Adventures, Misadventures , Reflections and Profanity

I have some days off coming up and they happen to fall on my husband's birthday so we have elected to go out of town and head north to go see me family. While we are there we plan to do many things, including going for a camping trip for part of our vacation together. I absolutely LOVE camping and I have not been in many years so I am very much looking forward to it, but when it comes to planning a trip out of town, I have mixed feelings. There is of course the excitement of a change in the routine and getting to go do fun things while not working, but here I am, three days and a wake up from our departure date, and I am already exhausted just thinking about everything that needs to be done. There is also the anxiety of visiting my family. My husband is gracious enough to agree to spend his birthday trip with his in-laws, but I can already sense tension surrounding the idea. My family and my husband are VERY different people (a big part of why I love him so much!), and in the pas...

Warning! This post contains graphic descriptions of menstrual distress and the discussion of drugs which are now legal to consume n the state of Nevada. Yesterday I had a surprise day off from work in the middle of the week. My homeschooling student wasn't feeling well and so his parents cancelled school. This doesn't happen often, but when it does I like to make the most out of the day and try to be as productive as possible. I have been intending to use some old rope I had laying around to make my first attempt at a rope rug for my shop and so at 7:30am, I busted out the rope, my hot glue gun, and the Netflix and got to some early morning crafting. It was really wonderful to sit, enjoy my iced coffee that I would usually be trying to drink as fast as possible on the freeway on my way to work and to just do some mindless craft work. That kind of crafting is on the short list of things that actually relax me (sex, laughing, crafting, eating is pretty much the whole list). So ...

Yesterday I tried something that I have never done before: I attended a support group for grieving people. Having lost 4 very important people in less than two years, the most recent of which was my mother in January, I have been struggling with grief and anger and exhaustion from it all. the anger and grief has started to make me a bitter person and I have caught myself being cold or short with people that I love, and that just isn't acceptable to me. I started researching online for some resources for free grief counseling. Being a teacher, there just isn't a lot of extra money to go around, so it was imperative to find something for free. My first choice was to find a grief counselor of some kind, but unfortunately one on one counseling just isn't ever free, or even affordable from what I could find, which I guess makes sense. That left support groups, which honestly scared the crap out of me. the thought of sitting and crying in a room full of strangers sounded like a t...

Several years ago I was in a pretty serious motor sports accident which left me with a dislocated and de-arranged knee, multiple contusions, a concussion, extreme whiplash and general badness all up and down my back. Things have never really been the same ever since and I live with some amount of leg and back pain pretty much all of the time no matter what, but there are times when all these old injuries get aggravated and the muscles in my neck and back twist and bind up for days at a time. The pain is immense and there is pretty much nothing anyone can do but give me some anti-inflammatory meds and tell me to just wait it out. The last two days have been bad for the pain. My right shoulder is always the worst because I am right handed. I have been bound up from the tips of my fingers all the way up my arm, and all the way up into my neck where the pain spills downward into my upper back and it finally all feels like it sort of pools under my right shoulder blade. I used to be in trea...

This must be the millionth blog I have tried to start. I don't know why, but every time I start a blog, I never seem to make it past the first three posts. In fact, any time I try to start anything I seem to have a hard time staying consistent. My home is filled with half finished craft projects, all representations of good ideas gone awry. If you aren't the kind of person who has trouble finishing things, you probably don't understand. But if you are, if you are also forgetful, tend toward procrastination, or suffer from manic depression then you know exactly what I am talking about. The burst of energy and creativity that inspires the craft or piece of writing or new task rarely last long enough to carry me through its completion and what I am most often left with is a sense of emptiness and failure. It seems simple enough and I hear it from the people around me in one way or another pretty often: "if you want to finish things, then just FINISH THINGS." And yes,...