TGIF!! I hope all our Florida friends are safe after the powerful hurricane and storm surges. We don’t have TV right now where I’d see more images, but I did see news feeds on my phone. That hurricane was scary, and the aftermath is horrendous.

Now to totally shift gears, let’s dive into sharing five random things about our week. Here’s mine:

1. Maggie is adjusting to her new home. The first couple days she was exploring, running around and thrilled to see people coming and going. But during the nights, she was scared and barked in her kennel. The first night I let her out to sleep in her bed next to me. The second night, we made her tough it out, the third night she was such a good girl. I’m proud of her! Really! When we first got her, she barked ten long nights. Just so everyone knows we’re not being cruel, we have real reasons why we want her to sleep in a kennel, the two main ones being 1) she is so attached to me, we want to give her places to feel safe without me next to her, and 2) fire or other emergencies in the middle of the night — in her kennel we always know where she is and can quickly load her in the car to escape.
2. We love it in the new house so far! Although Wizard took a picture of me trying to cook dinner in my new kitchen and posted it to our family message  board saying, “Mom is lost trying to cook in the new kitchen!” He’s not wrong!!
3. The day after we moved in, we had a plumbing issue that happened when Wizard was gone and I was just leaving for a long awaited specialist (gastroenterologist) appointment. Suddenly I heard a weird bubbling. At first, I thought it was the washing machine where I was washing towels, but it looked fine. I heard the noise again, and found the toilet in the bathroom next to the laundry room was bubbling. Like almost boiling. I looked for a shut off valve, when it stopped. I HAD to leave. I shut off the washer and called Wizard. He answered, and said the exact words I needed to hear: “I’m pulling in the driveway now, come outside, take the car and go, I’ve got this.” It turned out the housing track superintendent was right outside our house (even more luck!) and knew what it was. There’s a cleanout drain outside, and some worked had put paper towels down there. They cleaned out a wad and all is well. Crises averted!
4. We’ve had lots of help! I want to give a shout out to middle son, youngest son, my youngest daughter in law AND her mom! They have all done so much! My sister’s been here twice too while dealing with her own home owner problems (water leak) because she’s my rock! Oldest son and his wife, as well as middle’s wife all have offered, but they are on call for later projects :-). So many people have called, texted and emailed, knowing what this move meant to us (there’s a lot of reasons it needed to happen) and we are so grateful for that support. And you all know we loved our old house too, but life and needs change.
5. Fun story; two sons were here helping to install ceiling fans. Wizard was involved too, and being a “dad” telling the two boys what to do. The two boys have installed more ceiling fans than Wizard, so that was fun. Youngest DIL and I were sealing the granite and doing a ton of other stuff, but we saw all this, including the boys endless patience with dad’s constant advice. All the boys were in the master bedroom trying to figure out how the housing track color-coded the wiring in the ceiling fan prewire, and the two boys kept telling wizard they know what they’re doing. Finally the fan was in and they told Wizard to turn it on. He did…and sparks flew everywhere! I was walking through and ducked in panic. There was a stunned silenced afterward, then youngest announced, “It’s okay, everyone calm down.” No one screamed or said much, so yeah, we’ll do that youngest Anyhow, Wizard recovered from teh shock, looked at the two boys, “Told you it was wrong.” LOLOLOL!!! But all was fine. Middle (who has the most experience with all wiring, he really does know what he’s doing) replaced the wall switch, then they all redid the ceiling fan connections and it works great. They installed the next two without incident. Two morals to this story: 1) Our new house didn’t burn down and 2) Wizard is sure he was right! (For me, the best thing ever is that our kids wanted to be here to help!)

I know everyone will tire of hearing about the house. I totally understand. And we will soon learn the problems and challenges this house will have, but for the moment, we are enjoying it! I’ll try to post pictures on Monday (I hope — we keep getting sidetracked form goals by multiple ongoing projects).

So that’s my five and now I’d love to hear yours! I really do love hearing about your lives! Have a great weekend!

Hi everyone! I missed you all, but man, the days are a blur. We are in the new house, and this morning we spent a few hours cleaning the old house. Tomorrow we will turn over the keys. We loved that house, but now we will love this one We are so exhausted and sore, but we are here!

I tried to post a picture of my kitchen, and the blog site refuse for “security reasons.”  So weird! I’ve never seen that before. I’ll figure it out, but not tonight (which is last night when I wrote this). I barely slept at all last night and fatigue is making me loopy and blank even though the days have been jammed packed with things happening.

Overall, everything has gone well. We hired movers, and we are so glad we did! It was over a 100 degrees. The poor movers, I don’t know how they work in the heat like that. We did all our past moves ourselves, but this time we just couldn’t. As it is, we’ve been working from the time we get up until 8ish at night for four days straight. Anyway, the movers did great, and now we’ll be unpacking and organizing until 2030

How was your weekend and the beginning of the week? I really want to know!

I really hope I feel more coherent by Friday, LOL!

TGIF!! Lets dive right into sharing 5 random things about our week!

