Dr. Hook

…And I Missed It.

/ Diane Henders / 31 Comments

Update Jan. 23/22: Just a heads-up — I didn’t mean to scare anybody off the booster shot, and I’m sorry if I did. I’m just a freak, and I’ve reacted hard to ALL the shots, including the booster. Meanwhile, Hubby and all my friends just breezed through it. So don’t be afraid — if your first two shots went fine, your booster should, too. 🙂

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Well, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks… as far as I know. To be honest, I was stoned and I missed it.

I knew in advance that I wasn’t going to enjoy my COVID booster shot. My second shot had made me feel as though somebody had thumped me in the back for a day, and my arm hurt for three days. So when I woke up at midnight feeling like I’d been repeatedly kicked in the armpit with a pointy-toed shoe, I wasn’t surprised. I took an acetaminophen and went back to bed to tough it out. Next came pain in every joint. Then fever. For the next twenty-four hours, I watched the clock and gulped acetaminophen at the exact minute my next dose was allowed.

I almost never take acetaminophen, and I was surprised at how dopey it made me. I guess it wasn’t a bad thing in retrospect: I was miserable, but at least I was stoned. I didn’t even bother trying to work that day; just lay around and binge-read. After four books and most of the day, the fever subsided and I went to bed knowing the worst was over.

The next day I was fine, except that somebody had apparently sneaked into our bedroom overnight and replaced my armpit lymph nodes with red-hot pebbles. Painful, but an improvement overall.

Until the insanely itchy rash appeared.

No good ever came from a conversation that begins with “Let me tell you about my rash”, so I won’t. But it turns out that antihistamines make me even dopier than acetaminophen. For most of the day, I stayed in the kitchen baking because I had to stay on my feet. If I stopped moving, my eyelids dropped shut. And I read the recipes VERY CAREFULLY. Over and over. Even though I’ve been making them at least once a month for the past couple of decades. Yes, I was that stoned.

But I’m pretty sure I was doing it wrong, because these guys look like they were having ’way more fun than me:

(I’ll have what they’re having, please.)

Anyhow, I’m finally back to normal; or as normal as I ever get. So, hmmm… I wonder what I should do for a high this week?

Marijuana is legal here, so I guess I could try that; but I’ve heard it causes the munchies. I have a permanent case of the munchies even when I’m stone-cold sober, so that could get scary. If my next post contains nothing but a photo of me nesting in a pile of empty Doritos bags with a beatific smile and crumbs all over my face, you’ll know what happened.

Actually, y’know what? Maybe I’ll skip the weed and go straight to guacamole corn chips. And Cheezies. And sour-and-cream-and-onion potato chips… Mmmm… now that’s my kind of high!

What’s your “food drug” of choice?

Book 17 update: Despite my ongoing back problems and my chemically-altered downtime, I still managed to make a bit of writing progress. I’m on Chapter 12, and charming liar Ian Rand has just messed with Aydan… again.

I’m A Rock Star!

/ Diane Henders / 36 Comments

Don’t worry; it’s safe to stick around – I promise not to sing.  I wouldn’t do that to you.  Hell, I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.

No; my rock-stardom isn’t related to music (for which we can all be thankful).  It’s related to… well… rocks.

Our new home site is basically a gravel pit, which is good for a house foundation but not so good for gardening nuts like us.  The rocks are so plentiful and so interlocked that you can’t even dig into the “soil” here with a shovel – you have to bash it apart with a pickaxe or hoe.

Or…

You can dig it up with power tools, woohoo!

My latest toy (rented, sadly – it’s a little too pricey to own).

Playing with an excavator is a blast for a gearhead and toolaholic like me, but my excavating services won’t be in demand anytime soon.  After the first hour, I could make the machine do what I wanted about 90% of the time… if I worked with intense concentration and at the pace of a crippled snail.

The secret to not causing major damage with an excavator is:  If anything goes wrong, TAKE BOTH HANDS OFF THE CONTROLS.  (That stops everything from moving.)  But I’ve spent far too many years operating tools and vehicles where you NEVER take both hands off the controls.

So when things went awry on the excavator I usually remembered to let go with my right hand; but my left hand clung stubbornly to the joystick, causing some amusing and occasionally alarming gyrations.  But hey, I didn’t wreck anything – I only knocked over one little aluminium garden stake; pshaw.  And I did get the grade the way I wanted it.

