You spin my head right ’round …

I’m in one of those modes where my mind is racing. I can’t make a complete, coherent thought to save my life! It’s very frustrating! So I must warn you that this will probably make no sense what so ever so you can skip this entry if so inclined. I’m just going to ramble on and hopefully it will settle my mind.

Hubby informed me at lunch today that he has to go out of town next week for work. He’ll be leaving on Sunday afternoon and will be back late on Thursday evening. The plus side is that he gets triple overtime for the 5 hour drive on Sunday. Another plus is the break from each other. I feel like I am suffocating. I’m used to him being gone at least 9 hours each day, which he still is now. Except now he comes home for lunch. Which he would never do when he was in the AF. So now I feel like I can’t get anything accomplished because once I get going, I have to stop to make lunch, then spend 45 mins with him, then I get back into what I was doing only to have to stop less than 2 hours later to go pick her up from school. Then we get home & I try to start again only then I have to stop after an hour on the days she has karate or girl scouts to take her to that, then rush home to complete dinner, then do dishes and deal with her, etc. By then I am exhausted and I fall into bed feeling as if I didn’t get not one thing done. And that’s not including the days I have to run errands or make phone calls – which is another thing that frustrates me – why can’t the man make his own damn phone calls???

Another plus to him being gone means I will be able to do our bedroom. All the furniture has to be moved away from the walls so that I can take down the wall paper before painting. Which means our room will be an obstacle course, which would just mean I’d have to hear him bitch about being inconvenienced. So with him gone, I can get the job done, uninterrupted during the day, without the bitching. I just hope I can move the stuff by myself because you know it will be a cold day in hell before I ask him to help. So hopefully by the end of next week the main floor will be complete and I can then start on the basement wallpaper.

Oh wow, I forgot to mention it in my last entry … Master Scott, who owns the karate school The Child attends, is interested in me doing pictures for the school. Talk about mind blowing. I’ll spare the long, boring details of how that came about lol but suffice it to say, I’m over the moon over the possibility! Every time we get into a discussion about it I have to remind him that I am not a professional nor am I a legal business. Which I understand that is all he is used to dealing with in the past and if that is the route he wants to go, that is fine with me. He wants me to make flyer’s/posters to put up in the school announcing me doing the pictures (he wants me to make them!!) but I have to be careful of how I do it because I legally can’t charge money but yet I won’t do them for free either. He keeps showing me these websites of professional sports photographers he’s used in the past and yes they are good, the pictures are awesome, but they have a LOT of editing – like the same pose on different backgrounds, multiple images of the same person in different poses on one picture, etc. Yes, I can do that but you are talking long, long hours, possibly hundreds of hours (on the whole day of shooting) of work when all is said and done. I don’t want to invest that kind of time. I’m still researching printing companies. My style is to put everything on a disc and give it to the family with a copyright release and let them deal with the headache of printing. I may still do that. There is so many tiny, tiny details to work out and I just can’t do that right now. I told him after the holidays I’d do more research. He wants to do in-studio and I want to do outdoors. I much prefer natural lighting since I don’t have professional studio lighting. Anyway, none of this will happen before the spring time anyway so it’s kinda moot to think about it now.

Only 3 more days to come up with something for the days of thanksgiving on Facebook. Thank God! That is probably what has fried my brain lol.

Thanksgiving was wonderful for us. Our friend Mark came up from Dallas to spend the weekend with us. I cooked a phenomenal meal. I probably cooked too much but it was worth it. It felt so good to be cooking like that again. I spent 7.5 hours in the kitchen and I loved every minute of it. I took pictures but I won’t bore you to death with them. But needless to say, we ate good for many days! LOL After eating leftovers all day on Friday, they decided they wanted steak for dinner. So we went to a local steak house. Mark treated me to a prime rib dinner for cooking such an outstanding meal the day before LOL. I was going to get a cheap Alfredo meal but Mark told me I could order whatever I wanted from the menu, regardless of price. I elbowed Hubby when Mark said that & told him to take notes. All in all it was a good weekend. Mark is a computer whiz/geek and loves anything electronic. He was in heaven when he discovered we were (and had been having for quite some time) having issues with some computers and our tv Internet box. When he left only one item wasn’t fixed and that was my desktop because he had to order a new hard drive because mine was toast (thanks again Tinker AFB for the multiple power surges we had each week of the 8 months we were there causing a total of 2 desktop death’s in our household). The new hard drive will be here by the beginning of next week, which, since Hubby will be gone, it’ll be another week or so before my desktop is fully operational. At least I have my laptop in the meantime … Anyway, I had to take pictures because I thought it was so funny. The first one is from Friday morning & I titled it "Geek Fest Twenty Twelve … a family that internets together, stays together" on Facebook & then the 2nd picture I titled "Geek Fest Twenty Twelve lives on for another day" because I took it on Saturday night lol

The Child is over the moon having her laptop back up & running again lol

Oh, and see the dog in the bottom of the right hand picture? That’s Mickey. And Mickey sheds. A lot. I had stirred up my allergies in a bad way on Wednesday when I was cleaning, so Mickey and Cocoa didn’t help at all over the long weekend. I did manage to go all day today without sneezing so that is a plus … still had a few moments of watery/itchy eyes, but no sneezing.

