So I know I've been lax in the coming back blogging, but I find that I am still running really, really slowly. Like my energy tank (which is always at about a quarter full anyways) totally forgot how to distribute that quarter tank to the places it needs to go. I'm doing a lot of wheezing, a lot of sitting up too fast and having my head spin and almost blacking out, a lot of stuff I thought I was pretty much adapted to, but am apparently not. (Actually, it's kind of pissing me off this whole "Just when I think I get used to how things are and have stuff at a vaguely controlled level, my body decides to screw with me some more and start all over again" crap is beyond irritating, but I am still feeling so SO much better than I was two weeks ago, so it feels sort of petty to complain now. We'll see, as time goes on if that attitude sticks or not.)

I do keep thinking of things to blog, even look over at the computer and will my thoughts to go from my brain directly onto the screen without any additional effort on my part, but I have yet to master this skill (any tips?), and so posts remain unwritten.

In the meantime, I have been (very, very slowly) combing through the 1000+ items in my Google Reader, and here are a few of the posts I read today that I thought "Hey I could've written that!" (Except it never would've come out this good, so you're lucky I'm pointing you to them...) and in an effort to both highlight exceptional posts and clean out my brain a little bit, I give you some links:


Amalah asks: "Can't anyone just be SAD anymore?" and one of her commenters leaves the brilliant reply that there is a difference between "rational sadness and irrational sadness". That comment really lit up parts of my brain that have been taking me to task for not accomplishing all I should (/want/need to) be accomplishing right now...sometimes there are reasons for taking it slow, and that's ok. Sometimes there are reasons for being sad, and that's alright. It's the times when there is no rationale, no reasoning: those are the times you have to worry about. (In other words: cut yourself some slack, dummy.)

Melissa over at Suburban Bliss writes a familiar-feeling post about moving that hits really close to home:

"The problem with moving when you're practicing Extreme Denial is you don't actually pack anything when you're preparing for a pretend move. You tend to think you'll "pretend pack" when the "pretend move" is closer."

We signed our package and sale yesterday. We have till March 30th to vacate the premises. We still have nowhere to vacate to, are living in a mess of boxes and stuff (but not stuff in boxes) and I am stuck somewhere between extreme panic and extreme denial... but mostly I'm just stuck.

Y'all know how close I am to my mom, and how hard it has been this past year when she hasn't been all... here. She's been dealing with losing her mother, her house, & almost her sister; she has her own health issues, all of the stuff I have been ranting about here - the wedding stress, my brother and his 'wife', dad, the kiddos, me, and on and on and on - a million plus things to deal with, so I'm not saying she doesn't have a perfect right to be as checked out as she needs to be, but I think this is a safe enough place to say that it hurts. It hurts me to not be able to say the words that she needs to hear, to not be able to ask her to say the words I need to hear - the wanting to make things easier for her, winds up, inevitably, making things harder for me.
(Not just emotionally, but physically too: there are a lot of things I could use help on that I hesitate to ask for help because it's just not good timing. Having her as my PCA and not being able to ask for what I need has been a whole hateful level of awkward and awful to our relationship.) Chicken and Cheese talks about her own relationship with her mother, and how the stresses of her life keep piling up, and how frustrating it is to know that you've had this plan, and how "it turns out that plan was built out of Popsicle sticks." I'm feeling very "Popsicle stick" built myself, lately, and that post made me cry a little.

On Sunday, I went to another wake. My best friend/college roommate's husband's grandmother, a lady I met only briefly and barely knew died last week, after a frighteningly quick battle with pancreatic cancer. My roommate's favorite in-law, and a sweet woman, with a wonderful best friend who I sat with at the wake and listened to for an hour. Last month, I was too sick to go to the wake of my Nana's cousin in-law, the kleptomaniac who eventually went almost completely blind but still insisted on writing her own Christmas cards ("Merry Christmas, Love Irene - Sorry this is messy but I am blind you know.") Basically, I am sick of going to wakes, to funerals, to places of grief. I am sick of grieving. And yet, it's not going anywhere, it's a part of our lives. But I'm with Meredith: It just doesn't seem right.

cancer is not something you expect to hear on a friday morning. not ever. not on a sunny day when life is already out of balance. cancer is not something that creeps into a man so alive, so tan, so good at doing hand stands for his kids at the community pool all those years ago.

my dad can’t have cancer.
not today.
not tomorrow.
not ever.

