Finally catching up

Wow! It has been forever since I had time to write here. I really do miss it, so maybe I can set aside some time each week. Let’s see if I can bring everyone up to date here. So much has gone on in the past few months.

We got the garden planted and had about half success with it. It rained too much this year for our watermelons. We didn’t get one watermelon. We did awesome with the lettuce, onions, spinach, green beans, and all the peppers just wouldn’t stop. I got my tomatoes too. The lima beans didn’t do too good, nor the cantaloupe. Potatoes didn’t grow either. We did learn from some of our mistakes though, and hopefully will have better luck next year. Right now we have winter onions, lettuce, spinach, and brussel sprouts.

Charles and I started taking riding lessons to determine if owning horses was something that we really wanted to do. I have always loved horses and used to ride a little bit when I was younger. Charles had never been around horses and had never ridden before. We will be buying two horses after the first part of next year. I only took a few lessons and had to stop because of my health. Charles took a few more lessons than I did. We go to the horse auction as often as we can now. They have one every Saturday night just a few blocks from our house. We have bought a few lead ropes, a few head gear and rein sets, a couple of blankets, some of the combs and stuff for grooming and one saddle so far. We also bought 18 panels to put up a round pen for a temporary place to keep the horses. We are in the process of trying to clear an area for the barns/lean-to/storage sheds and for the pastures and arena areas that we will need. Jack and Jan beat us to it by buying two horses. They are all very experienced riders, including Will, so we learn a lot from listening to them. They are our auction mates. They have just put a bid in on a house that is only about 6 miles from us and had it accepted yesterday. I am so excited to have them living so close to us. They have about 5 acres, I think. The home is beautiful. Two sides of the property are already fenced, but they will be doing fencing and cross fencing just like us here before long so that they can bring their horses to the new home also. They already have a chicken coop too, so guess they will beat us at getting chickens first also…LOL We went to the auction one Saturday night, and both ended up buying little healer puppies from the lady Charles and I were taking lessons from. We named ours Ruby, because she jumps like a kangaRU. Jan named hers Pit because she thinks she is a pit bull.

Ruby has come a long ways since we brought her home. A few weeks back, I let her out to terrorize the cats like she loves to do, and she came back with one side of her face swelled way up. I totally panicked. She looked so miserable. I couldn’t get a hold of Charles because he was in an all day meeting. I grabbed the leash and ran crying to our neighbor, Kippy. Kippy took one look at me, bawling my eyes out, and became very concerned. Then she looked down at Ruby and immediately had a huge smile on her face. “I see she found her first snake” she said. The fact that she smiled calmed me down instantly. Kippy told me not to worry, that Ruby would be just fine. She assured me that dogs aren’t really affected by snakes like humans are. I came back home and took a picture of poor little Ruby and her twice size face. She acted like nothing was wrong. She still chased the cats up the trees, still jumped up on me to get lovin, still ate food like it didn’t hurt at all. I hurt every time I looked at her. By about 3:00 in the afternoon, her whole face had swollen to about three times the size it should be and she had this swollen sack hanging below her throat. I got panicky again, and once again grabbed the leash and headed back to get reassurance from Kippy. Cliff was home this time also, and he took a look at Ruby too. He said that it looked like she had gotten bitten square on the nose. He said also that she would be fine. Just cautioned me that as Ruby learns about snakes, she will learn to turn away when they strike and may get bitten in the throat. If that happens, he said we needed to watch her and make sure that her throat doesn’t swell shut. He said just to give her some benadryl and she will be okay. Charles got some benadryl on the way home, we gave it to her that night. The next night you couldn’t even tell that she had been bitten. About a week later, Charles was taking her out to the kennel because we were getting ready to run to town. Right by the front porch, he found the snake that she had been bitten by. It was clear that she bit it’s head off for biting her. She is a little upset with us tonight. We had been letting her just run free on the property when she wanted to go out. Friday morning, Kippy called and said that she was over at their place and was headed towards 1488. I called her back home and she has been either on the leash or in the dog kennel that we bought for the most part when ever she goes out. This means that she can’t terrorize the cats like she loves to do and she gets pretty bored. I feel bad for her, but until we get the fence built, I’m not willing to take the chance that she might make it all the way to 1488 the next time. It isn’t that far away.

