Footprints on the Moon

Wow, ignore the raccoon eyes please! Hopefully those black circles don’t look as bad as they feel. I promise I don’t need any specialty eye creams or anything, I just need sleep. Which I will be headed to do in about 15 minutes– just as soon as I blow dry my hair and watch the end of The Amazing Race.

Did you all enjoy your 4 day weekends? I know I did! And I only had a 3 day weekend. I had Thursday and Friday off, but I picked up a shift on Saturday. Honestly, other than that, I did a whole lot of nothing this weekend! Thursday was dinner with the family, Friday I washed the dishes and took a 3 hour nap, Saturday I worked first shift, and then today I washed my work uniforms and watched movies! I really wanted to take a nap, but resisted the urge so that I’d be able to sleep tonight.

Now to dry my hair so I can sleep! Just didn’t want to miss another Self Portrait Sunday since I’ve been pretty lax about those lately.

Lookie what I did! I took a break from eating enough holiday food that I would seriously consider a colon cleanse, to start crocheting again. I made these two dishcloths. Obviously, they’re not done yet, since they’re being held together with crochet hooks, but all they need are buttons sewn on!

I like the pattern on the one on the left, and the topper on the towel on the right. I’m going to tackle another one and attempt to merge the two patterns. I already adjusted the towel on the left because I was going to run out of yarn (it was going to be HUGE) before I was finished.

Not much, but I hadn’t seriously crocheted in a looong time, so I’m happy with it! Let’s just not talk about the baby blanket I started at least 2 years ago that is still about a third finished…

I was going to wait until the beginning of the year when everything settles down to update again, but I pulled the numbers for my own information, and figured I might as well share. As you can see, not much progress, but at least it’s all still headed down. I’ve done nothing but make minimum payments the last two months as my focus has been elsewhere. Namely, Christmas, my car insurance and registration. I paid my registration online on Friday, and wrote the insurance check last Friday. If that’s not painful enough to make you look for cheap insurance, I don’t know what is!

As far as Christmas goes, I’m nearly done. I have a small gift that I’d like to buy for my niece, and then my dad’s present. That’s all, and I’ll be set there. I have a couple of short paychecks coming between taking an unpaid day for Jason’s funeral and the holidays, but hopefully I’ll be ready to get back on the debt repayment plan soon. I’m ready to be able to make more progress again!

It is pretty much a requirement to post what you are thankful for on Thanksgiving if you have a blog, so I thought I would come over here and do that before I go to bed in just a few minutes. I have to be honest and say that there’s a large part of me that is bitter, cynical, jaded and probably more than a bit depressed that is entirely ungrateful. But the rest of me is smart enough to look around and realize how ridiculously blessed I am every day. I’m thankful for many things in my life.

… my family. They’re weird, and quirky, and wonderful.

… my friends. I don’t have a large group of friends that live in the area, but the ones I have here are awesome.

… the internet. It keeps me in touch with friends that aren’t in the area, and has allowed me to meet AMAZING people all across the country and the world. People who have been some of the greatest friends I’ve ever had, wonderful support during dark times, and people who rejoice with me when times are good.

… my job. Sure, I don’t like it so much when I’m trying to drag myself out of a warm bed at five o’clock in the morning, but especially these days, I have to be thankful for the simple fact that I have a job. I can pay my bills, and keep a roof over my head, and that’s always a good thing.

So thank you. To all of you. You’re wonderful. I’m blessed. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to go to bed, and wake up tomorrow morning the same cynical person I’ve always been.

This is the post that I hoped and prayed that I wouldn’t have to write. About an hour or an hour and a half after I posted the update last night, I got a message on Facebook to call Aunt Jane. That’s when she told me that Jason had died.

I think the best two words to describe how we are all feeling are shocked and devastated. We all knew that things didn’t look good and that he had a long road to recovery, but as he kept improving little by little, I think most of us started to hope for the best possible outcome. But yesterday he started bleeding internally, and they couldn’t get it stopped due to the blood thinners he had been on to prevent blood clots.