1. Our grandson Turbo had his school pics done and because I’m a grandma, I want to share one:
2. Maggie has a really bad habit of running out the sliding glass door or screen to the back yard when it opens. So I’ve been breaking her of that. I had an epic and hilarious fail this week. Both the glass door and screen were closed, so I put her in a sit and opened the glass slider. I turned to her to check she was in position then turned back, and for some reason, she thought I’d released her. She ran smack into the sliding screen door that I hadn’t opened yet. I mean…seriously? How did she not see it? It popped off the track and both dog and screen were fine, but *I* clearly am failing at this little piece of training, LOL!  By the way, Maggie at first stopped, clearly confused, then a second layer she shook off the screen door and ran to check her lizard spots. The lesson in this story? Never let a little thing like a closed door stop you from your goal, LOLOL!
3. We did our final walk through yesterday! The key things are getting done. There will be a few things will happen later, and that’s to be expected.
4. The big news now — by the time this posts we will have signed the final docs for the new house! We’re doing it around 5 or 6 on Thursday evening, and I’m writing this blog right before that because who knows what might happen the rest of the night. We’ll either get the keys then, or sometime today (Friday). Either is fine and we are so danged happy! It has been a long haul, and there’s a lot more to do to get moved and settled, but YAY! We are thrilled!
5. The plan is to spend the weekend doing things in the new house and packing more stuff in the old house, then on Monday morning the movers come. In all that chaos is Wizard’s 50th Reunion on Saturday night. It’s crazy that our move fell on the same weekend, when we bought the tickets, we thought we’d already be moved in. Anyhow, we will go if we can and it’ll probably be a nice break for us. I’m also taking Maggie to boarding Saturday afternoon and will pick her up Monday afternoon. That way we don’t have to worry about leaving her for several hours Saturday night and she’ll be out of all the moving commotion. I will take her to the hew house for a few hours while we’re doing things in there so she will be familiar with it, then when she comes back on Monday, all her stuff (and ours) will be there.

I probably won’t be able to post on Monday in the typical moving chaos and exhaustion, unless I get a burst of energy and post from my phone (we won’t have internet for a couple days).

So that’s my five, now I’d love to hear yours! I hope everyone has a great weekend!

So we’re just here waiting for the time and place to sign the docs on the house and close. Maybe. It’s a bit of a nail biter when people are waiting to the last second to do their jobs and then asking for things they’ve had for months, or suddenly don’t understand what they do have. But we are being patient and staying positive. Truthfully, we know everyone is trying, but they are all overworked and pressured beyond reason (in my opinion). Especially with some staff turnovers that have happened and that is likely the reason we’ve had to resubmit documents.

So will we close on time??? Even my crystal ball is fogged with confusion at this point. I should know by Friday’s post. What I do know is that we have to be out of this house by the end of the month. I’ve held onto my “Leo” temper for 8 months now, and I really don’t want to test it

Which reminds me of a totally unrelated story about my temper. I don’t usually yell, but I solve problems. Like the time a hospital threatened to “release” my mom who had three fractures in her spine. So I had taken her in and had to go home to get my kids from school. My sister left work early and went to be with her, when the hospital doctor told her they were sending my mom home. This is a typical tactic that I won’t get into here. but I was familiar with it. When my sister called me in a panic and told me that, my temper snapped. I told them to her to tell them to go right ahead and release her — I’d have a newspaper reporter and photographer (before cell phones and going “viral” was a big thing) waiting there to document it. My sister to her credit, trusted me and told them what I’d said. I wasn’t bluffing, I was royally pissed and I’d have done it in a heartbeat. Once my sister told them that, the hospital had an instant change of heart and did the right thing. That’s what my temper looks like when I’m pushed beyond my limits.

All that said, I believe being nice and listening to others gets more done in my experience. It also makes me like myself better Another part of that story with my mom — over the next months as my mom got sicker she had to go into a full time care facility. When she got scared, was in pain and couldn’t get help, she’d threaten with, “I’ll tell my daughter when she gets here.” Now my mom had a high pain tolerance and sometimes wouldn’t realize how much pain she was in until it was really bad. I knew this, so when I’d walk into that situation, it was easy to resolve because I had a good relationship with the nurses and staff there. I’d taken the time to get to know them, and since they dealt with older sick patients everyday, they’d taught me a lot about how to handle things. Being there often, along with being nice, kind and asking questions, solved way more problems then my losing my temper ever would have. These people took as good of care of my mom as they could in that kind of setting, and I made sure to appreciate that every single day. They’d call me when she had any issues no matter how small. They’d never have done that if I’d been a jerk to them.

Which has nothing to do with the house But I really do know everyone is trying hard, and I have faith it’ll all work out.  Probably!

Do you have any random thoughts you’d like to share?

The weekend came and went exactly as the calendar promised, and overall it was a good one for us. And it’s been nice weather!

Friday we had the walk through of the new house. There’s just a few minor things fixed or finished, and everything looks to be on schedule. We are excited about that, and going through pretty typical frustrations of trying to get various arms of the process to give us info or dates. That is very normal, but aggravating as one glitch can start the dominos of delay. But we are pretty confident that everything will happen as planned.

