Holly’s Happenings

Every once in a while I come across some links and websites that offer some really cool samples and freebies. Some of the ones that I’ve ran across recently have been things like a free sample of Seattle’s Best Coffee, a Sleep Well pack from Tylenol PM and samples of Glad storage bags. I’ve even ran across a few that have given me one year subscriptions to magazines, like right now I’m receiving TV Guide and a cooking magazine.

Anyway, for some reason it hit me today as I was checking a few of them out that maybe you all would enjoy some of these as much as I do. So I was wondering, if I were to dedicate a separate page on the site just for those really good freebie and sample offers that I come across, would it be something you’d be interested in?

Many of the freebies and samples that I come across are really dumb ones, so those I wouldn’t share with you. For instance I recently ran across one that if you put this REALLY ugly banner on your website or MySpace page, they’d send you a spoon or something. But if you actually kept it there for a year, they’d send you a bottle of some new liquor. And yes, I agree that sometimes free alcohol is a good thing, but it is worth a years worth of “rent” on your site? I don’t think it is!

So give me your thoughts? Would it be something you enjoyed and something you’d “visit”? I know that many of you read my posts in feed readers rather than visit the site, so if I did do this, I’d also update with a blog post letting you know that there were new freebie/sample offers you needed to check out! Tell me what you think!

For some reason or another, this time of the year brings out the part of me that realizes just exactly how fortunate I am! Yes, this year has been a little more difficult than the past couple of have been, but that’s what life is about! You have to take the bad along with the good, and just do the best that you can!

It’s been almost two months since my nephew passed away. It’s still very difficult for me to believe that he’s gone. But I didn’t spend a huge amount of time with him, so when I’m in my own “world”, doing my own things, I don’t think about his death that much. It’s only when I do things like talk to his family members or catch a glimpse of one of his pictures that I think about the fact that he’s truly gone. My heart still breaks for his family and I often find myself wishing that there was more that I could do to help them through this difficult time! But they also know that I am here if they need me!

Even with all of the pain and loss that I’ve gone through this year, I can still find many things in my life that I truly feel are blessings! I feel very blessed to have my job, my husband and children, a roof over my head, clothes on my back and food to feed my family! There are so many things that could be going on in my life that, in my opinion, could make it much more difficult than it is!

There was a customer at work this week who really touched my heart! She was a young woman, somewhere in her late 20’s, who had an absolutely beautiful daughter. I was out in the dining room that day, and while I was wiping tables down, this young woman asked me if I could help her. It was obvious her daughter had medical “issues”, and she wanted to know if I could help her carry her food to the table. I did so without hesitation, first because it’s my job to do so and second, as a mom I know how nice it is to have a helping hand when you need one.

She sat down at a table and was soon joined by another young woman. While I was going around the dining room cleaning things up I happened to over hear them talking about the little girl and soon realized that her health “issues” were due to the fact that the little girl had cerebral palsy. The young mothers love for her child was obvious just by watching her interact with her daughter! Not once did I see the young woman act as if she felt overwhelmed or “burdened” by having a child with health “issues”, I only witnessed a mother who showed nothing but love. I also overheard her mention to her friend that she and her husband were still calling and interviewing cerebral palsy lawyers, that they hadn’t decided which one to use yet. I just hope that she finds one that will fight for her daughter and secure a settlement that will allow her to not have to worry about being anything but a wonderful mother to a very special child!

And now, as I sit here watching the news, I see that a few areas of North and South Dakota have received several inches of snow already this year. Yet here I am, in NW Ohio, looking at a high temp in the mid 60’s for today. Just another reason for me to feel thankful and blessed!

Yes, I do have some difficult things going on in my life, things that can occasionally feel a bit overwhelming. BUT, if I step back from the things that are going on in my life, and take a look at the world around me, I realize that the things I’m going through aren’t quite as difficult as I think they are!

Today is election day here in the United States. And yes, I know that you already knew that..LOL! But before I get my day started I wanted to make sure to remind you, just in case you might have forgotten, to GET OUT THERE AND VOTE!

I don’t care who you are voting for or what your thoughts are, I just care that you make your vote heard!

