COUNTDOWN!

Today, I have a dental appointment, and I'll be leaving at noon. I parked on the street, because it's cheaper than paying $6 for the paved lot across the street. It was a very cold walk to the office, and I still can't feel my knees a half hour later!

After today is done, I have only 3 days left in the month to work. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Everyone around here knows about it, but I've asked for things to remain quiet about it all, and so far, only one or two people have come around to talk with me about it. I suppose that they're surprised that I'm not jumping up and down about it--all things considered.

It's exciting and not exciting at the same time. It just feels like it's another day. Perhaps I'll feel differently on Friday. I just hope I don't spend the entire day crying about it.

Things I won't miss....

The work. It pains me to say, but I never dreamed I would spend my life pushing paper around, and never thought that I would spend the last few working days doing nothing but making copies and scans of copies. So I won't miss the work.

The parking downtown and walking to work in all types of weather. I am so happy to not have to make that trek anymore. No more rain, snow, sleet or heat. No more worry about slip, fall, break a hip. Nope. And no more paying for the parking--one of the biggest expenses of working downtown.

The drive in--oh yes. No more slippery roads in the winter. No more having to get up so early in the morning, unable to see the road in front of you. God has been good to me, and kept the deer out of my way all these years. The only one time I hit a deer was when it actually hit me.

No more alarm going off at 5:30am, nor snooze alarm set to wake me again at 6am to get off my sleepy, warm bed and get going. I'll probably get up early ANYWAY, but the fact that I don't HAVE TO is the biggest blessing of all, I think.

So what will I do with my days? Do you know that I haven't decided? Yes, I know that I will knit, sew, crochet and craft for the rest of my life, as long as God permits me to do so, and I will start spending time with friends and family again. I know that my local knitting group will be really happy to see me come back, and my Tuesday night knitting group still wants me to come spend time with them. Maybe I'll see if my sister would like to go with me sometime.

So you see, I do have some things planned, and of course, some options still left open to me, and as things move forward, perhaps a trip, perhaps a move away from this cold--if things go well and I'm able to save some money here and there, perhaps hubby will take me to Scotland, as I would love to go--as well as Jerusalem, Owahu and a dozen other places closer to home. The sky is wide open, and I hope it stays that way for a while.

I look forward to this new, exciting part of my life, and I intend to run to it with open arms and when I get to the end of the line, I'll run and jump and slide into home plate with the exclamation "WOW! What a ride!"

The Blanket

And there it is. I think I love it.

Sissy is in the Hospital

My sister is in the hospital today recovering from a gall bladder removal yesterday. Yes, missed half a days work for that

Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

The surgery took 2 1/2 hours. That's a long time for a gall bladder laparoscopy, which takes 1/2 hour generally. We were all pretty worried that she was having difficulty,mor that things were not going according to Hoyle, but the doctor assured us that things had gone relatively well. There were a couple of surprises, but beyond that, things went okay.

So now she is convalescing.

Her friend Karen was there in the waiting room with me, as well as my brother in law and Karens husband. I also ran into my ex in laws, Rick and Wanda Draper, who were there for her her brother in law, who had some cancer removed. Apparently he's not doing very well, although the surgery went as well as expected.

The conversation with Karen turned a little sour, however, when she told me that my brother in law had filed for divorce before Christmas. Now I'm pretty mad about this, since he's been such a devoted person at the hospital and worried as much as I was, and because my sister has not said a single word to me about this. Secondly, that she's still seeing my ex every now and then. The betrayal is almost more than I can bear. 

And now, I'm not trying to make this all about me. I'm mostly mad at my brother in law. He has no right to hurt my sister this way. If anyone has a right to file, it's my sister, since he abandoned her.

Now, it's difficult to relate to him, and I have to deal with it somehow. 

Pushing him off the nearest cliff sounds like a good option.

And when it rains, it pours...

Sisters

My sister is in the hospital.

It's nothing extremely serious, just that she needs a gall bladder removed because it's causing her pain. The poor things! Both sis and the gall bladder. Mainly because she has a condition that causes her blood pressure to rise under anesthesia, and I hope to heck that they don't give her ketamine.

The gall bladder because she tends to eat a lot of high fat foods, very rich with quite a lot of salt. She's overweight, and should probably have a gastric bypass. But then, who am I to talk, right?

And yes, I'm worried about her. I'll head out at noon to check up on her.

Now none of this would be especially mind shattering, except that I only met my sister when I turned 24. I was adopted, you see, and my adopted mom always told me that I had a sister somewhere. Come to find out that until she was 10, she was right there in St. John's. She just went to a different school. All the while thinking that she was an oops! Baby. The last of the troop. And wasn't she surprised when she learned she had a younger sister?

Meeting her was odd, because I'd spent the last, oh, perhaps 13 to 15 years looking for her, only to find out that all I had to do was contact the judge who did the adoption. Come to find out, he was a personal friend of the family, and he let the family know first. Her dad was all for it, but her mother was skeptical.

Still, it was her choice, and after two weeks, she did call me, and we made a date to meet. We decided to bring our spouses, too, in case we ran out of things to talk about.

But we didn't. Not for the last 30 years or so, although there was a period of time when we did not speak, because she got married, and had my ex-husband walk her down the aisle. This ticked me off to no end, and I tried to keep in touch, but felt so betrayed over it, that I just couldn't.

