Feel Like Complaining

When you have a child and they are sick or hurt they can convey their pain or at least point to the offending owies. When your pet gets hurt or sick, it begins a guessing game and when you're wrong, it can be a great thing. A few weeks ago when I got home from work my family informed me that our dog Nellie was not doing well. She had only been outside for about 30 minutes and when she came in she could hardly walk. Nellie was now lying in the hall and couldn't even muster a wag for me. We just let her be and thought a little rest would help. She has hip problems and has sometimes gone 'Bambi' on slick surfaces. It causes her to limp for a few days but later that night what I saw was not limping. It was truly frightening. Her hindquarters were hunched and her back feet were walking on tip toes. She could only walk a few feet before collapsing. The next time I saw her get up it was worse. Her back end wobbled and swayed before she went down. I brought her food and wat...

Not even a week after my strange coffee date from the last post, I had a much different  experience over another cup of coffee. I had the most distinct pleasure and privilege to have coffee with the woman I spent the last year gifting to on a weekly basis. After I had written to her and told her my story and why I did it, she Facebook messaged me. She had told me she really didn't adequately know how to say thanks and had started a letter many times. Amy said that after Travis died her husband had to come home from where he had been deployed and  money got very tight. She explained that sometimes they needed diapers and the only money they had was the money in Travis's account. I told her that one sentence made it all worth it; that I knew it was the right thing to do. We planned to get together for coffee and I was so nervous. She was a little late and I thought I'd been blown off. I texted her and then looked out the window and there she was. As she walked in I la...

It was a weird day. It didn't start that way but it most certainly was. I was excited to have coffee with a friend. I've written about her before on my '365 days' blog. She's known hubby for quite awhile through his driving job and also more recently as a client of his. She came for a reading quite some time ago and is now coming every 2-3 weeks for ongoing mentoring sessions. I can't say she's a happy person and she freely talks about her depression and years of therapy. I can kind of relate so I think that's why we hit it off, or so I thought. During our visit she just had a strange vibe to her. We were just talking about things in general and she said she didn't think she'd ever be happy. She says she's spent a lot of money and time with therapy and still doesn't feel like she's getting anywhere. Then she started talking about hubby and some things about her sessions that she doesn't like and some things he says bothers her b...

....being a parent of a Senior in High School. When our daughter was born a little over 17 years ago we didn't even think about college. Let us enjoy this time, that's a long way off. Even as she went from Grade School to Jr. High, we said 'Oh, we have lots of time to ponder that'. As a Freshman in high school, thinking about college, choosing a career, and the financing of it all still seemed far off. But as we are realizing now, we wish we had really started planning then. We foolishly thought that a guidance counselor would walk us through the steps but how can they? One counselor has almost 400 students to take care of, our daughter has not even met hers this year. I guess if you're not a troubled kid, you never even get close. As soon as she started school this fall I started doing research on filling out the FAFSA (financial aid application), and you know how it is when you look one thing up; 100 more like-minded topics show up. I was getting inundated with ...

After I got home from my trip to Alaska it didn't take me long to get sick. Two days after returning I got a sore throat which transformed into a regular ol' cold and cough. I despise trying to sleep with a cough. So I chug cough syrup. I've always done it and always thought the red liquid to be innocuous. Then I got hives one night soon after dinner. I still don't know if it was the medicine that did it but I had to rule out any kind of food allergy. My upper chest, neck and face were covered with welts and although not red, they itched and burned like crazy. My face was significantly swollen, it looked like my fat days. The only clear way to get rid of them is an anti-histamine and I had plenty of that around here, so I initially elected not to go to a doctor. Just Say No! What surprised me though is in researching cough syrup in general, I found the ingredient Dextromethorphan to be a nasty drug. It was developed in the 1950's for cough suppression as a r...

When we landed in Anchorage it was 10:30 pm. Everyone took off in different directions. A few of them had brought some frozen crab and had to pick it up. At this point, I couldn't give a flip about their crab. Barb and I went to find her checked bag, which never showed. One of the hosts called me and left a message saying to get our boarding passes for the next day and meet them at the baggage claim. We were just there, they weren't there. We were all so tired and chasing this bag around did not help. I finally called back and asked where they were. We had got our stuff at Penair and they were at Alaska. I lost it. When we found them I yelled at them for leaving us. Damn it, why was it so hard to travel as a group and get things done faster. It was like wrangling kittens, they were running around all willy nilly. They looked at me like I had slipped a cog. They all kept insisting that Barb's bag was here somewhere, like we hadn't been to every place we were sent to. Fin...

Desperate People, Desperate Times All of us were up early again , loaded our crap in the back of the van again , and headed to the airport. There we sat for hours waiting for some kind of word. Didn't look good, more cancellations and the airport was filling up. It's only one large room, separated by a chain door to the ticket counter. The natives were getting restless as well as the crazy white people from Washington state. We were told it could be two or three days before we could leave. For others, it had been weeks, depending on where they were going. People were out of clothes, I was out of bp medicine and I sure could have used some by then. The airport said it would update us at 2:00, then 2:30, then 3:00, then 4:00. That's what was so hard, the severe highs and lows of the whole situation. After breakfast at the airport we were so bored we actually went to Safeway to walk around. Seriously people there is nothing to do there. 'The Others' had already b...