OK, I’m just really having a difficult time believing it’s November already! I think, more than anything, it has to do with the VERY odd weather we’re having this weekend. Yesterday we had a high temperature of 70 degrees, and this morning when I woke up at 6:00 AM it was almost 60 degrees already. The current temperature is in the mid 50’s, but it’s still very nice outside, other than being a little cloudy.

Today I was scheduled to work from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM, but I ended up working until almost 4:20 because my replacement was running late. While I usually don’t mind working over a little bit, I didn’t get a break today, so I was very tired and VERY hungry…LOL! Today was also my first day running register on my own and, for the most part, it went fairly well. I have to question the idea of putting a person on a register alone for the first time on one of the busiest days of the week though.

I did OK when it came to the breakfast and bakery stuff, my problems came in when we switched over from breakfast to lunch. The lunch menu isn’t something I’m really familiar with and although most customers go over to the cafe area to order for lunch time, we were busy enough that I had a steady flow of people ordering lunch items from me. I did the best I could and was doing OK until an elderly lady I ended up naming “Mrs. Grumpy McWitchy” decided she wanted to place her order at my register. She wanted a sandwich completely different from how it is “normally” ordered, and since I’m totally unfamiliar with running the register on sandwiches, I was probably quite a bit slower than she was hoping I would be. And since she had to change just about everything about the sandwich, well, I ended up messing it up. So I told her that I needed to have my manager fix it for me and apologized, at which time she looked me in the eye and said “What are you, stupid or something?”. Honestly, I really wanted to cry, but I’ve dealt with this type of person THOUSANDS of times in my years of working with the public. So, I simply looked at her, smiled and said “No ma’am, actually, I’m new and this is the first day I have ever ran register on my own. I’m simply doing the best that I can”. Apparently she didn’t like my reaction because she walked away and let her husband finish things up. My manager came over, quickly fixed things and I then gave the man his total, smiled, cashed him out and told him to have a very good day. It was probably one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do in my life. I honestly wanted to tell that woman what she could do and how she should do it. But my job is important to me and I know that if I had reacted like that A). She’d have won because she was hoping to get some sort of negative reaction out of me and B). I’d have lost my job right then and there.

Other than Mrs. Grumpy McWitchy, my day went pretty well. There were a few other times that it was a bit frustrating, but I never stopped smiling and I never stopped trying. The only way I’m going to learn how to do this is to just keep doing it, no matter how frustrating it can be and giving up simply isn’t an option!

I’m kicking back tonight a bit, have a few things I need to take care of, but then it’ll be an early night for me because I open again tomorrow morning. Thanks to time change I’ll actually get an extra hour of sleep, w00t! But it’s also a short day, I only work until noon, well, until my replacement that is scheduled to come in at noon replaces me LOL

And before you ask, not, it hasn’t been bad crazy, it’s simply been busy crazy. It feels like all I’ve been doing is working lately, but that’s OK because I know it helps to pay the bills!

The beginning of the week started off cold and wet! The morning temps were below freezing, and we had a rain/snow/sleet mix come through the beginning of the week. Thankfully it didn’t last long and as the week progressed, the temps really warmed up nicely! Yesterday afternoon it got up to 70 degrees and this morning when I woke up the temps were already at 60 degrees. That is VERY nice for November temps!

The week also started off with us having to replace the shower head in the front bathroom. When we moved in here a year ago we replaced it with an inexpensive hand held model. We should have known better, because the old adage “You get what you pay for” really stands true when purchasing stuff like that! But at the time we just needed to buy something that would work! We didn’t really have the cash flow to replace the one that was originally here with one of the really nice Danze faucets for showers that I had seen. And Monday morning, when my son was taking his shower for school, the shower head completely fell apart on him.

Thankfully when we called the company who manufactured it, they were very nice and understanding and said they’d ship us a new one to replace it, but it would take a couple of days and since that’s the only usable shower in the house, we had to buy something that would hold us until the replacement came.

