Lazy days and Saturdays

Today is the last Saturday in 2006. There has been a lot of changes in this past year. I got regulated visits with my girls Tara & Elisa. We got permanent custody of Sandy. Mike got on disability. We purchased our first car. We got into our first house. We purchased a nicer car (with a little help from our friends). It's been a very busy 2006. Today is my mother-in-law's birthday. I know what you are thinking and she is nothing like your typical MIL. In fact she has been more of a mother to me in the 8 years that Mike & I have been together then my mother has been in my entire life. In fact she gets very offended if I refer to her as my mother-in-law. She considers me one of her daughters. I asked Mike if Mom would like it if I officially had her adopt me. He pointed out to me that if Mom adopted me then that would make us brother and sister. So needless to say I think I will forgo that idea. Oh well, it's the thought that count.

Right now I am battling a cold. I thought at first it was just allergies, but I have been running a low grade fever the past two days and feeling bleck. I have been doing some pretty heavy coughing. If it doesn't clear up I will call my primary doctor and get on some antibiotics. I very nice lady who's office is just up the street from where we live. The other nice thing about her is that she will get you in on the day you call. Having an HMO, that is a real rarity, like a full spare tire and the Coelacanth. I like the lady but I don't want to have to get on anymore meds.

Noisy kitties and other things

We currently have 3 what we refer to as our 4 footed kids. Jenny who is a Calico. She is our oldest at 4 yrs and is the "typical" cat. She bestows affection when and where SHE wants. She was suppose to be my cat, but she adopted Mike as her human. There is Shadow. He is a black Siamese mix and is 3 yrs old. We got him during a time in my life when I was very depressed. He has so much personality. He likes to play fetch, he wags his tail, he squeaks like a mouse and fortunately only gets Siamese vocal when he wants to be fed. And last but not least there is Mac. We just got him in June. He is an orange Tabby/Siamese and in the past 6 months he has completely and totally taken over this house. He bullies Shadow incessantly, he purrs the moment you pet him, he will make bread on your neck and drool all over you and he currently has getsonta syndrome. He gets on ta everything he shouldn't get on like counters, sinks, bookcases & tables. He gets very vocal when he wants to be fed also. Anyway, we let Shadow sleep with us last night. When it gets cold here we have to leave our bathroom door open and our bedroom door closed. Since two of our cats like to shred toilet paper, the only one we can let into our bedroom at nite is Shadow. About 5:45 this morning he started meowing, and meowing and meowing. It seems his royal highness wanted out of the bedroom, so I get up and let him out. Then at 8:00 Mac was sitting outside our door yowling to be fed. This went on until 8:30 when I finally got up just to shut him up. And by the time I was finished I was wide awake. Thanks cats.

Sandy & I baked sugar cookies. Actually it was the premade, precut kind seeing as I have no luck making the the real stuff. Then we all helped decorate and we will give some to the neighbor lady who takes Sandy to her JROTC functions. I think we will give her most of them seeing as Mike & I are trying to loose weight. Right now we are listening to music and Sandy is bouncing off the walls from the sugar high. Maybe later I will make Chex mix. Sunday we will be showing off Doddi to everyone at church. We already have one request for a ride. I would be willing to bet every person at church will be out ohhing and ahhing over our new vehicle.

Who gets to drive Doddi next?

Today we went to an appointment with CCA. That stands for Christian Community Action and we set up regular vouchers for food. Nice place, not a great selection but hey, what do you expect for donated and overstock food. Mike offered to drive there and back and I said I would drive to our friend Mary's house to pick up our daughter Sandy. Mary wanted us to come for lunch and see Doddi so we came right home and unloaded our stuff. I got into the car, made all of the adjustments, started her up and went vroom, vroom, vroom. I look over to see what Mike's reaction was and he shook his head and said "I will never to get to drive this car will I"? And I just gave him a shit eating grin and chuckled evilly. She is such a nice car to drive. She is smaller then Vicki (our other car that went to the great junk yard in the sky) and has alot more pickup then Vicki ever did. I have visions of Mike on his knees, begging to drive Doddi. Buhwhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

A car, a car, at last a car!