One of our projects was contouring the rhododendron garden before I started hand-placing rocks and wheelbarrowing soil:

About half done. Only a few more tons of rock and soil to go…

The paper sunshades are to ensure that our poor little rhodos don’t fry in the 33C/90F weather we’ve had lately. The wheelbarrow and pickaxe and hoe and shovel are to ensure that I sweat enough to look as though somebody dumped a bucket of water over my head before rolling me in gravel dust.

A couple of days ago I dragged my filthy-but-triumphant self into the coolness of the house and announced to Hubby, “I’m totally rockin’ that garden!  I am a rock star!”

He chuckled.  “Do you want help?”

“No, thanks.  I have a system.  I load up some rocks, wheelbarrow some soil, then go and get my rocks…”  I paused, grinning at his widening smirk.  “…off.”

Which, of course, was a nod to my favourite rock stars from long ago, Dr. Hook.  Even clowning around (or maybe especially clowning around), those guys were amazing musicians.  A few decades later, Dennis Locorriere (the guitarist and usual lead singer) is better than ever.  Sadly, Billy Francis (the singer for this song and, um… ‘exotic’ dancer) went to the big jam session in the sky in 2010, but the scenery was mighty fine back in 1975 when this video was recorded!  (Relaxed-fit jeans must have been a male designer’s idea.) 😉

So… this week I’ll be rockin’ to ‘Get My Rocks Off’ while I rock my garden.

Rock on!

We’re All Naked

/ Diane Henders / 27 Comments

Ever since I had my giggle over the dick pic I found on the internet a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about nudity.  Yeah, welcome to my brain.  Sorry about that.

Due to the mysterious workings of the universe, last week I coincidentally discovered another instance of nudity that made me laugh myself silly(er).

I’m a Dr. Hook fan from away back.  ‘Waaaaay back in the 1970s.  Back when they were Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, doing raunch ‘n’ roll that bore no resemblance whatsoever to their later mainstream hits.

So I was tremendously amused to find an old video of the Hook boys shit-faced, stark naked, and performing some “blues”.  *Warning for those who missed the words “stark naked” in the previous sentence:  Although the nether regions of the video are (mostly) blanked out, this link is NOT SAFE FOR WORK… or any other place where someone might be offended by the sight of drunk naked guys improvising scatological lyrics.

Which, admittedly, may prove rather limiting.

However.

After I picked myself up off the floor and dried my tears of laughter, I started thinking.  Is it funnier because they’re naked?  Hell, yeah.  Imagine the same video with clothes.  Funny, but not as over-the-top hilarious.

Why do we humans arbitrarily designate certain areas of our bodies as “Not To Be Revealed”?  Why are those areas considered so offensive that you can get arrested for showing them?  And why do some of us laugh when the naughty bits get accidentally exposed, while others are horrified?  (Unless the bits in question are exposed in Art, in which case we all stand around nodding seriously and looking constipated.)

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the practical advantages to covering up.  Those probably became agonizingly apparent the first time primitive man tried to step over a thorn bush.

But how did ‘Ow!  I’m gonna wrap some mastodon hide around that’ become ‘Don’t show that or you’re going to jail’?

Who decided nudity was “obscene”?  After all, as Sam the Eagle points out in one of my favourite Muppets skits, we’re all naked.  And aside from minor variations in size, shape, and colour, it’s pretty much a case of ‘If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all’.

Maybe it’s because we humans are such perverse creatures.  Tell us we can’t have something, and we’ll immediately devote huge amounts of time and energy to obtaining it.

So maybe the simple fact that we usually keep our goodies covered makes it that much more fun (or shocking, depending on your attitude) to sneak a peek.  Though by logical extension, that would mean most Canadians should faint at the sight of any exposed skin, since we’re pretty much bundled up eight months out of the year.

I dunno.  I guess, like some grown-up version of the “telephone” game we used to play as kids, somehow the message got garbled from ‘You don’t usually see that’ to ‘You shouldn’t see that’.  It would be interesting to see how long it would take for our taboos to melt away if nudity was more widespread.

So you folks down in the tropics give it a try and let me know how it goes, okay?  ‘Cause it’s still winter here, and it’ll be at least three months before I get my first forbidden glimpse of naked arms.

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Why does our society make such a big deal of nudity?  Why are naked marble sculptures considered “art” but naked magazine photos are considered “pornography”? 

Or, if you’re not so much into the philosophical discussion:  Have you been to a place where nudity is acceptable/expected?