Then on Wednesday evening I got a phone call from an old friend from high school that I haven’t heard from in a few years. He was calling to let me know that my best friend from high school asked him to get a hold of me to let me know that her father had passed away the day before and that the funeral was the next day, Thursday. And of course, I was working a training shift on Thursday that I couldn’t switch or miss, so it wasn’t possible for me to attend her fathers funeral. I felt so bad because she was there for me when I lost my father in 1979 and she was there for me in September of this year when I lost my nephew. But I called her and talked to her and explained, and she did understand. She knew because of how quickly they were doing things that there were going to be some people that weren’t going to be able to make it to the funeral. She and I are going to get together sometime next week, which will be nice, but I still feel very bad!

Since Thursday I’ve worked what feels like a TON of hours and I still have a full shift today as well as an opening shift tomorrow, then a meeting at work after close. And sometime in between now and the meeting tomorrow night I have to bake some cookies or something sweet to take into work for the meeting. So it’s definitely going to be a crazy busy weekend!

After work today I drove up to see my sister in law and take her some sweet bagel goodness from where I work! I knew that she liked our bagels, but when I heard that she hadn’t tried this months special bagel, the Pink Ribbon bagel in honor of breast cancer awareness month, I knew that I had to take her a few to try. I also ended up grabbing her a couple of the Cinnamon Crunch and Dutch Apple Raisin bagels as well.

I sat and talked to her for a little while, it just breaks my heart every time I see her! The loss of her oldest son has left her with a huge void in her life and an even bigger hole in her heart. As a parent, I can’t even fathom the pain she is feeling right now. Even though both of my kids are REALLY testing my patience tonight, to lose one of them would be devastating! My sister in law was telling me that she doesn’t know what to do most of the time, and she doesn’t feel like she’s helping anyone else deal with Eric’s death. I looked at her and told her that helping other people deal with this is not anywhere near the top of her priority list right now and as far as not knowing what to do, the only thing that she needed to do is what would get her through the moment she’s in, because that’s the only thing that matters at that specific time.

Like I said, it just breaks my heart, I want so much to be able to do something, ANYTHING, to help her deal with the pain she is feeling. But I also know that there is not a single thing on the face of this earth that would take her pain away. So the only thing I can do right now is just be there for her when I can and let her talk if she feels the need to talk.

Anyway, after I left her house, I drove into town to meet my mom. I had put the pictures of my nephew on an SD memory card that she could then either put into her own camera to look at the pictures, or she could put it into her printer to print them or take them somewhere and have some of them printed. I also took mom a few bagels because she likes them too. She and I walked around Walmart while waiting for the pictures to be printed, looking for some picture frames and a few other things she needed to pick up. My mom isn’t doing well with my nephew’s death either, it’s really taking it’s toll on her! She said she sits at night looking at his pictures and just cries, begging him to please come back. She said she even told him that she’d gladly take his place because she has lived a long and wonderful life and he still had things left to do.

It’s hard to hear my mother say things like that, and it brought tears to my eyes, not because she said it, but because I know she meant it. She’s spent nearly 30 years being a grandmother, and for every moment of those years, her grandchildren have been her life. I don’t care what she’s doing or where she’s at, if she finds out one of her grandchildren needs her, she drops what she’s doing to go to them. The walls of her house are FILLED with pictures of her 16 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren, who range in age from almost 28 to just a few days past 5 months old.

I’m sorry, I got carried away talking about my family that I TOTALLY forgot to talk about the title of this post. As you probably know, I live in NW Ohio. This time of year is filled with the beauty of hundreds of colors, but it also brings change, a.k.a. cold weather. The local weather men have been talking for a few days now that we were going to see our first snow flakes today, but that we didn’t need to worry, the ground was too warm for it to stick.

On my drive home I turned off a north-south road, to an east-west road and FREAKED out when I seen the sky! I quick grabbed my cell phone and turned on the camera to snap a few pictures that I could share with you. For those of you that have never lived in snow country, this sky is when we know snow is on the way!

Then, as I turned back onto a north-south road, I got a clear view of the sky to the east of me. Although it wasn’t as “threatening” I still thought it was photo worthy…LOL!

If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening to this long winded post and I hope you enjoy the pictures!

I was emailing back and forth with my sister last week about my new job. She wanted to know if I still liked it, which I told her I really did. She then asked what types of things they were having me do so far, so I told her about the different things that I had done so far. She then wrote back and said “I could never work there, I’d end up gaining a ton of weight because I LOVE bread”. I had to chuckle after reading that, it just made it more obvious to me that she knew very little about working in the food industry.

