Listen to me!!!

I have almost completely lost my voice. And that sucks. I can't talk!!! At least I don't have to sing an opera this weekend or something. Jeez. I started getting sick on Tuesday. Its been the weirdest thing. I kept having tightness in my chest, and I had stop and think through all the information I know about having a heart attack. You know...in case I was having one. But it wasn't that...after a while it progressed to feeling like an asthma attack. I guess. I have never had asthma so I can't actually KNOW what it feels like, but I was having trouble breathing. I was at work, and just plowing through trying to act like nothing was wrong, but in the back of my mind all I could think was "What the Holy Hell IS this?"

By Tuesday evening, I had my answer. I had a really nasty cough that felt like it was ripping my chest apart, and made my throat feel like I had swallowed a bunch of razor blades. That continued right on until today. I had today off for a Dr. appointment. That didn't happen. Is it possible to be too sick to go to the Dr.? LOL. My appointment was for a thyroid blood test. I didn't feel like giving blood today. All of the congestion has moved from my chest into my head. I can't breathe still, but now its out of my nose. Damn it....I just want to be able to draw a normal breath for a change of pace.

Ok, just a whine because I can't actually whine out loud. Its just a really nasty cold and will be over soon. I am off until Monday, so hopefully I will mend up nicely before then. I wanted to spend my weekend decking the halls with Halloween decorations, but.....that might not happen. Whatever. If I can just get better I will consider that a victory.

Where have I been? Ask the Liger....

I know its silly, but I have been totally tied up with a couple of Facebook games. It will pass, eventually. The novelty will wear off. But right now, its a whole lot of fun. I am really into Mafia Wars. Part of the fun is that its one of the first games that my husband (who is much more of a gamer than I will ever be) is playing too. What? You can't picture me as a ruthless mobster? LOL. It really is a lot of fun though. I just made it to Moscow where I get to be a KGB agent turned crime lord.

This weekend was "Tiger Loot" weekend for the Mafia. Jobs and fights are randomly dropping special "loot" like tiger assault rifles, tiger tanks...etc. There are 8 items. I have 7. I am obsessively playing just trying to get that 8th item, the "Liger". Did you know there really is such an animal? Its a cross between a male lion and a female tiger. The offspring tend to be sterile, but it makes for a lion-looking animal with muted tiger stripes that likes to swim. Did you know that tigers swim, but lions hate water? Google is an amazing tool. If only I would use it for more than trivial curiosity. Oh well. I still have until Monday at midnight to try and get my freaking Liger. Oh yeah....Bruce already got one, so the pressure is ON!

The second game that is taking up all my spare time is this:



That's right, in my time off from the mob, I farm. Quite successfully, too, if I do say so myself. Farmville is my son's favorite, so he is way ahead of me. But I have goals, and I keep growing my crops, harvesting my fruit trees, and taking care of the animals. Whew....I tell you...if things keep on like this, I am going to have to quit my day job just to keep up with my other activities. Haha. Whatever, mock me if you must, but it is fun.

Lapse of a couple of hours......

I finally got him! I got a Liger! My life can resume some sense of normalcy now.
Well, not that I am ever actually "normal", but....relatively speaking.
Isn't he awesome????

My Birthday in pictures

My birthday went on for days and days, which is particularly wonderful, and yet very bad for your diet. Jeanne, and her friend Malia, Delaney, and Casey came up on Friday.
Dad and Barb also came down. We had Parker's for dinner and Barb brought a birthday cake:



I wish I had pictures of the girls, and Malia, but somehow all of those pictures must have ended up on Barbara's camera. Notice the message on the cake!!! LOL!

Then on Saturday night, Bruce and I, Dad and Barb, and Hannia and Stephen had a wonderful dinner at Chef's 505. This is my birthday kiss: (also note the haircut...I got all my hair cut off just for something new and different to start my new year)



I don't know if you can see it very well, but that is crab stuffed tilapia on my plate and it was delicious.

