Happy Birthday JM

I can't believe it's been 3 years. I guess it really is that time flies.

I am sorry that you don't have many pictures in your scrapbook.
Actually, I am sorry you don't have a scrapbook with anything in it at all.

But.. I remember..

How you were mobile early and mobile you were.
How you loved taking the potatoes out of the bottom of the microwave cart
How one time to took a bite out of nearly every one
How you loved getting into stuff, partucularly the pantry.
How you'd climb anything.
How big you've been compared to kids your age
How worried I was that you weren't talking.
How much you talk now
How happy we were when we found out we were expecting you
How much you look exactly like your father
How funny you are about wanting to wear shoes indoors but take them off in the car everytime.
How you were riding a bike when you were 2
How happy you were to ride in the powerwheels jeep as the passenger, waving goodbye to me.
How many times I've called poison control after you'd gotten into something
How quickly you can get into anything
How much you want to do everything your brothers and sisters do
How much of a love bug you are
How much you love dogs.
And now cats

Happy birthday- life wouldn't be the same without you!

Our 15 minutes of fame

http://www.nctimes.com/business/article_2da72a74-2525-57ea-a9b7-b9e1823c3eb4.html

We also received a call from our local NBC affiliate

wow

Larry suggests we get JM's hair cut before that happens :-)

If you post stuff on craigslist

You get emails  such such as this


Dear Customer,

Thanks for choosing our Craigslist telephone marketing program! In the next 18 hours you'll begin getting calls from Craigslist affiliates offering few deals.

Preferable hours choosen by the member to take calls:: 1:15 AM to 4:30 AM sandiego



If you choose to opt out from the database, click here . We'll take your phone number off our program so you won't get any product promotion calls from craigslist sponsors again.


Best regards

Flossie Garner

http://sandiego.craigslist.org/nsd/zip/1566941887.html



sandiego


So far so good. NO 1:30-4:30 am calls.

Post Moving Depression

(it's ok, Mom. I'm not really depressed)

But...

I realized this week how little I like moving.

I mean I like the opportunity to purge through stuff that we don't need and the chance to organize (again) from a fresh start..

But really. It's not a fresh start.

All your crap from you last house ends in your new house and the end result looks like the last house threw up it's contents and spewed it across the entire house, yard and garage.

Seriously. I've been unpacking for a week and I've got... the kitchen unpacked. And the linen closet. And guest room.

But the laundry has piled up and it didn't help things one bit that the week before the move the laundry piled up until I finally washed it and tossed it into garbage bags marked "fold, sort and put away" I had 6 contractor bags of "fold, sort and put away" clothes. It's a wonder there was any left to pack. But not such a wonder why my kids had not been able to find clean pj's or long pants the last few days before the washing machine was hooked up.. which would have been yesterday.

All.. the luxuries of having working laundry facilities in your home.

So last weekend all (ok, the vast majority) of our household stuff was moved. A friend with a truck and trailer came and we ended up hiring 3 movers since our free help wasn't showing. Then the following day we rented an enclosed trailer to move the rest of our stuff..
And then the rain came. Lots and lots of rain. Monsoon sort of rain. And we did our best to unload the trailer in the lighter rain and wait out the down pours. And windy.. boy was it windy. I almost expected to see a weather person filming a 'hurricane update' it was so windy.

So. I guess it's not paradise here 100% of the time. Only 99%. Sadly it's not fun to move stuff that 1% of the time.

So after a week of rain we attempted move #2. Because we had a garage of business inventory that needed to be moved. And the grill, bikes, car top carrier, pallets that no one wanted for free, out door toys and all of Larry's tools. We filled our trailer, re-deposited it back at the storage lot and then filled a Uhaul truck.

When I say "we" this time I don't actually mean "we".
This time we hired help.

The kind of help that stands along the street at certain locations looking for work.
And my spanish is pretty rusty so I let Larry do the hiring part.

