While cleaning out the garage, my family and I came across some old rolls of film and I went and had some of them developed. One roll had my graduation from High School on it, another (from wence this picture came) was from my jr high graduation. We all look so young. Lets see how many of our old friends we can spot. And yes both Rah, Shellibear, Josephus, Castle and myself are in there. 

MAJOR UPDATE!

I just traded one cousin for another. Dawn is moving back into her mom's home taking her two kids with her and Gayle is moving in. She is 23 just like my sister Lou. So I think things will work out fine. I don't know what exactly spurred this exchange of family members, but hopefully in the next couple of days I will get to the bottom of the mystery! I think my sister Beth and my mom might be behind it.

Toes Again!

Okay so it has been a few days and I have come to the conclusion that maybe my toe isn't broken but very badly bruised and possible fractured since it hurts when I stand on my toes or bend them back. The bruising is disappearing and I can walk without a limp, so maybe just fractured. I think if I broke it, it would hurt more.

On a side note: Is it wrong to charge someone full price when you know there is a discount just because they really piss you off?

School and Toes

Okay so the other post never really happened. But I really do think I broke my baby toe. For the past two days since I stubbed it, my toe has been purple, and it hurts to touch it! So I have kept it taped to my other toes.

Today I started school. I think I will really love my Roman providences class, but my anthro class seems a little boring, but who knows. They could turn out just the reverse.

Okay so today while painting the house I feel backward off the roof. I know your saying 'Stupid!' Anyway on my trip to the ground I tense as I expect the hard impact of the cement below. However it doesn't come? From one moment to the next I pass from the exhausting Oklahoma heat to the blistering sands of not on this planet. Before me is a temple reminiscent of Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian cultures all morphed into one. The great stone steps leading ever upward are right in front of me. I can't resist my natural instinct as an adventurer to explore the temple. I stand and brush myself off realizing that I am wearing not my paint stained jeans and t-shirt but a futuristic, charcoal colored fitted tank and pants that leave little to the imagination. My gloves have been replaced by metallic gantlets of the same color as my outfit. Along with those I now have shin guards and boots. All designed in ancient glyphs. I mount the stairs and fly upward in my zeal to see inside the temple. I reach the apex and a darkened doorway greets me. Marching straight into the doorway I immediately come to terms with the lack of light inside the temple, but as soon as these thoughts cross my mind torches on each side of the hall light. I follow the hall into a darkened chamber, and there before me are predators. They silently welcome me into their number. The one I take as the leader motions me forward to a low standing alter and there before me are an extendable spear and a alien crested helmet. I place the perfectly fitted helmet on and grab the spear and follow in the wake of the predators as they move further into the temple. The helmet grants me vision without light. Time passes and the only sounds are our footsteps etching in the chambers as the temple shifts and becomes evermore a maze of death. Then the predators stop and look around as if senting the enemy. I stop and listen. There it is, a distant hiss. Fear increases the adrenaline flow. Quicker than the blink of an eye a sharply pointed, serrated tail whips through the air cleanly piercing the body of the predator in front of me. I am sprayed with fluorescent green blood and my body reacts before I can think about what I am doing. I leap into battle with the sleek black alien in front of me. The chamber becomes chaos as the room floods with aliens and the predators leap to action with guns and weapons flying. Fluorescent and acid blood permeates the air as both sides take wounds and casualties. Time passes, hours or seconds I don't know, but the body count rises as somehow I manage to dispatch another alien. Then it stops. The air settles and I am left with only two other predator comrades. We look at each other and realize that this isn't the end. We must kill the queen. Further and deeper we journey into the temple, dispatching aliens along the way. I have lost count of how many I have killed. Dark chamber into musty hall we travel until we reach the queen and she is pissed. She rips herself free of her egg sack and charges. We battle continual giving ground back through the passages we just passed, until we are once again in the chamber where I was welcomed in. One of the predators fall having been eaten through by acid blood from the queen. I accept the loss and rage back at the queen. I dive to the side narrowly missing a tail slash and thrust. Raising to my feet I dive from her biting jaws and reach my spear and thrust it through her abdomen. Blood drips onto my suit sliding to the side miraculously not eating through the fabric. The queen howls in pain and the last predator makes his move aiming his lazier and shoots though the queen's head. It is finished. We emerge from the temple to a silent standing ovation of elder predators. I am given the title of ultimate warrior. I step forward to receive my ceremonial spear and to be marked as ultimate hunter, when a flash of darkness takes me. I awake on the pavement beside my house. Disillusioned I shake my head and look around me. I'm home and there is a throbbing inside my shoe. I pull off my shoe to see that although nothing else is damaged it seems as though I have broken my toe in the fall. I gather myself and start to write off the experience as a concussion or heat stroke, when a burning sensation draws my attention to my left shoulder. There before my eyes is the marking of the ultimate hunter etched into my skin.

