He's of the colour of the nutmeg. And of the heat of the ginger.... he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him; he is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts. ~William Shakespeare, Henry V

Monday, December 21, 2009

A SURPRISE GIFT

Cassidy came home from school today with a really large Christmas present. When I asked her if everyone got a present when leaving the school, she told me no, and that only a few people got them. This made me curious so I opened up the card taped to the present. The card was signed by the Leeds Lutheran Church Circle. This made me even more curious since we are Catholics and do not attend the Leeds Lutheran Church. I let Cassidy open the gift and inside the box was a little blond doll, a new pair of blue jeans, a long sleeved pink shirt, and this really cute fuzzy zip up sweater to go over the shirt. I am very thankful that someone in the Leeds Lutheran Church thought of her this Christmas. Blessings do happen at unexpected moments. I send out a BIG thank you to who ever bought the items for Cassidy. It's appreciated greatly.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

MY SATURDAY E.R. VISIT

I was looking forward to the weekend on Friday. The Ex had picked up the girls for the weekend and I didn't have to work too early in the morning...which meant, this mother was going to get some well deserved sleeping in time. I jumped into bed around 9 o'clock (pretty sad for a Friday night, I know) and was excited for all the sleep I was going to get. I passed out five minutes after my head ht the pillow.

Around 2 o'clock in the morning, I was awakened by a bad itching feeling that went from head-to-toe. Not giving the itching a second thought, I scratched the hell out of myself and fell back asleep. Twenty minutes after I fell asleep, I awoke to more itching. This patterned repeated all through the night and into the early morning. At 7 o'clock in the morning, I had enough of all the itching, so I headed to the shower thinking it would help. I got to the bathroom, peeled out of my clothes, and then turned on the bathroom light...and that's when I got my first look at myself.

To put it mildly, I was hideous. If you ask my mother, she will tell you I looked like the Elephant Man. I had a complete body rash that went from the top of my head down to my feet. My eyes were so puffy, you would have sworn there were cotton balls under my eyelids. The rash was so terrible that I had it on the palms of my hands, in my arm pits, along my butt, and even between my toes. After getting over from being in awe of myself, I jumped in the shower. Big mistake. When the hot water hit my skin, it felt like the worlds worst sunburn standing 7 feet from the sun. After finishing my shower, I got light headed. I got out of the shower and went back to my bed and laid down. When I hit my bed, my ears got super sensitive and I could hear air moving around my bedroom....and the furnace wasn't running. When I could hear the air moving in the house, I knew I was in trouble, so I called my mom and told her she had to take me to the Devils Lake Emergency Room.

The ER doctor took at look at my stomach and said, "Oh my"...not a good thing you want to hear your doctor say...and continued inspecting my rash. I had a fever and my throat was red, but it wasn't sore. After I was completely checked out, the doctor said that I had a strep rash...which is like the Scarlett fever of strep throat. I have never heard of this in my life, but I guess when some people have strep throat they can break out in a terrible, hideous, monster looking rash. All the antibiotics that I was taking for 3 weeks made me feel better and took away all the symptoms of my strep, but it never really went away and I have been carrying it with me all this time. Of all the luck, instead of getting a sore throat again, it came back as a nasty ass rash!!! I got two more butt injections in the ER (this makes butt shots 3 and 4 for those of you keeping count). One was a long lasting antibiotic that doesn't need any pill follow up, and another prednisolone shot. I also got prescriptions for prednisolone tablets and Benadryl. Right now, my medicine cabinet looks a miniature pharmacy. I have everything in there that anyone could possibly need.

So, after getting out of the ER, mom bought me a Milky Way coffee at The Coffee Connection and we picked up food at McDonald's. I told mom if she wanted to go shopping, that was fine with me, but I was not getting out of the Jeep and walking around in public while I had the rash. She just laughed at me and understood. After all, she did call me the Elephant Man...When we got to mom's house, I stayed at her place and helped her wrap all the Christmas gifts. Around 8 o'clock on Saturday night, I left my mom's place and went home to sleep. I fell asleep shortly after getting home and stayed soundly asleep all night long. It was wonderful.