Around last April, my blood pressure started really messing up on me. It would drop so low after I took my meds that I was too weak to even get off the couch. So for a while, I was taking very small doses, and sometimes going without taking the meds at all. It would still be so low that I didn’t trust trying to do anything strenuous. This is when I stopped the riding lessons. Then around the end of August it went the other way. It started being so high that I had to sometimes double up on the meds just to keep it manageable. Around the same time, I started having major stomach problems. My stomach would hurt so bad that I couldn’t stand it. Different kinds of pain on different days, but always pain. Constant pain. It just wouldn’t let up no matter what I did. My General Practice doctor did everything she could think of over the next three months, but nothing helped. They did a full body CT scan and an upper GI and still couldn’t find out what was wrong. They finally gave up and told me that I needed to go to a GI specialist. By this time, I was having problems not letting depression get to me. Being in such pain for so long is not an easy thing to deal with. The GI did an EGD and a Colonoscopy. With that they did find a few problems. They finally put me on meds that seemed to be helping some and I was relieved of the pain for a couple of days. Then I had an allergic reaction to one of the new meds and developed Cankor sores all over my mouth, so I still couldn’t eat. They now finally have me on meds that seem to be working, that I don’t seem to be having too bad side effects. I am having headaches now, which I haven’t had in years, and I can’t take aspirin because of the stomach problems. So far though, the headaches aren’t that bad. So keep your fingers crossed that these meds will get rid of the stomach problems and all will be well again.

I don’t know why I reacted to the tests this time like I did. Through out my life, I have dealt with all kinds of medical problems and surgical procedures and never even thought twice about them. I just did whatever the doctors said to do and didn’t think twice about it. This time was different. I had such a bad feeling about all of this from the very beginning of the stomach pains. Maybe it was the fear that the cancer had come back. I don’t know. Even after they were pretty sure that it wasn’t cancer, I just had such an awful feeling. I was scared to death. When I found out that they would be putting me under for the EGD and the Colonoscopy, I was totally panicked. I was convinced that I wouldn’t live through the procedure. Even though I know they are very common procedures, I just knew something was going to go wrong and I wouldn’t live. I told Charles I was going to die every night for a week before the tests were to be done. Then the day before the tests, when I had to eat nothing but clear liquids and drink the liquid I was supposed to drink, something happened. I got up that morning and took the four pills I was supposed to take. I went all day eating only what I was supposed to eat and drink. At 6:00 I drank the first dose of the liquid. At 6:15, I could tell that my blood pressure was going up, so I took it. It was 157/99. I took another dose of my blood pressure meds and waited 10 minutes. I took my blood pressure again and it was 163/104. I was scared. The last time momma had a stroke, I took her blood pressure after I realized what had happened and the bottom number was 104. That memory has stuck with me. I called Fay (my girlfriend that works for the GI doctor that we went to) and I called my GP doctor. After talking to both of them, they both said to not take anymore of the liquid and just watch the blood pressure. By the time they called back, my B/P had started to come down a little bit. After I talked to them though, it started to go back up. My GP had told me that if that happened, I was to go to the hospital. I HATE hospitals though, so when it started to go back up, I decided to take a bath and try to relax first. If that didn’t bring the B/P down, then I would go to the hospital. While I was taking the bath, I started thinking about all that had happened and why I was feeling so awful about all of this. I thought that maybe this scare with my B/P from the liquid was the thing that I was feeling so much dread about. Now that we had stopped that, maybe all would be okay with the tests. I calmed down and went to sleep that night not feeling like I was going to die the next day. We got up and headed to the doctor’s office. We waited for three hours before they finally called me in to start the procedures. When they started to put the IV in, I totally lost it. Once again, I just knew something was going to go wrong and I was going to die. They called Charles back to the prep room to try to calm me down. Charles tried his best, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling. I cried and begged him not to make me go through with this. Some part of me was telling me that I was being foolish and that Charles was right. There was another part of me that kept reminding me that you are supposed to pay attention to your instinct. They finally decided to put me under with gas first, then put in the IV. I was being so irrational, they thought I was afraid of the IV or that I was afraid of the pain I would feel from the procedure itself. They kept telling me that I wouldn’t feel a thing because I would be under. I tried to explain to them that it was the anesthetic itself that I was afraid of. The anesthetic was not going to mix well with the meds that I take and I was going to have a reaction from it and die. The more I tried to tell them though, the more ridiculous it sounded even to me. So I just shut up and told them I was ready. I made sure I told Charles just how much I loved him and let them wheel me back to the operating room. When I woke up in the recovery room, I felt so stupid, but so relieved at the same time. I couldn’t wait to see Charles again and tell him one more time just how much I love him. Poor Charles waited for almost three more hours in the waiting room. They had told us that the operation would only take about an hour. By the third hour of waiting, Charles was worried sick that I had actually known what I was talking about when I told him something would go wrong. Doc came in to talk to us and give us the results of the tests. He said something about doing the colonoscopy again in a couple of years. He thought I was kidding when I said ‘oh no, I will never do this again’. I wasn’t kidding!