I guess what you do is you pull up, roll down your window and they ask "how many you need?" and you say "3" and then there's a race for 3 to get into your vehicle.

Just in case you want to hire some 'stand on the side of the road looking for work workers'

I know we'd been joking about it since we got here, but fear of arrest always kept us from doing it.. Welll.... NOW we actually asked local law enforcement about it and he said "well.. it's against federal law but we don't really enforce it here." Not only that but he told me they made $8-10/hr and they might approach you in the Home Depot parking lot for work as well. Interesting. No one approaches me in the Home Depot parking lot. I don't even see anyone doing any approaching.

Anyway... back to our workers... Larry said he was looking for 3 young-ish guys, knowing how heavy the diaper bales are. Cept 3 older men beat them to it. I'd guess 2 were in their 50's and a younger guy who served as the "translator" for them was in his 30's, maybe 40's. I use translator loosely because my translator capacity would be about his translator capacity.

And work they did. They made quick work of the garage and then cleaned it up and cleaned up the yard. Amazing. Larry and I were working on cleaning the yard and they saw what we were doing and followed suit. You don't see english speaking people with web sites looking for work doing that.

And then they came here and then emptied said uhaul.

And you know if it was Larry and I we'd have been doing that until midnight and then at it again tomorrow.  And much more sore than we currently are. I really like hiring people.

And we hired people to clean smelly house after we moved the household stuff out. And that house had never seen such clean. And I didn't have to spend the entire weekend doing it. I spent that time loading the remaining stuff in the trailer. (and wrangling kids out of the road)

And hired a babysitter to watch those same kids today for the major stuff moving time. Poor babysitter. She is an older lady who lived in our old neighborhood who would watch the kids while we went to bible study and other random occasions. We had her come to the new house the day after we moved and she was overwhelmed. And she doesn't drive that far so she brought her son who stayed the whole time with her.

So I asked her if she was free to watch them and she thought it would be better to watch them at her house.

ok. you asked for it. I know she enjoyed it, but was thoroughly exhausted after 5 hours. And she had a cat that the kids LOVED. Picked the poor thing up, carried it around. Even JM.

Well.. time to clean up enough to find the bed..

2 days left

That's all before we move.

In theory.

Or That's the day that we hope and pray people actually show up to help us.

Today we were blessed by 3 older gentlemen who came to paint and prep for painting the remaining few items. I volunteer in the Nursery with a wife of one of the gentlemen who thought they could help us.
And help they did. I now have a painted laundry room/entry way and the doors for the storage cupboards were sanded and primed before they left.

The laminite floor is now in the study and master closets, all rooms minus the master bath have been painted (The walls aren't yet ready for me to paint, Larry says. I had painted, uh, at least 3 rooms he didn't think were ready so this is a sticky point. I'll just wait, It's a bathroom, I can paint it while we live here.)
The lights are in nearly everywhere.
Carpet still missing a piece. That drama continues.
When I went to bring back the threshold and corner molding for the returned laminate floor, I had the misfortune of meeting the owner of the company who asked what the problem with the carpet was again.
They had a new sales guy there who when I walked in carrying 12 foot long board asked how could he help me and I said I was here to exchange it for new since the last was mis-printed, etc.. and he says 'I've never heard of that before!'

And I thought 'you must be new here' but said 'yeah, it was hard for us to believe ourselves'

At which point one of the girls said "you must be Mrs Cowles."
Yeah.
She'd been here more than a week.
Everyone else in the building knew who we were and how much trouble we've been causing for each other.

Anyway.. that floor is in and I'm pretty happy with it. The trim in that room will need to be painted and then it'll be set. Except for curtains and cleaning the windows from extra paint..

Overall.. I can see the end of the tunnel. At least in the painting the new house tunnel.

