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Strange Stuff Finds Me.

December 15, 2015December 15, 2015 Rachel Callahan Photographical Oddities, Utter Silliness, Weird Strange and True

…Like when I accidentally look up at the wrong moment and witness this awkward exchange.

Who knew? Dancer and Prancer greet each other just like dogs do.

Alabama is an interesting place. People are very passionate about their politics, their faith, their trucks, and their dogs. But not always quite as passionate about their spelling.

Eh, one out of two everys ain’t bad.

Also, at the DMV, you have two free choices for car tag designs: you can either choose “God Bless America” or “PC”. I mean they’re not going to hide it and call it “Nice Scenic Tag” or “Purple Mountains Majesty” – nope, they’re going to call it. You sir, are simply being politically correct.

(For the record I love God and I want Him to bless America but I have the PC car tag. Not sure how that happened but it is what it is. I hope God understands.)

The mall Christmas store always brings me great joy. This year, Chris and I took a walk around to enjoy the options we had available for our holiday decorating.

For instance, why put a star on top of your tree when you could have a resident of the Death Star?

Because nothing says “Unto you a Child is born” like Darth’s raspy whisper.

My favorite ornament in the store, by far, was this one. Which I can only assume comes in a series….

2015: I’ll be tan for Christmas.
2016: I’ll be sunspotted for Christmas.
2017: I’ll be prematurely wrinkled for Christmas.
2018: I’ll be biopsied for Christmas.

And then there were the food ornaments. So confusing. I mean, Antipasto is good but is it good enough to pay $10.99 to celebrate it on my Christmas tree? Not in any universe.

And who is so passionate about Garlic Knots that they’re like “yeah, I wanna hang THAT on my tree!”?

And apparently, somebody loves themselves the party tray from Roly Poly.

But maybe I’m just not thinking about this correctly. Maybe somebody out there has a food-themed tree and it’s just not complete without a collection of stuffed mushrooms that resemble full, open barf bags.

And that food tree without a properly labeled side dish of prosciutto and asparagus would not be a Merry Christmas for anyone.

But regardless. I get that this is supposed to be clams, but no. Just No.

Moving out of the food aisle over to the “let’s celebrate our screentime” section didn’t help.

Dear Baby Jesus, Thank you for coming to earth to save us all. And for my flat screen tv that is bigger than all of my neighbor’s.

And if you’re shopping for Uncle Raymond and the only thing that seems to fit his personality perfectly is this celebratory ornament, then perhaps just buy him a gift card to Radio Shack.

Moving on from the ornament store to a round of whiplash subject changes.

I ran across this 3-6 month old onesie and declared it the biggest lie ever screenprinted.

WHAT infant is grateful? Infants aren’t grateful for crap. Even though their cup runneth over with it.

I randomly spotted this on the sidewalk one day. And now I’m constantly looking behind me to make sure I’m not being followed by a green-tinted woman.

Noah drew me this sweet picture the other day. It’s Thomas the Train. And that…appendage…is the train conductor.

It might be my favorite picture ever.

We told the kids they could get one thing in the gas station and of course my kid wanted the one thing that was on sale for negative .38 cents.

I ran across this in the used bookstore. I laughed. And I hope the #1 tip is “You should have started in 2008. Haven’t you heard? Everyone says blogging is dead.”

So is Skeet the name of the man making my hot dog or is Skeet the result of my hotdog? Or yes?

Seen on the back of a baby changing table. No breakdancng, and no magically floating away in a graceful manner.

Seen at Staples in late 2015. Somebody buy Grandpa a smart phone.

Seen at CVS. If you’re buying your blue jeans in a box from the pharmacy, you’re doing it wrong.

One of our babysitters kindly bought our kids some Crayola Bath Tablets. Which first turned them and the bathtub lovely shades of blue and green. And then, when they got to the yellow tablet made their baths look thoroughly urinated in.

Just Say No to Crayola Bath Tablets.