Afterwards, we had yet another cake. Stephen and Hannia had this one made at a specialty bakery here in town called "A Perfect Cake". The cute animals are edible, and the cake is chocolate with raspberry filling. I can't even begin to describe how yummy it is. And there is still a lot of it left. Stop by and have a slice, cuz we are all gaining alarming amounts of weight with all of this birthday eating. LOL.





And just for the pet lovers, although this has nothing to do with my birthday, here is Vixen in her "devil" halloween costume:



And Omen in her "witch" halloween costume:




And just for Erica, because Shep looks like he is smiling:



He is probably smiling because the cats were forced to wear those goofy costumes, and he didn't have to. LOL.

On turning 47

I will be 47 tomorrow. And seriously? I have no hang ups about age, so I don't mind saying it. It is what it is. I never got the whole lying about your age thing. My mother was the queen of that. I find it both amusing and somewhat sad that I never knew how old she was until she died. She never would tell. Not even her own flesh and blood. Is that weird?

I took tomorrow off work. I wish I could say that it was to celebrate but the reality is that it is going to be round 2 of the root canal (insert scary music here...LOL). Oh well. I am reserving this weekend for celebrations and cake, so a silly ol' root canal is NOT going to spoil my fun.

I wish I had words of wisdom to share from my 47 years of life experience. The only thing I can say with certainty is this: try to go for MORE fun and LESS worry. Things happen exactly the way that they were meant to, and wasting time worrying about it doesn't change a thing. It just makes you miserable. There is more than enough misery in the world without any of us adding to it, so....yeah. There you have it.

Job Description

A friend sent this in an email today. Good for a smile.




PARENT - Job Description

This is hysterical. If it had been presented this way,
I don't believe any of us would have done it!!!!

POSITION :
Mom, Mommy, Mama, Ma
Dad, Daddy, Dada, Pa, Pop


JOB DESCRIPTION :

Long term, team players needed, for challenging,
permanent work in an
often chaotic environment.
Candidates must possess excellent communication
and organizational skills and be willing to work
variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends
and frequent 24 hour shifts on call..
Some overnight travel required, including trips to
primitive camping sites on rainy weekends and endless sports tournaments
in far away cities!
Travel expenses not reimbursed.
Extensive courier duties also required.

RESPONSIBILITIES :

The rest of your life.
Must be willing to be hated, at least temporarily,
until someone needs $5.
Must be willing to bite tongue repeatedly.
Also, must possess the physical stamina of a
pack mule
and be able to go from zero to 60 mph in three seconds flat
in case, this time, the screams from
the backyard are not someone just crying wolf.
Must be willing to face stimulating technical challenges,
such as small gadget repair, mysteriously sluggish toilets
and stuck zippers.
Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and
coordinate production of multiple homework projects.
Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings
for clients of all ages and mental outlooks.
Must be a willing to be indispensable one minute,
an embarrassment the next.
Must handle assembly and product safety testing of a
half million cheap, plastic toys, and battery operated devices.
Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.
Must assume final, complete accountability for
the quality of the end product.
Responsibilities also include floor maintenance and
janitorial work throughout the facility.

POSSIBILITY FOR ADVANCEMENT & PROMOTION :

None.
Your job is to remain in the same position for years, without
complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills,
so that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE :

None required unfortunately.
On-the-job training offered on a continually exhausting basis.

WAGES AND COMPENSATION :

Get this! You pay them!
Offering frequent raises and bonuses.
A balloon payment is due when they turn 18 because
of the assumption that college will help them
become financially independent.
When you die, you give them whatever is left.
The oddest thing about this reverse-salary scheme is that
you actually enjoy it and wish you could only do more.

BENEFITS :

While no health or dental insurance, no pension,
no tuition reimbursement, no paid holidays and
no stock options are offered;
this job supplies limitless opportunities for personal growth,
unconditional love,
and free hugs and kisses for life if you play your cards right.


Forward this on to all the PARENTS you know, in appreciation for
everything they do on a daily basis,
letting them know they are appreciated
for the fabulous job they do...
or forward with love
to anyone thinking of applying for the job.