I’ve worked a few different jobs in the food industry over the past 25 of so years. One of the things that has never been allowed in any of the food establishments that I’ve worked in is eating on the clock, and although some provided a free meal if you worked a long enough shift to take a lunch or dinner break, others only offered a discounted meal. But the fact is that you can never eat what you want, when you want to. Just about every last food item has to be accounted for, even if it’s something that is thrown away.

And if you think about it, if people who worked in the food industry were allowed to eat what they wanted, when they wanted to, we’d have to use appetite suppressants or we’d probably all end up enormously over weight. And I can tell you that the vast majority of the people I work with don’t even come close to having issues with weight problems.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been on the “outs” with some of my family members over a few things that happened within a few days of my nephew’s unexpected death. At the time it happened I felt angry and betrayed, but as time has passed, I got over it and moved on.

Then a couple of weeks ago my sister called my house telling me she had a “mission” for me. When I asked her what the mission was, she told me that I needed to search my house and find the memory card from my late nephew’s digital camera. She went on to say that she had been at my brother and sister in laws house that night and they had discovered that the memory card from his digital camera wasn’t in the camera, and that no one had touched it since I had brought the camera back to them after making his tribute video.

At first, I totally freaked out, thinking that I was a complete and total idiot for somehow losing/misplacing this. But then I sat at my desk thinking about the day I had it, when I was working on his video, and something just didn’t make any sense at all! I tore my desk apart looking for the memory card and it wasn’t anywhere to be found, so I called her back. When I called I asked her if she had went through his camera bag to make sure that it somehow hadn’t simply been taken out of the camera, then just put back in the bag. At that point she point blank said that she had torn the bag apart looking for it and that anyone that might have had access to the camera over the past two weeks was there that night and they all said that they hadn’t touched it and that I really needed to start looking or people were going to be really ticked off at me.

At this point, I completely lost it. I knew in my heart of hearts that I had nothing to do with this memory card being missing, I knew that when I had his camera, I took the card out of the camera, put it in my computer, copied the pictures from it that they wanted me to use, took the memory card out of my computer and put it back in his camera, then put the camera back into it’s bag and zipped it up. I was so meticulous that day with all of the pictures and stuff while making the video that I freaked out on my kids a couple of times for simply touching a picture or getting hear my desk. I had to be this meticulous because I knew what would happen if anything happened to any of the pictures or the memory card, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

For the past two weeks I have totally avoided my brother and sister in law, as well as their two remaining children. Although I KNEW I wasn’t responsible for the card being missing, I had no way of proving this, and with everything they were going through, I just felt that it was best for right now if I didn’t bother them. At one point during the past two weeks I received a phone call from my mother, during which she proceeded to accuse my daughter of taking the memory card. I was totally blown away and hung the phone up after telling her I couldn’t believe she had said that and told her I had gone through enough and wished her a good life.

Anyway, to shorten this up a little bit, I heard from my sister in law and nephew yesterday. Although several people checked my late nephew’s camera and had torn the bag apart, never finding the memory card in question, out of the middle of nowhere, “A” memory card turned up yesterday. I quoted “A” because it’s not the memory card that I used from his camera, but it does, however, contain all of the pictures that the original card had on it, many of which I never copied to my own computer.

While we are all very relieved that a card did show up with his pictures, we’re all also very confused! As I said, it’s definitely not the one that I used, and my nephew agrees with me that the original memory card was blue, while this one is black. I also clearly remember the original one being 512 mb, but the one that showed up is only 256 mb.

I’m now waiting to find out if either my sister or my mother are going to contact me to apologize, thankfully I’m not holding my breath, or I’d be the next family member that was 6 foot under!

It goes without saying that Autumn is my favorite season! First you have the beautiful colors from the trees, add to that the cooler temps during the days and the chilly overnight temps that make for excellent sleeping!

There is, however, one small thing about Autumn that I don’t like, and that is the fact that it is always followed by winter. See, winter and I just don’t get along and we rarely see eye to eye…LOL! I dislike the cold, snow and ice that comes with winter and can easily foresee myself becoming a “Snow Bird” at a later point in my life!

