I am sick again – for the third time this season.

The first time was a cold, the second time was the flu and again I am battling with a cold. It seems as if no matter what I do I am destined to be always fighting off some bug or other. I comfort myself that it’s just that my body having been dried and burnt out in Texas for 2 years and not being used to this cold and wet climate. That it is just overwhelmed and that sooner than later it’ll be able to withstand the constant barrage of germs. That pep talk isn’t working.

I know that the greatest part of my problem is being sedentary and as much as I would love to run – yes, I think I would love to run – I just can’t do it now. I can barely walk. Yoga was a problem. Just going the 300 or so feet to the mailbox is an issue. Sometimes just carrying a laundry basket up the stairs here at home makes me winded. I am in bad shape.

I have never been very active. High school was the last time I was physically active and without batting an eyelid, I will tell you that high school for me was a good 30 years ago. Yes indeed. I am that old. And lately, I have been feeling it. Lucky for me, I think I finally figured out what is wrong with me and I am going to get it looked after. I sincerely hope that once this treatment kicks in I can actually climb the stairs here at home, at a brisk trot and not feel like I’ve run the marathon when I get to the top rung.

That being said, I refuse to let this cold keep me down for much longer. It’s kept me mostly stationary all weekend. There are so many things I should have been doing this last month. Not the least of which is spending time with my friend and her newborn. I am tired all the time, and I am sick almost every other week and I just don’t feel well. It has got to stop NOW.

School starts next month again, and hubby will be gone for 6 weeks starting the first. I need to get myself sorted out quickly. I can’t be alone and sick for 6 weeks whilst I take on extra work and school. So I’ve vowed to also include a dose of airborne everyday with my one glass of lemonade too. I think in a little while work will require me to be up for far later at nights and awake far earlier in the mornings and I need to prepare myself for that.

(P.S. By the way, I am loving After the deadline. )

Related posts:

1. Where did my hobby time get to? “Hey Mom? I finally understand why you don’t read, or...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

When we heard we were going to be moving here to Washington state, my friend who has lived here for years warned me about S.A.D. I was never sure I would be affected because I have always been a fan of the rain and the darkness it brings.

As it turns out, the rain and the overcast days are actually the least of the problems. The real problem has started to emerge within the last few weeks as fall settles in for the long haul. Now underlined and bold-faced as we switch over to standard time from daylight savings.

The number of daylight hours is restricted even more when it is overcast and rainy. We have lived here for just about 3 months now, and I can tell you that on an average week, we get maybe 2 days of full sunshine – if we are lucky. Now that the days are shorter, it’s dark by 4pm or thereabouts. And I see it getting worse as we near the silly season.

And while I don’t know that I will suffer from S.A.D., I can see how the light (or lack, thereof) is going to play havoc with my internal clock. It already does. I find myself panicking at 4:30 because it looks and feels like much later. And I am finding that I am not a fan of the dark at all. I might like the rain and the overcast and the opportunity to build a fire and wrap up blankets … but I do not like the dark.

Yep – I am still adjusting to life out here. I never dreamed it would be this different, but nevertheless, I am liking it – a lot! I don’t know that I can live anywhere else after this. Dreary, rainy days or not!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Lawd whoee – what a stress!

I’ll tell you this, it’s heartening to know that SO many people want to be an authority on the fyr … I’m famous! Wewt!

I apologize to those who might have been working up the courage to comment (again?) and found that comments are now closed here – the reason is a sudden upsurge in the bitch content of my life which I am trying valiantly to quell and exterminate. So far, it seems to be working, but these things take a while – weeks, sometimes months. So please bear with me whilst I call in the exterminators.

In the meantime, here’s what my weekend looked like:

In true army style, we were summoned post haste to a married couples retreat of unknown content and to an unknown location for an unknown rendezvous time.  Oh yea, I was gearing up to REALLY not enjoy the weekend.

But it was a REAL NICE SURPRISE (THANK YOU CHAPLAIN ADAMS!) that greeted us on Friday afternoon. While it was called a “married couples retreat” the idea wasn’t to fix anything that was wrong, or help anybody with marital problems. In fact, the theme of the weekend was “Strengthening the bonds” and the idea was to equip us with the tools and tips to handle this deployment like pros.

I won’t go into the specifics of the weekend because … well, that’s kinda private smacks hand away but I will tell you this, the emphasis was on clear and genuine communication of feelings and expectations from this point onward. We got a list of things to discuss and a few things to think about and a few areas to work on. We got some ideas for communication while our soldiers are down-range and we got some stories about those have already been here. We got some tips on what’s the best way to deal with R&R and with homecoming … and while none of this is an exact science, I certainly feel FAR better prepared to manage this deployment.