If there’s a tiny pair of blue jeans on your parking meter, that means you don’t have to pay, right?

Does it give you extra assurance if they have neon yellow pockets?

(My imagined storyline: baby’s diaper overfilled on a walk. Mom left pants to dry on closest parking meter, and fully planned on picking them back up on the way home. Yes, that’s what happened.)

Seen, fully visible, from the Dairy Queen drive-thru.

Incidentally, I haven’t revisited that DQ.

This was in an actual survey I was asked to take by an actual company I’m actually affiliated with.

I’m pretty sure there’s not a checkbox that adequately expresses my feelings about “pre-chewing your child’s food”, and if only they had an option for “attach your own sarcastic meme”, and I’d be set for explaining how I feel about “eating your placenta.”

Chris and I went to a random Greek restaurant on one of our trips, and we knew it would be good when we saw this in the window.

But really. Who does the Baklava belong to – Burger, Lasagna, or Spaghetti??

Inside, we got more acquainted with their logo – perhaps a bit more acquainted that we would have preferred.

Is he….PEEING on Greece?!?!

BUT DARTH VADER HAD EATEN THERE. Like, the real Darth Vader of Christmas Tree Topping Fame. So clearly it was good.

And finally.

The most important step of starting any small business is to ALWAYS ask your friends what they see when they look at your proposed logo.

Because if you’re an Optometrist and you can’t see poo when it’s staring you in the face, then you might want to reconsider your career choices.

In the Collecting of Obscure Medical Procedures…

December 11, 2015December 11, 2015 Rachel Callahan A Day in the Life, Dysautonomia, Just My Luck

When I wrote my last post, I had no idea that I would find myself needing every one of those words the very next day.

But first, let’s back up a bit.

So for the last year and a half, I’ve worn duct plugs.

It’s a really fun phrase to say over and over out loud – try it.

Giggling now? Good.

Duct Plugs.

One of the most annoying symptoms of Dysautonomia is severely dry eyes – to the point that no drops can help it. On top of that, I’m limited as to what drops I can put in my eyes, so really – nothing helps.

Except for Duct Plugs.

They’re fantastic. They’re like tiny bathtub drain stoppers that are inserted into the tear duct on my lower eyelid to keep my tears from draining and, therefore, perfectly solving my dry eye issue.

I got my first pair of duct plugs the summer before last. About a year later, they fell out. My eyes had been burning and making me feel ridiculously sleepy, and it occurred to me to check my duct plugs (because you can see the tiny little things sticking out of your eyelid,) and alas – they were gone.

(Let’s take a minute for everyone to go find your tear ducts. Look in the mirror. They’re on the top side of your lower lid, on the nose-side of your eye. You have tiny holes just waiting to drain your precious tears away. They’re quite useful – unless you suffer from an eternal draught. Now. Think of the biggest pore plug/blackhead that you’ve ever squeezed out of your nose, except envision it made of rubber and shoved into those tiny ducts. That’s what my duct plugs looked like. Are we together now?)

I called to make an appointment with my Ophthalmologist (the receptionists all passed around my call so that everyone could hear me ask for new duct plugs), and when I went in for my appointment, he told me what I had previously not realized – duct plugs falling out was expected. In fact, my duct plugs lasted a lot longer than most. He said he’d put the next bigger size in, and hopefully they’d last a while. But it turned out, those were still too small, so he gave me the BIGGEST size of duct plugs available.

(I have big ducts. And I cannot lie.)

He explained that our next step, when these duct plugs left me, would be permanent duct cauterization – it was a great solution, but insurance didn’t allow it until you’d lost a pair of the biggest duct plugs.

So I happily left with my XL Duct Plugs, snugly keeping my tears in Eye Lake.

Which brings us to this week.

Again, I began feeling infinitely sleepy, eyes burning, lethargic, the whole deal. You just don’t realize the debilitating nature of something so simple as dry eyes until your eyeballs are withered raisins, and then wow do you ever.