I’m hoping to be able get out and about at some point today and get some good pictures and video’s of the beautiful fall colors around my area! Last Autumn I was kind of busy getting things moved in and unpacked, so I was only able to take a few pictures of our property, and although they were very pretty, there are places that aren’t too far from here that have some even prettier colors!

If I do get to head out, I’ll be sure to post some pictures for you, so stop back to see them!

WOW, talk about an INSANE and busy day! I didn’t have to go into work today until 11, so my hope was to spend a couple of hours after the kids left for school getting some stuff done around the house and doing some much needed blogging. That feel apart REALLY quickly!

Since last night we had been experiencing some really crappy connection problems with our DSL. We tried several things in hopes of helping it, but none of them worked. See, our DSL is ran through a wireless router so that we can have 4 computers connected at the same time. My hubby’s laptop is connected through the wireless, but mine and the kids’ computers are hard wired. His laptop actually wasn’t experiencing anywhere near the problems that the other 3 computers were, but we still couldn’t figure out what was going on.

So, for the umpteenth time since last night we rebooted the modem and the router and amazingly, it seemed to do the trick. What was funny was that right in the midst of that reboot our DSL provider called to see if they could help figure out what was going on. Just to let you know exactly how bad the connection was, my download speeds were averaging less than 300 kbps and my upload speeds were below 50 kbps. After that reboot, the download speed jumped up to 3200 kpbs and the upload speed was near 700 kbps. All was well in internet land again, for a few minutes anyway!

Within 10 minutes, my download speed was down to right around 1100 kbps, and the upload speed tanked out at a whopping 27kbps. It was then that we finally realized that the problem had to be router related. Since the router is roughly 6 months old, we decided to contact the company it was made by. I decided to try and contact them via online chat and was very quickly connected to a customer rep. They asked how they could help me, I explained the problem and they came back asking me for model and serial numbers for my modem. I explained that I’d have to walk out to the other room to get those numbers, they said that was fine and I went and got the numbers. When I came back I gave her the numbers and sat and waited for a few minutes with no answer back. I had to get ready, so I explained that and told them that my husband would have to take over. I went and got showered and dressed for work and came back out to see how things were going only to have my husband say they still had not came back. I understand people get busy and stuff happens, but GOOD GRIEF, totally dropping someone in a customer service chat is totally rude!

By that time, I had no choice, I had to leave for work or I was going to be late! I got to work, put my stuff in my locker, grabbed my apron and clocked in, at 11:00 on the nose! Work went well today, but WOW, the weather was so strange, one minute it was raining, the next it was sunny, and in the midst of it, it got REALLY humid and muggy! So much so that it was really warm in the store and I was sweating my toosh off! I tell you, many more days like today where I’m sweating like that, and there will be NO need for me to take any type of diet pills or any other weight loss aids because the pounds will literally be melting off!

But seriously, I REALLY like this job! My co-workers all seem really nice, well, I’m still on the fence about one of them, but that’s OK! The managers are also very nice and very helpful! When I have questions, no matter who I’ve asked, they’ve all been very helpful! But, it is a lot of hard work right now since I’m out in the dining room! I have to make fresh coffee every hour, I have to make sure the dishes are bussed back to the dishwasher, I have to make sure the tables are all wiped down and the chairs are in place, I have to make sure the trash is emptied when it needs to be. There’s more, there’s much more, but honestly, I’m too tired to keep writing….LOL!

I’ll be back in the morning, I have a few more things to tell you about, some work, some family stuff and some just about life in general. But for tonight, it’s time for SLEEP! G’night!

I am, without a doubt, a frugal shopper! Before I do any type of shopping, I go online and look at the sales ads for the stores in my area to see who is going to have the lowest price for what I’m shopping for! This is especially important right now because I have to make every penny count!

Later this week I have to do some serious grocery shopping, my cabinets, fridge and freezer are really looking bad! So I hopped online earlier to see what’s on sale at my local grocery stores. I was able to grab a few AMAZING deals last weekend at a store I normally don’t shop at, so I made sure to head over and check their sales ad for this week. All I can say is WOW, am I ever glad I did that! They’re having a HUGE sale this week on tons of the stock up type items that I need the most! By huge sale I mean that they are offering OODLES of items 10 for $10 and you get an 11th item free. The really cool thing is that you can mix or match the items, so you don’t have to buy 10 of a certain item if you really don’t need 10 of them!