The Servant over at Serving the Queens lost someone that matters to her, recently, and she talks beautifully, heartbreakingly, about loss and love:

For the time being, these things do not change what is the truth to me right now, and that truth is achingly painful, and I am indescribably sad.
He is gone.
And so I weep.

I'll keep them, and their families, in my prayers, and keep hoping for them as I hope for all of us.

Looking back, it seems like my brain is full of sadder things, but that I'm in good company. I do hope that we'll all be feeling better, soon. That life will start giving us some breaks, give us a chance to catch our collective breath.

Hope you are breathing well, and I be back!

Ok People

Here I am, much recovered (for me at least) and glad to be back.

I really have missed you, and wish I could be clearer about how the whole month of January managed to pass without me even really noticing, but I figure let's just move on from where we are: sound good?

My Nana's 1st anniversary was on Monday. It was a hard day, but significantly easier than it could of been because of a few little ironies that helped me & my family cope with the day.

During the 3 years of my blog that Nana was alive, I ranted more than once about her, so I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that she had very strong opinions on a lot of things, and was never quiet about sharing them with the world in general. She was a lot of fabulous and wonderful things: caring, generous, lovable, sweet, powerful, amazing.

She was also casually racist.

When I say 'casually' racist, I mean that, for her, it wasn't an active intense dislike or hatred of people who were different, particularly black people... it was more just a sense of "these people are different. That is fact. You cannot convince me it is not fact" and the attitude and actions that would come about because of that belief.

It was something that she and I argued about - a lot - and a part of her that I found cruel and ignorant, but it was a part of her. A lot of it was generational - she still felt perfectly comfortable using the N word (although was eventually convinced by us that it was inappropriate in public, thank the lord), would sometimes say things like "call a spade a spade," and would sometimes refer to desegregation & the civil rights movement as "the time when those people went crazy."
It was from her that I learned all of the racial slurs that I would eventually hear in history classes, and that's something I'm not particularly proud of. I know that there were generational contributions to our different value systems as far as prejudice went, but Nana's stubbornness cannot be discounted as a contributing factor. Yes: she was born in 1923, and grew up in a largely white, largely segregated community in Massachusetts that would eventually become a city that has one of the largest immigrant populations in New England. She was a schoolteacher in the 50s and 60s and lived through the forced busing desegregation scandals in Boston in the early 1970s. We live next door to a private school that went from all white to probably 75% minority over the course of her lifetime. In her mind, the changes that occurred in her classrooms over the years - the falling standards, the growing lack of respect for teachers and authority figures, the lack of parental involvement and caring - correlated directly to the increase in minority students & families. I don't agree, and I know that even she didn't think it was the sole contributing factor to why (in her words) "teaching now is not teaching, it's zoo keeping. I didn't go to school to become a zoo keeper."

On a case by case basis, my grandmother was completely capable of looking past skin color (and even sexual orientation, which for her was an even bigger button to push), and see that individual people were great people: When my youngest sister, whose mother is Filipino and who has (you may have noticed) much darker skin than any of us, was first brought home, my Nana said "black is black" when my father tried to explain that she was Filipino. But that didn't stop her from loving SisterK and from claiming her as her granddaughter (even though she, technically, was not). She had black friends and colleagues who mourned her loss just as much as her white friends and colleagues. She continued to talk about my best friend from elementary school (who was Malaysian) as "the sweetest girl I ever taught" and kept in contact with her family all these years later.

But even though she was able to look past race if she had to, the fact that it was something to "look past" was always there... you were black, white, Asian, Latino, and to her, that meant you were different. Until you proved otherwise. Anyways, I could go on and on about all of the reasons I think she was racist, or the reasons I don't think she really cared that I considered her racist, but suffice it to say that she was.