The one down side to the weekend was suddenly realizing that “Hey! Block leave is already here and you haven’t done squat to prepare for it … DUDETTE!”

True to my organizer breeding, I wrote up my little month-long calendar we have on the wall by our desks and started to hatch out a plan on how to manage the week. I needed some comfy clothes for MI (post-surgery and all that jazz), I needed to get Nala’s rabies shot done and her fecal test and feline distemper registered on-post, I needed to find a sitter or a boarding house, I needed to organize what would happen with the mail …. you get the picture.

Thankfully, the shopping and organizing Nala’s shots and test results were knocked off in high organizational fashion on Monday thanks to a fellow-spouse who agreed to accompany my righteously indignant mug around town. She also helped reinforce to me what a downright waste of time it was mourning “the catastrophe” … “I don’t know you all that well, but that doesn’t sound anything LIKE you.“

And to top it all off, hubby comes home and says “Ooh – FRG leader has a pet sitter name for us – she’ll email you tonite”.

Long and short of it … I now have a potential kitteh sitter who will care for Nala whilst we are in MI and get our mail and watch the house to make sure it doesn’t get stoned, or egged or tomatoed by the bully-defense-patrol.

I’m all set – or am I?

Damn – I still have to pack, don’t I?

Related posts:

1. So much to say, so little time I am sick again – for the third time this...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Earlier this week, I did something I know I had to do and had been putting off for weeks because it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do – I surrendered a pet to the post animal shelter.

Since then, I have asked myself over and over whether it was necessary and whether I was a mean person for doing it. Each and every time, I have ended up feeling like the scum of the earth despite the answer being “Yes, it was the right thing to do.”

Bear has been with us since February 2008. I have blogged and talked about Bear incessantly. He came to us at just under a year (about 9 months old) and as wild as the day is long. At first he would run and hide when he heard strange external noises (the doorbell, the lawn mower) and that was fine because he had learned that we (my husband and I) were his family and we would never hurt him.

Last August, when my parents came to stay with us for our wedding, we were all surprised at how quickly he made friends with them as well. Even after the upheaval of Nala arriving and herself adjusting to us and him and the house. But he grew to like my parents, to come out and say hi and get an ear rub from Dad. It was a beautiful thing.

Then after we were married, we had to move. And that was stressful for him, I think. He hid for a whole day. But that was expected – all the new smells, new sense of space, new everything except us. And that helped a little I think … that we were still there with him, still loving him.

He was fine for months until he started stealing food. I had to rig the kitchen counters to be an automatic remote alarm so that when he jumped onto the counter the falling soda cans would startle him and he would learn not to jump on the counter. After we heard the cans fall a couple of times, I figured he had learnt and moved them.

Well, he hadn’t learnt and would still jump onto the counter to steal food – and this is with food in his bowl, by the way. In case you were thinking “poor kitteh is actually hungry – why don’t you feed him?” Frankly, it only hit me while writing this post that his behaviour had started to get a little off the minute we left the first house we lived in. He would chew on stuff … especially cardboard boxes. Again, with food in his bowl. We put up the Christmas tree in December of 2008 and he chewed on the branches (they are plastic).

Hubby and I thought maybe he just didn’t like that brand of food – we changed it 3 times. We knew he liked wet food, we got him more. I even tried feeding him more often, put out more food at a feeding – that only made him put on weight, it did nothing to alleviate the chewing and the stealing. We tried everything we could think of – it made no difference.

Bear developed a wailing kind of cry during these days – a caterwauling like you hear wild cats doing. Hearing it would make anyone think he was in pain and distress. It drove me nuts because I knew that I was doing just about everything I could for him. I fed him, I cleaned up after him, I made sure he had water, was warm and safe.

It was during this period also that we realized that if we missed feeding them by a few hours, Bear would puke his food up and run scared for the rest of the day until hunger drove him out later for more caterwauling.

I think the final straw for Bear was the 3 day drive from Kentucky to Texas. Once he got here, he was as neurotic as I’d ever seen him to be. Where before curiosity drove his need to get into every door and cupboard, now it seemed almost pathological.

He developed his first UTI evidenced by his frequent trips to the litter box and eventually his peeing on everything but in the litter box – including the furniture. It if hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been funny – furniture covered in paper, doors closed, cupboards reinforced with things to block his access … the vet told us that they do that because they associate the litter box with pain.

Ever after being treated, he was erratic and the caterwauling became his standard cry. The stealing became worse, he would leave the food in his bowl and take food off the stove, out of the sink … even out of the garbage. He would run away from me and from hubby with no known trigger. He would hide all day and seek to get through every single closed door he could find – even the exterior doors.