We did some site seeing on Sat. with Mark. It amazes me that I can be so moved when we visit historical places. When we traveled Europe the 4 years we lived in England, I spent more time crying at different places than not. To this day I still get all teary and goose-bumpy when I recall our visit to the Anne Frank House. I actually walked through the same bookcase opening that she did! All the pictures she had torn out of magazines and put up on the walls to make it feel more like home were still on the walls! Anyway, I get moved when we visit historical places and Sat. was no different.

We learned a lot about the history of Dodge City, toured the famous Boot Hill Cemetery (supposedly all the "occupants" were buried with their boots still on) and then went to site see a section of the Santa Fe Trail.

The last picture I took of Hubby & The Child walking on the Santa Fe Trail … (Did I ever mention that when I took her for her school physical earlier this month that they measured her and she is only 3 inches shorter than me? She’s only 11 people!!)

Of course we laughed the entire weekend more than anything! That’s the great thing about Mark, when we all get together we laugh till we cry. Just to give you an idea of the sense of humor those 2 have …

I did have an epiphany Thursday evening. I had a few minutes till dinner was served so I stepped outside and was thinking of how happy I was after all the cooking I had just done. And then it dawned on me … see I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been melancholy the past month or so. I couldn’t quite place why either. Just something was "off" with me. But then I figured out what it was standing outside … kids … I miss all the kids … since she was 2, we have always had at least 1 kid she was friends with. I was always having kids over to play. In Charleston, we had kids by the bucket full all over the place. As crazy as it would get having 6 kids age 9 and under all in my house, I loved every second of it. When we moved to OK, The Child had her friend Tommy to play with. And then she met a couple of the neighborhood kids to play with also. Fourth of July I mentioned on FB how wonderful it had been having Amber and her family over, listening to the kids run around laughing, having a blast. We don’t have that here. I have always, always loved being around kids. I wanted 4 of my own. But God had other plans for me. But I have always still been surround by kids. And now I’m not. It brings home, like an arrow to my heart, that I can’t have any more children. As long as I was surrounded by kids, it didn’t hurt so much. Now it does. I’m still very grateful for The Child, and I love her more than life itself. But girlfriend has got to start inviting school/girl scout/karate friends over so I can get out of this "funk". I don’t feel like "me" …

And then you add in my Christmas tree to the melancholy … *sigh* … my poor beloved tree … it is sick. I’ve been fighting with it for 2 days now. Hubby got in on the fight tonight, only because he was in all "I am Mister Man, I fix things" mode … but even he couldn’t fix it. It is a 6.5 foot pre-lit tree. This is our 10th year with it. This is it’s 4th move. Two of the 10 years it was not used. The 1st time was when we had our house in Sumter up for sale and our Realtor advised us not to put it up since it is fairly huge. Last year it arrived in OK on Dec. 23 while I was still in Charleston. For weeks now I have been dreaming and planning putting it up this year. I finally was able to start that yesterday but yet it still sits in my living room, broken and un-decorated. I know it isn’t as detrimental as I’m making it sound, but to me, it saddens my heart. I have 3 sections that the lights are not working on. Each section goes half way around the tree. All 3 sections are not side by side or on top of each other yet they are close enough to each other to make the tree look pitiful. My OCD is in overtime about it and I’m trying to not allow the OCD to control me. We don’t have the money to go out and buy a new one. Trying to replace every bulb would get expensive after the 1st section, even if we had the extra money to spend. Buying and stringing lights to try to blend in might work, but I don’t think I could get it to look like we didn’t buy light strands to put there. So since it is just us, and we will have no visitors, I will adjust one section to line up with the other 2 sections and face the complete side that does work to the window and we, on the inside of the house, will have to just deal with the missing sections of lights. I can’t believe I am so saddened by this, but I am. Hubby did mention that we could get a new one after Christmas, when they go on sale to have for next year but I doubt I’ll be able to.

Of course he mentions that after he tells me that we don’t have money to spend since he is the only one bringing home a paycheck and that next week he will be hitting up the tool stores to buy the rest of his tools he is wanting instead of waiting for our tax return in Jan/Feb.

So tomorrow I will decorate my tree, and put out all the other decorations inside. The outside is Hubby’s domain and will have to wait till the weekend … if he’s not too busy getting ready for his trip that is … 

Till next time …