I haven’t been in the greatest of moods lately. I chalk it up to PMS and the seeing the horrible, naked (literally) truth about Nanny’s condition this week. Wednesday I drove down in the afternoon to take her for a chest x-ray and got to see exactly what’s happened to her over the past couple of months. She can’t walk more than a few steps at a time; I honestly have no idea how she makes it up the stairs to my mother’s half of the house on a daily basis. We used the wheelchair to get her from inside the house to the truck. It took all her energy to change into the smock for the x-ray, and when she was getting dressed again she decided that her bra was just too much effort to put back on. She’d put off getting the x-ray for some time now, because it can confirm just how bad the cancer is; no one wants to know that they’ve got a chestful of cancerous cells in addition to the ones in her bone, breast, colon, liver, and lymph nodes.

I can’t stand to see her like this. Her skin just literally hangs from her, and between the chemo and the cancer itself she’s being eaten alive inside. It hurts to see her struggle for every step, or to see her eat nothing but a few bites of salad and a couple of pieces of meat for dinner. I absolutely hate seeing her in pain like this.

On a lighter note, because if I keep writing like this I’ll be crying all day, Eddie and I have started looking at apartments. We’re hoping to move out ASAP because I just can’t stand living in a place where I’ve conditioned myself to tiptoe through the house in order to mask my presense and lessen the chances that the landlord will find some reason to come down and ask questions. Eddie’s calling on a couple of places today, and I’m calling on a couple if I can ever find the phone numbers.

We’ve had a very hot week in RI. Today it’s only about 75F, but it’s been in the 90’s for the past few days. The skies boiled over with a thunderstorm that rebooted my computer at some point last night. I learned that nothing is quite as embarassing as being stuck in 96F heat on the highway and being caught singing Bon Jovi’s You Give Love a Bad Name with all the truck’s windows down, unless it’s being caught by an SUV filled with black guys who are applauding your performance.

I called my mother last night to find out how my grandmother made out with her second dose of chemo yesterday. They’re expecting her hair to thin, so my mother bought her a couple of do-rags. She’s been told that she needs to walk at least 10 minutes a day - not 10 minutes at once, but total, since she’s too weak to do much more than walk up the stairs to get dinner. She almost fell in the shower this week, and needed my cousin to help her put her bra on when she got dressed the other day. And have I mentioned they’ve discovered she’s got bone cancer as well? Is there anything else that can go wrong with my grandmother, or can we be cut some slack now?

I love Fridays. I especially love Fridays at the end of the month, when the pharmacy is empty of everyone but the most freaky of the local freaks. We get to sleep late tomorrow morning, and I hopefully won’t wake myself up shouting “I’m gonna call the cops!” like I did this morning while having a nightmare. We’re not sure exactly what we’re going to do all day, but there’s a couple of good movies playing at the drive-in (Ocean’s 13 and Live Free of Die Hard double feature) and we’ve been debating going to BotCon downtown. I still can’t believe that they’ve changed Bumblebee in the Transformers movie. There’s going to be a whole generation of kids who have no idea that Bumblebee was a VW Bug.

After almost a week of nice weather, it’s raining over here. It always rains on my days off, which shouldn’t really bother me because it’s not as though I go out and do anything in the sunshine to begin with.

A bunch of stuff happened recently. We lost our internet, which wasn’t cool at all since we couldn’t log in and play WoW. Around the same time chicky.net expired, and I made the decision not to renew it. My grandmother has made the switch from oral chemo to IV chemo, and we’re waiting and watching to see if this makes her less miserable. So far, in my opinion anyway, there isn’t much difference. Brian’s parents have come up from Florida for a visit, meaning that my mother’s house is both crowded and noisey until they’re gone. I imagine that my grandmother will be hiding in the basement for much of the next week or two. I may or may not be going with my mother and Brian’s mom to get a manicure in an effort to be an anchor of sanity for Mom.