Which is why when I saw that her anniversary would be falling on Martin Luther King Jr Day this year, it helped to lift my spirits a little bit. The delicious irony of remembering Nana on a day when we're also remembering - when the whole country is celebrating - one of the most influential and charismatic leaders of the Civil Rights movement was just enough for me to not make that day into the hardest day we've had in a year. It was difficult - it was always going to be a shit day, and it wasn't as if I was running around singing and painting rainbows - but it wasn't a huge pit of awful that I fell into either. I think we all tried to sort of actively ignore the date as much as possible, but even as I'm writing this, I still get a little giggle out of how much Nana would've hated the fact that her day was MLK day. Just to really drive this home, I'm going to admit to something that is awful and embarrassing and just hateful all around... Nana used to call MLK "Martin Lucifer Koon" which is speech straight out of a Klan rally if I ever heard it and still makes me shudder to think of it.

Bearing that in mind, and bearing in mind that the very next day we were able to swear in our first African American president, and I hope you can see why this anniversary wasn't as hard as it could've been. And it's like a little inside joke that fate gave us, just enough of a twist to take the edge off of the worst of the grief.

I still miss her, and thought of her as I watched our new president make his wonderful speech without any dismissive comments from the peanut gallery. I think of her most days, when Lil Girl is doing something adorable and I want to call her to come down and see; when I've been sick in bed for three weeks, I want to shoot the TV it's boring me so much, and there's nobody to play cribbage with. When we leave the house and I still automatically look up at her porch to see if she's in the window. When the buyers were traipsing through the house talking about which walls they'd knock down and how there'll be classrooms here and there. When I look at mom and see how fresh the grief still is in her eyes; or when I purposefully don't go to the hospital (even though I really should have) because I just couldn't face going back there right now, during the time that Nana was there and so sick: I couldn't do it to me and I couldn't do that to my mom. It's still hard, every day to know that she's not coming back. But it's getting easier, a little. And the day itself had just enough grace to see us through. And for that I'm thankful.

I'm off to do something irresponsible and just for me today - instead of packing or planning or cleaning or any of the millions of things I should be doing: checking e-mails or getting through my google reader; cleaning out my closet or under my bed; sorting through the mail that's been sitting here since Christmas. I'm going to let it all go for one more day, and just do something I want to do (that I am up for) --- I'm going to scrap JUST because I want to. Not because I should (even though I should) and not because there are birthdays that need to be scrapped for. I'm going to do it for fun. Because I need a little bit of fun today.

So that's where I'll be... amidst stickers and patterned papers for the remainder of my day. I hope you all are able to do something carefree today too.

So here's what I thought I might do

blog everyday for two months straight, right up through Christmas, and then get really sick and abandon the whole thing for over three weeks. That's a great idea, yes?

Sorry to have disappeared, although I am sure you are not - my faithful readers - particularly surprised. But the fevers have finally broken, the steroids and antibiotics are starting to wear off (they always kick my ass), and my brain is plugging back in a bit. So I just wanted to say "hey: hope 09 isn't beating you up like it's been beating me up", and that I'll be back ASAP, as I've definitely missed the world outside my room.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

:D

Hey Santa... let's rock!

Merry Christmas, all!

Welcome Christmas

fah who rah moose.

The Whos are in Who-ville, and I am in bed watching them. Cookies are baked and presents are ... mockingly unwrapped but there's always tomorrow. Our Christmas Eve looks to be a low key day, so I hope yours is as peaceful as you'd like it to be too.

Made cookies today

and rejoiced that this is our last Christmas with the ridiculous oven. Time for cookies is supposed to be between 8-12 minutes, right? The first ones took 22, and the last ones took 14. The banana bread was in the oven for... about 2 and a half hours. Seriously.

Lots of things I'm going to miss (and am decidedly NOT thinking about today), but this stove, sure ain't going to be one of them.

My Tivo and I will be happy, regardless

It has not stopped snowing here since 1:00 on Friday afternoon, which, by my count makes it 56 hours. It is beautiful to watch, but that is because I am not the one who has to shovel it. My job, as relates to the snow, is to put out clean towels (and warm ones, if possible) for the people coming in. If I am up to it, I also put on the hot water (although nobody has used it yet: it would be the one time I didn't put it on that they'd come in wanting tea or hot chocolate or some such). The little tree in our front yard is covered tip to root, and has no underneath at all: only snow. We've got well over a foot, I should imagine. A lot of schools are closed from now until the 5th of January... no sense heating up the school for a possible half day on Tuesday. Come the end of June, there'll be some grumpy kids (and grumpier teachers), but that's a worry for another day.

For today, there is a Tivo who automatically records everything with the words "holiday, Christmas, or special", and that leaves me with a surfeit of wonderful Christmas movies and specials to watch. Not to mention the ones we already have: tomorrow is to be Love, Actually, the Muppets, and all the old Christmas cartoons that we taped off the television for the past 20 years (complete with vintage commercials! There's M&M commericals, people!) and present wrapping. That's an almost perfect day in my book, peaceful and calm, little energy required, plenty of resting as needed.

I hope wherever you are - snowed in or not - you're enjoying your Sunday, taking what peace you can find. And if today begins the holidays for you and your family, my very best Hanukkah wishes.

(Oh, and in case you don't have videos or Tivo to keep you company, check out the entire week's posts over at the Collective: they've got a lot of fabulous YouTube clips up, which basically include my entire playlist for tomorrow.)

Is there some sort of reason that people consider Groundhog Day to be a Christmas movie? I found 2 clips (so far) on YouTube that include Groundhog Day in their Christmas montages... I don't get it. I think it's pretty clear that that is, in actuallity, a GROUNDHOG DAY movie. In fact, it is the only Groundhog Day movie I can think of. So let's not gyp Groundhog Day, here people: let it have its one movie - Christmas has plenty of its own to chose from.

We got about 6-8 inches of snow today, and, while the heaviest stuff is done, it's not over yet. Since I don't have any plans for leaving the house, I say "bring it on". We were out when it started, and I realized it must be at least two years since I've been outside while it's snowing - probably a lot longer than that, but I know I wouldn't have done it purposefully last winter, and I can't think of any that might have happened otherwise. Today it was just coming back into the house at the very beginning of the storm, with about an inch down, all white, crisp and powdery.

It's a fresh kind of feeling, at first. Everything's so quiet and hushed.

Nature and I were never bosom buddies, but there are times I miss simply being able to go out and just be. To feel snowflakes melt as they hit my cheeks or to watch clouds float by in a bright summer sky.

So although I was soaked through getting the 40 feet from the driveway to the door, it was kind of refreshing - something different to add to my day.

And then I got to watch everybody else from inside with all my heating pads and blankets, so that's pretty damn good too.

See you later, alligators. I'm off to watch the wind die down.

Took the kiddos to see Santa today

and nobody cried.

And a bunch of us "grown ups" managed to decorate the tree tonight.

And still, nobody cried.

Even if it hurts,

That is a good day.

Stark Numbers

For a few weeks now, I've been seeing a behavioral specialist that my new primary care doctor recommended. At our first appointment, I told her that I was looking for new - to me - ways to manage my pain, up to and including heroin. I may have been joking, but I'm not entirely sure I will be able to say the same three weeks from now if this pain continues unchecked as it has been. (Yes: the Lyrica helps. It helps so marginally, though, that I'd stop taking it if that margin wasn't the difference between "needs to be committed because she can't stop screaming from pain" and "is able to limit screams just to when people touch her".) So she recommended a behavioral specialist that helps people with chronic illnesses find new ways of coping with the pain. I probably still would have preferred the drugs, but I went anyways. I went because my pain and I? We're so tangled up together that there's really no separating it from me anymore, and I just don't want to live like that: it isn't how I need my life to be. So, if it isn't going to get better/go away, then I need to deal with it better, because I feel sometimes that it is swallowing me whole.

The specialist is actually part of a group, and since I couldn't see her, I'm seeing an intern, who I really like. She's very nice, and has managed to - in the two sessions we've had - grasp what I am trying to say even when I feel like I am babbling like a fool. We talked a lot about how I am managing (or not managing) the challenges of living with chronic pain and illness, and she's going to see what she can do for me as far as additional strategies go. At the end of our last session, two weeks ago, she gave me a homework assignment, which was to track my pain. She gave me a week's worth of worksheets (she was sick last week, which is why I didn't have an appt.), and told me to try to circle a number for pain every hour I was awake.

This is not a new experience for me: in 14 years of dealing with this, if I hadn't have somehow tried to keep track of good days and bad days by now, then I don't know that you could call me very smart at all. But it's been a few years since I've done it, in that way that things come up - babies get born and start wiping poop on your face, houses get sold and you have to pack all your belongings up in under 2 months, grandmothers get sick and die in the same short time period - and you get too busy to do more record keeping type stuff. So, I had no problem doing it again.

I think, a lot of the time, that the people in my life are confused about my pain: they think I'm either exaggerating or that it can't possibly be as bad as it sounds. The thing is? I know that I actually understate the whole thing, so as not to spend each day focused solely on myself, so that I don't seem like a constant complainer who nobody ever wants to be around. I try to only grimace when Lil Girl hugs me or my uncle pats me on the back, rather than bursting into tears, which is how bad it truly hurts. I try not to moan every time I move, like my dad does when his back is killing him, because I hate that! I try to keep the whining to a minimum; try to do for myself when I can so that when I can't someone is willing to help; try to make my life as ordinary as it can be.

But the truth is?

During all of that, I am in pain. A lot of pain.

Always. It doesn't go away, not ever.

When I go to the doctor and say "I can't remember a pain free day. I don't remember what that feels like anymore." Or "my pain is 7 out of 10 - on a GOOD day," I am not exaggerating: that is as honest as I can be.


But I can't explain how I do manage to get up and get dressed (some days) and watch Lil Girl or try to go shopping or scrapbook or make cookies or any of the relatively small things I do that make up my every day. I can't explain it satisfactorily to myself, let alone to other people. "If your pain is that high, if you're really not sleeping more than 2-3 hours a night,you wouldn't even be able to function" a family member said to me recently. And the truth is? That sounds right to me, but I know it's wrong: I make it through my days, doing what I can do, living with what I can't do, because that's what I have to do. I don't have a choice - it's just the way it is. This is the functioning I am able to do, so it's what I do.

The pain is not going to go away if I wait long enough; the fatigue isn't going to get better no matter how long I rest (3 years of sleeping 18 hours a day certainly cleared up that mystery for me), and time is going to pass, life is going to move on whether I do anything or not, so I do what I have to do.

And now I'm wandering away from my point (there's a point) more than a little.

My point was that seeing my pain quantified in those little charts (which, because I am sad, I have since converted into an Excel worksheet. Complete with graphs. Seriously: professional student much?) was a surprise to me.

Not that I didn't know the actuality of living my life, but seeing these numbers? Has really brought up a lot of conflicting emotions for me.

It's made me angry, because I see how much of my life is really consumed by pain. There's no real emerging pattern, which drives me crazy. It's so frustrating to see it all in black and white (and colors: wait till you see the colors) because I just want to erase all the high numbers and start over. It's also made me really conscious of the levels of pain - having to seriously consider where I was at, every hour, made it more possible to see all the different yet subtle ways I was feeling better or worse.

I want to print it out and stick it on the refrigerator, or e-mail it to everyone I know or ever met and be like: "See?!? This is what it's like to be me: This is what I'm dealing with. Look at all those 5s and 4s!!! Now ask me again why I'm not working but instead 'sucking up your social security'!" At the same time, I want to hide it... I'm a little bit ashamed of it, that it's gotten this bad. I want to ignore it, to not have to face it.

It makes me want to cry - with grief, because this is my reality and there is no ignoring it and with relief, because I'm not going crazy, it really is as bad as it seems.

And it makes me hope, really hope, that when I go in for my appointment tomorrow, she'll have some magic up her sleeve. It's the season for miracles, right?

Last week there was a major ice storm

and my family and I were largely unaffected (SisterS up in NH lost her power for 2 days, but the only real loss there was their fish: IDK why she didn't just put them in a bowl of clean water or something... it's beyond me). Others are still without power, nearly a week later.

And tonight the weatherman tells us that it is going to snow three more times in their little five day forecast:

Starting, oh about now, and lasting till noon tomorrow,with most of it being washed away but tomorrow night.
Again on Friday, with a much higher chance of a couple of inches sticking and staying stuck for a while.
And then again on Sunday, which he happened to call a "likely nor'easter."

This is not reassuring to those of my neighbors who are still waiting for the National Guard to get the tree limbs out of their street. I love to watch the snow fall - it's peaceful, and since I don't get to leave the house much, it gives me the feeling that other people are also comfortably ensconced beneath blankets, watching it drift down while they drink hot cocoa. Of course I know this is a false belief, as most people still have to leave their homes, regardless of snow, and are therefore toiling beneath heavy coats and hats, shoveling and scraping to get their cars out, but I still like to think it.

Plus side: chance of a white Christmas climbed to 85%.

You never know.

Our house

(or rather, the new preschool's next location)

smells so freaking good right now.

I love Christmas trees.

(at least as much as I can till it gets overwhelming and I have to shut the door, but that for the first day or so, when it's REALLY strong.)

Not what you expect at a birthday party, that's for sure.

So we had a big Clump Pt 1 party today (with about half of the clump being born between November and the end of the year, and the other half being born in January or February) and it went alright. I wound up doing too much, trying to run things that I should let other people run, but at least today I realized I was doing it and made myself take steps backwards. It's tough, though to see Lil Girl and Youngest Nephew behave so differently when their parents are around and not want to step in and say "No: that's not acceptable - at least not at our house!"

From the unexpected developments category, however, comes the following anecdote:

There's about 8 of us sitting around the table playing bullshit, when SisterCh looks over at the bedroom door and asks "Why is that door opening?" It shuts immediately, but I've seen the little face and the tiny fingers that caused the opening/shutting and am stunned: those little fingers, that little face belong to a little girl who is supposedly napping.

In her playpen.

That's right, Lil Girl had climbed out of her playpen, I still don't know how. All she could tell me afterwards is that she "Jumped". I don't think that's exactly the right word, but it certainly tells us that someone is ready to nap on a bed (which we haven't done before because this is a child who needs boundaries and the edge of a bed means very little. However, if the walls of a crib are also going to mean very little, the edge of a bed is a safer useless boundary.)

Oh, but wait: that's not all.

I went in to try to get her to go to sleep, and rather quickly figured out the reason that she wasn't sleeping: A pungently poopy pull-up.

Which she had left in her playpen, before her "jumping" out.

So, there she is bare-assed, and she says "I did pee pees" and let me tell you that I almost panicked, thinking about all the places she could have peed in my parents' bedroom, before she proudly towed me to the "big girl" (toddler) potty that is in there.

She had peed, so I put her up on the bed, and wiped her, got a new pull up on.

Surely that is the happy ending to our story? No? No.

I shut off the light and tried to get her to lay down again. She sat in my lap, and we rocked to the lullabies, and she gently caressed my face.

The odor of the poop was still pretty strong, though, so I asked her if she'd pooped again. "No."

I played with her hair, she played with mine.

Still: the smell.

And then a terrible thought occurred to me:

"Lil Girl, did you touch the poo poo with your handies?"

"No"

A big sigh of relief....

"No," she says, wiggling her hand in my face: "just my fingers."

Did you know?

People, did you know that there's a poker app on Facebook?

Did you know that I have no time to play endless poker games on Facebook? Even if I am playing it at 4 in the morning after another long night of not sleeping.

Did you also know that I had 3 Aces? And quadrupled my (fake/Facebook) money in the course of one hand?

Yeah, I just thought you should know that.

