Society for the Preservation of My Sanity

so... continuing from my last post of any reasonable substance...

==nancy and her li'l puppy did come over that day. and whaddaya think happened?

the day went just fine. of course it would. *heh* never fails when i go all psycho-obssessive about something. i guess mainly i was worried because i had sooooo much to get done and was completely clueless about how it would go. but she just jumped in and worked her skinny fanny off and took that cutiepie puppy out every so often. so that other than tucker being totally opposed to the pup breathing his air, things went wonderfully and we had a great time together.

that'll learn me. *sheesh*

==we had a nice thanksgiving. mom and dad were here. dad got mamaw from the nursing home, so she was with us too. they didn't clear her to stay overnight, so she had to go back that afternoon and she seemed ready to go, even though she complained about the home, then in the same sentence told you some great thing about the place... *rolls eyes* now she's been in the hospital for going on three weeks. bronchitis and heart stuff that she usually has this time of year and she is getting better, but now there is a viral outbreak of some kind at the home and they are quarrantined, so mamaw is at the hospital til...??? i dunno how they can do that to people... i mean, dad's having to pay to keep her room since she's "left it vacant" for over the allotted 5 days, plus the hospital costs? good grief! how do they expect people to afford this kind of thing?!?!?

gah!

um, so... thanksgiving.. yeah. it went well. (excuse that aside) karen and two of her sons were here. i think all of them had a good time. mom and dad were worn out. mom especially. as usual, i think she just wore herself out trying to 'do' with making food and such. *sigh* and i think she was wound up about mamaw being here, too. all that emotional garbage, etc... :( anyhow... they went on back home after taking mamaw back, but karen and her guys stayed til supper time.

good thing because we needed more eaters to help with all that food!! ;)

==i'm loving my redone kitchen. even though there's been all this christmas stuff all over my computer/school/living room ever since the day after thanksgiving. corey just up and decided to get it all down and he put up the tree (which i then had to put lights on *bah!*) and helped decorate that, but the rest (i decorate the top of the entertainment cabinet, the coffee table, piano and mantle, etc) i just wasn't in the mood for it and couldn't seem to make anything look right. besides just hurting and being so tired.

i really was out of it for about two days after thanksgiving. but finally, and i mean like not til nooow i''m finally getting it all together and can get these boxes outta here and back up into the attic. *wheeew!*

==tommy worked the friday and saturday after thanksgiving. it was an opportunity to make a little extra money. he referred to it as "christmas money", but i knew better. we'd need it for bills! and that's what happened. still, even though i just hate it when he has to work so hard and spend his "time off" working, i was thankful to have the money to get some bills paid. and so was he.

==i had a bad low sugar episode recently. i'll save that for a seperate post. the whole experience shook me to my core. :(

==other exciting things are going on in our house, like the boys both being in a big newspaper article for their work through the emt cadet progam. they have helped make and serve thanksgiving dinner to residents in a low-income retirement home, and this article was to recognize when they went to decorate the same facility for christmas using items they'd gone around and gotten donated. it was a really good article with comments from all the cadets.

casey's starting basketball and that's always 'citin' for us all. games will start just after the first of the year. *woot* (where are my earplugs! [i can still hear with them in, believe me!]) ;)

other things are either under wraps or still up in the air... they might happen and might not... so i'll wait for an all-clear on those. *heh* we're real big-time around here. *roflol!!*

==other than that? we're just gearing up for lotsa christmas gatherings. some include me... some don't! *lol!*

the boys' emt christmas banquet is coming up and that's always fun. this year, the girl will be coming with, so all the more fun! ;)

we have christmas with inlaws week before christmas (when mil is off work *sigh)

then our own kicked-back christmas eve here at home.

then christmas with my parents? well, that's kinda up in the air according to mom. says it all depends on when they can get mamaw, etc. *shrugs* whatever. i think we'll just be doing light fare... finger foods and maybe country ham with homemade gravy and biscuits. you cain't beat that with a stick, folks. hoooo-weee! 8D

whenever and however it all goes down, it'll be okay.

