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Sunday, September 11, 2016

Finally Found Some

This week. Oh, this week! Let me give you a rundown of how it's gone:

 My birthday was Monday. The night before, we went to a favorite hole-in-the-wall pizza restaurant in a hole-in-the-wall town near the lake house to celebrate. No one offered to seat us, so we finally sat down at a table ourselves. No one around us had any pizza and had obviously been sitting there a long time. The waitresses ignored us, never bothering to give us menus or take a drink order. My son saw a mouse (correction: either one very fast mouse or several mice, he wasn't entirely sure which) several times in a hallway next to my husband's seat. One of the waitresses, after visiting the other tables and promising their pizza would be ready soon, actually RAN INTO MY SON'S SHOULDER and STILL didn't stop to take our order. My husband went to get one after half an hour (it really is good pizza or we wouldn't have still been there) and finally got our pizza ordered and drinks delivered to the table. After an hour, still no pizza (although the waitress had assured us it wouldn't be long, as most of the people in the other dining room had gotten mad and left, leaving more time for the cook to make ours). At one hour and fifteen minutes of waiting for pizza, and an hour and forty-five minutes after arriving at the restaurant, my husband went to talk to the waitresses, the cooks, and a disinterested manager, stomped back to us, announcing, "This is bullshit!" and we left. No birthday dinner.

 It was my first birthday in 56 years without my mom. If I wasn't WITH my mom on my birthday, she would call me, and either way, without fail, she would tell me how x number of years ago, she was in HELL until she finally delivered 10 lb., 1 ounce baby me. It was a running family joke (although at the time, I don't think it was very funny). Oh, how I missed that story this year!

 Preschool started this week, and let me tell you, it has exhausted me! By Wednesday afternoon, I thought it was going to kill me, and I fully believe my death certificate would have listed "preschool" as my cause of death.

 I wrote a pretty decent Six Sentence Story and was putting the final touches on it when *poof* Blogger ate it and there was no recovering it (and believe me, I tried EVERYTHING and have the search history to prove it). I wanted to cry.

 My daughter was cyber-bullied this week. A girl she knew copied a couple of pictures she had posted on Instagram and made a not very nice comment about her, and posted it on Twitter Friday afternoon, and even though she had cropped the picture and didn't show my daughter's face, if you knew her at all, you knew it was her (she was in her volleyball uniform in both pictures). 

 I got hit in the back of the head with a volleyball at a tournament Saturday. The back. Of the head. And I was sitting on a mezzanine about ten feet ABOVE the volleyball court.

 Ten Things of Thankful don't always just jump out at you after a week like this.

 So I searched. Here goes:

 1. My birthday was Monday! I'm a year older! That beats the alternative.


2. I wrote a scathing review on TripAdvisor about the pizza restaurant, and that made me feel a little better about having my birthday dinner ruined.

 3. My husband promised to get me a new laptop for my birthday.

 4. My dear friend Ruth sent me an article about facing your first birthday without your mom. I tried to find a link for it, but I can't locate one, so I am posting the picture of the newspaper clipping that Ruth sent me instead. You'll want to read it.


5. I'm carrying out the suggestion in the article that says to buy yourself a present. Stay tuned for that one.

 6. While the first two days of classes nearly killed me, the second two weren't quite as tough. I forget from year to year how HARD it is to start out a new school year with very small people, but in a week or two, they will "get" it and be model students (she said hopefully).

 7. On losing the Six Sentence story... nah, I've got nothing. That just sucked.

 8. My daughter was alerted to the cyber-bullying by a boy she's known since kindergarten, one of several boys she's been friends with since she was little and who always have her back. I am grateful she has that kind of support system.

 9. My daughter went to her volleyball coach about the situation, and her coach took the necessary steps to get something done about it. I'm extremely grateful that the coach handled it quickly, and I am hopeful this will be the end of it all.

 10. The volleyball team didn't do great at the tournament (their own fault; they didn't play well until they got into bracket play), but they did get 5th place, and I got a couple of good photos of my daughter serving the ball:





Look hard. Look deep. There are thankfuls everywhere.


Ten Things of Thankful


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Sunday, September 4, 2016

I Felt The Earth Move Plus A List Of Thankfuls

Every week, without fail, I think about what I'll include on my weekend Ten Things of Thankful post. If I'm smart (and I'm not often), I even take notes on my phone so I won't forget anything. No notes were taken this week, however, as I had a pretty good list going in my head, and then, early Saturday morning, I was shaken from my sleep by a FREAKING EARTHQUAKE and every mental note got shaken right out of my rattled brain.