My cousin living with me Update

So yesterday was the VPO hearing and the judge released it against the kids but kept it on my cousin, whom we shall call Dawn. (Just 'cause I think it's fun to give people code names). So Wayne, Dawn's abusive husband, as soon as the hearing is adjourned runs straight over to the children's school waving his little paper about demanding that he wants to see his children. Well this little paper says that he can have supervised visits and can only go to the school during lunch time and must inform Dawn of all these things. However he throws a fit anyway and the principal makes a decision and lets him see the kids since they are at recess. Well Dawn freaks out and the next couple of hours are spent defining the visitation guidelines.

Today the kids are out with their father and everything seems as if it will workout. Although we will see how the kids handle everything. Oh and Wayne decided to file for legal separation after Dawn filed for divorce. Ugh! I have the feeling this is all going to get hairy! Fortunately the divorce hearing is on the 30th.

:o) 

House Update

Okay now for an update on the house repair and build-in status. The garage is built-in and cleaned out, and now has a window and textured walls. All that is left is to repair some of the cement and to paint! The attic has also been cleaned out, new flooring added, insulation put down and reorganized. We had to do the attic to put more boxes up there of things from the garage that we planned on keeping. In order to do all this cleaning we had to rent a hopper. Imagine a semi trailer cut in half and you have the size of this dumpster. After cleaning out the garage and the attic we filled this thing full. I got in it twice to stomp everything down so that we could fit in more. It's crazy the amount of stuff people can accumulate.

So not only did we get all of our stuff out of the garage and cleaned out of the attic we also got a lot of overdue yard work done. Everything that needed to go went! The outside of the house is slowly coming along. One eave of the roof is sanded and primed, the other is now sanded but we have to wait until the rain has stopped to prime it. The back of the house is almost all scraped and the sides. So we are close to the halfway point and hopefully we will be able to finish before school starts on the 23rd. Hopefully.

Just going through some of my pictures today and thought this was a good one of Joey. 

Moment in Time I Wish I was Present for!

Okay so Joey wants me to write about how Howard (the guy in the picture below) went to court about child support and lost bigtime by representing himself. Yes I did say representing himself. To make a long hilarious story short Howard went to court to try and make his child support payments smaller. You see according to Howard when he and his wife divorced he had this great job (No one is sure what exactly it was) where he made lots of money, but when he followed his now ex-wife to Oklahoma he wasn't able to produce that same income. His wife (still according to Howard) had an awesome attorney who managed to get his child support payments set on his income at the time. I personally think any attorney awesome or not who is worth their salt would do the same thing. I mean it is what he was making at the time.

Anyway now he says he can't afford the child support so he goes to court to get the payments reduced. Unfortunately Howard hasn't been paying his child support for the past year or so and has had his drivers license suspended. Hehe What a dolt. So here he is at court pleading his poor beaten down dad case, and low and behold the judge basically laughs at him and tells him that he should have been making an attempt to pay something on his child support. The judge then slaps him with a higher payment to make up for all the other times he hasn't paid. Oh to be a fly on the wall.

My aunt says that afterward he exclaimed that they could just arrest him because he refused to make the payments because they were unfair. My aunt was there for the trail and said that the guy sitting next to her began laughing when he found out that Howard was representing himself. Not knowing that she was with him the guy leans over to her and tells her that the guy is stupid for representing himself and then later tells her that he must be crazy. And my aunt still supports this guy. Ugh!

Weird

www.howardmorgan.com
This is my Aunt's supposed guru on all things spiritual. I just think he's creepy and crazy!!! He claims to have been given inside knowledge on God and the bible. Not only that but he also wants to start a community. I'm thinking cult. He has already been kicked out of a church he was regularly attending and is now trying to use my aunt's house as a new church. He has at some point, in the past few years since he has known my aunt, tried to convert her children, my family and my grandmother to his way of religion. Luckily none of us are that gullible. (Except for my aunt that is). The link above is where you can explore more about Howard. He has all kinds of things listed including his new radical religious book True Convictions!

