. An excellent choice, I thought.

Once she had Icebat, she was over the whole shopping thing. I almost stopped at Eangee Home Design on my way home to purchase a jellyfish light that had caught my eye, but decided I could always get it later.

I dropped her off so she could go to a 5:00 p.m. soccer game, headed home and took a nice nap with the cats before having dinner with my husband and getting caught up on an entire week’s worth of TiVo’ed entertainment.

I didn’t get any housework done this weekend, nor did I work on songs, catch up on laundry or even cook a meal at home. It was all worth it, though.

Yesterday was my husband’s actual birthday. We had a lovely dinner, made even more lovely by this special balloon.

Xena is back from the vet with a cone over her head.

(You know I couldn’t resist making her a LOLcat.)

What else? Well, I have sore muscles from yoga class on Monday. I hope that today’s class will loosen things up a bit. It’s nice to be reminded that I have abdominal muscles buried somewhere underneath all my winter lard.

I went to the doctor on Monday to find out why I have severe, throat-burning acid reflux every day despite my prescription for Nexium. She switched me to Protonix, so we’ll see if that helps. (So far, not so much.)

Thanks to that doctor visit, I know exactly how much I weigh right now and I was not happy to hear it. I’m already lightening up my diet to try to combat the heartburn, so I’m hoping that a stepped-up exercise plan will take care of the rest.

And that’s all I’ve got. But hey, it’s Wednesday already! My weekend promises to be a whirlwind of activity and fun. Well, activity anyway. I’ll do what I can to work in bits of fun.

I’ve been wanting to link to this ever since I bought it, but I’m never sure if my husband might randomly read my blog and I wanted it to be a surprise.

My hubby is one of those guys who pretty much goes out and buys himself whatever he wants. Thus, it’s really difficult to think of a good gift for him that he wouldn’t have gotten himself. When I ran across a link to Austin artist Kennon James‘ Black Faerie print, I knew I had a winner:

The price was right, so I ordered a print and took it to my favorite shop to be matted and framed. This was back in early March, so I ended up hiding it in my closet for weeks, waiting to present it.

Finally, I gave it to the birthday boy before his party on Saturday. He loved it and wants to hang it on the wall in the studio where he’ll see it when he’s sitting at the mixing console (which is most of the time). He was a little concerned that it might be "too much" for more conservative clients, but I think it’ll be fine.

Since I bought the print, Kennon has become one of my regular blog readers and commenters. How cool is that? I enjoy his blog too (particularly the fish) and I hope to buy more of his artwork in the future.

Today is Tax Day. I filed my taxes yesterday. I know enough people who’ve worked for the IRS to know that
there’s a secret grace period of about a week, but I’m too chicken to take advantage of it. For me, not having to line up at the post office with my forms in my hand is a great triumph.

Unfortunately my triumph was short lived. When I sorted through the mail I received yesterday, there was an envelope from my late grandparents’ bank. In it was a Form 1041, Schedule K-1 from my grandmother’s trust with instructions to include the amount listed on my 2006 federal income tax return. 2006. The one that’s due today.

The letter was dated April 7th and it was postmarked April 12th, so there’s no question that they completely dropped the ball and had no intention of getting it to me in a timely manner.

I suppose I have no choice but to file an amended federal tax return. I don’t know if it’ll affect my state returns (I file two because I work in one state and live in another), but that would be a huge pain. I’ll almost certainly end up having to pay back some of my federal refund, which makes me very unhappy.

My plan is to fax the form to my accountant (she shouldn’t be too busy today, right?) and let her deal with it after her post tax day break.

In the timeless words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, "Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it’s always something."