I made my appointment for duct cauterization (so much nicer to request than duct plugs), made sure I wouldn’t need anyone to drive me home, and anticipated eyeball moistness once again.

I dumped my kids on my neighbor and headed in.

My Ophthalmologist came in and checked out my one remaining duct plug. I asked him to go ahead and pull it so I could get this cauterization thing over with in both eyes. He looked at me skeptically, but agreed to do so. He yanked it out, examined my eyes some more, then said,

“Do you think you can do this without a pain injection? Because the injection is really just as bad as the procedure itself.”

I thought of the all the things I’ve let my Physical Therapist do to me in the past six weeks. I’m tough. I can handle whatever my Ophthalmologist throws at me.

“Sure.”

I’ll be fine, I told myself. He wouldn’t offer to do it without the pain shot if it wasn’t a viable option.

The doctor left the room, then came back with paperwork that I had to sign, acknowledging the permanency of the procedure, and with a pen-sized blowtorch.

While the door was still open, the nurse walked by and said, “I’ll be right out here if you need me…”

I raised an eyebrow. “That sounded ominous.”

The doctor laughed. I was not sure how to interpret his laugh, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like it.

He told me to lean my head back, and he stuck the tip of his cautery gun on my eye duct and turned on the zapper. I jumped slightly, as one does when a red-hot piece of metal touches their eyelid.

He pulled back. “Did you feel that?”

“Yes, but I can take it. It wasn’t horrible.”

“Hmm. I changed my mind. I want you to get the injection because I want to be able to really get in there and burn it good.”

He disappeared again and came back with an unholy-long eye shot.

He again told me to lean back, open my eyes as wide as I could, and look at the ceiling. He pulled back my eyelid and stuck that needle through the inside of my lower lid.

GUYS.

We have SO MANY NERVES in our eyelid. SO MANY.

The needle went into my eyelid and felt like it was coming out of my right nostril. He jammed that thing all up in my face. I felt the cool liquid of the numbing medication trickle into my sinus cavities from above, and it made me desperately need to sneeze.

But alas. There was three feet of needle in my eye. This seemed like a bad time.

“Keep your eye open!”

(I would have answered “I can’t!” but I couldn’t move without moving the needle in my eye.)

“Are you okay?”

(I would have answered “Are you kidding?” but I couldn’t move without moving the needle in my eye.)

He finally pulled it out, then walked around to the other eye.

WHOSE bright idea was it to get both eyes cauterized on the same day? I should have kept that precious duct plug as long as it agreed to stay in.

It was unbelievable. The pain from the injection was definitely that red crying face from the pain chart, and worse if such a thing exists (a crying poo emoji? Yes. A red crying poo emoji.)

(And as a reminder, this is coming from the person that has happily let her Physical Therapist stick her dozens of times in the past six weeks in the neck, shoulders, leg, and head.)

But I somehow survived.

He told me he’d be back for me when I was numb, and happily walked of the room, leaving me to tend to my gaping eye wounds.

I dabbed. I thought about crying but figured it’d hurt too much. I dabbed some more and realized I couldn’t feel my dabbing anymore. At least that seemed like a step in the right direction.

He came back and had me insert my head into the head brace so he could “get a really good angle.”

He got out his burny tool and inserted it deep into my left eye duct. Pressed the button, heard the electrical burning sound, then the frying/boiling of flesh, then a poof of smoke shot up directly in front of my eye. I guess that was his cue that cauterization had occurred, because he retracted his eye branding gun and stuck it down into my right eye duct.

Button, burn, boil/fry, poof of smoke, retract.

Seeing the poofs of smoke caused by the frying of my live eyelid skin made me thankful for those Son-of-a-Motherless-Goat Shots from Hell.

Each eye took maybe three seconds.

But after he finished, THEN he found it to be the right time to say,

“Oh by the way. Just so you know, the cauterizations will probably open back up at some point. But the good news is, we can do this as many times as we need to!!”

