So, somewhere in the middle of April, someone related to me on the hubby’s side (this person shall remain nameless out of respect) had to surrender themselves over to the police to do no less than nine months in jail on some domestic charges from 2008. This person has 8 kids, 4 of their own and 4 from their spouse’s first marriage and they all live with them. Another story for another time, trust me on this. Well, they didn’t tell anyone about this court case until about 8 days before they were supposed to turn themselves in. Anyway the spouse has a job which takes them out of the country for several months at a time, if you’re smart you’ll be able to figure out what that is without me saying. Long story short, no parents, 8 kids, and we (hubby and I) are the only family who live close enough to allow the kids to finish out the school year and not interrupt their lives any more than necessary. So of course hubby and I agree to take them in for the last month and a half of school because it’s family and that often means doing things that may be uncomfortable for you to help out the people you love,but I digress. So we came up with a plan where we would take them up state to their grandparents when summer break started, which seemed great and worked for us, only they forgot about the Ireland cruise they had scheduled for July and August so two days before we were supposed to take them there we got rooked into keeping them all summer. So for the past few months I have spent almost every waking moment with 7 boys all under age 8 and a 13 year old girl with an attitude problem. Don’t get me wrong she definitely deserves to have an attitude because her parents keep completely screwing up her life, but as someone who has no children this has been a trying time in my life. Not really because we got a insta-family, or a teenager with an attitude if you will, but because of that old saying when it rains it pours, and the hits just kept coming. Okay, before I go off on a tangent filled with sayings and the sage wisdom I’ve acquired from this experience, I’ll continue with my story…

So as June begins, everyone is adjusting and the kids are happier and becoming more like themselves again yada yada yada and the train (which has 2 seats and 10 people crammed inside lol ) is chugging along when we run smack dab into a brick wall. In case anyone reading this doesn’t know, I have a dog named Lola, and she’s like my baby plus she’s a diva. Well, one Saturday she’s playing with the kids and everything is fine one minute and the next no one can find her. A little while later she comes hobbling up to me crying and whimpering, she can’t walk on one of her hind legs and it’s just dragging behind her. So we do a dash to the emergency vet clinic, which by the way is about a 45 minute drive away. Again with the long story short clause, she has something called IVDD or Inter-Vertebral Disc Disease which is fairly common in dachshunds, especially if they’re overweight (which she is) or they are allowed to jump off of things. Basically, it’s a ruptured disc disease which puts pressure on the spinal cord and causes paralysis, I included a link if you want to know more about it. Well her case was pretty severe considering the fact that by the time we got to the vet both hind legs didn’t work and she was dragging herself on her front paws. She had paralysis from about the mid-back to the tail and we decided to treat with meds, wait and see instead of emergency surgery which would’ve cost a fortune. Watching her in pain and looking so sad was horrible, my poor baby even remembering it makes me want to cry. She was prescribed some Prednisone for the swelling, an antacid for the side effects, and about six weeks of crate rest. Normally keeping her crated for that long would be bad, but having kids around that she was dying to get out and play with made it so much worse. Add to that the fact that she had to be given oral meds every 12 hours, and the paralysis made her lose bowel control so we had to express her instead of taking her outside to potty. Essentially that means squeezing the urine out of her bladder every couple of hours so she didn’t accidentally go in her kennel. Yeah, so 8 kids that didn’t belong to me and a dog who was incapable of taking care of herself. By now I’m thinking, just as you probably are, this can’t get any worse, only it did.

So in the midst of dealing with all this, my sister calls me the week before the 4th of July holiday and her first words are “I have something to tell you, and I need you to not get upset.” Right away, I know it’s not good. Turns out my uncle, my mother’s brother, passed away. It was a random Sunday afternoon, he was watching his son and he took a nap and just never woke up. His girlfriend came home and their 4 year old said daddy’s been sleeping a long time and won’t wake up. My uncle was only 50, and by all accounts pretty healthy, so this came as a huge shock to our whole family. The autopsy is still out, so we still don’t know the official cause of death but it was just so sudden. I mean I had just talked to him not long before that. So we had to go through the funeral process and all that good stuff with 8 kids and a paralyzed dog who’s incontinent. Like I said the hits just keep on coming. And my poor mother, she has lost 3 sisters, both parents, a grandma, and now a brother all in a 7 year span. If anyone can tell you about how to keep going after a loss and living each day to the fullest, it’s my mom. I feel so grateful that she’s still around, especially with the way her siblings keep passing away too young. My mom is 55 and none of her siblings have ever even made it to that age, in fact she’s the second oldest out of 10. It’s weird the blows life throws at some people.