Eddie and I dyed our hair this weekend. I made an attempt to both bleach out the bottom layers while dying the upper layers black, and failed dismally. Rinsing everything out simply deposited the black pigment back into the blonde areas, creating a strange non-blonde area that will need to be fixed this weekend. Pickle, eager to get into the action, jumped into the sink while I was applying the black and had to be forcibly removed, resulting in a black spot about the size of a quarter between her shoulder blades because I was wearing the gloves. Yes, I rinsed her off. Eddie’s hair is black as well, and looks pretty good.

Tonight we’re going to Dad’s house for dinner with that side of the family. Dad wasn’t around on Father’s day, so we’re going over tonight to give him his card and gifts.

We’ve been gifted a truck. My grandmother decided to sign over her ‘95 Explorer to us over the weekend, on the condition that we get the Neon off the street and help with her doctor appointments. This doesn’t bother us at all, since we’ve got just about 2 free days during the week with which to help out. Nanny is doing ok with the chemo; she’s tired, but she’s got her appetite and her headaches and nausea are under control. I honestly think that it’s just a matter of time before she moves upstairs into my mother’s part of the house because her legs are just not working as well as they have done, and I don’t think she’ll be able to manage the stairs up to Mom’s for dinner and the bathroom much longer. Since we’ve now eliminated a main sticking point for us financially with this truck, we’ve started looking for a new place to live. Eddie’s been looking at trailors in Coventry; I’ll be happy with anything that will allow me to have a pet or two and doesn’t involve a nosey landlord.

Speaking of nosey landlords, Comrade came downstairs last night to give us notice that he wants to come in and check for window leaks tonight because his are leaking upstairs. Lovely. We did an assload of cleaning this morning, and Pickle will be spending a couple of days at Mom’s house because not only does he want to check the windows, but he has also requested that we not shut our door on Saturday because he’s painting the hallway and our doorway’s trim. Needless to say we’re not leaving the house on Saturday because I wouldn’t put it past him to exploit the open door and just pop in to look around if we’re not home. I wouldn’t put it past him to have already done so, locked door or no. Eddie left a note for him saying that tonight is not good, the windows are most definitely not leaking, and that if they were we’d let him know.

My boss was asked by someone higher up to have a “woman to woman chat” with me about my hair color. They admitted that they can’t take any disciplinary action about it because there’s nothing in the exployee handbook’s dress code that says that my hair can’t be unnaturally red, but they would appreciate if I could tone it down a bit and perhaps be a bit more professional-looking. There’s no rush to get it changed, so I’ve got a bit of time to contemplate what I’d like to do with it. I’m seriously considering going back to black and keeping the bottom layers red like I did a few years ago. I did warn my boss that the last time someone told me to tone it down it ended up being blue. She laughed.

We have been lazy today. We slept in, then played a little bit of Wow just long enough to check our characters’ mailboxes and discuss plans for later. Pickle came out and played with us, running around the living room like a psychotic ball of fur and teeth and claws before attacking me ankles in the bathroom for no other reason than that I was standing on the bathroom rug. We showered, and Eddie had fun putting the shower head on the “spray flesh from bone” setting and “painting” my back red; it felt divine on my still terribly sore back. Then we drove up to Attleboro to check out Newbury Comics’s selection of lawn gnomes. From there we hit Stop & Shop to grab food for lunch and dinner, and then on to my store to grab some pink flamingos, tin foil, Breathe Right strips, and dishwasher soap.

Nanny is in good spirits, either that or has decided that she’s just going to do whatever the fuck she wants at this point in life. She wants to spend her money (she’s going to be doing that anyway, her chemo meds are about $650/cycle). She wants a sports car. She came upstairs last night and had Brian make her a drink. She made Brian go out and get her a DVD to watch. For the first time in several years she didn’t eat a salad with her dinner. She laughed at my joke about how it’s a short trip from breast cancer to colon cancer when your boobs already hang down that far anyway.

At now, since we’ve finished out dinner of fish and chips and have done some good stuff in WoW already (reaching level 36 and doing a Scarlet Monestary run with some guildmates), I think we’ll retrieve Pickle from her spot in the bathroom and retire to the bedroom for tv and books. We’ve both got work in the morning, and I’d like to be able to relax tonight so that I’m mellow enough tomorrow and don’t stab my idiot of a pharmacist in the eye with a spatula or brain her with a tray when she fucks something up.