I looked at him incredulously. He did not look like he was being ironic.

The paperwork. Our conversations. Everything had indicated that this was it. The Holy Grail of duct closure. A vasectomy of the tear drain. AND NOW HE’S GONNA TELL ME I GOTTA DO THIS AGAIN AND AGAIN AND POSSIBLY AGAIN.

No.

I said in my most biting tone, as I tried to hold my recently char-grilled eyes open, “You know what, let’s go ahead and schedule ourselves a monthly date.”

As I got in my car to drive away, the numbing shot quite immediately wore off, and I began to feel the third-degree burns in my former eye pits. I fought to keep my eyes open, thinking angry thoughts about the receptionist who told me I wouldn’t have need for a ride home.

But I made it.

And for now, at least, my ducts are closed for business.

Appendix: if you want to see the procedure, I found a very accurate and short video here. Except that my doctor definitely did believe in inserting the cauterizing gun into the puncta. And also if you see me this weekend and I appear to have a black eye, please compliment me on my stellar eye shadow job.

All The Answers: Staring at my Innards.

October 1, 2015October 1, 2015 Rachel Callahan "Deep" Thoughts by Rachel, I embarrass myself just for your amusement.

You guys have so many questions. Good questions. Piercing questions. Fun questions. Thank God not a single political question. Let’s continue where we left off yesterday, and be sure to hang around until the end of the post to see visual evidence of my shortcomings.

Aadrw (Darcy) asked,

Are blog conferences worth attending?

It totally depends on your personality and what you want out of it. I never got too much out of the sessions, so was really going for the relationships. I attended BlogHer for four years in a row and struggled to interact, but did gain a handful of new friends. I went to a local conference, Y’all Connect, for the next two years and highly enjoyed interacting. Turns out, I’m more outgoing when engaging with local people than I am with national people that I’m not connected to on an ongoing basis. At the national conference, there were just too many people, and of those people, very few that I was already connected to. At the local one, we all knew who each other were so it was like a big party.

But if you’re the rare unicorn that is an Extroverted Blogger, by all means go to a national conference – you’ll have the time of your life.

You’ve done wonderful work with your local ministry via photography – any updates on how all that’s going in Birmingham?

Thanks! It’s going well. Picture Birmingham has been able to donate over $8,000 to The WellHouse, along with another $1,200 to Mission Birmingham through our joint calendar project (2016 calendars are newly available, by the way.) I would LOVE to be able to donate more and am working on different angles and products so that I can raise more money to rescue victims of human trafficking.

The WellHouse is growing tremendously and can now house more women than ever. They have rescued over 40 young ladies this year, and have assisted law enforcement officials in arresting at least three of the traffickers. They have helped these women regain their identification, get health care, spiritual and emotional healing, GED and college educations, and job and life skills training. They also rescue women nationally – not just locally. They have a hotline 800 number that they spread far and wide, and have rescued as far away as Washington.

The trafficking industry is a 32 BILLION dollar industry, and is staggering in its reach and deceptiveness – especially to our children and teens. There is so much more fighting that needs to be done. But every woman that The WellHouse rescues is one person’s horror story that is finally over.

The current products I’m offering are Prints, Calendars, Note Cards, Postcards, curated collections, a black and white collection, and gallery wrap canvases. I can also do privately labeled note cards or postcards for businesses (or individuals), and am always willing to get by-request photographs of specific places, along with helping to create advertising products for corporations. My products are for sale online at my website, along with several stores in town – Naked Art Gallery, Urban Standard, Smith’s Variety, and Alabama Goods. I would also love to get my products into more stores to continue spreading the opportunities to provide hope for the women that The WellHouse rescues. As always, 100% of Picture Birmingham profits go to The WellHouse.

Jen asked,

What does your average day look like? Seriously, how do you get so much done? (Please don’t answer that parenting/wifing (I’m pretty sure that’s a word), running crazy mileage, blogging, photography, and homeschooling are so effortless for you, you wish you had more accounting clients to fill the gaps.)