So needless to say I’ve really been put through the ringer this year, but all in all it’s starting to look up. We took the kids to their grandparents a couple of weeks ago and then hubby and I spent a week of well deserved vacation together enjoying some alone time. Yay for no kids, it really was good practice for when we decide to start our own family, but I can definitely say I will not be having 8 kids. Or even 7 or 6 or 5 or 4 lol… maybe 1, possibly 2 . Anyhow, they’re starting to adjust to being there and starting a new school and everything. They call us almost every day, mostly to check on the dog’s progress, but I’m sure they also miss us. I know we miss them, even though it is nice to sort of return to normal. The dog is doing much better, the paralysis wasn’t completely permanent and as of today she has complete mobility in one hind leg and about 40% in the other. This means she can hobble around three legged and she kind of uses the bad leg to balance, stand, and stabilize herself. It’s been about 12 weeks and this is marvelous progress considering we didn’t even know if she’d ever walk again with out the help of doggy wheels. Here’s a picture I took of her yesterday. She was standing but of course she sat before the flash snapped lol! So right now I’m just trying to get back to what life used to be for me, which is weird. I work, write, do the internet thing, all things I haven’t done for months, but it’s so quiet here I can’t seem to concentrate. I mean, no one’s crying, or running around, nothing’s broken, it’s very surreal and it’s already been about 3 weeks, it is nice though my time being my own again. Apparently I needed these experiences to make me a better person, or to make me cherish what I have or something, which trust me I do now. This was definitely a summer that changed me, made me more responsible and what have you. Hopefully the change was for the better, but I guess time will tell. Oh yea, in the midst of this I also had my 30th birthday so happy belated birthday to me!! More posts to come soon, just because I have the time now and I can. I shouldn’t have said that I probably jinxed myself haha! Big love readers, if you’re still out there

What do you do when you are feeling very sad or depressed?
Cry, eat (yes I know that’s not a good thing), or throw myself into work.

Who was your first crush?
I can’t exactly remember the first person I had a crush on that I actually knew, but I do know that when I was around 4 or so I wanted to marry Cookie Monster! At least that’s what I’ve been told lol!

If given a chance to skip work for a day (without repercussions), how would you spend the entire day?
Well since I work from home this question doesn’t really apply but if I did work outside my home I guess I would probably sleep or have some kind of movie marathon.

*stops blogging to answer the door* Hmm, that was odd a little kid probably about 8 just knocked on my door and gave me a religious pamphlet. Which is all fine and well, even though I already have a church and a religion. The weird thing is that this kid was by himself and it is almost a quarter til 11 at night. That’s random, I find myself wondering what kind of parents does he have to be out pedaling pamphlets so late? Some people, I don’t why I’m so surprised. Anyways I’m off to do something constructive like take my butt to bed or I don’t know watch tv, wait that’s not constructive, lol either way I’m out of things to bore the masses at the moment. Big love to you all

So now about Valentine’s Day. Hubby had to travel for work, and was gone all of last week (including Vday), so we celebrated this weekend and had a date night on Saturday. Well, if you can call it celebrating because really it’s more of a consumer driven holiday. That said, it was a good night. We went out to dinner and then a movie. It was a toss up on what to see but we ended up watching Valentine’s Day! I don’t know what others thought of it, but we both loved it! Probably me more than him. Besides the fact that it is packed with talented actors, it was a good movie with a good story. Usually I can predict what’s going to happen in a movie and this one was like that until almost the very end. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a predictable movie I’m just good at calling what’s coming. Well, I called most of what happened in this apart from the ending, which I loved. It was both surprising and feel good. One of the big shockers I saw coming but the other I was cheesing like awww squee! Long story short, it was a movie I’d recommend. Especially if you like romantic comedies. Any of you seen it? Did you enjoy it?