So I went through their sales ad, as well as the sales ads of the other stores I like to grocery shop at and made myself a list! I about choked when my printer finished printing it out and I seen that I had almost 5 pages of stuff that I wanted to pick up…LOL! I doubt I’ll be able to get all of the items I want, but at least I know where I’m going to be able to get the items I want and need the most at the best possible price!

With the stress that has gone on in the past 24 hours, I’ve spent the better part of this evening chilling out and watching some TV with my husband and daughter. I don’t know if it’s just something they’re doing this weekend or if it’s something that they’ve done for a while since it’s not a channel I watch frequently, but TNT has been showing movies all day today with the least amount of commercials I have ever seen! Normally a TV station shows about 44 minutes of programming per hour with about 16 minutes of commercials, I’d have to say TNT has cut it back to about 10 minutes worth of advertising per every hour of broadcast, and let me tell you, it’s a WONDERFUL change!

Today we’ve managed to catch a couple of the Fast and Furious movies and tonight I’ve been chilling out with my daughter watching Titanic, one of my all time favorite movies! I used to have Titanic on DVD, but sometime over the past few years I’ve apparently lost it, so it’s nice to watch it tonight with very minimal commercial interruptions!

I’m happy to report also that my daughter is much happier with her “new to me” computer now that we’ve been able to give it a little extra computer memory late this afternoon to help it run a little faster! It’s not that it wasn’t running well before that, it’s just that it was a little laggier than it needed to be in order to run some of the games and programs she uses.

I haven’t received any more phone calls today from family members, and right now I need it to stay that way! Most of the sickness I felt earlier has passed and I was actually able to keep the few bites of mashed potatoes that I ate at dinner time down, which is a HUGE plus!

Anyway, I need to get back to the movie and my daughter, she’s getting a bit impatient with me…LOL! This is one of her favorite movies too!

I’m sure you’ve all seen the newest commercials on TV with various characters explaining to people that they’ve entered “the dead zone” as for cell phone service. The funny thing is, where we live is exactly one of those areas!

We’ve been told that because our house is directly in one of the flight paths of the nearby airport, that’s the biggest reason why the cell phone signal in the area is as poor as it is! And it’s actually been suggested to us more than once that we look into a cell signal booster for our home and our vehicles. I think what amazes me the most is the fact that it’s nearly impossible to pull in a reliable signal on my cell phone in my yard, but if I go less than half a mile down the road I’ve got a full signal.

It stinks that I moved into a “dead zone” area for cell phone service, but hopefully some day I can pick up a good booster and change that! In the mean time, if you call my cell phone, don’t be surprised if it goes straight to voicemail

I have to admit that the things that have happened over the past few weeks have really gotten me to looking back at my life! I know that I do quite a bit of complaining about my life, but I honestly do feel very fortunate to have lived the life I have!

Yes, I have had some fairly traumatic things happen in my life, but I’ve also had many more wonderful things happen as well! I grew up on a farm, in the country, with a very wonderful family! Life was always very busy! If we weren’t in the fields planting, fertilizing or harvesting crops, we had livestock to take care of! During the times that those things were taken care of and I didn’t have anything to do, were the times that I had the most fun.

Growing up like I did was a completely amazing experience! I learned the lesson about how good it feels to do hard work and I learned that it’s the simple things in life that bring you the most happiness! Things like laying on a blanket in the yard on a summers day listening to CKLW and trying to figure out exactly what animal that cloud in the sky looked like. Or swinging so fast and high on a tire swing that you swore you were going to crash into a huge tree limb!

Eventually I replaced CKLW with WIOT and when my parents started becoming grandparents they replaced that old tire swing with one of those really nice wooden swing sets because it would be safer for their grandchildren. But my point is that it’s those simple things that I remember the most about my childhood, and it’s those memories that mean the most to me! Life was so different back then compared to what it is now.

I know that life is never easy, I know that stress is a part of life, whether we like it or not! But I had something “happen” this morning that kind of freaked me out! So if you would, please keep reading and give me your thoughts.

The past two weeks have been extremely stressful! It was two weeks ago yesterday that my nephew passed away suddenly, two weeks ago today I spent the day with family, trying to do what I could to help out. The day after that I spent the entire day putting together the tribute video for my nephew, and ran into problems in the end stages because the program I was used to using didn’t publish DVD’s and I was totally unfamiliar with the program I ended up using, which really made me freak out!

Then there was the day that everything blew up with my family over the video, which ended up with me spending the visitation day and the day of the funeral with the vast majority of my family pissed off at me and completely avoiding me, leaving me feel completely abandoned by them.

Since then, there has been some fairly major financial stresses, my kids freaking out over really dumb things, two weeks with little to no communication with family members, a dog totally destroying a sofa, finding out that we lost our health insurance because of letters that were mailed to us that we NEVER received, and then there is the fact that I spent three days kind of stressing out over going on the first job interview I’ve been on in over 5 years.

I know that stress can mess with your mind and your health. But can it also make you completely forget something you normally do on a regular basis? I recently joined a forum and would visit it several times a day. Out of the middle of nowhere, I completely forgot about giong there and haven’t went to it in quite a few days. My brain feels like it’s complete mush right now, I’m feeling so tired all the time lately, yet when I go to bed, I can’t get my brain to shut down, so I lie there flipping channels on the TV for a while before I can finally fall asleep.

What I’m wondering is, do I need to be worried about this to the point that I should see a doctor? To me it just seems like something that will eventually pass, but the fact that I completely forgot about something I did on a daily basis kind of bothers me. I don’t have health insurance right now, so going to the doctor today, or even this week, is not at all possible! I don’t know what to do honestly. I think if I just try to chill out, it will eventually pass. And it’s not like I’m not used stress, because it’s been a part of my life for a long time. So, what do you think?

Yes, I do realize that it’s basically two months away, but I’m a planner, I don’t like doing things last minute! Ask anyone that knows me well, if you call me last minute to do something, I’ll usually say no…LOL!

I know that this year’s Thanksgiving dinner will just be me, the hubby and the kids. It’s been that way for most of the last 15 or so years, and we actually enjoy it that way. Some years we do make the traditional dinner with turkey and all the trimmings. But considering that I really don’t care for turkey, nor does my son, unless I can find a really small turkey, it’s usually a waste of a good bird. So many years we actually opt for a non traditional dinner. We’ve made things like tacos and subs for Thanksgiving dinner…LOL!

This year, however, I’m going to make a traditional dinner with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and all of the rest of the trimmings. Normally I make a small dish of sweet potatoes for my hubby (he’s the only one that eats them). But when I was talking to him about Thanksgiving dinner the other day he asked me if I could try to find a good recipe for sweet potato casserole this year instead. It was one of his favorite dishes as a kid, and he hasn’t had it in many, many years. Lucky for him, I don’t mind baking new dishes, so I won’t mind making it at all! But he’d better darned sure eat them and like them…LOL!

I think the thing that I look forward to the most on Thanksgiving is what comes after we eat. NO, I’m not talking about nap time…LOL! I’m not even talking about football. After the nap and the game, we load up the kids and go to the movies! We try to find a movie we’ve all been wanting to see. When the kids were small it was pretty easy, we’d just see the latest cartoon type movie. Now that the kids are teens, finding a movie we all agree on might just be a little more difficult!

WOW, I swear this week flew by faster than any week of my life! It’s so strange to think that it’s been over a week since I received the phone call about my nephew’s death, it feels like it was just yesterday that the call came! For the most part, it’s been a pretty good week, no major drama or problems came up.

I’ve been very tired, but I just wrote it off to stress and a touch of depression. That could have played a part in it, but I can’t help but wonder if it had to do with the fact that I came down with one heck of a bug yesterday! About mid day I just started feeling YUCK, by dinner time I was running back and forth between my desk, the bathroom and the recliner. I haven’t been that sick in quite a long time! Thankfully at one point I remembered that I had an old prescription for some anti nausea medication from when I used to get severe migraines. It took me a few minutes to find it (it ended up being in a box in the pantry that has stuff from one of the kitchen cabinets from the old house in it), but within an hour of taking it the nausea and other related conditions pretty much cleared up, and it also made me tired, so I was able to get a pretty good nights sleep too.

I woke up feeling quite a bit better this morning. My stomach still feels a little off, but I don’t have any nausea yet. I do, however, still have a few stomach pains going on. If I start feeling nauseous again I’ll take the meds I took last night.

Not too much going on today, I have a little bit of work to take care of, a load or two of laundry to do, and a few phone calls to make, so I should be able to pretty much take it easy today, which is a good thing! My son just called from school and he wants to go to the football game with his friends tonight. It’s so nice to see him getting out and doing things with friends! It’s funny though, he absolutely HATES football….LOL! So, that’s what’s going on with me, how are things going with you? Hope you had a good week!

Because of all of the stressful things that have been going on lately, I’ve had some MAJOR sleeping problems. I don’t care if I’m so exhausted that I can’t hardly keep my eyes open, it seems like the minute I lay down to go to sleep, I’m wide awake and my brain won’t stop spinning!

My hubby has been wonderful lately, though! Since he’s currently not working he’s been taking care of the kids in the morning and trying to let me sleep in if I can. As much as I appreciate the thought that he’s doing this, he’s not the best at making sure the kids do what they’re supposed to do in the mornings!

I’ve tried making the coffee a little stronger in the hopes that that might help me wake up in the mornings better, but that hasn’t worked. And even if I do sleep in later than normal, I still spend the bulk of the day dragging butt rather than getting the things done that need to be done around here! Sometimes I wonder if taking something like the Orovo Super Vitamin/Multi Vitamin would help any! I just feel so BLAH lately! No energy to do anything and even if I do have some energy, I just have no desire to do anything!

We’ve had our current cell phones and service for almost 3 years now and have, for the most part, been happy with them. I originally signed up for them through a special that was being offered after our phone company started offering cell phone service. It was fairly affordable and very convenient since I was able to add the service to our home phone bill.

During a visit to the phone company’s websitea couple of moths ago to pay my bill, I discovered that the part of their website detailing cell phone services and phones was no longer there and after some “investigation” I found out that they are actually going to stop offering cell phone service by the end of the year or sell the services off to another company. Now mind you, this was a couple of months ago, and as of right now we’re about 3 1/2 months away from the end of the year, and we still have yet to find out what is going on as to whether they’re going to end service completely, or sell it off to another company.

So, we’ve been looking around at our options. We want to expand this time to a family plan that offers the ability to share the minutes between four phones, mostly because I’m tried of sharing my cell phone…LOL! We’ve also checked into several carriers and have even looked at unlocked cell phones, but until we know exactly what’s going on with our current service carrier, we really can’t do anything yet. If they sell the service off, we’d rather go that way than having to start all over on our own. But with some of the rumors we’ve heard as to who is considering purchasing the service, we’re not very happy either.

Do any of you have suggestions as to who you think is the best service carrier, or even ones to avoid? Prior to our current phones/service, we always went with prepaid cell phones because we rarely used them. Unfortunately we’ve grown accustomed to using them more than we used to, so going prepaid isn’t a financially feesible option any longer.

It’s weekends like this past one that test my patience as a parent of teens! I don’t begrudge my kids for wanting to spread their wings and have a little more freedom, as a matter of fact, I expect it. But what I don’t expect is for a child to make plans that I approve, then call me in the middle of them and tell me there has been a minor change, then call me a little while later for me to find out that the little change has actually been a MAJOR change to something that I absolutely will not allow!

I totally understand that at just four months away from turning 16 my son is going to want to go out and do things with his friends, and I actually relish the fact that he actually is starting to have a fairly active social life! It’s made me feel a little better and a lot less nervous…LOL! But when he called me during the football game Friday night to say that his plans were changing from going out to a local coffee/sandwich shop after the game to going to a lounge at a local hotel, my foot went down with a resounding NO HOW, NO WAY! And I expected his reaction to not be a happy one. What amazed me the most was how quickly he went from being totally pissed off at me to actually understanding my decision!

Right now, I’m not sure what this week holds. I’d like to get some of the painting in the kitchen finished up and I need to get some major sock sorting and folding done. Have I ever told you how much I HATE sorting and folding socks? LOL How about you? How was your weekend and what do you have going on this week?