But I realized how much I still haven't packed. Apparently I(or my helper from last week) packed all of Kayla's clothes. Which of course had led to wailing and gnashing of teeth that she doesn't want to wear what I can find for her to wear. It figures the kid who will wear the same outfit day and night for a week didn't have much dirty clothes in the laundry for me to find her clothing to wear. Now if it was the older two..

Note to Mom, I know understand why you'd get mad when you'd see folded clothes in the dirty laundry pile. I makes me batty, too.

So off I go to ship a zillion orders for the last time before we pack up the business for a few days. I mis-timed our 'vacation' for the business and now I have to catch up in a hurry. And since the computer with the program that lets me change the website is gone and the soft ware to re-load it is packed in one of the dozen or so boxes labeled 'office' it will have to wait.

Sadly.. pregnant moms don't like waiting.

Which makes me want to say "didn't you have SOME notice the baby was coming before today?" I'm not taking to the premature birth moms. I'm talking to the ones that email me their due date is this week and they need their order express mailed. Really. God gave you 40 (plus or minus) weeks for a reason.

As one of my professors used to say: "poor planning on your part does not constitute and emergency on mine"

I do enough poor planning on my own without having to compensate for someone else's lack of planning skills.

In happy kid news.. Kayla and JM have discovered the linen closet. Especially now that it's 90% empty. Earlier today I found him on the floor in the bottom of the closet with blanket and pillow and Kayla on the shelf above him also with blanket and pillow. pretending to go to sleep.
Sheesh.. had I known all I needed was a closet with shelves I wouldn't have invested in bunk beds. Or rooms to put the bunk beds in.

oh what a week

I can't even remember most of it. Which is probably good.

Lets see... the more memorable parts-

JM spilled my entire cup of coffee on my computer this week. Because he was throwing a fit that he wanted more juice. Which my answer had been "no" about 100 times already.

The computer is now awaiting a new keyboard with me hoping it will fix it.

Luckily it was my "old" computer. We had recently purchased a new computer from my (super cool) computer brother, but since it wouldn't work with the hard drive Larry bought for it, the new computer had been sitting on a shelf waiting for me to HAVE to use it. Larry was planning on taking my old computer to Afghanistan with him. So I was going to have to start using it sooner than later. He was planning on taking it because thus far it has been indestructible. Truly a match made in heaven as far as computers go. It had been dropped countless times. Once on it's power cord so that it pushed the little thing in the computer in at an odd angle and bent the power cord tip. A new power cord and a little fixing from Larry and it still works. Several hits from table to tile floor chipped the case but it still runs (tho occasionally the battery could fall out for a while). The keys had the letters worn off several of the buttons and the paint was worn off on the mouse left click button and the scroll side.  I loved my computer like a comfortable pair of shoes. 

And I'm not a fan of change. Especially when it involves me trying to remember all those pesky passwords the computer had been remembering for me for the past 4 years.

So here I am using an unfamiliar computer and can't figure how to get the font from the microscopic to a font I can actually read.  In buying Larry sunglasses for Christmas, I tried on a pair of those reading glasses. And I refuse to admit that I could actually see a little better with them. Refuse.

As far as my vision goes, I retract what I said about military medicine. They have a civilian neurologist who I call a genius and has seemingly fixed my vision in about 2 weeks. Well..About 80%. Which is phenomenal. With a silly little pill that causes drowsiness and weight gain, but dang it, it fixed that burning in the back of my head and the double vision, which my best guess right now is from that odd migraine variant which if I was a real Nurse Practitioner I'd know the answer to. Since I only pretend to be one these days, I can't remember the name.. But..I'll call her genius. But it doesn't seem to halt the normal vision aging process. Waiting for a magic pill for that.

Hey.. if you go to the right hand bottom corner and click the "plus button with 100%" next to it, you can make the font bigger. Ah. I can see clearly now the font is bigger...

OK. now that that ADD stream of conscious moment is done..