Today, I still have some signs of the rash. I have some light pinkish marks on my face, stomach, and along my legs, but they are not near as bright as they used to be. I hope tomorrow there will be no signs of the rash at all!!

Friday, December 18, 2009

MOMMY IS A SQUEALER

When Cassidy started Kindergarten this year, I told myself I wasn't going to be one of "those" mothers. You know the ones I am talking about; the ones that always complain to the Principal because something is happening on the playground, in the classroom, or being picked on all the time, and the ones that go over board and seriously over react in simple situations that don't require much to resolve. I'm also not going to be the parent that harps because their child isn't first in sports or anything like that. Don't get me wrong. I will be there to defend Cassidy when something does happen. I just want her to be able to stick up for herself and be tough, but not so tough that she is considered a bully.

Thursday, Cassidy came inside the house after she got off the bus. She took off her glove and showed me this huge bite mark on her finger. She said that she turned around and knelled on the bus seat to wave at a friend that was sitting behind her. As Cassidy was waving, this "friend" grabbed her wrist and bit down on her finger and then started to laugh. Being the tough person that I am, I had a mental image go through my head that I hoped Cassidy took her fist and popped this "friend" right in the face. Now, I know that's wrong, but that's what I would have done. Cassidy said she didn't do anything and just turned around and sat back down. I told Cassidy the next time something happens on the bus, she needs to immediately talk to the bus driver because they are there to help if there are any problems. I also made a quick call to the school principal. I hated doing it, but I wanted the other child to know that they were not going to get away with picking on either of my girls. The principal was surprised to hear what the other child had done, and she promised me that she would speak to the child first thing tomorrow morning and tell them that is 100% not acceptable behavior on the bus. I thanked the principal and then hung up.

I kind of feel like a shit for doing that. I don't want Cassidy labeled as "the squealer" either. I would prefer she try to handle it without me getting involved as much as possible. Since she is only 6, I will have to intervene now-and-then. Again, don't get me wrong. I am not running away from the responsibility myself, I would just like to see Cassidy handle those situations well too. I don't want the other kids to harass Cassidy more because her mom called the principal. Peer pressure for small children is terrible. I know they don't say a lot of things because they don't want to be teased more or picked on then they already are. They only want the other children to like them. They think that if they don't tell anyone if anything bad is happening, then these other kids will like them. It's awful they have to think that they will gain acceptance this way.

Yesterday, Cassidy told me that things were okay on the bus and she didn't sit next to the "friend." I thought that was a wonderful first step that Cassidy took. By staying away, this child will not be able to do anything to her. I am hoping that Cassidy doesn't have any more problems on the bus this year.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

NEW ROOMS

When I get stressed or something bothers me, my natural automatic response to it is to keep myself occupied. And I don't mean cross stitch, puzzles, or reading a book. I have to have something that keeps me moving and my hands busy. I rarely notice what I am doing or how much I accomplish until I step back and look around. These moments are bitter sweet. I get a lot of shit done, but something has to dramatically shift in my life to do it, and a majority of the time it's not a shift that someone would want to welcome. I have done this since I can remember when and drives some people nuts. Today was one of those days.

I started with picking up the living room, and then I moved to the kitchen. When I was done in the kitchen, I decided to start cleaning up the girls toy room and bedroom. When I was done with the girls rooms, I decided that today would be a good day to switch the two rooms around. I have no idea what possessed me to think of doing such a thing. I had to move all the toys and junk from the toy room to the living room, then the dressers needed to be moved into the "old" toy room before I could take the bunk beds apart. I vacuumed the "old" toy room and got the two dressers moved in. Right now, the bunk beds are still in the "old" bedroom until I can find someone to help me get the top bunk bed down on the floor. Then, I will be able to everything into the new bedroom and the toys can come out of my living room and go into the new toy room. In the process of all this, I was able to pitch hay for the horses, cook two meals for Jessie, and keep Jessie occupied while I was cleaning everything else. I also went through ALL the toys and threw a bunch out that the girls do not play with anymore.