Site News
New layout is up as of today. Not overly detailed, it’s simplistic and I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve also cut the fat on some of my affies and exchanges. Deleted those who I’ve been neglecting (again sorry hope you got my emails) or those who failed to inform me they were closing. I still have a few and intend on maintaining those relationships. I’m also working on updating parts of the resources and tutorials sections, new updates for those are in the works but with me it could be a few weeks before they’re completed.

Oh yeah the cable company, this is a whole other story to tell. So the TV cable started working again around 1pm on Thursday, after we called Comcast and they reset us or whatever it was they did, but they told us there was no signal coming from our modem so they’d have to send out a tech. The customer service guy seemed slow or something like he wasn’t understanding what I was saying, and I tried to tell him over and over that my modem was working and the light was flashing a cable link error. Anyways I won’t get started on that guy, because I’ll never stop, he was a complete moron. So he says that a tech will be out between 8am and 8pm on Friday. I mean 8 and 8, could they be anymore vague? That’s basically like saying waste your whole day waiting for us and we’ll be there when we get there. So yeah, we wait around all day Friday and finally call in a bit before 8pm after no one ever showed up. So this time my hubby calls and they tell him the guy (you know the ignorant one I talked to the day before) made a note on our account but never scheduled a tech to come out. This new guy says sorry but since it’s closing time I’ll have to schedule a tech to come out tomorrow. So at this point we (hubby and I) are both so pissed we’re yelling in stereo at this poor man who had nothing to do with it, because his co-worker is an idiot. We end up having to sort it all out with a manager who gave us a $25 credit for each of the 3 days we we’re without service, and he assured us that someone would be coming out first thing in the morning. So when the tech got here the next morning, he tested the modem and just like I said there was nothing wrong with it. So he tested the wall outlet and the signal coming from it was so weak it barely registered. So he goes outside and he’s crawling around on our building trying to figure out what’s going on. So after awhile the cable completely goes out, then comes back on and the tech comes back in telling us that the signal was low because there was a splitter on our line outside and the snow made the connection moist and loosened it. Apparently at some point one of our neighbors was hijacking our cable! :shakefist: :shake: How completely rude and wrong, not to mention illegal is that? I mean here we are being friendly and cordial to these people when we see them outside or whatever and all along someone was being a snake stealing from us. Too bad we don’t know when it happened or who it was, because that really pisses me off. Anyway the cable is running fine now, but this was definitely a trying and unpleasant experience. It always seems as though I get a completely incompetent customer service rep every time I make a service call to a company. I know there has to be some perfectly lovely cms people out there, why do I always have to get the stooge? Okay, I think I’m done ranting now.

In other life news, the gum area where I had the tooth pulled is finally beginning to heal. I’m off the pain meds, and it’s not inflamed anymore, which is great. I’m excited for it to completely heal because it was the tooth directly to the right of my front teeth so I have a huge gap there that doesn’t look cute. Anyway I have to wait for it to completely heal so I can get a post put in surgically to hold the prosthetic one. I’ve also been wearing a night guard to prevent my nighttime grinding from breaking another one of my teeth. Today I woke up and there was a huge whole where I apparently ground right threw the guard. Great so now I’ve got to buy a new one. I don’t even know where this teeth grinding thing came from. My hubby says I have always done it, at least since he started sharing a bed with me, but I’ve started doing it a lot more the last 6 months. The dentist said I could be doing it more because of nerves or stress, but I just think it’s odd, I didn’t even know I did it until I broke the tooth. Hopefully my nerves or stress will subside so I can keep the rest of my teeth. I either have weak teeth or I am like a champion tooth grinder, because I imagine I had to be doing it really hard for it to just snap like it did. Well, now that I’ve bored the masses and ranted about the evil customer service machine, I think I’ll go do something productive. Big Love :heart: