Random...

Random thought...

We need people in our lives who will keep us accountable. They're like the white and yellow lines on the road. We know we're supposed to stay in our own lanes - but they help remind us. :)

Lots to do!

I need to be snuggled down in my bed...quickly falling asleep...but alas...I'm not. I have an early meeting tomorrow about a fundraiser for Katie's band...somehow I've been 'volunteered' as a co-chair for the giftwrap service. We have a meeting with our contact at the mall tomorrow.

I also have a few errands to run after that and then I need to come home and try mowing the lawn some more...blah!

Tomorrow night we're celebrating Spencer's 17th birthday! Where does the time go? How did he go from the little chubby precious baby to this big, bright kid? I ordered a special cake from my friend, Brieanna - you should check out the cakes that she makes - she's really amazing. Spencer loves the taste of wedding cake and so, I've asked Brieanna to make a birthday/wedding cake. I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Then...I have to pack. How on earth did this creep up on me? On Friday I'm heading to Destin to spend a couple days with some friends. It should be interesting and hopefully really relaxing and peaceful.

I'm super proud of my mom. She has been doing pretty well lately, emotionally. She seems to have a little more vim and vigor. :) It's been difficult to get her to go to church or a bible study, but I did convince her to go to a local divorce recovery class. Unfortunately, it wasn't what she or I thought it would be. They just had a speaker talking about lawyers...we both thought that the class would be seeing divorce and relationships through God's eyes...but she did promise to go again the next time they have the class, just to double check.

We've come to the decision that she's going to move upstairs so that we can start to consolidate. With both of us living upstairs, we'll only be using the electricity upstairs, which will save money on the utilities.

To make that happen...Fred has to get the rest of his stuff out of his room and that room needs to be cleaned. We need to pack everything in my dad's office up and put it in Fred's room. My mom declared that she should do the packing...whatever...so...that's her project for this weekend. Hopefully, she'll be feeling well enough to do it while I'm gone.

Once my dad's office is cleaned out of the stuff, I will clean the room and mom is going to pick out a paint color. Then...if all is done by Monday...I'll start painting...we'll see if I can keep from falling off a ladder this time. Once it's painted, etc...we need to move her the things she wants in her bedroom upstairs. I might be enlisting the help of some friends for that.

Once she and the dogs are moved upstairs...we can then start working on arranging things downstairs so that it can all be sold! YAY!!!!! I think we'll keep her old room for items that we don't want to sell, but don't quite have room upstairs for.

We have quite a few big items upstairs that we're going to sell as well so my project is to take pictures of everything, look up approximate value online and then post on craigslist...etc.

So...there's a lot that we have got to get done. But I'm proud of my mom. Now...I have no doubt that she will change her mind, lose her initiative and we'll end up with a bigger mess than what we started with...but I can only pray.

A Dilemma

I am allergic to grass. It's sooo not fun. If we get a real tree at Christmas, decorating is problem b/c even touching it and I break out. *sigh*



Normally I do pretty well to stay away from it all, but since I haven't found anyone to reasonably keep up with our lawn, my mom has been doing it. She's feisty and pretty tough, but after working all day on a school bus in addition to the multitude of drama in her life, it wears her out.



So...she spent about an hour on it yesterday while I was lying in bed with the migraine. I feel guilty.



So...the dilemma is, do I risk it? Yeah...I think I kind of need to. BLAH!



I despise outside work anyway...and being allergic makes it worse.



*sigh*



Here I go...

Couldn't Resist...

I was sooo cute! What on earth happened? I think I 'peaked' in elementary school. *sigh* oh well...this is me on my first day of kindergarten...with my Garfield lunch box and my very blonde hair...oh...maybe I should be a blonde again. :)




Ok...so I was sifting through more stuff and found these old pictures. Since my niece is also in band...and we just had a mini band reunion...I figure it's definitely time to bring these out of the woodwork. :) The below picture is the flute section either my sophmore or junior year...but i'm not 100% sure which.



The below picture is of our entire band after we had marched at the Emerald Coast Marching Fest in Ft. Walton during my Freshman year. (I only know b/c there's a date printed on the picture...haha) I had forgotten just how big of a band we were. WOW. Good times

Ok...I'm done posting old pictures...for now :)

Blast from the Past

I finally finished rearranging my room AND got my printer set-up. So...I of course needed to procrastinate a little and start scanning some old pictures and documents. Here's a pic of me and my little cousin, Alison, that I haven't seen since she was about 4 years old.

This pic was from Christmas 1988 (I think). Those were the days when my hair was long, white-blonde and had to be pulled back so tightly that my eyes almost bugged out.

My family still makes fun of me for my 'fashion' decisions...and rightly so. I had some pretty weird ideas and was so stubborn that nothing they could say would have deterred me from doing what I wanted to...hmmm...sound familiar?

This below is a picture of my dad. I'm not quite sure when it was taken, but I'm leaning towards the late 70's - about the time I was born.

I'm working on my family's geneology (all sides) so expect to see some random old pictures and documents over the next several months as I get things organized. Should be kinda fun. :)

Working through a Migraine

Last night I was supposed to push my clock back an hour. YAY!!!! I get an extra hour of sleep!!! The problem with that scenario is...I actually pushed it forward an hour. So when I woke up thinking it was 8:00, it was really only 6:00. No big deal...I woke up with a migraine so I should be able to go back to sleep for a good 2 hours. Yeah..except that I didn't reset the clock and kept waking myself up to make sure I didn't oversleep...consequently...I overslept.


Ha. Such is the day. So about 9:30ish I finally got out of bed and took more drugs. It definitely helps that I was picking up Katie for church or else I probably would have just gone back to bed and pulled the covers over my head.


I burned the side of my face Friday morning with my curling iron. I've done that before - but this one is worse - and it certainly hurts worse. It's not a 2nd degree but it's got to be close and it just plain hurts. It's also a bit conspicuous, kind of hard to miss. blah! Been putting aloe, vitamin E and micitracin intermittendly on it.

Anyway, I was running late, Katie was running late and Claire was too sick to go. We got to church a bit late so I just snuck in the back. The one time that I actually put my phone away for church and I had a couple of people texting me worried about where I was. Probably wouldn't have happened if I wasn't in semi-hermit mode.

I had promised Kate that I would drop her and her friend off at the fair - but first we needed to eat. We needed to be kinda quick, but good so we decided on Subway. Pulling into the parking lot we both decided to forego our original idea and head straight for Waffle House. :) A much better idea and it gave us plenty of catch up time, just me and her. She's so busy with school, band, ROTC and her friends and I'm always so busy and distracted that I don't get to spend much one on one time with her.

I love that kid.

Afterwards I went straight home and tried to get some more sleep. The migraine was still lingering and I just didn't feel well. I made a couple of phone calls just so some people didn't think I was dead and then went back to bed.

Sadly - the migraine didn't go away.

Explosion

It's like words have exploded in my head and they are just screaming to escape. I know you've really missed me and I hope you enjoy this bit of saturation because I have no idea how long it will last.

I figure a good way to keep myself somewhat accountable is to put things on paper - or rather - on the internet. There are 10 million things I need to do - and it seems as if my head just spins most days and I accomplish absolutely nothing. So to motivate myself a little more, here are a few things I need to be working on.

• Finish rearranging my bedroom. I've done a pretty good job, and there are really only a couple of things left to do, but that also means vacuuming before I move the furniture.
• Organizing my office. It's in a complete shambles and I have no idea where anything is or for that matter, where it's supposed to be.
• Set-up my printer.
• Print lots of things - resume, applications, paperwork, transcript requests, etc. I need to kill a lot of trees...but I'm so far away from that now...
• Car needs an oil change, rotation and general 60,000 mile check-up. She also needs a serious bath and time set aside to be detailed.
• Finish stuff up for school...gather all the necessary paperwork, student loan stuff...wading through the multitude of that junk.
• Hair trim
• Pictures - take lots of pictures of stuff my mom is finally ready to sell.
• Post those pictures online - ebay/craigslist...etc.
• Keep track of all of that. yay.
• Find a job
• Kitchen - the cabinets must be emptied, scrubbed, kitchen-ware must be gone through and what I'm keeping needs to be put back. Everything else, needs to be priced to sell.
• Organize boxes and boxes of pictures...scan all the old pictures and put them on CD's.
• Figure out what's going on with my health insurance...and it's time to make a doc appointment.
• Then of course there's my dad's bankruptcy, my parent's divorce and all the daily drama that goes along with that.
• I need to find someone that will keep up with our lawn for a reasonable price.
• Start mapping out the repairs that need to be done in the house and preparing for those.
• Pack up the stuff my dad left in his office and then move my mom upstairs.
• Pressure wash the driveway
• Katie's band commitments...
• Work on our geneology

Woah

Yeah, so, there's a lot going on. I'm not quite sure how we're going to do this once I go back to work AND start school. This will be interesting and I have no idea what it will all look like on this part of the journey.