Back to the past week.  The counter-top went in. Took 2 days. The guys who first came started sweating and talking really fast in spanish and while I couldn't understand them well, I got the message pretty clear that the counter they carried in did not fit where it was supposed to. The ground a bunch of it down in the front yard and some of it then fit, but the rest they had to bring back to the shop to re-adjust. They called English-speaking boss man (who is the guy our contract was with..) who came to explain they'd be back the following afternoon with the counters after they fixed it. I had the vision of the Grinch telling Cindy loo Who he was bringing the Christmas tree back to fix as he was saying it. Probably because our dealings with the company we bought the counters(and carpet and tile) from has been nothing less than a major nightmare.

So much of a nightmare there is a lawsuit happening and Larry is being subpoenaed to testify.  I snorted it will be hard to serve him a subpoena in Afghanistan, but he seems to think it will happen before he leaves.

But basically the sales guy/contractor we worked with sold us product and arranged the contractors to do the work under the umbrella of the company but not through the company so that we paid the sub-contractors directly to do the work. Apparently he was supposed to do it through the company, the company was supposed to get paid (more) and then they'd pay the sub-contractors(less).  So the company fired him, citing conflict of interest.  We got a call from the company and the guy almost simultaneously telling us this news.

And the story probably would have ended there...  Cept owner of the company called all the subcontractors and told them if they still wanted to work for him, they could never work for sales guy/contractor(SG/C) again. So SG/C filed a complaint with some governmental agency citing racketeering or something and oh, by the way owner is really a drug dealer... of course he is innocent until proven guilty.

If only I was making this stuff up.

Anyway.. we're still dealing with this company. Who installed bedroom carpet in the living room and then ran short of carpet for bedroom. Their tile subcontractors also installed tile so that the smaller tile is substantially lower then the larger tile, so the floor is uneven. Very uneven. And without pulling up all the smaller tiles and re-grouting the entire thing it won't be fixed. And I really can't see that happening. And it will really put a kink in our trying to move in this week.

The laminate floor we bought was misprinted so cherry was bright orange and the pattern didn't run along the board, it was printed at an angle. So he just went back to bring it back and they have to replace it. It's been ordered, they'll let us know when it's in.

We bought it all the same week, or else we would have took warning from our first dealings with the company and subcontractors and gone elsewhere.

I have pictures on facebook, so if you want to see pictures, mosey on over to there and look in the "under construction" album. If you're not on facebook and/or not my friend on facebook you'll just have to wait. I can upload pictures straight to facebook from my phone camera and until the computer situation is settled, I don't see me messing with cameras, camera cords and the computer.

Anyway... we had to tell our landlord that we weren't going to be out on the 10th as we thought. And there's the disagreement on what date our monthly rent should have started on. The contract originally signed was the 1st. However... he wasn't ready until the 9th. Actually the house wasn't really ready then since the house was filthy and the carpets were soaked.  And 10 days of rent is alot. But the signed paper work is the 1st, so I think we'll be SOL on that one.

And then he offered to lower our rent by $700/month if we'd stay. Of course we'd already bought our house at this point. And I'm SO ready to move into a non-nasty carpet house. And our mortgage with taxes and everything is still less than what rent would be.

And then there's the sticky point that he stopped paying his mortgage in May. and we're getting all his foreclosure notices. He's been in pre-forclosure since Nov 1st. He should have 91 days from then until when the bank takes the house. Which makes it Feb 1st, I believe.

Really. I couldn't dream this up if I tried.

JM's EGD esults came back. The good news is his pancreatic and other enzymes were ok, no sign of celiac disease, but his esophagus was inflamed and he demonstrated significant reflux during the EGD.  So.. they're starting him on a PPI for the next 12 weeks. Which doesn't solve the diarrhea issue. So they're going to try some Flagyl to see if it fixes things. And put him on some strong pro-biotics.  So. no, we still don't really know what's wrong with him. But we do know if you hang around as a patient in chidlren's hospitals around Christmas, you will get gifts from people dressed as Santa. We're still dragging Shamu around since his EGD. We haven't actually started the meds because the dr at Balboa can only prescribe in Balboa so unless we want to drive an hour to wait a few hours there, she has to email one of the peds who has seen him to put in the prescription up here so we can go and wait for a few hours here.

fun times, I tell you.