Blessings

Okay so I know I have griped about having a cold and all the work we are doing around the house, but I do have to mention that we have been very blessed. Our church has gotten together and sent a couple of guys over to build in the garage, which is now almost complete. And it has worked out that we don't have to pay our electric bill this month, due to some sort of credit my mom had from several months back. (When the electric company tells you you have a credit, you don't ask questions!) So the money we would have used to pay the electric bill went instead to purchase supplies for the garage build-in. Space that we desperately needed. God does provide in so many ways.

So that no one worries about my health I did take a break yesterday and slept ten hours! For anyone who knows me well, you know that, that is a huge accomplishment.

I now have a horrendous cold!!! Is it bad to fall asleep in the bathtub?

Rain

Okay so due to my last post you would think that rain would be a blessing. I thought the same thing. Sit around sleep a little more. Well we were wrong.

Last night after work I knew that rain was in the forecast so I made sure to recaulk all the areas on the roof where my sister and I had been scraping. Unfortunately at 6:30 am water streamed through the vent in my mother's room. Great. Wonderful. Oh JOY! To top that off we now have no electricity.

So at 6:30 in the morning I am in the attic crawling through little spaces with a flashlight look in for the leak. I find three. An hour later I emerge dusted in cobwebs and insulation, having come to the conclusion that I have done all I can do from the inside of the house. Now that the lightning has stopped outside, I have the privilege of ascending the ladder to the roof of the house and trying to hang plastic drapes over the eaves of the house to prevent anymore water entering the house. Lucky for me the sun has joined me and it is no longer dark. An hour and a half later I am soaked to the bone, numb and climbing down from the roof thankful to be done.

Now I have to go to work. Then it occurs to me, how do you blow dry your hair and iron your clothes with no electricity.

The Beginning

This is my first attempt at this sort of thing, so we'll see how all of this goes. A friend once told me that writing would be therapeutic and I need a place to vent. Why do I need a place to vent you ask? Well that's a good question.
You see I still live at home. I know...I know...25 and still living at home that's crazy, but it helps me pay for college. Anyway I get along with my family quite well except now I have returned home from a much needed and wonderful vacation ( 2 weeks lounging on the beach) to find none other than my cousin and her two children (having fled an abusive father and husband) living in my house. So my 4 bedroom home is now inhabited by 7 souls. To remedy the space problem my mother has decided to build in the garage, and our church is willing to help with this so we will not be out of a lot of money.
All things said so far are fine. My cousin needed a place to stay and I am happy we could provide, and my mother has wanted the garage built in for years so this pushes her to her goal.

My real issues with all of this is that I am exhausted. Physically, Emotionally and Mentally.
You see in order to build in the garage we needed to empty 11 years worth of 4 peoples possessions and memories, and either relocate them or sale them. And besides all of this we had already planned to use this past weekend to paint the house. So besides just painting the house we are now having a garage sale and trying to pawn our junk onto someone else. So needless to say I am physically exhausted trying to accomplish all the moving, scraping, saleing, painting...etc.
Now if any of you have ever been in an abusive relationship you might understand what my cousin is going through. She and her children are afraid. Having filed a VPO against him has relieved her fear some, but now she must deal with the questions and ever present advice from friends and family. On top of this my cousin has never really disciplined her children and so has never really had authority over them, leaving my already maxed out mother to try and be the bad guy. Unfortunately for me my mother has always leaned on me since the passing of her husband, my father. So these two children now have three mothers instead of just one. I think everyone can see the problem in this. Nobody supports the others commands, especially their biological mother who gives in at the slightest bit of pressure or nagging, then proceeds to ask my mother to discipline their misbehavior because she cannot control them. Enter mental and emotional exhaustion.

I miss the quiet. I honestly know everything will work out in the end, and I know we are merely adjusting until we learn how to fit into each others lives and spaces. God does have a plan and he gives us the strength that we need.
"He gives power to those who are tired and worn out; he offers strength to the weak. Even youths will become exhausted and young men will give up. But those who wait on the Lord will find new strength. They will fly high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint." Isaiah 40:29-31
This was the lesson this Sunday. I know God is with me.