Right now, I really don’t want to hear about how Jason dying is all a part of God’s plan. Whether or not that is true is irrelevant. It’s just not the time. Right now, our hearts are hurting. Right now, I just want to be pissed off at how unfair life is.

He leaves behind a wonderful wife, a beautiful baby girl, and a large extended family who all loved him very much. We miss you already, Jason!

Well hello there! I’m still alive even if I haven’t blogged in a couple of weeks. I just haven’t had the mental energy to deal with it! Between Grandma being sick, and worrying about Jason who is still in Ann Arbor fighting for his life I just haven’t wanted to come over here and deal with the every day mundane things like linking to glucomannan or talking about how I’ve gone to work everyday and everything was business as usual. Plus in the middle of that, my modem went bad and I had no internet for several days until I was able to call Comcast and schedule a service visit.

Anyways. The last time I posted about Jason, he was in the hospital with a fever of 104. Things got markedly worse from there as his fever shot up to 107, and nothing they could do would bring it down. They ended up putting him on a ventilator and then into a medically induced coma to keep him calm and try and let his body heal. By the time they decided to airlift him to Ann Arbor to be put on a heart and lung machine, he was on full life support, his kidneys had started to fail, and the doctor here was only giving him a less than 25% chance of survival.

Thankfully things started turning around once they got him in Ann Arbor. He’s improved quite a bit, but there’s still a very long way to go. Even today, he had a very rough day and they had to take the ventilator back up to 100% before backing it off to 60%. They have him off the paralytics, and we’re all just praying that he continues to improve every day. As of right now, we have no way of knowing what kind of recovery time line he’ll be looking at, or even what kind of lasting damage he’ll be dealing with. They’re still trying to get him out of the woods.

Needless to say, your continued prayers would be very much appreciated. He’s got a wife and a baby girl, as well as a large extended family that really need him to recover and come home!

It seems like our family keeps getting the rugs pulled out from underneath us. Grandma is doing better, she’s at home, and we’re all on a 24/7 rotation to make sure there is someone there with her to help out if needed. She’s better, but there’s still a long way to go until she’s GOOD.

Then… my cousin Izzy’s husband Jason has been sick for about a week. Most likely the swine flu. But he just didn’t get better, and didn’t get better. Then Saturday night, Izzy took him to the ER because he wasn’t getting any better, and she was afraid his flu had turned into pneumonia. Turns out, it had. By last night, my mom called to tell me that they were putting him in the ICU and putting him on a ventilator. He had a temperature of 104 that they couldn’t get down and they couldn’t get his oxygen levels up. To sum it up in two words: it’s bad.

Izzy made a post on Facebook in the wee hours of the morning that there was slight improvement. Please pray that that improvement continues. They’ve got a 15 month old too, who thankfully shows no signs of getting the flu even though she’s been exposed.

Okay, obviously I didn’t take this picture today. Well, maybe it’s not obvious, but I did in fact take this picture yesterday, on my way out the door. I went over to my grandma’s to hand out candy to her trick or treaters. I live in an apartment with a locked lobby, so I’m fairly confident that I get zero kids coming by, or close to it anyways. So I dress up and go hand out candy at Grandma’s. I had at least one kid come up to get candy and yell “It’s Coraline!” so that was cool.

I noticed a couple of things though. First, what happened to manners? Except for the real little ones who were still holding onto Mom or Dad’s hand, we got very few thank yous. When I was younger and still going around, we all said thank you at every single house. Even handing out candy last year, the kids were very polite. Not so much this year.

Second… there was a house somewhere in the neighborhood handing out small cups of cider. Since when do parents let their kids have something like that? Did they buy term life insurance first? Maybe I’m overly paranoid… or just old enough to remember the horror stories around Halloween every year about things added to candy or whatever. My kids wouldn’t have been drinking the cider… and we wouldn’t have been able to drink it when we were young, you just don’t know! Take it to be polite, but throw it out later. I remember there was always an older guy in the neighborhood we trick or treated in as kids that would hand out Twizzlers. As in, peeled individually out of a regular package. We took it, said thank you, and threw it away at the next trash can.

Mom and I were the odd ducks out on that argument last night. What do you guys think? Prepackaged candy only for your kids from complete strangers?