Uh, NO. I typically exist in a panic because of all of the things I’m not getting done that desperately need to get done. I also ignore many things that shouldn’t be ignored, like cooking regularly and dishes and decluttering and not letting my children leave crap all over the house and the car and the front yard. My life is a mess. I promise. Sometimes I clean up that mess, sometimes I don’t. Most of the time I don’t.

But, my typical day, on a school day:

– Ali wakes me up at 8am, then wakes up her brother (I am blessed with children that sleep late and I never squander that blessing by rising early.)

– Ali helps me get breakfast together (maybe my secret is that Ali does all the work. SHE’S the efficient one. She typically has already read two books and written in her diary before she wakes me up.)

– At about 9am, we start school. And surprise, Ali is efficient and gets her school done very quickly. We’re usually done by noon. I do school with Noah intermittently while Ali is doing independent work.

– After lunch, we sometimes go on a hike or errands, depending on if we’re feeling like it and what we need to get done.We also have several neighbors that we’re close to and often play with.

– Historically, we’ve started nap and quiet time around 2pm, and it lasts till 4:30 or 5. Noah is newly no longer napping and isn’t great at quiet time (Ali adores her quiet time, being the truest introvert), so I’m looking into possibly restructuring this, but it hurts me to think about. Between 2-5 is my time to blog, answer emails (also terrible at that lately), get Chris’ company’s accounting done (there’s really not much), and update Picture Birmingham. I prefer these activities to be quiet and uninterrupted. Noah does not.

– Chris comes home around 5:30-6pm, and we eat at home or go out to eat. He also often sends me to run or catch a sunset before dinner.

– The kids go to bed around 8:30.

– Chris and I sit together like slugs, talking, watching TV, listening to podcasts, and looking at our phones until nearly midnight. Unless Chris has work to do, we rarely do anything industrious after the children are in bed.

(Notice there’s really just no time for chores.)

aroe02 asked,

What does your husband do for work? I need to send mine back to school, eventually, and it appears (through blog-land eyes) that it was a good career choice. Not his company/salary, but more like what was his degree in, and did he stay in that field kind of info. Thanks :)

He has a degree in Civil Engineering and does Structural Steel Detailing. But for the record, Birmingham is one of the top most affordable cities to live in (and most beautiful and wonderful all the way around), and we live in the county (outside of “good” school districts), so we’re able to be efficient with our resources.

Kyla asked,

How do you find the time to blog? I recently had my 3rd kid and can’t imagine a day when the laundry and dishes were all done and I had time to sit and write. I am not efficient apparently.

It has become much, much harder over the past couple of years. My brain doesn’t work as efficiently or creatively as it used to (thanks, Dysautonomia), and life is just busier. The best moments of blogging for me is when I have a great story to tell and it just flows. I am able to write and edit very quickly. But other times it’s like pulling glue out of my brain to type a single word. And also, as stated before, laundry and dishes get the boot so that I have time to write.

While I’m on the subject of my housekeeping failures, Sarah asked as a follow-up question on the first questions post for a house tour. After chuckling to myself how my house tour would look compared to most blogger’s house tours, I snapped a couple pictures for her – #nofilter, y’all.

Here’s my office. Epicenter of blogging, Picture Birmingham, random kid’s art projects, and voluminous amounts of crap.

My kitchen table has the remains of some random craft project Ali embarked on and either didn’t finish or clean up after herself or both.

The “catch-all” counter in my kitchen – a stack of magazines I’ll probably never read, a few butt-ends of bread loaves, apples, finger paints my kids have been begging me to let them use, and iPhone chargers – of course. Oh and a completely well-placed beach shovel. Because why not.

And the dining room table is the school table. Sometimes I clean it off for the weekend. But definitely not during the week.

So now you know from where I steal all my time. From being a responsible, neat adult.

I have one more day of questions left to answer, so if you want anything added to the last post of ever-unimportant opinions, ask quickly.

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