Tomorrow, I am not sure what I am going to do. I have the day off of work and I absolutely have to have something to do. If it was still 40 above zero, I would actually go and clean out my entire garage so that I can finally park my car in it...but that's not going to happen until spring now. I am not going to freeze my ass off while I am working.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME

With money being super tight, trying to figure out how to put together a cheap Christmas, and trying to work out my daycare issue, I didn't think things could possibly get any shittier for me then they already have.

I was completely wrong.

Today, mom gave me money to treat my girls to a movie. We went to Devils Lake and saw the new Disney film, The Princess and The Frog. It was a good show and we all enjoyed it. When the girls and I got back to my moms, I attempted to help her put up her Christmas tree. I didn't get much done, the girls got extremely tired, my mom was getting pretty crabby, and it was time to go home. Everyone needed a break from each other. After the girls and I got home, we started watching Grandma Got Ran Over By Reindeer. Cassidy got up to go use the bathroom. The cat followed her. Cassidy must have thought the cat was thirsty because the cat jumped in the tub and laid down. When Cassidy got done going to the bathroom, she went over to the tub to turn it on to give the cat a drink. When Cassidy leaned against the tub, the top edge of the tub collapsed and created a big ass hole along the top edge of the tub. I repeat; This isn't just a little crack, it's a huge ass hole! I didn't get upset with Cassidy. It was not her fault. There had been a big crack running along the top of the tub for a while. I was going to buy a fiberglass repair kit to fix it, but I don't have to worry about a kit, now I need a whole new damn bathtub.

I want to go out to my front yard and scream "Why me?" as loud as I possibly can. But what good would that do? It's not like someone is going to hear me, and even if they did, what would they do? Also, it would only be affirming my neighbors suspicions of me being a nut case.

This sucks so much, and it couldn't have happened at a worse time. I will admit that any time it would have happened wouldn't have been a good time, but with things tight like they are and Christmas two weeks away.........why now? But just like everything else, I will take a deep breath, suck it in, and just deal with it. A person cannot change what is done, but they can take it and make it better. A tub is a necessity, and we don't want to stink. The new tub has become top priority in my household. I will now be working my ass off to be able to purchase a new tub in 4 weeks. It's going to take at least that many weeks to establish a good enough paycheck.

Most of you think I am handling things well lately. I say Thank You to all of you, but I'm not taking it as well as you really think I am. I am mad, upset, depressed, and very much borderline insane right now. I don't know how much more of it I can take. It's situations and times like these that make people want to check out.

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

I HATE MONEY

All of you know I am pretty content with life and I don't get excited about much, except when it comes to horses. However, nothing pisses me off more than when you mess with my money. I hate money. It truly is the root of all evil in this world. A person cannot survive without it....well, you could, but I guarantee you would be uncomfortable without most modern conveniences.

My job is a bit crazy right now. The company is experiencing hardship, just like every other business out there, and they were going to lay off employees. A bunch of us put up a big stink about it because they just hired a bunch of new people. What company in their right mind hires a bunch of people and then decides they have to lay off? After a few weeks, the company decided that instead of lay offs, they were going to cut every ones hours down to 18 hours a week. If we want more hours, we are responsible for checking the schedule board and picking up shifts that other employees post for pick-up. This is crazy, insane, and almost impossible because everyone is scrambling to pick up hours so they can all make 40 hours a week, and it's hard to meet 40 hours a week when nobody wants to give up any of the 18 hours that they have. And if someone does post hours, you better be looking at the break board when they do it, or the hours are gone as soon as they are posted. I am lucky if I make 25 hours a week. This makes the paycheck look pretty said.

Also, I was going through my accounts last week and noticed that I did not have a child support payment come in. This surprised me. I get a child support payment the same day that I get paid from my job. I thought the payment may be posting late because of the Thanksgiving holiday. The more I thought about it, the more that didn't add up. If that was the case, my paycheck should have been late too. I use the child support payments to pay my child care provider for when my girls are in daycare. My daycare does not do credit, so I have to pay her Friday of each week. I did not have the child support payment to pay my day care provider, so my girls cannot go back until she gets her payment for last week. My daycare provider isn't being rude or doing it to be mean, she is just running a business and I totally understand where she is coming from. I was hoping I would have the payment in my account today so that I would be set up to bring the girls back to daycare on Monday. When I checked my account today, there was still no child support posted.