It took a long while, but I finally resolved that the sorry excuse for a man didn't deserve to have my sister. And so she and I started speaking again...slowly at first, and now we talk all the time. I still haven't talked about my feelings about my ex with her, and her choice to have him walk her down the aisle at her wedding, but I will someday, and then she and I will be free to be sisters again, as we should be. I don't think she sees my ex anymore and that is just fine with me. Because I never want to run into that person again. Not ever.

In the meanwhile, she's all I can think about. I'll keep you all posted about things. Battery on my Ipad is about to run out, so I best go.

Circular Blanket

My blanket. The darker green is around the light green again, and I started another strip of the red around that. I have one more row to go, then on to the dark green, and I think I'll stop there.

Finally! Back to Blogging Time!

No one needs to tell me that I've been away forever. To my followers and readership, I apologize. Things have been crazy around here, and I've been busy...and

Oh, who am I kidding? I've just been too lazy to post.

There was the ice storm, in which we lost power for a few days, and the house temperature dropped to 40 degrees. On the day we decided to get a generator, none could be found. Then sometime during the day, the electric came on again.

And we still don't own a generator.

I've been telling hubby for years that we need one for just such emergencies. He is equally adamant that we don't need one.

Then after the ice storm was a snowstorm that socked us in for 3 days. I just looked at my husband and said: "Let's just hope our electric doesn't go out again."

Which would have been tragic, actually, and I would have been totally miffed.

And now, I'm sitting here blogging and trying to decide what to say about what's been going on, and you know what? I can't think of anything to tell you.

Oh, then the plow came through, and while he did an excellent job on the roadway, he didn't do so well on our mailbox. That poor mailbox. Between teenagers using a bat against it in the summertime, to the plow this winter, it has never really seen better days. I think when we get our January thaw (put in a prayer for me, will ya?) we'll have to replace our broken down one. Poor thing is laying on the snow berm in our front yard.

Needless to say, we aren't getting mail. No news is good news, right?

But when the plow came through, the snow socked us in again, after hubby spent half a day blowing the snow out of the drive with our snow blower. So of course you know that when he went out to blow the drive after the plow went through, our dependable machine of 14 years decided to break.

No, I don't mean break-down. I mean it broke. Into pieces that fell all over the driveway.

Might be time to get a new snow blower? Hubby plans to if we get anymore sizable snowfall. The thing is, how will we get out to buy one?

.........



I've been doing a fair bit of sewing. During the ice storm, my mother's electric went out for a day or two, and she came to live with us. Now, she doesn't like cat or dog hair, which I have plenty of, and so she was miserable the entire time, but we all tried to make the best of it. I made up her pajama pants, and she just loves them. I need to still make a top for my husband, but that's on the back burner for now, since the blistering cold has moved back to the artic circle for the time being. I'm crocheting a blanket in the round, which is turning out very nice. I finished a few projects over the holidays, and I've purchased some fabric to make a pillow and a handbag for my knitting stuff.

One can never have enough project bags, and the plastic Meijer bags are getting a little old.

I made a fleece blanket and gave it away at Christmas. It was really pretty. Blue. My favorite color. I hated to do it, but didn't have a lot of goods to give away at Christmas, since the ice storm took all of our shopping time (you know--I'm a last minute Christmas shopper) away while we stayed at my in-laws house. Everyday, we came home and let the dog out, fed the animals, cleaned out the cat litter, and then we were "off" again. We only had one car, since we loaned the other one to visiting family over the holidays. Then came the snowstorm, and it took a while to get it back. We finally did. It's been a great week, having my vehicle back. Instead of tying the strips, I just used a blanket stitch around the fleece, then crocheted a shell in every other strand. It turned out really nice, if I do say so (and you know I do). I'm not sure the recipient appreciated it. In fact, I'm not sure who I gave it to anymore.

But all of this chatter leads me back to the ice storm. I stopped at the bank to deposit a check, and hubby calls me asking if I finished cleaning out the car to give to family, and I put my alumawallet on top of the ATM so I could hold the phone. I made my deposit, got pretty frustrated and stressed with my husband's demanding that I head for his mother's post haste, and left my alumawallet on top of the ATM.

Three hours later, I realized that I'd forgotten it (and where), and we were almost home (five miles away), and the ice storm was starting (and it was starting to get slick), and I turned about on the off ramp and headed back to town to see if my alumawallet was still on top of the ATM (It wasn't.)

We drove back home, more carefully this time, since it was now VERY icy. I was angry at my husband for calling me and stressing me out so badly that I forgot my credit cards and banking information, INDEED, even my driver's license, and when I told him about this, he asked me

"How is this MY fault?"

Indeed.

Back home, I had to call on all my cards, cancel them and all of that, but when I got hold of the Lost/Stolen cardmember services personnel, I was told that my husband had just called it in.

To which I replied, that I didn't think so, since he'd been with me all day, and therefore, was more likely that it was the perp who took my alumawallet off the ATM!

There have been no outstanding charges on my cards, and after the holidays, the bank called to tell me that some fellow had dropped off my alumawallet there, and would I like to retrieve it.

Insert resounding "yes" here.

So all cards have been replaced, Alumawallet is back in my pocket, and life is pretty much back to normalcy.

At least for the next two weeks, will things be normal. I'll be retiring at the end of the month, and I'm so excited about it that I can barely breathe. I have a lot to finish up in these next two weeks, so you might not see me, but after that, I should be posting normally again.

So I'm sorry for not posting, Please forgive and we'll see you again in a couple of weeks. I'll have pictures for you.