 Mind you, this was not my first earthquake. When you have live in southern California and you have been through the 7.1 magnitude Northridge earthquake, then this one we felt Saturday morning was not that big a deal. UNLESS YOU ARE IN SOUTHWEST MISSOURI, WHERE WE AREN'T SUPPOSED TO HAVE EARTHQUAKES.

 Note: the most active seismic area east of the Rockies is located along the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri. More than 200 earthquakes a year are recorded in the area, although they are too small for humans to feel; the last Big One was in the early 1800s and caused the Mississippi River to change its course.

 I was still asleep when the shaking woke me, and it took me a few seconds to process the situation. My first thought was that one of the cats was on the bed, violently scratching an ear with a hind foot, but once I remembered we were (a) at the lake house and (b) cat-less this trip, it began to dawn on me that it was an earthquake. With windows rattling and floor shaking (along with my knees), I walked out into the hallway at the same time my kids came out of their room and my husband came down the hall from the living room. The kids were wild-eyed. "WHAT WAS THAT? WAS THAT AN EARTHQUAKE?!" 

 Yup.

 The news reported a 5.8 magnitude earthquake centered in Pawnee, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma City, and while the WHY of the cause of these earthquakes is still being debated, they are definitely man-made. The state averaged one earthquake over a 3.0 magnitude per year from 1978-2008, then oil prices went up and fracking increased, and in 2015 alone, there were 890 earthquakes above a 3.0. 

 Sooo, anyway, I forgot what was on my list of thankfuls after all that, but I shall make a new one, starting with no damage for us, just a good scare, and no injuries reported anywhere for this earthquake. Now to normal stuff:

 2. Our volleyball team was pounded twice this week by worthy opponents. In other words, they played teams that were REALLY, REALLY GOOD, not that our team is bad or anything. This doesn't sound terribly thankful, but the thankful part is Emma played very well at both games (all season so far, in fact), and I'm really proud of how well she is doing. 


3. Open House at preschool this week! Tuesday morning was the day my Primary class (3 year olds turning 4 over the course of the year) came to visit. It's a big class, with 13 enrolled in it, but it should be entertaining!

 4. Wednesday was open house for my Pre-K class, and let's just say it's going to be a lively year!

 5. My Shark Navigator vacuum cleaner. 

 6. The pet hair remover attachment for the above vacuum cleaner.

 7. Propel Fitness Water. Grape, berry, peach or cranberry-l
ime, please.

 8. Impromptu frozen custard date with my husband.

 9. Buy one, get one free coupon for the frozen custard.

 10. A weekend of cooler temperatures, giving us a hint of fall and thoughts of pumpkins and leaves and other wonderful autumn things.

 How was your week? Did your world rock, either literally or figuratively? 


Ten Things of Thankful


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Thursday, September 1, 2016

Block: A Six Sentence Story




I had intended to have a leisurely bubble bath, soaking in warm water, scrolling through Pinterest on my phone, before going to bed, because who doesn't sleep better after a long, soaky bubblebath? I ran water in my large Jacuzzi-style tub, adding plenty of bubblebath, and when the tub was full and frothy, I climbed in and leaned back onto my bath pillow, not realizing until I got myself completely settled that the water was hotter than was really comfortable, and while any ordinary person would sit up and run some cold water into the tub to bring the temperature down from poach to slight simmer, my stomach muscles won't allow me to do that since my reconstruction surgery from bilateral mastectomy four years ago; instead, I laid there, sweating and scrolling through my phone, even dozing off a few times, until I reached the hard-boiled point and decided to get out.

Since I can't sit up, the only way I can get myself out of the tub (short of using a wrecker) is to roll over on my side and get up on my hands and knees, at which time I can stand up, towel off, and step out of the tub. Maybe it was the extra bath bubble solution that I put in to ensure an extra-sudsy experience, but this time, THIS time, something went terribly wrong, and the second I rolled over onto my right side to begin the launch process, I flipped like a turtle onto my left hip, my back against the outer edge of the tub, and torpedoed around the periphery of the tub, continuing until I had made it three-quarters of the way around the and stopping only when I whacked the back of my head on the faucet. And I didn't hit the hard part of my head, but instead made contact with the faucet with the soft part, just above the nape of my neck, the part that seems to be unprotected by skull and vulnerable to brain injury (or at least a whopper of a headache) when it thwacks into something hard and stationary, such as a faucet. Had the faucet not blocked my forward momentum, I fear I would have been a living example of Newton's First Law of Motion, spiraling around and around the tub into eternity, or until someone in my household, be they either two- or four-footed, needed to be fed.
Death spiral began at green arrow, ending
abruptly at faucet (that's a faucet the red arrow
is pointing to, not an elephant or worse).
Linking up with Ivy at Uncharted for Six Sentence Stories with the prompt "block."
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