I called the ND Child Support Division in Devils Lake and asked them to check on it. I was surprised to find out that another person receiving child support has an ex who is working for the same company as my ex, and they had previously called in because they were missing their payment too. From what I was told, the woman who does payroll for the company my ex works for was out sick with the flu, so she was late at getting the money out for child support. This made me a little upset, but you can't hold being sick against someone. I did tell the person I was speaking to that I haven't had a payment since November 18th and I couldn't work until my daycare provider got paid. The child support division thought my last payment on November 18th was odd as well. Child support is going to make some calls, speak with my ex's employer about the last payment, and then call me back. I am hoping that I will have some type of payment extremely soon. This is the first time EVER that a child support payment from my ex has been late. I understand that it's not his fault, but the company he works for. However, I need this money for child care expenses and bills to be covered that I cannot cover with my paycheck.

Now all I can really do is hope that something posts tomorrow or Monday morning. If not, I will have to come up with other sources. I hate doing that and it makes me mad. I am so annoyed with everything right now, it's eating me alive!

CUSTOMER SERVICE

I have worked a lot of customer service jobs over the years, and when you work in customer service, there are people out there that never fail to let you down on how retarded some of the human race can be. Now, I am not calling myself super smart or anything, but I do have common sense. A great perk about my job is that I get to work from a home computer set up at my parents house. The downside is that it's fast-food. I'm not going to complain. At least it's a job that I can do in my pajama's if I want too. But, some of these people really make me laugh and annoy me at the same time.

I had a lady today ask me, after I took her order, if she should pay me or pay the person at the window. Seriously?! You have no idea how badly I wanted to tell her to go ahead and try cramming her money into the slots in the speaker post. I would have paid to watch that. Another woman got irritated when she asked for a plan cheeseburger with no cheese and I put a plain hamburger on her order. She specifically demanded a cheeseburger with no cheese. I hope she realised when she got home that she just ordered an expensive hamburger. A majority of the customers also have this habit of placing their orders and then screaming, "I want my order to go!" Yes sir, however you are in the drive-thru, are you not? What scares me the most about these people is that 99% of them are ordering Happy Meals for the children screaming in their cars, so you know they are reproducing!

After these two orders, I remembered a call I took when I handled customer service for The Sharper Image catalog. A woman called because a bathroom radio/CD player she purchased was not working correctly after a few weeks of having the item. After what felt like an hour of going over the item with her, she told me she had a little bar that kept blinking right before the radio/CD player shut off. I took my glasses off and hung my head. I politely explained to her that was the battery power display. She had low batteries and they needed to be changed. She was adamant that she had good batteries in the unit. She had a package of Energizer batteries with an expiration date of 12/12 on the package so she knew the batteries weren't dead. At this point, I banged my head on my desk and I had to explain to her that the date she was reading on the package of her batteries was the shelf life of the batteries. It didn't mean that the batteries were going to keep working until 12/12. She got a little upset and was pretty sure I was incorrect about what I was talking about. Miraculously, I talked her into changing the batteries and was surprised when the unit worked. She started to ask me date questions about the batteries, and I told her as calmly as I could, that she would have to direct those questions to Energizer, not me. By far, this has been my favorite customer service call yet. My heart goes out to the Energizer customer service representative that woman spoke to.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

JUST SHOOT ME PLEASE

This is a recap to bring people up to speed on whats going on.

Three weeks ago, I got strep throat. Last week, I had to go back into the clinic because it had started to come back. I was giving an injection of Rocephin in the butt and a different prescription. Today I had to go back to the clinic because during the night it became very difficult to breath and my chest felt like an elephant was squatting on it.

