Summer winds down to a close...

Good Monday Morning my lovlies! I hope your week is getting off to a great start!

Summer vacation is winding down to a close here in the House of Wolf, and I am glad for it. It has been a long and difficult Summer, and Alex has not had the best of vacations, as we did not get to do anything due to Jack being hurt, my Dad dying, and just general crap. I know she is anxious to get back to her friends and have some fun, and I am ready for her to have that as well, in addition to the relative peace and quiet I will have here.

I am looking forward to writing more here, and over at Planet Buddha, now that I will have more time to devote to it.

Tomorrow is Alex's open house, and they start school on Thursday, for half a day, with a full day Friday, which I find ridiculous. I never understood why the kids just can't go back on a Monday and be done with it.  I guess they are trying to ease the kids back in to it. But yeah, we are ready.

No new developments with Jack yet. Still no second surgery approval, and we have contacted a lawyer. I am not really allowed to talk about it anymore, due to insurance companies having people troll the internet looking for things to use against people when they get a lawyer, so until all that is over, I will not be mentioning it much. There is no change, he is not improving, as he has not had surgery, so I will leave it at that.

I am doing better myself. I have actually had a few days where I have not thought of my Dad at all, not the sad parts anyway. I still tell him goodnight and kiss his little container of bone dust before I go to bed, but I will probably do that for the rest of my life. There are not really any tears anymore. So healing is taking place.

Nothing else is really happening here at home, things are in a holding pattern until school starts, so we are just hanging around for these last few days until school routine becomes the norm again. Last night was the OFFICIAL start of Operation Bedtime, as all attempts last week died a fiery death, so I said to hell with it, I will start Sunday. Which we did. Of course, the bedtime is more for ME, since I have the issues dragging my ass out of bed that early in the morning. I am not so much worried about Alex, once school starts she will be tired and go to bed on time, just like always. Kids are very adaptive that way lol.

I got up at 8 this morning, although I was awake at 7, I was just enjoying the lounging in bed feeling, I do not get that often. All Summer it has been up all night, sleep most of the day and jump out of bed as soon as my eyes open because it is so late. So it was nice to lounge a bit and wake up fully. I feel good. As much as I am a night owl at heart, I like the routine myself when school starts. I will be fully ready to sleep in when next Summer rolls around, but for the most part, once we get on schedule, things will be great.

Things are about to pick up over at Planet Buddha as well, I can feel it. We have some new writers, and hopefully will have another here in the next couple of days. I have been blessed with an Admin role there, and I am SO happy and excited to be a part of the group there. Everyone there is so kind and intelligent and amazing. It feels like a second home. I feel really good about the whole experience and I am looking forward to working more there.

I think that about sums it up for this post. I am really excited about things to come, great things are in the works!

Have a great week everyone!!

A little bit of this...a little bit of that.

Howdy folks. Look, it has only been a week since I posted last, woohoo!

The school year is winding ever closer to being over. Part of me is thrilled, part of me is terrified. Jack and I are going to have a hard time finding stuff to keep her entertained this Summer, I can tell already lol. With him being home for at least 3 more weeks, hopefully we can get some beach time and other fun stuff in. They get out Thursday the 31st and I am so looking forward to not having to get up at the ass crack of dawn for a couple of months!

It has been a busy couple of weeks. Last Saturday we went with my two oldest kids and my 15 year old's boyfriend to the lake where said boyfriend lives. It was nice. There was a little party that we were there to basically chaperon, but we had a good time swimming.It is a private lake, only accessed my the homeowners, with a locked gate, and we were the only people there all day.

I have been working on a gift for my Mom and my two older kids. Mom bought..the gifts...and I, along with Perth, have been using our talents to improve said gift. I am being cryptic since my eldest girl sometimes reads my blog, and it would be my luck this would be the one post she sees lol. We are going over tomorrow to give the stuff to them. They will be very happy.