** AND A FOOTNOTE 'THERE IS NO RETIREMENT -- EVER!!









~Jen Kline~

One Day at a Time

Right now, everything is good. Scooter is seemingly fine...again. Do I dare start to think we are out of the woods yet? I don't know, but he seems completely normal now.
He eats normally, he runs around normally (well, as much as a 14 year old dog "runs". But he is up and around and interested in stuff again). He watched me make his dinner tonight with gleeful anticipation, tail wagging all the time, and I felt almost guilty that less than a week ago we were ready to put him down. Well, the vet was too. He was so sick and so miserable. Who knows what the future holds. We are just taking it one day at a time.

Bruce and I decided to take a little break from the mayhem around here last night. We went out to dinner (we had the endless shrimp at Red Lobster...the coconut shrimp is still the best). Then we hit all the Halloween shops in town hunting down a costume for our cruise in October. There is going to be a dinner and costume party on Halloween night, and we want costumes. Dad and Barb have already bought theirs, but they are being highly secretive as to what they are going to be. We can't have them outdo us now, can we? We saw a few things, got a few ideas, but we still have to contemplate this for a while before we commit. Do we do a couples thing? Or be individually creative? We haven't gotten all of that figured out. But I do know that there WILL be pictures, so stay tuned.

Speaking of pictures, Bruce bought us a new camera this past week. Its another one of the small digitals that I love so much. I LOVED my little Sony that was hardly bigger than a pack of cigarettes. This is an Olympus, still very small, but waterproof. We decided after our river tubing trip that we needed a waterproof camera, so....there you go. Its good up to 33 feet, and virtually indestructible.
You can drop it up to 6 feet and supposedly drive a car over it. Yeah, well, I hope to not test that one out, but it says it will withstand some serious abuse. So far the pictures have been good. But I haven't had any time to actually sit down and figure it out. Maybe I will do that tonight. In our shopping last night, we bought the cutest little Halloween costumes for the cats. Yeah, we really did...LOL. Omen is a witch, and Vixen is a little devil. They hate them passionately, of course. But I intend to get at least a couple of cute pictures out of this deal whether they like it or not. I may be sporting some deep scratches all over my body, but I need cute kitty costume pictures to ring in the fall season!!!!!

Soon

Is it fall yet? We've had some cooler weather, so maybe? Soon? But anyway, things are still semi-crazy around here. Stephen is still recovering from having his wisdom teeth out. He just isn't bouncing back as quickly as he hoped. I think he misses being able to eat real food most of all. But hopefully he will be able to eat soon....Soon seems to be a reoccurring theme lately.

My tooth is finally feeling normal again with all the antibiotics. Of course, now my stomach hurts. Those meds always make me feel like crap, but what can you do? I have the root canal scheduled for Tuesday, so again....soon....things will be better. LOL.

But the thing that has driven my the most crazy lately is Scooter. It was the dog flu. Tests and xrays and trips to the vet that showed nothing. Then he mysteriously got better. Then this past weekend, he got sick again. Just stopped eating, and was lying around feeling feverish and miserable. We got him to the vet again. More tests, more xrays....and she admitted that she had exhausted her arsenal of diagnostic tools. There was a chance that he was just having a really bad time with this flu, or....he might have liver disease or possibly liver cancer. The tests were all inconclusive. The only things that showed up were a slightly enlarged liver on the xrays, and slightly elevated liver enzymes in his blood tests. Could be disease, but not totally abnormal for a dog of this age. She gave us 3 options:

1. A trip to the Vet school in Raleigh for a full CT scan. Just the diagnostic estimate was $2,000-5,000.
2. Hit him up with a whole range of meds just to see if something might work. That would only be if it was just a bad case of flu.
3. Euthanasia. Because seriously, he was miserable.

We opted for the meds. And there are a ton of them. None of them are ultra-expensive, but we pretty much shove pills into this dog most of the day. On the upside, he is doing great, acting normal and eating again. The thing is that if he has a relapse, thats pretty much the end of the line. We will have to schedule euthanasia....because it pretty much means its something untreatable (or even unfindable). So, I haven't been able to relax and just be happy that he is better.
I keep feeling anxious that he is going to stop eating again. But...he is 14 years old, and if it comes to that, then I will deal with it.

Soon....its all going to be better. I am sure of it.