Well it took until 7:30 pm, but we have finally have gotten our car. It was touch and go wondering if we were going to get it. When we called the guy on Tuesday he said he would be willing to deliver the car to us. When Mike called on Wednesday morning he was a little hesitant to deliver it until we told him we could not get anyone to take us there. He told us the tires were in and he would call us when the car was finished. We called and left a voice message at 2:00, 3:00 & 4:00 with no return calls forth coming from him. I told Mike we needed to call his boss, so we called the main number and low and behold guess who answered the phone. Yep, our illustrious car salesman. His excuse was that he had changed desks and could not access his voice mail. Yeah right, everyone who believes that jump up and down and clap your hands! He then tells us that he won't be able to deliver the car to us because he was short handed. We reiterated that we had no way to get there. So then he says he can meet us half way. Does this bozo not understand basic English? We have no car to get there and no one to take us to him or half way. Moron! So then he says he would see what he could do and call us back. By this time Mike is blistering paint and I am getting peeved. He calls us back a few hours later and says he would deliver the car at 8:00 pm. He did show up early but was none too happy that we insisted on test driving it again. We decided to be nice and only go around the block, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. I can say this, there is no way in hell we will ever do any business with this guy or company again!

Another exciting day in Mr. Bacon's neighborhood

We had a pretty dull day today. Usual day for us. We are waiting to get our car sometime tomorrow. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long. We are kidless this evening. A friend of ours picked her up and took her over to another friend's house to help make piñatas and play with their grandkids. She may even be gone Wednesday nite too. Mike & I use this time to regroup and truly unwind. Later this week we will be baking and decorating cookies and making Chex mix. This is about as exciting as it gets in the Bacon household.

Christmas wishes

We were sitting down to eat our traditional Christmas dinner and our 15 yr old daughter looked very pensive. We asked what was wrong and after a slight pause and a sigh she declared that she was wishing for more presents. This started the lecture on appreciating what you have and starting to think about someone other then yourself. I have a feeling that she turned off two seconds after we started, but she may surprise us yet. She did say she wanted to volunteer at the local homeless shelter next Monday and we are encouraging her. Her thing was earning community service points for her JROTC class, but I think she will be in for an eye opening experience. I personally have never served at a homeless shelter, but I do appreciate everything I have and what I can do for myself. I am hoping this will make her grow up just a little and appreciate everything that she has now and what she has gotten over this past year.

Where oh where has my little..................well big voice gone?

You never realize just how much you use your voice until it takes a hike on you. I have allergies and around this time of year they seem to get active. Usually all that happens is that I will sneeze and maybe do a little coughing. A few years ago I had allergies so bad that I cracked a rib coughing. That was not fun I can tell you. I have this thing about breathing. It tends to keep me alive. Anyway, the past two days I have woken up a little stuffy and did some sneezing, not a big deal when you consider my cracked rib a year ago. Well I woke up this morning and my voice decided to take a vacation. I still made it into church today but I had to mouth the hymns and responsive readings. We then went to a friend's house for lunch. For about 4 hours my voice was as good as gone. I am still horse (Go ahead, you know you want to). What I can't figure out is that I don't do nearly the amount of talking that Mike does and he hasn't lost his voice but once. And that was at a time where he needed to use his voice. The only other thing I can come up with is while we were coming home from closing the deal on our car we were almost T-boned by a lady pulling out from a parking lot. I must have left my voice behind with my heart. I hope I am better tomorrow so I can talk to my girls Tara and Elisa.

Yes Virgina there is a Santa Clause

Our wishes and prayers came true yesterday. We have found a car! After a month and a half of doing without and relying on rides from friends we have found a car that is far newer then we had figured we could get. It is a 2000 Dodge Intrepid. It is four door, auto, air (Yeah!), cloth interior and lots of room for a family of 5. We hemmed and hawed all the way home as to what we should call our newest addition. Sandy wanted to call her Christine, but I really didn't want the car possessed by bad spirits, Mike wanted to call it Doge, but that was shot down real fast. I came up with Dotty. It is a Dodge after all and Vicki was a Crown Vic. Hey, what can I say, we need a life. Sandy didn't care for the name but it isn't her car, so she will have to deal. Now I can call Tara & Elisa either today or tomorrow and tell them all about Dotty.

The hormone fairy strikes again!

Our 15 yr old daughter Sandy is home for Christmas break. She got out early yesterday and when she came home she was acting like she had lost her best friend. We asked her what was wrong and we got a sullen "nothing". We made the comment that we thought she would be more excited since she was out of school for the next week and a half and her response was a shrug. That should have been our first warning. She was fine for the most part yesterday except for a few incidents (see yesterday's post). She woke up today on the wrong side of the bed. She was whiny, disrespectful and argumentative. I have started a new tact in regards to her attitude and disrespect. She is given three warnings that she has to improve her mood. And if she continues I make her write one page front and back "I will or I will not" what ever she is doing. She absolutely hates writing and will complain about how she can't write that much. If she gets even more snarky, then I will add an additional page to her writings. At this point she has maybe 5 out of 8 left to do. I told her that she was going to do one page a day over her vacation until she got it all done. Since she was gone most of the day yesterday I didn't press her doing any of the writing. I told her this morning that I wanted a page and a half and she started to whine and it went down from there. My only guess is that the hormone fairy made a visit sometime yesterday and decided to remain for awhile.