Last week Perth and I decided we would have a cookout. Perth would buy the food and Jack and I would prepare it. Perth and I went food shopping Friday, and Saturday I got up and started prep work. Our menu consisted of Steak, green pepper, onion, and whole mushroom kebabs, Chicken, pineapple, onion, orange and yellow pepper kebabs, fresh corn on the cob, Hawaiian rice, baked potatoes and Parmesan garlic bread. All grilled. Steak was marinated in Jack Daniels steak house marinade, and the chicken was in a Tropical marinade. I also baked a homemade lemon cheesecake. All the food was divine, but I was in the kitchen for 8 hours, not counting clean up later. I enjoy prep work in a kitchen, but by the time it was over, I was almost to tired to enjoy it! Still, it was awesome, and the company was great. We watched the Will Smith movie "Seven Pounds". It was good, interesting, but it left me very confused for most of it. It is very emotionally charged, but it moves very slow, to the point of being frustrated. I am glad I saw it, but I would not watch it again for that fact. Still, it was a good day, with great food and great company.

On a more somber note, my Dad had to return to the hospital last week. His pneumonia came back, and he could hardly breathe or function. He was unable to walk, and he was put on a large dose of oxygen just to be able to get from the bed to his chair, or to the bathroom and back to where ever he was sitting. Mom called me today and told me that he was getting worse, and to prepare myself, because it looked like he might not make it out of the hospital. He was facing a surgery to drain the fluid in his lungs, but he would have to be put on a respirator to breathe for him for a couple of days, and both my parents have a no artificial means to live clause in their wills, as well as a no resuscitation order. So I started the mental process of losing my father...for the second time this year. A few hours later, Mom called me to say Dad called her ( which is saying something as this morning he could not even talk, he could not catch enough air to do so ) and told her that the doctors put him back on his Lasik, I think it is called, which he had been taking for his congenital heart failure for years. It takes fluid from the body, so it does not build up around the heart and lungs. Well, when he was undergoing his cancer treatment, he got very dehydrated all the time, so they took him off of it. As of yet they had not started him back. As basically a last resort, the doc put him back on, he thought MAYBE it would help draw some of the fluid that he could audibly hear bubbling in his lungs out. Dad told my mother that after they put him on it, a few hours later he had to use the bathroom. A bit of TMI here, but he told her that he passed two QUARTS of fluid when he went to go urinate. Two...QUARTS! He said the nurse was stunned. ( They had one of those measuring cup things in the toilet and she had to verify how much he passed each time he had to pee.) A couple of hours after THAT, the doc came in and listened to his lungs and said there was NO more bubbling, and that he was moving air once more. ( Not at full capacity, but much better than he was before the meds. ) So they are going to keep him on that, and run some scans tomorrow and see how that worked. But he told Mom he felt a tiny bit better, and he could breathe just a tiny bit better, so I am hopeful that the Lasik will continue to help him, and with his heart issues, after he stopped the radiation and chemo, in my opinion he should have been put back on the damn stuff to start with! But that is my opinion. 

Jack has his last physical therapy appointment Tuesday, and he goes back to the doctor on the 18th and hopefully they will finally let him go back to work. The physical therapist, who is a dingbat little chick who is about 23, keeps scaring Jack, telling him she does not see how he can ever go back to being a mechanic. She is seriously pissing me off. After every appointment he has with her, I have to talk him down from a near panic when he gets home, and remind him what his SURGEON says, which is that he CAN return to being a mechanic, he will just have to be more conscious of how he moves and bends in the future, and that he is still not back to where he was before the accident, and to give it time. The first doctor said it would take a full year to be back to normal, and it has only been 5 and a half months, and only 3 months since surgery. So I am VERY glad that after Tuesday Jack will not have to see that little twit any more. I have seriously wanted to go talk to her supervisor and tell them to have her do her job but keep her opinions to herself. They were supposed to be encouraging him to return to normal, and helping him to do so, not speculating and scaring the crap out of him. I know she is not being malicious or anything, she is probably not even aware of what she is doing, but I still do not think it is right.

So that is what has been going on around here over the last several days. Nothing much, but busy at the same time lol.

What are you folks out there doing this Summer? Any plans?