==plans for our own christmas (which will be on christmas eve) is to pretty much kick back and do what we enjoy most. cook our favorite foods->potato soup!->peanut butter cookies!->aw... and a bunch of other stuff the boys ticked off faster than i could write on a list today... so we plan to um... eat, i think. *wide grin* we love to hang out in the kitchen (and how fun to do so in the cool redood one!) and cook together.

we'll watch 'a christmas story' since there's always a marathon on tbs. *lol!* hopefully, we can find 'it's a wonderful life' at least once and a good quality rendering of 'a christmas carol'.

anyhow... we've never been huge on any of our own family traditions. i guess that's been mostly because of how things just got all turned upside down when first my mom's side of the famiily got all ... well, true-colory i suppose, and the christmas gatherings stopped. then mom, my grandmother (yeah, that's what we called her) died on christmas morning 2001 and well, i think any chance of getting the familiy gatherings started again just died with her. there's a lot of other baggage, bad ugly nasty stuff there that ya'll don't wanna know, so it's not quite as simple as callin' everybody up and sayin' "c'mon over". but anyhow...

then there's dad's side... my grandpa died the year i got married... like two months afterward. i'd give almost anything in this world for him to have been able to know my boys. *sniffle* anyhow... as weird as those christmas get-togethers always were, well, you still miss 'em, ya know? weird? yeah...papaw always had to announce after dinner, as he walked into the living room to where the tree and gifts were as he rubbed his sandpapery hands together like a kid about to have a whole pie served to him... "let's see what santy brung" when i was a little kid, still believing in santa claus, i just thought he must be completely in the dark about how 'the man in red' operated. sheesh! *lol!!* later, it was just so funny to watch his expressions and his joy. to him, it was just time to be happy and tear up wrapping paper, ya know? it didn't much matter what was inside, it was the anticipation and the joy of the season.

*sigh* i miss my papaw soooooo much. *sob* anyhow... my dad has one brother, i've mentioned this before. they don't get along so well. these days, they tolerate each other. well, basically like always, it's just that now they have to be in closer proximity much more often and it's really hard on my dad. his brother who's 10 years older always did and still does treat him really bad and take pretty much any chance he can get to take verbal shots at my dad. i dunno what went on with them as kids, but whatever it was, it was way not good.

so my uncle has 3 kids, one of whom still lives here. her family and ours used to get together with mamaw after papaw passed away. her two kids got older and started going to boy- and girl-friend's houses for christmas and then the son died in the car crash just days before thanksgiving in 2002. we (meaning me and my mom) tried to take up any slack we could and help get them through the holidays by keeping the celebration out of mamaw's trailer (where we'd always crammed it in before) so i hosted that first year... then my mom did the next... then the next year they went to georgia where her mother and siblings live. the next year, again, they celebrated elsewhere with barely any word for mamaw about where she was supposed to go. this cousin of mine makes huge fusses over mamaw and big promises to her, but then leaves her in the cold. it makes all of us so furious. so anyhow. now they have their own little celebration and we have ours.

it used to be really depressing. now it only makes for a bit of melancholy. i mean, it's still sad that having such a lot of family on both sides, we don't get together with any of them. as it was back in the days when we did have christmases together, that would be the one time each year that we'd see most of them. otherwise, you didn't know jack about them unless (in some of their cases!) you read about it in *that* section of the newspaper, ya know? i didn't have cousins very close in age to me anyway, but add in all this see-ya-once-a-year thing and it made for major awkwardness. and it didn't get any better as we all got older and had kids. *sigh* corey was just a toddler when we stopped having big family christmases. i have to strain to remember them myself.

really pathetic!

however, i came up with a new tradition for our family. it's of course, quite late in the making, but the boys were both pretty excited about it so maybe this was perfect timing. ;) i cut up a bunch of thick wrapping paper into strips about an inch high and 4 inches wide. then, i got an old candle jar (sans candle wax; cleaned and dried) and hot-glued some ribbon on for decoration. all the strips i'd cut up, i put in a big decorative christmas box (thank the Lord i had something to put those suckers in!) so the idea is that everyone takes a strip of paper each day and writes down something they're thankful for, then rolls it up and puts it in the jar. (from the looks of things already, i think the jar will get too crowded before christmas eve!!) then when we settle down from cooking, eating, singing, movie watching and game playing to read the christmas story from the bible and open the very meager gift offerings there will be under the tree (which is still bear!) we'll get all those out and read all the things each other of us are thankful for.

so. there. : D

okay. i'm going to quit. i have had about two more posts started but seems it takes me longer and longer to make a post these days. (do NOT say it's cuz they're too long in between or i say too much! *pthththt* i am low on brain cells, ya'll! and interruptions, i got plenty. sometimes, it's just impossible to get one done. oh, and sometimes they're so controversial, they just fry my brain too. *heh*)

hope all of you are well, warm (i am freeeeeezzzzzzing!!!!) and healthy!!

blessings!