A 15 yr olds' shopping spree

The pastor's wife came to me the other day wanting to know if she could take me and Sandy out for a ladies day out. It seems that some of the ladies of the church noticed that Sandy was not wearing nice clothes to church on Sunday. So they put some money into the kitty and wanted to contribute to Sandy's new wardrobe. Suffice it to say that in my humble opinion the money they contributed was far, far more then what was necessary. We first went out to a nice Italian restaurant. I had cheese, sausage and spinach ravioli (yummy), Kay (pastor's wife) had the cob salad and Sandy had chicken fingers. Yes, she had chicken fingers at an Italian restaurant. What can I say? That's our daughter. We then went to Khol's clothing store where we all picked out shirts for her to try on. I didn't get an end count, but she spent half on the total allotted there. Then we went to the mall and wandered. The crowds really were not too bad. She decided that she absolutely had to have a new pair of sneakers. She first wanted boots for slopping around in the mud, but typical of a 15 yr old female, changed her mind. She bought brown suede sneaks. I told her that she would have to wear different footwear when it rained, but that was no deterrent. She then wanted to look for more jeans, but I talked her into looking for skirts to go with all her tops. We wandered into a couple of stores including JC Penny, but not one store carried skirts that I could live with that she liked. By this time it was 6 pm (we had left our house about 1:15 pm) and Kay & I were exhausted. I still had to stop at Wal-Mart to pick up some things that I needed. Sandy was none to happy with the idea of stopping her shopping spree. To put it in her words "This is really dumb". We told her that we would take her out again after Christmas. She wasn't really happy, but knew better then to argue with a tired, hurting mom. We then went to Wal-Mart and I got what I needed rather quickly, but I had to wait for Sandy to finish her Christmas shopping. It was after 8 pm by the time we walked through the door. I think she would have shopped until after midnight if she could have gotten away with it.

All I want for Christmas is.....................a car

In the beginning of November we lost our first car Vicki. She was a 1989 Crown Vic (hence the name Vicki) and she was the first car we have ever had together. Mike & I have been together for 8 yrs and until February of this year we got along fine on public transportation, rides from caring friends, loan of a car from friends or on our own two feet. When we lived in Phoenix we were close enough to grocery stores and could take a bus to where we needed to go. And since we never had our own car whenever we needed it, we never knew what we were missing. Now we are living in an area were walking to the store is not an option, there is no bus transportation available and taxis are not an option, so we have to rely on generous people from our church to get anywhere. Now don't get me wrong, I love our church family and they have been generous to a fault. However I can sense that they are getting tired of carting us to our doctors appointments, grocery shopping and back and forth to church. We don't live very close to church anymore so anyone who comes to pick us up for church, or anything else for that matter, has to drive about 20 to 25 minutes one way to reach us. We desperately need a car and if Santa were to ask me what I want for Christmas, I would say all I want for Christmas this year is a car.

In case you were wondering...

As Mike discovered, the only way we seem to be able to place a picture into the profile here, is to post one up on the blog. Well, here goes. So if anyone other than those who already know me have been wondering here is what I look like!

Whos' screw up?

A few weeks ago we decided that we needed to change banks. The one we had we were not happy with the service we were receiving. So we opened a new checking and savings account with another bank, closed out our old account and notified Social Security of the change of banks. We erroneously assumed (and you know the saying that goes with that word) that Sandy's check would be transferred with Mike's since he is her payee. Well that was not the case. Sandy's check went to the old savings account. Ok, lesson learned. We went to the old bank, took the money out and closed the savings account and vowed we would notify SS about the change to Sandy's account. Then our car died and we forgot to call SS. We did not remember until after Sandy's money did not show up. Mike called SS and they told us that they would electronically transfer the money and to give it 3-5 working days. We checked the bank account on-line and no money. Soooo Mike called SS again and they couldn't understand why the money wasn't there, but to give it another day and to call today if it wasn't there. Again, no money. Mike decided to give it another day. We get our mail today and we got notification from our old bank that they have reopened our old savings account and Sandy's money was deposited there. Now my question is this, what gave our old bank the right to open an account that has been closed and why didn't SS tell us when we were talking to them on the phone that Sandy's money had gone into the old account?