On top of the medical problems, my puter has been giving me hell. At first, it was just because it was so old. We usually rotate between updating my computer and Charles computer, but Charles has had some really bad luck with his for the past year or so. So the need to fix his over took my wanting to upgrade mine. Mine got put on hold about three times while we fixed his. Mine was still working fine, so no need to really worry about it. I did buy a 160 gig hard drive during this time. It became my main drive and I put in a little 40 gig hard drive to store all the stuff I do for MegaSite. We got hacked into a few years ago and lost a lot of stuff. Since then, I have saved everything that has been sent to me, and everything I have done. Just in case of another emergency. I had about 3 years worth of transcripts, best lines, updates, recaps, screen caps, banners, wallpapers, etc on that drive. When my computer finally did give out about 2 months after we bought the 160 gig drive, we bought me a brand new one that had a 200 gig hard drive in it. So, I decided to transfer everything I had on the MegaSite drive to the 160 drive and put it in as my secondary drive. The 200 gig drive that came with the computer became my main drive, and the 160 gig drive became my MegaSite drive. Everything worked fine for about 2 months. Then last week the 160 gig drive just completely crashed on me. I opened a graphic file, worked with it, saved it and tried to open another graphic file. It gave me the ‘this drive has not been formatted, would you like to format now’ message. It was late at night, the night before the EGD and Colonoscopy and I was in no mood to mess with it. I just shut down and went to bed, thinking Charles could fix it later when the tests were out of the way and my medical problems were taken care of. Well, I did defy death and was back at my computer a couple of days later, and it started sinking in all that I lost. Charles found a program on the net that claimed to recover files from crashed hard drives, even if you had already formatted the drive. He downloaded that and started a scan of the 160 drive. It ran all night and still wasn’t finished. It did show that all the files were still there though. When it finished running, he started the restore procedure. We stopped it after about 5 hours so I could work on the site a little and run the transcripts for the day. After I ran the transcripts, I decided to look at some of the files that had been recovered. I couldn’t open any of them at all. They were already corrupted. We figured we had been scammed and the software really couldn’t do what it claimed. I remembered the 40 gig drive that I had copied to the 160 drive two months before. Charles found it and plugged it into a media machine that he is building for me to use solely for running transcripts for the site. We discovered that I hadn’t just copied the files from that drive to the 160 drive, I had moved them. They weren’t on the 40 gig at all anymore. Then we remembered that the software was supposed to be able to recover even after formatting so we tried it. Wah Lah!!!! All the files were there. So I only lost about 2 months worth of stuff. Most things I can get back from the site and sent emails though. A few things I can’t get back, but I will just have to live with that.

Sometime this summer, we were talking to our neighbors, Cliff and Kippy and realized that the deed restrictions for our sub-division expired right before we bought the house. There aren’t many restrictions, but the ones that were in place were good ones. No junk cars in our yards, no trashy yards, and no trailers. Kippy organized a couple of meetings for the whole sub division and we all voted to re-instate the deed restrictions. Kippy has a lawyer friend that has agreed to file the paperwork for us. He is a bit backed up right now though and it will be after the first of the year before he can get them filed. We recently learned that Mr. Faulkner will not be around much longer. Kippy said that he has cancer. He owns 22 acres that are right next to ours. We have wanted to ask him about buying a couple more acres of land from him, but were lead to believe that he is firm on not selling anymore of the land. His fence is about 10 yards onto our property and we had intended on talking to him about moving the fence also. A tree has fallen on part of the fence and it needs to be repaired anyway. I think we will move it when we repair it. Kippy said that his sons have wanted to bring trailers on to his property before to start a trailer park. I hope that we get the deed restrictions filed before he dies and his sons take over his property.

I have told you before about the cat that we adopted when we first moved out here. His name is Schizzy. A few nights ago, we had a cold front blow in and it was supposed to get below freezing. During the day, Charles and I had gotten the kitty litter box and food dishes set up in the garage again for the cats so that they could be inside by the space heater we have out there. Ebony and Whiskers are the two wild cats that have adopted us. Ebony will let us pet her and has even been in the house a few times. Whiskers is very willing to take the offerings of cat food that we put out, but other than that, wants nothing to do with the humans, or Ruby. I started to go out that evening to try and gather the three cats up and was shocked to find Schizzy sitting at the front door with a kitten that looked just like him. He is wild, like Whiskers, but has chosen to stick around for a while. I call him Mini-me because he looks so much like Schizzy.

Well, that pretty much catches you all up on the goings on around here. We put the tree up last night and decorated it. I bought the cards yesterday too. Will be trying to get those sent out sometime this week. I have a lot of catching up to do on the site this week also. I still need to finish copying the files from the 40 gig drive back to my new computer. I don’t know what I will do with the 160 gig drive. I am tempted to format it and try using it again, but I am afraid to really trust it. Along with the MegaSite stuff that I lost, I also lost all my downloads and saved games for my Sims games. I hadn’t installed it on this computer yet, and so hadn’t copied the user folders over. That is very upsetting also because I am sure I won’t be able to get most of it back..:(

For now, I am tired of typing and you all are probably tired of reading. I will try to keep posting weekly again now. We will see how that goes. Now I just have to try to remember how to post this on blogspot. 360 is easier..:)

Boo