Today's dose of reality

Brought to you by Government.
Yes, you pay for it. And for that pay taken right off the top of your check...

You get phone trees with voice recognition that can.not. recognize an adult voice over the children's noise in the background. Apparently helicopters bombing in the background also confuse it and you get a nice computer lady repeating over and over "I'm sorry, I don't understand, please repeat" and then dumps you back into the voice tree that reminds you to visit their website at www.itdon'twork.gov

Back on the website, you go to renew your licenses. Now of course it's your fault that you didn't renew on time. Admittedly. So now I'm 3 days late. and counting. And IF I could just send a check and the paper thing they send in the mail- I WOULD HAVE. Except I have 2 licenses and they only sent me one renewal piece of paper. OR rather.. the Government run post office only delivered one. Perhaps both were deposited into the mail on their end. Either way. I have to renew 2, have the paperwork to renew only one and thus I can get in my car and drive for 8 hours to go and wait for 3 to talk to someone or I can attempt to contact someone with smoke signals from here.

 4 screens into "continue" when the computer tells me I don't have an address associated with my license I'm trying to renew. OK.. back to the license and I see an address. right there. yes it's there. OK. I'll update it to the new one. click continue and it tells me I don't have an address.. repeat. click a bunch of other stuff. curse at the computer. Remembering the definition of insanity being repeating the same thing and expecting different results.

Back to the phone. THIS time I get a busy signal. I hit redial every 30 seconds until it rings and I get "I am sorry, due to high volume of calls, we cannot accept your call at this time." click. Curse under my breath again.  Try calling again until I get the phone tree. Finally get to the "renew licence" press number 3, press number 3 and get the "due to high call volume" message

Bang head on the computer until one of the keys stick. Mutter about not eating at the computer.

Try calling to order a dumpster (again) because we have more trash than we're allowed in our one permitted trash can at the new house with the construction stuff. Get a person on the first try. Yippee. Things are going good. Order dumpster. Give them credit card. Can't find our household credit card, must be in my jeans pocket upstairs, pull the business one out of our wallet. And it's declined. Oh, right, I forgot. It's Monday.

Monday is the day that our credit card company decides we've have too many charges in a set period of time and they turn it off until I call in to politely ask them to turn it back on. We've been through this with several credit card companies. They're all the same.

You see.. we ship alot of packages. And most of them we ship fedex. ALOT of packages. Over 1000 since June.
Fedex bills each package individually. And they process charges 2x a week. One of them being Monday,  For the past 4 days of shipments.
Credit cards have a limit on number of transactions you have have in a day and in a month. Most mondays we exceed that limit. I have yet to pin them down on the exact number but one of the rookies told me it was 25. Several supervisor calls later, they have assured me they raised the limit, but apparently we still exceed what ever our mystical magical number is nearly every week.

I have given up on changing it. I've written letters to Fedex asking them if perhaps they couldn't do ONE charge for that day's charges? or do an invoice for a week of charges, I've written and changed credit card companies thinking it was just the credit card company's policies, but apparently it's universal and I'm thinking all the 'fraud operations' decisions are handled by the same 3 people for all companies. I've stuck with this one because it has reward points for stuff I actually use. And for the most part they're nice about turning it back on. I mean, it's embarrassing enough for the card to decline and usually they apologize and say they'll put on on hold to talk to their supervisor who will also apologize and tell me it won't happen again.

And it doesn't. For about 6 days.

And I'm happy their phone tree doesn't have voice recognition "technology" because the time it takes me to say the "16 digit account number" is far too long to avoid some huge racket or disaster to happen in the background.

And all that before 8:30 am.

I'd like to say the rest of my day went splendidly.