Saturday I went to Kohls and bought new towels for one bathroom. I couldn’t make a decision on colors for the second bathroom, LOL! I just stood there debating until I realized that the store would still be there after we moved in and I had a better feel for it. And because I wasn’t looking for clothes at all, I stumbled on three long-sleeved shirts I really liked and bought those. After than exciting excursion, I came home and packed. No matter how much we pack, the second we fall asleep, more crap materialized in the dark. It’s like ghosts are going to vampire garage sales and refilling our cupboards or something.

Sunday I did more endless chores then we took Maggie to Home Depot to buy granite sealer. Maggie was so intrigued by the huge Halloween witches and  other assorted characters that were inflated and talking. People were watching her staring at the decorations and trying to figure out if they were friend or foe. It was my laugh for the weekend! Plus it got her out of the house too.

How was your weekend?

TGIF! Time to share five random things about our week. Here’s mine:

1. This afternoon we’re doing the walk through on our new house. It’s finally happening after 8 months!
2. We went to see Wizard’s mom this week. Maggie was thrilled! We sat out in her backyard and she ran around to her heart’s content. She was rolling on her back in the grass, and my mother-in-law noticed. Maggie kept doing it, then she’d lift her head and check to see if my mother-in-law was watching her. The dog is ridiculous. But I also love that Maggie can give my mother in law a bit of joy. Being 90 comes with challenges, but Maggie doesn’t care of my mother-in-law doesn’t remember her name or some silly little detail, and I think that gives my mother-in-law some relief. (And I’d just like to say, that I hope I’m in as good of shape physically as my mother-in-law is if I hit the major milestone of 90!)
3. The weather has cooled! The last two days we haven’t had to not run the air conditioning. It’s been nice to air out the house (even if we’re moving soon!). Plus it should help the electric bill.
4. Yesterday I spent time with my sister, because…we are never too old to need our sister. Also, I wanted to buy gorilla glue and she found it for me in Target! My sister has skills
5. This weekend, part of a freeway near us will be closed, which makes it a lot harder to get places like where two of our kids live. We have a lot to do around the house, packing is endless (and unpacking will be the same!), so that’s not too big a deal.

So that’s my kind of lame five, now I’d love to hear about your exciting week! I hope everyone has an amazing weekend!

This blog is one I originally wrote for the MurderSheWrites blog back in 2008. I’m posting it again just for fun

Missing Muse Report

Do you guys ever have one of those days where your muse isn’t cooperating? This blog is a parody I wrote about that frustrating feeling a while back for another blog. It’s from a police detective’s POV.

MISSING MUSE REPORT
12, MAY 2008
DESCRIPTION: SLIPPERY AND SNEAKY
STATUS: NO FREAKING IDEA

Monday morning, at eight oh four a.m., a woman came into the precinct. She wore jeans and a t-shirt with the words, I Kill for Chocolate, written across her chest. In a clearly agitated state, she reported that her Muse is missing.

“When was the last time you saw her?” I inquired.

“Never. I’ve never seen that hussy. She’s like smoke. Well not smoke because that would suggest fire. And trust me, I have not been on fire. So she’s like fog, except not fog. Fog is not the right word to describe her. Dry ice? Still not the right word to describe her. Okay, uh, let me think. Do you have a thesaurus?”

Feeling a headache coming on, I said, “Let’s skip the description. What is your relationship to Muse?”

“Hot and cold. No, too bland. Fire and ice? Friend and foe? No! No more clichés! My relationship to Muse is complicated. Like a cat! Yes, she’s sort of like a cat, friendly and sweet sometimes, then aloof and bitchy other times. Like a cat.

I realized I was bobbing my head back and forth like I was watching a tennis match. I tried to recap what the woman had said, “Muse is a cat? Ma’am, this is a police station. We don’t look for missing cats.”

“My Muse is not a cat! Where would you get such an idea? I said she’s like a cat. That’s a metaphor. Well I said like, so it’s actually a simile. But not a cat.”

I turned to look at the woman fidgeting on the chair facing my desk. “Have you been drinking?”

“Sure. Absolutely. I’ve tried it all. Wine, gin tonics, coffee and Kahlua, I still can’t find Muse! This morning, I woke up at 3 A.M. I meditated. I did Yoga. I lit candles. I asked my Higher Self for guidance. I downed two pots of coffee! And I still can’t find that sneaky, double-crossing, word-tease, idea-slut, anywhere!”

I had enough. “Let me get this straight. You are reporting Muse missing, but you can’t describe her, have never seen her and you look for her by doing Yoga, lighting candles and drinking coffee?”

“Yes! Exactly!”

“Ma’am you do realize this is a police station? That it’s a crime to make a false report?”

Her blue eyes lit up, she sat forward and put her arm on my desk. “Do you get a lot of false reports? I mean what kind of person makes a false report?”

He opened his mouth, “Well…”

“A desperate person, maybe a woman who can’t tell the truth, but—”
She stood up. “Thank you!”

“Uh, for what?”

She frowned, her blue eyes studying him as if he were a little dim. “Haven’t you been listening? I lost my Muse. Now I found her. You people do good work. Later.”

I watched her bounce out as if she were twenty pounds lighter. “What just happened?”