Just a random idea...

Dad Gone Mad has commenced Operation Comment your Balls/Boobs off (depending on your gender), and I think it's a fabulous idea.

So if you have time, don't forget to spread some comment love.

A small freak out, which you can feel free to skip, followed by more bad news

So we do in fact have a preliminary buyer for our house: there's still an inspection to get through, but the house is damn old and we already told them that, so hopefully it won't turn up anything too surprising.

And while this is good, this is a good, good thing, it is also horrifying and panic inducing. I'm freaking out a little bit, and there's this ball of tension in my belly that's amped waaaaaaaaay up, mostly because, pending inspection, we're expected to clear out by February the 23rd. Which is basically, two months and two weeks from today.

We do not have anyplace to go once we leave here, and that, my friends, is a terrifying thought. I'm afraid of how fast my parents are going to burn through that money: if we find a permanent place to live right away, I'm worried about how much a mortgage is going to cost and how my parents haven't paid rent, let alone a mortgage in over 25 years, and how they're totally not being realistic about how much we're going to be spending now just to live somewhere. And about how my less than $500 a month isn't really going to help out all that much there.

If we don't find a permanent place right away (and we haven't in the nearly a year we've been looking, since there's so many constraints on what we need, let alone what we'd like), then how quickly are we going to go through our money renting some place accommodating enough for us (ok - me), and how will we ever be able to make that money back?

I'm really working very, very hard at not freaking out about those things, because they are, in very large part, beyond my control: we're looking, we'll have to go someplace, it's just that there's so many unanswered things right now and I HATE THAT.

I read a lot about people who can look at these sort of things - these challenges and changes - as adventures, and these sort of people - even the real life people whose blogs I read - take things as they come and don't really worry excessively and somehow it all turns out alright. I would give anything to be one of those people, but I'm just not.

I'm trying to see this as optimistically as possible, but there's also the reality of what's happening, and that is this: in two months and two weeks, unless we do some very hard work very soon, we will have nowhere to live.

Nowhere to live.

If that isn't scary to you, then I don't understand how your brain works. (Obviously).

Now, granted, I don't think it's possible that we'd wind up living in our van (which, also, sadly is deciding it should fall apart little piece by little piece, lately), but it's like my parents are living on a cloud of denial where our dream house is going to be A) affordable, B) immediately available, and C) Right next door! and so I feel like the less they are able to face reality, the more I have to think about it.

Not that thinking about it is doing me any good, because honestly, what good is worrying about it here going to do? I just need to get it all out of my head for a little bit, just put it here and LEAVE IT HERE for a while.

We are working hard - looking at houses and more houses and more houses, farther away than we want, really, but maybe our best option at this point. We're looking at two families to own and one families to rent; we're looking at long range hotel rooms and another storage container. (Confidentially, I've even looked into independent housing for myself, even though I know I'm not up to it health wise, but all of the housing for people with disabilities around here just isn't appropriate for me: I don't need most services, don't qualify for some I could use, and can't live in a group environment where someone else is making the rules about smells and chemicals and whatnot.) We're doing the work, but the answers haven't presented themselves yet, and I'm just not a "leave it to the universe" type of person.

The universe has screwed me on more than one occasion, you might recall, so I'm not exactly sure it's looking out for our best interests.


So, with all of that in my head, I sure am glad I have this place to just spew, and also ----

And also, as I was just finishing up this lovely little rant, a cousin calls to tell me that my great aunt - who I was not close to and really only knew through special occasions and the fact that she was our family kleptomaniac ("Is Irene coming? Make sure the Waterford crystal is not on the sidebar!) has passed away and I will be required to attend yet another funeral early next week.


It's like I said a few weeks ago: what I wake up worrying about is never the stuff I wind up worrying about at the end of the day, so why do I even bother?

2008 has been a sucky, sucky year, and if 2009 isn't better I might have to punch it in the face.

Holy shit

we may have just sold our house.

First present

First present: wrapped, bubble wrapped, boxed and addressed (the actual mailing is not my job, really). Only about a zillion to go.