Spent a good chuck of time cleaning the work site (aka new house) and then taping off the remaining trim to paint. And ran out of tape. I could have sworn I had 2 more rolls of tape, but it was no where to be found.

So.. kids in car and off to buy tape.

Dressed in my "painting clothes" which today consisted of a ratty tshirt and Larry's old BDUs (camouflage) pants from his skinnier airforce days. The BDU's in themselves are quite a fashion statement, much less paint covered and torn and ripped.

Not wanting to waste the 40 minutes it would take me to go home disembark and re-embark the kids into carseats I figured 'heck, I'll run in like this. They've seen worse.

No, possibly not. At least not at Walmart. I've gone in paint covered in Home Depot and looked like I fit in just fine. But Home Depot doesn't sell milk and we were also out of milk.

And go figure. As I'm walking out I see one person, a person who knows me as the owner of little lions, sees me and we exchange greetings. Well. THAT's making a great public image.

At least we're real. What you see is what you get. No mascara, no hairspray. Just plain old salt of the earth- the kind you put on the road in winter. Yep. That would be me. And life just wouldn't be the same with out me. Or at least without salt. Me.. ah.. well.. life would be less dull. And the poor guardians of my kids would be going and getting themselves some Prozac.

If I could turn back time..

I'm embarrassed to admit that last night Larry mentioned 'remember 10 years ago and the hoopla over y2k and waiting for the clock to strike midnight to see if the lights would still be on?

And... I didn't remember.

I mean, yeah, I remember the fuss about it and the 6 gallons of bottled water that sat in our basement for years after because we were stocking up 'just in case'

But. no. I don't remember that night.

OR pretty much alot of New Years Eve nights in the past 36 years.

Pathetic. Truly pathetic.

I remember opening a bottle of sparkling cider with friends that was the most.rancid.thing.ever.bottled.

I remember the night in high-school I was at a friends and one of the other friends had to go to the ER. Well.. I remember kinda. I don't remember whose house I was at or who was going to the ER. And aside from that excitement it was un-memorable.

I remember the year my brother and sil came to visit me in Nashville and parking across the street and walking to see the lights at Opryland because I was too cheap to pay the $20 to park at Opryland. I think that was New Years Eve???

Oh, yeah, and the year I had the bright idea to drag me, brother and sil into boston for first night one of those 'dangerously cold' nights and got us horribly lost (on foot and walking and unable to even find a T station) sometime after midnight miles from our hotel. ok. yeah, I remember that. And that I lost my just-bought cell phone at the pizza place we stopped in at midnight for pizza and to defrost and went back the next day to get it and got a parking ticket in the 2 minutes it took to run in and grab it. I was parked in a loading zone. because it was Boston and parking there is only second to New York in terms of difficulty. Tho possibly Europe and Asia would be worse, but I can't speak from experience on those..

And for 2 years we went to Larry's high school friend's parents condo because it was tradition for them to have a party. I remember mostly because we went the first year we met and our first 'couple picture' was taken that night. Ahh... fond memories.. Larry with a mustache, earring and gold chain around his neck. And leather trench coat. We still disagree on that silly coat.

Last year I took the kids to see the fireworks at Legoland. Of course those were at 8:30 or something and I'm sure I was asleep by midnight. Larry was working. Because it was his intern year and he worked every.single.holiday last year. don't miss that year at all.

Oh, and last night. Larry woke me up so we could ring in the new year together. Yeah. Again.. making memories.

But.. in an aside...

Dear  West Coast,
You are even more pathetic than we are. I can't believe that you tape the New York ball dropping and then re-broadcast it with "live from New York" in the top or bottom corner. Seriously lame. really lame.
I tried to find it at 9pm -when it was actually LIVE and couldn't find it. At midnight it's broadcast as "live" but seriously.. LAME.No wonder people here don't have a clue.


So.. That's 7 new year's eve's accounted for. My memory has a lot of holes in it.