I saw my doctor at 10:30 this morning. During my exam, we had to pause for five minutes so I could take the time to throw up in a cute little blue sack. Then the doctor sent me over to Mercy Hospital to have a chest x-ray performed because he said my chest sound like "an old rusty gate swinging in the wind." I returned to the clinic to wait for the results of the x-ray and threw up some more. The x-ray's didn't show any pneumonia, some places were a little cloudy, but not really that bad at all. My doc decided to give me a steroid injection (a second shot in my butt!!) to help speed up the effect of the steroid, and he also prescribed steroid tablets that I have to take for 10 days.

As soon as I got to my car, I had to throw up again. I didn't care about dignity after the shot in my butt, so I just kicked the car door open, leaned over, and threw up on the clinic parking lot. It was a good 10 minutes until I felt well enough to start driving. As I was driving through town, I felt nauseous again and pulled over near the McDonald's and threw up some more on the side of the road. I wasn't sure if I was going to make the drive home or not, so I just sat in the car and waited to see what would happen. I started to feel okay, so I headed home. I got to the BTR elevator outside of Leeds when I had to throw up again. I had a car in front of me, a car behind me, a car passing me, and no place to pull over........so I will let you use your imagination on what happened next.

I got home at 1 o'clock. I put my pajamas on, threw my jacket, sweatshirt, and pants in the washing machine, and laid down. I don't think I was in bed for 5 minutes and I was fast asleep. I didn't wake up until a quarter after five. I got clothes on, went to the grocery store, and then picked up the kids from daycare and came home. I have been sick for 3 full weeks now and have suffered from almost everything I can possibly imagine. I cannot wait to see what I catch next. I just hope that I feel good during Christmas.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

OH CHRISTMAS TREE

For Thanksgiving, I went to Jamestown for the day and spent it with my brother. We ate a lot, drove around, went shopping, and had a really good time together. I left Jamestown really late that night and came home. Now I can't wait for Christmas when the whole family is together. It will be a lot of fun.

Saturday afternoon, I decided to put up the Christmas tree. Last year, the plastic base for it broke and I got a metal tree stand to replace it with. The metal stand didn't work all that well because the post for my artificial tree kept slipping in the metal stand, causing the tree to have a really wicked left shift lean to it...or it would topple over if we were not careful around it. I decided to run into Devils Lake and get an appropriate base for it. The only base I could find for an artificial tree was at K-Mart, and it wasn't a normal "plain Jane" stand, it was a heavy duty rotating stand and it was expensive. Because of the price, I decided to run to Rugby and look for a stand. I couldn't find any stands in Rugby at all. At one of my last stops in Rugby, I was told by a man that it's near impossible to find an artificial base, and places only sell the big green bases for real trees since most trees now come with a base already. It was about 8 in the evening and I was upset that I spent all day looking for a stand and I should have just bought the one at K-Mart. *I believe this is when I suffered my first aneurysm of the Christmas season. I couldn't set the tree up without a base, and the branches to the tree were scattered all over my living room.* I made a call to a friend, and they happened to be in Devils Lake, so they picked up the stand up at K-Mart for me and drop it off at my house.

It was close to 9 o'clock, and now that I had the base, I started putting up the tree. I got three rows of branches on my tree, and then my light strings decided that they only wanted to light up half way *Aneurysm #2.* I was tired and didn't want to mess with it anymore, so I left it like it was and went to bed. The next morning, I sat down with all my light strings and spent about 4 hours getting them to completely light up and then finished putting up the tree. I had the girls put the ornaments on the tree. They did a fantastic job decorating it. After it was all decorated, I went and plugged it in....and the stupid light strings only lit up half way again *Aneurysm #3.* I decided to say the heck with it and left them like they were. It still looks really pretty, but I am bummed that the lights decided to be stupid. I don't dare turn the base on at all so the tree can rotate it. I hate to think about the mishaps that could happen with that....also, it won't tempt the cat to attack the ornaments.

Now, I just have to get all the decorations up on the inside of the house and I am all set for Christmas. I don't know why I decorate the inside of my home. It's not like I have a lot of people coming over or anything. I think I mainly do it for the girls.
 


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