There were days when he seemed fine, however. Days when he would sit either at the open back door of the house or on a chest in the spare room staring outside, or just sleeping in the recliner. When he would be affectionate and friendly, playful. These days we would think “it must just have been a phase, he’s ok now”. But it would never last long.

And this is at the root of our reasoning – with this kind of erratic behaviour – stealing, sneaking, running scared today and affectionate and playful tomorrow … well, he wasn’t happy and he was making us unhappy. There weren’t a lot of choices for us. We couldn’t afford to care for him anymore – both financially and emotionally, he was getting to be unmanageable. And a friend suggested that as well as he was right now, this was the best time to get him a new home rather than waiting for him to get sick again.

We discussed it – over and over and over. We wavered from one position to the other. It was especially obvious to us when we had to board them both while we went North to say goodbye to hubby’s Grandfather. When we got back, his UTI had returned, he had lost about 3 pounds and he was caterwauling like you wouldn’t believe. Once home, he seemed to get better, but the caterwauling, the stealing and running scared continued.

It was driving me nuts – as a light sleeper, having a cat sit on your legs in bed and caterwaul at 3am is not happy days. Even locking them out of the room did nothing to help, he would sit in the small closed hallway and caterwaul outside the closed door anyway.

I guess when I think about all these things and put them down in writing, I realize that there really wasn’t much we could have done. Without the means and money to care for him, we were actually going to be doing us all harm – Hubby, Nala and myself – by fooling ourselves into thinking “he’ll be ok”.

The last straw was him puking his breakfast up onto Scott’s favourite chair. For weeks, I had been setting alarms to wake me to feed them on time, and one morning I was off by an hour and even that was too late. Hubby was gone all day and half the nights too sometimes, I was alone and at my wits end. With the upcoming deployment, this was just not something either of us wanted to have on our plates on top of everything else.

So, off to the shelter I went. I know there were other options: we could have found him a new home ourselves. We could have tried harder with him, I know. And this is probably where my guilt and depression now stem from – knowing there were other options, and I chose the easy way out. Except, that I personally could not in all conscience knowingly inflict that kind of erratic behaviour on anyone else.

Maybe I was wrong and I will rot in hell forever. Maybe. I know I can’t get out from under the dark, evil cloud of the whole thing. I know it was the right thing to do, but that isn’t making me feel any better.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So, my husband turned to me last week and said (and I quote) ” Wanna cook thanksgiving dinner?”

It prompted a complex set of emotions:

• Satisfaction: clearly he thinks I am decent enough cook to pull it off if he asks like that
• Fear: I have NEVER really COOKED a traditional meal (Jamaican OR American) for anyone but myself or my parents … I was SO going to blow it because I KNOW I am no good at this.
• Excitement: at the “project” aspect of the idea
• Anxiety: at having to debut my dubious cooking skills to perfect strangers

Perfect strangers, you ask – well, hubby wants to invite the 2 soldiers he supervises and their significant others; well, one significant other anyway.

At first, I thought I would leave it until I could actually present this awesome home to people – you know the one with the coordinated furniture and the beautiful wall hangings, etc. Then I thought, that isn’t likely to happen too soon, I can find ways to make this house work as is – why not just DO IT already? Then, he said he wasn’t sure it would actually work because he and one of the other soldiers were going to be working on Thanksgiving day.

Long story short, we are going to be doing our thanksgiving dinner on Sunday the 29th instead. Frankly, I don’t really care whether we coincide with the day or not. I am just happy for the opportunity to make this work.

So I set to work: I reached out and asked a very good friend of mine who is a guru in this area (wink at mistikhal1) and he sent me some links. First thing I had to do was choose my recipes, then make my ingredients list and go shopping. Next I had to plan the cooking and split it over 2 days.

In my usual fashion, I avoided thinking about it until this morning when I got up to feed the kittehs and realized I needed to get moving on it or lose out. So I sat down, chose my recipes, made my ingredients list and priced it and showed hubby who ok’d all of it and we made a date to go shopping.

Of course, I shall keep you all updated on this “project” of mine… if nothing else, it gives me something to blog about.

What’s that? The recipe list? Bah… ok, ok. Well, these are the basic recipes, but rest assured there will be a Jamaican flavor in there somewhere:

Honey Glazed Carrots http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_164269,00.html Do Nothing Turkey http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_35203,00.html Mashed Potatoes http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_27724,00.html Turkey Gravy http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_34635,00.html Pumpkin Cheesecake http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_83689,00.html

Wish me luck!

Related posts:

1. So much to say, so little time I am sick again – for the third time this...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.